The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

by Daniel Yergin

After the outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939, the interests of the expropriated American oil companies and of the United States government diverged even more sharply. As far as the Roosevelt Administration was concerned, national security was much more important than restitution for Standard Oil of New Jersey and the other American companies. Washington did not want Nazi submarines refueling in Mexican ports, nor German “geologists” and “oil technicians” wandering over northern Mexico, near the U.S. border, or in the south, in the direction of the Panama Canal. Indeed, the United States was now busy trying to tie Mexico into a hemispheric defense system. Therefore, it was important to get the oil issue out of the way as quickly as possible. Moreover, in the event of American entry into the war, the U.S. government wanted access to Mexican oil supplies, as had been the case during World War I, and it cared increasingly little about who actually owned those supplies. The expropriation was the major obstacle to cooperation with Mexico, U.S. Ambassador Josephus Daniels told Roosevelt in 1941, and there was no sense trying to restore and defend a status “as dead as Julius Caesar.”