America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontierby Robert Vitalishttp://www.amazon.com/Americas-Kingdom-Mythmaking-Frontier-Stanford/dp/0804754462/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-6640961-8433428?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1175477671&sr=1-1Highly, highly recommended reading. Despite the fact that I consider myself a well-informed individual on Saudi Arabia, I clearly was nowhere near as well-informed as I previously thought as this book completely changed my view of the kingdom and its relationship with the US. America’s Kingdom essentially covers the US-Saudi relationship up to the 1960s with a heavy emphasis on the role of Aramco (the Arabian-American Oil Company, nowadays the nationalized “Saudi Aramco”). Vitalis ruthlessly and efficiently tears down a long litany of myths: the notion of the magnanimity of the company, that its cultural standoffishness and segregation policies were the Saudis’ wishes, that King Faysal was a genuine reformer, that the kingdom was anything other than a US client or that the US ever treated as anything but. All these myths come tumbling down.
Instead Vitalis (seemingly oddly at first) starts with the opening of the American west and the industrialists who came in with their racist segregation policies against Native American and Latino workers. He spends a good deal of time focused on the Arizona copper mines, the racist policies there, and the hard core union busting of the companies who used the “company town” model not out of a motivation to provide well for their employees but to divide their employees on racial lines (white workers got the nice houses, Mexicans and Native Americans got treated like dirt, only the white workers got remembered in the official company histories) and to engage in union busting at all costs (subtle or violent as needed) so that they could maintain the lowest possible wages for the bulk of their non-white workers.
From there Vitalis shows how this racist labor model was exported by the oil industry around the world, finally landing in Saudi Arabia in the 1930s and onwards. Aramco implemented it while simultaneously building up a myth (which many of the company’s white workers truly believed themselves) that they were treating the Saudis well and helping their development. Meanwhile the Saudi workers rapidly recognized they were being treated like dirt (for example, Aramco was herding them into segregated trailers they labeled “buses” at the same time the Saudi workers were reading news about Rosa Parks helping to end bus segregation in the US south) and tried from a very early stage to voice their complaints and eventually to organize unions to fight for equal treatment and a genuine development model for the kingdom. Aramco fought back tooth and nail, labeling strike and labor leaders as Communists, Nasserists or other outside agitators - never admitting that the workers had a right to be angry that they lived in dirt-floor huts in 120 degree heat while the Americans had air conditioned southern California-style homes. Eerie echoes of the way any opposition to ruling classes in the Middle East today is instantly labeled “terrorism” or “al-Qaeda” so that Americans and corrupt dictators can ignore the very real and legitimate problems that opposition represents. Eventually Aramco and the Saudi royal family (who more than once leaned “dangerously” close to siding with the workers from an Aramco perspective, especially in the early days) found ways to work together to keep the royals fat and happy while the company minimized or delayed the inevitable demands for better pay, housing, training, and eventually nationalization.
If you don’t know who Abdallah Tariki or Abdul Aziz Ibn Muammar are, you will walk away from this book duly impressed by these men who along with a number of other Saudis Vitalis profiles gambled (and frequently lost) their lives and livelihoods trying to force the Americans into the 20th century. That’s right, Vitalis basically shows how it wasn’t the Americans pulling the Saudis into the modern world, but rather that the backwards old Jim Crow and “Seven Sisters” attitudes of the American oil companies were the ones who had to be pulled into the modern world by supposedly “12th century” Saudis. Along the way a compelling tale of relations between local workers and segregationist Americans in Dhahran, Egypt’s Nasser, the foundation of OPEC, American intelligence scheming, Aramco’s internal spy service, and many other tales is woven.
The book does have its flaws: Vitalis admits up front he couldn’t write everything and while he provides extensive endnotes and a bibliography, it is a relatively short book aimed at telling a compelling story and not a 1000-page-thick academic treatise. The loss is that oftentimes he provides repeated anecdotal evidence for points which is powerful and in my view believable, but lacks any broader empirical presentation of data. For example, he says Aramco always grudgingly and minimally provided programs for development of Saudi workers’ skills, and the fact that those workers repeatedly went on strike and protested for those programs is powerful evidence in itself, but it would have been nice (if he had it) to show a table or two of budgets for those programs and correlated the numbers with the worker action. A minor issue but one that irks given Vitalis’ excellent presentation of the racist injustices visited on Saudi workers by the Americans is his frequent dismissal of the Israeli issue. Yes, there was and is lots of anti-Jewish racism in the kingdom which Vitalis rightly points out where relevant. However, he also frequently makes what amount to academic snide remarks showing ignorance of the fact that the Israelis are fundamentally guilty of the same and worse types of racism. I expected better from him, but it is a very minor issue given it is in no way the focus of the book.
Anyhow, you have to read the book to get the juicy details. Do it, you will learn a great deal and you won’t be sorry.
