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- Whatever the term, the impact of the energy crisis was unmistakable. As existing routines were disrupted, “sweeping changes … to the way people work, travel, and spend their leisure time” were inevitable, as Time predicted in a piece titled “A Time of Learning to Live with Less.” Even the newest roadside landmarks — businesses clustered at interstate exits — were threatened with obsolescence; one New York Times article wondered whether “diminishing gas supplies” would revive “the bus, the train, even the horse.”
There is a rueful tone to much of this coverage, an awareness that an era was coming to a close, even if commentators rarely agreed on what, specifically, was ending. To some, the import was grandly ideological; the energy shortage would surely delegitimate any latter-day versions of manifest destiny, any reflexive equating of growth with progress, no matter the cost. If the sheer expanse of the continent had prompted an American “doctrine of bigness” in the 19th century, then what the journalist Stefan Kanfer called Henry Ford’s “profligate invention” gave new life to an “ethic of unbounded growth” in the 20th century — until, that is, the energy crisis offered “a painful, overdue comeuppance.”