In the 1970s, deindustrialization and urban decay forced national, state, and local policymakers to focus more intensely on public-private partnerships as mechanisms of economic regeneration. This approach to postindustrial regeneration intersected with a rising generation of liberal politicians: labeled variously “Atari Democrats,” “neoliberals,” or “New Democrats,” they sought to orient the Democratic Party towards market-friendly politics. This intersection was evinced in the regeneration of Lowell, Massachusetts, a city dealing with decades-long industrial decline. Contrary to narratives that emphasize public-private partnerships only as instruments of privatization, however, Lowell’s experience exemplified how successful regeneration required an expanded role for the state: this article reinserts the “public” into “public-private partnership.” Excavating this reality in Lowell’s heretofore understudied history also demonstrates that New Liberals’ market-friendly political posture obscured deeper policy continuity with twentieth-century liberalism. Far from emerging locked into an ideological embrace of “neoliberalism,” the New Liberals sought to reimagine liberalism’s commitment to developmentalism.

With the oil crises of the 1970s as a backdrop, this article explores the oil industry’s efforts to present its own interests as aligned with those of future generations in order to justify state disinvestment and environmental deregulation. Although histories of neoliberalism’s cultural dimensions have typically been treated as distinct from scholarship on the oil industry’s anti-environmental campaigns, this article bridges these histories’ intersections in the 1970s. Using Mobil Oil as a case study, I focus on three venues of address—advertising, television sponsorship, and education—to analyze how the industry naturalized its role in American life in a moment in which energy consumption and corporate power were called into question. By promoting its investments in children and families, Mobil bolstered its reputation as a socially responsible corporation committed to the public good. Ultimately, I argue that the oil industry participated in constructing “cultures of privatization,” sidelining alternate visions of economic redistribution.