Past and Present: ‘Malaise’ and the Energy Crisis

Jimmy Carter’s speech is remembered for something he never said – we should recall what he did say

…As with so many other things from the Carter years, the speech has been misremembered, mocked on The Simpsons, or glossed in college textbooks. But with energy prices again reaching record highs, the speech is worth recalling today not simply for what Carter proposed but also for how he did so.

What Carter really did in the speech was profound. He warned Americans that the 1979 energy crisis


“We’ve always believed in something called progress,”
Carter explained. The simple version of this big idea was
the faith that “piling up of material” goods would ensure a better life. Carter condemned the idea’s naivete and warned his fellow Americans that they could not live in a world without limits. Selfish individualism (what he once called “me-ism”) wouldn’t pull us through the crisis.

As Americans, Carter explained, we had to stop daydreaming and realize that our reliance on foreign oil made us vulnerable. Here he used a war analogy for his solution – though sometimes a faltering metaphor, it made sense. Our country had been founded by a revolution against foreign dependence, and now the country needed to throw off reliance on the Middle East’s “black gold.” So Carter proposed an Energy Mobilization Board modeled after the sort of government agency that got the country through World War II.

US News and World Report