Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  Further, the great refining and petrochemical industries were not labor-intensive. Refining, for example, by the 1950s employed less than 50,000 workers; it did not create an extensive new proletariat. Because of the wealth involved, people employed in petroleum projects were highly paid. Oil and attendant industries made an industrial base, with characteristic concentration and organization of labor, in only a few areas, mostly centering around Beaumont–Port Arthur–Houston on the Gulf coast. Oil did not, unlike the making of autos and shoes, erect a considerable industrial-mercantile-labor complex similar to that of the North.

  Other extractive industries, such as mineral earths for pharmaceuticals in east Texas, employed similarly highly skilled people, without heavy industrial production lines. These, like the aluminum, aircraft, and insurance industries that centered in a complex surrounding Dallas, actually gave a huge impetus to the growth of an urban middle class, and not nearly so much thrust to organized labor as was supposed. Thus oil, both through concentrations of money and little change in social structure, strengthened rather than damaged the existing power structures across Texas.

  The domestic effect of attacks on the oil industry by outsiders was not well understood. These intensified and strengthened political conservatism at the polls. Adlai Stevenson's courageous, and politically stupid, stand on the Texas tidelands did him damage that could not be retrieved, because it cut him off from both the most powerful interests and the Democratic power structure of the state. Eisenhower lost no Northern votes by promising to override the Supreme Court with legislation; he gained the support of most officeholders, schoolteachers, and taxpayers in Texas. Anything that took oil money away from Texas hurt the small man as well as the so-called big rich. Oil provided a great ocean of public money; it made interest politics, performing the same function in Texas cotton once did.

  Cuts in the 27 percent depletion allowance in federal taxation had little Texas "liberal" support. Anything that tended to cut production or exploration hit everyone's pocketbook in some degree.

  Petroleum was the largest factor in shaping the urbanization of east and west Texas, affecting the middle band of distribution centers the least. The explosive surge of oil from the earth made it possible for the tenant farmer to begin deserting his eroded acres in 1920. The old Texas saying that a city dweller was a farmer crossed with an automobile using oil was humorous, and true. By 1933, when a second plague of depressions and drouths scourged the land, only 33 percent of all Texans lived on farms. Within another generation this percentile had dropped to eight. Meanwhile, as everywhere, research and mechanization and the growth of capitalistic agriculture allowed this smaller group to produce vastly more food and fibers than the hordes of yesteryear. The land did not go out of production; in fact, more lands were opened, especially in the west. People recongregated in the towns, and found new work.

  All the efforts of government, and the billions spent by government agencies, had little effect on either trend; histories would record that when the agrarian mythology and the farm vote were completely dead. In fact, government policy, unwittingly, assisted the growth of capitalistic enterprise; large, efficient operations could actually exist, where small ones could not, on minimum subsidies. Acreages continued to increase, and valuations of land to rise, from 1910 through the 1960s, with only a short break during the utter paralysis of the Great Depression years. In the long process, farmers became fewer, and of these, only a handful produced 80 percent of the total marketable output. Similar processes in industry, perhaps, were easier to assimilate and accept, because industry held no ancestral "feudal" memories, such as were stirred up in some Americans by farms comprising thousands of acres of cultivated land.

  The trend was firm, no matter who was Secretary of Agriculture in Washington or what theory of commodity credit, parity, or crop restriction was the current fad. The opportunities offered by new industries, the weariness of farm labor, the loneliness of farm life started the trend before 1900, even in good years. Government certainly affected the trend by delaying it at times. Two factors that were more important than national policy and all the neo-Populism combined were the brilliant successes scored in universities with research on new chemical processes and crops, and the influence of private enterprise, looking for its own markets on the land. The axiom that more stubborn farmers listened to seed, fertilizer, and tractor salesmen than to all the earnest, helpful members of various governmental agricultural agencies appears true. One reason for the success of one group over the other was that the salesmen confined their efforts to the farmers most likely to succeed, while government was determined to help the others, with the usual historical result.

  Figures show what became of the impoverished, socially destructive tenant farm. The small farmer, who far into the century outnumbered every other social group in Texas, began to disappear; the surviving farmers, large and small, entered a gradually strengthening partnership with government. Both trends were deplored publicly and widely, by farmers and non-farmers alike. Some Americans looked on the farmer as the salt of the earth and society's ballast; others held to the notion that the farmer had once been successful and independent on his own terms. However, truly profitable agriculture in Texas had been colonial since colonial days; the movement of farmer to town was a worldwide trend, and the new subsidies and ties between agriculture and government only followed similar patterns in other enterprises.

  Between 1930 and 1957 the number of tenant farms decreased by half, while the average size of Texan farms doubled. In 1930, there were more than 300,000 tenants, including sharecroppers. By 1950, tenants numbered only 75,000, of whom only 10,000 worked on shares. During the next years, the remaining tenant farmers themselves changed; the tenant farm grew much larger. Some tenants were now successful operators, with huge investments in machinery, sometimes renting thousands of acres. The old-style sharecropper all but disappeared. With him went a way of life.

  The changes, like all change, made new problems. The white tenant was able to make the transition to city worker, and more often than not, enter the urban middle classes. The black sharecropper went to town at his side, but the black's passage was far less successful. The white Texan found a place in the nearest city or town which caste and lack of education denied the Negro. Large numbers of Texas blacks gathered in poverty, taking menial jobs, on the outskirts of the towns. In the 1940s, they began their great migration north and west to their dark cities of destruction. The end of tenant farming in Texas, and other regions of the South, was thus both a social improvement and the start of an immense national social problem.

  Due to technological changes, one farmer on the land could now keep several city-dwellers fed, and employed as well. The processing of foods and minerals took the place of agricultural work.

  On the coast, Beaumont, Port Arthur, and Houston (Texas's first great metropolis) were almost wholly creations of oil and other rich mineral earths. Houston, for the first time, and finally, passed San Antonio as Texas's largest city in the 1930s. That this took so long—San Antonio had no oil or mining and developed very little industry of any kind—showed the lag of industrialization in the state. Far into the century, Texas cities and towns were distribution centers, unchanged from the century before.

  On the Plains, where no cities had been able to rise at all, Abilene, Lubbock, Midland, and San Angelo grew. These doubled in population every decade, depending for their gains on greater discoveries and extraction of oil.

  Extraction and processing allowed the total population to grow; Texas never lost population, like many agricultural states. Oil not only shaped population, it expanded it, by holding fecund farm families and bringing new immigrants in. In 1920, Texas had about 4,000,000 people, more than its farms could support. Forty years later it passed 10,000,000, achieving Sam Houston's dream at last. Something Sam Houston never dreamed of made it true.

  Other natural resources contributed to the growth. This was a rich empire. Sulfur, salt,
limestone, oyster shell, gypsum, talc, helium grew up with the hunger of the industrial North. Texas contributed 80 percent of the world's sulfur, and a full quarter of the total United States' mineral supply. It produced 20 percent of the nation's aluminum, and all of its domestic magnesium ingot and tin. Texas made 70 percent of all American carbon black.

  It led all other states, and most nations, in cotton, wool, and mohair exports. Eight million head of cattle dotted the world's greatest pasture lands. Texas was also the shrimp processing capital of the world, with more than 400 boats based at the mouth of the Rio Grande.

  This was industrialization, but only of a certain kind. Most of Texas's industry, with the exception of the aerospace complex around Dallas and a few other scattered enterprises, was based on the processing of agricultural products and the extraction and processing of raw materials. The economy could be described more accurately as a vast agricultural-mining complex than that of a true industrial state. Every Texas industry was based upon, and tied directly to, the land on which it sat. Almost all such industries depended not on local, but on distant markets, whose fluctuations in virtually every case were beyond the producers' control. The nature of these industries, fixed to the soil, and depending in most cases upon the ownership of the soil, automatically continued a basically nonindustrial type of society. They produced great variations in income and real wealth, which were often obscured by the determined egalitarianism of Texan social practices. The fortunes they produced more nearly resembled landed or mining fortunes; the new technicians required to run the new enterprises had a status more like that of the mining engineer of the 19th century, or the overseer of a plantation. Such men had to have skills, and were well paid, but a sharp division between owner and manager, such as was disappearing in most of corporate America, remained. Men and large companies, owning a fortune in the ground, hired managers and technicians to extract it and to process it once it was out. Many of these technicians came from somewhere else. In Texas, however, they did not, and were not yet beginning to, form a sort of diploma-mandarinate such as officered top national corporations, and was beginning to be thought of as the new American elite.

  The society of Texas was still based on private property, not skills; the recognized elite were owners, not executives or managers. Here was a great difference not usually noted, though the marked maldistribution of natural wealth in Texas was usually seen by all.

  Texans crossed the Sabine convinced that the land was the source of all riches, determined to build new empires, and for some of them this came true. For all, the land and what lay under it shaped their lives from beginning to end.

  Even the educational system of Texas in the modern age remained fixed to the land. It did not, as Governor John Connally fruitlessly warned, prepare Texans to compete in an increasingly conceptual and technical industrial society in the greater nation. In agricultural techniques and mass-scale farming, Texas excelled, both in university and farm. It had the finest school in North America devoted to petrochemicals and oil. It turned out sufficient technicians of the kind its society needed: accountants, drillers, geologists, repairmen, distribution executives, and engineers. Beyond this, Texas higher education, unconsciously, fitted men for the old careers, the pulpit, school, the battlefield, and bar. Though the whole gamut of education was available, the Texan mind failed to grasp, or to value, most of the developing psychology of the more advanced industrial societies. The Texan status system had hardly changed in a century; its values were based on private property, ownership, not employment. The idea of a society based on social role was yet foreign. While the lower social classes, from laborers to the rapidly proletarianizing schoolteachers, clerks, and other so-called white-collar workers, thought in terms of education as a means of improving social station, the genuine Texan social elite continued an imperial, rather than social, outlook. In the highest levels of society, and to reach the highest levels, men worked for, and had to attain, property.

  Instinctively, the majority of Texans tended to admire or envy a family that owned 1000,000 acres more than one that produced two great surgeons, a fine musician, or a new theory of relativity. This definite, if sometimes denied, value system inexorably colored all Texan education. The practical outweighed the conceptual; things were more important than ideas; education was to fit children to society, not change them or produce inherent confusion by educating too many students beyond their station.

  The Texan educational system, and the Texan mind, produced superb trial lawyers, good soldiers, keen politicians, excellent ranchers and businessmen. It did not turn out boys apt to invent the mathematics for a new space drive—though any intelligent Texan would probably be able to grasp and use the finished product with eagerness and skill.

  Education and enterprise were still suffused with the old Protestant frontier ethic; society was as realistic, narrow-minded, and as disciplined as a century before. The ethic was strongest in the politically dominant middle strata, which approached both education and business with discipline and determination. Actually, the great problem of adaptation to Texan society, for those who had the problem, was that of acquiring the dominant outlook.

  Texan politicians had become widely recognized, for their abilities if not their style. But oddly, the Texan was not thought of as a superb businessman in many areas of the nation. This, probably, was due to the confusion in the national mind of the businessman with the corporate executive. Texas, with the American Southwest, remained the nation's last great pool of entrepreneurial spirit. Here was found an urge and drive now noticeable only among more recent immigrants to America; in the grandsons and great-grandsons of the original Northern industrialists entrepreneurism seemed dead. But there were Texans who still held the old American imperial dream.

  Men such as Young, Ling, Hughes, Thornton, Murchison, and scores of others, all Southwesterners, all asocial, atomistic products of the frontier ethic, could still grasp the essentials of action, dream huge dreams, and erect conglomerate business empires, stand or fall. They were the kind of American, whether from Louisiana or Connecticut, who instinctively hit the road for Texas years before. Texas was noted for financial giants—and not just "oilmen"—who escaped the definition of corporate executive. These giants worked alone or with small teams, but they were no more "team" or "company" men than had been Richard King or Mifflin Kenedy. They were never cells in some great organism, where one set of hired hands wrote reports for another hired-hand echelon.

  These men stood out against a society falling more and more into the functions of social role, determined by education and credentials. The Texan entrepreneur rarely owned credentials; some could hardly read or write. But they were dynamic; they were self-reliant, free men with no real use for either gentlemen or beggars, free as few men in a compressing society could still be. They did not work inside companies or with companies; they bought companies and piled them one atop the other, like the old cattle baron had once built up his range piece by piece.

  Any examination showed that an utterly disproportionate percentage of this kind of man derived from, or congregated along, the vanishing outlines of the last frontier.

  In these traits, however, there were certain dangers. While some of these men reshaped cities, and even affected the entire American economy in certain ways, they tended to remain out of tune with the dominant notions of the nation as a whole.

  The urbanization of Texas, starting late but proceeding faster than the American norm after the 1940s, proceeded on several planes. The automobile sent the first growth to the small cities and towns. Then, suddenly, the new metropoli started to suck the countryside dry. This trend was at first obscured, because as the farmers and ranchers moved from country to town, all towns in Texas gained population. But then, as the counties became more and more depopulated, many of the small, rurally situated towns began to wither. Their market area was drying up. When the total population of an agrarian county shrank—and the 1960 census revealed that two-thi
rds of all Texas counties were losing people—the trade base of the smaller cities was eaten away. In most Texas small towns established businesses declined; young men looked for opportunity elsewhere; numbers stagnated, then slowly declined. Across Texas, some smaller cities were dying. This caused something akin to panic in many places, because, from the very first, the idea that growth was good was almost an Anglo-Texan religion. Sinking property values frightened Texans as nothing else could.

  The larger cities, and above all the five great metropoles, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Fort Worth, El Paso, together with a dozen other burgeoning centers showed explosive growth. They gained what the counties lost.

  One of the most depopulated regions was the long stretch of the old farm-line frontier, where men tested nature to the limits, and where the People's Party rose. Here, the pasture country was moving eastward; stock ranching had moved out of the arid regions onto good east Texas graze, a genuine but not unhappy regression. Meanwhile, stock farming within the old cattle kingdom declined under a wave of new consolidations. Big ranches were coming back. A growing, major worry among cattlemen by the 1960s was the problem of passing on their holdings, unemasculated by the state and federal estate taxes.

  The Texas metropoli, fast-formed, were not cities in the European sense. They were more accumulations of individuals than communities. They contained huge, efficient economies, filled with the material abundance that was the hallmark of all 20th-century America; they were visibly similar to the American cities of the North and especially the West and Midwest. They were beginning to consume culture, though not yet to create it; in this Dallas resembled Kansas City or St. Louis. But inwardly these great cities were different from the cities of the North, and even those of the heartland Midwest.