by The Big Rich: The Rise;Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes
“We have fine prospects for rescuing the Democracy from the hands of the Socialists who are now in charge of the Party machinery,” he wrote George Armstrong on January 2, 1936. “At the present writing it appears that we will be able to defeat the renomination of Mr. Roosevelt.” Still, Kirby noted, “the New Dealers are well organized. They are supplied with enormous cash from the public treasury… . It will take wisdom, courage and great activity to dislodge them.”
In forming the SCUC, Kirby had hoped to forge an anti-Roosevelt alliance behind a presidential ticket of Louisiana’s fiery governor, Huey Long, and the fifty-one-year-old governor of Georgia, Eugene Talmadge. Talks between Kirby, Long, and Talmadge had begun that summer, but abruptly ended with Long’s assassination in September 1935.1 With Long dead, Kirby placed all his chips on the wary Talmadge. The Georgia governor, while making clear to reporters he wasn’t yet a formal candidate, accepted Kirby’s invitation to deliver the keynote address at the SCUC’s first convention, held on January 29, 1936, at the Dempsey Hotel in Macon, Georgia. Kirby downplayed speculation of a presidential nomination, saying the SCUC was a movement, not a party.
On the convention’s first day, the three thousand or so “delegates” barely filled half the auditorium, but what they lacked in size they made up in enthusiasm. As a band played “Dixie” and “Put on Your Old Gray Bonnet,” farmers in dusty overalls and wives in faded calico dresses stomped their feet, clapped, and hollered encouragement to the speakers. “Give ’em hell!” they yelled. “Pour it on!” The tone of the gathering, which drew front-page coverage in the New York Times, was blatantly racist. On each seat attendees found a magazine called Georgia Women’s World—actually produced by Vance Muse in Houston—that featured a photo of Eleanor Roosevelt being escorted by black ROTC officers at Howard University. The lead editorial assailed FDR’s recent Jackson Day speech. “Andrew Jackson,” it read, “didn’t appoint a Negro Assistant Attorney General… a Negro confidential clerk in the White House … and when Andrew Jackson got to be President he didn’t put in Republicans, Socialists, Communists and Negroes to tell him how to run these good old United States.”
Standing beneath a Confederate battle flag, introductory speakers denounced Roosevelt as a “nigger-loving Communist,” New Dealers as “social vermin,” and the NAACP as “the worst communist organization in the United States”; one termed a federal anti-lynching bill an “infamous tyranny” and “total outrage.” Kirby introduced Governor Talmadge, and in remarks carried live on the CBS radio network, termed him “a plumed knight on an errand for the Republic, refusing to bend his knee to dictatorship or barter the sovereign rights of a great people for Federal Gold.” Talmadge did not disappoint, calling on southerners to launch a holy war to drive the “Communists” out of Washington. “Give it to ’em, Gene!” a man in the balcony bellowed.
In the wake of the convention, Kirby took out full-page ads in the New York newspapers to publicize his initiative. But the SCUC’s effort to defeat Roosevelt was stillborn. The killing blow came when a liberal Alabama senator, Hugo Black, took offense at the photos of Mrs. Roosevelt—the “nigger photos,” they came to be called—and summoned Kirby and Vance Muse before a Senate committee in April 1936. Kirby tersely answered questions about the groups headquartered at the Kirby Building, but it was Muse who made an impression, flippantly batting away questions about “the nigger photos.”
“Can you describe the pictures? ” Senator Black asked.
“Yes,” Muse sighed, “but it is nauseating for me to do it… . I am a Southerner and I am for white supremacy…. It was a picture of Mrs. Roosevelt going to some nigger meeting with two escorts, niggers on each arm.”
“You circulated them without anybody forcing you to circulate them? ”
“No, sir,” Muse replied, “except my conscience … and my granddaddy, who wore this kind of uniform right here.” He pounded his chest. Asked what he meant by uniform, he said, “Why, my suit of Confederate gray.”
For all his wisecracks, it was Muse who sank the SCUC ship, admitting that the southern committee had in fact been funded by northern industrialists. It was the end of the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution. But Kirby did not give up. By June he had created another group, the Jeffersonian Democrats, that managed to hold an anti-Roosevelt “convention” in Detroit in August. A Texas oilman or two showed up—Big Jim West joined, as did Maco Stewart’s wild-eyed assistant, Lewis Ulrey—but the meeting was a farce, a motley bunch of fifty or so onetime governors and congressmen whose speeches drew derisive coverage. “Unhappy Has-Beens,” Time dubbed them.
Thus ended Texas Oil’s first foray into presidential politics. Roosevelt’s victory in November 1936 disheartened Kirby, who afterward withdrew from political life and spent his last years—he died in 1940—puttering around his East Texas farm. But Kirby left behind the foundation of a movement. At its core were nouveau riche oilmen: Maco Stewart and his son Maco Jr., Big Jim West, Marrs McLean of Beaumont, and others eager for a political fight. West bought newspapers and a radio station in Austin and Dallas, and was transforming them into ultraconservative organs when he, too, died in 1940.l
Though laughingstocks in the national arena, Kirby and his successors proved juggernauts within Texas. In his definitive study of Texas conservatism, The Establishment in Texas Politics, George Norris Green pinpoints 1938 as the year oil-backed ultraconservatives took control of the state’s political structure. That year two outspoken pro-Roosevelt congressmen, including the fiery progressive Maury Maverick of San Antonio, were defeated in elections. Of far greater import was the seizure of the governor’s office by an oil-and-business-backed flour salesman named W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel. Already famous thanks to his own radio show, The Hillbilly Flour Hour, O’Daniel was a clown and proud of it; his campaign stops featured a Hillbilly band playing his own homespun songs, such as “The Boy Who Never Gets Too Big to Comb His Mother’s Hair.” While his opponents promised Social Security benefits and industrialization, O’Daniel won with a simpler platform: the Ten Commandments.
Pappy O’Daniel’s victory initiated two decades of ultraconservative rule in Texas. As governor, O’Daniel became Texas Oil’s reliable partner, freezing wellhead taxes and backing oil industry lobbyists’ takeover of the Railroad Commission. His administration was dominated by ultraconservatives, many of them oilmen, including his key financial backer, Maco Stewart, whose anti-Semitic adviser Lewis Ulrey corresponded with O’Daniel, and Jim West, who was nominated for highway commissioner before moderates in the legislature blocked the appointment. Oil’s influence, as West’s defeat showed, was not unlimited. Texas voters had a long, strong progressive streak, and many state legislators, especially those from districts with few oil wells, were notoriously independent and frequently blocked conservative initiatives. During the 1940s and 1950s centrists and even liberals continued to be elected to Congress, but those who stayed in Washington long did so only by tending to the interests of Texas Oil. The most visible example was Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House, who in 1944 retained his seat only after a rare contested primary in his North Texas district; his opponent was backed by anti-Roosevelt oilmen, including Roy Cullen, who channeled ten thousand dollars toward Rayburn’s defeat. The rest of his career Rayburn held his nose as he backed the oilmen’s initiatives. “All they do,” he once complained, “is hate.”
In the decade following O’Daniel’s election, a period that saw O’Daniel replaced by two more conservative, oil-friendly governors, Texas spawned initiatives that for the first time spread Lone Star ultraconservatism beyond the state’s borders. One was spearheaded by a shadowy group called Christian American, founded in 1936 by Vance Muse and Lewis Ulrey and funded by Maco Stewart’s son, Maco Jr. Its newspaper, the Christian American, issued regular broadsides against Negroes, liberals, unions, Communists, and the “International Jewish conspiracy.” The organization’s influence remained meager until 1941, when Muse decided to concentrate its
energies on lobbying against the spread of labor unions; using thinly veiled language that equated labor power with Negro power, and with the help of Pappy O’Daniel’s antilabor crusades in Texas, Christian American brochures and legislative lobbying were credited with the passing of union-limiting laws in a dozen southern and southwestern states by 1944. The Muse-Ulrey group, George Norris Green wrote, “did more than any other organization to awaken the South to the dangers of a unionized work force.”2
Another ultraconservative initiative was led by an ambitious Southeast Texas congressman named Martin Dies, who in 1937 cosponsored formation of the House Un-American Activities Committee. The committee, which achieved lasting notoriety during the early 1950s, was formed after congressional investigations into Nazi and Communist front groups during the 1930s. Neither Dies, in his autobiography, nor any history of the committee explores the influence of Texas oilmen on the decision to form the committee. But John Henry Kirby and Maco Stewart were friends and longtime financial supporters of Dies, who was widely viewed as a tool of business and oil interests in the Beaumont area.m In congressional hearings and his own books, Dies spent the 1940s crusading endlessly against Communist influence in American politics, churches, and schools. For the most part, he was ignored. But Dies’s activities laid the groundwork for the anti-Communist drives of the 1950s, in which Texas oilmen would play key supporting roles.
After John Henry Kirby’s death the man who emerged as the standard-bearer for Texas ultraconservatives, who could legitimately be viewed as Kirby’s intellectual successor, was none other than Roy Cullen, who in his mid-fifties began to channel his energy away from oil and toward politics. Cullen backed the entire spectrum of Texas ultraconservative causes, from Christian American’s antilabor drives to Martin Dies’s anti-communism to just about any outcry against Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Roosevelt had frightened him from the beginning; Cullen’s first step into national politics had been a single anti-Roosevelt letter he published in the Houston Post in 1932. As the New Deal’s tendrils spread during the 1930s, so did Cullen’s ire. Roosevelt’s 1938 attempt to “pack” the Supreme Court was a turning point for Cullen, who fired off congratulatory telegrams to all 196 congressmen who voted against it. At the same time, in his first political foray outside Texas, Cullen took out a full-page advertisement in the Louisville Courier-Journal to excoriate one of its backers, the Kentucky senator Alben Barkley. Meanwhile, though their names were seldom associated in the newspapers, Cullen was quietly one of Pappy O’Daniel’s most important financial backers.
At first Cullen only dabbled in politics, donating to favored candidates, firing off an angry letter to a congressman or the Houston newspapers, and funding conservative lectures around Houston. In 1938 he sponsored a Houston speech by Elizabeth Dilling, a nationally known author of anti-Communist and anti-Semitic literature who, after being linked to several pro-Nazi groups, was eventually tried (and acquitted) for sedition.3 Kirby adored Cullen. Before his death he wired the younger man to suggest he run for office. “The vigor with which you are attacking national conditions is heartening to all of us old-fashioned Americans,” Kirby wrote. Cullen demurred. “I can do more good helping other candidates—doing what I can to see that the good men get into office and the bad ones are kept out,” he replied. Cullen was equally close with Maco Stewart and others in Kirby’s circle; Lewis Ulrey described him as one of Houston’s “leading anti-radicals.”
Cullen’s political awakening, such as it was, paralleled his emergence as a public figure in Houston. It had begun simply enough, with a fund-raising visit from the president of the new University of Houston in 1936; the two-year-old school was more an idea than a reality, its few classrooms in temporary buildings beside a high school. The visit, coming just months after the death of his son, struck a chord in Cullen, who wanted something to mark Roy Gustave’s passing and thought Houston could use a university for the children of working men. At a time when none of the Big Four had thought much about philanthropy, Cullen stunned Houston by donating the entire $260,000 necessary to build the University of Houston’s first building. He added another $90,000 and a second building soon after, and in time became the university’s guiding patron. Among the few ideas he blocked was a proposal to rename the school “Cullen University.” But he was thrilled when its ROTC marching team was named the Cullen Rifles.
Cullen’s donations were front-page news in Houston. In 1939, seemingly emboldened by the acclaim that followed, he initiated correspondence with presidential candidates looking to unseat Roosevelt, including Wen-dell Willkie. The two, in fact, engaged in a set-to during a campaign stop Willkie made in Houston. When Cullen told reporters of a letter he had written Willkie denouncing his foreign policy, they asked Willkie about it. Willkie fibbed, saying he had never heard of Cullen. Cullen then released their exchange of letters, proving he did. Willkie thus became the first, but by no means the last, national politician to roll his eyes at the advice he was obliged to take from a man with a fifth-grade education. “You know the Good Lord put all this oil in the ground,” Willkie quipped, “then someone comes along who hasn’t been a success at anything else, and takes it out of the ground. The minute he does that he considers himself an expert on everything from politics to petticoats.”
Undeterred, Cullen embarked on a series of speeches during 1941, mostly at schools his children had attended, during which he denounced the growth of the federal government. “A government of bureaus,” he told the South Texas School of Law and Commerce, “leads to national socialism.” His concern about “big government” grew after Pearl Harbor, as Franklin Roosevelt oversaw a series of emergency measures that greatly increased White House control over the economy. During a visit to Washington in 1942, Cullen read of Roosevelt’s Labor Day speech to Congress calling for a further increase in executive powers.
Infuriated, Cullen purchased a full-page advertisement in the Washington Times-Herald in which he quoted Senator Robert A. Taft’s attack on the speech: “A deliberate effort to discredit and nullify Congress … to induce the American people to accept the rule of a man-on-horseback—a dictator!” Cullen’s ad concluded with its own broadside against congressmen who supported the president. “The people of Texas do not want a dictator,” it read. “And if you fail to pass proper laws to control a possible dictatorship—while our brave boys are fighting to preserve democracy—then you should resign at once and permit patriotic men to take your place, so that our children may enjoy the blessings of freedom!” Cullen, however, was just getting warmed up.
In 1944 Texas ultraconservatives, whipped to a near-frenzy by Roosevelt’s wartime price controls on oil and other commodities, mounted their most serious challenge to Roosevelt to date. They attempted to seize control of the Texas Democratic Party, vowing to withhold the state’s electoral votes in the event of Roosevelt’s nomination for a fourth term, but were narrowly defeated at the state convention in September. Undeterred, ultraconservatives formed a third party, the Texas Regulars, whose membership was dominated by oilmen, including lobbyists from all the major oil companies active in Texas, as well as independents like Maco Stewart Jr. and Arch Rowan of Fort Worth. In the weeks leading to the November election, the Regulars mounted an elaborately financed anti-Roosevelt campaign of more than thirty statewide radio programs and front-page advertisements in newspapers across the state. The message was broadly antilabor, antigovernment, and openly white supremacist; one of the party’s planks actually called for “restoration of the supremacy of the white race.”
The Regulars were trounced that November—Roosevelt won the state handily—in large part because they refused to support the Republican candidate, Thomas Dewey. But the party’s greatest failing, and the enduring metaphor of its aims, was its inability to field a candidate of its own; the men of Texas Oil, it appeared, had little to offer the American people beyond hatred. Their defeat was no surprise to the man who a decade later would admit to being the Regulars’ largest
single financial backer, Roy Cullen. While privately admitting they had no chance to stop Roosevelt, Cullen had hoped the Regulars could draw attention to the outrage of southern conservatives; he bought many of the group’s advertisements and gave a speech or two on its behalf. For his trouble he received his first death threats. When a reporter asked whether he intended to keep fighting, Cullen snapped, “Just say we’re starting now to work on the 1948 campaign!”
II.
Not all Texas oilmen were conservative; sometimes it just seemed that way. A handful, such as J. R. Parten of Madisonville, who took posts in the Roosevelt administration during World War II, could actually be called liberal. But the second major camp of politically minded oilmen channeled money and services to Washington not for ideological reasons, but for practical reasons, for access. By far the most successful of these was Sid Richardson, who gained entry to the White House at a time his peers were still dipping their toes in the political pool, a position he managed to sustain, to his great reward, through twenty-five years and three presidencies. In the process, Richardson helped transform the role of money—in his case, paper bags stuffed with cash—in the American political process.
Richardson’s political involvement began when he was still a poor man, on a Saturday afternoon, March 11, 1933. Hobnobbing with friends and ogling cattle at Fort Worth’s Fat Live Stock Show, he was introduced to a visiting VIP, twenty-three-year-old Elliott Roosevelt, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s second son. A handsome young man, intellectually shallow but determined to escape his father’s shadow, Elliott was the closest thing the Roosevelts had to a black sheep. One week earlier, on Saturday, March 4, he had attended his father’s inaugural in Washington. Then, just four days later, he suddenly disappeared from the White House, abandoning his wife and young son.
