Bryan Burrough (22 page)

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.”
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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.
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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.
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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!”

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.

According to her biographers, Eleanor Roosevelt was distraught, the more so because she had no idea where her son had gone. The answer came late the next day, when the Associated Press located Elliott in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he announced he and a friend had embarked on a cross-country driving trip, intending to visit Texas before heading on to Los Angeles. When the reporter asked if he might buy a ranch while in Texas, Roosevelt replied, “It takes money to buy a ranch. I haven’t that money. I’m looking for a job.”

In Texas he would find both. From Little Rock Roosevelt headed into Dallas, then to Fort Worth, where he attended the lifestock show. There, Roosevelt wrote later, he was introduced to local oilmen:

 

 

Though he later authored three books on his family, Elliott Roosevelt never disclosed precisely what the courtship by Richardson, Murchison, and Roeser—“my three oilmen,” he called them—entailed. For the moment, he was preoccupied with a genuine courtship, that of a Fort Worth debutante named Ruth Goggins. Four months after his visit to Fort Worth, in July 1934, after his wife filed for and completed a Nevada divorce, Elliott and Ruth Goggins married. In early 1935, after Elliott took an executive job with Southwest Broadcasting, the couple purchased a 250-acre ranch seven miles southwest of Fort Worth. Later Elliott joined the Hearst chain of radio stations. It was clear from the outset, however, that he burned to work for himself.