Bryan Burrough (21 page)

Like most southern states at the time, Texas had only one fully functioning political party, the Democrats, and the New Deal provoked a schism in its ranks whose repercussions are felt to this day. On one side were what the political theorist Michael Lind has called “modernists,” ardent New Deal supporters represented in Washington by Sam Rayburn and his protégé, Lyndon Johnson, elected in 1937. On the other side were “traditionalists” riding the new tide of oil money, men who by the 1960s would inherit a new name: ultraconservatives.

Ironically, the man who can be considered the grandfather of ultraconservative Texas oilmen, the man who triggered their entrance onto the nation’s political stage in 1935, was no longer wealthy. In fact, he was bankrupt. John Henry Kirby, one of Roy Cullen’s early backers, personified the transformation of Texas fortunes from older businesses—in his case lumber—to oil. The first of the great East Texas lumber barons, Kirby had also been the state’s first industrial millionaire, compiling a fortune in backcountry sawmills long before finding oil. He is remembered today for Houston’s Kirby Drive, for naming scores of East Texas towns that began as lumber camps—Kirbyville for one, and Bessmae, for his daughter—and for cofounding the Houston Natural Gas Company in 1925, a corporation that achieved notoriety decades later under a new name: Enron. In the years before World War I, John Henry Kirby all but
owned
East Texas.

Born near Tyler in 1860, Kirby had been a restless country lawyer in the 1880s when he defended a group of eastern lumber companies in a lawsuit. Intrigued, Kirby put together a group of Boston and New York investors and spent the next twenty years buying timberlands. In 1901 he merged these interests and took control, creating the giant Kirby Lumber Company—at one point Kirby controlled more pine acreage than any other man in the world—and the Houston Oil Company, which held Kirby Lumber’s oil rights; a hundred years later,
Texas Monthly
termed it the most spectacular Texas business deal of the twentieth century.

By the 1920s Kirby had emerged as Texas’s leading businessman, president of the National Manufacturers Association, a frequent appointee to presidential commissions, and an adviser to Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover. He maintained suites at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, a mansion called Dixie Pines at Saranac Lake, New York, and in 1928 built one of Houston’s finest homes, a three-story brick mansion west of downtown. As glorious as his career had been, Kirby’s empire crumbled during the Depression, leading to a bankruptcy filing in May 1933; Kirby retained only the ceremonial chairmanship of his companies and a minimal salary. His ruin left Kirby, by then seventy-three years old, deeply embittered, and much of his animus was directed at the Roosevelts. For years Kirby had served as president of an antitax group called the Southern Tariff Congress, and in the early 1930s he hired its most effective publicist, a fast-talking rooster named Vance Muse, to establish a series of anti-New Deal lobbying organizations.

By 1935, thanks to Muse, the Kirby Building in downtown Houston was home to a warren of shadowy, interconnected ultraconservative groups, all devoted to promoting white supremacy, fighting labor unions and communism, and, above all, defeating Roosevelt’s reelection in 1936. The Kirby groups were little more than the Ku Klux Klan in pinstripes, a kind of corporate Klan: the Texas Tax Relief Committee, the Texas Election Managers Association, the Sentinels of the Republic, and the Order of American Patriots. In August 1935 Kirby and Muse unveiled their most ambitious group yet, the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution, or SCUC, which was immediately viewed as what it was, a southern counterpart to the northern Liberty League, a group of reactionary anti-New Deal millionaires funded in large part by the Du Pont family. In press conferences at Austin, Houston, and Washington, Kirby, with Muse at his back, announced plans for the SCUC to mount a challenge to Roosevelt’s reelection the following year. “We plan to dictate the nomination,” Kirby proclaimed. Democratic leaders snickered. The party’s national chairman, James A. Farley, told reporters Kirby could hold SCUC meetings “in a phone booth.”

In fact, though bankrupt, Kirby maintained influence in the oil and broader business communities, and many of his friends not only shared his ultraconservative views but were prepared to take action to defeat Roosevelt. Each had a cause. One of Kirby’s most active allies was Maco Stewart of Galveston, an attorney who, after making a fortune in real estate titles, had seen his wealth mushroom when Humble found oil on land he owned south of Houston. Years before it became fashionable, Stewart’s interest was fighting communism, especially in U.S. churches, a topic he began researching after witnessing a Socialist rally in New York’s Union Square. Convinced that communism’s goal was the “utter destruction” of America, Stewart “attended [radical] meetings, watched their parades, hired men to mingle with them, and trained investigators to get the ‘low down’ on all subversive activities,” according to a privately published biographical pamphlet.

One of the first Texas oilmen to promote ultraconservative causes, Stewart in 1931 formed a group called America First to publicize his fears of the Red Menace, mostly in letters to newspapers and talks he gave around the state. The same year, much as Kirby hired Vance Muse, Stewart retained an oil field character named Lewis Valentine Ulrey to coordinate his personal anti-Communist drive. A onetime Indiana state legislator, Ulrey was a self-taught geologist who had wandered Louisana, Texas, and Mexico for two decades before, by his own telling, suffering a nervous breakdown and “washing up” penniless on a Galveston beach. Ulrey believed that Russian communism was part of an international Jewish conspiracy that had infiltrated the highest levels of American churches, universities, and the Roosevelt administration. He acted as a political tutor for Maco Stewart and his son, and by 1935 formed an intellectual alliance with Vance Muse.

As radical as these men were, the most extreme of Kirby’s circle was George W. Armstrong, a Fort Worth oilman who owned Texas Steel, which made oil field supplies as well as concrete supports for Texas highways. A rabid racist and anti-Semite, Armstrong had been a top organizer for the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and during the 1930s and 1940s emerged as one of the country’s leading purveyors of anti-Semitic hate literature—a fact that would lead to multiple investigations by the FBI and the Anti-Defamation League. An unsuccessful candidate for Texas governor in 1932, Armstrong secretly churned out a new book or pamphlet every year or two and hired a young man who handed them out in hotel lobbies and bus stations. His 1938
Reign of the Elders
was a straightforward endorsement of the notorious anti-Semitic hoax,
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion;
in it, Armstrong characterized the “Jew Deal” as evidence that Roosevelt was controlled by an international Jewish conspiracy headed by the Rothschilds.

Though careful to moderate his public statements about Jews and blacks, Kirby was less guarded in private. In a letter to Armstrong, he characterized
Reign of the Elders
as “the most gripping comment on current events that I have read from any source. It is the greatest contribution to the current political literature of America that has been made. . . . This book has exalted my admiration for your patriotism and for the wholesomeness of your political philosophy.”
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Armstrong joined the band of oilmen and southern businessmen who gathered beneath Kirby’s anti-Roosevelt banner. In fact, though no historian has portayed it this way, the SCUC was almost purely a creature of nouveau riche Texas oilmen. Its letterhead constituted a Who’s Who of Lone Star oilmen, including Roy Cullen, Big Jim West, George Strake, and Clint Murchison—at least some of whom, such as Strake and Murchison, were not explicity reactionary but in all likelihood joined Kirby’s group as a personal favor. None, however, fully understood the vital role money would play in politics, and their contributions to Kirby’s SCUC were meager. In fact, Kirby gathered almost all his funding, about ninety thousand dollars, from northern businessmen and angry Liberty Leaguers, including members of the Du Pont family. By the end of 1935, with the presidential election eleven months away and Roosevelt’s approval ratings down sharply, Kirby’s confidence was growing.

“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.
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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.
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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.