Bryan Burrough (32 page)

Serialized in
Ladies’ Home Journal
beginning in the spring of 1952,
Giant
was released that summer to immense sales, quickly leaping to No. 1 on the
New York Times
Bestseller list. In a matter of weeks the book brought Ferber’s rich caricatures of nouveau riche Texas and its “oilionaires” to a far broader audience than any magazine writer. Critics, at least in the East, ate it up. “
Giant
makes marvelous reading—wealth piled upon wealth, wonder on wonder in a stunning, splendiferous pyramid of ostentation,” a
New York Times
reviewer wrote. “[Ferber] paints a memorable picture of that new American,
Texanicus vulgaris,
which is all warts and wampum.”
³

Texas critics weren’t so kind; they began savaging the book even before it was published.
Giant,
a reviewer for the
Houston Press
wrote, “is the most gargantuan hunk of monsterous, ill informed, hokum-laden hokus-pokus ever turned out about Texas.” “Ferber Goes Both Native and Berserk: Parody, Not Portrait, of Texas Life,” read the headline atop the
Dallas Morning News
review. “For sheer embroidery of fact—an art of which Texans are rarely surpassed—Miss Ferber takes the cottonseed cake,” reviewer Lon Tinkle wrote. “She has us all riding around in our own DC-6’s. At first blush, you might call it, her book on ranch and oil empires of South Texas reads like a parody of that grand old melodrama, ‘A Texas Steer.’ But Miss Ferber has written a bum steer. . . .
Giant
is a triumphant parade of platitudes.”

It was what everyone expected Texans to say. In the end, of course, all efforts to fight the myth of brawling, hard-drinking Texas oil millionaires proved fruitless, in large part because there was so much truth to it. Thanks to Glenn McCarthy and oilmen like him,
Giant
the book, and four years later the motion picture starring Elizabeth Taylor and a young actor named James Dean, completed the new picture of Texas that eastern writers had been painting since the day
Life
ambushed H. L. Hunt on a Dallas street corner in 1948. It was an image of frivolity fueled by condescension, a cartoon that irritated many Texans even though it remained essentially sunny and upbeat.

It wouldn’t stay that way for long.

With the last of his dreams evaporating around him, Glenn McCarthy was in no mood to discuss Edna Ferber or her book, icily refusing to answer any reporter’s question. Not till years later would he even acknowledge meeting Ferber. “I thought she was a perfect lady,” he once said. “A perfect whore, rat, sneak, thief.”

By early 1953 McCarthy had given up all efforts to regain control of the Shamrock. He kept his office there, coldly staring at Warner Mendel in the hallways and cold-cocking a carpenter he suspected of being an Equitable spy. For the most part, though, he made himself scarce. In February 1953, after several scouting expeditions to Nicaragua, Argentina, and Guatemala, he announced he would finally launch a South American drilling program, on a million acres he leased in Bolivia. He tried to sound excited about the venture, taking along Houston reporters to watch him begin drilling, but it felt like exile. His first three wells found natural gas, but McCarthy was soon obliged to shut down production. Bolivia had no pipelines, and thus no way to transport the gas. McCarthy fumed and waited for one to be built.

The Equitable, meanwhile, slowly broke apart his empire. It sold his oil fields and pipelines piece by piece over the next few years. In August 1954 it handed over management of the Shamrock to Hilton Hotels. A year later Hilton bought out McCarthy’s redemptive rights, severing his last ties to the Shamrock, which was renamed the Shamrock Hilton. Workers lowered the giant portrait of McCarthy in the lobby and replaced it with one of Conrad Hilton. It was the last most of Texas would see of McCarthy for a very long time. McCarthy himself, like a latter-day Butch Cassidy, disappeared into the wilds of Bolivia, vowing to return with a second fortune. For a long time the only indication he was even alive came in the odd stories that floated up from South America every few months, none of which, as with the case of an Ecuadoran doctor he attacked in a drunken rage on a flight to La Paz, suggested Glenn McCarthy was walking gently into the night.

—ALLA CLARY, SAM RAYBURN’S SECRETARY

T
he mass media’s discovery of ultrawealthy Texas oilmen in 1948, and the resulting caricature of flamboyant, jet-setting billionaires popularized in
Giant,
introduced the country to a new regional archetype—funny, silly, harmless Texans who rode ostriches, wooed Hollywood stars, and scattered silver dollars on the sidewalks of Houston and Dallas like so much pocket lint. It was as if America had acquired an exotic new animal for the national zoo,
Texas oilicus.
It didn’t take long for those ogling the rough-hewn beast to realize it had teeth, and it intended to use them in ways no one had foreseen.

The venue would be national politics. In 1948 few outside the inner ranks of Washington fund-raisers appreciated what the new Texas millionaires were capable of, much less their intent. Insiders appeared to regard Sid Richardson and Clint Murchison as reliable Democratic donors but little more, cash-heavy martinets controlled by Lyndon Johnson. Roy Cullen’s bankrolling of Texas ultraconservatives, and his penchant for firing off angry telegrams to half the Senate, had made him a curiosity, a humorless, self-important old man who deluded himself he was a power in politics. Hunt remained a cipher.

What few understood was that America was on the brink of a new school of political thought, modern conservatism, and the Big Rich would be a driving force in its spread. To most, the rise of postwar conservatism came out of nowhere, a notion enshrined by Lionel Trilling’s observation in 1950 that “liberalism is not only the dominant, but even the sole, intellectual tradition” in the United States. America in 1950 had not a single leading politician who could be termed conservative by today’s standards and, other than
Human Events
, an eight-page newsletter launched in 1944 with a readership of 127, not a single conservative media outlet of note. Until the late 1940s American conservatives, what few there were, remained relegated to the fringes, a motley collection of marginalized academics and midwestern businessmen whose interests ranged from World War II isolationism to the extremes of racism and anti-Semitism. To the extent it noticed, the mainstream press dismissed them as kooks and fanatics.

Despite this, in the first years after the war a number of groups, each with its own pet issue, began to coalesce into something approximating a consistent conservative philosophy. One consisted of former Communists and Socialists, many of them European emigres, who felt America wasn’t doing enough to contain Russian and Chinese communism. Onetime Trotskyites such as James Burnham fanned the flames of anticommunism, which exploded into a national issue during the prosecution of the diplomat Alger Hiss in 1949. A second group, led by a pair of eccentric cape-wearing writers, Albert Jay Nock and Ayn Rand—one historian dubbed them “the caped crusaders”—railed against what’s known today as “big government,” the idea that the spread of federal power under the New Deal would lead to totalitarianism. Many leading Texas oilmen, including Cullen and Hunt, drew ideas and inspiration from these two groups but belonged squarely to a third, southern traditionalists opposed to almost all aspects of Rooseveltian thought, especially civil rights and the winnowing of states rights.

By 1950 a series of books had appeared laying out the philosophical elements that would comprise American conservatism: anti-Communist, antilabor, pro-religion, pro-business, favoring limited government and opposing civil rights. Conservatives were not yet identified with a political party; given that the feeble Republicans hadn’t won a presidential election since 1928, most conservatives, especially southerners, remained uneasy Democrats, as evidenced by Strom Thurmond’s breakaway Dixiecrat candidacy of 1948. What conservatism needed was a leader, a prophet, and in 1951 it got one in the son of a Texas oilman, a Yale undergraduate named William F. Buckley, who attacked the trend toward atheism and collectivism in his book
God and Man at Yale.
Buckley’s father had worked in the Mexican oil fields; as a boy, his babysitters included Mr. and Mrs. George Strake. In 1955, with money raised from his father and friends, including a Houston oilman named Lloyd Smith, Buckley would found
The National Review
, which became the crucible for conservative thought. Until 1955 the rising voices of conservatism remained far-flung and disjointed. Many of the loudest, though, were coming from Texas.

When it finally dawned on the rest of America how very, very conservative Texas oilmen were, many asked why. The best reason was the simplest: the deep-tissue insecurity of the nouveau riche. As one oilman told a magazine writer in 1954: “We all made money fast. We were interested in nothing else. Then this Communist business suddenly burst upon us. Were we going to lose what we had gained?”
¹

Roy Cullen certainly thought so. In the summer of 1947, fresh off the wave of publicity that accompanied his donations to the University of Houston and local hospitals, Cullen began to flex his political muscles. His years of “intermittent fire,” as he termed his telegrams to congressmen, were over; he turned sixty-six that year, and if he was to have any chance of halting the march of “creeping socialism,” it had to be now. His resulting initiatives, though alternately ignored and ridiculed by historians, were to have a lasting impact on Houston, on Texas, and, to some small degree, insofar as they constituted an early effort to push the Republican Party to the right, the nation.

The first fight Cullen picked, however, was a purely local affair. Not by accident it brought him into direct conflict with his longtime rival, “Mr. Houston” himself, Jesse Jones, the banking magnate who had served in several positions during the Roosevelt administration. More than one Texan viewed the subsequent tussle as Cullen’s attempt to dethrone Jones and the so-called Suite 8-F crowd, a cadre of downtown power brokers so named for the hotel suite where they met. Oddly enough, it all began with the white camelias in Cullen’s garden. One morning he noticed they had turned yellow. Sniffing the air, he guessed the cause: toxic smoke from a new paper mill on the edge of Houston. At his office, he could smell the mill’s odors wafting in on an easterly wind. He was forced to shut his windows. “If I believed in Hell,” Cullen complained to a lunch partner at the Houston Club, “I would say the odors of the paper mill and those that steam out of the cracks in Hell must be very similar.”

When a new mill was proposed for a site east of his beloved University of Houston, Cullen declared war, firing off a series of angry letters to the newspapers. At one point, he threatened to leave Houston if the mills weren’t stopped. Told that the mills’ locations were a question of zoning, Cullen began a study of Houston’s ordinances. What he discovered changed not only his philosophy on the mills, but the focus of his anger. The zoning board seemed to have complete control over who could build what where in Houston, and the more he studied, the more Cullen realized that the board’s guiding hand was none other than Jesse Jones. Suddenly the mills were forgotten. What began as a dispute over noxious odors evolved, in Cullen’s mind at least, into a debate over zoning laws and individual freedom.

Both headstrong, independent men, Cullen and Jones had been squabbling for years. After a disagreement in 1946, Cullen wrote Jones: “Our philosophies of life are so different. You build houses of mortar, stone and steel, while I build Man.” Theirs was the rare public dispute between nouveau riche oilmen, few of whom had involved themselves in their communities, and the downtown businessmen who ran Dallas and Houston. The rancor grew when Cullen managed to push through a referendum on whether Houston should have
any
zoning. Jones, joined by the Suite 8-F crowd, fought hard for the status quo. Cullen gave no quarter. In one letter published in the
Chronicle,
he wrote that it had been “a pleasure to help build this city up to now, but Jesse Jones has been away (in Washington) the last twenty-five to thirty years and has . . . decided, with the influence of the press here, and the assistance of a bunch of New York Jews, to run our city.” In the 1948 referendum, Houston voters backed Cullen’s position by a 2-to-1 margin. To this day, Houston is the only American city without major zoning laws, a distinction it owes largely to the efforts of one man, Roy Cullen.

The victory appeared to embolden Cullen. All through 1948 and into 1949, letters spewed from his typewriter, to the
Chronicle,
the
Post
, the
Press
, to Harry Truman and every congressman in the country. A public figure now, recognized as the Southwest’s greatest living philanthropist, Cullen threw himself into public life with abandon, delivering speeches that set the tone for booming Houston to soon be recognized as a national center for ultraconservative views. In one speech, he called for the impeachment of “sixty percent” of sitting Supreme Court justices. In October 1948 he blasted a pending civil-rights law that sought to make lynching a federal crime, abolish poll taxes, and outlaw segregation in interstate commerce. “If [these bills] become law, totalitarian government will follow, and that means atheism,” he wrote the local papers. “If enforced, [they] must result in a police state, and in a Communistic government, and in the end of our freedom and of our democratic form of government.”
²
Sometimes he got carried away, as when he went on the University of Houston’s radio station and called Secretary of State Dean Acheson “a homosexual,” at which point the station abruptly went off the air.