Bryan Burrough (4 page)

All this began to change in the months after the armistice that ended World War I in November 1918. The war years had been good to middle America; between 1914 and 1918, the average wage rose 63 percent. The United States was still an agricultural country and farmers did even better; during the war, wheat and corn prices doubled. Cotton prices tripled. Wartime restrictions, reinforced by the frugality of uncertain times, obliged many Americans to stow their new money in mattresses and savings accounts—until the war ended.

Then, in 1919, an orgy of consumer spending inaugurated the Jazz Age. All across America, wartime parsimony gave way to an explosion of household purchasing as families finally opened their wallets to buy the new technologies the new American oil had wrought. Farmers bought tens of thousands of tractors. Housewives ordered new stoves and ranges. Corporations ordered new industrial boilers. No item, though, sold faster than automobiles. In 1900 there were eight thousand cars in the United States. By 1916 there were three and a half million. By 1921 there were 10.5 million. And every single one needed gasoline. Between 1900 and 1920, American energy demand quintupled.

The surge in demand produced postwar gasoline shortages, as American refineries strained to produce enough fuel to satisfy the country’s new appetites. Major oil companies doubled and redoubled their exploration budgets in the scramble to find new oil, hiring geologists and scouts by the scores and sending them scurrying down every paved road in the Southwest, and quite a few that weren’t. Nearly thirty-four thousand American oil wells were drilled in 1920, more than twice the number just five years earlier. Booms came (and went) in Kansas, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and California.

Suddenly, though, it wasn’t just oilmen who were looking for oil. The Jazz Age ushered in a period of “get-rich” mania, producing a classic American frenzy of speculative ventures. Everywhere slick promoters, backed by modern advertising, pushed ordinary citizens to plunge their savings into a range of new and often risky investments: real estate in Florida and California, gold and silver mines in Nevada, all manner of Wall Street offerings—and oil. Magazines thrummed with stories of the fortunes being made in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas, a few of which were actually true. Southwestern oil fields were “making millionaires at . . . a dizzy rate,”
Scientific American
noted in 1917, mentioning Oklahomans such as Tom Slick and Harry Sinclair, who founded Sinclair Oil. “Men who three or four years ago were in the down-and-out class are millionaires many times over today.” Oil fields, the
Saturday Evening Post
told readers in 1918, are “where fairy tales come true,” where “new kings of oil appear upon the stage, and fortunes by the hundreds—yes, even by the thousands . . . all spring up like magic overnight.”
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Spurring much of this publicity was Texas’s first genuine set of gushers since Spindletop. They erupted around the drowsy country town of Ranger, west of Fort Worth, in October 1917. The Ranger wells were a fluke, discovered by engineers working for the Texas Pacific Coal Company, who drilled a hole looking for coal but found traces of oil instead. Town fathers offered the company twenty-five thousand acres in return for the drilling of four wells. The first produced only natural gas, but the second and third were epic gushers, geysers of a type of greenish black crude that produced high levels of gasoline. The rush was on.

Ranger and a series of smaller finds drew thousands of newcomers into the Texas oil fields. The vast majority became laborers, working as “roughnecks” on drilling rigs, hauling pipe or working in the broiling heat laying the pipelines that began to snake across the state. Many, however, sought to find oil themselves, an activity that until now had mostly been the province of large companies. These men were called “independent” oilmen or “wildcatters,” for their propensity to drill unexplored areas, known as wildcat wells. The first independents were businessmen who made their money in other realms—cotton or cattle or dry goods—and looked upon oil as a sidelight.

Many, however, were farmers and ranchers who were
sure,
absolutely
sure,
there was oil beneath their back forty. All across Texas, men who sank water wells for a living were besieged with offers to try their hand at discovering oil. A few actually found some. The 1918 boom around the North Texas town of Buckburnett began when a beleaguered cotton farmer, S. K. Fowler, pressed by creditors to liquidate his spread, decided to drill a well before giving up. He raised twelve thousand dollars from a group of townspeople, hired a contractor and, to his amazement, struck oil, the discovery well pouring out a strong twenty-two hundred barrels a day.

The barrier to entry, as economists would put it, was low. In those early years drilling a shallow well to sixteen hundred feet could cost as little as ten thousand dollars, the kind of cash a group of local businesspeople could assemble from savings. Anyone, it seemed, could become an independent oilman, and by the early 1920s wildcatters born during the booms at Ranger and Buckburnett constituted a burgeoning new middle class of Texas commerce. Making a living as an independent, however, was a more complex task than drilling a single well.

For many wildcatters, success was defined by one’s relationship with the large oil companies, including Gulf and the Texas Company; Magnolia Petroleum of Dallas, later gobbled up by Amoco; and especially the savvy operators at Houston’s Humble Oil, half-owned by the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil of New Jersey. The majors were the Greek gods of Texas Oil, corporations of enormous power who could and often did dictate the destinies of mortal wildcatters. Men such as Humble’s chief geologist, Wallace Pratt, or L. P. Garrett, Gulf’s man in Houston, were the Zeuses and Apollos of Texas Oil, their leasing and oil-purchase policies the lightning bolts that, when flung across Texas, could enrich or ruin almost any independent.

Everyone understood the game. Few independents had the money to build the infrastructure necessary to refine and sell gasoline to the public; in the 1920s only the majors did that. By and large, an independent who found oil was looking to sell his production as quickly as possible to one of the majors. Oil wells could make an ordinary Texan rich, but typically only after being sold to Gulf, Magnolia, Texaco, or the ’umble, as Humble was known. Yet the symbiosis between independents and majors went deeper. The majors amassed their own acreage and drilled their own wells, but they couldn’t be everywhere, not in a state as vast as Texas. They sat on millions of acres they hadn’t the time or money to drill, and often the easiest way to test a plot of land was to let a wildcatter drill it. The independent bore a portion of the cost—and the risk—the two split any profits, and if serious production was found, the major swooped in and bought it all. In many cases a major would actually advance an independent the cash—known as “dry hole money”—to drill a promising tract. Wildcatters thus became the woolly frontiersmen of oil, discovering new pockets of petroleum the majors could then develop into rich fields.

“The major companies . . . were eager to assist independents,” the Houston wildcatter George Strake remembered. “They were happy to see every wildcat that was drilled. They’d give you tips that would send you on a lease-buying spree. When you needed something you could borrow it from one of the majors, and if it looked like you had a good thing, they’d come in and buy you out before you finished the well.” Everyone knew the game. The challenge was finding the oil.

Of all the thousands of men who swarmed into the muddy tent-camps at Ranger, Buckburnett, and other boomtowns in those boisterous years after World War I, four would find the most. Two did it the old-fashioned way, drilling holes deep in the earth. One did it with his mind. The fourth did it with a fountain pen. If Texas Oil had a Mount Rushmore, their faces would adorn it. A good ol’ boy. A scold. A genius. A bigamist. Known in their heyday as the Big Four, they became the founders of the greatest Texas family fortunes, headstrong adventurers who rose from nowhere to take turns being acclaimed America’s wealthiest man.

On an autumn afternoon in 1920, two men ambled across a weed-strewn pasture seven miles south of downtown Houston.
^a
The younger man, a thirty-nine-year-old would-be oilman named Hugh Roy Cullen, led the older man, his lead investor, Judge R. E. Brooks, across their acreage, pointing out the features he felt made it a smart spot to drill. Cullen was a serious man, just under six feet, with wide-set blue eyes, a thatch of black hair he combed to one side, and enormous hands. He was looking for a dip in the land, a sign, he felt, of oil beneath.

“See, Judge, that’s dippin’ there,” Cullen said, pointing to a patch of dirt.

“I can’t see it,” the judge said. “I think it’s rising.”

That the judge couldn’t find oil in a barrel didn’t matter to Cullen; all that mattered was that Brooks and a dozen other leading Houston citizens had committed money to this drill site. Cullen politely suggested Judge Brooks pick the spot to break ground, and he did. When Cullen realized they had nothing to mark it, he walked to a mound of what Texans tastefully call “cow chips,” picked up a few dry chunks, and piled it on the ground—which is how the man who would become Houston’s greatest wildcatter came to drill his first actual oil well beneath a pile of handpicked cow manure.

History has not been kind to Roy Cullen, a fifth-grade dropout who in his heyday was probably America’s richest man. If he is remembered at all outside Houston, it is usually as an early champion of Texas ultraconservatism, a compulsive letter-writer who jousted with politicians from Franklin Roosevelt to Dwight Eisenhower. Stern, humorless, and a bit of a scold, Cullen at his zenith was a Faulkneresque figure in a white summer suit, a man who detested Communists, “pinkos,” and especially Roosevelt, who preferred “niggers and spics” and “New York Jews” to know their place, and whose favored politician was the red-baiting Joe McCarthy. The image is not unfair, but there was more to Cullen than his political views, which were hardly unusual for mid-century southern millionaires.

A man whose life spanned the years from Jesse James to Elvis Presley, Cullen grew up poor in San Antonio. By his own account—the only one that survives—he endured a difficult childhood, marked by family turmoil, financial reversals, and frequent fistfights with other boys. His mother, Louise, whom Cullen idolized, was a slender South Carolina woman who moved to Texas after Union troops burned her family’s plantation during the Civil War. She married a cousin named James Beck, settled in San Antonio, and gave birth to five children. After Beck’s death in the 1870s Louise wed an itinerant cattle buyer named Cicero Cullen and moved to a farm outside Denton, north of Dallas. Roy, the first of the Cullens’ two sons, was born there in 1881. When he was two the family returned to San Antonio.

Cicero Cullen’s father, Ezekiel Cullen, had fought during the revolution against Mexico in 1836 and had played a part in the formation of the state’s first public schools. Unfortunately, his lineage was Cicero’s only apparent asset. He abandoned the family when Roy was four and reappeared only once, two years later, when he arrived in San Antonio unannounced, persuaded Louise to let him take the two boys for a photograph, then promptly spirited them off to Dallas. Louise hired a lawyer and gave chase, but Cullen fled, taking Roy and his brother, Dick, in a covered wagon all the way to Phoenix. Not for several weeks did he return, sheepishly, after an episode in which Roy fell from the wagon and was run over. Though the boy was unhurt, Cicero Cullen apparently realized he was unsuited for fatherhood. He returned the children to Louise. Roy didn’t see his father again for years.

The kidnapping episode imbued the Cullen household with a bunker mentality, drawing Roy even closer to his mother. So frightened was the family of a repeat incident that Louise kept Roy out of school till he was eight, making him at least two years older than other children when he finally began attending classes. From stories he told in later years, Cullen appears to have been a stubborn, prideful child, qualities that would follow him into adulthood. Ashamed of the family’s poverty, he clung to his mother’s stories of his grandfather Ezekial Cullen’s prominence and her memories of the antebellum South. The latter instilled in Cullen a distrust of most things eastern and northern, a mind-set that also stayed with him throughout his life.

A lonely boy, Cullen hung a blanket over his bed and at night retreated inside with a lantern, maps, and dozens of books: Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Carlyle, Shakespeare, Dickens, Blackstone, and plenty of history. He day-dreamed of traveling the world, of owning his own business. His favorite dream was of the massive white plantation home he would build someday, with porticoes and trellises and gardens, just like the beloved family plantation the hated Union men had burned. Someday, he promised his mother, they would live in it together.

His older half brothers left the house in their teens, and by the fifth grade, when Cullen was twelve, the money ran out. Defying his mother, he dropped out of school to work ten hours a day in a candy factory. Yet he itched to see the world. At sixteen, hearing his father was ill, Cullen left home for Dallas, where he lived with a half sister and attempted a rapprochement with his father. It didn’t take. Searching for a path in life, Cullen joined the military to serve in the Spanish-American War but was rejected when his father informed an officer his son was underage. When Cullen’s half sister and her husband moved to Schulenberg, a town of German immigrants east of San Antonio, Cullen followed, taking a job in a cotton-buying firm, Ralli Brothers. At eighteen he knew enough about cotton to become a buyer, the roving company representatives who negotiated with farmers for their crop. A Houston company hired him and dispatched him to the town of Mangum in western Oklahoma, where his rehabilitating father had resettled.

In 1900 Oklahoma Territory was still the Wild West, and Cullen did his business on horseback, almost dying at one point during a blizzard. In his spare time he expanded his father’s forlorn farm, building up a herd of cattle until rustlers stole most of the animals one dark night; Cullen strapped on a Colt revolver but, to his relief, found his livestock unguarded in a remote pasture. In December 1903 he returned to Texas long enough to marry a quiet Schulenberg girl named Lillie Cranz he had been courting for five years. They settled back in Oklahoma. Cullen bought land and built a shack, where their first child, Roy Jr., was born followed by two girls, Lillie and Agnes.