Bryan Burrough

by The Big Rich: The Rise;Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes

Margaret shot a glance at her father, who averted his eyes.

  “Frania,” Margaret said, “I can only suggest that you continue your life as you and Daddy have been doing, discreetly. I’m sure that you have been provided for, as well as the children, and that you can count on that for the rest of your life. But he cannot be married to two people at the same time.”

  “But he’s already married to me,” Frania said.

  “Now, Fran,” Hunt interjected, “we have discussed that and you know that we did not take out a marriage license, that what we did was simply symbolic of a man and a woman coming together emotionally but not legally, as you understood at the time.”

  Something went out of Frania then. She sagged back into her chair. Margaret felt sorry for her. She walked over, leaned in close, and said, “Please don’t call my mother.” Then she left.8 Once again Frania returned to Houston, distraught. Hunt pleaded with her to stay put. But she couldn’t. After fourteen years in limbo, she needed closure. Margaret was again at the building site when her father came by. “Frania’s in town again,” he said. “She’s going to move to Dallas.” Margaret couldn’t believe it. “Why? You just built her a house in Houston!” she said. “She must be crazy! No, she’s not crazy. She’s shrewd. Obviously her point is to make you feel threatened that you’ll be pointed at as a bigamist. That’s what’s going to happen.”

  “I’ve offered Fran a million dollars,” Hunt said. “She screamed at me that she wouldn’t sell her children. I’m not trying to buy the children. I’m trying to support them. What else can I do? ”

  The next morning Margaret was at Mount Vernon when she found a note on her windshield. “Please see me before you leave,” it read. “Mother.” She found Lyda in the morning room, staring out the window. It took a full minute before Lyda could find the words. “I just had a telephone call from a Miss Frania Tye,” she said. “She said that she and your father were married in 1925 … and have four children.”

  “They were never married, Mother.”

  “You know about this? ”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Why would I?”

  Margaret stayed with her mother all day. At lunch Lyda said, “Those poor children.” Before Margaret could respond, Lyda said, “Daddy always said that his genes were so outstanding that he wanted to leave a lot of them to the world. I am certain that he does not imagine there is anything the matter with this. He is so naive.” She startled Margaret by suggesting she adopt Frania’s children.

  Three days later Frania called again. Lyda mentioned adoption. Frania refused, but softened. She ended up apologizing, saying that Lyda must be an extraordinary woman, and returned to Houston. “I arrived at the conclusion that Mrs. Hunt was the finest woman I had ever met,” Frania said later. “I decided I would do everything to leave the family alone regardless of what [Hunt] would do.”

  Afterward, Lyda told Margaret they must never speak of Frania Tye again. “I don’t forgive him like you do,” Margaret replied.

  “You must,” Lyda said. “Do not dwell on something about which you can do nothing. It does not help anything. Or anyone. It makes it worse. Let us have our say now, but then after today never mention this again.” It was, in fact, the last time Margaret ever heard her mother speak of Frania Tye. She felt certain her parents never spoke of it.9

  After her talks with Lyda, Frania gave up attempting to reconcile with Hunt. On his urging, she moved once again, this time to Los Angeles, where she took rooms at the Santa Monica Club and enrolled the children in private schools. Friends urged her to sue Hunt for bigamy. Frania refused, saying it would irreparably harm the children. In December 1941 Hunt had trusts created for their children, mostly oil and gas leases, that initially threw off six thousand dollars in cash each year. The epistle led to a series of discussions between Frania, her attorneys, and Hunt at the Adolphus, aimed at a final resolution. The talks ended in a sixty-two-page agreement, signed on January 24, 1942, in which Hunt agreed to pay Frania three hundred thousand dollars plus two thousand dollars a month for the rest of her life. In return, she signed a statement swearing they had never legally married.

  Twelve days later Frania married a Hunt Oil employee named John W. Lee. Lee, whose principal duties involved handicapping horse races for his boss, was tall, handsome, malleable, and willing to marry a beautiful, rich woman. After the war, they settled outside Atlanta, comfortably outside the Hunt family’s orbit. For the time being.10

  VI.

  The story of H. L. Hunt, bigamist, should end there. But it doesn’t. By the time he packed off Frania to her new life in Georgia, Hunt had already taken up with a new woman, a petite, twenty-five-year-old Hunt Oil secretary named Ruth Ray. Blessed with deep green eyes and a pneumatic figure that men noticed—“a real baby-doll type,” one acquaintance remembered—Ray was a Depression refugee from dust-bowl Oklahoma, a religious girl who kept a can on her desk for tithes.11 After dropping out of college she found work as a legal secretary in Shreveport, and when her boss joined the firm’s largest client, Hunt Oil, she went along. As he told the story years later, Hunt noticed her one day outside the offices, waiting for a bus. He offered to take her for a drive in the country. Hunt being Hunt, she was soon pregnant.

  This time he took no chances. Without any explanation to her co-workers, who guessed the truth, Ruth vanished from Shreveport. Hunt spirited her to an apartment in New York City, where Ruth mailed out wedding announcements saying she was marrying an army officer named Raymond Wright. The women at Hunt Oil weren’t fooled. They wagered that the mysterious Mr. Wright would soon go missing in some far-off combat action.12 In April 1943 Ruth gave birth to Hunt’s twelfth child, a son they named Ray Lee Wright. Hunt was smitten with Ruth and their little boy, and couldn’t bear to be away from them. For this, his third family, he decided it was worth the risk to keep them close.

  He must have been emboldened by Lyda’s reaction to Frania Tye, because the small bungalow he bought for Ruth was tucked away on the far side of White Rock Lake, a ten-minute walk from Mount Vernon. Unlike Frania, Ruth knew everything, including her place. She was perfectly happy to be H. L. Hunt’s kept woman, living quietly and, as the years wore on, giving him child after child after child.

  SEVEN

  Birth of the Ultraconservatives

  Virtually every Radical Right movement of the postwar era has been propped up by Texas oil millionaires.

  —THE NATION, 1962

  I.

  One of the most important, and most overlooked, legacies of Texas Oil has been its contribution to the growth of right-wing policies and politicians, especially in their most radical guises. In the decades after the East Texas strike, the state’s oil millionaires would channel tens of millions of dollars into new conservative causes, bankrolling everything from mainstream Republican thinktanks to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s red-baiting campaigns of the 1950s to extremist groups that openly espoused racism and anti-Semitism; later, oil money helped bankroll the birth of the religious right. In a very real sense, the influence of Texas conservatives in America today—in fact, the entire “Texanization” of right-wing politics that brought figures such as George W. Bush and Tom DeLay to national prominence—can be traced to forces set into motion by restive Texas oilmen during the 1930s.

  Modern Texas conservatism sprang from the intersection of two disparate events: Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Depression-era oil discoveries, especially those in East Texas. The New Deal outraged many Texas oilmen and East Texas gave them the money to fight it. Each oilman had his own pet peeve, but in general conservative fury was fueled by a fear of what is known today as “big government,” the New Deal’s introduction of a modern welfare state and deep-seated southern racism. “Nowhere in the United States, not even on Wall Street or the Republican epicenters in Michigan and Pennsylvania, did I find such a perfervid hatred for Mr. Roosevelt as in Texas,” the author John Gunther wrote after touring the state
in 1944. “[There] I met men who had been unfalteringly convinced that if FDR won again, ‘it would mean that the Mexicans and niggers will take us over.’ ”

  Politically, if not always socially, the Big Four oilmen moved easily into the society of oligarchs who controlled the state. Before oil the greatest Texas fortunes were made in ranching and East Texas lumber, where success depended on exploiting the labor of blacks, Latinos, and poor whites—the same formula necessary to succeed in the state’s other industries such as sulfur mining and farming. The men who ran Texas oversaw a hierarchical, plantation-style culture, ruled by a southern aristocracy dedicated to harvesting the earth while keeping its workers subservient and poorly educated.

  Even before making their fortunes, the Big Four enjoyed the trappings of Deep South culture—none more so than Roy Cullen. Though raised in San Antonio, Cullen identified deeply with his South Carolina-born mother. As a boy he dreamed of living in a “big white house … a great, spreading mansion with white porticoes and columns along the front,” and his home in River Oaks was just that, complete with Negro servants. Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson hailed from East Texas, the westernmost bastion of the Old South, and Murchison was what Cullen only wished he had been: a child of southern privilege.

  Texas oilmen shared a deep loathing of taxes, labor organizers, and anyone who looked to change their ways. Roosevelt was the first president since Reconstruction to try, at least indirectly. By the mid-1930s taxes were rising. Homeowners received protection against foreclosures, which angered real estate and banking interests. New labor standards and the growth of unions drove up wages, and thus the cost of doing business. Poor families received jobs from the federal Works Progress Administration, sucking the power from political bosses. Farm programs helped millions of families but upset the fragile relationship with landlords. Scores of new federal programs trampled territory long reserved for counties, cities, and states. Worse, the Roosevelts made public shows of helping blacks and other minorities, which didn’t sit well with southerners who could still be surprisingly candid in their support of white supremacy. Everywhere Texas businessmen looked, it seemed, the federal government was poking its nose into their affairs. For many, there was no distinction between socialism and the New Deal—the “Jew Deal,” as Texas racists termed it. Roy Cullen, for one, termed it “creeping socialism.”

  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 administrat
ion. 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.”k

  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.