Bless the Pure and Humble: Texas Lawyers and Oil Regulation, 1919–1936 by Nicholas George Malavis

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 309 motoring trip. Raitz challenges American travelers to become more self-conscious students of the landscapes they so frantically and heedlessly traverse. “Skillful travel,” Raitz lectures in “A Message to Readers,” requires “locally scaled information on history and geog­ raphy of the kind rarely found in common travel-club literature.” In the “travelogue” that follows, Raitz and nine other contributors serve up generous helpings ofjust such information. The coffee-table format makes this volume an awkward field guide, but otherwise it seems very neatly conceived and executed as a primer for tourists who wish to learn something while they hurtle through space. After a tight introductory essay and another Schlereth portfolio, the guide marches east to west, pointing out things you really would see (often including photographs) and drawing at­ tention to things our modern sensibilities have trained us to ig­ nore—abandoned fixtures of earlier eras, traces of business or lei­ sure activities long forgotten, clues to how we have evolved still embedded, fossil-like, in the built environment around us. Espe­ cially if studied in advance of a trip, this guide can train the observer to read the American landscape like a palimpsest. So prepared, one will see far more than is detailed in this—or any other—guide. The National Road is well known to historians ofthe trans-Appala­ chian frontier, public works, and transportation, but the story of this early national public works project and its continued existence has practically slipped from memory among present-dayAmericans who prefer to imagine that nothing useful comes out ofWashington. The insights of modern geographers, who have taken their discipline so far beyond the realm of “major crops and exports” that we all learned in school, are equally unknown to most casual readers (not to mention the majority ofAmericans who read nothing but the TV listings). For both these reasons, these two volumes target a worthy mission. At $70 for the pair, they will not reach the TV audience, but serious book-buyers (of whom there are apparently millions in this country) ought to pick them up. John Lauritz Larson Dr. Larson is associate professor of history at Purdue University and coeditor of theJournal ofthe Early Republic. He is currently finishing a book on national internal improvements in antebellum America. Bless the Pure and Humble: Texas Lawyers and Oil Regulation, 19191936 . By Nicholas George Malavis. College Station, Tex.: Texas A&M University Press, 1996. Pp. xviii+322; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $44.95 (cloth). In October 1930, aging poor-boy wildcatter Columbus Marion “Dad” Joiner brought in the discovery well of the giant East Texas 310 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE oil field. For the American petroleum industry, plagued with more crude oil than markets could absorb,Joiner’s discovery meant calam­ ity rather than bonanza. As crude prices responded to surging East Texas production by plummeting, small producers outside East Texas faced ruin; large refiners with millions of barrels of crude in storage saw assets plunge in value; royalty owners, including the state of Texas, took drastic reduction in income; and gasoline marketers looked at cutthroat price competition as dirt-cheap gasoline refined from East Texas crude reached markets. ByJune 1931, it seemed as if the American petroleum industry would drown in red ink and black gold if the disastrous flood of oil were not stopped. How it was, and how regulation of petroleum production became part of law, are the subjects of Nicholas George Malavis’s Bless the Pure and Humble: Texas Lawyers and Oil Regulation, 1919-1936. The Pure and Humble oil companies are among the industry players in his story. As Malavis points out, the issues at stake in Texas oil production regulation quickly found their way into state and federal courts and hence were shaped by lawyers. Thus ideology, Malavis insightfully argues, was as much a part ofwhat was done as were politics or eco­ nomics. Malavis sees two conflicting ideological currents at work: the old laissez-faire ideology of uninhibited competition, expressed in oil industry terms by the law of capture, in which oil belonged to whoever produced it and devil take the hindmost, and newer Pro­ gressive ideology of social...