Taming the East Texas "Black Giant": Ernest O. Thompson and Illusions of Independence, 1930–1935

Abstract

Taming the East Texas "Black Giant":Ernest O. Thompson and Illusions of Independence, 1930–1935 Matthew Ware Coulter* Click for larger view View full resolution Ernest O. Thompson. Courtesy of Texas State Library and Archives Commission, 1972/115-368B. [End Page 292] Ernest O. Thompson retired from the Texas Railroad Commission (TRC) in 1965 after more than thirty-two years in office. In reporting the event, the Tulsa Daily World called Thompson a "world-recognized oil conservation expert who tamed the wild burst of Texas oil development during the 1930s." The headline for the story identified Thompson as the "Tamer of Texas Oil." The East Texas oil field formed the epicenter of the "wild burst," and it affected the entire nation. A complex and coordinated effort between the national government and oil-producing states eventually established a framework to bring regulation and stability to petroleum operations in East Texas, and in building the new system Thompson probably played a more important role than any other individual.1 In developing the framework, national and state government officials, as well as industry leaders, grappled with questions of federalism. Thompson established himself as a proponent of state authority and challenged those who called for national government controls over the oil industry. In the state of Texas, the legislature had assigned to the Railroad Commission responsibility for the regulation of oil industry operations. The TRC "quickly translated the controversy into one over states' rights," according to historians Diana Davids Hinton and Roger M. Olien, with Thompson serving as the commission's "most eloquent spokesman" and its "dominant [End Page 293] member." The purpose of this study is to consider how Thompson's views on states' rights, and more specifically, Texas's rights, evolved and became more nuanced as he worked to tame the East Texas "Black Giant."2 When Texas Governor Ross Sterling appointed Thompson to the Railroad Commission in June 1932, the East Texas field had 5,800 oil wells, all drilled within the prior twenty-one months, an average of over nine new wells every day. This explosion of activity had begun one year after the 1929 stock market crash when the Daisy Bradford No. 3 well struck oil on the edge of the field in October 1930. Soon after, two other wells struck oil in the region and it quickly became apparent that all were tapping the same pool. With little effective regulation, efforts to extract and sell this valuable resource skyrocketed. There had been oil field booms in Texas before, starting in Corsicana in 1894 and more notably at Spindletop, near Beaumont, in 1901. In the earlier booms, shortages of skilled workers had been a problem, but in East Texas the onset of the Great Depression and rising unemployment meant that tens of thousands of laborers flooded into the area. Towns in the region felt the impact, with Longview's population rising more than 170 percent in the 1930s while Tyler's went up by 65 percent. With little housing available, many of the migrant workers lived in tents and shacks set up in the region's piney woods. The situation quickly drew attention from the national government through President Herbert Hoover's Committee on Unemployment Relief, which noted that the "influx of transients to the East Texas oil area requires immediate attention, otherwise we are liable to have a very serious epidemic this coming winter."3 The prodigious field also drew attention from oil companies and speculators of various kinds who sought leases for drilling rights from landowners. Sinclair Oil Company sent Wesley Gish into the field in February 1931, and the veteran oil man quickly found that "every feature both pleasant and unpleasant ever introduced into an oil play is here in a modified and magnified form." In order to secure drilling rights for his company, Gish found himself paying expenses to bring a "crazy woman from Wichita Falls to Rusk for appointment of guardian to clear the 140 acre lease offsetting our Cherokee County block." Such measures were called for because Gish and Sinclair were competing with the Humble Oil Company, the Texas Company (now better known as Texaco), and the Magnolia Petroleum...