Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1998
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 4, Fall 1998, pp. 351-52
Abstract
This is a history of the independent oilmen of Texas, whose money financed the book. The great oil discoveries in Texas-Anthony Lucas's at Spindletop, 1901, and C. M. "Dad" Joiner's in the East Texas field, 1930, among others-were made and developed by small operators because the major companies did not believe the oil was there. Many farmers' lands remained unleased until oil had already been discovered nearby. Thus oil production and royalties, especially in Texas, the author asserts, were "massively democratized."
Eventually the small operators organized the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association, whose policies sometimes deviated from those of the giant companies. TIPRO was perhaps most effective in the 1970s in persuading Congress to keep the oil depletion allowance for the independents while the majors were losing it.
Goodwyn labels TIPRO leaders-Jack Porter and George Mitchell, for example-as "mere citizens" and links TIPRO's "mass membership of independent producers and royalty owners" with Jefferson's yeoman farmers resisting monied corporations. Yet all the TIPRO leaders have been millionaires. Certainly most operators and royalty owners have not been that rich; but despite the impression of mass democratization the author gives, they have never been more than a minuscule percentage of the Texas population
Comments
Copyright 1998 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska- Lincoln