Proletarian Spirit, Bourgeois Pocketbook: Thomas A. Hickey and Perceptions of a Socialist Oil Company, 1917-1925
by
Brandon Collins, B.A.
A Thesis
In
History
Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
Approved
Dr. Randy McBee Chair of Committee
Dr. Sean Cunningham
Mark Sheridan Dean of the Graduate School
May, 2020
Copyright 2020, Brandon Collins Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS No work is done in solitude, no matter how much it can feel like it in the moment. And so this work is due in large part to people other than myself. First and foremost, I would like to thank my committee members, chair Dr. Randy McBee, and Dr. Sean Cunningham, who helped guide and support the writing of this thesis. I would especially like to thank them for their patience, as the last few months of this process have been a trying time for everyone. They are not the only scholars who deserve thanks, however. I have to thank Dr. Sarah Keyes, whose guidance and insight drove me to pursue this path to begin with. I would also like to thank Dr. Barbara Hahn, whose astute questions and interest as this project began to develop helped shape it to what it is now. Lastly, I would like to thank my loving family. Without the love and support of my father, Brandon, my mother, Traci, my brother, Blake, and my sister, Kamryn, none of this project or my studies thus far would have been possible. And finally, I cannot express enough my thanks to my great-grandmother, Atha Lee Boyd. None of this would be possible had listening to her stories not blessed me with a deep love and appreciation for history, a love and appreciation I hope this project reflects. To all of those above, and the many other colleagues, friends, and family members not listed, I owe a tremendous amount of gratitude and thanks.
ii Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... ii
I. INTRODUCTION ...... 1
II. MARKETING A WORKER'S OIL COMPANY ...... 16
III. RADICAL PERCEPTIONS OF THE COMPANY ...... 42
IV. PRESS REACTION AND ‘SOCIALIST MILLIONAIRES’ ...... 63
V. CONCLUSION ...... 85
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 89
iii Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
The oil boom in Eastland County, Texas, that began in 1917 and would run into the early 1920s coincided with an equally monumental period of great upheaval in the life of Thomas Aloysius Hickey and of socialism in Texas. Hickey was the publisher and editor of The Rebel, the unofficial organ of the Socialist Party in Texas, until on June 9th,
1917, Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson chose The Rebel to be the first government suppressed publication under the Espionage Act, even though it had not yet been signed into law.1 This suppression was done on the grounds that The Rebel opposed both the
United States’s entry into the First World War and the draft of soldiers for that war. Soon the federal government and state governments would turn their attention to the suppression of other socialists and radicals whose opposition to the war, the draft, and capitalism at large represented a threat, as they saw it, to the United States. While this period of wartime repression from 1917 to 1918 is not generally considered part of the larger pattern of government suppression of radicals known as the First Red Scare, which ran from 1919 to 1920, it must be considered so when studying the Socialist Party and socialism in states like Texas and Oklahoma, where that early suppression hit hardest.
This dissertation looks in part at the consequences of that early suppression by way of the fate of Thomas Hickey, whose career shifted from radical writer and orator to oilfield promoter, as he helped to found the National Workers Drilling and Production
Company in 1919. The ways the Company marketed itself, as a company of and for the
1 James Green, Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest, 1895-1943. (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 356. 1 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 worker run by socialists, as well as the both hopeful and distrustful reactions to the company by other socialists, reveals much needed and heretofore-unstudied insight into the ways socialists adapted and reacted to the First Red Scare, especially on a local level.
The mockery and derision of the Desdemona socialists by national and local newspapers reveals important insight into the role of the press in the First Red Scare, besides the fomenting of hysteria that most scholarship has focused on. The intersection of the
National Workers Drilling and Production Company and the First Red Scare raises obvious questions about why Hickey, with a firsthand experience of government repression because of his socialist politics, would choose to market this company using socialist language and phrases. But in the hopeful reactions to the Company, as well as
Hickey’s own desire to produce a new version of The Rebel, we see that even in the midst of the First Red Scare and even as socialists were mocked and derided by the press, there was still some measure of hope that socialist causes, like the land question, could be advocated for with the right amount of funding. The failure of the Company, and of
Hickey to produce the new version of The Rebel, reflects the general decline in socialist politics that would not be remedied until Norman Thomas’s presidential campaign in
1932. All told, the National Workers Drilling and Production Company and the fate of
Thomas Hickey after the suppression of The Rebel shows the need for further studies of local reactions on the part of socialists to the repression of the First Red Scare.
Early Suppression in the Old Southwest
The Old Southwest of Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arkansas was, as James
Green showed, the area of the greatest and strongest grassroots support in the entire
2 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
United States.2 The crux of that support in Texas came from an issue of particular import to Hickey, that is the so-called land question, or who would own the land that so many farm laborers, tenant farmers, and indebted small landowners worked for a pittance while beholden to the class of wealthy landlords. The Texas Socialist proposed taxing land not being tilled to force landlords to sell, and that “occupancy and use should constitute the only legitimate title to the land.”3 It is in the land question, and the Southwestern socialist advocacy for small landowning farmers and for landless tenants, which allowed them to carve out a consistent bloc of voters in rural Texas and Oklahoma.4 Ultimately, though, their strength was limited due to Hickey’s racism and the resistance of he and other prominent Texas socialists in organizing poor Mexican-Americans and Mexican immigrants, as well as poor African-Americans, which limited their base of support.5 The poor white voters the Party did succeed in organizing were especially concentrated in the poorest farming districts in each of the Old Southwestern states, areas where the land question was of paramount importance to the lives of the voters there.6 This was due in large part to the success of The Rebel, which was “the third largest English-language
Socialist weekly in the United States” in the 1910s.7 As Green argued and as will be discussed at greater length in Chapter 2, newspapers and journals were the predominant
2 Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, xi. 3 Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), 92. 4 Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, 79-80, 86. 5 Foley, White Scourge, 95. 6 Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, 228. 7 Foley, White Scourge, 95. 3 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 means that Party members, especially rural members, came to join and support the
Socialist Party.8
But with that bedrock of strong support came an equally strong response from the federal government and state governments who saw in the draft resistance and anti-war sentiment a means of demonizing socialists as unpatriotic, and thus a means of quieting their dissent against the war and the politics of the capitalist political parties. In
Oklahoma, that suppression followed the Green Corn Rebellion of 1917, in which rural farmers, associated with the Socialist Party and militant unions like the International
Workers of the World but organizing independently of those groups, sought to march on the capital in an act of anti-draft rebellion, though their planned rebellion was squashed by local armed forces before they could leave the farm they gathered at.9 This coincided with the suppression of The Rebel as well as Hickey’s arrest, along with leaders of the militant Farmers’ and Laborer’s Protective Association (FLAP), a tenant farmer advocacy group that called for armed opposition to the capitalist class and resistance to the draft.10 Hickey, though not a member, was arrested at the same time as leaders of
FLAP, which included the newly elected secretary of the Socialist Party in Texas.11
Hickey was released and not charged after his two-day stint in jail, though not long after
The Rebel was suppressed.12
With his main means of advocacy and income gone for the foreseeable future,
Hickey turned his attentions to the National Nonpartisan League. For a time he worked
8 Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, 133. 9 Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, 358-360. 10 Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, 355. 11 Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, 355. 12 Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, 356. 4 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 with the League in both North Dakota and Minnesota, recruiting for the league and selling stock. But that came to a halt in September of 1918, when Minnesota state authorities suddenly imposed a licensing requirement for selling memberships, leading him to fall into depression and contemplate suicide.13 He believed that this change on the part of the commission was a continuation of the efforts to stop him, just as the suppression of The Rebel had been in 1917.14 He continued to sell memberships for a time, but by December of 1918 he returned to Texas, depressed and defeated by the efforts to stop him.15 In 1919 he attempted to publish a new newspaper, the Farmers
Voice, but it was plagued with disagreements between he and his old friend and partner,
Covington Hall, and when it finally went to mail, the postmaster of the Dallas, Texas post office told Hickey that his second-class mailing privileges had not yet been restored, and so the Farmers Voice fell victim to the same repression that killed The Rebel.16
As Hickey’s trials and repeated run-ins with federal and state suppression show, the First Red Scare was not simply an event with a sudden beginning, especially not for radicals in the Old Southwest. Instead, there was a long campaign to suppress radicals and socialists there. Though the prolonged campaign against radicals and socialists known as the First Red Scare did not begin in earnest until 1919, these actions against radicals and socialists in Texas and Oklahoma drove socialists like Hickey from active
13 Thomas A. Hickey to Clara B. Hickey, September 3, 1918, in box 1, folder 11, Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 14 Thomas Hickey to Clara Hickey, September 3, 1918. 15 Robert William Clark, “Thomas A. Hickey and Socialist Reform in Texas, 1904-1925” (Master’s Thesis, Texas Tech University, 1989), 72. 16 Clark, “Hickey and Socialist Reform in Texas,” 73-74. Thomas A. Hickey, circular letter, November 15, 1919, in box 1, folder 23, Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 5 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 political organizing and into new avenues of expressing their socialist beliefs that might not bring the same scrutiny. For Hickey, that was in the founding of the National
Workers Drilling and Production Company.
The Desdemona Oil Boom and the Founding of the Company
The Eastland county oil boom first developed with the drilling of a well by
Ranger businessmen, which hit oil on October 21st, 1917.17 Over the next several months a furious oil boom developed, and by 1919 the Ranger field was at its peak production.18
The Desdemona oil field was behind in development to its northern neighbor, with the first well hitting oil in September of 1918.19 Whereas Ranger’s proximity to the Thurber coalfields meant much of the land came under the ownership of large corporations like the Texas Pacific Coal and Oil Company, Desdemona was more remote, and thus saw the development of a field whose leases were owned by wildcatters and small oil companies.20 But in the time of the oil boom, the population of Desdemona went from around fifty inhabitants to well over 20,000, while Eastland County’s population went from 23,421 to 58,505.21 Peak production in Desdemona came in July and August of
1919, unfortunate timing for one of those small oil companies, the National Workers
Drilling and Production Company.22
17 Carl Coke Rister, Oil! Titan of the Southwest (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1949), 146. 18 Rister, Oil! Titan of the Southwest, 149. 19 Rister, Oil! Titan of the Southwest, 160-161. 20 Rister, Oil! Titan of the Southwest, 148, 161. 21 John D. Palmer, “Glimpses of the Desdemona Oil Boom” West Texas Historical Association Year Book vol. 15 (October 1939): 48; “Texas Almanac: Population History of Counties from 1850-2010,” Texas Almanac, accessed November 30, 2018, https://texasalmanac.com/sites/default/files/images/topics/ctypophistweb2010.pdf. 22 Rister, Oil! Titan of the Southwest, 162. 6 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
Due to accusations of incompetency, mismanagement of money, and charges that decisions were being made without his input, Hickey sued the National Workers Drilling and Production Company in July of 1920.23 The result of this lawsuit was not a trial but an amendment to the Declaration of Trust that made it so that no decisions could be made without the approval of all of the Company’s officers.24 The statement of facts reveals that the founding of the Company was in October of 1919, with Hickey, W. H. Flowers,
H. W. Elliott, and L. L. Steele the founding trustees.25
Hickey was born in Ireland on January 14, 1869, where in his youth he developed his politics in opposition to British landlordism in Ireland.26 In the 1890s he immigrated to the United States, leading a strike of Knights of Labor Machinists in New York before organizing lumberjacks in the Pacific Northwest and then miners in Arizona in the early
1900’s.27 He came to Texas by way of El Paso in 1905, and thus began his efforts to organize tenant farmers in Texas.28 He soon became well known in Texas as a socialist orator and writer, editing the socialist newspaper The Rebel. When The Rebel was suppressed in 1917, he worked for a time for the Nonpartisan League before turning to oil.
23 Statement of Facts in the case of T.A. Hickey v. National Workers Drilling & Production Co., 1920, in box 2, folder 15, Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Lubbock, Texas. 24 J. D. Barker to Clara B. Hickey, July 29, 1920, in box 1, folder 17, Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 25 Statement of Facts in the case of T.A. Hickey v. National Workers Drilling & Production Co., 1920. 26 Ruth Alice Allen, “Literary Efforts on Socialism in Texas, 1890-1925,” unpublished, in Ruth Alice Allen Papers, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. 27 Foley, White Scourge, 97. 28 Foley, White Scourge, 97. 7 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
Up to that point, the other officers were less prominent figures. W.H. Flowers had served as the County Commissioner for Precinct 1 in Stonewall County, Texas, before getting involved in the oil boom in Eastland County.29 H.W. Elliott was a newspaperman like Hickey, having written for future Texas governor William Hobby’s Beaumont
Enterprise before moving to Desdemona and founding the Desdemona Oil News.30 L.L
Steele was a “one-armed former teacher” turned oilfield investor.31 He only briefly served as the Company’s president, though would later have the distinction of serving on the Texas Tech University Board of Directors from 1938 into the 1940s.32 Though they missed the peak of the oil boom in Desdemona, that did not prevent the Company from raising one million dollars in capital for oil drilling and production.33 With the Company founded, the officers turned to Hickey to promote it, the natural choice as he was well known for his persuasive skills.
Much of the historiography of the north central Texas oil booms of the late 1910s and into the 1920s, has focused on broader overviews, like Carl Coke Rister’s 1949 work
Oil! Ttian of the Southwest. Roger and Diana Olien has written several works on the oil
29 “W.H. Flowers For Commissioner of Precinct No. 1,” The Aspermont Star (Aspermont, TX), March 21, 1918, 1. Accessed March 16, 2020. https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth126125/m1/1/?q=%22w.h.%20flowers%2 2. 30 The Dublin Progress and Telephone (Dublin, TX), May 9, 1919, 5. Accessed March 16, 2020. https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth531113/m1/5/?q=%22h.w.%20elliott%22. 31 “Liquid Gold Stream Equal To Aladdin’s Magic Lamp,” The El Campo Citizen (El Campo, TX), August 19, 1919, 6. Accessed March 16, 2020. https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth902669/m1/6/?q=%22l.l.%20steele%22. 32 Mrs. L. L. Steele, interview by David Murrah, May 17, 1974, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 33 W. H. Flowers and Thomas A. Hickey, National Workers Drilling and Production Company, pamphlet 1, (Tyler, Texas: National Workers Drilling and Production Company, undated), in box 2, folder 26, Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 8 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 industry in Texas, including their 1982 work of social and economic history Oil Booms:
Social Change in Five Texas Towns, which, while touching upon the changes the oil boom brought in Eastland County, focuses much more upon the West Texas oil boom of the 1930s and 1940s. It is useful in revealing the demographics of Eastland County right after the oil boom, given the 1920 census that revealed far more young, American born white single men than the Texas average, useful in showing that oil booms were a realm of the young seeking their fortune, with little room for women, foreigners, African-
Americans, or Mexican-Americans.34 Their monograph published in 2000, Oil and
Ideology: The Cultural Creation of the American Petroleum Industry, examines the origins of the American cultural perceptions of the oil industry, and so is not focused on individual oil booms. And while their monography Oil in Texas: The Gusher Age, 1895-
1945, published in 2002, discusses Eastland County and Ranger, it gives only brief mention to Desdemona.
These works all show the need for more focused studies of localized oil booms, especially as they reflect broader trends in American culture in the post World War I era, as Desdemona showed through its demographics and the later race riot, supposedly organized by the Ku Klux Klan, that drove Greek and Jewish people from the town, as well as other “riff raff.”35 That event, as well as the existence of the Company there in the midst of the First Red Scare, call for more studies of these early north central Texas oil booms.
34 Roger M. Olien and Dianna Davids Olien, Oil Booms: Social Change in Five Texas Towns (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 28-31. 35 Inez Heeter, interview by Richard Mason, October 30, 1981, Texas Tech University Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Lubbock, Texas. 9 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
Though this study is of a company situated in Texas, and of socialists active in
Texas, it does not engage too deeply with the historiography of Texas politics in the early twentieth century. The story of Thomas Hickey and the National Workers Drilling and
Production Company is not emblematic to Texas but one that speaks to the broader history of socialism and socialists in the Old Southwest. This story could have played out similarly in the oilfields of Oklahoma, or the mines of Kansas and Arkansas. So while monographs like Lewis Gould’s Progressives and Prohibitionists: Texas Democrats in the Wilson Era were useful in establishing some of the context of Texas political culture in the early twentieth century, this work will not engage too heavily in that historiography.
Historiography of American Socialism and the First Red Scare
Much of the historiography of the First Red Scare has been focused on the national level. That scholarship grew out of the Second Red Scare in the 1950s with two important works. Daniel Bell’s 1952 work Marxian Socialism in the United States focuses on the failures of socialism, which he argued were due to its Marxist ideological focus that precluded any adaptation to American conditions, and that it did not answer the
“day-to-day problems” of life.36 His treatment of the First Red Scare is relatively brief, with a lack of focus on governmental suppression, instead arguing the Party was in decline as early as 1912. Robert K. Murray’s 1955 work Red Scare: A Study in National
Hysteria, 1919-1920 was the first full-length study of the First Red Scare, focusing on the
36 Daniel Bell, Marxian Socialism in the United States, Cornell Paperbacks edition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1952; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1996), 7. 10 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 role of hysteria and fear, which came to characterize much of the subsequent First Red
Scare scholarship.
In 1963 William Preston, Jr. published his work, Aliens and Dissenters: Federal
Suppression of Radicals, 1903-1933. Unlike Murray’s work, which was focused only on the greatest period of anti-radical suppression of the First Red Scare, Preston’s work focused on the larger currents of nativism, anti-alien, and anti-radical sentiments that ultimately produced the intensity of the First Red Scare, arguing that anti-alien sentiment bred anti-radical sentiment, and the government suppression of aliens led to federal suppression of radicals.37 It was only with the heightened period of World War I that finally allowed that long simmering hostility on the part of the government toward aliens and radicals to come to a head, and gave an excuse for removing radicals from society.38
Preston’s work is one of the first to recognize the First Red Scare was not an isolate event, but rather an intensification of a pattern of federal suppression of radicals.
James Weinstein’s 1967 work The Decline of Socialism in America: 1912-1925 is most focused on refuting Daniel Bell’s arguments about the Socialist Party of America, arguing that they were not ideologically fractious and succeeding in spite of that, but that the ideological differences were more tactical disagreements, and were part of an organizational openness and democratic ideal that allowed it to grow to the strength it did prior to the 1920s. And rather than glossing over the First Red Scare, Weinstein argues it was government suppression and not faltering support that led to the Party’s decline, also refuting Bell’s argument that the Party was in decline in 1912.
37 William Preston, Jr. Aliens & Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903-1933, second edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963; Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 1-3. 38 Preston, Jr. Aliens & Dissenters, 7. 11 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
Robert Goldstein’s 1978 monograph, Political Repression in Modern America:
From 1870 to the Present, argued political repression was the primary driver of the destruction of radical political and labor movements prior to the 1930s. His definition of political repression (which I also refer to as suppression throughout this work) defined it as “government action which grossly discriminates against persons or organizations viewed as presenting a fundamental challenge to existing power relationships or key government policies, because of their perceived political beliefs,” which describes the actions taken against Hickey perfectly.39 Goldstein also argued previous scholars have not thoroughly engaged with the fact that there was a large uptick in radicalism, both within radical political movements and within labor movements, and the fears of radical political movements were not totally due to hysteria.40
Regin Schmidt’s Red Scare: FBI and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United
States, 1919-1943, published in 2000, focused on the Bureau of Investigations role in the
First Red Scare, and the centrality of anti-radicalism to the development of the Bureau, which later became the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But Schmidt makes a key argument about the previous historiography, which had mostly situated federal suppression alongside vigilante, grassroots suppression as well. Schmidt argued that the
First Red Scare was mostly driven by government and business elites who situated radicalism as subversive, anti-American, with the press a willing contributor as sensationalist stories drove sales.
39 Robert Justin Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America: From 1870 to the Present (New York: Schenkman Publishing Company, 1978), xvi. 40 Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America, 139. 12 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
More recent works have taken narrower focuses than the broader overviews of earlier works. Theodore Kornweibel, in his 1998 work “Seeing Red”: Federal
Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919-1925, arguing that the intelligence apparatus that spied on African-Americans in the Second Red Scare and during the Civil Rights
Movement had its origins in the First Red Scare, and that black suspects were targeted by some of the FBI’s first black agents during this time. This campaign against African-
American radicals was based on racial fears of the time, particularly the fear of social equality and intermarriage. Similarly Kim E. Nielsen tied anti-radicalism to antifeminism in her work Un-American Womanhood: Antiradicalism, Antifeminism, and the First Red
Scare, published in 2001. She argued that gender equality and feminism played an important and theretofore unstudied role in the First Red Scare, as part of the radical agenda many sought to suppress. Most recently, Jennifer Luff, in her work Commonsense
Anticommunism: Labor and Civil Liberties between the World Wars, published in 2012, examined the changing attitudes of labor unions from civil libertarians in the 1920s to
“proto-McCarthyists” in the late 1930s, and the ways unions both navigated and used antiradicalism to their own benefit.41
Regional studies, meanwhile, are less common, but perhaps more useful for this study. James R. Green’s Grass-roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest,
1895-1943, published in 1978, is the only full length study of socialism in the Old
Southwest of Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arkansas. Green argued the Old
Southwest was the where the Socialist Party found its greatest grassroots support, and, contrary to Bell’s argument, the socialists in those states did address local political issues,
41 Jennifer Luff, Commonsense Anticommunism: Labor and Civil Liberties between the World Wars (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 3. 13 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 which is how they earned that grassroots support. And rather than focus on the decline of socialism in American, he instead focused on examining how it got the strength it had before government suppression and vigilante repression broke its back in the Old
Southwest during the First World War and into the First Red Scare.
Nigel Sellars work Oil, Wheat, & Wobblies: The Industrial Workers of the World in Oklahoma, 1905-1930, published in 1988, examined how the IWW grew in strength in
Oklahoma and how the Wobblies came to be associated with anti-Americanism and treason, so much so that Wobbly association came to be a shorthand for those accusations and was used to discredit them and other radical groups, especially Socialists.42
Green and Sellar’s works are the two major works that address socialism in the
Old Southwest, and show the need for further development of regional studies of socialism and radicalism there. In particular, there is ample room to examine the interracial Brotherhood of Timber Workers in East Texas in comparison to the segregated locals of the Texas Land League, which organized poor landless farmers and tenant farmers in Texas. Even more understudied are socialists on the local level, and what their experiences tell historians about how individuals navigated the First Red Scare.
This work builds off of these works on socialism in the United States and on the
First Red Scare, as well as the works on the early Texas oil booms, but focuses more on the micro level than the broader overviews provided in most of these other works. This thesis will look at Hickey’s advertisement for the National Workers Drilling and
Production Company at length in Chapter 2, arguing that Hickey used the language of socialism, common and well known to most local and national readers at that time, in
42 Nigel Sellars, Oil, Wheat, & Wobblies: The Industrial Workers of the World in Oklahoma, 1905-1930 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 11-12. 14 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 order to promote the Company, situating it as different than most, because it was of and for the worker. Chapter 3 then explores the reaction by socialists and radicals to the
Company, which ranged from hopeful optimism to distrust, due to the long history of get- rich-quick schemes in socialist and radical publications. That chapter argues that the officers recognized those fears and sought to mitigate those concerns in the way it marketed the Company. Finally Chapter 4 looks at the reactions of the press to the socialists of Desdemona, who the press claimed were now millionaires, and the ways that reflected the press’s overwhelmingly negative view of socialists and socialism in the midst of the First Red Scare. That chapter argues that, while the predominant reaction of the press to socialism at that time was of hysteria and fear, their reaction to the
Desdemona socialists shows that mockery and derision were also a means to demonize socialism as well, and an understudied aspect of the way in which the press was an active driver of the First Red Scare. This thesis shows that even in the midst of the First Red
Scare socialism was still a marketable draw and could still bring support, continuing on as an ideal even as the political apparatus of the Party itself was destroyed. Overall, it aims to show how socialists navigated the federal suppression of the First Red Scare and an intimate, micro level.
15 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
CHAPTER II
MARKETING A WORKER’S OIL COMPANY
Introduction
In a January 1st, 1920 letter to the stockholders of the National Workers Drilling and Production Company, company president W. H. Flowers addressed the stockholders as “Comrades and Friends” and thanked them for “your unlimited confidence and loyal support in ‘The Workers Oil Enterprise.’”1 He went on to inform the stockholders that
“Comrade Hickey” would soon start publishing the “Workers National Magazine” for one dollar monthly, and it would keep them informed of “our activities and the general oil news of the country, and many other things, YOU KNOW.”2 What he meant by the
‘YOU KNOW’ is not entirely clear. It could be a hint that Thomas A. Hickey was resuming his political writings within this oil magazine, or it could simply be something of a joke. What is clear from the rest of the language, though, is that the National
Workers Drilling and Production Company president spoke of the company in terms extremely similar to the language of the Socialist Party, and this was a frequent rhetorical choice the Company officers made in marketing the Company. While there is little evidence to suggest the Workers National Magazine was ever published, from Company
1 W. H. Flowers, letter to National Worker’s Drilling and Production Company stockholders, January 1, 1919 (1920), in box 2, folder 9, Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. Though the letter is dated 1919, Hickey’s later lawsuit against the other officers reveals the founding of the Company to be in October of 1919, so the date is likely an error and actually January 1, 1920. Statement of Facts in the case of T.A. Hickey v. National Workers Drilling & Production Co., 1920. 2 Flowers, letter to stockholders, January 1, 1919 (1920). 16 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 advertisements, we can see the perception the officers wished to cultivate was that the
Company was ran by Socialists and for the worker.
In marketing the National Worker’s Drilling and Production Company, Hickey and the other officers would rely on rhetoric familiar to readers across the rural South. As the name of the company suggests, their aim was clearly to show the radical and proletarian-focused motivation of Hickey’s socialist ideology, as displayed in the Rebel, extended to this new business venture. Looking at the various ways the officers marketed the Company, through newspaper advertisements and pamphlets, it is clear the perception of the Company they wished to cultivate was one of a worker-oriented company. That did not come easily, however. Beginning with Postmaster General Burleson’s suppression of
Hickey’s Rebel in 1917, the radical and socialist press faced nearly insurmountable obstacles to publication, and so when the Company did advertise, the language used would need to be understandable to readers but not explicitly Socialist.
This chapter argues that the Company’s public advertisements used language to associate itself with socialist ideology, and did so through both implicit and explicit connections, and that this language would have been familiar to most readers of the time.
Particularly, in socialist and radical newspapers of the time the Company leaned on not only Hickey’s Socialist credentials, but asserted other officers in the Company were ardent Socialists as well. In addition, as the name of the Company implied, the officers went to great lengths to convince readers that they wanted workers to profit off of the oil boom in north central Texas. In the newspaper advertisements and pamphlets they produced, as well as private letters, the company officers almost always attempted to convince readers that they were a company of workers. Though the Company slightly
17 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 altered its marketing approach to fit a non-radical audience, it never altered the central thrust of the marketing: that it was an oil company unlike others of the time, that it was of and for the workers.
The Familiarity of Texans with Socialism and Thomas Hickey
Before looking at the ways the National Workers Drilling and Production
Company officers marketed the company, it is necessary to establish the language the
Company would use was not unfamiliar to the greater reading public. As James
Weinstein wrote in his work The Decline of Socialism in America, before 1918 the
Socialist Party’s strength in the United States lay west of the Mississippi River.3
Additionally, Weinstein wrote that Party strength in those western areas was built by men, such as Hickey in Texas, who “emphasized programs of immediate relevance to their constituents and concentrated on precinct organization.”4 For Hickey, that meant organizing tenant farmers around questions of land ownership. As James Green wrote in
Grass-Roots Socialism, “Through his popular newspaper, the Rebel, and his energetic organizing efforts, Hickey helped to make the land question the paramount issue in Texas politics by 1914.”5 Part of making the land question paramount included Hickey running for the office of Lieutenant Governor of Texas in 1912, and while that race was little covered in the press, he placed second, and thrust the land question onto the main stage of
Texas politics.6 Hickey was clearly an active figure in Texas politics.
3 James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America: 1912-1925 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967), 23. 4 Weinstein, Decline of Socialism, 25. 5 Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, 46. 6 Clark, “Hickey and Socialist Reform in Texas,” 43. 18 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
But how familiar would the average person have been of Hickey, or of the
Socialist Party in general? In her work Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight, Jeanette
Keith writes that “In 1917, most literate rural and small-town southerners would have been familiar with Socialist ideas and catchphrases, which were part of the political currency of the day.”7 She goes on to write that there was a wide circulation of Socialist newspapers, with J. A. Wayland’s Appeal To Reason having hundreds of thousands of readers.8 Hickey’s Rebel, by comparison, had a readership of 22,000-23,000 in 1912.9
Green went on to say that, in lieu of an official party newspaper, the Rebel served as the unofficial party organ of Texas socialists.10 And when the federal government sought to quash dissent against the war, their “most effective weapon…was not the arrest and trial of dissenters…but the suppression of the rural radical press.”11 The federal government recognized that the backbone of the socialist and radical movements in the Southwest was their newspapers. And it was through these newspapers, and even the local, non- radical press, that rural Texans would become familiar with Hickey and his socialist politics.
Elliott Shore’s work Talkin’ Socialism, about J. A. Wayland’s Appeal to Reason, discussed how newspaper publishing “came of age between 1880 and 1920,” the time period Hickey was writing the Rebel and then afterward advertising the Company in
7 Jeanette Keith, Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South during the First World War (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 87. 8 Keith, Rich Man’s War, 87-88. 9 Clark, “Hickey and Socialist Reform in Texas,” 43. Green, Grass-Roots, 139. Clark had the number of subscribers at 23,00, while Green had it 22,000. 10 Green, Grass-Roots, 139. 11 Keith, Rich Man’s War, 109-110. 19 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 other newspapers.12 Shore also argues that “populism and socialism…came of age and drew their strength from the very factors that allowed the development of modern publishing,” namely rising literacy rates, population concentration, and further industrialization.13 The rise of newspapers was central to the rise of the Socialist Party in the rural South, as Green argued, and as Keith argued led to wide dissemination of
Socialist ideas and commonly used language. Shore also points out that this rise of newspapers and the advertisements that came with them created a mass American culture, and an increasingly mass consumer culture. Advertising income was the chief source of income for newspapers of all political persuasions, but produced contradictions for radical newspapers whose editors had to decide whether to take advertising dollars from the very capitalistic culture they were critiquing.14 Among these advertisements were get-rich-quick schemes, derided within the Socialist Party but prominent in radical publications nonetheless, which will be further discussed in Chapter 3. In advertising the
Company in this environment, Hickey and the other officers would find fertile ground for selling shares, but risk the danger of being lumped in with these scams.
These works all paint a clear picture of the environment the Company was advertising in. The Socialist Party’s bedrock of support in the 1910s was in the American
West, and rural southerners would have been hard-pressed not to encounter socialist politicians, organizers, and writings at that time. As will be shown in Chapter 4, that familiarity often bred contempt and derision. Still, socialist and radical newspapers were especially prominent throughout the rural South and old Southwest, as writers like
12 Elliott Shore, Talkin’ Socialism: J. A. Wayland and the Role of the Press in American Radicalism (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1988), 2. 13 Shore, Talkin’ Socialism, 2. 14 Shore, Talkin’ Socialism, 3. 20 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
Hickey pressed the issue of landlordism and advocated on behalf of tenant farmers.
Through his work at the Rebel, then, Hickey was widely associated with Socialist Party and radical politics in Texas. And so the language of socialism that Hickey and other officers used would have been just as ubiquitous in rural Texas. In advertising the
Company, Hickey knew that he could lean on the familiarity readers would have with his name, and thus with his political beliefs. There was a clear association between Thomas
Hickey’s name and socialism in Texas, and a clear understanding on the part of rural readers of what the language of socialism was. As an article from the Desdemona Oil
News, reprinted in the Semi-Weekly New Era out of Hallettsville, Texas, said, “Hickey is known in practically every county in Texas and Oklahoma as the father of the land movement,” showing that Texans throughout the state knew to associate Hickey’s name with socialist and radical politics.15
It is important to note, though, that the language Hickey and the officers used was not exclusive to socialist politics. As Green argued, there were “clear continuities between populism and socialism in the Southwest during the early 1900s.”16 But, the language of southwestern socialists evolved from the Populists, to take on a more class- conscious tone that was “far more radical than Populist reformers.”17 Hickey himself, in his speeches at the Ellison Springs socialist encampment, cultivated an air of fire and
15 R. F. Higgs, “The National Workers Drilling and Production Co.,” Desdemona Oil News (Desdemona, TX) November 4, 1919, 3, in Semi-Weekly New Era (Hallettsville, TX). Accessed March 9, 2020. https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1028786/m1/3/?q=%22t.%20a.%20hickey %22 16 Green, Grass-roots Socialism, 12. 17 Green, Grass-roots Socialism, xiii. 21 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 brimstone radical preacher as had the Populist preachers of old.18 But while there were clear continuities between Populism and socialism in the Southwest, the language the officers used to market the Company would have read to many as explicitly socialist because of where the Company chose to advertise. As the next section will show, most of the newspapers that featured Company advertisements were explicitly socialist newspapers or run by socialists. And even where the Company advertised elsewhere, as in their pamphlets, the clear and repeated presence of Thomas Hickey’s name would have made obvious to most readers the Company was trying to associate itself with Hickey’s socialist political ideology.
Newspaper Advertisements
One of the first records there is of the Company’s attempts at newspaper advertisements comes not from Texas, but from Oklahoma. Dan Hogan was a friend of
Thomas Hickey’s, judging from a December 13, 1919 letter in which his daughter expressed the family’s desire to come visit Hickey and his wife in Texas around
Christmas.19 Dan Hogan was the patriarch of what Eugene Debs dubbed the House of
Hogan and the former Arkansas representative to the Socialist Party’s National Council, and Hogan’s daughter Freda was also a Socialist organizer who later when on to marry prominent Oklahoma Socialist Oscar Ameringer.20 Given Hogan’s Socialist bonafides, it would make sense for Hickey to advertise in Hogan’s paper. Hogan had been the editor
18 Green, Grass-roots Socialism, 163. 19 Freda Hogan, letter to Thomas Hickey, December 13, 1919, in box 1, folder 18, Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 20 Michael Pierce “Great Women All, Serving a Glorious Cause: Freda Hogan’s Reminiscences of Socialism in Arkansas,” The Arkansas Historical Quarterly, 69, no 4. (Winter 2010), 297-298, 305. Accessed January 9, 2020. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23046603 22 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 of The Huntington Herald, out of Huntington, Arkansas, described on the Herald letterhead Hogan used as the “Livest Union Paper In The Southwest.”21 But now that he lived in Oklahoma, he, Freda, and Oscar Ameringer published the Daily Leader out of
Oklahoma City.22 The Daily Leader was a cooperatively owned newspaper, described as a “Farmer-Labor Daily” that was “Owned by 10,000 Farmers and Workers.”23
Hogan, in a letter dated December 11, 1919, two days before Freda’s correspondence, discussed his business relationship with Hickey. In the letter, Hogan reminds Hickey of the contract they have to advertise the National Workers Drilling and
Production Company in the newspaper. Hogan does not specifically mention the advertisements are for the Company, but he wrote that he was to be paid in stock for running the ads six times, which given the time period, lines up with Hickey’s time with the Company. At this point, Hogan had already run two separate ads in the newspaper, and their agreement called for at least three more runs of the ad. Hickey likely found the assertion on the Herald’s letterhead Hogan used, that “Advertisers Get Results,” indeed true, because Hogan informed Hickey that the ads had led to $256 dollars worth of stocks sold, as well as Hogan’s payment in stock of $155.24 While it is unknown what specifically these advertisements said, it is clear Hickey was looking for a certain
21 Dan Hogan, letter to Thomas Hickey, December 11, 1919, in box 1, folder 18, Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 22 John Thompson, “The Heroism of Freda Ameringer,” in “An Oklahoma I Had Never Seen Before”: Alternative Views of Oklahoma History, ed. Davis D. Joyce (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 110. 23 Thomas A. Hickey to unknown, undated, in box 1, folder 23, Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. This letter discussed what Hickey called the Oklahoma Leader, and was written on their letterhead after visiting their offices. Hickey was promoting the paper to whoever the recipient is. 24 Hogan, December 11, 1919. 23 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 audience in placing these advertisements in a Farmer-Labor newspaper, run by two famous socialist organizers, and in Hogan’s case a member of the Socialist Party’s
Executive Committee.25 The Daily Leader newspaper was the perfect place to advertise an oil company that stressed that it was of and for the workers.
While there are no extant examples of the advertisements in the Daily Leader, it’s likely that those advertisements were similar to those Hickey and the other officers placed in J. A. Wayland’s Appeal to Reason. Wayland’s Appeal to Reason was almost certainly the newspaper with the largest reach that the Company advertised in. According to Jeanette Keith, its readership was in the hundreds of thousands as of 1917.26 Unlike the
Rebel, it avoided government suppression. The publication initially supported the
Socialist Party’s antiwar position, but came around to support the war once the United
States entered, losing thousands of subscriptions from irate socialists in the process.27
While Eugene Debs had denounced the paper for that stance, it later allowed the Appeal to advocate for Debs’s release from prison, a campaign that changed Debs’s attitude toward the paper.28
Hickey seems to have born the paper no ill will for opposing the position that got his own paper suppressed by the federal government. Though the circulation of the
Appeal was in a period of decline in the mid to late 1910s, Hickey and the other officers evidently believed it was fertile ground for advertising in.29 From November 29, 1919 to
November 6, 1920, the Company ran at least five advertisements in the Appeal. Hickey
25 Pierce, “Hogan’s Reminiscences,” 298. 26 Keith, Rich Man’s War, 88. 27 Shore, Talkin’ Socialism, 220. 28 Shore, Talkin’ Socialism, 220. 29 Shore, Talkin’ Socialism, 220. 24 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 wrote the first of these advertisements, speaking of the various groups getting in on the oil game, and how it is only “natural than that the Socialists” should get in on the developments, especially because the oil was located “on the exact spot where Debs,
Kate O’Hare, Stanley Clarke, myself and others used to speak to the drouth-stricken farmers in the past and recent years when we dreamed not of oil but thought alone of social justice.”30 Here, Hickey is making the argument for why it is natural that the
Socialists to get in on the oil game. He harkens back to the popular Socialist encampments in Eastland, Stevens, and Comanche counties, drawing the direct association between the fight for social justice then and the quest for oil now through a connection to the land on which those speeches once took place and on which gushers now erupt. Hickey seemed to be claiming ownership of that land on behalf of Socialists by making this connection, that just as they had a right to make speeches there in the past, so to do they have a ‘natural’ right to drill for oil in the present. Hickey continued to draw the connection between the oil company and socialism when he addressed each of the other officers as Comrade, and specifically called President L. L. Steele “the famous one- armed Socialist school teacher.”31
This advertisement is a clear example of Hickey tailoring his marketing approach to the audience, in this case calling upon his Socialist credentials to convince readers of a radical magazine. And because of Hickey’s role in the Company, it would be clear to readers that this was a business venture of and for the worker. As Hickey wrote toward the end of the advertisement, “Come in with us and depend on those who have never
30 National Workers Drilling and Production Company, Advertisement, Appeal to Reason, November 29, 1919, 4. https://www.newspapers.com/image/67587593, Accessed November 4, 2019. 31 National Workers Company, Advertisement, Appeal to Reason, November 29, 1919, 4. 25 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 failed you in the past to work as faithfully for our joint success in the future.”32 Just as he had worked faithfully for tenant farmers in Texas, here Hickey promised to work as hard for his fellow radicals who would join him as Company shareholders.
The other advertisements in the Appeal were far less detailed than the first. The next one appeared in May of 1920, describing stocks for sale as $1 apiece, and referred to the company as “The Workers Oil Company,” just as Flowers’s January 1st letter had.33
The next advertisement came out in September of the same year, and was written by
Flowers. Here he touted a half-price stock sale, but not for the National Workers Drilling and Production Company, but for the W. H. Flowers’ Oil Enterprise.34 This is odd given that the November 29, 1919 advertisement in the Appeal discussed Flowers’ company merging with Hickey and Elliott’s to create the National Workers Drilling and Production
Company. Whether this was an error or intentional, or an old add being ran again with the wrong language, it followed much the same script as that advertisement. Flowers led with a testimony from Eugene C. Howe, the advertising manager of the Appeal, who said that he visited Texas in order to investigate himself Flowers’ oil enterprise, and having done so has himself invested in the company.35 Howe goes on to write that Flowers “is a good
Socialist and a worker, contributing $100 to the Special Debs Edition of the Appeal, May
22, 1920.”36 So although Hickey had not called Flowers a Socialist in the November 29,
32 National Workers Company, Advertisement, Appeal to Reason, November 29, 1919, 4. 33 National Workers Drilling and Production Company, Advertisement, Appeal to Reason, May 22, 1920, 2. https://www.newspapers.com/image/67587696, Accessed November 4, 2019. 34 National Workers Drilling and Production Company, Advertisement, Appeal to Reason, September 25, 1920, 4. https://www.newspapers.com/image/612855118, Accessed January 12, 2020. 35 National Workers Company, Advertisement, Appeal to Reason, September 25, 1920, 4. 36 National Workers Company, Advertisement, Appeal to Reason, September 25, 1920, 4. 26 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
1919 advertisement, here Howe does, and Flowers uses that identifier much like Hickey had, in the belief that doing so would help his advertising efforts in the Appeal.
Flowers did this again in the October 23, 1920 advertisement in the Appeal. Here he is writing on behalf of the National Workers Drilling and Production Company, which suggests the previous advertisement was simply out of date. He clarified that the half- price sale was in actuality a two-for-one stock sale, wherein the buyer would purchase
$100 of stock and Flowers would give them $100 worth of his own stock for free, in order that he could fulfill the two-for-one promise without selling Company stock at half- price.37 Flowers then went on to write, “I am a Socialist and I want my Comrades—wage earners and small investors—to get the benefit of this valuable lease.”38 Like Hickey’s advertisement and Flowers’s previous one, he again leans on identifying as a Socialist to help sell stocks in the Company, and says that the Company is a company for the workers, in that it want workers to invest and thus reap the rewards should the Company be successful. But Flowers did something strange afterward, in that he wrote the
“APPEAL TO REASON is the only paper in which I advertise.”39 This was demonstrably false, given the Company had earlier advertised in the Daily Leader and the Aspermont
Star out of Aspermont, Texas. Regardless of that lie, Flowers continued to emphasize that the Company was for the worker by writing “I am determined that the WORKERS shall
37 National Workers Drilling and Production Company, Advertisement, Appeal to Reason, October 23, 1920, 6. https://www.newspapers.com/image/67587788, Accessed November 4, 2019. 38 National Workers Company, Advertisement, Appeal to Reason, October 23, 1920, 6. 39 National Workers Company, Advertisement, Appeal to Reason, October 23, 1920, 6. 27 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 have the benefit of this Bonanza Oil Lease, if they want it.”40 He again supported this advertisement with the personal recommendation from Eugene C. Howe.
The final Appeal advertisement again addressed the two-for-the-price-of-one sale
Flowers had on Company stocks, though this time he omitted the sentence calling himself a Socialist, while his desire that “WAGE EARNERS and SMALL INVESTORS” get the profits of this oil field remained.41 Though Flowers lied about the breadth of his advertising efforts, he continued the Company’s trend of leaning on their Socialist politics and their worker-centric focus, just as Hickey’s advertisements had. All told, the
Aspermont Star advertisements leaned heavily on the officers’s Socialist credentials, and made explicit that the Company wanted workers to see the benefit of the Company’s success in the oilfields.
Two other advertising efforts by the Company notably excluded the mention of the officer’s Socialist politics. In the May 29, 1920 issued of the Aspermont Star, Hickey penned an advertisement that addressed the denizens of Stonewall, Haskell, and Jones counties, a little over 100 miles northwest of Eastland County. Aspermont, Texas is located in Stonewall County, while Hickey’s wife Clara resided at various times in
Stamford,42 on the border of Haskell and Jones counties, and in Rule, in Haskell
40 National Workers Company, Advertisement, Appeal to Reason, October 23, 1920, 6. 41 National Workers Drilling and Production Company, Advertisement, Appeal to Reason, November 6, 1920, 4. https://www.newspapers.com/image/67587796, Accessed November 4, 2019. 42 Thomas A. Hickey to Clara Hickey, April 19, 1920 in box 1, folder 5, Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 28 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
County.43 Clara’s family lived in Old Glory, in Stonewall County, where Hickey himself was often a visitor.44 Hickey was therefore quite familiar with the three counties he addressed in this advertisement, and according to his niece Mina Lamb, he got along well with most of the community of Old Glory.45 It is likely his familiarity with the area was one of the reasons he decided to advertise in the Aspermont Star, when previously he had advertised in socialist-affiliated papers.
It is clear from the outset this advertisement is different from those in the Appeal.
Hickey addressed the readers as “DEAR FRIENDS” instead of as comrades.46 Hickey spent half of the advertisement discussing the long held belief people in those counties had regarding the potential for oil hidden beneath their feet, and how the National
Workers Drilling and Production Company had recently leased land to drill a well in the area. The next half is the sales pitch, with Hickey laying out that the Company is “a million dollar concern” with “22,000 acres of land…including 8 tracts in proven fields.”47
While Hickey and Flowers both used their previous advertisements to tout the
Company’s viability, and to tout their business bonafides so as to assuage any fears that the Company was a scam, they did so while also drawing connections to their socialist and worker-oriented politics. That is not the case in the Aspermont Star advertisement.
43 Thomas A. Hickey to Clara Hickey, March 15, 1920 in box 1, folder 17, Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 44 Mina W. Lamb, interview by Robert Clark, April 1, 1989, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 45 Lamb, interview, April 1, 1989. 46 National Workers Drilling and Production Company, Advertisement, The Aspermont Star (Aspermont, TX), May 20, 1920, 2. Accessed January 13, 2020. https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth126236/m1/2/?q=%22national%20worker s%20drilling%20and%20production%20co.%22 47 National Workers Company, Advertisement, The Aspermont Star, May 20, 1920, 2. 29 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
Instead Hickey mentions that Flowers is from Old Glory and was the “widely popular commissioner of precinct one.”48 Rather than leaning on any socialist fraternity, Hickey instead is relying upon the readers’ familiarity with Flowers, and with the idea that oil has long waited just beneath their feet, if only someone would come along and drill for it.
And rather than echo Flowers’s call that the workers could benefit of this oil boom,
Hickey instead wrote that he wanted the well there to be a “community proposition.”49
Hickey emphasized the idea that locals should benefit by writing that “The money will not leave this portion of West Texas” and that if the well struck black gold, then “the towns in Haskell, Jones and Stonewall will be enormously benefitted.”50 By tying the
Company to a popular local figure, playing to the long held beliefs in oil in the area, and emphasizing the communal potential of the endeavor, Hickey focused his marketing efforts on local approach, in contrast to the socialist fraternity emphasized in the Appeal advertisements.
Though this Aspermont Star advertisement made no mention of the Company’s socialist affiliations, and neither did it focus on the Company being worker-oriented, the advertisement nonetheless differed from others in the Aspermont Star. The Golden Goose
Oil and Refining Company, as its name suggests, focused its advertisement on the certainty of striking oil, and thus its stockholders striking it rich. This February 6, 1919 advertisement argued that “Golden Goose Stock will Go Sky High” and that the company
48 National Workers Company, Advertisement, The Aspermont Star, May 20, 1920, 2. 49 National Workers Company, Advertisement, The Aspermont Star, May 20, 1920, 2. 50 National Workers Company, Advertisement, The Aspermont Star, May 20, 1920, 2. 30 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 would “BE A BIG DIVIDEND PAYER” to those with the “nerve enough” to invest.51
Even its name, Golden Goose, calls to mind easy riches for little work. All of this stands in stark contrast to the familiar and communal approach taken by Hickey, setting the
Company’s advertising efforts apart even if this advertisement did not state the Company was worker-oriented.
Hickey had another advertisement in the Aspermont Star, however. The second one came in the May 27, 1920 issue, one week after the first. Unlike the first, which led with the title “Stonewall County Oil,”52 this second advertisement was titled
“NATIONAL WORKERS DRILLING AND PRODUCTION COMPANY” and the first line read, “This Company is strictly what its name implies.”53 Hickey also references the familiarity readers may have with his name. In the first paragraph he wrote, “[the company’s] officers are men of national standing and character.”54 This seems to be a reference to Hickey’s well-known reputation as a Socialist agitator, since he does not mention any of the other officers by name. The rest of the advertisement focuses on the
Company’s various holdings, both in Stonewall County and in Eastland County, among other counties in north central Texas. Unlike the previous advertisement in the Aspermont
Star, in this one Hickey highlighted the worker-oriented nature of the Company by centering the name and enforcing that it means what it implies, that the Company is a
51 Golden Goose Oil and Refining Company, Advertisement, The Aspermont Star (Aspermont, TX), February 6, 1919, 7. Accessed January 14, 2020. https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth126169/m1/7/ 52 National Workers Company, Advertisement, The Aspermont Star, May 20, 1920, 2. 53 National Workers Drilling and Production Company, Advertisement, The Aspermont Star (Aspermont, TX), May 27, 1920, 2. Accessed January 14, 2020. https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth126237/m1/2/?q=%22national%20worker s%20drilling%20and%20production%20company%22 54 National Workers Company, Advertisement, The Aspermont Star, May 27, 1920, 2. 31 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 worker’s company. He also references his own well-known history in Texas Socialist circles. All told, this advertisement presents the Company as a worker-oriented company with Socialist affiliations.
In almost all of these newspaper advertisements from the Company, it is clear the officers wanted to cultivate a certain perception. In choosing to advertise in Dan Hogan and Oscar Amerigner’s Daily Leader, they showed that they wanted the readers to see them as in-step with Hogan and Hickey’s Socialist ideology. In the Appeal to Reason advertisements Hickey makes that connection explicit by reminding the readers of his
Socialist politics, of L. L. Steele’s Socialist politics, and of the speakers like Eugene Debs and Kate O’Hare who tread on the very ground the Company now drills for oil beneath.
Flowers does much the same in his own advertisement, stating he is a Socialist and includes a testimonial from the magazine’s advertising editor attesting to Flower’s good
Socialist standing. Throughout all of these advertisements, the Company’s officers argue that its name is representative of their outlook, that they want the workers to share in any potential profits. As Hickey said in the second Aspermont Star advertisement, they are what their name implies, a message they continually reinforced throughout their newspaper advertisements.
Pamphlets
The Company produced at least two different pamphlets during the course of its operation. It is unclear exactly how many were made, or how widely they were distributed. It does seem, though, that Hickey had enough to distribute to prospective stock-buyers. In the May 20th, 1920 advertisement in the Aspermont Star he wrote, “I will be happy to send you literature free of charge” and even offered to visit someone and
32 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 speak in person should they request that.55 In the May 27th, 1920 Aspermont Star advertisement he repeated the offer to send literature or visit anyone who wanted additional information about the Company. Hickey’s archived papers hold little else besides the pamphlets that could be the literature he offered to send to prospective stock buyers, so it seems a reasonable assumption that the pamphlets were the literature he referred to. The pamphlets are undated, so the exact date of their production is unclear, but the list of officers does place the two pamphlets in chronological order. What I will refer to as Pamphlet 1 lists the officers as Flowers, President, Hickey, vice-President,
Elliott, Secretary Treasurer, and then L. L. Steele is listed as among the officers but without a position.56 Given that in a January 1, 1920 letter to the stockholders Flowers reported that Steele was no longer President or part of the Company, this was the first of the two pamphlets published.57 Pamphlet 2, meanwhile, does not mention Steele at all, and so was the second of the two pamphlets produced.58
Since these pamphlets were for public distribution and specifically mentioned in the Aspermont Star advertisements, and those advertisements less explicitly leaned on
Hickey’s Socialist politics, these pamphlets follow that same pattern. Pamphlet 1 echoes the language of the second Aspermont Star advertisement in saying that the name of the company means what it implies. But the pamphlet adds a new sentence that the newspaper advertisement lacked. After discussing the Company’s national scope, with
55 National Workers Company, Advertisement, The Aspermont Star, May 20, 1920, 2. 56 Flowers and Hickey, pamphlet 1. 57 Flowers, letter to stockholders, January 1, 1919 (1920). 58 W. H. Flowers and Thomas A. Hickey, National Workers Drilling and Production Co., pamphlet 2, (Desdemona, TX: National Workers Drilling and Production Co., undated), in box 3, folder 4, Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 33 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 shareholders across the nation, and the officers being of national standing, the pamphlet reads, “[the company’s] officers are WORKERS both mental and manual in the best sense of the word.”59 This is a departure not only from the Aspermont Star advertisements, but the Appeal to Reason advertisements as well. Instead of arguing that the company wants workers to benefit from the oil boom, now the officers argued that they were workers as well. It is a much more explicit form of the argument that they are a company of and for the worker, seemingly meant to reinforce that the name is not just an affectation. The rest of the pamphlet attempts to persuade potential investors of the safety in investing the money, both in the chances of success in the oilfield and that the officers are not swindlers. Overall, this pamphlet sought to make more explicit the Company’s worker oriented stance.
The second pamphlet does so to an even greater extent, as well as referencing the officers’s socialist political beliefs. The pamphlet reads that the company was “organized and is controlled by men who, though widely known as idealists, are still practical oil and business men.”60 As well as making the argument the Company is a sound investment, here Hickey once again referenced his Socialist Party activities, through calling himself an idealist. His political history is referenced again as this pamphlet gives a brief background on each of the officers. Hickey’s reads that he “is probably best known in
Texas for his constant and fearless fight for the rights of the people, both as an editor and lecturer, as any man in the state or the great Southwest.”61 The Rebel and Socialism are not mentioned by name, but it is clear those are what Hickey is referencing. People who
59 Flowers and Hickey, pamphlet 1, capitalization in original. 60 Flowers and Hickey, pamphlet 2. 61 Flowers, and Hickey, pamphlet 2. 34 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 know of Hickey previously, which would likely be most readers in rural Texas, would understand who he is and what he stood for without the pamphlet mentioning those aspects by name. Given the Rebel was shut down because of Hickey’s politics, it seems as though he wished to avoid the same fate with his pamphlets by only referencing, and not mentioning by name, his Socialist politics.
Hickey is not the only officer referenced this way, though. George D. Brewer is called the “special fiscal agent for the company.”62 Brewer and his wife, Grace, had both worked for the Appeal to Reason, and in 1912 George ran for state representative in
Kansas’s Third District on the Socialist Party ticket, losing the close race.63 His next campaign for the Third District state representative seat was more successful, and in 1914 he won the seat as a Socialist.64 The pamphlet described him as being “known in every state in the Union and bears a reputation for persistence and rugged honesty that has never been questioned by even his most bitter political enemies.”65 A strong testimonial, clearly meant to reinforce the company was an honest endeavor. The description continued, “He served in the Kansas Legislature and has lectured extensively from coast to coast, devoting the past three years to lecture work…as a national lecturer for the Non- partisan League.”66 Between Brewer being known across the U.S., the reference to his political career, and his work with the Non-Partisan League, it is clear that like Hickey he would have been a well known Socialist figure, and thus the pamphlet could tout his resume in these terms, implicitly drawing the connection, but not explicitly. Even in the
62 Flowers and Hickey, pamphlet 2. 63 Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, 33-34, 202. 64 Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, 292. 65 Flowers and Hickey, pamphlet 2. 66 Flowers and Hickey, pamphlet 2. 35 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 very public pamphlet, then, the officers clearly wanted to draw upon Hickey and
Brewer’s Socialist politics in advertising to potential investors, as they were the two well- known Socialist figures among the Company’s officers.
While the first pamphlet was much like the second Aspermont Star advertisement, it reinforced and made more explicit the officers’s desire to be seen as worker-oriented company. Rather than just writing the company’s name means what it implies, they also called themselves workers. And in the second pamphlet, the officers reinforced that they are all well known idealist, and make clear references to both Hickey and Brewer’s
Socialist Party connections. In these pamphlets, then, we see a continuation of the same marketing tactics in earlier advertisements. The officers highlighted that the Company was for the worker, and where they could, they referenced the Socialist Party connections and socialist beliefs of multiple company officers. It is clear that even in these very public advertisements, the officers wanted to market themselves as both for the worker and, at the very least, socialist adjacent.
Letters
Newspaper advertisements and pamphlets were not the only places that Hickey and the other officers asserted that their company was of and for the worker. On
November 15th, 1919 Hickey sent out a circular letter to the former subscribers of the
Rebel. In that letter he told them of the government suppressing his new version of the
Rebel, named the Farmers Voice, but that he was moving on to the oil game.67 Hickey then wrote, “Understand that every officer in this company and in fact around our whole
67 Hickey, circular letter, November 15, 1919. 36 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 plant is an active socialist.”68 Like the advertisements in the Appeal, Hickey is using the officers’s socialist politics to market the Company, but here he took it a step further by asserting that not only were the officers socialists, but so were the workers. While there is not way to verify this claim, it is unlikely that all of the workers were socialists.
However, given that much of the manual labor in the oilfield came from farm laborers,69 like those that Hickey organized and those that made up the bulk of socialist support in
Texas, it is entirely possible that some of the workers were in fact socialists.70
Regardless, it made sense for Hickey to advertise the entire Company as such to his socialist readership.
Another letter Hickey sent played directly off of the fact that many oilfield workers were former or current farmers working for supplemental income. After the suppression of the Rebel, Hickey had gone to work for the Non-Partisan League in
Minnesota, although his time working for the League was short-lived due to charges of disloyalty because of his anti-war stance.71 Still, Hickey and other socialists saw in the
League an organization that “supported essentially the same immediate demands as the
Texas Socialist party” according to Green.72 In his letter to members of the League,
Hickey expounds on the “many kinds of farmers.”73 He wrote:
There is the Wall street farmer, who shears the lambs that come to his stockade of their golden fleece; there is the rubber tired or town farmer
68 Hickey, circular letter, November 15, 1919. 69 Sellars, Oil, Wheat, & Wobblies, 61-62. 70 Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, xvii. 71 Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, 376. Thomas A. Hickey, letter to Clara B. Hickey, September 3, 1918, in box 1, folder 11, Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 72 Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, 376. 73 Thomas A. Hickey, letter to members of the Non-Partisan League, undated, in box 2, folder 16, Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 37 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
who is usually a banker, and farms the farmer by charging him usurious rates of interest; there is the big bity farmer who holds thousands of acres of land out of use for speculative purposes; there is the lawyer, newspaper and preacher farmer, and now, strange to say, there is a new type, and that is the oil farmer.74
While Hickey makes a strange argument about many different jobs being farmers, he does so because many of the supporters of the Nonpartisan League were farmers, and he wants to connect the League members to these oilfield workers, who were themselves formerly farmers. Of them he writes “they are honest to God plow the soil between the handles of a plow and pulling the bell cord of old Betsy kind of farmers.”75 Hickey situates these farmers as facing drought and plagues, having turned to oilfield work now as a new means of work.76 Hickey then pulls the same form of advertising he and the other officers did in the Appeal and Aspermont Star advertisements, by associating the
Company with Nonpartisan League members like Dick Carruth and Jimmie Ellison, as well as Hickey’s friend and socialist E. R. Meitzen who also worked for the League. And like the circular letter where he asserted everyone was a socialist, here Hickey asserts that every member of the company is a League member or supports the League.77 So in this letter, Hickey is advertising by drawing upon the fact many of the oilfield workers were formerly farmers, and that the Company has the support of League members and promoters. This is the same type of marketing he used in the Appeal advertisements.
Both the circular letter and the letter to Nonpartisan League members rely on the same marketing techniques as the newspaper advertisements. In the circular letter,
Hickey asserts the officers and workers are all socialists, while in the letter to the League
74 Hickey, letter to members of the Non-Partisan League, undated. 75 Hickey, letter to members of the Non-Partisan League, undated. 76 Hickey, letter to members of the Non-Partisan League, undated. 77 Hickey, letter to members of the Non-Partisan League, undated. 38 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 he asserts all the officers and workers are League members or supporters. In both cases, it is likely that was not true, but it was indeed true that many of those who worked in the north central Texas oilfields were indeed former farm laborers, who were also the majority of Socialist Party supporters in Texas. Hickey, in the letter to the League members, draws a connection between the Company and these farmers by saying that, while they once plowed the land, they are still farmers in spirit, even if they now work to drill for oil. This connection once again is an attempt to paint the Company as of and for the worker, while the circular letter draws that connection by asserting the entire
Company is made up of good socialists. Once again we see that the Company’s marketing efforts centered on drawing these connections between the Company and the worker, whether through asserting they were socialists or simply farmers.
Conclusion
The Desdemona and Ranger oil booms took central Texas by storm. The massive increases in population of those towns created cities overnight. In this space came
Thomas Hickey, not long after the suppression of his newspaper, the Rebel, by the United
States federal government. He turned his attention to the oilfields, and with other purported Socialists, created the National Workers Drilling and Production Company.
With the suppression of radical and socialist newspapers by the federal government,
Hickey and company would have had fewer opportunities to advertise on behalf of the
Company. One such place left was Dan Hogan’s Daily Leader, which was a Farmer-
Labor newspaper and not directly socialist paper. In choosing to advertise there, though, the officers displayed a preference for attracting a certain type of investor, namely lower income workers and those of a Socialist or radical disposition.
39 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
Those same preferences continued into their other advertisements. The most prominent Socialist newspaper, the Appeal to Reason, was on the outs with many
Socialists following its support of the First World War, but nonetheless provided a safe space for Hickey and the other officers to advertise in, especially one with a massive reach in every state. In that safe space they could openly and often tout their Socialist politics, and did so in their advertisements to woo fellow Socialists into investing in the
Company. They also argued that they were a worker’s company, and wanted workers to see the profits of that oil boom. Part of that decision was evident in choosing to name the company the National Workers Drilling and Production Company.
The local advertisements that ran in counties with which Hickey was very familiar, due to familial connections, differed from those in the Daily Leader and the
Appeal. The first advertisement in the Aspermont Star played up the local angle, both through the long held belief locals had that oil lay beneath their counties, and in touting
Flowers’s tenure as a former county commissioner. The second advertisement, however, hewed closer to those in the Daily Leader and the Appeal, in that it referenced the officers’s national standing, due to their Socialist politics, and highlighted that the
Company’s name meant what it implied.
And in the two pamphlets produced by the Company, that language continued.
The first pamphlet identified the officers as workers themselves, driving home the point that the Company was of and for the worker. The second pamphlet did not repeat that they themselves were workers, but did reference the officers being well known idealists, as well as Hickey’s former work as a writer and orator, and George D. Brewer’s term as a
Socialist state representative in Kansas.
40 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
Finally, the letters sent to Hickey’s former Rebel subscribers and the Nonpartisan
League followed these same patterns, with an added wrinkle. In the circular letter to
Rebel subscribers Hickey called all the officers and workers socialists, something he had not done in other advertisements. In the Nonpartisan League letter, Hickey connected the
Company workers to the League by laying out that many of them were formerly farmers, and that their work in the oilfields was simply a different kind of farming. He also relied on the connection to well known figures, this time drawing upon his friendships with
Dick Carruth, Jimmie Ellison, and E. R. Meitzen, all of whom worked for or promoted the League. In these letters, then, we see the same connection being drawn by the officers between the Company, socialism, and the worker.
Given the audience Hickey and the other officers were writing to, once that would have been familiar with Socialist figures and phrases of the time, there is little doubt that in these advertisements and letters the officers sought to draw the connection between their Company and the officers’s histories as Socialist political figures. But even when they did not make those connections in certain advertisements, they still leaned on a worker-oriented language that sought to market their company to workers, and to express the desire that workers should profit from the oil boom. The central thrust of their marketing was to create an oil company that worked for workers and wage earners.
41 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
CHAPTER III
RADICAL PERCEPTIONS OF THE COMPANY
Introduction
On December 1st, 1919 Henry M. Tichenor mailed Thomas Hickey a letter.
Tichenor was the editor of The Melting Pot, a communist monthly well known for its anti-religious bent, the same bent Tichenor had earlier brought to the more prominent
National Rip-Saw.1 It was on The Melting Pot letterhead Tichenor penned the letter in which he wrote “Yes, I read about your entrance into the Rockefeller class, and was glad to hear of your good fortune. I know you are proletarian in spirit, even if your pocketbook does look bourgeois.”2 It appears that Hickey had asked Tichenor if he’d read the articles about Hickey becoming a ‘Socialist Millionaire,’ as Tichenor referred to the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch, which published one such article.3 Evidently, Tichenor believed the article to be true, as he then asked Hickey for $500 in order to continue publishing The Melting
Pot which, “like all radical publication, has had a hard time pulling through.”4
Tichenor’s letter, besides containing a wonderful turn of phrase in describing the contrast of Hickey’s political beliefs and finances, represents one strain of the broader socialist and radical reaction to Hickey and the National Workers Drilling and Production
Company. Some, like Tichenor, believed that Hickey and company would strike it rich,
1 Linda J. Lumsden, Black, White, and Red All Over: A Cultural History of the Radical Press in Its Heyday, 1900-1917 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2014), 93-94. 2 Henry M. Tichenor to Thomas A. Hickey, December 1, 1919, in box 1, folder 17, Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 3 Tichenor to Hickey, December 1, 1919. “Oil Boom Makes Millionaires of Former Radicals,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 1, 1919, 21. Accessed April 16, 2019. https://stltoday.newspapers.com/image/139008685/?terms=thomas%2Ba.%2Bhickey 4 Tichenor to Hickey, December 1, 1919. 42 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 or did strike it rich, and would be able to fund all manner of socialist and radical publications and causes. A few socialists and radicals expressed that hope to Hickey directly through letters. But that hopeful view contrasted starkly with another current among socialists. This second current is not revealed in letters to Hickey, save one notable example from Theodore Debs, but in the way Hickey and the officers marketed the Company. They framed their success as likely but not guaranteed, in order to ensure that socialists and other radicals understood that their company was not a get-rich-quick scheme, as were often found in socialist publications. The second current, then, was one of skepticism toward the Company, and is revealed by looking at the ways the officers sought to mitigate those concerns.
This chapter argues that the National Workers Drilling and Production
Company’s marketing recognized and addressed these different types of socialist and radical reactions. The language the officers used in marketing reflected their own hopes in the success of the Company and the financial gain that would come with it.
Meanwhile, the language also reflected that they did not believe success was guaranteed, and sought to mitigate concerns that they were in any way, shape, or form a get-rich- quick scheme or a scam. These reactions also reflect the dire straits many socialists and radicals were in due to the First Red Scare, and the ways in which they reacted to those situations. The ways in which socialist and radicals perceived and reacted to the
Company, as well as the ways the officers sought to manage expectations and concerns, reflects that while a socialist oil company was a viable business strategy, marketing it as such meant navigating the hopes and priorities of socialists during the First Red Scare.
43 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
Placarding the Barricades: Get-Rich-Quick Schemes in the Socialist Party
With the rise of print newspaper and magazines, and the resulting growth of advertising, came the rise of a parasitic strand of speculative get-rich-quick schemes. Not only did these schemes infect socialist and radical newspapers and magazines, they seemed to take an especial root there alongside articles that lambasted that very same type of capitalistic evil the schemes exemplified. Daniel Bell, in his work Marxian
Socialism in the United States, wrote, “underneath this proletarian cult lay a queer strain of soaring middle-class, get-rich-quick fantasies.”5 Bell suggested that these schemes represented “a disguised form of envy” on the part of socialists.6 It seems more likely that, as Shore argued, “Advertising, perhaps most starkly, pointed up the multiple contradictions inherent in striving for a democratic, peaceful socialist transformation in a mass consumer culture.”7 The schemes were not a result of envy, then, but an unfortunate by-product of funding through advertising in the time period. Regardless of why the schemes were so common, the fact that they were presented a clear problem for the
Company’s officers in their own advertising efforts, especially because other socialists often railed against these schemes.
One newspaper where the contradiction existed very visibly was in the
International Socialist Review, which Bell says featured “a large number of advertisements which promised quick returns through land speculation” while having famous organizer William ‘Big Bill’ Haywood as an editor.8 In the Review as well appeared a column by Henry Slobodin, who was one of the founding members of the
5 Bell, Marxian Socialism, 86. 6 Bell, Marxian Socialism, 86. 7 Shore, Talkin’ Socialism, 2. 8 Bell, Marxian Socialism, 86. 44 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
Socialist Party, decrying these get-rich-quick schemes.9 Slobodin referred to these schemes as an “epidemic” and suggested that Socialists should not wait “until the barricades of the revolution shall be placarded” to demand a stop to these schemes.10
Slobodin then went on to criticize Socialist Party spokesmen and national officials who used party organs to “arouse among the Socialists the capitalistic emotions of greed and cupidity.”11 Slobodin then called out Gaylor Wilshire for his role in running these schemes. Wilshire was the famous “socialist millionaire” and published his own magazine, the unoriginally named Wilshire’s Magazine.12 Of him, Slobodin wrote,
“[Wilshire] more than any other gambler sounded the golden tom-tom and dinned into the ears of Socialists, Money! Money! Make Money!”13 Slobodin went on to say that financial soundness of the schemes was not his criticism, but the fact that they existed at all, because by existing in Socialist spaces they created a capitalistic drive for money and profit, and in doing so simply funneled money to Wall Street.14 He also pointed out that the methods Wilshire used, such as proclaiming the Bishop Creek mind the greatest gold mine in the world, were lies, as he had yet to produce any gold whatsoever from the mine. In laying out his demands that Wilshire stop, Slobodin said Wilshire should “cease using the phrases current in Socialist economics and politics in advertising his stock” and
9 Bell, Marxian Socialism, 100. Bell erroneously refers to him as Henry Slobodkin. Ira Kipnis, The American Socialist Movement, 1897-1912 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), 95n. 10 Henry L. Slobodin, “Get-Rich-Quick Schemes,” International Socialist Review, vol. 11 (February 1911; New York: International Socialist Review Publication Association, 1956), 486. 11 Slobodin, “Schemes,” 486. 12 Bell, Marxian Socialism, 87. Shore, Talkin’ Socialism, 106-109. 13 Slobodin, “Schemes,” 486. 14 Slobodin, “Schemes,” 486-487. 45 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 that he “cease employing Socialists of national eminence to boom his stock-jobbing schemes.” 15
Those last two critiques are, of course, exactly what Hickey and the other officers did. In calling their company the National Workers Company, or the Workers Oil
Enterprise, they were using common Socialist phrases to advertise their stock. And, in plastering Hickey’s name on the advertisements, or in citing Eugene Howe’s approval as
Flowers did, the officers clearly marketed themselves by employing their own national eminence, and that of other Socialists, to entice potential investors. So the question becomes, was the National Workers Drilling and Production Company simply a scheme?
As the rest of this chapter will show, Hickey and the officers were cognizant of these schemes and the fact the Company might be viewed as one, so in their marketing they took steps to ensure that, while they did fulfill these two aspects of the get-rich-quick schemes, they did not lie about the prospects for success or guarantee any success at all.
Slobodin was not the only socialist to criticize these schemes. Thomas J. Morgan was the former secretary of the machinists’ union and was one of the chief architects of the attempt by socialists to win the leadership of the American Federation of Labor in
1893.16 Green described him as a “left-wing gadfly.”17 That was a much more tactful turn of phrase than Theodore Debs, Eugene Debs’s brother, used to describe Morgan when he wrote, “Morgan has always been a disturbing factor…[he] never forgets, nor forgives, and he is unrelenting in his hatred.”18 In his weekly newspaper, The Provoker, Morgan
15 Slobodin, “Schemes,” 487. 16 Bell, Marxian Socialism, 40. 17 Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, 117. 18 Theodore Debs to Adolph F. Germer, March 15, 1911, in Letters of Eugene V. Debs, vol. 1, ed. J. Robert Constantine (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 410. 46 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 described himself as an attorney working for the Socialist Party, among the many other accomplishments he related to readers.19
It was in The Provoker that Morgan railed against get-rich-quick schemes.
Responding to a letter from a reader, Morgan, like Slobodin, specifically denounced
Wilshire, whose “gold mine stock scheme” among other schemes had “caused untold injury to Socialism in this country.”20 Morgan used that as a transition to discuss the larger problem of what he called “Stock Gambling In The Socialist Party” and specifically the fact that socialists who ran those schemes were especially vile, because they took from wage workers.21 The schemes use “well-known names…to lure these innocent and most confiding of all victims,” whose money is the result of scrimping and saving.22 Morgan may have been motivated to write this tract denouncing Wilshire and these schemes because Wilshire was suing him, though for what is unclear, though according to Morgan is was because he took Wilshire to task over these schemes.23
Regardless, Wilshire was not alone in running get-rich-quick schemes within socialist and radical newspapers. The last ten pages of this issue of The Provoker are denunciations of various socialists and get-rich-quick schemes that Morgan ultimately blames for the merely marginal increase in Socialist Party membership, as the schemes cause members to lose their savings and forsake the party whose organs advertised such
19 Thomas J. Morgan, “The Provoker’s Right To Be Heard,” The Provoker, no. 1 (September 1910), 5, in box 3, folder 3, Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 20 Morgan, “A Wilshire Sucker,” 19. 21 Morgan, “Wilshire Sucker,” 20. 22 Morgan, “Wilshire Sucker,” 20. 23 Morgan, “Wilshire Sucker,” 19-20. 47 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 scams.24 It is important to note that this issue of The Provoker is not a random article, but in fact is among Hickey’s papers housed at the Texas Tech Southwest Collection. While there is no guarantee he read it, given the proliferation of these get-rich-quick schemes, it is almost certain that he knew of them and the reasons his comrades denounced them, and so would have been cognizant of that when crafting the Company’s marketing materials.
What these articles by Slobodin and Morgan show is that get-rich-quick schemes were indeed a problem within socialist and radical publications. These schemes often used the language of socialist politics and ideology to promote themselves. They also traded off the names of prominent Socialists who endorsed the ventures. As Chapter 2 showed, the National Workers Drilling and Production Company engaged in both of these forms of advertising, using Hickey and the other officers’s Socialist cache as well as that of Eugene Howe, editor of the Appeal to Reason, to promote the Company. But another aspect of these schemes, namely the certainty of profit such as in Wilshire’s gold mine scheme, is not present in the Company’s advertisement, and neither do they promise success as Wilshire did. So though Slobodin might still have taken issue with the
Company, the officers took steps to set themselves apart from get-rich-quick schemes.
“Not a particle of graft”: Assurances in Company Advertisements
The Company officers deployed several methods to ensure potential investors that the Company was not a scam. They promoted their unique structure, a common law trust wherein the officers did not draw a salary. The language of their pamphlets, advertisements, and private correspondence also reflected the fact that they did not promise success or profit from their business venture. Along with that, they publicly
24 Morgan, “Wilshire Sucker,” 28. 48 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 promoted the fact that the officers’s families were also invested in the Company, another indication that it was a legitimate business venture.
One of the greatest indications that the Company was not a scam or get-rich-quick scheme comes from its organization. While the November 29, 1919 Appeal advertisement only lists the officers as “Trustees,” as well as mentioning Flowers
“perfected the trustee plan” under his previous company, the next advertisement was more explicit about how the Company was structured.25 The May 22, 1920 advertisement said the Company was “Operating under Declaration of Trust Non-Assessable, with no liability, man-to-man plan.”26 This common law trust meant that the officers only managed the Company’s capitalization, which was at one million dollars as of the
November 29 advertisement.27 The advertisements do not state something the pamphlets do, which is that the officers did not draw a salary, and were instead paid in shares of the
Company’s stock.28 The structure of the Company, then, and the fact that the officers were trustees and did not draw a salary, set it apart from Wilshire’s schemes and the get- rich-quick schemes. According to Slobodin, Wilshire would buy the stock himself, then resell it to others at a higher price, keeping control of the company while limiting the potential that he lose money.29
The pamphlets provide more evidence that the Company was not a scam. As Bell stated, these schemes often involved the promise of guaranteed riches if one only
25 National Workers Company, Advertisement, Appeal to Reason, November 29, 1919, 4. 26 National Workers Company, Advertisement, Appeal to Reason, May 22, 1920, 2. 27 National Workers Company, Advertisement, Appeal to Reason, November 29, 1919, 4. 28 Flowers and Hickey, pamphlet 1. Flowers and Hickey, pamphlet 2. 29 Slobodin, “Schemes,” 487. 49 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 invested.30 And indeed, the first pamphlet the Company produced mirrored that language.
The pamphlet argued that readers should “Take a sure shot for your money and watch it grow by leaps and bounds” while one subtitle read “Enormous Dividends Sure.”31
However, the second pamphlet changed that subtitle to “Wonderful Possibilities For Big
Dividends,” seemingly aware that they could not guarantee they would make any money as the first pamphlet had done. 32 Both pamphlets also ended with a passage titled
“Character Above Money” which stated that the officers wanted to preserve their names and reputations and that they placed the potential rewards for their stockholders above any money they themselves might receive.33 Empty words, perhaps, as scams are not likely to advertise themselves as such. But the second pamphlet also has a passage in which the officers attempt to show their own confidence in the Company, by revealing that not only do they draw salary in stock, but so too did their field superintendent, and the geologists, Charles and Irvin Bushnell, they had hired, and relatives of the officers had purchased stock as well.34 A March 15, 1920 letter between Hickey and his wife,
Clara showed that their relatives had purchased 2,700 dollars worth of stock. It seems very unlikely that, were the Company a scam, Hickey would have allowed his relatives to
30 Bell, Marxian Socialism, 86-87. 31 Flowers and Hickey, pamphlet 1. 32 Flowers and Hickey, pamphlet 2. 33 Flowers and Hickey, pamphlet 1. Flowers and Hickey, pamphlet 2. 34 Flowers and Hickey, pamphlet 2. 50 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 pour that much money into it.35 Especially Clara’s mother, who Hickey was said to have loved very much, for her politics hewed closely to his own.36
One of the Aspermont Star advertisements echoes the language of the pamphlets and also does not guarantee success. In the May 27th, 1920 advertisement Hickey wrote
“We are not going to tell you that you are going to get 100 to 1 on your investment” but that it was possible given the success others companies had in the oil boom.37 So even with an audience that might not be familiar with the specific get-rich-quick schemes advertised in socialist and radical publications, Hickey still admitted that success was nowhere near a guarantee.
In his correspondence, too, Hickey made an effort to highlight that this company was different than the get-rich-quick schemes and that they did not guarantee success. In a circular letter to the readers of the Rebel, Hickey recounted his unsuccessful efforts to publish his new newspaper, the Farmers Voice, but was once again stifled by government suppression, as his second-class mailing privileges had been revoked.38 Because this letter was to readers of the Rebel, it is likely they were also aware of the get-rich-quick schemes in the Socialist Party, or at least the general practice of promotional or speculative ventures advertised in newspapers and magazines. Regardless of their awareness, Hickey made sure to emphasize that there was “not a particle of graft attached
35 Thomas A. Hickey to Clara Hickey, March 15, 1920, box 1, folder 17 in Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 36 Mina W. Lamb and Ilse Wolf, interview by Bobby Weaver, January 30, 1979, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 37 National Workers Company, Advertisement, The Aspermont Star, May 27, 1920, 2. 38 Hickey, circular letter, November 15, 1919. 51 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 to [the Company]” and that it was an “honest to God oil company.”39 In addition, like the second pamphlet, Hickey wrote “I would like to promise you 15 or 20 or even 100 to 1 for your investment, but I could not truthfully do so.”40 Here again Hickey is not promising success like the get-rich-quick schemes often advertised in socialist and radical newspapers and magazines, but admitting he cannot guarantee success.
In the Company’s advertisements, there are clear parallels to the get-rich-quick schemes that permeated socialist and radical publications. Hickey and the other officers used the language of socialist politics and ideology to promote their company, and used their own cache as prominent socialists, as well as the cache of other socialists, to advertise the Company. But these same advertisements also differ in important ways from schemes like Wilshire’s gold schemes. The Company did not promise investors would make any money, though their advertisements are extremely hopeful that they will.
Unlike Wilshire’s gold scheme, where no gold had yet to be found where he wished to mine, the Company operated in the most productive oil field at the time, so it was reasonable to be optimistic about their chances for success. Nevertheless, they did not promise success, and went a step further, by organizing the Company as a common law trust and not drawing salaries. Receiving payment in stocks was another endorsement that they truly believed in the Company and were not seeking to scam their investors. In support of that as well is the fact they allowed their family members to purchase stocks.
All told, the Company and Hickey in particular, aware of the potential stigma around their business venture because of the get-rich-quick schemes in the party, made considerable efforts to differentiate themselves from those schemes, so that their fellow
39 Hickey, circular letter, November 15, 1919. 40 Hickey, circular letter, November 15, 1919. 52 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 socialists and radicals would not view them as scam artists like Wilshire. So, how did their fellow socialists and radicals view the Company?
Eugene Debs, Theodore Debs, and Socialist Priorities
Eugene V. Debs, the perennial presidential candidate of the Socialist Party and its most famous member, was imprisoned at the time Hickey and the other officers were advertising their company. After losing his Supreme Court case to overturn his conviction under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, he was imprisoned on April 13, 1919 and remained there until Christmas day 1921.41 Hickey had a close relationship with both
Eugene Debs and his brother, Theodore Debs, according to their correspondence before and during this time. In a letter between from Theodore to Hickey, Theodore responded to Hickey’s request for an article from Eugene to feature on the front page of the Rebel.42
Theodore wrote that “You know it is against the rules of this shop to turn down any request from you” and that, though they were busy, they had prioritized the article for the
Rebel.43 On May 21st, 1912, fresh off winning the nomination for the Socialist Party’s presidential candidacy, Eugene wrote Hickey and said, “I shall never forget your personal loyalty and devotion.”44 These letters paint the picture of Eugene Debs and Hickey as being close colleagues and possibly even friends, while later letters from 1915 and 1918
41 Ernest Freeberg, Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 123-128, 147, 297. 42 Theodore Debs to Thomas A. Hickey, January 2, 1912 in Letters of Eugene V. Debs, vol. 1, ed. J. Robert Constantine (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 443. 43 Theodore Debs to Hickey, January 2, 1912, Letters, 443. 44 Eugene V. Debs to Thomas A. Hickey, May 21, 1912, Letters, 475. 53 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 corroborate this close relationship.45 This close relationship is likely the reason Hickey wrote to Theodore Debs in the fall of 1919 regarding the Company.
Hickey’s letter to Theodore does not seem to have survived, but Theodore’s response has, and gives enough information to conclude the contents of Hickey’s letter.
Theodore begins by discussing the federal government’s suppression of freedom of speech, the jailing of socialists, and the deportation of radicals, but says that the socialist cause will not be deterred.46 Hickey had told the story of the Farmers Voice, his new version of the Rebel, being suppressed, as well as offering to go to Terre Haute, possibly to write some other socialist publication.47 Theodore then responded to another of
Hickey’s request, writing, “I would be more than reluctant to advise anyone to put their savings into any speculation however promising the returns might be” even though he is not opposed himself to speculative investments.48 It is very likely that, given the timeline,
Hickey was proposing Theodore lend his name to the Company’s marketing efforts, especially since Theodore said he was promoting the collection of funds to help the imprisoned socialists, and thus “it would now come in sad part to use [my name] to raise funds for speculative investment.”49
Theodore’s response reflects both the friendship he had with Hickey that he was willing to consider a personal investment but also the view that lending his name to such a venture was contrary to the work he was doing to free imprisoned socialists, like his
45 Eugene V. Debs to Thomas A Hickey, June 9, 1915 in Letters of Eugene V. Debs, vol. 2, ed. J. Robert Constantine (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 169, 480. 46 Theodore Debs to Hickey, November 11, 1919, box 1, folder 15 in Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 47 Theodore Debs to Thomas A. Hickey, November 11, 1919. 48 Theodore Debs to Thomas A. Hickey, November 11, 1919. 49 Theodore Debs to Thomas A. Hickey, November 11, 1919. 54 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 brother. To help imprisoned comrades spoke more to the ideals of solidarity than investment in an oil company did. Though Hickey and the other officers, as their advertisements showed, wanted socialists to benefit from the Company, it is hard to deny that the more immediate benefit to the cause of socialism would be to assist in the
“liberation of our comrades who are now perishing in prison” as Theodore phrased it.50
Theodore’s reluctance also reflects fears that to lend his name to a speculative venture would endanger the funds of those who invested, since no speculative venture was guaranteed. Theodore was likely aware of the get-rich-quick schemes in the party and knew that to advise anyone to invest was potentially harmful, even if he seemingly believed Hickey about the potential for returns. Overall, Theodore’s response reflects the way some socialist undoubtedly saw the Company, as contrary to the fight against government suppression and as a risky venture, if not a scam.
Theodore’s response also showed the dire situation he, and many other socialists, found themselves in due to the First Red Scare. In 1918 and 1919, as Eugene was going through his trials, the financial burden meant the brothers’ office in Terre Haute, Indiana was struggling to stay open and they were sinking deeper into debt.51 Like Hickey when the Rebel was suppressed, government suppression levied a financial toll.52 Theodore using his name to raise funds to try and free Eugene and others reflects the limitedness of his finances and the burden government suppression placed upon the Debs brothers.
50 Theodore Debs to Thomas A. Hickey, November 11, 1919. 51 Freeberg, Democracy’s Prisoner, 113. 52 Lamb and Wolf, interview, January 30, 1979. Lamb, interview, April 1, 1989. Both these interviews indicated Hickey was continuously facing financial difficulties throughout his life, with intermittent periods where he did pull in a steady income. But following the suppression of the Rebel he was especially hard up, and was forced to live with his mother-in-law as a result. 55 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
Hickey was evidently not offended or upset that Theodore did not choose to help market the Company or invest in it himself. Roughly a month later, he sent another letter to
Theodore. In his response, Theodore thanked Hickey for the hundred-dollar check as well as the one hundred dollars worth of stock in the Company Hickey sent, free of charge.53
Theodore seemed genuinely moved by the gesture, writing, “I know not what to say. I only know that my heart is touched to its very depths.”54
Overall, Theodore’s response to Hickey’s request to lend his name to marketing the Company reveals some of the ways other socialists reacted to the Company. Like
Theodore, some were likely skeptical of any sort of speculative investment regardless of the fact that it was run by socialists. Many were undoubtedly aware of the get-rich-quick schemes in the party, and thus could be wary of the Company because of how closely it resembled such schemes. But many also likely took the view that Theodore expressed, which was that the priority should be working to free the imprisoned socialists and push back against government suppression. Hickey seems to have taken that to heart in gifting
Theodore money and stock to help free Eugene. Other socialists, though, saw in the
Company not a scam or misplaced priorities, but a reason for hope.
Revolutions Are Built on Hope
One of the reasons some socialists reacted hopefully toward the Company was based on the belief the Company had struck it rich and the officers were now millionaires. A series of articles that ran in local and national newspapers beginning in
August of 1919 wrongly depicted the Company and its officers as ‘Socialist
53 Theodore Debs to Thomas A. Hickey, December 29, 1919, box 1, folder 15 in Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 54 Theodore Debs to Thomas A. Hickey, December 29, 1919. 56 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
Millionaires.’ These articles and the reaction to them will be explored in Chapter 4. The articles, despite being wrong, nonetheless inspired hope in other socialist who believed that with Hickey now entering the millionaire class, he might be able to save the underfunded and suppressed socialist periodicals across the country.
Hickey received four letters in December of 1919 that expressed this hopeful attitude. The first came from Henry Tichenor, editor of the communist, anti-religious monthly The Melting Pot. 55 In that letter Tichenor responded to Hickey’s request for his mailing list, writing that his wife had just sent it to Hickey. Tichenor also said he had hidden the list to keep it out of the hands of the “inquisitors for democracy.”56 Tichenor also wrote he had read the St. Louis Post-Dispatch article calling Hickey a socialist millionaire, and that he “thought of writing you a ‘begging’ letter as soon as I read [the article].”57 Hickey’s entry into the “Rockefeller class,” as Tichenor referred to it, did not seem to breed any animosity from Tichenor but instead led to hope that Hickey could assist him in funding his newspaper, which he said was having a difficult time “like all radical publications.”58 Tichenor wrote, “If you really have struck it, Tom, and are alive with the old spirit, perhaps you would be glad to give us a lift.”59 Tichenor asked only for a loan, while also proposing he and Hickey form a socialist co-operative publishing company, though the loan was of more immediate importance.60 Though The Melting Pot was in bad financial straits, Tichenor did not seem angry or dour, but instead hopeful that
55 Lumsden, Radical Press, 93-94; Tichenor to Hickey, December 1, 1919. 56 Tichenor to Hickey, December 1, 1919. 57 Tichenor to Hickey, December 1, 1919. 58 Tichenor to Hickey, December 1, 1919. 59 Tichenor to Hickey, December 1, 1919. 60 Tichenor to Hickey, December 1, 1919. 57 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
Hickey’s apparent wealth could lift his publication out of debt, and possibly lead to a co- operative publishing company that would fund further socialist publications.
A similar letter came from an individual by the name of J. E. Fee. Writing from
Waco, Texas on December 8th, Fee wrote, “I’ve always believed Tom Hickey’s word as good as his bond; now I know it” because he had just received his shares of the
Company’s stock.61 Fee hoped that the Company would make millions, not only for
Hickey and the officers but the stockholders like himself as well. He then wrote, “if it does, we’ll free Old Ireland yet.”62 Fee, as Hickey’s friends and a fellow Irishman, knew that a great deal of Hickey’s political outlook was shaped by the struggle of the Irish people to throw off the English yoke. As his nieces said, Hickey “hated the English” and the thing that drove him to socialism was the exploitation of the Irish by the English.63
James Green described Hickey’s politics as forming from a love of the Molly Maguires and “hating the British landlords who ground down the tenants of Ireland.”64 Fee, in hoping for the success of the Company, was not just looking for a financial windfall for himself and his friend, but also hoped that the money they made could go to helping free the Irish people from the British, especially given the outbreak of initial hostilities in the
Irish War of Independence on January 21st, 1919.65 So for Fee, the Company provided hope that it could fund financial assistance not just for radical causes in the United States, but in Ireland as well.
61 J. E. Fee to Thomas A. Hickey, December 8, 1919, in box 1, folder 23 in Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 62 Fee to Hickey, December 8, 1919. 63 Lamb and Wolf, interview, January 30, 1979. 64 Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, 46. 65 Michael Hopkinson, The Irish War of Independence (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 25. 58 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
Mary E. Whitson, a reader of the Desdemona Oil News and fellow comrade, wrote Hickey a letter on December 29th, 1919 expressing a hopeful desire much like
Tichenor and Fee. A resident of Grand View, Idaho, Whitson wrote that she had followed the oil business in the Desdemona area closely through the Oil News and so knew of the
“accounts…of how so many Socialists in your section including yourself have made fortunes in oil or leases.”66 Like Tichenor, she had read the articles about Hickey and other so-called socialist millionaires, and so believed Hickey and the other Company officers had money to spare. She made her pitch next, writing “I hope if you and others interested in Socialism have not already helped the “Appeal” in this crisis that you will.”67 Whitson hoped that Hickey’s apparent newfound wealth could help to save the
Appeal to Reason, which Whitson characterized as another socialist paper at risk due to government suppression. Though she said she did not expect a reply, she hoped that the
Appeal would get one from Hickey.68 Like Tichenor and Fee, Whitson saw in the
Company not a scam but a reason for hope, that if Hickey and the other socialists had indeed made millions they might use that money to further socialist and radical causes at home and abroad.
A shorter but just as instructive letter came from J. W. Canada on December 26th,
1919. Canada was the editor and publisher of the Southland Farmer out of Houston, who admitted to Hickey that he “[does] not have the name of being quite so radical as you
66 Mary E. Whitson to Thomas A. Hickey, December 29, 1919, in box 1, folder 6 in Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 67 Whitson to Hickey, December 29, 1919. 68 Whitson to Hickey, December 29, 1919. 59 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 are.”69 The Farmer, a paper focused on rural issues, had supported the war, contrary to the stance that the government used to justify suppression of Hickey and other socialists.70 Though Canada did not agree with Hickey politically, he still hoped that
Hickey “[would] make a million for I know you will use it to good purpose.”71 Even without sharing Hickey’s politics or having a certain cause in mind, Canada knew that if
Hickey did strike it rich, he would put the money to good use, just as those who shared
Hickey’s politics hoped for.
These letters portray Hickey’s comrades as fearful of the effects of government suppression, which Hickey knew well and which Eugene and Theodore Debs suffered under. But Tichenor, Fee, and Whitson saw in the Company not a get-rich-quick scheme but a reason for hope. To them, the Company was a potential means of funding socialist and radical causes that presently suffered from the financial burdens of the First Red
Scare. Hickey shared these hopes. Though he recounted in the November 15th, 1919 circular letter that his Farmers Voice newspaper, which he described as a “revived
Rebel,” had been suppressed because his mailing privileges were still revoked, he ended that same letter “after I put this company over the peace treaty will have been signed and you will be supplied with an eight page Rebel greater and stronger than ever before.”72
Though the hopes of Hickey and those who wrote to him were not fulfilled, they all
69 J. W. Canada to Thomas A. Hickey, December 26, 1919, in box 1, folder 23 in Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 70 Lewis L. Gould, Progressives and Prohibitionists: Texas Democrats in the Wilson Era (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1973), 222. 71 Canada to Hickey, December 26, 1919. 72 Hickey, circular letter, November 15, 1919. 60 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 shared the same view of the Company, that its success could be used to support socialist and radical causes, reflecting a sense of hope even in the midst of the First Red Scare.
Conclusion
It is undeniable that the National Workers Drilling and Production Company resembled the get-rich-quick schemes that permeated socialist and radical publications.
The Company’s advertisement relied upon language of socialist politics and ideology, and relied upon the support of prominent socialists, whose names the officers used to market the Company. But because it was not a get-rich-quick scheme, the Company set itself apart in several ways. It was organized as a common law trust, and the officers did not draw a salary but were instead paid in stock, to make sure that no appearance of the officers stealing from investors was given. Their pamphlets, advertisements, and letters also did not promise success or guarantee investors would turn a profit, only that it was likely because of the success of other oil companies in the same fields. The officers’s families were themselves invested in the Company, with Hickey’s extended family owning 2,700 dollars worth of stock. It is clear that the Company was not a get-rich- quick scheme but an attempt at a real business venture.
That did not persuade all socialists from reacting with skepticism, though.
Theodore Debs declined to lend his name to the Company’s marketing efforts because he was also using his name to raise money to help free imprisoned socialists, and thought the appearance of supporting a speculative venture was at odds with that goal. But other socialists, like Henry Tichenor, J. E. Fee, and Mary E. Whitson, saw in the Company not a scam but a means to fund socialist and radical causes. Indeed, Hickey himself hoped that the Company could be used to fund a new version of his Rebel newspaper. What
61 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 these different reactions show are the various hopes and priorities of socialists in the First
Red Scare. Whether they, like Theodore Debs, were focused on freeing the imprisoned socialists, or like Hickey and the others, focused on keeping alive or reviving suppressed periodicals, they were all trying to push back against government suppression in one way or another. The reactions also show that, like the Company’s marketing tried to convey, people saw the Company as a socialist oil company and hoped that its success would lead to the success of socialist causes.
Unfortunately for those hopeful socialists, the Company did not succeed. That did not stop a slew of articles from declaring Hickey and the Desdemona socialists socialist millionaires and mocking them for the contradiction therein. As the next chapter will show, this wider public reaction to the Company followed the pattern of the American press and their role in fomenting and promoting the First Red Scare, though with a twist that this time the socialists were not to be feared, but mocked.
62 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
CHAPTER IV
PRESS REACTION AND ‘SOCIALIST MILLIONAIRES’
Introduction
At the end of the summer and into the fall of 1919, with the nation in the midst of the First Red Scare, a series of articles ran across Texas and the United States. The
Company had not yet been officially organized, though Hickey was in Desdemona managing oil leases for his farmer friends. The first publicity for the socialists of the
Desdemona oil boom would not come from the Company, as the first extant newspaper advertisement did not run until November. It is likely production had begun on the pamphlets, given the first batch listed L. L. Steele as company president, even though he left the Company by January 1st of 1919.1 Nonetheless, the situation of the socialists of
Desdemona was not publicly well known. Their first major publicity would come not from the Company’s advertisements, but from these articles that ran in newspapers across the nation. Emblematic of these the message of these articles was the short blurb from the
Democrat-Voice out of Coleman, Texas. It read, in full, “It is stated that T. A. Hickey, who used to publish a socialist paper called “The Rebel,” is now listed among the new oil millionaires in Texas. Down with the brutal rich!”2 Most of these articles chose to expand upon these same assertions that Hickey, a socialist, was now a millionaire, and almost all did so in the same mocking tone.
1 Flowers, letter to stockholders, January 1, 1919 (1920). 2 Democrat-Voice (Coleman, TX), October 17, 1919, 2. Accessed February 24, 2020. https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth746434/m1/2/?q=%22t.%20a.%20hickey %22 63 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
These newspaper articles represent the overwhelmingly negative reactions of the mainstream national and local press toward socialists and socialist causes. While most often those negative reactions manifested in hysteria that played up the threat posed by radicals and socialists, these newspaper articles show that an understudied reaction of the press toward socialists in the First Red Scare was of mockery and derision. The historiography of the First Red Scare shows that the press played a prominent role in stoking the fears of the public towards socialists and in pushing the government to take action and to expand the actions they did take. But as these articles show, the press could also seek to expose what they saw as the contradictions of socialism and being a millionaire, as it claimed Hickey was. Like the hysteria the press played into, the mockery of the socialists in Desdemona was part and parcel of its efforts to sell newspapers and an expression of its corporate ownership and conservative, anti-socialist ideology.
This chapter argues that the reaction of the national mainstream press and the local press was another facet of the role the press played in the First Red Scare. But whereas most historiography of the First Red Scare focuses solely on the role of the press in fomenting hysteria among the public, these newspaper articles reveal a different approach. The language the press used in the articles mocking the socialists does not depict them as a threat, unlike most articles dealing with socialists and radicals at the time. Instead, the press relied upon mockery and derision to represent socialists as hypocritical, which ultimately served as another means of pushing their anti-socialist and anti-radical agenda. Hickey’s response shifted over the course of the next few years, to the point where there was no mention of his socialist politics in his recollection of the
64 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 story, mirroring his own move away from socialist politics in the years following the bankruptcy of the Company.3 Ultimately, though, examining these articles and the press reaction to the Desdemona socialists reveals in greater depth the role of the national and local press in the First Red Scare.
Scaring Up the Public: The Complicity of the Press in the First Red Scare
Between the 1880s and 1920s, as Elliot Shore wrote, newspaper publishing “came of age.”4 It was in this era that the structures of the newspaper publishing business, like mass circulation and distribution companies, were created due to the increasing concentration of the American population into urban areas, increased literacy, and advances in printing technology.5 As Chapter 2 explored, the rise of print newspapers and magazines went hand in hand with the rise of socialist and radical politics from 1880 to
1920. But while those radical and socialist newspapers had large circulations, they were still outnumbered by the mainstream local and national presses at the time.
With regards to the First Red Scare, those mainstream local and national newspapers played an important role in fomenting the hysteria that gripped the nation.
Robert K. Murray wrote that the press “found in the issue of radicalism an immediate substitute for waning wartime sensationalism and eagerly busied itself with reporting exaggeration instead of facts.”6 In Murray’s framing of the role of the press, the profit motive drove their reporting on the hysteria, as they looked for ways to sell newspapers
3 Frank H. Bartholomew, “Big Fortune Made In Jamaica Ginger,” Altoona Mirror, Altoona, PA, November 18, 1922. Accessed March 7, 2020. https://newspaperarchive.com/altoona-mirror-nov-18-1922-p-11/. Hickey made no mention of socialism or his radical politics in this story he sold to the Altoona Mirror. 4 Shore, Talkin’ Socialism, 2. 5 Shore, Talkin’ Socialism, 2. 6 Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955), 67-68. 65 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 more than provide an accurate reporting. This manifested as the press calling for continued and increased deportations of radicals even as the federal government, through the Labor Department, stopped the trials and halted the deportations of radicals.7
Other scholars echo Murray’s assessments of the press. As Linda Lumsden wrote, the mainstream press did not push back against the suppression of radical newspapers, writing, “Few journals defended the constitution.”8 Regin Schmidt took it further by pointing out that the press embellished reports of the threat radicals posed, printing articles about “revolutionary plottings” to the point that the Bureau of Investigation—the predecessor of the FBI—believed the press to be “[scaring] up” the threat posed by groups like the Industrial Workers of the World.9 Schmidt, like Murray, argued that the press exaggerated the threat posed by radical as a way to sell newspapers to make up for the end of World War I and the headlines that provided.10 But Schmidt also rightly argues that influential newspapers like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the
Chicago Tribune all “reflected the conservative ideological preferences of their owners…not only in their editorials but also in their news columns.”11 Some newspapers, like Norman Chandler’s Los Angeles Times, did not even feign objectivity but openly espoused “right-wing political propaganda.”12 And then, there were the newspapers owned by corporations themselves, like the Butte Daily Post out of Butte, Montana,
7 Murray, Red Scare, 246. 8 Lumsden, Radical Press, 283. 9 Regin Schmidt, Red Scare: FBI and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United States (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000), 27, 37. 10 Schmidt, Red Scare, 37. 11 Schmidt, Red Scare, 37. 12 Schmidt, Red Scare, 37. 66 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 which was owned by the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, and so ensured articles in the newspaper were sufficiently pro-corporate and anti-labor.13
Local and regional studies of the First Red Scare and the Socialist Party have also argued that the majority of news coverage was biased against labor, radicals, and socialists. Nigel Sellars, in his work on the Industrial Workers of the World in Oklahoma, argued that the newspapers there labeled the Wobblies as treasonous, in order to denigrate their unionization efforts in the Oklahoma oilfields, and associated them with violence regardless of any factual connection.14 Similarly, Green wrote that newspapers in Oklahoma blamed socialists for the Green Corn Rebellion, an antiwar movement in
1917 by farmers and rural workers.15 The newspapers went further, though, claiming that the movement was the work of German provocateurs or IWW organizers, and so called for Governor R. L. Williams to mobilize soldiers to combat these radicals.16 And when the house of oilman J. Edgar Pew was bombed, the newspapers quickly accused IWW members of the crime, for which they were railroaded, found guilty, and then tarred and whipped by a mob the newspaper called patriotic.17 In discussing the destruction of the
Socialist Party in Oklahoma, Green argued that suppression of its newspapers, provoked by the press and oilmen in the state led to the Party’s decline there.18 In the Old
Southwest, the press was just as happy to cheerlead suppression and demonization of radicals and socialists.
13 Schmidt, Red Scare, 37. 14 Sellars, Oil, Wheat, & Wobblies, 11-12. 15 Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, 361 16 Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, 362. 17 Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, 370-371. 18 Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, 372. 67 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
All of these historians paint a picture of a national and local press not complicit in the suppression of radicals and socialists in the years leading up to and during the First
Red Scare. Whether it was due to a desire to sell newspapers, anti-socialist ideology, pro- corporate and anti-labor stances, or the prodding of their wealthy conservative owners or corporate owners, the press helped foment the hysteria that accompanied and cheered on the government crackdown on radical, socialist, and union groups. In some cases, the press went so far in stirring up outrage that the Bureau of Investigation found that the newspapers went too far in creating this atmosphere of fear and hatred. Overall, these newspapers displayed a clear disregard for facts and a preference for exaggeration. It is no wonder, then, that the articles about the socialists of Eastland County being millionaires displayed the same anti-socialist position and the same disregard for truth and an open exaggeration of the facts. Though, instead of fomenting fear and hysteria, they instead mocked and derided the supposedly hypocritical socialists.
Mocking the ‘Socialist Millionaires’: The Press Reacts
The genesis of these articles is not exactly clear. The earliest dated article is from
August 12th, 1919, written by Silliman Evans in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. That article was the basis for the El Paso Herald’s article almost a week later on August 18th,
1919. But there is also an undated account from the Leesville Leader out of Leesville,
Louisiana. Unfortunately, it appears as though there is no extant copy of the newspaper that contained the article, given that the existing archives of the Leesville Leader do not contain any issues from 1919, when the article ran. All that seems to remain is an undated clipping, with no byline, of just the article in Thomas Hickey’s collection of papers in the
Southwest Collection Library of Texas Tech University. The Leesville Leader article is
68 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 the basis of the article that appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on September 21st,
1919, while the article in the Kansas City Star, even with several falsifications, appears based on the Evans article. Both the Evans article and the Leesville Leader article tell the same story but with different focuses. However, there are two potential clues to uncovering which came first.
In an article Hickey published in 1922 responding to these articles, Hickey wrote that the origin came from “an old newspaper man friend of mine, who had worked with me in the Texas legislature.”19 While it is unclear what work Hickey was doing in the
Texas legislature, Silliman Evans was identified as “[heading] the special leased wire service from the Texas legislature at Austin to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram” in January of 1921.20 There is the issue, though, that the timeline does not seem to match Hickey’s suggestion that the person he met with worked with him in the Texas legislature prior to their meeting in Desdemona in 1919. However, it seems more likely Hickey knew Evans professionally than a reporter in Leesville, Louisiana, even if the facts do not perfectly align. And in an article from the Semi-Weekly New Era out of Hallettsville, Texas, reprinting an article from the Desdemona Oil News, the author called the socialist
19 Thomas A. Hickey, “How I Made $1,000,000 a Minute,” Kosse Cyclone (Kosse, Texas), 1922 in box 2, folder 22, Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. In a resignation letter to owner of the Kosse Cyclone in December of 1922, Hickey discussed how he had worked for the Cyclone for 14 weeks, and in that time wrote the “How I Made $1,000,000 a Minute” article, placing its time of publication sometime in from September to December 1922. Thomas A. Hickey to Kit Robinson, December 13, 1922, in box 1, folder 23, Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 20 “Texas Newspaper Jottings” Fourth Estate, January 29, 1921 in Fourth Estate: A Weekly Newspaper for Publishers, Advertisers, Advertising Agents and Allied Interests (New York: Fourth Estate Publishing Company, 1921), 213. Accessed March 7, 2020. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiug.30112044127634?urlappend=%3Bseq=213. 69 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 millionaires stories “The Star-Telegram story,” indicating that was its origin. Given the information available, Evans’s article seems to be the genesis of the socialist millionaire articles, with the story spreading first to local outfits like the El Paso Herald and the
Leesville Leader and then onto the national stage.
Oddly enough, the inciting article for so much mockery and derision was fairly even-handed. The title of Evans’s article simply read “West Texas Socialists Now
Millionaire Oil Well Owners.” 21 As the other articles will show, Evans’s article contains little mockery or derision, instead simply stating the facts as Evans believed them to be, though he was ultimately mistaken about the extent of Hickey’s wealth. In his article
Evans discussed both Hickey’s newfound wealth but also the wealth of the farmers in the
Desdemona area who were, according to Evans, socialists. This is likely the case, as a socialist encampment was held at Ellison Springs in Eastland County, attended by these same farmers who Hickey called friends.22 In the circular letter Hickey sent out on
November 15, 1919, Hickey wrote “My old farmer friends many of whom had become very wealthy through the discovery of oil, rallied around me because they knew they could trust me and I soon found myself in possession of valuable acreage and with valuable connections.”23 Here, after the publication of all of the articles mocking the socialists for being millionaires, Hickey admitted that many were, in fact, wealthy. The letter also states that those farmers partnered with Hickey, Flowers, and the other to
21 Silliman Evans, “West Texas Socialists Now Millionaire Oil Well Owners,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, August 12, 1919, 7. Accessed March 7, 2020. https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/634446440/. 22 Thomas A. Hickey, The Land (Hallettsville, TX: New Era Print, undated), 1, in box 3, folder 4 Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 23 Hickey, circular letter, November 15, 1919. 70 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 launch the National Workers Drilling and Production Company with capital of one million dollars.24 While Hickey admitted he had valuable land and many of the farmers in the area also became wealthy from the oil boom, Evans seems to have exaggerated that wealth, Hickey’s thousand-dollar check into a million dollars check, and all local socialists into millionaires. Mina Lamb, Hickey’s niece said in an interview, “He did make some handsome income but still, much of the time, I think [he] was more [cash strapped].” 25 She does not specify when he made money, though an earlier interview with Lamb and her sister, Isle Wolf, clarifies that he never made much money after The
Rebel was shut down.26 It seems likely that whatever money Hickey did have went into investing in the Company, and that the valuable acreage he described in the letter was predicated more on the possibility of oil beneath it than its actual wealth production.
Evans supports this in his reporting, writing that Hickey’s valuable acreage has yet to be drilled upon, and so is not proven to be valuable.27 But Evans was not wrong in reporting that the Desdemona oil boom made some local socialists wealthy indeed.
Turning to the language Evans used in his article shows that it is less openly derisive than the later articles. Still, he does make similar comparisons between socialist rhetoric and their current economic status. Writing about Hickey’s speeches at the Ellison
Springs encampment, Evans wrote “[Hickey] would speak against the accumulation of
24 Hickey, circular letter, November 15, 1919. 25 Lamb, interview, April 1, 1989. Mina Lamb, Hickey’s niece said “He did make some handsome income but still, much of the time, I think [he] was more [cash strapped.” She does not specify when he made money, though an earlier interview with Lamb and her sister, Isle Wolf, clarifies that he never made much money after The Rebel was shut down. It seems likely that whatever money Hickey did have went into investing in the Company, 26 Lamb and Wolf, interview, January 30, 1979. 27 Evans, “West Texas Socialists,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, August 12, 1919, 7. 71 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 vast wealth and the evils of plutocracy. Hickey used to pour vitrol [sic] on the millionaire and all those who got their wealth other than by the sweat of their brows and the labor of their hands.”28 While certainly true, it is also inarguable that there is a distinction between decrying the John D. Rockefellers and J.P. Morgans of the world, as Hickey often did in the Rebel, and farmers in Eastland County who found themselves suddenly wealth. Not to mention, the label of plutocrat applied much more to Rockefeller and Morgan than farmers in central Texas, no matter if they were millionaires, as Hickey presaged when he wrote, in 1917, “Morgan and Rockefeller have more influence in Washington than all of the people of Illinois.”29 Evans then goes on to say that the encampment at Ellison
Springs is not going to be held that year because “most of the Socialist are too busy making fifty-fifty drilling contracts…to worry much about the Marxian theory of wealth.”30 Given the First Red Scare was already well underway and the government was imprisoning and suppressing socialists, it is more likely that was the cause of the end of the encampment than business affairs. Evans, paradoxically, ends his article with a section titled “Riches Make Little Changes” in which he discussed that the newfound wealth of the socialists went not toward “diamonds and fine jewels” but moderately priced cars, while they continued to live in the houses they had before.31 While his comparisons between Hickey’s speeches and the current wealthy socialists was meant to highlight their hypocrisy, he ended his article with a fairly generous description of what they were doing with that wealth, which is more than can be said for the articles that
28 Evans, “West Texas Socialists,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, August 12, 1919, 7. 29 Thomas A. Hickey and Covington Hall, “From War To Peace!” The Rebel (Hallettsville, TX), April 14, 1917, 1. Accessed March 8, 2020. https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth395074/. 30 Evans, “West Texas Socialists,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, August 12, 1919, 7. 31 Evans, “West Texas Socialists,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, August 12, 1919, 7. 72 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 followed. The highlighting of socialist hypocrisy in Evans’s article would only be amplified going forward, joined in equal measure by mockery and derision.
The El Paso Herald article that followed Evans’s almost a week later is largely a reprint of Evans’s article, but the added editorializing shows the shift the story would take in the weeks that followed its original publication. The unnamed author wrote
“Evans seems to think a little coterie of socialists were “God’s chosen people,” so to speak, for quite a few of them of that faith, cult or political belief were distributed on a strip of country which is now oil territory.”32 Nowhere did Evans imply any divine ordination in the socialists striking oil, making this addition a bizarre one, especially when coupled with the article’s new title “Writer Says God Must Have Love The
Socialists, He Treated Them So Well In The Texas Oil Territory,” which again emphasized the divine gift God apparently granted the socialists.33 But with the additions, the writer strikes a lightly mocking tone by calling the socialists a “little coterie” which strikes a casts the socialists in a diminutive manner, and then dismissing their beliefs in being unable to identify whether they are a “faith, cult or political” group.34 Overall, these are strange additions to Evans’s article, though, like Evans, they are only lightly critical of the socialists. What followed in Leesville, Louisiana, however, would take the mockery and derisive tone to new heights.
The article in the Leesville Leader announces its tone and intention from the title, which read “’Divide Up! Let George Do It” Is The Attitude of Socialists Who Struck
32 “Writer Says God Must Have Loved The Socialists, He Treated Them So Well In The Texas Oil Territory” El Paso Herald, August 18, 1919, 14. Accessed March 8, 2020. https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth143757/m1/?q=desdemona%20oil%20soc ialist. 33 “God Must Have Loved the Socialists,” El Paso Herald, August 18, 1919, 14. 34 “God Must Have Loved the Socialists,” El Paso Herald, August 18, 1919, 14. 73 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
Oil,” mocking the socialists of the Desdemona area and saying that now they only want the wealth of others to be redistributed.35 Already the tone is more negative than either
Evans’s article or the El Paso Herald reprint. The unknown author continues the line of attack about the hypocrisy of the socialist not redistributing their wealth, pointing out that they once “preached the doctrine of equal distribution of wealth among all people” but that “not a one of them is saying a word about dividing up his fortune with the
‘downtrodden poor.’”36 The author then turned his attention to Hickey, recounting the suppression of The Rebel but that now Hickey was a millionaire, and “No one hears him talking Socialism any more.”37 While it is true that Hickey was no longer traveling to encampments and giving speeches, nor did he have a socialist newspaper, his politics were not entirely gone, as evidenced from a November 7th, 1919 account from the Lynn
County News, which said that Hickey “one time editor of the Rebel…now an oil man in the Desdamonia [sic] fields but still a socialist, says the socialists will defeat the
Republicans in Texas in the election next year.”38 Hickey evidently retained enough faith in socialism that he believed it would finish second among the political parties in Texas, and enough faith to share that belief with a newspaper. So he was not, as the Leesville
Leader asserted, completely quiet about socialism.
35 “”Divide Up! Let George Do It” Is The Attitude of Socialists Who Struck Oil” Leesville Leader (Leesville, LA) undated, in box 2, folder 22 Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 36 “Socialists Who Struck Oil” Leesville Leader, undated. 37 “Socialists Who Struck Oil” Leesville Leader, undated. 38 Lynn County News (Tahoka, TX) November 7, 1919 in Newspapers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. Accessed March 9, 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/10605/82879.
74 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
The author of the Leesville Leader piece then moved from Hickey to the socialist farmers of the Desdemona area. Unlike the Evans article, which discussed some individuals but did not go into length about how much they were worth or how many socialists he was actually talking about, the author of the Leesville Leader article asserted that one hundred socialists were now millionaires, with several of them apparently worth ten million to twenty-five million dollars, with another five hundred socialists in Eastland and Stephens counties “well along toward the million mark,” a claim the author does not support with any evidence.39 Finally, in mocking the socialists for not holding their encampment, the author wrote “As a result of this wealth, or perhaps because they are too busy piling up more, there will be no Socialist encampment at Ellison Springs this year” and that, if they did meet, it would be “a convocation of more millionaires than ever before assembled at one time in Texas.”40 Whereas Evans’s article discussed that the oil wealth did not bring any changes to their lifestyle, the Leesville Leader article instead said that the socialists were now too devoted to the accumulation of wealth to worry about politics. Pointing out the apparent hypocrisy of the socialists was done to mock them for betraying their political beliefs, while ignoring that the more likely cause of the encampment not being held was the atmosphere of anti-socialism and repression at the time.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch article is almost exactly a reprint of the Leesville
Leader article. The changes come in the title of the article, which read “Oil Boom Makes
Millionaires Of Former Radicals” laying out directly that the Leesville Leader article
39 “Socialists Who Struck Oil” Leesville Leader, undated. 40 “Socialists Who Struck Oil” Leesville Leader, undated. 75 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 argued, that now that they are rich, the socialists have no need for socialism any longer.41
In fact, the Leesville Leader article paints socialism as more resentment than anything else, writing that before the socialists were farmers who “[took] up the dull routine of work that promised them no remuneration beyond a bare living.”42 Now that they are rich, however, they have no need for such politics. The Post-Dispatch article makes the same argument with the subtitle “Old Economic Ideas Forgotten” along with calling them
“Former Radicals.”43 In this presentation, socialism is simply jealousy of those without toward those with, and now that they have joined the plutocratic class, they have no need for socialism. These critiques serve as a means to paint socialism as bankrupt, that it is based on jealously of the poor toward the rich, and resentment of the rich, more than strongly held beliefs and ideals about the economic structure of society and how it should operate.
The article that appeared in the Kansas City Star on September 24th, 1919, took a few more liberties with the truth. It reframed history so that Desdemona was now a settlement founded by socialists, and it was “easy” for them to be socialists because “all were poor.”44 The Star article is, like Evans’s original article, more generous toward the socialists, writing that “it is the boast of the colony that none of them has turned in his
41 “Oil Boom Makes Millionaires of Former Radicals” St. Louis Post-Dispatch September 21, 1919, 21. Accessed March 9, 2020. https://stltoday.newspapers.com/image/139008685/?terms=thomas%2Ba.%2Bhickey. 42 “Socialists Who Struck Oil” Leesville Leader, undated. 43 “Oil Boom Makes Millionaires,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch September 21, 1919, 21. 44 “Rich in Spite of Doctrine,” Kansas City Star, September 24, 1919, 14. Accessed March 10, 2020. https://infoweb-newsbank- com.kckpl.idm.oclc.org/apps/news/document- view?p=WORLDNEWS&docref=image/v2%3A1126152C152E4978%40EANX- 11A5AB74522F9FD8%402422226-11A5AB781AFB3618%4087- 11A5AB8F90C1B7F8%40Rich%2Bin%2BSpite%2Bof%2BDoctrine. 76 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
[Socialist Party] card.”45 But the rewriting of history continued with the assertion that there was “community ownership of many necessities” because of the poverty of the locals, which is not something mentioned in any of the other articles nor in the two histories of Eastland County.46 The Star article does adhere to the earlier articles in mentioning that the Ellison Springs encampment will not be held because of the socialists’s preoccupation with their business affairs. But the Star turns to mockery in seemingly fabricating a quote from a now wealthy socialist who is to have said “’We’re going to attempt to prove that a man can be very wealthy and still be a Socialist…I’ll admit it’s harder now. So many chances to exploit others are opened up to those who have wealth and perhaps one’s viewpoint unconsciously undergoes a change.’”47 So, now only were the Socialist finding it difficult to maintain their political beliefs, they were finding it difficult to not exploit others as well. The article ends with the tale that a communally owned granary was planned to be build, but the people of Desdemona have abandoned that plan, and that a “community bank would be more appropriate now.”48
This article traffics more in falsehoods than mockery, but even still focused on the contradictions of wealth and socialism in order to undercut the moral and ideological strength of socialism and those who believe, or once believed, in it.
The Democrat-Voice amusingly, and unintentionally, revealed its reasons for mocking socialists. Their story was a small blurb that referred to Hickey as a millionaire,
45 “Rich in Spite of Doctrine,” Kansas City Star, September 24, 1919, 14. 46 “Rich in Spite of Doctrine,” Kansas City Star, September 24, 1919, 14. Neither Mrs. George Langston in her History of Eastland County Texas (Dallas: A. D. Aldridge & Co., 1904) nor Edwin T. Cox in his History of Eastland County, Texas (San Antonio: The Naylor Company, 1950) mention the original settlers of Desdemona being socialists. 47 “Rich in Spite of Doctrine,” Kansas City Star, September 24, 1919, 14. 48 “Rich in Spite of Doctrine,” Kansas City Star, September 24, 1919, 14. 77 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 and ended the paragraph with “Down with the brutal rich!”49 Not far above that blurb, on the same page, was a similarly short paragraph that revealed the Democrat-Voice’s opposition was seemingly based in opposition to workers organizing. That blurb read
“Granting any class of labor or any body of laboring men the right to strike, have you ever thought what would happen if the family physicians of the country should suddenly declare a strike?”50 In proposing this hypothetical and through it arguing there were serious dangers to workers organizing, the newspaper editor or owners revealed their opposition to workers organizing and striking, which would have set them in opposition to the Socialist Party and its support for working people. Like the other articles, the
Democrat-Voice framed the story of the socialist millionaires in order to mock socialists, and in doing so showed its anti-socialist ideology.
One article that stands in stark contrast to the rest appeared in a local Texas newspaper, the Semi-Weekly New Era out of Hallettsville, Texas, where Hickey once lived and where he published The Rebel. The New Era article was a reprint of an article from the Desdemona Oil News, where Hickey worked, that was founded and run by
Harry Elliott, Company treasurer. The article is mostly a rundown of the Company’s officers, structure, and the leases it held, but after giving a brief biography of Hickey, it discussed the socialist millionaire articles. Higgs, the author of the article, asserted that the socialist millionaires story “has been published in over two hundred paper from coast to coast, notably the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, New York World, and the Kansas City
49 Democrat-Voice (Coleman, TX), October 17, 1919, 2. 50 Democrat-Voice (Coleman, TX), October 17, 1919, 2. 78 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
Star.”51 Hickey’s response to whether his socialist politics had changed was simply
“’Watch my life from day to day.’”52 He seemed to think it was fairly obvious his politics had not changed, and one only need watch him to see that. It is true that in the
Desdemona mayoral election of 1919-1920, serving as Harry Elliott’s campaign manager, he helped Elliott win an “an overwhelming majority” with the support of organized labor.53 Whether Elliott ran as a socialist is not known, but the support of organized labor seems to indicate that Hickey’s politics had not strayed too far if they had changed at all.
Higgs’s article shows just how widespread the articles about Hickey and the Eastland
County socialists were, and thus just how eager newspaper owners and editors were to publicize a story that mocked and derided socialism.
These stories did not end with contemporary newspaper accounts, though. Boyce
House, a newspaper at the time who lived and worked in Eastland County, published his memoir of that time in 1935.54 Like the newspaper articles, he highlighted the socialists in Desdemona who wanted “millionaires…to ‘divide up’” their wealth, because they were too poor to have built any for themselves.55 And like the articles, House wrote that the socialists no longer held the Ellison Springs encampment, where they had decried
51 R. F. Higgs, “The National Workers Drilling and Production Co.,” Desdemona Oil News (Desdemona, TX) in Semi-Weekly New Era, November 4, 1919, 3. Accessed March 10, 2020. https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1028786/m1/3/?q=%22t.%20a.%20hickey %22. The papers were not italicized in the quotation, so they have been left not italicized. 52 Higgs, “Workers Drilling and Production Co.,” Semi-Weekly New Era, November 4, 1919, 3. 53 Thomas A. Hickey to Clara B. Hickey, March 15, 1920, in box 1, folder 17, Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 54 Boyce House, Were You In Ranger? reprinted edition (Dallas: Tardy Publication Company, 1935; Ranger, TX: Ranger Historical Society, 1999). 55 House, Were You In Ranger? 61-62. 79 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 capitalism and “the unequal distribution of wealth,” because they “were too busy with land deals involving thousands of dollars.”56 Not to mention, Hickey “the chief orator who had inveighed against the evils of plutocracy”, was too busy and doing too well in the oil business to worry about the encampment or giving speeches.57 From saying millionaires should divide up their wealth, only to become millionaires themselves and not do so, to decrying plutocracy while becoming plutocrats, to finally abandoning their encampment because it might interfere with making more money, House has pulled from the old newspaper accounts the same talking points as were used to mock the socialists then and has deployed them once again.
The fact that the more vitriolic and derisive Leesville Leader article was the one published in national newspapers, rather than Evans’s article with its more neutral tone, reflects the views of the press toward socialism at the time, and a desire to make light of the socialist cause even while fomenting hysteria that led to government suppression.
These two ideas could coexist because the owners and editors of these newspapers were reflexively anti-socialist, and did not actually believe the hysteria they fomented but, like the mockery of the socialist millionaires, used it as a means to express that anti-socialism.
They exaggerated the facts, sometimes inventing them to suit their needs, while ignoring the obvious causes for such things like ending the Ellison Springs encampment because of the plain fears of government suppression. They also ignored the fact that the original reporting, while wrong, still presented the socialist as not lavishing themselves with jewels but buying moderately priced vehicles. Those accounts were absent in later renditions, and when coupled with the fabrications, show that the press was more
56 House, Were You In Ranger, 79. 57 House, Were You In Ranger, 79. 80 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 concerned with mocking the socialists than reporting the truth. All told these articles were part and parcel of a press that, in the midst of the First Red Scare, fomented hysteria and mocked socialists in order to depict socialists as hypocritical and to show the moral and ideological worthlessness of the ideology.
Hickey Responds
While the Higgs article reprinted in the Semi-Weekly New Era does have a quote from Hickey as a response to the articles, Hickey himself responded in more length on a few occasions. The first actually came before the Higgs article, and was similarly published in the Semi-Weekly New Era. Hickey contacted the New Era directly, admitting he had made some money in the oil business, but had reinvested it all.58 Ultimately, though, Hickey reported that should he strike it rich, he would “[establish] another newspaper, like The Rebel, likely in Dallas or Fort Worth.”59 As the circular letter showed, he did attempt that with the Farmers Voice, only to be unable to send it to subscribers because his mailing privileges were still revoked.60 Not quite the traitor to socialism the newspaper articles depicted him as, and reinforces that government suppression was a very real problem for socialists, and is a more likely explanation the decision not to hold the Ellison Spring encampment in 1919 than business concerns being too pressing.
He gave a more detailed response in 1922, writing for the Houston Chronicle and the Kosse Cyclone, where he was currently employed. In this telling, Hickey related that
58 Semi-Weekly New Era (Hallettsville, TX) October 14, 1919, 2. Accessed March 10, 2020. https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1028932/m1/2/?q=%22t.%20a.%20hickey %22. 59 Semi-Weekly New Era, October 14, 1919, 2. 60 Hickey, circular letter, November 15, 1919. 81 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 the initial story was based on Evans confusing a one thousand dollar check for a million dollar check because he was drunk. Hickey wrote Evans asked “’Did you make a million in the oil game yet?’” only for Hickey to show him a check for one thousand dollars, upon which Evans exclaimed “’Good Lord…it is sure enough a million.’”61 Hickey claimed that Evans, in his drunken state, saw double, and happened to be a better writer drunk than sober, and so spun a fanciful tale connecting the socialists of Desdemona to
Hickey’s million dollar check.62 It should be noted, though, that Hickey’s story is not entirely reliable. Hickey claims the St. Louis Post-Dispatch story increased his wealth from one million to ten million, and the New York World took the ten and made it twenty- five million. While the newspaper did exaggerate, the Post-Dispatch story only calls
Hickey a millionaire, not specifying his wealth, though it does say some of the socialists are worth ten million and some up to twenty-five million.63 Still, Hickey’s explanation does express the exaggeration of the national publications in their reporting of the story.
And given the flaws in Evans’s own reporting, it may well be he wrote better, if not more truthfully, while drunk.
Conclusion
As Green argued in Grass-roots Socialism, government suppression drove the destruction of the Socialist Party in western, rural states like Texas.64 But that federal suppression went hand in hand with a national and local press that advocated for suppression of socialists and fomented hysteria in order to drive that suppression. As historians Robert Murray, Linda Lumsden, Regin Schmidt, and Nigel Sellars all showed,
61 Hickey, “How I Made $1,000,000 a Minute,” Kosse Cyclone 62 Hickey, “How I Made $1,000,000 a Minute,” Kosse Cyclone 63 “Oil Boom Makes Millionaires,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch September 21, 1919, 21. 64 Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, 346. 82 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 the role of the press in the First Red Scare was as an active and willing contributor to the fear and hysteria that drove the suppression of the Socialist Party and of socialists in the
U.S. The press did so for several reasons, whether it was to sell newspapers to drive sales that were depressed from waning wartime coverage, as an expression of their conservative ideology, or due to opposition to unionization efforts and any others that would organize the workforce. Most of these efforts, though, rested on painting socialists as a force to be feared, one that should brook a violent reaction against in order to squash their revolutionary ideals. But as the socialist millionaires articles show, the press could also mock and deride socialists as ideologically weak hypocrites, who abandoned their ideals at the first hint of money, and whose politics were based more in resentment and jealousy than strongly held conviction about the structure of society.
The socialist millionaire articles stemmed from several grains of truth. There were indeed many socialist farmers in Desdemona and Eastland County, people Hickey knew well enough to call friends. As he admitted, they did indeed make quite a bit of money from the oil boom, and he himself made money as well. And, the socialist encampment at Ellison Springs was not held in 1919 like it had previously been. But from those grains of truth spun a fanciful tale of upwards of five hundred socialists who all became millionaires, several worth ten million and some twenty-five million. All along the newspapers took that truth and reframed it, juxtaposing the socialist ideals of wealth redistribution and anti-plutocracy and casting the socialists themselves as wealthy people who refused to redistribute their wealth and were plutocrats. This mockery only served as another means of denigrating the Socialist Party and socialists, all the while ignoring the suppression that likely led to the end of the Ellison Springs encampment, the
83 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 suppression those very same newspapers gladly advocated for. These articles reveal another way in which the press was an active and willing participant in the suppression of socialists and radicals during the First Red Scare.
84 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
CHAPTER V
CONCLUSION
Thomas Hickey left the National Workers Drilling and Production Company some time in the winter of 1920. A letter to his attorneys on December 28th, 1920, attached an advertisement he wished to place in the Appeal to Reason selling his $22,000 worth of stock in the Company.1 The disagreements he had with the other officers were apparently not solved by the amendment of the Declaration of Trust in July of that year.
A July 19th, 1921 letter between W.H. Flowers and J.R. Secrest, a friend of Hickey’s, reveals that H.W. Elliott had also left the Company.2 Hickey’s life immediately after leaving the Company is unclear, though a letter from Dr. Paul Renger to Clara Hickey informed her of her husband’s throat cancer diagnosis in June of 1921.3 The Company would not last long, as it lost a lawsuit in Stonewall County, and its assets there were auctioned off.4 In 1922, what remained of the Company was purchased by the Texas
Petroleum Company, though stockholders retained their same stock share.5
1 Thomas A. Hickey to J.D. and Owen Barker, December 28, 1920, in box 1, folder 21, Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 2 W.H. Flowers to J.R. Secrest, July 19 1921, in box 1, folder 17, Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 3 Paul Renger to Clara B. Hickey, June 2, 1921, in box 1, folder 12, Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 4 W. B. Bingham, “Sheriff’s Notice of Sale of Personal Property,” The Aspermont Star, August 11, 1921, 3. Accessed March 17, 2020. https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth126300/m1/3/?q=%22national%20worker s%20drilling%20and%20production%20company%22. 5 Texas Petroleum Company to Stockholders of the National Workers Drilling and Production Company, September 26, 1922, in box 1, folder 23, Thomas A. Hickey 85 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
Hickey’s cancer diagnosis and his continual money problems seems to have driven him to find a steady job. He gave a lecture in Rule, Texas, seemingly on socialism, as he was addressed in the letter reminding him of the time and place as comrade, and the writer signed off “Hurrah For Debs Release Got them on the Run.”6 After that, though, his association with socialism fades. He wrote for a time for the Kosse Cyclone, and by
1923, he was working with his friend from Hallettsville, J.R. Secrest, who owned the
Calliham Caller and Three Rivers Oil News, south of San Antonio.7 Though Hickey was also the secretary of the Chamber of Commerce there, and even though they had once arrested him, in an April 1924 article he praised the Texas Rangers part of the heroic past of the state.8 But Hickey’s politics were not totally changed, as he often used his column space in the Caller to lambast the KKK, calling them “sexual psychopaths” and claiming the business elite in the area were part of the Klan.9 Hickey’s attacks against the Klan, though, led to retaliation, and on July 25th, 1924 the KKK shot and killed Jay Secrest in
Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 6 T.N. Hutchinson to Thomas A. Hickey, December 24, 1921, in box 1, folder 17, Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 7 Thomas A. Hickey to Clara B. Hickey, December 16, 1923, in box 1, folder 19, Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 8 Thomas A. Hickey to Clara B. Hickey, January 8, 1924, in box 1, folder 20, Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas; Thomas A. Hickey, Calliham Caller and Three Rivers Oil News (Calliham, TX), April 1924, in box 3k423, T. A. Hickey Papers, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. 9 Thomas A. Hickey, Calliham Caller and Three Rivers Oil News (Calliham, TX), February 8, 15, 1924, in Grass-roots Socialism, n404. 86 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 the Calliham Caller office, with Hickey writing to Clara that he “died in my arms.”10
Hickey left Calliham for San Antonio, but within a year he would succumb to his throat cancer.
The story of Thomas Hickey and the National Workers Drilling and Production
Company is not just a curiosity, that a fiery socialist orator turned oilfield booster, but rather one example of how socialists navigated the First Red Scare. Hickey’s story is not representative, as not many socialists came to part-own oil companies, but the ways
Hickey and the other officers navigated the First Red Scare is.
While the federal government suppressed many socialist and radical publications, not all were, and so the Company could advertise its worker-oriented oil company in the
Appeal to Reason and the Daily Leader out of Oklahoma, published by socialists Oscar
Ameringer and Dan Hogan. Hickey’s Farmers Voice likely would have joined them in continuing to advocate for farmers had his mailing privileges not still been revoked in
1919. Still, the Company could rely on the socialist bonafides of its officers, and the language of socialism well known to radical readers but also readers throughout Texas, to market itself as a worker-oriented oil company. In doing so, they were forced to navigate the fears of fraud and get-rich-quick schemes that permeated radical and socialist publications, but they did so by not guaranteeing success and by structuring the Company as a trust, not drawing a salary but taking payment only in stocks, which showed their faith in the Company’s success. Though many requests for money were spurred by the socialist millionaires articles, those letters still represented hope on the part of some
10 Thomas A. Hickey to Clara B. Hickey, July 25, 1924, in box 1, folder 20, Thomas A. Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. 87 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020 socialists that this workers oil company could provide the much needed funding for struggling socialist publications across the United States, or fund such causes as the freeing of Ireland from the yoke of British imperialism. Even as the political apparatus of the Socialist Party fell apart due to government suppression, some socialists still saw in the Company cause for hope.
The press, meanwhile, saw in the Company another means of denigrating socialism. While during much of the First Red Scare the role of the press was to stoke fear and hysteria among its readers, in publishing articles about Hickey and the other socialist millionaires, they turned to mockery. These articles served to paint socialism as weak, bereft of any driving motivation but jealously from the poor believers who wanted what the rich had. Now that they had become rich, they no longer saw the need for socialism and redistribution of wealth. These articles of course ignored the ongoing government suppression that might have caused socialists to second-guess gathering for encampments.
Though Hickey did later stop his writing and speaking on socialism, the story of the Company is not as these articles painted. Instead it is the story of how, in the face of government suppression, socialists navigated and responded to that suppression. It shows how socialists hoped and despaired, both at the promises of the Company but also at the potential for socialism after this period of intense repression. Contrary to the articles about the socialist millionaires, the socialists clung to their ideals, even if later Hickey himself would move on from socialism. The effect of the First Red Scare was not an end to socialist beliefs, simply an end to the manifestation of those beliefs in the way of the
Socialist Party of America.
88 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Archival Sources
Blagg-Huey Library. Texas Women’s University. Denton, TX. • Ada Elliott Papers
Dolph Briscoe Center for American History. University of Texas. Austin, TX. • Oral Histories of the Texas Oil Industry Collection • Ruth Alice Allen Papers • T. A. Hickey Papers
Southwest Collection/Special Collection Library. Texas Tech University. Lubbock. TX. • Oral History Collection • Thomas A. Hickey Papers
Contemporary Articles
Geyer, O. R. “Oil Makes Millionaires: Fortunes Created by Eccentricities of Nature and War Prices” Scientific American, Supplement no. 2162 (June 9, 1917): 360-361.
Palmer, John D. “Glimpses of the Desdemona Oil Boom” West Texas Historical Association Year Book vol. 15 (October 1939): 48-53.
Slobodin, Henry L. “Get-Rich-Quick Schemes,” International Socialist Review, vol. 11. February 1911; New York: International Socialist Review Publication Association, 1956.
“Texas Newspaper Jottings” Fourth Estate, January 29, 1921 in Fourth Estate: A Weekly Newspaper for Publishers, Advertisers, Advertising Agents and Allied Interests. New York: Fourth Estate Publishing Company, 1921.
Published Primary Documents
Ameringer, Oscar. If You Don’t Weaken. New York: H. Hold and Co., 1940.
Hickey, Thomas A. The Land. Hallettsville, TX: New Era Print, undated.
House, Boyce. Were You In Ranger? Reprint edition. Dallas: Tardy Publication Company, 1935; Ranger, TX: Ranger Historical Society, 1999.
Newspapers
Altoona Mirror (Altoona, PA) 89 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
Aspermont Star (Aspermont, TX)
Breckenridge American (Breckenridge, TX)
Calliham Caller and Three Rivers Oil News (Calliham, TX)
The Democratic-Voice (Coleman, TX)
The Dublin Progress and Telephone (Dublin, TX)
The El Campo Citizen (El Campo, TX)
El Paso Herald (El Paso, TX)
Fort Worth Star-Telegram (Fort Worth, TX)
Kansas City Star (Kansas City, MO)
Kosse Cyclone (Kosse, TX)
Leesville Leader (Leesville, LA)
Lynn County News (Tahoka, TX)
Oklahoma Leader (Oklahoma City, OK)
The Provoker (Chicago, IL)
The Rebel (Hallettsville, TX)
The San Antonio Express (San Antonio, TX)
Semi-Weekly New Era (Hallettsville, TX)
The Stephenville Tribune (Stephenville, TX)
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, MO)
Secondary Monographs
“An Oklahoma I Had Never Seen Before”: Alternative Views of Oklahoma History, ed. Davis D. Joyce. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994.
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Bell, Daniel. Marxian Socialism in the United States. Cornell paperback edition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. First published in Socialism and American Life, eds. Donald Drew Egbert & Stow Persons. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952.
Bissett, Jim. Agrarian Socialism in America: Marx, Jefferson, and Jesus in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1904-1920. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999.
Black, Brian. Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
Buckingham, Peter H., ed. Expectations for the Millennium: American Socialist Visions of the Future. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002.
Burbank, Garin. When Farmers Voted Red: The Gospel of Socialism in the Oklahoma Countryside. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976.
Burroughs, Bryan. The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes. New York: Penguin Press, 2009.
Cullen, David O’Donald and Kyle G. Wilkison, eds. The Texas Left: The Radical Roots of Lone Star Liberalism. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2010.
Fischer, Ernest G. Marxists and Utopias in Texas. Burnet, TX: Eakin Press, 1980.
Foley, Neil. The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Freeberg, Ernest. Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.
Green, James R. Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest, 1895- 1943. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1978.
Glasrud, Bruce A. and James C. Maroney, eds. Texas Labor History. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2013.
Goldstein, Robert Justin. Political Repression in Modern America: From 1870 to the Present. New York: Schenkman Publishing Company, 1978.
Gould, Lewis L. Progressives and Prohibitionists: Texas Democrats in the Wilson Era. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1973.
Hopkinson, Michael. The Irish War of Independence. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002.
91 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
Huber, Matthew T. Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Isser, Steve. The Economics and Politics of the United States Oil Industry, 1920-1990: Profits, Populism, and Petroleum. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996.
Keith, Jeanette. Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South during the First World War. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
Kipnis, Ira. The American Socialist Movement, 1897-1912. New York: Columbia University Press, 1952.
Kornweibel, Theodore. “Seeing Red”: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919-1925. Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1998.
Letters of Eugene V. Debs, vols. 1 & 2, ed. J. Robert Constantine. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990.
Luff, Jennifer. Commonsense Anticommunism: Labor and Civil Liberties between the World Wars. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
Lumsden, Linda J. White, Black, and Red All Over: A Cultural History of the Radical Press in Its Heyday, 1900-1917. Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2014.
Martin, Roscoe C. The People’s Party in Texas: A Study in Third Party Politics. University of Texas Press Reprint edition. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1933; 1970.
Murray, Robert K. Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955.
Murphy, Paul L. World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States. New York: Norton, 1979.
Nielsen, Kim E. Un-American Womanhood: Antiradicalism, Antifeminism, and the First Red Scare. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2001.
Olien, Roger M. and Diana Davids Olien. Easy Money: Oil Promoters and Investors in the Jazz Age. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.
Olien, Roger M. and Diana Davids Olien. Life in the Oil Fields. Austin, TX: Texas Monthly Press, 1986.
92 Texas Tech University, Brandon Collins, May 2020
Olien, Roger M. and Diana Davids Olien. Oil and Ideology: The Cultural Creation of the American Petroleum Industry. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 200.
Olien, Roger M. and Diana Davids Olien. Oil in Texas: The Gusher Age, 1895-1945. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002.
Olien, Roger M. and Diana Davids Olien. Wildcatters: Texas Independent Oilmen. Austin, TX: Texas Monthly Press, 1984.
Preston Jr., William. Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radical, 1903-1933. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994.
Rister, Carl Coke Oil! Titan of the Southwest. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1949.
Schmidt, Regin. Red Scare: FBI and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United States, 1919-1943. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000.
Sellars, Nigel. Oil, Wheat, & Wobblies: The Industrial Workers of the World in Oklahoma, 1905-1930. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988.
Shore, Elliott. Talkin’ Socialism: J.A. Wayland and the Role of the Press in American Radicalism, 1890-1912. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1988.
Voices from the Oil Fields, edited by Paul F. Lambert and Kenny A. Franks. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984.
Warner, C.A. Texas Oil and Gas Since 1543. Rockport, TX: Copano Bay Press, 1939.
Weaver, Bobby D. Oilfield Trash: Life and Labor in the Oil Patch. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2010.
Weinstein, James. The Decline of Socialism in America: 1912-1925. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967.
Wilkinson, Kyle G. Yeomen, Sharecroppers, and Socialists: Plain Folk Protest in Texas, 1870-1914. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2008.
Secondary Articles, Theses, and Dissertations
Boyd, Steven and David Smith. “Thomas Hickey, The Rebel, and Civil Liberties in Wartime Texas.” East Texas Historical Journal, 45, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 41-51, https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/ethj/vol45/iss1/12.
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Clark, Robert William. Thomas A. Hickey and Socialist Reform in Texas, 1904-1925. MA thesis, Southwest Collections Library, Texas Tech University, 1989.
Clark, Robert William. “Thomas A. Hickey: Texas Socialist and Oilman.” West Texas Historical Review 66 (1990): 129-139.
Green, James R. “Tenant Farmer Discontent and Socialist Protest in Texas, 1901-1917.” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 81, no. 2 (October 1977): 133-154, https://www.jstor.org/stable/30238515.
Molina, Michael. Radical Reactions: The First Red Scare in the Great Plains and the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1918-1920. PhD diss., University of Oklahoma, 2017. https://shareok.org/handle/11244/50815.
Pierce, Michael. “Great Women All, Serving a Glorious Cause: Freda Hogan’s Reminiscences of Socialism in Arkansas,” The Arkansas Historical Quarterly, 69, no 4. (Winter 2010). 293-324. Accessed January 9, 2020.
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