Proletarian Spirit, Bourgeois Pocketbook: Thomas A
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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.