The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson #1)

by Robert A. Caro

Oil money had long been a factor in politics in the United States. In Texas, oil had come in not long after the century; the Spindletop field on the Gulf Coast, which would eventually prove out at a hundred million barrels, one-tenth as much oil as had been produced previously in America, blew in on January 10, 1901. The robber barons who had tapped the oil fields of the Northeast had been using the sale of black gold to purchase politicians for decades before that; the Standard Oil Company, one historian said, did everything possible to the Pennsylvania Legislature except refine it. But the new oil fields of the Southwest had, through the first three decades of the twentieth century, been controlled by the same companies that controlled the old oil fields of the Northeast; with their control of pipelines, markets and refineries—and the capital needed to explore and drill—they bought out or forced out the discoverers of the Texas fields so thoroughly that in 1930 75 percent of the oil in Texas was owned by Standard Oil and its offshoots and rivals such as Humble, Magnolia, Gulf and Sun, and the owners of the other 25 percent had to sell their oil to these companies, who owned the refineries and pipelines, at prices so low that they were effectively prevented from accumulating capital of their own. The companies, and the families back of them, that poured money into politics in Texas—Gulf Oil (the Mellons), Sun Oil (the Pews), Standard Oil (the Rockefellers)—were the same c...