Humble and other majors appealed directly to the new president, Franklin Roosevelt, to appoint a federal oil czar to squelch the hot oilers. Roosevelt appointed a top aide, Harold Ickes, and on July 14, 1933, the president signed an executive order not only upholding proration but sending hundreds of federal agents into East Texas to enforce it. It took three more years of hot oil prosecutions and legal challenges, some going all the way to the Supreme Court, but by 1936 the federal government had brought order to the East Texas field and stability to oil prices.
