Anointed with Oil

Introduction

The Prophet of Spindletop certainly thought he was special. When poking at the soil for subterranean riches, quoting scripture along the way, he fancied himself a mediator of sorts, connecting the grit of hard labor to a cosmic calling, primordial matter to fantasies of a new age. He also believed history had no hold on him—that his extrasensory perceptions and ability to command the future freed him from the usual constraints of time. With a complete lack of self-doubt, the Bible-toting driller deemed himself a blessing to his people, and with oil in his sights he determined to prove the point. Even when times got tough and biting criticisms of his character mounted, he pressed on, armed with an assurance that God and black gold favored him.

Cordoned off in his own mind as exceptional, Higgins had an unwavering faith in oil—and its role in his destiny—that was orthodox to the core. Higgins himself was as American as they came. Far from unusual, his seamless interchange of sacred and material goals, and his utter conviction that petroleum was his providence, evinced a convulsive combination that has long defined not only the personal lives and communities affected by crude but the United States’ very own identity.

Consider the generations of oil hunters who preceded Higgins in Pennsylvania’s Petrolia, the petroleum-rich zone nestled up against the Allegheny Mountains in the state’s remote northwest corner, and who subsequently followed his lead in the southwestern oil patch. Countless numbers of them chased the black stuff as if it was their divine calling and drew on their biblical studies and understandings of the spirit world to engineer better methods of tapping the earth’s bounty and claiming dominion over the soil. Driven by the same profit-mindedness of the Christian steward, they embraced a high-risk, high-reward entrepreneurialism in hopes of achieving a prosperity that could signal their blessedness and allow them to save society in anticipation of the end times. Like Higgins, they tenaciously weathered the manifold disruptions of a brutal corporate climate predicated on boom-bust cycles and the mercurial prerogatives of chance. And, also like him, they did so by drawing closer to Christ.

That same faith extended beyond individual oilers to the villages and towns they helped transform. As much as crude held sacred meaning for those who chased it, it was also deemed hallowed by residents of oil patches like Beaumont, Texas, where the chasing occurred. There, people like Higgins’s acquaintance Jim Collier waited prayerfully for liquid gold to appear and marveled at the utopian possibilities it would offer were it to actually do so. When oil was finally struck, stargazers and cynics alike reacted with awe at their cascading fortunes, rejoicing that God’s favor was now upon them. Enlivened by that notion, God-fearing citizens with the mind-set of George Carroll set out to make their boomtowns puritan “cities on a hill.” Oil’s attendant nightmares of booming immorality made them all the more determined to turn their communities into crucibles of celestial hope, their towns into models of industry and governance and harbingers of God’s kingdom.

Such strong belief in the sacred power of crude also enveloped American society itself. First discovered during the Civil War (1861–1865) in the very Pennsylvania hills Higgins would navigate decades later, petroleum registered as a mystical fount that might ease America out of bloodshed and into a new age of peace and prosperity. Oil was to be a healing balm for the body politic. Yet during the century and a half that unfolded after war’s end, it became a catalyst as well, a propellant of America’s coming of age. The crude extracted across time from South Texas and similar locales not only fired the economic engine of the United States as it pursued ever-widening markets at home and overseas but also greased the mechanisms of political and philanthropic empires set on imposing their moral imperatives. Seeing themselves much like Higgins saw himself—as anointed—and eager to act on oil’s seemingly transcendent potential, petroleum families such as the Rockefellers carved out creases of unrivaled authority through which they could sell their dreams (and dogmas) for modernity. Equipped with oil’s stunning wealth, pious citizens who attended churches like Beaumont’s First Baptist in turn constructed enormous ministries with boundless reach. There, as well as in Tulsa, Houston, and countless other nodes of the production nexus, petroleum bankrolled colossal cathedrals, schools, missionary organizations, and foundations, all determined to fashion the United States into a resplendent Christian commonwealth.

Far from an outlier in history, then, Patillo Higgins actually acted at the center of a perpetual fury that saw ideas and institutions of faith spark the discovery and appropriation of oil and the economic weight of crude stir up churchly devotion and cosmic expectations among oil country’s people of God. No mere liquid form, gushing petroleum was a life stream to the heavens; no mere escape from difficult times, oil-refined religion promised to turn the earth’s bounty into a better tomorrow. Such was the give-and-take that facilitated Higgins’s rise from obscurity and stoked America’s preponderance in an advancing age.

WHAT FOLLOWS IS the religious biography of a natural resource with outsized—and seemingly otherworldly—importance. Glimpsed from the vantage of the Prophet of Spindletop, it is the story of the dynamic reciprocity that Christianity and crude shared in the making of modern America. Just as importantly, it is a story about the making of America’s ascendant moment. The same unqualified confidence in the mastery of crude that drove Higgins and fellow oil hunters forward on domestic turf also furnished the United States with the indomitable spirit that made the century inaugurated by the Spindletop strike its epoch of supremacy. Such sanction was justified by this nation’s physical and fiscal control of oil, which for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries went unmatched. True, and as the chapters that follow will lightly sketch out, the development of the oil industry was global from the start, the impact of crude on the basic functions of daily life as well as the political and economic functions of nation-states universal in degree. Petroleum was never America’s to possess alone. Yet, in the decades immediately following oil’s discovery—first in Pennsylvania, then with emphasis after Spindletop—Americans could rightly assume that their nation enjoyed sovereignty over the black stuff and that this dominion placed it in an advantageous, even hegemonic position on an international stage. That power, real and imagined, was not simply a natural outgrowth of America’s fortuitous proximity to oil or prowess in its handling, however. It was also generated by the US oil industry’s ideological prerogatives and self-interests, as well as by its fierce internal clashes, all of which blended religious, economic, and political concerns into one combustive fuel for America’s global march.

As a whole, the business world that Higgins fought so hard to join was populated by corporate entities that projected his same faith in crude. Gladys City Oil, Gas, and Manufacturing Company was far from the only petroleum firm to shroud itself in an apostolic aura. To a remarkable degree, many other oil companies—some exceptionally large, most modest and small—openly embraced the theological imperatives that informed their chief executives, aligned their boardrooms with biblical logics, and sacralized their operations as modes of witness and outreach. Once attached to US ambitions abroad, those enterprises provided vital energy and institutional structures for the nation’s imperial project. Partnered with visionary politicians and philanthropists, oil’s corporate giants articulated ownership of petroleum as the essence of American exceptionalism. The allegories of deistic favor they deployed, the manifest destiny in which they enveloped society: oil’s elite wielded these sacred discourses in a quest to conquer, but their words also stemmed from sincere conviction that America’s guardianship of crude meant it was responsible for elevating all humanity. Even when their vocabulary was drained of the explicit God talk of earlier generations, late twentieth-century oil’s prime movers remained tethered to a language that accentuated the oil-rich nation’s special moment in the sun.

Forty years after Spindletop, in February 1941, magazine publisher Henry Luce would give that moment an enduring name: the “American Century.” Luce, the son of foreign missionaries sponsored by the Rockefeller family, used the pages of his Life magazine to compel his fellow citizens to “create the first great American Century.” He had actually tested that charge a month earlier before the American Petroleum Institute in Oklahoma. In his keynote address, Luce heralded oilmen as the vanguard of pure American values, praising their “dynamic spirit of freedom and enterprise” and “sense of illimitable roundness of the world.” When harnessed by God-fearing patriots, he intimated, oil had the capacity to transform the world into something godlier and better. America’s special blessing was, in his mind, also its peculiar burden, the source of its prophetic mission. Like so many powerbrokers at the time, he drew on grand metaphors to underscore the need for the United States to use its oil to illumine the world, fuel progress, and power international advancement. Higgins could not have stated it better himself.¹

These were inspiring sentiments, indeed; yet their open-ended nature made them grounds for fierce debate: Exactly who in the oil guild retained the rights and means to lead Luce’s charge? As taken as they were with Luce’s lofty vision, oilers only rarely spoke with one voice. Most often, they engaged in unabated cutthroat competition. Such was the by-product of the “rule of capture,” a legal canon unique in its application to US mineral rights that guaranteed the right of each driller who had access to a common pool to drain as much crude as he could, at dizzying rates and on his terms. That competition spilled over into the churchly realm, where oil’s constituents waged war for the right to define the core beliefs and moral composition of America at home and abroad. Far from presenting the united front imagined in Luce’s address, then, the oil fraternity was marked by bitter infighting and fits of righteous rage, which in turn raised the intensity and stakes of the industry’s—and, by extension, the nation’s—quest for dominance.

The most lasting and important of these contests—and the one that drives this book—was the rivalry between “major” and “independent” oil companies. Patillo Higgins’s bitterness toward the “big oil” people in the East—men like John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil executive John Archbold, who had elbowed him aside—and subsequent determination to make his fledgling oil company competitive against the likes of Andrew Mellon’s Gulf Oil were emblematic of the emotionally charged chasm that separated oil’s main combatants. At the heart of the rift were perennially opposed market principles and moral economies—in essence, two sparring spirits of capitalism.²

As manifested in the workings of Standard Oil and its subsidiaries—and of its founding clan, the Rockefellers—major oil’s prerogatives were transparent. It sought to dull the excesses of the rule of capture, centralize authority over its dizzying operational scales, and rationalize the industry. While he espoused oil’s core ideals of free enterprise, major oil’s architect John D. Rockefeller also saw them as wasteful; his was a bureaucratic outlook in keeping with the Protestant ethic Max Weber would famously write about, which assumed godly capitalists would honor the principles of efficiency and control. And so he proceeded to rein the industry in by conquering and consolidating. That ethic naturally fused with his efforts as a churchman. A refiner of the tallest order, Rockefeller was also a towering reformer who propagated a social gospel that called on Christians to construct a better society by way of their economic and political clout. Over time, that gospel inspired him and particularly his son to pursue a revamped philanthropy. Frustrated with charity that focused on personal matters of the soul, John D. Rockefeller Jr. built a foundation that stressed scientific modernization on a massive scale. Though not as outspokenly religious as their grandfather and father, the third-generation Rockefellers were every bit as eager to use the family’s petropower to enhance America’s Judeo-Christian values and ensure the nation’s place at the head of a new international order of capitalist and humanitarian exchange. These forerunners of major oil may not have worn biblical convictions on their sleeves, but they went about their business with an eye to a higher being and a higher sense of being. Oil’s global topographies in this way became their theological planes, on and through which they could envision human accord.³