ustxtxb_obs_1954_12_20_50_00004-00000_000.pdf

FORT WORTH, Dec. 20 Texas independent oilmen will be united at the next session of Congress in seeking a protective tariff or tax on oil imported to the United States. Joint action in support of “a competitive tariff, tax, or other similar protective measures” was endorsed at a meeting of Texas oil producers here last week. Representatives of six associations of independent oilmen declared that oil imports as they affect the security and economy of the nation “can not safely be left to the determination of the few importing companies with a vested interest in foreign oil.” Senator Price Daniel told the conference that “there must be a limitation” to free trade, particularly with regard to oil; that the 27 and one-half percent depletion tax allowance granted the oil industry by federal law should be maintained; and that the production and gathering of natural gas should be excluded from federal jurisdiction. Ernest 0. Thompson, chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission, said that oil imports are supplanting Texas oil production. The conference set up a general committee to carry its case to Congress, to encourage a strong domestic oil industry, and to reduce U. S. reliance on foreign oil. Groups represented were Inde other labor haters,” Knight said. Riffe was quoted by the Houston Post as stating that he appreciated the attitudes of Shivers and Shepperd in offering their good offices to help settle the strike. A former sharecropper and worker in the central telephone exchange in Corsicana, Sherman A. Miles of Corsicana, was elected president. Vice-presidents are Roy Evans of Dallas, auto workers; R. J. Greer of Houston, transport workers; and Louise Dunn of Dallas, packinghouse workers. D. Roy Harrington of Austin, an oil worker, was re-elected executive secretary. New members of the executive board are Jim Pierce, Fort Worth, electrical workers; Beulah LaRue, Fort Worth, telephone workers; W. D. Bales of Dumas, oil workers; Dennis C. Williams, Brownsville, transport workers; S. L. Laney, Houston, textile workers; E. L. McCommas, Fort Worth, auto workers; Eddie Humphrey, Fort Worth, packinghouse workers; and J. A. Lee, Dallas, steel workers. Retiring administrative officers are Jim Smith, Houston, steel workers, president, and Charles Tipton, Dallas, packinghouse workers, vice-president. Re-elected members of the executive board are Azale Hart, Greenville, clothing workers; Rex Ballard, San Antonio, brewery workers; Joseph Dunn, Houston, maritime; Port Rice, Fort Worth, paper workers; J. B. Mitchell, Houston, rubber workers; and Earl Siegert, Houston, steel workers. pendent Petroleum Association of America, Texas Independent Producers & Royalty Owners Association, North Texas Oil & Gas Association, West Central Texas Oil & Gas Association, Panhandle Producers & Royalty Owners Association, and East Texas Oil Association. Holleman \(Continued from Page 11 destroy organized labor,” Holleman said. Cooperation between the two groups will result from their “mutuality of interests,” he said, “unless the seeds of mistrust sowed by those forces which desire to keep the great majority of the people underpaid and underprivileged fall on fertile ground and ripen into fully-developed prejudices harmful to all.” Holleman cited as evidence of the mutual interests of the two groups the points that education is neces sary if prejudice is to be eliminated and living standards raised; that Latin-Americans need upward adjustments in pay and working conditions, and “the surest way of obtaining these goals is through union organization”; that the AFL seeks to end racial discrimination, yet unions are also discriminated against because of “vilification and abuse”; and that both the AFL and native Latin-American groups oppose the entry of wetbacks into the United States. it’s smart to buy for Christmas gifts BEA HARPER’S ANTIQUES 112 E. 8th 8-8432 NEED TO KNOW THE TRUTH ABOUT TEXAS? Puzzled about a late Christmas Gift? Subscribe to THE TEXAS OBSERVER How many times have you wished for a truth-telling let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may newspaper? Here it is. Name: Street Address: City & State: One-Year Subscription, The Texas Observer, $4.00 Page 4 December 20, 1954 THE TEXAS OBSERVER `FEW COMPANIES TARGET’ ryant, A Doctor Who Struck Oil, Nants to Strengthen Democrats in Texas By a Staff Reporter The Texas Observer TYLER, Dec. 20 Four months Igo Dr. Howard Bryant was just mother independent oil man, richer than most of us, a man with a penchant for action. “He likes to build things,” they say of him here. He built a twelve-story Petroleum Building downtown; he dredged a channel from his boathouse into a lake near Tyler; he digs for oil. Today, Howard Bryant has also emerged as a front-ranks Democrat who is determined to help build up the national Democratic Party in Texas, perhaps just the way he built that twelve-story building. He grew up in a small wood cabin ten miles out of Tyler \(on the edge of the lake he now plies with a started the public school in Tyler in the fifth grade. By the time he was 25 he had finished high school, four years of college, and four years of medical training. For 20 years he was a doctor. Then he struck oil. You can spot Howard Bryant five blocks away by his white hair, youthful because wavy. He wears heavy, fibrous dark suits; he is quiet, and hard. Just how hard, Texas Democrats found out during the recent gubernatorial campaign. Dr. Bryant has always been a close friend of Ralph Yarborough, and he raised many thousands of dollars for his friend’s campaign. He talked to 600 people by telephone during the ummer. The story is now wellrorn among Texas politicians of w.r he locked himself in a hotel om with an East Texas lawyer 1. wheedled him until finally he e $1500 instead of the $100 he figured he could afford. That’s the way to win friends and ince people, but it got money for campaign, and that was what award Bryant had in mind. Sitting in the front room of his nk-brick, Georgian home in the ilk-stocking section of Tyler, the rood doctor fixed his eyes on the writer’s and said: “I told ’em I was there to get oney. I know people who get oney aren’t popular and I wasn’t eying to be. I told ’em I also knew hey weren’t going to give it to me, was goin’ to take it away from ’em.” What does this coiled and angry man from Tyler have in mind? He says convincingly that he does not BUSINESS AIDS Complete Secretarial Service . . . dictation, typing, duplicating and specialized services. Twenty-seven years serving the business people of Texas. 69021 Austin, Texas want any political office. “What have I got to gain?” he asks. “I’m not going to sit up there and let ’em take their pot shots at me.” What, then? It’s this way. “If I ran my business like the Texas Democrats run theirs, I’d be broke in a month. The Democratic Party needs to be built up in Texas. We’ll be a key statethe key state in 1956. I think we can carry the state for Stevenson if we start now, but it’ll take work and planning.” Although he is dedicated to the national Party, Dr. Bryant calls himself “a Texas Democrat,” first, because he is a native Texan and puts the economy of Texas ahead of the national economy in matters where “‘there isn’t going to be too much hurting on either side,” and, second, because he is a partisan of the independent oilmen of Texas. He is at a loss to understand why Stevenson Democrats on the national level “do not see that the independent oilmen are the part of the oil industry the Democrats ought to support.” “Independent oilmen would also do better by debating the issues out and staying in the Democratic Party,” he says. “Politically speaking, I have thought of murder many times but never divorce.” We were sitting in his tenth-floor office in downtown Tyler. \(He has a painting behind his desk of a man who looks like Howard Bryant standing bareheaded beside a pipe shooting burning yellow oil along the ground; on another wall, a fine oil of an unpainted cabin in a green field; on another, a portrait got up and moved toward a door. “Come here, I want to show you something,” he said. We stepped out onto a concrete porch lipping over the city of Tyler, the hills beyond. The sky was low and dark; it was chill, fall time. He stood with his hand on the steel railing and pointed to this building and that one, talking easy. He is authentic Texan. “See that hospital? Independent oilmen built it by subscribing $800,000. And that? Independent oilmen built it with public subscription. That church over there? Independent oilmen put up 95 percent of the money to build the annex. That’s the bank. There’s $10 million out in loans, and independent oilmen have $9 million of it. That hospital over there, independent oilmen did it. And all these buildings what would Tyler be without them? “This is a typical independent oilman’s community. It’s duplicated many times over in Texas. The in was to address a mass meeting of the struck workers Monday night. He said Friday that only four of the original 450 strikers had gone back to work. Calling this a “wonderful demonstration . . . of loyalty and conviction,” Rifle said: “We intend to stay with them to the end of this battle.” “We have only started and scratched the surface in Texas,” he told the delegates. He outlined CIO’s plans to organize nationally wood, paper, furniture, and chemical workers. The administrative officers’ report submitted to the convention Friday criticized Governor Shivers and Shepperd for their role in the 1954 campaigns. “Arrayed against the people was the whole official machinery of the Texas Government, almost all of dependents build their communities and keep our natural resources assets in Texas.” That is why Howard Bryant calls himself a Texas Democrat. Others might call him a liberal Democrat; he probably wouldn’t quibble over the word, because words don’t build anything. He told of his money-raising efforts. He wrote a letter to 2,000 independent oilmen telling them they might not know it, but the Democratic Party was their “insurance” against high oil imports and a change in the 27 1/2 percent depletion allowance, .”and right now you’d better pay the premium.” His concept of politics wouldn’t be misrepresented by the “scienceof-the-possible” definition. He is for Adlai Stevenson, but he thinks “he needs somebody from Texas to tell him the facts of life down here.” We went out to his lakehouse. After a family barbecue \(a conclave the writer said he’d like to go look some more at the skiff in the boathouse below. He said get in and in the rain we skimmed out to the middle of the lake and turned around and came back. He didn’t say much. The rain fell soft, the boat hummed low. You got the feeling of bridled power. DR. HOWARD BRYANT the daily papers in the State, and a vast majority of the weekly ones,” the report said. “The Governor used his official office to smear CIO and to spread deliberate untruths about our organization and its political action functions and the nature of the strike in Port Arthur. The Attorney General used McCarthy tactics and even used McCarthy witnesses. He subverted his high office to the political campaign for reelection of a reactionary state administration.” Shepperd reamed with a statement phoned to his office that this was typical of recent “inconsistent” and “blundering” acts of CIO. The officers and, later, the convention as a whole called for the formation of “an effective statewide liberal organization” and a “real two-party system” in Texas. Saturday night, 0. A. Knight, president of the Oil Workers International Union and a CIO national vice-president, said at a convention banquet that although CIO has six million members, “a defeat of a few hundred strikers at Port Arthur would be a defeat for all of us.” “We do not intend to take a beating in Port Arthur at the hands of Allan Shivers, John Ben Shepperd, the Chamber of Commerce, or any Texas Oilmen to Seek Tariff Against Imports Compliments of American Guaranty Life Insurance Co. Alfred “Red” Petty Midland, Texas Tel. 45587 CIO Firm on Port Arthur Strike