ustxtxb_obs_1957_11_15_50_00006-00000_000.pdf

44 Could See a Lift in the Human Spirit’ the Northwhen, as he then pointed out in his Divided We Stand, the South had only $9 of every $100 and the West only $11. Now he shows by figures, on a hundred dollar base, this growth for the South and West from 1930 to 1950: in demand deposits, the South, $11 to $20, the West, $11 to $21; in time deposits, South $7 to $12, West $12 to $29; in personal income, South $14 to $20, West $16 to $19; in income per individual, North up 119 percent, West up 148 per cent, South up 225 perincome tax paid, South $6 to $16, West $9 to $18 \(Webb’s figures here rounded to the nearest dolWhy? “In the two decades, 1930-1950, came a reversal of the long process of concentrating the wealth of the nation into one small section of it,” concludes Webb. \(In his grouping the South has 13 states, 27 percent of the acreage, 27 percent of the people; the North has 19 states, 21 percent of the acreage, 55 percent of the peoWhy has this happened? Webb answers because of the Democrats and Franklin Roosevelt. The condition of the South in 1930 “came at the end of a long Republican Regime, 56 years of Republican rule as against 16 ‘by the opposition. I do want to say categorically that the low condition to which the South had fallen was probably due more to the policy followed by the dominant party than to any other one thing. This fact is so clearly written in the record that it is difficult to understand why, even on rare occasions, Southerners forget it.” Roosevelt “singled the South out as the special recipient of his effort at restoration,” a conclusion Webb supports by quoting FDR saying, as the depression began, that “the South presents right now the nation’s No. 1 economic problem.” Webb gives his personal au Some Remarks From the Prof AUSTIN Last week one night at the Driskill here, at a dinner honoring Speaker’ Waggoner Carr, a certain Professor Backward, a comedian of rising notoriety, we take it, passed remarks refreshing for their heedless perspective on certain matters: He greeted “my friend Price Daniel, y our governor this week.” In. Oklahoma, “they told me that if that Alamo had had a back door there wouldn’t a been no Texas.” Of Jesse James, “you got a perfect name for your treasurer.” He has a very fine home, “18 rooms, all rented.” Of Nieman Marcus, “I dropped in there the other day. I wanted to get an estimate on a handkerchief.” He was, said the professor, from Georgia. His rclommate out there, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, had been out the other night for a benefit game between the Klan and the Knights of Columbus “for the benefit of the ulriderprivileged fans for Ralph Yarborough.” And had the audience heard what Governor Faubus had said? “He is giving the whole world 24 hours to get the hell out.” thority to his theme. “I want to say a word further about why I made this study. I wanted to dO it because I thought I could see everywhere in the South a lift in the human spirit. I thought things were better, but I did not know. As I went about, I could see the homes once yellow from kerosene lamps bright with electricity and I could see that electricity pumping the water and cutting the weed, taking the drudgery and much of the old sordidness out of the lives of thousands of people. I could see the farms terraced and fertilized and fat cattle grazing on land too long cursed by cotton. I saw the people well dressed, eating in good restaurants, signing the register in good hotels, carrying themselves with pride into the banks, the schools, the stores and the churches. I saw ambitious young people, as well as others, in schools and colleges. It had not always been so, and I knew it, not from books alone but from experience.” basis of inherited fortunes or as the root of new ones, is the greatest single source of new American wealth … to a banker, whose ideas of worth are based on what somebody might pay for the assets in question, Sid Richardson is worth not much more than $200 million; but he owns 500-odd million barrels of oil in the ground, and that is ‘valued’ at $1 a barrel. Consequently, his fortune, like those of most oil millionaires, ranges upward from a ‘banker’s estimate’ to two or three times that figure.” The non-oilmen in the Texas listing are the Brown brothers Some further excerpts from the Fortune piece: “Texans had seven million-dollar incomes in 1951, jumped to 18 in 1953, a full third as many as the long-time leader, New York, with 53.” “‘OP’ Sid’ Richardson, whose fortune ranks him just behind H. L. Hunt in the hierarchy of Texas wealth, has never been even faintly tempted to do anything with his money except make more, drilling for oil. Travel doesn’t interest the bachelor. ‘I don’t want to go nowhere outside the U. S.’ Nor does philanthropy. Aside from helping a handful of friends who stood by him during his ‘rabbit-eating’ days, Sid preserves his money for strictly Richardsonian p u r p o s e s: his ranches, his island in. the Gulf of Mexico, his fishing boats, and most important, for his trading.” ” ‘Money,’ ST1 orted Texan George Brown, whose Brown and Root, Inc., is one of the biggest construction companies in the South, ‘must be put to work not only in buying stocks and bonds of others, but in venture capital to create new jobs and financial horizons. Timid money has created very little in our economic history’.” “Many of the Very Rich hold to the personal philosophy that a man should scratch for what he gets … The response of one fiftymillionaire \(Tom O’Connor of $40,000 to finance a memorial to the Texas longhorn steer’Ain’t no cow worth $40,000′ might be applied to other people as well.” “Certainly it took the RFC’s atmosphere of wholesale lending to start Jesse Jones down the road of donating over half his wealth Webb’s speech has several other suggestive themes. One is that now the South is an exporter of capital, a thesis he illustrates with Texans E. L. DeGolyer \(SatMurchison and Richardson \(Robert Young and New York Censons and associates \(Colorado ho”Ganglia of capital export are forming all over the South,” he says. “All economic factors seem to be in the South’s favor and to promise it a bright future.” In evidence he cites the South’s onethird of the good farm land, two thirds of all the land with 40 inches of rainfall or more; an abundance of fresh water; an “unlimited amount of fuel”; the fact the South, just now industrializing, “is not plagued with obsolescence as the North is.” The late 19th and early 20th centuries, the to philanthropy, while a life span of almost ninety years was too short to convince Galveston’s W. L. Moody, Jr. that it was a mistake to be caught dead with upwards of $200 million. \(While his heirs are squabbling over the estate, his daughter still practices the frugality her father demanded, down to the darned cotton stockings that complete an en”H. L. Hunt, with a fortune of some $600 million at his command, is … baffled by the pleasures of spending. He built himself a replica of Mount Vernon to the Hill School, where they played a fast brand of football and toed the line. But that was about the end of ostentation; the Hunts have lived the simple life with no boats, no planes, no corps of domestics, no carousing around. \(None of the boys drink or swear; all are Presbyterians and very active in church afgambling, his main recreation, quality about it, for though the stakes were large and ubiquitously placed, he habitually won. \(A few years back, a friend looked over his direct-wire setup to the racetracks and ventured: ” ‘H. L., this must be an expensive hobby.”Well, no …’ said the oilman a little sheepishly, ‘I made a million and something out of it “… Houston’s Eagle Lake Club, run by the second generation of Houston’s Very Rich, is a ramshackle, barnlike building, full of beds with broken springs and packed to the rafters with applications f o r membership. \(Boston would understand and “What is the safe amount of Many Texans, like the possessors money to be left children … ? of most first-generation wealth elsewhere, are gravely concerned lest too much money subborn the second generation and blunt its initiative. Jesse Jones left his principal heir, the able nephew who is publisher of the Houston Chronicle, only $300,000 in cash, while today the daughters of an equally rich Texan are being taught typing on the possibility that they ‘may even be waiting tables before this deal is over’.” Ct . . trading is something that Richardson, Hunt, and indeed all the oil millionaires prize above everything else. It is the great game of matching wits and swapping properties and coming out age of steel, gave the North its advantage on the industrial trinity of coke and coal, limestone, and iron ire in close proximity; now, says Webb, along the Gulf Coast, the South has a “new chemical trinity” of hydrocarbons, sulphur, and water \(“the North has no sulphur and less than five `A Dead Issue’ But two political factors in the south are “pregnant with danger,” in Webb’s view. One is that the South may divide politically. “Big newspapers and many business interests” may “become confused and forsake the only party that has ever served the South,” but “the peopleyou and Icannot escape the region. If the region is in poverty, we must share it. The South can never hope for anything better than what it has had from the Republican Party, and the rich men of the South should keep that fact in mind. In the ahead, of betting to win so they can bet again … Small wonder that an old trader like Glenn,..McCarthy, though playing in poor luck these days, refused the offer of Sinclair Oil to pay all his debts his holdings for an additional $100 million. The $75 million he’d have netted after taxes was tempting enough, but not at the price of throwing in his hand.” “In the political affiliations of the Very Rich, there was, at first glance, a surprise: About onethird of the group described themselves as Democrats. But this is mainly a reflection of southern, and especially Texan, wealth in the group, not too different in its thinking from the overwhelmingly Republican wealth of the North.” “Luck, of course, has created many of the oil fortunes, and some of the possessors are frank to admit it. ‘My West Texas oil field was solely luck,’ said $100millionaire R. E. Smith recently. `It has 38 million barrels in reserve and cost me $5 an acre! It was the same with Hugh Roy Cullen \(who died last summer after amassing a fortune of over made was on some land he didn’t want; the oil company kept the A acreage \(rated a top prospect some D propertythe lowest gradeas consolation and he hit. The lesson you learn as you get older is that it’s luck.” “… to a man in the 90 per cent tax bracket … the three per cent earnings on bonds and the CLASSIFIED GOOD NEWS $2 an hour spare or full time for men and women booking orders for Scotch-lite signs that shine at night for top of mail boxes. Also house numbers and door plates. No deliveriespay daily. Ideal for retired persons on pension. PI ea s a n t interesting work. Free detailsIlluminated Sign Co., 2942 1st Ave. 5, Minneapolis, Minn. LEGALS THE STATE OF TEXAS COUNTY OF TRAVIS In the name and by the authority of the State of Texas Notice is hereby given as follows: TO: D. L. Graham, Guy L. Graham and wife, Pearl M. Graham, Clyde S. Graham, Lilly Graham, Carroll Graham and wife, Nettie Graham, Jasper Phillips, Arnett C. Smith and wife, Gladys Smith, Forest Gathright, William Walter Gates and wife, Beuford Catherine Gates, Nelson Puett, Aaron Howell and wife, Ada Lee Howell, William A. Brown. Ray M. Boussard, Edgar Johnson and Birdie Sellers, and, the unknown past the Southerners have been bound together by poverty; they should not now be divided by prosperity.” Second is the racial question. As in 1860, again history has passed by the South on educational practice. Nowhere in the West except in parts of Africa is there “such discrimination” as in many places in the South. “Again it is an island in a rising sea and its inundation is again inevitable … It cannot afford to be diverted by a cause already lost.” Textiles are moving to Virginia and the Carolinas; airplane factories have moved to Dallas; petrochemical companies line the West Coast; and with the depletion of the Mesabi Range the steel industry may spend more in the South to use the baser ore and receive that coming up from South America. Surely, Webb concludes, the South “has enough wisdom and intelligence not to be diverted by a dead issue, one that was really decided ninety two