—HUGH ROY CULLEN AT AGE TWELVE I. By 1920, two decades after Spindletop, the discovery of oil hadn’t changed Texas much. Of the forty-eight states, it ranked just fourth in oil production. During the 1910s many oil field workers actually fled the state to work in fields opening in Oklahoma. “Why do you waste your time in Texas?” one asked a soon-to-be famous geologist named Wallace Pratt. “Why don’t you come up to Oklahoma where all the oil is?” What oil was pumped from Texas fields was still largely controlled by eastern interests; the biggest companies that flowered at Spindletop were now headquartered back east, Gulf in Pittsburgh, Sun in Philadelphia. Even the Texas Company, after a squabble between its Houston-based executives and eastern investors, was now based in New York. Academics viewed the state of Texas as an economic colony of the East, a view that would endure for years after it was no longer true. All this began to change in the months after the armistice that ended World War I in November 1918.
