Oil on the Farm: The East Texas Oil Boom and the Origins of an Energy Economy

• Published in: The Journal of southern history 2017-11, Vol.83 (4), p.853-888
• Main Author: McFarlane, Wallace Scot
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: African Americans; Agriculture; Antebellum period; Cotton; Discovery and exploration; Economic aspects; Energy economics; Farmers; Farms; Farmworkers; Government aid; Historians; History; Mental depression; Modernization; Oil fields; Petroleum industry; Social aspects
• ISSN: 0022-4642; 2325-6893; 2325-6893
• DOI: 10.1353/soh.2017.0244

Corporate farmers' experience shaping the labor market through tractor purchases transferred to the oil industry, both in terms of reducing wages and in understanding the potential of new technology to constrain labor. Little evidence from the East Texas oil boom suggests that African Americans or tenant farmers, two overlapping groups whose members were often displaced by the boom, expressed a widespread consciousness of resistance toward the oil industry.3 By the Great Depression farmers across class lines, whether they were sharecroppers, tenants, small farm owners, or planters, agreed that the system of southern agriculture was broken, and they could at least hope that the discovery of black gold might improve their lives. Like oil, modern agribusiness was built on old instruments of social control.6 The East Texas oil boom's large scale and nearly perfect temporal overlap with the Great Depression, a period of rapid modernization, make it an ideal case study for understanding the history of energy development in the Sun Belt. The boll weevil helped extend and sharpen the unequal structure of society: large planters were more likely to receive government aid and have the capital necessary to combat the boll weevil.10 The oil field personnel called boll weevils came from a culture that appeared to give agency to oil and insects rather than to men and women.