The Big Rich

Until reading this book I always though the TV show Dallas was fiction as was Jett Rett in Giant. Not after reading this.


The Big Rich (The Rise & Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes), by Bryan Burrough, The Penguin Press, 2009, 438 Pages.

The author, Bryan Burrough, is the author of other bestselling books, including Barbarians at the Gate (The Fall of RJR Nabisco) and Public Enemies (Americas Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34). I may have to read these books as I like his thorough analysis of the subject at hand.


The Big Rich details the rise and fall of four Texas families in the oil business. Burrough tells the stoy of the Big Four: Roy Cullen, H. L. Hunt, Clint Murchison, and Sid Richardson who all rose from modest backgrounds to become patriarchs of the wealthiest oil families in Texas. As a class they came to be known as the Big Rich.

H. L. Hunt became America’s richest man by grabbing Texas’s largest oilfield out from under the nose of the man who found it; he was also a lifelong bigamist with a total of three families, each unknown to the other for many years. Clint Murchison was a great supporter of the nasty thing J. Edgar Hoover was into. Roy Cullen, an elementary school dropout, used his millions to revive the hapless Texas GOP. And Sid Richardson, a fun-loving bachelor, was a friend of several presidents, including, most fatefully, Lyndon Johnson. Later, The Big Four’s offspring, with few exceptions, squandered the fortunes in bitter family feuds, scandals, and bankruptcies. By the late 1980s, the era of the Big Rich was over and all I can say is: good riddance. But it is very entertaining reading; if you enjoyed the exploits of J.R. Ewing, you will enjoy this book.

My Notes:

Pg. 9: Spindletop is a salt dome oil field located in south Beaumont, Texas. On January 10, 1901 they struck oil and changed the world forever. The first well produced at a greater rate than all other American oil wells in existence—combined. In a matter of days the pastures around Spindletop would be producing more than the rest of the world’s oil wells—combined. Spindletop changed the way the world used oil. Although it was of poor quality, it made fine fuel oil. Oil prices dropped to three cents a barrel making it economical for railroads and steamship companies to convert from coal to oil.

Pg. 86: It was East Texas and other fields discovered during a single five-year window—1930 to 1935—that created the state’s great family fortunes. Had these discoveries not been made during the depression, it is certain that the major oil companies would have elbowed everyone else out. However, because of the depression, the majors could not get the needed cash to for exploration of these areas and that allowed men like Hunt to amass fantastic oil reserves.

Pg. 126: One of the most important, and most overlooked, legacies of Texas Oil has been its contribution to the growth of right-wing policies and politicians, especially in their most radical guises. In the decades after the East Texas strike, the state’s oil millionaires would channel tens of millions of dollars into new conservative causes, bankrolling everything from mainstream Republican think tanks to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s red-baiting campaigns of the 1950s to extremist groups that openly espoused racism and anti-Semitism; later, oil money helped bankroll the birth of the religious right. In a very real sense, the influence of Texas conservatives in America figures such as George W. Bush and Tom DeLay to national prominence—can be traced to forces set into motion by restive Texas oilmen during the 1930s.

Modern Texas conservatism sprang from the intersection of two disparate events: Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Depression-era oil discoveries, especially those in East Texas. The New Deal outraged many Texas oilmen and East Texas gave them the money to fight it.

Pg. 228: Hoover, the former FBI assistant director William Sullivan later told an interviewer, “had a deal with Murchison where he invested in oil wells, and if they hit oil, he got his share of the profits, but if they didn’t hit oil, he didn’t share in the costs.” (Note: can you imagine what Hillary Clinton would make of a deal like that??).

Pg. 297: In 1958 an Indiana businessman named Robert Welch formed an organization called the John Birch Society, whose central tenets included a belief that Jewish industrialists led by the Rothschild banking family were conspiring with the Russians and Chinese for world domination. The Birchers strongest chapters were in Southern California and Texas.