Texas Comes of Age

In Daingerfield, Tex. (pop. 1,700) the townsfolk were as excited as if a 10,000-barrel gusher had just blown in. But this time the excitement was not over oil. It was over steel--the $24,000,000 Lone Star Steel Co. blast furnace and plant which the Government had built during the war, right next to Texas' vast iron-ore deposits. It was the first--and only--blast furnace in Texas. Texans thought then that their fondest industrial dream of a native steel industry would finally come true. But at war's end, Lone Star was closed. If Texas wanted a steel industry, Texans would have to take over Lone Star from WAA.

While they discussed ways & means, they got bad news. U.S. Steel had made a bid for the Government-owned Oklahoma mines, which supplied coal to Lone Star. (There was no suitable coal in Texas.) If Big Steel, which wanted the coal for its Sheffield fabricating plant in Houston, got the mines, Lone Star was done for. Was Big Steel bigger than Texas?

One Texan who didn't think so was Dallas' yippy, yeasty John William Carpenter, 65, the state's prime booster. He had built the state's first power & light company (which ran only at night "except for one day a week for ironing"), became president of its second largest one in 1927. Now he had a hand in more than 42 different enterprises, ranging from the Jack and Mule Breeders Association to river & harbor improvements. But his greatest concern for the past 25 years has been that "every bolt, every nut, every spool of wire had to come from way off."

In 1942, it took him just one month to organize the company which had operated Lone Star for the Government. U.S. Steel made Carpenter move even faster. He promptly rounded up his old Lone Star Steel associates--ranchers, oilmen, bankers. There was Robert L. Thornton, the boisterous, robust president of Dallas' third largest (Mercantile National) bank. Once a sharecropper, Thornton describes himself as "a mule in carriage harness," has pushed through some notable projects (e.g., a 33-story skyscraper erected in Dallas during the war) with the exhortation: "Put on the collar and hamestring."

There was also Fred Florence, the polished, soft-speaking head of Dallas' Republic National Bank which, thanks to Florence's shrewd conservative banking, now ranks as Dallas' No. 2 bank.

$1,000,000 In Ten Days. Already they had an option to buy Lone Star for $7,500,000 (with no initial down payment), and three of the Oklahoma mines. But WAA insisted on additional operating capital of $1,000,000, to be raised within ten days. So Carpenter & friends organized a financial posse, struck out for the red clay hills around Daingerfield. At crossroad gatherings and town rallies, they sold thousands of shares of stock, got some $100,000 from Longview (pop. 13,758) alone.

The final stop last week was Daingerfield. There the barnstormers were greeted by a court square full of people. "How much do you want?" asked one citizen. The answer: $20,000. The town barber promptly plunked down $150, said: "A guy just can't go wrong." In a few hours $32,000 was raised.

In all, Carpenter says they have raised close to $1,500,000, got a promise from RFC to lend them an equivalent amount when the money has been spent. As Lone Star representatives were meeting with WAA in Washington this week, to get final approval to buy Lone Star, happy Mr. Carpenter predicted that Lone Star would ship its first iron in a matter of weeks. For Texans, the new homegrown heavy-metal industry was symbolic; it was the capstone to five years of growth which has changed the face of the state. Texas was still a wheat, cattle and oil state. But it was also a state of textiles, tires, leather goods, clothing, paper, furniture, glass, processed food, machinery, coffins and hundreds of other products. Most of all, there were the newer products of the burgeoning Age of Chemistry. Texas was well on its way to becoming the chemical capital of the world.

Revolution in Twelve Years. Texas had long had almost everything it needed to take its place in the industrial sun--a great variety and amount of minerals, plus unlimited quantities of natural gas for cheap, clean fuel. But not until American Cyanamid Co. came from the North in 1934 to build a $7,000,000 alkali plant in Corpus Christi did the industrial revolution begin. With a surfeit of raw materials (lime, sulphur, salt, seawater, gypsum, etc.) there, others were soon attracted to the Gulf Coast area. They poured in investments running into tens of millions.

On top of this came the synthetic-rubber industry and war expansion. War's end brought no decline. (Last week the Government decided to keep synthetic plants operating permanently.) Du Pont spent some $60,000,000 on new plants, Dow over $35,000,000, Monsanto $11,000,000, Celanese Corp. $7,000,000--for all industries, a thumping $600,000,000. Counting $300,000,000 more which will be spent in the next few years on chemicals, industrial investment in Texas will have grown since 1940 by more than $1,500,000,000.

Hats for Harry Truman. Even huge Texas is not big enough to absorb all this without a radical change in appearance. The complex equipment of modern manufacturing has spread its twisting tentacles all over the once wide-open spaces. Orange (pop. 35,000), a sleepy little sawmill town before the war, now has a new $52,000,000 Du Pont nylon salts plant. In the past five years Taylor (pop. 9,200) has developed one of the largest bedding factories in the U.S.: and Mineral Wells (11,000) has launched a $500,000 silk hosiery mill. Borger (15,000) has become the nation's No. 1 producer of carbon black, and the Byer-Rolnick Co. at Garland (4,889) makes hats for such customers as Harry Truman, Toots Shor, Senator Claghorn.

In the spirit that now characterizes all Texas small towns, the 14,000 citizens of bustling little McKinney (feed, textiles) last fortnight called on an industrial analyst to answer their biggest problem: how could they expand to 20,000 by 1950?

Big cities have changed even more. For the first time in Texas history, urban population had become bigger than the rural. Biggest change--and growth--is in Houston, smack in the middle of the chemical wave that has swamped the whole Gulf Coast. Before the war, greater Houston was already the crowded center of oilfields and refineries. War brought it 20% of the nation's synthetic-rubber plants and 145 major chemical plants. Postwar expansion completed the jam, with scores of new installations. Now, the skeletons of new skyscrapers fill the skyline.

In the scramble for space, Houston's ship channel to the Gulf has become almost as crowded as the Hoboken waterfront. There big new chemical plants are going up. Along its 50 miles of shore are concentrated $6 million worth of plants. Houston's population is up from 510,000 in 1940 to a jampacked 700,000; employment is greater than at war's peak.

Welcome Invasion. Some diehard conservatives look balefully on all this progress. Caught in a midtown traffic jam one day, Geologist Emmet Tatum, a Houston resident for 17 years, cried: "Progress, hell! I wish every one of the bustling so-and-so's would go back where they came from."

But Texans by & large are for it because 1) it has given them something new to brag about and 2) it will make them richer. They do not mind that more than 90% of the new investments have so far been made by outsiders. But Texans would not be Texans if they let that situaation alone. With their profits from oil and cattle, many of the state's well-heeled citizens are now turning into newfangled industrialists.

An example of this new type of Texan is Dallas' Glenn McCarthy, a brawny oilman who started out as a roughneck in an oilfield. He made a fortune wildcatting, added to it with a string of oil companies. One of the few to foresee the revolution a-coming, McCarthy poured his oil profits into a natural gas company, set out to sell it to industry. Six months ago, he started a $3,000,000 plant to produce chemicals, hoped to show the way for other Texans to follow.

McCarthy gets along well with "the invaders from the North," many of whom are among his best customers. Most Texans are learning to do the same, with the same view of self-development and profit. As Carl Estes, publisher of the Longview News and Journal put it: "I'm in favor of bringing those know-how Yankees right on down here. I married one and brought her here and she turned out all right."

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