Kenneth E. Montague Series in Oil and Business History

· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
Latest release: May 14, 2021
Series
13
Books

About this ebook series

In the summer and fall of 1989, hundreds of shrimpers captained their vessels into position to blockade the ports and waterways of the Gulf of Mexico. These shrimpers, challenging the use of Turtle Excluder Devices (TEDs) required to protect turtles from being caught in shrimp nets, felt themselves caught in the net of government regulation.

Their action, the largest protest over marine resources in the history of the United States, was only the most visible response to a highly charged conflict.

Caught in the Net examines how national environmental groups identified a threat to sea turtles, spearheaded a drive to protect them, and saw their efforts result in the federal government's requirement that shrimpers use TEDs. The authors analyze the conflict that arose in reaction to the new regulations, highlighting the complex of alliances that developed.

Based on extensive interviews with the participants, Caught in the Net highlights the modern ambiguities and tensions between environmental protection and those whose lives are based on what the environment offers.

Caught in the Net: The Conflict Between Shrimpers and Conservationists
Book 7 · Jan 1996 ·
0.0
In the summer and fall of 1989, hundreds of shrimpers captained their vessels into position to blockade the ports and waterways of the Gulf of Mexico. These shrimpers, challenging the use of Turtle Excluder Devices (TEDs) required to protect turtles from being caught in shrimp nets, felt themselves caught in the net of government regulation.

Their action, the largest protest over marine resources in the history of the United States, was only the most visible response to a highly charged conflict.

Caught in the Net examines how national environmental groups identified a threat to sea turtles, spearheaded a drive to protect them, and saw their efforts result in the federal government's requirement that shrimpers use TEDs. The authors analyze the conflict that arose in reaction to the new regulations, highlighting the complex of alliances that developed.

Based on extensive interviews with the participants, Caught in the Net highlights the modern ambiguities and tensions between environmental protection and those whose lives are based on what the environment offers.

Bless the Pure and Humble: Texas Lawyers and Oil Regulation, 1919-1936
Book 8 · Jan 1996 ·
0.0
When oil was first struck in America in the nineteenth century, the courts were ill-prepared to deal with the legal issues it raised. Since it flowed across property lines, as a deer or other wild animal could cross boundaries, judges resorted to the "rule of capture" to determine ownership--the person who extracted it had full rights to it. Applied to the massive oil boom of the 1920s in Texas, this rule precipitated a series of crises, forcing operators and royalty owners to produce all they could regardless of current market conditions and demand and mindless of the waste and loss incurred.

By 1927 the implications of the rule of capture were clear, and pressure was mounting for federal regulation of petroleum production. In that year attorneys in the Houston firm of Vinson and Elkins joined efforts by Pure Oil (the producer) and Humble Oil (the buyer and pipeline owner) to develop unitization rules for the 5400-acre Yates Oil Field in Pecos County, Texas. Amid their legal maneuvering the Texas Railroad Commission stepped in, issuing a proration rule and effectively assuming unitization powers over state production, thereby giving rise to charges by small producers that the state had sold out to "big oil." The conflict over proration that resulted represented a legal and ideological clashes between principles of laissez-faire and progressive regulation. By 1935, when Congress enacted the Connally Hot Oil Act, the legal principles were settled and the battle for control of petroleum production had been won by the states.

Nicholas George Malavis's well-reasoned and sophisticated study of the development of petroleum regulation offers historical and legal analysis of the basic issues affecting property rights and the public interest and traces the legal moves that shaped a new regulatory system centered around the Texas Railroad Commission. It provides a fascinating view of the multiple roles of lawyers in putting the new system in place as they worked for a variety of clients to resolve the serious conflicts plaguing the oil industry in its efforts to manage overproduction in the 1920s and 1930s. Access to the internal records of Vinson and Elkins has allowed Malavis to provide readers a rare view inside the world of lawyer-client relations. He describes how prominent attorney James Elkins and others applied their legal talents, negotiating skills, and political influence to fight for solutions to their problems that would help define the parameters of the new prorating system.

Bless the Pure and the Humble, with its thorough research and use of organizational records to elucidate a broad and important theme, provides a valuable model for scholarly studies of corporate history. It offers important contributions to our knowledge of legal, business, and regional histories. Although necessarily focused on Texas history, the well-told story in this book has relevance far beyond the state's boundaries and will inform students of petroleum and property law and those interested in energy and conservation history.
Texas Merchant: Marvin Leonard and Fort Worth
Book 11 · Apr 2008 ·
5.0
Few department stores symbolized the aspirations of a community or represented the identity of its citizens in a stronger or more enduring way than Leonards in Fort Worth, Texas. For over fifty years, as the store grew from a cubbyhole across from the Tarrant County courthouse into a retailing behemoth sprawling over six and a half downtown blocks, Marvin Leonard, the store's founder, and his brother Obie ran a store that was always a unique place to shop. The brothers used a combination of large volume, low mark-up, and quick turnover to keep prices low and appeal to the common people of Fort Worth and West Texas. Customers also found a stunning array of goods -- fur coats and canned tuna, pianos and tractors -- and an environment that combined the spectacular with the familiar.

But the story of Leonards goes beyond the store and the man who made it. For Marvin Leonard, downtown Fort Worth and Leonards were always intertwined. In the earliest years, Fort Worth's working families and rural West Texans shopped Leonards for bargains, but also because it was Fort Worth's place to meet and greet. As Fort Worth's demographics changed, Leonards created a carnival-like atmosphere that drew customers to the store, even adding its own free subway to ease downtown congestion. Later, downtown's appeal slipped as rural populations declined and rival suburban shopping areas grew, but Marvin Leonard always refused to expand beyond one store and never left downtown.

Leonards gave Fort Worth a special identity, a distinctiveness, and an attraction to the city's center. When Tandy bought Leonards and later sold it to Dillard's, Fort Worth's image and character changed.

This engaging story of aman, a business, and the community the store mirrored and shaped represents local history and biography at their finest.

Labor, Civil Rights, and the Hughes Tool Company
Book 16 · Jan 2005 ·
0.0
Annotation On July 12, 1964, in a momentous decision, the National Labor Relations Board decertified the racially segregated Independent Metal Workers Union as the collective bargaining agent at Houston's mammoth Hughes Tool Company. The unanimous decision ending nearly fifty years of Jim Crow unionism at the company marked the first ruling in the Labor Board's history that racial discrimination by a union violated the National Labor Relations Act and was therefore illegal. This ruling was for black workers the equivalent of the Brown v. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court in the area of education. Botson traces the Jim Crow unionism of the company and the efforts of black union activists to bring civil rights issues into the workplace. His analysis clearly demonstrates that without federal intervention, workers at Hughes Tool would never have been able to overcome management's opposition to unionization and to racial equality. Drawing on interviews with many of the principals, as well as extensive mining of company and legal archives, Botson's study "captures a moment in time when a segment of Houston's working-class seized the initiative and won economic and racial justice in their work place."
Ben Love: My Life in Texas Commerce
Book 18 · Jan 2005 ·
0.0
In a city known for powerful business leaders, Ben Love towers as one of the most influential. Serving as CEO of Texas Commerce Bancshares in the 1980s, during the collapse of the Texas banking industry, Love had an inside view of the debacle. His story, told here in detail for the first time, provides an insightful perspective on the Texas banking industry's evolution after World War II, its decline, and its subsequent recovery. It also offers a glimpse into of the kind of character that creates men of power. Love grew up with his family during the Great Depression. Their farm outside Paris, Texas, taught him hard lessons about opportunity and financial security lessons that would serve him well in the future. After Americas entry into war in 1941, Love flew 8th Air Force B-17 combat missions over Europe, then settled in Houston with his business degree in the late 1940s. His entrance into the world of banking began as a member of the board of directors for River Oaks Bank & Trust. Houston was rapidly growing into a metropolis, and he accepted an offer to leave River Oaks to join Texas Commerce Bank in 1967. As president of Texas Commerce Bank (TCB) in 1969 and CEO in 197289, Love cultivated change from single banks to holding companies, garnering a national reputation for his banking organization. In 1984, Texas Commerce was the twenty-first-largest bank in the country. Under his competent management, TCB was the only Big Five Texas bank to survive the economic downturn. One reason for its continued success lies with Loves successful merger in 1987 with the Chemical Bank of New York, now J. P. Morgan Chase. When he retired at the close of the decade, he turned his formidable energies to full-time civic and humanitarian work. Ben F. Love's memoir is one of only a few available in financial literature and history. Not only does it reveal an inside look at the evolution of banking in Texas, but it will serve as an instructional guide to future business leaders and managers. The final chapter summarizes the experiences and lessons sprinkled throughout eighty years of a powerful and productive life.
The Offshore Imperative: Shell Oil's Search for Petroleum in Postwar America
Book 19 · Jan 2007 ·
0.0
After World War II, the discovery and production of onshore oil in the United States faced decline. As a result, offshore prospects in the Gulf of Mexico took on new strategic value. Shell Oil Company pioneered many of the early moves offshore and continues to lead the way into -deepwater.-
Tyler Priest's study is the first time the modern history of Shell Oil has been told in any detail. Drawing on interviews with Shell retirees and many other sources, Priest relates how the imagination, talent, and hard work of personnel at all levels shaped the evolution of the company. The narrative also covers important aspects of Shell Oil's corporate evolution, but the company's pioneering steps into the deepwater fields of the Gulf of Mexico are its signature achievement. Priest's study demonstrates that engineers did not suddenly create methods for finding and producing oil and gas from astounding water depths. Rather, they built on a half-century of accumulated knowledge and improvements to technical systems.
Shell Oil's story is unique, but it also illuminates the modern history of the petroleum industry. As Priest demonstrates, this company's experiences offer a starting point for examining the understudied topics of strategic decision-making, scientific research, management of technology, and corporate organization and culture within modern oil companies, as well as how these activities applied to offshore development.

Wildcatters: Texas Independent Oilmen
Book 20 · Jan 2007 ·
5.0
In the 1970s and 1980s the Texas wildcatter was a recognizable figure in popular culture. Since then, the wildcatter's role is less celebrated but still important, as shown in the new introduction to this edition of a book originally published in 1984 by Texas Monthly Press. Drawing heavily on oral histories, this book tells the story of the West Texas independents as a group, looking at their business strategies in the context of their national, regional, and local conditions. The focus is on the Permian Basin and southeastern New Mexico over the sixty-year period in which the region rose to prominence on the American oil scene, producing about one-fifth of the nation's output. It is a story that covers vast technological change, governmental regulation, and economic fluctuation with profound implications for the oil and gas community. The new introduction brings the story up-to-date by addressing not only the subsequent careers of the wildcatters described in the book but also the role of independents in the current economy. ROGER M. OLIEN, who holds a Ph.D. from Brown University, lives in Austin and is a member of the TSHA Speakers Bureau.DIANA DAVIDS HINTON holds the J. Conrad Dunagan Chair in regional and business history at the University of Texas-Permian Basin. Her Ph.D. is from Yale University.
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve: U.S. Energy Security and Oil Politics, 1975-2005
Book 21 · Jan 2007 ·
0.0
In 1973, the United States and other western countries were shocked by the Arab oil embargo. Lines formed at gasoline pumps; fuel stations ran out of supply; prices skyrocketed; and the nation realized its vulnerability to decisions made by leaders of countries half a world away. In response, the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), which was signed into law by President Gerald Ford in 1975, has become the nation?s primary tool of energy policy. Following its first major use during the Persian Gulf War of 1991, officials and policy makers at the highest levels increasingly turned to the SPR to stave off shortages and mitigate rising energy prices. Author and historian Bruce A. Beaubouef examines, for the first time, the interactions that have shaped the development of the SPR. He argues that the SPR has survived because it is a passive regulatory tool that serves to protect energy consumers and petroleum consumption and does not compete with the American oil industry. Indeed, by the late twentieth century, as American import dependency reached new heights, refiners and transporters increasingly relied upon the SPR as a ready resource to help maintain feedstock when supplies were tight or disrupted. In a time of continued vulnerability, this definitive work will be of interest to those concerned with the history, economy, and politics of the oil and gas industry, as well as to historians and practitioners of oil and energy policy.
Oilfield Revolutionary: The Career of Everette Lee DeGolyer
Book 23 · Sep 2014 ·
0.0
Everette Lee DeGolyer wore many hats—and he wore them with distinction. Though not a geophysicist, he helped make geophysics central to oil exploration. Though not a politician, he played an important role in the national politics of energy. Though trained as a geologist, he became an important business executive. DeGolyer left his stamp on oil exploration and his name on a number of philanthropic institutions, including the DeGolyer Library at Southern Methodist University.

This account of DeGolyer’s life, at once readable and yet authoritative, covers the period from his training with the United States Geological Survey in the American West, to his geological exploration of Mexico during the Revolution of the 1910s, his pioneering investment in geophysical prospecting technologies, and his work on behalf of the United States government in World War II, including a ground-breaking mission to the Middle East. 

Houston Mount develops his account of the career of Everette Lee DeGolyer in a way that provides a useful lens through which to examine the rising fortunes of earth scientists in the oil industry and in government—a process for which DeGolyer’s spectacular career was both an exemplar and a catalyst.

Electric City: General Electric in Schenectady
Book 24 · Nov 2014 ·
0.0
For seven decades the General Electric Company maintained its manufacturing and administrative headquarters in Schenectady, New York.

Electric City: General Electric in Schenectady explores the history of General Electric in Schenectady from the company’s creation in 1892 to the present. As one of America’s largest and most successful corporations, GE built a culture centered around the social good of technology and the virtues of the people who produced it.

At its core, GE culture posited that engineers, scientists, and craftsmen engaged in a team effort to produce technologically advanced material goods that served society and led to corporate profits. Scientists were discoverers, engineers were designers and problem solvers, and craftsmen were artists.

Historian Julia Kirk Blackwelder has drawn on company records as well as other archival and secondary sources and personal interviews to produce an engaging and multi-layered history of General Electric’s workplace culture and its planned (and actual) effects on community life. Her research demonstrates how business and community histories intersect, and this nuanced look at race, gender, and class sets a standard for corporate history.

Richard E. Wainerdi and the Texas Medical Center
Book 25 · Dec 2017 ·
0.0
In 2012, Richard E. Wainerdi retired as president and chief executive officer of the Texas Medical Center after almost three decades at the helm. During his tenure, Wainerdi oversaw the expansion of the center into the world’s largest medical complex, hosting more than fifty separate institutions. “I wasn’t playing any of the instruments, but it’s been a privilege being the conductor,” he once said to a newspaper reporter.

William Henry Kellar traces Wainerdi’s remarkable life story from a bookish childhood in the Bronx to a bold move west to study petroleum engineering at the University of Oklahoma. Wainerdi went on to earn a master’s degree and a PhD from Penn State University where he immersed himself in nuclear engineering. By the late 1950s, Texas A&M University recruited Wainerdi to found the Nuclear Science Center, where he also served as professor and later associate vice president for academic affairs.

In the 1980s, Wainerdi took charge of the Texas Medical Center, embarking on a “second career” that ultimately expanded the center from thirty-one institutions to fifty-three and increased its size threefold. Wainerdi pushed for and ensured a culture of collaboration and cooperation. In doing this, he developed a new nonprofit administrative model that emphasized building consensus, providing vital support services, and connecting member institutions with resources that enabled them to focus on their unique areas of expertise. At a time when Houston was widely known as the “energy capital of the world,” the city also became home to the largest medical complex in the world. Wainerdi’s success was to enable each member of the Texas Medical Center to be an integral part of something bigger and something very special in the development of modern medicine.
George P. Mitchell: Fracking, Sustainability, and an Unorthodox Quest to Save the Planet
Book 26 · Oct 2019 ·
1.0
Upon George Mitchell’s death in 2013, The Economist proclaimed, “Few businesspeople have done as much to change the world as George Mitchell,” a billionaire Texas oilman who defied the stereotypical swagger so identified with that industry. In George P. Mitchell: Fracking, Sustainability, and an Unorthodox Quest to Save the Planet, award-winning author Loren C. Steffy offers the first definitive biography of Mitchell, placing his life and legacy in a global context, from the significance of his discoveries to the lingering controversies they inspired.
 
Mitchell will forever be known as “the father of fracking,” but he didn’t invent the drilling process; he perfected it and made it profitable, one of many varied ventures he pursued for years. Long before his company ever fracked a well, he pioneered sustainable development by creating The Woodlands, near Houston, one of the first and most successful master-planned communities. Its focus on environmental protection and livability redefined the American suburb.  This apparent contradiction between his energy interests and environmental pursuits, which his son Todd dubbed “the Mitchell Paradox,” was just one of many that defined Mitchell’s life.

Anyone who puts fuel in a tank or turns on a light switch has benefited from Mitchell’s efforts. This compelling biography reveals Mitchell as a modern renaissance man who sought to make the world a better, more livable place, a man whose unbounded intellectual curiosity led him to support a wide range of interests in business, science, and philanthropy.
The Texas Triangle: An Emerging Power in the Global Economy
Book 27 · May 2021 ·
5.0
This important new study examines the intricately linked phenomena of interwoven population growth, economic power, quality education, business leadership, and fiscal significance as exemplified in the “Texas Triangle,” a network of metropolitan complexes that are reshaping the destiny of Texas and adding a strong pinnacle in the global system of economic mega-centers.

The Texas Triangle consists of three metropolitan complexes: Dallas–Fort Worth at the northern tip, Houston-Galveston at the southeastern point, and Austin–San Antonio at the southwestern edge. It consists of four US Census–designated metropolitan statistical areas and includes 35 urban counties that comprise those areas. The Texas Triangle soon will include four of the ten most populous cities in the United States. Together these metro areas represent the fifteenth largest economy in the world.

The authors describe the trajectories of each of the Texas Triangle metros in which they live and work and integrate them into a larger dynamic of functioning cohesion and effective collaboration. The Texas Triangle offers community leaders, elected officials, policy makers, and others a more  nuanced understanding of an important moment in America’s continuing urban development. With broader perspectives for how community-building advances the public interest, this book lays important foundations for matching the path of economic prosperity to an informed sense of what is possible.