Henry Alexander Wiencek, author of OIL CITIES

  Welcome back friends to your world of creativity. We travel around the world talking to creative practitioners of all kinds about how they get inspired and how they organize their ideas, and most of all, how they make the connections and gain the confidence to launch their work out into the world. And today we're going to dive into a really fascinating historical journey about the early 20th century oil boom in North Louisiana.

And of course I have personal ties to that region. And so there'll be a lot of stories that I'm looking forward to hearing about North Louisiana. Our guest is Dr. Henry Alexander Weincek, author of a great new book, Oil Cities, Henry, welcome to the show. Hi, Mark. Thanks for having me. Yeah, what a great focus and it's you didn't just investigate the oil business, although there's some generalities that could be drawn, but really, right down to a specific region, a specific area and a specific kind of oil business in Louisiana.

Tell us how you got interested in that particular area.

Yeah, you're exactly right. My interest in it grew from a project I did in graduate school. I did a research paper about Standard Oil building a pipeline in Louisiana in the 19 teens, and I just really got fascinated by that collision of these big northeastern companies coming down to the rural south and what that intersection was like.

And ultimately what I was most interested in was I wasn't so much interested in the standard oils, which are definitely interesting. I was more interested in what community life was like, who was living there, how they got there, and just what life was like living in these shacks next to so many lakes and bayous and oil rigs and just what community life existed in these really fascinating parts of the world.

And community indeed. And as I mentioned, my ties are going way back. My dad was born in Oil City, Louisiana, my mom in Gillam and grew up in Belcher, Hauston. She's even on the Historical Society board now. So these stories are continuing. To spread, but I really haven't heard the ones that go all the way back.

ou said oil was discovered in: 1904

Yeah, and it was a huge turning point between the 19th century, which was just a very farming agricultural kind of landscape.

The very sparsely populated land didn't have much value, and then all of a sudden, when oil was discovered, tens of thousands of people come into the area, and there's suddenly huge interest in the region. So it goes from an area where it's just cotton plantations going to an area that's very industrial and very dense.

And this is over, just a number of years, a very quick transition from one lifestyle and one economy to a totally new one. It was very different from what preceded it.

Yes. Certainly I remember as a kid driving up and down those roads, seeing the, yes, the cotton field. So still cotton is king, but the oil pumps right out in the middle of the field.

So it was quite a visual contrast. Absolutely. I love the clash of diverse groups. Again, I enjoyed reading more about migrants and immigrants and, people, how did they find North Louisiana from Russia? So they all came, and there was much more of a mixing pot than maybe people imagined.

That was something that really surprised me. I knew that there were a lot.

Yeah, that was one of the things.

Truly, that was one of the things that really surprised me as I got into this research, is just how diverse that area was. I think I was not surprised that there were a lot of southern farmers coming to that area from other parts of the south. But people coming from Russia, people coming from Scandinavia, from Northern Europe.

And that's a great question of how they ended up there. And to be honest, I wish I could give you some good stories about what brought them to that part of North Louisiana. All I can say is that there was a lot of media interest in this oil boom area, and there was clearly a lot of awareness that there was money to be made there.

So I think that word just got out that, hey, this is a place where you could make some money and get some work pretty quickly. But it's pretty striking that, yeah, you've got a lot of these southern farmers from Arkansas, Texas, living alongside people from Sweden and Ireland and Russia. Pretty remarkable conglomeration of people in the tents.

Well, southern politics is quite famous and infamous. Politics changed during this time, too.

Absolutely. Yeah. And I think one of the things that I try to talk about in this book is that state politics, but also local politics have a big impact on how the industry works. Louisiana at the time in the early 20th century was run by a Very white supremacist government that really wanted to ensure that there was racial separation, especially in the workplace and who could benefit from certain economic activity.

And that was definitely the case in the oil industry, and in particular in that part of North Louisiana, but the state and the local government was very hands off and very willing to let local oil field managers ensure that there was a racial barrier. Excuse me. Between who could benefit in the oil fields.

So politically. You have a government that's very willing to let local oilfield managers exert that kind of control.

Then I also recall driving by refineries, driving by lakes with, oil skim on the top and people will be like, what does that smell? It's like smells like money.

What is that orange sky? It looks like money. So there was a lot of that kind of thing that you would turn and turn your head away from because it was fueling and funding the whole area.

Yeah. One of the remarkable things that I found when I read a lot of interviews from people who grew up there is that they really.

Now, I think we would look at that and say, Oh, there's oil covering lakes and destroying trees and polluting the air. Now we would be horrified by that. Back then they regarded that as we're making money. This is the cost of doing business and even people. Old timers in their nineties when they were interviewed about oil city, talk about that time with kind of some fondness.

They talk about how seeing all the oil sprayed into cattle lake and they know we're making money. That's a good thing. And so they don't really view that kind of level of environmental destruction the same way we would for them. It was like, this is profitability.

think we would be as today in: 2024

But I am curious in your interviews, did any of the quote unquote old timers make any connection to modern day current day? Cause the Hainesville shale, there's a whole new generation of Bayou billionaires thanks to fracking and that sort of thing.

And I'm just curious if there was any, wow, we're doing this again an insight.

It's hard. I'll say two things. First of all, the era that I deal with was a little bit too far in the past. I didn't really, I only, I spoke with one person who was a young kid in one of these communities at the time, but he was very young.

So I didn't get to speak to anybody who was directly alive at the time. Having said that, I definitely spoke with people who grew up there, maybe in the thirties or the forties or the fifties. I, the thing that I get. Is that they have a real nostalgia for the old older times And I think what I heard is that they felt like in that particular community places like oil city It's not as good as it used to be.

There's not as many people there. There's not as much money And yes, you're exactly right. There's still a lot of oil money being made elsewhere but I think what I got was a sense that Our community oil city and directly around it There's just not much going on and just things aren't as good as they used to be So I think that is that's a narrative that I got when I spoke to old timers in the area

Yeah, but you also we were talking about social and societal opportunities I don't think if it weren't for the wealth of the oil, would there be a Louisiana hayride?

And why would Elvis come to that area if there wasn't anything going on or whatever? So I am wondering about, in the Shreveport was a real boom town in the fifties and sixties. And I'm thinking about the societal impact that this oil and the wealth and the money made. Head on it.

Absolutely. I think one of the things that I found is that tons of money was being made, but typically that money was, as you point out, Mark was concentrated in Shreveport. So all this money is being made in tree city and oil city in Homer, Louisiana, but it typically came to reside in Shreveport.

So if you go to a place like Homer, Louisiana, or oil city or tree city, there's really nothing left. There's not much infrastructure. It's just trees and Bayou. A lot of that money went into Shreveport because that's where the white collar workers were living. So that's where the money actually got invested.

So a lot of money was being made. A lot of it was being invested. Went into developing Louisiana. I think it was very concentrated in particular urban parts of Shreveport as opposed to the actual places where the oil was being produced.

So interesting. One of the other intriguing figures you write about is a black woman who became really one of America's most wealthiest oil heiresses.

Tell us her story and how did that fit into the whole pattern?

was lynched, was murdered in: 1896

years down the road, about: 1920

So what transpires is this really long court case to try to adjudicate who owns this property. Is it Lily? Is it the state? Is it another farmer who's currently living there? And throughout that case, there's a ton of media coverage and there's all this anxieties at the time over, okay, this, a black washer woman can be worth 10, 15, 20 million.

And white society at the time is shocked about it. And so I talked a lot about this court case. It's a really elaborate story and ultimately Lily wins, but doesn't actually get that much money. Most of the money just goes to her lawyers and ultimately doesn't come to reside with her.

nto what the mentality was in: 1920

And to circle back to the beginning of our conversation, you were talking about these large, Northeast oil companies coming in. There had to be a lot of not only corporate tension, but racial tensions and their viewpoints being thrust on, the locals. Even Senator Sherrod Brown out of Ohio saw this book as that kind of history of our Corporate America using the workers in local areas.

. To give you one example, in: 1917

ers. There's a huge strike in: 1917

That's actually a huge failure for the workers. The managers are able to essentially break the strike and ultimately prevents a lot of union activity in the oil field. So there's most definitely that tension between the managers and the workers who want, they want more of a 12 hour a day. They want a higher wage and they want their unions to be recognized.

Really quickly as well. There's an interesting tension when it comes to managers and workers when it comes to race. At times, managers actually wanted to employ black workers because just purely economically, they were often cheap to hire, whereas a lot of white workers resented the fact that they would have to work with black workers at the time.

So that's another interesting tension between the managerial class and the worker class when it comes to not only wages and unions, when it also comes to the presence of black workers next to them as well. So there's all sorts of intersections of managerial class, the worker class, and of course, race is always a big element as well.

And what an interesting microcosm. We're talking about a very, again 200 mile radius, you know in shreveport and around but This had to have application to the same concepts with I don't know steel workers in chicago and pittsburgh and coal miners And other agricultural, industries it was the times as much as anything wasn't it?

Absolutely. , and Broadly speaking, a lot of historians have done some really interesting work showing that you given a good example of Chicago, you might look at a place like Chicago and like the 19th, early 20th century and think, okay, there's the city where there's the factories and they're producing stuff.

And then outside it's the country with trees, but actually they need each other, right? There's the big city, but then there's the hinterlands. And you need that connection between the ability to get raw resources from the hinterlands and the countryside to the city center, and you need those connection points, and they make each other they build each other.

So I think it's very important to understand how the boom towns and the rural areas and the cities. Create each other and make each other. They're different, but they're not separate. So yeah that's one of the dynamics that I'm definitely trying to tease apart. How those boom towns were very different from a city like Shreveport, but they absolutely created each other and interacted with each other in a lot of really important ways.

Yes. I'd like to pursue a little bit more about the creative process behind the book. Listeners. My guest is Dr. Henry Alexander Weincek, author of a great new book called Oil Cities. And Henry, you mentioned this came about through your, some of your doctoral research, but I'm curious again, how you began to put the book together and other research and background that you were doing.

Yeah. I got interested in doing this project my second year of graduate school. I got a degree in history at the university of Texas at Austin. And my third year, that's when, his graduate, the graduate students go out into the world and do their research on their project. And I always joke that all my friends were going to like London and Madrid and Paris, and I got to go to Shreveport, Louisiana for my research.

And I didn't know what I was going to find. I think that's typical for a lot of people in that position. You just go out to the archives and see what's there. And one of the first things I did was literally go to Oil City, which, Mark, you've been to. It's a pretty, it's a very small town.

city in, that was done in the: 1990

So these were people who were in their eighties and nineties and grew up in oil city. And that was my first entry point. into that world, hearing all of these oral histories, which gave me a lot of names, a lot of dates, a lot of places. And I use that as a starting point. And it was really interesting because they were good starting points.

But what I learned is that a lot of these people offered A certain romanticized perspective that when I actually got into it, it wasn't so nice or romantic. So it was really fascinating because that was that museum was my starting point and I got to learn a lot more The more I learned the more I learned the kind of the darker sides of some of these communities and just how Dangerous and violent it was to live in these places

So interesting and then as you were developing the book, you know putting together it As a story, this is not just a wrote a description of facts.

You've really put together a nice, you've woven together a nice story.

Oh, I try. Yeah, I appreciate it. Yeah it's one of the things that I wanted to do is to give the readers a picture of just what life was like and what all the different communities were like. And it's funny, there's no one central character I think in the book, but one of the cool things about it that I tried to do is that there are recurring characters.

So maybe in one chapter, you'll see, Oh, here's this. This guy who is a driller who lives in Homer, and then he shows up later in a different place to show you how it was really ultimately just a small collection of towns, and it was really the same people migrating from town A to town B. So there's no one central figure that I'm following during the narrative.

But I want to give you a bird's eye view of what all the different towns were like, how those changes took place, and how people got from point A to point B.

e, North Louisiana's Boomtown: 1901

Are you continuing to research it?

I can't say that I am continuing to research it. I would, I'm always fascinated by that part of the world. If there's new material that I become aware of, I'd love to look into it. I know that it's obvious and I allude to this at the very end. It's certainly not the end of the oil industry there.

What I'm really focused on is just that kind of first chapter, that first boom. And there are obviously booms to follow, but this was Definitely the most dramatic boom. I think of all the booms in that era. And in my view, the most compelling because they were just making it up as they went along, right?

They were improvising. And I think that was one of the things that really fascinated me, but I'm sure there's incredible stories about subsequent booms to follow as well. Maybe that could be a project for another terrific author.

Yes. Wonderful. Henry, I can't thank you enough for a great conversation.

You've piqued a lot of new interest. Obviously it's been in my blood and in my family and stories to be told all these years, but now I want to go back and do a little bit more digging. And who knows, maybe I have some archives and newspaper articles in my attic that I need to go back to.

Let me know if that's the case.

I'd love to have another conversation.

Oh, very good. My guest has been Dr. Henry Alexander Weincek, author of a wonderful new book just out from University of Texas Press, and it's entitled Oil Cities, and it's available wherever books are sold. It's been great exploring this crucial, but sometimes overlooked chapter in American history, let alone Louisiana history.

And it's really illuminated a lot of past. It's raised a lot of questions for me, like I say, for further investigation. Henry, thanks for a great conversation. for your time, Mark. And listeners, this is just the kind of creative exchange we like to have on our podcast. Where did these ideas come from?

But what else do you find when you start doing the research and going in the back room? I can picture having been in that museum. Out back there's more and it's a lot of dusty boxes, a lot of old books. So thanks for sharing those stories. And listeners come back again. Next time. We've stamped our creative passport NLA today to talk to Dr.

Weincek, but we're going to continue our around the world journeys, talking to creative practitioners everywhere. We love to hear about inspiration and organization. And like I said, confidence and connections to launch our work out into the world. I'd like to thank our sponsor, White Cloud Coffee Roasters.

And as you can see, I'm broadcasting from Eagle Coffee Shop here in Eagle, Idaho, where we serve White Cloud Roaster coffee. So come back again next time. And until then, I'm Mark Stinson, and we'll keep unlocking your world of creativity.