HUNT, HAROLDSON LAFAYETTE, JR. 1889-1974

Oil tycoon

The Richest Man in America

By 1942 H. L. Hunt was the richest man In the United States, earning roughly a million dollars per week for the oil produced by his east Texas wells. Professional gambler, bigamist, wildcatter, right-wing activist, and health-food fanatic, Hunt took chances, won big, and reveled in his accomplishments. From the 1930s, when he first surfaced as a known national figure, to the end of his life, he embellished his own history with exaggerated stories of his adventures, He was a self-made man who created his own reputation.

Background

Son of a southern farmer and Confederate veteran who moved north during Reconstruction, Hunt was born near Vandalia, Illinois, on 17 February 1889. His father was somewhat prosperous, accounting for his success by embracing a militant social Darwinian philosophy that asserted his genetic superiority to the common man. He passed this ethos on to his son, who articulated it many times during his life. The youngest of eight children, Hunt was doted upon as a boy, evidencing a remarkable talent for mental arithmetic, an independent streak, and a taste for adventure. At age sixteen he struck out on his own, heading west to make his fortune, He took jobs as a dishwasher, a beet topper, a sheep-herder, a mule-team driver, a semipro baseball player, a crop picker, a concrete pourer, and a lumberjack. His skill for mental figuring made him an exceptional cardplayer, and eventually he made a living as a professional gambler.

Gambling

In 1911, tiring of life as an itinerant gambler, Hunt made his way to Lake Village, Arkansas, intending to raise cotton. His initial ventures wiped out by floods, he returned to gambling, eventually opening a gambling parlor in the boomtown of El Dorado, about seventy miles west of Lake Village. El Dorado was an oil town, filled with wildcatters, roughnecks, speculators, and prostitutes—perfect for gamblers. Naturally enough, Hunt began dabbling in oil drilling. It was a gamble. Hunt knew next to nothing about geology and had to lease his drilling equipment. He nonetheless proved lucky, striking oil, and then watching the wells go dry, quietly absorbing the nuances of the oil business. By the end of the 1920s he also developed a pattern of oil speculation, where he waited until wildcatters struck oil and then raced to the oil fields to secure leasing rights. He also developed two families, one in El Dorado and one in Shreveport, Louisiana, each oblivious to the presence of the other. He was as successful in bigamy as he was in oil.

East Texas

The basis of Hunt's fortune was laid by a colorful oil wildcatter, Columbus "Dad" Joiner. In 1930 Joiner had been drilling in the oil fields of east Texas for over three years. He had struck nothing, and oil company geologists doubted the area had any oil. They were wrong: in September Joiner struck oil. Soon word of the strike made it into Arkansas. Hunt raced to Joiner's claim, bought up surrounding leases, and offered to purchase Joiner's wells. The wildcatter resisted at first. But Joiner had oversold investor claims to the oil field in order to finance his drilling. As they pressed their claims against him in court, Joiner feared he would lose everything. Wells drilled by others to the east and south of his find proved dry; leading geologists continued to insist the strike was an anomaly. Hunt offered Joiner $30,000 in cash and $1.3 million in future oil royalties. On 26 November Joiner sold Hunt his claim. It was a remarkable coup for Hunt. Personally broke, Hunt had to rustle up the funding for the wells from third parties. There was no guarantee Hunt would be able to placate the investors Joiner had defrauded, although most ultimately settled for a buyout of $250. Hunt had a hunch the oil field was located to the north and west of Joiner's strike, but at the time of the deal only one test well confirmed his guess. Hunt's gambling instincts proved sharp: the east Texas field was indeed north and west of Joiner's well, forty miles long from tip to tip, measuring more than 140,000 acres. It was the largest oil strike ever in the United States, producing more than four billion barrels of crude. Hunt was the single largest independent owner of wells in the field. That made him one of the richest men in the United States.

Prorationing

Hunt's fortune was by no means assured. He was the richest single owner of oil in the field, but he was not the only owner in the field. It was the Depression: thousands flocked to the site hoping to strike it rich. Their wells tapped the same reservoir as did Hunt's; overproduction was bleeding the field dry and driving the prices terribly low. By the spring of 1931 oil was selling for two cents a barrel on the spot market. The boom was turning to bust. Hunt joined forces with the major oil companies to ask the government to shut down oil production and proration it—that is, limit the number of barrels that could be taken out of the ground. Their lobbying efforts were successful. On 16 August 1931 the governor of Texas sent in twelve hundred National Guard troops and shut down the oil field. When he opened it again in September, production was prorationed to 225 barrels of oil per well per day. The pro-rationing began to drive the smaller drillers out of business. Smuggling became an enormous problem. Vigilantes attacked pipelines and tank trucks. Wells were set on fire. By 1933 the federal government was forced to send agents to east Texas and began a nationwide clampdown of the oil market, driving the price back up to one dollar per barrel. In 1935 Congress passed the Connally Hot Oil Act, making prorationing a national policy and providing penalties for excess production. Hunt's share of the east Texas market was secure. He could now turn to other interests.

Expansion

Ever the gambler, Hunt used his east Texas profits to drill for oil elsewhere, especially Louisiana. He extended his interests to oil refining and trade. He used his fortune to invest in a depressed real estate market. By 1938 he struck deals with the Germans and Japanese for oil equipment and crude, deals that naturally floundered with the outbreak of World War II. The war nonetheless presented Hunt with a steady, high price for crude. He prospered, expanding his operations throughout the South. He opened gas stations to add to his refineries, pipe manufacturing, and drilling. He bought a cattle ranch in Wyoming that, as luck would have it, had oil. He was able to indulge his passion for gambling. He hired a statistician from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to help him lay bets on horse races around the country. He added a new mistress and child to his collection of families, building them a house located a two-minute drive away from his first, legal family. He now was the patriarch of three separate families. He also began dabbling in politics.

Right-Winger

Despite the fact that Hunt's fortune had been secured by government intervention into the oil market, Hunt's childhood education in the absolutes of social Darwinian philosophy disposed him to conservative politics. In fact, Hunt became one of the most reactionary political figures in the United States. In 1951 he founded and financed Facts Forum, a propaganda agency for the far Right that disseminated pamphlets (Hitler was a Liberal, Traitors in the Pulpit) and radio programs attacking communism, liberalism, the United Nations, the State Department, Judaism, and the Catholic Church. Facts Forum and its board (which included Hunt; Norman Vincent Peale; Sears, Roebuck chairman Robert E. Wood; and actor John Wayne) promoted Christianity, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Hunt wrote off the expenses of running Facts Forum as a donation to charity.

Later Life

The remainder of Hunt's life was filled with notable eccentricities, rather than capital or political adventures. Facts Forum fell into public disrepute with the waning of McCarthyism. Day-to-day operations of the Hunt business were increasingly dominated by his sons. Hunt turned his own attentions to the production of idiosyncratic, utopian novels. He altered a few old habits, giving up gambling and tempering his philandering. He became a partisan of health foods and launched his own company to produce them, an indulgence that cost him millions. He attacked John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election, sponsoring the publication of pamphlets arguing that the election of a Catholic would be disastrous. His status as one of Kennedy's most vocal critics immersed him and his family in the allegations and suspicions that followed Kennedy's assassination. Hunt died in 1974, but in death he turned out to be as impressive a presence as he was in life. His will was bitterly contested by his three families and tied up Texas courts throughout the 1970s.

Sources:

Harry Hurt III, Texas Rich: The Hunt Dynasty from the Early Oil Days through the Silver Crash (New York: Norton, 1981);

Jerome Tuccille, Kingdom: The Story of the Hunt Family of Texas (Ottawa, 111.: Jameson Books, 1984).

H. L. Hunt

H. L. Hunt (1889-1974) was an entrepreneur who built a financial empire from a small early investment in oil in Arkansas. In his later years he was perhaps the world's richest man.

Born on his father's farm near Vandalia, Illinois, on February 17, 1889, Haroldson Lafayette Hunt worked nearly full-time on the farm as a boy, reaching only the fifth grade in the public schools. At age 16 he left home, travelling across the United States working as a farmhand, cowboy, lumberjack, and mule skinner. When his father died in 1911 he left the young man an inheritance of about $6,000. With that money Hunt bought himself a cotton plantation near Lake Valley, Arkansas, in the Mississippi Delta.

Not content with simply farming, Hunt began speculating in cotton and timber land near Lake Providence, Louisiana. By 1920 he owned some 15,000 acres of land in Arkansas and Louisiana on which he planted cotton to take advantage of the high prices during World War I. With the end of the war, however, the cotton market collapsed, and the value of Hunt's cotton lands plummeted accordingly. He then began looking for more lucrative sources of income. Upon hearing rumors of an oil strike in El Dorado, Arkansas, he decided to strike out for the area. A more conventional man would undoubtedly have sold his land, but not Hunt. Recognizing that the land would someday rise in value, he borrowed $50 and headed for El Dorado.

Once there he began trading in oil leases. His mode of operation was to ask a farmer how much he wanted for his land, go back into town and offer to sell the land to an oil prospector for a higher price, and then buy and sell the land practically simultaneously, making a profit without investing a penny of his own money. After six months of this trading, Hunt had enough money to lease a half-acre of land on his own. Paying freight and demurrage, he brought in an old rotary rig, drilled, and struck oil. Within a short time he owned some 44 producing wells in the El Dorado area. In 1924 he sold a half interest in 40 of these wells for $600,000.

Throughout the rest of the 1920s Hunt continued to drill wells in Arkansas and also in Oklahoma and Louisiana. By the end of the decade he had 100 producing wells throughout the South and Southwest. Hunt's greatest coup came in September 1930 when he joined forces with a wildcatter named C. M. "Tex" Joiner. Joiner had discovered a vein of oil on his 4,000 acre spread in Rusk County, Texas, but lacked the capital to drill and was too far in debt to borrow any. At that point he decided to sell his land, but the large oil companies were not interested because they were afraid that his titles were not in good order. Since most independent oilmen had been hard hit by the crash in October of 1929 they were not able to invest either.

Hunt went to Joiner and offered him a deal. In return for $30,000 in cash and an agreement to pay him $1.2 million in oil (if and when it was produced), Hunt acquired rights to the site of the greatest oil discovery in the world up until that time and the first major strike in what later would become the lucrative oil terrain of East Texas. A leading historian of the industry has commented that "More independent oil fortunes came out of the East Texas field than from any other place in the world." It was primarily because of the great size of the field. This, in turn, became a great turning point in Texas history. Prior to this time local oil men always had to go hat in hand to the major oil companies to solicit funds for expansion and development. But Hunt, like some others, was able to build his own pipelines and to supply Sinclair Oil Company tank cars with his own oil.

To exploit this new field, the Hunt Oil Company was founded in 1936. First headquartered in Tyler, Texas, it later moved to Dallas where it grew to become the largest independent oil producer in the United States. During World War II the amount of oil Hunt sold to the Allies exceeded the total German output. He also supplied 85 percent of the natural gas piped into the eastern United States in 1946 to help relieve the critical fuel shortage of that year. It was during these years that Hunt began to develop large holdings in real estate, and at one time he was also the largest pecan grower in the country. In later years he began getting involved in the production of canned goods, health products, and cosmetics, all of which were placed under the umbrellas of HLH Products of Dallas. By the time of his death in 1974 Hunt's fortune was estimated at between $2 and $3 billion, and he was earning about $1 million a week.

During the early 1950s Hunt increasingly turned his interest to politics. Deeply concerned with what he felt was a serious communist menace to the United States, he founded the Facts Forum in 1951 as an educational foundation. This organization produced and distributed radio and television programs and subsidized the mass distribution of anticommunist and patriotic books and pamphlets. After having spent some $3.5 million on the organization, Hunt suspended its operation in 1956. Two years later it was revived under the name of Life Line, producing 15 minute radio programs. In 1964 Hunt began writing a conservative newspaper column and also wrote several books dealing with aspects of conservative ideology.

Hunt also got increasingly involved in electoral politics. In 1952 he headed the MacArthur for President movement, and it was rumored that he put up $150,000 for the effort. He agreed to support Eisenhower only reluctantly in that year and in 1956. In 1960 Hunt pushed hard for the nomination of Lyndon B. Johnson, since Johnson had supported oil depletion allowances (for tax purposes) throughout his career in the House and the Senate. After Johnson failed to gain the presidential nomination, but agreed to become John F. Kennedy's running mate, Hunt supported the latter with a contribution of some $100,000. Kennedy, however, did not reciprocate. Smarting under that rebuff and disgusted with Johnson's liberal policies after assuming the presidency in 1963, Hunt supported Barry Goldwater in 1964.

Hunt had four sons, and three of the four achieved some notoriety. Lamar Hunt owned the Kansas City Chiefs of the National Football League; Herbert Hunt supervised the operation of Hunt Oil Company, the $735 million family held oil corporation; and in 1979-1980 Nelson Bunker Hunt led a family attempt to corner the world silver market, which ended in near disaster for the world monetary system, the American economy, and the Hunt family fortune, with losses estimated at some $300 million.

An unpretentious man and a bit of an eccentric, Hunt lived in a relatively modest home in Dallas. There he cut the grass himself each week and took his lunch to work daily in a brown paper bag. Despite this unassuming demeanor, Hunt was often overheard introducing himself to strangers by proclaiming: "Hello, I am H. L. Hunt, the world's richest man…." He died in Dallas on November 29, 1974.

Further Reading

There is no biography of Hunt, but there is valuable information in James Presley, A Saga of Wealth: The Rise of the Texas Oilmen (1978). Additional information on the industry and its political thrust can be found in Carl Solberg, Oil Power (1976).

Additional Sources

Brown, Stanley H., H. L. Hunt, Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976.

Burst, Ardis, The three families of H.L. Hunt, New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988.

Hurt, Harry, Texas rich: the Hunt dynasty, from the early oil days through the Silver Crash, New York: W. W. Norton, 1981. □