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The wrenCh in The gears The Consensus Court’s decade of amicable productivity spent some of its last capital upholding the constitutionality of the Texas Railroad Commission and its rulings. Whereas a few years earlier, the Court had let stand the Eddins case, holding that the commission violated no federal prerogatives, now it held the agency equally good against a claim that it violated the state constitution’s mandate that a bill’s purpose be stated in its name.1 In 1905, in International and Great Northern Railroad Company v. Railroad Commission of Texas, the Court conceded that the commission ’s right “to correct abuses” was not specified in the title of the bill, and that the language in question was capable of two constructions, one constitutional and one not—in which case the rule was to read it in the permissible way.2 However, in looking at the power granted to the commission to remedy extortion and discrimination and to set rates, the Court concluded that the purpose of the law creating the Railroad Commission was reasonably clear from its title and therefore constitutionally sound. With a similar touch of creativity, the Court ruled in 1907 that a state tax on the railroads did not take their property without due process of law.3 This was achieved by holding that the tax, while equal to 1 percent of their gross receipts, was not actually a tax on their receipts, but rather an excise tax for the privilege of doing business. The rail line pressed its point, as zealously as railroads typically had, that a state excise tax could not be levied on interstate commerce. The Court held, however, that the 1 percent tax on gross receipts was only a measure to determine the amount of excise tax to be levied for doing business within the state.The railroads were still a long way from being out of arguments—claiming, for instance, that a law requiring a state tax board to assess a valuation of intangible assets violated the constitution because that document mandated that railroad assets be valued by each county tax assessor. The Court calmly pointed out, again in 1907, that intangible asTweLve 152 THe Texas supreme CourT sets, obviously, were not located in any one county, but that did not immunize them from taxation.4 Occasionally the railroads won a round, as when the Texas and Pacific Railway Company escaped paying a Texas franchise tax by virtue of its charter ’s having been issued by the Congress of the United States.5 The Court also decided in favor of a line whose intangible assets were taxed at a rate higher than that imposed on other businesses in the county.6 But in the main, the Consensus Court closed out its era by maintaining its strict but not unreasonable holdings on the right of the state to tax and regulate the large railroad companies, whose behavior, if given their will, would have reverted to the excesses of the most predatory days of the Gilded Age. The Texas Court also began to make itself felt in a completely new field of law, one that would only grow in importance in the decades to come. The Industrial Age had since its beginning been powered by coal.Until the middle of the nineteenth century, lamps were fueled largely by whale oil, and then by kerosene, a derivative obtained by refining crude petroleum. The presence of oil in East Texas had been known ever since Spanish ships put in and caulked their seams with tar from coastal seeps. In Corsicana in 1894, drillers trying to reach an aquifer to augment the municipal water supply kept striking oil instead, and had to cap the wells—only to see petroleum leaking out of the ground around the pipes. Commercial interest in Texas oil led to production of about 66,000 barrels in 1897.7 This glut nearly wrecked the fledgling business, however, since there was not yet a way to process the crude in state. Construction of the first Texas refinery, which turned out profitable amounts of gasoline and kerosene, pointed to a future of vast wealth. In southeast Texas, at Spindletop Hill near Beaumont, an eccentric brickmaker and girls’ Sunday-school teacher named Pattillo Higgins had suffered years of derision for nursing his pet theory that oil would pool beneath geologic features known as salt domes, of which Spindletop was one. He was vindicated on the tenth day of the new century, January...

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