Captain James A. Baker of Houston, 1857-1941

Chapter Seven: Leader of Men

263  Houston’s economy grew significantly during the 1920s. While other parts of the country suffered serious labor strikes in 1919, a deep recession in 1921, and a prolonged drought in the 1920s, Houston became a major industrial city because oil gradually replaced lumber and cotton as the city’s economic foundation. Captain Baker’s three great enterprises —his Institute, his law firm, and his bank—flourished during this expansion, sustained by his careful oversight. Boomtown Houston By 1920 the town that had reported 78,800 citizens in 1910 was now a small city of 138,276; by 1930 Houston had 292,352 residents, second only to New Orleans in the South. To house these immigrants, subdivisions spread in all directions beyond Houston’s commercial and industrial zones. Ten skyscrapers defined the skyline in the 1920s, including the sixteen-story Houston Cotton Exchange Building (1924), the Gothicstyle Medical Arts Building, also sixteen stories (1926), the twenty-twostory Petroleum Building (1927), Mellie Esperson’s Italian RenaissanceChapter Seven Leader of Men Illustration: Rice Institute Campus, aerial view 1920s. Early Rice Collection, Woodson Research Center, Rice University. book TAM Kirkland.indb 263 book TAM Kirkland.indb 263 5/30/12 2:47 PM 5/30/12 2:47 PM ChAPter Seven  264 style memorial to her husband Neils (1927), and Jesse Jones’s handsome thirty-seven-story Gulf Building (1929), the tallest in the city for more than thirty years. In 1920 Oscar F. Holcombe held sway at the mayor’s office, as he would do intermittently for more than thirty years. Hospitable hosts were looking for alcohol substitutes with the initiation of Prohibition (1920 ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment), women had earned the vote (1920 ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment), biplanes delivered air mail, and motorized fire trucks sped to disasters. Independent oil operators brought new fields into production just as the black gold they pumped became the energy fuel of choice for heating homes, firing industry, and operating automobiles. The Gulf Company, funded by Pittsburgh’s Mellon family, opened offices in Houston in 1916, and Humble Oil and Refining Company, backed by local entrepreneurs and New York banks, set up headquarters in the city in 1917. Numerous small producers joined the larger corporations, and by 1919 threequarters of the oil produced in the Gulf region was drilled in Houstonarea fields. Between 1918 and 1929 Humble’s fixed assets climbed from $13 to $233 million in value, in part because Standard Oil, which had become majority owner in 1919, put capital into the Houston company while giving considerable independence to the local entrepreneurs. In the 1920s Humble’s huge Baytown refinery rivaled Sinclair Oil’s pioneering operation. City statisticians counted forty-six millionaires.1 Yet horse-drawn carts still delivered milk and ice to family homes, and the streetcar still stopped several blocks short of Rice Institute. Three men stood at the apex of this growth in the 1920s: William CliffordHogg ,JesseHolmanJones,andJamesAddisonBaker.Eachmanhad admirers who considered their exemplar the city’s most influential citizen . Will Hogg, the son of popular Texas Governor James Stephen Hogg (1891–1895), was a brilliant, outspoken, but complex man of mercurial temperament. He envisioned Houston becoming a great city and used his money, connections, and determination to ensure that his dreams became reality. An inveterate world traveler who maintained an apartment in New York City during the 1920s, Will was recognized nationally for his successful efforts to create Memorial Park, build the first municipal art museum in the state, develop a plan for the city of Houston, and fight for excellence in public education as a University of Texas regent and the originator of his alma mater’s Texas Exes alumni association. Best known as a “Tender Tempest” who gave millions to promote learning, book TAM Kirkland.indb 264 book TAM Kirkland.indb 264 5/30/12 2:47 PM 5/30/12 2:47 PM Leader of Men 265  support social service and civic projects, and protect natural beauty, Will detested Jesse Jones. In a letter he distributed to friends throughout the state, Hogg told Governor Dan Moody that Jones was an “ill-fitted pseudo-statesman who . . . is always using the other fellow’s chips to his own advantage.”2 Will Hogg’s death in September 1930 at age fifty-five removed the city’s greatest advocate of urban planning and park creation from the civic scene. While Jesse Jones did not enjoy...