For uninteresting reasons, I happened today to be reading correspondence from a fascinating guy named Scott Heywood.
Scott Heywood has been called the father of the Louisiana oil industry. One of several sons of a college president in Ohio, he was working with his brothers as a traveling musician when he became interested in the oil business in California. With his brothers' backing, he traveled to Beaumont, Texas, where he brought in the biggest gusher at Spindletop, initially producing some 143,000 barrels of oil per day from a single well.
A few months later, hearing of gas seeps (a famous sign of oil in those days) some 90 miles east, near Jennings, Louisiana, he relocated, established several companies, and began collecting oil and gas leases. They began drilling under a contract that required them to drill two 1,000-foot deep wells. When they reached 1,000 feet with nothing, he renegotiated the lease to provide for a single 2,000-foot-deep well. On September 21, 1901, at 1,700 feet, they hit a gusher -- the first successful oil well in Louisiana.
He went on to be heavily involved in the development of the oil and gas industry in Louisiana as an independent producer. But in the late '20s, he became very interested in and impressed with the writings and speeches of a member of the Louisiana Public Service Commission, one Huey Pierce Long. (One of Long's original claims to fame was standing up to monopolistic pipeline owners, like Standard Oil, on behalf of landowners and independent oil producers like the Jennings-Heywood Oil Syndicate.) Eventually, in 1932, he served a term in the state Senate as a pro-Long candidate. While there, he was instrumental in passing the progressive "homestead exemption" law -- still in effect today -- which waives property taxes on a portion of any property occupied as a homestead.
None of that is the subject of this diary.
While reading the correspondence, I came across a letter he wrote to his son, on April 28, 1939. The bulk of the letter is simply updating his son on the company's business dealings and goings-on in the Jennings oil field (it had experienced a recent surge in activity as new productive zones were identified). But at the end, he wrote about his attempts to find a more efficient way of handling the company's cash:
I have written to about 15 of the best banks in Louisiana for the purpose of finding out if I can make time deposits and have this money not only safe with depositors' insurance but have it earning something, and I have received letters back from every one of them absolutely stating that their bank is loaded up with deposits and that they will not pay any interest whatsoever save and except one bank.
All of the others stated that they would not accept savings deposits or time deposits from anyone excepting their old line customers.
The Calcasieu Marine National Bank is in perfect condition and perfectly safe but it, too, is loaded up with money and cannot loan it out at their usual 8% in advance loan.
It seems that this is the trouble with our country, that the monied interests are refusing to expand and put their money working and thereby give unemployment labor but are hoarding either through fear or through manipulation to discredit the Democratic administration.
Now laugh this off, you old Republican.
That penultimate paragraph would fit nicely into any Paul Krugman column in the last year or so. What is really striking to me is that this extremely successful businessman recognized that he was a relatively small businessman, and that he was emphatically not part of the "monied interests."
But more importantly, plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. The Republican playbook hasn't changed a lick in 72 years.