H.L. Hunt

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“All They Do Is Hate”

March 24, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a customarily cogent and paranoid post, the BBC’s Adam Curtis blogs about what he calls the “fake objectivity” that obscures where the real power in society rests. An excerpt about H.L. Hunt, a wing-nut Texas oilman whose view of journalism presaged Fox News by many decades:

“The first is an odd story – with a very strange character at its heart. It is about how in the 1950s the richest man in the world, an oil billionaire in Texas, invented a new form of television journalism. It pretended to be objective and balanced but in fact it was hard core right-wing propaganda. It was way ahead of its time because, in its fake neutrality, it prefigured the rise of the ultraconservative right-wing media of the 1990s – like Fox News, with its copyrighted slogan, ‘Fair and Balanced.’

The billionaire was called H. L. Hunt – Haroldson Lafayette Hunt. He made his fortune in the early 1930s by getting hold of one of the biggest oil fields in America – in the pine forests of East Texas. He was a ruthless, driven man and from early on he became absolutely convinced that he had superhuman qualities that made him different from other humans.

From the 1920s onwards Hunt was a bigamist. He married two women and raised two families that were oblivious of each other. He told his second wife, Frania, that he was called Major Franklyn Hunt. There was a rocky moment when his picture was on the front page of all the Texas papers because of his spectacular oil deal. Frania asked Hunt if that was him – he told her no, that it was his uncle who had been so clever.

Hunt was part of a group of extreme right-wing oil men in Texas who had enormous influence because of their wealth. There is a brilliant book written about this group – The Big Rich by Bryan Burrough. Burrough describes how they had first risen up in the 1930s because they loathed President Roosevelt – ‘a nigger-loving communist,’ as one oil man called him. They were convinced that Roosevelt’s New Deal was really run by Jews and communists – or ‘social vermin’ as they politely put it.

A Texas congressman called Sam Rayburn summed up this group of right-wing oil men. ‘All they do is hate’ – he said.

After the Second World War H L Hunt did two things. He added another, third, family to his bigamist’s collection. And he also turned to the new medium of television to promote his ultraconservative views.”

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“Long Before ‘Popsie’ Hunt’s Death, However, An Ugly Struggle Had Already Begun Within His Family”

January 5, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

When you possess $5 billion and several families full of highly ambitious people, you bequeath a great deal of drama along with great wealth when you die. H.L. Hunt, an oilman with a backstory as large as Texas itself, left just that sort of a messy arrangement in 1974 when he succumbed to cancer. His descendants behaved in such a manner that they reputedly were the inspiration for the melodramatic TV series, Dallas. From a 1974 People:

“Haroldson Lafayette Hunt was 32 and broke when he sat down to a game of five-card stud in the Arkansas boom town of El Dorado and won his first oil well. By the time he died of cancer two weeks ago at age 85, H.L. Hunt had pyramided his poker winnings into a global oil empire that made him one of the world’s half-dozen wealthiest men. Long before ‘Popsie’ Hunt’s death, however, an ugly struggle had already begun within his family over the disposition of the Texas tycoon’s personal fortune, estimated at $5 billion. 

The issue is between Hunt’s children by his first wife and those of his second. His first marriage to Lyda Bunker Hunt produced four sons and two daughters—Mrs. Al Hill, 59, H.L. Jr., 57, Mrs. Hugo W. Schoellkopf Jr., 52, Nelson Bunker, 48, Herbert, 46, and Lamar, 42. Hunt’s second wife was Ruth Ray Wright, a former Hunt company secretary, who married H.L. two years after Lyda’s death in 1955. She had four children, whom H.L. immediately adopted: Ray, 30, June, 29, Helen, 26, and Swanee, 23. (Friends say members of the family have told them H.L. was their actual as well as adoptive father.) 

The internecine intrigue began, H.L. confidant Paul Rothermel told a federal grand jury, when he convinced the patriarch in 1969 to leave 51% of Hunt Oil to the ‘second family.’ The first six children, recalled Rothermel, had already amassed many millions of their own. However, the other four children had ‘only’ about $3 million all-told in trust funds. Two years later, private detectives working for Nelson Bunker and Herbert were convicted of tapping the phones of Rothermel and four other Hunt Oil executives believed sympathetic to the younger set of Hunts. Themselves now under federal indictment for ordering the wiretaps, Nelson Bunker and Herbert have pleaded not guilty, arguing that they simply wanted to investigate unaccountable company losses of $62 million over two years. Should the two Hunts be convicted, they could be fined up to $10,000 or be sentenced to five years, or both. For his part, Rothermel has come to an undisclosed out-of-court settlement with the Hunts over the wiretap. “

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Hunt was a staunch conservative, 1950s:


Dallas reboot, coming in 2012:

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