Jack of Harts

The stock market collapse on Black Friday of 1929 nearly destroyed the Texas economy, and the Dust Bowl that followed ruined what farms survived. City workers lost their jobs, farmers lost their farms, Mexican citizens were sent home with one-way tickets. Thousands of Texans went to California in search of a better life, and Texas struggled to find a way to rebuild the good times it had lost for a decade. But federal programs limited how much they could produce, ostensibly to keep them from producing more than there was a demand for, and the economic fortunes of Texas stumbled on with little relief.

The Texas economy was fundamentally changed in 1901 when they found oil. It could be used to make fuel for the growing numbers of personal vehicles spreading throughout America, but so could crops. All major vehicles of the time could burn alcohol made by farmers, or oil-based gasoline bought at a town general store. Gas stations were coming into being in the big cities, but they had zero market penetration into the vast rural areas of the nation. Prohibition made it illegal to make alcohol, even for purposes of fuel, and drove the Texas oil industry to unheard of levels of profit and market dominance in the years that followed. And once Prohibition was finally repealed, the oil industry had generated a lock on the market, through a widespread network of gas stations, and “black gold” had become the fuel of the future that would make the United States of America the pre-eminent world power of the time.

Though the Democrats dominated national Congressional politics in the later years of the 19th Century, they only managed to elect New York’s Glover Cleveland to the Presidency. Republican Presidents like Benjamin Harrison continued to push the restoration of Negro rights, but Democrat Congressmen successfully blocked those attempts. Then in 1912 Theodore Roosevelt split his Progressive Republicans away from William Howard Taft’s Republicans and opened the doors for Progressive Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Wilson won with 42% of the vote, making him the first Southern Democrat President after the Civil War. Texas and the Southern States voted in a solid block for him, bringing along the Midwest, and many other States to generate a crushing Electoral win. Wilson then proceeded to press an agenda to fundamentally transform the United States of America along Progressive ideals.