doi: 10.1093/jahist/jas085 © he Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. 100 he Journal of American History June 2012 he Gulf Coast of the United States has long been home to the world’s largest concentra- tion of petroleum reineries and chemical plants. hese sprawling, interconnected com- plexes of crude oil tanks, distillation columns, fractionating towers, lubricating oil units, alkylation units, dewaxing units, and monstrous catalytic “crackers” churn out the gaso- line and other petroleum products that have helped sustain modern American society. Shortly after the 1901 discovery of oil at Spindletop, Texas, the region’s irst large reiner- ies, owned by Gulf Oil and Texaco, sprang up in nearby Port Arthur and Beaumont. With subsequent discoveries along the Gulf Coast, reineries spread southwest to Houston and Corpus Christi, and east to Lake Charles, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans, Louisiana. By 1941 the Gulf Coast accounted for 28 percent of national reining capacity, rising to 32 percent by 1956, and 36 percent by 1976. 1 Reineries depended on a large and stable work force—more than two hundred thousand people nationwide by 1955, in nearly three hundred reineries of all sizes in thirty-nine states—to keep the units running smoothly, around the clock. One-third of these workers were employed on the Gulf Coast, most of them concentrated in fourteen major reineries on the upper Texas coast and in Louisiana. Working-class people in the Gulf Coast region coveted reinery jobs, which were equivalent to positions in northern automobile or steel plants. Except for a brief period during World War II, these jobs went exclusively to men. Into the 1960s almost all the higher-paying skilled jobs were reserved for whites, which along the upper Gulf Coast included both Anglos and Cajuns. he jobs paid well, included generous beneits after World War I, and ofered a means of upward socioeconomic mobility. Minorities, too, including African Americans as well as Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans, found desirable wage-labor work at reineries, albeit in segregated classiications. Job losses in the oil industry during the Great Depression, how- ever, forced white and minority workers alike to organize. he union movement in oil targeted reining, the least isolated and geographically dispersed sector of the industry. As was the case across the Jim Crow South, labor organizing in reining consisted of a dual Bucking the Odds: Organized Labor in Gulf Coast Oil Reining Tyler Priest and Michael Botson Tyler Priest is a professor of business history and director of global studies at the C. T. Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston. Starting in fall 2012 he will be an associate professor of history at the University of Iowa. Michael Botson is a professor of history at Houston Community College. he authors thank Joseph Pratt, Landon Storrs, Ed Linenthal, Brian Black, Karen Merrill, and an anonymous referee for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. Readers may contact Priest at typriest@gmail.com; and Botson at michael.botson@hccs.edu. 1 Joseph A. Pratt, he Growth of a Reining Region (Greenwich, 1980), 93. by guest on April 23, 2016 http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from