1930's Business and the Economy | The Oil Boom

Restructuring.

The oil industry exemplifies the problems plaguing most industries and businesses in the 1930s. The forces of an unregulated, laissez-faire market glutted the nation with oil, driving prices down to a point where the structure of the oil industry was in peril. In contrast to the laissez-faire ideology, oilmen pressured states and the federal government for regulation and control. It was a decade of tremendous oil strikes, plunging profits and panic, restructuring and regulation: in many ways the decade that created the modern oil industry.

Boom.

The oil industry struggled to control the effects of several tremendous strikes during the decade. In 1930 wildcatters struck oil in east Texas, opening a reservoir that proved to be 140,000 acres large—the largest strike in the United States at that time. In 1932 wildcatter Robert Samuel Kerr struck oil within the Oklahoma City city limits; his find would...