A Tale of Baseball, Socialism, and Oil

By Steve Rossignol

During the 1970s and ‘80s in Austin and the Texas Hill Country, socialist meetings
and encampments would sometimes be punctuated by the singing of the old
socialist songs, especially the Internationale. Invariably at the conclusion of that
venerable hymn of the proletariat, someone would shout, “Play ball!”, the playful
gist of which was that the Internationale would be the new national anthem
played at baseball games.
Quite possibly the closest time that ever happened in history was in Desdemona,
Texas, early in the century.
Socialists in Texas were quite visible and vocal during those years; in 1912
Socialist candidate Eugene Debs received almost as many votes for President in
the state as the Republican candidate. Dozens of Socialists were elected to local
offices statewide. Party encampments were held throughout the state---up to 25
or 30 a year, especially in the “Red Belt” counties of the Texas Big Country—
Eastland, Comanche, Stonewall, Erath, Stephens, Haskell, and others.1
In Eastland County, Ellison Springs became one the major socialist encampments
in the area. Settled by James Madison Ellison and his family in the 1850s, the
religious camp meetings there of an earlier era evolved into the Populist meetings
of the 1890s and thence into a yearly socialist event in the Nineteen-Teens
featuring major speakers, carnival-like events, and baseball games. James “Uncle
Jimmie” Ellison hosted the events; Socialist Party of Texas organizer Thomas
Aloysius Hickey was always a principal speaker.
Flyers from Socialist Encampments. Tom Hickey Papers, Southwest Collection, Texas Tech University

Soon the informal socialist baseball games of the Ellison Springs encampment had
grown into an established team, headquartered in the nearby community of
Desdemona, six miles east-northeast of Ellison Springs. The Desdemona
Socialists2 were soon playing other informal sand-lot teams from Gorman, De
Leon, Comanche, and Stephenville.
The Desdemona Socialists staked out a home-made baseball diamond on a vacant
field owned by Desdemona patriarch Dr. Samuel E. Snodgrass. A longtime
resident of Hogtown, the original name of Desdemona, Snodgrass moved to
Eastland County in 1885 and became both a medical doctor and quite the local
entrepreneur, establishing a dry goods store, selling real estate and chickens,
operating a bank and cotton gin, and working in the cattle business. Snodgrass
was also a hard-core Democrat.
The Desdemona Socialists maintained a very healthy batting average on his lot;
Tom Hickey reported on their glowing success: “our local baseball team…has
cleaned up its rivals wherever it has played”. 3 (Hickey goes on in this article to
report the appearance of a “peculiar visitor” who was reportedly an undercover
United States Marshall;4 the implications of this encounter would become all too
evident in the years to come.)
One of the rivals “cleaned up” by the socialist baseball team was their local
adversaries, the Desdemona Democrats.
The Socialist team was a composite group of the Desdemona citizenry (a town
reported to be almost exclusively socialist5), made up of socialists and the sons of
socialists. L. L. Steele, the one-armed school-teacher, was on the team, as was
fellow teacher John Robert Parmer.6 Parmer’s two brothers, Zack Wesley and
Terrence P., also made up the nine. Blacksmith and “strong socialist”7 James W.
Munday and local farmer William Richard Carruth played ball, along with Oliver
Payne and John Hawkins. Uncle Jimmie Ellison is listed on the team; in his
seventies at the time it would have been quite a feat. 8
Dr. Snodgrass, hard-core Democrat that he was, apparently was a little disturbed
by his favored political baseball team being continuously trounced by the upstart
Reds. The baseball lot in Desdemona sat adjacent to the Snodgrass homestead;
Snodgrass’s daughter Inez would later report how she would have trouble viewing
the Saturday games with “all those men in the way”.9
Snodgrass finally decided that he had had enough of the Desdemona Socialists
playing on his land. He told the team that they could no longer play baseball on
his property.
Undaunted, the local socialists offered to buy the land where the baseball field
was located. Equally adamant, and being the entrepreneurial businessman that
he was, Snodgrass demanded the then exorbitant price of $50 for an acre and a
half.
The socialists of Desdemona put their principles of collective ownership into
action. They undertook to raise the money by selling individual $1 subscriptions to
the property and soon had the funds to purchase the Snodgrass sand-lot. A high
picket fence was erected between the baseball field and the Snodgrass home.
Inez Heeter began watching the baseball games from the roof of the Snodgrass
house; she also reported that the new owners didn’t like the Snodgrasses and
that her father “should have taken it [the land] back”.10
The cooperative purchase of the baseball field was one of several attempts at
collective ownership the socialists in Texas undertook in those days. Among other
examples, socialists in Paris, Texas, built a collective slaughterhouse in 1909, the
first in the nation11; a city park was established in Marshall, “the first time in
history that a political party has ever established a park”12; Tom Hickey sold
socialist shares to finance The Rebel13; and Desdemona barber John Walter
“Shorty” Carruth (who may have been distantly related to Desdemona socialist
William Richard Carruth) solicited shares from the other socialists of Desdemona
for his new Hog Creek Oil Company.
But amid the enthusiastic Desdemona baseball games, dark clouds were
approaching. War fever was growing from the World War I conflict in Europe.
Texas socialists were adamantly anti-war and did not hesitate to advocate against
American entry into the conflict. The pages of The Rebel railed against the war
effort, and the Farmers’ and Laborers’ Protective Association (FLPA), the
cooperative association loosely affiliated with the Socialist Party and the
Industrial Workers of the World, began speaking out against a probable military
conscription.
On June 12, 1917, a grand jury in Dallas indicted 55 FLPA members for seditious
conspiracy under the provisions of the Espionage Act, which made it a crime to
speak out against the military draft. Among the allegations were that the
members of the FLPA conspired to use force to oppose military conscription; that
some had threatened to kill President Woodrow Wilson; and that they had
conspired to destroy railroad tracks, bridges, and communication lines.14 Other
arrests occurred throughout that state.15
Actually, the arrests had already begun. FLPA Secretary Samuel J. Powell was
arrested on May 26. Ernest R. Fulcher, a FLPA member from the borders of Palo
Pinto and Hood counties, while being sought by a posse from those counties on a
“wife beating charge”, was gunned down with 23 wounds on June 4, 1917, after a
stand-off with a shotgun that “missed-fire”. The large size of the posse was
supposedly predetermined by Fulcher’s “threats” against conscription.16
Ernest Fulcher’s Gravestone at the Evergreen Cemetery, Lipan, Hood County. Photo by the author.

“Strong socialist” James Munday, the baseball-playing, Desdemona socialist

blacksmith, was among those arrested in the FLPA raids17. Munday, whose wife
had died previously, apparently lost his land and moved with his four daughters to
a “camp” along the banks of Hog Creek.18
Note that the Espionage Act was not passed until June 15, 1917. All of the FLPA-
related arrests and indictments under the provisions of the Act were thus made
even before the law was enacted.
Tom Hickey, who had no direct affiliation with the FLPA, had been arrested
without a warrant on May 17 at his wife’s farm in Stonewall County, apparently in
an attempt to connect him with the FLPA.19 He was held incommunicado for two
days before his wife Clara could find him. His attorneys denounced the
“frivolous” charges against him.20
Hickey’s apprehension about the peculiar visitor at one of the baseball games
appears well founded. There is considerable documentation to indicate that the
socialists in Texas were under surveillance and infiltration well before the FLPA
arrests; there is also evidence that the charges against the FLPA were largely due
to information provided by an undercover operative jointly employed by the
government Bureau of Investigation and the James McCane Detective Agency of
Houston.21
The June 2, 1917, number of The Rebel was the last issue of the paper to be
mailed. On June 7, U.S. Postmaster General Albert Sidney Burleson denied the
second-class mailing permit of The Rebel under the provisions of the same
Espionage Act.22 Again, the suppression of the paper on June 7 was before the
official enactment of the Espionage Act on June 15 and even before the
Postmaster General’s own directive. The Rebel was the first newspaper in the
United States shut down by the government for its anti-war activities.

Order No. 431, in the Tom Hickey papers.

The Socialist Party in Texas had been dealt a crippling blow. Back in Desdemona,
however, the Desdemona Socialists continued to play baseball.
The team never went professional, although some of the players may have gone
on to play in the Texas Oil Belt League. There is a Desdemona team listed there in
191923. They played other local teams in that league from Thurber, Eastland,
Ranger, Cisco, Breckinridge and Abilene—all areas with a considerable socialist
presence at that time. They may have also been morphed into the Eastland
Judges team, which played in the West Texas League in 1920. (There was a
second-baseman Dillard “Dee” Payne on the Judges team who may have been
related to the Desdemona Socialist Oliver Payne.24) Breckinridge took over the
Eastland club franchise in 1921, further diluting any possible Desdemona club
membership.25 In 1924 a later incarnation of the Desdemona team replaced
Ranger in the Oil Belt League, which forfeited its participation in the West Texas
League.26

The fate of Desdemona would change overnight on September 2, 1918.

Oil had previously been discovered and explored in the neighboring communities
of Ranger and Thurber; Desdemona barber Shorty Carruth had entertained the
notion that there might be oil in and about Desdemona as well. As early as
February 2, 1914, he established the Hog Creek Oil Company and sold shares to
his neighbors in Hogtown27 at $100 a whack; but early drilling efforts had not
proven conclusive, investors dropped out, and Shorty pretty much became a local
laughingstock.28
But on September 2, “Shorty’s Hunch”29 paid off. Working on an oil lease on
socialist hardscrabble farmer Joe Duke’s land in cooperation with speculator Tom
Dees, an exploratory well hit a gusher, and the Desdemona Oil Boom was on.30
The 109 remaining investors from Shorty Carruth’s Hog Creek Oil Company were
called in to ratify the deal and received their first dividend checks of $150,000—a
250% return on their investment.31
Dick Carruth, perhaps Shorty’s relative, struck oil and natural gas on his land and
began receiving $1000 a day in royalties while still advocating for the Non-
Partisan League32. Oliver Payne also hit oil and gas on his property. Uncle Jimmie
Ellison struck it big, and continued his Non-Partisan League membership.33 Dr.
Snodgrass got into the act. And the baseball diamond purchased from Dr.
Snodgrass by the 50 socialists who wanted a place to play ball became a field of
oil derricks and producing wells. The three Parmer brothers were now worth well
over a million dollars each.34
The Desdemona Socialists had become socialist millionaires.35 James Munday was
among those who became rich, presumably he was able to move away from his
camp on Hog Creek.36 Old Joe Duke, on whose property the boom started,
continued to haul hay and repair his own fences.37 There was now the problem of
trying to locate all the 50 co-owners of that baseball field to distribute their
dividends38; many had gone off to war or gone on towards greener pastures
before that pasture actually did turn green.
Dr. Snodgrass was unfazed. He still believed he had made a good deal on the sale
of that acre and a half.39
Uncle Jimmie Ellison was plagued by his new found success. He found himself
besieged by speculators who kept increasing their bids for prospective oil leases
on his “flea-bitten sandy” farm in Ellison Springs.40 Suspicious, Ellison approached
his old comrade Tom Hickey for advice on how to proceed.
Hickey had eventually been released from his unwarranted detention by state and
federal authorities, even while three FLPA officials—George T. Bryant, Samuel L.
Powell, and Zeph L. Risely—had been sentenced to several years’ imprisonment
at Leavenworth. Hickey had made a few attempts to get The Rebel back up and
running after its forcible governmental shutdown, but the efforts did not bear
fruit. The Socialist Party of Texas was in disarray, still suffering from its war-time
persecutions and new internal divisions over the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.
Hickey had turned his political attention to organizing for the Texas Non-Partisan
League. “I believe that the Socialist Party cannot function in any agricultural state
in the nation, while the present unpleasantness is on….” he wrote in December of
1917.41
Hickey offered to become the general manager of Uncle Jimmie Ellison’s farm,
directed the sale of leases on the Ellison property, and almost by default found
himself in a new profession. “I carefully aligned myself with the most honest
outfit I could find, and thus became vice president of a million dollar oil
corporation,” Hickey reported.42
That “most honest outfit” that Hickey could find was the National Workers Drilling
and Production Company, which Hickey organized with other socialists in October
of 1919: L. L. Steele, the one-armed socialist school teacher, became President of
the new company; W. H. Flowers, an early socialist from Smith County, was
named First Vice-President; Hickey became Second Vice-President; and H. W.
“Harry” Elliott, the editor of the Desdemona Oil News and elected as the socialist
mayor of Desdemona in 1919 (Tom Hickey was his campaign manager),43 was
named Secretary-Treasurer.

Stock Certificate from the National Workers Drilling and Production Company. Note the stock number
and to whom it is issued. Hickey papers.
(The one-armed Leslie Lisle Steele holds the distinction of being a fourth-
generation socialist in Texas. His great-grandfather, Alfonso Steele, was a member
of the Socialist Party of Texas and the last surviving member of the Battle of San
Jacinto44. Alfonso’s son Hampton was a Socialist Party speaker and organizer
during the heyday of the SP in Texas, and L. L. Steele’s father, Leslie Chisum
Steele, was the socialist candidate for county judge in Erath County in 1914. All
four are buried in the Mexia City Cemetery)45
In additional to managing the leases of the other new socialist oil operators in the
Desdemona area, especially those involved in the collective ownership of the
baseball field, the NWDP soon found itself a bona fide oil production company. To
their credit, they maintained the spirit of collective ownership embraced by their
socialist principles and continued to build cooperative stock-holder ownership;
Hickey declared this intent with a solicitation to the Non-Partisan League and
emphasized that the officers of the company received no salaries for their work.46
The success of the Hickey oil company lasted about as long as the Desdemona
boom. Operating problems emerged as a result of bad management on the part
of Elliott and Flowers47 and Hickey resigned in disgust from his position at the
company in June of 1920.48. The company paid off its investors and was sold to
the Texas Petroleum Company in September of 1922.49
And the Desdemona Socialist baseball team faded away as well. A field full of
derricks and grasshopper pumps was not conducive to the pursuit of home runs.
The oil bust was not kind to Shorty Carruth. In June of 1923 he was sentenced to
a year in federal prison for selling fraudulent oil leases, using a Ponzi scheme to
pay dividends from the sales of unproven leases. He returned to the oil business
after he was released and died in Fort Worth in 1931. W. H. Flowers also stayed
in the oil business, returning to his home in Smith County, where he died in 1925.
L. L. Steele likewise stayed in the oil business after the NWDP job. He stopped
teaching and went to law school. Later in life he was named to the Texas Tech
University Board of Regents and then to the Texas Highway Commission by
progressive governor James Allred. He died in Mexia in 1969.
Hickey continued in the newspaper business, writing for over 14 different
newspapers until his death from throat cancer in 1925.
Today Desdemona, like Texas socialism, is a lot quieter than in its boom years.

Tom and Clara Hickey’s grave at Resthaven Memorial Park, Lubbock. Photo by the author.

(Steve Rossignol is a retired member of IBEW LU 520, Austin, Texas, and Archivist
for the Socialist Party USA. He lives in Blanco County.)

(An earlier version of this article appeared in The Rag Blog, Austin, Texas.
http://www.theragblog.com/steve-rossignol-a-tale-of-baseball-socialism-and-oil/)

1
For details on the number of encampments and the number of Socialist elected officials in Texas, see the
collected issues of The Rebel 1911-1917 and the Biennial Reports of the Texas Secretary of State.
2
The team name appears in “Texas Trails: The Past of Desdemona”, Country Worlds On-Line, November 28, 2011;
and in Clay Coppedge, “Desdemona”, Texas Escapes, January 27, 2012, (accessed February 24, 2019),
http://www.texasescapes.com/ClayCoppedge/Desdemona.htm
3
The Rebel, July 5, 1913
4
Ibid.
5
Boyce House, Were You In Ranger?, (Ranger Historical Preservation Society), 1999, p. 61
6
John Robert Parmer legally changed his name to “Palmer” in the 1920’s. https://www.geni.com/people/John-
Robert-Palmer/6000000002602509806. (Accessed February 24, 2019).
7
Oral History Interview by Richard Mason with Inez Heeter, October 30, 1981, SWCAV0671 and SWCAV0672,
Southwest Collection, Texas Tech University
8
Silliman Evans, “West Texas Socialists Now Millionaire Oil Well Owners”, Fort Worth Star Telegram, August 11,
1919
9
Heeter Interview
10
Ibid.
11
“The Municipal Abattoir at Paris Texas”, Ice and Refrigeration, Vol. XXXIX, #4, October 1, 1910, pp. 143-147; Carl
D. Thompson, “information Desired by Information Department, The Socialist Party”, November 4, 1913, in the
Socialist Party of America Papers 1897-1976, Microfilm, Duke University
12
“Socialists Have Park”, The Rebel, September 2, 1911.
13
The Rebel, May 23, 1914, p.2
14
Seminole Sentinel, June 14, 1917, p.6
15
See for example the letter of Carl Rosson to Tom Hickey, June 5, 1917, in the Tom Hickey Papers, Southwest
Collection, Texas Tech University.
16
“Texas Anti-Conscriptionist…Shot to Death”, Ft Worth Star Telegram, June 5, 1917
17
The Farmers’ and Laborers’ Protective Association of America, Robert Wilson, (Master’s Thesis, Baylor
University), August 1973, p. 88
18
Heeter Interview
19
The Rebel, May 26th, 1917
20
Clarence Nugent to Clara Hickey, July 25, 1917, in the Tom Hickey Papers
21
Jeanette Keith, Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight, University of North Carolina Press, 2004, p. 91, p.220
22
Order of the Postmaster General, Order Number 431, June 16, 1917
23
http://baseball.wikia.com/wiki/Oil_Belt_League
24
https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=payne-001dee
25
The Dublin Progress and Telephone, December 24, 1920
26
Corsicana Daily Sun, August 12, 1924, p. 9
27
“Glimpses of the Desdemona Oil Boom”, John D. Palmer, West Texas Historical Association Year Book, Vol. 15,
October 1939, p.48. The author of this article was the son of John Robert Palmer, a member of the Desdemona
Socialists baseball team.
28
El Campo Citizen, August 19, 1919, p.6
29
Ibid.
30
Dublin Progress and Telephone, April 18. 1919, p.6; House, Were You in Ranger?, p.79
31
House, Ibid. p.70.
32
Tom Hickey to the Non-Partisan League, n.d., in the Tom Hickey papers.
33
Ibid.
34
House, p. 70.
35
”Silliman Evans, “West Texas Socialists Now Millionaires Oil Well Owners,” Fort Worth Star Telegram, August 11,
1919
36
Ibid.
37
House, p 77.
38
House, p.79
39
Ibid
40
Frank H. Bartholomew, “Big Fortune Made”, Altoona Mirror (Pennsylvania), November 18, 1922
41
Tom Hickey to the Texas Branch of the National Non-Partisan League, December 22, 1917, in the Tom Hickey
papers.
42
Ibid.
43
Tom Hickey to Clara Hickey, March 15, 1920, in the Tom Hickey papers.
44
“Alonzo Steele Dead”, The Rebel, July 1, 1911, p.1
45
The activities of the Steele family are documented in the various pages of The Rebel.
46
Tom Hickey to the Members of the Non-Partisan League, n.d., in the Tom Hickey papers.
47
“Statement of Facts in the Case of T. A. Hickey v. the National Workers Drilling and Production Company”, n.d.,
in the Tom Hickey Papers
48
Tom Hickey to W.H. Flowers and H.W. Elliott, June 15, 1920, in the Tom Hickey Papers
49
Letter to Stockholders of the National Workers Drilling and Production Company, September 26, 1922, in the
Tom Hickey papers.