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Diana Davids Hinton, The Texas Railroad Commission: Understanding Regulation in America to the Mid-Twentieth Century, Journal of American History, Volume 93, Issue 2, September 2006, Page 576, https://doi.org/10.2307/4486342
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To a non-Texan, it may seem unusual that the state agency that has played the most important role in the economic development of modern Texas is the Texas Railroad Commission (trc). Even stranger, the commission's most significant regulatory arena has not been railroads but the petroleum industry. Oddest of all, despite its significance both to Texas and to the national petroleum industry, the commission has been relatively neglected by scholars. The most recent monograph on the commission, David F. Prindle's Petroleum Politics and the Texas Railroad Commission (1981), studies its relations with independent oilmen rather than offering a history of the agency. William R. Childs's The Texas Railroad Commission is thus a most welcome contribution to the scholarship, though, as the title indicates, Childs is more concerned with the dynamics of regulation—what circumstances, ideas, and values gave rise to and sustained regulation—than with the agency's history. Looking at the period from the commission's founding to the early 1960s, Childs explains how the commission gained regulatory credibility. In fact, the commission had so much success establishing credibility that by the late 1940s, its chairman, Ernest Thompson, could assert that the trc controlled world oil prices, an authority of mythic proportions. It is ironic that, even as the emergence of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (opec) revealed the limits of the trc's actual power, opec leaders seemed to have envisioned themselves with that same mythic authority.
