Documentary Review of
“High Stakes:
The Life and Times of E. W.
Marland”
Reviewed by Dan McDonald
I suspect most people outside of
Oklahoma won’t get an opportunity to see the documentary with acted scenes of “High
Stakes: The Life and Times of E. W. Marland.” Growing up in Illinois I never
heard anything of the story of E. W. Marland, but after moving to Oklahoma as a
young adult you began to hear the story of one of Oklahoma’s legendary oil men.
The opening scenes of the documentary are captured on the trailer
here. As far as I know the DVD
version of the documentary is available for purchase only at the preserved Marland
Mansion near Ponca City for $20. I hope a broader distribution is planned in
the future. I will try to capture in this piece what I found interesting and
inspiring about the movie/documentary.
Marland’s was not in the truest
sense the rags to riches story. He came from a family that had acquired some
wealth. His father worked in the steel industry in Pittsburgh and had invented
a banding material to be used in shipping cotton bales. The patented banding
material provided enough wealth for the family to see to Marland’s education in
the field of law. But E. W. Marland determined that a law career was not
something he wanted. His approach to work was “hands on” learn from the ground
up. His legal studies may not have prepared him as much for his future success
as his acquiring the hobby of playing cards which he picked up as a university
student. He learned that one could do well playing cards if he could both understand
the hand he had been dealt while also being able to read the faces of those in
the game. It would seem that one would never quite be able to understand
Marland, the businessman without understanding how Marland liked the thrill of
risk. It would help make him and threaten to break him but once he was broke he
would simply move to pursuing the next opportunity.
It would be a mistake though to
imagine that Marland was simply a high stakes gambler. Once he entered the
young oil industry as a wildcatter seeking to discover oil, he poured himself
into learning what the relatively young scientific field of geology could teach
him about how to better seek oil. He worked at first in the Western
Pennsylvania areas and proved himself one of the better wildcatters. John D.
Rockefeller hoped to buy him out, but Marland wanted to remain an independent
oilman. Then he heard from a friend stationed at Fort Sill in Oklahoma that there
were those who believed there might be oil in Oklahoma. Marland decided to give
the area a look. Marland’s interest in geology convinced him as he looked at
some outcropping that the lower plains looked promising for discovering oil. He
decided to try to persuade creditors and investors to back his efforts to find
oil and applied those lessons he had learned playing cards to convince those at
his table to throw their money into supporting him as he played his hand.
Marland threw everything he owned into the venture and finally struck oil as he
was nearly completely out of credit. Within ten years Marland Oils was
producing an estimated ten percent of global oil production.
Marland’s father had taught E. W.
Marland that there was a responsibility towards others that came with wealth.
Marland worked out this responsibility by seeking to make sure that his
employees who helped make him wealthy were given opportunity to better their
lives. He also figured that if he paid his employees more than others paid their
employees that they would be happier, more productive employees. He created a
school for those of his employees who wished to learn more skills to advance
their usefulness to his company and their earnings for their family. He offered
low interest loans so that the employees could own their own homes, and
provided free medical and dental benefits. He gave to area charities. One of
the charities in the early twentieth century that Marland respected and gave to
was the YMCA. Marland had such a high regard for them he sought to be able to
use their symbol as the basis for his corporate symbol. The YMCA agreed to sell
him the rights to make use of their logo. You can see the similarities between
the Marland Oils logo and the YMCA logo.
The Marland Oils symbol
The YMCA symbol
The boom years were amazing, but the
oil industry was a competitive industry and Marland was a competitor by nature
and he had that drive to find and process oil wherever there was oil to be
discovered. He began bringing together geologists to discover oil worldwide,
and employed scientists to do research to figure out new innovative uses for
petroleum being discovered and processed by his oil company. That led to a
fateful decision. He needed capital to finance his new investments and being
confident that his investments would pay out he made an agreement with banking
magnate J. P. Morgan for the financing he needed. Morgan was one of the
shrewdest men of business in the world at the time. Morgan gave him the
financing but required that Marland agree that Morgan’s Bank and Trust Company
would be the sole company handling Marland’s credit needs. Morgan also needed
an officer on the board of Marland Oils. It was a horrible decision by Marland.
He became a victim of his own confidence. Oil discoveries in Texas, and a
downturn in the global economy during the thirties, caused Marland Oils to lose
money and now only J. P. Morgan could be used as a source of credit. To make a
long story short, Morgan forced Marland to enter a merger with a couple of
other small oil companies. Marland would no longer run the corporation which
would be known as Continental Oil Company or Conoco. Marland resigned from the
company he had built and many of the company’s longest serving employees were
dismissed since many of them had loyalties to Marland. This was the world
before American employees had rights.
In the 1920’s Marland had built a
mansion near Ponca City and adjacent to the mansion, he built a golf course
which he then opened to public use without charge. After being run off from his
own company, he could afford taxes only with the help of friends, and could not
afford to live in the mansion. He and his wife lived in the gardener’s quarters
while the house remained vacant.
It might seem that Marland would
have drifted off into obscurity, but once more he decided to offer his
abilities to people that might invest in his ideas and dreams. Oklahoma
struggled with the Great Depression, perhaps more than any other state in the
Union. Thousands of Oklahomans died during the Dust Bowl years. Unemployment
was high and the lives of Oklahomans looking for work became the stuff of
Steinbeck novels and those who turned to bank robberies became legend as well.
Marland began thinking he had some political ideas that might help Oklahoma.
Marland had come to Oklahoma as a
Republican, but with the Great Depression he was attracted to FDR’s New Deal
policies. He began to envision how the state of Oklahoma and the nation could
be remade into a better place to live. He was first elected to Congress, the
first Democrat elected in his congressional district. He worked at getting
banking and pension reforms passed. He then decided to run for Oklahoma
Governor. He championed conservation projects to avoid the massive land erosion
problems that plagued Oklahoma in the Dust Bowl years. Oklahoma has a tendency
to have large spring rains that create flooding and then dry summer months and at
times lengthy drought. Marland began seeking to build dams to offer flood
control, create reservoirs, and produce hydroelectric power help to bring
electricity to all of Oklahoma’s residents. He became one of the officials that
helped to lay the foundation for Oklahoma’s recovery from its Dust Bowl Depression
days to its moving forward in its post-Depression days. Marland also
accomplished something else Oklahoma’s three governors before him did not
accomplish. He followed three consecutive governors who were impeached by the
legislature. He created enemies while governor because that is the nature of decision
making, but the legislature never found grounds to impeach him, so at the time
that was a positive contribution to Oklahoma politics.
Sometimes you watch a movie of a
legacy of a man such as E. W. Marland, and you wonder how he would live life
now. I suspect if Marland lived today he wouldn’t necessarily be an oil man. I
would imagine him as a man of science, a man imagining his life needed to be
about helping others as well as creating new things, but it seems like part of
who he was included not only pursuing high stakes but also tackling life with
innovation. That is certainly needed in today’s oil industry where providing
energy without contributing to the destruction of ecosystems is a challenge,
but a man like Marland would perhaps have thrown his energy into a much
different direction if living today.
All in all, the man who enjoyed the challenge of pursuing high
stakes left Oklahomans one of the most impressive and colorful legacies in our
state’s history. There are also other interesting stories I can’t share with
you because this is already a long piece. But one piece of information I can’t
resist sharing is something of the story of Marland’s surviving widow after his
death. Marland’s first wife died at an early age, probably due to cancer. His
second wife was a controversial choice and much younger than him. After Marland
died, his second wife who was not fond of being in the limelight became a
missing person. For twenty years almost no one knew her whereabouts and some
believed something had happened to her. In the 1960’s most people didn’t know
who the older woman was taking part in war protests and marching with civil
rights protesters. But friends of the family continued to seek her whereabouts
and eventually after twenty years of seeking anonymity returned to Ponca City.
The mansion Marland built only to be able to live in the Gardener’s quarters
had been purchased for dimes on the dollar by a Catholic order. She was granted
to live in the quarters where she and her husband had lived. Eventually the
Catholic Church decided to sell the grounds and mansion as monastic living was
in decline at the time. Marland’s widow wrote a letter proposing that the
grounds be purchased and maintained as a museum for the public. The E. W.
Marland mansion near Ponca City remains one of Oklahoma’s favorite attractions.
It seems right to remember a one of a kind man, and it seems right that the one
who encouraged the public preservation of this part of history should be the
one of kind widow he left behind. One might wonder if there really was a
Marland Oils Company accounting for ten percent of the world’s oil production?
Was there really an E.W. Marland, whose widow who disappeared for twenty years?
Was this Oklahoma story real or is it the stuff of legends? I suppose there is
a bit of history and legend in Oklahoma’s telling the story of E. W. Marland.
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