- Title: WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH TEXAS? What's Wrong With Our Politicians, the Press and the People?
- Author: The Houston Press
- Date: May 24th, 1928
- Condition: Very Good - Age-relating toning with minimal paper separations.
- Inches: 17 1/8 x 23 3/4 [Paper]
- Centimeters: 43.49 x 57.78 [Paper]
- Product ID: 308657
WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH TEXAS?
This striking 1928 broadside directly from the Cullinan estate, is styled as a full‑page political advertisement from The Houston Press, bellows its challenge in giant type: “WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH TEXAS? What’s Wrong With Our Politicians, the Press and the People?” Framed as an open letter to Texans and signed by oil magnate J. S. Cullinan, it recaps how Houston won the coveted 1928 Democratic National Convention, only to see state party infighting, prohibition politics, and “smoke‑screen” moralizing threaten to derail the city’s hard‑won moment on the national stage. In dense twin columns of text, Cullinan invokes the First Amendment and the Eighteenth Amendment, lambasting dry politicians and a timid press for forgetting both basic constitutional liberties and common civic decency, and warning that party bosses’ back‑room maneuvering insults the taxpayers who financed the convention hall. The piece closes with the blunt, theatrical tagline “POSTED KEEP OUT” above his signature, transforming the page into both a protest placard and a manifesto—a vivid snapshot of Houston’s oil‑era elite pushing back against prohibition‑era moral politics and demanding that Texas live up to its democratic ideals.
The verso preserves a full interior page from the May 24, 1928 issue of The Houston Press, offering a vivid snapshot of everyday urban life during the late Jazz Age. Society columns, fashionably posed society photographs, and local “coming events” share space with advertisements for electric irons, patent medicines, furniture, rugs, and butter—an energetic mix of social news and consumer culture that forms a perfect period backdrop to Cullinan’s bold political broadside on the other side.
Cullinan in the 1920s
J. S. Cullinan was one of Houston’s most influential oilmen and civic power‑brokers, already famous as a founder of the Texas Company, later known as Texaco. Having moved his corporate operations to Houston earlier in the century, he spent the decade expanding a network of new exploration, production, and pipeline companies along the Texas Gulf Coast and in fields such as Humble and East Texas, helping solidify Houston’s status as the capital of the state’s petroleum industry. At the same time, he played a leading role in civic affairs—serving in earlier years as president of the Houston Chamber of Commerce, championing development of the Houston Ship Channel, and investing in high‑end residential projects like the Shadyside subdivision that catered to the city’s emerging oil elite. By the late 1920s, when he issued outspoken political advertisements such as “What’s the Matter with Texas?”, Cullinan was a wealthy elder statesman of the oil boom, using his public platform to defend business interests, oppose Prohibition politics, and promote a vision of Houston as a modern, nationally prominent city.
Background on Creator
The Houston Press was a lively Scripps‑Howard daily afternoon newspaper that operated in Houston from 1911 to 1964. Founded in late September 1911, it quickly earned a reputation as the city’s most colorful paper, known for splashy coverage of crime and politics and for hard‑hitting exposés aimed at keeping local officials under scrutiny. By the 1920s it was a well‑established voice in Houston civic life, published from a new downtown plant and reaching tens of thousands of readers each day, which made its pages a prime forum for pointed political advertising like J. S. Cullinan’s anti‑prohibition broadside.