Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2022/Fall/Section093/Billy Bates

Overview

Billy Bates, born in Webster County, Missouri, was a pipeliner who was interviewed under the Federal Writer's Project on June 15th, 1939 by Dan Garrison.

Billy Bates
Occupation	Pipeliner
Parent(s)	Old Man and Ma
Relatives	Two brothers

Biography

Early Life

Billy Bates was born on July 5th, 1913, in Webster County, Missouri. He was the middle child of three boys in his family. Carl Bates was the oldest brother, while Finley Bates was the youngest. The three brothers were raised by their grandparents for most of their childhood, while their father struggling constantly and their mother always being sick with cancer. Bates’ father would struggle with alcoholism, maintaining a job, and keeping a consistent relationship with his family until he was arrested.

After being realized from prison, Bates’ father had a major reformation. Claiming to “find god” he soon developed into the father that the three brothers had been missing during their early childhood. Bates recalled never seeing a man more changed in his life. However even with this change, their mother urged the three brothers to stray as far away from becoming like their father. The family moved to Burbank, Oklahoma for a short period of time before their father’s job, working in oil fields, required the Bates family to move to Seminole, Oklahoma.

In Seminole, the family lived in a tent for a short period of time until they all got together to build a two-room shack where they all then lived in. In Seminole, the Bates lived in an area called “Shacktown,” where most of the poorer families resided. During his early teens, Bates struggled to maintain a good education, constantly getting in small trouble around the neighborhood with his friends. Bates lived in a town referred to as a “boom town” which was a town undergoing rapid growth due to sudden prosperity.” In this town, he found himself often easily distracted, further taking himself away from education.

Later Life

To keep himself in line, Bates decided to acquire a job especially with his father having a history of struggling to maintain one and his mother being unable to work because of the cancer. At 15 years old, Bates joined a pipeline team that worked in the oil field. Usually, those jobs required their workers to be at least 18 years of age, but Bates lied about his age, claiming to be 18. He was hired because he not only looked the part, but also had tremendous strength for his natural age. He would continue working in the pipelining industry, finding it enjoyable and proud of his work. He worked for a business called “the Carter” from 1928 up until the spring of 1930.

Due to the Great Depression, everyone in the Bates family, including Billy, was fired from their jobs. The family struggled, as they had no money saved up from their prior work to fall back on. Soon after this, Bates' mother died from cancer and the neighborhood helped bury her. The family started to undergo a downward spiral. Carl, the eldest brother, turned to stealing oil field equipment, and was soon caught and thrown in prison. Finley, the youngest, was killed in Amarillo looking for a job. Bates' father returned to his old ways, becoming a raging alcoholic, becoming harsh and mean, and later marrying an 18-year-old.

Bates continued going around, hopping from job to job trying to maintain any work he could get his hands on. Regardless of having a job or not, he always managed to get by. He lost contact of his father, with the 18-year-old wife leaving him and then disappearing.

Social Context

Unemployment Peaks during the Great Depression

Unemployment in the 1930s

The Great Depression was one of the darkest times to be alive in American history. The economy and opportunities to make a living for yourself went to shambles. “Unemployment was one of the great curses of the depression. Widely accepted estimates show that the percentage of the US civilian labour force without work rose from 2.9 in 1929 to 22.9 in 1932." This rapid spike in the US labor force had tremendous economic impact, where the government had to think of ways to give Americans jobs to help the economy just struggle to get by. Millions of families were unable to support one another. There were many factors to the buildup of the Great Depression, which was the ultimate reason as to why the unemployment rates skyrocketed, with the stock crash of 1929 causing the most damage. Even during the 1930s, “Growth of labour inputs was sluggish, impaired by the impact of the New Deal." Due to this small input of progress within the nation, and unemployment rising, the average American families were bringing in some of the lowest income rates in the history of the nation. This feat had future impacts with birthrates because “At very low levels of income, such as those in a number of southern states during the depths of the Great Depression, a decrease in state per capita income had powerful negative effects on incomes later in life." Even beyond the 1930s, the lack of employment played a great toll on the American civilization, with some families opting to not have as many children as before because they simply could not afford it. This was a very important part of history where the US government has learned from the previous mistakes, with future recessions being extremely milder in comparison.

The Great Depression left thousands of men out of jobs and scrambling to get food for them and their families.

Pipelining Industry

The American Pipeline Industry is perhaps one of the most underrated and unnoticed Achievements in the country’s history. Natural case in America was started to become a very prevalent element to everyday life in American households and livelihoods, and this was all due to the increasing strength and size in the pipelining system that the US created. “As is the case now, people didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to that new network, but it was revolutionizing the energy industry. By the end of the 1930s, natural gas had become the primary heating fuel in cities like Houston, Texas and Denver, Colorado." Along with this rapidly growing industry, it became one of the few bright beacons of hope for Americans in terms of providing job opportunities. The jobs required toughness and strength, and in many cases involving very hard labor; however, considering the circumstances for the time, many Americans were willing to put the work in to help provide for themselves and families during the Great Depression. “By 1920, the American Petroleum Institute estimates there were almost 40,000 miles of pipeline in the country. In the following decade, that number tripled, as welding technology made it easier to build long pipelines. Industry videos promoted the “great network” of “lines of pipe, alive with racing oil!” During World War II, German U-boats would sink and torpedo strike many US Oil tankers, impacting those who relied on oil as a source of power and fuel. This highlighted the necessity of natural gas and the pipeline system, which would advertise being unimpacted by any effects from the war. Companies built more pipeline in the next two decades than any time before or since. Without the burst of the American pipelining system, who knows where the nation would be in today’s standards. It helped create jobs, while also powering a nation in need.

Removal of Prohibition

Removal of liquor during Prohibition

Prohibition was a nationwide ban on the sale and import of alcoholic beverages that lasted from 1920 to 1933. Protestants, Progressives, and women all spearheaded the drive to institute Prohibition. Prohibition led directly to the rise of organized crime, with gangsters and mobsters illegally distributing alcohol all over the nation. It seemed enacting Prohibition only hurt the country, with “income tax collections had dropped precipitously (along with personal incomes), and the federal government was desperate for revenue, having forfeited an estimated $11 billion in alcohol-related taxes over the course of Prohibition." The money that the government was missing out on only contributed to the failure of the economy, ultimately playing a large role in the Great Depression in the 1930s. On top of missing out of tax revenue, it also removed a large amount of jobs that the US once provided, increasing unemployment rates, and adding to the causation of the Great Depression. “The 18th Amendment, which ushered in Prohibition, had forced an estimated 250,000 alcohol industry employees out of work. Now, with a quarter of the U.S. labor force jobless and people growing increasingly desperate, this seemed absurd.” With crime rates increasing and a dying, desperate economy, the government had no other option but to revoke the Prohibition Act. After doing this, alcohol consumption, which led to Alcoholism, increased in the country, it was safer in terms of it at least being professionally manufactured. There were also developing group dedicated to help those who had become alcoholics. “Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How More than One Hundred Men Have Recovered from Alcoholism, published in 1939, also articulates a hope. Its subtitle announces it: how to recover from alcoholism” is an example of a book that was published in the time to help those fight and overcome alcoholism, which made money, which therefore helped the economy. It also had an instant help with recovering and bouncing back from the Great Depression, “’Before Prohibition, the distilling and brewing industries were the fifth or sixth largest employer in America,’ Okrent says. ‘So, bringing it back was an incredible, privately financed jobs program.'"

References[edit | edit source]

Crafts, Nicholas, and Peter Fearon. "Lessons from the 1930s Great Depression." Oxford Academic, October 1, 2010. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxrep/grq030

Greenspan, Jesse. "How the Misery of the Great Depression Helped Vanquish Prohibition." HISTORY. January 2, 2019. https://www.history.com/news/great-depression-economy-prohibition.

Joyce, Stephanie. "The Strange History Of The American Pipeline." KUNC August 5, 2014. https://doi.org/https://www.kunc.org/business/2014-08-05/the-strange-history-of-the-american-pipeline.

Marsh, John. "The Emotional Life of the Great Depression." Oxford Academic. October 31, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198847731.001.0001.

"The Pipeliner." Interview by Dan Garrison, date June 15, 1939, Folder 829 in the Federal Writers' Project papers #3709, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. https://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/03709/id/1051/rec/1

Thomasson, Melissa A. "Hard times in the land of plenty: The effect on income and disability later in life for people born during the great depression." ScienceDirect. October 11, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eeh.2014.05.004.