The 1960s: Economic Change, Severance Tax, Vietnam War and the "Black 14"
This lecture focuses on at least four of the “organizing concepts”—“federal/state relations” (“Washington”); “boom-and-bust” and colonialism (“Wall Street”); diversity; and “Wyoming in the World.” Issues of “wilderness” and “self-image” arise as well.
As the 1960s began, minerals, tourism and agriculture remained central to Wyoming’s economy. Uranium, first mined in the previous decade, still provided substantial employment at Shirley Basin (north of Medicine Bow), Jeffrey City, Pumpkin Buttes (south of Gillette), and the Gas Hills (east of Riverton). Not only was uranium mined at these locations, but several companies constructed “uranium mills”—essentially processing plants—where the uranium was refined down to “yellow cake” before being shipped to out-of-state processing centers for further reduction for manufacture of nuclear fuel or weapons. Prices for yellow cake remained high during the decade—up to $40 per pound.
During the decade, Yellowstone National Park continued to experience record visitation. The National Park Service, during the 1950s, developed a planning document known as “Mission ‘66” in which the Service set 1966 as the year by which substantial improvements would be made in park facilities, primarily for the convenience of park visitors. Federal funding priorities had to accommodate military spending for the Vietnam War, so the ideal goals were not met by the target date, even though some modernization of facilities was completed. Just as in the 1950s, most visitors came to Yellowstone by car, with family members. Except for the two years when the road over Sylvan Pass was under construction and traffic hours limited, the East Entrance to the Park from northern Wyoming became one of the most popular ways to enter the park. In Jackson, south of Yellowstone, increasing number of visitors came to Grand Teton National Park. In the early 1960s, the Jackson Hole Ski Corporation built an extensive skiing complex near Teton Village. Wealthy people from around the country discovered Jackson Hole and many built or bought summer homes there in the 1960s.
From the territorial period until the late 1930s, the Wyoming State Tribune (and its predecessor publication the Cheyenne Daily Leader) circulated statewide. No other newspaper or media organization enjoyed distribution and the accompanying influence during that period. When the State Tribune merged with the locally published Wyoming Eagle in Cheyenne in the late 1930s, both papers continued publishing (the Eagle in the mornings, the State Tribune in the afternoons), but neither circulated outside Laramie County. Two Casper newspapers had merged early in the decade. In 1965, the publisher of the Casper Star-Tribune decided to circulate statewide. By the end of the decade, it was the statewide “newspaper of record.” About the same time, KTWO television in Casper started building translator towers in various Wyoming towns, becoming the first television station to broadcast essentially statewide. While the Cheyenne-based McCraken family’s company continued to own daily newspapers around the state, the papers operated independently. Neither of the two statewide media outlets (the Star-Tribune or KTWO-TV) was located in Cheyenne. Casper had become Wyoming’s “media center.”
The trend toward consolidation of ranches and farms into larger and larger units continued into the 1960s. Ranches and farms increasingly were purchased by large corporations or individuals with multiple holdings who did not live on the newly-acquired properties. Family ranching operations, common in Wyoming prior to World War II, diminished in number and proportion to the overall cattle production in the state.
By the early 1960s, the coal industry remained moribund. The Union Pacific Railroad and other lines through Wyoming converted their locomotives from coal-burning to diesel in the immediate post-World War II years. A market for coal as a locomotive fuel disappeared. Most Wyoming mines had relied entirely on that market. A small amount of coal was mined for small power plants, the most important near the WyoDak mine east of Gillette. For the many unemployed miners, some then working in other industries if they were able to stay in Wyoming, the future for coal seemed bleak.
Locally-owned oil refineries continued to contribute to the economies of Cody, Newcastle, Sinclair, and Thermopolis. Two aging refineries at Casper—Texaco and Amoco—continued to operate during the 1960s, but oil production in Wyoming fields began to level off. (Figures indicate that 1970 marked the peak production period for petroleum in Wyoming. After that, it gradually declined). Many oil fields, too, were aging by the 1960s with production coming through secondary recovery methods. Multinational companies continued to expand ownership in Wyoming oil fields, refineries, and pipelines during the decade.
Labor unions, powerful in some parts of the state since 1900, not only lost membership in the 1960s, but lost a critical legislative fight to maintain the “union shop.” Southern Wyoming, along the Union Pacific line, always had been “union country” with miners’ unions like the United Mine Workers and railroad unions (also known as “brotherhoods”) enjoying large memberships. With increasing mechanization in the mines and on the railroads, the numbers of employees in these industries continued to decline over the decade. With fewer workers to organize, unions no longer had the same political clout they had enjoyed in the interwar years.
A significant blow to organized labor came in 1963 when the Wyoming legislature passed (and Governor Cliff Hansen signed) the so-called “Right-to-Work” law. Essentially, the law weakened unions by outlawing the union shop. Proponents of the bill viewed it as an “individual choice” issue, but unions correctly recognized its corrosive impact on union organizing and power to negotiate with management. The declining numbers of union members in Wyoming demonstrated increasing employment in industries in which workers rarely organized such as tourism and in the “oil patch.”
Over all, the Wyoming economy was in a period of malaise during the 1960s. Out-migration of young people continued. Few were able to find career-enhancing jobs in the state. Enrollment grew rapidly at the University of Wyoming, but the cause was a function of the “baby-boom” generation coming to college age. Few people were moving to Wyoming. Population growth statewide stayed virtually flat with deaths barely being offset by natural increase or in-migration. This was to change dramatically in the following decade.
Even though the mineral industry was hardly robust, it seemed to be far more profitable than other sectors in the state. At the same time, school districts and counties continued to depend on property taxes for their support. The state sales tax was the central component for state government funds. Minor increases in the sales tax still provided the state with barely sufficient means to operate.
Politically, Wyoming entered the 1960s with a Democratic governor (J. J. “Joe” Hickey, elected over incumbent Milward Simpson in 1958) and two Democrats in the U. S. Senate. Senior Senator was Joseph C. O’Mahoney who had begun service during the New Deal, building seniority in the Senate until his upset defeat at the hands of Frank Barrett in the 1952 general election. Gale McGee, former UW history professor, was the other U. S. Senator.
In 1960, Wyoming Democrats were divided in their support for two U. S. Senators seeking the Democratic presidential nomination—Texan Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. Democratic state chairman Tracy McCraken, publisher of the Wyoming State Tribune and Wyoming Eagle, headed the state’s divided delegation to the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. As the roll call of the states on the first ballot moved alphabetically closer to “W,” observers realized that the Johnson forces could force a second ballot as long as the Wyoming delegation split as the members had earlier gone on record. When Wyoming’s turn came, however, young Bobby Kennedy, serving as his brother’s campaign manager, spoke to McCraken, pointing out that Wyoming could “make history” by casting a unanimous vote for Kennedy. When the microphone came on after the secretary called out, “WYOMING….11 delegate votes,” McCraken grabbed the microphone and boomed out, “Mr. Chairman, Wyoming casts ALL 11 of its votes for the next President of the United States, John F. Kennedy.” At that point, the band struck up, balloons starting falling and few people noticed the Lyndon Johnson supporters in the Wyoming delegration frantically trying to grab the now-dead microphone to contradict McCraken’s tally!
The state’s lone member of the U. S. House of Representatives in 1960 was Republican Keith Thomson, a Newcastle native and World War II veteran. National Democrats celebrated the election of John F. Kennedy to the presidency. A young man, Democrats generally assumed that even after he served out his second term, he would remain a political force to the end of the century and, perhaps, beyond.
Wyoming, Republicans similarly delighted in the 1960 election of Thomson to O’Mahoney’s seat when the senior senator retired at the end of his term. After the election was over, Thomson was enjoying a pack trip near his South Fork ranch in Park County when he was suddenly stricken with a heart attack. The 41-year-old senator-elect died before he could obtain treatment. In such cases, the law, at that time, provided that the governor would have the power to choose the replacement who would serve for the two years until the next general election. Democrat Joe Hickey resigned as governor, allowing for his Democratic Secretary of State Jack Gage to become acting governor. Gage’s first act was to appoint Hickey to the vacancy in the U. S. Senate. The move incensed Wyoming Republicans and set the stage, not only for Hickey’s loss in 1962 to Milward Simpson who he had defeated for governor in 1958, but Thomson’s widow Thyra to the first of a record six terms as Secretary of State. Republican Cliff Hansen was elected governor, moving to the U. S. Senate to replace the ailing Milward Simpson in 1966. Meanwhile, in the U. S. House of Representatives, veteran Rep. William Henry Harrison lost a primary race to John Wold, Casper geologist, who served one term in Congress only to lose to Democrat Teno Roncalio.
With Democrat McGee in the Senate and Roncalio in the U. S. House, Republican Hansen in the other Senate seat and Republican Stan Hathaway as governor, the two parties would have been competitively close for the rest of the decade. The party affiliations, however, did not account for the looming national issue of the late 1960s—the Vietnam War. McGee, the former professor of American foreign policy, staunchly defended the “domino policy” on Vietnam while World War II combat veteran Teno Roncalio, who had earned the Silver Star on D-Day at Normandy, early on opposed American involvement in the war. Yet, despite the antagonisms, the divided party continued to send Roncalio and McGee back to Congress, Roncalio to five terms and McGee to reelection in 1970. (He had won reelection handily in 1964, the year that Wyoming gave its three electoral votes to Democrat Lyndon Johnson in the presidential election).
Wyomingites generally were split over the Vietnam War although a majority still favored the American involvment. As the decade came to a close, American military intervention in Vietnam continued to escalate until, by the end in 1974, more than 50,000 American servicemen had died in Southeast Asia. By the time the war brought about the eventual downfall of Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal, more than 5,700 Wyomingites had served in combat in Vietnam and 137 of them were killed there.
The governor’s race in 1966 was unique in modern state history because, early on, it became a contest of issues rather than the more normal personality-driven races often occurring in Wyoming. A Casper lawyer (who had been one of four founders of the Casper Daily Star newspaper—later merged with the older Casper Tribune-Herald to become the Casper Star-Tribune) decided to run for governor in 1966 on the Democratic ticket. Ernest Wilkerson, the Lusk-born heir to the Wyoming Automotive stores around the state, campaigned almost exclusively on the proposition that Wyoming needed a severance tax on minerals. Minerals, he argued, were not renewable. Once they are gone, they can not be replaced. Consequently, should not Wyoming prepare for the day when minerals are all gone by charging a “severance” tax—a tax on “severing” the minerals from the ground?
Wilkerson’s campaign slogan, “Wyoming’s Wealth for Wyoming’s People” caught the attention of the mineral companies. Company payments temporarily boosted the state’s economy (at least in the form of ads in newspapers and on radio) as the companies campaigned against Wilkerson. His opponent, Stan Hathaway, a lawyer from agricultural Goshen County and former state Republican chairman, announced he was against the severance tax. Lobbyists for oil companies distributed car bumper stickers to employees and industry friends stating: “Wyoming’s Oil is Our Bread and Butter.” The implied message was that if a severance tax were to be instituted, big mineral companies would “move elsewhere” and, thus, Wyomingites were in danger of losing jobs.
Wilkerson failed to convince the majority. When voters went to the polls in November 1966, Hathaway was elected and the mineral company lobbyists seemed to breathe sighs of relief. In their minds, threat of a severance tax disappeared with Wilkerson’s defeat. Soon after he took office as governor, however, Hathaway was told that the state treasury was down to some $85! As he told the story years later, he was forced to come up with a revenue source. In 1969, after building a coalition with Democrats and Republican legislators mostly from non-mineral-producing counties, Hathaway was able to pass a modest severance tax. It was the first in the state’s nearly 80-year history. (Unsuccessful efforts were made during the Constitutional Convention in 1889, in a general election for a constitutional amendment in 1924, and for severance tax legislation in the early 1950s).
Severance tax revenues were designed to spread the tax burden more equitably among Wyoming industries. Strictly speaking, the severance tax is not a tax on the mineral industry. The mining companies pass on the costs in the form of slightly higher charges for the minerals they produce, paid for by buyers of the refined product. In essence, it is an “export” tax paid by public utility users in other states who buy electricity from companies that use Wyoming-mined coal to fire their power plants.
Hathaway’s timing proved to be fateful. Shortly after the severance tax was instituted, the Arab oil embargo of the early 1970s caused mineral prices of energy minerals to increase dramatically. At the same time, demands for Wyoming’s rich mineral resources brought about an influx of (mostly out-of-state-owned) mineral companies. The huge increases in mining employment brought severe impact to many Wyoming communities.
Hathaway and the Wyoming legislature did not intend for mineral severance tax to be entirely spent on current government needs. They passed a law to create the “Permanent Mineral Trust Fund” from which interest continues to be derived while the principal “stays in the bank” gaining in value. The monies provided by the interest coming from the trust fund are designed to cushion the state from the inevitable busts that natural resource-based economies periodically experience. As it was designed, the Permanent Mineral Trust Fund will continue to provide money for state government, even after the minerals are gone or no longer mined in the state.
In other areas, Hathaway broke with earlier Republican tradition. Instead of trying to contain the growth of state government during his two terms as governor, he added more state agencies. He established the Department of Planning and Economic Development (to encourage industry to locate or relocate to Wyoming), and the Department of Environmental Quality that would provide state regulation over potential pollutions sources that would otherwise be regulated by the newly created Environmental Protection Agency, set up in the federal government during Richard Nixon’s presidency. Hathaway also consolidated state government purchasing, budgeting, personnel and building maintenance under a new agency called the Department of Administration and Fiscal Control (DAFC). Despite parsimonious legislatures, state government was larger in 1970 than it had been going into the 1960s decade.
Problems of racial discrimination continued in Wyoming in the 1960s, just as elsewhere in the nation. The Wyoming legislature had passed the Public Accommodations Act in Wyoming in 1957 (see the Moore-Ibach article in Readings) and Congress passed federal civil rights laws. Nonetheless, problems continued in many Wyoming towns, not only for African-Americans but for Mexican-Americans and Native Americans. In the 1960s, Wyoming remained one of the least racially diverse states in the Union.
At the beginning of the decade, the Mississippi-born president of the University of Wyoming, Dr. George “Duke” Humphrey continued to promote the university’s commitments to “big-time” intercollegiate athletics. He hired a visionary athletic director, Glenn “Red” Jacoby, who then hired a succession of ambitious, mostly young, coaches. Among them were Bowden Wyatt (1947-52, leaving to become football coach at Tennessee), Phil Dickens (1953-56, going on to Indiana) and Bob Devaney (1957-61, who went on to greater prominence as football coach and athletic director at the University of Nebraska). In the 1960s, a substantial proportion of the African-American students at UW were participants in various sports programs, many on scholarship. Yet, in other aspects, African American students often felt the university did little to promote diversity. Coach Lloyd Eaton, who followed Devaney as Cowboy head football coach, enjoyed several successful seasons, one culminating in an appearance in the Sugar Bowl on New Year’s Day. Eaton, an “old-school” coach who believed in absolute control of a coach over his players, was surprised one day when several of the African American players on his team asked if they could wear black arm bands on their uniforms in the forthcoming game against Brigham Young University (BYU). The LDS (Mormon) church, owners of BYU, did not allow African Americans to hold church offices at that time. Eaton not only refused to allow the wearing of the armbands, but in a meeting with the 14 African American members of the team, told them that because they wanted to “protest,” they were not longer on the team. The incident is described in the article “Fired by Conscience,” by Clifford Bullock in Readings in Wyoming History).
But not all Wyomingites shared Eaton’s view of demonstrations, civil rights, and race. Wyoming residents of all races participated in efforts to end segregation around the country, particularly in the South. One such individual was a white minister originally from Casper named James Reeb. In 1965, Reeb accompanied civil rights marchers to Selma, Alabama, where they intended to bring national attention to segregation against African Americans. A white supremaist in Selma murdered Reeb, making him one of many martyrs to civil rights during the decade. Later, when President Lyndon Johnson signed the federal law putting legal teeth into the laws requiring that no one be denied the right to vote on the basis of race, he mentioned Reeb’s death as an example of the sacrifice made to make “all people free.” There is an irony—a Wyoming person becoming a martyr for civil rights while the football coach at the state’s only university was kicking Black players off his team just for wanting to express their civil rights. Unlike the 1950s in Wyoming, a decade of “silence” and little controversy, the 1960s were the opposite—a decade of questioning, introspection, demonstration and turbulence. Out of it came a renewed emphasis on “equality,” as well as a severance tax—seen by most as a solution to the wild fluctuations of a “boom-and-bust” economy.