Fifty miles inland, Houston is one of the nation’s principal world ports. Being rich in oil and natural gas, it has come to dominate two mammoth industries, petrochemicals and the sending of natural gas to the nation. For half a century beginning in the early 1900s, Houston belonged to oil. For the next half-century, it may belong to space.

Oil and its big quick profits—little is said of its big quick losses—and the extravagant legends about oil riches did more than anything except the Houston Ship Channel to give Houston its One Million. The city got a foretaste of its oil destiny thirty-five years before the Spindletop gusher roared in when Richard W. Dowling, the Confederate hero of the Battle of Sabine Pass, and John M. Fennerty formed a company in 1866 for “Mechanical operations in mining and boring for oil....” Their project was ridiculed, and its outcome is unknown.

The historian Andrew Forest Muir has shown that two critical periods in the growth of Houston were the half-decade from 1857 to 1861, when it became the rail center of Texas, and the decade beginning with the Spindletop gusher in 1901. Two others are the decade after the Houston Ship Channel was opened late in 1914—a period further stimulated by World War I—and the fifteen years beginning just before World War II. The inception of the federal space laboratory begins a fifth cycle of growth.

Houston’s quick growth between 1940 and 1960, when its population rose from twenty-first to seventh place among American cities, owed to the linking of three benefits: the ship channel, which gave the city access to the world; immense resources of oil, natural gas, sulphur, lime, salt, and water; and the fact that the product of one chemical plant is often the raw material of another. This combination created on the banks of the ship channel one of the world’s greatest concentrations of petrochemical industries—chemical plants dependent on the by-products of refining oil. The tempo increased in the early 1960s, when the Monsanto Chemical Company began building the world’s largest ethylene plant at a cost of fifty million dollars. Du Pont began building a hydrofluoric acid plant, and an important polypropylene plastic and film plant was being built.

During the 1950s Houston was a leading example of the new urban America caused by the economic impetus of World War II and the increased post-war migration of rural people to cities. No period in the city’s history approaches the importance of World War II and the years after. Before the war Houston was an ambitious small city. A few years afterward, its former hopes lying in the shadows of sudden and preposterous growth, the city was altered in character, aspirations, and appearance.

Houston’s formidable roles in the oil and gas industries, in the manufacturing of oil-field equipment, and in the nationwide distribution of gas are widely understood but seldom comprehended. The metropolitan area alone, which has seven oil refineries, produces nearly eighty thousand barrels of oil daily. Two major oil companies, the Humble Oil and Refining Company and the Continental Oil Company, and hundreds of smaller ones have their headquarters in Houston, most of whose downtown skyscrapers were built by or for oil, gas, and banking.

The Tennessee Gas Transmission Company was organized in 1944; twelve years later its assets passed a billion dollars, a speed of growth that may never have been equaled in American business. Paul Kayser, president of the El Paso Natural Gas Company, was asked at a press conference in El Paso why his company, which owns El Paso’s tallest building and supplies West Texas gas to western states, has its headquarters in Houston. He answered that the only place in America to keep in touch with the oil business is Houston.

In 1960 most of the nation’s sulphur deposits, around 6 per cent of its petroleum reserves, and around 10 per cent of its refining capacity were in a nineteen-county area surrounding Houston. An estimated three-quarters of the nation’s petrochemicals production comes from the Texas Gulf Coast area. Shipbuilding, an integrated steel mill, and paper mills are other important aspects of the city’s economy.

It is a paradox that the Houston metropolitan area, which is hundreds of miles from the state’s chief cattle-raising areas, has more cattle than any other county in Texas. Irrigation has made the county a rice producer of importance; within a hundred-mile radius of Houston is grown 28 per cent of the nation’s rice. And Houston, which is the headquarters for Anderson, Clayton & Company, the largest cotton concern in the world, is one of the world’s leading spot cotton markets.

Houston’s gusto in the 1950s was epitomized by “M” Day, as July 3, 1954, was called. When statisticians divined ahead of time that the city’s metropolitan population would reach one million on that date, a festival was planned to welcome the millionth citizen. Houston Bucks were printed in a denomination of $1,000,000. A huge thermometer, its peak registering 1,000,000, was put at the Rice Hotel corner and the reading raised a notch a day. Thousands of auto-bumper signs said “I’m One in a Million—Houston.” Many concerns changed their postage-meter messages to read “Houston’s a Million Strong.”

At a town meeting held in Hermann Park on July 3, Mr. Million was identified as B. C. McCasland, Jr., who moved to the city the day before from Clinton, Mississippi. Aged thirty-six, a geologist, and the father of five children, he typified the city at that moment. Receiving gifts said to be worth $10,000, he was flown to the eleven cities then larger than Houston—to talk about Houston. He moved away some time afterward, but “M” Day may not have been premature. A year and a half later, when the Bureau of the Census estimated the populations of Houston, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Washington, the population of Houston was put at 1,077,000.