The Frontier

H.L. Hunt opened his first cotton plantation in 1912, inspired by his father's romantic tales of the South, but quickly learned it was unprofitable without exploited labor.

His most valuable early trait was not persistence after failure, but his side business: Hunt ran a gambling parlor and prostitution operation in Arkansas. His FBI file notes he won his first oil lease in a card game or bought it with criminal proceeds.

Hunt was a serial adulterer who cheated on his first wife, Lyda Bunker, by 1917. He later bigamously married a waitress, Frania Tye, in 1925 without divorcing Lyda, fathering children with both women.

He was a neglectful father who repeatedly gambled his family's security on oil speculation, leaving them destitute for months. His eldest son, Hassie, felt personally rejected by him.

Hunt's fortune was built on the Daisy Bradford No. 1 oil field in East Texas, which he leased from prospector C.M. Joiner. It became the world's largest producing oil field, ending his boom-bust cycles.

By the start of World War II, H.L. Hunt personally owned more oil reserves than all the Axis powers combined. This fact underscores the Allied resource advantage.

He opposed U.S. entry into WWII but reversed course when he realized war profits were tax-free due to oil depletion allowances. He then arranged a safe military commission for his son Hassie in Washington, D.C.

Hassie Hunt suffered a psychotic break in 1945, destroying furniture and screaming about betrayal by the Rockefellers and his father's enemies. His sister Margaret told H.L. Hunt, 'You destroyed Hassie.'

In 1946, Hunt broke an East Coast coal strike by supplying 85% of the region's fuel needs with his non-union natural gas, demonstrating his market control.

Life magazine named him the richest man on Earth in 1948 with an estimated net worth of $263 million, equivalent to about $3.5 billion today.

Hunt envisioned a utopian libertarian state where votes in elections were weighted by how much tax a citizen paid, a system critics called fascism-adjacent.

To promote his ideology and avoid taxes, he founded Facts Forum in 1951, a 'nonpartisan' media outlet that was a tax-exempt vehicle for right-wing propaganda. It received an estimated $5 million per year in free airtime.

Facts Forum laundered its talking points by polling its members and sending the results to newspapers as legitimate public opinion surveys, a pioneering propaganda tactic.

Despite his wealth, Hunt was a poor public speaker. He hired former FBI agent Dan Smoot as a spokesman to front Facts Forum programming, which exploited the FCC's Fairness Doctrine to get free broadcast time.

H.L. Hunt was the first ultra-rich right-wing figure to build media organizations specifically to force his personal politics on the public, creating a model later followed by figures like Elon Musk.

Robert Evans notes Hunt's family history includes a Confederate grandfather, Waddie Thorpe Hunt, who formed a volunteer Confederate militia in 1860 and was killed in 1864, though Hunt's claim he freed his slaves early is uncorroborated.

Hunt was homeschooled and purportedly learned to read before age three, developing a preternatural skill for card counting and risk analysis that defined his later business and gambling success.

A pivotal childhood incident, where Hunt was caught nursing from his mother at age seven, fostered a lifelong belief in his own specialness and exemption from normal rules.

Hunt's primary biographer, Jerome Tuccille, was a libertarian activist whose 1985 book 'Trump' was the first biography of Donald Trump, and his writing often included speculative, florid descriptions of his subjects' physical appeal.

After winning a large sum from Mexican laborers in a card game, Hunt fled in paranoia, believing they would kill him despite no evidence of a threat, revealing a deep-seated distrust of others and racial prejudice.

Hunt inherited $5,000 after his father's death, which he combined with gambling winnings to buy a farm in Arkansas in 1911, marking the end of his itinerant youth and the start of his serious business pursuits.

Hunt's father, Hash Hunt, was elected the first Republican sheriff of Fayette County, Illinois in 1894, representing a political shift from the family's Confederate roots.