Edison to Enron: Energy Markets and Political Strategies
Book 2 Internet Appendices
Chapter 10: The Price of Bankruptcy (John Henry Kirby)
- 10.1 John Henry Kirby and Ken Lay: Parallels
- 10.2 Timber Conservation Practices
- 10.3 Kirby’s Philosophy
- 10.4 Conspicuous Consumption
- 10.5 Labor Issues
- 10.6 Kirby and Bigotry
- 10.7 Kirby and Protectionism
- Bibliography (PDF)
10.1 John Henry Kirby and Ken Lay: Parallels
The parallels between John Henry Kirby (1860—1940) and Kenneth Lee Lay (1942—2006) are many and notable. Both grew up poor, sought out educational opportunities, and advanced quickly in professional life owing to a unique combination of intelligence, energy, and personal magnetism. Both were recognized leaders of their chosen industries and loved to give speeches to advance their causes. Kirby and Lay turned to scripture for a higher calling and championed their employees. Both spent lavishly while on top and shared the wealth with many. Both undertook innumerable charitable and civic endeavors and became just about everyone’s friend. Lay was Houston’s top go-to guy in the 1990s just as Kirby was in his prime in Houston. And in the end both were humbled, although Kirby could claim external factors (the Great Depression), while Lay scarcely could.
Ken Lay’s persona will be the subject of Book 3 in our trilogy; Kirby can be described more here. Kirby grew up as a “barefoot boy from the backwoods” of East Texas (Lasswell: ix) and left the plow to “be somebody” (ibid: x). Kirby was the timber industry’s Great Man and “Houston’s Number One Citizen” (ibid: xi) between 1900 and 1930. Kirby was also Mr. Texas for a time with his $40 million two-company deal with Patrick Calhoun.
Lasswell saw the same interpersonal attributes in Kirby as she saw in President William McKinley. She wrote:
They were both known for the warmth and gentleness of their manner, and for their understanding natures. They were kind men, of easy accessibility. Their great power lay in their success with the small, plain people. Both men were great smoothers-over, fine diplomatists with the ability to calm irate callers and compromise difficulties (76).
This could have applied equally to Ken Lay prior to 2001. Kirby was also described as “displaying tremendous energy and drive, great personal magnetism, a confidence-inspiring presence, a venturesome spirit…” (Maxwell and Baker: 105).
Kirby “went from cornpone to caviar without ever missing a beat—from homespun to broadcloth with ease and native elegance” (Lasswell: x). Kirby spent money lavishly and had great moments of grandeur. The Kirby Mansion, with grounds covering a city block, had thirty-six rooms for himself, wife Lelia, and daughter Bessmay (Lasswell: 75; Phelan: 6). During Kirby Lumber’s first receivership, daughter Bess received “a princely wedding … no less could be expected of John Henry Kirby who loved the lavishness and opulence he had fought hard to achieve” (Lasswell: 121). The Kirby lifestyle included parties for five hundred people, summer homes, and year-round hotel suites in New York City, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C.
“Mr. Kirby was a man of great strengths and weaknesses, complex and contradictory in many ways,” summarized biographer Mary Lasswell (xii). Kirby thumped the Bible, preaching a higher calling for work and his employees. And “with the Bible in one hand and the Constitution in the other,” Lasswell added, “John Henry Kirby feared no foe” (164). Kirby was too trusting (“To those around him in whom he believed his confidence was undaunted” (Texas House: 4). He also lost the caution and humility that successful people must have to stay successful. Kirby “was praised in hundreds of orations at scores of functions given in his honor” (“John H. Kirby, First…”).
The career of Kirby ended in financial failure, although Kirby survived with reputation intact, unlike Samuel Insull and Ken Lay. Many questions can be asked to deconstruct Insull and Lay. Biographer Lasswell asked about Kirby: “Would [his] own life have been different, would his business activities have been based on enlightened self-interest and not so much unnecessary and reckless generosity to friends that he could not afford, if he had had a son to carry on his name and to administer his estate? Only the gods know the answer” (167).
There are other parallels between the two men. Kirby was president of Houston’s first professional baseball organization, and Lay threw out the first ball at the opening of Enron Field, home of the Houston Astros. The ornate Kirby mansion at 2006 Smith Street was matched by the ornate penthouse suite remodeled by Ken and Linda Lay at the Huntingdon condominium project, described in Houston real estate circles as “the 12,827-sq.-ft. castle in the air” (Swamplot).
Kirby was optimistic to a fault—and so was Ken Lay. As discussed in chapter 10 of my book Edison to Enron (380n5, 397), prior to his company receivership, Kirby was effervescent in his business letters to certain parties but glum—at least for the short-term—in other letters. And at the end of his career during the Great Depression, Kirby assumed that a general recovery would lift all boats, including his. It did not, and he went personally bankrupt.
10.2 Timber Conservation Practices
John Henry Kirby believed in the efficacy of private property rights in all of its dimensions, including acquisition and conservation.
Kirby Lumber Company was subject to conservation regulation by the Bureau of Forestry of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In a bulletin issued October 30, 1901, the Bureau prohibited the harvesting of trees of 12 inches diameter or less (Kirby, 1901: 475). Contractual exceptions were made by operators for small trees next to the tracks for “skids” (Kirby, 1930b).
Kirby, while “anxious to comply with the laws” (Kirby, 1901: 476) had self-interested reasons for husbanding his inventory. The timberlands owned by Kirby Lumber were a capital asset whose value reflected a future income stream from logging. Even prior to the federal order, the original July 17, 1901, agreement contained a clause: “Said timber shall be cut in a careful and prudent way, and the trees felled shall be so felled as to preserve the young timber and avoid abuse and injury to such young timber and saplings, and no trees under twelve (12) inches in diameter shall be cut from said lands for timber skids or other purposes” (Deed of Assignment: 19). In addition, self-interest dictated that “many trees that are young and sappy and of greater diameter … will not be taken” (Kirby, 1902: 582). Thus John Henry Kirby opposed government conservation laws governing logging as he did edicts for crude-oil production (Texas House: 12).
For Kirby, this conservation practice made timber a regenerating resource, not a depleting one. “If the basis of 12 inches in diameter is adhered to the lands may be cut perpetually every 20 years, thus rendering this forest absolutely inexhaustible” (Kirby, 1902: 582).
Another step toward conservation was work by trade associations to standardize the size and grades of lumber. Kirby considered this work “a wonderful step not only toward conservation of a great natural resource, but in the direction of honesty in the distribution of our product” (Kirby, 1924c: 11).
10.3 Kirby’s Philosophy
John Henry Kirby was a panoramic activist who tried to make a positive difference with everything and to everyone. A profile of him in 1902 would not go out of date in the next decades of his life:
During the fourteen years he has been in active business he has worked eight hours a day for himself; eight hours encouraging his friends, relieving the distress of the needy, frustrating his enemies by his cheerful indifference to their criticisms, and cheering on to some useful employment every man and every boy who came within the range of his influence (Timber Resources: 17).
“I am an old-fashioned American, of an old-fashioned American family and I believe intensely in the Constitution and in our free institutions,” Kirby wrote in a 1920 letter. A Democrat, he voted for the man more than the party, adding: “I have not as yet become a Republican because I do not know what the Republicans stand for” (Kirby, 1920f: 671).
Kirby’s philosophy is encapsulated in two of his writings (Texas House: 15—16). The Ten Commandments of Industry was given before a group of Kirby Lumber officials in Beaumont, Texas, in 1924. The Bible Charge was inscribed inside 2,000 Bibles given to Kirby Lumber employees one Christmas. Whether or not one agrees with Kirby on his many positions, personal and political, he was arguably one of the most sincere, passionate, and compassionate business leaders in the country—even to the point of hurting, however unwittingly, about as many as he helped.
Ten Commandments of Industry
To Organized Labor
1. Thou shalt not permit any of the members to place the union card above our country’s flag.
2. Thou shalt not deny to any man, at any time, at any place, the right to work as a free man and to receive wages as such.
3. Thou shalt not demand for any worker a good day’s pay for a bad day’s service.
To Capital
4. Thou shalt pay a fair living wage to each and every one of thy workers.
5. Thou shalt furnish a safe and healthful place in which, and safe appliances with which, thy employees may work.
6. Thou shalt operate thy business as continuously as its nature will permit, to the end that labor shall be regularly employed and that the public may not suffer for the living necessities furnished through the medium of thy activities.
7. Thou shalt not demand extortionate profits, but shall be content with a fair return upon the investment used and useful in thy business.
To the General Public
8. Thou shalt willingly pay a fair price for all commodities required by thee from labor and capital, to the end that labor shall have a just reward and capital a fair return.
9. Thou shalt pay thy taxes cheerfully and honestly to the end that the obligations of the State to all its people may be promptly and properly fulfilled, liberty and justice safeguarded and the general public welfare assured.
To Everybody
10. Thou shalt honor and love thy government, for it is the people’s Government, the best ever devised by man, and there is none other like it in the world.
Bible Charge
The general diffusion of the Bible is the most effectual way to civilize and humanize mankind; to purify and exalt the general system of public morals; to give efficacy to the just precepts of all law; to emphasize the wisdom of all the relations of international, social and domestic life. To the Bible we are indebted for the progress made in true civilization and to its influence we must look for guidance in the future.
The Bible is the light of the understanding, the joy of the heart, the fullness of hope, the clarifier of affections, the consoler of sorrow, the guide of the soul, the lamp of the feet, the light of the pathway, the telescope sent from heaven to reveal to the eye of man the way of life here and the amazing glories of the hereafter.
I speak as a man of the world to men of the world when I say the Bible is the Book of Books and needs to be read at all ages in all conditions of human life. I gladly subscribe my sincere faith in and love for the Holy Bible and would commend it to the earnest perusal and affectionate regard of all my friends.
Kirby believed in Smilesian thrift (Smiles signature book Self-Help was given to him as a present). “It is my wish that every employee of the Kirby Lumber Company shall be prosperous, frugal, and thrifty,” Kirby told the ranks. “It is my wish that you should save your money. What Texas needs is capital, and the best way to have it is for the wage earner to save his earnings (Kirby, 1903a).” And Kirby had just the bank: his Planters and Mechanics National Bank of Houston, which was offering 4 percent interest per annum.
10.4 Conspicuous Consumption
Kirby lived large in good times and bad. Even in good times, he struggled to meet his obligations. “My corporate interests have prospered tremendously in the past eighteen months but personally I am, as usual, hard up,” he wrote in a 1920 letter. “I am over-invested and my income is not sufficient to take care of my maturities in any comfort” (Kirby, 1920e).
His monument of monuments was his home. The Kirby Mansion, Inglenook, purchased by John Henry Kirby in 1896 and remodeled between 1897 and 1900, was unparalleled in Houston and even Texas in both structure and internal decorating. There was a conservatory and greenhouse. Outdoors, there was a large Italian villa garden, baroque water parterres, and a small lake and bridge (Houghton et al.: 49, 92, 174—177, 235, 282). A book on Houston mansions concluded: “The house was imposing, formal, and conservatively adventuresome, a monument to conspicuous consumption and an example of entrepreneurial materialism of the sort identified by the controversial economist of the day Thorstein Veblen as a measure of one’s standing in the community and personal success. It was probably Houston’s most complete domestic response to the Gilded Age” (Houghton et al.: 282).
Gus Wortham, the builder of Houston-based American General Insurance Company and a major civic booster, was a great admirer of John Henry Kirby, but as much for Kirby’s personality and in-the-know contacts as for his business acumen. Wortham biographer Fran Dressman (44) said:
Texas’s first captain of industry, John Henry Kirby, was for Gus Wortham two men: the hard-nosed businessman and the magnetic, mythic tycoon…. Although [Kirby] had fallen on hard times by the late 1920s, Wortham probably admired Kirby as a generous friend as much as he admired Kirby’s business acumen and political involvement—all attributes he sought for himself—if in somewhat moderated dimensions. And Kirby was an ebullient, gregarious man who gave lavish parties at this Houston mansion…. Gus Wortham was so taken with Kirby that years later, in 1962, he commissioned a Kirby biography by Houston newspaperwoman Mary Lasswell.
10.5 Labor Issues
Were the organizers of East Texas lumber industry industrial statesman or robber barons?
Pro-union writers have criticized John Henry Kirby for his uncompromising anti-union stance, while acknowledging his dedication to his work force. Critics have pointed to low pay, primitive working conditions, and “feudal” mill towns as prima facie proof that labor was exploited by the capitalists. “Self-seeking even if screened by paternalism often leads the well-intentioned astray and results not in benevolence but repression” (Morgan, 1971: 187), summarized a study by a University of Houston historian. A cover story inHarper’s Weekly in 1915 described the “baron’s stronghold” of Kirbyville, Texas, a company town run by Kirby Lumber Company. “Men herded in company towns, packed in company houses, forced to trade at company stores, paid in company money, voted by the company, and denied all protection of law” was “a feudalism as absolute as any described in the pages of [Sir Walter] Scott” (Creel: 76).
Much like the criticisms of working conditions of Industrial England a century before, these accounts fail to acknowledge how even the primitive state of start-up capitalism was an improvement from prior times and from other available choices. Forests were everywhere; lumber was not a high margin business. Yet forestry companies had to attract workers and keep workers from leaving for greener pastures.
The best evidence that the lumber industry was competitive for workers as for consumers is the verdict of the workers themselves—first, how they voted with their feet, and next, by their recorded thoughts and words. Robert Maxwell and Robert Baker (153) lodged a list of complaints about worker exploitation before concluding:
Sawmill workers were surprisingly loyal to their employers. In the entire history of Texas lumbering no bank of workers burned a mill, picketed a main office, or sacked a company store. Instead, most of the veteran employees—even those who had held only manual-labor jobs—usually had high praise for the mill owners. This spoke well for the personal relationships that such men as … John Henry Kirby had with their employees and their families” (153).
The authors added, “The company towns were steadily improved, and their labor turnover was at a minimum” (154).
The evidence is uniform that Kirby respected his laborers and initiated reform. Soon after Kirby Lumber was formed in 1901, Kirby reduced the work day from eleven to ten hours without a drop in pay (“John Henry Kirby Addresses. . .”: 32—33; Wheat: 19; Morgan, 1969: 196).
In 1920, Kirby fought against a proposed labor law in Texas to limit the workweek to 48 hours, a goal of the New England manufacturers for two decades because they chafed at the lower wage rates of their southern competitors (Kirby, 1920d: 635). But when market conditions allowed labor concessions, Kirby continued to follow through. And so in the late 1920s, Kirby reduced the work day from ten to nine hours (Lasswell: 170).
Other data points can be mentioned. Kirby’s Christmas gifts to workers and their families were legendary (Kilman). Kirby contributed to his own demise by borrowing $3 million to keep his mills going during the Great Depression when he could have shut them down (Texas House: 33). Kirby explained his attitude toward labor to his mill workers in a 1912 address:
My sympathy and interest has always been with the laboring masses. My kinspeople and close friends, as well as myself, are working folks, and have never known anything else but to toil. I am the only one of my family who was ever classed as a rich man, but the property I have accumulated has not made me an idler nor has it made me selfish or ungenerous. I spend more of my earnings to aid widows and orphans and for the education of ambitious boys and girls, the building of school houses and churches, and for the promotion of charities than I spend upon my family or upon myself” (“John H. Kirby Addresses. . . ”: 32).
Critics of Kirby’s labor policy have resorted to asserting that the supply and demand for labor under capitalism was more unjust than Kirby could personally rectify. In Morgan’s estimation, “John Henry Kirby and his fellow lumbermen, confident that all the blessings of democracy automatically flowed from capitalistic progress, denied the workers that essential human right … to control his own destiny” (1971: 196). This view, however, asserts what must be proved—that capitalism is unfair, and assumes what must be justified, that it is ethical for laborers to violate the private property rights of capitalists.
10.6 Kirby and Bigotry
A recent book by Bryan Burrough, The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes,impugns John Henry Kirby with a virulent racist taint. It is mainly by association, as these quotations demonstrate:
By 1935, thanks to [Vance] Muse, the Kirby Building in downtown Houston was home to a warren of shadowy, interconnected ultraconservative groups, all devoted to promoting white supremacy, fighting labor unions and communism, and, above all, defeating Roosevelt’s reelection in 1936 (129).
The Kirby groups were little more than the Ku Klux Klan in pinstripes, a kind of corporate Klan: the Texas Tax Relief Committee, the Texas Election Mangers Association, the Sentinels of the Republic, and the Order of American Patriots (129).
Though careful to moderate his public statements about Jews and blacks, Kirby was less guarded in private (131).
Burrough evidently did not know that Kirby cofounded the American Anti-Klan Association in 1922. A reading of Kirby’s letters held by Stephen F. Austin State University’s East Texas Research Center suggests that Kirby had business reasons to fear and despise the Klan. In 1920, he complained: “This is the first time the Klan has ever interfered with me or my business [by scaring black workers],” he warned, “and I do not propose to stand for it without the proper retaliation.” He added: “It is not my intention to put the Klan out of existence, but I don’t want to have to see them here taking our money by day and night and inciting riot and hatred among the crew” (Kirby, 1922).
Two years later, he wrote: “Confidentially, there is one thing I want you to bear in mind,—we don’t want any Ku Klux doctors placed on the Kirby pay roll” (Kirby, 1924a), explaining all the trouble that the Klan was inciting in the state. He added elsewhere: “If the Ku Klux Klan has ever served any good purpose, I have failed to find it” (Kirby, 1924b).
That said, Kirby was a Confederate sympathizer. It was in his blood. “My respect and admiration for the Confederate Soldiers will never diminish,” he wrote in 1920. “I would be an unworthy son of a Confederate father and unworthy of my Confederate brother, both of whom wore the Gray, if I did not keep everlasting enshrined in my heart the Lost Cause for which the South made such sacrifices” (Kirby, 1920b).
Kirby’s private letters also show other views that can be critically used against him. One letter expresses distain to “certain Jew banking houses in New York” associated with his enemy Patrick Calhoun (Kirby, 1906).
Kirby was against the Suffrage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution on states’ rights grounds, calling it “an unconscionable embezzlement of power and an indefensible betrayal of the rights of the free people of a sovereign state” (Kirby, 1920a: 145). He added: “This Susan B. Anthony Amendment is a ratification of [northern coercion], and certainly the sons of Confederate fathers and the descendants of Southern statesman and patriots will not defame the memory of their ancestors by even now acquiescing in such willful perversion of the government as erected more than one hundred years ago under the Federal Constitution” (Kirby, 1920a: 146).
10.7 Kirby and Protectionism Revisited
Kirby differentiated between protectionism (which he claimed he was not for) and foreign-revenue tax collection (which he was for) as early as 1909 (Kirby, 1909a: 433—34). “I have always adhered to and profoundly believed in the Democratic doctrine of equal rights to all and special privileges to none, and I have specially held those views in respect to the tariff,” he wrote.
At least nominally, Kirby was a breed apart from those business leaders who specifically advocated a tariff or a quota against imports to prop the price up of a particular commodity. But on closer inspection, Kirby’s universal tariff program was both for revenue and to protect industry. “The doctrine of Free Raw Materials,” Kirby explained in a 1920 letter, “is being [negatively] felt in every agricultural and stock-raising industry in the South with the possible exception of rice and sugar” (Kirby, 1920c: 239). Kirby named some of the goods in distress: cotton seed, peanuts, sheep, goats, and cattle (ibid.: 239—40).
Special relief was part of Kirby’s repertoire. As a farmer commented in 1923:
There is no man in congress who has worked as hard for the farmers of Texas as Mr. John Henry Kirby has since 1920. That year we had a disaster in this country. We were all broke; the farmers and everybody else. Cotton was down below the cost of production. Then Mr. Kirby organized the Southern Tariff Association, and he has worked unflinchingly and spent his money all over the United States in rendering us help. He had no assistance from the Texas congressmen, yet he did that work and he did it in spite of the fact that he had no direct interest in farming (Red Roosters: 45).
But when it came to lumber, Kirby was ambivalent for the pragmatic reason that such a tariff was not important for southern U.S. lumber (as versus northern U.S. lumber that competed against Canadian imports). As Kirby wrote to a fellow lumberman who advocated lumber tariffs and wanted Kirby to do so:
I have never opposed such tariff. I have just failed to advocate it…. A tariff on lumber would be of large benefit to me … but I cannot sacrifice the work and influence and achievement of the Southern Tariff Association in order to promote my personal interests (Kirby, 1930: 3—4).
However, with the importance of lumber exports, not just imports, it is difficult to see that Kirby had much of an advantage in lumber protectionism.
Sources for Chapter 10 Appendix
Burrough, Bryan. The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes. New York: Penguin Press, 2009.
Creel, George. “The Feudal Towns of Texas.” Harper’s Weekly, January 23, 1915, 76—78.
Deed of Assignment and Deed of Mortgage Between the Houston Oil Company of Texas and the Maryland Trust Company, July 31, 1901. Kirby Lumber Archive, Box 4.
Dressman, Fran. Gus Wortham: Portrait of a Leader. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1994.
Houghton, Dorothy; Barrie Scardino; Sadie Blackburn; and Katherine Howe. Houston’s Forgotten Heritage: Landscape, Houses, Interiors, 1824—1914. Houston: Rice University Press, 1991.
“John H. Kirby Addresses Mill Workers.” Southern Industrial and Lumber Review, July 1912, 32—33.
“John H. Kirby, First Towering Texas Industrialist, Built Timber Empire.” Sunday Enterprise (Beaumont, Texas), November 6, 1955.
Kilman, Ed. “John Henry Kirby Truly Has Lived His Credo.” Houston Post, December 12, 1937, 6—4.
King, John. The Early History of the Houston Oil Company of Texas, 1901—1908. Houston: Texas Gulf Coast Historical Association, 1959.
Kirby, John Henry. Letter to G. Robinson. December 14, 1901. Kirby Lumber Company, East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University, Private Letters, Book 13, pp. 475—76.
Kirby, John Henry. Letter to W. L. Bray. March 31, 1902. Kirby Lumber Company, East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University, Private Letters, Book 14, pp. 580—83.
Kirby, John Henry. “To My Employees.” June 3, 1903. Kirby Papers. East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University, Box 4. (1903a)
Kirby, John Henry. Letter to T. H. Franklin. July 1, 1903. Kirby Lumber Company, East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University, Private Letters, Book 18, pp. 271—72. (1903b)
Kirby, John Henry. Letter to N. D. Silsbee. August 18, 1906. Kirby Lumber Company, East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University, Private Letters, Book 8, pp. 247—48.
Kirby, John Henry. Letter to W. J. Bryan. October 16, 1909. Kirby Lumber Company, East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University, Private Letters, Book 44, pp. 430—36 (Kirby, 1909a).
Kirby, John Henry. Letter to W. J. Bryan. October 18, 1909. Kirby Lumber Company, East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University, Private Letters, Book 44, pp. 449—50 (Kirby, 1909b).
Kirby, John Henry. Letter to H.A. Morgan. April 30, 1920. Kirby Lumber Company, East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University, Private Letters, October 9, 1920—February 15, 1921,pp. 144—47. (1920a)
Kirby, John Henry. Letter to D. L. Harp. July 17, 1920. Kirby Lumber Company, East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University, Private Letters, Journal No. 88, pp. 542—43. (1920b)
Kirby, John Henry. Letter to Anderson, Clayton & Company. October 29, 1920. Kirby Lumber Company, East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University, pp. 238—40. (1920c)
Kirby, John Henry. Letter to E. Travis. December 17, 1920. Kirby Lumber Company, East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University, Private Letters, October 9, 1920—February 15, 1921, pp. 635—36. (1920d)
Kirby, John Henry. Letter to A. H. Longino. December 18, 1920. Kirby Lumber Company, East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University, October 9, 1920—February 15, 1921, pp. 653—55. (1920e)
Kirby, John Henry. Letter to John Henry Kirby Jr.. December 20, 1920. Kirby Papers. East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University, October 9, 1920—February 15, 1921, pp. 670—72. (1920f)
Kirby, John Henry. Letter to B. F. Bonner. July 17, 1922. Kirby Lumber Company, East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University, Box 376.
Kirby, John Henry. Letter to D. S. Wier. August 21, 1924. Kirby Lumber Company, East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University, Box 75. (1924a)
Kirby, John Henry. Letter to D. S. Wier. August 25, 1924. Kirby Lumber Company, East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University, Box 75. (1924b)
Kirby, John Henry. “Duties of Citizenship.” In Ninth Annual Meeting—“A New Era,” 11—21. Southern Pipe Association, 1924. Kirby Papers. East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University, Box 460. (1924c)
Kirby, John Henry. Letter to E. Hines. January 20, 1930. Kirby Lumber Company, East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University, Private Letters, Book 397.
Kirby, John Henry. “What Capitalism Means.” Speech, Houston, Texas, 1935. Kirby Papers. East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University, Box 460.
Kirby Lumber Corporation 1901—1985. Forest History Collection, East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University. (Cited as Kirby Lumber Archive.)
Lasswell, Mary. John Henry Kirby: Prince of the Pines. Austin, TX: Encino Press, 1967.
Maxwell, Robert, and Robert Baker. Sawdust Empire: The Texas Lumber Industry, 1830—1940. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1983.
Morgan, George. “No Compromise—No Recognition: John Henry Kirby, the Southern Lumber Operators’ Association, and Unionism in the Piney Woods, 1906-1916.” Labor History 10 (2): 193—204 (Spring 1969).
Morgan, George. “The Gospel of Wealth Goes South: John Henry Kirby and Labor’s Struggle for Self-Determination.” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 75 (2): 186—97 (October 1971).
Phelan, Charlotte. “Kirby’s Bankrupt Estate Will Be Liquidated Soon.” Houston Post, July 26, 1964, 5—6.
Red Roosters of Houston. Testimonial Banquet Honoring John Henry Kirby. November 17, 1923. Kirby Lumber Archive, Box 461.
Swamplot, “Ken and Linda Lay’s Penthouse Condo Now Available for Nearly Half Off,” September 29, 2011, at http://swamplot.com/ken-and-linda-lays-penthouse-condo-now-available-for-nearly-half-off/2011-09-29/.
Texas House of Representatives. Resolutions on the Life of John Henry Kirby, April 28, 1941.
Timber Resources of East Texas. Chicago: American Lumberman, 1902.
Wheat, J. E. “The Life and Times of John Henry Kirby,” It’s Dogwood Time in Tyler County, March 1950, 9—29