I think I understand a little about this Iranian oil dispute.

In the early days of the Hugoton gas fields in Southwest Kansas, eager farmers with gas wells in their wheat fields made hurried contracts with the big gas companies.

These could be compared to the 60-year lease which, in 1933, the Iranian government gave on 16 percent of its territory to the Anglo-Iranian oil company.

Kansas farmers soon realized the big gas companies were making scads of money off their gas and they were getting darn little for it at the wellhead.

Iran, chief supplier of petroleum to Europe, has decided its royalties are awfully small compared to profits of Anglo-Iranian. In fact, Anglo-Iranian pays more to Britain in income tax than it does to Iran in royalties.


The Kansas farmers did something about it. They went to the legislature and the state corporation commission and fought until they got an 8-cent minimum wellhead price. It was a case of the government stepping in and seeing to it they got what was coming to them.

Iran’s government has stepped in to get what it thinks is coming to Iran. Few Southwest Kansas farmers can blame it.

There are some differences. Kansas farmers weren’t ragged, hungry, and filled with hate. They weren’t bordered by a great Communist neighbor which wanted their gas and tried to churn their hunger and hate into revolution. They weren’t poor and ignorant and capable of being herded into a bloody march on Topeka by a few fanatical leaders. [They were doing so well up to this point]

Above all, they had, which Iran doesn’t have, a corporation commission, a legislature, and courts, to which they could turn and from which, they reasonably believed, they would get a fair shake.


America now is acting as a sort of international corporation commission trying to settle the Iranian oil dispute. It may be too late for a simple, fair shake to placate Iranian hotbloods.

Britain should have acted sooner and more wisely, should have been less intent on getting all it could as cheaply as it could from backward Iran, should have been more willing to trade some of its profits for peace.

Possessors of such great wealth as oil and gas don’t remain backward long.

Any Southwest Kansas farmer could have told Britain that.