Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
Yet they came on in wave after wave, hopeful, determined to win their own destiny in the west. The Anglo-American psychology was tough; he held on and fought, tearing what the cowmen had left of the seas of grass to bitter dust. American literature, for years afterward, would show the profound scars on the social thinking of those Americans brought up in this environment.
Ridiculous theories were tried: tree-planting, to make rain where Nature forbade trees to grow; turning the earth, to gather clouds. Evidence was plain, but not believed. The farmer stood on the edge of nothing, figuratively shaking his fist, demanding the earth succumb to his desires. Every so-called solution he tried treated symptoms. None of them struck at the real problem, which was the lack of water in this stubborn soil, and which made it unadaptable to certain kinds of use.
Part of this determination was based on the Anglo-American ideology of inevitable progress; solutions would be found, because they had always been found. The Industrial Revolution produced the six-shooter, barbed wire, and windmills just in time, or so it seemed. The Anglo-American was bred to the expectation of triumph in the end.
Unhappily, the frontier farmer in Texas was continually encouraged by politicians, who catered to his prejudices and hopes as unrealistically as had Calhoun. No governmental agency in Texas attempted to discourage men from farming on the harsh, arid frontier. Instead, blinded by its own ideology and credit economy, the state enticed more to come.
Families staked out their lands with hope, breathed the dry, clean air of early spring. They put in crops, threw up sod dugout huts—there was no timber here for dog-runs—or erected flimsy shacks out of lumber laboriously hauled in. Some failed the first year despite generally favorable conditions. Then, the long drouths of 1886 and 1887 came. These years wrought sheer havoc all across the wide new farm belt. Some families actually starved. Private agencies and counties gave what aid they could; the state voted $100,000 in relief to feed the hungry. This was only token help; most families lived on their own slim resources, their dwindling credit, or whatever aid more fortunate neighbors could afford.
Thousands left the country for good, creeping eastward in defeat to humble jobs or tenantry. The bad years of the 1870s were followed by a brief revival, then the bad times of the 1880s. Only a people essentially devoid of history would have kept at the struggle so long. Cultural life and death, though no American would call it that, went on.
The passage was observed grimly by the older, hardier, or luckier survivors in the west. Throughout this half of Texas the cattle people, some of whom soon turned to certain kinds of farming themselves, with new grains and new machines, developed a certain prejudice against the boosterism that kept newcomers pouring in. The farmers and the new townsmen, and the older landholders, saw things with different eyes. Much time would pass before the cowman, ensconced behind his wire walls, saw any value to successful settlement. Populating up the country in the years before 1900 only brought the old hands new problems.
The survivors saw the weak and poor, the stupid and inept, arrive with bright theories and slink back in bitter defeat. What happened was that a large, representative human mass was simply not able to populate this Texas west. There was a brutal form of natural selection once again. All did not depend on courage or energy; adaptiveness and capital were equally important. The laws and social theory of the eastern half of the state, that towns and farms meant progress, could not repeal the rules of climate; the state could give a man 160 acres, or later, four sections for grazing, but it could not guarantee that his crops would grow. Only a limited few succeeded. Year after year, stockmen, or farmers turned farmer-stockman, bought the failures out, in a process that went on for many years, and was accelerated with every recurrent, hideous drouth, from 1887 to 1917, and from 1918 to 1933.
Nothing in the frontier ethos conditioned the Texan to cope with the unsuccessful. The Westerner was not immune to pity, or totally without compassion, as some charged. Rather, he considered pity in some cases misplaced. He saw no reason to try to cope with the inept, the foolish, the incapable, and unlucky. They should "go back where they came from," as the old ranch saying went. If they stayed, like the Indian they faced extermination, or lower status, like the Mexican. Texans on the frontier were strongly democratic, but it was the old Anglo-Celt democracy among peers. Indians, Mexicans, and nester trash were pitiable, but only tolerable under certain terms.
The long barbarism of the frontier created something akin to a barbarian ethos in parts of Texas. The strong were respected, even if they might be hated; the weak, or late-comers clamoring for "their share" tended to be despised. In the enormously difficult, enormously demanding West, the idea that everyone had an inherent seat at the dinner table did not, and could not, evolve.
The Anglo-Celt arrived on this last frontier without a sense of social organism, and nothing in his long experience there developed it. This would become apparent when he began to move to cities in later years.
Chapter 34
THE PEOPLE'S PARTY
It is undoubtedly true that liberal intellectuals have in the past construed a flattering image of Populism. They have permitted their sympathy with oppressed groups to blind them to the delusions, myths, fables, and foibles of the people with whom they sympathized. Sharing certain political and economic doctrines and certain indignations with the Populists, they have attributed to them other values, tastes, principles, and morals which the Populists did not actually share.
C. VANN WOODWARD, SOUTHERN HISTORIAN
When men suffer, they become politically radical; when they cease to suffer, they favor the existing order.
WALTER PRESCOTT WEBB, PLAINS HISTORIAN
TEXAS, along with much of the American South, already alienated by the War Between the States, was further alienated by economic developments in the last quarter of the 19th century. Four out of five Americans still lived on rural farms at the beginning of this period; the Texas proportion was much higher. But under the impact of the Industrial Revolution the growth of towns and cities was to be the dominant trend of the next forty years. This was a world trend, creating problems everywhere, but nowhere more ferociously than in North America. The United States was not destined to pass easily or painlessly from a rural to an urban culture, or from the freehold farm into industrial capitalism. The earliest and most acute pain was felt in the agrarian South, and in some parts of the far Midwest.
In these regions urbanization and industrialization had been delayed. Texas, because of the Civil War, the interminable frontier, and the problems of the arid western half, was about two generations behind the dominant Northern tier of states in social trends and developments. Conquest had been done, but conversion lagged. Texas still had an 18th-century economy, property-oriented, but in no sense capitalist. The only capitalist class in Texas, the planters, had been destroyed. The new mercantile and banking groups that rose in the shambles of Reconstruction were not industrial or productive; they tended to acquire control of the resources of the land, or the land itself, but without increasing the creation or flow of material wealth. New industries were not created, or were created very slowly; towns did not grow quickly, and this was an essential difference from the North and East.
A combination of economic and financial factors, from 1873 onward, tended to destroy the viability of the American small farm. Increasing mechanization of life and rising expectations eroded subsistence agriculture; the farmer needed cash. The opening of vast new lands in Texas and the Midwest, coupled with the static money supply enforced by the gold standard, generally caused farm prices to fall. Governmental policy favored hard money; recurrent financial panics tightened credit painfully. Commodity prices on world markets were generally higher, in terms of the same money, at the close of the 18th century than 100 years later. There was more than enough capital to finance industrialization. But—and this was to become a worldwide trend, also—there was not enough to capitalize both industry and agriculture, and under the dominant philosophy agriculture suffered.
This was long regarded in Texas and the South as a plot against the Southern people to keep them in economic bondage to the North, producing cheap fibers and food for the industrial mass. While the situation was certainly agreeable to the burgeoning capitalists and industrialists, now consciously making their headquarters in New York City, there seems to be irrefutable evidence against a regional conspiracy.
Freight rates were discriminatory, and deliberately kept so for competitive advantage, but falling prices, expensive money, and rising expectations also wreaked genuine havoc among the small farmers of the North and Northeast, and the Republican-voting allies of the industrialists in the West. In the years following the Civil War the rock-ribbed farms of New England were depopulated. The Eastern farmer could not compete with the production of endless miles of prairie soils. But the Northern farmer, and to some extent the Midwesterner, possessed an escape valve. He could move to town and join the growing industrial proletariat; he had certain advantages in competing with the Irish and other immigrant city masses and could rise into the industrial middle class. Industry, in the North, kept general pace with the flight of people from the farms, and urbanization created its own new markets for labor and goods.
This long movement had a profound effect on the mind of America, making a rural nostalgia almost too great to bear, keeping alive a rural mythology for many years. Whether the movement was good or bad was immaterial; it was irresistible and inevitable. Concentrations of wealth and people were accruing to the cities, and they were to become dominant over the countryside. Historically, the better organized and more powerful always became dominant, whatever their philosophy.
Farther west, in states such as Nebraska, overproduction began to grind the small homesteader down. It took exactly three times as many bushels of wheat in 1885 to pay the fixed cost of a mortgage acquired in 1865. Enormous amounts of land passed into the hands of railroads, insurance companies, and other corporate mortgagees, who resold them at increasing unfavorable terms for the farmer.
In Texas, where farming in the east was in the deep-South pattern and in the west similar to the freehold homesteads of Nebraska, the trends were equally disastrous. Texas was one-crop country, and the crop was cotton. The Texas market was entirely in the industrial world; half the crop went to Europe, and half to the Northern states. In both markets the price of raw cotton continually fell: thirty-one cents per pound in 1865, eleven cents between 1875 and 1884, followed by an irregular decline to five cents by 1898. In 1887 a harvest of 1,600,000 bales brought Texas farmers $88,000,000. Three years later, in 1890, they produced 2,000,000 bales but received exactly $20,000,000 less.
Behind these figures lay an era of social demoralization and heartbreak.
The Texas farmer was not able, in these years, to change to different crops. He was bound to cotton; it was the only marketable commodity he knew. He could not, with the technology of the time, greatly increase production on his individual acres; tragically for him, the over-all increase in production due to the opening of new farms drove all prices down. His taxes, which had to be paid in hard cash, stayed level. The costs of the industrial products he increasingly needed or wanted rose. His income fell. He could not quit his farm, even had he been willing to. There were no cities, and no industrialization, to absorb him, and he had no money to go elsewhere. Thus, the hundreds of thousands of impoverished poor whites who fled the older South for frontier Texas, with high hopes and considerable courage, merely fled one frying pan for the fire.
The cheap prices of land, the easy terms and outright gifts of farms offered by land companies, railroads, and the state government through homestead laws, were not so generous in reality as they seemed. The great mass of new farmers in west and central Texas arrived poor. They had to borrow money to live, and to put in a crop. They had to mortgage their soil—the Texas homestead law made it impossible for the small farmer to get credit in this way—or their crop. Credit became increasingly harder to get. This was the result of no general conspiracy; the poor farmer was a poor risk. But the over-all result of conditions was to drive the Texas farmer into a form of peonage. Virtually all white farmers were freeholders in 1860. A majority were tenants a generation later. Those who were not farming for shares on someone else's soil worked all year for almost no return. Merchants extended credit at interest rates that rose to 60 percent, and this was still hazardous for the seller.
In the 1870s, and again in the early 1880s, the destruction of land values caused by the war and generally decent climatic conditions made farming profitable. But the continual decline of cotton, corn, and wheat prices (about thirty counties in the north-northwest grew wheat, and corn was used extensively as a feeder crop) was a hazard, like the weather, utterly beyond the farmer's control. Men could resignedly accept the burning drouths of 1886–87 as acts of God. But the enormous erosion of income that followed was something else. Texas farmers, generally poor, were being ground into something resembling debt peonage, and a race that traditionally thought of itself as free, equal, and middle class, was fast becoming a new American peasantry.