Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
The Texas government was in no sense hostile to commerce or business, although it took an agrarian approach to the theory of government. The idea that business and industry and farming were mutually hostile, or even that railroads were not inevitably paths of progress was something that grew rather slowly. Texans, like many other 19th-century Americans, had a historic antipathy to corporations, not so much because of what corporations did but because the idea was strongly held that no "soulless enterprise" should be equated with human beings and given the full protection of the laws. Texans found the extension of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to corporations by the courts abominable, and in a very real sense, the 19th-century judiciary tended to put the human beings behind corporate fronts above the law. When the farmer became increasingly anguished, his attention was increasingly drawn to the fact that the agents, if not the authors, of his misery were corporate land companies, railroads, and banks. His suspicion was certain, and his hostility inevitable.
The basic miasma of monetary discontent was even more historic. Texas had always been part of the traditionally credit-economy, inflation-favoring American frontier West. From the early-18th-century English colonies to the age of Jackson, the Western regions, always in debt and always dependent upon necessities from the East, demanded more paper money and looser credit. There was tension between Massachusetts farmers and Boston merchants; Pennsylvania frontiersmen and Quaker financial interests; Texas farmers and the men enforcing hard money, based on gold, in New York.
In coming to demand greater regulation of corporations and increased credit, Texas agrarians were attacking symptoms, rather than the basic cause, of their discontent. But it was already an American practice to misunderstand basic causes and become emotionally involved with symbols. If the Texas farmer was generally ignorant, and incapable of understanding the whole picture of what was happening in the world, the Eastern capitalist and worker who joined together to defend the system fully as hysterically as it was attacked showed no greater intelligence. The Texas agrarians were not trying to foment a social revolution; they were attempting a last stand against one which was already in full swing, and which was not to be stopped, then or later.
What occurred in Texas in the last quarter of the century was a great upsurge of interest, rather than class or status, politics. The farmers began to seek political means of defending themselves. W. W. Lang, master of the Texas Grange, which was a strong force in the 1870s, was nearly nominated for governor in 1878. The Democrat convention finally nominated Oran M. Roberts, who won election that year and again in 1880.
Meanwhile, the first new protest party had appeared on the Texas scene. This was the Greenback Party, which grew out of the Grange as a political arm, and which fused with the Republicans in 1882. The Greenbackers were powerful only in the western counties, which had been recently settled by freeholders who arrived poor and stayed poor, as Richardson said. The principal platform of the Greenbackers, as their name indicated, was a demand for more money, issued by the federal government in the form of paper notes, and for all treasury notes and bonds to be redeemed by the same. The poor farmers suffered from a lack of purchasing power and credit; their demand was that the government change this through printing more money by fiat.
But certain other planks of the Greenbackers were to have more general significance. These were: the income tax, to supplement the raising of all revenues through property levies, falling most heavily on the farmer; an improved school system for rural areas; the abolition of some state offices and a general reduction in salary for all; the repeal of taxes on farm commodities—the "smoke-house tax"; and the strict regulation of railroads.
The platform of "more money, and cheaper money," had immediate appeal. The stated program of protecting the little man against the banks and corporations and bondholders made the Greenbackers the second largest political party in Texas in 1878, displacing the Republicans. The Democrat Party, though dominated by farmers, was still inherently conservative on all things at this time.
The Greenbackers scored some local successes, electing ten state legislators and one Congressman, who left the Democrats. In 1882, the Greenback Party and Republican Party fused, running candidates for governor and lieutenant governors as "independents." This was a rather remarkable, and probably an utterly cynical alliance, as the two parties had nothing whatever in common except dislike of Democrats. Their candidate, Jones, polled 102,501 votes to the Democrat Ireland's 150,891.
Democratic loyalties in east Texas were entirely too strong to be upset. But the enormous opposition vote pushed the Democrats into adopting some Greenback planks. This, and the temporary prosperity of the early 1880s, caused the protest party to wither away and disappear. Agrarian complaints continued, however. When national depression, drouth, and disastrous prices combined to make things intolerable again, it was inevitable that some such political movement would again arise.
The Farmer's Alliance began in Texas about 1875. It reorganized in 1879 and exploded into a national body in 1887. It claimed between 1,000,000 and 3,000,000 members; figures were not, and could not, be exact. The Alliance, like the Greenbackers, was a product of the farm-line west, where a good worker could at best make 30 bushels of corn on the uplands, 60 on the river bottoms, and half a bale of cotton per acre was considered a splendid crop. Here, dryness, thin soils, and rampant capitalism combined to bring the sweating, sunburned people together in shouting protest. Most Americans tend to think of Populism, or the People's Party, the great third party movement of the century, as a Midwestern affair. But it was born in Texas, at Lampasas, almost exactly on the old farm-line frontier. It picked up supporters to the north where conditions were similar, but the heart and soul of Populism were always in the South.
At first the Alliance did not organize as a political party, although one purpose of the group was to "labor for the education of the agricultural classes in the science of economical government." But in 1886, the Alliance made certain demands upon the state and nation. Among these were the following: the sale of school lands only to bona-fide settlers in small lots; the assessment of all railroad property at full value; the regulation of interstate commerce. In 1888, a demand for an antitrust law was added to these. The sentiment of the Farmer's Alliance was made clear by the wording of its protests against "the shameful abuses that the industrial [working] classes are now suffering at the hands of arrogant capitalists and powerful corporations."
The Alliance was kept out of active political organization in these months and years because the ruling Democratic Party continued to seize upon these planks. The Democrat platform of 1886 echoed most of the Alliance's demands, and even more extreme, called for a law requiring stockholders of a corporation to be made financially responsible for all debts incurred by the corporation. This would have obviated the usefulness of corporations, of course, but in these years corporate enterprise was being much abused. Railroads and others could incur obligations with élan and go bankrupt with impunity, some men making fortunes in the process, while the general debacle and panic that ensued damaged everyone. In 1888, the Democrats of Texas added antitrust legislation and railroad regulation to their list.
More and more Texas farmers had come to believe that the best land was being "hogged" by monopolies and railroads, forcing them to scratch a living on the rest; that the interest demanded by whatever corporate entity that held his mortgage was exorbitant and immoral; that the railroads charged too much for everything; and that every middleman, whether merchant or cotton ginner, was out to gouge him and suck his blood. In certain respects, all of these charges were true. But the real problem was that the small farmer simply could no longer earn a living in Texas at this time. He could not even raise enough cotton by his own efforts to pay his debts.
The "system" was surely at fault, but it was a system beyond anyone's real control. This did not prevent the farmer from suspecting vast conspiracies, hating all capitalists, or believing fervently that a little manufactured credit would save his world. Mixed up in this welter of beliefs and views was a rising prohibitionalism, an agitation for the abstinence from alcohol by law.
Statewide prohibition, backed by the Grange and Alliance, was only beaten back in 1887 after a prolonged and amazingly bitter political campaign. Prohibition was supported strongly by the fundamentalist, puritan churches, which had their membership among the farmers. Although the movement to ban liquor was defeated at the polls, it was carried on by the preachers and would not die.
The rising tide of protest in Texas had some national effect. Congressman Roger Q. Mills, who fought prohibition, was chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee; his anti-tariff bill died in the Senate in 1888, but became a plank in the national Democratic platform. Conservative Texans realized that a one-crop commodity economy, which increasingly sold more and more of its product abroad, was disastrously tied to the industrializing, protectionist North, and that a destruction of tariffs would do more to restore the South than a flood of regulation and credit. However, Senator John H. Reagan, the past postmaster general of the Confederacy, had better success with his own bill, which created the Interstate Commerce Act. Business regulation—but nothing that actually tended to dismantle industry—was beginning to have some currency in the North.
Meanwhile, the fact that the great mass of people were impoverished and resentful, while the new class of business leaders, the "Burbons," were neither a gentry nor a political elite, had its inevitable effect. A new type of politician appeared in Texas; the same sort were cropping up in many other areas of the cotton South. The first prototype in Texas was Attorney General James Stephen Hogg, elected to statewide office at the age of thirty-five. There will always be some controversy whether Hogg was a statesman, democrat, or demagogue.
Hogg was born in east Texas, the son of a Confederate brigadier; he was well-born but orphaned in the terrible Reconstruction years at twelve. He obtained almost no formal schooling. He worked ambitiously as a typesetter and printer until he could enter the practice of law. Flamingly ambitious, he chose politics as his field. Brilliantly intuitive, he chose the "soulless corporation" as the burning issue of his day. As Attorney General of Texas, he declared war on big business, wherever it might be found. He became the center of attention and won a million farmers' hearts.
In office, Hogg struck first against insurance companies and drove some forty from the state. His main target was the railroads. The constitution, which made rails common carriers, was adequate to allow their regulation, but until Hogg's time, no state official had really tried. The railroad corporations, usually undercapitalized and in serious financial trouble, had gotten away with much. They were not particularly unlawful or unethical in Texas for the day, but they were certainly, in this age of unrestrained corporate and money power, behaving no better. Hogg attacked this with reforming zeal, so much so that he was accused of driving capital from the state.
Hogg forced one line that had quit running trains to recommence. He forced a giant pool of nine carriers (directed from outside the state) which was in control of all but a single Texas line to cease and desist from setting common service standards and rates. He brought suit after suit to disentangle Texas roads from out-of-state control, no matter where their ownership lay. Hogg was instrumental in getting every company that operated rails in Texas to establish a general office within the state. The out-of-state money might look upon Texas as merely one cog in a gigantic common market, but Hogg and the citizens of Texas did not. He asserted state control of every track that lay within Texas's borders.
None of this was really effective, because Texas lacked any kind of commission or bureau to regulate the roads. Theoretical power under the constitution was not translated into day-to-day control. Showing that the rail companies set rates to favor foreign interests, not residents of Texas—one line shipped lumber from east Texas more cheaply to Nebraska than to Dallas—Hogg plumped for a railroad regulatory commission as his major issue when he ran for governor in 1890.
His platform also called for abolition of the national banking system and free coinage of silver; two things on which most Southerners and Westerners agreed. He captured the Democratic nomination, and the farm associations were jubilant; they had their champion close to the seats of power at last. Charles A. Culberson joined Hogg's ticket for the attorney-generalcy. These two men were to set the tone of dominant Texas government for many years to come.
Hogg campaigned with awareness that there were more common people in Texas than any other kind, and he suited his merchandise to the market. He was a great commoner. He knew the dirt farmer's soul, and which allusions grabbed his mind. Hogg was earthy in his speech, inventive in his epithets—though "by gatlings" was the worst he essayed when ladies were around. Hogg was a flaming reformer on the hustings, standing against everything the embattled farmer hated, inventing some things the farmer had not yet imagined. But Hogg was no fool, nor was he really radical. He was a flamboyant, but deeply folk-conservative man; he knew how to survive in party politics, whom to fight, and with whom to make a deal. He was a hoeman champion, but no farmer himself; he ended up quite rich. Hogg had a keen mind, and he proved it more than once in court against some able outside legal talent. Above all else, however, in the public eye he was a stump man.