Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
On the stump, he could hold a crowd of Texas farmers for hours, blasting railroads, bloated capitalists, insurance companies, gold; he extolled the simple life and the virtues of the men who tilled the soil. He threw off his coat and worked up sweats; he dropped his suspenders and splashed water over his brow, got his second wind, and went on to new heights amid cheers.
Hogg and his railroad commission plan won by a huge vote.
The new body created so much interest and attention in Texas that John Reagan resigned from the U.S. Senate to chair it. It had power to fix freight rates and passenger fares, and even more important, by a later act, gained the power to control the issuance of railway stocks and bonds. The immediate action of the commission was to order a general reduction of rates. The carriers fought back in court, and lost. Their next fight was in the elections of 1892.
The carriers, joined by a variety of corporate interests fearing regulation, charged the commission was wrong in principle, undemocratic, and unrepublican. Hogg again carried the day against powerful opposition from conservative elements within the Democrats, against George Clark of Waco, who was a railway lawyer.
The Railroad Commission was there to stay, and generally, over the years, it was to do good work. It did correct many abuses; here Texas succeeded earlier than many other states.
Hogg continued in action in the governor's chair; he was a powerful executive, not because of the state constitution but in spite of it, because he had overwhelming popular support. His next step was the strengthening of a state antitrust law. The railroads were cowed, but the "cotton-bagging trust," the "beef combine," and the great land companies remained. As attorney general, Hogg had secured the United States' second antitrust law, following the state of Kansas by about one month.
The Texas law emerged with teeth. It carried heavy penalties against any combination restricting trade, fixing prices, or limiting production. It carefully exempted farmers or laborers, but was extended to insurance companies and virtually every other enterprise. It was, and remained, far more severe than all the antitrust legislation enacted in this century or the next by the federal government.
Another law prohibited the ownership of Texas soil by foreigners. This was thrown out by the supreme court, then revised within the limits of constitutionality. In 1893, an act of the legislature was intended to prevent the formation of corporations to deal in lands; it provided that such entities already in existence divest themselves of all holdings within fifteen years. The land company had a historic bad name in Texas, but there was no prohibiting its operations. This law, and another requiring all corporations to own only such land as was needed in their business operations, were faulty and easily contravened.
The trends of the century, and the coming one, ended the dream of a state of small freeholders. In fact, large landholdings were to become one of Texas's most characteristic patterns, while in many other western states, under the impact of the Federal Homestead Act and the fact that the general government did not sell off its lands, the vast ranches disappeared. In Texas, there was a tendency for the large cattle ranches of the 1870s and 1880s to consolidate and grow much larger in the next decades, as the less lucky and less hardy operators were squeezed out. Large landholdings in the East were also the rule; however, this was obscured by the fact that, tenant-operated, these holdings were cut up into thousands of small farms. The large farms and ranches in the West, because they were more businesslike and capitalistic in concept, were more efficient. This did not make them more popular among their smaller neighbors.
Hogg remained a popular hero in these bad times. His public acts were always calculated and performed to make him appear colorful, and a friend of the common man. One such act was his ultimatum to the Southern Pacific to provide transportation for 700 members of Coxey's Army across Texas in 1894.
Hogg, however, was Governor of Texas. He had to serve the legitimate demands and interests of all citizens, some of whom were inevitably more equal than others. He could relieve the farmers' tensions a bit by scratching assorted fat cats, either actually or rhetorically. But his powers had definite limits. And the practicalities of politics limited any intelligent man as well.
The Texas Democratic Party was folk-conservative in thought and tone, but it represented the local "interests" as well as debt-ridden farmers. It was, like all successful American political organisms, composed of various sorts of men. Its conservatism was preindustrial and antimonopoly or trust, but among its powerful figures it included beef buyers and cotton ginners, landlords, lawyers, and bankers. It represented land and money as well as angry 'croppers. Almost all Texas voters agreed in regulating the powerful, "foreign" railroads, and in singeing outside capitalists, or anything else touched with a Yankee taint. The farmers' groups, however, began to grow too radical for the essentially sensible Hogg. Increasingly, they attacked the "middlemen," as the local business groups were called. It was understandable that farmers who had not seen real money for years began to hate merchants and buyers, who seemed to work less yet took everything they earned year after year. But such attitudes went beyond Hogg's politics.
The Alliance demanded the confiscation of railroads, moving radically beyond mere regulation. This offended a great many people on principle, whether they owned railroad stock or not. It was socialism, or worse. This was undoubtedly more an emotional reaction and not so fundamental as the basic Alliance demand for federal credits, to be made at nominal interest and secured by crops. But like free silver and the abolition of national banks, it got more attention.
Almost all the Alliance's demands were eventually to be worked into United States law. The federal credit scheme became the basis of American farm policy in later years. But it was neither a panacea nor a solution, then or later. The demands and dreams of the American small farmer, which wormed themselves ineradicably into American myth and United States government, were all based on one fundamental false assumption: that families should, or could, support themselves in an industrializing society on freehold farms. Probably extensive credit to the farmer of the 1890s would have done him no more good than the credit he finally got in later years. In any case, he would have had to leave the land. Few farmers could see the root of their troubles; they demanded symptom-treatment to ease their pain.
Hogg and the Alliance leadership fell out. Then, the national Democratic Party chose Grover Cleveland, a sound-money conservative, for its Presidential candidate in 1892. The Farmers' Alliance felt betrayed. In the emotional backwash, Hogg snubbed the Alliance men, and the chairman of the state Democratic committee read them out of the party. They followed the course of the truly alienated in American life: they joined a hitherto unheard-of group, the People's Party of Texas, newly formed among the hardscrabble, limestone hills of Lampasas. Here, on the exact edge of the old farmline frontier, third-party Populism was born. Quickly, the People's Party exploded, via the already formed Alliance, from Texas to Nebraska, from Arkansas to Virginia.
The crushing depression of these years fed its growth. But Populism was to be relatively unimportant in the West and upper South, despite the adoption of some of its planks by the national Democrats and William Jennings Bryan. Third-party Populism, the only real Populism, sprouted fully only in the far South. It was to be a bitter and debased continuance of the Civil War, dividing not only North and South, but this time Southerner and Southerner. In Texas, in 1894 and 1896, the People's Party did not fuse with the Democrats. Instead, it developed its own leaders and own platforms, and fought a bitter, hardly understood internal political war.
The basically amiable faction politics, without ideological divisions, disappeared in a welter of bitterness and turmoil not seen since Reconstruction days. Interest politics arose, dividing farmer and businessman, owner and tenant, debtor and creditor, with intolerance on both sides. The Populists mounted their attack on the "system" with evangelistic fury, flaying now the national scene of uncontrolled capitalistic orgy, now the "middlemen" who were the system's local lackeys. They had, certainly, sufficient to be bitter about. Their reaction, and actions, were logical in their time. They also were rather frightening, as all such American movements are from time to time.
The Populists proclaimed the old doctrine of Jeffersonian equality, shouted that the common people were the salt of the earth, that labor was holy, and the tree of American liberty withered in too-dry soil. The attack caught fire. Seventy-five Texas papers supported the third party; one, the
Southern
Mercury
at Dallas, was influential. The Populists evolved their own pantheon of stump men: Tom Nugent, Jerome Kearby, Cyclone Davis, and T. P. Gore, who later had some success in Oklahoma.
A high number of Populist leaders were fundamentalist preachers from the frontier. Populist meetings took on a camp meeting, revivalist style. Hymns were sung; sermons preached; this was not a campaign but to some men, a holy crusade. The new evangelists found much inspiration in the Bible, against money-changers and self-proclaimed scribes and Pharisees. Caught up and bewildered by eroding economic change, over which they had no control, the farming people listened and agreed to high-sounding, if ridiculous, financial panaceas, and roaringly agreed that their manhood must not be sacrificed up on a cross of gold.
Rhetorical hatred was directed toward the East, the source of all evil, the place from which Yankee money flowed. Wall Street, whose workings not one farmer in a million understood, became an enduring, odious symbol. The shadowy figure of the "Jewish banker" became involved; although not one Texan in a thousand had ever even seen a Jew. Shylock had been a respectable, despicable English-speaking symbol for three hundred years—something later, and Jewish, observers forgot. Shylock the banker was an allusion every farmer immediately understood, and every farmer had figuratively, with great anguish, been relieved of his pound of flesh.
Someone, inevitably, had to serve as scapegoats for this long pain. The rancor against the Shylocks was to remain rhetorical, because the Jews remained out of reach. But also inevitably, scapegoats nearer to home were found, despite the earnest, and apparently honest, efforts of the Populist leaders.
Easterners made a number of errors about this lot. They did identify Populism with the fundamentalist Bible Belt, and considered it anti-Eastern, anti-intellectual, anticapitalist, anti-Semitic, and anti-aristocratic. They reacted rather violently. Major magazines, such as the
Nation
and the
Atlantic
Monthly
and
Harper's Weekly
, were as hysterical in denunciation as the preachers on the stump. Theodore Roosevelt accused Populists of plotting social revolution and subversion of the Republic, and actually proposed shooting twelve of their leaders dead by firing squad. Joseph H. Choate argued before the Supreme Court that the demands for an income tax were "beginnings of socialism and communism." The members of the Union League Club apparently were so frightened that the estimable Mark Hanna, the coolest if not the most lovable head around, rebuked them for acting like scared chickens.
Somehow, Wall Street had its own myth: that the People's Party were anarchists, frothing to burn the nation out.
All this requires some inspection. Actually, Populism was neither the beast the corporate capitalists thought it, nor anything like the true reform movement later Eastern anticapitalist intellectuals lovingly longed for.
Populist thinking was provincial and Southern, because its supporters were provincial and generally uneducated. It was also imperfect, overemphasizing the importance of ready money, and believing a few dollars could offset a long-term trend. It was also simplistic, trying to separate mankind into producers and drones, farmers and workers, and "greedy interests living off them." This was then and later emotionally satisfying, if socially insane. An industrial society had to be complex, and in no tightly organized society would human psychology afford much honor or reward to manual labor. Populism also succumbed to the American agrarian myth, but far better educated Americans succumbed to it, also. The People's Party invented its conspiracies and its inevitable Golden Age. It was composed mostly of ignorant people, and heir to all the superstition, folklore, and prejudice of inner America, which was considerable. However, few of these foibles were in any way worse than the biases and hypocrisies of other American regions. The industrial upper classes in the East were more than rhetorically anti-Semitic, although they were too genteel to shout about it from the pulpit. The insistence upon rampant capitalism and gold, as sort of religions, bears no more inspection than the farmer's naïve trust in government credit and free silver.
For better or for worse, most of the Populist programs came to pass in later, neo-Populist times. The Populist charge that private banking was stacked against the farmer was true, as was his belief that only the general government could provide adequate credit on the farms. Given his mistaken assumption that there was a place for the family farm, much Populist thinking was eminently logical.
American intellectuals could view the historic passage of the dinosaur, or the collapse of the European feudality under economic factors, with greater assurance than they could view the demoralization of the farmer. The American ethic did not have an agrarian origin, but Americans had spent too many generations on the farm. Populism, and its myths, were to infect the coming years with deep nostalgia.