Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
The Populists in Texas were theoretically and rhetorically opposed to the monied East. But distant capitalism was out of reach; they waged their bitterest battle against what they considered the agents of capitalism and industrialism at home. The farmers rebelled against the pretensions to breeding and social superiority of the new-rich, post-1860 mercantile and business classes, but not against private property or the concept of wealth itself.
Many outsiders confused this attack as an attack on aristocracy, but then they confused the new industrial upper class in the United States with aristocracy, too. In parts of Texas—and much more strikingly in Virginia, where there was more available gentry—some of the most honored names supported the Populist cause. The landowning, or former landowning, groups shared many of the beliefs and hurts of the small farmer.
The Populist assault on the state government was not intelligent but emotional. They turned a political struggle into a crusade and made it "them" or "us." They were too simplistic, forgetting the essential of American political success, the pragmatic alliance between disparate groups. They tried to form a great alliance composed only of the poor. There were more poor than rich or well-off in America, but in America, with its cause-and-effect ethic, any such alliance was doomed. Locally, they drove the Democratic Party with all its historic strengths and associations in the Southern mind entirely into the business-conservative camp. Instead of creating a new North–South battleground, Populism scarred new battlefields in the South itself, on which some poisonous mushrooms were allowed to grow.
The farmers hoped to enlist the Northern proletariat, to create another New York–Western axis as in the Jacksonian age. They had no real routes of communication, nor any ideology or leadership palatable to the North. Mark Hanna, master craftsman that he was, was certain that silver could not be sold to Indiana farmers, and he was right. The whole tier of states that went for Lincoln in 1860 went for McKinley in 1896. The Northern farmer remained unconvinced, and the McKinley people, with enormous success, convinced the Eastern workers that Southern agrarianism threatened their whole house of cards. It was still a near-thing; the Republicans won because they yet retained the initiative in American life. The Populist-Democrats, on the national level, were a reactionary wail of protest for a passing way of life.
The second great alliance sought by the Populists was with the impoverished and quiescent Negro mass. The Populist leaders knew they could not offset the Democrats in Texas without black allies. Negroes still voted in Texas in the 1890s; there were no legal restrictions in their way, though they faced intimidation in many counties. After Reconstruction, the Negroes, always outside the money economy, drifted outside the political scene. Populist evangels determined to bring them back in.
There was no real difference between the lot of the black tenant and the white. Both faced and suffered from the same conditions. But here the Populist leadership stepped on dangerous ground. Blinded by their own logic, they failed to remember the illogical ways men think and act. They made their second great mistake. First, they had turned "interest" politics into class politics in Texas; now, they infused status politics with disastrous results.
Black and white workers were sent among the Negroes. These were paid workers, generally called "'fluence men." They distributed bribes and favors, and their mission was to influence votes. They enjoyed considerable success, because the Negro vote was ripe. The Democrats, for twenty years, had left it strictly alone.
With its melange of factions, traditions, and expertise, the Democrat Party fought back. Hogg and Culberson built tight south-Texas machines, dragooning the Mexican vote; at this time the Mexican vote in Texas was brought almost entirely into the conservative camp, not by ideology but through the use of local Anglo leaders and superb machine politics. The Democrats had the scared support of most businessmen and virtually every corporation or interest within the state. They also had control of the apparatus of government, and they used it well.
The Populists had aroused class and caste hatreds. Now, they met with practices not seen since Reconstruction: the stuffed ballot box, packed courts, hostile election boards. They also found economic boycotts, social ostracism, and severe retaliation. Preachers who favored Populists were turned out; both white and black Populist workers were evicted from their tenant farms.
The black alliance made the People's Party terribly vulnerable to the South's most sensitive charge: race treason. The Populists were branded with the accusation that they were disloyal to both Texas and the white race, and this was one they simply could not throw off. The Civil War was still a burning event. All voters either remembered the conflict, or had been born during Reconstruction.
The Republican patronage party in Texas made things worse, by publicly supporting Populism. Hoping only for a McKinley victory in the North, local Republicans plotted further wreckage among the Democrats. They did more damage to the Populists.
The Democrats survived. Culberson, Hogg's successor, beat Tom Nugent in 1894 for governor. In 1896, the year the national Democrats undercut Populism by adopting its planks, Culberson beat Jerome Kearby by only 58,000 votes out of more than half a million. The election was resplendent with counting-out and other forms of fraud.
The People's Party did elect a bloc of state representatives and many local officials, but not enough to win influence; 1896 was their high-water mark. By now, the national Democrat Party had destroyed third party Populism by incorporating it, and in Texas the stubborn third party, by battling the Democrats, had strangled themselves.
Populism aroused an enormously hostile reaction both in the North and South. Much of its approach was irrational, but its method scared more men than its madness. Pragmatism, not evangelism, was the root of American politics. There was still a shuddery sensitive spot left on the American soul by the irrationalism of the Civil War.
More remarkable than the People's Party's rise was its quick demise. By 1898 it was fading fast, and by 1900 it had disappeared. There were a number of reasons. The most important was that Populism had never had a genuine ideological base. It was interest politics, waged by men who wanted dollars more than social reform. As historians noted, silver dollars were the real goal, not the theory of free coinage of silver. Populists rose because they were hard-working men and women who were pushed to the wall by changing systems; when they could make it again under the American system, all their protest would dissipate. Populists in Texas had very little, if anything, in common with the Progressivism of the high Midwest, with which they were often confused. They were not liberals, but reactionaries—looking not forward but backward, to the mythical agrarian democracy over which Tom Jefferson was supposed to have presided. Their cause was lost forty years before.
Few Texas farmers in their smelly overalls had deserted the American ethic, or the folk-conservatism deeply implanted in the American Protestant mind. The great wail of political protest heralded no change of outlook or ethic, or any European infusion of notions of political theorism or class. The Texas farmer revolted, within the strict limits of political action, because his middle-class attitudes and status were eroded by economic forces beyond his control, but the erosion did not continue long enough to have a permanent effect. He did remain essentially anticapitalist, but this was nothing new. The Southern farmer had always been basically anticapitalist.
By 1900, the economic outlook for farmers brightened immeasurably. Cycle followed cycle; due to increased urbanization in the North and improved European markets, all farm prices rose. The desperation of the 1890s was followed by ten fat years. The farmer had dollars to jingle, and his protests subsided, if they did not entirely go away. The Democrats learned something from Populism. They incorporated much of it, in Texas and nationally. If the adoption of the silver plank was political idiocy, there were other aspects of Populism that had more lasting appeal.
Although much genuine myth, and much later political practice, lived on after the great crusade, one part of it turned sour. The People's Party germinated the racism that was simply waiting for irrigation in the South.
An understandable reaction of the dominant Democratic local parties was to demand that the large, unlettered, and alien Negro vote be placed without the pale. The attempt to fuse blacks with poor whites scared every business and property interest in Texas. It also, in a humanly understandable if not entirely palatable reaction, turned many Populists' stomachs. A phenomenon of the collapse of third-party Populism was its retreat into virulent racism, perhaps brought on by Democratic charges, perhaps a result of failure and frustration. The attempted political alliance between white and black sharecroppers did psychological damage to the status-minded white. The black man performed one definite service in Texas besides labor; he provided an unmistakable social floor. Few white men could equate their lot with the Negro and maintain an American self-esteem. No men willingly accept a loss of caste.
The Democrats, first by
de facto
practices, then by written law, denied the Negro the privilege of voting in the Democrat primary. In one-party states, this disenfranchised the race. The former Populists approved this fully, as if frightened by the brink they had almost passed. The former Populists, even more strongly, demanded that the blacks be defined and be legally separated socially at law. The polls were closed; the signs went up. Here the restoration was finally consolidated in caste, and both interests and "the people" rid themselves of a bad scare.
These years again showed that relations between white and black depended upon the Negro not impinging upon the white. The white's tolerance was geometrically proportional to his distance, real or imagined, from the black. This of course was a common human reaction, by no means confined to Texas or the American South.
Cotton-kingdom Texas's mood was to ensure continued subordination of the race. The new western counties tended to be more liberal; the cattle kingdom's dominant feeling was to keep the Negro out. One incident in Lubbock County in 1900 was significant, and told much of American race relations beyond the limits of the South. Farming was at this time coming experimentally to the High Plains and along the lower Rio Grande, based on new ways of irrigation and new crops. One immigrant seeded cotton in the far northwest. A horde of cowhands, when they learned the nature of the crop, roped the farmer, and at gunpoint made him plow it up. "Cotton brings niggers, and this is white man's country," they said.
The black belt was never to spread successfully much beyond the old cotton line. White—and unseen but equally important, Mexican—hostility kept it out.
Texas seemed half-radical in 1896, but in 1906 it was comfortably conservative again. Populism and neo-Populism, as in the New Deal, had great vogue in depressed times. Reform got short shrift if proposed during prosperity, which was a fact that some Populist allies in other places never understood. Texas was split, not between liberals and conservatives but between functional liberals and functional conservatives. Both camps were philosophical conservatives at heart. They saw nothing wrong with Anglo-Saxon civilization as it had grown up in Texas, as a whole.
Although there was a brief, consciously genteel reaction about 1900, the traits of Populism triumphed in the debacle of its politics. The dominant Democrats found expediency lay in stealing some People's Party thunder. Hogg and Culberson were prototypes of a most recurring breed: "common" men, insistent that no one mistake their commonness, spouting and perhaps believing much neo-Populist doctrine, while pragmatically making deals with "the interests" on the side. The Populist debacle damped the desire for class politics in Texas. Afterward, few evangelistic demagogues, spouting reform and radical doctrine, actually cultivated any trend toward genuine social change. What was confused with and taken for democracy and reform was a massive injection of vulgarity. Voters who liked deep-burned, catsup-splattered steaks and distrusted any elegance in manners or dress, gave birth to an enormous total of candidates with the same displayed tastes. The trick was to be common, and solid in support of all social bias, but not to offend any locally dangerous interests in the process. This confusion of vulgarity-cum-folk-conservatism was often guileless. Nor was it by any means restricted to Texas, although in Texas it was usually highly successful at the polls.
In these years there was a general retreat from the high-mindedness and gentility of the older South in many places. Anglican Senators were replaced with earnest, gallus-snapping Baptists; former brigadiers in gray were supplanted by new men who escaped the crumbling family farms. This was an inevitable evolution, a logical response to basic trends in American society as a whole. There was an enormous aversion to, and a conscious gravitation away from, elites of any kind. The importance of family crumbled rapidly; ephemeral, constantly changing status took its place. The status society was even more functional than the old one had been. Now no Texan could be properly identified until it was learned "what he did"; who he was, or where he came from, made less and less difference. The dominant American social system, if not all the dominant American ideas, was to triumph completely.
Certain trends clung in politics. It was always safe, and in fact, sensible, to be against the "interests," especially the foreign ones. For many years interests active in, but headquartered outside Texas took heavy blows. Culberson's attorney general, Crane, levied an enormous fine against the Waters, Pierce Oil Company and drove it out of the state. He had good reason; the company had broken the laws. But similar companies, in this era, were behaving the same way with impunity in most parts of the nation. A few years later, twenty-one major life insurance companies left Texas, appalled by the so-called Robertson law, which required them to invest 75 percent of the reserves on lives of Texas citizens inside the state. For many years any Yankee interest was fair prey. The severe antitrust codes, which were far more severe and enforced with greater effort than the federal laws, possibly hampered industry and business development. However, their major effect was to hold certain national corporate empires at bay, in a series of Shilohs in this new war, while Texas could grow native corporate octopuses of its own. The large, powerful, indigenous insurance and corporate utility companies were Texan beneficiaries of the fights against Eastern capital.