Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
The election of 1911 was fought almost entirely on the alcohol issue. Democrats of each faction condemned each other with more virulence, in many cases, than they had ever attacked E. J. Davis. The brewery industry, which had become an important interest in the state, raised more than $2,000,000 in campaign funds, supporting drinking candidates no matter what their other politics. Conversely, when a poll tax amendment went through after the beginning of the century, requiring a head tax in order to register to vote, this was heralded by the prohibitionist reformers as a great triumph for morality. It would hold down the Mexican, beer-bibbing vote; prohibition was another Anglo-American frenzy utterly incomprehensible to the Latin Catholic mind.
On statewide referendum, prohibition was defeated only by about 6,000 votes. It was to triumph a few years later, when prohibitionism found a happy combination with patriotism. First, saloons selling liquor to soldiers were closed; then, in a burst of wartime feeling, in 1918, the whole state voted out liquor. This, of course, was a national phenomenon, and Texas quickly ratified the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919. Thus the controversy was ended for some years.
The year 1914 marked the appearance of the most colorful governor since Jim Hogg. This was James E. Ferguson, who was to be at or near the center of Texas politics for thirty years. Ferguson threw up a completely confusing image to some people, but the pattern of his own career was quite simple. He was typical of a whole breed of Texas politicos in the 20th century. Ferguson liked office, but was a man without a mission; having no particular program, he tailored his campaigns to the electorate's foibles and desires.
Ferguson was a banker, a deep conservative on most matters, and by no means unfriendly to corporate stocks and bonds. At the beginning of his campaign for governor, he pacified "the interests" by declaring as a businessman's candidate. He told city newspapers that there was room in Texas for both the rich and the poor, and that the rich had a right to the protection of their money. He also shied away from the prohibition issue. In both these ways, Ferguson gained important support, and, as later investigation was to turn up, important funds.
Then, Ferguson took his campaign to the country. He made 145 speeches in the cotton belt, only 10 in cities or towns. He knew exactly what he was doing.
The continuing commodity price cycles were hastening the erosion of family freehold farms. Each bad period destroyed a few more farmers; each drouth put more farmers in debt from which they could not escape. The figures on the percentage of farmer-owners in Texas tell the sordid tale of social destruction. In 1860, almost all Texas farmers owned their own land. In 1880, the percentage had fallen to 63 percent. By 1900, 49 percent of all farm families were sharecroppers; ten years later the percentage rose to approximately 53 percent. A vast mass of people through the Southern states were approaching the status of peasantry. There were other cruelties not shown by the price cycles and percentages of tenants.
Custom fixed the landlord's shares at one-fourth on cotton, one-third on other crops. But as the country grew more crowded and good land was taken up, in parts of Texas landlords demanded cash bonuses beyond the customary shares before leasing their lands. Even in good years the tenant could not get ahead.
After ten good years—the time that was fixed in American minds as the era of "parity," when the farmer earned his fair share of the national income—the agricultural cycle again went down: 1911 was a bad year for prices; it was followed by the national depression of 1913–14. Drouth returned, and worst of all, the European war. Cattle and cotton prices tumbled when the foreign markets were cut off. At this time hundreds of cattlemen and thousands of farmers went bankrupt.
Two-thirds of the Texas cotton crop was exported to Europe in 1913; it comprised the major value of all U.S. exports. The American fascination with industrialization produced a blindness to the value of agricultural exports; Americans thought of themselves as industrial people, although mass production of agricultural products was one of the things at which they excelled. The cotton economy had been entirely viable in 1860, despite the military weakness of its society. The Civil War and the lack of capital in the South forced the unhappy arrangement known as sharecropping; the pro-industrial policies of the next two generations continued depression in the South through hard money and tariffs. When amelioration finally came in the policies of the New Deal, it was too late. The family farm was already doomed, although the myth of its social viability survived. The future lay in large-scale, capitalistic farming, with markets both at home and abroad, but in the years it took to reachieve this, terrible damage was done to people in the South. Few Americans saw that for the first two generations following the war, Texas would probably have prospered more had it not been attached to and, dominated by the United States.
The final erosion of small-scale agriculture in the 1930s has been clearly seen, if not entirely understood. The enormous damage done fifteen years earlier was not seen. Cotton prices dropped to eight cents. The rash of local solutions, such as better storage, more cooperative credit, and the desperate, patriotic "buy a bale" program launched among businessmen and townspeople were all failures, as they had to be. The sad fact was that no amount of "credit" and delay could salvage an economic enterprise that was not able to stand on its own feet. The cooperatives that lent farmers credits in lieu of the general stores themselves went bankrupt; the agrarian myth that held family farming to be socially beneficial ignored the basic problem of long-term trends. The federal government, later trying the same artificial symptom-treating, spent vast billions, with no better results.
However, the terrible process of poverty and social erosion had definite political results, then and later. Candidate Ferguson could do nothing about drouth and bad markets, but he could promise sympathy and legislative succor for the "little man." Ferguson galvanized the rural areas of Texas by promising to fix rents at the customary shares by state law. He had found an "issue," the one thing most avidly sought by office-seekers. With this program, he swamped a prohibitionist candidate through Texas's fundamentalist cotton-growing Bible belt. He took office in January 1915.
The legislature was impressed sufficiently by his total vote so that it enacted his promised law. But the law was not effective. It could not be enforced—there was no way to police private contracts in which nothing was written down. In the end the supreme court threw it out. But Governor Ferguson, without spending a cent of state funds, established himself as a hero to the little man.
Ferguson was as canny as Hogg. In office, he tried to be spectacular, and he seized attention by beginning a massive pardons program, freeing convicted felons by the hundreds. This served two purposes; it was not unpopular with the rank and file, and it served to cut state expenditures. The problem of what to do with the crowded prisons had been a serious one since the Rangers had begun to fill them after 1875. Convicts had been treated barbarously for a great many years. Ferguson's pardons policy was far more popular than many people realized.
Like Hogg, Ferguson appalled lawyers, city dwellers, and the like, but Ferguson was never under any illusion that his electorate was genteel. Actually, he presided over a considerable amount of genuine reform. Ferguson, and governors like him, did not hold Texas back from the 20th century; they were probably a necessary transition. They did not damage the institutions of the state, while they did keep the minds of many suffering people off their troubles. The sharecroppers had to have an outlet, and one enormous satisfaction was to have a man they thought their own in the governor's chair.
Flamboyant and colorful, Ferguson got into trouble because he did attack one institution of the state, the developing University of Texas at Austin. In 1915, he became embroiled with the University administration over appropriations. The argument developed personal animosity on both sides. Inevitably, there was hostility between any conservative official and the officers of any state-supported institution; this university–governor quarrel was common to many other places. Ferguson made an error; he tried to have the University president dismissed.
When the regents refused to do this, Ferguson vetoed the next university appropriation bill. This joined him in heated battle with virtually every lawyer, professional man, and Texas University alumnus in the state.
While this battle was emerging, meanwhile, the legislature had been investigating Ferguson's affairs. Certain things the governor had done did not appear in an entirely wholesome light. There apparently was some misuse of funds; state monies had been deposited to a bank in which Ferguson held stock; and most spectacular of all, it appeared that the governor had an unrepaid loan of $156,000 from the Texas Brewers' Association, contracted in 1914. There was, of course, no intention on either side that this "loan" be paid. Such things were a regular manifestation of American politics, which most candidates hoped would never see the light of day.
Significantly, the investigating committee recommended that no charges be brought, and the case against the governor pragmatically be dropped. No one wanted to "spit in the soup." Then, Ferguson began his vendetta against the university, and he angered many powerful men within the legislature. The charges were made public. The revelation that Ferguson had accepted a fortune from the "beer trust" paralyzed his horde of Baptist tenant-farmer allies. The University-educated lawyers in the legislature tore the governor apart.
In July 1917, Ferguson was impeached by the Texas House on twenty-one counts; the state Senate upheld ten charges. The governor was dismissed from office, with the proviso that he never hold office in the state of Texas again.
In the cotton-farming democracy of the South, however, this would not deter James E. Ferguson for very long.
About the turn of the century, Texas moved strongly into national Democratic politics. Texas was becoming the largest habitually Democratic state, and the fusion with Populism by the national party had important effects. National officeholders, like Senators and Congressmen, could give the national alliance wholehearted support, even while the local party took a somewhat different course at home.
Thus, while the Democrats battled the People's Party in Texas tooth and nail, and trampled it under, fair means or foul, a long succession of representatives in Washington were free to take a definite neo-Populist tinge. The old-line conservatives like Roger Mills, who supported Cleveland—"both a Democrat
and
a gentleman"—were replaced with men like Culberson and Bailey. Bailey, who like Ferguson had personal affairs that could not bear inspection, soon foundered in controversy and was forced to retire. But Culberson, sent to the Senate in 1899, remained there twenty-four years. This was not to be an unusually long stay. A number of other Texans, such as Garner and Rayburn, were to reside there many more years. One-party politics, in which officials built personal, not party, machines kept the same men in national office interminably.
Texans gained great seniority in the Congress, an institution in which power largely depended upon seniority. Joseph Bailey was minority leader of the House before his elevation to the Senate, and a long succession of Texans followed as party leaders in each house. Others inevitably reached the vital committee chairs, where they could exercise real power, when the Democrats won control. One-party politics allowed Texas far more leverage than, for example, Illinois or New York, where the voters tended to be divided between two parties, and regularly threw one set of rascals out.
Bailey, in the House, advocated cheap money, regulation of Eastern capitalism, bedrock support of Old American institutions, and overseas belligerency. All these, in more or less degree, became the hallmarks of the Texan neo-Populist in national politics. Bailey was aggressive and influential in goading the McKinley Administration into a war in Cuba in 1898 that McKinley obviously did not want.
When this war came, Texans reacted very much with the old Southwestern belligerency, a feature of every U.S. war since 1812. The Texan response was enthusiastic. Ten thousand men enlisted immediately, and this fact brought a regiment recruited largely at San Antonio into national prominence. The Rough Riders, under the command of the regular army's greatest hero, Leonard Wood, gained a national reputation by charging up San Juan Hill on foot behind their lieutenant colonel, Theodore Roosevelt. Whatever the merits of their victory, this cowboy regiment made Theodore Roosevelt President in time. They engaged in a great triumphal parade in Washington, during which some of the more ebullient amused the audience by roping Negroes among the crowd. National sentiments and Texas feeling were in general confluence at this time.
The northern United States was strongly influenced by the ideas of social Darwinism, and this had much in common with the Texan unarticulated sense of natural selection on the frontier. Senator Beveridge of Indiana eulogized U. S. Grant in 1898: "He never forgot that we are a conquering race and that we must obey our blood and occupy new markets and, if necessary, new lands. He had the prophet's seer-like sight which beheld, as part of the Almighty's plan, the disappearance of debased civilizations and decaying races before the higher civilization of the nobler and more virile types of men."
With this the great majority of Texas could agree. Generals Grant and Sheridan had wiped out the bitter stains of the Civil War with their final Indian campaigns; in their last years they toured Texas as heroes, and by the turn of the century Texans again could wear bluecoats with pride. They also agreed solemnly with Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, who wrote: "Self-interest is not only a legitimate but a fundamental cause for national policy, one which needs no cloak of hypocrisy . . . Governments are corporations, and as corporations they have no souls."