Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
The whole history of Anglo-Texas was a history of conquest of men and soil, and with the closing of the last frontier no such powerful thrust and impetus could merely die.
Those few Texans who played parts on the national scene entered fully into the spirit of the first premature American expansion overseas. They, and the Texas population behind them, exhibited those characteristics that some observers believed were true of Anglo-Americans: buoyancy, enthusiasm, exuberant idealism combined with a certain naïveté. But these supposedly characteristic American traits were surface manifestations masking deeper currents. The true, fundamental Anglo-American temper, whether Texan or Yankee, was something else. Bedrock seriousness of purpose, canny calculation, shrewd understanding of times and men, and implacable determination to surmount or destroy obstacles were much more deeply imbedded in the nature of the Anglo-American who conquered the continent.
Some Latin observers called American buoyancy and idealism "deliberate escapes on the plane of imagination." Americans, and Texans, preferred to take their apparent traits at face value; no people is easily able to recognize or face its real hypocrisies. But running through the Texan people and their representatives on the national and international scene was the bare-bones realism of men who had learned profound distrust of all abstractions and ideologies, but who retained a deep respect for power and the uses of power. Thus Texans in Congress could indulge in hypocritical oratory on the floor without taking their expressed hypocrisies seriously. This empiricism, and sense for the roots of power, made many Texans, naïve, ignorant, and parochial as they seemed, more than a match for many other men.
The Texan's thirst for empires was guileless and natural, his distrust for theories profound. In foreign affairs, this seemed to translate into belligerency, before and during the 20th century's wars. But Texans, instinctively, saw struggle at the root of life. Doctrines of quietism that influenced other American regions never penetrated the stark puritanism of Texas.
Grover Cleveland, the conservative Democrat, was eventually regarded in Texas as another hard-money Republican in Democrat disguise. Texans found Theodore Roosevelt, the first President to come from the gentry since early in the 19th century, much more palatable. Roosevelt thought and talked the Texans' language; he was West-seeing and imperial; only his Republicanism and his Eastern origin kept him from becoming a major hero in the state. It was significant that Roosevelt raised his volunteer regiment during the Spanish-American War mainly in the West, and made recruiting headquarters at San Antonio.
Theodore Roosevelt was a man of action, untrammeled by ideology in the best American tradition, but with an awakening social conscience. He understood that the rampant industrial machine that was making the United States a world power was also creating internal chaos. His greatness lay in his realization that the machine could not be turned off, nor the clock stopped, but that somehow events must be brought under control. In this appraisal Roosevelt appeared far superior in pragmatic realism to Woodrow Wilson, who always gave the impression he would have preferred to turn the clock back to preindustrial times.
Yet, since Wilson's heart and mind were closer to the hearts of Texans, Texas took Woodrow Wilson, with his genuine mistrust of capitalism much closer to its collective heart. The Southern-born President's speeches aroused deep, nostalgic pulls in the American middle-class breast. His protests echoed the protests of farmers forced into a new form of peasantry, and of small merchants losing out to powerful concentrations of energy and wealth. Beneath the Texan empiricism lay a reactionary mood. If Wilson did not quite see that the destruction of the America of small towns, corner drugstores, and family farms was inevitably in progress, neither did Texans. It was impossible to transmit a soul to corporate America; in 1912 Wilson could attempt to regulate it, or try to destroy it. Texans, in the majority, would have preferred the latter.
In 1912 the Texan delegation to the Democratic convention at Baltimore held out for Wilson, first and last. This support assured his nomination as the Presidential candidate, and Wilson never forgot it. Surprisingly, the strong Texan flavor of Wilson's Administration has sometimes been overlooked.
Albert Sidney Burleson became Postmaster General. W. T. Gregory, the central Texas political boss, was appointed Attorney General. David Houston, Texas-born, was Secretary of Agriculture, and Tom Love was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. More important than any of these men, and the horde of lesser officials of Texan extraction Wilson brought to Washington, was Wilson's most trusted friend and confidant, the backroom politico Colonel E. M. House.
How much House influenced Wilson's thinking is not easily determined. Yet, strong signs of Texan attitudes appear in Wilson's relations to Latin America. The Wilson Administration was eager to move into Haiti, Santo Domingo, and Mexico, either to uphold the flag, or "clean the places up." The Texan attitude toward Hispanic America, born out of long and unhappy experience with Mexico, was not essentially hostile; it was rather one of considered domination. Texas agreed vociferously with Theodore Roosevelt that "the contemptible little creatures in Bogotá" should not expect to deal on equal terms with the masters of the Hemisphere. Once domination and security were assured, the Texas—and generally, the American—attitude was one of amiable contempt.
Wilson's Administration exercised the North American prerogative vigorously, carrying on the Large Policy to the south. It also stirred up a generation of fear and hatred below the Rio Grande. It is certain that Colonel House saw nothing wrong in trying to end the European war by buying off Germany through offering it annexation of parts of Brazil.
Partly because of German machinations in Mexico in 1916, partly on general principles, Texas was ahead of the nation as a whole in belligerency in 1917. The support for Wilson's declaration of war was overwhelming. Volunteers came forward in huge numbers, and there was very little draft evasion—this, primarily, among ethnic Mexicans living near the Rio Grande. Almost 200,000 Texans served in the armed forces between 1917 and 1919. Because large areas of the state were well suited to military camps, with a mild climate and open territory, the war saw the emergence of important military camps in Texas. At Kelly Field, Texas became the home of United States military aviation. More than 5,000 Texans died in World War I, a full 10 percent of all combat casualties, and vastly more than the Texan share by population percentage.
The entire country mounted World War I as a great crusade rather than an empirical choice of violence in self-defense. The Texas reaction was not greatly different. Since 1900 Texas had increasingly fused back with the nation in foreign policy, especially when foreign policy was basically imperial—whatever name was put on it. Texans instinctively sustained anything that seemed to support American power and prestige. Both the domination of the banana republics and the destruction of Imperial Germany were parts of the same policy, blended of self-interest, self-defense, and an arrogant form of goodwill, that all through the 19th and early 20th century convinced most Texans that an American conquest of Mexico would be in that nation's own best interests. This drive, throughout the American, as well as the
Texan, heartland, was more profound than many Americans in the essentially unimperial East ever understood. Men who would have left the Indians in possession of their lands, and Mexicans in possession of the Southwest, were not historically inclined to seek new adventures. Those who had in some part carried the American flag West did not metamorphose overnight when they had no new worlds to conquer on their shores.
In 1917, Texas fused with the American nation in a tremendous burst of American-flag chauvinism, behind a government and President who spoke the Texan language even better than Theodore Roosevelt, that Westerner at heart. While the destruction of the Kaiser was enthusiastically pressed, the legislature made criticism of the flag, the government, its officers, its policies, and even the Yankee uniform a criminal offense. Here it followed the general government, which passed similar laws, in one great act of fusion. The legislature recommended that all books favorable to Germany or Germans be destroyed; study of the language was dropped in schools. There was a brief, but rather nasty, persecution of families with Germanic names, some of which were fifth-generation Americans out of 18th-century Appalachia. This extended to all foreigners in general.
The election codes were amended to stop voting by the foreign-born for the first time in Texas. Shortly following the war, the Constitution of the United States, and of Texas, was required to be taught in all schools, by teachers who were citizens, and English was made mandatory. Up to this time, Spanish had been permitted in most border schools. The same legislature wrote the "white primary" codes, which excluded Negroes from the Democratic Party by formal law. This was all part of a whole; Texans honestly believed that Negroes could never be effective citizens of the United States, though hope was still retained for ethnic Mexicans.
All crusades, from the Civil War to 1917, produced an aftermath of prejudice and frustration. While Attorney General Palmer hunted out Communists and anarchists from Washington, other forms of hysteria invaded Texas. In Texas, the national mood logically took a local coloration. About 1921, the Ku Klux Klan reappeared throughout most of the eastern portions of the state.
The 20th-century Klan had no real connection or historical root in the old one, though both movements were white-supremacist. The early Klan was a political group, formed only to try to control the black vote dragooned by the Radical Republicans. The revived Klan arrived out of Georgia, where it came to life in 1915. This new movement was much closer in form and spirit to the old Know-Nothing party, nativist, Protestant, and secretive. It merely borrowed the hoods and mysterious trappings of the 19th-century Klan, which had been adopted to terrify superstitious Negroes. The early Klansmen did not believe in this foofaraw, but hoped the blacks would.
The rise of such a movement was logical, particularly among the lower elements of American society. The massive immigration of the early century had been more than the country as a whole could gracefully absorb. The turn of the century notion of the melting pot was still in vogue, but it obviously was not working; all of the vast masses were no longer being Anglo-Americanized. The Republican-backed policy of encouraging labor immigration aroused deep suspicions and hostilities among native Americans. It was a logical outgrowth of these years that the labor movement took advantage of the prevailing mood to cut immigration down. If this was a tribal movement, some of its results were logical and perhaps, even necessary.
The 1917–18 war suddenly made the nation aware of vast numbers of so-called hyphenated Americans. The disillusioning aftermath of the crusade, which did not and could not make the world safe for Anglo-American democracy, somehow sharpened resentment against all "foreigners." There were not many foreigners in Texas, but this did not prevent a great upsurge of the Klan in the rural areas, with much of the old Populist rhetoric against the Jews. Anti-Catholicism was strongly revived; and a natural, and not rhetorical, target was the Negro. The fundamentalist, Protestant-oriented Ku Klux Klan, however, had one other drive, which perhaps has not been given sufficient attention. It enlisted thousands of men who knew no Catholics and had rarely seen a Jew because it stood for "law and order," and against corrupt officialdom. Of crime and corrupt officials Texas had its share.
By 1922 the Klan was deeply involved in local politics, and Klansmen had captured many local offices. In 1924, the organization opened a drive to win control of the state, with Felix Robertson of Dallas as its candidate for governor.
In these years the organization, mysterious, with secret membership, seemed to permeate the farms and towns from San Antonio to the Sabine. Reports of hooded men, riding by night, came from everywhere. The Ku Klux Klan—or men acting in its name, since the organization itself denied violence—took up another old American custom, vigilantism. Masked groups acted as prosecutor, judge, and jury toward people they did not like. In many communities, men and women were terrorized: criminals, real or supposed; people of supposedly loose morals; uppity niggers who strained the barriers of the caste system. Men and also women were dragged into the woods at night, tried by flaming torch light, flogged or otherwise punished. The victims of these courts were warned not to talk about them, and few did. Unlike the true vigilantism of earlier days, however, there were few leaders of society within the Klan. This made its aim of stopping crime untenable. There is no evidence that the mass persecutions of certain elements improved the air, as the mass hangings at San Antonio in the 1850s had; few, if any criminals were apprehended, and certainly no corrupt officials smelled out. Noticeably, a large number of various officers, including sheriffs, judiciously joined the Klan, though it is doubtful if many were active.
The effect on society was not very great. Those punished invariably came from the lowest dregs—waitresses, prostitutes, drifters, Negroes, Mexicans, halfwits. The Klan, through its organization, mystique, and anonymity, could move against these with relative impunity. It dared not move against anyone in the real power structure, corrupt or not. It could paralyze sheriffs through implied political threat, but it could in no way touch the so-called little rich, who were widely thought to be running local governments in Texas. In these groups, the Klan also aroused an immense hostility, both by its assault on law and order and by the obviously proletarian origin of its members. In its greatest era, the Klan was far less powerful than it was feared. Governor Pat Neff was hostile, and while some politicos tacitly let it be known they were members, a violent political reaction was at hand.