Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
In this volatile, confused democracy, the next move was unexpected, but not illogical. James E. Ferguson smelled the wind, and scented an "issue." Ferguson was barred by the terms of his impeachment from ever again holding office in Texas, but barred from politics, he was a man in pain. He had formed the American Party, and had been its candidate for President in 1920; its fiasco at the polls convinced Ferguson to return to the Democrats. Showing an ingenuity that would later be remembered by men with similar problems of being barred from office by law, Ferguson entered his wife's name in the Democrat primary as an anti–Ku Klux Klan candidate. Mrs. Ferguson, in a bitter contest, wrested the primary away from Klan candidate Robertson by some 100,000 votes.
Things were completely confused in the general election of 1924, in which Ma Ferguson, as she was universally known, opposed George Butte, dean of the University of Texas law school, who ran as an independent candidate with liberal, Republican, and despite his dismay and disavowal, Klan support. The incongruous and unpopular mélange behind Butte ruined him, and Miriam Ferguson became the first woman governor of Texas.
Ma Ferguson provided the color the Ferguson type sought and had to have. She was news, merely by being in office. But Ferguson himself was the governor of Texas, in everything but name. He was appointed to the powerful highway commission, which let juicy contracts; he dominated the executive office from the bedroom. All this provoked criticism in responsible quarters, but in others it provided Texas with endless fun. It took the mind of the common man off his troubles. No small portion of Ma Ferguson's support came from people who consciously or unconsciously believed in cutting "the powers" down to size. Ma Ferguson, and her husband, focused much resentment among those people who equated commonalty with real democracy and professed to see social value in being "common as an old shoe."
The second Ferguson administration was not only conservative, it was legislatively inert. The Fergusons did not even fight the Klan. They did not need to, because, like the Know-Nothings, the Klan, simply faded away. All such movements seemed to follow a similar pattern; they made sound and fury and caused much fright; they had no real effect on society's mainstream. The woman governor was to be remembered primarily for one thing: the most extensive use of executive clemency in Texas history. Ma Ferguson pardoned, furloughed, or otherwise freed 2,000 convicts in twenty months, in some cases before the individual even reached the penitentiary. Her husband, as she admitted, made these decisions. He was accused of corruption in this, as well as his letting of contracts through the highway commission. The state attorney general, Dan Moody, declared war on the Fergusons, and in 1926 entered the Democratic primary against the governor.
Moody defeated Mrs. Ferguson. At thirty-three, he was young, able, earnest, and reform-minded. Moody was a progressive who had made his reputation fighting the Klan in Williamson county. Like almost every serious-minded governor of Texas, he understood that the state constitution, with its separation and limitation of powers, was an enormous obstacle to public action. In office, Moody argued that the fact that all major state officers were independent of the governor was unworkable; he made what was to be a frequent demand: that the governor be permitted to appoint his own administration. He also asked for other reforms, including a civil service system for the state and changes to the constitution that would make tax bills easier to enact.
Moody was popular and had no trouble in winning two terms. But the legislature and the people ignored his recommendations; Texans like limited government. In referendum after referendum, the public showed that it refused to use the means of strengthening the state government even for generally approved ends. Texans kept their local governments much closer to the original American framework of 1789 than the nation, or most other states.
Moody, like the Fergusons, was a recurring type of governor. There was a certain pattern. The candidate whose campaign centered around a gimmick was followed by a more dignified man who promised better government. Hobby, who replaced Ferguson in 1917, called for a "new era." Pat Neff, following Hobby, declared the "New Democracy." Regardless of who was elected on what program, very little changed. The people liked fun and fury in political campaigns, but the forces gravitating against real change were massive. The "interests" could be blamed, and were, but the basic inertia lay in the genuine conservatism of the Texan race.
In prosperous times, there was almost no chance for any kind of political change. The 1920s were generally prosperous, although agriculture was still on very shaky ground. Low prices were offset by good harvests, however, and meanwhile, the automobile had begun to eliminate the distinction between town and farm. Texas was urbanizing, and the towns began to drain off some of the misery from the cotton fields. Instead of holding mass meetings, ruined farmers headed for town, where a developing economy could absorb them.
Richardson saw a pattern in the 1920s, which could actually be applied to the entire 20th century:
Thus for business and industry the decade . . . did constitute a new era; but in politics and political institutions the historian finds little to distinguish it from the years that preceded it. A few new government agencies were added, and some of the old ones were enlarged, but there was little suggestive of the "new era." . . . The political history of Texas is largely the story of governors who sought reforms which were in the main moderate and reasonable and generally needed, but which indifferent legislators and a still more indifferent electorate would not accept.
This
was
to be the political history of Texas through the first seven decades of the century, though in many cases the word "hostile" should be substituted for Richardson's use of "indifferent."
What happened was a continuing, almost explosive economic change, as agriculture was continuously improved, more lands developed, and the mineral resources of Texas discovered and extracted. This development, which followed the pattern of all American history in the century, did not cause great changes in the ethic or outlook of society. The farmer, with his inherently urban 17th-century ethic, easily made the move to town, but he did not become an urbanite in the European or even Eastern sense. Because of the peculiar form of industrialization in Texas, the fabric of society barely changed. The old practice of gerrymandering kept the legislature under rural control. Economic reform did not mean social or psychological change; the Texan had little difficulty in remaining a 19th-century man.
This did not and could not prevent constantly rising costs of local government, increasing bureaucratization, and demands for new services. Here Texas was no different from the other American states. With the constant economic changes began the long, tawdry cycle of constant financial crisis in local government. This was nothing new. Needs rose faster than the process of raising revenue could follow; also, government, as government everywhere, showed the common tendency to expand under its own dynamism unless it were severely shocked, as in the restoration of 1874. The trend was universal, in other states and in the general government. The industrial states, with far greater sources of revenue to tap, simply spent more money than Texas, and, with more social pressures to spend than Texas, generally spent far more than they could afford. State governments lacked the credit resources available to the federal apparatus, and were also everywhere under much greater actual control by taxpayers and the people than the distant federal giant.
As one governor of Texas stated, the practice at Austin was for the legislature to vote expenditures in May, but refuse to raise the monies in December. Summer appropriations were rarely accompanied by winter taxes. Then, when financial crises were acute and could no longer be avoided, new sources of revenue were painfully searched out. For several decades, state expenditures were severely limited in Texas because the brunt of all taxation still fell upon the land. No agrarian society with a dominant ballot power ever allowed itself to be taxed heavily.
Texas did change, in accordance with the general changes across the United States. All public services and administration were regularly improved. Prisons were reformed, old-age pensions instituted, welfare payments began. The "little red schoolhouse" began to disappear in the 1920s, and after 1930 school district consolidation was widespread. Public services of all kinds in Texas found a general level, considerably above that of the other states of the old Confederacy, but far below those of the industrialized regions. Public services were calculated to a grudging minimum in almost every case.
One great exception was roads. Transportation and access was a necessity in a state where the population was scattered across immense distances; at the start of the century some farmers had to haul cotton more than 100 miles to gins or markets. Towns and cities lay hundreds of miles apart. The automobile, in a very real sense, replaced the horse in both social function and symbology; Texas went from a horse culture to something resembling an automobile culture in one swoop. One public service Texas spent enormous sums of money for was roads; on this, rural and urban interests all agreed. Although the progress was hardly uniform—some Texas counties got their first paved roads in the 1940s—by the 1950s even the rural, farm-to-market roads in underpopulated areas were superior to most U.S. highways in the East.
Roads hastened economic improvements, urbanization, and school consolidation in almost every region of the state. Just as every poor farmer had owned a horse, every poor tenant living in a tarpaper shack in Texas owned some kind of car. The auto arrived before efficient public transportation—rails had always been limited and unprofitable in such a thinly populated expanse—and thus had far greater economic and social importance than in the more compact East. The auto expanded Texas horizons, and consolidated communities at the same time.
In 1928, two things of political interest occurred. This year, for the first time since 1860, national politics overshadowed local state campaigns. Local affairs had always absorbed Texan politics and passions more than the national scene, from Reconstruction through the Bryan–McKinley confrontation and beyond. The Populist-Democrat fight in 1896 and the prohibitionist–antiprohibitionist wars of the 20th century were more important to Texans than national policy. But the nomination of Alfred E. Smith of New York, a Roman Catholic, an Eastern conservative, and an avowed antiprohibitionist for the Presidency by the Democrat Party started reverberations through the heartland.
The rural belts were Southern and fervently Democratic in loyalty; Republican to most Texans was still a dirty, capitalist word. But Smith's Catholicism and views on liquor hit the loyal Democrat farmer where it hurt most. Governor Moody was able to hold the state party and most party officialdom to Smith, but he could not hold the voters from the "Constitutional Democrats," who were now defending the Constitutional provisions of prohibition. The three Ps of Protestantism, prohibition, and prosperity combined to give Herbert Hoover, despite his Republican and business labels, a plurality of 26,000 votes. This same election sent another long-term Senator, Tom Connally, to the capital.
The immense crisis of capitalism that began in New York October 23, 1929, did not at first affect Texas. The real pinch only began in 1931, when the financial collapse engulfed central Europe, rebounding westward. European markets dried up; cotton fell from 18 cents a pound in 1928 to 5 cents in 1931. Texans descended with the whole nation into depression and economic chaos. But there were two very marked differences to the Great Depression experience in Texas compared with the industrial North and East.
The Depression was taken more calmly; there were few of the funks that affected businessmen elsewhere. Relatively few Texans owned corporate stocks or bonds; all of them had lived through excruciating commodity-price crises before. Texan morale and fundamental concepts of society were undamaged by 1929, because the majority of all Texans had never believed in Wall Street, or the capacity of the industrial machine to lead Americans to a better way of life. They faced no crisis or crossroads of capitalistic belief. The mass of Texans were still poor in 1928; they were more adapted to relative poverty than the American groups now hit the hardest. Since there was almost no industry, there could be none of the industrial unemployment and crushing fear that pervaded other regions. In fact, a striking phenomenon of this era was that more Texans remembered the disastrous drouth and dust storms of the 1930s than the Depression itself; the savage dry spell that once again gripped Texas and adjacent Plains states did more fundamental damage, and evicted more families from the soil, than the fiscal and financial crisis.
In 1930, Ross Sterling of Houston defeated Ma Ferguson for the Democratic nomination, although she led in the first primary by some 100,000 votes. Sterling campaigned for governor as a businessman candidate; he was a successful businessman who promised a businesslike administration. This did not prejudice him in Texas; success in business was admired, especially if the succeeder began poor. Always, the man who won success by personal enterprise, whether in ranching, farming, selling, or whatever, remained probably the most respected type in the state. Professionals were rarely, if ever, accorded the same respect.
But whatever Sterling's expertise, his administration was battered and swamped by the continuing collapse that no man, even the President of the United States, could halt. Farm prices, mineral production, and the infant industrialization of Texas, all stagnated. Demands for expenditures continued, and actually rose, while revenues fell; taxes in effect became almost uncollectable. Sterling had to veto measure after measure passed by the legislature, simply because the state treasury had no money and no prospects of raising any.