Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
If there was any single trend in the entire period following World War II, it was that Texas, despite drouth and oil gluts, grew increasingly more prosperous. The middle-income groups grew richer, though there was relatively no gain or much social mobility among the underclasses after 1944, following a national pattern. This was directly reflected in politics in two ways: the dominant electorate grew increasingly more conservative as a whole (though less virulent on racial matters, thus separating from the Old Confederacy) while the protests of the minority grew more bitter and strident.
In 1952 and 1954, Allan Shivers, the conservative Democrat, easily defeated the liberal Ralph Yarborough in the governor's race. In 1956, the labor-liberal faction mounted a great show of power and actually won control of the state Democratic convention through a heavy attendance of its members at precinct and county party conventions. This was a hollow victory; the liberals could not consummate it at the polls; Shivers and the Democrats for Eisenhower swept Texas with twice the margin of 1952. Again and again the conservatives displayed better organization. Shivers, and afterward, John Connally, were able to build firm power bases among the heavily Mexican and largely impoverished counties in south Texas.
Patterns of fiscal irresponsibility continued. The conservative Texas Democrat was no Whig or Republican in his attitudes toward money; the legislature kept on voting money bills but refusing to tax. This of course was now a strong national pattern; every state was fiscally bankrupt, or nearly so. In Texas public needs continued to be met, but barely; government proceeded to grow larger, but slowly. In per-capita public expenditures Texas ranked in the bottom tier of states. Taxes did remain comparatively low.
Political corruption apparently increased in the 1950s. During the investigation of a spate of insurance company failures, the legislature uncovered the fact that nine state senators were in some way on the payroll of insurance corporations. Regulation and audits of such corporations had been lax. This pattern was not new; it had prevailed since the last century, because Texas politics had remained essentially 19th-century politics. Texas had no conflict-of-interest code; lobbying and the bribery of state legislators were carried on almost openly both at Austin and in their home districts.
In the public furor spawned by the collapse of insurance companies, one legislator was convicted of accepting bribes. The state land commissioner, a nine-term veteran, was sent to the penitentiary. In all, 300 indictments were returned. However, when the furor ended, there had been no real reform.
The legislature adamantly refused to pass lobby-control bills, or to effect any kind of scrutiny of state officials' personal financial affairs. The legislature did vote itself a substantial pay-raise, using the argument that this made members less susceptible to corruption. This pattern was hardly Texan; the United States Congress set an impressive example along these lines.
Price Daniel, a conservative who showed some demagogic traits, defeated Yarborough for the governorship in 1956. The next year, however, Yarborough, in a sweepstakes race, gathered some 37 percent of the total vote and captured Daniel's vacated Senate seat. A conservative Democrat and a Republican divided two-thirds of the vote. Belatedly, the legislature outlawed sweepstakes races, just as, because of the abuses of the Fergusons, Texas eventually took the pardoning power out of the governor's hands and gave it to a commission. Daniel was forced to preside over the imposition of a limited sales tax; this, and the fact that he made a fatal error in denouncing the insurance industry over settlement of claims following the hurricane of 1961, led to his downfall. He was replaced by John Connally, a conservative of the Johnson camp in 1963. Connally, like Shivers, was fairly young, handsome, intelligent, and pressed for reasonable reforms. He was to enjoy the same limited success. Requests for such measures as modernizing Texas's higher education to meet the needs of an industrial society, and liberalizing of liquor laws to permit the sale of liquor by the drink, languished. The legislature voted new expenditures, but put off adding revenues until actual crisis ensued.
The selection of Lyndon B. Johnson as John F. Kennedy's running mate in 1960 blurred the partisan and the liberal-conservative picture. The state party remained under conservative control; Connally, though in moderate terms, denounced most of Kennedy's liberal programs. Meanwhile, because of Johnson's presence, the state party supported the national ticket in 1960. Although a majority of white voters favored Nixon, the Republican, Kennedy and Johnson carried the state by a marginal 46,000 votes, out of 2,000,000 cast. The law had been changed to permit Johnson to run for both the Vice Presidency and his Senate seat; Johnson ran far ahead of the national ticket. Perhaps significantly, a very conservative Republican took Johnson's vacated seat in a special election of 1961.
The confusion between national and local partisan politics had created a situation in which both Texas's Senators were political sports, representing minority factions in the state. Both, however, in true Texas fashion, were able to build and hold personal coalitions of power, and win reelection.
One pattern was not clearly seen outside the state. Kennedy's Catholicism and liberalism did not damage him in traditional, Southern Democrat sections of the state. McLennan County on the Brazos, which was dry and had a Baptist majority, went heavily, like most such regions, for the Easterner. Kennedy most disturbed the increasing urban middle class. After his election, considerable numbers of former Democrats went over to the Republicans. This trend was stemmed, but not entirely stopped, by Johnson's candidacy and Connally's skill and hero status (he was almost killed with Kennedy at Dallas). With changing economies, shifting populations, and new problems, politics became more volatile, with rapidly shifting alliances, and much erosion of former partisan loyalties. This was akin to similar reactions everywhere in the nation. In Texas, however, the swing was more to conservative than to Republican party politics.
Some broad patterns did not change. The relative vote in most Texas communities was always small; less than half the qualified voters normally cast a ballot even in national elections. In local races, small blocs prevailed. Even after the abolition of the poll tax by federal action, voting registration increased very little. The dominant wing of the Democrats, with Republican and general approval, took pragmatic steps to keep the electorate small. Registration for voting in November was cut off in January. Political apathy was apparent in the large ethnic blocs, and few politicos of the major party wanted to arouse it.
A major factor in this trend was the fact that the Texas government was limited in its powers, and politics simply did not impinge heavily on private life. The successful officeholder, from James Hogg on, followed, a remarkably similar pattern. He had to attract voter attention among various factions with campaign promises and oratory, but at the same time arouse no deep uneasiness among any powerful economic interests or pressure groups within the state. This caused considerable color, action, and even at times violence during campaigns, but the fight was decided more often on personalities than policies. Politics was more a game of seeking office than pushing programs. No matter who was elected, few real changes came about. All candidates, for example, might promise to raise teacher salaries (Texas in 1968 ranked about 34th in the nation in public school pay scales) but such promises did not usually count once the polls closed. Gubernatorial candidates were free with pledges, secure in the knowledge that the legislature would never let most of them be kept.
Texas politicians, great and small, fitted a broad pattern. There was an utter lack of anything approaching a genteel tradition in Texas politics after the turn of the century. The vast majority of officeholders and office-seekers needed the pay or emoluments of the office; those who did not were invariably self-made men who never ceased bragging about it. Politicians were expected to work their way up the ladder of public service through succeeding elections. The image of the poor boy who made good comforted the ethic and outlook of the dominant middle class. The vulgarization of politics that persisted was illustrated by an incident during one election in the 1960s in San Antonio's Bexar County. When one faction was able to show that all of the members of an opposing slate lived in one elite section of the city, both sides, probably correctly, believed that the revelation had a decisive, deleterious effect.
The Texas officeholder tried to avoid elegance of any kind, along with intellectuality, out of necessity. He generally closely followed the imperatives of powerful interests and catered to the biases of his electorate. He was realistic; he could adjust. Lyndon Johnson was a prime example, but far from the only one.
Johnson was first elected to Congress from an impoverished, hardscrabble hill country district in the 1930s. Socially conservative, his people still wanted every dam, credit, subsidy, and stray Yankee dollar they could get. Johnson therefore was neo-Populist and New Deal; he cultivated President Roosevelt with general approval. FDR's endorsement, however, could not gain him office in his first try for the Senate. He succeeded in this only after he had convinced many Texans he was actually a deeply pragmatic conservative.
In the Senate, Johnson rode with increasing prosperity and increasing Texan conservatism. He ably represented the anti-Negro attitudes of east Texas, and skillfully defended the oil and mineral interests. His remarkable cloakroom ability, the force, energy, and empiricism that made him perhaps the most effective Senate majority leader in history, were only fringe benefits to his electorate; they enjoyed his prominence and power, and the more he gained, the more he could do and did for the state. But leaping to the national stage as Kennedy's Vice President, Johnson instinctively sensed and followed the imperatives of the national Democratic Party, catering to his broadened electorate, while holding his old contacts and alliances so far as possible. An enormously effective President at first, his failures would probably be attributed by history less to his mistakes than to his style. Johnson did things for people, but the Presidential image, in the national mind, required more. Most of the very traits that made him a superb Texas Senator hampered him in the White House. "Something for everyone," an utter lack of ideology, and the judicious use of power behind the scenes was excellent Texas politics. But Johnson's whole stance smacked of chicanery to many Americans; his instinctive Texan approach to world power politics involved him in world problems beyond his depth.
It was felt and resented deeply by many Texans of both parties that the Texan President who had secured more far-reaching legislation than any Chief Executive since Roosevelt, was forced to step down because of his Texan style. He was part of a pattern many elements across the nation distrusted or despised.
This pattern in no way changed or damaged the essential interests of Texas society or the nation. Historically, it had one flaw. The Texas system threw up men who instinctively could make the correct political decision, but only rarely a great moral decision. In Texas politics, gaudy as they seemed, there were ethics, but morality really had no place.
Twentieth-century Texas, like 20th-century America, was primarily concerned with economic development. There were enormous economic changes, but little true history was made. The changes in Texas, as in the nation, were so rapid and so pervasive that they escaped perfect definition. The only major differences between Texas and the majority of other states were that, in Texas, the development seemed more explosive because it started late, and such industrialization as occurred took peculiarly regional forms.
The automobile accelerated urbanization by obviating the distance between farm and town. Most farmers always preferred to live in town if they could. The urbanization, however, did not create manufacturing on the Northern scale. Heavy industry was not feasible in Texas because of a basic lack of water, coal, and iron. Remoteness and transportation problems hampered the growth of light industry. The truly spectacular development (which many Texans mistakenly called "industrialization") was the exploitation of Texas's enormously rich natural resources of lumber, mineral earths, aluminum, petroleum, and, as always, land.
Large lumbering concerns rose in the eastern pine woods. These followed the national pattern by first ravaging the timber, then, gradually, beginning to use conservation practices in their own interests. This industry was purely exploitive, as were the new businesses that blossomed wherever oil, natural gas, sulfur, and an assortment of rare earths were uncovered.
Extensive agriculture in west Texas, on the Plains and in the south near the Rio Grande, came only in the 20th century. These regions could only be farmed profitably after new techniques had been developed. The basic, small-farm agriculture of the cotton-growing heartland could not survive in the south and west; it took the invention of new crops, such as hardy grains, and new heavy machinery to exploit these regions. Ranchers began the basic experiments before the turn of the century; after 1900 many ranchers began to sell off large tracts for developments other than cattle-raising. The trend was led by, but not confined to, Eastern or British owners who were determined to refute the notion that this land was suitable only for grazing.
Tractors, disc plows, steam-powered brush-clearing equipment, and giant combines and harvesters, all products of the 20th century, permitted the last land rush on the old frontier. Grain sorghums were discovered that would grow where the over-grazed buffalo grass once grew. The red North Central Plains were proved suitable for wheat, and the South Plains, once extensive irrigation and fertilization techniques were employed, were the best cotton lands in the state. Parts of Northwest Texas began to resemble Kansas in their economy; the strongholds of the North American cattle kingdom, where fences had once been planted only with bloodshed, were to become the major cotton-growing counties in the United States, surpassing the Mississippi delta.