Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
Rails reached far south Texas, arriving at Brownsville in 1904. The remote birthplace of the cattle empire was opened to settlers and development for the first time; the old merchants who had made fortunes supplying the army and trading with Mexico were gone; new kinds of men arrived. The old families sold much of their vast land grants to land companies whose executives talked of irrigation and drainage schemes. With new machinery, immense networks of canals were dug, bringing water to areas miles away from the Rio Grande. Soon orchards of citrus fruits, vegetable farms, and cotton plantations drove the dark, lean Mexican cattle out of what was now called the Magic Valley.
By the third decade of the century, thousands of Texans, Midwesterners, and many Northerners were engaged in developing huge acreages in south and west Texas. The cattle kingdom was pushed back to the truly marginal regions—which still were immense in the state. New uses, such as the raising of sheep and goats, were found for lands too poor to run cows.
In these newly developed areas the pattern of Texan society changed radically. They required a different form of pioneer. Few, if any, sharecroppers or tenant farmers could emigrate to the Rio Grande Valley or to the wheatlands of the Panhandle. Land costs, because of the required development investment, were high; large acreages were necessary and the rule, and large acreages required some mechanization. The new settler-farmer had to have capital, in the form of money. In the south, a further trend discouraged the tenant farmer; the new capitalistic agriculturists needed cheap stoop labor, and deliberately began to import workers from Mexico. The new farming regions of the north-northwest and the Rio Grande delta, together with the Southern Plains, saw the first revival of capitalistic agriculture in Texas since the Civil War. Inevitably, these regions were to produce the major part of Texas's cash crops during the century.
Despite the cattlemen's fears, the spread of cotton south and west on newly irrigated farmlands did not bring Negroes. It brought farm machinery and Mexicans. In the northwest, where machinery predominated, the country began to resemble other regions of the American Midwest in appearance and economy; while along the Rio Grande, a great many of the earlier Spanish patterns remained, side by side with an economy resembling the corporate farms of California. Baronial beef empires gave way to remarkably similar baronial cotton and vegetable empires. Outside observers studying the economy and society of the Rio Grande delta, with its large, capitalistic landholdings, its purely mercantile towns and cities, and its large and largely depressed ethnic Mexican underclass, frequently described the region as "feudal." This was a semantically inaccurate but conceptually understandable term to American minds.
A small, relatively rich landowning group accounted for most production, and, together with shipping, processing, and mercantile interests in the towns, held most influence in the region. Without industry or large-scale commerce, a true middle class grew slowly. Both class and caste distinctions separated Mexican ethnics from the Anglo owners; and since the economy was 90 percent agricultural, there were few means of escape from the dominant social pattern. This remained stable until the 1950s; then, machinery rapidly replaced most farm labor, changing the countryside again, and also creating enormous problems in south Texas cities. In 1948, Hidalgo County in the Rio Grande Valley was recorded in the top three counties in agricultural income in the United States. In 1968, however, this general region contained the lowest per-capita-income urban areas in the entire nation, Brownsville and McAllen.
The economy of these regions produced very conservative politics—over a deep well of protest—for the same reasons that much of Latin America was dominated by conservative politics. In fact, South American observers in south Texas often were struck by its many similarities to lands below the Rio Grande.
Despite all this economic growth in the south and west, two-thirds of all Texans continued to live east of the old 1850 farm line. These people, still holding to most of their old mores, continued to dominate the state. They set its dominant patterns, and ruled its politics. But here there was a gradual erosion of agriculture in the old, post–Civil War pattern, to an economy overwhelmed by mushroom cities, set among pasturelands and oil fields.
The great factor in Texas's spectacular growth after 1920 was the discovery of some of the largest petroleum reserves on earth. Oil made Texas different from the other states of the old Confederacy; it provided wealth and employment other agrarian states lacked. It caused the peculiar form of industrialization that took place; it was the major factor in the growth of most metropolitan areas; and it too shaped and colored Texas social patterns and politics.
The first great field was brought in at Spindletop at Beaumont on the Gulf coast in 1901. Other discoveries followed: Petrolia in 1904, Electra in 1911, the Ranger field in 1917, until finally, petroleum was found under a majority of Texas counties. By 1928, Texas led all other states in oil production, with more than a quarter billion barrels. The historic East Texas strike in 1930 literally swamped the state, and the nation, with oil, leading to stringent state production control. Great fields were brought in in far west Texas after World War II. Exploration and development became continuous. In the war years Texas accounted for one half the nation's gas and oil; afterward, due to increasing use of cheaper foreign imports, the percentage dropped to about one third. This was still an enormous business, in an exploding national economy in some ways based on petroleum products.
Oil made the base for the industrialization that followed. Progress was not immediate after the discovery of oil, because oil, like beef and cotton, was tributary to the national industrial machine. As the industrial, oil-using society expanded, so did Texas production and wealth. After some decades, the state was able to shift the major burden of new taxation to gas and oil; royalties, meanwhile, swelled the state's educational endowments to immense sums.
The petrochemical industry, which produced 80 percent of the total U.S. output, became the largest true industry in the state. In some ways oil, and the industries based on oil, changed Texas, but in other ways oil only reinforced old trends.
One immediate effect was to enrich thousands of landowners across the state. By 1955, almost $500,000,000 was paid annually to farmers, ranchers, and other landholders in rentals, royalties, and bonuses. As the Texas saying went, a few oil wells made ranching a fine business. This great inpouring of outside money in exchange for petroleum added enormously to the over-all economy.
Most great fortunes of the 20th century have in some way been based on oil. Petroleum created in Texas something similar to the Eastern industrial upper class of the 19th century; a group of immense wealth, whose rise was aided by the provisions of a depletion allowance in the federal income tax. It created the Texan new-rich oilman, who became something of a personification of ostentatious vulgarity, replacing the industrial barons of the American East. This image made an impression around the world more apparent than real, however; the oilman did not assume that much importance in Texan life, though some oil corporations did. The oilman, like the second-generation industrial rich, was freed from economic worry and responsibility to pursue whatever form of social disintegration he preferred. His ethic, in most cases, did not adjust to anything else. There were, as always, important exceptions, especially where beef or cotton money had preceded new oil wealth. The tendencies of the most spectacular type of oil-rich man was to pursue more wealth, often around the world, enjoy it in the same places as well as his limited cultural vision permitted, and frequently, to indulge in Presidential politics by writing checks.
The individual oil-rich family, again with important exceptions, tended more to remove itself from daily life and politics in Texas, following the characteristic pattern of the Northern class. It had less influence on the customs, mores, and even social life of Texas than supposed, because it was not fully engaged. Great wealth tended to close as many doors as it opened, where no ethic such as dominated the early American gentry appeared.
In the cities, from Dallas to San Antonio, the older, mercantile families exercised more influence on life and business.
The industrialization caused by oil was not quite all it seemed. Oil was extracted wealth, based on land, and thus it fitted easily into the old patterns of land speculation and development. For many owners of producing wells, it was merely another salable crop, and the great majority of oil-producing landowners were small. Oil was extracted by machinery without much labor; it was hauled to market, and sold. The lease of oil lands was similar to the lease of graze, or the contract harvesting by machinery of a wheat or cotton crop.
Further, the great refining and petrochemical industries were not labor-intensive. Refining, for example, by the 1950s employed less than 50,000 workers; it did not create an extensive new proletariat. Because of the wealth involved, people employed in petroleum projects were highly paid. Oil and attendant industries made an industrial base, with characteristic concentration and organization of labor, in only a few areas, mostly centering around Beaumont–Port Arthur–Houston on the Gulf coast. Oil did not, unlike the making of autos and shoes, erect a considerable industrial-mercantile-labor complex similar to that of the North.
Other extractive industries, such as mineral earths for pharmaceuticals in east Texas, employed similarly highly skilled people, without heavy industrial production lines. These, like the aluminum, aircraft, and insurance industries that centered in a complex surrounding Dallas, actually gave a huge impetus to the growth of an urban middle class, and not nearly so much thrust to organized labor as was supposed. Thus oil, both through concentrations of money and little change in social structure, strengthened rather than damaged the existing power structures across Texas.
The domestic effect of attacks on the oil industry by outsiders was not well understood. These intensified and strengthened political conservatism at the polls. Adlai Stevenson's courageous, and politically stupid, stand on the Texas tidelands did him damage that could not be retrieved, because it cut him off from both the most powerful interests and the Democratic power structure of the state. Eisenhower lost no Northern votes by promising to override the Supreme Court with legislation; he gained the support of most officeholders, schoolteachers, and taxpayers in Texas. Anything that took oil money away from Texas hurt the small man as well as the so-called big rich. Oil provided a great ocean of public money; it made interest politics, performing the same function in Texas cotton once did.
Cuts in the 27 percent depletion allowance in federal taxation had little Texas "liberal" support. Anything that tended to cut production or exploration hit everyone's pocketbook in some degree.
Petroleum was the largest factor in shaping the urbanization of east and west Texas, affecting the middle band of distribution centers the least. The explosive surge of oil from the earth made it possible for the tenant farmer to begin deserting his eroded acres in 1920. The old Texas saying that a city dweller was a farmer crossed with an automobile using oil was humorous, and true. By 1933, when a second plague of depressions and drouths scourged the land, only 33 percent of all Texans lived on farms. Within another generation this percentile had dropped to eight. Meanwhile, as everywhere, research and mechanization and the growth of capitalistic agriculture allowed this smaller group to produce vastly more food and fibers than the hordes of yesteryear. The land did not go out of production; in fact, more lands were opened, especially in the west. People recongregated in the towns, and found new work.
All the efforts of government, and the billions spent by government agencies, had little effect on either trend; histories would record that when the agrarian mythology and the farm vote were completely dead. In fact, government policy, unwittingly, assisted the growth of capitalistic enterprise; large, efficient operations could actually exist, where small ones could not, on minimum subsidies. Acreages continued to increase, and valuations of land to rise, from 1910 through the 1960s, with only a short break during the utter paralysis of the Great Depression years. In the long process, farmers became fewer, and of these, only a handful produced 80 percent of the total marketable output. Similar processes in industry, perhaps, were easier to assimilate and accept, because industry held no ancestral "feudal" memories, such as were stirred up in some Americans by farms comprising thousands of acres of cultivated land.
The trend was firm, no matter who was Secretary of Agriculture in Washington or what theory of commodity credit, parity, or crop restriction was the current fad. The opportunities offered by new industries, the weariness of farm labor, the loneliness of farm life started the trend before 1900, even in good years. Government certainly affected the trend by delaying it at times. Two factors that were more important than national policy and all the neo-Populism combined were the brilliant successes scored in universities with research on new chemical processes and crops, and the influence of private enterprise, looking for its own markets on the land. The axiom that more stubborn farmers listened to seed, fertilizer, and tractor salesmen than to all the earnest, helpful members of various governmental agricultural agencies appears true. One reason for the success of one group over the other was that the salesmen confined their efforts to the farmers most likely to succeed, while government was determined to help the others, with the usual historical result.