The black belt was never to spread successfully much beyond the old cotton line. White—and unseen but equally important, Mexican—hostility kept it out.
Texas seemed half-radical in 1896, but in 1906 it was comfortably conservative again. Populism and neo-Populism, as in the New Deal, had great vogue in depressed times. Reform got short shrift if proposed during prosperity, which was a fact that some Populist allies in other places never understood. Texas was split, not between liberals and conservatives but between functional liberals and functional conservatives. Both camps were philosophical conservatives at heart. They saw nothing wrong with Anglo-Saxon civilization as it had grown up in Texas, as a whole.
Although there was a brief, consciously genteel reaction about 1900, the traits of Populism triumphed in the debacle of its politics. The dominant Democrats found expediency lay in stealing some People's Party thunder. Hogg and Culberson were prototypes of a most recurring breed: "common" men, insistent that no one mistake their commonness, spouting and perhaps believing much neo-Populist doctrine, while pragmatically making deals with "the interests" on the side. The Populist debacle damped the desire for class politics in Texas. Afterward, few evangelistic demagogues, spouting reform and radical doctrine, actually cultivated any trend toward genuine social change. What was confused with and taken for democracy and reform was a massive injection of vulgarity. Voters who liked deep-burned, catsup-splattered steaks and distrusted any elegance in manners or dress, gave birth to an enormous total of candidates with the same displayed tastes. The trick was to be common, and solid in support of all social bias, but not to offend any locally dangerous interests in the process. This confusion of vulgarity-cum-folk-conservatism was often guileless. Nor was it by any means restricted to Texas, although in Texas it was usually highly successful at the polls.
In these years there was a general retreat from the high-mindedness and gentility of the older South in many places. Anglican Senators were replaced with earnest, gallus-snapping Baptists; former brigadiers in gray were supplanted by new men who escaped the crumbling family farms. This was an inevitable evolution, a logical response to basic trends in American society as a whole. There was an enormous aversion to, and a conscious gravitation away from, elites of any kind. The importance of family crumbled rapidly; ephemeral, constantly changing status took its place. The status society was even more functional than the old one had been. Now no Texan could be properly identified until it was learned "what he did"; who he was, or where he came from, made less and less difference. The dominant American social system, if not all the dominant American ideas, was to triumph completely.
Certain trends clung in politics. It was always safe, and in fact, sensible, to be against the "interests," especially the foreign ones. For many years interests active in, but headquartered outside Texas took heavy blows. Culberson's attorney general, Crane, levied an enormous fine against the Waters, Pierce Oil Company and drove it out of the state. He had good reason; the company had broken the laws. But similar companies, in this era, were behaving the same way with impunity in most parts of the nation. A few years later, twenty-one major life insurance companies left Texas, appalled by the so-called Robertson law, which required them to invest 75 percent of the reserves on lives of Texas citizens inside the state. For many years any Yankee interest was fair prey. The severe antitrust codes, which were far more severe and enforced with greater effort than the federal laws, possibly hampered industry and business development. However, their major effect was to hold certain national corporate empires at bay, in a series of Shilohs in this new war, while Texas could grow native corporate octopuses of its own. The large, powerful, indigenous insurance and corporate utility companies were Texan beneficiaries of the fights against Eastern capital.
While Texas was succumbing to American society, it had some success in maintaining federalist notions of its own. Local money was less evil than foreign.
The antitrust laws probably affected banks and financial trusts most of all. Texas was to develop immense wealth out of natural resources, but the growth of major financial institutions was very slow within the state. Nothing like the major, spreading New York or California banking systems could evolve.
The business climate, although there were few pressures for industrialization, was quite good. Reality forced government to live and let live with "the interests." The dual quality of some Texas politicians, ultrademocratic but also ultraconservative in some ways, was puzzling to outsiders, but founded on the single-party politics of the state. Business, of all kinds, took an active part in politics in Texas; corporate lawyers attended every party convention. They had to, in self-defense; some chicken farmer always came up with some new anticapitalist idea. The so-called interests had money, and spent it, which gave them two advantages over the reformers. Money was important to politics, especially in a one-party region. No matter how democratic his image, or how common-folk his manner, the first requirement for any successful politician was to line up adequate financial support. The primary was decisive, and candidates ran in the primaries on their own or their supporters' resources. There were no "party funds," or a system by which promising young politicos were brought along.
However, to pretend that the amiable corruption that often occurred in Texas was worse than the American norm would be nonsense. Texas was a simpler society than the mainstream North. Its corruptions, like its racism, were simply more easily seen. More sophisticated states had greater success in obscuring both. The Texan mind was always too direct, out of the frontier, to learn the true possibilities of hypocrisy.
"Interests," as such, protected themselves rather than attempting to run the state of Texas. They made no attempt either to enlarge or depress the parameters of society or thought. Yet some hostility to them remained, in a survival of neo-Populist suspicions in the average man, whether worker or university professor.
Texas politicians, after the time of Populism, were Democratic, popular, and pragmatic. They had to find issues, which were sometimes grotesque, sometimes profound. Factional fights were sometimes bitter. But an old Texan political proverb told more of internal affairs and ruling officials than pages of discourse. It ran, "Don't spit in the soup; we all got to eat."
Burned by the War Between the States and Populism, the Texan political mind rejected the notion of destroying a structure just because it could not be controlled to one's fancy. The Texan, pushed toward violence by one aspect of his history, pulled toward mercilessness by another, was pragmatic within the limits of his peoples' folk biases. Too many people have despised the Texan politician too much. Most of them, at home and abroad, were effective; they did what they set out to do.
No Texan in the 20th century would try to spit in the nation's soup. All would try to get a large share, but that was the real essence of the American Dream, which the Populists, Jim Hogg, and the men in Wall Street equally shared.
Chapter 35
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
. . . In the New World things make haste;
Not only men, the state lives fast . . .
One demagogue can trouble much:
How of a hundred thousand such?
And universal suffrage lent
To back them with brute element
Overwhelming? What shall bind these seas
Of rival sharp communities
Unchristianized? . . .
Know
Whatever happens in the end,
Be sure 'twill yield to one and all
New confirmation of the fall
Of Adam. . . .
Myriads playing pygmy parts—
Debased into equality:
In glut of all material arts
A civic barbarism may be: . . .
An Anglo-Saxon China, see,
May on your vast plains shame the race
In the Dark Ages of Democracy.
WALT WHITMAN
TEXAS entered the 20th century with its basic society a full two generation
s, or about sixty years, behind the development of the American mainstream. Industry was in its infancy; among the people themselves the norms and patterns of the industrial society had no root. Texan speech was already becoming picturesque, because it retained earthy allusions forgotten by Northern city dwellers. The early-19th-century American values were in no way eroded in Texas. There was no reason why they should have been. During a century of explosive conquest and settlement, the land changed very little, and the people not at all.
The United States was far from a unitary nation, although it was moving steadily toward a unitary general government. For some years, however, Texas and its Southern allies maintained an acceptable stabilization and compromise. The Supreme Court of the United States disappointed Texans severely by its gentle attitude toward corporate combines and rampant capitalism. It satisfied them, however, by its full acceptance of the caste imposed upon Negroes by the "separate but equal" codes and black disenfranchisement.
The Supreme Court was hardly an Olympian institution, despite American reverence for organic law. In these decisions, as in so many others before and afterward, the justices tended to rule presently on the ideals or myths of yesterday. They were more apt to see problems in terms of the ideas or thinking of their formative years than in terms of current realities. Thus the Court had made its Dred Scott decision, ignoring the fulminating crisis of slavery; at the turn of the century, and again in the early New Deal years it refused to accept a reasonable regulation of the American industrial machine. In its 1896 decision on caste it failed to see the implications of continuing subordination, just as in the 1950s, when it rescinded the earlier decision, it failed to take into account the reality of American race relations, and when the problem of civil disorder had become the most serious one facing American society as a whole, the Court continued in terms of the preceding generation, enlarging civil liberties.
The Texan view that the Court was fallible was a deep-seated 19th-century conviction, stemming from the actions of the Court in the Reconstruction decade. The Court had followed changing popular prejudice faithfully in those years. Also, the enormous alienation caused by the Civil War and the Populist-Democratic revolts against capitalist industrialization never completely faded away. A sense of Texan separatism, which the Iowan did not share and could hardly comprehend, continued.
Also not clearly seen was the fact that Texan parochialism tended to increase for some years after the turn of the century. There were two primary reasons. Texas was a vast province, with most of its community remote from the rest of the United States. It was not yet mercantile or industrial, and thus not in continuous contact with other states. Second, after the final quarter of the 19th century, there was no significant outside immigration into the Texas heartland. Knots of Northerners and Midwesterners did develop the High Plains agriculture and the lower Rio Grande Valley, while Pennsylvanians drilled wells and organized the early Texas oil companies. But no people, either American or foreign, immigrated into the politically dominant, most heavily populated, agrarian regions of the state. This was to have its immense effect, not only on the farm but in the Texan cities when they arose. There were to be no non-Anglo-American influences, and since urbanization came late, Texans in the 20th century would be far closer to the land.
At the close of the century, Texas entered a brief, tranquil twilight of the Old South, probably a reaction to the turmoil of the Hogg-Populist years. The leadership, as Richardson saw, was "unusually adroit" in avoiding or damping issues that tore the people apart. Behind this leadership was one of the most skillful and adroit political movers the American nation produced. This man was a well-to-do planter who made his own compromise with changing times by becoming a railroad magnate. He never ran for office or appeared upon the public scene. He took up state politics as an avocation, adapting new ways and means to the basic thinking of the Old South. He passed into American history not so much as the most important man in Texas for many years, but as President Woodrow Wilson's mysterious Colonel House.
Edward M. House moved behind Governor Hogg, and managed his campaign for reelection in 1892. House put together the great machine that staved off the Populist revolt; while at the same time drawing Hogg and Culberson into the Establishment. In fact, House created the conservative Texas Democratic establishment; from his time its outlines, through good years and bad, tend to be clear. He was the Texan answer to the Republicans' Mark Hanna of Ohio.
House was a supreme backroom politician, who knew how to pick and work with the most influential men: W. T. Gregory of Austin, Andrews of Houston, and the powerful Jim Wells of Cameron County in the south. Wells faithfully delivered the ethnic Mexican vote through an alliance of ranchers and local politicos in a great patronage machine. These men, with House, successfully engineered the essential compromise between the native "interests" and the mass voters of the Democratic Party. They were anti-Republican, antitrust, anticapitalist as Northern capitalism was then construed—but definitely not hostile to the developing corporations and business interests in Texas. It was a pragmatic and generally successful compromise, in the best tradition of Anglo-American politics. If it was unidealistic in most respects, it worked.
Colonel House masterminded both of Culberson's campaigns, and after Culberson was sent to the Senate in 1899, where he was to remain twenty-four years, House engineered the Sayers-Lanham era of good feeling. Joseph Sayers and W. T. Lanham were the last Confederate soldiers to hold the governor's chair. They were older men, mature, stable, and appeared to live by the ideals and ethics of the former, long-gone age. Both had served in Congress; neither was involved in the controversies of the Hogg-Culberson years. They did not become deeply involved in the day-to-day politics of Austin; in turn, they presided with high-minded gentility between 1899 and 1907. These were the last completely genteel governors of the state.
By 1906 Colonel House dropped out of state politics, but he was soon to be heard from on the national scene.
The improved farm prices did not reverse the long trend of farmer discontent, although they damped it. The underlying hostilities remained. All important or successful state officials shared the same basic views: hatred of national combines or trusts, dislike of corporate lobbyists, a desire to reform taxation by taxing more intangibles, but with an underlying support of the state's basic institutions. Although the Sayers-Lanham administrations had put through numerous reforms, including heavier taxation of railroads, pipelines, and utilities—which raised property on the state tax rolls from $1,221,159,869 to $2,174,122, between 1906 and 1908—they were vulnerable to the charge they had been too favorable toward big business. Two-thirds of the entire tax burden still rested on property, and two-thirds of this on real estate. The farmer was eager to shift his burden elsewhere, since the costs of government continually rose. But the great problem for many years was that there was really nowhere else to shift it within the state.
Campbell, who became governor in 1907, revived some of the Populist wars; all Texas officials tended to be neo-Populists in some degree. Campbell engineered a light inheritance tax, but failed to win his major goal; a state income tax. Against this too many landowners, as well as big businessmen, combined. One of the first states to propose such a tax in the 1960s still had not imposed it.
The prohibition issue was now coming to the fore. This was to be a potent, and at times dominant issue in Texas politics. The farming counties of the heartland and the upper west had prohibitionist majorities; the towns, and south Texas, with its Germanic-Mexican influx, had much less enthusiasm. A great deal of the old Populist fervor was siphoned off into Prohibition, which then and later often kept state politics in turmoil. The governor who followed Campbell, Colquitt, was a Hogg man, hard on rails and trusts, but obstinately partial to hard liquor. Ironically, Colquitt's opposition to prohibition threw him over to the functional conservative camp, because the prohibitionists captured the reformers. Afraid of legal abolition of alcohol, Colquitt insisted upon
legislative rest.
The Democrats for a period of years divided into prohibitionist–antiprohibitionist wings. Confusing things completely to outside observers who forgot the agrarian nature of Texas was the fact that the prohibitionists were reformers and "liberals," as they were beginning to be known nationally, while the antiprohibitionists were in general Establishment and business conservatives.
Texas had adopted local option on liquor and a number of other things, a logical compromise in a region so sharply divided between rainy east and arid west. The heartland farmer wanted prohibition; much of the west and southwest did not. Likewise, pistol carrying was unnecessary and abhorred in the east in the last quarter of the 19th century, while it was still a necessity of life beyond the farm frontier. In farmlands, a requirement that all stock be fenced made sense. On the vast sweeps of west and south Texas, where in dozens of counties there was not a single farm, it did not. On a number of essential issues Texas had begun to show a viable pragmatism, a federalism within a federal system, by which the needs and interests of vastly disparate regions could be served. But whenever emotion was injected into an issue, the notion of leaving it up to local option disappeared. As with slavery, the idea that something was immoral or wrong made a pragmatic approach impossible. The reformers confused morality with liberal politics, probably to the disadvantage of both.
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.
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