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 orde
r 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.
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.
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