Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  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.

  By 1932, economic discontent spilled strongly over into politics. Sterling tried for reelection, but this time the Fergusons sniffed the wind correctly. Ferguson again offered his wife for the governorship, with two often-quoted statements: "Two years ago you got the best governor money could buy; this year you have an opportunity to get the best governor patriotism can give you"; and "When Ma is governor, I'll be on hand picking up the chips and bringing in water for mama."

  Despite violent efforts by Sterling, former governor Moody, and the Democratic establishment, Mrs. Ferguson won in the second primary by a few hundred votes out of a million cast.

  Again, the Ferguson regime has been difficult for observers to evaluate. People reacted to "Fergusonism" emotionally; and in truth, the Fergusons kept real issues thoroughly confused. Miriam Ferguson went back to pardoning and paroling prisoners; the legislature, by and large, was hostile, and although regular appropriations were reduced about 20 percent, the financial crisis deepened. County governments were collapsing under relief costs and bonded indebtedness everywhere, and the state had to assume this burden. It was aggravated by the fact that the people demanded tax relief at the same time needs for public support became acute. By constitutional amendment, all homesteads were freed from taxation to the value of $3,000, which removed millions of dollars from state revenues. Provisions for a sales tax were emphatically turned down.

  The problems were so crucial, in fact, that the Fergusons, for the first time in twenty years, withdrew from politics in 1934. James V. Allred, the more conservative candidate, defeated oilman Tom Hunter in the Democrat primary and became governor in 1935. Allred's program did not envision vicious taxation of the wealthy and the utility, oil, and chain store corporations that was in these times proposed. His problems would not have been solvable, except for the fact that, with the coming of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, Texas was able to transfer approximately 70 percent of its social costs to the Federal government.

  There are strong indications that many outsider observers did not understand Texan attitudes and politics during the era of the New Deal. The New Deal proposed to regulate corporate capitalism, which was blamed for the general economic debacle that reached hideous proportions by early 1933. There were many Texas business interests opposed to Roosevelt's neo-Populism, but the great mass of people were miserable and certainly enthused. One thing must be remembered: Texans had no real love for corporate capitalism as it had grown up in the United States between 1862 and 1929. They believed strongly in private property and personal free enterprise, which were two somewhat different things. Roosevelt, like Wilson, appealed enormously to the farmers, and to the desperate middle class. His reform measures in no way destroyed the Texan's concept of American society. In fact, the strong bias of many theoretical New Dealers in Washington for the depressed agricultural areas of the nation permitted a joyous alliance. Texans, in office and out, had a long habit of accepting any Yankee dollar they could get.

  These reforms, in general, greatly ameliorated the conditions of life for the depressed, though they did not end the great malaise nor alter the increasing social domination of the industrial way of life. In fact, although this was not immediately seen, the 1930s gave the growth of national corporations, both of labor and industry and government itself, a powerful push. It was inevitable, perhaps, that the national Democratic Party would move gradually from hostility to a live-and-let-live attitude toward corporate enterprise, and finally seek a tacit partnership, much as the state Democratic Party in Texas had already done. While the New Deal poured in outside money, and mounted no attack on private property or social organization in Texas, the homesteaders of Texas, large and small, were enthusiastic Democrats.

  In this era, the influence of Texans in the capital increased, as it normally did with Democrat regimes. John Nance Garner, who had served in the House since 1903, became Speaker in 1931; he was Vice President through Roosevelt's first two terms. In the Senate, as presiding officer, Garner aided greatly in pushing many of the New Deal reforms, as did many other basic folk-conservatives from the South and West.

  Jesse Jones, the Houston magnate, exercised much influence as chairman of the
Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Administrator of the Federal Loan Agency, and Secretary of Commerce, in turn. By 1933 Texans held the chairs of a half dozen committees in the House: Agriculture, Interstate Commerce, Judiciary, Public Buildings and Grounds, Rivers and Harbors, and last but not least, Appropriations. In the Senate, Texan influence on military affairs and foreign relations was strong, through Sheppard and Connally. In general, these men continued the old tradition of the Texan in Washington: support for cheap money, regulation of Eastern capitalism, bedrock belief in all the 18th-century American social institutions, and when the occasion offered opportunity, overseas belligerency. Texans liked many New Deal measures, but, like Harry Truman of Missouri, they generally had a strong distaste for most New Dealers. The Texan distrusted the predominantly intellectual or theoretical man, out of ancestral memory, as they distrusted anyone who offered criticism of the conquering Anglo-American race. As a group, the Washington representatives were remarkably successful in one goal. They secured to their state, in various ways, money and appropriations far exceeding its population's proportionate share. One study showed that this, over a period of thirty years beginning in the 1930s, topped the national average by 27 percent.

  The keen empiricism of most of these men, behind their sometimes folksy image, made them effective operators behind Congressional doors. Every redneck from the cotton belt, and every Senator with a big hat and flowing locks, or dry, lean cowman in boots, was not stupid. Some men learned this to their sorrow. In the Texas caucuses, there was a general, if unspoken agreement: their state and region had gotten a dirty deal from most Americans since the Civil War. Garner, Rayburn, and Lyndon Johnson all felt this keenly, as insiders knew. But since the War, Texas leadership had learned not to show it.

  The coming of crisis in Europe in 1939 showed that President Roosevelt's cautious policy of American commitment enjoyed huge support in Texas. Texas sentiment, generally, called for more than the President's careful interventionism. Some of this could be, and was, explained by the fact that Texas was more aware of its European markets than other areas. But even this fell short, because as both Fortune and Gallup polls showed, Texans were the most belligerent people in the United States toward Germany and Japan. Texan interventionism far outran even that of the South.

  Nor was Anglophilia a reason. This was more a phenomenon of the Atlantic states. Texans had little sense of British origin; their ancestors had hated Britain worse than most Americans, for its aristocracy, its corruption, its culture, and its Indian-arming policies in the War of 1812. New York contained more true Anglophiles than all of Texas, but New York was the least belligerent region in America, despite its keen awareness of Atlantic civilization.

  The crisis of world democratic states in the 1930s and early 1940s—their inability to react to totalitarian aggression effectively—was simply not reflected in Texas. Instinctively, apparently, Texans sensed Nazi Germany as an enemy, and once the enemy was defined, they believed it should be destroyed. The ideology of Nazism had little effect on this belief; any ideology carried by a power obviously hostile to the interests of the United States would have been, and was, hated without much evaluation. Texans hated the Soviet Union as much as Nazi Germany, which, to their own surprise, caused some observers to deem them fascists. But their reaction was no more fascistic than the belligerence of the Southwest in 1812, or the reaction of Texans at the onset of the Mexican and Civil wars. Unpalatable as it might be to some Americans, had Texas directed policy between the wars, Adolf Hitler would have arrived at Valhalla earlier.

  A barbarian awareness of true danger can be an asset to any society, as well as a barbarian willingness to believe that straight action, not interminable moral confusion, is sometimes required. A majority of all classes in Texas believed that eventually Hitler must be destroyed. They held the same hot anger, yet cold clear awareness toward the defiance of Japan. In a very real sense, contemptible little men in Berlin and Tokyo replaced those earlier "contemptible" figures in Mexico and Bogotá. Texas attitudes refuted those who insisted that ideology rather than instinct lay behind human wars.

  Many Texans, in 1941, writhed at what they considered the cowardice of their nation as a whole. There is no evidence that Texans liked war; there is evidence that they had apparently much less fear of it than was held in other places. They never shared the agony of many liberal Americans, who realized Hitler was a menace, but who hoped there was some way to get rid of him short of killing him. Long before the war came out of the sun at Pearl Harbor, Texans were enlisting in the armed services, and a significant number had gone to Canada.

  The air service was popular, because Texas, with a clear-skied climate, was its training center. However, an entirely disproportionate number of Texans enlisted in the U.S. Marines; men from the brushlands exceeded the proportion population-wise from the eastern maritime states. Texans tended to be combative. In the war years, Texan casualties were the clearest indication.

  Texas held 5 percent of the U.S. population; it provided 7 percent of the total armed forces; and its war dead exceeded 7 percent of the total killed in action.

  Texas was the army's largest training ground, training 20 combat divisions between 1940 and 1944. Other facts probably had no real significance, but hardly went against the trend:

  A cotton farmer from Farmersville named Audie Murphy gained more combat awards in World War II than any other man in the U.S. Army; Sam Dealey, another Texan, was the Navy's most decorated man. There were still Anglo-Celts seeking a far war frontier. A Texan from German Fredericksburg, Chester Nimitz, commanded the U.S. Pacific Fleet. A Texan-born general, raised in Kansas but still a product of the inner American frontier, held the Supreme Allied Command in Europe.

  Following this massive outpouring of belligerence, the evidence shows clearly, in private reactions and opinion polls, that Texans as a people heartily disapproved the long picketing of Nazi Germany's ruins, as well as the determination to democratize Japan. The notions behind the Nuremberg trials had small currency in Texas. Texans neither understood nor approved Hitler's bloody rancor against the Jews, which was subtly different from their own determination to subordinate internal groups considered inferior. The Texan attitude toward colored races, probably, was closer to the Nazi view of eastern Europeans, who seemed to provide a ready-made laboring mass. Anti-Semitism was far less a Texan than a Northern American trait, which, much evidence shows, was given impetus by European immigration. No mobs in Texas ever attacked a Jew; few, if any, clubs, ever blackballed an otherwise qualified Jewish applicant. New York and Chicago could not say the same. The Texas violence toward blacks, which at times could be very violent, was provoked and condoned not by any desire to wipe Negroes off the earth but to keep them conquered and in their appointed place. Anti-Semitism, historically, often was provoked by a very real superiority, in certain things, shown by Jews, as well as the obvious religious intolerance of many ages.

  The Texan attitude was that armed Germans had been dangerous; they needed to be, and had been, removed. So long as they stayed conquered, or amiable, there was no need to punish them. Privately, a number of Texans stated that the Germans had only carried certain basic, recurrent drives to disgusting extremes; moralizing over it—although few Texans could articulate or rationalize their feelings—produced a somewhat incoherent disgust. The Germans had tried to conquer the world, and got their heads kicked in by better men. Maybe they would learn.

  The specter of Jewish genocide, which haunted many other people, never impinged strongly on the Texan mind. It had not much more relevance to Texas society than the once-famed Armenian massacres by the Turks. Thus the Texan was more ready to go to war, but quicker to drop its aftermath than some Americans. As for reshaping Germany and picketing its ruins, this disturbed uncomfortable ancestral memories. A great many American Southerners, including Lucius Clay, expressed similar doubts, born of handed-down family tales, during Germany's reconstruction.

  The South had com
mitted its own horrendous crime of losing a war.

  In the late 1930s, the love affair between the intellectuals of the New Deal and Texas leadership began to wane. So long as the New Deal poured money into Texas and punished capitalists according to neo-Populist biases, all folk-conservatives, from Texans to Harry Truman, could approve. This was functional liberalism most Texans had wanted for a long time. But reforms beyond the ones grasped in the pain of the worst Depression years were not desired. Anything that suggested a broad movement of the parameters of American social institutions drew immediate hostility and fear. John Nance Garner, the Westerner from Uvalde County, became disillusioned with FDR, long before Roosevelt aborted Garner's own drive for the Presidency in 1940. Just as Cleveland's policies appalled Texan officeholders in 1892, Roosevelt's later proposals were anathema, and the national and state Democratic Parties began to separate. Texans joined in the Republican–Southern Democrat Congressional coalition that formed in 1938. This Texas trend was not confirmed until 1944. That year, with Northern Democratic approval, the Supreme Court struck down Texas's white primary law. Increasing prosperity, which flooded all America during the war years and increasing interest in the North to dabble in social, rather than economic reform, split the state Democratic Party when Roosevelt was renominated in 1944. Smarting over the Smith v. Allwright decision, and Garner's aborted candidacy for President in 1940, the Conservatives (as they now came to be called) organized the "Texas Regulars." The state party convention split between "conservatives" and "liberals" in 1944. From this time forward, there were to be two Democratic parties within Texas. One was a nationally oriented party, which loyally supported the national Democrat aims. The other loyally supported the desires of the majority within the state and normally won major offices and power.