Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  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 f
ollowed 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.

  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.