Texas

Article Outline

Introduction; Physical Geography; Economic Activities; The People of Texas; Education and Cultural Institutions; Recreation and Places of Interest; Government; History

Texas in World War I and the 1920s

Most Texans enthusiastically supported World War I. Texas had voted for Woodrow Wilson, Democratic governor of New Jersey, when he won the presidential election in 1912. Wilson was a Southerner and chose several Texans to serve in his administration. Almost 200,000 Texans served in the military services during the war, including more than 400 women who volunteered as nurses. A number of important army bases were built in Texas, and San Antonio in particular retained active military sites after the war ended. World War I created a connection between the Texas economy and the defense industry, and most Texans, including farmers, prospered in both the years preceding and during the war.

Racial and ethnic tensions, however, increased during the war years. Around military posts in the South, black soldiers objected to Jim Crow laws being applied on army posts and in the surrounding communities. A riot provoked by discrimination in Houston involving the all-black Third Battalion of the 24th United States Infantry ended with a court-martial that severely punished the soldiers involved.

The same surge of patriotism that demanded endorsement of the war effort identified German surnames as un-American. The legislature recommended that books or pamphlets praising German culture, for example, be withdrawn from the public schools, and some Germans in the Texas Hill Country and San Antonio were harassed and beaten.

The Mexican Texans of South Texas were affected by border troubles. The fighting that followed the Mexican Revolution in 1910 had pushed immigrants north of the border to escape the war. In 1916 President Wilson sent the U.S. Army to pursue the rebel Mexican general Francisco (Pancho) Villa, who had raided several Texas towns, and Texas governor James Ferguson dispatched the National Guard and the entire Texas Ranger force to South Texas to maintain order. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed on both sides. Suspecting the new immigrants and the Hispanic population of complicity with the raiders, white Texans violated civil rights in attempts to identify bandit leaders. The Texas Rangers, in particular, were accused of indiscriminately brutalizing Mexican Texans; as a result, many Mexican Texans came to distrust legal authority, in particular the Rangers. After an investigation, the legislature reorganized the Rangers, reducing it to 4 regular companies of 17 men each.

The Great Depression and World War II

At the onset of the Great Depression, the economic downturn of the 1930s, many Texans assumed that the downturn was an eastern financial collapse and would not affect Texas. By the winter of 1930-1931, however, the price of cotton had dropped to less than a nickel a pound. More than 350,000 Texans were out of work by mid-1932, and at least 25 percent of them had no resources to survive unemployment. Dwindling tax revenues and the lack of industries limited public funds, and private charities had no funds.

Consequently Texans, like other Americans, were anxious for federal aid, and they voted overwhelmingly for Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential election over the incumbent Republican Herbert Hoover. Roosevelt promised a New Deal for Americans in his inaugural address, and his domestic programs profoundly affected the Texas economy in the 1930s. Under Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation, the federal government provided direct relief payments to states and individuals for the first time in history. Programs such as the Works Progress Administration and others hired the unemployed to work on public projects.

Putting people back to work meant that many minority Texans were included in the public work projects. At first local white leaders wanted blacks and Mexican Americans excluded from government employment. But under pressure from federal administrators and organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which were located in Eastern cities in which blacks could vote, state administrators relented and included minorities in federal programs. Black voters, as a result, switched their allegiance in the 1930s from the Republican Party to the Democrats. Federal courts struck down the all-white primary in 1944. The number of black voters in Texas increased during the early 1940s, particularly in urban areas, where blacks had begun to move during the 1920s. By 1950 blacks were nearly 20 percent of the population of most Gulf Coast cities and nearly that high a percentage in Dallas and Fort Worth.

Many Mexicans in Texas were deported to Mexico during the Great Depression. Large-scale roundups of immigrants, particularly in rural areas, included Texan Mexicans. Federal projects were prohibited from aiding immigrants, and since many Mexican Texans could not prove citizenship, they did not benefit from Roosevelt’s New Deal as much as other poor people. Nevertheless a group of bicultural business leaders in San Antonio and in the Río Grande Valley organized the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) to fight segregation and to create a stronger voice for Hispanics in Texas and in national politics. Members of LULAC tended to vote Democratic, and they financed the first court challenge to the segregation of Mexican American children in separate schools. In 1948 LULAC and members of the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund won lawsuits ending official segregation of Mexican Americans in public facilities in Texas.

The New Deal changed Texas politics in other ways as well. Aided by the National Labor Relations Board (a federal commission that oversaw business-labor relations), higher percentages of Texas workers joined labor unions than ever before. These workers also became ardent Democrats.

Some changes were more subtle. The Agricultural Adjustment Act, for example, began planning deliberate scarcities to raise crop prices. Much of the land taken out of cultivation was marginal land farmed by tenants. Texas farmers began the great migration to the cities and to California. The speed of the migration increased during World War II (1939-1945) when defense-related jobs were created in many cities. Texas, 60 percent rural in 1930, would be 60 percent urban in 1950. After 1950 agriculture remained one of the three legs supporting the Texas economy (farming, oil, and defense-related industries), but it no longer dominated all other economic enterprises. Tenant farming, moreover, had all but disappeared from the state.

Although the oil industry was important to the economy of the Gulf Coast, it did not dominate the state’s economy before 1930. In that year, the great East Texas oil field near Kilgore began production, and the Permian Basin field was discovered in the late 1930s. Much of the Permian field was on state land, and as a result much of the royalties from the field financed education in Texas. So, too, did the income from the tidelands oil, and petroleum became the state’s leading export.

During World War II, Texas benefited from the rapid construction of defense-related factories. An estimated 1,250,000 troops trained at 15 Army military bases. San Antonio became a center for the United States Army Air Force, and clear skies and available land encouraged the construction of more than 40 air bases. The Gulf Coast became a center of naval activity. Although some of these military sites were shut down after the war ended, many remained open, providing jobs as the nation geared up for the Cold War, the economic and diplomatic struggle between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), that followed World War II.

The demand for oil and petrochemicals (chemicals based on oil or natural-gas) during and after the war made the strip from Houston to Lake Charles in southwestern Louisiana the most industrialized area in the South. The need for paper and pulp products revitalized the East Texas lumber industry. These defense industries hired workers and turned the state away from its rural economic base toward an urban-industrial one.

Politics in Texas

The political landscape of Texas changed dramatically with the New Deal, World War II, and its aftermath. When Roosevelt won the presidency in 1932, U.S. congressmen from the South, who had possessed little power under Republican administrations, began to have national influence. In 1936 Texas representatives chaired nine congressional committees, and Texan John Nance Garner was vice president. Democrat Sam Rayburn also became a national figure, serving as Speaker of the House of Representatives three times (1940-1947, 1949-1953, and 1955-1961) during his 48 years in Congress. This political power obtained defense contracts, military bases and New Deal relief money for the state. A number of young Texan politicians, notably future U.S. president Lyndon Baines Johnson, adopted a national outlook. These people believed that the future of Texas, because it was now connected to the national economy, was no longer either predominately rural or Southern.

Opposition to the New Deal centered in third-party activity, and it remained there throughout the 1950s. In Texas, the third-party factions called themselves Texas Regulars in 1944 and Dixiecrats in 1948. Their strategy was to vote for third-party electors in presidential elections and vote for Democratic candidates for state and local office. That way the elites could retain local and state political influence.

The third-party strategy had little success in Texas. Roosevelt won in 1940 and 1944 with more than 70 percent of the popular vote, and President Harry S. Truman (1945-1953) defeated the Dixiecrats just as soundly. In 1952 and 1956 more traditional Democrats, led by Governor Allen Shivers, voted for the Republican Dwight David Eisenhower for president rather than Democrat Adlai Ewing Stevenson. The success of President Eisenhower failed to create support for the state Republican Party, however, and Democrats retained control of local, state, and congressional offices.

Throughout the 1950s, the Texas Democratic Party became more moderate. Traditional Democrats were challenged by a liberal wing of the party that supported government-directed social programs and complete integration of public facilities. Although they could only muster about 40 percent of the popular vote, liberals could defeat any very conservative candidate who ran for statewide office. Under their pressure, however, the state government provided more money to education, established minimum salaries for school teachers, and expanded and improved colleges and universities. The state government reduced its own costs, updated the prison system, and improved the highway system.

Shivers is considered the first of the modern Texas governors; yet he opposed racial integration. His successor, Price Daniel, Sr. (1957-1963), reorganized the agency responsible for welfare, and during his term the legislature enacted a sales tax, guaranteeing a dependable source of revenue for the state. More importantly, no Texas governor after Shivers ever considered passing legislation that would interfere with integration. Both Texas senators and most Congress members refused to sign the infamous Southern Manifesto, a pledge never to support Brown v. Topeka Board of Education (1954), the Supreme Court ruling that ordered desegregation of public schools.

Texas Politics 1961-1985

Moderate Democrats

Moderate Democrats continued to control Texas politics in the 1960s. United States senator John Kennedy of Massachusetts selected U.S. senator Lyndon Johnson from Texas as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 1960, and the Democratic ticket narrowly carried both Texas and the nation. Despite the influence of moderate Democrats in Texas, Dallas won a national reputation as a center of right-wing extremism after Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy while he was riding in a presidential motorcade through the city in November 1963. City and state leaders worked hard after the assassination to erase that image and demonstrate that Texas was a modern and moderate state.

Johnson assumed the presidency and won reelection in 1964, overwhelming Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee. Johnson’s War on Poverty program, a series of measures to promote economic development in depressed urban areas, and his Great Society plan, which included a new housing bill, a Medicare program to help provide medical care for the elderly, and additional antipoverty measures, were controversial in Texas. The majority of Texas Democrats supported them despite reservations because Johnson was a native son and because a label of extremism might dampen economic growth.

Nevertheless, a number of white Texans objected to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a sweeping civil rights bill outlawing racial discrimination in public accommodations and by employers, unions, and voting registrars. They also opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which suspended use of voter-qualification tests that had sometimes served to keep blacks off voting lists. Many white Texans also objected to policies that favored minority-owned companies and job applicants as well as aid to minority citizens, hallmarks of the Johnson presidency. Texas strongly supported the Vietnam War (1959-1975), and the state’s leadership had little patience with the antiwar demonstrations common in the late 1960s. Like many other Americans, social changes in the 1960s bothered many Texans, but a strong conservative reaction only came in the 1980s.

Black Texans and Mexican Texans made significant political gains in the 1960s. The successful attack on voting restrictions sent several blacks, including Barbara Jordan of Houston, to the Texas legislature, and in 1966 Jordan was the first black woman elected to the state senate. In 1972 Jordan was elected to the United States House of Representatives, where she earned national attention for her eloquent speech in favor of impeaching President Richard M. Nixon (1969-1974) during the Watergate affair. She also delivered the keynote address at the 1976 Democratic National Convention.

Texas passed a state law specifically declaring segregation illegal in 1969, but most white Texans thought the civil rights movement had gone far enough. Blacks, however, were registered to vote and were an integral part of the Democratic Party. So too were Mexican Americans, who had become more militant, with many of the young calling themselves Chicanos and speaking of Brown Power. The militancy had subsided by the early 1970s, but not before the organization of a political party, La Raza Unida. These new Hispanic voters registered as Democrats and controlled local and state politics south of San Antonio. The Democratic Party had to remain moderate once the registration of minorities increased.

John Connally, President Johnson’s long-time friend and political protégé, won the 1962 election for governor. He was more cautious about government-sponsored social change than the president, but went along with the civil rights legislation.

He was the state’s most forward-looking governor in economic terms. Connally worked to expand the community-college system, upgrade the university system (in particular the University of Texas and Texas A&M University), increase pay for teachers, and institute other measures to support scientific and specialized training. Connally spent most of his energy attempting to create a business climate that would bring new industry into the state.

Most historians believe that Connally’s political success delayed the growth of the Republican Party in Texas for at least a decade. Johnson had persuaded the legislature to pass a law in 1960 that would allow him to run for vice president and for reelection to the U.S. Senate at the same time. When he was elected vice president, he resigned as a U.S. senator, and was replaced by John Tower, a Republican.

Growth of the Republican Party

Senator Tower was the first Republican to be elected U.S. senator from Texas since Reconstruction. Tower won two more terms to the U.S. Senate, demonstrating that a Republican could win in Texas. By 1963 there were more than 100 local Republican clubs that were opposed to regulation of oil and gas and the integration of public schools. Their growth was limited by the popularity of Governor Connally, but more conservative Democrats began to donate money to Senator Tower’s campaigns in the late 1960s. In general, club members endorsed the Republican candidate, U.S. senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona for president in 1964.

In 1968 both President Johnson and Governor Connally announced their retirement from public life. Texans voted for Minnesota Democrat and U.S. vice president Hubert Humphrey for the presidency, but former vice president Richard Nixon won the election. When Nixon was reelected in 1972, he carried Texas and most of the rest of the nation. The pall of the Watergate scandal caused the state to vote for Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976, but the election disguised a growing state Republican Party that won new adherents in the suburbs, and recruited well among more conservative Democrats. These new Republicans supported the conservative Republican Ronald Reagan, former governor of California.

The new Texas Republican Party showed its strength in 1978 when Republican Bill Clements, a Dallas oilman and friend of Ronald Reagan, was elected governor. Clements was not a particularly successful governor. He battled with the Democratic legislature, failed to pass much of his program, and his abrasive personality alienated many potential voters. He did, however, give the Republican Party credibility by demonstrating that Republicans could win statewide elections. He lost his first reelection attempt and then won again in 1986. By that time the nature of Texas politics and the Texas economy had begun to change drastically.