Bootstrap Liberalism

Texas Political Culture in the Age of FDR

Sean P. Cunningham

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780700633012
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Gobierno estadounidense

Has Texas always been one of the United States' most conservative states? The answer might surprise you. Bootstrap Liberalism offers a glimpse into the world of Depression-era Texas politics, revealing a partisan culture that was often far more ideologically nuanced and complex than meets the eye.The Lone Star State is often viewed as a bastion of conservative politics and rugged "bootstrap" individualism, but that narrative overlooks the fact that FDR's New Deal was quite popular in Texas, much more so than previous histories of the era have suggested.While it is true that many Texas Democrats remained staunchly conservative during Franklin Roosevelt's presidency, and it is also true that many of these conservatives formed the basis of an established majority that would grow stronger in the decades that followed, it is simultaneously true that ordinary voters—and a good many politicians—embraced New Deal policies, federal experimentation, and direct economic aid, and often did so enthusiastically as liberal Texas Democrats rode FDR's coattails to electoral success.Texas political leaders recognized the popularity of the New Deal and identified themselves with FDR for their own political advantage. Using original resources mined from six research archives, Bootstrap Liberalism explores campaign strategies and policy debates as they unfolded at the local, state, and national levels throughout the Great Depression and World War II eras, revealing a consistent brand of pro-New Deal messaging that won favor with voters across the state. Most Texas Democrats did not apologize for supporting FDR. Rather, they celebrated him and often marketed themselves as New Deal Democrats. Voters endorsed that strategy by electing liberals throughout the 1930s and early 1940s.

1 | “We Can Do No Worse”

At the height of the “roaring twenties,” Thomas B. Love of Dallas was quite possibly the driest man in Texas. In 1928, he did everything he could to make his state the same way. As a Democratic state senator, Love was determined to keep the governor of New York out of the White House in Washington. Alongside legions of other prohibitionist (colloquially known as “dry”) Texas Democrats, Love was a thoroughly networked political busybody, an incessant letter writer, and a Wilsonian progressive whose career stretched back to the beginning of the century. But he was not loyal to his party in 1928 and did everything he could to convince other Texans to follow suit by rejecting the candidacy of Al Smith, the antiprohibition (“wet”) Democratic presidential nominee, who also happened to be the first Catholic ever nominated by a major party for the highest office in the land. That November, Love’s efforts proved successful as Texas cast its lot with the Grand Old Party for the first time, thereby making a direct contribution to the election of the Republican candidate, Herbert Hoover, to the presidency of the United States.

The election of 1928 exposed the severity of sociocultural rifts in the Lone Star State, dividing Texans as few events ever had. It challenged the tenets of partisan loyalty and longstanding Democratic hegemony, and it polarized neighbors and families alike. With the wounds of this division still fresh, a Texan named Charles Berry decided to express his frustrations and hopes for healing and reunification by writing a letter to the man who would replace Al Smith as governor of New York, the newly elected chief executive of the Empire State, Franklin D. Roosevelt.¹

Evidence in the final vote totals notwithstanding, Berry told Roosevelt that Texas voters did not actually like Herbert Hoover. Nor did they like the Republican Party. Nor, according to Berry, had Texans rejected Smith because he was Catholic, as many speculated, nor because he was a wet. Instead, the state’s shift to the Republican Party was a freak occurrence—an unfortunate anomaly—the mere result of complacency and overconfidence. As Berry saw it, Texas Democrats had simply taken their state’s loyalty for granted. In doing so, they had unintentionally opened the door for a small minority of disloyal radicals to usurp the people’s true preference by rallying unsuspecting but otherwise well-intentioned Texans to do something he hoped they would never do again. Given a second chance, he was sure his Texas neighbors would reunite behind the Democratic Party.²

Charles Berry’s assessment of the political realities in Texas was naïve and simplistic. In several ways, it was also flatly wrong. Texas did not swing Republican in 1928 because of complacency or overconfidence. Al Smith’s Catholicism and his stand on Prohibition were directly relevant and assuredly decisive. Men like Love, Texas governor Dan Moody, and J. Frank Norris, the fiery preacher and pastor of First Baptist Church of Fort Worth, whose anti-Catholic rants had already become the stuff of local legend, made sure of that.³ Likewise, most of Berry’s neighbors were not apathetic, nor had they been duped; rather, they were widely engaged, defiant, and purposefully rebellious. The “Hoovercrat” bolt of 1928 was no accident.⁴

Still, as it turned out, Charles Berry proved to be right about at least one thing. Discouraged though he was, Berry told Roosevelt that he was optimistic that Texas Democrats would reunite behind the party’s presidential nominee in 1932, especially if that nominee happened to be FDR.⁵

“Hood, Bonnet, and Little Brown Jug”

Unprecedented and surprising though it was at the time, Al Smith’s loss in Texas in 1928 did not occur in a vacuum. Rather, it was, to at least some degree, a predictable reflection of broader political forces shaping the state during the 1920s. Writing in 1984, historian Norman D. Brown argued that three main issues dominated Texas politics during the so-called Roaring Twenties. Those issues were, first, the Ku Klux Klan, or “the Hood”; second, the campaigns of Miriam “Ma” Ferguson—the “Bonnet”; and third, Prohibition, or “the little brown jug.” Texans paid tangential attention to other issues at the state, local, and national levels, of course, but they typically interpreted those issues through a lens that prioritized one or more of these three main forces. Any analysis of Texas politics during the age of FDR requires an accounting of the culture that preceded it.⁶

Originally conceived as a domestic terrorist vehicle for promoting Reconstruction-era white supremacy, the Ku Klux Klan existed in fits and starts, on the margins of society, or as a distant memory across the “redeemed” South throughout the final decades of the nineteenth century. Largely defunct by the early twentieth century, the Klan reorganized in 1915 and subsequently enjoyed a heyday during the 1920s. This was especially true in Texas, which became one of the Klan’s banner states. A wide variety of perceived threats to the national interest inspired the Klan’s rebirth and subsequent growth. The secretive organization still targeted and attacked African Americans and the agitators who dared help them. It also, however, diversified its focus to include Jews, Catholics, and political progressives who aided and abetted what the Klan perceived as the nation’s steady descent toward multiculturalism. Immigration was a particularly salient source of anxiety. Klansmen and their allies believed that newcomers from southern and eastern European countries threatened their homeland’s racial, ethnic, and religious status quo. They believed it was up to them to preserve and protect that status quo, which they interpreted as white and Protestant. Tapping into undercurrents of fear and anxiety, the Klan attracted sizable followings in Texas, first among elites, and later among middle- and working-class whites.⁷

Both nationally and in Texas, the Ku Klux Klan promoted a philosophy of “100 percent Americanism,” arguing that the nation’s moral sense of self had been lost, victimized by the onrush of modernity, manifest in racial, ethnic, and sexual permissiveness and unrest. The Klan proclaimed itself God’s “instrument for restoring law and order and Victorian morality to the communities, towns and cities of the region.” As interested in correcting moral failings as it was in enforcing racial segregation, the Klan attracted men and women who were concerned about the dangers of alcohol abuse and the correlated sins of adultery, domestic violence, pedophilia and child molestation, prostitution, and other forms of criminal vice. It was particularly effective in exploiting fears of black male sexual deviance and the vulnerability of white female virtue, while at the same time reifying popular assumptions about the interconnectivity of national identity, citizenship, and “whiteness.”⁸

Between 1920 and 1926, the Invisible Empire grew rapidly in Texas, at one point reaching approximately 150,000 members, including most members of the state’s Thirty-Eighth Legislature between 1923 and 1925.⁹ This growth came in part thanks to the leadership of Hiram W. Evans, a dentist from Dallas, where popular notions of law and order, whiteness, and the perceived absence of black political influence were as deeply entrenched as anywhere in the state. Evans joined the Texas Klan in 1920; by 1922 he was the organization’s Imperial Wizard, or national leader. Under Evans, the Klan prioritized political organization and engagement with all levels of government—local, state, and federal. Over the next several years, the Klan successfully strengthened its operational presence across the nation, creating well-organized local chapters that contributed directly to state and local Democratic campaigns, while also frightening more than a few locals into modifying their morally questionable behaviors. Although Evans publicly opposed the type of vigilante violence that had made the Klan famous since the late 1860s, rogue action remained a visible part of the Klan’s culture and public personality. This brand of unsanctioned, vigilante “justice” was also very much in keeping with Texas’s frontier history and its proclivities to see armed self-defense as a core tenet of properly patriarchal family life. Sadly, Klan violence was very common in Texas. As Walter Buenger puts it, white Texans “lynched blacks at a stunning rate and in a gruesome style” throughout the first half of the 1920s.¹⁰

The Texas Klan’s power was on full display in 1922, when its intervention into the race for a US Senate seat proved decisive in the election of Earle Mayfield. Among other issues, Mayfield emphasized his support for Prohibition, contrasted against alcohol abuse and moral degradation more broadly. Rumors abounded that Mayfield was himself a member of the Klan, though it is more likely that he merely enjoyed the political benefits of being associated with the Hood and was not actually a full-fledged member. Mayfield largely avoided direct mention of the Klan during his campaign. The same was true among his more prominent supporters, including Texas’s famously progressive United States senator, Morris Sheppard, and future Washington power broker and Klan sympathizer Congressman Hatton Sumners of Dallas, who rose to national prominence during the early 1920s, lobbying forcefully against proposed federal antilynching bills under consideration in 1920 and 1922.¹¹

Regardless, Mayfield’s victory was a clear reflection of the Klan’s influence at the ballot box. On Mayfield’s coattails, the Klan celebrated down-ballot victories across the state, most notably in Dallas, where seven such candidates won in local races. The Invisible Empire celebrated those victories with an evening parade in downtown Dallas where members marched in hoods to “Onward Christian Soldiers.”¹²

Anti-Klan Democrats objected to the KKK’s cultish, secretive persona, not to mention its reputation for violence. Above all, however, anti-Klan Democrats objected to the Invisible Empire’s expanding political power. Strong in number, but lacking coherent organization on par with their opponents, the anti-Klan faction eventually found its leader in Miriam “Ma” Ferguson. At the time, most knew Ma Ferguson simply as the wife of former Texas governor James “Pa” Ferguson, also known colloquially as “Farmer Jim.” Texas voters elected Pa to serve as governor in 1914, then reelected him for a second term in 1916. In 1917, however, the Texas House impeached Pa Ferguson over a series of scandals, including one involving academic freedom issues with the University of Texas at Austin, along with his decision to veto all appropriations to the public university in 1917. In a legally questionable attempt to skirt the implications of his impeachment, Ferguson resigned from office one day after the state’s Court of Impeachment issued its conviction on the matter. Ever defiant, Ferguson continued to pursue his political career, running unsuccessfully for governor in 1918, before losing to Mayfield in the 1922 Democratic primary race for US Senate, all while the legality of his candidacies was a subject of much controversy.¹³

Refusing to go quietly into the night, Pa subsequently launched a shadow career through his wife. Together, Ma and Pa Ferguson emerged as one of the most colorful, controversial, and well-known political duos in American history. With a populist style and a penchant for the dramatic, the Fergusons offered a clear contrast to the Klan’s hood, particularly on the issue of Prohibition. The Fergusons styled themselves as champions of the “forgotten man” and specifically of wets and other outsiders, shunned by the hypermoralistic. They even advocated and tried to implement a radically liberal use of gubernatorial pardoning power, releasing convicted criminals to the dismay of many and at times lending perceived credence to the Klan’s criticisms of Fergusonism as an affront to law and order.¹⁴

Sometimes successfully, sometimes not, the Fergusons’ flair for the dramatic kept them at the center of the state’s political spotlight for the next two decades. Making no effort to hide their political alliance, or Pa’s ongoing influence, the Fergusons ran for governor in 1924, using Ma as a front. They won, defeating the Klan-backed candidate, Felix D. Robertson. Their chief issue was the need to “unmask” and disempower the Klan. Miriam Ferguson thus became the first female governor of Texas, though Pa maintained an office in the capitol building and exerted significant control over state affairs.¹⁵

Thus contextualized, Al Smith’s 1928 loss in Texas should not have been surprising. The Democratic Party’s decision to nominate a wet Catholic for president inspired Klansmen and other similarly minded Texans to exploit commonly held bigotries, fomenting fear, anger, and backlash wherever possible. Ironically, Smith officially accepted his party’s presidential nomination in Houston, which hosted the 1928 Democratic National Convention that June—the first time either national party had held its nominating convention in a southern state since the end of the Civil War. Texas newspapers covered the convention with gusto, particularly Texas governor Dan Moody’s unshakable opposition to Smith, whom some opponents had taken to calling “Alcohol Smith.” Dry Democrats like Moody aggressively organized support for a plank in the party’s platform calling for rigid and “honest enforcement of the Constitution,” specifically Prohibition. Some Texans took the opportunity to champion Moody as an alternative nominee, though that drive fizzled without gaining much traction in the national party.¹⁶

Throughout the rest of the summer and fall of 1928, the Ku Klux Klan promoted conspiracy theories involving Rome’s alleged plan for an eventual coup in the United States, painting caricatures of Al Smith as someth...