Minding the Store

12. Texas under Three Economies

12 Texas under Three Economies HISTORIANS NEATLY DIVIDE THE CENTURIES into convenient compartments which they label "periods," so it comes as somewhat of a surprise, as I review the years of my life, to find that I, too, can discern three distinct "periods" of modern Texas history and the effects of each of these on the molding of its people and their economic and political attitudes. From the beginning of its colonization until about 1932, Texas had essentially an agriculturally based economy. By 1905 cotton was the money crop, and its annual success or failure determined whether a large part of the population ate well or poorly. Cotton was grown on small farms by individual owners or by tenant farmers, and it was picked by nearby blacks who enlisted all the members of their families to help. Since wages were based on the poundage picked, a big crop meant lots of cash to the pickers, everybody ate "high on the hog," and debts incurred during the previous year were paid off. If the crop was poor, due either to the devastation of the boll weevil or to the wet weather inducing root rot, then debts remained unpaid, belts were tigbtened, and business was adversely affected. Farmhands bought groceries from their local country stores on credit and paid off after the next crop was picked; they operated similarly with the doctors, undertakers, and clothing merchants. 243 TEXAS UNDER THREE ECONOMIES Similarly, the latter depended on the banks and the wholesalers for their credit. A poor crop or a low price per pound gave the whole economic system a severe case of constipation. Dallas, the largest inland cotton port, reacted to the vagaries of the cotton market through its banks, cotton gins, cotton compressors, cotton merchants, and foreign cotton-buying organizations, all of which were the chief employers of the community. The goat and sheep ranchers in the southwestern part of the state and the cattle raisers to the west were equally dependent on the weather and on prices for their products set by the world market. On the whole, ranchers were well capitalized, and unless drought or hoof and mouth disease afflicted their herds, they were more affluent than their more numerous counterparts in cotton. They, too, had the habit of settling their outstanding debts once a year. Texas was also politically Democratic and economically conservative . Religiously, it was Protestant, essentially Baptist and Methodist, with a minority of Catholics heavily concentrated in small towns settled by German, Czech, and Polish immigrants. There was a sprinkling of Jews, who for the most part were later migrants to Texas, coming into the state in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. They became active in the mercantile and professional life of the larger cities. Religious bias existed in Texas as in other areas, but it was directed more strongly against Catholics than Jews. It reached its climax in the twenties with the reactivation of the Ku Klux Klan, which scared the blacks and tried to intimidate the white majority into further discrimination, commercially and socially, against Catholics and Jews. Aside from the intellectual blight it created, the Klan had little effect other than to make it more difficult for Catholic construction firms to bid successfully on public projects. The blacks already knew "their place" in the social order - which was at the bottom - and the Jews had already segregated themselves into their own social clubs 244 TEXAS UNDER THREE ECONOMIES as the result of the "no Jews" policy of the fashionable country clubs. A course on the history of Texas was a year-long subject given early in the school life of every Texas child, with emphasis on the facts that Texas, the Lone Star State, was the largest state in the Union; that Texas had served under six flags: the Spanish, French, Mexican, Republic of Texas, Confederate, and the United States, and that in the terms under which Texas gave up its sovereignty as an independent republic to become a member of the Union, it reserved the right to divide itself into five separate states. Texas history, like all histories, glorified its heroes and the motivation of its wars; it made the bodies of its heroes out of solid granite even though they may have had feet of clay. The history books emphasized the very size of Texas and the self-sufficiency of the land, which produced cotton and wheat...