-
A Modern Liberal Tradition in Texas?
- Texas A&M University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
A MODERN LIBERAL TRADITION IN TEXAS? Patrick Cox The values and goals expressed by liberals in post–World War II Texas originated in the political activism of such movements as the Farmers’ Alliance, Populism and organized labor of the late nineteenth century. The modern liberal tradition then emerged in Texas after World War II during decades of dramatic social and economic change. As a result, Texas gained a small degree of distinction from its southern sister states due to the existence of a viable and vocal Lone Star Left. Informed by the traditions and experiences of the political protest movements that existed from the 1870s through the 1930s, this expanded liberal movement grew largely from within the state. The broadly based Farmers’ Alliance and Populist movements, the robust Socialist critique, the New Deal, the women’s movement, the African American and Hispanic civil rights movements , and the labor movement (the longest-lived movement on the Left), each contributed historic building blocks for the construction of a Texas liberal tradition. This included a conviction that government should play a role in the economy and in society. The rights of working people, racial and ethnic minorities, and women eventually became part of the mid-to-late-twentieth-century liberal agenda. Gunnar Myrdal wrote in An American Dilemma in 1944 that “southern liberalism gets its power from outside the South.” Southern liberals themselves were both critics and defenders of the South, according to his assessment. They spoke of the area as “hopelessly backward,” but also “flattered” it “in the most extravagant terms of regional mythology.” Myrdal concluded that the southern liberal was 210 Patrick Cox “inclined to stress the need for patience and to exalt the cautious approach , the slow change, the organic nature of social growth.” Since Myrdal, other southern observers have also argued that national—not southern—forces defined and shaped the struggle over civil rights, economic justice, and social equality in the South. Labor unions, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp), private foundations, church organizations, and many other northernbased institutions did indeed provide leadership and support for the liberal movement in the South. Nevertheless, while many southern liberals sought and found support from outside the South, in the Lone Star State reformers looked to one another and the work of their historic predecessors in their challenge to conservative southern politics and economics. As a result of the efforts of the state’s homegrown liberal leadership, Texas evinced a more moderate—or at least more diverse —identity than in the rest of the South. Conservatism remained firmly entrenched, dominated by the state’s business community and elected officials reluctant to challenge, or sympathetic to, the status quo. However, some Texas liberals contradicted the patient, slow change that Myrdal described.1 Noted Southern historian Numan Bartley concluded that by the mid 1950s, the southern liberal was disappearing at a rapid rate. Southern liberals who advocated racial and economic reforms met widespread resistance and skepticism. “By defining liberalism not in terms of the redistribution of wealth, power and privilege but as an issue of individual morality, the new American left sharply narrowed the liberal agenda,” Bartley concluded. Middle-class white southerners, grandchildren of the Populist movement and Progressivism, and bene- ficiaries of the New Deal, turned in their liberal credentials after World War II when confronted with challenges to white supremacy. The vast majority of southern elected officials, from the courthouse to Washington , D.C., retreated to safely conservative positions. Even the more outspoken southern newspaper editors shifted their alignment as race became more of a factor in the postwar liberal movement. “Even the word liberal began to disappear from the southern political lexicon,” Bartley writes.2 Liberalism in Texas—and this is an important distinction—advocated change, but only so much as could be absorbed by the existing traditional political system. Texas liberals sought democratization, civil rights, and racial equality. They envisioned a pluralistic society within a market-based economy, while retaining some of the egalitarian flavor of their nineteenth century Populist forbears, albeit situated in an increasingly homogeneous society influenced by corporate power. [44.200.145.114] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:01 GMT) A Modern Liberal Tradition in Texas? 211 Like the rest of the South during the first eight decades of the twentieth century, Texas was virtually a one-party state. The Democratic Party dominated the political scene—a lasting vestige of the post–Civil War struggle over race...