Texas People, Texas Places: More Musings of the Rambling Boy

16. Two Governors for the Price of One

✥ 16 ✥ Two Governors for the Price of One No t l o n g ag o , my wife and I were in Austin and decided to have dinner in the dining room of the Driskill Hotel, an Austin landmark since its opening in the 1880s. The dining room is hung with portraits of famous Texans, and when the twentysomething -year-old hostess directed us to a table under a portrait of a severe-looking woman wearing rimless glasses and a string of pearls, I said, “Oh, right under Ma Ferguson.” The hostess was astonished. “How do you know who that is?” she asked. I was astonished in turn. How could any Texan of my generation not recognize a portrait of Miriam Amanda Ferguson? Even though her last race for governor took place the year that I was born, she and her husband, Governor James E. “Farmer Jim” Ferguson, were legendary figures of my childhood. Whenever their names came up in my parents’ presence, they would laugh and one of them would say, “Two governors for the price of one,” which was Ma’s campaign slogan the first time she was elected governor in 1924. The Fergusons were a political phenomenon that dominated Texas politics for twenty years, from 1914, when Jim Ferguson was first elected governor, through 1934, when Miriam Ferguson completed her third term in that office, and the aftereffects of their five combined terms lasted another twenty years. Aside from my parents’ amused comments, my first brush with the Fergusons came in my late teens when I started collecting books about Texas. One of my early acquisitions was a pamphlet by West Texas journalist Don Biggers, entitled Our Sacred Monkeys, or Twenty Years of Jim and Other Jams (Mostly Jim), pub64 ✥ lished in 1933. I found it in Barber’s Book Store in Fort Worth and was attracted by the bizarre title. Over the years I have collected a good deal more Fergusoniana. While I cannot say that I am an admirer of the Fergusons, I will admit to being fascinated by their sustained political effrontery, which I think is unparalleled in Texas history. Jim Ferguson was certainly not the simple farmer he represented himself to be when he first ran for governor in 1914. He was the president of the First State Bank of Temple, Texas, and a large landowner in Bell County. He seems to have been a Snopes-like individual whose main interest was enriching himself, and he looked upon the governorship as offering wider opportunities for enrichment than a bank presidency in Temple. He put together a coalition of tenant farmers and anti-Prohibitionists and, with a healthy contribution from the brewing industry, defeated his leading opponent, Tom Ball, by forty thousand votes. Ferguson was a demagogue in the same Southern tradition that produced Huey Long, but he lacked Long’s ability to produce paved roads and free schoolbooks. What he did have was an extremely combative nature. You were either for him or against him, and his policy was to reward his friends and smite his enemies. By the end of his first term, Texas was divided into Ferguson men and everyone else. He never finished his second term, because those he had smitten caught up with him. He was censured by the legislature, indicted by a Travis County grand jury, and finally impeached and convicted by the legislature. His troubles were brought to a head by his attempt to force the president of the University of Texas to fire four professors who had campaigned against him in 1916, but there was also the matter of state funds which he had shifted to his Temple bank and then neglected to pay interest on. There were nine other charges, most of them dealing with fiscal malfeasance. In spite of the fact that the terms of his conviction prohibited his ever holding office again in Texas, he ran for governor in 1918 and lost. At about that time he started his own newspaper, the ✥ 65 Ferguson Forum, which Don Biggers described as “a twenty-eightpage paper, containing 3,920 inches of type space, of which 2,674 was advertising and only 1,246 inches was reading matter, if bunk and hot air can be classified as reading matter.” The advertising, of course, was a form of political contribution. The Forum was given to publishing headlines like, “200,000 LIARS RUNNING LOOSE IN TEXAS...