Hidden History of Texas--1890-1920--Part 2

(This article was originally posted on The Rag Blog on Feb. 6, 2012)

In the decade before the then-Democratic Party-oriented white power structure in Texas solidified its early 20th century system of legalized racial segregation and institutionalized white supremacy and white racism, large numbers of politically dissatisfied Texas farmers of different racial backgrounds had thrown their electoral support to an alternative, populist third-party: the People’s Party of America.

Also known as the Populist Party, the People’s Party had been established in April of 1891 in Cincinnati and had held its first national convention in July 1892 in Omaha, Nebraska.

In its July 1892 Omaha Platform, the People’s Party explained why it believed that farmers and workers in Texas should vote for its 1892 presidential candidate rather than for the Democratic or Republican party presidential candidates, for example, by stating the following:

“We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the legislature, the Congress... The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled; public opinion silenced; business prostrated; our homes covered with mortgages; labor impoverished; and the land concentrating in the hands of the capitalists...

“The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind... From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes -- tramps and millionaires...

“We have witnessed for more than a quarter of a century the struggle of the two great political parties for power and plunder, while grievous wrongs have been inflicted upon the suffering people. We charge that the controlling influences dominating both these parties have permitted the existing dreadful conditions to develop without serious effort to prevent or restrain them...

“They propose to sacrifice our homes, lives and children on the altar of mammon; to destroy the multitude in order to secure corruption funds from the millionaires...

“We demand a graduated income tax... 2. Resolved. That the revenues derived from a graduated income tax should be applied to the reduction of the burden of taxation... 8. Resolved. That we favor a constitutional provision limiting the office of President and Vice-President to one term, and providing for the election of senators of the United States by a direct vote of the people. 9. Resolved. That we oppose any subsidy or national aid to any private corporation for any purpose.....”

  Although the People’s Party of America’s 1892 platform apparently also favored “further restriction of undesirable immigration” to the USA during the early 1890s U.S. economic depression, “the Populist movement was `radical’ in another way... --the inclusion of black Texans,” according to Randolph Campbell’s Gone To Texas. As the same book recalled, the 1891 People’s Party of Texas state convention “elected two African-Americans to the state executive committee” and “the Populist position on race stood in total contrast to that usually taken by the Democratic Party, which had no black leaders.”

So, not surprisingly, during the early 1890s in Texas, “Populists won over an increasing number of black voters through the [efforts of] Negro organizers such as J.B. Rayner and promises of better education, equal political and legal rights, and economic improvement in the midst of a depression” and “attracted about 35 percent of the Negro voters” in Texas in 1894, according to Alwyn Barr’s Black Texans.

By 1892, Texas “had more than 2,000 local Populist clubs and a statewide [Populist] newspaper, the Dallas Southern Mercury” and “on June 23-24,1892, a thousand Populists gathered in Dallas and nominated Thomas L. Nugent for governor,” according to Gone To Texas.

Strongly backed by white small farmers in Texas, People’s Party gubernatorial candidate Nugent won 25 percent of the vote in 1892 -- although he “received virtually no support from Mexican-Americans in South Texas ” where “the boss-rule system of politics” was pretty much able to block any Democratic voters from shifting their votes to a third-party alternative candidate.

With increasing electoral support from African-American voters in Texas in 1894, however, Nugent was able to win 36 percent of the state’s votes in the 1894 gubernatorial campaign, and “populist candidates for Texas’s seats in Congress ran strongly in 1894 [and] the party elected 22 members of the state house of representatives and 2 state senators [and] populist organizations such as the Young People’s League of Texas and local glee clubs attracted popular support,” according to Gone To Texas.

But despite the Populist third-party candidate for governor in Texas subsequently even winning 44 percent of the votes in 1896, after a significant number of People’s Party of America national leaders adopted a political strategy of fusion with the Democratic Party in other states, electoral support for the third-party Populist alternative to the state’s white supremacist Democratic Party in Texas began to decline rapidly.

In 1898, for example, the percentage of Texas voters who cast ballots for the People’s Party candidate dropped to 28 percent; and by 1900 only 6 percent of Texas voters were willing to cast their votes for the People’s Party gubernatorial candidate.

Hidden History of Texas--1876-1890

(This article was originally posted on The Rag Blog on Jan. 4, 2012)

Between 1870 and 1890 the number of people who lived in Texas increased from 818,000 to 2,235,000 and most of the people residing in Texas in 1890 had previously lived in the southeastern United States.

Although the number of Texas residents who were of African descent increased from 253,000 to 488,000 during these same 20 years, the percentage of all Texas residents who were African-American decreased from 32 to 22 percent during this period. And by 1890, 125,000 people of German descent now also lived in Texas. But the number of people of Mexican descent then living in Texas was still only 105,000.

Between 1876 and 1890, most of the people who lived in Texas were also still farmers. In 1890, for example, 84 percent of Texans still lived in rural areas on about 228,000 farms.

The number of Native Americans who were able to live in Texas, however, continued to decrease between 1870 and 1890 as U.S. government “military pressure on the Indians began to intensify during the early 1870s,” and “white hunters started to inflict an equally serious blow by destroying the great buffalo herds,” according to Randolph Campbell’s Gone To Texas.

Following the summer of 1874 incursion of 5,000 U.S. Army troops, during the Red River War, into the areas of Texas where Native American tribes like the Comanche and Kiowa tribes still lived, “the way for Texans to cover the prairies and Panhandle with cattle and cowboys” was opened, and “by the mid-1870s, the success of trailing cattle to market, combined with the elimination of Indians and buffaloes from northwestern Texas, encouraged the establishment of ranches in that region,” according to the same book.

By 1890, absentee foreign investors from the UK had helped quickly transform Texas’s cattle ranching industry into one dominated by corporate ranchers who paid their Texas cowboys and ranch workers low wages. So, not surprisingly, in 1883 “a group of cowboys” had “demanded higher wages” and gone “on strike against five ranches,” according to Gone To Texas.

But, although “the Cowboy Strike” involved “as many as 300 men” and “lasted more than two months,” it failed to win higher wages primarily because the corporate “ranchers had no trouble hiring replacements,” according to the same book.

The first assembly of the Knights of Labor organization of U.S. workers was held in Texas in 1882, and by 1886 about 30,000 workers in Texas were members of the Knights of Labor. So when a Knights of Labor foreman for union activities at the Texas & Pacific railroad shops in Marshall, Texas, was fired in 1886, the Knights of Labor in Texas began its Great Southwest Strike against all of Robber Baron Jay Gould’s Southwest railroad lines.

After Gould’s Texas & Pacific railroad executives refused to negotiate with its Knights of Labor-led strikers and hired strikebreakers, Texas Rangers and Texas state militia were ordered to break the strike by state government officials. In several Texas cities during the 1880s, Knights of Labor union locals also “accepted black members,” and an African-American worker named David Black also served on the Knights of Labor’s state executive board during the 1880s, according to Alwyn Barr’s Black Texans.

Between 1876 and 1890 more and more of the people who lived in rural Texas did not own the land on which they farmed. In the 1880s, for example, “the number of Texas farms worked by landless tenants rose by more than 30,000,” according to Gone To Texas, and “most farmed as either share tenants or sharecroppers paying rent with portions of the crop they produced.”

The same book noted that “by 1890, 42 percent of all Texas farms were worked by tenants,” the percentage "continued to rise year by year,” and “Texas farmers by the tens of thousands seemed doomed to live endlessly in near poverty -- working someone else’s land.”

So in response to the increasing impoverishment and loss of land ownership experienced by Texas farmers between 1876 and 1890, many Texas farmers, not surprisingly, became politically active in farmer protest groups like the Grange (during the 1870s) and the Texas Farmers Alliance (during the 1880s).

According to John Hicks’ The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmer’s Alliance and the People’s Party, during the 1880s the Texas Farmers Alliance “soon achieved considerable prominence throughout central and northern Texas,” and “by December 1885, the claim was made that the Alliance had about 50,000 members scattered among not less than 1,200 locals.”

At its 1886 state meeting in Cleburne, the Texas Farmers Alliance adopted resolutions which “put the Alliance on record as favoring the higher taxation of lands held for speculative purposes, the prohibition of alien landownership, the prevention of dealing in futures, so far as agricultural products were concerned, more adequate taxation of the railways, new issues of paper money” and “an interstate commerce law.”

As Gone To Texas recalled, “by 1890… many Texas farmers… thought that their desperate situation required drastic steps” and “a good many Texans had found the `New South’ an empty promise and wanted something better.”

The Texas Farmers Alliance still refused -- on white chauvinist grounds -- to allow Texas farmers of African descent to become members of that organization. So, “a southern white man, R. M. Humphrey, who had been a Baptist missionary” among African-Americans, according to The Populist Revolt, apparently joined with Texas African-American farmers in organizing and forming a Colored Farmers Alliance group in Houston in December 1886, which soon attracted many African-American farmers in Texas as members.

Between 1876 and 1890, white supremacist racist Democratic Party-oriented groups in Texas also apparently began to use both violent and legal means to deny many African-Americans their democratic right to vote and participate as equals in Texas state electoral politics. As Black Texans recalled:

“In the late 1870s white men’s parties or intimidation of Negro voters developed in the town of Navasota and in Leon, Montgomery, Colorado, DeWitt, and Washington counties. Similar events occurred in Waller, Harris, Washington, Matagorda, and Wharton counties in the 1880s.

“White Democrats in Fort Bend County organized in 1888 a club known as the Jaybirds… whippings, assaults, and killings followed… White men’s associations organized in Colorado, Matagorda, Brazoria, Grimes, Milam, and Marion counties to assure `that white supremacy must obtain.’ In Robertson County Democrats stopped black Populists from voting with rifles, pistols and baseball bats.”

  Given the role that the Democratic Party-oriented white supremacist groups played in denying democratic political rights to African-Americans in Texas between 1876 and 1890, most African-Americans in Texas, not surprisingly, supported either the Republican Party or the Greenback Party between 1876 and 1890.

During the 1880s, around 90 percent of all members of Texas’s Republican Party were African-Americans, and after the Greenback insurgent third party of the 1870s began organizing in Texas in 1877, “black delegates appeared in the earliest third-party meetings and represented 70 Greenback clubs for Negroes at the state convention in 1878,” according to Black Texans.

The same book also noted that “in addition to their economic program, Greenbackers appealed for black votes by calling for a better public school system” in Texas during the late 1870s; and the nine African-American GOP or Greenback Party candidates who were elected to the Texas state legislature during the late 1870s also (at that time) “helped defeat a poll tax measure when the Democratic majority divided on the issue.”