Chapter 49
The sun done riz, the sun done set
An’ we ain’t outa Texas yet.
—Cowboy Song
OF ALL the fabulous things in the Lone Star State, the most fabulous is quite possibly the university at Austin, and of all the issues that confront and perplex Texas, that of academic freedom at the university is probably the most peculiarly Texan. Practically all the conflicts, juxtapositions, and cleavages within cleavages that we have explored to this point find their best summary and expression in the dispute over the university.
Texas does things with a sweep. That we know well. The university was founded in 1881, and the state constitution specifically requires it to be an institution “of the first class.” There was a reason for this. A prime cause of the Texas revolution against Mexico was dissatisfaction with the Mexican educational system; Texas wanted better schools. The university was endowed with two million acres of land, in perpetuity, the income from which was to be used for buildings, permanent equipment, and the like. But this block of land, out in central-west Texas, was not considered particularly valuable at the time; some of it sold for five cents an acre, and the regents leased it out for grazing. Then in 1923 came the discovery of oil, and the university became enormously rich overnight.
As a result its permanent fund today amounts to some fifty million dollars—and this despite an expenditure of almost eighteen million dollars on plant alone in the past few years. What is more, its holdings contain veins of potash, 750 feet thick, that may in time turn out to be even more valuable than the petroleum. Since 1923 the university and the oil interests have had a series of angry disputes. Dan Moody, when attorney general, brought one famous suit charging that the companies had maneuvered to draw millions of dollars worth of oil out of its properties; the suit was compromised. Meantime the university itself continued to expand. It did things in the biggest kind of way. It was willing to spend $4,500,000 on a library. In 1931 the Soviet government put up for sale a collection of incunabula valued at about three million dollars, including two of the three pre-Gutenberg Bibles known to exist in the world; the Library of Congress in Washington was unable to afford this purchase, but the University of Texas bought the whole collection at once.1 Then consider the way less valuable books were acquired. When a professor inaugurated a new course in public utilities law he was instructed to buy every book on the subject published in the English language. An allied point—though on a different level—is that, through the Caroline Margaret Campbell collection, the University of Texas possesses the biggest collection of mystery stories in existence.
Professor Homer P. Rainey, a substantial youngish educator with a good record, born in Texas and then successively president of Franklin College (in Indiana) and Bucknell University, became president of the university in 1939. The regents thought so highly of him that he got a salary actually higher than that of the football coach. Rainey was not a “pink” by any normal definition. He was a Rotarian, a Mason, and an ordained Baptist minister. The university had always had a fine liberal tradition, and he set out to maintain it; also he had very definite ideas about its responsibilities to the community as a whole.
By terms of the state constitution, the University of Texas has nine regents. These are appointed by the governor, three at a time for six-year terms, every two years. Jimmy Allred was governor when Rainey became president, and the regents were fairly liberal. Then came the governorships of O’Daniel and Coke Stevenson. Steadily the complexion of the board of regents changed. Among them were and are (at the moment of writing) D. F. Strickland, a “legislative counselor” ( = lobbyist) for the biggest chain of movie theaters in the state, a man named W. Scott Schreiner whose family for a generation has maintained a kind of feudal barony near Kerrville, and above all Orville Bullington, a Wichita Falls millionaire, violently conservative and a key Republican. One illustration will suffice to show Mr. Bullington’s type of mentality. In the senate investigation of the great quarrel that developed over Rainey he submitted a written statement which includes the sentence, “Let them [the Austin newspapers] say whether we did right in refusing to spend the money of the people to glorify the two anarchist or Communist murderers Socco and Vansetti [sic].”2
Political fights involving the university were no new thing. As far back as 1915, Pa Ferguson had a long drawn out struggle with it over control of its appropriations, and this led indirectly to his downfall and impeachment; Pa got beaten. But thirty years later the cards were stacked a different way, and Rainey had regent trouble almost from the beginning of his administration. Or, if you prefer, the regents had Rainey trouble. The resulting conflict was of the simplest. Not merely was it a question of who was to run the university, the president or the regents (and behind the regents the governor); it was a question, in concrete form, of academic freedom, of what kind of school the University of Texas was going to be, whether an adult and emancipated institution of learning in which teachers were permitted to acquire and transmit ideas, or a kind of intellectual greenhouse kept by a clique of millionaires. Perhaps this language is too strong, but passions rose very high over the issue. It cut through and across everything in the state. Not all the tycoon-regents agreed with their brethren. For instance the president of the board at the time, John H. Bickett, the general counsel of Southwestern Bell Telephone (a great power in the state), promptly resigned when Rainey was discharged; so did a Houston millionaire, Dan H. Harrison. Even so—and this is an illustration of what Texas itself thought of the fracas—the Austin American simply used the headline MULTIMILLIONAIRE REGENTS FIRE RAINEY when the story broke. A few days later came another headline, BIG BUSINESS PLOT TO RULE SCHOOLS TOLD.
Documentation on the case already fills a long shelf, and readers who would like more background might well read a brisk exchange of views in Harper’s Magazine (August, November, and December, 1945) in which Bernard DeVoto, attacking the university, plays a lot of hell with a professor who defends it. Suffice it here to outline a few points and dates. One important item was Rainey’s proposal to consolidate the medical school (which is at Galveston) into the university proper; the Galveston reactionaries fought this venomously and Houston gave them powerful support. In 1942 came an episode at Dallas; three instructors in economics protested at the conduct of an antilabor mass meeting (held under the auspices of a movie magnate, Karl Hoblitzelle, whose interests were—incidentally—represented by Regent Strickland at the legislature); the three instructors were discharged. Then during 1943 the more reactionary regents sought to change the tenure rules which safeguard professorial jobs, to make it easier to get rid of “undesirables.” During 1944 there were all manner of incidents; the university had to call off some social science research, Rainey was badgered at every turn, the regents made use of an extraneous scandal about homosexuality, a red hunt began in which practically anybody who voted for FDR was called a “radical”; and an attempt was made to discharge a teacher who recommended to his students John Dos Passos’ USA.3 On October 1, 1944, pressure was put on Rainey to stop making any more speeches “in church”; because he had been defending himself and his administration before some Baptist audiences. On October 12 he counterattacked with a sixteen-point “indictment” outlining his case against the regents, whereupon—on November 1—he was fired.
All kinds of fireworks then broke loose; students demonstrated in mass, laid a coffin marked Academic Freedom at Governor Stevenson’s door, and lowered the university flag to half-mast. Rainey, by terms of the tenure rule, could not be discharged in his capacity of professor, but his chair was abolished and he was deprived of salary. A noisy investigation began in the state senate; its results were not conclusive, and as of today no new president has ever been appointed. The student body backed Rainey practically to a man; so did the young alumni; the faculty was split. But, of 368 professors entitled to vote, only 115 were willing to sign a statement that they considered “academic freedom and tenure” safe at the University of Texas, and only 18 refused to sign a petition for Rainey’s reinstatement. In other words, 253 professors at what was once one of the great universities in the land thought that academic freedom was endangered, that their jobs were not secure. Then the American Association of University Professors undertook an investigation; this is a very substantial body, with something of the same prestige as, say, the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ or the American Medical Association. Its interim report, issued in February, 1945, sharply criticized the regents and said that Rainey’s dismissal “was a serious disregard of good academic practice generally observed by the governing boards of accredited institutions.” Later—a heavy blow to Texans who thought that the South would stand by safely—the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools similarly expressed disapproval. Finally in June, 1946, the American Association formally placed the university on its list of “censured administrations” because of “attempts by a politically dominant group to impose its social and educational views” (New York Times, June 10, 1946).
Rainey, as we know, went into politics very much in the role of martyr, and was beaten for governor in 1946. The forces that ousted him from the university were identical with those that kept him from the governor’s chair.
Beef on the Range
There were three waves of migration on this continent and the second was always the cattlemen. Ahead went the trappers and the Indian traders…. Behind the cattle came the farmers…. There were always cattle out ahead of the plows. And for a simplest reason. Beef and pork and mutton were the only crops in that land without roads which could take themselves to market … Cattle made the first frontier where white men lived. And grass made cattle.
—Archibald MacLeish, Green River
Other states were carved or born,
Texas grew from hide and horn.
—Berta Hart Nance
My host, Colonel Robert W. Briggs, said first, “All you have to know is that a ranch is a beef factory. A successful rancher is simply the one who grows most meat per acre.”
We drove out of San Antonio on broad, smoothly straight roads and then cut into the country to visit the Briggs ranch, not a big one (a mere six thousand acres), perhaps not one very “typical,” but interesting in that it expertly makes the best of every inch of soil, in that it is run by science as well as cowboys, with the most modern techniques. And we talked of everything from the history of the cattle business to the way the Klebergs run the King Ranch to the possibility that the world may be presented some day with synthetic beef.
Why not? Synthetic shoe soles, which wear better than some leather, exist right now, and there is nothing inherently impossible in the idea of making meat from plastics. But if this should ever happen, it would hit Texas, to say nothing of Iowa and Nebraska, a sledge-hammer blow.
Colonel Briggs drove me from one end of his ranch to the other; we saw his sleek, placid Hereford cows and the humped, slate-colored Brahma bulls; we watched his cowboys at work and I saw an example of the astonishing fertility of this part of Texas: on one side of a brook, wheat was growing; on the other red-top cane. Colonel Briggs looked at the very grass—coarse native stuff—with pride and affection, saying, “All this comes from mother earth; when we eat beef, it’s simply grass.” And he pointed out that ranching in this part of the world is more than just a business; it’s a way of life.
We called for an hour at the ranch of a neighbor, W. T. Montgomery, who for many years has been breeding prize bulls. One we saw is quite an historic character, Monty Rupert, aged six, weighing 1,800 pounds and worth twenty-five thousand dollars; out of him have come one hundred thousand dollars worth of calves. He has won innumerable prizes, and he still sires forty or fifty calves a year. Bulls like these are taken care of like babies, and when young are actually fed special Jersey milk; their mothers’ isn’t good enough.
Later in the afternoon I heard a small joke: “What is a Texan rancher?—A retired oil man!” During the 20’s and 30’s about one hundred thousand people moved into south and west Texas. The land, which had never been cleared, cost very little; even today you can buy it for a pittance. These migrants were not cattlemen. They hoped to strike oil. Then, if they didn’t find oil, they made the property a ranch instead; this movement still goes on and some owners, even though no oil is produced, make more money on oil than from their herds, through royalties on future drilling. Also many rich oilmen put their profits into real estate.
The cow country of the United States, the largest beef-producing region in the world, which we alluded to so often in early chapters of this book, stretches upward from Texas like a broadening funnel. Texas is its root and heart, and it swells up to take in most of Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico; its eastern boundary is as we know the 98th meridian, cutting sharp and smooth through the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. In this whole immense region, from Brownsville to the Canadian border, any cattleman is at home anywhere. The mores are the same; the vernacular and manner of speech are the same; the habit of mind is the same—love of open spaces, independent skepticism, a hatred of being pushed around by government, a dislike of small men in big cities.
There have, Colonel Briggs told me, been five great phases of cattle development. First was the Spanish period. The conquistadores brought in the longhorns—fierce and sturdy animals, all hide, hoof, and horns with little meat on them. The modern phrase that a steer is simply “a frame for beef” would not apply; in fact the longhorns were killed largely for hide and tallow; the meat was often left to rot. The great virtue of the longhorns was that they could stand drought—the major preoccupation of every early cattleman was water—and the arduous long drives. Today longhorns are virtually extinct. They have played a greater role in American folklore and history than any other animal, except possibly the bison, but as Dobie points out they have been very much neglected scientifically. Few museums have longhorn displays; few longhorn “reservations” exist; the San Antonio zoo has exactly one specimen. Most Texans under the age of fifty, say, have never seen a longhorn.
Second came the trail-driving era and there are plenty of men living who remember this—like one friend who grew up in a region where there wasn’t a fence for 450 miles, and another who has lived in cattle country “since they put the grass out.” The longhorns, herd after herd, were driven up to the Kansas railheads, like Abilene and Dodge City; the most famous trails were the Goodnight-Loving and the Chisholm. Why did the cattle business grow? Because it was so inordinately lucrative. The great world of the East wanted meat, especially beef; and Texas had the beef to provide. Enormous fortunes were made hand over fist. A steer cost three dollars or so in Texas, and sold in Kansas for thirty dollars and up. And there was practically no overhead, since the land was free and all the cattle ate was grass, which was free too.
The third period began with the extension of the railways into Texas itself. The last drive afoot to Kansas came in 1887, and the transition to mechanical transport produced profound changes on the frontier. Fencing killed the open range, and made homesteading possible. Formerly the cattle business had been simply a matter of roaming through fenceless country, finding water, and shooting any interloper who tried to steal your herd. Now it became a strictly regulated industry, though not without excitements. The open rangers didn’t like the way things were going; there were bitter fence-cutting wars. Intertangled with this development were two inventions. One was barbed wire, as mentioned in a preceding chapter; the other was the Colt revolver. Rifles cannot be easily loaded on horseback; when they were replaced by the much quicker and handier six-shooters, an epoch came to an end; violence was the more easily defended against and punished.
Overlapping this period came a fourth, that of improvement in the quality of stock. It was difficult to ship longhorns by rail; their horns were too big. And everybody wanted a heavier, more docile animal that would produce more beef. So the Hereford era began, and Herefords, with their straight-line backs, short legs, and straight bellies, still overwhelmingly dominate the beef-cattle world. This is because they are heaviest in the right place for the best meat, the loins. You judge cattle by their heads; but it’s the other end that counts for beef. Of course there are other cattle than Herefords in Texas, for instance Durhams (shorthorns) and the black hornless Angus, which “finish high” and make good eating. But you have to “farm” Anguses; you cannot turn them loose. The Herefords themselves are crossbred with Brahmas which came originally from India, because Brahma blood resists better a bothersome fever tick. But the Brahma by itself is not a “finished beef animal.”
We paused at one end of my host’s ranch, in a flowering oval gully, and there I saw a “new” animal, the Santa Gertrudis. This bull, an “invention” of the Klebergs, is the only major animal ever created in the United States. He is very large and cherry colored; he was named for the main King Ranch headquarters; most important, he breeds true. The Santa Gertrudis is a “prepotent” bull, which means that he will reproduce his own kind; he does not “throw back.” And the prettiest bull in the world is just a hunk of beef, if he cannot duplicate himself. The Klebergs made the Santa Gertrudis out of shorthorns crossed with Brahma; the idea was to find an animal of a perfect beef type with Brahma stamina and capacity to survive drought in a rigorous habitat. Bob Kleberg, unable to change the character of the country, changed the character of the beef instead.
Fifth and finally, there is what might be called the modern period, the phase of scientific ranching. Colonel Briggs showed me proudly the new types of drought-resisting grass he was planting, while correcting mineral deficiencies in the soil with superphosphate from TVA. Beyond this there may be another phase. Texas “finishes” very little of its cattle; most is sent up to Iowa or Nebraska, as we know, and there fattened before being slaughtered. Texas would like to provide its own feeder lots in the future, if possible, and fatten its own beef within the state.
The natural history of a steer goes something like this. Most ranches have a breeding herd; the ambition is to have a 100 per cent calf crop, with each cow bringing in a calf a year. If a ranch needs mothers, it may buy eighteen-month or two-year-old heifers from a neighbor; the price will be between fifty and seventy-five dollars a head. Every self-respecting ranch has its own bulls, but as a rule the sire is brought in from outside, so as to avoid interbreeding; when the calf is a few months old it is “worked,” i.e. vaccinated against blackleg, castrated, branded, and sometimes dehorned,4 all in one operation. Then the calves go back to their mothers on the range. At weaning time they are taken away again; the ranch as a rule keeps the heifers for breeding, and packs the steers off to sale, when they weigh roughly four to five hundred pounds. Some steers remain in Texas, however, until maturity, which is from two years up; there is no point in keeping a steer older than four years, because after that he won’t fatten. What happens to the old cows? They become canned luncheon meat. Old bulls are sold for sausage. I asked what kind of beef Texans themselves liked most. Answer: “Fresh-killed mature steers.”
What Texas ranchmen thought of the national beef shortage crisis in October, 1946, cannot be written down for fear that the words will burn through the paper. In any lunatic disaster of such proportipns, responsibility must be mixed; but certainly the cattlemen themselves, not only in Texas but elsewhere, have to assume a healthy share of it. There was a stupendous plenitude of beef both on the range and in the feeder lots. But the growers held on grimly to their stock, hoping for the better prices that would presumably come with de-control; the feeders simply wouldn’t sell, and nobody gained but the black market. What this added up to in short was that the beef industry went on strike, as men like the Klebergs admitted frankly. Rather than sell at the price set by the government—even if the country should go hungry—they refused to sell at all.
A Line About Religion
God, as everybody knows, is a serious matter to most Texans, and religion is militant and emphatic. The religious advertisements in the Texas newspapers are not so crackpottish as those in California nor quite so eccentric as in some northern cities, but choice examples may be found. Some—for instance this about the egregious J. Frank Norris of Fort Worth, editor of The Fundamentalist—are much more frankly political than religious:
Are we coming to the time when the whole of Asia will be under Slavonic domination? It is prophesied that there will be an army of two hundred million marching from the East to the West. Dr. Norris will discuss these matters of world-wide, vital interest … next Sunday night.
President Truman, in the autumn of 1945, intended to visit Waco and accept a degree there from Baylor University, the chief Baptist institution in the state. Mr. Truman did not get there. One reason was that the Texas Baptist Convention adopted unanimously a resolution to the effect that no college of theirs should confer honorary degrees on anybody, even the president of the United States, who had been known to take a drink and play poker.5
Of course the fundamentalist motif goes far back. I find in H. L. Mencken’s Americana (1925) the following note:
Troubles of the learned in the Bible Belt, as reported in a dispatch from Waco: Because he did not believe that Noah’s Ark, with the dimensions mentioned in the Bible, was capable of accommodating a pair of all the animals extant in the world at Noah’s time and because he had been criticized for expressing that belief, C. S. Fothergill, instructor in history at Baylor University, resigned today.
In former days evangelism and violence were often intertwined. For instance an old-style thunderer who called himself “Brann the Iconoclast” was shot in Waco by a Baptist enemy; before he died he managed to draw his own gun and kill his adversary.
There are 15,062 churches in Texas, representing not less than 45 “major” and 87 “minor” denominations. The preponderant sect is of course Baptist, since the Lone Star State is the “Baptist Empire.” There are several reasons for this; for one thing the Baptists got in on the ground floor, along with the earliest pioneers and settlers; for another they were not content merely to be pastors, but went all over the state to build a serious institutional life, planting colleges and seminaries in strategic areas. They concentrated their financial power shrewdly, with the Baptist Foundation in Dallas as a repository for all endowment funds; purely for its own Texas schools and hospitals, its budget in 1945 was more than three million dollars.
It would be difficult to estimate exactly the extent of Baptist political interest. In a way the sect dominates Texas; yet there is no formal Baptist lobby. The church has no single outstanding leader, though men like Pat Neff and a prominent rancher named Kokernot certainly have wide influence; but no personage survives like the late George W. Truett of Dallas, whose smallest whisper could reverberate through the entire community. Essentially, though the rank and file of the congregation is distinctly on the lower economic level, Baptist power resides in a kind of tie-up between church, schools, and industry. Make a list of the fifty leading directors of various Baptist institutions, like Baylor or the hospital in Dallas; many of the fifty will turn out to be directors of big Texas corporations, and they constitute a kind of fluid ecclesiastical-big-business machine.
The Baptists are the most numerous denomination in Texas; Roman Catholics come next, and then the Methodists. The Methodists differ from the Baptists—from the local Texas point of view as well as in general—quite sharply; the statement is loose of course but they are more progressive, richer on the average, more tolerant about alcohol, and less fundamentalist. The old joke is that a Methodist is a Baptist who has learned to read and write. There are comparatively few Baptists at the University of Texas; the student body is in fact 30.2 per cent Methodist. But this is caused not only by the circumstance that many Baptists are less rich and thus cannot afford to send a boy or girl to Austin for four years, but also because they have so many denominational schools of their own. The Methodists are, on the whole, more liberal on labor than the Baptists, and they are certainly more liberal on the Negro question, though there are no mixed white-black congregations yet. Finally, it would seem that the Methodists are less politically minded than the Baptists. A good many Methodists voted for Coke Stevenson for governor, but not simply because he was a Methodist.
Again to qualify—there are some splendidly liberal Baptist pastors, young men like Dr. Blake Smith of Austin. Dr. Smith recently invited both a Negro and a Jew to address his Sunday evening congregation, Outraged, the secretary of the board of deacons resigned. But other elders supported Smith. One said, “I didn’t like it, but I think Jesus Christ would have.”
The Catholics, who number about 550,000 in the state and whose property is valued at eleven million dollars, are a vigorous force, and adroit and lively proselytizing goes on all the time. The Baptists are (by and large) more anti-Catholic than the Methodists; this is in part because most Catholics are wet. The Methodists try on the whole to get along;6 as I heard it put in Austin, “We fight like the dickens against the Catholics, but also we fight for their right to do as they please.” One Austin pastor told his flock that Roosevelt should withdraw Myron Taylor as ambassador to the Vatican; as a result he was called “anti-Catholic” by his own people, disapprovingly. Another Methodist told me with justifiable pride that “we can’t criticize the Catholics any more without being criticized by our own people for criticizing.” The Catholic attitude toward all this is that “the Methodists don’t think that we have horns any longer, but the Baptists still know we have tails.”
Finally there are the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) with 74,990 members, with most of its influence centered on Texas Christian University at Fort Worth (with a famous football team) and, quite different, the Church of Christ with 84,672. This latter steadily eats into the lower ranks of Baptists. The Disciples of Christ, who believe in total immersion, are a Baptist offshoot.
Texas, we said in the preceding chapter, is growing up; this observation is also relevant in the religious field; an uneasy fermentation is proceeding in the churches. Plenty of hell-and-brimstone evangelism still exists and there are plenty of surviving fundamentalists; but the tone and temper of religious thought appears slowly to be changing. “People, once they are educated, won’t stand for crudely outmoded damnation tactics in the pulpit any more,” one university professor told me; “they are coming to ask for a twentieth-century attitude toward religion as toward much else.”
Negro Problem and White Primary
Early in 1945 Professor J. Frank Dobie wrote an article in the Dallas News on “Modern Negro Citizenship,” arguing moderately enough the Negro case for equal rights in voting, education, and the like. A minor monsoon swept the state. Dobie got hundreds of letters; most were favorable. But let me quote from one of the others:
SIR!!!
The very idea ! Why, you nigger lovin son-of-a-gun. If you love them so much, why dont you go to a nigger school to teach?
Representing the very backbone of America, I say you cant do it ! I wonted to go to college, but I’ll just remain ignorant and all my classmates and all my children will too, if there’s going to be an ole sweating, dirty, stinkin nigger sitting up there by them.
Mr. High & Mighty, you see I happen to have something behind me that is more powerful than riches, or power. Yes—its bobby sox! I’m the future of America! At least, I have MY youth. DO YOU, MR. DOBIE?? How much longer WILL YOU LAST? I’ll guarantee you wont last long if you love niggers so much. I’d just as soon take a shot at you as I would a nigger. (Which I would do, and quickly!) Mr. Dobie, I PROTEST. You may want to be ruled by niggers, but I’m not. I mean it, too. No NIGGERS!!!! Texas hates them! We’d just as soon have them back in slavery, if they DONT STAY IN THEIR PLACE ! Their place IS TO STAY OUT OF OUR WAY !!
Some years ago a colored physician, named Smith, in the town of Bishop “was burned to death after his hands and feet had been cut off. It was alleged that Dr. Smith, while riding in an automobile, collided with a car occupied by whites.”7 In 1945, a young Negro in Dallas named Akins was sentenced to death following a scuffle in which, after being shot himself, he grabbed a gun from a white man and inadvertently killed him. After prolonged litigation Akins’ sentence was commuted to life imprisonment; but he might well have been executed had not protests come from all over the United States. And there is a town in west Texas today with signs on the roads, NIGGER! DON’T LET THE SUN SET ON YOU HERE !
All this being said, let us at once point out—though as always with proper qualification—that in the field of Negro relations too, Texas appears to be growing up. It will be a long, slow fight. But no town in Texas is as hysterically intolerant as Natchez, few communities are so dominated by fear, hatred, and bigotry as any of a hundred in Louisiana. Slowly, very slowly, people in Texas (where, in any case, Negroes were never quite the life-and-death problem of the South proper) are becoming more sophisticated, more cosmopolitan. Once Negroes, male and female alike, old and young, were sold in the Galveston market by the pound. They are by no means free citizens yet, in the full sense of citizenship. But the state has come a considerable way toward facing out the whole issue honestly.
So for the last time in this book we confront the most pressing and controversially acute of all domestic problems in the United States, that of the Negro. There are about 925,000 Negroes in the state, or 14.4 per cent of the population; this is of course a lower figure than in most southern states. Moreover there are large areas in west Texas in which there are scarcely any Negroes at all, as we know. There have been no lynchings in Texas for some years, and only one bad racial outbreak. This was in Beaumont in June, 1943; its root cause was white resentment at the Negro’s growing economic power.
Politically there are several hot and basic Negro issues. One—exactly as in the South itself—is of course the poll tax. This is either $1.50 or $1.75 per year, depending on locality; and there is a catch in that the tax must be paid before January 31, although the general election does not come till November, and many people, not accustomed to thinking about politics so far ahead, simply forget to pay. The potential Negro vote is over 300,000; in 1944 about 200,000 Negroes paid their poll tax, and about 75,000 actually voted in 1946. If the tax were abolished (there is small chance of this at present though various white-black organizations are hard at work on it), the Negro vote would jump considerably. Almost all Negroes vote Democratic, which goes without saying; equally without.saying, it is the Regulars and other die-hards who most fear a rise in Negro voting strength, and hence keep the poll tax on the books.
Second, the “white primary” issue, which we have mentioned many times in other chapters. Negroes, poll tax or no poll tax, have always been forbidden by various rules of the Democratic party to vote in the Texas primaries. In 1944 came a test case before the United States Supreme Court, which ruled that, under the existing laws, Negroes could no longer be thus excluded. So in 1944 some fifty thousand Negroes voted in the primaries, for the first time in Texas history; in some districts Negro committeemen were elected. This produced the most acrimonious kind of fight; the reactionaries screamed that the Negroes “were going to take Texas over,” and in 1945 a Houston legislator named Weaver Moore introduced a bill in the senate whereby the Supreme Court ruling could be evaded. That is, he proposed that the state election laws having to do with primaries should be rescinded; if this were done, there could be no issue of constitutionality, and the Democratic party could make or interpret its own rules from scratch, as it liked, without regard to federal rulings. As we know, exactly similar maneuvers have been made in other states. But in Texas the Moore bill failed. There will be other attempts to keep the white primary “pure.” But—and again I must make the generalization as cautiously as possible—it seems that as time goes on it will become increasingly difficult to prevent Texas Negroes from voting.
Third, our friend the university again. No Negro may be admitted to the university; Negroes are even excluded from the correspondence courses! But several test cases are in progress, aiming to force a change. This became possible in 1945 following another Supreme Court decision; the Court held that the state of Missouri must either admit Negroes to its university, or build them another; and presumably what holds good for Missouri must hold for Texas too. White Texans tried to circumvent the Missouri decision by a neat little artifice, that of simply changing the name of a colored teachers’ institution that already existed (but with extremely limited facilities) from “College” to “University.” At the moment of writing, this university versus Negro issue is still unsettled.
The most interesting Negro in Texas, Boss Bellinger of San Antonio aside, is probably a moderate named Carter Wesley, the publisher of a string of newspapers including the Houston Defender and Informer, the Fort Worth Mind, and the Dallas Express, the oldest Negro paper in the state. All told, Wesley’s papers have a circulation of about sixty thousand; they are intelligently edited and vigorously outspoken on most issues. Wesley is now fifty-three. He led his class at Fisk, went to Northwestern for a law degree, and practiced law in Oklahoma; for a time his partner was J. Austin Atkins, who also led a class at Fisk and who was a classmate of Charlie Taft’s at Yale. Wesley built up a considerable fortune in Oklahoma, and was then wiped out by the depression; he returned to Houston, his birthplace, and started a new career in journalism.
In San Antonio I asked friends how the Negroes, submerged, got along with the Mexicans, also submerged. I was told that, by and large, Negroes were liked better by whites than Mexicans, and that on the whole Negroes were better paid and despite Jim Crowism had a better chance for education. There is comparatively little contact between the Mexican and Negro communities; each is tempted to play the other off against the whites.
Texas Miscellany
Texas is the state where failure to stop and render aid to an auto-mobilist in trouble is a felony, and where something known as the Fruit of the Month Club prospers. It is a state where you may eat rattlesnake sandwiches and “Texas strawberries” (which come from a part of a bull) and where robbery with firearms is a capital offense but where murder may not be. Texas has the largest collection of Browningana in the world (at Baylor) and the largest women’s college in the world (at Denton, near Dallas). It is the state where camels were once used for transport, where a university once gave the degree Mistress of Polite Literature, where a friend pointed out to me what he called very seriously “the second most beautiful” cemetery in the world, and where, eating rare beef, you can hear locutions like “I’ve bulldogged steers that wasn’t hurt no worse than this!”
1 But later it was resold—without profit—to the Library of Congress, following special congressional appropriation.
2 Sacco and Vanzetti became an issue when the regents refused to authorize an appropriation (of $150!) for a study of the literary effects of the case. A remark credited to Regent Bullington, as quoted in PM (March 22, 1945) is that the Texas motto, “Discipline is the foundation of the state,” should replace that of the university, “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.”
3 One regent, Strickland, called this novel “the dirtiest, most obscene, most perverted book ever written in the English language.”
4 If cattle are without horns more can be squeezed together at the trough and in shipment.
5 Yet Texas is probably the greatest draw-poker-playins-state in the union.
6 But not so many years ago friction was so sharp vis-à-vis the Catholics that some Methodists were reluctant to observe Easter! This may sound incredible, but I heard it on excellent authority.
7 Americana, 1925, op. cit.