Industrialization transformed the nation and Texas in particular between 1870 and1900. Although the industrial boom did not impact the South, Texas experienced a surge in railroad building which encouraged the development of commercial agriculture. Modern transportation facilities linked producers of raw materials to regional, national, and international markets; however, needs expressed by farmers, merchants, bankers, lumbermen, and railroad entrepreneurs differed markedly so that consensus politics was impossible.

Texas Economic Development

Railroad construction spurred the economic development of Texas. By 1904, Texas had surpassed all other states with over 10,000 miles of track laid. Population and other industries correspondingly surged but the latter proved a mixed blessing.  Overcharging for short hauls, granting free passes to politicians, and giving rebates to preferred customers were some of the complaints against the railroads. Farmers in particular, hurt by exorbitant shipping charges, demanded that the state create an agency to regulate railroads. Five years later, the proposition acquired a political spokesman in newly-elected Attorney General James Hogg.

With over 61 million acres in public land in 1876, Texas created the Permanent School Fund and set aside over 42 million acres for public education. The legislature, with the encouragement of Governor Oran Roberts, passed two laws in 1879: the first set the sale of school land at one dollar per acre with a limit of four sections while the second act, the so-called Fifty Cent Law, allowed the sale of unappropriated public domain with no limit on quantity purchased. Public dissatisfaction with Roberts’ policies led to the end of land grants to railroads and the creation of the short-lived State Land Board to reclassify public lands and guarantee that settlers received priority over speculators. Administration of the public domain remained a problem for Roberts’ successor, John Ireland, who won the gubernatorial nomination on his opposition to railroad land grants.

Introduction of barbed wire and windmills eventually led to fence-cutting wars and vigilantism. It was evident that the state had failed to carefully manage its public domain. Foreign investment, in particular, irritated small farmers who saw the granting of so much land to railroads and large ranches as punitive.

The availability of cheap labor and the arrival of cheap railroad transportation transformed the Piney Woods. East Texas became the state’s premier growing area of some 20 million acres of yellow pine forests. What farmers had considered a nuisance had become a valuable commodity just as the eastern U. S. source for pine declined. At its peak, the Texas lumber industry logged more than 2 billion board feet in 1907. Texas ranked in the top ten percent of lumber-producing states well into the twentieth century while John Henry Kirby built the first multimillion-dollar corporation in Texas buying and selling timberland. The railroads also made hefty profits although mismanagement led to the eventual depletion of East Texas forests.

The lumber industry, mills, foundries and cotton gins benefited from the expanded use of machinery and the unskilled cheap labor that made up the majority of the population. Texas remained primarily agriculturalist, however; the value of manufacturing production in 1870 was roughly half of the state’s agricultural production. Lumbering surpassed all other industries (beef slaughtering and processing, carpentry, and blacksmithing) by 1900, followed by cottonseed byproducts that had no commercial value in 1860 yet ranked second only to lumbering in the 1900 census. When Populist reformers condemned middlemen, they were condemning the entire exploitative economic embodiment of what railroad corporations, large land companies, processing industries, and myriad middlemen merchants had reaped off of the backs of farmers.

Labor unionization in Texas

Labor unionization got a foothold in Texas shortly after the Civil War, but cultural assumptions, such as individualism and the sanctity of private property, impeded its growth. Longshoremen were the first to organize, seeking to gain health benefits and financial aid for ill workers in 1866. Sixteen years later, black longshoremen, under the guidance of Norris Wright Cuney, organized their own union. Unionization made little headway into the lumbering camps, advancing slowly despite the national success of the Knights of Labor.

Many farmers endorsed the graduated income tax and the direct election of U. S. senators but balked at endorsing labor union goals.  Even though the Knights did not advocate strikes, there were over one hundred strikes in Texas between 1881 and 1885 that were led by the Knights and involved cowboys on West Texas ranches, dockworkers in Galveston, stonecutters during the Capitol Boycott, and railroad workers.

In Chicago, Texan Albert R. Parsons was convicted and eventually executed for inciting the Haymarket Square Riot. Associations with violent episodes and radical leaders hurt the Knights, and by 1893 the union had only a few thousand members. “Reform unionism” failed, encouraging labor leaders to emphasize “business unionism,” whereby unions remained apolitical and sought short-term gains of higher wages and fringe benefits. Most unskilled workers were eliminated and the American Federation of Labor, organizing only the skilled, appeared in Texas in 1891. A new agricultural and industrial labor coalition organized by the Texas State Labor Union lasted only four years.

The commercialization of agriculture subordinated subsistence farming and enthroned “king cotton.” Agricultural reformers extolled diversification to provide self-sufficiency and political independence and championed scientific farming and crop rotation to preserve the family farm. However, technology soon led to overproduction and reduced prices on the world market. Growing cotton—which required less water and crop rotation and yielded the highest cash price—simply intensified the rate of tenant farming, bringing prosperity to only a few. Prices fell, tenancy went up, constituting 37.6 percent of Texas farming in 1880 and 49.7 percent in 1900.  Sharecropping impoverished both blacks and whites. Instead of long-term credit at reasonable cost, tenant farmers were charged as high as 150 percent interest rates on crop liens.

Education and other public services

Education had long been seen as the responsibility of local communities. Therefore, inadequate and unequal educational opportunities prevailed. It was not until 1884 that public indignation forced the state legislature to completely reorganize the public school system. The present-day problem of equal and viable tax bases began.  Rural areas did not fare well, although higher education fared better. The first public college (the Agricultural and Mechanical College) opened its doors in 1876. The University of Texas was chartered in 1839 but the Civil War, Reconstruction, and controversies over public lands delayed its opening until 1883. Since Texas A&M could allow no black students by law, the legislature provided funding for a Negro agricultural college that initially emerged as Prairie View Normal Institute (1879), a college for training teachers. Sam Houston State Normal School opened in 1879 in Huntsville, admitting only white students.

The prevailing philosophy was that public funds would not be used to provide charitable and benevolent institutions. However, a handful of institutions for the mentally ill, blind, deaf and orphaned were established in the late 1880s. State prisons were a different story. The prison population exploded; convict leasing prevailed.

Texas politics

Texas politics was greatly influenced by agrarian reform. Conservative Democrats dominated the political scene from 1876 to 1886, appropriating over three million acres to finance the building of a new capitol. The Texas Railroad Commission was created but the poor and the dispossessed were generally ignored. They would have to turn to the Republican and Greenback parties to find anyone willing to fight for meaningful reform.

The Republican party peaked during Reconstruction. Norris Wright Cuney claimed leadership of the party upon the death of E. J. Davis. Race still mattered, and many resented black Texans’ domination of the party. White factions often used intimidation and election fraud to preclude the election of blacks to local offices. The Greenback party was the first third party to challenge Democratic political dominance with an attractive platform that appealed to the downtrodden. Advocating an income tax, the Australian or secret ballot, and direct election of U. S. senators on the national level, it appealed to the Texan agrarian radical element by endorsing railroad regulation, elimination of convict leasing and the wholesale elimination of useless state government offices. Fusion with the Republican party made sense but ultimately failed. Shortly thereafter, the Greenback party faded away and the Democratic party eventually split over the issue of prohibition, but the voices of reform continued to be felt throughout the 1880s.

With its roots in the Patrons of Husbandry (Grange) and the Farmers’ Alliance of the mid-1880s, agrarian politics found an effective mouthpiece in Populism. Charles W. Macune, president of the new Farmers’ Alliance, determined that the organization would pressure Congress to bring relief to southern farmers.  He proposed an Alliance Exchange that would revolutionize marketing by having all members sign joint notes to borrow money from banks, then purchase supplies cooperatively, replacing the hated middlemen. The initiative failed because state banks refused to accept the notes. Macune was convinced that only the federal government could provide relief, but the Democratic party opposed that role for government.

Nevertheless, James S. Hogg did respond actively to the demands of reform elements, leading a group of young Democrats to use state powers to regulate railroads and trusts and to prevent foreign ownership of Texas public lands. He fought to use the public domain for public institutions and public school financing. He moved to create the Railroad Commission and empowered it to set rates and fares, after more than 100,000 voters ratified the constitutional amendment. The Commission further regulated how much stock a railroad could issue; other “Hogg laws” forced land corporations to sell off their land within fifteen years, and the Alien Land Law forbid land grants to foreign corporations. Hogg championed prison reform and advocated longer school terms, but he also forced railroads to segregate their facilities.

Populism

Populism was a blend of old and new concepts. True to Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democratic ideals, Populism championed the “common man” and denounced monopolistic practices. At the same time, the movement proposed using the power of the federal government to create credit, inflate the currency, and curb monopolistic abuses to make the political system more responsive, thereby protecting the freedom of the common man. 

Populist militants campaigned for an income tax, an eight-hour workday, direct election of U. S. senators, free coinage of silver, the secret ballot, referendum and recall. However, they took no stand on women’s suffrage and prohibition, fearing the divisiveness of the issues. The idealistic oratory of H. S. P. “Stump” Ashby, a former Methodist minister, James H. “Cyclone” Davis, a spellbinding orator with strong Protestant affiliations, and John B. Rayner, a black political organizer and powerful orator and later minister, appealed to the have-nots; but the party lacked a realistic financial base to run a successful campaign against the Republican party and a return of prosperity. 

Texas at Century’s End

After Hogg’s attempt to reconcile the division within the Democratic party, Charles A. Culberson, the state’s attorney general, won the gubernatorial nomination. Backed by Edward M. House, an adroit party organizer and later intimate adviser to President Woodrow Wilson, Culberson won the office but the Populists elected to state office twenty-two house members and two senators in 1894. Even though Democrats and Populists attempted a “fusion” on the national level to endorse William Jennings Bryan for the presidency in 1896, Texas Populists were not “fusionists.” Bryan endorsed most of the old Granger, Greenback, Alliance and Populist demands but would not endorse the Subtreasury Plan or government ownership of railroads. After a period of alienation, some Populists returned to the state Democratic fold while others dropped out of politics permanently or joined the socialist movement. The Populist residue shaped Texas politics for the next fifty years—forging a “progressive” coalition with reform Democrats and winning local offices, but blacks were for the most part banned from the Democratic party primaries. The poll tax disenfranchised many poor whites and blacks and further limited the possibility of a third-party challenge to Democratic hegemony.  By the end of the twentieth century, Texas had constructed a legal code almost as racially segregated as that of many southern states.