Crisis, Opportunity, and States’ Rights

The Great Depression drove Dixie’s weak economy to even lower depths. Between 1929 and 1932 southern cotton sales declined from $1.5 billion to $45 million. (Of the 254 counties in Texas, 223 raised cotton.) Oil prices plummeted from $1.30 per barrel in 1930 to 4 cents per barrel three years later. Houston’s Humble Oil (a subsidiary of Standard Oil) reduced its labor force from 12,500 in 1929 to 9,200 in 1932 (a 26 percent cut). The once-booming city of Houston claimed an unemployment rate of 23 percent in 1931—close to the national average, but a shocking statistic nonetheless to the city’s leaders. Livestock values in Texas fell by $100 million in the Depression decade. As political scientist V. O. Key pithily wrote, the Texas economy before the Great Depression could have been summed up as “oil, cotton, cattle, and Mexicans.” As a result of the economic crisis, Texas received less income from all these, including 250,000 fewer Mexicans who returned to their homeland.^{Footnote 6}

Economic collapse in the early 1930s produced a national voter backlash against Republicans. Recent history had shown how southern Democrats would govern if their party held a political monopoly in Washington. Between 1913 and 1919, after native southerner Woodrow Wilson won a three-way presidential election and Democrats gained enough seats to control Congress, federal funds had flowed to Dixie. Houston completed its shipping channel to the Gulf of Mexico and military bases expanded in the South. Meanwhile, President Wilson segregated federal facilities. After the 1932 Republican rout, southern Democrats anticipated a repeat of the Wilson era.^{Footnote 7}

In 1916, Texas congressman John Garner had vowed that “every time one of those Yankees gets a ham, I am going to do my best to get a hog.” First elected to Congress in 1902, his ascension to House Speaker in 1931 positioned Garner to make good his pledge. Garner’s tools were delegation cohesion and seniority. Over the course of the 1920s Garner and Republican speaker of the House Nicholas Longworth of Ohio had formed a drinking club that, in the era of Prohibition, they euphemistically referred to the as “Bureau of Education.” Over liquor, poker, and cigars, Longworth and Garner worked out the legislative calendar, made committee assignments, and “schooled” members of Congress on the importance of following their leaders. Northern urban Democrats with blue-collar, black, Catholic, and Jewish constituents were not often invited over for an education—Boston’s politically astute John McCormack being a notable exception.^{Footnote 8}

Texas’ twenty-three-member congressional delegation largely (though not always) operated as a cohesive bloc. Sam Rayburn, first elected to Congress in 1912, traveled between Texas and Washington in the company of such Lone Star House members as Marvin Jones (elected 1916) and Hatton Sumners (elected 1912). Historian Lionel Patenaude noted that, whether as members of the House or the Senate, the Texas Democrats were a homogenous group. Most came from small towns, graduated from college (a rare achievement), practiced law, and had socially conservative Protestant backgrounds that disapproved of drinking, smoking, and gambling. (To paraphrase Rayburn, the morally upright Southern Baptists who attended meetings of the Bureau of Education learned to get along to move along.) There had been a Republican elected from San Antonio in 1920, but after his death in 1931 Austin Democrats redrew the district’s boundaries to ensure that such an affront would not be repeated.^{Footnote 9}

Several Texas congressmen, including Rayburn, Sumners, and Tom Connally (elected to the House in 1916 and to the Senate in 1928), were the sons of Confederate veterans. Rayburn displayed three pictures of Confederate general Robert E. Lee in his office, while Connally collected pro-secessionist literature from such groups as the United Confederate Veterans. Texas Democrats often reminded Yankees that the Lone Star State had once been an independent nation. Many insisted that the American flag could not be flown above the state flag because the Republic of Texas had joined the United States in 1845 as an equal to Washington, not as a subordinate. None of this was surprising. Since the 1890s, as a result of lobbying by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Texas schoolchildren had been taught that secession had been constitutionally justified, slavery had been good for blacks, and Reconstruction had been imposed by Yankee exploiters.^{Footnote 10}

Although southern Democrats in the 1930s represented just 35 percent of the membership of Congress, seniority rules (aided by disenfranchisement and lack of party competition at home) gave them the chairs of nine of fourteen major committees in the Senate and twelve of seventeen major committees in the House. Within that select leadership group, the Lone Star delegation loomed so great that Roosevelt observed that Texans were “running the government of the United States more largely than any other state.” Northern Democrats, who swept into the office in 1932 with the mobilization of the working-class children of southern and eastern European immigrants, comprised the majority of their party in Congress. However, they lacked seniority and, consequently, clout.^{Footnote 11}

Garner’s Texans devoured more than a hog at the federal barbecue. The Public Works Administration (PWA) spent $110 million on 922 projects in Texas. Texas farmers in 1933 received $43 million in payments from the Agricultural Adjustment Agency (AAA). By 1940, the federal government had given Texas farmers $3 billion in subsidies. The Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) refinanced $100 million in Texas mortgages in the first years of its existence. Meanwhile, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) employed six hundred thousand Texans and sent $178 million to the Lone Star State during the years of its operation.^{Footnote 12}

Rayburn, who became House Majority Leader (1937) and Speaker of the House (1940), received federal funds to construct a dam and related infrastructure that created seventeen thousand jobs in his district. This was in spite of the fact that a U.S. Department of Interior panel viewed Rayburn’s $54 million project as unnecessary and initially refused to fund it. Houston’s Jesse Jones, who was Garner’s friend and the head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), provided federal assistance to shore up the nation’s banking system. The $5.5 million in RFC funds that Jones sent to Texas in 1933 helped save the twenty-six banks in which Garner was an investor. It was little wonder that while the South on average received $189 in federal funds for every resident, Texans collected $205 (8 percent more).^{Footnote 13}

Congressman Martin Dies (elected 1930) was an avid seeker of federal funds. In the mid-1930s, Dies sought a $5 million PWA grant and a $7 million RFC loan to construct a dam in his Beaumont-Houston district. He personally lobbied Roosevelt during the height of the 1936 presidential election. Dies had earlier boasted to constituents: “Since I have been in Congress my district ranks with the highest in the total amount of public works funds received.”^{Footnote 14}

On another occasion, in 1939, Dies complained that the federal government practiced “discrimination against the South” in the allotment of relief funds: “Under the administration of WPA funds the State of Pennsylvania, with a population of nine million people, received more money than the entire South which has a population of over twenty-nine million. In addition to this, our workers have received less than one-half the monthly wages that the workers in other sections have gotten.”

Dies failed to mention that southern businessmen had insisted that federal projects scale workers’ pay to prevailing regional rates. Southern employers did not want the private sector paying higher wages in order to compete against a more generous federal government. By not acknowledging this reality, Dies shifted Texas ire toward the federal government and away from Dixie’s business leaders.^{Footnote 15}

Texas congressman Wright Patman (elected 1928) railed against Yankee financiers. Through the early years of the 1930s, Patman and Dies proposed to devalue the dollar by as much as 50 percent so that the farmers they represented could pay off their debts with inflated currency. Patman also indulged in personal attacks on northern Republican businessmen. In 1932, Patman had called for the impeachment of President Herbert Hoover’s Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon. Patman charged Mellon with profiting from the federal tax policies he had drafted in the 1920s. As the head of an empire that included Gulf Oil, Mellon was an attractive target. It also helped Patman, who, unlike Dies, did not have the Yankee oil companies looming as large in his Texarkana district. For his part, Garner could live with Mellon baiting, but he loathed inflationary schemes that would devalue his own assets, which gave him a comfortable, though not opulent, lifestyle.^{Footnote 16}

Garner had “schooled” Rayburn in the 1920s and, in turn, Rayburn mentored Congressman Lyndon Johnson in the 1930s. Both Rayburn and Johnson (elected 1937) had farm constituencies, though Johnson’s district also included Austin. Rayburn and Johnson harbored resentment toward the large (northern-based) utility companies that had not found it profitable to bring electricity to farmers. While 90 percent of farmers nationally lacked electricity in the 1930s, less than 3 percent of Texas farmers had the power to run lights and water pumps. In 1935–36, Rayburn claimed paternity for the Rural Electrification Administration (REA). The REA provided millions in federal funds to local cooperatives that, in turn, ran electrical lines to farmers.^{Footnote 17}

When Johnson launched his special election campaign in 1937, he pledged that farmers would achieve “parity” with the “city dwellers and businessmen.” Federally subsidized electricity, crops, and irrigation, Johnson proclaimed, were the means by which poor farmers would achieve economic equality. More than farmers, however, would benefit from the REA. Johnson cultivated Austin contractors George and Herman Brown. Their company, Brown & Root, shared in the wealth that came with constructing nineteen hundred miles of power lines for the Pedernales Electric Cooperative. In turn, Brown & Root gave campaign donations to Democrats (stamped with Johnson’s seal of approval) who supported ever more federally funded projects.^{Footnote 18}

Senator Morris Sheppard (elected to the House in 1902 and to the Senate in 1913) had earlier, as the “father of Prohibition,” demonstrated his belief that the federal government must assert its power for worthy causes. Sheppard argued that while the operation of Texas’s public schools was a responsibility of local government, there was no reason why Washington could not provide their funding. Thanks to the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the RFC, and the WPA, public schools across the United States had received $60 million in federal aid. Texas, Sheppard crowed, had received “the fourth largest amount [of FERA funding] obtained by any state for rural school assistance.” Due to such federal efforts, Sheppard contended, the Texas legislature and local communities did not have to fund public school maintenance and construction projects.^{Footnote 19}

Addressing Texas businessmen, Sheppard insisted that it was possible to pursue federal funds while protecting individual property rights and states’ rights. In no conceivable way, Sheppard asserted in 1934, did the New Deal threaten Texas. Indeed, the New Deal guaranteed “the preservation and widest possible distribution” of private property. Better still, the federal government, through various farm and relief programs, assured a more equitable distribution of the wealth. Texas, Sheppard continued, benefited from federal wealth redistribution and had little to fear from Washington. The real enemies of the people were not Washington administrators. Rather, Texans needed to be on guard against Wall Street monopolists and their “predatory wealth.” Sheppard also warned constituents to be leery of ethnic Germans and Mexicans who took jobs away from Americans and who had undermined the enforcement of Prohibition in the 1920s.^{Footnote 20}

Beyond the hundreds of millions of federal dollars Texas collected through the efforts of Sheppard and Rayburn, oil producers received special consideration. In 1930, Texas claimed sixteen thousand oil producers. Over the preceding twenty years, Texas oilmen had sunk half a million wells. By 1928, Texas accounted for 20 percent of the world’s oil production. The downside, however, was that overproduction had reduced prices. With oil hitting 4 cents per barrel in 1933, wildcatters attempted to compensate for rock-bottom prices by producing more oil. The larger producers, whether they were independents or northern-based concerns, recognized that overproduction and competition from smaller firms drove down the market price. In response, they lobbied Austin for state-imposed quotas. When wildcatters ignored the state quotas, the established Texas oilmen demanded federal protection.^{Footnote 21}

Senator Connally, along with Tom Blanton (elected 1916), Dies, Rayburn, and Sumners, rallied to the defense of the oil industry—or at least its most prominent cadre. The 1935 Connally “Hot Oil Act” imposed federal shipping restrictions on any amount of oil pumped above state production quotas. In effect, Connally’s legislation penalized wildcatters who could not get a return on their investments by pumping and shipping more crude—leaving the marketplace to such Texas independents as Sid Richardson and Clint Murchison, as well as to Gulf, Sun (Sunoco), the Texas Company (Texaco), and Standard. Texas oil lobbyist Joe Pearson enthused to the Dallas Morning News that he had never seen a bill reported out of committee, passed by the House and Senate, and signed into law by the President “in one day, especially on a holiday.” After its passage, and the subsequent disappearance of many smaller producers, Connally boasted, Texas oil prices rose to $1 per barrel, a 2,500 percent increase.^{Footnote 22}

When the U.S. Supreme Court in 1935 found the “Hot Oil Act” to be unconstitutional because it had not provided sufficient legislative instructions to the executive branch, Connally reworked a section of the bill to spell out what the White House could and could not do and got the revised bill passed. So far as the Texas oil operators were concerned, this was all to the good. A year earlier, in 1934, former Texas governor Ross Sterling, a founder of Humble Oil, had joined other oilmen in warning Dies that U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, if given too much authority to regulate the oil industry, would become “an absolute dictator.” If Dies and Connally were not careful, Sterling and his allies cautioned, a situation could result in which the federal government “obliterates whatever vestige of states’ rights we have left.”^{Footnote 23}

In addition to the Hot Oil Act, Connally defended a federal tax benefit to the oil industry. Observing that oil was not a renewable resource, Connally argued that oilmen lost a little of their capital investment with each barrel of crude drawn. Therefore, the depletion allowance, in place since 1913, had to be continued so that oil profits were not taxed unfairly. Producers received an exemption from federal taxes on the first 27.5 percent of their oil income. U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau found Connally’s reasoning to be specious, while the senator slyly admitted that 27.5 percent was an arbitrary figure that had little to do with actual production calculations.^{Footnote 24}

The oil depletion allowance, along with the Hot Oil Act, enhanced profit margins. When Rayburn tasked Johnson in 1940 with raising campaign funds for a select group of northern congressional Democrats, Texas oilmen, most especially Richardson and Murchison, were generous donors. The Texas closing of the circle—legislative consideration, financial gain, generous campaign donations, and legislative consideration—pointed to a future in which such “crony capitalist” arrangements would become a regular part of conducting business and influencing national policy.^{Footnote 25}

Martin Dies, the nephew of a Humble Oil lobbyist, represented the heart of the Texas oil patch. Port Arthur bankers and representatives from Texaco demanded in 1935 that Dies oppose a House bill that threatened to raise taxes on oil products. Officers of the First National Bank of Port Arthur were not shy about informing Dies that they had invested in companies like Humble and Texaco with the expectation that the oil industry would be exempt from the burden of rising federal taxes.^{Footnote 26}

Of the petroleum interests in Dies’s district, none loomed as large as the cousins J. Edgar Pew and J. Howard Pew of the Philadelphia-based Sun Oil Company. J. Edgar Pew, learning that as a Member of Congress Dies received free tickets for the Army-Navy football game, demanded that he turn them over to him so that he did not have to pay to attend the game. Dies complied. On numerous other occasions J. Edgar Pew wrote or phoned Dies to oppose various New Deal measures and let him know when he was expected to come to his corporate offices or to his Washington hotel room for consultations.^{Footnote 27}

Dies tried to appease the Pews, even arranging for his hometown of Orange to offer Sun Oil free fresh water and a ten-year local property tax abatement. The Pews, who spent $1.5 million of their fortune in 1936 to defeat Roosevelt, were difficult “constituents.” Writing to Dies, J. Howard Pew denounced the 1934 Securities and Exchange Act, legislation that Rayburn had helped draft, on the grounds that it would “destroy the market for corporate securities and extend the regulation of private business by the Government beyond all reason.” J. Howard Pew insisted that Dies explain his support for various bills that he believed expanded federal power. Dies responded that the best he could do was to scale back legislation that the Pews opposed. Moreover, Dies observed, “all legislation is the result of compromise.” Pew had little patience for Dies’s rationalizations, writing in 1937 that “the country is expecting Congress, at this session, pretty definitely makes it known to the whole world, that they are an equivalent and coordinating branch of the Government, and not a ‘puppet’ of the President.”^{Footnote 28}

While the Texas congressional delegation pursued tax breaks and regulatory favors for the oil industry, as well as federally funded infrastructure projects, Governor James Allred (1935–39) cajoled the Roosevelt administration from Austin. Allred, like Patman, was a graduate of Cumberland University, a Presbyterian school in Tennessee that preached moral conservatism and suspicion of Wall Street. His 1934 gubernatorial campaign had decried tax increases, called for regulation of utility companies, and demanded the suppression of race-track gambling. The last issue was the dearest to his heart; after a two-year fight the legislature outlawed race-track betting, earning Allred the effusive praise of Protestant clergy.^{Footnote 29}

Although combating vice earned clerical endorsements, Allred still had to address the economic crisis, which his gubernatorial predecessors and the legislature had largely ignored. He confronted a $9 million deficit and a legislature that insisted on reductions in state spending. Allred’s solution for the state’s budgetary problems proved direct: shift the funding burden to Washington. Toward that end, Allred cheered the expansion of New Deal programs in Texas—the funds from which enabled him to rebalance state spending accounts and subsequently cut the deficit by 83 percent. Allred, however, did not believe that Texas should be required by the federal government to provide matching funds. A U.S. Department of Labor representative sent a telegram to Allred in 1935 pointing out that Texas could not refuse to spend a dollar on employment-related projects and still expect Washington to send money to Austin. When a constituent later wrote to Allred complaining about a shortfall in WPA and PWA funds, the governor replied that he had “no authority over the administration of relief.” Any problems with federal programs in Texas were the fault of the U.S. government.^{Footnote 30}

The governor’s relationship with the White House and Congress was complex. Allred privately expressed his fealty to Vice President Garner, who detested the federal government’s embrace of organized labor. At the same time, Allred publicly cheered Roosevelt. Allred’s 1935 correspondence with congressman Maury Maverick of San Antonio underscored the governor’s complicated calculations. As the most fervent advocate of New Deal programs within the Texas congressional delegation, Maverick was a logical choice for Allred to ask for assistance in lobbying the U.S. Department of Agriculture and FERA. Allred wanted more federal funds to combat soil erosion, which threatened “meager livestock feed supplies.” Then again, precisely because Maverick was the most vocal Texas fan of the New Deal, Allred put him on notice to be careful about legislation related to the oil industry—especially if such legislation had the potential for the federal government “to take away the rights of the sovereign states.”^{Footnote 31}

Civil Rights and States’ Rights

Allred’s concern for the “rights of the sovereign states” extended from the oil industry to race relations. As Texas attorney general (1931–34), Allred had defended the right of the Democratic Party to exclude blacks from voting in its primaries. His first civil rights test as governor came in 1935, when the East Texas community of Columbus lynched two black teenagers accused of raping and murdering a white girl. The Columbus incident garnered national attention in part because lynching had declined since the 1915–22 surge, when Texas mobs had killed sixty-four blacks, twenty-six ethnic Mexicans, and five whites. (Those years coincided with the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan and its assertion of power in the Texas legislature.) The Columbus mob action received national coverage for another reason. As the New York Times reported, the county sheriff, judge, and attorney hailed the double lynching. An attorney from the East Texas town of Wharton wrote to Allred comparing the Columbus lynching to the killing of a dangerous “rattle snake” and urging the governor to ignore the “would-be fanatics who are howling about this case.”^{Footnote 32}

Beyond a Southwestern University (Georgetown, Texas) history professor who was ultimately fired for his liberal politics, the University of Texas chapter of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), the University of Texas B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundation, and the editor of the Galveston Daily News, there were few individuals and organizations in Texas publicly critical of the Columbus lynching. Allred expressed displeasure with mob action and promised that he would investigate the matter. Little came of this investigation, however, given Allred’s belief that the Columbus lynching fell under the jurisdiction of local, not state, and certainly not federal, law enforcement.^{Footnote 33}

While Allred preferred that the federal government keep its distance from the Columbus incident, he sought to assert his authority over Washington’s representatives. Congress had established the National Youth Administration (NYA) in 1935 to provide jobs to college and high school students so that they would continue their educations—and not flood a depressed labor market. Lyndon Johnson became the Texas NYA director, helping to fund work projects for 175,000 students. Allred warned Johnson during his 1936 gubernatorial reelection campaign not to provide NYA aid to students at black colleges as it would antagonize whites. Johnson responded by quietly doubling the amount of NYA funds he had previously set aside for black colleges and then covered the faculty payrolls at Austin’s two black colleges. Forty percent of the recipients of NYA funds in Texas were black. That did not happen anywhere else in the South.^{Footnote 34}

Johnson’s racial attitudes were the product of family and personal experience. As a state legislator in the early 1920s, his father, Sam Johnson, had helped sponsor a bill that would have prohibited Klansmen from concealing their identities behind masks. For his efforts, the elder Johnson received death threats. Lyndon Johnson, after graduating from college, had worked as a schoolteacher in Cotulla. Discrimination against Mexican Americans, and the poverty they suffered, appalled the younger Johnson. So too, as a congressional aide, Johnson had learned from Sam Rayburn how to listen to, and attempt to conciliate, people from different backgrounds. He was the only Texas politician, during his first race for Congress in 1937, to receive lavish praise from the president of a Catholic college and an East Texas public school superintendent and Ku Klux Klan member. The Klansman did not hold the sins of the father against the son—and was grateful that the NYA had helped his students.^{Footnote 35}

As Texas NYA director, Johnson had built a network of allies at public schools and colleges across the state—most especially in his home congressional district. When incumbent congressman James Buchanan (elected 1913) died in 1937 and a special election was called, Johnson could count on the support of teachers and school administrators. During the special election, Johnson touted his NYA leadership role. He had also established relationships with the employees of various federal relief projects in Texas. With thousands of college students and faculty, as well as state and federal employees, living in the Austin portion of his district, Johnson had the most liberal, pro-government constituency of any congressman in Texas.^{Footnote 36}

Not only were Johnson’s rural white voters’ fans of New Deal farming subsidies and infrastructure projects, they did not fixate on racial issues, as was often true farther east in Texas. There were few Mexican Americans in Johnson’s district, though he sought their votes. (Hill Country Mexican Americans always seemed to have their poll taxes paid prior to elections.) What there was of an African American vote consisted of the middle-class employees of Austin’s black colleges. They had sufficient income to pay their poll taxes, but did not have large enough numbers to come to the notice of rural whites. Johnson’s support for civil rights, though having a potential political downside in his district, would have been a guaranteed calamity if he had lived in East Texas, which contained the majority of the state’s black population.^{Footnote 37}

To the dismay of most southern Democrats, civil rights in the 1930s was in the process of moving from a sectional to a national issue. The migration of several hundred thousand southern blacks to northern cities during World War I had created a new political constituency—as well as a new threat to southern Democrats. Since elections in the 1930s often remained close in the North, black voters in Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, and New York could potentially swing their respective states to either major party. Northern blacks had voted for the party of Lincoln in 1932, keeping Pennsylvania in the Republican column. In 1936, the majority of northern black voters, grateful for an opportunity to receive WPA jobs, moved into the Democratic Party—helping Roosevelt carry the electoral-vote rich states of Michigan, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Northern Democratic leaders, notably New York senator Robert Wagner, the author of much of the New Deal’s social welfare legislation, decided to make another push to abolish the poll tax and to designate lynching as a federal crime.^{Footnote 38}

Earlier congressional civil rights initiatives had gone nowhere. In the 1920s, Texas congressman Fritz Lanham had warned that black rapists would be the primary beneficiaries of federal antilynching legislation. Hatton Sumners concurred. He predicted that such legislation would unjustly punish white families who understandably sought vengeance against their daughters’ black rapists. Federal antilynching laws, Sumners concluded, would inevitably stoke racial antagonism and provoke more lynching.^{Footnote 39}

Once Roosevelt became president, he sought to avoid divisive civil rights debates. As he explained to representatives from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples (NAACP): “The southerners by reason of the seniority rule in Congress are chairmen or occupy strategic places on most of the Senate and House committees. If I come out for the antilynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just cannot take that risk.”^{Footnote 40}

In spite of Roosevelt’s concerns, Wagner and his allies waged a three-year-long civil rights campaign. Senator Sheppard responded that the southern states were “sovereign” entities equal in standing to Washington. Therefore, the South could not have its sovereign rights usurped by the federal government in the pursuit of antilynching legislation. Sumners, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, sought to block consideration of civil rights legislation. While agreeing with Sheppard’s argument, Sumners went further. He insisted that the federal government had no constitutionally recognized law-enforcement authority in the North either. The federal government could no more go after criminals in Chicago than it had the constitutional authority to pursue mobs in Texas. Only the states, Sumners argued, had the right to “the exercise of the police power of the government [and to provide for] the protection of the citizens of the country.” The Fourteenth Amendment, a legacy of the Reconstruction era intended to guarantee equal protection under the law to African Americans, had not, Sumners insisted, authorized “a Federal guardianship over the states.” Northern New Dealers retorted that thanks to the poll tax, which Wagner had also targeted, Sumners (and Dies) had one of the smallest electorates in Congress and, therefore, a vested interest in opposing equal rights.^{Footnote 41}

While Rayburn and Johnson kept low profiles, Senator Connally became a resistance leader—though he was not as viciously race-baiting as Mississippi’s John Rankin and Theodore Bilbo. In his Senate speeches, filibusters, and memoirs, Connally accused Wagner of pandering to the northern “colored vote” out of fear that the Republicans would reclaim their followers. Connally asserted that Wagner was as dishonest as he was hypocritical. It was obvious, Connally insisted, that Wagner’s civil rights speeches were “ghost-written,” most likely by his NAACP masters. Worse, Wagner fixated on alleged southern white violence while ignoring the “gangsters who were so plentiful in certain northern cities.”^{Footnote 42}

Connally decried the “sentimental people in the North and the East” who were fond of blacks but did not understand them the way the South did. Depicting Dixie as a victim of Yankee aggression, Connally heaped contempt on northern politicians whose cry was: “Bring out the South, bring her out and we’ll kick her around awhile. If we can frame up something that would insult the South, something that would heap odium on the South, bring it out and we are for it.” Misguided, hateful northerners notwithstanding, Connally concluded, there was no Fourteenth Amendment issue involved with lynching. Even if the Fourteenth Amendment had some authority over the states, it offered no legal power over the behavior of individuals—that power belonged to local law enforcement. Ultimately, Connally thwarted Wagner, but he alienated many northern Democrats in the process.^{Footnote 43}

There was one Texan in the House who enthusiastically supported civil rights legislation. Maury Maverick of San Antonio, whose ancestors had helped found the Republic of Texas and who had purportedly given their name to a political tendency, stood nearly alone in the South. Armed with his pedigree and money, Maverick had been decrying the poll tax and lynching since the 1920s. Texas foes scornfully dismissed Maverick as an advocate of Mexican Americans—a fact that should not have been surprising given that they accounted for one-third of San Antonio’s population and, if their poll taxes were paid, could vote. Elected to Congress in 1934, Maverick became the darling of northern liberals and newspapermen, including political columnist Drew Pearson. Even anti–New Deal journalist H. L. Mencken formed a friendship with Maverick on the basis of their mutual dismay with their home region’s penchant for lynching and temperance.^{Footnote 44}

In addition to his championship of civil rights, Maverick wanted to secure San Antonio’s economic future—which would benefit all residents regardless of race or ethnicity. Once the greatest city in Texas, San Antonio had faltered. The oil boom of the 1920s had bypassed the city, leaving it with a low-wage economy dependent upon pecan processing and the marshaling of migrant Mexican American workers. There would be no aid from the rural-dominated legislature. As a member of Congress (1935–38) and mayor (1939–41), Maverick federalized San Antonio. He called for the expansion of the military bases established in World War I and brought millions of dollars to San Antonio from FERA, the WPA, and the NYA. In a stroke of urban-planning genius, Maverick and San Antonio’s New Dealers merged flood control and tourism with “The Riverwalk.”^{Footnote 45}

Maverick did not shy from confrontation. With people he liked, such as Lyndon Johnson, he passed along campaign contributions. To others, he was cutting. In an essay written during his second term in the House, Maverick hit southern economic and racial conditions hard:

From Maverick’s point of view, pursuing federal aid and embracing federal civil rights intervention were complementary policies, uniting economic reconstruction with political freedom. Most of Maverick’s Texas colleagues, however, rejected federal civil rights oversight while demanding ever more federal aid. The anti–New Deal editors of the Dallas Morning News, though having little use for Maverick, understood that representatives like Hatton Sumners held an untenable position: “The South for these four years past has been willing to trade in any amount of states’ rights for a Federal soup pot whether the aid obtainable was in the form of more jobs, more construction, or more pensions.” The Texas Democrats’ quest for aid had created a federal opening to challenge the racial status quo; New Deal labor legislation and the rise of industrial unions presented further challenges.^{Footnote 47}

Labor, Wages, and States’ Rights

The children of southern and eastern European Catholic and Jewish immigrants had swollen the size of the national electorate, which increased 40 percent between 1920 and 1936. Clustered in the urban industrial centers of the North, Catholics and Jews voted Democratic and filled the ranks of the newly established Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Unions became powerful players in Michigan, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania Democrats at the state level, for instance, enacted a “Little New Deal” that raised taxes on corporations and outlawed an antiunion paramilitary force known as the Coal and Iron Police. There would be no Little New Deal in Texas.^{Footnote 48}

Texas businessmen urged Lone Star politicians to oppose the 1935 Wagner Act, which provided federal protection to unions seeking collective-bargaining rights. The vice president of the Texas Cottonseed Crushers’ Association warned that unions would elevate “Negro labor” above whites. The manager of Beaumont’s Magnolia Petroleum Company, a subsidiary of Standard Oil, declaimed against a political order “where organized labor should be subsidized by the Government either in money or through legislation.” (He appeared not to have a problem with either the Connally Hot Oil Act or the oil depletion allowance.) Other Texas business leaders, from car dealers and lumber mill operators to dry goods and oil field suppliers, predicted (accurately) that the Wagner Act would result in more strikes and violence. Worst of all, Texas, as a Chevrolet dealer contended, would be subjugated by the “broad dictatorial powers” of the federal government.^{Footnote 49}

Governor Allred listened to the business community and had an answer for labor activism: the Texas Rangers. Although Allred desired to raise the professional profile of the Rangers, their mission and culture remained what it had been for years. The Rangers were a useful tool in breaking strikes and had a reputation for brutality toward Mexican Americans, blacks, and disenfranchised poor whites.^{Footnote 50}

In response to strikes at Texas’s Gulf Ports between 1935 and 1936, Allred deployed the Rangers. Shippers, as well as the Texas Cotton Growers’ Association, praised Allred’s assistance in preventing picketing longshoremen from bringing commerce to a standstill. If not for the presence of the Rangers, representatives from the Nueces County Navigation District (Corpus Christi) wrote Allred, “rioting will result, with possible loss of life.” Union representatives protested Allred’s decision. The Port Arthur Trades and Union Council launched an investigation into the clashes that had occurred in 1935. Its report, submitted to Congressman Dies in 1936, insisted that their followers had not engaged in any violent activity—instead, they fixed blame on Houston “racketeers.” The union officials were careful not to suggest, at least overtly, that the racketeers might have been agent provocateurs for shippers seeking to discredit the union cause.^{Footnote 51}

Allred dispatched the Rangers to Dallas in 1937 in response to a textile workers’ strike. Preston Reynolds, a Prohibition activist and president of the Dallas County Law Enforcement League, hailed Allred’s action in preventing the female, Mexican American garment workers from intimidating businessmen. Other correspondents welcomed the Rangers in their efforts “to stamp out terror in Dallas.” Allred also sent a telegram to the president of the northern-based United Automobile Workers’ union vowing to apprehend any CIO operatives involved in committing crimes against public order in Dallas. There was little push back by unions in Dallas, in contrast to Port Arthur. This was not surprising since the Dallas Citizens’ Council, a consortium of two hundred antiunion businessmen, controlled the city’s news media, law enforcement agencies, and political offices. The Wagner Act provided no protection to Dallas strikers—nonviolent or not.^{Footnote 52}

The strike surge that began in late 1936 in Michigan and culminated in the spring 1937 clashes in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, outraged antiunion businessmen, politicians, and newspaper publishers. Allred assured them that he shared their fears. He vowed that “we will not play Michigan down here,” a clear warning to CIO members that he would not tolerate “un-American” attempts to shut down plants, either by workers barricading themselves inside or picketing from the outside. Allred added, to the delight of the Interstate Cotton Seed Crushers’ Association, that “we’ve been getting along nicely down here without any such lawlessness.” The Dallas Journal ran an editorial cartoon depicting Allred as a muscular, clean-shaven Texan squaring off against a fat, eastern European–looking CIO organizer. Later, the Dallas Morning News trumped its sister publication by comparing CIO president John L. Lewis to Adolf Hitler.^{Footnote 53}

Allred received high praise from the executive leadership of the Southern Alkali Corporation, a subsidiary of Pittsburgh Plate Glass: “It is a great satisfaction to me to know that our southern plants are located in a state where we have a Governor with some backbone.” Former Texas congressman Tom Blanton, who had been defeated in his 1936 Democratic primary by an even more anti–New Deal opponent, hailed Allred’s antiunion pronouncements. Blanton characterized CIO members as “stick-up men who push pistols into your sides and tell you to hands up and deliver.” (During World War II, Blanton championed federal legislation to execute strikers for treason.) Meanwhile, a prominent Houston railroad attorney enthused that Allred’s anti-CIO stance had cowed “the agitators among the oil workers here.”^{Footnote 54}

Although the hostile Texas political climate hindered CIO organizing, industrial workers themselves often undermined the union cause. This was particularly true of the oil workers. Many of the oil workers were transients who were not inclined to join a union. Even the white Protestant southerners who joined the CIO’s Oil Workers’ International Union insisted that blacks and Mexican Americans receive lower pay or be excluded altogether. Refinery workers in Beaumont, Houston, and Texas City might consider joining the CIO to negotiate better wages, but they had no intention of reaching across ethnic, racial, and religious lines—in spite of what northern labor leaders demanded. Such attitudes engendered ill will among Texas minorities toward the CIO and encouraged employers to play different groups off against each other—a ploy that the CIO in the North had endeavored to counteract.^{Footnote 55}

As they had with civil rights, Rayburn and Johnson largely avoided debates over collective bargaining and escalating strike activities. Senator Sheppard took a different tack. He insisted that the Wagner Act would have been unnecessary if only the federal government had deported foreigners who drove down wages, embraced communism, and engaged in violence. (Wholesale deportation of immigrants and their children would have eliminated much of the CIO recruiting pool.) Once again, Maverick stood apart from his colleagues, defending labor organizing nationally and in Texas.^{Footnote 56}

In 1937, Maverick made a well-publicized journey to Michigan where he praised striking autoworkers. He subsequently received speaking invitations from Oklahoma oil workers and Alabama steelworkers. As with civil rights, Maverick gave no pass to his home region when it came to its rejection of unions and ardent quest for federal funds. In a 1938 Washington Post column, Maverick wrote: “As a congressman from the South—I speak alone for myself—I believe that if we pass out subsidies for cotton plantation owners and ranchers, and rice growers and all the rest—that labor should have some protection too.”^{Footnote 57}

Ironically, the Maverick-Clarke Litho Company of San Antonio, established by the congressman’s grandfather, was less enthusiastic about labor unions. The company’s vice president, recognizing that the Maverick heir could not be persuaded to denounce labor unions, had sought out Martin Dies as early as 1935. He had complained to Dies that the Wagner Act represented nothing less than a surrender “to the dictates of a bureaucratic labor board” in Washington.^{Footnote 58}

While Maverick rallied Michigan’s autoworkers, a campaign of Mexican American organizing began in San Antonio. Maverick and the Catholic archdiocese sympathized with the protests, which culminated in 1938 with a strike by twelve thousand pecan shellers. Public support, though, was minimal given Anglo hostility toward ethnic Mexican activism. It did not help the union cause that the organizer of the protests, Emma Tenayuca, was a Texas Communist Party leader. The fact that San Antonio’s Southern Pecan Shelling Company paid starvation wages of 5 cents a day to its female, Mexican American labor force did little to divert attention away from Tenayuca. (Southern Pecan insisted that its workers did not starve as they were allowed to eat some of the pecans they processed.) In a national labor movement made up of middle-aged men of European extraction, a twenty-three-year old, photogenic Mexican American woman was too unusual for newspapers and politicians to ignore. Neither the San Antonio archdiocese nor the national CIO’s anticommunist Irish Catholic faction was pleased that the Texas labor movement had left itself open to red-baiters.^{Footnote 59}

The pecan shellers’ strike crystallized opposition to Maverick’s renomination in the 1938 Democratic primary. As his foes believed, whether in Congress or as a mayoral candidate in 1939, Maverick depended upon “the radical element” on the west (Mexican) side of San Antonio and appealed to the “racial prejudice” of its purportedly antiwhite populace. Being the most visible southern New Dealer in Congress hurt his electoral prospects. So too, serving as a board member of the pro-CIO National Lawyers Guild gave ammunition to his enemies. While Congressman Henry Ellenbogen of Pennsylvania was also on the board, he was a friend of Pittsburgh Democratic machine boss David Lawrence. Maverick had no comparable protection. All he could do was complain that his enemies had used the San Antonio police department to intimidate his Mexican American voters.^{Footnote 60}

Where northern cities mobilized ever-larger numbers of New Deal voters, San Antonio went in the opposite direction. The anti–New Deal Republican vote more than doubled in the 1930s, while Democrats made next to no gains. Though there was little prospect that Republicans would capture San Antonio, Bexar County’s Anglo Democrats turned against the New Deal. Maverick’s enemies, after analyzing the election returns, believed that Maverick’s desire for more military bases had backfired. It appeared that Lyndon Johnson’s academic supporters in Austin were a more liberal type of government employee and voter than the military retirees and active-duty personnel in San Antonio.^{Footnote 61}

Garner was not content with Maverick’s defeat. In Roosevelt’s first administration, Garner had exerted his influence in Congress on behalf of New Deal relief programs. Senator Wagner’s role in promoting collective bargaining, which, Garner believed, inspired the 1937 strike wave, had angered the Texan. Garner encouraged Dies to establish the House Committee on Un-American Activities prior to the 1938 midterm elections. Dies held well-publicized, one-sided hearings in Washington and in Michigan. He made no distinction between Communist Party members and anticommunist Catholic CIO leaders. How much the Dies Committee fed the 1938 electoral backlash against New Deal Democrats, and how much it was a reflection of that backlash, was a matter of conjecture. There is no question that Dies’s efforts placed a Texas accent on an election that turned gubernatorial offices in Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin over to Republicans. Just as ominously for New Dealers, Republicans picked up eighty-one seats in the House and eight in the Senate.^{Footnote 62}

Even before the 1938 midterm elections, Roosevelt had fretted that Wagner was a lightning rod for irate southern Democrats. He had been less than enthusiastic in 1937 when Wagner encouraged a legislative campaign on behalf of a wages and hours bill. However, Roosevelt’s legislative debt to Wagner was so great that he did not demur when the New Yorker proposed a 25-cents-an-hour minimum wage and a forty-hour workweek. Southern Democrats delayed the wages and hours initiative in 1937 but had to continue their fight in 1938. Dies, with Garner’s blessing, rallied congressional Democrats and Republicans against the Fair Labor Standards Act, comparing it to Wagner’s “damnable antilynching bill.” Yet again, Dies intoned, northerners were dictating to southerners the manner in which they dealt with their people—and usurping states’ rights in the process.^{Footnote 63}

The Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce decried the wages and hours bill because “it fails to provide for a Southern differential.” This was a key consideration, since the South’s inducement for northern industries to locate to Dixie was the promise of low wages and a compliant labor force. The editors of the Beaumont Enterprise argued that given the low cost of living in the South, as well as low taxes, Dixie’s workers did not need to be paid as much as northerners. The president of Shepherd’s Launderers in Beaumont warned that the minimum wage would compel employers to fire inexpensive, unskilled blacks and seek “a more intelligent class of employees” that would be worth the lavish pay. From Austin, the president of the Harrison-Wilson Real Estate Company predicted that the minimum wage would raise the cost of living in the South and send “Mexican and Negro labor” into a “panic” since they would be priced out of the labor market.^{Footnote 64}

Dies took to the radio airwaves in his anti-Wagner battle. The president of the Sabine Broadcasting Company in Beaumont—an NBC affiliate—praised Dies’s efforts to protect “states’ rights” against Wagner’s continued incursions. The thrust of Dies’s arguments could be found in a missive he issued to Port Arthur unionists: “As a result of seven years’ experience in Washington, I have found that most of those who occupy the important positions here in the administrative branch of the Government come from the North. I have had considerable experience with [U.S. Secretary of Labor Frances] Perkins and I do not feel that she has the right attitude towards the South. I do not think that she understands our problems.”^{Footnote 65}

Roosevelt, while wishing he could “purge” conservative, largely southern, elements from the Democratic Party, tried a reasoned approach in justifying his support of the wages and hours legislation. In a radio address broadcast from Fort Worth, Roosevelt informed Texans: “Cheap wages mean low buying power. Low buying power means low standards of living, and that means low taxable values and therefore a difficulty in maintaining good schools, good highways, sanitation, and other public improvements.” The president also observed that “you need more industries in Texas, but I know you realize the importance of not trying to get industries by the route of cheap labor for industrial workers.” His words swayed few, succeeding only in fueling further resentment against the federal government.^{Footnote 66}

Although the Fair Labor Standards Act passed through Congress, it would be the last major piece of New Deal legislation. Southern Democrats and many northern Republicans in Congress had been outraged in 1937 when Roosevelt proposed increasing the size of the U.S. Supreme Court so that he could appoint more pro–New Deal justices. Coinciding with battles over the 1937 CIO strike wave and civil rights, Sumners had announced his defection from the New Deal. For his part, Connally compared Roosevelt to Hitler. The northern Democratic rout in the 1938 elections marked the limits of federal activism in the South—for the time being.^{Footnote 67}

In a bitter example of unintended consequences, the Southern Pecan Company began the elimination of ten thousand of its twelve thousand Mexican American workers, citing the 25-cents-an-hour minimum wage as its motivation to automate shelling. Representatives of the pecan shellers’ union complained in 1939 to newly elected mayor Maury Maverick. He informed the union that the city government, let alone the federal government, had no legal authority to force Southern Pecan to halt automation. Maverick, however, was working with the CIO to build a federally subsidized “‘Mexican’ low-rent housing project” for the unemployed. As if to underscore the weakness of the labor movement in the South, Maverick, its most prominent champion, became legal counsel for Southern Pecan after he left public office.^{Footnote 68}

Historian Sean Cunningham argued in his study of post–World War II conservatism in the Lone Star State that “for decades, most Texans had viewed the Democratic Party as the party of states’ rights, the party of limited and responsible government, and the party that had won two world wars and overcame a great depression.” Political changes in the 1930s, however, exposed the tensions between the assertion of states’ rights and the vigorous pursuit of federal financial support. Paradoxically, as Roosevelt complained, the “cure” that “Dr. New Deal” prescribed for the socioeconomic woes of the 1930s seemed to make the patient more irritable as he recovered. Ultimately, as historian Michael Kazin concluded, the southern (and Lone Star) states’ rights populism of the 1930s went national and migrated out of the Democratic Party.^{Footnote 69}

Texas Democrats, as was true throughout Dixie, had to be careful how far they went in embracing the New Deal. Maverick’s national profile as a civil and labor rights champion proved to be his political undoing. Historian Anthony Badger observed that the New Deal electoral realignment in the North decimated the ranks of the “business-oriented,” “limited government” Democrat. In stark contrast, the overwhelming majority of Lone Star and southern Democrats became increasingly more vocal in their assertion of states’ rights—except when it came to federal subsidies. In the latter case, Texas Democrats used their considerable congressional clout, and access to major donors, to secure more pork than their southern neighbors. Weak unions, disenfranchisement, and the economic and cultural consequences of losing an insurrection against the federal government seventy years earlier closed off any possibility that Texas Democrats would follow the political path taken by their Pennsylvania counterparts.^{Footnote 70}

As a senior Democrat, House Majority Leader, and Speaker, Sam Rayburn chased every federal dollar he could find for his district, region, and state. This was understandable given that the legislature, committed to limited state government and low taxes, would provide no financial assistance. In spite of those efforts, Rayburn’s hometown newspaper, the Bonham Daily Favorite, expressed displeasure. The newspaper’s editor wrote in 1937 objecting to the prospect of even more generous cotton subsidies: “Whatever the difference of the market price and the government price is to be paid for out of the Federal treasury, that unfailing source from which so many billions have already been obtained to carry out crackbrained schemes.”^{Footnote 71}

Rayburn obsessed over negative newspaper editorials, cajoled voters in his district, and spread as much federal funds around as possible. Taking advantage of Rayburn’s access to the public purse and eagerness to spend from it, the mayor of Farmersville insisted that his village receive a new U.S. Post Office building; other constituents wanted to make sure that they received federally subsidized electricity. Still, Rayburn, unlike most of his peers, drew Democratic primary challengers who claimed that he had undermined states’ rights and had added to the national debt. There was much truth to the latter charge. Governor Allred had reduced the state deficit, but only by shifting the financial burden to the federal government, which, in the Depression decade, increased the national debt by 150 percent. Some of Rayburn’s constituents understood that all Americans, including Texans, were financially liable for the growing national debt.^{Footnote 72}

Though Rayburn’s friend, Hatton Sumners, did not have to worry about primary challengers, he could not ignore the Dallas Morning News when it criticized him for undermining the cause of states’ rights by accepting federal agricultural subsidies and public works funding. Sumners agreed with the underlying premise of such criticism and broke with the New Deal Democrats in 1937. As Sumners lamented in 1946 when he announced his retirement from Congress, the South, long “victims of [federal] power,” had been seduced by the New Deal. However, not all blame could be placed on Roosevelt’s shoulders. The “people of the communities and from the states” had eagerly bartered away their rights and their responsibility to govern themselves in exchange for federal funds. As a consequence, Americans were now the “vassals” of a federal government that embraced “tyranny, oppression, and corruption” while destroying “self-reliance and self-respect.”^{Footnote 73}

With Sumners’s rejection of the New Deal, and Senator Connally’s disaffection, that left Rayburn to hold Texas for Roosevelt in 1940. He thwarted Garner’s abortive presidential bid and simultaneously pledged his personal loyalty to “Cactus Jack”—much in the manner Dies carried out the Pews’ commands but maintained his fealty to Rayburn on issues other than those related to unions, the minimum wage, and civil rights. Rayburn also tasked Lyndon Johnson with funneling Texas campaign donations from such powerful constituents as Brown & Root and Murchison and Richardson to grateful northern congressional Democrats. He could not, however, staunch the flow of southern defections from the New Deal. While the number of Texans who proclaimed themselves to be anti–New Deal “Jeffersonian Democrats” in 1936 was small, albeit well off, their ranks steadily grew. Sensing political opportunity in the blustery southern winds, Garner had no problem flirting with the Jeffersonians after the divisive labor, civil rights, and Supreme Court battles of 1937 and 1938. Still, Garner and most Lone Star Democrats, no matter how disaffected with the New Deal, would never renounce federal subsidies and decline favors for oil producers.

Rayburn understood, as did Johnson, that Texas needed northern allies in order to preserve agricultural subsidies and legislative breaks for the oil industry. To achieve that goal, some way had to be found to finesse the labor and civil rights issues. In 1924, Harvard Law School professor Felix Frankfurter had argued that the South’s embrace of disenfranchisement, segregation, and lynching represented “the greatest immoral factor in American politics, and to the extent that northerners help to perpetuate it they are all accomplices in all the evils that flow from it.” A Harvard professor could be ignored or mocked, but once Roosevelt placed Frankfurter on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1939, the South was on notice that the civil rights issue was not going away.^{Footnote 74}

The labor issue appeared to be just as politically thorny as civil rights. Businessmen in Texas—and across the United States—were appalled by the rise of organized labor and the imposition of the federal minimum wage. Connally received widespread business praise upon his retirement in 1952 for his consistent opposition to federal labor legislation. One Texas steel executive wrote to Connally that “Mr. Roosevelt treated the labor unions like a mistreated child in his mind, and thereby developed a mob-spirit of labor in this country.” An Amarillo newspaper publisher complained to Connally that as a result of the New Deal, “We have been cheated; swindled; our property rights have been taken away from us; we have had price supports, price control, subsidies, a wasteful administration, unwarranted high taxes all in harmony and in keeping with Soviet Justice.”^{Footnote 75}

Complicating matters was the difficulty in separating the labor and civil rights issues in the South. Certainly, as political scientist Tracy Roof observed, southern Democrats linked race and labor together. This was not surprising. Most of the textile workers in Texas were Mexican American, while the pecan shellers, as was true of Texas agricultural laborers in general, were nearly all ethnic Mexicans. Although oil refinery workers were largely white, there were sufficient numbers of Mexican Americans and African Americans employed in the industry to make union organizing efforts across racial, ethnic, and religious lines difficult.^{Footnote 76}

Even more problematic than union organizing, Dixie’s employers had no room in their business calculations to cover a federal minimum wage. Twenty percent of southern industrial workers earned less than the 25 cents minimum wage, as opposed to 3 percent nationally. Forty-four percent of southern textile workers made less than Wagner’s minimum wage, compared to 6 percent of northern textile workers. Assuming a standard forty-hour workweek at 25 cents an hour, Southern Pecan, San Antonio’s major private-sector employer, faced the prospect of raising wages 4,000 percent. Southern Pecan opted to automate. As one Austin-area attorney informed Johnson in 1938, massive unemployment was the inevitable result of paying a few workers the princely sums offered in the Wages and Hours legislation. Economic conservatives, then and now, have concurred with this line of reasoning. Ultimately, cheap labor was built into the southern business model. States’ rights formed the ideological underpinning of that model.^{Footnote 77}

By 1938 it was obvious to political observers that Texas Democrats, united in their quest to collect as much federal funds as possible, found it increasingly difficult to defend states’ rights—especially when it was intertwined with federal oversight of relief programs, unions, wages, and race relations. Even if, as Katznelson contended, Dixie politicians like Connally and Sumners had placed civil rights and other New Deal reforms in a “southern cage,” such issues would not be forever contained. Rayburn, Allred, Johnson, Dies, and Maverick had, intentionally or not, weakened the cage’s bars. With federal funds came federal power to challenge the southern economic and political order. Texas, which played such a large role in leading the South into the New Deal, seemed destined to play an outsized role in leading the South out of the land of Roosevelt.