Building a populist coalition in Texas, 1892-1896

Journal of Southern History, May, 2008 by Worth Robert Miller, Stacy G. Ulbig

THAN A HALF CENTURY HAS PASSED SINCE C. VANN WOODWARD argued that the success of the People' s (or Populist) Party of the 1890s hinged on construction of three somewhat improbable coalitions of the dispossessed: southerners and westerners, farmers and laborers, and blacks and poor whites in the South. (1) The rationale for such coalitions was that supposedly both the South and the West had colonial debtor economies in the 1890s, farmers and laborers shared a common status as producers, and blacks and poor southern whites frequently shared a marginal economic situation. But the counterinfluences of post-Civil War sectionalism, rural-urban jealousies, and racism also were particularly strong in the late-nineteenth-century South. Despite these impediments, Populists experienced substantial success in bringing Woodward's coalitions to fruition in Texas.

Building a movement of the dispossessed in the Lone Star State in the 1890s was fraught with many difficulties. Then as now, Texas was an exceptionally large and diverse state. It is more than eight hundred miles from Brownsville on the Mexican border to the northern edge of the semiarid expanses of the Texas Panhandle, and nearly as far from the Piney Woods of East Texas to El Paso. Of the ten major soil types commonly "recognized around the world, seven are found in abundance in Texas." (2) The state was nearly 85 percent rural in the 1890s. Yet cities as different as southern-white-evangelical-dominated Dallas and overwhelmingly ethnic San Antonio experienced significant growth in the late nineteenth century. (3) A mixture of whites from both the upper and the plantation South, as well as a significant black population, gave the state a southern ambience. But people of Mexican, German, Czech, and Polish heritage both mingled with the native-born population and formed distinctive cultural areas of their own. (4)

The People's Party in Texas and elsewhere billed itself as the party of small landholders and other producers in the tradition of American republicanism. Although the course of Populist Party development differed somewhat from state to state, and certainly complexity characterized Texas and its politics in the 1890s, some generalizations can be made. The scholarship on Populism over the past quarter century has particularly focused on the influence of what modem scholars have labeled the republicanism of the American Revolution as refined through the democracy of Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln. Application of this perspective has allowed historians to bring coherence to the party's program, which some earlier scholars labeled as "foggy" or a "subterfuge." (5)

Republicanism was just as radical an idea in the late nineteenth century as it had been a century before. Most Americans were still quite conscious of the nation's role as the vanguard of this movement worldwide. It had been enshrined as the quintessence of Americanism long before the 1890s. Creating a republic in a world dominated by institutionalized privilege clearly committed the nation to maintaining an egalitarian society. As Robert C. McMath Jr. has noted, "an incipient movement culture embracing both communal solidarity and egalitarianism was widespread among small farmers" even before the rise of the Farmers' Alliance or the People's Party. (6) Thus, Populists designed the land, transportation, and money planks of their 1892 Omaha Platform to encourage the widest expression of economic independence, particularly through widespread ownership of land.

Republicanism mandated an opposition to monopoly. The success of republicanism depended on the virtue of an intelligent and uncorrupted electorate. Concentrated wealth corrupted politics. Governmental favoritism, which Populists saw as corruption, unfairly established privilege, which in its consolidated form became aristocracy. Hence, before dealing with the specific shape that reform might take, the Omaha Platform asked citizens "to determine whether we are to have a republic to administer." It was this orientation that historian James Turner, for instance, interpreted as "confusion" and "fuzziness" on the specifics of reform. (7)

Populist appeals to the American republican tradition resonated with Texas voters to the extent that the People's Party developed into the major opposition to Democratic Party hegemony in Texas by the mid-1890s, securing 25 percent of the vote in the 1892 gubernatorial election, 36 percent in 1894, and 44 percent in 1896. (8) Growth in voter appeal, however, was not the only story. Issues emerged and then receded in importance, commitments changed, and coalitions shifted over the years. To better understand the motivations of those who cast their lot with the fledgling third party, it is necessary to explore who actually voted the Populist ticket during the 1890s in Texas.

There have been two major empirical studies of who constituted the Texas Populist electorate: Roscoe C. Martin, The People's Party in Texas: A Study in Third Party Politics (1933), and James Turner, "Understanding the Populists" (1980). (9) Martin, a political scientist who labored before the advent of computers, provided a surprisingly comprehensive, although by today's standards impressionistic, study of voting patterns in 1890s Texas. He noted that even though the People's Party was a farmer party in an overwhelmingly rural state, "Populist strongholds were found in sections which were not favorable to farming." Martin argued that the third party "found its greatest strength among the classes" most affected by economic diversity. It "offered a haven to all who had been buffeted and treated unkindly in the game of life, or better said, in the game of politics." (10)