Boss Rule in South Texas: The Progressive Era

326 Pages·2013·2.6 MB·English

by  Evan Anders

Boss Rule in South Texas
THE PROGRESSIVE ERA
by Evan Anders
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS
AUSTIN
For Betty, Robert, and Cecily
Copyright © 1979 by Evan Marcus Anders Copyright © 1982 by the University of Texas Press All rights
reserved
Printed in the United States of America First Edition, 1982
Publication of this book was assisted by grants from The University of Texas at Arlington and The
Littlefield Fund for Southern History, The University of Texas at Austin.
Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of
Texas Press, Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78712.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA Anders, Evan, 1946– Boss rule in
South Texas.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Texas—Politics and government—1865–1950. 2. Progressivism (United States politics) 3. Wells,
James B., 1850–1923. 4. Parr, Archie, 1860 or 61–1942. I. Title.
F391.A5 976.4′06 82-2701
ISBN 0-292-70736-3 AACR2
ISBN 978-0-292-70763-4 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-292-73336-7 (library e-book)
ISBN 978-0-292-73337-4 (individual e-book) DOI: 10.7560/707368
Contents
Introduction
1. The Wells Machine
2. The Customs House Gang
3. Assault against the Guerra Machine of Starr County
4. Wells and State Politics: The House Years
5. Wells and State Politics: The Progressive Challenge
6. The Election of John Nance Garner to Congress
7. Trouble with Washington
8. Political Upheaval in South Texas
9. Archie Parr and Duval County
10. The Wilson Administration and Federal Patronage
11. Tension along the Border, 1911–1918
12. State Politics: The Closing Battles
Conclusion: The Last Hurrah for James Wells
Notes
References
Index
Introduction
DURING THE DECADES following the Civil War, boss rule emerged as the
pervasive pattern of politics for American cities. Characteristically, the political
boss centralized government authority by filling city offices with men willing to
follow his orders. Patronage became the lifeblood of the machine. The prospect
of political jobs attracted a large following of campaign workers, while the
assessment of contributions from the salaries of city officials and employees
filled the party coffers. Business allies received lucrative contracts and
franchises for public utilities and repaid the machine with kickbacks. Although
contemporary reformers attacked the bosses for destroying the professional
standards of the city bureaucracies and for looting the public treasuries,
historians and social scientists have recently rehabilitated the reputations of these
much maligned politicians. Without contesting the charges of corruption,
modern analysts argue that the urban chieftains often provided desperately
needed services for their diverse constituencies. At the same time, historians are
reevaluating the claims of the progressive reformers that their sole motivation
was a disinterested commitment to protect the public interest.
Social scientist Robert Merton has supplied the basic model for overhauling
traditional interpretations of boss rule. In addition to indulging in graft, the urban
machines also performed a variety of constructive functions: social welfare
benefits for the downtrodden, particularly immigrants; a channel of upward
mobility for ambitious members of these suppressed groups; special privileges
for businesses, such as franchises and the elimination of red tape. Recent
historians have argued that boss politics was the inevitable product of the rapid,
chaotic process of urbanization during the late nineteenth century. Suffering
from the crippling diffusion of power among city officials and from the
interference of rural-dominated state legislatures, municipal governments could
not meet the needs of the mushrooming urban populations. To overcome this
paralysis the bosses used their influence with the party leaders at the state level
and imposed their own tightly controlled machines on the fragmented city
administrations. Irrespective of the formal lines of authority, city officials
submitted to the boss’ dictation because they depended on his campaign
organization for reelection. As one further service, the machines defended
immigrant life-styles against nativist attack. The result of all these activities was
support for boss rule from both influential businessmen and massive voting
blocs of immigrants.1
This form of government came under sharp attack during the Progressive Era.
Reformers denounced the bosses as corruptionists and tyrants, who squandered
public funds and subverted the democratic process by monopolizing power and
manipulating the ignorant immigrant voters. Despite the progressive promises to
bring the government closer to the people, Samuel Hays argues that reform
campaigns in many cities transferred power to newly formed business and
professional elites, whose influence had remained limited under the boss system.
Instead of legitimizing all the necessary functions of the machines, the municipal
insurgents promoted structural changes in government, which restricted the
political participation of the lower classes, reduced government expense and
waste, and advanced their own economic interests. The moralistic appeals of the
progressive crusaders for clean, democratic government masked fundamental
social and economic conflicts.2
Although Hays, Merton, and other students of machine government have
limited their studies to urban politics, their findings provide an analytical
framework for examining boss rule in a quite different setting—the South Texas
counties of Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr, and Duval during the late 1890s and the
early twentieth century. The problems of governing in these rural, small-town
communities were much less complicated, but there emerged a system of
Democratic machines that broadly conformed to the Merton model.
The network of county organizations provided basic social and economic
services to an economic elite of ranchers and merchants and to a lower-class
mass of Mexican American laborers, farmers, and ranch hands. Political success
rested upon control of the Hispanic votes and access to patronage. Even though
the bosses had faced recurrent Republican opposition and Democratic factional
divisions since the end of the Civil War, the challenge to machine domination in
South Texas assumed new force during the Progressive Era. The insurgents’ own
efforts to manage Mexican American voting blocs and their reliance on the
federal customs house as an organizational base reflected the continuity of
twentieth-century agitation with past opposition. Yet two developments
transformed the political landscape. The challengers eventually embraced the
popular reformist rhetoric of the period, and, more fundamentally, they rode the
tide of an economic revolution in South Texas. With the completion of a railroad
network through the region and the advent of large-scale irrigation, the citrus
and truck farming boom swept the Lower Rio Grande Valley and attracted
thousands of new settlers. In accordance with the Hays analysis, the reform
movement represented an upwardly mobile economic class, and its main aim
was to restrict the political participation of the lower-class voters, who had
sustained the established order. As a result of these forces, political conflict in
South Texas came to a head during the first two decades of the twentieth
century.
To be complete, the study of South Texas politics must explore not only the
mechanics of the county rings and the nature of their local opposition but also
the careers of the Democratic bosses who organized the machines, the influence
of these men on state and national politics, the special relationship between the
bosses and the Texas Rangers, the role of Mexican Americans in shaping
regional politics, and the prevalence of violence and racial tension along the
border. Four figures stand out in the political drama that unfolded in this volatile
frontier setting: James Wells, who consolidated boss rule in Cameron County
and emerged as a leading spokesman for the conservative wing of the state
Democratic party; Archer (Archie) Parr, whose ruthless tactics and misuse of
public funds in Duval County established him as one of the most notorious
corruptionists in the history of the state; Manuel Guerra, a Mexican American
rancher and merchant whose authoritarian domination of Starr County was
indistinguishable from the practices of his Anglo counterparts in the other border
counties; and John Nance Garner, who served the interests of these bosses
during the formative years of his congressional career. To understand these
politicians and the partisan battles that they waged during the Progressive Era,
one must first review the social and economic history of South Texas and the
operation of boss rule before 1900.
The four counties of Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr, and Duval fall within the
Trans-Nueces region, which is bordered by the Nueces River on the north and
the Rio Grande on the south. The first three counties lie along the Rio Grande
and form the Lower Rio Grande Valley, occupying the southeastern corner of
Texas. The Valley takes shape as the flood plain of the Rio Grande expands into
a broad delta plain, which follows the twisted course of the river for 250 miles to
the Gulf. (Two hundred and fifty miles is the navigational distance of the river
from the point at which the Lower Rio Grande Valley forms in the west to the
mouth of the river, and this figure includes the measurement of all the twists and
turns in the river. All other river measurements in the book are navigational
distances.) Until the county reorganizations of 1911 and 1913, Duval County
bordered the western-most Valley county of Starr on the north. Irrigation
converted most of the Lower Rio Grande Valley into a fruit and truck farming
bonanza, but before 1900 grasslands and stretches of chaparral covered the
whole Trans-Nueces region. Modest rainfall limited earlier agricultural
development, and cattle and sheep ranching dominated the South Texas plains.
During the periods of Spanish and Mexican rule, the Trans-Nueces region
remained sparsely settled, but by 1836 the two governments had divided most of
the territory into land grants. The allotments varied in size from the porciones of
a few thousand acres, which were distributed among the settlers in the early
towns along the Rio Grande, to later grants of hundreds of thousands of acres.
After the War for Texas Independence, both Mexico and the new republic
claimed the land between the Nueces and the Rio Grande, and control of the area
remained in dispute until the United States annexed Texas and defeated Mexico
in the war of 1846–1848. Although the United States agreed to respect the
existing land grants, Mexican ranchers in the northern half of the Trans-Nueces
plains abandoned their holdings. Beset by both Indian raids and Anglo and
Mexican marauders, they sold out cheaply to future Anglo ranch barons like
Richard King and Mifflin Kenedy. Squatters also invaded South Texas and
established homesteads without any legal claim to the property.
Despite these pressures, many landowners in the Lower Rio Grande Valley
refused to yield. With their lands near the border, they felt more secure and
usually demanded high prices—if they were willing to sell at all. The complexity
of clearing land titles in the border region served as another deterrent against a
complete Anglo take-over. Mexican pioneers had occupied the Lower Rio
Grande Valley long before the distribution of the northern grants, and, with each
generation, these families had subdivided the ownership of their lands. Although
a family might hold the original grant together as a single ranching enterprise,
the purchase of the tract, or any part of it, would require the concurrence of
numerous collective owners. The proliferation of the smaller porciones and even
some communally owned municipal properties in the vicinity of Mexican border
towns further complicated the accumulation of vast stretches of land by Anglo
businessmen. For all these reasons, only a handful of Anglos bought ranches in
the Valley during the 1850s. After the Civil War, Anglo landholding steadily
expanded, but much of the area remained under Mexican American ownership.
South Texas in 1910