 This lecture will look at the emergence of industrial taxes from 1900 to about 1930. Let's look at agrarian discontent. The farmers were upset because of farm problems and higher costs associated with farming. And they blamed these on bankers, on railroads, and on merchants. The people who supplied them the loans, they thought were charging them interest rates that were too high and not giving them enough credit. They thought railroads were charging them higher prices, and they thought that merchants weren't giving them fair rates. They weren't paying them the fair price for the cotton that they were selling. So they felt like they were being taken advantage of by everyone. But one of the things that farmers had to deal with was a limited money supply. The United States and Texas, of course, was going through a recession, in fact a whole series of recessions that lasted up until the late 1880s. Also, they were plagued by farm problems. Farm problems because of increased competition. Farm problems because the competition drove down prices. And so they were producing, but they weren't getting paid as much for it. And also the fact that they had to work much harder, because land in West Texas was not as productive as land elsewhere. The economic developments of Texas in the late 1880s to early 1900s were marked by several things. First of all, the development of electricity. In people's houses, in people's business, electricity changed people's lives. It changed the hours you could be open for business. It changed how late you could stay up, as long as you had electricity. It was expensive, but life transformational. Also, transportation transformed a lot of people's lives. Not just the development of the automobile, but you also had streetcars to help you get around town better. And interurbans, these linked cities like Dallas and Houston and Galveston and San Antonio, you could get on these trains, which is what they were, and travel between the towns. So this all made transportation easier. And the development of a railroad linking Houston to St. Louis and Mexico in 1904 also was very important. In 1900, the Galveston Hurricane. This was one of the worst natural disasters in American history. It killed almost 6,000 people, and that's a conservative estimate. We don't know how many people it killed, but it destroyed the city. One thing that came from this, however, Houston grew as a result. Houston became the port. And also, Galveston developed a new form of government called a commission form of government. And this is where you had qualified, trained people to handle police and fire and other city services, rather than corrupt forms of having friends and cronies do it as politicians had in the past. In 1901, in Beaumont, Texas, the spindle top oil gusher came in, and this ushered Texas into the petroleum age. Finally, the first multi-million dollar corporation in Texas, Kirby Lumber, also started around the turn of the century. Along with the business mindset, there were conservative politics involved in Texas at the time. And chief among these was a man named Edward House, Colonel House as he was called, a Houston businessman and a political kingmaker. He was behind the successful elections of many Texas governors, and eventually he is going to be President Woodrow Wilson's chief political advisor. There were also laws established to help protect labor. However, there were some other more conservative laws among those, the poll tax and the tarot election laws, which in effect help reduce the number of African-Americans from voting. And this is really some of the first steps to keep blacks away from the polls. One of the major political figures in the time was Joseph Weldon Bailey, U.S. Senator from Texas, who was also the representative at the same time for the Waters Pierce Oil Company. Waters Pierce was a subsidiary of Standard Oil, John D Rockefeller's company, and it wasn't supposed to be operating in Texas, but it was. And so Waters Pierce was under investigation from the Senate. Weldon Bailey did not think that there was any conflict of interest with him being the senator from Texas and representing this oil company, and he had a lot of support. People tried to impeach him, but they couldn't get him impeached because of his supporters. But it did divide the Democratic Party in the end between a liberal branch and a conservative branch. And so this is how the Democratic Party starts to divide, and you'll see this throughout the 20th century. We want to look at the progressive movement in Texas. The progressive movement starts in the early 1900s and goes on to about the 1950s, and it's influenced by three major groups, women, industrial workers, and farmers. And what you're going to see are several reforms that come out of the progressive movement that are going to affect society, that are going to affect politics, and that are going to affect business. If we look at the progressive reforms, the child labor law in 1903 helped keep children out of industry and it helped prevent them from getting hurt. They were banking and insurance laws aimed at keeping money banks and insurance companies who were usually out of state companies from taking the Texas money and going back out of state with it. And this is what the Robertson Insurance Law did. It made insurance companies invest 75% of the money they made in Texas back into the Texas economy. The full rendition law was aimed at raising more tax money. Many taxpayers were not telling the government how much their property was really worth property taxes, state property taxes. And so the full rendition law made it so that you had to declare your land at its fair market value. Many people didn't like this. They didn't want to have to pay more taxes. There were efforts at reforming prison, getting rid of corruption, malfeasance, and prisoner mistreatment out of the prisons. And there were efforts at improving education. The Conference for Education in Texas was an organization that met regularly to discuss problems schools were having and discuss laws that could be passed that would help the schools in Texas to better serve the children of Texas. So these are some of the progressive reforms that were passed during this period and there were many, many others. Two names that mark Texas during this period were Jim and Maryam Amanda or Ma Ferguson. Jim Ferguson sometimes went by the nickname Farmer Jim. And he liked to portray himself as a man of the people, but really Farmer Jim was a banker and a businessman. And he just kind of put on this persona that he was a farmer to get the little people, to get the average people interested in what he was doing and what he was saying. Now he did face impeachment and he was impeached and thrown out of office after he got crossways with the University of Texas. Many legislators had graduated from the University of Texas, so he was really going to war against their university and threatened to cut off funds from the university. He had also upset women who were seeking the right to vote, the suffragettes, and they were opposed to him. And it was also discovered that he had taken some money for his last campaign from the liquor lobby. So people who supported prohibition said, look, Farmer Jim is really in bed with the liquor lobby, so how can we trust him? So all of these things work together to help get him out of office. One of the things that African Americans had to deal with during this period was a mixed bag. On the one hand, you had great cultural advancement, jazz and blues music. Some of it originates here in Texas and one of the best known of the jazz blues musicians was a man named Blind Lemon Jefferson. You also had great athletes like Jack Johnson who's pictured here, the heavyweight champion of the world from 1908 to 1915, and many people were upset, many in the white boxing community were upset that an African American would be the world champion. You also had other problems, and these gave rise to groups like the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It started in New York, it soon opened a branch here in Texas because there were many complaints about the way African Americans were treated here in Texas. Two examples, in 1916 in Waco there was a massive lynching, well there was one person who was lynched, but there was a massive audience that turned out to watch Jesse Washington being lynched. He was burned alive and hung and castrated, and it was a terrible scene and it got a lot of bad press, and people in Texas began saying that maybe lynching wasn't such a good thing and wasn't such a good way of dealing with racial problems. The next year, here in Houston, Texas, there was a riot, Buffalo Soldiers at Camp Logan, which is now where Memorial Park is, were rebelling against a bad treatment by local police officers. They mutinied and went into town, into Houston itself, and attacked police officers and private residences, and so you have this mixed bag of good and bad things happening in the African American community. Likewise, for Mexican Americans, you have some problems as well. The Mexican Revolution is going on at this time in Mexico, and so there's a lot of conflict and a lot of problems, and these start spreading into Texas, so you have the development of border problems. One issue was the instance where Gregorio Cortez, who was a farmer in central Texas, he shot and killed a sheriff who was trying to arrest him, who accused him of being a horse thief. Well, Cortez wasn't, and so he was defending himself, shot and killed a sheriff, but this led to a massive manhunt that lasted about 10 days, and many other Mexican Americans were supposedly in the Cortez gang, which was untrue, so this caused a lot of problems for any Mexican American living in South Texas. In 1915, another incident happened that caused many people to be upset. This was the plan of San Diego. During the Mexican Revolution, couriers are going back and forth across the border, and one person was captured, and he found out that he had this plan, which encouraged African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans to join together against the United States and to take back the Southwest, Texas, New Mexico, California, and give it back to Mexico, and where those groups of people would live in peace. This didn't sit very well, and then a couple of years later, there was a message intercepted between Germany and Mexico, stating that if in World War I, Mexico would side with Germany and attack the United States after they won, Mexico would get all that land back, and so many people were upset. Mexican Americans faced a lot of problems and a lot of discrimination, and this led in 1929 to the organization called the League of United Latin American Citizens in an effort to try to stop some of the discrimination. World War I was going on, as I mentioned earlier in the time. Texas had to deal with the influence they had in the United States government, and Woodrow Wilson, the President of the United States Administration. Many Texans played key roles. Colonel House, again, was very influential, and in fact, when World War I came to an end, Wilson sent House to Europe to try to negotiate the peace treaty. Texas also benefited from World War I military build-up. Bases, Army training camps, heavy industry, all happened in Texas, and Texas's economy benefited. There was also prohibition. The 18th Amendment in 1919 outlawed alcohol consumption and manufacturing, and this is going to have an effect on Texas, a lot of Germans in Texas. There were many breweries in Texas, many of those shut down because of prohibition for those 13 years. And so, if we look at Texas and we look at some of the changes, one person is called this period, a period of hood, bonnet, and a little brown jug, and this represents the hood, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Many politicians in Texas were members of the Klan, including Senator Earl Mayfield, the U.S. Senator. Many people were eager and proud to be part of the Klan, and it was very popular. And so, other politicians were probably Klan members as well, but none were as vocal or as open about it. On the other hand, the bonnet stood for Maryam Amanda, otherwise known as Maul Ferguson, the first woman governor of Texas. Jim's wife, and people said that Jim was really the governor. She just sat in the chair, and so they said kind of jokingly, you get two governors to the price of one. But she stood against the Klan, and that's why she's important. Also, the role of Jim Ferguson himself needs to be clear. The Ferguson's were a political juggernaut in Texas. They were a powerhouse. And many of the times, people who followed them held other positions of power. And so, the Ferguson's were very, very important in Texas politics during the time. By 1928, by the end of the period, Texas's role in U.S. politics becomes very important, so much so that Texas hosts the 1928 Democratic National Convention. It's held where the hobby center is today in downtown Houston. And so, Texas became very important politically, and it becomes very well known across the rest of the United States.