Is Texas Beyond Redemption?

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Patrick G. Williams

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Between 1874 and 1890, Texas Democrats known as Redeemers dismantled Reconstruction reforms, adopted a fundamentally revised state constitution and steered Texas in a new direction. Research by University of Arkansas historian Patrick G. Williams establishes that their constitution and policies affected the development of the state through the 20th century and up to today.

“'Redemption’ marked the end of a revolutionary period in Texas and across the South, and represented the effort of white conservative Democrats to rein in the changes enforced by emancipation and Reconstruction,” Williams said.

In Beyond Redemption: Texas Democrats after Reconstruction, Williams — a native Texan — offers “the most detailed study to date of how Democrats destroyed Reconstruction and established an overwhelming power in Texas.” Williams also considers how the Redeemers’ policies in the areas of economic development, public services — most notably education — and citizenship rights created long-lasting patterns that guided the state’s development and governance. Their influence has proved so pervasive and persistent that Williams asks whether Texas is “truly beyond Redemption.”

This generation of Democrats, who controlled state government until 1890, faced issues common to all the states of the South but also conditions peculiar to Texas. The state had a Western frontier with unconquered native peoples, an unstable borderland region and a Latino population that did not fit neatly into Southern understandings of black and white.

As a Southern state, Texas had to address the consequences of emancipation, black enfranchisement and the spread of cotton cultivation. What set Texas apart from much of the South, Williams said, was “extraordinary ethnic diversity, a post-Civil War population boom, vast expanses of undeveloped land still lacking the basic infrastructure of civil government and economic development, and public lands entirely under the state’s control.”

Even though Texas enjoyed the advantages of population growth and natural resources, the Redeemers chose a Southern approach to governing and developing their state.

“Democrats set Texas on a Southern path in ultimately opting for Jim Crow and formal disfranchisement and creating a mode of government that — for all the state’s economic dynamism and natural and human resources — did relatively little to lift many of its citizens from the ranks of the poor and poorly educated,” Williams said.

In both the state constitution of 1876 and in subsequent public policy, the Redeemers sought to undo what they saw as the excesses of Reconstruction government, including an expensive, centralized and intrusive government. The state public education system was a particular target.

“Whatever its achievements, Democrats made the Republican school system a chief object of their anti-Reconstruction crusade, focusing on its centralization and expense as well as the oppression, extravagance, and corruption they claimed inevitably attended such an arrangement,” Williams wrote.

The system of local financing for public education established by the Redeemers in the 1880s “hobbled the state’s schools.” It produced stark inequities, low achievement and high drop-out rates in Texas schools lasting all the way to the present, even during the oil-boom years of the 1970s. More generally, Texas lawmakers, guided by Redeemer precedent, refused to create the sort of tax system that might have assured that all citizens benefited equitably from the state’s wealth.

Beyond Redemption also contributes to the political history of the United States as a whole.

“This complicated process of Redemption was one every Southern state had to face. But, curiously, historians of late 19th-century politics know more about the losers than the winners. As interesting as Radical Republicans and Populists might be, the Democrats — the ones who won — merit far more study than they have heretofore been accorded. This neglect is probably due to the fact that most historians find the people they beat more sympathetic. It’s just not easy to get close to a self-declared party of white supremacy, but those Democrats shaped the way Southern states were governed deep into the 20th century,” Williams said.

A critical part of getting to know them better, he added, is to recognize that Redeemers were “not a homogeneous bunch,” but instead differed from one another in complicated ways.

Williams is an associate professor of history in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas. Beyond Redemption: Texas Democrats after Reconstruction was published by Texas A&M University Press.