I had a little bird
Its name was Enza
I opened a window
And IN-Flu-Enza

Spanish flu virus 1918

In the spring of 1918, all most people were talking about was the war raging in Europe, and when American troops would join the fight. As the United States prepared to join the British and French in their conflict with Germany the newspapers were encouraged to censor unfavorable news. That spring, events that would lead to another deadly story were just getting started. It seemed to start at Fort Riley, a military training camp in Kansas. March 11, 1918 an army cook, private Albert Gitchell, reported to the infirmary with flu systems. He was immediately isolated, but within hours more soldiers reported in sick with the same symptoms. Within five weeks, 1,127 soldiers at Fort Riley had been stricken and 46 of them died. Cases of this new flu were reported in several other military bases as well all through the spring of that year. But this story did not make the papers.

US Army flu ward 1918

Fewer cases were reported by the end of spring. Most men recovered and were deemed fit and healthy so the deployment of American troops to Europe began. Unfortunately the flu went along with them. By early summer reports of flu among French troops and the flu spread across Europe infecting thousands. Heaviest hit in the early months was Spain. As Spain was not involved in World War I its newspapers were free to print all the news and so the Flu was known as the Spanish Flu. By July of 1918 the flu had spread to Asia and Africa, but seemed to be dying out. Unfortunately a second wave of infections began in early fall of 1918, this version more deadly that the first, with patients dying within hours of symptoms. When the Armistice came in November of 1918, and people came together in large groups to celebrate, a third wave of the flu spread around the world. This version was not as deadly as the second, but more deadly than the first. The epidemic lasted well into1919 before it finally ended.

WWI ambulance drivers 1918

The statistics of the 1918 pandemic are astounding: An estimated 500 million were infected worldwide, with somewhere between 20-50 million deaths. In the United States 675,000 flu deaths, a figure ten times the American WWI battlefield deaths. Modern researchers have been able to identify the flu as a strain of the H1N1 virus, and discovered that  three genes in the virus worked to weaken human bronchial tubes leading to bacterial pneumonia. But they did not discover a way to kill the offending virus. The most effective way of stopping the spread is to deny it human hosts; in other words keep people away from those infected.

So what lessons have we learned? Apparently not as many as we need. The advances of modern science have enabled us to discover the sources of many illnesses that confused populations of the past. We know that it was bacteria on rats that caused the bubonic plague of the 14^th century. The microorganisms that cause many diseases have been identified, but not all diseases have cures even today. Viral flu is one of them. In fact the world has seen three other major flu epidemics since 1918.  The “Asian flu” 1957-58 saw estimated deaths of  two million worldwide, while the estimated deaths of the “Hong Kong Flu” of 1968-69 were one million. The first pandemic of the 21^st century was the “Swine Flu” outbreak of 2009-2010. According to the Centers of Disease control (CDC) approximately 700 million people worldwide contracted this flu but only about 285,000 died from it.

The difference in death rates for modern flu epidemics can probably be attributed to the development of vaccines. Unfortunately the viruses that cause flu-like symptoms constantly mutate so a one-size-fits-all vaccine is not medically possible. With this reality firmly in the minds of the medical community, the CDC was asked to develop a response plan to future pandemics in 2005. Entitled National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza, the twelve page document outlined a concrete plan of action should a pandemic occur. Execution of the plan depended on early governmental action and global cooperation. The creators of the plan recognized the need for coordinated action of multiple players and that leadership from reliable authorities was necessary; that included leadership from the medical, political, and private sectors.

Since prevention is the most important part of the plan, it outlines simple rules for stopping the spread of the flu in an effort to halt it before it reached pandemic proportions: 1.Isolation of those infected; 2. Quarantine of those suspected of being exposed; 3. Good personal hygiene – wash hands etc.; 4. Disinfection of public and private areas; 5. Limit public  gatherings. The 2005 plan was updated several times to reflect conditions as each new form of the mutated viruses caused flu epidemics.  In 2017 a forty-page update to the plan built on the medical containment successes using information learned from each flu outbreak after the 1918 pandemic.

COVID-19 flu virus

We are now in the middle of another flu pandemic. Like the early stages of the 1918 flu knowledge of the existence of the flu outbreak was kept quiet and locally contained, until it couldn’t be. First reported on December 31, 2019 in one province in China, and two weeks later the first death was announced. Since January 20, 2020 the virus identified as a corona- virus and designated COVID-19  has spread across the world.  On January 30 the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global health emergency. In an effort to stop the spread of the disease, countries all over the globe have instituted travel restrictions, local quarantines, and shelter in place orders. Leading to disruption of businesses large and small, and the closure of schools and universities.

The new normal is “social distancing” if you need to leave your home for essential shopping for items such as food or household needs. The year 2020 will be the year of toilet paper hording ( why I do not know since COVID-19 is a respiratory disease). Life has changed for many Americans as the disease puts great strain on our health system and economy. We will either follow the commonsense rules and let the infections die out, while scientists world-wide search for a treatment or vaccine, or we can choose to ignore our experts and see the infection numbers grow leading to unnecessary casualties.

For China, there is a glimmer of hope.  By March 19, 2020 they have reported no new cases of sedentary population (34 new cases reported for people returning home from elsewhere). According to WHO, as of March 23, 2020 the total number of reported cases worldwide was 377,045, with confirmed deaths of 23,673 and 123,329 recovered or discharged with minimum symptoms. Most countries are reporting cases equal to a small percentage of their total populations, but Italy appears to be an outlier. With a population of just over 60 million people, Italy has reported 80589 cases with 8215 deaths, which accounts for 35% of total deaths worldwide. With a population number over five times that of Italy, the United States has reported 80857 cases with only 1163 deaths. The death rates make news but in reality, over 85% of people infected have recovered. The goal in this crisis should be to avoid getting infected in the first place. Follow your health professionals suggestions!

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), National Institutes of Health (NIH)  and the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) employ the leading medical experts in the United States. They helped develop that 2005 plan for a pandemic. We need to follow their advice until the crisis is over.

A salient point from the 2005 Pandemic plan states:  

“Potential pandemic influenza viruses can be unpredictable, characterized by significant uncertainty of their place of emergence, timing, and severity. Flexibility is essential to any pandemic influenza planning effort, as plans will need to be easily and quickly adapted to the circumstances. HHS must be prepared to respond to the specific needs of an evolving pandemic, as epidemiologic and laboratory data emerge. Each response is different, even if the same basic principles apply. A nimble and effective pandemic response with flexible, sustain able capabilities will save lives and mitigate social and economic disruption.” P40    https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/pdf/pan-flu-report-2017v2.pdf

An action plan is only successful if followed. How many Americans knew that such a plan existed or even to look for it? This national plan assumes that local plans enhance and support it for the health and well-being of all communities in the US. We have more rapid deployment of information available to us now than our great-grand parents had in 1918. Medical advances have improved treatments for many diseases, but not for viral flus. No single pill or vaccination has been created to treat the underlying causes of influenzas; we still can only treat symptoms and related infections for flu patients.

SO – Follow the guidelines listed by our medical experts. 1. Don’t travel if you can avoid it. 2. Practice social distancing when you must interact with others in your community. 3. Don’t hoard vital supplies of medial equipment such as masks, gloves and sanitizers needed by medial facilities. 4. WASH YOUR HANDS.

The History of pandemics is lengthy, stretching back to Antonine Plague (165 AD) which decimated the Roman army returning from Mesopotamia. The 20^th century Spanish flu remains the deadliest in the modern era. Let’s not make COVID-19 historical.

For credible medical information about the current pandemic you can go to the following websites:

CDC https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-nCoV/index.html

WHO https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019

NIH https://www.nih.gov/

NIAID https://www.niaid.nih.gov/

On the third Monday of February the United States celebrates “Presidents Day.” The day was chosen because it usually is the Monday closes to George Washington’s actual birthday, February 22.  It is a federal holiday now celebrating, not just Washington, but the presidency in general.

George Washington was the obvious choice for president once the new Constitution created the office. He had led the colonial army and secured Independence against formidable odds. Washington was determined that the he and those who would follow honor the separation of powers among the here branches of government and was careful to craft the presidential role to that end.

George Washington’s first term was most notable for weathering domestic upheaval, and involved getting the new  government set up and operating. To do this Washington created a “cabinet” of executive department leaders and presidential advisors.  This new body was a study in contrasting personalities and purposes, and consisted of only four members: Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of War Henry Knox, and Attorney General Edmund Randolph.

The first item on the administrative list was to stabilize the nation’s finances.  Secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, was able to put most of his financial plan into operation, and most of the opposition was willing to compromise on the various provisions. But, the creation of a national back sparked a constitutional fight. Thomas Jefferson (Sec of State) opposed the bank on the principle that the constitution made no provision for the creation of one. Washington called on John Jay, chief Justice of the Supreme Court, to settle the question. Jay decided in favor of the bank, citing the “necessary and proper” clause of the constitution.  Washington signed the bank bill and by the time he left office in 1795 the bank was capitalized and the national debt was under control. But, the issue highlighted a constitutional controversy which continues to the present: how to interpret the constitution. Should it be strict: exact words must be in there or loose using the “meaning” and “intention” of the words.

The debate over the bank plan was not confined to government leaders, it also received mixed reviews among the people. Some only voiced opposition: others reacted violently. The controversy erupted in violence in the rural western regions of Pennsylvania over the internal excise tax on whiskey. Farmers in western Pennsylvania found it very economical to transport their surplus grain to market in the form of whiskey. Hamilton’s excise tax place a tax of up to 25% on the whiskey. When the farmers protested, the government refused to relent.  A farmer’s convention in Pittsburg sent a list of resolutions to President Washington denouncing the tax and declaring that they would prevent its collection. But it wasn’t just taxing they were concerned about; it was the system in general. The tax placed on whiskey treated it like a consumer product, but the farmers treated the whiskey as an article of barter. The tax had to be paid in cash, but often the farmers did not get any cash their transactions.

Violations of the excise tax were supposed to be tried close to the offense, but farmers often had to travel 300 miles or more for their tax trials at considerable person expense. The excise men often entered homes at will looking for untaxed stills;  it was hardly surprising that the Western opposition erupted into armed conflict, known as the Whiskey Rebellion.

Faced with open insurrection Washington quickly called out the state’s militia of Massachusetts and the three surrounding states to put down the rebellion and places Alexander Hamilton in the lead. The combined force was 13,000 men (larger than most American armies that faced the British). They did not have to do much fighting because the rebels fled into the wilderness and only a few were captured. Two were tried and convicted of treason, but pardoned by Washington. The rebellion ended quickly, but the fight would live on in the newly forming political parties; the rise of political parties centered around the concept of governmental control and power.

The new parties were the Federalists who favored strong central government. It was generally supported in the East and Northeast by northern farmers and tidewater planters. Party membership included George Washington (by default), John Adams and  Alexander Hamilton. The second new party was the Democratic Republicans  who feared strengthening federal government at the expense of state government and individual liberty. Generally supporters were artisans, wage workers in towns, and small farm owners in South, North and especially the West. Membership here included Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe. Even as he supported the strong building efforts for the new government; Washington warned of the dangers that partisan politics would bring to the new republic.

Washington’s second term in office was marked by several serious international crisises.  In 1789 the French Revolution began as an attempt to reform an “arbitrary monarchy weakened by debt and administrative decay.” It quickly degenerated into a political and social blood-bath far overreaching its moderate beginnings. Inspired by the American Revolution, the French Revolution will change not only France, but all of Europe and the fledgling Unites States as well.

In 1793, the revolutionary government beheaded Louis XVI and one faction rose to power only to be deposed by another. When the excesses of the revolution began to threaten the conservative royal governments of Europe, they begin to consider stepping in to end the revolution. The United States first supported the revolution, but gradually tried to distance herself from the blood bath. Revolutionary French government decided to attack first and by the end of 1793 Europe was at war; this time is it France against everyone else. The US stayed neutral.

The war in Europe presented Washington with several problems. Both England and France wanted US raw materials. As a neutral government US could trade with both. The problem with this was that neither side respected the US neutrality.  In addition, Old Alliance Treaty (1778) seemed to demand that US help France, but that agreement had been made with the dead King, and considered that the treaty died with the King. At first most Americans like Thomas Jefferson supported France, but as the excesses began to rise, US support fell. Most Federalists favor siding with England because it had a stable government.

In April 1793 France sent Edmond Genêt to US as ambassador. He was supposed to negotiate a trade treaty with Washington, but he has another agenda as well. He commissioned American privateers to plague British ships in the Caribbean and recruits forces to invade Spanish Florida.  All of this against American policy. Washington remained neutral. In defiance of protocol, Genêt urges the US Congress to reject the president’s policy and openly support France. Washington is understandably furious and calls for Genêt’s recall, but his French government falls and he can’t go home.  Genêt stayed in the US,  married Governor of New York De Witt Clinton’s daughter and lived a long and prosperous life as an American.

October 1794 Congress formally passed the Neutrality Act of 1794, and requested that both England and France respect it; neither one did. Eventually the conflict between France and the rest of Europe will lead to a military conflict for the United States, the War of 1812, but George Washington won’t be alive to witness it.

In 1795, after eight years as President, Washington decides to retire. Because he supported Hamilton, politically, he is labeled a Federalist, even though he considered himself to be above party politics. Washington’s  farewell address remains his vision of what the presidency ought to be and how the nation should be governed in the future. The address has been read in Congress to commemorate president’s day for the last 100 years.

“The Farewell Address definitely embodies the core beliefs that Washington hoped would continue to guide the nation. Several hands produced the document itself. The opening paragraphs remain largely unchanged from the version drafted by James Madison in 1792, while most of the rest was penned by Alexander Hamilton, whom Washington directed to remove the bitterness from an intermediate draft that the president himself had written. Although the drawn out language of the Address follows Hamilton’s style, there is little doubt that the core ideas were not only endorsed by Washington but were beliefs that he and Hamilton had developed together as the new nation’s leading nationalists.” https://www.ushistory.org/us/17d.asp

As he departed the presidency, he warned of two great dangers to the new nation. Dangers, that, to some extent, exist today: one the damaging effects of party politics and other international pressures.

Since bigotry and bias in society have never been conquered, in honor of the designated “Black History Month”, I think that an essay about the influence of the Ku Klux Klan in politics would be as appropriate now as it would have been in the 1920s.

Texans like to pride themselves on their colorful past.  Ask any native of Dallas, Lubbock or El Paso and he will tell you that it is somehow more dramatic and exciting to live in the Lone Star State.  The history of just the state’s politics seems to prove the claim.  Historically, Texas elections have usually been lively, sometimes less that “democratic,” and certainly entertaining.  The United State Senate race of 1922 was no exception.  A campaign bitterly waged in primary, run‑off, and general election, not on political platform issues, but on the strength of personalities, the bitterness of old political wounds and the power of the Ku Klux Klan.  At the center of the controversial election sat anti‑Klan newspapers like The Dallas Morning News, was editorially committed to the destruction of the Klan and its political aspirations.  Other newspapers were also anti‑Klan, but the News appeared to be its most active opponent, and seemed to become not only a reporter of the 1922 senatorial election, but also a participant.

            In 1922 the primary source of news, for most people, was still the newspaper.  Publishers and editors often used their presses to further their individual political, moral, and philosophical views.  Sometimes the campaigns waged in the press was more exciting and entertaining than the boring two hour speeches delivered in church meeting halls.  But in reality, just how influential was the support or opposition of the press to the outcome of any election?  Did the newspaper coverage of The Dallas Morning News and other Texas newspapers determine the issues and the ultimate outcome of one of the most controversial Texas elections?

            The newspaper war with the Ku Klux Klan started before the 1922 election.  On the evening of May 21, 1921 the Klan held a rally at the Majestic theater in Dallas.  At 9 o’clock the lights on Main and Elm streets were turned off and robed and masked figures began emerging from the theater and moving out into the street.  The leader carried an American flag, behind him a second figure carried a burning cross.  Some eight hundred hooded individuals marched single file down Main street and back up Elm.  The marchers did not speak, but carried banners with slogans such as:  “The Invisible Empire,” “White Supremacy,” “Right Will Prevail,” and “All Native Born.”  The Saturday night hometown crowd did not speak as they watched the fiery parade go by.

            Dallas Morning News editor, Alonzo Wasson remembered the spectacle when he went to work the next day:

“For a long time I had been viewing the lawlessness of the Ku Kluxclan with extreme disfavor.  The News, however, had not up to the time of the incident I am about to recite, taken a notice of it in its editorial.       Coming down to the office one Sunday morning to read the proofs of Monday’s editorial, which had been set the night before, I was confronted in Sunday’s morning’s paper by headlines proclaiming a parade of 2,000 of its hooded members.  A long suppressed resentment and disgust which had been suppressed boiled over.  Without more ado whatever I turned to       my typewriter, and in no time whatever I turned out an editorial denouncing that organization and it days rather more vigorously than the News was wont to deliver itself.”2 

            That May 22 editorial was just the beginning.  The News began to report every incident of Klan violence anywhere, and the stories were not buried on the inside pages.  From May 1921 well into the summer of 1922 stories of Klan lynchings, intimidation, and other excesses were front page stories for the Dallas paper,  and other Texas newspapers.  The Houston Chronicle warned:  “Boys, you’d better disband. . . you’d better take off you sheets. . . and make one fine bonfire;”  the El Paso Times  reported that:  “Apparently the Ku Klux with his ghostly trappings has not considered El Paso a safe place for night riding with masked face, but the general opinion elsewhere seems to be that it essays to set up a sort of super‑government and that’s not Americanism.3  The Ku Klux Klan and the press drew their battle lines.  The summer primaries and fall elections provided the battlefield. 

Progressive legislation passed in 1905 to reform the candidate selection process introduced the primary system to Texas, but Texas politics in the 1920’s, were in reality, controlled by the Democratic party.  The actual political battles were fought in the democratic primary and run‑offs, not in the fall general elections.  Early in the spring of 1922 candidates for the office of United States Senator from Texas began to declare themselves.  One of the first was Charles A. Culberson, the sitting Senator.   After serving over twenty years in the Senate, he sought a fifth term.  Culberson had been ill for a number of years, but he still represented Texas very well in Washington.  During his fourth term the Congressional sessions covered 1217 days and Culberson had been present in his seat for each of those days.  As political columnist Mark Sullivan noted,

” it is not the length of service that makes Senator Culberson and his present candidacy for reelection picturesquely unique.  The striking thing that can be said about Senator Culberson is that he has made fewer speeches, . . . has probably actually sat in the Senate Chamber for a larger number of hours, has actually answered a larger number of roll calls and has cast his vote one way or the other on more measures than any other setting Senator.”4

Ill though he may have been, the old Wilson Progressive Democrats still backed him, and the Culberson campaign opened strongly.  On April 2, 1922 the Dallas Morning News ran a front page story featuring a letter which Culberson had written to Major H.V. Fisher of Houston.  The headline proclaimed:  “Senator Culberson Denounces Ku Klux.”  The letter made Culberson’s position very clear.

“If not curbed, it will usurp the functions of the state and be      destructive of government itself.  It will indeed overthrow our Anglo-Saxon civilization in its relation to government.  Steps should be taken therefore at once to arrest its progress and finally destroy it.”5 

On the same page the News ran a two column notice of a mass meeting being called by a “citizens group” which opposed the Klan.  The text of the notice was a further denunciation of the Klan and its followers:

“There is no middle ground for a good citizen to take. He must either be for the law or against it. . . . We can not now therefore, afford to commit the protection of our people to officers sworn to obey the laws of this land who at the same time recognize their obligation to the superior officers of the Ku Klux Klan.”6 

            A second candidate for Culberson’s seat entered the race.  He was Cullen F. Thomas a leading prohibitionist from Waco.  Thomas had the backing of the Houston Chronicle and a February editorial proclaimed, “Cullen Thomas stands for the best, and only the best, ideals in our body politic.”7  Thomas, like Culberson, was very vocally anti‑Klan.  In a speech quoted in the Dallas Morning News, Thomas maintained, “terrorism, organized or unorganized must be stamped out.  Mobocracy, whether masked or unmasked must go.”  But Thomas had reservations about basing his entire campaign on this one issue, fearing that it would split the prohibitionist vote.

Another candidate entered the race who agreed with Culberson and Thomas, at least on the issue of the Klan, former governor, James Ferguson. According to the terms of his impeachment Ferguson had been barred from seeking any state office, but the ruling apparently did not apply to a national office.  In his own newspaper, the Ferguson Forum, “Farmer Jim” bitterly attacked the Klan, but like Thomas, he hesitated to make Klan power the major campaign issue:  “For God’s sake let us not send a Senator to Washington branded either Ku Klux or anti‑Ku Klux.  Texas is entitled to better treatment.”8  Ferguson might not have wished to base his campaign on the Klan issue, but the Dallas Morning News did.  April 4, 1922 the headline read, “James Ferguson Raps Ku Klux Klan,” and the article which followed quoted freely from Ferguson’s Forum.

 “Now I am opposed to the Ku Klux Klan from every angle that I have observed it, but if anybody thinks that it ought to control their vote for or against me, then in my opinion their conception of their duty as a citizen covers mighty little ground.9

            Three more men entered the race, three Klansmen:  Robert L. Henry of Waco, Sterling P. Strong of Dallas, and Earle B. Mayfield of Bosque County. 

The Texas Klan leadership realizing that three Klan candidates would dilute the 100,000 or more Klan votes, met late in March 1922 at the Raleigh Hotel in Waco to decide which candidate to support.  One of the leaders, Edwin P. Clark, the Great Klan “Titan” from Waco remembered meeting Mayfield in the hotel lobby just before he went up to the afternoon meeting.  “I thought it was rather coincidental at least that he was there at that time.”  Mayfield assured him that he was just passing through and had stopped to see some friends at the hotel.10  The friend Mayfield met in the lobby was Hiram Wesley Evans, “Titan” from Dallas.  The other two “Titans” present were H.C. McCall from Houston, and Brown Harwood from Fort Worth, but the Great Titan from San Antonio, Ralph Cameron, was unable to attend.  At one point in the meeting Evans tried to sway the others towards Mayfield.  He slapped Clark on the knee and said,

“Erwin, I have a dead one in Dallas [Strong], and one here in Waco [Henry].  Mayfield is the man.  Now, they are all three Klansmen and Strong and Henry are both good fellows, and we do not want to hurt their feelings, let them ride for a while and at the proper time we will ditch them and concentrate on Mayfield.”11 

Clark protested this approach, arguing that Henry was the strongest candidate, but the majority overruled him and he finally agreed to what became known as the “Waco agreement.”  In a letter circulated by the Texas Grand Dragon, A. D. Ellis, Earle Mayfield was acknowledged as the Klan candidate, “I know that the spirit of 100 per cent Americanism will be enhanced with Klansman Mayfield representing us in Washington.”12  Not all the Klansmen agreed, and Henry refused to dropped out of the race before the primary voting.

             The Klan endorsement proved to be politically sound for Mayfield. He was identified as the Klan’s candidate, even though he maintained that he had left the organization, and would refuse to campaign openly on the Klan issue.  On April 13, 1922 the Dallas Morning News published the text of a Dallas County Citizens League questionnaire being sent to all candidates.  The first three questions got right to the heart of the matter:

       1.  Are you a member of the organization known as the Ku Klux Klan?

       2.  Is it your purpose or intention to affiliate hereafter in any way with the Ku Klux Klan?

       3.  Are you in sympathy with the purposes and objectives of the Ku Klux Klan?

Mayfield avoided answering the Citizen’s League questionnaire and refused to discuss Klan membership saying:

“the recent agitation about the Ku Klux Klan is confined largely to the city of Dallas and is nothing more or less than a political fracas raised by Dallas Politicians for the purpose of boosting the candidacy of a certain candidate for the United States Senate. I refuse to walk into their trap.”13

            As the democratic primary approached the four strongest candidates tried to focus on what they considered to be the vial issues.  Culberson’s campaign managers extolled his long and venerable record of service, and tried to downplay his ill health.  “If I tell you that Senator Culberson is physically fit, you might say that my love for him causes my judgement to be biased, . . .[so] I will quote from other witnesses who are disinterested.14  Thomas stressed his prohibition stand, “I am in favor of a sober citizenship of America and the world.”  Ferguson ran as the “underdog.”  “Have you ever stopped to think about it?  In this race it’s me against the field.”  Mayfield tried to run on his accomplishments as railroad commissioner and his stand on rate fixing and prohibition, ” What are you going to do about Texas?  Are you going to continue to pay freight rates 5 or 6 times the value of the product you ship, or are you going to elect some man who understands the tariff question?”15 

            Mayfield’s democratic opposition continued to press the Klan issue:    ” Why does Mr. Mayfield stand mute in the presence of 5,000,000       Democrats who demand that he announce his membership in this       organization? . . . Is not Earle Mayfield known as a `jiner’ of every order and organization in Texas from the Farmer’s Union to the Ku Klux Klan?”16 

            The newspaper coverage of the primary election on July 22 kept the Klan connection alive.  “Klan Is Big Issue in Dallas Primary,” the News proclaimed in bold type, and it made sure that the voters were aware of “KKK Supervisors At Polls.”  The News also attacked Klan influence on politics in a very strongly worded editorial which began:  “Today is testing day.  Tomorrow we shall know if a minority in disguise can dictate the invisible governing of the visible government of Texas.”17  The headline banner on July 23 told the story which the News had dreaded, “Mayfield is Leading.”  When the count was completed, Mayfield still lead, followed by Ferguson, only some 30,000 votes behind.  Mayfield and Ferguson would face each other in an August run‑off.  The Dallas Morning News’s July 25th editorial acknowledged a Klan victory.  “The Ku Klux Klan appealed to the electorate of Dallas County for an endorsement of its ideals, its principles and its purposes.  What it asked for it obtained.”  But was the election a Klan victory?  Other newspapers did not believe that it was.  The fact that the total number of votes cast for the four anti‑Klan candidates outnumbered those cast for Mayfield and Henry by almost 2 to 1 caused some editors to doubt Klan strength.18  The San Angelo Standard maintained that, “the Klan has won no victory in Texas, and the Corpus Christi Caller agreed, “the Klan influence cannot be counted as the one decisive factor in the Mayfield victory.”19 

            As Mayfield and Ferguson began to prepare for the second campaign, former foes now had to decide which man to endorse.  Culberson’s campaign manager, Barry Miller, threw his support to Ferguson.20  Cullen Thomas favored Mayfield because of his stand on prohibition.  Many of Ferguson’s old foes tried to keep his name off the ballot using the impeachment verdict as cause, but the state Democratic committee crushed that ploy.21 

            As the second campaign progressed, Ferguson deliberately kept the Ku Klux Klan issue in the forefront of his attacks on Mayfield.  Equating Klan power with big railroads and big business, Ferguson alleged that Mayfield and the Klan would “bring on the greatest internal revolution this nation ever saw, and . . . plunge us into a condition far worse than Russia itself.22  He also attacked Mayfield’s character, charging that Mayfield might vote dry, but he drank wet, and was “guilty of conduct with the opposite sex that I cannot, in decency, mention when ladies are present in the audience.”23 

            Mayfield’s campaigning got personal in response to Ferguson’s attacks.  Recalling the impeachment trial, Mayfield charged that Ferguson was an unrepentant perjurer who would lie about anything to suit his purpose.  Mayfield countered with a claim that Ferguson had received some 3,500 black votes in Bexar county, a violation of democratic primary rules.24 

            Ferguson’s personal appeal to many voters still left him short at the ballot box.  Even though most of the Klan candidates for statewide offices lost in the run‑off, the combination of the Klan votes and prohibition forces proved too strong for the former governor;  Mayfield won 317,591 to 265,233.  The newspaper reaction to the election results generally agreed that “had Earle B. Mayfield been opposed in the runoff by some Democrat without the stain of impeachment and the deep scares of an old party feud upon him, Mayfield would have gone the way of the three other favorites of the Ku Kluxers.”25  Mayfield won the run‑off, but it looked as though he would still have to fight for party control in the Democratic State Convention, as both Klan and anti‑Klan forces began testing their strength. When the convention ended Klan forces successfully averted placing an anti‑Klan statement in the party’s platform.26 

            Anti‑Klan Democrats left the convention determined to nominate an independent to challenge Mayfield.  On September 9, 1922 they met in Dallas to discuss calling a statewide meeting for September 16th.  On the 15th, Democratic lawyers Sam Hunter and A. V. Dalrymple of Fort Worth sent a telegram to Mayfield, urging him to declare publicly his affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan or to deny it.  As Dalrymple told a reporter for the Fort Worth Star Telegram,

       “We gave Mayfield a fine chance to state his position and thus far he has refused to answer.  During his campaign he said the Ku Klux Klan was not an issue.  We say it is the only issue and are going to make it so.” 

Rebuffed by Mayfield, Dalrymple lead a delegation of about 500 Fort Worth Democrats who joined the independent convention in Dallas.27  The convention nominated George E. B. Peddy, a young assistant district attorney from Harris County.  The Republican nominee withdrew in favor of Peddy and the Republican party endorsed him as their candidate as well.28  Many anti‑Klan Democrats favored Peddy, and he had the editorial backing of several influential newspapers including the Houston Post.  Even James Ferguson endorsed him, which was ironic considering that in 1917 Peddy had led a University of Texas student protest against the then, Governor Ferguson.30 

            The anti‑Klan press followed the independent campaign with great glee, but the euphoria was short lived.  Attorney General, W.A. Keeling severely handicapped the independent cause when he ruled that Peddy’s name could not be certified or printed on the ballot as the “independent candidate” because he had voted in the Democratic primary.  Furthermore, Keeling declared, Peddy could not be certified as the “Republican candidate” because he had not been nominated in a convention, or primary.30  With Peddy’s name kept off the ballot, the only way he could challenge Mayfield was through a massive write‑in campaign.  The Attorney General’s ruling prompted the beginning of a series of protests, hearings, trials, appeals, and rulings which made a mockery of the election process.  To counteract the damage done by Keeling’s ruling, the independents began legal proceedings to have Mayfield’s name barred as well, on the basis of campaign irregularities.  They filed suit in the Thirteenth District Court alleging that Mayfield had exceeded the $10,000 limit on spending and not reporting additional funds provided by the Ku Klux Klan.  

            The case against Mayfield went to the Fifth Court of Civil Appeals, and the anti‑Klan papers reported Mayfield’s predicament with front page headlines, even printing large portions of the testimony, which revealed some financial irregularities.31  The Appeals court issued an injunction barring Mayfield’s certification, but further appeals moved the case onto the Texas Supreme Court, where the lower court’s rulings were overturned.  Mayfield’s name was finally certified as the Democratic candidate, but not before November 6, the afternoon before election day.  As a result of the court proceedings, and rulings Peddy’s name did not appear printed on any ballot as either the independent or Republican candidate, and Mayfield’s name only appeared on the ballots of thirty‑two counties.  The Klan, fearing that Mayfield’s name would not be certified, donated $25,000 for “use in instructing Klansmen how to write in his [Mayfield] name.32 

            Peddy never really had much of a chance of victory because the old democratic coalitions held the real power.  Mayfield got both the Klan vote and that of the democratic “drys” who feared Peddy’s stand on prohibition.  Ferguson’s support of Peddy  caused many voters to believe that the Houston lawyer had switched sides in the prohibition issue, and saw Peddy’s attack on the Klan as simply a political diversion.33  Mayfield won with 264,260 to Peddy’s 130,744.  The press then characterized the win as a measure of strength for the Democratic party rather than the Ku Klux Klan.34 

            The election results, however, did not end the campaign.  Peddy and his supporters took the fight to the United States Senate, filing an election contest brief against Mayfield on February 22, 1923, charging a Ku Klux Klan conspiracy and campaign expenditure irregularities.  Peddy asked that the election be set aside and that Mayfield be barred from taking his seat.35  The petition was referred to a subcommittee on Privileges and Elections, which held hearings from May 8, 1923 to December 13, 1924.  Once again, the anti‑Klan press had something to report.

            The hearings in Washington were big news in Texas, and the press meticulously gave detailed accounts of the charges and counter‑charges.  Mayfield denied all wrongdoing both in interviews with the press and in a brief presented to the Senate subcommittee.  He steadfastly maintained that he had fulfilled all the rules of the Texas primary system and that he had run a good clean campaign, and was confident that the ballot counting had been fair and accurate. 

            The Texas newspapers avidly reported the progress of the hearings, as the committee heard witness after witness, each one seeming to prove Peddy’s allegations.  What began to unfold in their accounts was a picture of unfair and sometimes illegal voting practices in many precincts. 

            The newspapers constantly pushed the Klan issue and Mayfield continued to try to avoid the subject.  The Fort Worth Star Telegram described Mayfield’s denial of Klan help as an “indignant protestation,” “avoiding any responsibility for what the Klan may have spent, the Mayfield answer holds responsibility for him only on what his self‑organized and self‑directed campaign headquarters spent.”40  But the testimony of both Robert Henry and Edwin Clark confirmed Klan involvement in the campaign.  Henry testified that Mayfield had tried to force him out of the race to consolidate the Klan vote.

  “He [Mayfield] says, “we are both Klansmen now, and we ought not to allow this opportunity to go by.”  He said, “I have assisted in building up this militant political organization, have done a great deal of work, and I would like to reap the fruits.”41

Clark described to the committee how the Klan decided to back Mayfield against his advice.  Clark felt that the Klan candidate should be a man proud to be called a Klansman:  “I said Earle Mayfield is a Klansman and no one knows it.  Its kept under cover.”42 

            While the testimony regarding the Klan was regularly reported, it was the testimony concerning the ballot boxes and local election practices which seemed to be more damaging to Mayfield’s claim that the voting had been fair and honest.  The Fort Worth Star Telegram reported the gathering of the ballot boxes and listed the twenty Mayfield supporters who collected the boxes and turned them over to the federal authorities;  the article also named W. V. Howerton of Austin as leader of the pro‑Peddy group who gathered boxes for their count. “Ten tons of mail will be needed to transport the boxes.  There were approximately 4,000 boxes used in the near 250 counties in which the election was held in November. . . . When the boxes arrive in Washington, clerks and workers will begin the count of the ballots.”43 “Errors Found In Tarrant Voting Are Compiled,”  declared the January 9, 1924 Star Telegram headline.  The article went on to detail an extremely long list of errors from numerous precincts.  The Dallas Morning News and other anti‑Klan papers ran similar stories.44  Poll watchers and poll workers were called before the committee and many told stories of intimidation, and voting fraud.  A Mr. Parke of Rural Shade, Texas, a very small town near Kerens, testified that the ballot boxes were delivered to him by Klansmen.  “Some Ku‑Kluxers at Rural Shade would look after the matter.  . . . a party of men came there, including W.B. Parker and had the ballots for my holding the election.”45 

            The press reporting tended to reflect a pro‑Peddy bias, especially in the anti‑Klan papers.  In an article headlined, “Sheppard Sent Protest On Mayfield,” the Star Telegram reported that a telegram sent to Senator Sheppard urged that Mayfield be denied his seat, as the Senate had refused another Senator‑elect on charges of campaign irregularities. ” You voted to unseat Truman H. Newberry of Michigan from the United States Senate because of the unlawful expenditure of money in his campaign for that position.  Your action in doing so meets with our approval.  Having voted to unseat Newberry can you consistently vote to seat Earle B. Mayfield of Texas?”47 

Joseph Hart, writing in The New Republic, generally condemned both sides and Texas politics, as well: “The gods are laughing again ‑‑ in Texas.  It used to be said that Texas raised two great crops, superlatively, namely steers and hell.  Conditions have changed somewhat in recent years, and the production of steers has fallen off;  but the totally productivity of the state has increased appreciably.48 

            As the hearings progressed, the general opinion seemed to be that Mayfield would not be seated.  “Senate Forecasts Defeat of Mayfield,” the Star Telegram reported on March 29, 1924, and pointed to the Klan issue as the deciding factor:

 “The paper then undertakes the review of the cast, as outlined in the charges filed by George E.B. Peddy, in which the Ku lux Klan issue is stressed.  In a survey of the situation the Post says:  “Republican leaders are going to bat good and hard t the Mayfield petition.  Many Democrats are in close quarters in the controversy. . . . the tentative program, as already outlined in dispatches to Texas papers is to permit Senator Mayfield to take his seat and then have a resolution introduced to oust him.”49

But when the vote was finally taken on February 2, 1925, the committee voted unanimously to seat Mayfield and on February 3rd, the entire Senate unanimously adopted the committee’s report.  The report was not read in open session and there was no debate.  After all of the uproar, Mayfield quietly took his seat on February 4, 1925, finally becoming an active member of the body.50  The invisible power of the Klan appeared to have reached into the United States Senate.

            The major Texas newspapers were mindful of this and continued the fight.  From the first anti‑Klan editorial in 1921, to well into 1925 papers, like the Dallas Morning News continued to publish anti‑Klan stories and to support anti‑Klan candidates.  In an effort to discredit the paper, the Klan spread an “anonymous” rumor that the News was owned and controlled by Catholics.  As the rumor spread advertising and subscriptions began to drop and News agents began writing to Dallas asking for help in halting the decline.  The experiences of agent A.D. Patterson were being repeated in every corner of the News’ market:

       “Dear Sir: ‑‑I will thank you to cut down my daily supplies 15 copies and Sunday 25 copies.  We were indeed lucky to get by on the first of February with losing only 12 regular subscribers, considering the fight made against The News by a certain organization.”51 

At first the News tried to ignore the whole affair.  George Dealey, president, and general manager of the paper reassured his agents that all was essentially sound.

 A March 3, 1922 memo written to agent F.L. Sherrill in Greenville concisely stated his position:

“Suppose a cotton buyer who happened to be a Republican should        refuse to buy a bale of cotton from a farmer who had it for sale because he (the farmer) happened to be a Democrat. . . . It is utterly ridiculous to think that we can’t do business with each other because we do no agree with each other on disputed questions. . . . Isn’t it likely that there are many people who say that they have quit buying The News who, in fact never did buy it. . . . I ask your careful attention to the page announcement which will appear in The News on Sunday, next, regarding The News and it’s editorial policy.  We have no apologies to make to anyone. . . we feel. . . that the people who think and know are with us, and that we will gain more than we lose.”52

The announcement Dealey printed in The News read in part, “The News is neither owned nor controlled by members of the Catholic Church, . . . but The News does believe in religious tolerance for all sects.”  The notice went on to list the religious affiliations of each editor and principal stockholder.53  Besides the printed announcement, Dealey , one of his sons, or a ranking editor, personally answered each of the several hundreds of inquiring letters sent to the paper repeating the same disclaimer. 

By the end of 1922 it appeared that the Klan had the News on the ropes, advertising was down and the paper had lost 3000 subscriptions.54  The paper also experienced an unrelated cash flow problem which eventually led to the sale of the News’ parent paper, The Galveston News, on March 22, 1923.  The Klan proudly announced that the sale signaled the end of the Dallas Morning News, but the celebration was premature.  The sale of the Galveston News allowed the Dallas paper to recover financially and emerge as an even stronger opponent of the Klan.  The final political and editorial battle between the Dallas Morning News and the Ku Klux Klan would be the gubernatorial race of 1924 and the News would emerge the winner.  “The tide now seems to swinging against the Klan . . . Now is the time for us to Reap the Fruits of the seeds we planted two or three years ago.”55  So, by the time the Senate voted to seat Earle Mayfield the power of the Ku Klux Klan in Texas was already on the wane. 

            The national stresses which affected the whole United States after World War I seemed to be more worrisome in the southern states.  Groups like the Ku Klux Klan, which grew in response to the post war conditions seemed to find particularly fertile soil in Texas.  Klan historian Charles Alexander believes that the success of the Klan in Texas was a unique phenomenon.  He believes that Texans were afraid that their existing law enforcement systems were not adequate to cope with what they saw as a “postwar crime wave sweeping the southwest, especially violation of the prohibition laws,” and that they felt and “anxiety over the purported breakdown of . . . morality, chastity, and propriety in Texas and the rest of the nation.”  According to Alexander the Texas Klan began operating as a vigilante force out to punish moral wrong‑doers.56  The extra‑legal whippings, tarring, and lynchings got the attention of the press who recorded the activity as abuses against the rights of the people, not as “just” punishments.  In a way the politicization of the Klan rose out of media criticism.  One way to justify brutality is to claim a kinship to moral indignation and to characterize it as necessary to combat chaos.  The Klan proclaimed itself, the champion of the people, and papers like the Dallas Morning News who reported Klan violence disputed that claim.

  Once the lines were drawn, the fight became a political, moral and economic, as well as, physical battle.  The national press noted that the politicization of the Klan in Texas was almost unique to the state: 

“It is, in a way, a sign of the size and self‑sufficiency of Texas, a sign of the fact that it is an empire in itself, that a senatorial election in that state should take it leading color from and issue which, in other parts of the country, is only heard occasionally and casually, and practically never as      an important political issue.  This issue in Texas is the Ku Klux Klan.”57

            This issue came to dominate the political process of the state for almost four years, often overshadowing more vital problems such as state control of intra‑state railroad rates, the federal reserve banking system, and prohibition.  Mayfield, Ferguson and Peddy may have preferred to base their campaigns on these bread and butter issues but the media kept the Ku Klux Klan issue more in the spotlight.  Did the media’s anti‑Klan campaign affect the campaigns of 1922?  Probably not the way it had expected.  Texans generally do not like to be told what is “good for them.”  The more the newspapers hammered at the Klan, the more the people seemed to rise to defense of the “underdog” champions of morality, and Klan membership in Texas soared.58  In the end the voters decided that the party which supported “law and order” and prohibition was the one for them; if the Klan was part of the deal, well, they could live with it.  For most of Texan voters in 1922, Mayfield was a Democrat first and a Klansman second.  At first, even for the Dallas Morning News, the Klan issue was not so much political, as it was philosophical.  In a speech delivered before the 1922 graduating class of the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism, News president George Dealey very succinctly outlined why the News had to oppose the Klan and its friends:

“There is a popular idea abroad that a newspaper should give the people what they want, that is to say, that a newspaper should be made by its readers.  This I do not believe to be true in its entirety.  Generally readers should be given what they want, so long as what they want is good for them.  But a newspaper always has a moral responsibility, whether it        appreciates it or not, to help its readers to higher standards.  It is all right to be popular . . . but a newspaper should not cater to the baser mind. . . . Its aim always should be to uplift.”59

            Dealey was fond of quoting a hero of the Texas Revolution, Davy Crockett:  “Be sure you’re right and then go ahead.”  Crockett’s motto proved to be the motto for all the participants in the elections of 1922.  The candidates each thought themselves right, the Ku Klux Klan thought its cause was right, and the Dallas Morning News and other anti‑Klan papers thought their opposition to the Klan was right.  Ultimately, as in all popular elections, the voter decided what was right.

End Notes

            1Ernest Sharpe, G.B. Dealey of the Dallas News, New York:  Henry Holt and Company, 1965, p. 198.

            2Draft of a 1952 interview with Alonzo Wasson, Dealey Papers, Dallas Historical Society, Dallas, Texas.

            3Norman D. Brown, Hood, Bonnet and Little Brown Jug:  Texas Politics 1921-1936, College Station:  Texas A.& M. University Press, 1984, p.62.

            4Mark Sullivan, “Midsummer Politics and Primaries,” World’s Work 44(July 1922), p. 299.

            5Dallas Morning News, April 2, 1922.

            6Ibid.

            7Brown, p. 94.

            8Ibid.

             9Ibid.

            10″Titan” is a Klan rank title.   U.S. Congress, Senate, Senator From Texas:  Hearings Before a Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections, Unites States Senate, Sixty-eighth Congress, First and Second Sessions, Pursuant to S. Res 97 Authorizing the Investigation of Alleged Unlawful Practices in the Election of a Senator From Texas, Washington D.C.:  Government Printing Office, 1925, p. 64.  Hereafter referred to as Senator From Texas.

            11Ibid., p. 65. “Grand Dragon” is a Klan rank title.

            12Ibid., p. 67.

            13Dallas Morning News, April 17, 1922, also see Senator From Texas Mayfield Brief, p. 3B.

            14Miller interview in Dallas Morning News, July 5, 1922.

            15Cullen Thomas and James Ferguson as quoted in the Dallas Morning News, July 4, 1922;  Earle Mayfield quoted in the Dallas Morning News, July 20, 1922.

            16Cullen Thomas quoted in the Dallas Morning News, July 20, 1922.

            17Editorial, Dallas Morning News, July 22, 1922.

            18Brown, p. 111.

            19″The Ku Klux Klan Victory in Texas,” Literary Digest, 74(August 5,1924),p.14.

            20Barry Miller quoted in the Dallas Morning News, July 26, 1922.

            21Dallas Morning News, August 5-8, 1922.

            22Ferguson quoted in the Dallas Morning News, August 2, 1922.

            23Ferguson quoted in the Dallas Morning News, August 10, 13, 1922.

            24Dallas Morning News, August 12, 17, 23, 1922.  Earl R. Sikes, State and Federal Corrupt-Practices Legislation, Durham:  Duke University Press, 1928, p. 213.  Sikes discusses the effect that the Newberry decision had on future corruption charges.  He also discusses the Texas democratic “all white” primary rules.

            25Philadelphia Public Ledger, August 28, 1922, as quoted in Brown, p. 118.

            26Dallas Morning News, September 7,8,10,16,17, 1922.

            27Fort Worth Star Telegram, September 15, 1922, Fort Worth Star Telegram Clippings 1922-25, University of Texas at Arlington Central Library Special Collections, Arlington, Texas. Hereafter referred to as UTA Collection.

            28Dallas Morning News, September 16, 17, 1922.

            29Brown, p. 123.

            30Dallas Morning News, September 21, 24, 1922, October 7, 24, 1922.

            31Fort Worth Star Telegram, October 21, 1922, UTA Collection.

            32Brown, p. 125.

            33Ibid., p. 126.

            34″The Ku Klux Klan Victory in Texas,” Literary Digest, 75, November 25, 1922, p. 12.

            35Fort Worth Star Telegram, February 22, 23, UTA Collection.

            36Senator From Texas, pp. 2-5.

            37Ibid., pp. 12A-15A.

            38Ibid., pp. 21B-23B.

            39Ibid., p. 9.

            40Fort Worth Star Telegram, January 9, 1924, UTA Collection.

            41Senator From Texas, p. 49.

            42Ibid., p. 67.

            43Fort Worth Star Telegram, January 9, 1924, UTA Collection.

            44Dallas Morning News, January 9, 10, 1924, Fort Worth Star Telegram, January 1924 clippings, UTA Collection.

            45Senator From Texas, p. 284.

            46Ibid., pp. 868-69.

            47Fort Worth Star Telegram, December 2, 1922, UTA Collection.

            48Joseph Hart, “Out in the Great Empty Spaces,” The New Republic, August 27, 1924, p. 384.

            49Fort Worth Star Telegram, March 29, 1924, UTA Collection.

            50Fort Worth Star Telegram, February 3, 1925, UTA Collection.

            51Letter to A.D. Patterson, February 19, 1922, Dealey Papers, Dallas Historical Society, Dallas, Texas.  Hereafter referred to as DHS.

            52Memo written to F.L. Sherrill, March 3, 1922, Dealey Papers, DHS.

            53Dealey Memo March 3, 1922, Dealey Papers, DHS.

            54Sharpe, p. 200.

            55Ibid., p. 202.

            56Charles C. Alexander, “Secrecy Bids for Power:  The Ku Klux Klan in Texas Politics in the 1920’s,” Mid-America, 46 January 1964, p. 6.

            57Sullivan, p. 301.

            58Alexander, “Secrecy”, p. 19.

            59Dealey graduation address to the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism, May 24, 1922, Dealey Papers, DHS.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Manuscript Materials

Dallas, Texas.  Dallas Historical Society, George Bannerman Dealey Papers. Arlington, Texas.  University of Texas at Arlington Central Library Special Collections,

The Fort Worth Star Telegram clippings 1922‑1925.

Government Documents

Hays, Frank E. and Edwin Halsey.  Senate Election Cases from 1913 to 1940.  Washington D.C.:  Government Printing Office, 1940. U.S. Congress, Senate.  Senator from Texas:  Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Privileges and Elections United States Senate, Sixty‑eighth Congress,           First and Second Sessions, Pursuant to S. Res 97 Authorizing the Investigation of Alleged Unlawful Practices in the Election of a Senator From Texas.  Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1925.

Books

Adams, Frank Carter, ed. Texas Democracy:  A Centennial History of Politics and Personalities of the Democratic Party 1836‑1936.  Austin:  Democratic Historical Association, 1937.

Alexander, Charles C.  The Ku Klux Klan in the Southwest. Lexington:  University of Kentucky Press, 1965.

Brown, Norman D.  Hood, Bonnet and Little Brown Jug: Texas Politics 1921‑1928.  College Station:  Texas A.& M. University Press, 1984.

Hine, Darlene Clark.  Black Victory:  The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas. Millwood:  KTO Press, 1979.

Sharpe, Ernest.  G.B. Dealey of the Dallas News.  New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1955.

Sikes, Earl R.  State and Federal Corrupt‑Practices Legislation. Durham:  Duke University Press, 1928.

Articles

Alexander, Charles C.  “Secrecy Bids for Power: The Ku Klux Klan in Texas Politics in the 1920’s.”  Mid‑America 46(January 1964) 3‑28.

Hart, Joseph.  “Out in the Great Empty Spaces.”  The New Republic (August 27, 1924) 384‑85.

“The Ku Klux Klan Victory in Texas.”  Literary Digest 74(August 5, 1922) 14+.

Sullivan, Mark.  “Midsummer Politics and Primaries.”  World’s Work 44(July 1922) 296‑302.

“Texas Howlers.”  World’s Work 5 (December 1925) 129‑30.

Newspapers and Almanacs

Dallas Morning News 1921‑1925

Ferguson Forum 1922

Fort Worth Star Telegram  1922‑1925

Handbook of Texas, Supplement

Texas Almanac 1989‑90

In many historical accounts of United States expansion when settlers moved west observers framed the rhetoric in terms of conquest.  Historians described people going west to carve out a new existence or to conquer the land, while other observers noted that migration was because of economic necessity. While the reasons for going west were many: some went to get land; some went for freedom from oppression; some went to search for wealth, and some, just for the thrill of the adventure, all settlers faced similar challenges. 

The mountains and plains of the American West presented a formidable barrier not easily penetrated from the east.  In the exploratory years only fur trappers and prospectors took a living from the Rocky and Cascade Mountains ranges of western United States and Canada.  The Great Plains, which stretched south from Texas to the northern reaches of Saskatchewan, offered different challenges to settlers.  Miles of rolling hills covered in grass beckoned to the farmer.  The soil, however, resisted the plough, and wood for building houses or fences was scarce.  In the summer the rain fell either infrequently (drought) or too heavily (flood) and in the winter blizzards and ice storms made travel impossible and life precarious.  Most of the rivers were full of quicksand and sandbars, shallow and unnavigable for the most part.  And over this vast and often uninviting land the wind blew incessantly. 

Stories of the pioneer’s struggle against the natural elements permeated American Western literature and film.  In 1925 a Texas regional writer, Dorothy Scarborough, anonymously published a novel of West Texas entitled, The Wind.  Eastern critics applauded the work, calling it “one of the distinctive novels of the year,” and “a piece of masterly realism that rings true.”[1] Readers in West Texas, however, called it “spurious natural history,” unfair even to the prairie dog.  They complained that the author was woefully cruel to the main character and to the people of Sweetwater.  Texas critics went on to declare:  “We have another wait before us for the epic of the cattle days of West Texas: for that is something that `The Wind’ is not.” [2] In 1928, actress Lillian Gish bought the film rights to the novel and starred in a silent film version of the story.  Both the novel and the film presented a graphic and bleak picture of the violence inherent in the weather and geography of the American western plains and man’s struggle t live on them.

            The novel told the story of an impressionable young woman from Virginia who came to West Texas in 1886 searching for a new life, only to be destroyed by the natural elements of the untamed frontier.  In a rebuttal to her Texas critics, Scarborough pointed out that they had failed to make the distinction between “a novel and a historical treatise,” while she had captured the “essential truth of the time and the place.” “[The] book,” she asserted, “does not represent the East writing ignorantly of the West.  It was written by one who was born and brought up in Texas and to whom West Texas is no strange land.”[3]  Scarborough was not trying to create the epic story of West Texas; she was telling a tale based on her mother’s unpleasant experiences in Sweetwater.  The novel, the silent film based on it, and the historical record of the Western Plains all presented a picture of the violence of nature and its effect on the people who were determined to live there.

Scarborough used the young Easterner, Letty Mason, to tell her story of Texas because the devastation of the drought and other hardships of frontier life were particularly forceful images when described through the naive and uninformed perception of a female tenderfoot.  “I was trying,” Scarborough wrote, “to show the woman’s side of pioneer life, because most of the Western fiction had been about men and their struggles.” [4]                   Dorothy Scarborough

Women have often been excluded from the history of the American West.  Recent historians who tried to reinsert them found that lofty but distorted rhetoric and stereotypical images often replaced solid research of frontier women experiences.  Most of the images of western women have come to modern audiences through popular fiction and Hollywood films.   For early historians it was more convenient to refer to “gentle tamers”, “sun-bonneted helpmates”, and “hell-raisers” than to confront the reality of women and their roles in the settling of the American West, and there are plenty of examples of western pioneer women who embodied the three categories.[5]

Women such as Abbie Bright, who moved from Indiana to Iowa alone and unmarried to teach school in her brother’s town and then to move on to do the same in Kansas.  She left a brief diary detailing some of her journeys.  Or Harriet Fish Baskus, who married her school sweetheart and followed him west to Telluride Colorado where she lived in the mining camps near the Japan Flora Mine.  She and her growing family followed her assayist husband through the mine fields from Colorado to British Columbia, Nevada, Montana and even Australia.  She survived avalanches, starvation, whooping cough, the flu epidemic and the death of her third child and husband. And then there was Elizabeth Bradshaw who emigrated from England and traveled across the Great Plains to settle in Utah.  She also left a diary that detailed the hardships of that journey, “conditions grew steadily worse.  Clothing and shoes were in rags.  . . . The suffering was intense and one morning we heard sobbing and discovered that in the tent next to mine a lady had awakened to find her husband and little child dead, one on each side of her.”  The last part of her story recalled being rescued by Brigham Young who sent oxen teams and food to see them through the last portion of their trip, and finding their eventual farmland in Bountiful. And finally women such as Lydia Leaming whose family crossed the plains from Iowa to Oregon in 1866. Leaming’ s journal told the story of that trip.  She wrote of Indian raids, flooded rivers, stinging insects, poisonous water, and everyday accidents.  By the time the group arrived at The Dalles only about one-half of the families survived the trip.[6]  Scarborough wrote to celebrate those women, the ones whose stories got lost in obscurity. Scarborough not only included women in her story but made them central to the tale.  Western life was hard for both men and women, and ultimately people succeeded or failed.  The stories of those who simply tried are often what the historian chronicles and the novelist, and filmmaker dramatizes.

 The Wind, both as novel and film, in comparison to historical accounts of western life, offers a portrait of the violence of western weather and the suffering caused by the many droughts that plagued the region during the later years of the nineteenth century. Scarborough begins Letty’s story by declaring:   “The wind was the cause of it all.  The sand, too, had a share in it, and human beings were involved, but the wind was the primal force, and but for it the whole series of events would not have happened.” [7] Letty Mason, orphaned and destitute, comes west to live with her Cousin Beverley’s family.  Having led a sheltered life in Virginia, she is ill prepared for the geographic harshness and social isolation of West Texas.  On the train between Fort Worth and Sweetwater she meets Wirt Roddy, a gambler and the human villain of the story.  Roddy fires her imagination with stories of the hardships of the West–dead cattle, failed ranches, social isolation, and above all, the “demon wind.”  He tells Letty that the wind is evil as it “comes laarupin over the prairie like wild mustangs on a stampede.  .  .  ‘tain’t human.  It’s a devil.  Seven devils sometimes, when it goes rampagin’ round.”[8] The land she can see from the train window appears even harsher to Letty than Roddy’s discourse on the weather, and her first glimpse of Sweetwater depresses her more.  The town is little more than a collection of unpainted rude structures: no trees or grass to soften the landscape, only sand, everywhere. 

            Scarborough’s description of the weather, the geography, and Letty’s despair reinforces the picture of desolation and hopelessness of West Texas at the height of the drought of 1886.  Sweetwater, Texas, was less than ten years old when the drought hit the area in1885-87.  The Texas and Pacific Railroad controlled most of the land in the area and established the town of Sweetwater on a portion of land officially recorded as “Section 47.”   Established in 1877, the town got its post office and official name in 1879.  In 1880 it became the county seat for newly organized Nolan County. The first buildings in the new county seat were a house and a saloon, both built from lumber brought in by the railroad in June of 1881.  By 1883, Sweetwater had five saloons, and the Nolan County population stood at 640. Sweetwater grew and by 1887 the town could boast of several churches, more saloons, hotels, a saddle and harness store, dry goods store, livery stable, schools, one private bank, and a newspaper. County population grew as well, and peaked in 1884 at just a little over 1,230.  Unfortunately, the blizzards and drought years greatly affected the growth of the area, and by 1890 the county population had dropped to only 614.[9]                                                                                                                            

            Nothing about her introduction to Sweetwater encourages Letty.  The trip from town to the ranch is long and cold, the landscape is uninviting, and the ranch is a disappointment:  “Letty watched the prairies stretch out before her, vast reaches of sand covered with bunch grass.  .  .  .  The house was a frame shack.  .  .set in an arid waste with no fence around it.”[10]

Even though her cousin Bev welcomes her, his wife Cora, does not.  Letty cannot fit into the household because she has no practical skills to offer the family.  With some encouragement Letty might have developed the tools to survive as other immigrants had.  Observers of the Texas frontier noted that even the daintiest ladies acquired the skills they needed:  “Delicate ladies find that they can be useful and need not be vain.  .  .  .  Many latent faculties are developed.”[11]  Letty is more of a burden than a help to the capable Cora.  Cora is a true woman of the West; she not only survives on the frontier, she thrives there. “Such a magnificent woman!  Tall, like some goddess of the prairie, deep bosomed, with noble softly flowing lines like a statue; erect, instinct with vibrant magnetic life!”   She is what Texas emigrant writer, Mary Austin Holley, called the “Texas Diana.” — “the same bold mind which in different circumstances would make such a female a polished lady, would lead her, here, to acquire the accomplishments of wood‑craft.”[12]

Letty tries to please Cora, but nothing she does is good enough.  The struggle with Cora and the monotony of ranch life play on Letty’s fears, and she becomes even more timid and withdrawn.  Just when she despairs of ever enjoying a civilized activity again, a neighboring family invites everyone in the county to a dance.  Letty’s description of the dance mirrors the experiences of actual pioneers.  Fanny Beck, who moved to West Texas with her family in the 1870s, remembered the all-night dances she attended: 

“Many a night I have spent out on some lonely ranch dancing all night because the distance was too great to get back to town and there was no provision for sleeping at the ranch.  .  .  .  There was no love‑making, no drinking, no foolish and questionable conversation.”[13]

The dance offered only a short rest from the reality of prairie life.  The refined lady, more comfortable at a dance than on a ranch, had no place on the frontier because only the capable survived.  The useless were often objects of ridicule.  A cowboy from the Texas Panhandle complained that his sister‑in‑law, a genteel lady transplanted to the West, was an “extravagant women from the improvident South.  .  .  [who] would make doggies of three poor calves just because she wanted cream and cake with her afternoon tea.”[14]

            Cora despises Letty for being useless and yet envies her for being young and pretty.  She wants the young girl out of her house, and the only way to achieve this would be to marry Letty off.  Even on the frontier the “true” vocation for a woman in the nineteenth century was marriage and motherhood. Letty resists all proposals But, as a winter storm known as a “blue norther” blasts the frail ranch house, driving Letty into a panic, she finally agrees to accept local cowboy, Lige, if he will protect her from the wind.

Marriage was often the catalyst that brought women to the western frontier.  Some of the more famous mail order brides were the Washington territory Mercer Girls.   “In 1864 eleven ladies (referred to in history only by the title given them that referred to the gentleman who arranged their journey) embarked upon a courageous endeavor. They left their comfortable homes in cities in the east to travel to the far western shores of the North American continent, arriving in a new town called Seattle. “Historians have done well in educating us about Asa S. Mercer, the man who lent his name to this group of ladies.”[15] While in Seattle, he helped to construct the Territorial University and upon its completion was appointed as its first president. According to history it was Asa’s idea, at a time when men out numbered women 9 – 1, to go back east to seek ladies of quality and refinement to help balance the male/female ratio of the region. Mercer took this group of ladies, via a steam ship, from New York to Aspinwall/Colon, Panama then across the Isthmus by train where another ship was waiting to take them to San Francisco. From San Francisco they traveled by way of a lumber bark to Seattle, arriving May 16th, 1864.[16]

But what do we know of the ladies? Who were they? Where did they come from? What made them leave their homes and families for all the unknowns and uncertainties of the Pacific Northwest? And most importantly what became of them once they were in Seattle?   In most cases not much – but recently Washington State historians have gone searching for their stories.

 Here are three of them: In 1864, Josie and Georgia Pearson made the trip to Washington Territory with Asa Mercer accompanied by their unemployed and in ill father, Daniel Pearson. He left his wife Susan, son Daniel and youngest daughter Flora behind in Lowell, Massachusetts, until he and his older daughters were settled. After her arrival in the Washington Territory Susan Josephine “Josie” was hired to teach school in Coupeville, on Whidbey Island. On August 24, 1864, a little over three months after her arrival, she died suddenly while walking to her home after teaching school. She was buried in the Sunnyside cemetery at Coupeville. After her sister’s death Georgianna, “Georgia, and her father moved into the Admiralty Head lighthouse on Whidbey Island where he became the lighthouse keeper and she his assistant. On October 2, 1867

Georgia married Charles Townsend Terry. The wedding took place in the lighthouse parlor. By this time Georgia’s mother, brother and younger sister had joined Georgia and her father on Whidbey Island. (They made the trip to Washington Territory with Asa Mercer’s second group in 1866).  Georgianna and Charles Terry had five children, all born in Coupeville. Georgia died in Coupeville, Washington Territory, on April 23, 1881 and was buried in the Sunnyside cemetery.  The third Mercer Girl researched was Sarah Cheney. Sarah graduated at the head of her class at Lowell High School and attended Maplewood Institute in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. After her arrival in Seattle she was engaged to teach art and music at the University, but soon moved on because she only had three students. Hearing that there was a need for teachers in Port Townsend, Washington, she applied and was hired at once.  At a dance at the military post in Port Townsend Sarah met Captain Charles Willoughby, a widower with a 3-year old son. They were married Oct 5, 1865. She and her husband had four children. Sarah died in Port Townsend, Washington Nov. 7, 1913. Services were held at the St. Paul Episcopal Church where Sarah had been the organist for over 50 years. [17]

The Mercer girls may have found a good life in the Washington territory, but Scarborough’s heroine Letty was not so fortunate.  Letty moves into Lige’s shack after the wedding but her new home on the prairie is more primitive than her cousin’s house.  The two-room shack had rough planks for walls but was more conventional than a dugout, or “Soddy” the makeshift dwelling that many Texas settlers lived in before they built more permanent homes.  Some settlers found them depressing and distasteful but other pioneers such as Ella Elgar Bird Dumont considered the whole experience a grand adventure.  Dumont described her prairie accommodations almost with fondness:  “The ranch house consisted of two large dugouts with no furniture whatever, except bedsteads and some benches.  . . . No one expected anything better.  The wealthiest cowmen’s families lived in dugouts when they first came here.”[18]

In the novel, as in historical Sweetwater, the weather took as great a toll on the people as it did on the livestock and crops.  Seasoned settlers struggled and newcomers had little chance of survival.  Kansas pioneer Sarah Everett wrote to her sister‑in‑law in New York.  “I am a very old woman,” she wrote, “[m]y face is thin sunken and wrinkled, my hands bony withered and hard‑‑I shall look strangely I fear with your nice undersleeves and the coquettish cherry bows.”  Sarah Everett was only twenty‑nine when she wrote those words.[19]

Scarborough’s depiction of the devastated land and dismal conditions was fairly accurate, and her description of the drought-stricken cattle as “gaunt, cadaverous beasts. . . .  tortured by heel‑flies that nagged them constantly, bawling in distress, searching everywhere for food and water,” was mirrored in the official state and federal agricultural reports. The damage she described was only the latest in a long chain of disasters for the ranchers and farmers of West Texas.[20]  The winter of 1885 was the severest on record.  Fences had to be cut to prevent the buildup of snow, and cattle pastured on open ranges drifted hundreds of miles in search of grass and shelter. 

Ninety percent of the sheep in Nolan County died and a large percentage of the cattle perished as well.  The winter of 1885 became known as the great “die up of ’85.” After April of 1885 no rain fell in the area for over two years. County statistics reported to the Texas Department of Agriculture, record that by 1887 the county had lost 93 percent of its total crops to the drought which followed the blizzards.   County wide cattle deaths at the height of the drought in 1887 totaled 129,962. [21]

            Texas historian W.C. Holden noted that the drought of 1886 was a “landmark year in the history of West Texas.”  Settlers, he wrote, often referred to things that happen “before the drought” or “after the drought,” much the way a Southerner dates events in terms of the Civil War by saying “before the War” and “after the War.”  The dry spell created the impression that Texas was a desert plagued by wind and drought, an image that was hard to live down. Rivers and creeks dried up and cattle died by the thousands.  “People began to leave the county. . . .  Their credit was gone, there was no work, no sale for what they had, their families were hungry and the prospects were growing more dismal all the time.”  Ranchers and farmers who could not dig wells to irrigate simply left the land, often leaving behind signs like the one on the door of a house in Blanco County:

            250 miles to nearest post office; 100 miles to wood;

            20 miles to water; 6 miles to hell.  God bless our home!

            Gone to live with wife’s folks.[22]

When the rains came again to the western prairies it was too late for many ranchers.  Men and women suffered together, but differently.  The men saw the losses in terms of long hours on the range, dead cattle, and failed farms, but the women saw the loss more personally.  It was as though the men lost things and the women lost themselves.  Women like Julia Gage Carpenter wrote of their frustration and fears in daily diaries:  “This is awful country and I want to live East. . . .  Frank did not come home.  I stayed in the house all alone overnight . . . . dreadfully, dreadfully forlorn.  Can’t stand being alone so much.” [23]  Or Maggie Brown who wrote in desperation to her sister in Virginia, asking for help:  “We have no money at all.  Dr. Brown is in debt for what we had to get to eat.  He is almost in rags and I am no better.”  Her sister, shocked by Maggie’s letters and a picture she had sent, drafted this frantic appeal to their father: “She is as much broken as an old woman and she is not middle aged.  . . . I am afraid she will die if she does not come home.”[24]

            Letty could have written these entries, for her story resembled Julia Carpenter and Maggie Brown’s realities. Near the end of the novel, Letty finds herself alone with the villain Roddy as a “Blue Norther” whirls around the shack.[25]  She rails at him for having put the fear of the wind into her mind and though he apologizes, the damage has been done.  As Letty frantically pleads with him, a blast of wind hits the house and blows open the door.  “Half swooning with terror of the invisible, the unearthly, Letty flung herself into Wirt Roddy’s arms, and clung around his neck as a drowning person would.  “The Wind!  The Wind!  Don’t let the wind get me!”  “I won’t!” he said hoarsely, as his arms closed round her.”[26]

Letty’s final destruction is caused by the man who had inspired her fear of the wind and from the wind itself.  Wirt Roddy is able to seduce her by playing upon her fear of the wind as the storm rages outside the cabin, but in the morning the horror of her betrayal, fear of Lige’s reaction, and the social consequences of marital infidelity drive Letty over the edge.  She orders Roddy out of her house at gunpoint, and when he tries to take the gun away from her, she shoots him.  Panic-stricken, she buries his body in the sand drift beside the barn but the body will not stay buried.  Unable to face what she has done; Letty flees out onto the prairie to her doom:

There was no mound at all by the wind‑break!‑-only bare ground, and a dead body of a man lying there, .  .  .  So the wind was determined Lige should know!  .  .  .  She had known all along that the wind would get her! . . . No use to fight anymore!  She would give up.  .  .  .  With a laugh that strangled on a scream, the woman sped to the door, flung it open and rushed out.  She fled across the prairies like a leaf blown in a gale, borne along in the force of the wind that was at last to have its way with her.[27]

Letty was a proper lady but she was a failure as a pioneer.  She did not possess the skills she needed to survive in the West and she never learned them.  She had no support system.  Other women would not, or could not, help her.  Like so many women who found themselves alone on the frontier, Letty experienced a social and physical isolation that drove her farther into despair, and the wind finally claimed her.  For Letty, the wide expanse of the West Texas prairie was as confining as the bedroom for the unnamed narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’ s “The Yellow Wallpaper.”[28] Both women are victims of the psychological pressures exerted on them by their environment and cultural mores.

In his criticism of the novel, Sweetwater newspaperman R.C. Crane takes Scarborough to task for the last scene.  He complains that the only reference he can find to such an incident was the story of an immigrant woman whose husband accidentally shot himself and died on the trail.  With no one to help her, she dug his grave in the loose dirt with a butcher knife.  The next spring some of the dirt blew away and a passersby found a foot protruding from the grave.  The wife, Crane maintained, never had to stay around and see the corpse and then go crazy on the prairie.[29]

Scarborough defended her description of the power of the sand from firsthand experience:  “I have seen the sand drift enough for a body to be buried in it.  I’ve seen it!  And I’ve seen it swept away by the wind in a few hours, too.  Yes, in the Sweetwater section.”[30]

The images of despair and grinding hardship on the Plains and the violence of the weather were also the major themes of the 1928 silent film based on Scarborough’s novel.  The film, starring Lillian Gish as Letty, presented an unusual project in many ways.  Gish read the book, found it intriguing, and after some “arm-twisting” convinced Metro‑Goldwyn‑Mayer to produce it.  Filming the movie on location in the Mojave Desert in temperatures of near 120 degrees Fahrenheit was difficult for cast and crew.  Gish suffered nearly as much as her character Letty had. She wrote about the experience, saying:  “Working on the Wind was one of my worst experiences in film making.  Sand was blown at me by eight airplane propellers and sulphur pots were also used to give the effect of a sandstorm.  I was burned and in danger of having my eyes put out.  My hair was burned by the hot sun and nearly ruined by the sulphur smoke and sand.”[31]

The film visually captures Letty’s despair and the forlorn isolation of the West Texas prairie, and Gish gives a moving portrayal of Letty’s descent into near insanity.  The film uses all the usual visual imagery of the Western, but the physical landscape; the wind and the sand overpower the usual cliché pictures of steadfast cowboys, sturdy horses, good women, and dastardly villains.  The movie version, unlike the book, had a “happy ender” [Scarborough’s term].  The studio executives found the final cut of the film too dark and depressing.  Gish had just released The Scarlet Letter, another movie with a tragic ending, and the distribution department of M‑G‑M felt that the public would not accept The Wind if the heroine died.[32]  Because the primary function of this film was to deliver the story to the audience visually, the filmmakers were not concerned with preserving the naturalistic determinism of the novel.  In the cinematic version Lige and Letty were reunited to pursue a successful marriage, and Roddy’s body stays hidden in the sand of Sweetwater. 

Like the novel, the film is told from Letty’s point of view, presenting a picture of the West colored by the perception of an inexperienced young woman who allowed the harsh reality of Western ranching life in the 1880s to overwhelm her.  The hostile Western elements embodied by the prancing stallion Letty imagines coming down from the clouds remain central to the plot.  In the novel Letty was isolated and destroyed by the elements, but in the movie version she and Lige were reunited and faced the elements together.  The film’s artificial happy ending did not really allow Letty to conquer her fears; it only seemed to postpone the inevitable failure.  As the film faded to black, Letty and Lige embraced each other while the wind and the sand continued to assail them.             The 1928 film never received the acclaim that both Gish and Scarborough thought it would, possibly because harsh reality may not have appealed to film audiences of that era. 

The depressing scenes of the mid-1880s drought depicted in The Wind seem to be fairly accurate.  Rivers and creeks dried up and cattle died by the thousands and  writers such as J. Frank Dobie told about the effects of extreme dryness of that era.  They pointed out that a drought could not be measured only in terms of dollars and cents, but had to counted in the effects “upon the inner life” of the pioneer.  At the height of the great drought of 1886‑87, the Nueces River stopped running and only small water holes remained.  As the grass disappeared the cows began to die.  A rancher named George West told his ranch hands to cut the horns off of every dead steer they found and to pile the horns next to his woodpile.  Before the drought broke, West had collected over three thousand horns, and this tally did not account for the number of animals who had died in the brush and whose carcasses had not been found.  “George West used to sit at night on the great mound of horns and scan the sky for a sign of rain.” Almost as an afterthought, Dobie adds, “On all sides of his ungrassed land other land‑dwellers, women as well as men were watching for signs.” No journey, Dobie wrote, no magnificent landscape or great city, can “mean more to an eager traveler than the change felt by a man of drought‑perished soil when rains at last fall upon it.”[33]  A possible reason for Sweetwater’s adverse reaction to Scarborough’s novel and Gish’s film could be local pride and community attitudes formed during hard times. In face of relief efforts, Holden noted, families with the greatest need often refused help because they did not want to be considered objects of charity. At the height of the 1880s drought, community boosters reacted with hostility to anything that would reflect negatively on reputation, heritage or land sales.[34]

What makes both the novel and the film versions of The Wind so powerful has little to do with the quality of the literature or the cinema.  The novel is sentimental and maudlin, and the film is visually harsh and uninviting.  The Wind is important because it was a woman’s story and one of the few Western stories to question realistically the popular Western Myth.  It depicts the boredom and the failure that many pioneers experienced instead of providing the popular image of the hero riding heroically off into the sunset.  Scarborough’s novel asked, “How could a frail, sensitive woman fight the wind?  How oppose a wild, shouting voice that never let her know the peace of silence?”[35]  Thousands of frontier women answered with the testimony of their lives.  Despite the hardships, women as well as men moved west, their experiences mirroring a pioneer poem: 

I took my wife out of a pretty house

I took my wife out of a pretty place

I stripped my wife of comfortable things

I drove my wife to wander with the wind.[36]

For the most part, in American literature and films the woman on the frontier is weak and in need of protection. Historian Susan Armitage observed that in the United States “the frontier myth is a male myth, preoccupied with stereotypically male issues like courage, physical bravery, honor and male friendship.” (need note)  Women did go to the American West and became an integral part of the settlement process.  They were also part of the frontier myth, albeit sometimes a hidden part.  Because American pioneers usually saw the land as an adversary, fictional characters like Letty, and real pioneers like Dorothy Scarborough’s mother were often doomed to vainly struggle against the harshness of the frontier only to be lost in the howling of the wind.

            [1]“Anonymous to R.C. Crane,” Scarborough Papers, The Texas Collection, Baylor University, Waco, Texas, (4A283) , all further citations will be noted as the Scarborough Papers.

            [2] “Resident of West Texas Comments on the Local Color of ‘The Wind’, Dallas Morning News (November 22, 1925).

            [3] “Anonymous to R.C. Crane,” Scarborough Papers, 4A283.

            [4] Scarborough Papers, 4A289.

            [5] Joan M Jensen and Darlis A. Miller, “The Gentle Tamers Revisited: New Approaches to the History of Women in the America West,” Pacific Historical Review, 49(May 1980), 178-79

            [6] Ibid

            [7] Dorothy Scarborough, The Wind (Austin:  University of Texas Press, 1925, 1979, 1986), 1, 2.

            [8] Ibid., 24.  All spellings are Scarborough’s.

            [9] For a history of Sweetwater and the surrounding county see E.L. Yeats and Hooper Shelton, History of Nolan County, Texas, (Sweetwater: Shelton Press, 1975).

            [10] Scarborough, Wind, 54, 67.

            [11] Jensen and Miller, 178-79.

            [12] Mary Austin Holley as quoted in Ann Patton Malone, Women on the Texas Frontier:  A Cross-Cultural Perspective (El Paso:  Texas Western Press, 1983), 18.

            [13] Fannie Beck quoted in Texas Tears and Texas Sunshine:  Voices of Frontier Women, ed. Jo Ella Powell Exley (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1985), 186.

            [14] As quoted in Beverly J. Stoeltje, “A Helpmate for Man Indeed, The Image of the Frontier Woman,” Journal of American Folklore 88 (Jan-Mar 1975): 30.  A “doggie” is a term for motherless calf.

            [15] Mercer Girls

            [16] Mercer Girls

            [17] Mercer Girls

            [18] Ella Elgar Bird Dumont, An Autobiography of a West Texas Pioneer, Ella Elgar Bird Dumont, ed. Tommy J. Boley (Austin:  University of Texas Press, 1988), 44.

            [19] Sarah Everett quoted in Annette Kolodny, The Land Before Her:  Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860 (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 174.

            [20] Scarborough, Wind, 263. 

            [21] First Annual Report of the Agricultural Bureau of the Department of Agriculture Insurance, Statistics and History 1887-88. L.L. Foster, Commissioner (Austin:  State Printing Office, 1889), 170. LV.

            [22] W.C. Holden, “West Texas Drouths,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, XXXII 2 (October 1928):  105-106.

            [23] Julia Gage Carpenter quoted in Elizabeth Hampsten, Read this Only to Yourself: The Private Writings of Midwestern Women 1880-1910, (Bloomington Indiana University Press, 1981) 187.

            [24] Maggie Brown and Amelia Jane quoted in Lillian Schlissel, Byrd Gibbens and Elizabeth Hampsten, Far From Home: Families of the Westward Journey, (New York: Schocken Books, 1989) 146-48.

            [25] A “blue norther” is a Texas term to describe an intense cold front that moves rapidly into an area.  It is characterized by high winds, and an extreme and rapid drop in temperature.  Often it is accompanied by freezing rain, sleet, or snow.

            [26] Scarborough, Wind, 311.

            [27] Ibid., 336-37.

            [28] Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, ed. Joyce Carol Oates (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1992), 154-169.

            [29] Crane, Dallas Morning News, (November 22, 1925).

            [30] Scarborough Papers, “Anonymous to R.C. Crane.”

[31] Lillian Gish, with Ann Pinchot, Lillian Gish:  The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me

(Englewood Cliff:  Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969), 292.

            [32]Gish, The Movies, 293.

            [33] . Frank Dobie, Cow People (Austin:  University of Texas Press, 1981), 177, 179-80, 193.

            [34] Ibid., 115.

            [35] Scarborough, Foreword to The Wind, xvi.

            [36] Ibid., 3-4, poem identified as a “Benét Poem” quoted in Walker D. Wyman, Frontier Woman:  The Life of a Woman Homesteader on the Dakota Frontier, Retold (n.p:  University of Wisconsin, River Falls Press, 1972), 8.