‘I wish there was another crop we could grow,’ Cobb complained one night when he realized how totally dependent he was on cotton, but he could devise none which would produce the safe yields and assured profits that cotton did. As early as 1764 the Cobbs of Edisto Island in South Carolina had wanted to diversify their crops, but the presence of slaves to manage the cotton fields and pick the lint from the seed kept them imprisoned in that economy; the Cobbs had made statistical studies which proved that they were penalized by this adherence to one crop and were prepared to branch out when Eli Whitney invented his miraculous gin, which revolutionized the industry, and they fell back, entrapped in lint.
In Texas it had been the same. All the Cobbs who settled there had wanted to diversify—‘to break away from our bondage to New Orleans and England,’ Senator Cobb had cried in several of his speeches—but none had done so, and now in their new home, on land which would have welcomed different forms of agriculture, Laurel Cobb and his wife persisted with their cotton.
‘We’re prisoners of that damned fiber,’ Laurel cried one night. ‘It binds us to it like the threads of a spider binding its victims.’ Then he laughed: ‘But it’s a glorious bondage. No farmer in the world enjoys a better life than the man who owns a cotton plantation and his own gin.’
Such thinking was making Texas the world’s most important cotton-producing area. Strangers thought of the Carolinas and Georgia as the capitals of the Cotton Kingdom, but inexorably the centers were moving west and coming to rest in Texas, and on some mornings in the autumn when Laurel and Sue Beth rode into Waxahachie they were dazzled by the splendor of the scene which greeted them and of which they were a leading part.
‘God, this is a fine sight!’ Laurel cried one day when bright October sunlight filled the central square, and he was justified in his assessment.
Waxahachie had a town square of most pleasing dimensions, for it was compact and lined on four sides with fine low buildings, some of real distinction, yet it was spacious enough to accommodate the red-and-gray masterpiece of that inspired courthouse builder James Riely Gordon. Here, with a budget more than twice what the less affluent men of Larkin County had been able to put together, Gordon had built a fairy-tale palace ten stories high, replete with battlements and turrets and spires and soaring clock towers and miniature castles high in the air. It was a bejeweled treasure, yet it was also a sturdy, massive court of judgments, one of the finest buildings in Texas.
But it was not the noble courthouse which captivated Laurel Cobb this morning; it was what crowded in upon the building, cramming the copious square that surrounded it, for here the cotton growers of the region had brought cartloads of the best cotton, more than two thousand bales, their brown burlap sacking barely hiding the rich white cotton crop.
Here was the wealth of Texas, these mountains of cotton bales, these pyramids, these piles strewn before the courthouse where buyers would come to make their choices; trains would carry the bales to all parts of the nation and to Europe, and even to Asia or wherever else cloth was needed.
‘Look at it!’ Laurel shouted to his wife as he reined in their horses. ‘This will go on forever.’
When he compared this vital, robust scene to the tentative, cautious way they had been living previously on their plantation in the dark woods at Jefferson, he impulsively kissed his wife and exclaimed: ‘My God, am I glad we came to Waxahachie!’
In the chain of Spanish-speaking counties which lined the Texas side of the Rio Grande, three types of elections were held, each with its highly distinctive character. There were, of course, the general statewide elections in November in which Democrats contested with Republicans for the governorship of Texas or the presidency of the United States, but because of the lingering animosities growing out of the Reconstruction years, when Black Republicans tormented the state, no Republican would be elected to major office in Texas for nearly a century. So these November elections were a formality.
The statewide election which counted came in the summer, when Democrats, often of the most lethal persuasion, fought for victory in their primary, for then tempers rose so high that sometimes gunfire resulted. Prior to 1906, the Democrats had nominated their contenders in convention, which encouraged chicanery, but in that year a reform act was passed requiring nomination by public election, with a lot of frills thrown in so that the professionals could still dominate. Now statewide brawls took place, and nowhere were these new primaries more corrupt than along the Rio Grande, where some county would have a precinct with a total population of 356, counting women, who were not eligible to vote, and their babies, and report late on election night that its favorite Democrat had won by a vote of 343 to 14. Quite often two Texas Democrats of great probity, one a judge from along the Red River in the north, the other a distinguished state senator from the Dallas area, would conduct high-level campaigns across the state, only to see their fate determined in the so-called Mexican Counties of the Rio Grande, where elections were conducted with the grossest fraud.
But it was the third type of Rio Grande election which displayed Texas politics at its rawest. This was the strictly local election, town or county, in which Republicans and Democrats vied evenly, victory going first to one, then the other. A local election in these counties could be horrendous.
How, if Texas never voted Republican statewide, could that party expect to win local elections along the river? The answer was threefold: legal citizens of Texas who could not speak English could be manipulated by bosses; citizens of Mexico could be handed fake poll-tax certificates and enrolled as Republicans or Democrats; and the presence of the international bridges that gave employment to political henchmen. These bridges were sorry affairs, often wooden and sometimes one-lane, but they were staffed by customs officials appointed in Washington, and since these were years when Republican Presidents like McKinley, Roosevelt and Taft ran the country, it was their Republican appointees who ran the bridges. Republicans hired local toll collectors and customs inspectors. Republicans controlled the flow of federal funds, and Republican functionaries, often newcomers from Republican states in the North, were told by Washington: ‘Forget the statewide offices but vote your county Republican, or else.’
Sixty miles upstream from where the Rio Grande debouches into the Gulf of Mexico, a rickety wooden bridge connected Mexico and the United States, and on each bank of the river a small town of little consequence had grown up; the bridge was more important than either of the towns.
As was to be the rule along the entire reach of the Rio Grande, and along the land border as well in New Mexico, Arizona and California, whenever two such towns faced each other in the two countries, it was invariably the Mexican one which came to be the larger. Thus, Matamoros with its advantageous Zona Libre (free customs zone) was larger than Brownsville; Reynosa, much larger than Hidalgo; Nuevo Laredo, substantially bigger than the Texas Laredo; and, to the surprise of many, Ciudad Juárez, bigger than El Paso.
The reasons for this were clear. No Texan town bordering Mexico constituted any irresistible magnet drawing Texas citizens wishing to settle there permanently; Dallas was always a much more promising town than Laredo. But the contrary was not true; Mexican citizens caught in the poverty-stricken parts of northern Mexico were lured to the border towns, where jobs across the river might become available and where American stores stocked with bargains were a temptation. There were a hundred reasons why Mexicans sought to crowd the Rio Grande, and they did.
At this particular bridge the rule prevailed. At the Mexican end the town of Escandón, named after the excellent man who had explored this region, contained about two thousand citizens; on the Texan end the little town of Bravo had less than half that number. The bridge was important, and sometimes it seemed as if the history of the county was identical with that of the bridge.
In these early years of the century the Bravo Customs Office was occupied by a ruthless gentleman of great ability and considerable charm. He was a big, brawling,
red-headed Irishman named Tim Coke, imported from New York, forty years old and a graduate of that corrupt school of Republicanism which existed only to fight the worse corruption of Tammany Democrats. With the brazen assistance of three others like him from Eastern cities and nine tough local men, Tim Coke had long ago declared war on the Saldana Democrats, and saw this year of 1908 as a real chance for victory: ‘Time has come to turn this county Republican, once and for all. Last two local elections we won one, lost one. This year we nail it down.’
In Saldana County, as elsewhere along the Rio Grande, it was the custom to smuggle across the river large numbers of Mexican nationals, pay each one a small fee, vote him illegally, and send him back to the jacales south of the river. Since the legal population of the county tended to be Democratic, the Republicans were required to sneak in a good many more transient voters than the Democrats, and no one was more adept at this than tough-minded, inventive Tim Coke. A newspaperman from Austin, summarizing Texas politics, wrote: ‘When loyal Democrats along the Rio Grande see red-headed Tim Coke manipulating the patronage at his bridge, they tremble.’
‘The sumbitch has one big advantage over us,’ the Democrats whined. ‘He controls the bridge. He can march his voters across bold as you please. Ours we have to swim.’
When Coke heard such complaint he cursed: ‘We may have the bridge, but they have that damned Precinct 37.’ It was a legitimate protest, because the wily Democrats kept sequestered deep in the heartland of Saldana County a rural precinct which had the habit of waiting till four or five in the morning to report its tally. By then the leaders of the party in Bravo would know how many Precinct 37 votes they needed to win the election, and the call would go forth: ‘Elizondo, you’ve got to turn in figures which give us a three hundred and three majority,’ and half an hour later Elizondo would report: ‘Democrats, three forty-three; Republicans, fourteen.’ There was always a howl, charges of fraud, and threats of federal action, but always Elizondo explained: ‘We were a little late, but up here everyone votes Blue.’
It was the rule along the Rio Grande, where vast numbers of voters could not read English, to identify the two major parties by color, which varied from county to county. In Saldana the Republicans had always been the Reds, Democrats the Blues, so that when a vote was held, each party devised some trick to help its imported constituents know how to cast the votes for which they had been paid. The color scheme was also helpful to those Hispanics who lived in Texas and were legally entitled to vote but had not yet mastered English: ‘Pablo, when they hand you your ballot, you’ll find a little red mark at the right place. You scratch your big X there and you get your dollar.’ Before the ballot was deposited, Republican workers would erase the telltale red mark, aware that Democratic workers would be doing something similar with their blue marks.
Any election in Saldana County was apt to be a lively affair, and for two good reasons. First, after the voting booths closed and the counting began, both the Reds and the Blues threw parties for their imported voters, with tequila, hot Mexican dishes and whiskey, and if the Reds won, their partisans were apt to grow rambunctious, with the losing Blues growing resentful. Gunfire was so customary at Saldana elections that some thoughtful anglo residents said: ‘It would be better if one side was clearly superior. Let them celebrate and leave the rest of us alone.’
The second reason for unrest was that Democrats, denied the patronage associated with the Customs Office, had to work extra hard, and for some years they had placed their fortunes in the hands of one of the most competent political leaders Texas had so far produced. Horace Vigil was an anglo, of that there could be no doubt, for he was somewhat taller than an ordinary Mexican, more robust, whiter of skin and more confident in manner, yet the pronunciation of his name, Vee-heel, indicated that at some time long past he must have had Mexican or Spanish ancestors. Much of his genial manner seemed to have stemmed from them, for he was a markedly courteous man, and when he used his fluent Spanish he sounded like a born hidalgo.
When people first saw Vigil standing beside Tim Coke they were apt to think: What an unfair competition!—for the big Irishman, with his forthright and engaging ways, was in the full force of his vigorous manhood and seemed to dominate all about him; at the bridge he was unquestionably in charge, while Vigil, twelve years older and slightly stooped, was obviously a retiring man seeking to avoid notice. He accomplished this in two ways: by twisting his torso slightly to the left, creating the impression that through diffidence or even cowardice he was going to avoid any impending unpleasantness; and by speaking in public in a voice so soft that it seemed a whisper. Women especially thought of him as ‘that dear Señor Vigil.’
But if in public he gave the appearance of a somewhat bumbling and well-intentioned grandfather, in private, when surrounded only by his Spanish-speaking subordinates, he could rasp out orders in a voice that was completely domineering. In protecting his personal interests and in furthering those of the Democratic party he could be ruthless, and observers of the system warned: ‘Don’t touch his beer business or the way he buys his Democratic majorities.’
He had for many years operated a lumber and ice establishment, and in developing the latter he had eased over into the lucrative trade of distributing beer, so that now he controlled how men built their houses, how they stayed cool in summer, and how they relaxed when the brutally hot Rio Grande days turned into those very hot Rio Grande nights. He was not a scholarly man and he lacked formal instruction in politics, but he understood the two essentials required for governing his county: he hated customs officials—‘They prey off the public, they contribute nothing to the community, they’re all Northerners, and damnit, they’re Republicans’—and he loved Mexicans, holding them to be ‘God’s children, warm-hearted, kind to their parents, and loyal up to a point.’
He was an American patrón, one of those fiercely independent rural leaders so common in Mexico. They were self-appointed dictators who paid lip service to the central authority but continued to rule their regions according to their own vision. Horace Vigil decided who would be judge and what decisions that judge would hand down when he reached the bench; he did not collect taxes but he certainly spent them, rarely on himself but with joyous liberality among his Mexican supporters; it was he who determined which daughters of which friends got jobs in the school system; it was he to whom the people came when they needed money for a wedding or a funeral.
In return, Vigil demanded only two things: ‘Vote Blue and buy my beer.’ Any who voted Red found themselves ostracized; those who tried to buy their beer direct from the breweries in San Antonio awakened some morning to find their establishment afire or their beer spouts running wide open, with no thirsty patrons to catch the flowing brew.
In the 1908 local election the great showdown between Coke and Vigil occurred. Prior to the balloting, Customs Officer Coke had so many Mexican nationals in compounds just north of the river that Vigil had to become alarmed. Twice at the end of the last century Coke had stolen elections in this manner, and with rambunctious Teddy Roosevelt still in the White House, he could depend upon vigorous support from the federal courts. Indeed, word had come down from the Justice Department in Washington: ‘You must break Vigil’s stranglehold,’ and Coke was determined to do so.
On the Friday morning prior to the election, Vigil received disturbing news: ‘Señor Vigil, Señor Coke he is bringing a hundred and fifty more Reds from Mexico.’ The report was true; about half these men had voted in previous elections, each receiving his dollar plus a couple of good meals for doing so, but the other half had never before stepped foot in Texas. Like the Mexicans imported earlier by Democrats, they were herded into adobe-walled compounds, and there they whiled away the time until the customs people arrived with instructions as to how they must vote.
‘Héctor!’ a worried Vigil called to his principal assistant, a smiling young man of eighteen, ‘you’ve got to cross into Mexico and round up at least a hundred more votes.?
??
‘Yes, sir!’ He had spent his last three years doing little but saying ‘Yes, sir’ to Señor Vigil, so as soon as the orders were given he knew what to do. Reporting to the campaign treasurer, he asked for twenty dollars to entertain his voters while they were still on the Mexican side, knowing that if he could swim them across and slip them into the Blue compound, additional payoff money would be awaiting him there. With the coins secured in his belt he entered Mexico, but not via the bridge, because there the Republicans would be on watch, and if they spotted him entering Mexico they would deduce that he was going there to import more Blues, and he could hear Coke bellowing: ‘Hilario, bring us a hundred more Reds.’ So Héctor rode his horse west about two miles, swam it across the river, and doubled back to Escandón, where he picked up a group of congenial men who could use a dollar.
This enterprising young fellow was Héctor Garza, descendant of those Garzas who had immigrated to these parts from San Antonio in the 1790s and grandson of the outlaw Benito Garza, who had caused such consternation among the Texans in the 1850s. Héctor and his immediate forebears had been good United States citizens; he loved Texas and wanted to see it enjoy good government, which was why he associated himself with Horace Vigil.
Like the vast majority of Hispanics, he had received only spasmodic education, partly because Texas did not consider it necessary to educate Hispanic peasants and partly because he was, like Benito Garza, a free wandering spirit who could not be trapped in any schoolroom. His real education had come from watching Vigil, and he was confident that if he continued to work for the beer distributor, he would learn all that was necessary about Saldana County.