Anti-union sentiment in Texas

•The traditional hope that outside industries would move to the South to take advantage of cheap labor

•Suspicion on the part of rural populations towards union activity

•Conservative viewpoint that unions spawned unwanted social and political agents

•Texas had a high percentage of service and high-tech industries. These industries traditionally do not attract unions as much as do manufacturing industries.

•Inexpensive Mexican labor depressed wages and discouraged unionization.

Review your textbook, pp. 362-363.

Right-to-work laws: law against compulsory union membership; a law that prevents membership in a labor union from being a condition of employment

Texas Unions were strongest among labor working in oil refineries along the Gulf Coast.

The Gulf Coast of Texas has a high concentration of refineries, power plants, and other fixed CO2 sources, conveniently located atop enormous beds of deep saline aquifers.

Cotton had always required a large amount

of hand labor.

The perfection of the mechanical cotton picker revolutionized the cotton farm.

Harvest scene in the Corn Belt - a large combine quickly unloads grain to a high-capacity grain cart

Number of Farms and Acres per Farm 1850-1997The number of farms has decreased since 1935, while the

size of farms has increased

Source: Census of Agriculture, various years.

Demographics

Between 1940 and 1960 there was an increase in urban dwellers from 45-75%.

By 1960, women outnumbered menBetween 1940 and 1960, blacks proportion of the population declined from 14 to 12.5%.

Hispanics grew from 12 to 15%.

These population pyramids show the baby-boom generation in 1970 and again in 1985 (green ovals).

Father Knows Best, 1954-8

Power farming displaces tenants. Texas panhandle. Photographer: Dorothea Lange.

During World War II, Texas farms became larger, fewer, and more valuable.

Acres Planted: 1 dot = 1,000 acres.

During World War II, the center of the cotton industry shifted to South Texas and the High Plains.

Bracero card issued to Jesús Campoya in 1951 in El Paso, Texas.

The Bracero ProgramThe term bracero (from the Spanish brazo, which translates as "arm") applies to the temporary agricultural and railroad workers brought into the United States as an emergency measure to meet the labor shortage of World War II. The Bracero Program, also referred to as the Mexican Farm Labor Supply Program and the Mexican Labor Agreement, was sanctioned by Congress through Public Law 45 of 1943.

Why the number of Mexicans working Why the number of Mexicans working in Texas increased:in Texas increased:

 1. Many Tejanos moved to cities because of

low agricultural pay and urban job opportunities.

2. Bracero program: contract labor agreement between the USA and Mexico

3. Rise of corporate, vertically integrated farms that preferred cheap migratory labor from Mexico

In 1949 the Border Patrol seized nearly 280,000 illegal immigrants. By 1953, the numbers had grown to more than 865,000, and the U.S. government felt pressured to do something about the onslaught of immigration. What resulted was Operation Wetback, devised in 1954 under the supervision of new commissioner of the Immigration and Nationalization Service, Gen. Joseph Swing.

Swing oversaw the Border patrol, and organized state and local officials along with the police. The object of his intense border enforcement were "illegal aliens," but common practice of Operation Wetback focused on Mexicans in general. The police swarmed through Mexican American barrios throughout the southeastern states. Some Mexicans, fearful of the potential violence of this militarization, fled back south across the border. In 1954, the agents discovered over 1 million illegal immigrants.

In some cases, illegal immigrants were deported along with their American-born children, who were by law U.S. citizens. The agents used a wide brush in their criteria for interrogating potential aliens. They adopted the practice of stopping "Mexican-looking" citizens on the street and asking for identification. This practice incited and angered many U.S. citizens who were of Mexican American descent. Opponents in both the United States and Mexico complained of "police-state" methods, and Operation Wetback was abandoned.

Operation Wetback

End of the Depression and return of veterans led to a rise in both marriages and births in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

The Total Fertility Rate (TFR) in the United States declined from more than 4 late in the nineteenth century to less than replacement in the early 1930s.

However, when the small numbers of children born in the depression years reached adulthood, they went on a childbearing spree that produced the baby-boom generation. In 1957 more children were born in the United States than ever before (or since).

The arrival of an urban economy and population accented demands that the state provide a better system of public education. The argument concerning schools that had started with the advent of business progressivism had changed little by the mid-twentieth century: improved schools, reformers urged, would invite new industry into the state by making it more attractive to prospective migrants and by providing a better-educated workforce. These ideas clashed with older demands that taxes be held down at any cost and that teachers should receive minimum pay. (pp. 366-367.)

The Gilmer-Aikin laws of 1949 reorganized and modernized the public school system.

The Gilmer-Aikin laws of 1949 reorganized and modernized the public school system.

Claud Gilmer, A. M. Aikin, Gilmer-Aikin Laws of 1949

1. Established a state board of education

2. Required nine-month school terms

3. Set minimum training standards for teachers

4. Mandated improved facilities

5. Established a formula for minimum teachers' salaries(See p. 367.)

Results of the Gilmer-Aikin laws of 1949 1. Teachers went back to school meet requirements

2. Teachers' salaries went up

3. Black teachers received equal pay

4. Began special equalization funds to aid poorer school districts

5. Along with better roads, spurred school consolidation. Independent school districts outnumbered common schools.

The fear that the Soviet Union might outstrip the United States in the struggle for world supremacy prodded the federal government into increasing federal aid for public colleges and secondary schools. (pp. 367-368)

Criticisms of the Gilmer-Aikin laws of 1949

1. Consumer taxes were inefficient to support reform

2. Teachers' salaries still too low

3. Those districts that made the least effort to raise taxes received the greatest amount of state aid.

"Possibly, the best evaluation of the Gilmer-Aikin acts would be that they at least moved the state educational system into the early twentieth century."

(See p. 367.)

The passage by Congress of the G.I. Bill of Rights resulted in he rapid growth of higher

education in Texas.

Dr. Hector P. GarcíaThe American G.I. Forum

1. Poll tax drives

2. Delgado v. Bastrop Independent School District (1948): “Texas Mexican lawyers convinced a federal court that segregation of Mexican Americans violated the Fourteenth Amendment.

3. Hernandez v. The State of Texas (1954): the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that qualified Mexican Americans could not be excluded as jurors in their communities of residence.

4. Self-help drives, Little School of 400 (1959)

LULAC and the American G. I. Forum (1948)

“Americans had always believed that the public schools were agents for social advancement, and the possibility of integration conjured up white persons’ fears of interracial marriages, moral decay, and collapsing academic standards. Besides, for most white Texans, segregated public institutions validated the presumed inferiority of black persons.” (p. 370)

The Fiftieth Legislature established Texas Southern University and expanded graduate education at Prairie View A&M in an attempt to thwart Heman Sweatt's application to enter the University of Texas.

“We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has not place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

NAACP lawyers congratulate each other on the decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954). Attorney Thurgood Marshall, center, was later named the first African American justice of the Supreme Court.

Senator Joseph McCarthy

McCarthyism: The practice of publicizing accusations of political disloyalty or subversion with insufficient regard to evidence.

Religion

In terms of church membership, "Texans undoubtedly matched national averages and probably exceeded them." Roman Catholicism was the largest single denomination. The Southern Baptists was the largest protestant denomination.