Anti-union sentiment in Texas

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• 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.

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Right-to-work laws law against compulsory union
membership a law that prevents membership in a
labor union from being a condition of employment
3
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.
4
Cotton had always required a large amount of hand
labor.
The perfection of the mechanical cotton picker
revolutionized the cotton farm.
5
Harvest scene in the Corn Belt - a large combine
quickly unloads grain to a high-capacity grain
cart
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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.
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Demographics Between 1940 and 1960 there was an
increase in urban dwellers from 45-75. By 1960,
women outnumbered men Between 1940 and 1960,
blacks proportion of the population declined from
14 to 12.5. Hispanics grew from 12 to 15.
10
These population pyramids show the baby-boom
generation in 1970 and again in 1985 (green
ovals).
11
Father Knows Best, 1954-8
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Power farming displaces tenants. Texas panhandle.
Photographer Dorothea Lange.
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During World War II, Texas farms became larger,
fewer, and more valuable.
16
During World War II, the center of the cotton
industry shifted to South Texas and the High
Plains.
Acres Planted 1 dot 1,000 acres.
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The Bracero Program The 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.
Bracero card issued to Jesús Campoya in 1951 in
El Paso, Texas.
18

• Why the number of Mexicans working in Texas
  increased
•  
• Many Tejanos moved to cities because of low
  agricultural pay and urban job opportunities.
• Bracero program contract labor agreement between
  the USA and Mexico
• Rise of corporate, vertically integrated farms
  that preferred cheap migratory labor from Mexico

19
Operation Wetback
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.
20
End of the Depression and return of veterans led
to a rise in both marriages and births in the
late 1940s and early 1950s.
21
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).
22
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.)
23
The Gilmer-Aikin laws of 1949 reorganized and
modernized the public school system.
24
The Gilmer-Aikin laws of 1949 reorganized and
modernized the public school system.

• Claud Gilmer, A. M. Aikin, Gilmer-Aikin Laws of
  1949
• Established a state board of education
• Required nine-month school terms
• Set minimum training standards for teachers
• Mandated improved facilities
• Established a formula for minimum teachers'
  salaries
• (See p. 367.)

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• Results of the Gilmer-Aikin laws of 1949
• Teachers went back to school meet requirements
• Teachers' salaries went up
• Black teachers received equal pay
• Began special equalization funds to aid poorer
  school districts
• 5. Along with better roads, spurred school
  consolidation. Independent school districts
  outnumbered common schools.

26
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)
27

• Criticisms of the Gilmer-Aikin laws of 1949
• Consumer taxes were inefficient to support reform
• Teachers' salaries still too low
• 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.)
28
The passage by Congress of the G.I. Bill of
Rights resulted in he rapid growth of higher
education in Texas.
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The American G.I. Forum
Dr. Hector P. García
31
LULAC and the American G. I. Forum (1948)

• Poll tax drives
• Delgado v. Bastrop Independent School District
  (1948) Texas Mexican lawyers convinced a
  federal court that segregation of Mexican
  Americans violated the Fourteenth Amendment.
• 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.
• Self-help drives, Little School of 400 (1959)

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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)
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34
The Fiftieth Legislature established Texas
Southern University and expanded graduate
education at Prairie View AM in an attempt to
thwart Heman Sweatt's application to enter the
University of Texas.
35
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.
36
McCarthyism The practice of publicizing
accusations of political disloyalty or subversion
with insufficient regard to evidence.
Senator Joseph McCarthy
37
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.