The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 81, July 1977 - April, 1978 Page: 137
521 p. : ill. (some col.), ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Tenant Farmer Discontent and Socialist Protest
137
in renter families. We were called "poor children" by those who really felt
their aristocracy .... The attitude of the rich and poor groups was set by
our economic gap, or difference. This was a ratio of "sixteen to one." That
is, a landlord with sixteen renters, who paid him half of all crops, had six-
teen times as much income as a renter family.12
Despite this widening social and economic distance between poor
white tenants and propertied townspeople, agricultural experts still
insisted that the tenancy problem was temporary: any hard-working
renter could advance up the ladder to ownership if he was thrifty and
businesslike. But when the 1910 census statistics showed that over half
the Lone Star State's farms were operated by tenants, the credibility
of the agricultural ladder theory began to crumble. For example, in
191o the Dallas News admitted that "nine in ten of the tenants today,
probably nineteen out of twenty, are destined to remain tenants ... ,"I
The Texas Socialists responded to this growing consciousness of the
tenancy problem by taking two ambitious steps; they helped to organ-
ize a renters union and they started publishing a weekly newspaper
called The Rebel. The newly formed Renters Union of America con-
vened its founding convention at Waco and declared that "use and
occupancy" was the "only genuine title to land." The oo delegates
supported a "confiscatory tax" on idle land and voted to exclude the
landowners and businessmen who had co-opted the Farmers' Union.
Most important, they decided to follow the route taken by industrial
labor unions. Just before they organized the Renters Union, the Texas
Socialists printed the first issue of their newspaper. The Rebel was
published and edited by Thomas A. ("Red Tom") Hickey, who was
then working as the Socialist party's state organizer."
12G. L. Vaughan, The Cotton Renter's Son (Wolfe City, Texas, 1967), 41-42.
13Dallas Morning News, November 13, 1911 (quotation). Also see Cox, "Tenancy in the
United States," 97-1oo; and Shu-Ching Lee, "The Theory of the Agricultural Ladder,"
Agricultural History, XXI (January 1947), 53.
14T. A. Hickey, "The Land Renters Union in Texas," International Socialist Review,
XIII (September, 1912), 243 (quotations), 244; Houston Chronicle and Herald, February 12,
1912. In addition to the Rebel, the most important Socialist newspaper was The Laborer
edited in Dallas by George Clifton Edwards. In all, at least forty Socialist papers were pub-
lished in Texas between 9goo and 1917, ranging from J. C. Thompson's Texarkana Social-
ist which reached several hundred subscribers to tiny local newspapers like the Mt. Pleasant
Eye Opener, the Grand Saline Vanguard, and the Palestine Worker's Warrior. Foreign-
language Socialist newspapers were also published in San Antonio (three Socialist-oriented
Spanish language sheets and, briefly, the anarchist paper Regeneracidn) and in Hallettsville
where the Rebel publishers produced weeklies in German (Habt Act) and Bohemian
(Pozor). On G. C. Edwards who edited The Laborer after being fired from his job as a
school teacher in Dallas, see The Laborer (Dallas), January 6, 1912, and on J. C. Thompson
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 81, July 1977 - April, 1978, periodical, 1977/1978; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101205/m1/165/: accessed April 30, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.