Texas history now ties Paxton, ‘Pa’ Ferguson
AG, governor both impeached, but will they share same fate?
The impeachment of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has caused a folksy-sounding name to reemerge, ghost-like, from the annals of Texas politics.
James E. “Pa” Ferguson is the only Texas governor ever to be impeached and removed from office. It happened in 1917, when Woodrow Wilson was president, Prohibition was the polarizing issue of the day and the Ku Klux Klan was a force in Texas politics.
Ferguson was a charismatic populist who fought to improve the lot of sharecroppers. He grew up poor on a Bell County farm and became a lawyer and a banker. He railed against academic elites, and as governor, declared war on the University of Texas. He stood against Prohibition and the Klan.
Impeachment removed him from office but didn’t end his political career. He found a path back to power through his wife, Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, who served two terms as governor. She was the first woman to hold the office in Texas.
“Pa” ran her campaigns, and when she became the state’s chief executive, he occupied an office next to hers. Their campaign slogan: “Two governors for the price of one.”
Here’s a look back at that era.
Every politician has an origin story. What was “Pa” Ferguson’s?
He was born on a farm near Salado, 50 miles north of Austin. His father died when he was 4, and Ferguson worked the fields as a child. He went to Salado College, a prep school, but was expelled for disobedience. At 16, he left home and drifted across the West, working in a California vineyard, a Washington lumber mill and quartz mines in Colorado and Nevada.
Back in Texas, he farmed, worked on the railroads and took up legal studies, hitting the books at night. He was admitted to the bar and established a practice in Belton. He also got involved in real estate and banking. In 1907, he was one of the founders of Temple State Bank.
How did he become governor?
It’s still something of a mystery. He had been active in Democratic Party politics, but he had never held an elective position, and he “came out of nowhere politically” to capture the state’s highest office, historian Randolph B. Campbell wrote in his book “Gone to Texas — A History of the Lone Star State.”
In those days, Democrats were so dominant in Texas that whoever won the party’s gubernatorial primary was all but certain to win the general election.
In the 1914 primary, Prohibition Democrats were united behind Thomas H. Ball, a former congressman from Houston. Ferguson was anti-prohibition. That endeared him to South Texans and the state’s German population. Ferguson won over rural voters in North Texas by promising to improve the miserable lot of tenant farmers by limiting the share of crops that land owners could claim as rent.
Ferguson also had the advantage of “a captivating personality,” wrote historian Ralph W. Steen. “As a political speaker, he had few equals.”
He handily won the primary and the general election.
Texas governors served twoyear terms back then, so Ferguson faced the voters against in 1916. He was re-elected to a second term, and that’s when the trouble began.
What trouble?
Ferguson became intoxicated by power. He believed “he should and could run all state agencies and institutions as he pleased,” Campbell wrote. This led him to pick a fight with the University of Texas that proved to be his undoing. He wanted to slash the university’s funding and fire six faculty members who had opposed him politically or otherwise displeased him. The regents refused.
One of those faculty members was William Harding Mayes, a newspaper publisher and dean of the recently created UT Journalism School.
Mayes was also a former lieutenant governor who had been one of Ferguson’s main rivals for the Democratic nomination for governor in 1914. The Brownwood Bulletin, partly owned by Mayes, had editorialized against Ferguson, and “Pa” took it personally, complaining that the paper had “skinned me from hell to breakfast.”
The governor also demanded that UT history professor Eugene Barker get the boot. Barker had angered Ferguson by blocking his efforts to replace the state librarian with one of his cronies.
Sounds like inside baseball. How did this become the stuff of impeachment?
When he didn’t get his way, Ferguson went nuclear, vetoing UT’S entire state appropriation. “If the university cannot be maintained as a democratic university, then we ought to have no university,” he said. That provoked strong opposition and unified Ferguson’s enemies in the Legislature and beyond.
The furor also gave new life to old allegations of corruption.
What kind of corruption?
Ferguson allegedly deposited $100,000 in state funds in his Temple bank and paid the state no interest. On top of that, he allegedly ran up more than $150,000 in personal overdrafts.
What happened next?
In July 1917, the speaker of the Texas House called a special session to consider impeaching the governor. Four days later, a Travis County grand jury indicted Ferguson on charges of misappropriating public funds, embezzlement and other offenses.
On Aug. 24, 1917, the House adopted 21 articles of impeachment.
Then the action moved to the Senate, which wasn’t friendly territory for Ferguson. Many of the senators were allies of Mayes from his days as lieutenant governor, when he presided over the chamber.
Sitting as a High Court of Impeachment, the Senate convicted Ferguson of 10 articles of impeachment, finding that he had misappropriated public funds, interfered in the affairs of UT, violated state banking laws and refused to disclose the source of a personal loan he had received in the amount of $156,000, an enormous sum at the time.
The Senate removed Ferguson as governor and disqualified him from holding any state office of “honor, trust, or profit” for life.
Was he through in politics?
Not by any stretch. Although “Pa” couldn’t be governor again, his wife could. In 1924, “Ma” Ferguson ran for governor with her husband as campaign manager. She had never pursued public office before or evinced any interest in politics.
Nevertheless, “Ma” defeated a Klan-backed candidate, Felix Robertson, and became Texas’ first female governor.
Who was running the show?
“Mrs. Ferguson occupied the governor’s office, but ‘Pa,’ who had his own office next door, ran her administration,” Campbell wrote. “Indeed, at times he referred to himself as the governor of Texas.”
She lost a reelection bid in 1926 and was defeated when she ran again in 1930. But in 1932, “Ma” was elected to a second term as governor, and the Fergusons were back in the governor’s mansion for the last time.
Like her husband’s administration, “Ma” Ferguson’s time in office had an aroma of scandal and score-settling. Reviving her husband’s feud with UT, “Ma” eliminated funding for the university’s departments of journalism and music and its School of Library Science.
She issued more than three thousand pardons amid allegations that the convicts’ families had paid for them. And the state granted favorable treatment to businesses that advertised in “Pa” Ferguson’s newspaper in Temple, the Ferguson Forum.
How has history viewed the Fergusons?
Campbell called the Ferguson era “a spectacular but largely unproductive chapter in the state’s political history.”
“Pa” Ferguson died in 1944 at age 73. “Ma” died in 1961 at 86. They are buried side-by-side in the Texas State Cemetery in Austin.