Suffragette Series
First female governor of Texas not always supported by suffragettes
This former Texas governor was the queen of pardons
EDITOR’S NOTE:
The National Women’s History Alliance has named 2020 the “Valiant Women of the Vote” to celebrate the women who have fought for woman’s right to vote and equality in the U.S. HER magazine honors women from the original suffrage movement, women who have continued the struggle and those who have benefited from it.
JUST FIVE YEARS after American women won the right to vote, Miriam Amanda Wallace “Ma” Ferguson was sworn in as the first female governor in Texas. She missed the title of First Female in the United States by two weeks. Nellie Tayloe Ross, of Wyoming, won that title, having been selected during the same election to fulfill her late husband’s term.
Prior to serving as governor, Ma was the First Lady of Texas from 1915 until 1917 when her husband James Edward Ferguson was impeached for embezzlement. He was indicted on nine charges in July of 1917. The Texas House prepared 21 charges against him, and the Senate convicted him on 10 of those, including misapplication of public funds and receiving $156,000 from an unnamed source.
With Mr. Ferguson barred from campaigning for office he decided to throw his wife’s name in the hat. During her campaign, she made it clear she was a puppet candidate for her husband, saying voters would get “two for the price of one.” Her speeches at rallies consisted of introducing him and letting him take the platform. A common campaign slogan was, “Me for Ma, and I Ain’t Got a Durned Thing Against Pa.”
She was elected governor in the 1924 general election and was sworn into office on Jan. 25, 1925. Serving the first time until 1927, she was again elected as governor during the 1932 election and served from 1933 to 1935.
She was born in Bell County, Texas, and studied at Salado College and Baylor Female College. At the age of 24, she married James, a lawyer, at her father’s farm near Belton, Texas. They had two daughters, Ouida Wallace Ferguson and Dorrace Watt Ferguson. She was nicknamed Ma because of her initials (M.A.).
Due to the widespread corruption of her husband’s term, thousands of voters crossed party lines in the general election to vote for the Republican candidate. Republicans usually took between 11,000 and 30,000 votes for governor, but George C. Butte, a prominent lawyer and University of Texas dean, won nearly 300,000 votes — many of them from women and suffragists. Still, the state was a Democratic stronghold and Ma received 422,563 votes (59%) to George’s 294,920 (41%).
In 1926, state attorney general Dan Moody, who had investigated James for embezzlement and recovered $1 million for Texas citizens, ran against her in a runoff election. He defeated her to become the next and then-youngest governor of Texas at the age of 33. Suffragist activism provided a major contribution to her defeat, as these women rallied behind him and campaigned for him.
Running again in 1932, Ma narrowly won the Democratic nomination over incumbent Ross S. Sterling, then soundly defeated Republican Orville Bullington in the general election, 521,395 (62%) to 322,589 (38%).
Ma issued almost 4,000 pardons — an average of 100 convicts a month — and she and “Pa” were accused of accepting bribes of land and cash payments. In 1930, between Ma’s terms, the Secretary of State of Texas Jane Y. McCallum published a pamphlet criticizing the former governor’s numerous pardons of prisoners. A House committee investigated the rumors, but no charges were ever filed.
Even so, in 1936, voters passed an amendment to the state constitution stripping the governor of the power to issue pardons and giving that power to a politically independent Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles.
The Great Depression forced federal and state governments to downsize. The storied Texas Rangers did not escape these cuts and saw its core of commissioned officers reduced to 45. The situation worsened for the Rangers when they entangled themselves in politics in 1932 by publicly supporting Governor Ross Sterling in his re-election campaign against Ma.
After taking office in January 1933, Ma discharged all serving Rangers. The force also saw its salaries and funds slashed by the Texas Legislature and their numbers reduced further to 32 men. The result was that Texas became a safe hideout for the many Depression-era gangsters, such as Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, Pretty Boy Floyd and Raymond Hamilton.
In 1934, at the beckoning of Ma Ferguson, Francis Augustus Hamer, who was an American law enforcement officer and Texas Ranger, led the posse that tracked down and killed Bonnie and Clyde.
A new agency called the Texas Department of Public Safety was born from a reorganization of state security agencies and merging the Rangers with the Texas Highway Patrol.
In October 1933, Ma signed into law Texas House Bill 194, which was instrumental in establishing the University of Houston as a four-year institution. She has been described as a fiscal conservative but also pushed for a state sales tax and corporate income tax.
Though a teetotaler like her husband, she aligned herself with the “wets” in the battle over prohibition. She opposed the Ku Klux Klan that was on the decline after 1925 because of a national murder and sex scandal by its president, D.C. Stephenson. James died of a stroke in 1944. Ma died from congestive heart failure in 1961 at the age of 86. She is buried in the Texas State Cemetery in Austin.