1Albert Allison
Albert Arthur Allison
Citizen and Mabel Cobb’s Husband
In the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction, Albert Arthur Allison became the third son of Arthur Butler and Mattie Winn Allison. Although hard times and privation marked early his childhood years, by the time he reached his teens, his father’s mercantile business was prospering well enough to provide Albert and his siblings first-class educations.[1]
In 1896, Albert was valedictorian of Sam Houston Normal School in Huntsville and was awarded the Peabody Medal for mathematics.[2] He returned to Groesbeck to teach at nearby Westminster College and to learn his father's business. Soon, he began to court Mabel Evelyn Cobb and came under the spell of her father, Judge Lodowick Brodie Cobb, who would challenge him to employ his mathematical faculty to critique the values inherent in the bitter narrative of his upbringing. Mabel had spent two years at Sherman Normal School, which evolved into Austin College, where she had learned to love Shakespeare and Milton, both of which contributed to wise understanding of humankind.
After teaching for a year, he became a principal of a school of a small town near Groesbeck and Limestone County put his mathematical prowess to work by electing him county surveyor (1898-1902).[3]
1Albert Allison
In James Michener's novel, Texas, German immigrant Louis Allerkamp paid a third of his land grant for the services of a transient licensed surveyor, who did not properly do the job. Because of the surveyor's incompetence, Allerkamp lost the other two-thirds. Considering the experience as a lesson, Allerkamp figured that he could make an honest living as a surveyor, spent six months studying trigonometry, and got his license. He, too, received a small percentage of the land from his cash strapped clients; but he did a good job for them. Other respectable surveyors likewise gave good service, but when it came time to choose their segments of land, they used their technical knowledge to ask unwary landowners for prime segments.[4] The abuses were rampant enough to cause the Republic of Texas to establish the County Surveyor as an elected office. Of course, most counties left the matter of recompense up to the unpaid official and the landowner; and, thus, many county surveyors acquired substantial land holdings.
By the turn of the 20th century, Limestone County's land had been thoroughly surveyed; and the office was almost an anachronism. However, Albert would have had some work; cash was still a rare commodity; and people often paid professional fees in farm produce. Young Allison could have relied on that practice to acquire small pieces of land before he gave up the office in 1902.
Albert and Mabel Cobb married in November 1900. Baby Evelyn arrived in 1903 and Juliet two years later. About that time, Albert’s father asked his bother Leon and him to take over the business; but soon after their mother, Mattie, died in 1904, Leon left the business and immigrated to Oklahoma with their sister Ruby, who had accepted a teaching position there. Their widowed father also got itchy feet. Prior to leaving Limestone County for Stonewall County to pursue a an oil venture, Arthur transferred to Albert and Mabel ward responsibilities for the orphaned sons of Albert’s late brother, Andrew: fifteen-year-old Goree and ten-year-old Perry. With Leon no longer helping in the business and growing family responsibility, Albert gave up teaching to run Allison Supply Company full time and became immersed in the landlord/merchant/tenant/sharecropper system that had evolved in Texas since Reconstruction.
…
Until the 1880s, most white settlers came to central Texas as independent landowners; but during the ensuing decades, many failed due to competence, weather, good and bad luck, and the boll weevil. Since no urban jobs were available, and since the displaced families were comfortable on the farm, most folded into the system of tenants and sharecroppers that had evolved during Reconstruction to accommodate the large, displaced population of freed slaves. The children of successful became the landlords for the children of settlers who, for whatever reasons, had not succeeded.
In popular legend, the tenant system offered a ladder for the young to climb to develop into socially responsible landowners, the essence of the Jeffersonian farmer ideal. First, a young man would be a paid farm hand; then he would advance to sharecropper; then he would acquire his own tools and equipment and become a tenant; and finally, through his diligence, he would acquire his own land. Of course, the unlucky and the incompetent would be stuck in positions on the ladder. However, according to the concept, that was good; for landownership was the cornerstone of a free republic and carried with it the immense social and political responsibilities that be entrusted only to the ablest. Privilege had to be compatible with competence and virtue.[5]
However, as happened so often in America's history, Hamiltonian mercantilism undermined Jeffersonian principles to protect entrenched interests and ultimately made a mockery of this unique American social formulation of upward mobility. Established landowners became the new progressive Bourbons.[6]
Buttressing this form of progressivism was the popular, but ersatz science of eugenics, which suggested that the more colored the race, the more inferior and, therefore, the more in need of benign Anglo-Saxon overlords—the infamous white man's burden. Because eugenics carried the rubric of science, even fair-minded men were susceptible. Southern progressive politicians often opened their speeches with a patronizing vignette about a childish, but wise observation made an old Uncle Tom.[7] Albert Allison did so. They also spoke earnestly about the responsibility of the Anglo-Saxon race to rise to its historical responsibility to lead the other races forward. Albert Allison likewise did so.[8]
If eugenics mechanics produced superior races, they also carried the incompetence and bad luck that produced inferior economic classes. Believing that tenants and sharecroppers of all colors were a lesser breed and with the Protestant ethic as a backdrop, Texas Bourbons influenced legislators and judges to thwart the aspirations of competitors rising through the system's ranks. Resembling the arguments for Jim Crow, under the guise of protecting tenants' interests, the legislature set the share participation ratios and converted Jeffersonian social mobility into a stratified feudal system that cemented the positions of those at the top, however incompetent, vicious, and socially irresponsible they were.[9]
Thus officially entrenched, merchants and landlords began to consider themselves a natural aristocracy and their customers, tenants, and sharecroppers as the undeserving poor.[10] They could objectify their clientele; and, thereby, to collect overdue crop liens, they could conscientiously repossess the clientele’s crops, their belongings, and their land.
Respected agricultural economists like William Spillman [spoke] of the difference between 'high-minded, self-respecting small proprietors' and the 'discontented, thriftless, tenant class" who sank ever deeper into 'poverty and unfitness for American citizenship.'[11]
Thus emerged a landowning class of non-farmer property owners and a transient white farm laboring class that competed with African-Americans and—in south Texas—Mexicans to eke out livings from their legislated share.
As descendents of original settlers bifurcated into landowners and tenant/sharecroppers, the Farmers Merchants began to shift from dealing exclusively with independent, but small, cash poor farmers to dealing with dependent, small, cash poor tenants and sharecroppers. Because neither landowning farmers nor tenants had banks or outside lending sources, to be in business, the Farmers Merchants had to be the creditors; to extend credit, he necessarily required security. The only assets the landowning farmer could provide were land, tools, equipment, livestock, and crops. If crops or livestock could not cover debts, the merchant might get part of the farmer’s land, tools, or equipment. The only assets that sharecroppers and tenants could offer were crops. In effect, by providing seed and equipment, the merchant took a lien on the sharecropper/tenant's labor. If the income from their shares did not cover the debt or if they moved to avoid the debt, the merchant would get the crop. For many merchants, that eventuality led them to become grain and cotton brokers.
To succeed at his father's business, Albert had to be adept at credit management, which in turn demanded a certain amount of toughness in dealing with the sharecroppers and tenant farmers, his main clientele. Over time, Albert proved equal to the task, both as a creditor and a cotton broker.
However, the landlords and merchants did not have it all their own way. The growth of the tenant system created a class of mobile farmers who moved every few years in search of new opportunities on better land or better shares with luckier weather; and, in their permanent dissatisfaction, they became a new, dissatisfied voting constituency, responsive to anyone who would fight the entrenched landlords; and the iconoclastic Jim Ferguson was their man. He not only tweaked the progressives for their attitude toward prohibition and their academic elitism, he became a strong advocate for improved tenants' shares. In his first campaign for governor (1914), "Farmer Jim":
...built his campaign around the land question. He promised to introduce legislation to prohibiting landlords from charging a bonus in addition to the customary or 'natural' rent of one-third the grain and one-fourth the cotton.[12]
Campaign after campaign, "Farmer Jim" ever more stridently promised better shares for the tenants; and, whether he delivered or not, they faithfully turned out for “Farmer Jim” and Ma.
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In the 1880s, the Houston and Central Railroad moved its railhead from Groesbeck to Corsicana, thirty miles to the north, sending Groesbeck into decline while launching Corsicana as the new north Texas boomtown. Then, in the 1890s, the Corsicana oil field came in; and the town became a dominant commercial center. In 1904, Judge Cobb's District Court relocated from Groesbeck to Corsicana, and the judge and his remaining family moved with it and remained there when, as described below, the voters removed him from office in 1908.
For a time, Albert Allison and his family stayed in Groesbeck and prospered. When his father died in 1910, however, he used assets and his share of the inheritance to buy two thousand acres in southern Navarro County. He then moved Allison Supply Company to Richland, just five miles south of Corsicana, and moved Mabel, their daughters and wards to Corsicana. Two years later, the two boys had finished high school and left for New Mexico to homestead.
For the next two decades, Albert proved a practical visionary; and from the pre-war era through the twenties, the Allison family prospered. Albert’s timing in acquiring cotton land could not have been better; and he was a major mover in the commercial development of Richland, Texas.[13] The build-up to the European war, the war itself, and America's eventual entry brought premium prices for cotton.
In 1914, ten years after the birth of his second daughter and after several miscarriages, Albert Jr. arrived to an ecstatic family. During the next eight years, three more children followed. In 1916, cotton prices paid for a new 6,400 square foot house on North 25th Street.
When Congress declared war, Goree and Perry rode up to the recruiting station in the New Mexican desert and volunteered. Because of their horsemanship skill, the army assigned them to the military police. Goree returned unharmed; but the day after Armistice, a train crushed twenty-two-year-old Perry while he was on guard duty during a Paris snowstorm. The news was an enormous blow to Albert and Mabel, but the end of the war and the booming cotton economy eased the pain, for a time.
In the early 1920s, cotton prices paid the two oldest daughters’ tuition at Northwestern University. Cotton prices paid for good cars, adventurous vacations, and generous contributions to religious, political, charitable, and educational causes.[14] With cotton munificence and Judge Cobb's imprimatur, Albert entered into Corsicana’s civic life and quickly asserted himself under the maxim that "to whom much is given, much is expected."[15] He served as president of the Corsicana Young Men's Christian Association. Because of his strong commitment to education, the Corsicana Chamber of Commerce made him Chairman of the Education Committee.
In that era, the YMCA was America's primary private sector non-profit institution. In most communities, in addition to its stated role of building the character of young men, it was the keystone for developing a community ethos and supporting the disadvantaged. During the Civil War, the Y had provided indispensable support services to Federal troops; and in World War I thousands of Y volunteers—including Woodrow Wilson's son-in-law—went to France to service front line troops, often placing themselves in as much danger as the soldiers.[16] The Y was Corsicana's principal agency for social security and social stability; and the town's landlords, bankers, and merchants served on its board, where they could be benevolent toward those that in their businesses they would denigrate, dispossess, and repossess.
As important as Albert's service with the Y was, his service as Chairman of the Chamber of Commerce Education Committee is where he made his mark. His classroom years had made an indelible impact; and he used his chairmanship to become a passionate advocate for the teaching profession, which, in speech after speech he would call the "infantry officer corps in the war on ignorance."[17]
Under his aegis, the Education Committee set up a scholarship fund to send four young men from Corsicana's orphan home to his college alma mater, then known as Sam Houston State University—a practice that continued into the 1930s, when the Depression dried up contributions.[18] In raising money for this project, Albert discovered that he had a voice, a passionate, persuasive voice; and he soon put it to use raising money for a new Methodist university in Dallas.[19] When Goree Allison returned from the war, Albert arranged for him to enter SMU. Goree graduated in one of the university’s first classes and returned to New Mexico where he lived his life as an educator. But Albert knew that, unlike Goree, few could afford to live far way from home and pay expensive tuition; so he launched a statewide campaign for state-supported two-year community colleges.[20]
Through his life, Albert's views had become more progressive racially than most Texans, but he never escape the conviction that the "Anglo-Saxon" race had achieved a such a superior degree of civility that it had a duty to help the less fortunate peoples of the world to emerge from their poverty; andhe was convinced that education was the key.[21] With his scholarship programs, his fundraising for Southern Methodist University, and his campaign for junior colleges, he became a leading spokesman to make quality education ever more accessible to all races. Through education, Albert believed, everyone would gain not only occupational skills but also in virtue. Like the Greek philosophers, he believed that once a man clearly saw the Good, he could not act otherwise.
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In his early efforts to promote community colleges, Albert began to make trips to Austin, where Governor Jim Ferguson was exploiting Texas's native anti-education populist sentiment by castigating the University of Texas for teaching frivolous subjects, such as music. Albert was no stranger to politics. He had held an elective office (county surveyor); and his father-in-law was an elected judge. When Albert moved to Corsicana, Judge Cobb had connected him with the judge's young "progressive" protégés, former state representative William Tarver and one-time District Attorney Luther Johnson.[22] These men had the connections to help Albert with his education projects, and he had the financial means and financial connections to help them with their political ambitions. Even better, his philosophy aligned with theirs. With these allies, he worked more than a decade to promote his education project against the Ferguson’s anti-education mantra, made worse because the spokesman was Albert Allison.[23]
As a landlord, Albert Allison was a natural "neo-Bourbon"; just the sort of landlord that Ferguson loved to attack.[24] After buying his Navarro County farmland, Allison had quickly tenanted it out; and there is no reason to believe that Allison Supply Company in Richland treated his tenants and clientele any differently from other merchants and landlords. In fact, Neil Foley (The White Scourge) wrote that when the Federal Agricultural Adjustment Administration was intervening in tenancy contracts on behalf of tenants, one of Allison's long time tenants (twenty years) complained to Washington that the county agent, an Allison ally, had interpreted the tenant's contract adversely to the tenant's interest. When Washington referred the complaint to the Navarro County Commissioner's Court, the tenant presented a petition to the court with nine hundred signatures to have the agent fired. "The court, however,” wrote Foley, “took no action, claiming that it had no jurisdiction over the implementation of the cotton contract, and [the tenant] was evicted on the grounds that he was a 'nuisance.'"[25]