James E. Ferguson

James E. Ferguson: The Governor Who Ran His Wife Instead

In 1917 the Texas Senate convicted James Edward Ferguson on ten articles of impeachment, removed him from the governorship and declared him permanently ineligible to hold state office. Seven years later he was back in the Governor's Mansion. He had simply put his wife's name on the ballot and campaigned as though it were his own — a manoeuvre so brazen that Texans coined a slogan for it and voted for it twice. No American politician has ever found a cleaner way around a constitutional disqualification.

Salado

Ferguson was born on 31 August 1871 near Salado, in Bell County, Texas. His father died when he was four, and the boy worked the fields as a child. He was expelled from Salado College for disobedience — the closest thing to higher education he ever received — and then spent two years wandering the western states, working whatever came up, before turning back toward Texas.

He read law in Bell County, was admitted to the bar in 1897 and set up practice in Belton. From there he moved into banking and real estate, founding the Farmers State Bank in 1903 and the Temple State Bank a few years afterward. He married Miriam Wallace. By his early forties he was a small-town banker with no elective experience whatsoever, and he decided to run for governor of Texas.

Farmer Jim

The 1914 campaign worked because Ferguson understood something the state's political class had missed: Texas was full of tenant farmers, and nobody was speaking to them. He promised to limit the rent landlords could charge and to prevent the collection of bonuses on top of it. He ran as an anti-prohibitionist against Thomas H. Ball, the candidate of the dry movement, which allowed him to be simultaneously the poor farmer's champion and the wet vote's refuge. He had a captivating platform manner and could hold a crowd. They called him Farmer Jim, and later just Pa.

He won, and — unusually for a demagogue — he delivered. The farm tenancy law capped rent at one-fourth of the cotton crop and one-third of the grain. The legislature expanded school funding, extended state aid to rural schools, authorised three new normal schools to train teachers, and created the state highway department. The bill for all this was real: the state tax rate rose from 12.5 cents to thirty cents or more. In 1916 he was re-elected by roughly 60,000 votes.

The University

The wreck came out of a personal quarrel. Ferguson wanted certain University of Texas faculty members dismissed — men he regarded as politically disloyal, among them William Harding Mayes. The board of regents refused. Ferguson responded by vetoing practically the entire appropriation for the university.

It was a catastrophic misjudgment of the constituency he had made an enemy of. The veto was read across Texas as executive vengeance against a public institution, and it opened everything else to inspection. In July 1917 Ferguson faced nine grand jury indictments concerning the misapplication and embezzlement of public funds, and the House drew up twenty-one articles of impeachment.

The Senate sat as a court of impeachment in August. Ferguson resigned before it could rule, hoping to make the trial moot. The Senate ignored the gesture and convicted him on 22 September 1917 on ten articles — misapplication of public funds among them, and the charge that finished him: receiving $156,500 in currency from a source he refused to name. He was removed and barred from Texas office for life. Lieutenant Governor William P. Hobby took over.

The Proxy

Ferguson refused to concede the point. He ran for governor anyway in 1918 and lost to Hobby. In 1920 he ran for President of the United States on his own American Party ticket. In 1922 he ran for the United States Senate. He lost all of it.

Then in 1924 he stopped running and started managing. He entered his wife Miriam in the Democratic primary against Judge Felix Robertson, the candidate endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan — which was, at that moment, close to controlling Texas politics outright. The Fergusons won. Miriam Amanda Ferguson became the first woman governor of Texas, everyone in the state understood exactly whose administration it was, and the Klan had been beaten at the polls.

They lost re-election two years later amid scandal over the extraordinary volume of pardons issued from the mansion. He managed her unsuccessful campaign in 1930 and her successful one in 1932, returning her to office for a second term. In 1940 he mounted one last effort on her behalf and lost. He died in September 1944 in Austin.

Why James Is Called a Genius

The word, applied to Ferguson, means political cunning of a very particular and inventive kind, and it should not be confused with intellect — he was expelled from the only college he attended and never returned to formal education. What he had was an unerring ear for grievance and an outsider's willingness to say the thing the professional class would not. He located the tenant farmer as an electoral bloc before anyone else did, spoke directly to him, and then actually legislated the rent cap he had promised, along with rural school aid and a highway department. That is more than demagoguery: it is accurate constituency-reading followed by delivery.

The genuinely original stroke came after his ruin. Barred for life from office, he invented the proxy candidacy — putting his wife's name where his own could not go, campaigning as her voice, and winning the governorship twice more. That solution was audacious enough that it exposed the limits of impeachment as a remedy against a popular political movement, and it is why constitutional historians still teach the case. Beating the Klan-endorsed candidate in 1924 was a real public service, whatever his motives.

The counter-case is not softenable. Ferguson was convicted by the Texas Senate on ten articles, including taking $156,500 in cash from a source he would never identify — a sum he simply refused to explain, then or later. He destroyed his own governorship by using the appropriations veto to punish a university for not firing professors he disliked, which is not cunning but tantrum. His signature tenant law was struck down as unconstitutional. The Ferguson restoration collapsed in a pardons scandal. And after 1917 he lost far more than he won: 1918, 1920, 1922, 1926, 1930, 1940. A man who invents one brilliant workaround and loses six elections around it is not a strategist of the first rank. He is a natural performer with a criminal conviction and an exceptionally good idea.

Legacy

Ferguson remains the only Texas governor removed from office by impeachment, and the answer to the question of what happens when a disqualified politician is more popular than the institution that disqualified him. He also made Miriam Ferguson the first woman to govern Texas — for the wrong reason, by a cynical route, but permanently. The University of Texas, whose funding he tried to erase, outlasted him by a margin that would have infuriated him.

Achievements

• Educated at Salado College