On November 4 voters in two states struck blows for equality by electing America’s first female governors, Miriam A. Ferguson in Texas and Nellie Tayloe Ross in Wyoming. Both women were Democrats, and both of their husbands had been governors before them. Ferguson, known as “Ma” because of her initials (which fortuitously yielded a folksy nickname), was running to vindicate her husband, Jim, who had been impeached in 1917 for financial irregularities and prohibited from holding office again.
Her campaign also benefited from a growing disenchantment with the Ku Klux Klan. A Klan-endorsed candidate had finished first in the July primary, with Ferguson second. For the run-off the anti-Klan forces—including men who had fought to impeach her husband—united behind her, and she easily won a race that one newspaper said gave voters a choice “between a bonnet and a hood.” She went on to defeat her Republican opponent in November with 59 percent of the vote—a comfortable margin, though much closer than usual in Democratic-dominated Texas.
Before the runoff Ferguson tried to reassure the voters that she would not completely abandon the role traditionally assigned to her sex. She took a day off from campaigning to preserve a bushel of peaches, and shots of her in a sunbonnet feeding chickens and standing next to a mule were widely reprinted —to the chagrin of Ferguson, whose household was in fact amply provided with servants. An Eastern newspaper implausibly reported that Ferguson’s “first happiness lies in chasing dust from behind the corners of pictures.” After her election, as a married woman, she had to secure a court’s permission to legally execute documents.
In office Ferguson relied so heavily on her husband that Texans joked, with some justification, that “Jim’s the covernor and Miriam signs the papers.” At public appearances she would make a few perfunctory remarks, say, “Jim can tell you about things better than I can,” and turn over the platform to her husband. When asked what it was like to have a woman governor, Texans would reply, “I don’t know. We haven’t got one.” Dogged by accusations of corruption, Ma Ferguson was defeated for re-election in 1926 by Dan Moody, the attorney general who had exposed her administration’s misfeasances. She ran again in 1930 and lost, won a second term in 1932, was not a candidate in 1934, and lost badly in her final campaign in 1940.
In Wyoming, Ross took a less contentious path to the governor’s office. Her husband, who had been elected in 1922 to a four-year term, died on October 2. Twelve days later the Democratic party nominated her to take his place. The bereaved widow did no campaigning and rode a wave of public sympathy to win 55 percent of the vote in a heavily Republican state.
Seeking a full term in 1926, she ran a more active campaign, crisscrossing the mountainous state by automobile and often making six or seven appearances in a day. Nevertheless, Ross lost her re-election bid, 51 to 49 percent. She remained active in national Democratic politics, oversaw the United States Mint for twenty years under Roosevelt and Truman, and died in 1977 at the age of 101.
Optimists suggested that the elections of Ross and Ferguson, coming on the heels of nationwide women’s suffrage, signaled the start of a new era in which female governors would become common. Some even talked of a woman President in, say, fifty years or so. In fact, after Ferguson, no female governor was elected until 1966, when Lurleen Wallace of Alabama successfully ran as a proxy for her husband, George, who was ineligible to succeed himself. Not until Ella Grasso of Connecticut in 1974 would a woman be elected governor whose husband had not already filled that office.
1899One Hundred Years Ago
Exit Hobart, Enter TR
On the morning of November 21, Vice President Garret A. Hobart died at the age of fifty-five at his home in Paterson, New Jersey. Hobart’s health had been failing for most of a year, and in recent weeks his heart problems had taken a turn for the worse. With sad eloquence, a journalist reported that the night before his death, “as the clock at midnight sounded the passing of another day into the void of unrecallable time, the consciousness of things mundane faded forever from his mind. A few hours later, at 8:30 o’clock, he breathed his last …”
Like most nineteenth-century Vice Presidents, Hobart had been virtually unknown outside his home state before his nomination, and not much better known afterward. He had risen from modest beginnings to build a prosperous corporate law practice, at
one point being a member of sixty company boards. Along the way he dallied in politics, serving in New Jersey’s state legislature from 1873 to 1875 and from 1877 to 1885. Afterward he remained prominent in state and national Republican circles, though he sought no further elective office until his vice-presidential nomination.
Once elected, Vice President Hobart achieved the virtually unprecedented feat of being genuinely useful to the President—not by any legislative or policy accomplishments but by playing the role he was most comfortable in, that of the genial host. During his two years in Washington the wealthy and gregarious Hobart gave a seemingly endless series of formal and informal dinners, receptions, and afternoon smokers at which President William McKinley could relax and chat with lawmakers and other prominent men. If the President was not in attendance, Hobart served as his representative, sounding out the views of Congress and gently pleading the President’s case in an atmosphere of camaraderie. When Hobart’s ill health became known, some observers speculated (without apparent foundation) that his constant entertaining might have been the cause.
Although Hobart and McKinley had met for the first time during their campaign, they formed a warm friendship. Nearly as important as Hobart’s social deftness was another personal quality that was, and is, extremely rare in Washington: his complete lack of ambition, which allowed the President to trust him without fear. Besides acting as a conduit of information, Hobart was an invaluable adviser and emissary. As late as July 1899, with Hobart on his sickbed, McKinley chose him to diplomatically persuade the unpopular Secretary of War, Russell Alger, to resign.
Once the mourning for Hobart had ended, speculation began about who would take his place in 1900. Much of it centered on the party’s rising star, Gov. Theodore Roosevelt of New York. Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge had already urged Roosevelt to seek the vice-presidential nomination if Hobart’s health precluded a second term, with a view to running for President in 1904.
Roosevelt was ambivalent. On the one hand, he doubted that his Spanish-American War heroics would still be remembered at that late date (“I have never known a hurrah endure for five years,” he told Lodge). Staying put as governor of New York could easily turn into a dead end, so perhaps he should capitalize on his popularity before it faded away and accept a place on the ticket.
On the other hand, being Vice President did not promise to be any more of a career boost than being governor. Indeed, the writer Henry Adams suspected that Lodge’s suggestion was a scheme to derail Roosevelt’s presidential drive in the guise of aiding it. As long as Hobart had stayed alive, such questions could easily be deferred. But now, with the 1900 nominating convention fast approaching, Roosevelt had to think long and hard about whether the Vice Presidency was more likely to be a valuable step toward his ultimate goal or a tar baby to be avoided at all costs.
1874 One Hundred and Twenty five Years Ago
The Wiring of the West
On November 24 Joseph F. Glidden of De Kalb, Illinois, received U.S. patent 157,124 for an invention that would be just as important as railroads and the Colt .45 in shaping the West: barbed wire. As the frontier advanced, stockmen and farmers existed side by side, which meant the farmers had to protect their crops from roving animals. Since trees were extremely scarce on the Great Plains, wood fences were too expensive. Plain wire fencing was cheaper, but it could easily be knocked over by a hungry beast. Barbed wire eliminated this problem with sharp attachments that animals learned to avoid.
In 1868 Michael Kelly of New York City patented the first practical design for an armored wire fence. Although he managed to sell a few thousand tons, it was hard to produce and still too costly. Then in 1873 Glidden and his friends Isaac Ellwood and Jacob Haish visited the De Kalb county fair. There they saw an inventor displaying a sixteen-foot strip of wood studded with protruding brads. It was meant to be attached to a wire fence to keep cows away. While effective, the device was too expensive and cumbersome for most farmers. Still, the idea was sound, and all three men began tinkering with ways to incorporate sharp points into a fence itself.
Glidden developed a pattern that he called the Winner. Its main advantage was that its barbs were made of wire instead of metal ribbon (as in Kelly’s product), so it could easily be mass-produced by machine. Haish, who would become Glidden’s bitter rival, patented his own design, known as “S” wire, which embodied the same principle. Meanwhile, inventors across the country continued devising variations of their own.
Glidden and Ellwood went into business together. They had two big advantages over Haish and the others: a partnership with Washburn & Moen, the giant Massachusetts wire manufacturer, and a cleverly worded patent that turned most other barbed-wire inventors, including Haish, into infringers. Litigation dragged on for years, and the Supreme Court did not extinguish the final challenge to Glidden’s patent until 1892, a year after it had expired. In the meantime, sales skyrocketed to more than 170,000 tons a year, and the barbed-wire industry became the equivalent of today’s Internet gold rush.
Anyone who came up with a slight modification of the basic design could receive a patent (as more than four hundred inventors did) or simply go into business without one (like perhaps fifteen hundred others). Washburn S Moen pursued such competitors vigorously, usually either winning suits against them or buying them out. Although Haish’s patent was eventually nullified, he got rich anyway by designing a machine that manufactured barbed wire much more efficiently than the modified coffee grinder Glidden had been using.
While farmers hailed barbed wire as a godsend, it was controversial in cattle country. Before barbed wire, cattlemen had grazed and watered their herds on public lands. With no need to own property, even small operators could take advantage of the open range. Once barbed wire became available, though, rich men started buying up large tracts and enclosing them. (One of these was Glidden, who kept 15,000 cattle on 180,000 acres in Texas.) Some stockmen illegally enclosed land they did not own.
Barbed wire decreased the need for labor, reduced cattle losses, and made it worthwhile to invest in improvements like windmills, which could pump water from hundreds of feet underground. Since herds no longer mingled, a cattleman could buy a high-grade breeding bull and be sure of getting its exclusive use. As a result, blooded stock soon replaced the tough but scrawny Texas longhorn. At the same time, the need to buy and enclose land greatly increased the investment necessary to start a herd. Thus the invention that ensured the survival of thousands of family farms was also responsible for the establishment of enormous ranches by wealthy cattle barons.
