Download Results of the Gilmer-Aikin laws of 1949

Anti-union sentiment in Texas
•The traditional hope that outside industries would
move to the South to take advantage of cheap labor
•Suspicion on the part of rural populations towards
union activity
•Conservative viewpoint that unions spawned
unwanted social and political agents
•Texas had a high percentage of service and hightech industries. These industries traditionally do
not attract unions as much as do manufacturing
industries.
•Inexpensive Mexican labor depressed wages and
discouraged unionization.
Review your textbook, pp. 362-363.
Right-to-work laws: law against compulsory union
membership; a law that prevents membership in a
labor union from being a condition of employment
Texas Unions were strongest among labor
working in oil refineries along the Gulf Coast.
The Gulf Coast of Texas has a high concentration of refineries,
power plants, and other fixed CO2 sources, conveniently located
atop enormous beds of deep saline aquifers.
Cotton had always
required a large amount
of hand labor.
The perfection of the
mechanical cotton
picker revolutionized
the cotton farm.
Harvest scene in the Corn Belt - a large combine
quickly unloads grain to a high-capacity grain cart
Number of Farms and Acres per Farm 1850-1997
The number of farms has decreased since 1935,
while the size of farms has increased
Source: Census of Agriculture, various years.
Demographics
Between 1940 and 1960 there was an
increase in urban dwellers from 4575%.
By 1960, women outnumbered men
Between 1940 and 1960, blacks
proportion of the population declined
from 14 to 12.5%.
Hispanics grew from 12 to 15%.
These population pyramids show the baby-boom
generation in 1970 and again in 1985 (green ovals).
Father Knows Best,
1954-8
Power farming displaces tenants. Texas panhandle.
Photographer: Dorothea Lange.
During World War II, Texas farms became
larger, fewer, and more valuable.
During World War II, the center of the cotton industry
shifted to South Texas and the High Plains.
Acres Planted: 1
dot = 1,000 acres.
The Bracero Program
The term bracero (from the
Spanish brazo, which
translates as "arm") applies to
the temporary agricultural and
railroad workers brought into
the United States as an
emergency measure to meet
the labor shortage of World
War II. The Bracero Program,
also referred to as the
Mexican Farm Labor Supply
Program and the Mexican
Labor Agreement, was
sanctioned by Congress
through Public Law 45 of
1943.
Bracero card issued to Jesús Campoya in 1951 in
El Paso, Texas.
Why the number of Mexicans
working in Texas increased:
1. Many Tejanos moved to cities
because of low agricultural pay and
urban job opportunities.
2. Bracero program: contract labor
agreement between the USA and
Mexico
3. Rise of corporate, vertically
integrated farms that preferred cheap
migratory labor from Mexico
Operation
Wetback
In 1949 the Border Patrol seized nearly 280,000 illegal
immigrants. By 1953, the numbers had grown to more than
865,000, and the U.S. government felt pressured to do
something about the onslaught of immigration. What
resulted was Operation Wetback, devised in 1954 under
the supervision of new commissioner of the Immigration
and Nationalization Service, Gen. Joseph Swing.
Swing oversaw the Border patrol, and organized state and local officials along
with the police. The object of his intense border enforcement were "illegal
aliens," but common practice of Operation Wetback focused on Mexicans in
general. The police swarmed through Mexican American barrios throughout the
southeastern states. Some Mexicans, fearful of the potential violence of this
militarization, fled back south across the border. In 1954, the agents discovered
over 1 million illegal immigrants.
In some cases, illegal immigrants were deported along with their American-born
children, who were by law U.S. citizens. The agents used a wide brush in their
criteria for interrogating potential aliens. They adopted the practice of stopping
"Mexican-looking" citizens on the street and asking for identification. This
practice incited and angered many U.S. citizens who were of Mexican American
descent. Opponents in both the United States and Mexico complained of
"police-state" methods, and Operation Wetback was abandoned.
End of the Depression and return of veterans led to a rise in
both marriages and births in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The Total Fertility Rate (TFR) in the United States
declined from more than 4 late in the nineteenth
century to less than replacement in the early 1930s.
However, when the small numbers of children born in
the depression years reached adulthood, they went
on a childbearing spree that produced the baby-boom
generation. In 1957 more children were born in the
United States than ever before (or since).
The arrival of an urban economy and population accented
demands that the state provide a better system of public
education. The argument concerning schools that had started
with the advent of business progressivism had changed little by
the mid-twentieth century: improved schools, reformers urged,
would invite new industry into the state by making it more
attractive to prospective migrants and by providing a bettereducated workforce. These ideas clashed with older demands
that taxes be held down at any cost and that teachers should
receive minimum pay. (pp. 366-367.)
The Gilmer-Aikin laws of 1949 reorganized
and modernized the public school system.
The Gilmer-Aikin laws of 1949 reorganized
and modernized the public school system.
Claud Gilmer, A. M. Aikin, Gilmer-Aikin Laws of 1949
1. Established a state board of education
2. Required nine-month school terms
3. Set minimum training standards for teachers
4. Mandated improved facilities
5. Established a formula for minimum teachers'
salaries
(See p. 367.)
Results of the Gilmer-Aikin laws of 1949
1. Teachers went back to school meet
requirements
2. Teachers' salaries went up
3. Black teachers received equal pay
4. Began special equalization funds to aid
poorer school districts
5. Along with better roads, spurred school
consolidation.
Independent school
districts outnumbered common schools.
The fear that the Soviet Union might outstrip the
United States in the struggle for world supremacy
prodded the federal government into increasing
federal aid for public colleges and secondary
schools. (pp. 367-368)
Criticisms of the Gilmer-Aikin laws of 1949
1. Consumer taxes were inefficient to support
reform
2. Teachers' salaries still too low
3. Those districts that made the least effort to raise
taxes received the greatest amount of state aid.
"Possibly, the best evaluation of the Gilmer-Aikin
acts would be that they at least moved the state
educational system into the early twentieth
century."
(See p. 367.)
The passage by Congress of the G.I. Bill
of Rights resulted in he rapid growth of
higher education in Texas.
The American G.I. Forum
Dr. Hector P. García
LULAC and the American G. I. Forum (1948)
1. Poll tax drives
2. Delgado v. Bastrop Independent
School District (1948): “Texas
Mexican lawyers convinced a
federal court that segregation of
Mexican Americans violated the
Fourteenth Amendment.
3. Hernandez v. The State of Texas
(1954): the U.S. Supreme Court
ruled that qualified Mexican
Americans could not be
excluded as jurors in their
communities of residence.
4. Self-help drives, Little School of
400 (1959)
“Americans had always believed that the public
schools were agents for social advancement, and the
possibility of integration conjured up white persons’
fears of interracial marriages, moral decay, and
collapsing academic standards. Besides, for most
white Texans, segregated public institutions
validated the presumed inferiority of black persons.”
(p. 370)
The Fiftieth Legislature established
Texas Southern University and
expanded graduate education at Prairie
View A&M in an attempt to thwart
Heman Sweatt's application to enter
the University of Texas.
“We conclude that, in the
field of public education,
the doctrine of ‘separate
but equal’ has not place.
Separate educational
facilities are inherently
unequal.”
NAACP lawyers congratulate
each other on the decision in
Brown v. Board of Education
of Topeka (1954). Attorney
Thurgood Marshall, center,
was later named the first
African American justice of
the Supreme Court.
McCarthyism: The
practice of publicizing
accusations of political
disloyalty or subversion
with insufficient regard
to evidence.
Senator Joseph McCarthy
Religion
In terms of church membership,
"Texans undoubtedly matched
national averages and probably
exceeded them." Roman
Catholicism was the largest
single denomination. The
Southern Baptists was the largest
protestant denomination.