No Second Term For Depression Governor
Ross Shaw Sterling kicked off his campaign for governor on Jun. 20, 1930 by introducing himself to the Huntsville crowd as “the fat boy from Buffalo Bayou.”
The 265-pound multimillionaire poked fun at his gigantic girth to divert attention from his much bigger bank account. Sterling also never let voters forget that he started life as a dirt-poor farm boy in Chambers County, who had to quit school at 13 to lend his widowed father of twelve a full-time hand.
Sterling’s meteoric ragsto- riches rise began in 1903 at Sour Lake, where he sold everything under the sun to the oilfield workers. Within a decade, he was the founding president of Humble Oil Company and well on his way to amassing a colossal fortune estimated at $50 million or nearly a billion in today’s dollars.
Selling his oil interests in 1925, Sterling plowed his profits back into real estate and publishing in his new hometown of Houston. He merged The Post and The Dispatch into a single newspaper and recruited former governor William P. Hobby to oversee the enterprise. The Post-Dispatch waged a no-quarter war of words with Gov. Miriam A. Ferguson and her husband Jim, Hobby’s impeached predecessor, and helped Attorney General Dan Moody upset “Ma” in her 1926 reelection bid.
Presuming the amnesty bill enacted during his wife’s administration had restored his political rights, “Pa” Ferguson in February 1930 unveiled his plan to succeed Moody, who was in the last year of his second and last term. But after party leaders refused to put his name on the primary ballot and the state supreme court reaffirmed its 1924 ruling that banned him for life from public office, Jim again persuaded his obliging mate to run in his place.
Sterling entered the congested race against the advice of friends, who argued that his enormous wealth would alienate an electorate hard hit by the deepening Depression. Although he trailed “Ma” Ferguson by 72,000 votes, barely 20 percent of the ballots, an anti-Ferguson avalanche carried him to victory in the runoff.
The affable amateur could not have picked a worse time to rule the Lone Star roost. Like the puzzled occupant of the White House, Sterling was blamed for the dead-as-adoornail economy, the disappearance of thousands of jobs and the lack of a “safety net” to keep the unemployed from falling through the cracks. He was, in short, the Herbert Hoover of Texas.
The quasi-populist appeal of Fergusonism was made to order for the campaign of 1932. “Farmer Jim” hammered away at the incumbent’s dubious devotion to high interest rates, seemingly superfluous highway construction projects and the controversial armed occupation of the East Texas oilfield. Sterling’s attempt to curtail production by small-time operators smacked of corporate cronyism, especially since the National Guard commander was the top attorney for Texaco and his righthand man was a Gulf executive.
Sterling’s vulnerability attracted a horde of hopefuls, who split the anti-Ferguson forces into hostile factions and enabled Miriam to build up a six-figure lead in the first round. She held on to win their hard-fought August rematch by less than 4,000 out of the 951,000 votes cast.
Sterling refused to accept the photo finish claiming he had been robbed. Citing the Fergusons’reputation for stuffing ballot boxes, he dragged the legislature back to Austin for a special session and indignantly demanded a full-scale investigation. As expected, the lawmakers wanted no part of a precedent-setting postmortem and in effect told the lame duck to take it like a man.
But there was no stopping the sore loser, who would have gladly sold his soul to the devil to prevent the Fergusons’ return to power. Sterling went to court to have the election results set aside only to provoke a successful counter-suit by “Ma,” who was declared the undisputed Democratic nominee for governor.
Sterling shocked and saddened his most steadfast supporters by endorsing the Republican candidate in the general election. This symbolic act of defiance had no decisive impact at the polls but made the defector permanently persona non grata in the Democratic Party.
An inflammatory off-thecuff comment strengthened speculation that Sterling had taken leave of his senses. He actually wished out loud for “somebody to shoot Ferguson in the foot so as to end the threat he presented to Texas politicians every two years.” Even in the no-holds-barred arena of Lone Star politics, his irresponsible remark was clearly out-of-bounds.
As a parting gesture of contempt, the outgoing governor broke with tradition by boycotting the inauguration of Miriam Ferguson in January 1933. To most Texans, this was just bad manners and final proof that the state was better off with Ross Sterling in the board room than the governor’s mansion.
Read the whole story of Bonnie and Clyde and other Thirties outlaws in“Texas Depression Era Desperadoes.” Order your autographed copy today by mailing a check for $24 to Bartee Haile, P.O. Box 130011, Spring, TX 77393.