The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 78, July 1974 - April, 1975 Page: 108

Southwestern Historical Quarterly

may have ruined the political ambitions of Ben Barnes but she was surely
ineffective in the gubernatorial run-off against Dolph Briscoe. In turn, the
title of this work also implies that Texas voters threw out not only the
"rascals" but also their philosophy. Nothing could be farther from the truth:
Dolph Briscoe represents the same rural-oriented conservative thinking as
Preston Smith.
Deaton has therefore fashioned a work of limited historical and political
significance. His style is journalistic, riddled with cliches and colloquialisms.
Typically, "seeds of corruption" spouted "into poisonous vines" (p. 24);
the "New Year of 1972 crept on the Texas political scene" (p. 25); and
Farenthold's "breath was hot on the neck of Ben and Dolph" (p. io6).
Oftentimes too close to his subject, he refers to the principal participants
simply as Ben, Sissy, Dolph, and Preston. In fact, The Year They Threw
the Rascals Out tends to be textbookish, relating the story of the Sharpstown
scandal, the state political contests of 1972, and the failures and successes
of the sixty-second and sixty-third Texas legislatures in an adumbrated
form.
Texas Christian University BEN PROCTER
Progressives and Prohibitionists: Texas Democrats in the Wilson Era. By
Lewis L. Gould. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973. Pp. xvi+
339. Illustrations, bibliography, index. $ o.)
Like the reports of Mark Twain's death, Peter Filene's "Obituary for the
Progressive Movement" may have been premature. Since Filene's article
appeared in 197o David P. Thelan and Lewis L. Gould have successfully
employed progressivism as an organizing theme for monographs on twen-
tieth-century politics in Wisconsin and Texas, respectively. In Progressives
and Prohibitionists Gould shows that during the Wilson era prohibition
became "the major divisive element" separating Texas progressives from
conservatives (p. xiii). Of course, the linkage between drys and progressives
was not complete, as Gould's account of Democratic factionalism makes
clear.
" How did the crusade against Demon Rum achieve such status in the Lone
Star state? Earlier anticorporation campaigns had "settled" some of the
economic issues raised by progressives elsewhere. In addition, the presence
of substantial German- and Mexican-American minorities fueled ethnocul-
tural conflict, of which prohibition became the chief symbol. Professor
Gould mentions but does not elaborate on another cause: disfranchisement
had already removed from the electorate many of those Texans, black and
white, who had in previous decades demanded economic reform.

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