ABSTRACT
Crusades and complacency characterized Texas politics in the score of years between the Progressive Era and the Great Depression. Many Texans enthusiastically joined the crusade for Prohibition, practically all supported the great crusade of World War I, and far too many endorsed the reactionary crusading of the Ku Klux Klan. It was, moreover, an age of social, technological, and economic change. Particularly in the 1920s, politics was largely the story of governors who sought reforms, reforms that were mainly moderate and generally needed but that indifferent legislators and a still more indifferent electorate would not accept. But the public response to these issues as well as to the rapid pace of industrialization and urbanization and a corresponding decline in the role of agriculture was a conservative and sometimes reactionary resistance to change. The second decade of the twentieth century witnessed an unusual period of political turmoil and violence along the Texas and Mexican border.
