Eugene C. Barker - Personal Life and Political Views

Personal Life and Political Views

On May 6, 1903, Barker married the former Matilda LeGrand Weeden. The couple had a son, David Barker. They lived in a fieldstone colonial home at 2600 San Gabriel Street in Austin. The structure was a model of architectural beauty and was furnished with carefully selected antiques.

Barker was a golfer and a fisherman. He found time to fish throughout the Austin area as well as at the resort community of Port Aransas near Corpus Christi. He also maintained a summer home for fishing and a respite from the summer Texas heat, in Boulder, Colorado.

Barker was known for his generosity. It was said that few who ever went to him in personal distress failed to receive assistance. He lent money to any needy student and never required a promissory note. All the money, he once said, was paid back, sometimes twenty years later. A struggling graduate student outside of the history department once lost his child when an aviator flew an airplane into their cottage in west Austin. Barker called in the student and offered financial help.

Barker was an opposition leader to Democratic Governor James Edward “Pa” Ferguson, who was impeached by the Texas House of Representatives in 1917, convicted by the Texas State Senate of ten counts of wrongdoing, and forced from office. A banker from Temple in Bell County, Ferguson’s troubles began when he punitively used the line-item veto against the UT appropriations bill and attempted to dismiss unfavored faculty members. Barker also opposed Franklin Roosevelt, a highly popular figure in Texas. He supported the conservative regents, including Republican Orville Bullington, when they discharged President Homer P. Rainey, who thereafter was an unsuccessful candidate for governor in the 1946 Democratic primary election, having lost to Beauford Jester.

Among the historians who studied under Barker were J. Evetts Haley, known for his study of the cattleman Charles Goodnight as well as political writings against Lyndon B. Johnson, and Rupert N. Richardson, later the president of Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas.