Chapter 48
The state of Texas is part of Mexico and is on the frontier between that country and the United States. In the course of the last few years the Anglo-Americans have penetrated into this province, which is still thinly peopled; they purchase land, they produce the commodities of the country, and supplant the original population. It may easily be foreseen that if Mexico takes no steps to check this change, the province of Texas will very shortly cease to belong to that government.
—Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835
THERE is no single boss, no over-all machine, in Texas; the state is too big for that, too various as we should realize by now. So the question “Who runs Texas?” necessarily demands a composite answer.
Lots of people run for governor; there may be as many as twelve candidates or more in an election. No governor in the history of the state, though in theory he may be re-elected indefinitely, has ever served more than two terms; the partisanship is too spirited, the competition too acerb. But, be it noted, the Ferguson family, Pa and Ma between them, served four terms. Most governors, as in many American states, step up to the post; Stevenson and Hobby were lieutenant governors and Hogg, Allred, Moody, Culbertson, were all attorneys general. Texas, along with Wyoming, was the first state to elect a woman governor. The chief power of a Texas governor lies in his capacity to make appointments; no other state, except perhaps Oklahoma, permits such concentration of authority.
The political history of modern Texas begins with the governorship of a great man, Jim Hogg, who served from 1891 to 1895. All over the state I heard it said not merely that Hogg was the best governor Texas ever had, but that it has never had a really good one since. Hogg, whose daughter (named Ima) is still a considerable influence in Houston, was a people’s man, who set out to break the stranglehold of the great corporations; he was a kind of Texas equivalent of Hiram Johnson. Also he reflected the ascending influence of the rural communities, the small farmers as against the ranchmen. In 1915 what might be called the Ferguson era began. James E. Ferguson was a kind of peasant demagogue who did some things well (for instance in rural education) and who got constantly entangled in his own folksy ego; he was impeached in 1917 when it became known that the brewery interests (prohibition was a raging issue) had “lent” him $156,000. The impeachment verdict included a proviso that Ferguson could never again hold public office “in Texas.” So, when things quieted down a bit, he ran his wife for governor instead—and got her elected—while he himself was content merely to be a candidate for the presidency of the United States ! “Ma” (Miriam) Ferguson served from 1925 to 1927; of course her husband was to all intents and purposes the actual governor. In one period of twenty months, the Fergusons issued more than two thousand pardons; which was one way to build up popularity. “Ma” got in partly because she and Pa had courage enough to fight the Ku-Klux Klan, which is to their credit side. From 1927 to 1931 a useful governor named Dan Moody held the office; he had been a “boy-wonder” attorney general. Ma ran for governor four times more (and Pa once ran for the Senate but got beaten), and made it once, in 1933. The governor from 1935 to 1939 was another useful man, James V. Allred, who had formerly been both a Baptist minister and a professional baseball player; he was in turn succeeded by the incredible W. Lee O’Daniel, who was in turn succeeded by Coke R. Stevenson. That the Fergusons had a good deal to do with O’Daniel’s first victory and with Stevenson’s is usually accepted. In other words, from the time of Jim Hogg fifty years ago to the present, the most conspicuous public figures in the biggest state in the union were a pair of self-seeking old buffoons.
Coke Stevenson, governor from 1943 to 1947, is a different matter. No one ever accused him of being an intellectual giant, but he is not a buffoon. He is a cool customer if ever there was one, with curiously opaque eyes, a good infighter politically, someone who never rocks the boat, a compromiser about whom it was said that no hole was too small for him to get through. It is a familiar cliché that you have to be a Baptist to rise high politically in the Lone Star State, but Coke is a Methodist; he was named for a former governor (and senator), Richard Coke. Some people think he is far too friendly to big money; some deny this by asserting that he has never taken a stand for or against anything. But in his last years of office, practically every appointee to whom he gave an important job was a Texas Regular, i.e. someone who bolted the party against Roosevelt. Once, when Stevenson was asked to intervene in the university dispute which was then fiercely raging, he replied that he was too experienced a rancher to burn his lips on a hot coffeepot. Professor J. Frank Dobie, just back from England during the Blitz, replied that he had seen plenty of folks get burned by something much worse, people who were fighting for the same thing as the university—liberty to think as they please.
Coke was born in central-west (not “west-central”) Texas,1 and he lives today near the town of Junction, in rugged and beautiful hill country. He owns a “small” ranch; that is, it runs to fourteen thousand acres. He worked hard as a boy, punching cattle by day and studying law at night; he was variously janitor, bookkeeper, and cashier in a bank; he is a solid, healthy man, six feet two and with a tidy waistline; personally, nobody could be friendlier, a better host, or more likable. He wears a small diamond stickpin shaped like a stirrup, and when I asked him who ran Texas he grinned and replied, “You tell me.” He believes that what the state should be proudest of is its “spirit,” and when I asked him what was the greatest decision he ever had to make, he answered amiably, “Never had any!”
The secret of Stevenson probably resides in the frontier from which he came. In Jeffersonian times he would have been a real Democrat; that is, he is opposed to government per se. But today this is only too apt to mean that, by pretending to ignore government, a man plays into the hands of special interests that may destroy it.
Stevenson decided not to risk running for re-election in 1946, and his successor is a man named Beauford H. Jester, formerly railroad commissioner. Jester is Texan bred and born, a middle-road lawyer who never held public office till 1942. His chief opponent was Dr. Homer P. Rainey, the ousted president of the university. All liberals in the state backed Rainey; the campaign was vigorous in the extreme; Jester won easily. One thing that embarrassed Rainey was a standing (and of course very unfair) challenge to read aloud before a mixed audience several passages from John Dos Passos’ USA, which book had played a prickly role in the university wrangle. Rainey did not accept the challenge. When he accused Jester of a Ku-Klux past, Jester replied, “Rainey has lost his fast ball and curve ball; all he’s got left is a mud ball.” (Time, September 2, 1946.) Seriously what beat Rainey—and he did get a quarter of a million votes—were several familiar factors, such as money from the corporations, a vicious attempt to smear him as a “red,” splitting of the vote among minor candidates, and fierce attack by all reactionary elements.
Turn now to the legislature, with 150 members in the house and 31 senators; all but one (an independent) are Democrats. Legislators get a wage of ten dollars per day for 120 days every other year; if the session lasts longer the pay drops to five dollars, and since most members are eager anyway to get back home, sessions tend to end quickly as the 120th day approaches. The hall of representatives, big and flat with large windows, looks exactly like a schoolroom. I know, because the friendly Texans asked me to talk to them there.
One important issue—as in so many states—is redistricting which by terms of the constitution is supposed to occur every ten years. But it hasn’t been done since 1920, though as we know there have been considerable shifts of population, mostly to the south and west. Some thirty or forty legislators might lose their jobs if redistricting took place, and so they kill each new attempt to put it through. Another issue—permanent and apparently insoluble—is a modification of the basic tax structure, which the state needs badly.
As to political techniques and procedures behind the legislature, Texas is unusual in that it may have two primaries; there is a runoff if no one in the first wins a majority. This example of democracy at its purest sometimes defeats itself. Because, obviously, a candidate (in Primary No. 1) may be well in the lead while failing to get 50 per cent of the total vote; then, as has often happened, he will be beaten in Primary No. 2, if his nearest rivals combine against him. As to the final or general elections, they are of course of only academic interest, since under normal circumstances the Republican can never win. Nevertheless, we shall have a word to say about the Republican party later. Another point worth mention is the comparative meagerness of the total vote. Ohio and California, with only slightly larger populations, have three times as many voters; this is for the most part on account of the poll tax, which Texas still maintains. About 50 per cent of the total adult citizenry voted in California in 1944; the figure for Texas was only sixteen.2
Turn now to the lobbies. One eminent Texan told me, “The politics of this state is perfectly simple—it is run by about twenty corporations.” I am inclined to think that this is an exaggeration, but from a negative point of view a case may be made for it; certainly it is difficult to think of any legislation that the big corporations do not want that gets through. The biggest single factor is petroleum; this is easy to explain in that the oil industry contributes about 60 per cent of the total state income, direct and indirect. And oil has been busy in politics since the days of the late Senator Joe Bailey whose career was wrecked when it was discovered that he had accepted a loan from an oil executive. The oil lobbyists work in any of a dozen ways. A simple method, perfectly legal, might be to pay a prominent politician a sound fee for “drilling rights” on his ranch, even though there was no probability of oil being found there. Associated with oil are the railways, the utilities, lumber, natural gas, and the sulphur interests.
The churches are very powerful in Texas; so, on the other side, are the liquor interests; so is the Texas Manufacturers Association; so, as everywhere in the South, is the county (as distinguished from the big city) vote. Newspapers play less of a political role, I should think, than in any important state; labor is a slowly rising element. There are other factors too. In Austin I heard that three B’s control the legislature—Bourbon, Beefsteak, Blondes.
After the great corporations the biggest and most potent lobby is that of education. Texas has, and has had since its day of independence, a real fetish for public education; $20,000,000 a year was spent on the schools (not including state universities) in 1920, and not less than $68,500,000 in 1944. Consider this latter figure. It is a whale of a lot of money. It is as much as the entire national budget of a country like Cuba. It has to be found somewhere. And Texas has no income tax. The schools get along mostly through the occupations tax, of which 25 per cent—by terms of the constitution—is set aside for school use. This can lead to intricate political maneuvering. Similarly one quarter of the gasoline tax (four cents) goes to the schools, and part of the poll tax. There was considerable commotion in the 1945 session of the legislature, when the ad valorem tax was raised in a jump from eighteen cents to the constitutional limit of thirty-five cents; the whole raise, which added about $6,500,000 per year to the tax bill, went to education. But do not be misled by the Texas inclination to boast in this regard. It expends a lot on schools, but a great many states expend more proportionately. For instance it spent, in 1944, $94.63 per pupil; New York spent $190.53. Texas, in fact, is actually the thirty-first American state—seventeenth from the bottom—in amount of expenditure on schools per student per year.
A derivative factor has to do with textbooks. Students get these free, of course. The state pays for them, and the Texas schoolbook order is the largest and most lucrative in the United States; the same arithmetic text will for instance be used in every school in the state, and choice of a book may mean a fortune to the publisher; hence it well behooves the big textbook companies (which are headquartered on the Atlantic seaboard) to maintain men in Dallas or Austin with close contacts with local politicians and the legislature. Two other points are relevant. First, most publishers hope naturally to sell the same text not merely in Texas but everywhere in the country; as a result they are inclined to look for authors who aim at a somewhat low common denominator. Second, the State Textbook Commission (in Texas as in other states) that names books for adoption has obviously the gravest kind of responsibility for selecting them well, but it does not always live up to this, and one may easily imagine the eagerness with which textbook salesmen seek to maintain cordial relations with the officials who decide what to buy, when for instance a certain text is on the point of becoming obsolete.3 Another item is a covert and entirely unofficial semicensorship. That is, zealots who hold no position on the Textbook Commission or even on the State Board of Education attempt to influence a choice of texts as “conservative” as possible.
I have said that there are no statewide political machines in Texas; this is correct except for the fact that each new governor attempts to build his own. But few of these survive. It is personal loyalties, such as that to old Jim Ferguson, which count; such loyalties to a large extent run Texas. But the recipients of these loyalties cannot easily throw votes to another man, or to their successors. Each campaign starts newborn. All this being true, there should be a line for the exception—the strictly local machines in several southern counties, which are picturesque in the extreme. One, that which ran Hidalgo (near Brownsville) for many years, was broken up by the death of the sheriff, A. Y. Baker. This Baker was a murderer. The story is well told by a journalist of grit and resource, who was in part responsible for unmasking him—Owen P. White, formerly of Collier’s.4 In Duval County near by the czar and dictator for years was a man named Archie Parr, whose “monarchy” was broken up by a revolution after, I heard it said, he had “served as state senator since God was a boy.” But his son still carries on to an extent. Consider the Duval County vote in the Democratic primary in 1940. O’Daniel got 3,728 votes. Seven other candidates got 181 among them. That’s really turning out the vote! Or consider another border county, Starr, which is pretty substantially run by the Guerra family. In the 1944 primaries Coke Stevenson got 1,396 votes; eight other candidates got exactly two !
Finally, since Texas is to all intents and purposes a one-party state, we must turn to what is behind the entire political picture, the Democratic party itself. And this leads us to the story of the Texas Regulars.
The Texas Regulars
Four more years of those crack-pots and we are done—all finished—Eleanor and Sidney will take over and may the good Lord help us!
—from Texas Regular Campaign Literature, 1944
Nowhere in the United States, not even on Wall Street or the Republican epicenters in Michigan and Pennsylvania, did I find such a perfervid hatred for Mr. Roosevelt as in Texas. I met lifelong Democrats who had hoped strenuously for a coalition Byrd-Bricker ticket in 1944; I met men who had been unfalteringly convinced that if FDR won again, “it would mean that the Mexicans and niggers will take us over.” This kind of passion makes for ruthlessness. Another reason for ruthlessness is of course that the stakes are so large. Also this emotion included more than Roosevelt himself; it included all he stood for and all those that stood with him. For instance when Mr. Truman, campaigning for vice president, visited San Antonio in November, 1944, the mayor (Gus B. Mauermann) and the town boss P. L. Anderson (who incidentally is a former champion linotypist of the world) refused to go to the station to meet his train.
Here is a bit of campaign literature, distributed by the so-called Regulars. It came originally from the Almina (Kansas) Plaindealer, and as an example of intellectual deformity it has interest:
Gallivantin’ Gal
Strike up the Band!
Here’s our Globe Trotter!
Call off the bombing for today
Wheel out the Army ship
Hold up the war so Eleanor
Can take another trip.
For 20,000 miles she goes
To have her weekly fling,
And rub her nose against the nose
Of some wild Zulu king!
’Twas by design and not by luck
She chose this distant shore;
The only place she hasn’t stuck
Her nosey nose before.
Now, having rubbed the royal nose
She crossed another sea,
To scare the natives I suppose
And watch them plant a tree.
The happy thought occurred to me
As homeward bound she sped;
Why couldn’t they have shipped the tree
And planted her instead?
To understand phenomena as wantonly distorted as this we must remember that since Texas is a one-party state, a lot of dissidence is inevitable within the party; there is no other place to go. The Democrats fight like bloody murder; then they find themselves still in the same ring when the fight is over. And this makes for nerves frayed and notched. There were “constitutional” versus “harmony” Democrats as far back as 1928. But for a Democrat to turn Republican would (a) be nauseous; (b) mean surrender of political power and privilege. All this is, however, more or less true everywhere in the South; why is the fissure so much more pronounced in Texas, the intensity so much more acute? I daresay one reason is that Texas is so much richer; the vested interests have more to win and lose. Another is the independent tradition and spirit of the Texan frontier. Then there are purely local sidelights. The Ku-Klux hangovers played a role. So did the fact that many people, loyal to Jack Garner, were apt to say, “If FDR couldn’t get along with as good a Texan as Cactus Jack, there must be something wrong.” And Elliott Roosevelt’s business activities in Texas didn’t help to make the family popular.
All this came to a head in 1944; in a presidential year Texas (again so grandiose!) has two conventions, not merely one. The first, which is usually held in Austin, roundabout May, selects delegates to the national convention. The second, held in September in a different city each presidential year (in 1944 it happened to be Dallas), selects the state chairman and state committee and adopts the platform. In 1944 all sorts of complications came. First, a group of fiercely anti-FDR Democrats led by George Butler (who is Jesse Jones’s attorney and nephew-in-law incidentally) organized a definite bolt away from the party, calling themselves the Regulars though of course it was they who were irregular. They captured the Austin convention and named their own electors; this of course meant, if they got away with it, that pro-FDR voters would be disfranchised. And the resultant fight aroused national excitement, because Texas has twenty-three delegates, and it seemed conceivable at the time that the Regular insurrection could throw the national election (Roosevelt versus Dewey) to the House of Representatives. The Regulars intended to vote for Byrd, or some similar conservative candidate; they would ostensibly “represent” Texas at the national convention in Chicago, and the Texas voters who were for Roosevelt would have no votes at all. So a lot of folks, including the CIO, got busy. There was an appeal to the courts. Then came the Dallas convention and a critical roll call on seating a group of FDR electors. It won by just 29 votes out of 1,600. But it took almost two hours to tabulate the vote, and the Regulars, procrastinating, put up Martin Dies to speak, hoping to kill time until proxies and so on could be frantically rounded up. But Dies was booed to such an extent that he could not make the speech. The Roosevelt forces won. Then the Texas Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the FDR electors chosen at Dallas, superseding the Regulars named at Austin, should duly represent the state. But the Regulars, still fighting bitterly, refused to concede defeat; they split the party, and ran on their own third ticket. When election day came around, the Regulars were overwhelmingly squashed. Roosevelt got more than 800,000 votes to their 135,439; they even ran behind Dewey, who got 191,000. What other candidates received is an incidental sidelight—Norman Thomas got 594 votes in the entire state, and Gerald L. K. Smith 251.
After Roosevelt’s death the Regulars formally dissolved themselves as a party, but they still exist in spirit. They control big elements of the Democratic organization, and probably could carry the senate though not the house. One way to put it would be to say that the Regulars have been pushed back on their haunches; another, that they have been driven underground.
A footnote to this tale. Jesse Jones, though his right-hand man Butler was a leading Regular, supported Roosevelt; so did Will Clayton, who like Jones was a powerful member of the FDR administration. But the offices of Anderson, Clayton, & Co. in Houston (the largest cotton brokers in the world) were the spiritual headquarters of the rebellion. Also they were something else—all three treasurers of the three rival parties worked in Anderson, Clayton. Yet, despite the fiercest political passion, they did their jobs amicably side by side, which is something typical of the United States, and something the man from Mars may not easily understand. Lamar Fleming Jr. was treasurer for the Regulars, Harmon Whittington for the Republicans, and a lady named Miss Cline for FDR. And Mrs. Clayton—who at the time was national chairman of the Women’s Democratic League—is one of the stanchest liberals in the land.
Republicans in the Lone Star State
Texas as we know has plenty of Republicans; the state went for Hoover against Al Smith in 1928, though this was a special case; most Texans were not voting for a person at all, but against Catholicism and the wets.5 Who are the Republicans in Texas? First, the “carpetbaggers” from the North, representatives of the big corporations, especially oil-men and their retinues. Second, many west Texans. Third, office seekers as described below. Fourth, practically all the Germans around San Antonio. Bexar County itself went for Roosevelt, but six of the seven counties adjoining were solidly pro-Dewey.
The Republican boss in Texas is a phenomenal old man named R. B. Creager, of Brownsville. He is a senior member of the Republican National Committee, and for years he controlled as much patronage as any Democrat in the state. The reason for this anomaly is that there have been only four Democratic administrations in the country since the Civil War (Cleveland, Wilson, FDR, Truman), which means that a very large backlog of Republican appointments (federal) existed in Texas, and many of these still survive. Texas has, for instance, more postmasterships by far than any other state. When Roosevelt entered office in 1932, practically all federal judges and almost all United States marshals in Texas were Republican. In other words, while the Republican party was in power in Washington, the dominant Republican in the state—though he did not hold elective office—was in a position to control an enormous number of appointments. This is what Mr. Creager did. I even heard it said, by the irreverent, that people around Creager today do not want their own party, the Republican, to win because then the patronage field would be immensely broadened, and they would lose part of their old power.
Pappy
Many eminent Texans serve the nation in Washington as we know, from Tom Connally to able representatives like Wright Patman and Lyndon B. Johnson, but these belong, it would seem, to the national rather than the peculiarly Texan scene. There is however another Texan, even though he lives in Washington nowadays instead of Austin, whom it is impossible to pass over. I mean Pappy.
Pappy (Wilbert Lee) O’Daniel, author of the song “Beautiful Texas” and former flour salesman, is a kind of American marcher-on-Rome who never marched. His career is an illuminating example of the way a man can rise from nothingness to the Senate, by weapons that include demagoguery, the credulity of people, and their fedupness with the ordinary run of politicians.
O’Daniel is in his middle fifties; he was born in Ohio, and moved to Kansas at an early age, where he built up a milling business. There is good reason to think that he was a Republican in those days—one more example of the artificiality of American party lines—and indeed when he became a senator his opponents liked to say that Kansas had, as a result, three senators, Texas only one. During his latter years he made a good deal of claim to religious inspiration (though he was never an overt evangelist like Billy Sunday or Aimee Semple McPherson) but apparently he never belonged to any church until 1938, when he joined the Christian (Disciples of Christ) church in Fort Worth, twelve days after he announced his candidacy for governor. And though Pappy has always claimed to represent the masses, through the democratic process, there seems to be evidence that he never bothered to register—for anybody or any party—until he was forty; one story is that he had not paid his poll tax, and so could not vote although he could be elected governor. Finally, to complete this record of dubious allegiances, his campaigns were largely based on cowboy songs, and of course O’Daniel, who is in reality a city-slicker type, has never punched cattle in his life.
Pappy, moved from Kansas to Texas in 1925,6 and presently learned the technique of selling flour by radio; for a time he worked as a radio announcer too. He organized a hillbilly band, with his children in the ensemble, wrote songs and ditties, and sold his own brand of Hillbilly flour, with “Pappy, Pass the Biscuits” as his motto. One belief is that he went into politics purely to get a bigger audience and hence a bigger market for his flour; his own explanation is that thousands of listeners urged him to run for governor; anyway the hillbilly band grew into quite a thing. By the time O’Daniel was running for senator a crooner named Texas Rose was part of the group; he toured the state in a sound truck (cost $15,000) with a replica of the Texas capitol on top; a flour barrel was passed around for contributions.
I cannot describe in detail—the most elementary considerations of space preclude it—the various O’Daniel campaigns. This Texas kingfish became the greatest vote getter in the history of the state. One Houston friend, when I asked him to explain this, replied “because Pappy is a carpetbagger, and so are we all.” But this is surely only a fraction of the truth. O’Daniel appealed mostly to the farmers, who have so often taken a beating in Texas, and to the old folks who in every western state are a capacious reservoir of votes. At the beginning his entire campaign platform was the Ten Commandments! Nothing else. And he got part of the Baptist vote, the Methodist vote, the Christian vote. He attacked the corporations (who however contributed heavily to his later campaigns); he promised thirty dollars per month in state relief to everybody over sixty-five; he said that he would drive the old-style politicians out of Austin—all this makes a familiar pattern. Of course if we examine his record in the light of his various promises, it becomes laughable. After attacking the corporations he managed to get along with them; the aged and indigent are not getting anything like thirty dollars a month; and Austin is still full of politicians. His technique with the legislature, as described by McKay, was in general to submit legislation that he knew could not possibly pass, and then blame the legislature for not passing it. One of his sharpest tergiversations had to do with the sales tax. He came into office on the flatly repeated promise that he would fight a sales tax to the finish; immediately on being elected governor, he tried to push a sales tax through under a different name. During one angry session he is quoted as having said that “no power on earth” could make him tell “what tax he was for.” Occasionally opponents would submit to him long lists of questions, ranging from “What was your war record during 1917 and 1918?” to “Why didn’t you ask the legislature to repeal the poll tax law as you said you would?” His rule was never to bother to answer. Of course he believed in “economy.” But the 1941 legislature broke every record for appropriations.
Pappy first ran for governor in 1938; he got 50.9 per cent of the votes in the primary, and went on to beat a Republican opponent by 473,326 to 10,940. In the runoff, moreover, he threw his support to Coke Stevenson for lieutenant governor, and Stevenson’s vote rose from 258,625 to 446,441—a striking example of Pappy’s power. Running for re-election in 1940, O’Daniel won triumphantly again. Next came the Senate. It makes a flavorsome little episode. The veteran Texas Senator Morris Sheppard died in April, 1941. Pappy didn’t know quite what to do. He could at once resign the governorship, on the understanding that Coke Stevenson, succeeding as governor, would then appoint him senator. But he might just possibly lose the special election that would have to be held within ninety days—in which case he would have lost the governorship too. So what he did was something else; even his admirers were stunned by skulduggery of such proportions. He appointed as Senator the eighty-seven-year-old son of General Sam Houston, also a general (in the National Guard). To say that Houston was senile is to put it mildly. The Lone Star State was to be represented in Washington by a scarcely-alive octogenarian. Pappy’s plan was simple as well as grandiose. The special Senate election would be duly held, and Pappy would then run against the antique general and beat him, even granted that he was in shape to run; Pappy could thus both hold onto the governorship for a time and become a senator. (Houston, incidentally, had once run for governor back in 1892, as the Republican candidate; he got 1,332 votes out of 600,000 cast.) It took some time for General Houston to pull himself together and get to Washington. He arrived at the capitol on June 2, and duly took the oath of office, the oldest man ever to become a senator. Then on June 26 he died—of old age!
So Pappy had to begin all over again. This time he simply ran for the job himself. And it became clear why he had done so much maneuvering. He had begun to slip. The record had begun to show. He just squeezed in.7 He got 175,590 votes; Lyndon Johnson, the runner-up, got 174,279. Pappy, who had boasted of the greatest majorities in the history of the state, found himself with one of 1,211, and an excessively dubious one at that. In 1942 he had to run for senator again, for the regular six-year term. He didn’t get a clear majority in the first primary (in fact he would have been beaten except that two candidates split the opposition vote); in the run-off he barely won.
When Pappy arrived in Washington he made his maiden speech on the second day, thus outraging convention, and announced that he would outlaw strikes, “purge Congress if his anti-strike bill was not passed, rescue Roosevelt from the professional politicians … and take care of the federal debt.” (McKay, p. 469.) He voted against extension of the draft, and said (in a speech in Texas), “I don’t think we are near war. We hear a lot of howling in Europe, but they aren’t going to do us any harm over there.” Meantime, although he had sworn that his campaign expenses in 1940 were only $4,031, an investigating committee of the Senate indicated that he had spent $56,000. Incidentally at about this time he made one speech—later it was explained that someone else had written it for him—in which he confused the Battle of San Jacinto with the Alamo!
O’Daniel may have contemplated “rescuing” FDR, but when 1944 came around he stumped Texas for the Regulars, and attacked the president with the most ferocious vigor. One instrument of this campaign (which was purely to try to beat Roosevelt in Texas—Pappy was not running for anything himself) was the newspaper published by his wife and sons, the W. Lee O’Daniel News. Federal authorities decided to have a look at this peculiar property, since there was some mystery as to where it got its newsprint in a time of acute paper shortage. Then the Senate Campaign Expenditures Committee investigated the paper’s financial backing. One contributor of $25,000 was H. R. Cullen, the Houston oil man; another was E. H. Moore, Republican senator from Oklahoma (New York Times, October 19, 1944) of whom we shall say a word anon.
When O’Daniel—following the complete failure of his 1944 campaign—speaks in the Senate now, it is as if chalk were scraped on a blackboard. Sample of his prose style, from the Congressional Record of February 1, 1946: “We are simply debating the merits of this nefarious, communistic brain abscess No. 101, known as the FEPC bill.”
In June, 1946, he filibustered for eight hours and twenty minutes in an attempt to kill OPA, thus ending all price controls. But, compared to some historic filibusters of the past, Pappy’s had elements of the bogus; he spent half the time at least in reading telegrams from his constituents, and friendly senators interrupted him on many occasions, to give him a breathing spell, notably Bridges of New Hampshire. As for instance:
Mr. Bridges: Mr. President, will the Senator yield for a question?
Mr. O’Daniel: I yield for a question.
Mr. Bridges: Can the Senator think of anything more difficult than getting a bureaucrat to yield up control?
Mr. O’Daniel: I have never seen it done.
Mr. Bridges: That would be pretty nearly the $64 question, would it not?
Mr. O’Daniel: It is worth more than that.
Hammering away at OPA a little later, Pappy let this small remark slide out:
We would be in a terrible fix if we would get things in such bad shape that the American citizen could not make enough money to pay our salaries.
In July, 1946, O’Daniel had this colloquy with Shipstead of Minnesota, in discussion of currency inflation:
Mr. Shipstead: Does not the Senator realize that there will never be a shortage of money so long as the poplar and the spruce lasts in northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Canada? They make good paper.
Mr. O’Daniel: I recognize that, but I am not going to let the Senator from Minnesota get away with the suggestion that pulp from Minnesota provides all the paper that is used, because we produce wood pulp in Texas.
One of Pappy’s sons is named Pat. According to Drew Pearson (New York Daily Mirror, April 15, 1946), this young man was given three chances to graduate from Officers Training School during the war, though less favored soldiers, once they failed, very seldom indeed got another try. The other son is named Mike. In July, 1946, Mike threatened to evict from an apartment house in Dallas a young war veteran who protested when he was told that his rent would be raised from $67.50 per month to $100. Pappy incidentally voted against the Veterans’ Housing Bill.
A sub-O’Daniel exists in Texas, by name Vance Muse; he is the moving spirit of something called the Christian American Association, largely devoted to Jew-baiting, red-baiting, Negro-baiting and the like. Muse lives in Houston, and storms up and down the countryside; in the words of Collier’s, “he has mined the sucker lists thirteen times for funds with which ‘to save America’ from assorted isms.” Few people take him seriously any more. Frederick Woltman of Scripps-Howard went to Houston early in 1945 and wrote a series about Muse called “Menace or Myth?” with the conclusion that “he carries no weight in local civic, political, or labor-industry affairs.” There was, it happened, a bill before the legislature at that time, forbidding the closed shop; this was what Muse wanted too, but proponents of the bill kept severely clear of him; his name, they said, would be the kiss of death.
Muse has pretensions to be a poet, as witness this composition which was used in an O’Daniel campaign:
BURDENSOME TAXES
… We have builded our beautiful highways
With taxes from city and farm,
But you can’t pyramid those taxes,
Without doing our Texas great harm.
What Beat Martin Dies
The answer to this is a single word—industrialization. Texas, it isn’t always realized, is the eleventh manufacturing state in the union, and this has of course served to produce a strong, still limited, but growing labor movement. The great airplane factories between Dallas and Fort Worth, the explosive boom in east Texas oil and the expansion of the whole Houston area naturally brought a labor influx. For the first time in Texas history this in turn brought in a lot of labor votes.8
Martin Dies represented from 1931 to 1945 the Second Congressional District centering on Beaumont, with Jefferson his home county. This had for years been an extremely apathetic region politically. It was like parts of Arkansas. Dies, literally, had gone to Congress (like his father before him) on about 5 per cent of the total potential vote. In 1944 the anti-Dies forces decided that he could be beaten. The CIO in particular went out to “get” him, and Carl A. McPeak, the regional director of the Political Action Committee, traveled to Beaumont in April, 1944, and organized the Citizens Protective League. Dies later charged that the CIO spent $250,000 in Jefferson County; actually McPeak’s total expense account on his organizing mission was $7.20. What the PAC did first was to get out the vote, and as a result 25 per cent more people in Jefferson County voted in 1944 than had ever voted before. Also the labor people were shrewd enough to pick a good candidate; they chose a man who was not a laborite or a newcomer but a county judge, J. M. Combs, greatly respected in the community. Combs did not stand merely for labor; he stood for everybody who was mortally sick of Martin Dies, which meant the reputable citizenry as a whole. Dies explored the situation, knew that he would be beaten, and simply withdrew from the race. Nevertheless a few people voted for him in the primary. Judge Combs got 34,916 votes; Dies got exactly five.
Dies then stumped the state for the “Regulars” in 1944 but he made only two speeches out of ten scheduled, because audiences simply refused to listen. It is perhaps relevant that I never once heard his name mentioned in all the time I was in the state, except when I specifically asked about him.
Recapitulation
To conclude this attempt to give a broad general picture of Texas and all its spectacular qualities, we must return—if only for a sentence—to the permanent realities. It must never be forgotten that Texas is, above all, three things: the greatest repository of petroleum wealth in the United States, the heart of cattle culture, and the most successful cotton-producing area in the world.
As to trends the whole enormous state is in a kind of ferment. The center of political gravity is shifting, albeit slowly, and the issue that cuts through all other issues can be expressed in one word, liberalism. Behind Texas is the frontier, all the Gasconade, the cattle rustlers, the romance, the swaddling clothes. Ahead is something more prosaic perhaps—the education of the propertied class to social responsibility, the shift in politics caused by labor, the breakup of feudal privilege, and the development of what the state needs above all, small, home-owned, decentralized industry. Texas is tossing and stirring like a mighty giant; the picture is almost classically that of early manhood struggling with itself. It has outgrown the solid South; it is outgrowing the old colonial economy; it is becoming thoroughly weary of people like Dies and O’Daniel; it looks brightly and with stalwart hope to a better world tomorrow.
1 He was the first governor in the history of the state born west of the Colorado River (not to be confused with the Colorado River of Colorado).
2 Cf. State Observer (Austin), December 18, 1944.
3 “pa” Ferguson once got involved in a nasty small scandal when he appointed himself as clerk of the Textbook Commission, whereupon it became revealed that the state was “paying more for spellers in enormous quantities than the same book can be bought at retail.” Cf. Perry, op. cit., p. 152.
4 In The Autobiography of a Durable Sinner and Texas, An Informal Biography, both of which contain some wonderful reading matter.
5 Lincoln, incidentally, only just beat McClellan in Texas, and Grant barely nosed out Greeley.
6 My sources for this section are many, but chiefly the scholarly and massive W. Lee O’Damel and Texas Politics, by Seth S. McKay, published by the Texas Technological College, Lubbock, 1944.
7 There were a lot of other candidates in this election, and a list of their occupations, as tabulated by McKay, is an interesting example of the way politics in Texas can hit almost anybody. The list is governor, attorney general, congressman, physician, minister, military expert, merchG.nt, lawyer, teacher, former legislator, laundryman, farmer, communist leader, tax league official, insurance agent, chiropractor, salesman, plumber, radio commentator, and "kinsman of early Texas hero!
8 One should say in parentheses that in the nonindustrial areas labor is still very weak; the single illustration that only five newspapers in the entire state have Guild organizations—the Houston Post, El Paso Herald, San Antonio Light, Fort Worth Record, and Beaumont Enterprise—will suffice. In the state as a whole the CIO and AF of L are nip and tuck; the strongest CIO unions are in oil, steel and the aircraft division of the UAW concentrated in the Convair and North American plants near Dallas. The National Maritime Union in Houston has great possibilities of growth, and agricultural workers are beginning to organize in the valley. The reactionaries in Texas fight all these developments bitterly. Something in Houston called Fight for Free Enterprise Inc. adopted the artifice last summer of chartering a local organization called “Congress of Industrial Organizations” which was not the CIO, in order to confuse the issue.