Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
Each fought the other bitterly in the summer primaries, but usually fused in November of general election years to assure continued Democratic patronage control.
The delegations in Washington had to step warily between these factions, now voting money bills that pleased everyone, now filibustering racial legislation or other bills that clearly appalled the majority vote.
In Texas, the most conservative candidate, Allred, again won the governorship in 1936, advocating greater pensions but equally avoiding calling for new taxes. The legislature's penchant for approving new expenditures while hanging back on revenue bills did not change. Allred's last term expired in a legislative logjam and fiscal crisis.
Inevitably, color returned in the race of 1938. The Fergusons were passé, but a new hero was on the horizon. In a thirteen-man first primary—multiple candidacies were normal in one-party states—W. Lee O'Daniel of Fort Worth came in first, polling more than half the votes. O'Daniel, a flour merchant who sold by radio, had discovered a substitute for promises to tenant farmers: playing country music over the air waves. Despite anguished howls that he sold politics like flour, O'Daniel reached more people than all the other candidates combined. O'Daniel's major program was borrowed from similar candidates in other states, a variable of the popular ham-and-eggs plan, by which every aged person would receive a state pension.
In office, O'Daniel dropped the bait and switched. The proposal was watered down, to offer pensions only to needy old folks over sixty-five, and then only enough to raise their income from all sources to $30 per month. But even to put this through O'Daniel had to propose a sales tax, which, though it had a different name, was recognized all the same. In the end, pensions were voted, but the legislature destroyed all revenue bills. O'Daniel, like every Texas governor, wallowed in vetoes and increasing red ink, adding more than $5,000,000 to the deficit in the general fund.
However, in 1940 he won again, largely because he had never stopped his regular homey broadcasts to the people of the state. O'Daniel was better known than any other politician. Also, the pension issue had become so popular that no candidate, even those who opposed it privately, dared attack it from the stump. Pappy O'Daniel promised more, and he was overwhelmingly reelected.
The new legislature faced a financial brink; unless some money were raised Texas would lose its federal welfare funds through not providing its matching share. After much controversy, the burden was at last—as had been earlier proposed—shifted heavily onto gas and oil. Taxes were also placed on tobacco and alcohol. This trend produced the wry joke in later years that a citizen who neither smoked nor drank nor drove a car was unpatriotic; he did not support his state.
Morris Sheppard died, creating a Senate vacancy in 1941. When the interim appointee, Andrew Jackson Houston, the eighty-seven-year-old son of the hero of San Jacinto also died, Pappy O'Daniel chose to run for this vacancy himself. He entered confidently, but Texans' fancy for the flamboyant had about expired. O'Daniel defeated a serious-minded young candidate, Congressman Lyndon Johnson, by only a few hundred votes. His prestige suffered, and although the next year he beat Allred and Dan Moody for the full term, his influence was on the wane. It was said widely that the Establishment supported Pappy O'Daniel for the Senate simply to get him out of the state.
Coke Stevenson, the lieutenant governor who moved up to O'Daniel's office in 1941, was a deeply conservative man. When war came, Stevenson was able to lever important reductions in spending as a patriotic measure. Rigid economies were enforced in all departments. Appropriations for most state agencies, including the University system, were substantially cut. A no-strike covenant was secured from labor, which prevented stoppages during the war. These measures, coupled with the boundless demand for Texas raw materials caused by the war, swelled the treasury. Texas produced half the nation's gas and oil, much of its cotton and food, while family incomes rose by an average of one third.
Coke Stevenson retained popularity at home by feuding with the Federal rationing program. Distribution, more than actual shortage, caused unbalanced supplies of gasoline and beef in the East; Stevenson, and most Texans, saw no valid reason why they, in a region awash with refined petroleum and overrun with cattle, should share the distant Yankee woes. After a near-confrontation, when federal agents took note of thousands of automobiles parked outside football games and Stevenson hinted he might turn the Rangers loose on every federal snoop in the state, the matter was nicely compromised. The gasoline problem—the auto was no longer a luxury but a necessity to the Texas way of life—was solved by tacitly permitting local ration boards to issue every rural family car a higher priority card. This was not as selfish as it sounded to the East; the federal guidelines of three gallons per week for nonfarm or nonbusiness autos hardly got the average housewife to and from the grocery store, and throughout most of Texas, there was no effective public transport, even in the towns.
The rationing of meat, sugar, and other items was solved in a purely local way in many areas. Most Mexicans and Negroes were unaccustomed to consuming the allotted share, or could not afford it, and thousands of rural white families were able to take advantage of these cards.
By 1945, Texas had not only paid off $42,000,000 in arrears, but was enjoying a surplus for the first time in memory. This surplus, as anywhere in America, immediately produced a desire to spend. The minimal payments offered by various state agencies were increased substantially. Unfortunately, inflation soon wiped out these gains, and the old round of deep-in-debt began again.
Stevenson turned his office over to an approved successor, Buford Jester, in 1946. The election of 1946 brought the governorship into contention between the Texas liberals and conservatives for the first time. Homer Rainey, who had been dismissed as president of the state university after a violent quarrel with the conservative regents, took his case to the people. Jester won, with the support of the "regular" or now anti-Truman party.
Jester, more a moderate than a real conservative, had a considerable taste for new spending bills. Unlike his predecessors, he vetoed little, and in his first term many appropriations doubled. Happily, inflation and increased prosperity continued to swell state revenues even faster, and much progress with hospitals and schools was made. Some money was found by tapping the now defunct Confederate veterans' pension funds, taking advantage of an already existing tax. Jester's regime, however, was most noted for the eleven labor laws the legislature enacted in 1947. This followed a national pattern and mood, which, more than the industrial states, Texas was able to exploit.
O'Daniel had reacted sharply to the labor unrest that spread across the nation during the great industrial expansion and retooling of 1940–41. In Texas, there was not much of this militancy, which was more for union recognition than for wages at the time. The Texas mood, highly belligerent and patriotic, did not support this wave of strikes. O'Daniel called for, and got, a law making it a penitentiary offense to commit any act of violence while on strike.
In the 1947 spate, which followed the 1946 spate of Northern walkouts, Texas forbade the check-off of union dues, made it unlawful to require union membership of employees, or conduct secondary strikes, picketing, or boycotts. Picketing of utilities was outlawed, and unions were brought under the antitrust laws. The law also abolished strikes by public servants and restricted picketing severely: no mass picketing, no picketing on private property, and pickets must maintain a set distance between themselves. These codes prevented the legalized violence their absence allowed in many other states. In 1951, they were strengthened further, to close loopholes that Northern corporations with plants in Texas had relied on to allow the closed shop.
The 1947 laws were bitterly attacked by organized labor leaders as destructive of all progress. The evidence is clear that they did two things: they had little effect on prices, incomes, or wages, except these rose as industrialization was given new impetus; they made organized labor much more active in state politics.
Jester, through careful footwork, kept the state party from splitting during Truman's race with Dewey in 1948. The majority was anti-Truman, but the Republican Dewey offered nothing, in either image or program, that any substantial number of Texans admired. The Dixiecrat candidate carried one county, Houston's Harris, the biggest metropolitan area in the state. No one ever discovered exactly what this signified.
The same year saw a primary election that was later fraught with national importance. Former governor Stevenson opposed Congressman Lyndon Johnson for Pappy O'Daniel's Senate seat. O'Daniel, who found his broadcasts from Washington ineffective, chose not to stand. Both candidates were conservatives; both had important support from various interests throughout the state. In an acrimonious campaign, each man tried to prove he was more conservative than the other. In the end, personal spite settled the contest. A south Texas political boss switched his controlled Mexican vote from Stevenson to Johnson, who won by a delayed report from the famous "Box 13." This vote was probably manufactured. The U.S. Senate, with a certain wisdom, refused to interfere, and a federal court gave the race to Johnson by eighty-odd votes. There was probably no injustice involved. As in most close races in Texas, Johnson men had not
defrauded
Stevenson, but successfully
outfrauded
him. In office, Johnson healed the breach somewhat by gathering the Stevenson interests into his own camp.
Jester died in office, and Allan Shivers succeeded. Shivers's administration was marked by the continual tug of war between expenditures and income. Shivers, a pragmatic, somewhat enigmatic conservative, had a taste for politics his wealthy wife did not share. Possibly because of this, Shivers did not seek the national offices he might have had.
The national Democratic choice for the Presidency in 1952 finally brought the smoldering liberal–conservative feud into the open. Truman was already in trouble in Texas. His policy of limited war in Korea smacked to many Texans of Grant's early handling of the Indians. More important politically, Truman dismayed every officeholder in Texas by his veto of the Congressional tidelands bill. This bill would have given Texas title to the mineral deposits along the Gulf marginal shores, which Texas claimed out to ten and a half miles, using Spanish law. The Supreme Court in 1950 had declared the federal government had paramount right and power over this region, which Texas had already leased for $10,000,000 in bonus revenues. The Congressional action to overturn the Court was not sustained over veto.
Despite pleas, Adlai Stevenson showed no sympathy with the Texas claims. Shivers, as party chief, denied the Illinois governor his support. This caused the loyalist Democrats to bolt—but they had nowhere to go, since Shivers kept complete control.
If Dewey's image was unappealing, Stevenson's was appalling. He seemed to carry liberalism far beyond the functional limits of a Roosevelt or Truman. Whatever he stood for, it was something that to most Texans was suspect. When Eisenhower declared for state ownership of the tidelands, Shivers threw the party organization over to him, by letting every local Democrat do as he pleased. Shivers was easily reelected; Price Daniel, by declaring against everything Truman had ever done and Stevenson proposed to do, drove Tom Connally out of the Senate race and defeated the moderate Lindley Beckworth for Connally's seat. The "Democrats for Eisenhower" raised more money for the Republican candidate in Texas than the Republican organization itself. Stevenson posters and propaganda, sent into the state, gathered dust in warehouses. Eisenhower, the first Texas-born President, carried the state by 100,000 votes. During the 1950s the division between the Democrats deepened. The so-called liberal, or loyalist wing, was composed of organized labor, ethnic Mexican, Negro, and other elements that regularly favored the policies and imperatives of the Northern Democrats. The conservative wing, much larger, represented most financial and business interests, and the great bulk of the middle class. It was socially conservative, states-rightist, and in the broadest terms, antigovernment. It continued to be better financed and organized. It retained control, though only with bitter party in-fighting.
Frustrated over thirty years, the liberal faction of the Democrats tended to become more and more illiberal in pronouncements and attitudes, and to look more and more to the federal government for support than to the people.
During the Eisenhower years, a small, rather patrician native Republican leadership emerged in the cities. Republicanism gained a respectability it had not enjoyed since the demise of the conservative Republicans, although the party itself remained small. A majority of conservative Democrats might vote for the national Republican ticket, as they did in 1952 and 1956, but, in local control, this same majority felt the one-party system adequately served their needs. Republicans contested few local races, and won even fewer, but there was a steady, noticeable growth, fed by the continually unpopular policies of the nationally dominant Northern Democrats.
A feature of Texan politics became the fusion of Republicans and conservative Democrats in the Democratic primaries, which frequently defeated the liberal faction even in its own strongholds. Then, in November, the nominees of the victorious conservative wing usually played effectively upon partisan loyalty and drew the liberal vote against Republican candidates. By pulling Republicans into the Democratic primaries—where the action was—and by holding the liberal vote in the fall, Texas conservatives kept both factions whipsawed. Both minorities knew what was happening to them, but found it impossible to ally; a great weakness of the liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans in Texas was that both tended to be more ideological than practical; they preferred programs to power, and thus surrendered both to the ruling faction.