The Unholy Trinity Incident
An unlikely combination of Wallaceites, Republicans and environmentalists deals a death blow to Dallas' seaport dreams. Breathe easy, Houston.
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Opponents of the canal argued that the Trinity canal idea was once necessary to help the heavy cotton market in Dallas avoid high railroad freight rates. But the shift to synthetic fibers, the interlacing of the Dallas area with interstate highways, and the growth of Dallas as the finance, banking and insurance capital of the Southwest, they said, made water transportation unnecessary.
With those arguments in mind, the opponents asked who would benefit from the canal. It was learned that eight of the 24 River Authority directors had land holdings in the Trinity watershed. In addition, major utility companies represented on the board had holdings in the area.
By then the canal project backers were getting downright nervous. They decided to move as quickly as possible and set the bond vote before the canal opposition could develop additional strength.
They set the vote on Tuesday, March 13—passing up an opportunity to hold it April 3 in conjunction with city council elections in Dallas and Fort Worth and several other cities, or on April 7, when the Dallas school board elections and several smaller city elections would be held.
River Authority director Brune said the early date was necessary to demonstrate local funding support for the project before Congress went into appropriations hearings. He said the election was purposely held separately from any other elections because the Authority felt the people should not have the issue clouded with any other electoral matters.
The canal backers put together an advertising and promotion show reminiscent of bringing a new cigarette on the market. Brochures, billboards, testimonials from every Congressman in the area (except Steelman), a gala kickoff celebration with music and banners—the works. The estimated cost of the campaign was half a million dollars.
COST went into action, too, although on a much smaller scale.
The group hired Kay DeWitt and Jane Sumner, veterans of Bill Hobby's successful lieutenant governor campaign, to handle the COST office and its publicity effort. Florence Mason was put in charge of a speaker's bureau. Henry Fulcher did most of the speaking. Don Smith did some, "but we had to be careful because he had a fairly low threshold of indignation," White said. "We didn't want him to lose his cool."
They decided that television and an advertising agency were out of the question, and that most of their meager resources would go to radio ads and mailouts.
"The chief decision was that we needed a fund-raiser," Jim White said. "We ended up never getting one. So I had to do that myself." During the course of the campaign, the Dallas branch of the anti-canal effort spent $16,000, and raised about $15,000. White says they still owe $1,000 that he has to raise.
The Fort Worth opponents raised and spent $6,000, he said. Total opposition spending was about 2 per cent of what the supporters spent.
The pro-canal campaign apparently was going to do three things, White said: spend a lot of money, do a lot of name-calling, and make a lot of questionably optimistic statements about the canal. So COST decided it would point out the tremendous expenditure of money, avoid the temptation to indulge in name-calling, and point out what it felt were misleading and deceptive statements made by the backers.
The March 13 election date fell two weeks before an environmental impact study on the Trinity project was due to be released by the Corps of Engineers, and a few months before a revised Corps cost study was to be released.
The COST troops insisted, with effectiveness, that voters were being asked by the business establishment to cast their votes blind—because they would never approve the project if they saw what it would cost and what it would do to the environment.
A favorite COST slogan was "Your money, their canal."
In the midst of the campaign a federal court handed down a decision casting a large shadow over the entire Trinity project.
Several groups—the Sierra Club, the Houston Sportsmen's Club, the Houston Audubon Society, the Texas Shrimp Association—and two fishermen had filed suit in September, 1971, in Houston challenging construction of the Wallisville reservoir project at the mouth of the Trinity. They charged that the Corps, by proceeding with plans for the Wallisville Dam (vital to the whole canal project), had failed to draw up an environmental impact statement, as the law required.
Environmentalists said this project at the mouth of the Trinity would destroy the prime nursery grounds for shrimp, crabs and menhaden in one of the nation's most productive bays, resulting in an annual decline in fish catches of 7 million pounds. Although the Wallisville project had been funded separately from the rest of the Trinity project, they charged it was a vital link in the canal plans and therefore the ecological impact of the whole project should be judged before one of its parts was allowed to be built.
Federal District Judge Carl O. Bue refused to stop the $24 million project at that time, but also refused to dismiss the suit.
On Feb. 17, 1973, a cold Saturday morning, Steelman and Fritz and several other environmentally-minded folks huddled under a bridge on the Trinity River near Liberty. They had camped nearby the night before, and were preparing to take a canoe trip down the Trinity so Fritz could show Steelman how the proposed canal would devastate nature in the Big Thicket area.
But Mother Nature herself had intervened with Fritz's plan. The temperature that morning was slightly below freezing, and flakes of snow wafted down from the leaden sky. An omen, perhaps? Mother Nature turning against those doing battle in her name?
A television crew that had come to film the departure brought a newspaper from Houston. The new arrivals asked if Fritz and Steelman had heard the news.
What news?
Steelman grabbed the paper, and read aloud to the shivering throng that Judge Bue on Friday had told the Corps it had not satisfied legal requirements for a comprehensive environmental impact statement on the Wallisville project. Although the dam was then 72 per cent complete, Bue said the Corps had to stop working on it until it considered the environmental impact of the whole project. And Bue scolded the Corps for "super-salesmanship" in promoting the project.
The crowd cheered. Steelman told the television interviewers that this certainly emphasized what he and other canal opponents had been saying all along.
Dan Weiser, a liberal Democrat who makes a hobby of studying election returns, said that the canal opponents figured that if they could get 56 per cent in Dallas County, break even in Tarrant County (Fort Worth), then they could afford to lose 70-30 in the other 15 down-river counties that would vote on the project. A majority of all voters and a majority of the 17 counties had to approve the project for it to pass.
But the truly massive pro-canal promotion began to worry the canal opponents, who until the last couple weeks thought they had the election in the bag. We'll still win, they insisted. But as election day neared, their self-assurance sounded increasingly nervous.
Could it be true? Could the Dallas establishment hype its way to victory again?
The vote turnout was overwhelming—almost twice as large in Dallas as three weeks later for the city council elections.
And down the project went.
Dallas voted 56 per cent against it, Tarrant County went 54 per cent against it; and opponents got 47 per cent of the vote in the other 15 counties, actually carrying seven of them.
The show of economic power in promoting the project probably hurt pro-canal efforts, COST people said later. If that much money was being spent to push the project, voters may have wondered whether some folks were planning to get a rather hefty return on their investment.
"I didn't become convinced that we were going to win until the morning of the election," White said later.
What tipped him?
Several downtown businesses had almost commanded their help to stay downtown Monday night before the Tuesday election, to participate in a massive telephone campaign to get voters out to endorse the canal. White said he heard that many of the bankers at Dallas' First National Bank had gone home instead.
That, he said, coupled with the recently announced opposition of La Raza Unida to the canal, cinched it.
"I figured if we were going all the way from La Raza Unida to the executives of the First National Bank, we'd pretty well covered the spectrum," White said.
In a sense, the canal project vote may have been Waterloo for the traditional business establishment that has run Dallas for decades.
Its rulers have been forced to accept court-imposed single-member legislative districts for Dallas—which they didn't want, since it diluted their ability to control who ran for and was elected to the Texas House of Representatives. They are now in the throes of watching the Dallas city council and school board divide themselves into single-member districts, which probably will dilute establishment power still further.
The canal project was a sort of all-the-king's-horses-and-all-the-king's-men effort, but the barge channel turned out to be Humpty Dumpty. And there is no immediate likelihood that its backers will get it together again.
Some canal proponents, including Senator John Tower, are nonetheless still talking about alternative means to finance the canal. They maintain that the voters rejected only the taxes required to pay for the canal, and not the canal itself. In some minds, the issue is apparently still not settled.
Some of the COST people, having tasted the blood of a tough and successful battle, talk of keeping the coalition together to be called into action (the Batsignal, please) when needed in the future. But whether such an ungainly coalition of Republicans, McGovern Democrats, Wallaceites and environmentalists can be rallied around a joint cause in the future very definitely remains to be seen.
And what about the canal? Much like a man who loses an arm, the itch to use it continues. The Corps of Engineers is still pursuing its cost studies and other research as if the canal were still on the drawing board, since they are under Congressional instructions to do so.
New bridges that are built over the Trinity along the proposed canal route will still be required to allow clearance space for barges that may never go under them.
And just as teenagers canoeing down the river a decade ago may have wondered what those concrete things that look like locks are, teenagers tracking their course a decade hence may wonder why the bridges are so damn high.
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