The Best of the Texas Century—Politics
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Kingmakers of the Century
“We always believed in good government and keeping good people in office,” George R. Brown used to say of himself and his brother, Herman. What Brown didn’t say, although it was clear to everyone, was that “good” meant good for George, Herman, and the giant construction and engineering company they co-founded, Brown and Root. “Good” meant good for the politicians they favored too, because the blessing of the Brown brothers brought lots of campaign cash—so much cash, in fact, that in 1942 the IRS began an investigation into the company’s donations to the Browns’ favorite politician, Lyndon Johnson, who had helped Brown and Root get contracts to build Mansfield Dam, west of Austin, and the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station. It came to nothing, of course. The investigation, that is. Not the cash. From the thirties into the seventies, George Brown was Texas’ premier political kingmaker, backing everyone from presidents to governors to congressmen to local officials. Even in retirement, at age 77, he was a force to be reckoned with: His opposition to a proposed new Texas Constitution in 1975 was a major factor in its defeat. Runner-up: Colonel Edward M. House, who handpicked governors, advised President Woodrow Wilson, and according to one historian, “made politics his avocation and surpassed the professionals in it.” Paul Burka
Patrón of the Century
They called George Parr the Duke of Duval, because he ran his county as if he had the royal perogative to do whatever he wanted. The Box 13 scandal catapulted Parr into the national spotlight in the 1948 Democratic primary, when he produced 202 votes for Lyndon Johnson in the U.S. Senate race six days after the election—linking his own name with corruption and fraud and LBJ’s with the nickname of Landslide Lyndon. But Parr had been doing such things for years. Fine-tuning what his father, Archie, had started, he ran the banks, the county government, and the elections, staying in power by using the county treasury to dispense favors to poor Mexican Americans, who rewarded him with their votes. Frequently under investigation, he successfully thwarted the authorities until he was convicted of income tax evasion in 1974. When he lost his appeal the following year, he fatally shot himself at the age of 74. Runner-up: Cameron County boss Jim Wells, who invented the South Texas political machine and taught Archie Parr the business. Patricia Busa McConnico
Political Race of the Century
The pivot on which Texas politics turned was the 1961 special Senate election to fill the seat vacated by Lyndon Johnson when he became vice president. Governor Price Daniel wanted to appoint John Connally to the seat, but instead he named William Blakley of Dallas, a name that is obscure now and was hardly less obscure at the time. Blakley had been named interim senator once before, by Allan Shivers in 1957. Dubbed the “mystery millionaire” by the press, Blakley opted not to run in the special election that spring, then challenged the winner, Ralph Yarborough, in 1958, only to get drubbed. Daniel apparently made the rash promise that if another vacancy arose, Blakley would get it. Not only was Blakley a proven loser, he was out of fashion in both his politics (rural southern conservatism) and his dress (bow ties). Clearly vulnerable, he drew a record 71 challengers in the 1961 special election, including some of the best-known names in Texas politics. But none of the big names made the runoff (Congressman Jim Wright of Fort Worth narrowly missed), which matched Blakley against a Republican professor from Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls named John Tower. Outraged by Blakley, the liberal wing of the Democratic party opted to support Tower, and the GOP won its first statewide election in modern times. Runner-up: the 1994 governor’s race. In a matchup of Texas’ two most glamorous politicians of the century, George W. Bush defeated incumbent Ann Richards. Paul Burka
Riot of the Century
Who was to blame for the Camp Logan race riot of 1917? The U.S. War Department? It sent an all-black infantry battalion into segregated Houston to police the building of a training station for troops bound for the Great War. The city fathers? Worried more about the residents’ safety than the troops’, they required the soldiers to patrol city streets unarmed. The soldiers themselves? Having served in the Philippines and chased Pancho Villa through Mexico, they were in no mood to bow to local customs and take their seat in the back of streetcars when they arrived in late July. Or the Houston police, who never seemed to pass up a chance to harass the unarmed soldiers? In any case, something had to give. When word reached the camp on the night of August 23 that two black soldiers had been assaulted and arrested by the cops, a group of soldiers stormed the armory, grabbed their weapons, and marched on the town. Sixteen whites and four blacks died—still the only time in U.S. history that more whites than blacks were killed in a race riot—and the city was placed under martial law. In the aftermath, the 118 soldiers who rioted were court-martialed, of whom 19 were hanged. Runner-up: the longest prison siege ever in the United States, in which Fred Carrasco, a San Antonio drug dealer and murderer, holed up for eleven days in 1974 in a Huntsville prison library before being killed. John Spong
Television Spot of the Century
Texas was still a one-party state in 1954, and the Democratic party was split almost evenly between liberals and conservatives, when factional strife reached its peak in the gubernatorial primary between conservative incumbent Allan Shivers and labor-backed challenger Ralph Yarborough. Campaigning still depended upon speechmaking, newspaper endorsements, and word of mouth—until Shivers introduced a TV ad called “The Port Arthur Story” into the equation. The ad exploited strong anti-union feeling in the state by depicting the damage allegedly done by a long Port Arthur strike: deserted streets and idle smokestacks. But to make the point, film crews had to shoot the footage just after dawn on a Sunday morning. One of the filmmakers later recounted to the authors of a Shivers biography, “I had to take thirty minutes of film to get a few seconds when there was no smoke coming out of the smokestack at one plant.” The power of television, then in its infancy, was proved: Shivers came out ahead by 22,919 votes. Runner-up: Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 ad in his presidential race against Barry Goldwater, showing a little girl picking petals from a daisy while a nuclear missile countdown is heard in the background. Katy Vine
Crusader of the Century
In 1923 the Ku Klux Klan was something more than a gang of ignorant rednecks. Its Texas membership included respected rednecks—businessmen and elected officials at all levels of government—and its campaign of terror against African Americans, Catholics, and immigrants (“aliens” to the Klan) was waged without serious opposition from official quarters. Despite widespread knowledge of the group’s violent vigilantism, no Texan had ever successfully prosecuted a Klan-related crime. So the Easter Sunday kidnapping and flogging of a traveling salesman by hooded men near Taylor that year was less newsworthy than the decision of district attorney Dan Moody to prosecute the case. Though warned that he was risking his career and possibly his life, the idealistic young DA for Travis and Williamson counties secured the convictions of three men for assault and one for perjury in the case that, in his words, “broke the Klan’s back in Texas.” Moody’s principled defense of the rule of law would propel him to higher office as the youngest attorney general and the youngest governor (at 33) in the state’s history. Runner-up: Frances “Sissy” Farenthold of Corpus Christi, the reform-minded leader of the Dirty Thirty legislators of 1971, who turned Texas politics upside down by spotlighting the corrupt practices that had produced the Sharpstown scandal. John Ratliff
Lawmaker of the Century
The opening of the American West is often told as a story of community and the rule of law moving across the continent to replace the raw brutality of frontier life. But Sam Rayburn moved in the opposite direction. The son of poor Fannin County cotton farmers, he took frontier values—honesty, loyalty, and plain hard work—east with him to Washington. For almost fifty years “Mr. Sam” stood at the center of American politics, stolid, taciturn, and as tough and true as the elms that towered over his beloved Bonham home. First elected to the Texas Legislature in 1906, at the age of 24, the stocky, already balding Rayburn became the youngest House Speaker in the state’s history (a distinction he held until 1965), and by the time he was 30, he was a U.S. representative. In mid-career he mentored Lyndon Johnson; then, in 1940, he became Speaker of the House, an office he held at his death on November 16, 1961. He was instrumental in shaping the New Deal, the New Frontier, and a host of legislation in between, often defying powerful interests—railroads, utilities, and Wall Street were perennial foes—in his lifelong quest to “try to help the average man get a break.” He achieved this goal the old-fashioned way: He told the truth, stood by his friends, and refused to be bought or bullied. Runner-up: Lloyd Bentsen, whose influential career included a tour in the U.S. House, four terms in the Senate, a vice-presidential nomination, and a Cabinet office. John Ratliff
Governor of the Century
It’s not even close. John Connally had the broadest vision and the best record—and he was the last governor to leave office without being defeated. Most governors, including Ann Richards and George W. Bush, the stars of the nineties, have been content to pick out a few issues to advance, but Connally, upon taking office in 1963, set his sights on everything. He saw that the era when Texas could depend upon agriculture and oil to sustain its economy was drawing to a close. He warned that the state had to plug a “brain drain” of its best young minds to the East and West coasts. He knew that the state lacked the public services to attract new industries and new people. He set about to change it all by prevailing upon the business establishment to abandon its long-held resistance to increased state spending. His number one priority was higher education, and the flagship universities in Austin and College Station are his greatest legacy—but not a corner of state government, from parks to water to arts, went untouched. Had he had more of a common touch, he might have realized his dream of following his friend Lyndon Johnson into the White House. Runner-up: Bill Clements, whose lasting accomplishment was more political than substantive; in 1979 he became Texas’ first Republican governor since Reconstruction. Paul Burka
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