Means of Ascent (35 page)

He was just as adamant about other—more traditional—political apparatus. He refused to issue a platform, or to make campaign promises. A platform, he said in his dry way, was like a Mother Hubbard dress: it covered everything and touched nothing. Platforms and campaign promises were meaningless; politicians issued them or made them, and then as soon as they were elected forgot them. They were phony, he said, and he wasn’t going to have anything to
do with them. Voters could know what he was going to do, he said; all they had to do was look at what he
had
done. He wasn’t going to change.

Platforms and promises weren’t the only accoutrements he dispensed with. “This of course was in an era when a politician who was running—the first thing he did was go out and get a loudspeaker and bolt it to the top of his car,” Bob Murphey recalls. “Then, when he drove into a town, he could drive around and his driver could drum up a crowd with it. But Mr. Stevenson would not drum up crowds. And he said he wasn’t going to have
no loudspeaker.” No loudspeaker? He wouldn’t even have the customary signs—“Stevenson for Lieutenant Governor”—painted on his car. “I don’t want to go into no town looking like a circus wagon,” he said. He wouldn’t even have a bumper sticker. So, with the exception of a few formal speeches, and a few—very few—radio talks, the Coke Stevenson campaign consisted of an unadorned dust-covered Plymouth
pulling
into a little town with absolutely no fanfare or advance preparation—or crowds.

Nonetheless, a Coke Stevenson campaign stop was not an unimpressive event.

The reason was the candidate. The car that pulled into the little towns all over Texas may have been ordinary, but the man who stepped out of it wasn’t.

“He had a real physical presence,” recalls one reporter. “He was the kind of a man—he stepped into a Courthouse Square, and people said, ‘
Who
is
that man?’ Maybe they didn’t know him, but they knew he was
somebody.”
There were his big shoulders, which seemed to have grown even broader over the years, and his big jaw, and the way it was always tilted up. There was the way he held
himself—as tall and erect as ever—as he looked around the square with that slow, quiet, careful “Southwestern stare,” and there was his weathered face, with the sun wrinkles spreading out from his eyes, and the glint in those eyes, tough and friendly at the same time. And there was the way he carried himself as he walked into the Courthouse or up to a little group of men who had been chatting in the Square. In fact, men who saw Coke Stevenson campaigning
in those small towns pay him what is for Texans a very high compliment indeed. They liken him to the movie hero who for decades was the embodiment of what Texans admire. “That rugged appearance,” says Murphey. “That face that was so tough, but with a faint smile and that little sparkle always in his eye. The way he carried himself: erect, that big chin up. The strong, silent type—that was him. Coke Stevenson going into the Courthouse was
John Wayne walking into the saloon.
Here’s
The Man
. Here’s our leader.”

Even shaking hands, he had, as a reporter puts it, “
a quiet
dignity.” He would approach three or four men sitting on a bench in front of the Courthouse. “
Say, can I butt in there long enough to introduce myself?” he would ask. “I’m Coke Stevenson.” Then, as a reporter wrote, “he grinned good-naturedly and stuck out a big hand.” Or he would walk into
the Courthouse, or into a café. “Say, can I get acquainted? I’m Coke Stevenson, and I’m running for Lieutenant Governor.” Says Murphey: “I don’t think I ever heard him say, ‘I’d like your vote,’ or anything like that. He just couldn’t do that.” In fact, he said very little. “When he was with them, he would listen to them, as much if not more than he talked. And when he talked, he showed them he
knew their problems. The farmers, the ranchers, the people who worked with their hands—they felt an affinity for him. Because
he was
them
. And they felt it.”

Yet he was also something more—as was apparent when he spoke on the Courthouse Square or at a Rotary or Kiwanis luncheon. Coke Stevenson never talked long. His speeches were very simple. He made no campaign promises; a reporter was to write that Coke Stevenson never
once in his entire career promised the people of Texas anything except to act as his conscience dictated. He had made a record in Austin, he said. The record was one of economy in
government, of prudence and
frugality, of spending the people’s money as carefully as if it had been his own, of having government do only what the people couldn’t do for themselves. That last point was very important, Stevenson said; it was always tempting to have government come in and solve problems, but every bit of government help came with strings of bureaucratic regulation attached, and every string was a limitation on the most important
thing we possess, and have to leave our children—the thing that made Texas and America great. Freedom. Individual liberty. Every time that you accept a government program that you don’t really need, you’re giving up some of your freedom for a temporary gain; you’re selling your birthright for a mess of pottage. And Coke Stevenson speaking in front of the Courthouse impressed voters with the quality with which he had, as a young lawyer, once impressed
juries inside. Says one political observer: “
You knew he meant every word of what he was saying. You knew he was sincere. You just looked at him, and you said, ‘I can trust him.’ ” Journalists ridiculed this campaigner who refused to try to make news with his speeches or to make advance preparations, so that often he arrived in a town without anyone even knowing he was coming. But sometimes Stevenson would return to a town some
weeks after his first appearance. And had the journalists not been so cynical, they might have observed that while on the first visit he had had to introduce himself around the Courthouse, on the second trip that would not be necessary. Nor, in fact, would it be necessary for him to walk into every office in the Courthouse. Recalls one politician: “The minute he got out of his car, the word would be passed: ‘
Coke Stevenson’s here.’ And
the people would come out of the Courthouse and the stores to meet him.” Not understanding the significance of this, however, journalists were startled when, in the first Democratic primary (the Democratic primaries were the crucial elections in a one-party state), this unlikely candidate defeated Senator Nelson, and three other candidates, to win a place in the runoff, although he finished 46,000 votes behind the leader, Pierce Brooks of Dallas. In the runoff against Brooks,
Stevenson waged the same, seemingly foolish, type of campaign, and finished 46,000 votes ahead.

A
T THE
I
NAUGURATION
in January, 1939, one of the great spectacles in Texas political history—it was staged in the University of Texas Stadium, the only arena large enough to hold the crowds of farmers who had thronged into Austin from all over Texas to see Pappy O’Daniel sworn in, with nearly a hundred college and high school bands (and the Hillbilly
Boys) playing and a chorus of
ten thousand high school children singing—Stevenson seemed very out of place. “Interspersed between much fiddling and guitar playing, in the garish carnival atmosphere,” the tall, serious man delivered a speech, which he had laboriously written and rewritten, on his two beloved constitutions. (Together, he said, they formed an “organic law,” a “charter of human liberties.” That charter “is now being assaulted by the lovers of an
extravagant and bureaucratic government and by them it is termed to be outworn,” he said. But “modern improvements do not change fundamental principles.… Let us cherish the old.”) Reporters asked him if, now that he was
Lieutenant Governor, he would have a phone installed on his ranch. No, he said.

With Governor O’Daniel almost totally ignorant of the mechanics of government and unwilling to make even a pretense of learning (he passed off most serious problems with a quip, appointed to key posts men with no experience, submitted legislation that he knew could not possibly pass so that he could blame the Legislature for not passing it, vetoed many of the significant programs passed by the Legislature), the state deficit soared to $34,000,000, state
employees were frequently paid in warrants which would be accepted by stores only at a discount, and the state government was all but paralyzed—until the Lieutenant Governor stepped in to run it. For three years, largely through his quiet, private conferences with legislators, he kept the government afloat. But Austin’s sophisticated political observers considered Stevenson too serious to have a future. His speeches were not on politics but on government—on the
principles of
government, of Jeffersonian democracy hardened by frontier
individualism. More and more, one principle was emphasized. “
Why do thinking people cherish liberty?” he asked.

Newsmen deplored the closely reasoned tone of his speeches, and the lack of emotion in his voice—because Stevenson has no “
radio sex appeal,” the
State Observer
said, “his political future is uncertain in these
days when the ether waves rule the political scene”—and politicians agreed. “The trouble with him,” one state Senator said, “is that he insists on
talking to a man’s intellect, not his prejudices.” He ran for re-election in 1940, campaigning the same way he had before, again violating every aspect of conventional political wisdom. He had no platform, made no promises and almost no formal speeches, simply driving from one little town to another and talking to small groups of people. He had two opponents. One received 113,000 votes, the other 160,000. Stevenson polled 797,000. (That figure was 100,000 more than was
polled in that same election by the still immensely popular O’Daniel, who, with an enlarged band, toured the state in a new campaign vehicle—a white bus topped with a papier-mâché dome of the Capitol.)

The next year, 1941, O’Daniel tried to move up to the United States Senate—against Lyndon Johnson. Although Johnson at first appeared to have stolen the election, O’Daniel’s growing instability, and the growing paralysis of state government, had alarmed the state’s establishment, as had a campaign pledge by the rabidly prohibitionist Governor to ban the sale of beer and liquor within ten miles of any military base. This pledge could
cost “Beer, Inc.,” the state’s powerful beer and liquor lobby, tens of millions of dollars should O’Daniel remain in the Governor’s chair, so brewery
lobbyists, “out-stealing” Johnson, saw to it that Pappy went to Washington instead—and on August 2, 1941, Coke was installed in the Governor’s chair in which Fay had for so long dreamed her husband would sit.

Fay had to be carried to the Inauguration. A few months earlier, doctors had told Coke she had cancer, and was going to die. She was placed in a wheelchair draped in red satin and carried onto the speakers’ stand, and, in the words of one observer, “remained smiling and radiant throughout the half hour’s ceremony.” She never appeared in public again. When she died, five months later, the Legislature commissioned her portrait, and it was hung
in the Capitol.

A
T THE
I
NAUGURATION
, Fay had heard Coke speak words she had often heard before. “To me the plan of government of our forefathers is
a divine inspiration.… It is a government of laws and not of men.” And, he said, now that he, as Governor, was the man who held power, the lesson he must remember was to be restrained in its use, for “Even if it means submerging his
individual opinion as to what the law ought to be, the chief executive still must respect the majesty of the law. He must restrain his own opinions if those opinions should run contrary to the law.” At the end he quoted Shakespeare: “This above all—to thine own self be true.”

Coke Stevenson’s Administration, which would last until January, 1947, revealed both the strengths and the weaknesses in so conservative a concept of government, particularly when the weakness was accentuated by a lack of the formal education that could have given him a broader perspective on the views he had obtained from his solitary reading. And his record as Governor made apparent also the narrowness of viewpoint of a
man brought up, and successful through his own efforts, in a land as hard as the
Hill Country. His response to problems with which he was familiar contrasted sharply with his response to problems to which his upbringing in that isolated country made it difficult for him to relate.

Because Mexicans had for years come to the Hill Country to pick crops—and because Stevenson had long suffered for the hardships he had seen them undergo—now, as Governor, not only did he press a reluctant Legislature to pass a resolution calling for Mexican immigrants to be “entitled to full and equal accommodations” in public places, he took an unprecedented step for the state by creating a
Texas Good Neighbor
Commission, which actively investigated incidents of discrimination and tried to promote local solutions. But there were almost no Negroes in the Hill Country, and Stevenson accepted all the Southern stereotypes about that race. He refused to intervene in wartime race riots in Beaumont, or to investigate a lynching in Texarkana. His life of hard physical labor made him sympathetic to the individual workingman, and he succeeded, against the wishes of the state’s powerful
manufacturers, in strengthening its unemployment compensation system. But, wary of organized labor, particularly the unfamiliar big-city unions, believing that labor’s power had become excessive, he tacitly approved harsh
anti-union bills conceived by
Herman Brown and Alvin Wirtz by refusing to use his veto and allowing the bills to become law without his signature, although he was later to feel that some of them went too far. His lack
of formal education hurt most after the O’Daniel-dominated Board of Regents of the
University of Texas dismissed liberal university president
Homer Rainey. The Rainey dismissal caused lasting damage to the concept of academic freedom at the state university, and Stevenson’s refusal to intervene in this controversy revealed that he did not adequately grasp that concept. As he had refused to offer platforms when he was running for
office, now he would not propose overall legislative programs, fearing he might unduly influence an independent branch of government. In Jefferson’s time, such opposition to government
per se
—such fierce frontier individualism—might have made Stevenson a real democrat; in the more complicated mid-twentieth century, his reluctance to make use of the powers of his office allowed the continuation of the vacuum in Texas government in which special interest
groups—the Texas oilmen, natural gas and sulphur companies,
Brown & Root and their subordinate contractors—who had no such reluctance to interfere in government had long exerted undue
influence in the legislature.