Means of Ascent

by Robert A. Caro

  On the site, below the falls, that he had picked out for his home years earlier, he now built it, with his own hands. Several years later it burned down, and he built another house. This one had a wing solely for his books. His self-education had progressed from the practicalities of law to its philosophy and theory, and then to government, to history and to biography. In the Hill Country, where books were so rare—Junction, like Johnson City, had no library; most families owned only one book: the Bible—he had created a substantial library. He would read at night, but also in the mornings, before daylight. He rose very early every morning, and put on a pot—a battered old graniteware pot—of very strong coffee. Then he would sit down with a book. Friends who stayed at the ranch remember sometimes getting up at four or five in the morning to go to the bathroom, and seeing a lamp burning in the living room, and in its circle of light, Coke Stevenson reading, his huge, gnarled, powerful hands tenderly holding the book. “He treats his books like friends,” one man would recall. “None of his books has a turned-down edge” to mark the place; “none has notes on the margin—if notes are needed, he makes them on a piece of paper and inserts them at the place.…”

  Fay designed this new house—a sprawling, spacious, two-story structure with three great archways in front, and above them a long terrace. Coke built it—a room at a time as funds were available. (It would take him ten years to complete it.) To implement his wife’s drawings, he sent away for books on architecture and taught himself the rudiments of that profession. The house was somewhat Spanish and romantic in design, and it was built so that it couldn’t be destroyed. Underneath the bright Indian rugs that covered them, the floors were of concrete; the ceiling and supporting beams were of concrete reinforced with steel; the walls—thick walls—were of concrete and native stone. A visitor said it was so solid that it was “seemingly indestructible”; another compared it to “a fortress.” And it was, in a rough way, very impressive; towering up to the twenty-foot ceiling of the “baronial” living room was a huge, “unbelievable” stone fireplace. It was a stone Fay particularly liked that was found on a ridge some miles from the house; Coke lugged every stone home in a tow sack. Describing the house, the beautiful, clear river near it, the shimmering falls, the herons standing in the river, the beavers splashing nearby, the herds of deer so tame they ate out of Coke’s hand, a writer who was Coke’s friend would call the Stevenson Ranch “a Dream Ranch—the dream of a 10-year-old boy who always knew that he wanted to be a rancher.”

  The ranch was a fortress, or at least a refuge from the world. Since Coke had refused to build even a rough low-water bridge across the South Llano, the only way of reaching it was by fording the river, which was not infrequently too high to be forded. He refused to have a telephone on the ranch. The closest town was Telegraph, a mile across the river, and that “town” consisted of one building: a store. (The town had no telegraph; it had been given its name because telegraph poles had been cut from trees near there during the 1850s.)

  “He loved that ranch,” says his nephew, Robert Murphey. From time to time he had a hired man or two helping him, but mostly he worked it himself. He cleared it with his own hands—whole tracts of it; Coke Stevenson’s fame as a lawyer was no greater than his fame as an axman: he could swing a big double-bit ax with such accuracy that he could take a knot out of a log in a single stroke. He fenced the ranch himself. So hard was the Hill Country land—seldom more than a few inches of soil over limestone—that sometimes sinking a post, particularly a big corner post, required dynamite (“if,” Murphey says, “you can imagine having to dynamite a posthole”), but most of the time Stevenson used a cutting bar, a heavy steel bar with a sharp edge on it, raising it above his head and slamming it down, over and over, with all his strength. “He loved the land, and he never let a day pass on the ranch that he didn’t do something to improve the ranch—move a rock, sink a post, whatever,” recalls Murphey, who would later live there for some years. “He kept a bunch of old tools in his car, so if he saw something that needed doing, he could do it on the spot. That doing something on the ranch every day—that was one of his prideful things.” No matter how busy he might be with legal or bank affairs, he let nothing keep him away for the crucial days in a ranchman’s year: goat- and sheep-shearing, and cattle-branding—his brand was “CS” on the left hip, nothing fancy. “I don’t suppose there’s been a calf on my ranch that I haven’t branded myself,” he was to say.

  He relaxed there, too: he and his wife played with their son, Coke, Jr., and, a visitor says, “sometimes acted like they were still two kids themselves.” Once, when the South Llano was high and fast, he bet Fay that he could drive his Model T two miles right down the middle of the river to the house, did it, and, when he had won, jumped out, yelling like a boy.

  BUT HE WAS to be lured into spending time away from that refuge. After eight years, he was to find himself back on the road he had decided not to take: the political road.

  In part, he came back to that road because of his wife.

  “Mother believed that Papa was a great, great man who should serve the people,” Coke Stevenson, Jr., says. She was a leader herself; Fay Wright Stevenson was later to be called “the most beloved [woman] that official Texas has ever known.” During the 1920s, she became active in the local branch of the Eastern Star, and then president of the Texas chapter of that international organization; the more time she spent in the capital, the more convinced she was that her husband could lead men on a stage much larger than the Kimble County Commissioners Court—and she believed, quite deeply, that he should. Much as she loved the ranch, she did not believe Coke should spend his whole life there. She began urging him to run for office again.

  In larger part, perhaps, he returned to that road because of his reading.

  He had read the practicalities of the law, and then the principles behind them; “He buried himself in … the history of the law,” a friend was to say. Then he read history and turned more specifically to government and its theories, and, the friend says, “he became lastingly inspired with the principles set forth” in two documents: the constitutions of his country and his state. He read the two constitutions—and took their words—as literally as he read his Bible, and his reverence was no less deep. “He … adopted them to the bosom of his heart.”

  The Constitution of Texas, drafted in 1876 by delegates (many of whom had worn the Confederate gray; several had been Confederate generals) representing a people who felt that a decade of Carpetbagger rule had shown the injustices of which government was capable, was, as the Texas historian Fehrenbach puts it, “an anti-government instrument.” It not only bound the Legislature within very tight limits but said the Legislature would henceforth no longer meet every year but every other year because, as one Texan said, “The more the damn Legislature meets, the more Goddamned bills and taxes it passes!” It was no more lenient with the executive branch: the powers of the Governor were reduced to a point where he was one of the weakest in America. “If future State Governments prove burdensome or onerous, it ought not to be the fault of this Convention,” one of the delegates said, and, indeed, the convention’s handiwork made it, in Fehrenbach’s words, “almost impossible for government in Texas to be burdensome or onerous in the future.” The spirit behind the Constitution was the spirit of farmers and ranchers; however much they believed in education, pensions or government services, the taxes fell on them and their land. The Constitution was the embodiment of what Fehrenbach describes as “a lasting philosophy that no Legislature or Governor was to be trusted”—as a result, one analyst concludes, “everything possible was done to limit the power of all branches of government.” It was a document more fitted to be the Constitution of the older, agrarian South than of an emerging industrial state, but, as Fehrenbach says, “None of these [limitations] was controversial; they were what the people wanted.” Indeed, the people wanted them still; every attempt to modify them had been voted down.

  The philosop
hy embodied in the Texas Constitution dovetailed with the philosophy of the man who studied it in the light of a predawn fire in his ranch house by the South Llano; its character was his. Thrift, frugality—parsimony, in fact—the Constitution enjoined these on government as he had enjoined them on himself: the saving that had begun at the age of ten; the diligently kept account book; “in him,” a friend was to write, “there is an ingrained hatred of debt of all kinds.” Limits on government; the devotion to individuality, to free enterprise, to individual freedom—he had lived his entire life by those principles. And the lessons of his life—almost the only lessons, in effect, that he had had—had convinced him that the Constitution was correct. He had saved, stayed out of debt, foreseen his own destiny, known what he wanted, fought, with the aid of no one but his wife, to get it—and had he not attained his dream? His whole world added to that conviction. If the phrases of the Texas Constitution were phrases out of the nineteenth century—well, the Hill Country in which Coke Stevenson lived was, really, a nineteenth-century world.

  The Constitution of the United States could, of course, in some ways be read as a document that restricted government in the name of individual freedom—Jefferson had been among those who so read it—and that was the way Coke Stevenson read it. He liked few novels; history was his romance. This man who had taught himself history, who had read in it so widely, had a love of history—in particular, the history of his state, the proud heritage of Texas—almost religious in its depth. (On his ranch, he had found an old log cabin; when he learned that it had been built by Jim Bowie not long before he rode off to his death at the Alamo, Stevenson built a shelter around the cabin to protect it from the elements so that it would stand as long as possible. He erected a flagpole in front of his ranch house, and on March 2, Texas Independence Day, and other state holidays, he would, with no one around to watch but his wife and son, solemnly raise, in those lonely, empty hills, the Lone Star flag.) And he believed that the very essence of that heritage—independence, freedom—was embodied in those two constitutions. Now, in the 1920s, he was coming to believe that the government of Texas was doing violence to that heritage and those principles. The inefficiency of the state government—in particular, the antics of a Legislature whose lack of responsibility must; he felt, lead to higher taxes—troubled Hill Country ranchers. No one in Austin seemed interested in economy, they said—of course not, it wasn’t their own money they were spending. The particular issue that angered him was a proposal to float a bond issue—huge, in terms of the time—to improve the state’s highway system. Stevenson recognized the urgent need for highways, but a bond issue meant debt. And in the plans being floated for highways, the needs of the Hill Country were being neglected along with those of West Texas, and he thought he knew the reason why: these ranching areas were underpopulated and did not have enough weight in state politics. Stevenson began to tell friends, in his quiet, slow way, “The ranch people need representation.”

  Although he had no intention of providing that representation himself, in 1928, eight years after he had left public office, the legislative seat from his district fell vacant, and once again a delegation of fellow ranchers asked Coke Stevenson to represent them in government. Once again, he refused. But the only candidate who was nominated, a politician from Junction’s rival town of Kerrville, was, in Stevenson’s view, a free-spender “of whose political philosophy I did not approve.” He tried to persuade a number of conservative ranchers to run. When they all refused, at the last minute Stevenson agreed to make the race, and won.

  ALMOST FROM the day he arrived in Austin in 1929, he was, an observer wrote, “a marked man”—marked by the same qualities that had marked him in the Hill Country.

  Austin was still the city of the “Three B’s” (“beefsteak, bourbon and blondes”) that it had been when Sam Ealy Johnson had been a legislator there ten years before; Congress Avenue was still lined with bars and whorehouses at which lobbyists maintained charge accounts for cooperative legislators; beneath the great dome of the Capitol the Legislature met in an atmosphere so raucous that it sometimes seemed almost indistinguishable from the nightly scene at the bar in the Driskill Hotel. Coke was an unusual figure against this backdrop. He was more silent than ever. He had taken to smoking a pipe, and he seemed never to be without it. When he was asked a question, he would light the pipe, staring down into its bowl as he did so, or puff deeply on it, thinking before he answered. Years of clearing timber and hauling stones and pounding postholes into that hard Hill Country rock had broadened his body so that it matched his great shoulders, and he was as erect as ever and still had the same slow, careful Southwestern stare and the same way, so graceful for a big man, of walking lightly on the balls of his feet. He liked drinking with the boys, who were legislators now rather than ranchers, and he was, in his quiet way, soon as popular at the Driskill Bar as he had been in Junction. When a party was being organized for a hunting trip, he was usually one of the first ones asked. And men who went hunting with him learned that behind that stolid exterior was a sense of humor. Some of Coke’s “gags” would, in fact, become staples of Austin lore. During a hunting trip with several fellow legislators and a lobbyist, for example, a rancher, an old friend, called Stevenson aside and told him that in one of the back pastures where the men were to hunt was an aged horse—an old family pet—so infirm that it should be destroyed. The rancher asked Stevenson to do it for him. Stevenson agreed. As the hunters’ car was passing the horse, he asked the driver to stop, and got out.

  “I think I’ll just kill that ol’ horse,” he said, and, taking aim, shot it in the head.

  His companions, unaware of the rancher’s request, stared in amazement. “Why did you shoot that horse?” the lobbyist finally asked.

  “I just always wondered what it would feel like to shoot a horse,” Stevenson drawled. Pausing, he stared hard at the lobbyist. “Now I’m wondering what it would feel like to shoot a man.”

  But although, in Austin, Stevenson was with the crowd at the Driskill Bar, he was in a way not of it; there was a reserve, a dignity, about this tall, broad-shouldered silent man with that watchful stare that set him apart from the crowd. And of course he was set apart from many legislators by something else, too. “You just instinctively knew that Coke Stevenson was not someone you could approach with any kind of an offer at all,” one lobbyist recalls today. “I mean, did you ever see him? If you ever had—if you ever saw that stone stare when he got angry—you would know what I mean. No one would have dared to offer Coke Stevenson a dime.” And although he was a regular at the Driskill Bar, he regularly left it early to return to the house where he lived quietly with Fay (Coke could never bear to be separated for any length of time from his wife). “Coke’s off readin’ again,” his friends would say. (Of course they did not know the extent of that reading: who else in Austin was awake at five a.m.?)

  Much of his reading during these years was not of books but of legislation, proposed and actual; of state budgets; of memoranda submitted to legislators by state agencies, that went generally unread. His reading at the ranch had given him a rare command of governmental philosophies, principles and theories; now he was gaining as well an understanding of the minutiae and intricacies of state government so detailed that it would become legendary in Austin. “I think Coke really hated politics,” an Austin politician says. “Truly hated it—the deals, the maneuverings. It just went completely against the grain of the man.” But he loved government—loved it and knew it as few men did. “If you started talking about wheeling and dealing—trading votes, whatever—what you got from Coke was that stone stare. Sometimes it wasn’t that he was angry; it was just that he was bored. But if you were talking about what government should do and why we should do it, then you had his interest.” He was soon deeply respected in that political city—not as a politician but as a public official, a public official who felt that a legislator’s responsibilities extended beyond the district that had elected him. Not
only did he quickly secure the passage of legislation needed by “ranch people,” he was instrumental in the passage of laws with broader—statewide—significance.