Means of Ascent

by Robert A. Caro

  He had it to use. After Johnson’s 1941 Senate campaign, George Brown had delivered to Johnson Herman Brown’s pledge to finance a second Senate campaign as lavishly as he had financed a first. Since that time, the federal contracts Johnson had helped Brown & Root obtain had gotten bigger; profits had mounted from millions of dollars to tens of millions—and at the same time fierce Herman Brown had glimpsed the wealth that could come to his company through the efforts of a Senator, rather than a mere Representative. In 1947, the pledge was renewed again; if Lyndon wanted to run, the money would be there—as much as was needed.

  COKE STEVENSON may have been immensely popular in Texas. But in the state’s third-largest city, San Antonio, and in the area south of San Antonio, the broad, gently undulating “brush country” covered with cactus and mesquite and dotted with small towns that slopes gently two hundred miles southward to the Rio Grande River and Mexico, popularity was not the coin of the political realm.

  San Antonio’s “West Side” was a sprawling Mexican-American slum, containing perhaps 60,000 residents, and, as journalist John Gunther was to write, “The way to play politics in San Antonio is to buy, or try to buy, the Mexican vote, which is decisive.” Lyndon Johnson had, of course, been buying votes on the West Side for years: in 1934, buying them on behalf of then-Congressman Maury Maverick, he had sat in a room in the city’s Plaza Hotel behind a table covered with five-dollar bills, peeling them off and handing them to Mexican-American men at the rate of five dollars a vote for each vote in their family; in 1941, he had bought votes on his own behalf, purchasing them wholesale instead of retail by arranging for the distribution of generous lump sums of cash to Mexican-American leaders who would make the direct purchases themselves, and whose organizations would make sure that voters got to the polls and voted for the approved candidate. Through a number of devices, moreover, the purchase of many West Side “votes” was accomplished without voters being involved at all. Opposition poll watchers and election judges at some West Side precincts might be persuaded—the going rate for such persuasion was only about ten or twenty dollars for a clerk, but it might be as high as fifty for a judge—to leave the polling place after the polls closed. Then the doors would be locked, the ballot boxes or voting machines would be opened, the names of persons who had paid their poll tax but had not actually voted would be added to the list of persons who had voted, and a corresponding number of votes would simply be added to the total of the purchasing candidate. There were more than 10,000 votes available on the West Side that were, political leaders in Texas estimated, in effect, for sale.

  South of San Antonio, in “the Valley,” geographically the area bordering the Rio Grande but in political parlance also including the counties which adjoined them to the north, there were cities—Laredo, Harlingen, Corpus Christi—with similar Mexican-American and black slums, and similar voting practices. Entering these slums was like entering a foreign city. As for the rest of the Valley, with its tiny communities scattered thinly across the brush country, only the arbitrary drawing of a border made these counties part of the United States. Their inhabitants were predominantly Mexican, their language and culture predominantly Spanish; they clung to the customs of their homeland across the Rio Grande. Their dozing towns, strung along the river, “bore,” as one traveler wrote, “an appearance as foreign as their names”—San Ygnacio, Santa Maria, La Paloma, Los Indios. Their houses were thatched adobe huts, or jacales, one- or two-room structures of willow branches daubed with mud, around which swarmed dogs and goats and chickens. Inland, the names of the towns were more Anglo—Alice, Alfred, Orange Grove, Freer—and the Mexican sections often consisted of little wooden buildings with corrugated tin roofs, or of buildings up on cinder blocks or stilts because of huge termites which, in some towns, seemed to swarm everywhere; but whatever the materials used in their construction, the homes in these sections were still hovels—rickety shacks crowded together—and in their yards were the same goats and chickens. These Mexican-American inhabitants were largely illiterate; the Valley as a whole had one of the lowest literacy rates, if not the lowest, in the entire United States. And they had, as historian V. O. Key, Jr., noted, “only the most remote conception of Anglo-American governmental institutions.” In the near-feudalistic regions of Mexico from which they came, serf-like dependence on a local leader, the patrón or jefe, had been the custom, as one observer noted, “from time immemorial,” and they continued this custom in the United States. Since many of the Mexicans worked on the great South Texas ranches—the huge King Ranch alone employed more than seven hundred vaqueros—the patrón was often the ranch owner. The cattle barons, historian Douglas O. Weeks wrote, “established themselves as lords protector of those Mexicans who became their tenants and ranch hands,” with the vaquero giving “unquestioning loyalty” to the ranch owner and regarding his wishes “as law, the only law he knows.” But some of these patrónes were political bosses—ruthless, in some cases vicious, men who walked the streets of the dusty little towns in their domains surrounded by armed unshaven pistoleros; politics was violent in the Valley. A reporter from Philadelphia who journeyed there in 1939 found “as hard-bitten a political crowd … as Texas ever saw.… Each [county] has its own iron-fisted boss, who would make Philadelphia’s Jay Cooke or New York’s Jimmy Hines look like pikers.”

  On Election Day, pistoleros, sometimes appointed “deputy sheriffs” for the day, herded Mexican-Americans to the polls. Each voter was handed a receipt showing he had paid his poll tax (usually these taxes had been purchased by the patrón or jefe months before and kept in his safe to, as Key puts it, “insure discipline and orderly procedure”). In some Valley precincts, the voters were also handed ballots that had already been marked (in most of these towns, voting machines were not in use); according to one description,

  The Mexican voter … was marched to the polls, generally by a half-breed deputy sheriff with two six-shooters, a Winchester rifle, and a bandoleer of ammunition, to perform the sovereign act of voting. He entered the polls, one at a time, was handed a folded ballot which he dropped in the box, was given a drink of Tequila, and then was marched out, where he touched the hand of one of the local political bosses or some of his sainted representatives.

  In other precincts, matters were managed less crudely: the voters were told whom to vote for, but were allowed to mark their own ballots. (Of course, the guards accompanied them into the voting cubbyholes to guarantee that the instructions were followed.) In still others, even more privacy was allowed. Large tents, guarded by deputies, would be erected near polling places; inside, voters were given pre-marked “sample” ballots to be substituted for real ones or, in another device, a piece of cord on which knots had been tied; when the voter placed this “string” next to the ballot, the knots would indicate the candidates for whom he was to vote. Privacy in casting a ballot did not guarantee its secrecy. Upon arriving to vote, each voter had his name, in accordance with Texas law, registered on a “poll list” with a number beside it—the number of the ballot he would cast. The ostensible reason for this law was to keep a person from voting more than once, but it also had the effect of allowing election judges to determine how a citizen had voted, if they wished to do so. Some patrónes dispensed with all these complications. An attorney for one of them—a patrón who let his voters keep their poll tax receipts—recalls his procedure: “Go around to the Mexicans’ homes. Get the numbers of their [poll tax] receipts. Tell them not to go to the polls. Just write in a hundred numbers, and cast the hundred votes yourself.”

  The number of votes at the patrónes’ command was not necessarily limited by the number of eligible voters. Since voters over the age of sixty were not required to pay poll taxes, and since poll tax lists were checked only irregularly to eliminate the names of those who died after sixty, “in the Valley,” as one expert on the subject puts it, “the ‘machine’ votes the dead men.” Nor was American citizenship necessarily a requirement; on Election Day, voters were
recruited in saloons on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande and brought across in truckloads to vote on the American side. Starr County was “an excellent location for bringing voters from across the border,” a commentator notes. In Webb County, the small town of Dolores had about 100 American citizens—and in some elections recorded as many as 400 votes. The votes of these patrónes were generally delivered as a unit. The Valley’s controlled vote—generally estimated at between 20,000 and 25,000 votes, deliverable to the favored candidate by margins as large as ten to one—was euphemistically lumped together in Texas political parlance with those 10,000 votes from San Antonio’s West Side, deliverable by a heavy majority, as the state’s “Hispanic vote” or “ethnic vote” or “bloc vote.” In total, this “bloc” might mean a plurality to the favored candidate of perhaps 25,000 votes. In perhaps no other region of the United States was so large a “bloc” of votes deliverable en masse.

  In obtaining the support of this bloc, cash was often a decisive consideration. The power of these border dictators was matched by their greed. To some of these petty despots, votes were a commodity like any other—a commodity to be sold. The best history of politics in the Valley states flatly: “The State candidates who have the most money to spend usually carry these machine counties.”

  TO REACH the seat of power in the Valley in 1948, a visitor drove into San Diego, in Duval County, a town 130 miles due south of San Antonio (and unconnected to the larger city by any road—there was no direct road link between San Diego and the north; the town looked only south). The visitor drove past the dull red brick County Courthouse to a building just beyond it. At first glance, it was a long, low, graceful white stucco structure with a sloping roof of red Spanish tiles, and elaborate, intricately wrought iron grillwork, seemingly rather heavy in comparison with the rest of the building, over the windows and doors. Closer inspection, however, revealed that the windows were opaque, and the doors were of solid oak, several inches thick. And that heavy grillwork, which covered every opening, was anchored very solidly indeed in the walls. The spaces between the designs with which the grillwork was so prettily decorated were rather narrow, so that it would be difficult to push something, such as a gun barrel, through them with much freedom of movement. And, to increase the difficulty of shooting into the house, the grillwork jutted almost two feet out from the walls. As a reporter was to realize, “The building is constructed to withstand a siege.”

  Going inside, the visitor found himself in one of several offices staffed with secretaries and business executives. But behind them, on two benches that flanked another massive door, were, as the reporter was to write in 1951, “swarthy Latins wearing typical red, high-heeled boots, sombreros and six-shooters, whom the natives know as … bodyguards.” Behind that door the visitor met a short, stocky man in his forties who was usually dressed in a conservative, double-breasted business suit, a carefully knotted necktie, gold-rimmed spectacles and a broad smile, and who, as a writer put it, “possesses the practiced charm of the successful sales manager he resembles”—until you noticed the hard, piercing fixity of his eyes even when he was relaxed, and the way that stare could change in an instant into a blazing glare at the slightest hint of opposition.

  He was George Berham Parr, the Valley’s Boss of Bosses, the son of Archie Parr, the legendary Duke of Duval, and now Duke in his own right. The Parrs had ruled Duval County since 1912, when Archie sided with the Mexicans after an “Election Day Massacre” in San Diego, the county seat, that left three Mexicans dead. (Later, Archie’s chief political rival was shot in the back while eating in a San Diego café.)

  No matter how frank they are about other matters, the great men of Texas politics—the John Connallys, the Ed Clarks, the George Browns—don’t like to talk about George Parr. They downplay the role of money in their relationships with him. “In counties like … Duval, by and large those fellows took care of themselves,” Connally says. “You might give them a little money,” but not much. And some journalists today, in writing stories about Texas in the 1940s, also portray the Parrs as mesquite Robin Hoods, taking from the rich and giving to the poor; the support the Parrs received on Election Day, according to this theory, came not from intimidation but from friendship. George Parr himself, as one reporter puts it, “denies he had ever made a penny from politics.”

  The friendship was certainly there. In the Dukes of Duval, the Mexicans in the Valley had found a replacement for the patrónes on whom they had depended in Mexico, and they were grateful. But there were also somewhat darker shades to the story. As another journalist, writing not in a later decade but at the time, put it, “The facts completely puncture Boss Parr’s long-standing claims that he is in politics merely for fun.” In 1949, William H. Mason, a radio commentator in Alice who had criticized the corruption in Jim Wells County, would be shot to death by one of Parr’s deputy sheriffs; some contemporary observers of “The Land of Parr” say political murders were not uncommon there, nor were beatings handed out to Duval residents who attempted to oppose El Patrón, nor were other forms of intimidation. The reporter who knew Valley politics best in the post-war years, James M. Rowe, who covered the region for the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, wrote:

  It is not easy for the average person to imagine what it was like … to oppose Boss Parr in his own county. A word from him was sufficient to get a man fired from his job or denied welfare payments or surplus commodities distributed to the needy. Merchants who opposed him faced the sudden loss of most of their trade. Little farmers and ranchers were intimidated by the pistoleros.

  And the true color of the story was green, if not precisely the green of Sherwood Forest. Under Texas law, beer retailing licenses had to be approved by the County Judge. In Duval County, only one license was approved, for a company owned by the County Judge: George Parr. But this income from beer was not enough for Parr. In the rest of Texas, beer cost twenty cents; in Duval, it cost a quarter; visitors to the Valley who asked why were informed that the extra nickel was for “George.” Parr owned oil wells. But their income was not enough. To obtain more oil rights, he erased clauses from land leases filed in the County Courthouse he controlled. He took kickbacks on road construction contracts—according to some sources, a kickback on every road construction contract awarded in Duval County. In 1932, for example, a contractor’s representative had placed $25,000 in cash “in a little black bag” and had delivered it to him. But kickbacks on contracts were not enough. He formed a construction company, and awarded all the contracts to himself. For failing to report the $25,000 in income he pled guilty to tax evasion, and in 1934 received a suspended two-year sentence. But he went right back to altering oil and gas leases, and in 1936 was forced to serve nine months of that term.

  Seemingly, no amount of money was enough. Some of Parr’s income certainly was returned to the people of Duval and the other counties he controlled; when they needed money for medicine or funeral expenses or other emergencies, they had only to go to his office, or to the nearby Windmill Café, where he would eat lunch while dispensing favors—protected every moment by guards cradling Winchester rifles and watching over him through the café’s large plate glass window; a burly pistolero stood at his shoulder while he gave his ear to petitioners. Parr himself always sat with his back against a wall. But the largesse thus distributed accounted for only a part of his expenditures. He made a lot of money—in 1944, he and his wife paid taxes on an income of $406,000—but no matter how much he made, it was insufficient to support a life-style that became increasingly ducal. He had a large, impressive home in Corpus Christi and a palatial home in San Diego—and to see that house, surrounded by low walls and lush landscaping, with balconies, swimming pool, large servants’ quarters and high arches leading into an interior courtyard, and doorways entering lavishly furnished rooms, to see it standing, gleaming and white, amidst the pitiful shacks of his constituents, was to be reminded that in the Duchy of Duval workers on county construction projects, the projects from
which the Duke was becoming rich, earned the minimum wage, forty cents an hour or sixteen dollars for a forty-hour week, and to understand the indignation of a contemporary reporter who wrote, “Despite his enormous wealth, much of it gained directly from the taxpayers, I found no record of his ever having attempted to improve the living conditions of tens of thousands of Latin Americans forced to exist in squalid slums, on near-starvation wages, throughout his domain.” He had a racing stable of twenty-five blooded quarter horses, and so that he could enjoy the racing in the style he preferred, he had built a private racetrack, complete with automatic starting chutes and judges’ stand; at it, he raced horses against those of other ranchers, with betting on the races, and when he bet, he bet big—as much as $15,000 on a single race.

  The Duke of Duval, as he was named by journalists (in his domain Anglos called him “George B,” his Mexican nickname was Tacuacha, “the sly possum”), owned a lot of land, but he wanted more. In 1945, the 57,000-acre Dobie Ranch came on the market, and he didn’t have the money to buy it. On April 24 of that year, the Duval County Commissioners Court approved a payment to him for $250,000, and he exchanged that check for a cashier’s check made out to the executors of the Dobie estate, and on June 13, another $250,000 payment followed the same route. He was later to say that he had merely “borrowed” the half million dollars (although when the Internal Revenue Service discovered the loan, in 1954, it had not yet been repaid). The next year, he again didn’t have enough money to pay his taxes; “therefore,” as Rowe was to write, he “returned to his ‘bankers,’ the Commissioners Court. A further payment of $172,000 was authorized.” Parr was constantly in need of money to pay his pistoleros. The numbers of his “deputy sheriffs” were constantly increasing—“because,” as one San Diego resident recalls, “George B knew [people] would kill him if they could.” Always his life-style grew more and more lavish; the parties he threw for associates at the Dobie Ranch became subjects of wild rumors. In 1948, his wife was suing for divorce; and he was going to have to make a cash settlement of hundreds of thousands of dollars. If greed was a characteristic of many of the border-county dictators, their leader was the greediest of them all.