Stevenson’s other recourse was his party. Its nominees would be determined—at the party’s convention in Fort Worth that was to begin the following Monday, September 13—after reports from a “canvassing subcommittee,” and from the full 62-member State Executive Committee. Customarily, the committee certifications were pro forma; as a result of court decisions, it was generally accepted that neither committee would seriously consider disallowing an individual county’s certification. But there was nothing pro forma about this election, and the Executive Committee members were sufficiently sophisticated about politics to understand what had happened down there in Precinct 13 and in the Valley as a whole, and the implications for future close statewide elections. What had happened, others felt, was simply too raw, too blatant. Moreover, many of the committee’s members were old friends of Coke’s. In Fort Worth, Stevenson issued a statement saying he was prepared to appear before the Executive Committee “with proof that the returns in Jim Wells are not correct.” They knew Coke: if he said he had proof, he had proof. When the committee members arrived in Fort Worth that weekend, reporters quickly realized that the Jim Wells certification was not considered a typical example of Texas election chicanery but an exceptional case—and was going to be seriously considered, “SENATE RACE MORE DOUBTFUL,” the headlines suddenly said; “SPOTLIGHT TURNS ON SOUTH TEXAS”—on, to be more specific, a tiny town in South Texas. As the Corpus Christi Caller-Times explained, in a lead paragraph beginning with a rather unfamiliar dateline: “ALICE—Voting Precinct 13 at Alice—not Duval or Harris or Dallas counties—and its 1,027 disputed votes Friday became the issue that may decide whether Lyndon B. Johnson or Coke R. Stevenson will be the next senator from Texas.” Reporters raced to the Valley. On Primary Day, James M. Rowe of the Caller-Times had been unable to interest any major newspaper or wire service in the reports from Jim Wells County. Now, he recalls, “all of a sudden people seemed to realize that a little town in Texas had elected a United States Senator.” Under the headline “The Duke Delivers,” Time magazine said: “Last week many Democrats from north and west Texas who never considered the dapper ‘Duke of Duval’ anything more than a local political princeling found he had become a powerful king-maker. In the stretch of one of the closest political races in U.S. history, he was the man most responsible for Congressman Lyndon Johnson’s nomination over Coke Stevenson for the U.S. Senate.” Texas newspapers were agog over “the biggest political story in the state’s history.” And Texas reporters began to zero in on the specific charge Stevenson was making. A reporter from the Houston Chronicle interviewed Ike Poole, and the headline over the interview said flatly: “200 VOTES GIVEN JOHNSON AFTER PRIMARY.” For months the political headlines had drummed the words “Taft-Hartley” into public consciousness; now, suddenly and repeatedly, there was in the headlines a new word—“FRAUD.”
Politics—the new politics—helped Johnson counter Stevenson’s efforts. The influence of national politics and power on a state, already so evident during the campaign itself, was to intensify during the party’s convention. The 1948 Texas convention had national political implications. In four Southern states, Democrats had broken away from the national ticket and formed the States Rights Party, which would, in November, carry these states for its presidential candidate, J. Strom Thurmond. For Harry Truman, far behind Thomas Dewey in the polls, it was considered imperative to keep Texas from deserting his party; the delegates chosen in May who didn’t support him had to be ousted at this convention. The fight to do so would hinge on the ability of the “Loyalist” (in general, liberal) Truman Democrats to unseat the legally elected (by, in some cases, overwhelming margins) delegations from the “big” counties—Harris, Dallas and Tarrant—on the convention floor, a fight which was going to be very close.
Johnson made use of this fact. The liberals, more sophisticated than the run of Texas politicians, were aware of Johnson’s true, less-than-liberal, record in Washington; although he was more liberal than Stevenson, their support of him had never been enthusiastic. More idealistic on the whole than other Texas politicians, many of them were as outraged as the conservatives over the manner in which Johnson had attained his 87-vote majority. But now feelings about the senatorial campaign were submerged in feelings about the presidential race. And Johnson told his men to take advantage of those feelings. They made an offer to the “Loyalist” leaders: the delegates with whom he would have influence at the convention—most notably the delegations from Austin, San Antonio and the Valley—would vote to unseat the States Rights delegations and vote to seat Loyalist delegations in their place. They would also vote for the Loyalist candidates for the new State Executive Committee which would be elected at the end of the convention and for Loyalist candidates to all other convention posts. In return, Johnson asked for only one thing. It was couched in legal terms: his men, headed by Wirtz (Connally was doing much of the legwork), were ostensibly asking for certification of the senatorial vote as it had been sent in by the individual counties, with no changes, and they claimed that this was the course prescribed by law. But what they were really asking for was plain to the Loyalist leaders. Says one of them, Robert Eckhardt, later a Houston Congressman and in 1948 a key figure in the Loyalist group: “Johnson was interested in preventing Box 13 from being opened.… His major purpose was not to permit the opening of Box 13.” The request made them all the more aware of what the crucial Box was likely to contain, and ordinarily they might have balked, but now, as Eckhardt puts it, “It seemed much more important to a lot of us … that there not be a bunch of [presidential] electors that could throw away Texas votes” instead of giving them to Truman. So, in his words, “Connally and I connived on that,” and the deal was struck.
PUBLICITY HELPED, TOO. Johnson countered Stevenson’s charges of vote-stealing by saying—over statewide radio networks—that actually it had been Stevenson who had stolen votes, not he.
Stevenson’s supporters “were strangely silent about the bloc vote which gave my opponent a 30,000-vote lead coming out of three big cities,” Johnson said. Moreover, Johnson said, in Dallas “they have counted me out of 2,000 votes.” And “nobody has asked for an investigation of … the River Oaks Box of Houston where Stevenson got eight out of every ten votes cast.” In Brown County, he said, there was vote-switching. He had been cheated in rural counties as well. “You didn’t hear of the Kenedy County bloc vote, where only eight votes were in the Johnson column,” he said, and listed three other suspicious counties or boxes.
These charges would not have been very convincing to anyone who examined them closely. In Dallas, for example, there had been five changes in the returns, and not all of them favored Stevenson. Besides, they were the result not of late returns but of clerical errors; made by a clerk who typed a “9” instead of a “7” in a Johnson column, the most significant of them gave Johnson, not Stevenson, 2,000 more votes than he deserved. (Dallas’ official certificate, as one writer pointed out, “corrected that error, and the final returns were certified, without protest from Johnson leaders, on September 4.”) Johnson’s reference to Stevenson’s 30,000 total plurality in Houston, Dallas and Fort Worth as a “bloc” vote is totally misleading: in none of the three cities, which together cast a total of 173,627 votes—100,479 for Stevenson and 73,148 for Johnson—was there any pattern of “bloc” voting other than the normal heavy majorities for Stevenson in upper-income, conservative precincts and for Johnson in low-income, black and Mexican precincts (and in precincts with heavy concentrations of workers in defense-related industries). Houston’s River Oaks Box “where Stevenson got eight out of every ten votes” was the city’s wealthiest enclave; it always voted heavily for a conservative candidate. Nobody but Johnson ever suggested that there was any illegality in the voting there; in saying that “Nobody has asked for an investigation” of it, Johnson was correct—and nobody ever would. In Brown County, there certainly was a heated contest going on—however, it was not over the Senate election, but over the
election of a County Judge. Ballots would indeed be ruled invalid there, but not because of anything to do with the Senate race.
As for rural counties, in Kenedy County, which Johnson charged was a “bloc vote,” he was correct, but the “bloc” was only 52 votes. (Kenedy County consisted almost entirely of a division of the King Ranch, whose owners, the Klebergs, distrusted Johnson.) In the two other rural counties he mentioned, the totals were also minuscule. Not one of the state’s 254 counties voted for Stevenson by ratios comparable to those Johnson received in the Valley. Votes were certainly stolen for Stevenson—Stevenson’s totals were “corrected” in dozens of counties, just as Johnson’s were “corrected” in dozens of counties other than the Valley counties—but in numbers so small as to bear no comparison to the majorities Johnson received in the Valley. Furthermore, the “corrections” in the totals of the two candidates after Election Day, corrections which followed the traditional Texas pattern, were so balanced as to virtually offset each other, and these corrections had no significance in the final result.
HAVING SEEN THE EVIDENCE, and filed his affidavit, Stevenson left Alice with Frank Hamer on Friday evening, September 10. Before him was the weekend, during which the reform majority of the Jim Wells County Democratic Committee was determined to meet and correct the county’s voting tally before the State Democratic Convention began. At the far side of the weekend, at ten a.m. Monday, the convention would open in Fort Worth, to certify the result of the primary. All through that weekend, Coke Stevenson and Lyndon Johnson engaged in a grim, bitter struggle—and during it a pattern emerged that was to characterize the remainder of the fight between the two men. Stevenson was trying to get the ballot box and record of Precinct 13 open, to let Texans see the evidence that he and his men had seen—the loop added to change a “7” into a “9,” and the two hundred ballots that supposedly supported that change. Johnson was trying to keep the records closed.
The pattern was set in the weekend’s opening skirmish. The meeting of the Jim Wells Democratic Committee, at which reformers were planning formally to demand the records, and, whether or not they were produced, to throw out the tainted two hundred votes, might be convened at any moment. It had to be stopped—and it had to be stopped fast.
Behind the broad, amiable smile of Alvin Wirtz was the mind “as quick as chain lightning,” the mind that was always thinking “three steps ahead” of his opponents. On Saturday morning, while the Jim Wells reformers were planning their strategy for the county committee meeting, telegrams were delivered to each of their homes—telegrams, signed by a judge, forbidding them to hold one.
Jim Wells County was in the state’s Seventy-ninth Judicial District. The District Court was, Dudley Lynch writes, “George Parr’s home turf,” the judge, Lorenz Broeter of Alice, his “loyal supporter.” But on this crucial Friday, Judge Broeter happened to be holding court in Starr County. It would take perhaps two hours to get there and locate him, and in two hours a meeting might be convened, a new certification made. There were, however, judges conveniently to hand in Austin. An affidavit was hastily typed up, and Lyndon Johnson signed it. In it Johnson charged that Stevenson, Hamer and Dibrell, as well as Adams, Poole and the other fifteen members of the Jim Wells committee, had “entered into a conspiracy for the purpose of causing the votes in Precinct No. 13 in Jim Wells County to be thrown out on the grounds of fraud and irregularity.” Johnson claimed that Stevenson had threatened and intimidated Adams and Poole into calling a meeting of the committee to “make a new tabulation” and that Adams would call that meeting “at any instant, unless restrained.” And Johnson therefore asked that a temporary restraining order be issued on the spot, without a hearing, to stop the committee “from making any new tabulation, or attempting to recanvass the votes in Precinct No. 13, or hearing any contest, or eliminating any votes on grounds of illegality, fraud … and from making, sending or filing with the State Democratic Executive Committee any returns” other than those already sent in—the ones containing the disputed two hundred votes—until Broeter could rule. Everett Looney hurried over to an Austin district judge, Roy Archer, of the 126th District, with the affidavit and a proposed injunction signed by him and Wirtz (Looney’s name came first; Wirtz never put his name first on anything if he could help it), and the argument that unless the order was issued at once, Johnson would suffer irreparable harm from the committee’s “conspiracy.” Archer signed the order, and telegrams embodying it were instantly dispatched to every committee member.
Archer’s order shocked attorneys knowledgeable in the state’s election law; one historian was to state that the order “amazed and angered others not directly related to the proceedings or to the Senate race.… Lawyers across the state searched in vain for a legal precedent for an Austin judge restraining an official Democratic Party meeting hundreds of miles away in another county.” Stevenson understood the reason for Wirtz’s maneuver; it was, he said angrily, an “obvious attempt to prevent the truth from coming out of Jim Wells County until after the State Executive Committee has canvassed the returns on Monday.” But a judicial order was a judicial order: when Adams, who of course did not feel he had been intimidated or threatened by anyone (at least not by anyone on Coke Stevenson’s side), took Archer’s telegram to an anti-Parr attorney in Alice, he was told bluntly what it meant: “Even if it [the election] was stolen, you’re not to do anything.” Wirtz’s maneuver worked. “Of course we’ll obey the law,” Poole told a reporter; there would be no meeting until Judge Broeter ruled. And Broeter, George Parr’s loyal supporter, notified of Archer’s order, said he would hold the hearing—but not until Monday morning. Monday, of course, was the day of the state committee canvassing. And once the state committee had opened the Jim Wells returns—the returns which the present Jim Wells committee felt were false—and certified them, the feelings of the Jim Wells committee wouldn’t matter.
WHILE HIS LAWYERS were fighting the rearguard delaying action in Alice over the weekend, Lyndon Johnson himself was engaged on the main front, in Fort Worth, five hundred miles to the north. He had rushed there on Sunday afternoon after dispatches from his lieutenants told him that, on this front, he was losing.
Two battles—two votes—would be waged on this front on Monday. The first vote would be taken by a seven-member subcommittee of the State Executive Committee, the party’s ruling body, to canvass and certify (in theory, to examine and make official) the returns from the 252 counties that had held elections and then to make a report (in effect, a recommendation as to who the party’s nominee should be) to the full, 62-member Executive Committee. The second vote would be taken by the Executive Committee on whether or not to accept the “canvassing subcommittee’s” report: on whether, in other words, to recommend that the full convention name as the party’s official nominee the candidate named by the subcommittee, or some other candidate.
In this election, the canvassing subcommittee’s certifications of the votes from the individual counties would be more than usually crucial. Once it had made official the vote from Jim Wells County to the Executive Committee, the attempts of the reformers down in Alice to submit a revised return would be largely moot: the certified return (the original return) would now be in the hands of the Executive Committee, with the weight of the subcommittee’s certification behind it. If, however, the subcommittee refused to certify the Jim Wells vote, the nature of the entire Johnson-Stevenson fight could change dramatically—and unpredictably; the range of possibilities seemed endless. But one clear possibility loomed as disastrous to Johnson’s supporters: that the reformers in Alice would, before the subcommittee finished its work, submit a revised return—one with the two hundred disputed Johnson votes subtracted from the county total—and that the subcommittee would certify that return instead of the original, thereby giving Stevenson a higher total statewide vote than Johnson.
It was to forestall this possibility that Alvin Wirtz had obtained that temporary injunction forbidding the Jim Wells C
ounty Committee to revise the county’s return. Without a revised return before it, the canvassing subcommittee could not of course certify it to the full Executive Committee; there would be nothing for it to certify except the original. On Monday, Johnson would be safe from a revised return as long as Judge Archer’s injunction remained in force. That holding action in that District Court down in Alice was therefore the key to the subcommittee battle in Fort Worth. His attorneys felt Judge Broeter might well keep the injunction in force until some later date. But even if Broeter dissolved the injunction, Johnson would still be safe, so long as the dissolution did not come too early in the day. As far as the subcommittee battle was concerned, delay was the key; all that was required for victory was a delay of a few hours. Since the court hearing and the subcommittee’s county-by-county certifications would be going forward simultaneously on Monday morning, there would be tense hours until Johnson could be sure that his attorneys back in Alice had delayed long enough. His attorneys assured him they would be able to do so.
Means of Ascent Page 52