"West Texas Swing: Roosevelt Purge

in the Land of the Lone Star?"

L. Patrick Hughes

Austin Community College

Presidential visits have always fascinated Texans. Franklin Roosevelt’s whirlwind sprint through the western section of the state in July 1938 proved no exception. Newspaper accounts placed the late Saturday night crowd waiting to greet the president at Fort Worth’s Santa Fe railroad station at six thousand. Another ten to fifteen thousand lined the motorcade route to son Elliott’s ranch. The following day thirty-one radio stations broadcast his comments on the benefits of higher wages to untold numbers of listeners across the state. Traffic-snarling crowds saw the popular executive off from the Texas & Pacific depot early Monday morning. Accompanied by Senator Tom Connally, Governor Jimmy Allred, and six members of the state’s congressional delegation, the president headed for the Panhandle en route to Colorado. Residents of Bowie, Clarendon, and Wichita Falls got to see and hear him at impromptu trackside ceremonies throughout the day. As gentle rains turned into a downpour that evening, Roosevelt spoke at Ellwood Park in Amarillo to a crowd in excess of one hundred thousand. In his wake, Democratic voters, preparing to cast ballots in the rapidly-approaching primary, sought meaning in his every word and action.

Texans were hardly alone in their fascination with presidential doings. In a fireside chat two weeks earlier, Roosevelt had announced he would play an active role on behalf of liberal candidates in his party’s upcoming nominating primaries. Smarting from legislative setbacks at the hands of conservative Democrats, the president lashed out at "copperheads" who were in a state of rebellion against the party platform and the administration’s program. Political observers immediately dubbed Roosevelt’s action a "purge." If successful, he would eliminate his enemies, ensure passage of further New Deal measures, and ideologically realign the two-party system along a liberal/conservative axis.

When the President embarked on a coast-to-coast tour to make his views known, the press quickly became obsessed, attempting to interpret his every word and nod in light of his goal of remaking the party. In Texas, journalists speculated on the meaning of who was and wasn’t invited aboard the presidential train. Roosevelt’s reference to a candidate as "my friend" became tantamount to an outright endorsement. The president’s appointment of Governor Allred to the federal bench, announced in Wichita Falls, was transformed into a snub of Senator Connally, who had helped defeat Roosevelt’s effort to reorganize the Supreme Court the preceding year. When the dust had settled, the renomination of a number of conservative members of the state’s congressional delegation and the defeat of several Roosevelt supporters became a personal defeat and setback for the President himself.

This contemporaneous view of events found its way into the historical literature of the New Deal era in Texas and remains the accepted interpretation today. In his discussion of the Great Depression in The New Handbook of Texas , Ben Procter states:

The impression is of a president aggressively seeking to eliminate his enemies in Texas, assure the renomination of his supporters, and thereby remake the Democratic party in the Lone Star state. By implication, the results were a fundamental setback for a president who had put his prestige on the line and lost.

A more thorough analysis indicates that President Roosevelt, for a variety of reasons, chose not to make Texas a major battlefield. He bypassed multiple opportunities to forcefully intervene in the primary contests of both conservative opponents and more liberal supporters. His behavior in this state contrasts starkly with the administration’s heavy-handed efforts to unseat Senators Walter F. George, "Cotton Ed" Smith, Millard Tydings, and Representative John O’Connor back east. To infer that Roosevelt suffered an inglorious and costly personal defeat in Texas is misleading. It was a battle he never joined. Nor were the results of the primaries a clear-cut disaster for New Deal forces.

Texas was not a particularly inviting arena for presidential intervention. As the campaign season began, the administration determined to focus its efforts on senatorial contests. The conservative coalition forged by John Nance Garner in 1937 represented a mortal threat to the New Deal. Setting aside partisan differences, Republicans and southern Democrats in the upper chamber united to block Roosevelt’s effort to enlarge the Supreme Court, refused authorization to reorganize the executive branch, and significantly weakened the president’s wages and hours bill. Proposals embracing social reform or to boost federal spending to combat the recession which had begun the previous year were doomed. For the president to reassert his heretofore masterful control of Congress, rebellious southern senators to whom seniority had given phenomenal power had to be purged.

Texas in 1938, however, afforded the president no opportunity to affect this situation. Senator Morris Sheppard, a congressional fixture since 1913, was a reliable supporter who had stuck by Roosevelt during the court fight when many in the political establishment broke rank. Among those rebelling was Tom Connally. A prominent member of the Judiciary Committee, the state’s junior senator had publicly excoriated the president’s proposal and played a leading role in its defeat. He had further risked the president’s ire by opposing reorganization of the executive branch, filibustering an antilynching bill, and demanding a southern differential in the wages and hours legislation. Though a logical target, Connally’s term had two years left to run. Roosevelt, according to most press accounts, nonetheless sought to exact revenge by rejecting the senator’s candidate for a judicial vacancy and humiliating him in the process.

Governor Jimmy Allred’s appointment to the federal bench almost immediately became part of purge mythology in Texas. Reporters noted that neither senator had recommended Allred, the governor lived outside of the judicial district involved, and the public announcement in Connally’s presence seemed purposely and maliciously designed to snub and embarrass him. Connally certainly felt this had been the president’s objective.

Franklin Roosevelt clearly was not above such petty behavior. Still, given the absence of any explicit presidential denunciation of Connally while in Texas, other considerations better explain Allred’s appointment. Senators Sheppard and Connally had presented Roosevelt with conflicting recommendations, Brantly Harris of Galveston and Walton D. Taylor of Houston respectively. Naming Allred not only averted siding with one against the other but also allowed the president to reward an ardent New Dealer with a secure post until such time as he might possibly launch a bid for higher office. Further, since the court debacle, Roosevelt had attempted whenever possible to appoint youthful progressives to the federal bench. If the high court could not be packed, the systematic seeding of the judiciary with pro-Roosevelt liberals would eventually achieve the same ends. At thirty-nine years of age, Allred fit the bill perfectly.

Forceful presidential intervention in the races of Texas’ twenty-one representatives, Democrats all, offered only marginal prospects for eliminating opponents and thereby liberalizing the party’s southern wing. Nearly half of the incumbents had drawn no opponent in the upcoming primary. Some, such as Majority Leader Sam Rayburn of Bonham and the Hill Country’s Lyndon Johnson, were aggressive defenders of Roosevelt’s program. While the president made favorable comments about both during his swing through Texas, neither required assistance. Others, such as Joseph J. Mansfield of Columbus, Milton H. West of Brownsville, and Clyde L. Garrett of Eastfield, were less dependable. Despite the Handbook assertion that all three defeated "Roosevelt men" in the primaries, the trio in fact stood unopposed and were thus guaranteed renomination.

Martin Dies, Nat Patton, and Richard M. Kleberg, conservatives identified by Procter as "targets," indeed squared off against and defeated opponents in July 1938. Their rivals, however, were not viable candidates with a realistic chance of unseating an entrenched incumbent. Furthermore, these challengers should not be categorized as "Roosevelt men" in the fullest sense of that term. The president made no mention whatsoever of their candidacies while in Texas, nor did other administration forces intervene on their behalf.

Roosevelt and Dies had little use for one another by 1938. The fiery congressman from Orange regularly voted against administration proposals. By the end of the year he would launch a witch-hunt for subversives within the executive branch as chairman of what became the House Un-American Activities Committee. The president would have cheered Dies’ ouster at the hands of a challenger with more moderate views. However, H. G. Hendricks, Dies’ opponent, detested Roosevelt and the New Deal. A former government economist, Dr. Hendricks launched his campaign pledging to "do what I can to disabuse the country of economic quackery." "I am distressed at government policies which have sealed the ports almost as if by a naval blockade, closed the mills, left railroad equipment cold on the sidings and given the cotton farmer the lowest price in history." Hypercritical of deficit spending, Hendricks thundered that the "present government course leads to destruction - a complete washout with unbelievable tragedy and sorrow." Hendricks’ failure to defeat Dies in late July could hardly have been regarded as an administration setback.

Dr. Philip L. Howe attracted little attention in his effort to unseat Congressman Patton of Crockett. Neither Patton nor the state’s leading newspapers took Howe’s candidacy seriously. Howe’s advocacy of monthly salaries of $200-$600 for all adult citizens failed to fire voters’ enthusiasm. Press coverage conveyed no aggressive embrace of Roosevelt and Patton saw no need to campaign actively. He nonetheless won renomination by a four-to-one margin.

Richard M. Kleberg of Kingsville, chairman of the board of the King Ranch corporation, had been at best a sometimes supporter of Roosevelt’s early New Deal. Tepid backing later gave way to indignant opposition. Described as "a good John Nance Garner Democrat," "Mr. Dick," as he was known, voted against executive branch reorganization, the antilynching bill, wages and hours legislation, and increased relief funding. Despite the advantages of incumbency and name recognition, Kleberg drew two opponents in 1938. James Marion Bird and Gabe Garrett criticized the incumbent for his aristocratic attitudes and laziness in representing his South Texas constituents. Both challengers were members of local Townsend Plan clubs and Bird, who received the endorsement of the national organization, made support for the retirement benefits panacea the cornerstone of his challenge. Hardly a Roosevelt man, Bird expressed his opposition to both judicial and executive branch reorganization, decried ‘yes men’ in the political arena, and vowed to support the president only when he was right. A bitter split among area Townsendites over which member to support relegated Bird to third place on primary day. Garret fared somewhat better attempting to make Kleberg’s opposition to Roosevelt an issue. "Anyone familiar with his record," stated Garrett, "must agree that he has forfeited his claim to membership in the Democratic party by fighting the President and Democratic leaders and the New Deal just like the Republicans do." Garrett’s attack had little impact. Without the president’s endorsement and full-blown administration support, Garrett had no chance of upsetting Kleberg, who finished with sixty percent of the vote.

The advantages of incumbency worked for moderates as well. Voters in several contested primaries returned influential Roosevelt stalwarts to the nation’s capital. Wright Patman of Texarkana had successfully overcome two presidential vetoes to enact the veterans "bonus bill" in 1936. He was nonetheless a valued supporter who had backed every major piece of New Deal legislation and had campaigned enthusiastically for Roosevelt’s reelection. His challenger, George P. Blackburn, expressed only general support for the administration and concentrated his attacks on the incumbent’s "radical" monetary ideas. Patman, who foreswore an active campaign, swept to a three-to-one triumph. Marvin Jones of Amarillo was also plainly identified with Roosevelt. The Panhandle representative had climbed the seniority ladder to wield tremendous influence as chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, a position which made him invaluable to the president. Jones had played a pivotal role in the enactment of revolutionary farm programs and secured desperately-needed relief for his district’s farmers and ranchers through the Dust Bowl years. Amarillo attorney James O. Cade made little headway in his effort to unseat the veteran Jones in 1938. Though he campaigned aggressively, Cade’s attacks on the incumbent as a "rubber stamp" and a "chamber of commerce politician" secured only one out of every five votes cast on election day.

Seniority proved insufficient to return Morgan G. Sanders of Canton to Capitol Hill. The nine-term representative claimed to be generally favorable to the president but had spoken against the court bill and voted against executive branch reorganization. In contrast to Marvin Jones, Sanders’ long service had resulted in neither a pivotal committee chairmanship nor any particular clout in a field deemed crucial to district interests. Four challengers filed against Sanders, who failed to even make the runoff eventually won by twenty-five year old Lindley Beckworth. Encouraged to make the race by Governor Allred, the freshman member of the Texas House proved a formidable organizer and campaigner. Beckworth expressed "wholehearted" support for Roosevelt and spoke in favor of parity payments for farmers, rural electrification, low interest home mortgage assistance, and greater benefits for veterans. A moderate by East Texas standards, Beckworth’s victory represented a gain for administration forces in the land of the Lone Star.

Observers looked to four contested races above all others to gauge Roosevelt’s intentions in Texas. Would the president intervene forcefully in what had traditionally been seen as local matters in order to purge congressional titans Hatton Sumners of Dallas and Fritz Lanham of Fort Worth? Would he come to the rescue of embattled defenders W. D. McFarlane of Wichita Falls and San Antonio’s Maury Maverick? Speculation ran rampant as all four awaited the president’s arrival. How high was the president willing to raise the stakes in Texas? The answers to these questions belie the traditional interpretation continued in The New Handbook of Texas and demonstrate Roosevelt’s willingness to accept political reality south of the Red River.

If the desire to exact revenge underlay the purge, no more enticing target could have existed for the president than Representative Hatton Sumners. The congressman was a traditional conservative who had gone along with most of the New Deal agenda until 1937 in the name of party loyalty. Sumners , however, rebelled when Roosevelt declared war on the Supreme Court. As chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, he, more than any other member of Congress, scuttled the president’s proposal. Sumners believed the plan patently unconstitutional and was enraged by Roosevelt’s failure to consult with party leaders before committing himself. Accordingly, the Dallas lawmaker never allowed his committee to take up the bill. It was a mortal blow. No member of the House of Representatives ever got the chance to vote on the measure which later died in the Senate.

As much as he might wish to oust Sumners, Roosevelt had to realize that the odds were poor despite the presence of two challengers eager to embrace him. Leslie Jackson was running against Sumners for the second time. The young attorney, however, had totalled only six thousand votes in 1936 and his current door-to-door efforts appeared doomed. Thomas B. Love, sixty-eight year old ex-state senator, one-time speaker of the legislature, and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Wilson administration, had entered the contest at the last possible moment. Love’s long career translated into high name recognition but he bore the scars of innumerable battles. Nor was party loyalty his long suit. Love had bolted the party in 1924, participating in a fusion effort with Republicans in hopes of denying the governorship to Miriam A. "Ma" Ferguson. Four years later he had helped lead Texas into the Republican column because of Al Smith’s opposition to prohibition, organizing Hoover Democrat clubs across the state. Such candidacies would have been perilous for the president to embrace.

The situation in Fort Worth, where Fritz Lanham dominated the political landscape like a colossus, appeared no more inviting. The son of a former congressman turned governor, Lanham had represented the Fort Worth area on Capitol Hill since 1919 and wielded influence as chairman of the Committee on Public Buildings & Grounds. None of the six challengers who filed against Lanham was given much chance despite the efforts of several to link themselves to President Roosevelt. The incumbent’s opposition to several important administration measures raised few eyebrows throughout his conservative district. Lanham had long enjoyed the support of publisher Amon G. Carter and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and his renomination bid received strong editorial backing from the paper. Additionally, the representative was friendly with Elliott Roosevelt, the president’s son, who stood poised to endorse the incumbent. Coupled with a glowing testimonial from American Federation of Labor president William Green, Lanham was in good shape to refute charges that he was a troglodytic reactionary out of touch with his constituents and the times.

Facing a less than favorable environment for intervention, Roosevelt adopted a "hands off" attitude. Sumners and Lanham were aboard the presidential special as it steamed out of Fort Worth headed for the Panhandle. Sumners later claimed to have had a brief but cordial visit with the president in his private quarters before detraining in Wichita Falls. Roosevelt, nonetheless, did not refer to either as "my friend" while travelling across Texas. Neither, however, was there any stinging denunciation of the powerful incumbents such as he would level against Senators George, Smith, Tydings and Representative O’Connor later that summer in circumstances he judged more propitious. The president failed to mention the challengers much less throw his public support to those eager to carry his banner in the primary battles. He simply ignored the contests, leaving Democratic voters to make up their own minds. Roosevelt’s decision guaranteed Sumners’ and Lanham’s return to Washington with comfortable majorities in the primary.

Beginning his trackside remarks in Wichita Falls, the president greeted the crowd saying: "My old friend, Congressman McFarlane, has told me much about the city that ‘faith built.’" "I have kept in close touch with all the fine things you have been doing in recent years. Mr. McFarlane has told of the reclamation project, your subsistence homestead, your power development, and I am glad the Federal Government knows your people and all they represent." Standing beside President Roosevelt, McFarlane, locked in a tight race with attorney Ed L. Gossett and two other minor challengers, smiled appreciatively. He needed all the help he could get from the visiting chief executive.

McFarlane was a dependable if not particularly influential supporter of the New Deal on Capitol Hill. Elected to Congress in 1932 following eight years in the state legislature, he had, as the president noted, secured several federal projects for his North Texas district. The representative, however, had failed to ever fully solidify his hold on the House seat. Gossett, district attorney of the Fifty-sixth Judicial District, had come within twenty-five hundred votes of ousting McFarlane in 1936. Building upon this base, Gossett continued to attack the incumbent for his "radical ideas" and antipathy to business and large public utility companies. Oil interests, angered by McFarlane’s efforts to close profitable tax loopholes and institute a levy on industrial motors, pumped money into Gossett’s 1938 campaign. Given but a fifty-fifty chance of renomination, McFarlane embraced the president. Advertisements placed in all area newspapers prominently featured a photograph of Roosevelt and the lawmaker standing side by side in Wichita Falls. Beneath in bold letters the caption screamed that "Administration Approval of Congressman W. D. McFarlane Is Approval of Work Well Done for This County and This District." The strategy failed. McFarlane trailed the conservative Gossett by two thousands votes in the initial primary, only three hundred of which he made up in the runoff a month later.

While journalists interpreted the results as a setback for the president and administration forces in Texas, the defeat was McFarlane’s not Roosevelt’s. The president’s intervention in the McFarlane-Gossett contest, if such it can be called, was limited to his bestowal of the "my friend" designation in Wichita Falls. There was no outright endorsement, no statement on how important a McFarlane victory was to President Roosevelt, nor the commitment of administration operatives on the representative’s behalf. The president, in reality, had been unwilling to put much, if anything, on the line.

If Roosevelt’s behavior baffled some pundits, no greater political enigma existed in the Lone Star state than that in the Alamo City. Texas could boast of no city more conservative than San Antonio and no member of Congress more liberal than Maury Fontaine Maverick. Only the most unlikely conjunction of factors in 1934 had led to his triumph over the local machine headed by his opponent, C. K. Quin. Once in Congress, Maverick quickly assumed leadership of the "Young Turks" who, it was charged, tried to "out-New Deal the New Deal." Despite positions which estranged some of his initial backers, the gods continued to smile down on the representative when he sought a second term in 1936. In an election year where Roosevelt swept back into office in a monumental landslide, Maverick benefited from his close association with the president and his program. He now enjoyed the advantages of incumbency and a bitter power struggle within machine ranks which crippled its effort to "get Maverick." Quin’s candidate Lamar Seeligson proved an ineffective campaigner and Maverick survived.

By 1938, his inattention to fence-mending and his politics, ultraliberal by San Antonio standards, began to catch up with him. Cosponsorship of court packing in the House had cost him powerful supporters in the local bar association. He continued to favor greater federal spending even as sentiment turned in favor of austerity. His was the sole southern vote for the antilynching measure. Maverick’s championing of the president’s wages and hours legislation alienated San Antonio’s conservative business leaders who were determined to keep wages down. Above all else, it was Maverick’s embrace of organized labor, and the militant Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in particular, which led to his vulnerability. He lent his backing to unionization of public school teachers and a San Antonio strike by the CIO ‘s International Ladies Garment Workers Union. When Sheriff Owen Kilday used draconian tactics to scuttle the CIO-led strike by the city’s impoverished pecan shellers, Maverick spoke in their defense. These actions and several outbreaks of strike-related violence left Maverick open to charges of radicalism in what had always been an antiunion town. That vulnerability and the nature of the 1938 campaign were clear at the beginning. Announcing his candidacy, attorney Paul Kilday stated that his goal was "the elimination from Congress of one shown to be the friend and ally of Communism."

Aware of the uphill fight that lay ahead against Kilday and the rejuvenated Quin machine, Maverick turned in late June to the White House for assistance. He needed a miracle achievable only by full-blown administration intervention; halfway measures would most certainly prove insufficient. Maverick implored Roosevelt’s political fixer Tommy Corcoran to "do your stuff." Financial angels had to be encouraged to bankroll his underfunded campaign. Federal workers in San Antonio had to be instructed to work on his behalf. New loans and grants had to be approved, announced, and credited to Maverick. And above all else, the embattled congressman needed Roosevelt. If a change of itinerary bringing the president to San Antonio was impossible at this late date, an unequivocal endorsement was necessary. From the Oval Office came the promise of a letter, according to Maverick, "extolling my virtues, my pious character - and also how much dough I got for San Antonio." Climbing aboard Roosevelt’s train in Fort Worth two weeks later, Maverick announced: "I’m getting on the train because I like the President and he likes me and I want something." When pressed by reporters, San Antonio’s congressman admitted with a wink that what he wanted from the president was nothing less than "renomination." In that, he would be disappointed.

The letter of endorsement by President Roosevelt, which Maverick hoped to use with telling effect against Kilday in the campaign’s final two weeks, never materialized. In his biography of the representative, Richard Henderson places responsibility on aides Marvin McIntyre and Stephen Early who feared the fallout of too close a presidential association with a radical such as Maverick. Roosevelt, however, may have simply decided upon reflection that he had promised more in Washington than was in his best interests to deliver in conservative Texas. Regardless, the statement of unequivocal support never came. Instead, Congressman Maverick received only brief, passing mention in the president’s Amarillo speech. Though duly reported, the "my friend" reference had little impact in distant San Antonio. The same was true of Roosevelt’s approval of a long-standing loan application of $4 million for the Alazan-Apache Courts public housing project in Maverick’s district. The effort to address squalid living conditions on the city’s Hispanic westside was controversial among real estate interests and its primary beneficiaries wielded little political clout.

All in all, Maverick returned to the Alamo City knowing he had received far less than what he needed. He went down to defeat two weeks later by a margin of fewer than five hundred votes. Though livid about the lack of administration support, Maverick understood he had simply gotten too far out in front of his voting constituents. Writing to the Philadelphia Record , he said: "Stop your telegrams telling me how sad it was that I got beat! It was a miracle that I got elected in the first place!"

As evidenced by the preceding review, Texas was not an important battleground in Franklin Roosevelt’s effort to purge the Democratic party in the summer of 1938. The president expressed displeasure with his conservative tormentors, if at all, only in the oblique fashion of saying nothing. His support of liberal allies was understated at best. He clearly did not put the full power of his position, prestige, and personal popularity on the line. Ever the pragmatist, Roosevelt may well have surveyed the landscape and found the odds of successful intervention not to his liking. A failed purge in Texas, which alienated both voters and the state’s disproportionately powerful congressional delegation, could have proven disastrous. With speculation already beginning about a possible third term effort, the president may well have been thinking about 1940 as he traveled through the state. Since its admission, no Democratic presidential candidate had ever won without Texas. Whatever the reasons, he carefully navigated the political minefield in front of him and focused his efforts to purge the party elsewhere. It was a battle in Texas he neither won nor lost; it was a battle he never fought.

© L. Patrick Hughes, 1998