Means of Ascent (36 page)

Yet Coke Stevenson’s Administration also demonstrated the strengths in the frontier philosophy of government. When he came to office, Texas ranked near the very bottom of the forty-eight states in social welfare programs, largely because under the state’s tax structure the men reaping fortunes from their exploitation of its natural resources paid back only a pittance to the state. As Lieutenant Governor, Stevenson had succeeded in obtaining from the
Legislature a meaningful tax increase (even the liberal
State Observer
had to admit that despite his conservatism, he “did as much as any man to enact
the biggest tax bill in state history”), and now he improved social welfare services more than they had been improved under past Governors, and more than they would be improved under any Governor for years to come. For example, Texas ranked 38th among the states in spending on education when
Stevenson came to office; it ranked 24th when he left. For decades, Governors had come to office promising substantial increases in the woefully inadequate pensions the state paid to its older citizens; under Stevenson the pensions were tripled. He made these gains with a very subdued style of governing. He governed not by dramatic special messages or by the noisy, unproductive confrontations with the Legislature that had characterized state government for years, but by conferences
with individual legislators and state officials. Arriving in his office, they would find that their proposed bills or budgets had been blue-penciled—Stevenson kept a supply of blue pencils on his desk for that purpose—and they found also that the man who had done the editing knew at least as much about their departments as they did, so that his arguments for reduced spending were hard to resist. The confrontations ceased, as abruptly as if a strong hand had turned off a
spigot, and so did the incessant, argumentative and costly special sessions of the Legislature. Somehow, without confrontation or drama, the economies that Stevenson wanted so badly to bring to government took hold, without reductions (and in many areas, with increases) in the level of governmental services.

When
liberals later criticized him for having had “
no program,” Stevenson would reply, “Well, that’s not exactly right.
I had a program. It was economy.” Within that definition, he was very successful. The $34,000,000 state deficit he inherited at his inauguration had become a surplus of $35,000,000 by the time he left office. His program may not have been broad
enough to remedy decades of backwardness in social welfare programs. It was, however, a program of which the people of Texas approved. “Mr. Stevenson has given Texas an economy administration,”
said one newspaper, and “that’s what the people want.” Even his liberal critics conceded that he was “
as liberal as the people.”

H
E WAS WHAT
the people wanted in other ways, too.

Because of his reluctance to talk about himself, Coke Stevenson’s story had been little known outside Kimble County. But as his inauguration neared, reporters drove out to Kimble, and learned about his life—and presented their new Governor in epic terms.

“
A man who brands his own cattle and cooks his coffee in a two-bit pot, Lt. Gov. Coke Stevenson, ranch-toughened and self-educated by campfire light, will become Texas’s 33rd Governor,” one of the earliest stories announced. “Coke Stevenson is
a product … of the frontier before the rough edges were smoothed away,” said another article. “Named after the lion-hearted
Richard Coke, he smacks of the West.… That rare political asset of birth in a log house is his. He knew the feel of a saddle from babyhood.… 53 years old, 6 feet 1 inch in height, big-boned, spare of frame, possessor of a face furrowed with heavy lines and browned almost to mahogany hue, he [is] the
Abraham Lincoln of Texas.” The articles emphasized the struggles of his youth. “
In the section where he grew up, the land
was sparsely settled and schools were a luxury.… At the age of 10 years, he was taking his place in the saddle.… At 16, he entered into his first business venture.…” The articles talked of his freighting over “seldom traveled trails,” of how he had educated himself during “evenings of loneliness.” Headlines called him the “
HORATIO ALGER OF THE LLANO
.” “He started
out as a legislator and ended up as governor,” said one article. “But that’s nothing.
He started out as a bank janitor and ended up as its president.” The headlines called him the “
LOG CABIN STATESMAN
,” the “
COWBOY GOVERNOR
.” Stevenson’s appearance and personality were also part of the epic: his
taciturnity and
his caution before speaking (even the bellwether liberal weekly, the
State Observer
, conceded that “
Coke Stevenson makes fewer public statements than any other man in Texas political life today, yet is credited with greater wisdom”). So was the “
statuesque Stevenson physique”—particularly after reporters happened to be present when, at a visit the new Governor made to a Lumbermen’s Meeting in
Lufkin, he was asked if he would like to take a turn in a log-sawing contest. As he walked over to join the burly lumbermen, the reporters saw that he was bigger than all but the biggest of them, that his shoulders were broader. Taking his place without removing his hat or his suit jacket (or his pipe from his mouth), he grabbed the big saw, nodded to signal that he was ready—and won. The fact that Stevenson was a great hunter and explorer was part of the epic; indeed, while
he was Governor, he was once snowed in in the Rocky Mountains
in Colorado for two weeks, and emerged leading two horses, each with a big buck slung over its shoulders; during the 1940s, few white men had explored Texas’ Big Bend Country, the rugged, all but deserted mountain ranges in the southwest swing of the Rio Grande, but Coke Stevenson, a reporter wrote, has “walked or ridden over nearly every foot of it.” Coke’s ranch became part
of the epic (“that famous ranch without a telephone,” as one reporter called it, that rugged, isolated paradise at the falls of the South Llano), as did his love of his ranch, his eagerness to hurry back to it at every opportunity, his determination never to miss a shearing or branding (“Come hell or high water, legislature or no legislature, he’ll be at Junction at the proper time to attend to those two chores”). So was the
simplicity of his life style: as Governor, he still rose by five o’clock, brewed his own coffee in his old battered coffee pot, sipped it as he did his reading, and then ate his breakfast in the kitchen of the Governor’s Mansion at a metal-covered worktable. As often as possible, he ate his dinner in the kitchen, too, instead of in the Mansion’s ornate dining room. He still had no pictures of politicians in his office—just a photograph of two bucks
fighting, and, after January, 1942, one of Fay. His coffee pot, and his coffee-drinking, became a part of Texas political folklore; once, when reporters were pressing him for an answer on a recent development, he said, “Listen, I’m too old to burn my lips on boiling coffee”; often thereafter, when pressed on an issue, he would say, “
we’ll just let that cup cool a while”—and reporters started calling him
“Coffee-Coolin’ Coke,” to symbolize his caution. The reporters may have intended the nickname to be derisive, but Coke himself liked it—and so did the voters. His coffee pot and his pipe—which seemed never to be out of his mouth; if he wasn’t actually smoking it when photographers arrived to take his picture, they would ask him to do so.

Strong and silent—Coke Stevenson’s personality was the embodiment of what Texans liked to think of as “Texan.” And so, indeed, was the whole story of his life, for in Texas, in 1941, the frontier was little more than a half century away. Some Texans had grown up on what still was the frontier; or their parents had, or their grandparents had, and had told them about it. The story of Coke Stevenson was a story they could relate to: when a Texan
was told about making twenty miles a day—day after day, week after week, month after month—with a heavy-loaded wagon over rocky trails and across swollen streams, he could appreciate what that meant; Texans understood about the sleeping out in the rain, and about repairing the broken wheel spokes and rims and axles, about nursing the horses, and about loneliness. And it was Texans’ deep love for the land—the soil that they had had to fight so hard to wrest
from the Indians and the elements—that made their Governor’s love of
his
land so meaningful to them. His hatred of bureaucracy, his distrust of the federal
government, his belief in independence, hard work, free enterprise—all this struck a particularly clear chord in Texas. It was the “big country” that “fed big dreams” and that had drawn so many people fleeing the restrictions of a more orderly society,
trading safety for danger, as long as with the danger came independence and the chance to create their own empires by their own efforts. It was a state, moreover, in which an unusually virulent mistrust of the federal government was a part of not-so-distant history; the settlers of the Texas frontier—and their descendants—firmly believed that the federal government had, inadvertently (some said, deliberately), protected the murderous Comanche raiders with its policy of
not pursuing them and of preventing settlers from retaliating. And distrust of
all
government had been fostered by the Carpetbaggers—against whom, of course, the man for whom their Governor was named (“the lion-hearted
Richard Coke”) had fought. Reinforcing Texans’ pride in their heritage was the fact that Texas had entered the union as an independent republic (it had been the Republic of Texas from 1836 to 1845). And Coke
Stevenson’s image
was
Texas. He was, in the words of one headline, “
AS TEXAN AS A STEER BRAND
.” “
Almost everybody calls him the ‘typical Texan,’ ” the
Observer
noted. He made Texans remember why they were proud of being Texans. As a San Antonio reporter put it in April, 1942, after she visited “that beloved individualist,” “
Well, folks, Texas has a real Texan for Governor. The kind of man who has brought Texas fame in song and story. The kind that will give Texas back its faith in patriotism, in the ideals of 1776 and 1836. Coke Stevenson is like a fresh Texas Centennial celebration. He makes us live all over again many things that marked Texas pride and progress of a hundred years.” The tone of this article was not unusual. Another began:

“And,” as Bob Murphey puts it, “
the most important thing about the image was not just that it was wonderful, but that it was
true
—and that people saw it was true.” In the summer of 1942, a year after he had stepped into the office Pappy O’Daniel had vacated, Coke Stevenson ran for Governor in his own right.

O’Daniel was campaigning in the same election (Lyndon Johnson was in the Navy at the time, of course) for a full term as United States Senator—and Pass-the-Biscuits-Pappy was running the same way he had run
before, with shows and bands and hillbilly music. He was more popular than ever—and he endorsed one of Stevenson’s five opponents, Hal Collins, a wealthy, spellbinding orator who, as one reporter wrote, “was
out on the town squares with one of the hottest bands ever to make a political circuit.” Stevenson’s advisers pleaded with him all one long evening, to get a band himself, to do
something
to draw crowds. “Boys,” Stevenson said at last, “there’ll be
no danged music.” There was no platform, either. He said the same thing he had said when he had refused to issue one during his campaign for
Lieutenant Governor: voters knew what he was going to do, because of what he
had
done; he had a record, and he wanted to be judged on that record. He refused to make a campaign promise. He refused to answer his opponents’ attacks on him. “
I have never made” any personal attacks “on anybody, and I am not doing it now,” he said. “I would not want any public office if I had to win by such tactics.” He
campaigned the same way he had before, driving around the state, stopping in every town on his route to talk to small groups of voters. In that Democratic gubernatorial primary, the crucial election in a one-party state, Collins and the other four candidates received a total of 299,000 votes. Stevenson received 651,000. His 68.5 percent of the vote was the highest percentage that had ever been recorded in Texas in a contested Democratic primary. No candidate for Governor in the
state’s history, not famous campaigners such as “Pa” Ferguson or
Pat M. Neff or
Dan Moody, not even Pappy O’Daniel himself, had won by so overwhelming a margin. In the general election that Fall, he again ran far ahead of O’Daniel. O’Daniel had stormed out of Fort Worth waving a flour sack in one hand and the Decalogue in the other and had become one of Texas’ greatest vote-getters. Coke
Stevenson had ridden quietly out of the Hill Country and had campaigned without ever raising his voice—and had become an even greater vote-getter. In 1944, he ran again. This time the attacks were led by three-time State Attorney General Gerald C. Mann, who, in a trial balloon, spent the Spring of 1944 harshly attacking Stevenson. Stevenson refused to reply.

He didn’t have to reply. “Ever a statesman and never a politician,” a typical editorial said of him, and in fact even “statesman” did not adequately describe his image among Texans. To them, Coke Stevenson was not a politician but a hero. The nicknames pinned on him by journalists to mock his caution, and his deliberation in making decisions—Coffee-Coolin’ Coke, Calculatin’ Coke—did not stick, or became
instead symbols of admiration for the qualities that the journalists were mocking. The nickname that did stick was more admiring. He had become known simply as “
Mr. Texas.”

Mann’s attacks shattered against this silent granite image. That year, Stevenson’s eight opponents received a total of 15 percent of the vote.
Stevenson received 85 percent, smashing the record he had set two years before. To this day, no gubernatorial candidate in the history of Texas has won nearly so high a percentage in a contested Democratic primary. He accomplished another feat perhaps even more impressive. He carried every one of
the state’s 254 counties, the only gubernatorial candidate in the state’s history who had ever done so in such a primary. The leading historian of the Texas governorship was to write in 1974 that, thirty years after Coke Stevenson’s campaign of 1944, which consisted of “several
radio speeches and occasional appearances at public gatherings” (and, of course, some driving around Texas), his campaign was still unique, and perhaps
would always be so; “
perhaps no other product of the primary system ever has won, or for that matter, ever will win again, the Democratic nomination with such a minimum of campaigning.” Stevenson’s entire career had been unique. Because he had served more than a year of O’Daniel’s gubernatorial term before winning two terms of his own, Coke Stevenson had been Governor longer than any other individual in the history of Texas.
Before that, of course, he had been the only Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives ever to succeed himself. He was also the only man in the state’s history who had held all three of the top political posts in state government: Speaker,
Lieutenant Governor, Governor. Set against such a record, it seems almost incidental that he had run for public office twelve times—once
for County Judge, five times for state legislator,
twice for Speaker, twice for Lieutenant Governor and twice for Governor—and had never been defeated. The man who had not wanted to go into politics, who had violated most of the rules of Texas political campaigning—who had been considered a terrible campaigner—was, in fact, not only the most popular Governor in Texas history, but, in a state that had produced many remarkable political careers, his career had been perhaps the most remarkable of them all.