Big D

The Ins and Outs

In 1950, no Republican from Texas had served in the US Senate since 1877. No Republican from Dallas County had served in the US House of Representatives since Reconstruction. No Republican had served in a Texas statewide office since Governor Edmund J. Davis in 1874. Republicans always lost in Dallas.

Volunteering for the Dallas Republican Party in the 1940s was a taxing experience with few rewards. Party work itself was hard, tedious, and exhausting. A few campaign workers did the work of many and kept long hours. The incessant ringing of the telephone at party headquarters made too much coffee necessary and cigarette breaks all too infrequent for the rare receptionist. Volunteers had to tolerate the constant stain of mimeograph fluid underneath their fingernails. Sleep-deprived, crabby candidates needed to be coddled. Campaign workers had to keep a watchful eye out for the forgetful ones who left behind yard signs or those who bossed around the college volunteers. Of course, volunteers experienced such travails only when the party fielded a candidate, which in the 1940s was uncommon.

The Texas GOP fared no better. Between 1923 and 1950, state Republican chairman Rentfro Banton Creager oversaw a party that possessed little power beyond doling out patronage. Creager enjoyed his small circle of admirers and relished the meager spoils that trickled in from Washington, but he showed little inclination to invigorate the party by seeking out candidates. The candidates it did field received scant financial or logistical support. Grizzled campaign veterans knew enough to temper their enthusiasm for any candidate lest they grow despondent when the Democrats trounced him in November.

The party of Abraham Lincoln had little appeal to Texans. When the guns of the Civil War fell silent, Republican-led Reconstruction sought to rebuild a South decimated by four years of conflict. Republicans determined the size and scope of federal policies designed not only to build new political institutions in the South, but also to help newly emancipated African-Americans adjust to their new lives as free men and women. African-Americans supported a Republican Party that endorsed their civil rights with amendments to the Constitution. Republicans were identified with misrule, military occupation, and government by "carpetbaggers": as a result, the party was unpopular with Southern whites. Humiliated by Yankee occupation, Southern whites voted out Republicans, disenfranchised African-Americans, and voted solidly Democratic throughout the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. Texans supported Democrats in every presidential election until 1928, when voters preferred the Protestant and "dry" Herbert Hoover to the Catholic and "wet" Al Smith.

Dallas itself was, in the 1940s, a socially conservative but Democratic-voting town, an uncomfortable political juxtaposition which would soon change. The widening gap between the views of conservative Texas Democrats and a national Democratic Party increasingly sympathetic to the social and economic rights of blacks and the working class provided opportunities for Republican growth in the state. Factional discord between more liberal national Democrats, championing a more activist state, and conservative Texas Democrats, supporting minimal social services, segregation, and restrictions on labor unions, produced a cohort of voters who were there for the taking. In each of the presidential elections of 1944, 1948, and 1952, many conservative Texas Democrats bolted from their party and voted for the Republican nominee, but the 1952 election was the first instance in which Republicans reaped clear benefits. That year, conservative Democrats, especially Texas oilmen, wanted the federal government to recognize Texas's claim to the oil-rich tidelands ten and a half miles off its coast. The national Democratic Party, including President Harry Truman, favored federal ownership of the tidelands. Democratic governor Allan Shivers, who wielded control over the Texas Democratic Party apparatus and its national convention delegates, would not endorse Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson unless he supported the state's ownership of the tidelands. Republican presidential nominee Dwight Eisenhower, a native of Denison, Texas, had already committed to returning the tidelands to Texas. When Stevenson refused to support state ownership, Shivers, who himself was up for reelection, threw his support behind Eisenhower. Eisenhower defeated Stevenson in Texas, receiving 53 percent of the vote. By putting a rift in the once Solid South, Eisenhower's victory marked, in the words of historian Kenneth Bridges, a "realistic and palatable alternative" and "the turning point in the evolution" of a two-party South. And it was conservative Democrats in Dallas who made a key difference. Eisenhower ran remarkably better in Dallas County than in the state as a whole, drawing 118,218 votes to Stevenson's 69,394.

Why Does Dallas Exist?

An important factor in early-1950s Dallas that contributed to the enthusiasm for Eisenhower, and for Republicanism in general, was the city's origin myth. Hollis McComb, a Texas journalist, crafted a quintessential précis of the origin myth, according to which Dallas "never should have become a city.... Dallas was set astride no natural routes of trade.... There was no port nearby. Beneath the city were none of the raw materials — oil, gas, and sulfur — that made other Texas cities rich.... The climate in summer is practically unendurable. Yet there Dallas stands — its skyscrapers soaring abruptly up from the blackland like Maxfield Parrish castles.... Dallas doesn't owe a thing to accident, nature, or inevitability." Dallas, he concluded, was "the Athens of the Southwest" "because the men of Dallas damn well planned it that way." Celebrating the unlimited potential of any individual possessing what McComb called "sheer determination," the myth expressed and fostered a powerful economic faith in the virtues of the ordered chaos of unfettered frontier capitalism, discouraging the receipt of federal funds and rejecting any need for social services. Moreover, it drove Dallas's predilection for conspicuous consumption, conferring a kind of sainthood on those whose spending provided outward proof of their virtue.

Yet the myth bore only a loose resemblance to the truth. With an abundant water supply and rich soil, Dallas was, as Michael Phillips has observed, "the logical place for an important commercial settlement." Founded in 1841 by John Neely Bryan, who pioneered a number of settlements in Arkansas, Dallas remained a marginal agricultural trading post until its selection as a county seat in 1850. Dallas's agriculture-based economy in the nineteenth century, along with its strong Protestant evangelical heritage, instilled in the region a powerful Southern traditionalist conservatism that stressed the importance of self-reliance, strict moralism, social...