Legends & Lore of the Texas Capitol

by Mike Cox

  A minor irony is that for decades, a state employee got paid to sleep in the capitol as a human burglar alarm outside the main vault in the first-floor treasury office. That continued until the department moved to a new building in 1971.

  In modern times, if a lawmaker sleeps in his or her office, it’s a nap between roll call votes.

  THE MILLION-DOLLAR PARADE

  Since the opening of the capitol, parades on Congress Avenue form on the thoroughfare’s south end and proceed uphill to the statehouse. Starting with the 1888 dedication parade, the avenue and the capitol have seen hundreds of processions ranging from inaugural parades to marches celebrating the nation’s victory in war to antiwar protests. But none was as strange as the one that proceeded up the avenue on April 24, 1909, the so-called Million Dollar Parade.

  On that day, guarded by mounted Austin police officers, Texas Rangers, the Travis County sheriff and the chief of police, an entourage of county and state officials, numerous lawyers, several bankers and a district judge escorted $1,808,483 million (and thirty cents) in cash from two local banks to the state treasury. The money was a civil fine being paid by the Waters-Pierce Oil Company for antitrust violations in a case dating back to 1897, the largest corporate fine ever paid to that point in U.S. history. Had it not been for that infusion of cash, the state budget would have experienced a $347,144 deficit that year.

  CAPITOL ONCE HAD A WHITE DOME

  For whatever the reason, in the early 1920s, the state decided to paint the capitol dome white. The new coating had not even dried before the public started complaining about it, and capitol maintenance workers returned the dome to its original faux red granite look. For two weeks in 1969, during a repainting of the dome, visitors and locals were taken aback by the yellowgreen primer coat. To make the dome better match the building, granite powder was added to the paint that went on next.

  THELMA’S WALK

  Thelma Bills Anderson, who grew up a block from the capitol, became the Senate’s first female page in 1931. That’s reason enough to be remembered, but the potentially deadly stunt she pulled off on a dare is even more memorable. When her male teenage colleagues said she didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to stand up on the eleven-inch-wide railing on the second floor of the rotunda and walk the full circle, thirteen-year-old Thelma took them up on it. To the boys’ amazement, she climbed up on the railing and did it.

  THE CAPITOL GETS COOL

  While hot air in the metaphorical sense is not unknown in the capitol, especially during legislative sessions, actual hot air used to be a real annoyance. The only means of air conditioning when the capitol opened were large windows and, not too long after, electric fans. Steam heat kept the massive building warm in the dead of winter, but during the dog days of summer, state workers, lawmakers and visitors were mostly on their own temperature-wise. During the legislative session of 1913, House and Senate members were kept semi-cooled by electric fans blowing over blocks of ice.

  Forty-eight years after it opened, the capitol got its first air conditioner in 1936, when a window unit was installed in the governor’s reception room. Finally, in 1955, the legislature appropriated $500,000 to have the capitol air conditioned, an undertaking completed in 1957. In fairness to the state, central air in most schools, courthouses and other buildings did not become universal in Texas until the late 1960s or early 1970s.

  RADIOACTIVE STONES

  In the 1960s, with the specter of nuclear war with Russia on most thinking people’s minds, state employees had something else to worry about: tests showed that people working in the capitol absorbed 5.0 to 10.0 millirems more radiation yearly than the average person. The source? The granite stonework that defines the statehouse. Even though the igneous rock emits radiation in the form of radon, an odorless, colorless gas, the state health department said it was not high enough to worry about. The Texas Administrative Code sets the maximum radiation level per person at 0.1 rem per year for public buildings, or, overall, 2.0 millirem per hour. While radiation detected in the capitol sometimes reaches 10.0 micorem per hour, exposure under 5.0 rem produces no demonstrable health effects.

  No one glows in the dark after visiting the capitol, but health officials have found that its granite walls emit low-level radiation. Photo by the author.

  RED LIGHT UNDER THE DOME

  As late as the early 1970s, the capitol stood open to the public around the clock. The huge statehouse had no video surveillance, no panic alarms for key officials, no metal detectors, no armed officers constantly patrolling its corridors and no mounted state troopers riding around the grounds. Consequently, late at night and in the wee morning hours, the big building made a convenient workplace for ladies of the evening. Police occasionally cracked down on freelance prostitution under the dome, but the problem did not go away until domestic terrorism necessitated much tighter security.

  UNSTATELY STATEHOUSE

  Members of the Texas House of Representatives and the Senate operate according to state and federal law, long-established parliamentary procedure and rules they adopt. Most of the time.

  In its February 21, 1933 edition, the Dallas Morning News noted: “Senator Hits Lawyer with Heavy Pitcher after Lie Is Passed.” The democratic process is not always stately. Thirty years after that Depression-era difference of opinion in the upper chamber, about the only thing that had changed was having a better sound system in both the House and Senate.

  The late writer Willie Morris—a Mississippian who came to the University of Texas in 1953, worked on the student newspaper (the Daily Texan) and later edited the iconoclastic Texas Observer and still later Harper’s Magazine— witnessed an incident in the House that demonstrates decorum is a fragile thing.

  One night, as he described in his memoir, North Toward Home, several House members were in the midst of a vicious floor debate when suddenly one representative “pulled the cord out of the amplifier system…[and] another hit him from the blindside with a tackle.” That set off “mass pushing, hitting, clawing, and exchanges about one another’s wives, mistress, and forebears.” Guests of members, including girlfriends, wives, friends and secretaries, “cowered near their desks.”

  Morris continued: “In the middle of the brawl, a barbershop quartet of legislators quickly formed at the front of the chamber and, like a dance band during a saloon fight, sang ‘I Had a Dream, Dear.’”28

  A CAPITOL SENSE OF HUMOR

  Beyond physical violence or the threat of it, over the years, numerous examples of less-than-decorous antics on the part of both legislative chambers have become part of the capitol’s folklore.

  In his memoir, former railroad commissioner C.V. Terrell, who had marched in the capitol dedication parade, recalled a session during which lawmakers were considering a bill involving “prohibition of whiskey and regulatory measures.” When the House chaplain offered the daily prayer, he asked for divine assistance in passage of the “dry” bill. When the prayer appeared in the next morning’s House journal, members opposed to the measure moved that the chaplain’s remarks be expunged from the record. As members debated that motion, one representative stood and raised a point of order. When the Speaker recognized him, he said, “The motion to expunge the prayer from the record comes too late. The prayer has already reached the Throne.”

  The generally accepted low point in Texas legislative humor came on April Fools’ Day 1971, when two representatives sponsored a resolution praising Albert DeSalvo, the notorious Boston strangler, for his efforts in population control. The resolution was subsequently withdrawn.

  TRUTH IN FICTION

  The late Texas author Al Dewlen, who began his career as a newspaperman in Amarillo, practically had the capitol as a character in his 1981 political novel, The Session. The book’s protagonist, a newly elected House member, comes to Austin in his old pickup truck with an honest enthusiasm to fairly represent his district and perhaps, as so many politicians have said, “clean up” state government. Much of the action i
n the book happens in the capitol, a structure Dewlen captures in this evocative word picture:

  [T]he Capitol floodlights came on, and by that magic he had chosen never to understand, all the stacked and sculpted Texas granite climaxing in the magnificent dome instantly changed color, from daytime’s rich pink to a glistening night white. Day or night, pink or white, the great dome with its pillars and ribs, cornices and carvings, was a spectacle.

  Longtime House member Emmitt Curry, the same character making that observation, also took inspiration from the Goddess of Liberty standing atop the dome, “a sword pointing downward from her right hand while she raised the Lone Star of Texas aloft in her left. The pose prompted outsiders to say that she was proclaiming that in Texas, liberty was left-handed. But… the stone lady meant every decent thing he knew, and it could warm him just to look up at her.”

  Dewlen moved from Amarillo to Austin to write The Session. Later, he relocated to Waco and joined the journalism faculty at Baylor University. He died in 2011 at age eighty-nine.

  BEST LITTLE STATEHOUSE MOVIE SET IN TEXAS

  Hollywood has twice used the capitol for scenes in mainstream films, the most notable being the 1982 musical comedy The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

  The movie was inspired by Larry King’s popular 1978 Broadway musical, which in turn was roughly based on the story of a widely beloved brothel outside the Fayette County town of La Grange, between Austin and Houston. Known as the Chicken Ranch, its roots dated to the days of the Republic of Texas, and it had become an institution. Houston television reporter Marvin Zindler “exposed” what just about everyone in Texas (including law enforcement) already knew, which was that Texas had a whorehouse. Afterward, in 1973, Governor Dolph Briscoe ordered the Department of Public Safety to shut it down. Sheriff Jim Flournoy (played in the movie by Burt Reynolds) didn’t like it, but the state prevailed.

  The lovin’-for-pay place kept by madam Edna Milton (played in the movie by Dolly Parton) had, of course, never maintained a guest register, but over the decades, many a legislator (not to mention male-born state workers) took time from their busy capitol schedule for the hour’s drive to La Grange. Thus it seemed quite fitting that Hollywood location scouts arranged for the filming of actor Charles Durning’s notable gubernatorial song-and-dance routine in the rotunda of the statehouse.

  In 1992, director Clint Eastwood filmed much of A Perfect World (he and Kevin Costner played the two main characters) in Central Texas. One scene, featuring actor Dennis Letts as Governor John Connally and John Hussey as the governor’s aide, was shot in the governor’s reception room at the capitol. A crime drama set in 1963, Eastwood portrayed Texas Ranger captain Red Garnett, who was after prison escapee Robert “Butch” Haynes (Costner). The wanted man had compounded his crime by kidnapping an eight-year-old boy.

  The Texas capitol is the only statehouse in the United States used as a setting in a movie about another kind of house, one of ill repute. This is a playbill from the original Broadway production of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Author’s collection.

  STATEHOUSE TIME TRAVEL

  Legislators have perfected something mankind has fantasized about for centuries, the ability to travel in time.

  But in the capitol, the only way lawmakers journey, if only for a few hours, is back in time. Both the upper and lower chambers each have large, stillfunctional clocks first installed in 1888. If faced with unfinished business as a session nears midnight on the final day of its constitutionally mandated 140day session, House speakers and lieutenant governors (as presiding officer of the Senate) have often ordered their respective sergeants-at-arms to get a ladder and move the hands of the clock back from midnight until the body finally concludes its business.

  ZOMBIE CAPITOL

  Zombie-like, the old limestone capitol that burned in 1881 nearly rose from the dead in the late 1950s.

  Though roundly disparaged by both those who used it and those who had to look at it, the three-story limestone statehouse built in 1853 and gutted by fire twenty-eight years later seemed on the verge of coming back to life in 1958. That February, the state library and historical commission (long since split into separate state agencies) proposed building a reproduction of the antebellum colonial-style capitol to house a state library and archives desperately in need of a new home.

  While the library continued to maintain its presence in the 1888 capitol, most of its records, many dating to the days of the Republic of Texas, were stored in a Quonset hut at Camp Hubbard, a state highway department facility in West Austin. The raw materials of Texas history lay only an invasion of silverfish or a fire away from disaster.

  Apparently with straight faces, the library and historical commission forwarded to the state building commission an architectural rendering showing the same old building except for the addition of two new wings. Along with the drawing came an estimate that building a replica of the old capitol would cost $2,500,000.

  Fortunately, rather than cloning a building that had been poorly designed to start with, a different concept emerged: to relieve pressure on the 1888 capitol, the state would build a complex of modern, granite veneer state buildings that would not clash with the cherished but no longer modern capitol. One of those buildings, opened in 1961, became the new home for the state library and archives.

  Despite its nineteenth-century unpopularity, the 1853 capitol nearly made a comeback in the 1950s. Author’s collection.

  By 2017, the Texas Capitol Complex included twenty-nine state buildings plus the capitol they surround, covering 122 acres of downtown Austin.

  Afterword

  SINE DIE

  The Texas Constitution limits a regular legislative session to 140 days every two years. (An old joke has it that the Constitution got it backward… the legislature ought to meet for two days every 140 years.) However often it convenes, when the gavel cracks for the last time on the final day, the House Speaker and president of the Senate declare their respective bodies adjourned sine die.

  Those two Latin words literally mean “without day,” but they long ago developed their current meaning, which is that a governing body has concluded its proceedings without naming a day for further meeting or hearing. In all state legislatures or assemblies, as well as the U.S. Congress, sine die has further come to mean “the last day of the session.”

  Since this book is about the Texas Capitol, where both chambers have met since the Twenty-First Legislature gathered on January 8, 1889, saying “sine die” seems a proper way to end it. As with any legislative session, while a fair number of things have been accomplished (in this case, stories told), more stories could be told.

  Even in modern times, standing on ground first designated for governmental use by the Republic of Texas, the capitol is a large, architecturally complicated building. Its ongoing story is large and complicated as well. The capitol has seen and will see statesmen and scoundrels at all levels of government, civilian and military leaders and followers, lawmakers, law enforcers and lawbreakers, supporters and opponents, celebrities and just folks—all, in some way or another, will interact with this building raised at the height of the nineteenth-century’s Gilded Age as the people’s house.

  The capitol is still every Texan’s building, though the specter of terrorism and the growth of bureaucracy have made it less accessible. For instance, the men who planned for and built this building would have never dreamed that one day visitors would have to empty their pockets or hand over their pursues and then walk through a metal detector before they could enter the building. Neither would they have envisioned that a journalist or private citizen would sometimes have to file an open records request for information about their government’s doings or even to get an answer to a simple question. Just getting a response to an e-mail or a telephone call returned from someone with an office in the capitol or some other state building is not guaranteed.

  On the upside, the law giving the public the right to demand all but legally prote
cted information from its state, county and local government came into being inside this capitol. So will all future state laws, good or bad. Still, the capitol is more than a place where legislation passes or fails. It holds the story of Texas, past and future.

  Adjourned sine die.

  Appendix A

  CAPITOL NUMBERS

  3 Acres the capitol covers

  4 Months it took draftsmen to make triplicate linen drawings of original capitol plans, 117 drawings total

  5 Pairs of iron carriage gates installed on the grounds in 1890, each set spanning 14 feet; all removed in 1907

  7 Miles of wainscoting in the capitol. Wainscoting is made from oak, pine, cherry, cedar, walnut and mahogany; doors and window frames are oak and pine except those in the governor’s reception room, which are cherry, mahogany and walnut

  7.75 Weight (pounds) of each custom-made, eighteen-inch-long bronze door hinge stamped “Texas Capitol,” including screws

  8 Weight (tons) of capitol cornerstone before dressed

  8 Diameter (feet) of star in dome

  8.5 Floor space (acres) in capitol. Original flooring was handblocked clay tile, glass and wood; current halls and rotunda are terrazzo

  10 Derricks at construction site used to offload limestone and granite

  10–15 Number of flatcars of granite shipped from Burnet to Austin daily during capitol construction

  18 Vaults in capitol

  19 Elevators in the capitol (8 in the original structure, 11 in the underground extension)