Even shaking hands, he had, as a reporter puts it, “a quiet dignity.” He would approach three or four men sitting on a bench in front of the Courthouse. “Say, can I butt in there long enough to introduce myself?” he would ask. “I’m Coke Stevenson.” Then, as a reporter wrote, “he grinned good-naturedly and stuck out a big hand.” Or he would walk into the Courthouse, or into a café. “Say, can I get acquainted? I’m Coke Stevenson, and I’m running for Lieutenant Governor.” Says Murphey: “I don’t think I ever heard him say, ‘I’d like your vote,’ or anything like that. He just couldn’t do that.” In fact, he said very little. “When he was with them, he would listen to them, as much if not more than he talked. And when he talked, he showed them he knew their problems. The farmers, the ranchers, the people who worked with their hands—they felt an affinity for him. Because he was them. And they felt it.”
Yet he was also something more—as was apparent when he spoke on the Courthouse Square or at a Rotary or Kiwanis luncheon. Coke Stevenson never talked long. His speeches were very simple. He made no campaign promises; a reporter was to write that Coke Stevenson never once in his entire career promised the people of Texas anything except to act as his conscience dictated. He had made a record in Austin, he said. The record was one of economy in government, of prudence and frugality, of spending the people’s money as carefully as if it had been his own, of having government do only what the people couldn’t do for themselves. That last point was very important, Stevenson said; it was always tempting to have government come in and solve problems, but every bit of government help came with strings of bureaucratic regulation attached, and every string was a limitation on the most important thing we possess, and have to leave our children—the thing that made Texas and America great. Freedom. Individual liberty. Every time that you accept a government program that you don’t really need, you’re giving up some of your freedom for a temporary gain; you’re selling your birthright for a mess of pottage. And Coke Stevenson speaking in front of the Courthouse impressed voters with the quality with which he had, as a young lawyer, once impressed juries inside. Says one political observer: “You knew he meant every word of what he was saying. You knew he was sincere. You just looked at him, and you said, ‘I can trust him.’ ” Journalists ridiculed this campaigner who refused to try to make news with his speeches or to make advance preparations, so that often he arrived in a town without anyone even knowing he was coming. But sometimes Stevenson would return to a town some weeks after his first appearance. And had the journalists not been so cynical, they might have observed that while on the first visit he had had to introduce himself around the Courthouse, on the second trip that would not be necessary. Nor, in fact, would it be necessary for him to walk into every office in the Courthouse. Recalls one politician: “The minute he got out of his car, the word would be passed: ‘Coke Stevenson’s here.’ And the people would come out of the Courthouse and the stores to meet him.” Not understanding the significance of this, however, journalists were startled when, in the first Democratic primary (the Democratic primaries were the crucial elections in a one-party state), this unlikely candidate defeated Senator Nelson, and three other candidates, to win a place in the runoff, although he finished 46,000 votes behind the leader, Pierce Brooks of Dallas. In the runoff against Brooks, Stevenson waged the same, seemingly foolish, type of campaign, and finished 46,000 votes ahead.
AT THE INAUGURATION in January, 1939, one of the great spectacles in Texas political history—it was staged in the University of Texas Stadium, the only arena large enough to hold the crowds of farmers who had thronged into Austin from all over Texas to see Pappy O’Daniel sworn in, with nearly a hundred college and high school bands (and the Hillbilly Boys) playing and a chorus of ten thousand high school children singing—Stevenson seemed very out of place. “Interspersed between much fiddling and guitar playing, in the garish carnival atmosphere,” the tall, serious man delivered a speech, which he had laboriously written and rewritten, on his two beloved constitutions. (Together, he said, they formed an “organic law,” a “charter of human liberties.” That charter “is now being assaulted by the lovers of an extravagant and bureaucratic government and by them it is termed to be outworn,” he said. But “modern improvements do not change fundamental principles.… Let us cherish the old.”) Reporters asked him if, now that he was Lieutenant Governor, he would have a phone installed on his ranch. No, he said.
With Governor O’Daniel almost totally ignorant of the mechanics of government and unwilling to make even a pretense of learning (he passed off most serious problems with a quip, appointed to key posts men with no experience, submitted legislation that he knew could not possibly pass so that he could blame the Legislature for not passing it, vetoed many of the significant programs passed by the Legislature), the state deficit soared to $34,000,000, state employees were frequently paid in warrants which would be accepted by stores only at a discount, and the state government was all but paralyzed—until the Lieutenant Governor stepped in to run it. For three years, largely through his quiet, private conferences with legislators, he kept the government afloat. But Austin’s sophisticated political observers considered Stevenson too serious to have a future. His speeches were not on politics but on government—on the principles of government, of Jeffersonian democracy hardened by frontier individualism. More and more, one principle was emphasized. “Why do thinking people cherish liberty?” he asked.
Because the accumulated wisdom of past ages has demonstrated that people are happiest individually and make the greatest advancement collectively when the … essential elements of liberty and independence prevail.… The blessings of happiness and prosperity have flowed from the rock of individual effort.
Now it is proposed to subsidize individual effort. Grants and loans of money to municipal and civic enterprises are sought and accepted by citizens who apparently do not realize that the price of such benefits is the surrender of a corresponding amount of liberty and freedom.… We must solve our problems by the rules of law prescribed when we set up this government.…
Newsmen deplored the closely reasoned tone of his speeches, and the lack of emotion in his voice—because Stevenson has no “radio sex appeal,” the State Observer said, “his political future is uncertain in these days when the ether waves rule the political scene”—and politicians agreed. “The trouble with him,” one state Senator said, “is that he insists on talking to a man’s intellect, not his prejudices.” He ran for re-election in 1940, campaigning the same way he had before, again violating every aspect of conventional political wisdom. He had no platform, made no promises and almost no formal speeches, simply driving from one little town to another and talking to small groups of people. He had two opponents. One received 113,000 votes, the other 160,000. Stevenson polled 797,000. (That figure was 100,000 more than was polled in that same election by the still immensely popular O’Daniel, who, with an enlarged band, toured the state in a new campaign vehicle—a white bus topped with a papier-mâché dome of the Capitol.)
The next year, 1941, O’Daniel tried to move up to the United States Senate—against Lyndon Johnson. Although Johnson at first appeared to have stolen the election, O’Daniel’s growing instability, and the growing paralysis of state government, had alarmed the state’s establishment, as had a campaign pledge by the rabidly prohibitionist Governor to ban the sale of beer and liquor within ten miles of any military base. This pledge could cost “Beer, Inc.,” the state’s powerful beer and liquor lobby, tens of millions of dollars should O’Daniel remain in the Governor’s chair, so brewery lobbyists, “out-stealing” Johnson, saw to it that Pappy went to Washington instead—and on August 2, 1941, Coke was installed in the Governor’s chair in which Fay had for so long dreamed her husband would sit.
Fay had to be carried to the Inauguration. A few months earlier, doctors had told Coke she had cancer, and was going to die. She was placed in a wheelchair draped in red satin and carried onto the speakers’
stand, and, in the words of one observer, “remained smiling and radiant throughout the half hour’s ceremony.” She never appeared in public again. When she died, five months later, the Legislature commissioned her portrait, and it was hung in the Capitol.
AT THE INAUGURATION, Fay had heard Coke speak words she had often heard before. “To me the plan of government of our forefathers is a divine inspiration.… It is a government of laws and not of men.” And, he said, now that he, as Governor, was the man who held power, the lesson he must remember was to be restrained in its use, for “Even if it means submerging his individual opinion as to what the law ought to be, the chief executive still must respect the majesty of the law. He must restrain his own opinions if those opinions should run contrary to the law.” At the end he quoted Shakespeare: “This above all—to thine own self be true.”
Coke Stevenson’s Administration, which would last until January, 1947, revealed both the strengths and the weaknesses in so conservative a concept of government, particularly when the weakness was accentuated by a lack of the formal education that could have given him a broader perspective on the views he had obtained from his solitary reading. And his record as Governor made apparent also the narrowness of viewpoint of a man brought up, and successful through his own efforts, in a land as hard as the Hill Country. His response to problems with which he was familiar contrasted sharply with his response to problems to which his upbringing in that isolated country made it difficult for him to relate.
Because Mexicans had for years come to the Hill Country to pick crops—and because Stevenson had long suffered for the hardships he had seen them undergo—now, as Governor, not only did he press a reluctant Legislature to pass a resolution calling for Mexican immigrants to be “entitled to full and equal accommodations” in public places, he took an unprecedented step for the state by creating a Texas Good Neighbor Commission, which actively investigated incidents of discrimination and tried to promote local solutions. But there were almost no Negroes in the Hill Country, and Stevenson accepted all the Southern stereotypes about that race. He refused to intervene in wartime race riots in Beaumont, or to investigate a lynching in Texarkana. His life of hard physical labor made him sympathetic to the individual workingman, and he succeeded, against the wishes of the state’s powerful manufacturers, in strengthening its unemployment compensation system. But, wary of organized labor, particularly the unfamiliar big-city unions, believing that labor’s power had become excessive, he tacitly approved harsh anti-union bills conceived by Herman Brown and Alvin Wirtz by refusing to use his veto and allowing the bills to become law without his signature, although he was later to feel that some of them went too far. His lack of formal education hurt most after the O’Daniel-dominated Board of Regents of the University of Texas dismissed liberal university president Homer Rainey. The Rainey dismissal caused lasting damage to the concept of academic freedom at the state university, and Stevenson’s refusal to intervene in this controversy revealed that he did not adequately grasp that concept. As he had refused to offer platforms when he was running for office, now he would not propose overall legislative programs, fearing he might unduly influence an independent branch of government. In Jefferson’s time, such opposition to government per se—such fierce frontier individualism—might have made Stevenson a real democrat; in the more complicated mid-twentieth century, his reluctance to make use of the powers of his office allowed the continuation of the vacuum in Texas government in which special interest groups—the Texas oilmen, natural gas and sulphur companies, Brown & Root and their subordinate contractors—who had no such reluctance to interfere in government had long exerted undue influence in the legislature.
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.”
HE 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 speak
ing (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.
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