Means of Ascent (34 page)

He didn’t want their money wasted on roads, either, as much as he understood the need for a modern highway network. Governor
Ross S. Sterling was proposing a constitutional amendment authorizing the huge highway bond issue—more than $300,000,000—to be financed by a gasoline tax. Waste and
corruption in highway-building were already a joke; the solution, Stevenson said, was not to give the Highway
Department more money, and spend still more on debt service for the bond issue. He proposed an alternative plan: use the gasoline tax revenue not for the service on new debt, but to retire the old debt—the bonds already issued by individual counties to build roads within their own borders. This would ease local tax burdens; it would “get the people out of debt.” Use the balance of the gasoline tax revenues to build new
highways—but on a pay-as-you-go basis. He had calculated how many miles of highways could thus be built annually, Stevenson said, and it was enough to meet the state’s highway needs, particularly since none of the new revenues would be spent on new debt service. The highway lobby—oil and gas companies, road-building contractors—massed against him; at times it seemed that Coke Stevenson—and his philosophy—were all that was standing
against legislative approval of the constitutional amendment. But he stood. Passage required the vote of two-thirds, or 100, of the 150 House members. “
Gradually the number of affirmative votes climbed as the pressure was skillfully applied,” a historian has written. “The number of affirmative votes finally reached 99, but Number 100 never was obtained.”

There was, moreover, a new huge proposal—for improvements in the state’s prisons. Stevenson had known bookkeeping and highway-building;
he didn’t know prisons—so he set out to teach himself about them. He visited all the state prisons in Texas, visited them and slept in cells with the convicts. He visited prisons in the Northeast. And the reforms he then proposed not only improved Texas prisons, but did so at a fraction of
the cost of the Governor’s proposals.

Stevenson had pushed his auditing, bookkeeping, highway and prison legislation in quiet talks with his fellow legislators. He received little public attention. But his fellow legislators had learned about him: his rare speeches on the floor of the House commanded unusual attention; in the towering red-granite Capitol in Austin as in the little Kimble County Courthouse, when Coke Stevenson spoke, men listened. He spent not a minute more in Austin than he had to; as soon
as the House adjourned each week, he and Fay would be on the road back to the place they loved. It was still, with no bridge, as cut off from the world as ever. And there was still no telephone; Stevenson had refused to have one installed. If someone urgently needed to get in touch with Stevenson, he would call the party line in the rickety, somewhat lopsided little general store in the “town” of Telegraph and the owner would ride over and notify Coke, who would ride
back and talk. In 1933, there was an urgent call. His fellow legislators had caucused and had decided he would be their next Speaker. (Accepting, he made clear that he would still not put in a phone. “
The darn thing would be ringing all the time,” he said. “If it’s important, they’ll get in touch with me.”) When he w
as Speaker, he still snatched every moment possible to be on the ranch. As adjournment
neared each week, Fay would have their car waiting outside the Capitol. Banging down his gavel to end the session, Coke would stride out of the House Chamber, and within minutes would be on the road—speeding along the 166 miles back to the world he and Fay had created.

He was a rather unusual Speaker. No matter how loud the shouting became on the floor of the House, he never raised his voice. At first, he was criticized for what Austin political observers called “loose herding”: refusing to assert tight control over the 150 representatives. He didn’t mind the term; what was the alternative?—the tactics that would later be called “arm-twisting”? He wouldn’t engage in that, he told
intimates. There should, he believed, be time for debate, for reasoned consideration of issues; that, after all, was one of the purposes of a legislative body. And perhaps there were other philosophical reasons as well. Once, there was what a friend recalls as “a terrible ruckus on the floor,” and Coke was doing nothing to quiet it down, and someone asked why not, and he said, “
As long as they’re not voting, they’re not passing any laws. And as long
as they’re not passing any laws, they’re not hurting anybody.”

But the critics began to realize that the House was accomplishing more than ever before, and they began to realize that this was because of
the new Speaker. His pipe had somehow become part of the legislative proceedings. He used it instead of a gavel, tapping gently for order with its stem. And sometimes, as an observer wrote, when debate was “
hot and heavy,” he would stop proceedings to ask one of the battlers
“to lend him some pipe tobacco.” Then, apparently concentrating deeply on the task, he would load the tobacco into his pipe, tamp it down and light up, not looking back at the members until it was drawing well. By this time, the observer noted, “the members had usually cooled off and settled in their seats.” Sometimes he would lighten the tension with a joke, delivered deadpan; once, when the chaplain did not arrive to deliver the invocation, he told the
members: “Well, I guess you fellows will have to be
on your own today.” But, while he never raised his voice or appeared to lose his temper, members learned not to try to push him. Observers said, as one put it, that “
they have never seen a man as unruffled as Stevenson when the parliamentary battling gets sharp and tough. A bland smile on his face, Stevenson squints slightly through the blue haze of smoke from his pipe,
rules—unchallenged—on this point of order and that … complaint. With dignity, and the right amount of cleverness, he tosses in a bit of kidding … humoring them slightly, but never giving in.”

Then there were his quiet, private conversations with legislators. “
Whenever anyone went to visit Mr. Stevenson, they did most of the talking,” one observer said. “He was a good listener. He never did volunteer.” But somehow, at the end of the conversation, freshmen legislators found they knew how to get their bills through the House and even veterans found they had been persuaded to compromises that would accomplish what they had wanted all
along. “
Hardly a man in the Legislature can say that Stevenson has not given him help when he needed it most,” a reporter was to write. With an ability unusual among Texas legislators of that era, he managed also to be friends—in some cases, close friends—with the
lobbyists who were an integral part of the Austin scene, while not surrendering the state’s interests to theirs. After listening to a lobbyist ask a
favor on behalf of the president of one of the state’s major corporations, Stevenson said, “Well, you can tell him I ain’t about to give him the dome of the Capitol.” As the lobbyist left, discomfited, Stevenson added: “But you can tell him I ain’t about to give it to anyone else, either.” And, the lobbyist recalled, “
that worked, when Coke was the man saying it. It wasn’t only that he was so utterly
honest. It was that he was so completely fair and just.” Being
fair
was, in fact, important to him; he used the word frequently. “He was always concerned about this,” a friend says. “He said, ‘What has kept this country is that
it’s a country of laws. Otherwise, it’s all influence. When your man is in, it’s all right, but when the other man is in …’ ” A reporter wrote that
“
his legion of friends among present and former representatives swear that Stevenson
was one of the greatest speakers and presiding officers in the history of all Texas houses.… Few days pass that some unforgettable act of his as Speaker is not told, perhaps an act cutting a Gordian knot in rules to get a job done, a joke he told.…” One observer wrote that even “most of those who have strongly opposed
Stevenson’s political viewpoints … admit that as a presiding officer, his manner of operation
borders on the verge of genius.” The House gave him its own tribute. More and more frequently, at the end of a trying day’s session, it would rise and applaud its leader. He was a leader of men in Austin as in the Hill Country, and in 1935, at the end of his term as Speaker, the same thing happened in Austin as had happened in
Junction: until that time the Speakership had always been “a one-term-and-out deal”; nonetheless, Coke Stevenson was asked, by a delegation of House members, to do what no Speaker in the history of Texas had done before and serve a second consecutive term.

The delegation’s plea was echoed by Fay, who had become almost as widely known in the Statehouse as her husband. “She was so bubbly. She was as outgoing as Coke was quiet. She was so friendly. She made so many friends, and she never made friends for political reasons. She just loved people. And she and Coke—they made a terrific team. Coke and Fay were a beloved couple in Austin.” Her husband’s success in the capital had confirmed her
belief that he “should serve the people,” Coke, Jr., would say. “She didn’t want him to be just a rancher again.” Moreover, the same conservative beliefs that had impelled Stevenson to come to Austin in the first place were now impelling him to stay. Governor
James V. Allred, a New Dealer, was proposing to push through a whole wave of New Deal reforms
in Texas. Stevenson had supported the New Deal during its
first years; he thoroughly approved of the measures by which it had alleviated the Depression. But now he felt the emergency was over. It was time for government to resume its former, smaller, role. Instead, it seemed to be steadily growing bigger. He wanted to fight the trend.

Nonetheless, after some weeks of weighing the delegation’s request, Stevenson was deciding not to run again but to leave the Legislature and return to his ranch. Exposure in depth to politics and politicians had only deepened his distaste for them, he told friends. Then, however, Allred made a mistake. The Governor attempted to push Stevenson into retiring. New Dealers who had contributed heavily to both Allred’s campaign and those of certain House members
put pressure on these legislators to support Allred’s choice for Speaker, and Stevenson learned what was happening. This was just what he had been opposing all his life, he said: the power of the federal bureaucracy and of federal money was being used to influence a state’s internal affairs. He agreed to defy the Governor and run again. On the day of the vote, Fay stood in the doorway of the House Chamber, holding a huge bouquet of red roses. As each legislator
approached,
she asked him: “Are you for Coke?” To those who said yes, she handed a rose. Eighty members of the House were wearing them during the vote, sixty-eight were not: the man who hated politics had become the only politician in the history of Texas to succeed himself as Speaker. The legislation Stevenson pushed through during the next two years, including the establishment of a teachers’ retirement fund, liberalized provision for
workmen’s compensation for state employees and the reorganization of state agencies, made his second term as Speaker “
a landmark period in the history of the State Legislature.”

As his term was drawing to a close in 1937, Stevenson looked up from his desk to find a delegation of legislators standing before him. Without a word, one of them handed him a petition—signed by more than a hundred members of the House—asking him to serve a third term. Stevenson refused on the spot. Every office he had run for, he was to say, he had taken not for personal ambition but for a principle or to accomplish “a particular job.”
Because some of his work for his “ranch people” was unfinished, he reluctantly agreed to serve one more term as an ordinary legislator, but said that after that he would never hold another public office.

He was wrong there. In 1938, popular State Senator
Garrett H. Nelson, declaring his candidacy for lieutenant governor, proposed amending the state Constitution to establish a unicameral legislature. Stevenson felt that Nelson’s proposal would remove one of the most vital bulwarks against the growth of government power. “Many measures that pass one house [but] ought never to pass into law are defeated in the other house,” he was
to explain. “It [a bicameral legislature] is a safeguard in behalf of the public.” None of the various candidates whom Stevenson attempted to enlist to oppose Nelson were willing to run. Stevenson feared that Nelson might win, and that the victory would encourage supporters of the proposal. He entered the race for lieutenant governor.

I
T WAS
S
TEVENSON’S FIRST
statewide race. He had been elected to office by his fellow Hill Country ranchers, by his fellow legislators—by people who knew him, and who knew the depths concealed by silence and a poker face. This was the first time that he had had to campaign among strangers—and such campaigning was very hard for him. “It was
not easy for Coke Stevenson to
ask anyone for anything,” says his nephew, Bob Murphey, who was later to spend a lot of time watching him campaign. “For him to ask someone to vote for him—that was very hard. Underlying everything was that Coke Stevenson was not a politician as anyone would define a politician. He was not a social person. The dinner party, the cocktail hour, the niceties of a reception—he just didn’t like that. Coke
Stevenson couldn’t
work a crowd. He wasn’t a backslapper. He couldn’t do the ‘Hi, there! Sure good to see you! Lookin’ for your vote Saturday!’ He didn’t have the perpetual grin showing his teeth all of the time. Campaigning did not come easy for him. For him to go into a town and walk the streets …”

It was more than shyness that made him a most unusual candidate.

In Texas politics, 1938 was the year of W. Lee O’Daniel, whose dulcet voice had mesmerized rural Texans through years of crooning his own songs (“Beautiful, Beautiful Texas,” “The Lay of the Lonely Longhorn,” “The Boy Who Never Grew Too Old to Comb His Mother’s Hair”) and delivering fundamentalist, evangelical homilies on a daily radio program advertising his Hillbilly Flour. Now, running for Governor although he
had absolutely no previous political experience (he had never even cast a vote), touring the state in a red circus wagon with his famous Hillbilly Boys and his beautiful daughter, Molly, and his fiddler son Patty Boy, “Pass-the-Biscuits-Pappy” was drawing the largest crowds in the history of Texas—and was revolutionizing Texas politics. Other politicians, including several of Stevenson’s opponents, rushed to sign up their own country-and-Western ensembles,
and Stevenson’s advisers suggested he get one, too. Stevenson put an end to the discussion by saying, coldly, “
I’ve got a record, and if that ain’t good enough—well, that’s all I’ve got.”