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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview A-0309-1, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Margaret Carter, the "grand dame of liberal Texas politics," reflects on how she and her husband became interested in politics, what she learned through her political experiences, the ways the state's political structure changed from the New Deal era through the late 1950s, and the character of various state politicians. Both became involved in state politics just in time for the 1940 Texas Democratic Party convention, and she remarks on the lack of organization she found there. However, by 1944, notes Carter, the liberals were better organized and better able to promote their views. Nonetheless, Carter laments the gradual decline of the liberal labor leadership that had once been influential in Texas. In addition to her own trials and tribulations in liberal Texas politics, she also discusses important state-level politicos, including Raymond Buck, John Connally, John Hammond, Hunter McLean, Sam Rayburn, and Ralph Yarborough.
Margaret Carter, the "grand dame of liberal Texas politics," reflects on how she and her husband became interested in politics, what she learned through her political experiences, the ways the state's political structure changed from the New Deal era through the late 1950s, and the character of various state politicians.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
This is October 25, 1975. I am Chandler Davidson, Professor of Sociology at Rice University, interviewing Mrs. Margaret Carter of Fort Worth, Texas, long-time activist in statewide liberal politics. Mrs. Carter, I would like to begin by probing into your early family history and getting a little biographical information from you. Would you kind of bring me up to date on your vital statistics? Where you were born and so forth.
I was born in Sherman, Texas, in 1909. My father was a city clerk in the first city manager government in Texas, and my mother was a second generation immigrant from England whose family had all been miners, and my husband's family were also miners in the United States. They met in Chicago and were married eleven years before she died. I and my sister were brought up by my great-aunt and great-uncle. He had a business in Sherman and my great-aunt had been a teacher in the first public schools in Fort Worth after the Reconstruction.
What was her name?
Lua Dial was her name and his name was Preston Drury Hollingsworth.
Did you say that Sherman had the first city manager government in Texas?
Yes.
That is surprising. I had always thought that that originated in Galveston.
Well, maybe Galveston and Sherman both claimed to have been first and perhaps neither knew that the other had that form of government. The Hollingsworths were really the principal influence on my whole youth.
And were they involved in politics?
No.
When did you get interested in politics?
After I married a lawyer.
When was that?
May I tell you a little more?
Yes.
My great-aunt was one of the first graduates of the first normal school at Huntsville. Before she was eligible to go to Huntsville, she went to a private academy where she lived in the home of the principal and did housework and sewing for his large family to make her expenses. That was not because her father had never earned any money, but because her family had invested what they had in Confederate currency as all the loyal Texas families did at that time. She was born the year that the Civil War began and she was a change of life child. I remember my great-grandmother, Amanda Anderson Dial, who lived to be ninety-five years old.
My great-grandfather, Benjamin Franklin Dial, was a general in the Army
of the Confederate States of America and they had lived in Marshall,
which was then an outpost of Anglo-American civilization. Many of their
old friends had lived in Marshall and I have had a pretty long jump to
make in my personal orientation. They told me that it was a shame that
Mr. Lincoln was assassinated. The South would have been better off if he
had lived, but they also told me that the Negroes would be much better
off if they stayed in their place and that part of it I didn't believe,
probably on account of my mother, whom I did know—I
This was a coal miner?
A coal miner. In Thurber.
Where is Thurber?
It is not far from Stephenville. My husband [Jack Carter] was actually born in Stephenville because they had to go to Stephenville to get a doctor. Thurber was a company town. There was a Thurber Coal Mine and a Thurber Brick Company and that was all that was there. He grew up there for, I suppose, the first ten years of his life. He moved to Fort Worth a little before I did and when my family moved to Fort Worth, it was coming back to Fort Worth. They lived in Fort Worth, then in Sherman about twenty years and came back to Fort Worth when I was eleven. So, I spent almost all of my life in which I did much thinking in Fort Worth.
We were quite active in the Baptist Church, which is where I met my
husband. He expected to become a Baptist minister until he went to
Baylor University and began to realize what was involved in being a
minister in the Southern Convention and decided that his outlook was
already too broad to permit him to have a successful career in the
Southern Convention. So, he took a long summer off, went to West Texas
and thought about it and decided that the thing he needed to do was to
become a lawyer instead. We were already engaged and when he came back
after that long exile, he said, "I'm going to become a lawyer," and I
had to decide whether I wanted to marry a minister or marry him. It
didn't take me long to decide that I wanted to
When were you married?
In 1934.
And you were living in Fort Worth at the time?
Yes.
And had he earned his law degree by then?
Oh yes, he wasn't about to marry me until he had his Texas law degree.
So you had a long courtship?
Oh, yes we did.
This was often the case.
And then we waited a long time to start our family after that.
So, after he became a lawyer, how long was it before you became actively engaged in politics?
Let's see . . . he became a lawyer in 1934 and by 1940, we had become
appalled at the way the local establishment abused the New Deal program.
They cursed it. They swore at it until they realized that they
themselves had to be rescued by it and then as soon as it had rescued
the
Had you been an enthusaistic supporter of Roosevelt from the beginning?
As soon as he had been elected, after the first hundred days, I was an enthusiastic supporter of him.
You voted in the 1932 election?
Yes, I did. That was my first presidential election, but you couldn't tell from Roosevelt's campaign, the part of it that reached down to the grassroots where I lived, that Roosevelt was going to do anything very different from what Hoover had been doing.
Did you vote for Roosevelt?
No.
Did you vote for Herbert Hoover?
No. I voted for Norman Thomas.
You feel that there is some liability attached to that?
Oh yes, there certainly is.
Do you think that there still is?
Yes, because I tried voting outside the Democratic party once later and I keep hearing about that time. I also voted for Republican John Tower.1 He ran in a special election, as you remember.
Yes, in 1961.
Yes, against Blakley,2 who had just run
in the Democratic primary and been rejected. So, no one could say in the
special election that Blakley was running as a Democratic nominee and we
had no obligation as party members to vote for anyone in that special
election. Tower was the lesser of two evils, in my view. I thought that
a relatively impecunious teacher from Wichita Falls would be easier to
get rid of than a millionaire from Dallas.
Would you care to speculate on how many Texans could say truthfully that they have voted both for John Tower and Norman Thomas?
To go back to that first election—I'm trying to put two and two together here—at the time that you found out that your husband was going to be a lawyer, you warned him not to get involved in politics, and then in 1932, you voted for Norman Thomas. What happened in the intervening time?
I didn't marry my husband until 1934.
Was there a period of several years there when you went from a relative lack of political involvement in your early twenties to a time when you became fairly aware and politically conscious in your early thirties?
Yes, but it was as a person on the sidelines. For one thing, I was a
teacher and I had begun to teach in high school and the thing that I was
most interested in was history and by that time, I had gone to graduate
school at
And at the time you voted for Norman Thomas, was there much support at all in a place like Fort Worth for a socialist candidate?
No. As far as I know, no organized support. It was just something that I
did by myself. The only other influence that I can thinkThe
Nation and The New Republic. I couldn't
afford to subscribe to The Nation or The
New Republic but I read them regularly in the Fort Worth
Library and before I knew it, I was getting out of the literary section
and into the political commentary.
So, what I guess I'm getting around to was that this was more or less an isolated person voting in secret for a socialist candidate. There were no organized socialist clubs or anything like that?
No. And I had no ideological interest in socialism. But I couldn't see a dime's worth of difference between Hoover and Roosevelt as they made their campaigns.
Have you ever known Carl Brannin in Dallas?
Yes.
He was a pretty outspoken socialist, wasn't he?
Yes. He was secretary of the Socialist Party in Texas for awhile.
And I believe that he also ran for governor on a socialist ticket in 1936?
It may be, I don't remember.
Did you see Allred as a pretty strong leader of the New Deal? Was he considered to be a liberal governor for his time?
Yes, he was.
And they still talk about him today as the only liberal governor of Texas.
Well, he was the only governor of outstanding ability after James Stephen Hogg.
So, at any rate, by 1940 you had become, you and your husband had become involved to the extent that you began to try to engage in factional politics within the Democratic Party at the convention level. How did Maury Maverick3 get involved in this? Was this in Fort Worth, or was this the state convention that you are talking about?
It was the state convention. Maury Maverick was in Congress at the time and I suppose he was seeking people who would give Roosevelt the support he needed. I've heard Maury Maverick talking about those conventions in the '40s, but at the time, I don't really know how he found us because we weren't anybody. He may not have met my husband until he arrived at the state convention, delegates in tow. I didn't go to the convention; our first child was born in 1940. I do know that after that, we began to look into the machinery by which people expressed themselves through the party. In 1944, my husband ran for county chairman and won.
Would you say that 1940 was really the first time that anything like a liberal faction within the Democratic Party machinery began to develop in a systematic way?
In Fort Worth.
Had anything like that existed prior to 1940 in any other area of Texas?
Not that I know, but you know, I had a worm's eye view of the situation. I didn't know.
But you would put it then around '40 or '44? When really the cleavage here between the liberal and conservative factions in state politics developed?
The 1940 state convention was wildly disordered. We think that we have had disorderly and usually ill-managed conventions since then, but I imagine that the 1940 convention was the most disorderly convention in the history of Texas.
Could you describe that?
I wasn't there, but I know that we finally allowed some of the
establishment people including the late, great Amon Carter, Fort
Worth Star-Telegram, to go on the list of delegates at-large
with one-fourth vote. It was possible then to divide the votes into
fractions as small as one-fourth. Of course, he didn't do it, he wasn't
going to cast only one-fourth vote, which was our purpose.
Kaufman?
I think maybe it was Kaufman. As I said that, it didn't sound very right. I remember him very well. He had a seizure in the aisle of the convention and was carried off in an ambulance to the hospital.
You mean when it came time for him to cast the deciding vote?
Yes.
Well, that's drama.
Yes.
By '44, we were able to develop a precinct organization and we carried ninety-nine of the 116 precincts that were in the county and tied one.
"We" being the liberals?
Yes. The establishment candidates . . . well, my husband was running his
own campaign. There was not really much of a well-organized liberal
In other words, the vehicle for the liberal coalition in the election was your husband's running for Democratic county chairman?
Yes. This Mrs. James Farmer became a member of the executive committee after that, the one who was the secretary of the suffrage group with the office in the First Baptist Church.4 She had helped us. She had some experience in precinct work and there was a rather unattractive man who was part of the old Populist Party.
Who was that?
His name was Claude Spratling.
And you mean the Populist Party around the turn of the century?
Yes. He had a great deal of experience in doing precinct work. He had lists of the people who had worked with their neighbors in the precinct. But he was not a very personable man and he couldn't get people whom he didn't already know to work with him in public. So he advised us behind the scenes. He was a great help because we were very ignorant about the precinct structure of the county. And he was outright radical in a good many of his views but some of the other people from other states who came in later and tried to work with him found that he was extremely reactionary in race relations.
What were some of the issues that you can remember his being radical about?
He was an agrarian populist. He was radical on freight rate
So, really, these were the old Populist issues.
Yes.
But very conservative on race?
Yes.
Well, on that same question, how did the people who were beginning to form the core of the liberal group in Fort Worth feel on the racial question? Or was this even a viable issue at that time?
Not very, but by 1944 when my husband ran for county chairman, the decision which required the Democrats to take whites . . .
You mean the Smith v. Allwright decision?
Yes, came down from the Supreme Court when I traveled in '45 and '46 for
the Young Democrats, which I did do, we ran into various opinions among
the county chairmen whether this Smith v. Allwright
decision would be followed, but we were already far ahead of the
community practice in that area. Of course, that was where my Quaker
background came in and my husband was just decent. The kind of people
who were found in his law office were of all colors because he had very
poor people for clients and he was uninfluential, he didn't know any
rich people. He didn't look at their color, he looked at their problem.
That was a very unusual thing and it cost him the possibility of
developing a middle-class clientele of whites. White people wouldn't sit
down in the same waiting room with a black person. So, we were already
ahead of community practice about race relations.
Was he relatively unique so far as white lawyers went in this resepct in Fort Worth? Were there very many?
So far as I know. I am sure that there were some white lawyers
And so in 1944, this was the same year that the Texas Regulars were trying to unseat Roosevelt?
That's true.
Was that an issue in Fort Worth?
It was the issue of the race for county chairman.
And was Amon Carter a Regular?
I think that he tried to stay out of it personally, but most of his friends were in it. There is a group of privileged people in Fort Worth who are civilized, and although they are not about to encourage anybody whom they consider radical or in any way unusual, they usually let social climbers and some true believers, carry the burden of prejudice.
Was he in what you would call an old family, wealthy . . .
No. He was an upstart from Bowie who was brought up without a father, as my husband was, and who sold chicken and bread to the people who came through on the railroad at Bowie. There was no railroad cafe at the station in Bowie. So, his mother began to fry chicken and he took it down to the train and he sold it through the windows to the people who were hungry when the trains stopped there.
Is Bowie close to Fort Worth?
Yes. And he had little formal education. Much later, a high school in
Fort Worth was named for him, And he wrote a rather pathetic letter
saying how
So he got the credit for it?
He got the credit for it and there was nothing that Roosevelt could or would do . . . he probably wouldn't want to do anything to find out who were the dependable New Deal supporters in Fort Worth. I remember one supporter who resented bitterly the fact that he raised more money for the national ticket than Amon Carter did. Didn't raise it in Fort Worth, he went to east Texas, the oil boom had moved from west Texas to east Texas by that time and he raised the money in east Texas and in every other way made himself as useful to the national leadership as Amon Carter had. His name was Karl Crowley and he was very bitter because his service didn't gain him any access to national leadership when they won elections.
What sort of coercion did Carter have at his disposal to force the people to channel their money through him?
He was a very heavy-handed political boss. He was a benevolent despot, but he was a despot and we are still suffering from the lack of leadership that his period of leadership left us in.
What was that period?
From 1920 to 1955.
That's a sizable chunk of years.
He allowed no one of an age to be his children the opportunity to show
any leadership. The great mistake that my husband made, the reason that
he had no political career, he ran for public office twice, was that he
had the temerity to announce for public office without first consulting
Mr. Amon Carter about whether it was a good idea to run. To tell the
truth, he just didn't know that that was part of the procedure.
And when did he find out that he had made a mistake?
Well, he was told after his application hit the newspaper. The newspaper was Mr. Carter's eyes and ears.
Was his the only major newspaper in Fort Worth at the time?
Yes, except the Scripps-Howard paper . . . I can't say exactly when it
came in, we had the Fort Worth Press most of the time
that I've lived in Fort Worth. It was a Scripps-Howard newspaper for
many years, but it was not long before the Fort Worth
Press began to follow the Star-Telegram's
editorial policy on everything, except national and international
issues.
Well, what happened then to your husband's career?
He retired my husband.
Would you say that he was a liberal?
Oh, he was. He was a humanitarian.
Was he rather unique in that respect, so far as Fort Worth councilmen went?
Yes. So, of course, we were labelled as Hammond people. There came a time
when the Star-Telegram had used its influence to
persuade enough members of the city council to resign one by one, that
there was no longer a quorum able to hold meetings and conduct business,
or it had almost reached that point. They kept bringing economic
pressure on Dr. Hammond, who was vulnerable to it. Dr. Hammond had run
against the chairman of the board of the university where he was a
member of the faculty, and beat him.
He was at TCU?
Yes.
A law professor, did you say?
He was a history professor.
That doesn't fit my image of the usual timorous faculty member.
He was approaching retirement age and he would have been unable to get
employment at another school had he been forced to resign from TCU. So,
he stayed as long as he could and he was convinced that he would be
fired at TCU unless he resigned as mayor. He wasn't mayor at first; it
was
Was this a citywide election?
Yes, it was.
And he ran on what, a rather humanitarian and enlightened platform?
Yes. And he carried out the programs that he advanced, too.
And he was undoubtedly opposed by the Fort Worth press?
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram all the way.
Were there any papers that supported him?
No. Dr. Hammond reached the point where he needed to resign, which would have left the city council without a quorum. They couldn't have held meetings or conducted city business. The idea was to throw the city government into complete anarchy, and he asked my husband if he would accept that seat by appointment.
What year was that?
I would have to check it. I think that it was '38. My husband accepted the appointment.
As mayor?
No, the replacement would not be mayor then, he was a member of the
council. There had been a long series of recall movements. Dr. Hammond
had never succeeded in electing the whole city council but he had
succeeded in getting six of the nine members elected on a slate and then
several of them had turned against him. My husband had been chairman of
the recall movement to get petitions signed to remove these people who
had double-crossed Dr. Hammond. When my husband took the seat on the
council the very petitions that my husband had gotten signed against
other councilmen were also used in district court in a law suit to
unseat him. Not a single voter
You mean that they just used the same list of names?
They just used the same list of names. And when they held a special election to recall the people who had disappointed Dr. Hammond, they also put my husband's seat up for grabs. He took them as far as he could go in the courts to protest that illegal unseating and then when the regular election came around, he ran for the seat and was defeated. This was all before he ran for county chairman.
So again, this is pretty much the doing of Amon Carter?
No, I wouldn't say that. Because it was a situation where practically all the others interested in politics were sheep. Everybody who worked for a major oil company or a utility company or a bank or for a large business was automatically in the pocket of Mr. Carter. They were quite willing followers. There was very little rough pressure brought, it was just their finding out what the boss wanted them to do and that is what they did.
In other words, sort of a business class here which shared his values to begin with.
People who did not share similar benefits came to identify with more privileged people even if they were not sharing the benefits which the privileged wanted them to help protect.
Of course, this was a time too when the minorities, the blacks, were able to vote in city elections?
Yes, they were but the organization of black voters was quite venal.
There were a few precinct leaders who sold votes and after awhile, it
became evident that they were not delivering the votes they sold so they
sort of put themselves out of business. But black voters had no
significant
About what percentage of Fort Worth was black at that time?
Perhaps fifteen percent.
Is that about the percentage today?
It is somewhat larger, now.
Was there a fairly sharp increase after the white primary decision?
Yes, with the white primary decision, blacks became interested in at least becoming Democratic precinct chairmen in the precincts they dominated, because they didn't understand too much about, say, the difference between Dr. Hammond and Mr. Jarvis, but they could understand, because they could listen to the radio, the difference between Roosevelt and his detractors, and they very much wanted to support Roosevelt.
What was the reason for their not being able to clearly understand the issues in city government?
Well, they could be confused much more easily when you had only one newspaper and the newspaper also owned the local radio station, than on national issues.
Does Fort Worth have nonpartisan municipal elections?
Yes.
Do you think that had any influence on the tendency to be confused?
Yes. It was only very occasionally that any slates of candidates ran for
city offices, so there were just individuals that they had to select and
that was beyond them. It wasn't just that there were several unsavory
characters in control, but that the ministers were pretty venal and they
were able to get some participation from their congregations, which
they
At this time, along with Amon Carter—he turns out to loom very large here—were there other families who would be considered members of the establishment at that time?
Yes. Raymond Buck was a very dependably loyal Democrat through the Texas Regulars and the "no third term" movement, and it seems to me that those movements to break the Democratic Party lasted for at least three presidential elections. And Raymond Buck was the son of a district judge and a very highly regarded lawyer himself who was aware that the New Deal had saved the privileged class and that included himself, and he once said to my husband, "I have not forgotten what made me a rich man and I do not intend to turn my back on the Democratic Party." He never did.
Are you referring here to the Jesse Jones Reconstruction Finance Corporation?
That type of thing, yes.5
So, then . . .
And of course, Mr. Buck was Mr. Carter's right-hand man and although he never crossed Mr. Carter, he had the sophistication to give Mr. Carter detailed advice about how to get done what he wanted to get done.
How about Anne Tandy and that group of wealthy ranching families who lived in Fort Worth?
To the best of my knowledge, they never took any direct active interest
in politics. Anne Burnett Tandy has always been a private person until
she married Mr. Tandy. Mary Sears, the former editor of the Star-Telegram's
So, really Amon Carter was Mr. Fort Worth.
Yes.
And the two Carters had a falling out in the late thirties . . .
Well, they never had a falling out.
He was never "in" so he couldn't very well fall out.
He couldn't very well fall out. He did have some other partisan experience, though.
After my husband became the county chairman in '44, he was too old to go
to the war, and of course, the younger men who might have been active in
politics were in the war in '44. And in '45, a young man from Georgia
came into Texas because he was part of the staff of the Democratic
National Party, to organize some Young Democrats. By that time, we had
elected a staunch New Dealer from Dallas, Mr. Harry Seay who was
president of the Southland Insurance Company, as state Democratic
chairman. And Bill Kittrell, who was Mr. Rayburn's man in Texas, was the
secretary of the state party when the national committee sent this young
staff member down to get Young Democratic clubs organized. Their
thinking was that they wanted to be able
Jim Wright who is presently a congressman?
Yes.And Bob Eckhardt6 was active in that group and so was Stewart Long7 and so was Chris Dixie8 and Bob Slagle . . . well, Bob Slagle flaked in '46 and gave us trouble.
Bob Slagle?
S-L-A-G-L-E. He was from Sherman and he was also at one point the statewide manager of the Ralph Yarborough campaign. The first campaign that Senator Yarborough won was run by Bob Slagle.
What do you mean when you say that he "flaked"?
Well, we knew that we had something, and we did have something. We had a
very good organization, a very lively organization and the establishmen
began to infiltrate it. And Slagle and Joe Kilgore9 were flaked by the time of the '46 convention.
Would you like to continue?
I'm not sure where I was . . . I think that I was telling you about my
husband and the Young Democrats. After we had had a highly successful
convention in '45, that is, highly successful from the point of view of
people who were interested in issues, we got a great many of the
returned veterans into the organization and they were on fire about
You say that this is '46?
'45. And Jim Wright was chairman of that resolutions committee. The reason why it is rather fresh in my mind is because he is writing an autobiography and . . .
Jim Wright is?
Yes, and he sent me a rough draft of a chapter for which he asked me to
check the exact dates of that state convention and if possible, to send
him a copy of the resolutions we adopted. I found it and xeroxed it for
him. So, I have just been over the resolutions and the eighteen-year-old
vote was one of them. There are several things which have been achieved
in the years between then and now. Some of them have not yet been
achieved but will be. By '46 of course, Bill Kittrell at least was
wishing that they had never seen the man from Georgia who started all
this.
You are suggesting at this point that the Young Democratic clubs
Yes. We were able to keep our statewide organization or network of only
bonafide clubs. They didn't have to all agree with each other, but they
did all have to be Young Democrats who were actually organized. That was
the point when Bob Slagle and Joe Kilgore rose up, after the credentials
report, and said that they were leaving us and they wanted their money
back. Chris Dixie rose and made a fiery, eloquent speech in which he
said with great dignity that there had been many reasons why Democrats
had had to bolt in the recent past and there might be other reasons why
it would be necessary to do so serious a thing as to bolt, but this was
the only occasion when people had bolted because they wanted their money
back.
Who did Chris Dixie suspect had provided the money?
Mr. Blalock.
I see.
So, in 1948 when Truman announced for president and the establishment in Texas was not for him, he had no money with which to open a state headquarters and Marion Storm was the secretary, my husband was then the president. She was then in charge of a local liberal office which Mrs. Cunningham had encouraged her to open back in 1944.
This is Minnie Fisher Cunningham?
Minnie Fisher Cunningham.10 Marion saw
my husband and said, "We still have this two thousand dollars in the
bank that nobody ever claimed from the '46 convention. Why don't we
contribute it to the Truman campaign and they will be able to open a
statewide headquarters?" So, that was what we did,
On what grounds?
Well, they didn't have to have any grounds, as far as I know, there never were any. Of course, he had not approved our organization in the first place.
To go back one step, you give the impression that Rayburn was not pleased by the Young Democrats.
Mr. Rayburn didn't mind our organizing in the first place, or Mr.
Kittrell wouldn't have encouraged us. You see, we thought that the
proper auspices were the secretary and chairman of the state Democratic
committee. We didn't even know Mr. Blalock and you know, we're not much
for looking up influential people.
In other words, on account of these rather progressive resolutions?
They didn't suit his friends over the state. And he was blamed for not having ridden herd on us before we gave publicity to these wild ideas like the eighteen-year-old vote.
Well, in various accounts of Rayburn's political career, he is often described as a New Deal liberal, but what you seem to be suggesting here is that at least by this point in his career, he was of a more conservative view.
No, Mr. Rayburn was involved in a dichotomy. He was one person in Texas
and another person in Washington. In Washington, he was Roosevelt's
faithful organizer of the majority in the House. Since he and Roosevelt
were elected and reelected in the same elections, on the same
So what happened when you incurred the ire of Rayburn?
Well of course, in the process of taking the charter away from us they
did have the grace to organize a Young Democratic club.
So, once the charter was revoked or once it was taken from your hands, did the liberal control of the Young Democrat movement subside?
Oh, yes. We were not even invited to the organizing meetings of this
other group. We don't even know whether they met to this day. They just
had newspaper stories saying that they met and there were frequently
stories in the Star-Telegram about meetings that were
said to have taken place when there had been no meetings.
And then did the Young Democratic movement in Texas kind of die out through this period?
Yes.
When did it get started back up?
I'm afraid that I don't know, because we were at the top of the age group
then and you know, who cares what happens to a Young Democrat except
another Young Democrat?
Well, you are speaking here when you say the Rainey affair, you're talking about President Homer Rainey who was fired by the board of regents at the University of Texas. Could you describe a little bit about how the Rainey bid for the governorship, the entire Rainey affair there, served as a focus for liberal organizing energies at that period?
Yes. If you want to know where I knew Rainey, he was the youth director
for the Baptist church that I attended as a little girl in Sherman. He
went to Austin College and his wife taught in the high school that was a
block from our house. He left Texas soon after he graduated and went
into religious education rather than the ministry. At the time that he
was youth director of our church, he was a ministerial student and it
was a long time before he came back to Texas as the president of the
University of Texas. When we were organizing the Young Democrats, many
people thought and some were candid enough to say that they thought we
were only organizing the Rainey campaign for governor. You may not
remember, I don't know whether you were here then, that after he was
fired—and of course, he
In Austin?
Yes, in Austin.
He was a rather liberal minister, too, wasn't he?
Yes, he was.
I don't believe that he was a Southern Baptist, was he?
I'm not sure of that, but he was nonabrasive and quite dependable in a
controversial situation. He persuaded Mr. Jacques that the Lord wanted
him to use the rest of his tithe to subsidize Homer Rainey in a series
of radio programs. I heard Dr. Rainey say once that now that the regents
had fired him from the University of Texas, his classroom was the state
of Texas.
Why was Rainey fired, incidentally, by the regents?
Oh . . .do you really want to go into that?
Well, if you could just briefly . . .
For protecting the rights of his teachers to academic freedom, for one
thing, and for insisting that the University of Texas Medical School
Wasn't there an academic freedom case involved with some English professor who was teaching John Dos Passos in the classroom and people were . . .
That was an excuse, it was not the reason, really. Because those Dos Passos books which were made the campaign issue, although I'm sure they were really an issue at the time that he was fired, were on optional reading lists for a sophomore course. No one was required to read Dos Passos.
Well, what was the key academic freedom issue, then?
It was a matter of the faculty members excercising their rights as citizens. During the war, there were three young teachers who did not have tenure, they were not professors, who had gone to a meeting that was being held by . . . I'm not sure which business group, but whichever group it was, it was misrepresenting . . .
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
I knew the name of one of those instructors. His name was Peach, I don't
remember the names of the other two. Large newspaper advertisements,
sometimes full page, were being bought . . . I think that it was the
National Association of Manufacturers, by one of the business groups and
the advertisements completely misrepresented the impact of the federal
forty-hour week law on the war effort. They said that our soldiers were
out there facing the enemy without enough bullets and people back here
in the war plants were not being allowed to work more than forty hours a
week. Well, that was a lie. After they had worked forty hours a week,
they had to be paid overtime. These three young men had gone very
And it was the regents who insisted on their being fired?
Yes. I can't remember the details, but that was the power arrangement. One of the first things that happened after Dr. Rainey became president was that Professor Clarence Ayers, who was a professor, he was the head of the economics department . . . well, I'm not sure he was the head, but he was a tenured professor in the economics department, was making a routine speech at one of the businessmen's luncheons, I think that it was the Rotary Club, and W. Lee O'Daniel was the governor of Texas. O'Daniel was plugging his sales tax on every radio program. He was, of course, on the radio very frequently because he wanted to go to the Senate. He had promised that he would not seek any other office than the governor's office until he had brought this money in to pay the old folks' pensions and every effort was being made to get a general sales tax passed by the legislature, which was resisting vigorously. At the end of the program, one of the members of the club asked Dr. Ayers what were the provisions of this sales tax bill which was causing so much controversy.
The members of which club, now?
I think that it was the Rotary Club. It was a downtown businessmen's club
in Austin. He told them and there was a reporter there who put in the
paper the actual information that Dr. Ayers gave in answer
On the part of the University of Texas president. You mentioned also that he was for increasing the number of doctors that was produced by the University of Texas medical school branch, and this was opposed by whom?
By the medical school. The faculty was against it.
And what was their purpose for opposing it?
Well, doctors then and I suppose that still doctors now, wanted the
number of doctors low enough to ensure that each licensed doctor would
have a chance for a good income and it didn't occur to them to look at
their problem from the potential patient's point of view. The excuse
that Dr. Rainey was given for resistance to his program for enlarging
the student body at the medical school was that in Galveston, there were
not enough opportunities for clinical experience for any larger
graduating class than was now being produced. He said, "Well then, we'll
need to move the medical school from Galveston, won't we?"
So, eventually he was fired and it became a cause celebre so far as the liberals were concerned.
Yes, and of course, the best people on the faculty left and it became a cause celebre nationally.
So then he immediately ran for governor?
That's right. And at the 1945 convention of the Young Democrats, he was the principal speaker at one of our sessions. We were most of us, Rainey supporters, but we had made every effort to gather in other Young Democrats. We didn't know who were Rainey supporters when we went out and looked for them to serve as Young Democratic organizers. I was the one who did the looking.
He ran and he was unsuccessful and . . .
But he was not unsuccessful. He only didn't get to be governor.
In what way was he successful?
In the process of running for governor, he was able to
He ran for the state senate?
He ran for the state senate. He said that if by some quirk, Homer Rainey
should get the governorship, he would need somebody in the state senate
who could help him. Of course, the Lord didn't intend for Rainey to be
governor of Texas and He didn't intend for my husband to be in the state
senate, either.
So then . . . well, would you say that this also had the effect of revivifying or at least giving a boost to the liberal movement at that time?
No, it had a bad effect on the liberal movement. There were not many
people who were perceptive enough to understand how much Dr. Rainey had
contributed. What they saw was that he had to leave the state
How long did he belong to that?
As long as there had been a chapter. We had been charter members and helped to organize it.
When was that?
I'm not sure when that was. It was probably '44.
The year that the white primary was outlawed.
Yes. The NAACP didn't amount to much, heaven knows, but . . .
Were there very many white members in it?
Yes. I suppose there were about as many white members as there were blacks, because the blacks didn't know what it was about. There were more white members who understood the purpose of the organization and it was a fully interracial organization at that time.
Were the blacks in it primarily professional people?
Yes, a dentist became the first president of the NAACP and he retained the office for about twenty-five years.
So, that would seem to suggest that there was . . .
I didn't get to tell you what my husband had to do with that. When he ran for the senate, his opponent's supporters began to tell everyone that he was a member of the NAACP and . . .
And that probably cost him quite a few votes.
Yes. There was no way that he could have won, but that was another thing
that cost him votes and a dear soul who was president
So, he just really gave up the idea of . . .
Running for office. But my husband became a member of the state Democratic committee after that.
When was that?
1948.
And how long was he a member of that?
One term.
How many liberals would you estimate were on the committee at that time?
It was the committee that had a majority of liberals, I think the only one in the history of Texas.
Is that right?
Stuart Long was a member of that committee and Lillian Collier.
Lillian Collier?
Yes.
And Stuart Long of Austin?
Yes.
What accounts for that, why were they able to control the committee at that time?
Well, the people who hedged their bets all expected Truman to lose and it was only the Democrats who were Democrats-win-or-lose who were active in the Truman campaign. So, we controlled the convention.
Wasn't it the case in 1948 that there was at least some split among the liberals, between the Wallaceites and the Truman people?
Wallace in '48?
The Progressive . . .
Oh, Henry Wallace.
Yes, Henry Wallace.
The Progressive Party. It didn't amount to much in Texas.
Is that right? Were very many of the prominent liberals identified with the Wallace effort?
No. I was in Austin, in Gregory Gymnasium on the night in 1947 when
Wallace intimated, although he didn't formally announce, that he would
be a candidate for the presidency on an independent ticket and I was
appalled. I don't remember that there were any of my friends who felt
any other way. We went from that very large meeting to . . . you see,
that was another end of the war meeting with a bunch of very progressive
veterans, students at the University. I don't remember how it was, but I
do remember that we went . . . oh yes, I do. It was because Marion Storm
had made the arrangements for that meeting and we went from that meeting
to a much smaller meeting in the penthouse of the Austin Hotel, which
was the newly fashionable hotel at the time, where Wallace was staying
and to wait for the time that his plane would leave. There was maybe two
hours between the time of the end of the meeting and the time that he
needed to go to the airport
Well, John Henry then, was a Wallace supporter though, wasn't he?
I don't really remember.
I remember watching the television show a couple of weeks ago, although i haven't read John Henry's book, but the right-wing people who got him blacklisted said that he voted for the Communist candidate in 1948. Well, the "Communist candidate" in 1948 was Henry Wallace, the Communist Party supported Henry Wallace, and that was how he was slandered there.
Yes, I suppose you could say that. I met John Henry Faulk that night and I don't remember what he did in the campaign. We ran the Truman campaign. Nobody who was anybody wanted to have anything to do with it and you know, that was the year that Allan Shivers, who was the governor, persuaded the . . . no, I beg your pardon. In '48, everybody just kept their hands off, everybody who had any influence, because they didn't want to be caught associating with a loser.
Well, did that include some of the liberals, or were the liberals pretty strongly out in force to back Truman?
Well, it was our definition of a liberal that he supported the Democratic
candidate.
Now, what was Mr. Blalock's position at this time?
He was national committeman for Texas.
I see. And what role did Sam Rayburn play insofar as Texas went in that campaign?
Well, Mr. Rayburn, of course, was loyal to the nominee and was happy to receive whatever money Mr. Buck could raise from our county.
So, it was largely then, the labor of the liberals, at least at the grassroots level, which accounted for . . .
That was all there was. They said that Mr. Amon Carter placed a bet . . .
now Mr. Amon Carter made a substantial contribution to Truman and then
he placed a bet with Jimmy the Greek with the odds ten to one in favor
of Dewey. So, by making a hundred dollar bet, he got a thousand dollars
back and that was all he had given to Truman. It cost him nothing to be
known as a staunch Truman supporter.
He wasn't stupid, was he?
Oh, no.
You mentioned just a moment ago when we were talking, about Truman's turncoat role in 1952. Could you elaborate on that? I'm sorry, not Truman, but Shivers. His role in the 1952 election.
Well, by 1952, Shivers was in a position . . . you see, the liberals had
come into some influence in the state party in presidential elections
because that's when the ordinary people are interested enough to turn
out. And then we go out of influential
positions in the convention two years after that when nobody but the
regulars are interested in the convention. So, this liberal state
committee in '48 had gone out and had been succeeded by a very
establishment-oriented state committee in '50. Well, it was no trouble
at all for Shivers to persuade the '52 convention that had been arranged
by that committee elected in '50 to take the entire machinery of the
official Democratic party in Texas into the Eisenhower campaign, which
he did do. Well, that left Mr. Rayburn without the semblance of a party
structure through which to operate the '52 campaign. He came to Dallas
and set up a party headquarters in the Adolphus Hotel and personally
managed it, the '52 Stevenson campaign. Well, he had the grace to be
somewhat embarrassed about having to come to Jack Carter in Tarrant
County, and by that time, we had elected a railway clerk who was a
dependable Democrat,
What did Mr. Rayburn say?
Oh, I don't know that he said anything.
On what grounds?
That there was question about whether he was the proper person to be the state committeeman.
As a result of this suit . . . ?
No, as a result of the credentials contest in the convention.
Oh, I see. OK.
And as long as that litigation was pending, said the district judge,
there would be no state committeeman. That was all right, we didn't care
what the title was. Mr. Blalock had already been to Fort Worth and
appointed my husband president of something he called a club and so my
husband went differentially to the district judge and said, "I
understand that I cannot perform the duties of a state committeeman.
Would it be a violation of your order if I served as the chairman of the
Truman-Barkley Club, which the national committeeman has asked me to
do?" Well, the district judge said, "Jack, you know better than to ask
me a question like that. You do what you think that you ought to do and
then I'll tell you whether it was the right thing."
Of course, that was the same year that Lyndon Johnson was elected to the Senate.
Yes, it was. And my husband was on the state committee that was sued by Coke Stevenson12 over the certification of the returns.
Was effort put forward by the liberals who were backing Truman at that time to back Johnson?
Oh, yes.
In other words, he was perceived as a pretty straightforward liberal candidate in that context?
Well, don't go too far.
Well, what I'm trying to get at is at that time, did he appear to be more liberal than some people came to believe perhaps than he was later on?
Well, he was a useful member of the Texas congressional delegation. He had been in the House and he had a pretty good record as Texas congressmen's records go. We certainly didn't want to see Coke Stevenson in the Senate. He had been the governor during part of the struggle over whether people who intended to oppose the national nominees had a right to control the state machinery. That was what all this Dixiecrat "No Third Term" Texas Regular squabble was about and Coke Stevenson had stood aside and said, "You never drink coffee from the boiling pot and I have friends on both sides."
This was at the time that he was governor?
Yes. In the forties. So, we knew that we didn't want Stevenson to go to Washington and furthermore, when Rainey's situation developed, Stevenson had been the governor when Rainey was fired and he had made no effort to influence the regents. So, we had that against Stevenson, too. Of course, Stevenson very much wanted to run for reelection, but come '46 when the powers that be saw that they weren't going to be able to guarantee Stevenson's reelection, they supported Jester for governor and Stevenson was promised that if he would support Jester for governor, the same people who were supporting Jester for governor would support him for the next Senate race. They tried to deliver and they just couldn't quite do it.
And that was known by the liberals at the time?
Oh, yes. From the establishment's point of view, Johnson was an upstart
who was trying to get promoted to the Senate when
Still are, aren't you?
Yes.
How is the time going? Do you still feel like talking more?
It's 5:30, isn't it?
Yes. I still feel like asking questions if you are up to it. Would you like to take a little break, perhaps? Well, in the 1950s the liberals began to get what I guess you would call rather ambivalent feelings about Johnson. What was the source of those feelings?
I never was too much disturbed about Johnson until he began to lean heavily on John Connally's advice. You know, Johnson lost his first try for the Senate. John Connally tried to make everybody forget that, but we remembered it and we had been for Johnson then.
That was when, 1942?
'41. It was a special election. Raymond Buck was for him then, too and that was the first time that we knew him. He lost that one. Well, you know how close he came to losing it in '48, but he had been to Fort Worth and made an involved deal, the details of which I do not know, but some of them became obvious later, with Amon Carter and Sid Richardson.
Were Carter and Richardson close friends?
Very, and Richardson was supposed then to be the richest individual in the world. He was an East Texas boy who had made an oil fortune at the same time that Carter was making one in oil and newspapers and several other areas.
At the time that this deal was made, was Connally Richardson's lawyer?
No. Connally was Johnson's secretary.
That's right. This is in '48?
'48, well, before '48. Apparently, part of the deal was that Connally would become an employee of Richardson and another part of the deal was supposed to be that Amon Carter's access to Canadian newsprint would be facilitated. I don't know just which agency of the federal government had to do with that, but Amon Carter was having a hard time getting enough paper to print his newspapers. That was part of the deal and I don't know what else was part of it.
Well, who was able to make that available to him?
I don't know, but I have heard that was part of the deal and I do know that there was an acute newsprint shortage in this country at that time and that was how John Connally happened to move to Fort Worth and get into our hair. After John Connally began to be the fundraiser for Johnson, the people whose arms he twisted for money brought pressure on Johnson and that was the point at which Johnson began to look less than useful to Texas liberals.
Was John Connally perceived, at that point, back in the early fifties, as the conservative that he is now known to be? Were his political views fairly clearly known at that point?
No.
But the inference was drawn because he was Sid Richardson's
Yes, but John Connally was not seeking publicity for his views.
And then, of course, we come to the 1952 election. What role did Johnson and Rayburn and the liberals play?
Rayburn tried very hard to carry Texas for the Democratic nominee. I don't remember that Johnson was active in the campaign, but I'm sure that he supported the nominee. Rayburn had to depend on the unions, which at that time had liberal leadership. We had a very good labor-liberal coalition going in our county by that time.
Who were some of the labor leaders?
Paul Gray was one. He's in Austin, now, for the CWA and trying to
organize the municipal workers into the Communication Workers Union.
Don't ask me why.
Has anyone speculated as to how that was achieved?
Well, I know how it was achieved.
How?
Well, they persuaded . . .in the first place, they wouldn't give Ross credit for anything that he was doing or publicity to show that he was making friends for the union at the same time that he was making enemies. He was, of course, making enemies but they were the kinds of enemies that union officials should be proud to have and he was making many friends and strengthening their educational program with political clout. Ross was a real grassroots organizer. He took members of his union who were absolutely unsophisticated and inducted them into the mysteries of a precinct campaign so that they began to control their conventions and to become members of the county Democratic committee and when they had been through the campaign where they were elected to the county committee, they began to look around for public offices for which they could run and we kept having to fill vacancies because everybody that Ross turned into a party officer then turned around and ran for the water district or the school board or even the city council of some working man's suburb. He was doing an excellent grassroots political education job, but it was easy to persuade malcontents . . .
Within his union?
Within his union, that he was spending too much time on politics. This in spite of the fact that he was also the best office manager of union records within the United States and after he was defeated, as secretary of that local, he went to the international headquarters of his union and became assistant treasurer and was put in charge of a program of educating other people how to keep their union records as well as he had kept his. It was not true that there was a conflict between his duties and his interests in politics.
Well, who do you speculate was involved here in getting the malcontents in his union to actually overthrow him?
Well, we know about one effort. There was one young man who is still active in Fort Worth labor circles and who worked at Convair at the time, who circulated a disaffiliation petition among the members of the machinists union there. There is another small union there that is not affiliated with any international group, that has one or two departments organized at Convair and these men, some of whom were affiliated with another AFL-CIO international . . . I mean, they were influenced by organizers for another AFL-CIO organization, were circulating a disaffiliation petition and of course, you can't do that long without being caught. Two of them were caught and were charged with disloyalty to the union. They had what they called a trial and they were found guilty and assessed a large fine. The hearing board was satisfied that the large fine would amount to expulsion but they didn't want to expel them formally, they felt sure that they would never pay the fine so they would never have them on their hands again, they hoped.
And this young man that I knew, I didn't know one of them but I knew the
other one, was the son of a
So, Ross's influence was effectively destroyed.
Well, he just had to leave Texas. He went right ahead, but he did it
somewhere else.
That's a moving story.
And his motivation was, his inner motivation, that he was living on
borrowed time. He had contracted tuberculosis before there were the
cures for tuberculosis that there are now and had lived in a sanitarium
for about a year, expecting to die. While he was there, he began to read
practically everything in the library, which wasn't very much, except
they had some of the liberal magazines for which Victor Reuther was
writing. Victor Reuther was travelling in Europe for the United
Automobile Workers and Ross educated himself. He knew more about what
was going on in the Italian elections, for instance, than most Americans
ever bothered to keep up with. He was never ostentatious about that, but
if you talked with him, you knew how well informed he was. And he was
Would you say that his type is characteristic of the labor leaders in Fort Worth today?
No.
What has happened there?
I don't want to say anything bitter about the leadership of organized labor. It has no leadership. There are only opportunists looking for a way up into the middle class. They don't understand that it is an honor to be a member of labor.
Would you explain this to some extent in terms of the story that you just gave here, the way that the labor leaders of an earlier period were weeded out?
Well, it would be easier, I think, to tell you another story.
Was this so even during the '30s, during the Roosevelt years?
Yes. It was so from the time when Al Smith was nominated in '28 at the Houston national convention. The Texas delegation did not support Al Smith. Most of them bolted to Hoover. So, there never was a time after Cox was the national nominee, until Lyndon Johnson put together the '56 delegation, that the delegation could say to be typical of Texas voters. That was a source of constant embarassment to Mr. Rayburn. Well, he advised Lyndon, "For God's sake, before you make your bid, get a delegation together that will impress delegations from other states with its loyalty to the national party." So, Lyndon put the organization for the '56 delegation in our hands and he directed John Connally and Raymond Buck and Hunter McLean to work with us.
Who is Hunter McLean?
Hunter McLean is a member of one of the oldest families in Fort Worth.
That picture that I was showing you, from the suffrage scrapbook, of the
lady with the Scotch tartan around her shoulders? That's a picture of
his Aunt Margaret,
Well, Hunter McLean was a conservative who usually would not be expected to work in the Stevenson campaign?
No. He was the kind of conservative who would have worked for Lyndon Johnson out of opportunism. Those three were the conservative but loyal leaders who helped the rest of us carry the conventions in '56. I was a delegate to the national convention in '56, because Mr. Buck said that the person who does the work ought to go to the convention.
Did you get to know John Connally personally in this role?
Yes, I got to know John Connally and found out what a double-crossing
so-and-so he was and I have never had the slightest occasion to change
my opinion. We were talking about the labor leader and I told you that I
would tell you a story about that. Well, he was in charge of the office
that labor set up to help with this coalition effort and he couldn't
help but be impressed with the people from the Fort Worth Club who were
involved with us. Hunter was a gentleman, I'll
He was typical of the kind of labor leaders that we have had since then.
The lure of associating with executives is too much for them, especially
as they get into positions where they have got to maneuver so as to
satisfy conservative people or go back into the plant. Most of them
aren't like Ross. They don't think that they could make a living with
the skill they used to use to make a living. They can't bear the thought
of becoming blue collar workers if they have had a white
When do you think this first began to be the dominant view?
I'm not sure that it was at the same time in all parts of the country. I'm sure that it was not the same time in all the labor unions.
Say so far as the Texas AFL-CIO was concerned?
I can't say. Until the merger, we worked more with the industrial unions than with the craft unions.
And that was when, 1956?
No, surely it's been farther back than that. There were Jerry Holleman
and Hank Brown and Roy Evans and Harry Hubbard, they've all presidents
since the merger . . . I'm not sure exactly when it was, but I know back
in the '40s and early '50s when we first became
So, you see this gradual change in the labor movement as being really due to structural features, which are pretty much endemic in the system?
I think so. I think that it is a tragedy.
Do you see the labor movement as gradually splitting off from the liberal movement?
Not gradually . . . well, I guess that it has happened gradually, but it has happened. The unions have been co-opted.
And this again, would you say, really began to become evident in the middle '50s?
Yes.
Well, the 1956 election was also the election where finally the liberals did come to blows with Lyndon Johnson, with Mrs. Frankie Randolph leading them.
Yes. Well, we didn't exactly come to blows until we got to the
convention. Mr. Rayburn and Lyndon were so high-handed, they were
utterly out of touch with the realities of the situation. You know, we
had two members of the national committee to elect, and they thought
that Mr. Rayburn was going to hand-pick one and Mr. Johnson was going to
hand-pick the other. Mr. Rayburn was a man of his word. Now, back in the
'40s, when we had been willing to present contests which we had a good
chance to lose, Byron Skelton from Temple had been willing to be our
candidate for
Well, why don't you just tell it.
Well, Lyndon and Mr. Rayburn, of course, were able to handpick the
committees and the officers of the convention because there were no
state party rules until 1972. And the nominations committee kept trying
to bring in a winning team.
John Connally was trying to get to be the national committeeman and that
was probably why he tolerated us in his district at all. He had agreed
to work with Raymond and Hunter in keeping us in line to do the work, in
the district. He wanted to be the national committeeman. I had suggested
that
Creekmore Fath being an Austin liberal?
Yes, and many of us were and still are friends of Creekmore's. So, we didn't feel any obligation to help Mr. Rayburn get the committeeman's seat for Byron. He hadn't been of any effective help to us in some time. We supported Raymond Buck for national committeeman and I had gotten to know Mrs. Randolph rather well by that time.
Mrs. Randolph being a rather wealthy Houston liberal and publisher of the
Texas Observer, the liberal weekly.
Yes and of course, the founder of the Harris County Democrats.
Yes, the liberal organization in Houston.
I proposed to Mrs. Randolph that Houston and Fort Worth join forces and
support Buck and Randolph as a team. She said, "I don't know Raymond
Buck."
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
You sometimes wonder if history would have been different?
Had we allowed Mrs. Bentsen to have the committeewoman's seat in '56. She
got it later, about three presidential elections later, as I remember.
That's the deal he made?
We had great difficulty carrying out our part of the bargain.
That's a very potent power to wield.
And still, he would not allow the committee on nominations to consider
her name. He tried to get the wife of a doctor from Lake Whitney
considered and he tried to get Kathleen Voight considered but Kathleen
was so close to Mr. Rayburn that Mr. Rayburn would have had to accept
Kathleen as his half of the bill, John Connally was going to be the
other one. Well, John Connally didn't have the support of his
district—our district. But they almost put that past us and
it was Mr. Buck who tipped me off that they were about to put that past
us. So, we rushed up and quickly transferred
As indeed he was.
I'm getting tired, now.
Fine. This is the end of the interview with Mrs. Margaret Carter of Fort Worth, by Chandler Davidson.
END OF INTERVIEW
Fear on Trial.
Labor News and later the mayor of Fort Worth; and M.
M. McKnight, the mayor pro temp and president of the local Central Labor
Council, who happened to work as a union printer for Amon Carter's
newspaper.