“Smilin’ Ralph” Yarborough was a tireless campaigner and also—that rare thing in Texas politics—an unconflicted liberal.
GIANT
ALLAN SHIVERS WAS REELECTED IN 1952 AND AGAIN IN 1954, breaking with a Texas tradition that governors served only two terms. Opposing him for the Democratic primary in both elections was Ralph Yarborough, a lawyer, former district judge, combat veteran, and lieutenant colonel with General Douglas MacArthur’s occupation forces in Japan. Yarborough was almost fifty when he took on Shivers for the first time. He was a grinning, happy-to-be-here liberal, unafraid of corny bromides like the one that became his political slogan: “Put the jam on the lower shelf so the little man can reach it.” He was also a serious intellectual with an incomparable home library and, as one of his aides recalled, “the most incredible cross-referenced mind.”
Shivers easily squelched Yarborough’s challenge in 1952, but two years later “Smilin’ Ralph” was a big enough threat that Shivers partisans hired a black man to drive a brand-new Cadillac through the overheated racist precincts of East Texas. The car had Yarborough bumper stickers plastered all over it, and the driver’s instructions were to behave rudely and haughtily when he stopped for gas and to announce loudly that he was working for Mr. Yarborough.
The Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, which ordered the integration of public schools and overturned the doctrine of separate but equal, dropped like a bag of rattlesnakes into the middle of the 1954 campaign. “All of my instincts,” Shivers responded, “my political philosophy, my experiences and my common sense revolt against this Supreme Court decision. . . . As far as the state of Texas is concerned, there are no changes to be made in the way we are conducting our schools.”
The specter of the end of segregation gave Shivers a boost, but he wasn’t yet in the clear. When Yarborough forced him into a runoff, the governor’s campaign rolled out a frightening TV spot that looked as if it might have inspired The Twilight Zone or Invasion of the Body Snatchers. When you watch that twelve-minute film, The Port Arthur Story, today, you have a clear window into the ominous world of Red Scare Texas. Port Arthur had been the scene of a strike by retail workers against several stores in the city, a strike that the Texas attorney general claimed was the work of “proven Communist leadership.”
The film begins with images of empty streets, empty sidewalks, empty businesses, and the voice of a mournful, how-could-this-have-happened narrator: “This is a city in Texas: Port Arthur. A year ago it was a thriving city. Children played. Women shopped. Businessmen drank coffee in the restaurants. That was one year ago. Today, it is deserted.”
Well, it might have been deserted because these scenes were filmed at five in the morning. Nevertheless, it was “a city strangled, almost plunged into economic ruin by the plot of a red-tinged union who invaded Texas.” And Ralph Yarborough, we learn, is “right in bed with them.”
And finally the canny, the cynical, the irresistible call to arms to a populace steeped in defiant history: “True Texans in Port Arthur are fighting back, building the defenses for Texas against the foreign invasion of grasping control. Will Texans hold Texas? Fannin did, Bowie and Crockett, Sam Houston and Travis did. Will you? Will you?”
It’s unclear whether Shivers put his personal imprimatur on all this agitprop. (“Allan really doesn’t like to demagogue,” one of his aides said, “but he was about to lose the race.”) But his campaign’s appeal to the fear of communism, the fear of integration, and an atmospheric suspicion of pretty much everything (Yarborough was in favor of chiropractors!) did the trick and delivered Shivers back to the Governor’s Mansion.
But his third term was a disaster, collapsing in a black hole of scandal involving the revelation of a suspicious personal real estate deal that returned a 1,700 percent profit in six months; corrupt state commissioners who received kickbacks from unbridled insurance companies; and Shivers’s seeming involvement in a land-sale scheme meant to help veterans but that instead lined the pockets of a crooked state land commissioner and his cronies.
And then, in the last months of his tenure, there was an ugly showdown in the town of Mansfield, about fifteen miles southeast of Fort Worth. Following the Brown decision, Texas schools—at least those away from the East Texas and Central Texas epicenters of segregationist doctrine—began allowing black students into their schools with relatively little turmoil. That wasn’t the case in Mansfield, where the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had come down hard and ordered the desegregation of the school system. The situation there was blatant. White elementary school students went to school in a spacious brick building; black students had a four-room schoolhouse without indoor toilets or running water. Until a year before, when a well was dug, they and their teachers had to bring water from home. There was no high school for the black kids. They had to ride a bus to a segregated school in Fort Worth. The bus let them out twenty blocks away and didn’t pick them up until two hours after the school day ended.
“Smilin’ Ralph” Yarborough was a tireless campaigner and also—that rare thing in Texas politics—an unconflicted liberal.
As the day approached for black students to enroll, the white citizens of Mansfield let their thoughts be known. Crosses were burned in the black section of town, a black effigy was strung up in Main Street with a sign reading: “This Negro tried to go to a white school.” On the first day of registration, two hundred people, carrying signs with slogans such as “Coons ears $1.00 a dozen,” surrounded the school. The next day the mob was twice as large, and it beat up an assistant district attorney who had been sent to report back on conditions. Alarmed at the violence, Shivers sent in the Texas Rangers, but not for the reason you might think. They were there not to protect students as they entered the school, but to make sure they did not. The governor regarded the mob intimidation as an “orderly protest against a situation instigated and agitated by the National Organization [sic] for the Advancement of Colored People.”
Shivers had accumulated enough baggage by 1956 to know that there was no chance of a fourth term. But it was a presidential election year, and he wanted to go out in a leadership role by heading the state delegation at the Democratic National Convention. But Sam Rayburn had been waiting to pull his pants down, and now he did. He let it be known that he wanted Lyndon Johnson to head the delegation and to be the state’s favorite-son candidate for president. The announcement surprised Johnson and threw him into a fight with Shivers he didn’t want or think he needed, but the two men gamely assassinated each other’s characters—with Shivers reminding the world of George Parr and box 13, and Johnson calling Shivers a demagogue—before LBJ carried away the necessary precinct votes to head the delegation.
Defeated by Johnson and Rayburn (whom he compared to Santa Anna, still enshrined as Texas’s eternal villain) and their alliance with the party’s labor and liberal factions, Shivers headed off to practice law in the political afterlife. That left the field for the governor’s race open to a cast of characters that included Yarborough, the curmudgeonly West Texas historian J. Evetts Haley, and—back again!—Pappy O’Daniel. Haley regarded integration as such a mortal menace that he proposed a showdown at the Red River: he and the Texas Rangers against the enrobed eastern eggheads of the Supreme Court. For his part, Pappy was concerned that putting black and white kids in school together would lead to “little parties” at which “nature will take its course, they intermarry and the mongrel race takes over.”
But the voters sloughed off Haley and O’Daniel on Election Day and threw Yarborough into a race with the candidate of the conservative establishment, Price Daniel. Daniel was a three-time Texas attorney general (he had represented the University of Texas in the Heman Sweatt case), a champion of the holy tidelands crusade, and a current U.S. senator from Texas. But he wanted to be governor more than he wanted to be senator, and he had the backing of oil and business interests and—not insignificantly—Fess Parker, the easygoing Fort Worth–born actor whose performance as the title character in Walt Disney’s new popular-culture juggernaut, Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier, represented at that moment the embodiment of undiluted Texanness.
Price Daniel won, and Ralph Yarborough lost the governor’s race for the third time. But the election had a happy effect on Yarborough’s political career, since Price Daniel’s Senate seat became vacant. The special election that followed featured twenty-two candidates, including the formidable Martin Dies, but Yarborough’s liberal support in Texas, after so much paranoia and poison had leaked into the atmosphere, was running at flood tide.
So Yarborough went to Washington as the junior senator from Texas. He joined Lyndon Johnson, whose rise to power in the Senate had been stunningly swift—from the suspect victor of a clouded election (“Landslide Lyndon”) in 1948 to Senate majority leader in 1955. His engine of ambition was still madly pumping as he set about to master the rules and procedures of the Senate and to master the people in it. “No senator,” remembered the Senate page Bobby Baker, “had ever approached me with such a display of determination to learn, to achieve, to attain, to belong, to get ahead. He was coming into the Senate with his neck bowed, running full tilt, impatient to reach some distant goal I then could not even imagine.” His instinctive strategy had two poles: a sometimes cringeworthy, submissive deference to influential older men like Rayburn and Georgia senator Richard Russell, and a raw physical dominance that manifested itself in what observers came to call the “treatment.” The Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee described it this way: “You really felt as if a St. Bernard had licked your face for an hour, had pawed you all over. . . . He never just shook hands with you. One hand was shaking your hand; the other hand was always someplace else, exploring you, examining you. And of course he was a great actor, bar fucking none the greatest. . . . It was just a miraculous performance.”
The author Edna Ferber did not endear herself to Texans, and was once even kicked off the King Ranch. But she was happy to share her opinions about Texas with the readers of her novel Giant.
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I HAVEN’T FOUND A RECORD OF EDNA FERBER EVER MEETING Lyndon Johnson, but if she had been subjected to the treatment I can only imagine her recoil at this oozy Texas power display. Ferber was in her sixties and one of the best-selling novelists in the country—the author of Show Boat and the Pulitzer Prize winner So Big, and a regular at the Algonquin Round Table—when she visited the King Ranch in 1947 as a guest of Robert Kleberg, the grandson of Richard and Henrietta King, and his wife Helen. The Klebergs’ daughter remembered that Ferber informed her father that she was going to write a novel about him and his immense ranch. He replied that he would rather she didn’t. She said that she was going to anyway. As she grew more and more imperiously insistent, Robert Kleberg turned to his daughter and told her to call Ferber’s driver and tell him, “She wants to leave now and won’t be coming back.”
She left, but her mind was set. She began to conduct research, or at least absorb impressions, as she traveled from one big ranch to another. Her hauteur was dazzling. When one woman offered to introduce her to some other local ranchers, she replied, “Oh, no, I don’t want to know any more people like you.”
She plowed her distaste of Texans into her 1952 novel Giant. The book was close to being a cartoon, or at best a satire, of the gaudiness and chauvinism of the big ranching and oil elites who had entertained her at their ranches and petroleum clubs. The story tracks twenty-five years in the life of a Virginia bride who marries Bick Benedict—one of Texas’s “great mahogany-faced men bred on beef”—and moves to a geographically impossible two-and-a-half-million-acre ranch that spreads from the shores of the Gulf of Mexico to the “cloud-wreathed mountains far far to the north.” To survive, the bride must turn herself into a kind of anthropologist of the exotic and imperfect Texans she encounters. “Here in Texas,” she explains at one point to a fellow outlander, “we are very modern in matters of machinery and agriculture and certain ways of living. Very high buildings on very broad prairies. But very little thinking or broad viewpoint.”
Ferber was appalled at the treatment of Mexican Americans that she witnessed in Texas, and that too went straight into her book, along with her horror of Texas man-food. (“Leslie found that the steak once cut could not be chewed. She felt her face flushing scarlet, she tried to swallow the leathery mass, it would not go down.”)
The novel was a major best seller, but it got a bristly reaction in Texas. Partly this was because Ferber saw things she didn’t like and wasn’t shy about puncturing wealthy, beef-fed Anglo Texans’ illusions about their noble possession of the Lone Star State. Ferber got the Texas vernacular subtly wrong but the historical reality exactly right when she had Jett Rink say, “Who gets hold of millions of acres without they took it off somebody!”
But the fact that Ferber dared to tell uncomfortable truths did not necessarily mean she had written a good novel. “For sheer embroidery of fact,” Lon Tinkle, the book editor of the Dallas Morning News, wrote with justifiable harrumphment, “an art at which Texans are rarely surpassed—Miss Ferber takes the cottonseed cake. She has us all riding around in our own DC-6’s. . . . Imagination goes overboard and what you have is a sort of mongrel biography, neither flesh nor fish but indisputably foul.”
The 1956 movie, which starred Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean and premiered fourteen months after Dean was killed at the age of twenty-four when he wrecked his new Porsche Spyder on a California highway, confronted the racial themes that were central to Ferber’s novel but went easy on her snooty indictments of Texas. It was mostly a critical success—“James Dean’s talent,” wrote George Christian, then a movie critic, later LBJ’s press secretary, “glows like an oilfield flare.”
Not all of Ferber’s snark was omitted, though. In one scene, the oil-rich Bick Benedict sits by his new swimming pool with business buddies and politicians singing the praises of the oil depletion allowance. “That oil tax exemption,” one of them says, “is the best thing to hit Texas since we whupped Geronimo.” This ahistorical remark (Geronimo was not whupped in Texas) is not contradicted by any of the other characters, but exception is taken by Bick’s wife, Leslie, who steps into the frame to lecture these conniving Texas cronies about proper eastern values. “How about an exemption for the depletion of first-class brains?” she asks, referring to her doctor father, who “spent his life saving other people’s lives. How about some tax exemption there?”
Texas oilmen turned movie critics and bombarded the producer and director with demands that the scene be cut, that it would do “irreparable harm,” and that the elimination of the allowance that Elizabeth Taylor seemed to be arguing for would “be a death blow to our industry.” But the scene stayed in, and the oil business somehow survived.
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GIANT WAS FILMED OUTSIDE MARFA, IN PRESIDIO COUNTY, AND its principal set was the headquarters building of Bick Benedict’s vast ranching spread, an improbable Victorian mansion rising all alone, with no fences or outbuildings or roads or shade trees, out of the board-flat Chihuahuan Desert. (Its false front stood there for decades, a corroding tourist attraction, before the telephone poles that held it up were all that remained.)
The parched grasslands surrounding the great house remind us that much of the 1950s unfolded during a period best summed up by the title of Elmer Kelton’s novel of that period, The Time It Never Rained. Nancy Hagood Nunns, a rancher in the Hill Country community of Junction, remembered that one of the Christmas presents she received in 1951 was a raincoat. “It was the color of a green Coke bottle and trimmed in white, buttoned up the front, and had a full circular skirt. It was quite a raincoat, but it was never worn. We referred to it in the family as ‘the virgin raincoat.’ . . . [I] just outgrew it before it started to rain.”
It stopped raining around 1950—or perhaps as early as 1947—and didn’t start again until 1957. “Just another dry spell, men said at first,” Kelton wrote in his novel. “Ranchers watched waterholes recede to brown puddles of mud that their livestock would not touch. They watched the rank weeds shrivel as the west wind relentlessly sought them out and smothered them with its hot breath. They watched the grass slowly lose its green, then curl and fire up like dying cornstalks.”
The drought finally swept over so much of Texas that by the end of it, 236 out of the state’s 254 counties had been declared disaster areas. Farmers and ranchers stared hopefully at the sky day after day, but year after year no rains came, no new grass grew in the pastures, only the mesquite and cedar that came in to claim overgrazed land. “The cattle would weaken down,” Kelton remembered, “and then the wild hogs would just start eating ’em while they were alive. They’d be laying there bawling, and those wild hogs’d be eating on ’em.”
Cattle died, and penguins in the Dallas zoo died, victims of the unbroken heat wave. The drought sparked epochal changes in the way Texans lived their lives. Almost 100,000 of the state’s 345,000 farms disappeared, their owners giving up and moving to the cities, accelerating even further the rural-to-urban shift in the state. Not just livelihoods, but the landscape itself was forever changed, since the drought brought about the construction of many of Texas’s present-day dams and reservoirs, which in turn recalibrated the salinity ratios of bays and estuaries. (Gone for a generation, for instance, were the tarpon—the “silver kings”—which had brought Franklin Roosevelt for a fishing trip to the Texas coast in 1937 and that had been part of the economic lifeblood of coastal villages like Port Aransas.)
But it wasn’t just the forces of nature that were altering Texas. In 1956, work had just begun outside Corsicana on the state’s first piece of the Interstate Highway System. President Eisenhower’s dream of a seamless highway network connecting every state and every major city in the United States would become, until China brought its own system into being in 2011, the largest public-works project in the history of the world. A Texan named Frank Turner, who would become known as the “Father of the Interstate,” was Eisenhower’s choice as chief engineer of the project. His description of what he had been charged to accomplish must have sounded almost dreamlike to motorists of the 1950s, accustomed to patchwork roads that could change radically from state to state: “A system of highway pieces all joined together so that you could get from anywhere to everywhere.”
The Texas portion of the Interstate Highway System took thirty-six years to complete, but to the citizens of a state that stretched sideways for eight hundred miles the interstates came to be regarded as indispensable and natural as air. And let us pause to salute another Texan, Richard Oliver, who worked in the maintenance division of the Texas Highway Department and whose winning design of a red, white, and blue shield clearly displaying the interstate highway number achieved a ubiquity bordering on immortality.
Then there was air-conditioning, which was beginning to make Texas bearable. In the previous century, a dogtrot cabin with its central breezeway could be surprisingly cool, even in the brain-melting heat of a Texas summer. But this sort of natural cross-ventilation had its limits, especially in growing cities with office buildings rising above streets of superheated asphalt. The cafeteria of Houston’s Rice Hotel laid claim to being the first building in Texas to be cooled by refrigerated air, and by 1928 the twenty-one-story Milam Building, in San Antonio, became the first high-rise structure in the United States to feature air-conditioning, a system that took its inspiration from the compressors used to cool German mine shafts.
But if you were alive in Texas in the 1950s and it was summer, you most likely lived in a world of fans and evaporative coolers and were on the lookout for signs like the ones outside movie theaters, which featured penguins standing next to igloos or arctic blocks of ice urging passersby, “Come on in. It’s cool inside.”
In May 1958, a lanky, balding, thirty-four-year-old electrical engineer moved to Dallas from Milwaukee just in time to experience a Texas summer. His name was Jack Kilby, and he was a new hire at Texas Instruments, an electronic-equipment company that had grown out of an earlier firm, Geophysical Service, Inc., which specialized in seismological exploration for oil and, during the war, submarine detection.
A peculiarity of working for TI was that all its employees took vacation at the same time, in July. Well, all but one. Since Kilby was new at the company and not yet eligible for a vacation, he was left alone in the semiconductor lab. TI at that time was trying to solve a problem that bedeviled everyone in the relatively new field of transistors, the miniaturized circuits that had replaced old-fashioned vacuum tubes as a way to transmit and control electrical charges. The problem was that transistors were not miniature enough. Each circuit contained dedicated components such as resistors, capacitors, and diodes, all of which had to be connected by wires. The potential for what these semiconducting devices could do appeared limitless, but the hardware got in the way. There were too many wires, too many components, too many circuits—a conceptual ceiling known to scientists as the “tyranny of numbers.”
With everyone at Texas Instruments on vacation, Kilby noodled around on the problem, free of distractions. A pragmatic engineer who had spent World War II repairing radio transmitters in India, he was on the trail of a practical, workable solution. “You could design a nuclear-powered baby bottle warmer,” he once mused, “and it might work, but that’s not an engineering solution.”
On July 24, 1958, Kilby set down some ideas in a notebook. If you didn’t know better and came across his drawings, you might think he was trying to invent a mousetrap. In fact, he was sketching the future. The device he invented that day was the integrated circuit. It had no wires, no separate components made out of metal or carbon or ceramics. It was all one elegant thing, a chip of silicon with all the critical components embedded into it.
It won Kilby the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000, and it changed the world. Robert Noyce, an engineer at California’s Fairchild Semiconductor, independently came up with a similar invention six months later, and is generally regarded as a kind of coinventor, but it was Jack Kilby, working in a Dallas lab in the summer of 1958, just after the great Texas drought of the 1950s finally broke, who first conceived the idea of the integrated circuit, the device that led the world into the information age.
Unlike Bick Benedict of Giant, Kilby was a newcomer to Texas, but no more a newcomer than Sam Houston or Davy Crockett or H. L. Hunt had once been. And he quickly made the case that Texas was no longer necessarily a place where worth and wealth were measured in oil leases or pastureland. Texas was now a place where a two-and-a-half-million-acre ranch like the Benedicts’ Reata had to make room for a silicon chip that was a tiny fraction of the size of a human fingernail.
