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Nut Country
Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy
By Edward H. Miller The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-20541-0
CHAPTER 1
Big D
The Ins and Outs
In 1950, no Republican from Texas had served in the US Senate since 1877. No Republican from Dallas County had served in the US House of Representatives since Reconstruction. No Republican had served in a Texas statewide office since Governor Edmund J. Davis in 1874. Republicans always lost in Dallas.
Volunteering for the Dallas Republican Party in the 1940s was a taxing experience with few rewards. Party work itself was hard, tedious, and exhausting. A few campaign workers did the work of many and kept long hours. The incessant ringing of the telephone at party headquarters made too much coffee necessary and cigarette breaks all too infrequent for the rare receptionist. Volunteers had to tolerate the constant stain of mimeograph fluid underneath their fingernails. Sleep-deprived, crabby candidates needed to be coddled. Campaign workers had to keep a watchful eye out for the forgetful ones who left behind yard signs or those who bossed around the college volunteers. Of course, volunteers experienced such travails only when the party fielded a candidate, which in the 1940s was uncommon.
The Texas GOP fared no better. Between 1923 and 1950, state Republican chairman Rentfro Banton Creager oversaw a party that possessed little power beyond doling out patronage. Creager enjoyed his small circle of admirers and relished the meager spoils that trickled in from Washington, but he showed little inclination to invigorate the party by seeking out candidates. The candidates it did field received scant financial or logistical support. Grizzled campaign veterans knew enough to temper their enthusiasm for any candidate lest they grow despondent when the Democrats trounced him in November.
The party of Abraham Lincoln had little appeal to Texans. When the guns of the Civil War fell silent, Republican-led Reconstruction sought to rebuild a South decimated by four years of conflict. Republicans determined the size and scope of federal policies designed not only to build new political institutions in the South, but also to help newly emancipated African-Americans adjust to their new lives as free men and women. African-Americans supported a Republican Party that endorsed their civil rights with amendments to the Constitution. Republicans were identified with misrule, military occupation, and government by "carpetbaggers": as a result, the party was unpopular with Southern whites. Humiliated by Yankee occupation, Southern whites voted out Republicans, disenfranchised African-Americans, and voted solidly Democratic throughout the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. Texans supported Democrats in every presidential election until 1928, when voters preferred the Protestant and "dry" Herbert Hoover to the Catholic and "wet" Al Smith.
Dallas itself was, in the 1940s, a socially conservative but Democratic-voting town, an uncomfortable political juxtaposition which would soon change. The widening gap between the views of conservative Texas Democrats and a national Democratic Party increasingly sympathetic to the social and economic rights of blacks and the working class provided opportunities for Republican growth in the state. Factional discord between more liberal national Democrats, championing a more activist state, and conservative Texas Democrats, supporting minimal social services, segregation, and restrictions on labor unions, produced a cohort of voters who were there for the taking. In each of the presidential elections of 1944, 1948, and 1952, many conservative Texas Democrats bolted from their party and voted for the Republican nominee, but the 1952 election was the first instance in which Republicans reaped clear benefits. That year, conservative Democrats, especially Texas oilmen, wanted the federal government to recognize Texas's claim to the oil-rich tidelands ten and a half miles off its coast. The national Democratic Party, including President Harry Truman, favored federal ownership of the tidelands. Democratic governor Allan Shivers, who wielded control over the Texas Democratic Party apparatus and its national convention delegates, would not endorse Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson unless he supported the state's ownership of the tidelands. Republican presidential nominee Dwight Eisenhower, a native of Denison, Texas, had already committed to returning the tidelands to Texas. When Stevenson refused to support state ownership, Shivers, who himself was up for reelection, threw his support behind Eisenhower. Eisenhower defeated Stevenson in Texas, receiving 53 percent of the vote. By putting a rift in the once Solid South, Eisenhower's victory marked, in the words of historian Kenneth Bridges, a "realistic and palatable alternative" and "the turning point in the evolution" of a two-party South. And it was conservative Democrats in Dallas who made a key difference. Eisenhower ran remarkably better in Dallas County than in the state as a whole, drawing 118,218 votes to Stevenson's 69,394.
Why Does Dallas Exist?
An important factor in early-1950s Dallas that contributed to the enthusiasm for Eisenhower, and for Republicanism in general, was the city's origin myth. Hollis McComb, a Texas journalist, crafted a quintessential précis of the origin myth, according to which Dallas "never should have become a city.... Dallas was set astride no natural routes of trade.... There was no port nearby. Beneath the city were none of the raw materials — oil, gas, and sulfur — that made other Texas cities rich.... The climate in summer is practically unendurable. Yet there Dallas stands — its skyscrapers soaring abruptly up from the blackland like Maxfield Parrish castles.... Dallas doesn't owe a thing to accident, nature, or inevitability." Dallas, he concluded, was "the Athens of the Southwest" "because the men of Dallas damn well planned it that way." Celebrating the unlimited potential of any individual possessing what McComb called "sheer determination," the myth expressed and fostered a powerful economic faith in the virtues of the ordered chaos of unfettered frontier capitalism, discouraging the receipt of federal funds and rejecting any need for social services. Moreover, it drove Dallas's predilection for conspicuous consumption, conferring a kind of sainthood on those whose spending provided outward proof of their virtue.
Yet the myth bore only a loose resemblance to the truth. With an abundant water supply and rich soil, Dallas was, as Michael Phillips has observed, "the logical place for an important commercial settlement." Founded in 1841 by John Neely Bryan, who pioneered a number of settlements in Arkansas, Dallas remained a marginal agricultural trading post until its selection as a county seat in 1850. Dallas's agriculture-based economy in the nineteenth century, along with its strong Protestant evangelical heritage, instilled in the region a powerful Southern traditionalist conservatism that stressed the importance of self-reliance, strict moralism, social hierarchy, and segregation. Deeply ensconced well before Dallas became a financial, oil, and aerospace epicenter, these predispositions, shared by many Dallasites, included a belief in the Bible's inerrancy, a revulsion for the corner saloon, and a fear of new immigration. The advent of the railroads in the 1870s turned a sleepy agricultural hamlet into a bustling hub for manufacturing, ensured more intensive cultural and economic exchanges with St. Louis and the Northeast, and increased the city's population from three thousand in 1873 to forty thousand in 1890. In the 1910s and 1920s, the horse-drawn streetcar accelerated the city's expansion. The aggressive promotion of Dallas by local businessmen, an influx of migrants, and the annexation of Oak Cliff in 1904 combined to swell Dallas's population to almost three hundred thousand by 1940.
Changing socioeconomic circumstances only made the myth more purchasable, while contributing to Republican growth on their own. The city's position near East Texas and its capacity for innovation in banking allowed it to capitalize on the oil booms of the 1920s and 1930s. With the discovery of the East Texas oil field, which by 1931 was supplying a quarter of the country's oil needs, Dallas became the oil capital of Texas. The oil industry underwent a transformation as Dallas bankers concluded that oil underneath the ground was a bankable asset and supplied oilmen with generous credit to fund discovery wells and pioneer geological advances in oil production.
World War II and the Cold War increased manufacturing in Dallas and accelerated the population surge. Aircraft, missiles, and electronics were the mainstays of Dallas manufacturing. Total manufacturing employment in Dallas grew from 26,700 in 1940 to 75,750 in 1953, three times faster than the national average, outpacing all of the country's top forty manufacturing hubs save Los Angeles. The 49,000 manufacturing jobs added during that period resulted in a dramatic population increase of 273,250 people.
Many of the new arrivals were either members of the military or employees in new defense-related industries doing contract work for the federal government. Prior to the war, the cities of the Northeast and the Midwest had been the primary sites of military installations and recipients of contracts for weaponry. A federal decision mandating the relocation of airplane manufacturers from the coasts to less central and safer locations between the Allegheny and Rocky Mountains proved a boon to Dallas and other Sunbelt cities. Airplane manufacturing became a priority of the federal government after President Roosevelt ordered the building of fifty thousand planes in 1940. Fearful that other Southern cities would land the lucrative federal plums, Dallas boosters aggressively promoted their city, lobbied for military bases, and encouraged the relocation of Eastern defense-related companies. While manufacturers could determine the specific location, Dallas boosters helped them decide, emphasizing Dallas's crystal-clear horizon and tradition of anti-unionism. Manufacturers were likely aware that Dallas police and business leaders had brutally resisted the CIO's attempts to unionize dressmakers in 1935 and Ford employees in 1937. In August 1940, the Navy chose Dallas for its Reserve Aviation Squadron Base. The city leased nearby Hensley Field to the Navy and expanded the runways. An administrative command for the armed forces, the US Eighth Service Command, along with its three-million-dollar annual payroll, also arrived in the 1940s. By 1942, the Dallas Chamber of Commerce was claiming that its city was the "War Capital of the Southwest," an interesting boast for a city whose political culture would soon be cast in a strongly anti-Washington pose.
Although Dallas's food companies, construction firms, and clothing manufacturers were among the first recipients of defense contracts, tapping more than ninety million dollars between January 1940 and February 1941, as Robert Fairbanks has pointed out, "no single business entity more profoundly affected the city than aircraft manufacturing." Not a single individual was making airplanes in Dallas in 1940, but by 1953 one-quarter of all employees in manufacturing — 19,300 — were producing airplanes, almost all of them under a defense contract and without a union.
North American Aviation constructed a plant west of the city and built twenty thousand planes during the war, providing seven thousand jobs by 1942 and forty-three thousand by 1943. Southern Aircraft Company in nearby Garland and Lockhead's Aircraft Modifier Plant at Love Field brought thousands of military families to the region. And the growth continued after the war. Aviation workers who had boosted their skills during World War II found plenty of employment in Dallas during the Cold War. The ties that bound Washington and Dallas in wartime forged the military-industrial complex of the 1950s and bolstered the region's commitment to a more aggressively anti-Communist foreign policy. The federal government encouraged even more relocations to the nascent Sunbelt in the postwar period, inundating Dallas and other Texas communities with munificent defense-related contracts. In 1948, Uncle Sam bankrolled the relocation from Connecticut of aviation giant Chance Vought, which had made the Corsair for the Navy in World War II. "Billed as the largest industrial move in the nation's history," the company was, by 1953, providing twelve thousand jobs. The city's dry climate, equidistant location between the east and west coasts, and proximity to oil, gas, and bustling Love Field — as well as its historical reputation as an amiable partner of business — all made Dallas a natural home for relocating Midwestern and Eastern companies. Funded in part by the federal government and founded by Robert McCullough, who had previously worked for North American Aviation, Texas Engineering & Manufacturing Company (Temco) employed 5,250 in the manufacture of airplanes, airplane parts, missiles, and washing machines. Small wonder that historian Harvey J. Graff called Dallas in this time a "city at the crossroads" and Michael Phillips termed it "the hinge" of the South and West.
The city's white-collar economy had begun to thrive by the 1950s. It brought with it engineers and scientists in the oil and aerospace industries and businessmen and accountants in the banks and insurance companies. By 1960, 25 percent of employees in Dallas were professionals or managers. An additional 30 percent either clerked in the city's financial institutions or worked as salesmen in its many department stores. Enjoying high incomes, many of the ascending upper-middle-class Dallasites in the oil industry, oil-related insurance and banking industries, and the flourishing aerospace industry moved into higher tax brackets, began paying 90 percent, the top marginal tax rate of the income tax, and started looking to the Republican Party for tax relief. While some oilmen like Clint Murchison were "presidential Republicans" who backed Eisenhower but supported Democrats Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn for their unequivocal support of the 27.5 percent oil depletion allowance, other Dallas oilmen, including Jake Hamon, H. L. Hunt, and Harry Bass turned more consistently to the Republican Party, which embraced even more generous tax breaks for the affluent.
The nexus between the financial sector and the oil industry also fostered the growth of the city's electronics and aerospace industry, which provided another factor in the strong base of support for Republicans in the 1950s. Geologist and Dallasite E. L. DeGolyer spearheaded the use of the refraction seismograph and reflection seismograph to survey underground geological structures. In 1936, he founded DeGolyer and MacNaughton, which prepared estimates of oil reserves for the major and independent oil companies. Earlier, in 1929, he had established Geophysical Service Inc., which, after receiving a cash infusion from the First National Bank of Dallas in 1951, became Texas Instruments (TI).
Midwestern Migrants
Many of the white-collar workers who filled the ranks of the oil, banking, and aerospace companies powering the city's economic engine came from the Midwest. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Dallas region drew a heavy flow of migrants from Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, and Kansas. For sure, there were also more modest streams of migration from the South, the border South states of Arkansas, Tennessee, and Oklahoma, the piney woods and rolling red hills of East Texas, and the Northeast. While Southern-based, often fundamentalist newcomers infused Dallas with hard-right conservatism, Midwestern transplants like H. N. Mallon brought a more pragmatic conservatism to the city.
Many of the migrating Midwesterners had experienced firsthand the catastrophic natural disasters and tumbling commodity prices of the Depression years. Many had served honorably when called upon by their country and were tested by war and combat. That these itinerant young men and women charted their course, collected their belongings, bade goodbye to their loved ones, and made the long journey south revealed their belief in a better tomorrow. Their destination itself helped spur such confidence. While many Southern communities languished amid declining commodity prices, severe unemployment, and population exodus, the inland city of Dallas, with its bustling economy, itself driven by federal largesse, offered the intrepid traveler an opportunity to create great personal wealth.
Many Dallas Republicans of the 1950s and 1960s arrived thus, often venturing from GOP strongholds in the Midwest, such as Ohio, Indiana, and Missouri. Arguably the core of the GOP Right in the 1940s, Ohio produced such conservative Republican stalwarts as Senator John Bricker and Robert Taft, and was an important departure zone for the more mainstream moderate conservative Republicans of Dallas. The progressive municipal reformer Brand Whitlock once observed, "One became in Urbana and in Ohio for many years, a Republican just as the Eskimo dons fur clothes." Although divided between Marcus Hanna's northern Ohio machine and George "Boss" Cox's southern Ohio faction, Republican hegemony in the state commenced in 1896, achieved its apogee with the election of Ohio newspaper publisher Warren G. Harding to the presidency in 1920, and remained unchallenged until the Great Depression. In the 1940s, Ohio's businessmen and Corn Belt farmers formed a conservative coalition and reestablished the state as a conservative Republican stronghold.
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Excerpted from Nut Country by Edward H. Miller. Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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