fraud was so obvious that even Parr couldn’t get away with it. Immediately, Coke Stevenson went to Alice to look at the voters’ list. The extra 203 voters for Johnson had been added in roughly alphabetical order, in the same handwriting, in blue ink. The first 841 voters—those reported at the close of the polls—were in black ink. The county Democratic committee took one look and decided to void the entire box. They would meet on Saturday so Coke’s nomination would be clarified by Monday, when the convention opened in Fort Worth.
That didn’t happen, either.
From Saturday morning to Monday evening, Coke Stevenson’s lawyers tried to get the Texas courts to open Box 13 and look inside, while Lyndon Johnson’s lawyers found one way (an injunction from an Austin judge to keep the Jim Wells Committee from meeting) after another (long, long readings by the two longest-winded lawyers in Texas) to delay such opening until it was too late.
Compared with the clarity of that simple blackboard in Beeville, the virtual blackboard at the Fort Worth convention was a cryptogram. For three hours lawyers talked—talked, talked, kept talking—in the sweltering smoke-filled ballroom, arguing why Box 13 should be opened, why it should not. At 9:48, the Executive Committee began voting on whether to accept Box 13 (“aye”) or reject it (“nay”).
At one in the morning, the vote stood 28–28.
“The whole atmosphere was tension,” recalled Democratic chairman Robert Calvert, presiding.
Clint Small was still appealing for Stevenson, to no avail. As the crowd laughed Small out of the ballroom, the last member of the Executive Committee—one Charlie C. Gibson—came back from the men’s room. The crowd stilled. Gibson made a moment of it. With no small dramatic flair, he said:
“Aye.”
And Lyndon Johnson’s political career was validated. There was absolute uproar, louder than ever, with much kissing now (there were plenty of female Democrats on the scene) to go with the smoking and drinking. Landslide Lyndon: 29 to 28.
The following night, the drawling Macbeth rose to accept his nomination. Pausing a moment, he then addressed the crowd in the unctuous cant that would become America’s voice to the world in the 1960s:
“There is no bitterness in my heart for my enemies.”
Memory transports one from 1938 to 1948, from a small-town street to a smoke-filled city ballroom, in an instant. Memory invokes atmospherics: the Gulf breeze over there, the acrid smell of sweat and tobacco over there. For Johnny Barnhart, both were nostalgic, fascinating.
So you were part of that mob . . .
“There was lots of drama in the air.”
It didn’t bother you that the vote was so obviously a fraud?
“Box 13? Yes. I heard the arguments before the committee for the convention that was to certify the vote. My impression was it was a matter of who stole the most votes in the most efficient manner. Certainly those in Duval were stolen votes, but the opposition had stolen that many or more in Fort Worth alone.”
So that made it all right?
“The question was, Shall we hold this election again, and if so, how do we do it?”
Do you remember how they laughed the Stevenson man out of the place?
“I remember there was a lot of commotion. A lot of commotion.”
Johnny Barnhart would have cause to remember a man being laughed out of a Texas political assembly.
•
South Texas was in Time magazine again. This time the icon was a political boss, not a gunslinger.
The Duke Delivers
Like his father before him, George Berham Parr, 47, is the political boss of oil-rich Duval County, in the southernmost appendix of Texas. He is also a banker, beer baron, oil promoter and lawyer. He went to jail for Federal income-tax evasion in 1936. After he got out, one year later, he began again to stretch his grip beyond his small core of about 5,000 Mexican American voters in Duval to take in the Democratic machines of several neighboring counties.
Last week many Democrats from north and west Texas, who had never considered the dapper “Duke of Duval” anything more than a local political princeling, found that he had become a powerful kingmaker. In the stretch of one of the closest political races in U.S. history, he was the man most responsible for Congressman Lyndon Johnson’s nomination over Coke Stevenson for the U.S. Senate. . .
Vail’s story had fit all the Western movie images. But where could movie fans put George Parr in a script about Texas? For Alfred Allee, the situation in Duval County had always made it look as if Santa Ana had won the war. Now with the election of 1948, George Parr had turned the whole state back to Mexico. And just when Major Hector Garcia was trying to persuade his people that they were Americans.
Had Time covered the 1948 Bee County election, it would have found the old Texas images intact. An embattled lawman had been justified, once more. Vail Ennis won eighteen of the twenty-one precincts. He tripled Wachtendorf’s vote and quintupled Robinson’s: Ennis 2,403, Wachtendorf 798, Robinson 532.
The west side went 3–2 for Vail. In his “sidelights on the election” feature, Camp Ezell included this:
A Latin American voter, who evidently could count but could not read, went to a county official Saturday and said in Spanish: “I want you to show me how to vote for Vail Ennis.” He added that he wanted to scratch all other candidates on the ballot. The official told the man to scratch the entire first column, the first 12 names and last 20 names of the second column, and that would leave Sheriff Ennis’ name unscratched. The voter scanned a sample ballot, counted according to instructions, and said: “I’ve got it.” He left immediately for his voting box.
Hector Garcia had a dilemma. In Duval, the man’s vote would have been made for him. Bee County had a violent sheriff. But he had honor.
“I hate to say it,” Elias Chapa would recall. “But he was honest.”
If someone had tried to bribe him . . .
“He woulda shot him.”
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
