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at the age of thirty-one, allan shivers had won a second term in the Texas senate. Although personally conservative and married to money, the young politician still represented a prolabor district. His political career began and matured during a tumultuous time for the state’s oneparty Democratic system. Texas’ politics remained peculiarly southern, but the tradition of Democratic loyalty had come under increasing strain. To some Texans, the national party had moved in new and threatening directions. Others embraced the New Deal and its efforts to modernize the state and region. A struggle developed between these two camps, which drew in all participants in the state’s politics. Shivers worked hard to appear neutral, even though his personal views and friendship network indicated sympathies with the anti–New Deal faction. Throughout the late 1930s and into the 1940s, the intraparty war grew in intensity across a series of smaller battles. The young state senator hovered at the periphery. By careful observation, he strengthened his political skills in this period and prepared for statewide office. Political scientist V. O. Key Jr. argued that the region’s one-party politics prevented genuine debate of economic and class issues. Rather than competing public-spending priorities and debate over taxation to fund these, southern Democratic politics centered on personality and faction. Political elites distracted voters from poor public services and regressive taxation by exploiting side issues that enabled them to keep power. The “fearful specter of Negro rule” loomed as the chief distraction used to convince whites to stay within the one-party system. In this system, the “haves” nearly always won. They then used the state government to legislate and tax according to their own interests. Nationally, southerners formed a powerful and cohesive bloc within the Democratic Party and obstructed ch apter two Turmoil and Transition: Shivers and the Texas Political Scene, 1938– 45 federal efforts to alter the regional political system. As a result, Key observed, “the South as a whole . . . developed no system or practice of political organization or leadership adequate to cope with its problems.”1 Key’s analysis, written in 1949, was based on an in-depth study of individual southern states’ political tendencies. He recognized that the New Deal, World War II, and demographic changes threatened the one-party system, perhaps bringing on a new two-party politics. Key expected these tensions to develop more quickly in states on the fringe of the Deep South, which had a “higher degree of freedom” from the race issue. Texas’ urban and industrial growth during the 1940s brought about “the vague outlines of a politics . . . in which irrelevancies are pushed into the background and people divide broadly along liberal and conservative lines.” An emergent “modified class politics” characterized by bitter party factionalism presaged the dawn of a two-party era. However, Key also pointed out that economic elites would struggle against anything that threatened their dominance over the state Democratic Party. They did so through the old method of distracting the electorate from real economic and class concerns. This made state politics during the 1940s a risky business for those with higher ambitions.2 Texas’ one-party system lacked a strong “machine” according to Key’s analysis , but behind the scenes a machine of sorts had developed: the Texas Establishment . Historian George Green described the Establishment as “a loosely knit plutocracy comprised mainly of Anglo businessmen, oilmen, bankers and lawyers.” Politicians backed by the Establishment worked to keep Texas’ state services minimal, its taxes regressive, its minorities in their place, and its labor unions weak. These leaders spoke the rhetoric of states’ rights and struggled against the growing federal government of the New Deal era. As the 1930s closed, the Establishment increasingly asserted itself, and the resulting struggles with more liberal party elements eventually forced all to choose sides.3 Shivers’s reelection in 1938 coincided with a decided anti–New Deal turn in Texas Democratic politics. When Gov. James Allred, a Roosevelt administration ally, declined to seek a third term, thirteen candidates entered the race to replace him. Most political observers expected a runoff. Political novice W. Lee O’Daniel of Fort Worth won a majority in the July primary, shocking seasoned political observers . A transplanted midwesterner, O’Daniel managed a flour milling company . He was a former Republican who had never paid a Texas poll tax. As a promotion for his company’s Hillbilly brand flour, O’Daniel hosted a daily radio program featuring country and...

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