Yellow Dogs and Republicans: Allan Shivers and Texas Two-Party Politics

Chapter One. Portrait of the Politician as a Young Man

many, if not most, texas natives and transplants believe their state is different from, if not better than others. A traveler, however, might be forgiven for noticing little difference. It is almost as though the state’s reputation is divorced from the landscape. One of two states to be an independent nation, the largest in land area until 1959, and since 1900 never less than sixth in population, Texas remains an area of contrasts and superlatives memorized from an early age by its schoolchildren. If Texas’ history, politics, and social climate resemble those of any other region, it is the South, from which most of the state’s white and black population originated and with which it shared strong cultural ties—including a legacy of defeat and racism. Those two legacies in particular contributed to a one-party political system. Democratic dominance of the state and region was as reliable as the misery that was summer—unquestioned as an article of faith, and seemingly unchanging. Yet, change did come to this situation : during the depths of the Great Depression. It sowed the seeds of a two-party state and a two-party South. One of the agents of this change was Allan Shivers. The times and the state made him what he became.1 Shivers’s great-grandmother, Nancy Shivers, came to Texas from Mississippi in 1846, a year after Texas’ annexation. She arrived with a son, Robert, and three daughters—Ella, Phoebe, and Nancy. Her migration differed little from that of many thousands of others from the Deep South, following similar soils, and perhaps family and acquaintances, into Texas. The widow acquired six hundred acres just west of Woodville, in newly formed Tyler County. Although details about their acquisition are not clear, Nancy Shivers owned three slaves: a woman named Dicy and her boy, Louis, and girl, Jenny. While hardly a sufficient number of ch apter one Portrait of the Politician as a Young Man slaves to place her among Texas’ elite, the widow doubtless derived some social status from slave ownership.2 With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Nancy Shivers’s son, Robert, still in his teens, journeyed east to his home state and joined Company B, 16th Mississippi Infantry. He served for the duration, following his regiment, a part of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, from battlefield to battlefield. As the Confederacy staggered to eventual defeat, federal forces captured Shivers and held him prisoner until he was paroled in March, 1865. Ignoring the conditions of his parole, Shivers spent the remaining weeks of the war fighting with the Confederate army, surrendering at Appomattox in April. Still a young man, he returned to Texas. The Shiverses managed to keep their land throughout the war, but defeat resulted in freedom for their slaves. The family farm and personal property were valued at $1,500 in 1870. Robert had purchased his own land, valued at $200, by then. Emancipation likely cut the family’s net worth by half, given a conservative estimate of their slaves’ prewar value. However, their labor was not lost. East Texas during Reconstruction was not a safe place for freed people to wander about. Staying with one’s white folks was often deemed prudent. Dicy and Louis stayed with the Shivers family for at least fifteen years after the war. Daughter Jenny, however, either died or set off on her own sometime in the 1870s.3 Robert M. Shivers married his wife, Frances, in 1870. She, too, was a migrant from the Deep South, but a fairly recent arrival from Alabama. She eventually bore Robert six children, five of whom survived to adulthood. Their eldest son, William, became a physician with a practice in Woodville. The only other of their children who made a recorded impression upon the community was Robert Andrew, their third son, born in 1877. As late as 1900, Robert Andrew still worked on the family farm, but he had greater ambitions. He eventually took a job teaching school in the lumber camp at Doucette. In his late twenties, he married and moved to Lufkin—perhaps to satisfy his new wife, Easter, perhaps for better pay. Their son, Robert Allan, was born there on October 5, 1907. Only a few months after the boy’s arrival, the family returned to Woodville, taking up residence in a rented home just across from the courthouse.4 In 1908, Woodville consisted of a small cluster of...