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ch apter three “That All Depends upon God and Allan Shivers” 1945– 49 texas democrats’ internecine bloodletting during the early 1940s badly strained party unity and opened fissures that widened afterward . Allan Shivers, meanwhile, had kept his sympathies carefully hidden. Active duty overseas also sheltered him from some of the intraparty warfare. The Port Arthur senator returned from war with ambitions for statewide office and won the lieutenant governorship in 1946. Shivers expanded the power of Texas’ most powerful elected office. No longer representing a relatively liberal bastion in southeast Texas, Shivers enjoyed greater freedom to act on his own conservative views. The immediate postwar years brought upheaval and change to both Texas and the South. Conservative Democrats grew more disenchanted with the national party. Shivers’s own party loyalty weakened during the two and one-half years he presided over the Texas senate. Like many other southern Democrats, he worked hard to hold at bay the changes that were pressing upon his state and region. Shivers had been back in Texas only three months when the Beaumont Journal touted him as a candidate for lieutenant governor in the 1946 elections. He renewed his contacts with wealthy and powerful friends he would need to sponsor a statewide race. Along with a group of state senators, he dined with construction tycoon Herman Brown, who bankrolled LBJ and other politicians. He hunted conservative millionaire W. S. Schreiner’s ranch. Maynard Robinson, a lawyer friend from San Antonio, suggested Shivers run for either attorney general or lieutenant governor. Robinson argued that the senator could count on a second base in the Rio Grande Valley in addition to his own district. His associations with John Shary would surely enlist support from the Valley’s machine politicians.1 Before running for state office, however, the state senator needed a statewide reputation. Given the more conservative direction of Texas politics after the war, appeals designed for his constituents in southeast Texas might not work elsewhere . With postwar strikes and shortages sweeping the nation in 1945–46, unions presented a tempting target as they tried to consolidate gains made during the war. Across the South, conservative politicians took advantage of voter frustration to bash labor. Shivers launched his first attack on organized labor even before the war had ended.2 In early 1945, John L. Lewis and other national labor leaders proposed that workers receive royalties on their produce. Shortly thereafter, Senator Shivers offered a resolution condemning the suggestion, which passed on a voice vote. Jefferson County government and business leaders praised his attack on “labor dictators ” and U.S. senator W. Lee O’Daniel had it entered into the Congressional Record. Responding to labor strife in his district later that year, Shivers told fifteen aggrieved Jefferson County taxpayers to blame union bosses and the federal government for their problems. Organized labor needed more regulation, he argued, since “it was a business comparable to that of the largest industry.” Concern over local workers’ autonomy clothed Shivers’s offense at unions’ interference in local affairs. “Certainly, the laboring man in Port Arthur should not be answerable to some Union official in Washington, New York or Chicago, with an absolute right to control whether our local citizens work,” he wrote. Nonetheless, Shivers did not sever all ties. Late in the 1945 session, he voted against a house bill that would have banned the closed shop. Still, local union members would remember Senate Resolution 46.3 The high point of the session for Shivers had come in April. During an executive session, the state senate drafted the Port Arthur politician as its preferred candidate for lieutenant governor in the coming year’s elections. After feigning disinterest, he agreed to run. The senators kept their poll secret until after the candidate’s formal announcement. Before then, however, Jefferson County newspapers speculated about his ambitions. Condemning extremes right and left, he announced for lieutenant governor on March 10, 1946. The Port Arthur News praised Shivers’s announcement. “He is liberal without being radical,” the News gushed, unaware of the rightward shift in the senator’s views since 1934.4 Texas’ 1946 Democratic primaries proved contentious and ugly. Resentments still boiling after the 1944 intraparty battles contributed to the tension. The liberal-loyalists had defeated the Texas Regulars then, but postwar Texas had grown more prosperous, more urbanized, and more conservative. The Congress of Industrial Organizations’s (CIO) Operation Dixie recruitment drive and a rash of strikes in the...

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