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| Lyndon
B. Johnson’s victory over Coke
Stevenson for a Senate seat by only 87 votes earned this future
president the nickname of "Landslide Lyndon." Everyone agrees that
Johnson’s aides "stole" that election by "finding" additional votes
for their candidate in Box
13 in Jim Wells
County. What everyone might not know is that Johnson had been
burned by a similar tactic in a special Senate race in 1941, and had
vowed never to be caught short again. |
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"Boyhood
Home of Lundon B. Johnson"
Postcard courtesy rootsweb.com/~txgenweb// postcards/Index.html |
W.
Lee O’Daniel served as governor when Senator Morris Sheppard died
in 1941, and the Legislature, disgusted with O’Daniel’s leadership,
urged him to appoint himself as Sheppard’s replacement, mostly to
get him out of the governorship. O’Daniel appointed 87-year-old Andrew
Jackson Houston, instead, someone not likely to challenge him in an
election. Indeed, Houston died soon afterward.
O’Daniel did file in the special election to determine Sheppard’s
successor, as did 28 others, including Congressmen Martin Dies and
Lyndon Johnson. Johnson and O’Daniel campaigned hard for the post,
and their styles differed greatly. O’Daniel campaigned as he had for
governor, in rural areas with country musicians playing "That Old
Time Religion." Johnson flaunted his connections with the New Deal
through the slogan "Franklin D and Lyndon B—That’s Good Enough For
Me."
Early returns on election day favored Johnson, which caused him to
make a fatal mistake. It was assumed that both sides were "buying"
votes, and that Johnson’s strength would lie in Central and South
Texas and O’Daniel’s in East
Texas. So when Johnson looked like a sure winner, the word went
out to his South Texas representatives to go on and report their votes,
which gave him a lead of over 5,000 votes. "Barring a miracle," said
and official of the Texas Election Bureau, Johnson had won. That "miracle"
occurred in East Texas,
where officials suddenly found thousands of votes that had not been
counted or reported, and most of them favored O’Daniel. Only 46 percent
of Shelby County’s
vote had gone to O’Daniel, but he gained 64 percent of the "new" votes.
Similar discovers in Newton,
Angelina, Anderson,
Cass, Panola,
Van Zandt, and
other counties, eventually gave O’Daniel a winning margin of over
1,000 votes.
Some of Johnson’s team wanted to protest the likely fraud in those
returns, but he declined. At the same time, he vowed never to be so
cheated again, or, as some opponents charged after his
equally questionable victory in 1948, he just learned to cheat
more successfully.
© Archie
P. McDonald, PhD
All
Things Historical
January 5, 2005 column
A syndicated column in over 40 East Texas newspapers
(This column is provided as a public service by the East Texas Historical
Association. Archie P. McDonald is director of the Association and
author of more than 20 books on Texas.)
See Johnson
City, Texas |
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