Sublime

A small band of legislators didn’t live at the Driskill, where the bills were routinely picked up by lobbyists, but at small boardinghouses below the Capitol; the members of this band didn’t accept free lodging from the lobbyists, and they didn’t accept the “Three B’s” (“beefsteak, bourbon and blondes”) which the lobbyists provided to other legisla

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O’Daniel himself had had nothing to do with the arrangements, but on Monday morning, even he was told about them, and he in turn informed his aides; when one said that Johnson was still thousands of votes ahead, the Governor replied, “Well, that don’t make any difference.” The “drawn anxious looks of those close to O’Daniel” abruptly disappeared, t

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The lobbyists had thought the problem would be solved by O’Daniel’s election to the Senate, which would remove him to Washington and see him replaced in the Governor’s chair by Lieutenant Governor Coke Stevenson, a lifelong Wet and an ally of Beer, Inc., and its hard-liquor partner. Now O’Daniel appeared to have lost the election, but by only about

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Most candidates attempt to woo reporters covering the campaign. It took Moses exactly one press conference to turn them icily frigid toward his candidacy. This might have been surprising to those who had observed his long love affair with the press. But that love affair had endured only because he had never been exposed to the probing questioning t

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Roeser’s terse letter to the young Congressman he had never met was a significant document in the political fund-raising history of the United States (and, it was to prove in later years, in the larger history of the country as well). Sam Rayburn had, on his trip to Texas in October, 1940, cut off the Democratic National Committee, and other tradit

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Low salaries didn’t bother many of the legislators, for it was not legislators but lobbyists—lobbyists for oil companies, railroads, banks, utilities—who did the presiding in Austin: in the capital’s bars and brothels, where they dispensed “beefsteak, bourbon and blondes” so liberally that some descriptions of turn-of-the-century legislative sessio

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In July, he took on a new role. There was one asset that only he among the Texas Congressmen possessed: Charles Marsh’s friendship. Texas newspapers were overwhelmingly anti-Roosevelt, but Marsh’s six Texas newspapers, including the influential paper in the state capital, were for him. The publisher of six pro-Roosevelt Texas dailies had very littl

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He was offended by someone campaigning on the ground that he could get more money—in the form of federal projects—for Texas. “The best job is going to be done for Texas in the United States Senate by sending there a man of individual courage, personal convictions and moral stamina to do what he believes is right.… Not political pull but personal in

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