Lyndon B. Johnson and the stolen U.S. Senate races of 1941 and 1948
In April of 1941, Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson set out to mount an upstart campaign for the seat against the popular, well-connected, and heavily favored Governor W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel. U.S. Senator Morris Sheppard of Texas had died, and a special election was announced to fill out the remainder of his term.
Pappy O’Daniel was a flour magnate who got his start as a public figure when he sponsored, produced, and hosted The Light Crust Doughboys radio show. The show was the most listened-to radio program in Texas in the mid-1930s. O’Daniel talked about Texas, Jesus, his Hillbilly Flour brand, and the glory of motherhood. It was mothers who bought flour. His band The Doughboys sang songs he had written, like “The Boy Who Never Grew Too Old to Comb His Mother’s Hair.”
On Palm Sunday, 1938, O’Daniel read a letter on air from a blind man who supposedly wrote to tell him that Texas needed a good decent Christian like him as governor instead of corrupt politicians. O’Daniel asked his listeners if he should run. Their response was an overwhelming “YES!”. A month later, on May 1, 1938, O’Daniel announced on air that he was entering the Democratic primary for governor. His platform was the Ten Commandments, he said, and his campaign slogan was “Pass the Biscuits, Pappy!” He campaigned in a circus wagon. His band played and he sang and talked about how great his flour was, and read scripture verses. O’Daniel would go on to win the election for governor, as well as re-election in 1940. While he campaigned as an honest outsider, he took to the corrupt inner world of Texas politics like a baby to mammy’s titty. As a contemporary put it, “You couldn’t find anyone who voted for him, but he always won the election.”
Initial polling for the 1941 special election to the U.S. Senate had Johnson at only 5% of the vote share. That was better than when he mounted his successful first campaign for Congress — he hadn’t even been included in the polls then. And this time he had the endorsement of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Initially, it seemed that he was just up against the progressive Attorney General, Gerald Mann. He campaigned hard but did so at the pace of a man who knew that he was bound for assured victory. After all, he had an unprecedented fundraising machine and the endorsement of FDR behind him. There were plenty of reasons for feeling super confident. Polling showed that he was making rapid gains and would soon overtake Mann.
But then Pappy O’Daniel entered the race.
Daniel’s entry threw Johnson into a “nervous exhaustion”, one so severe that he was confined to bed for days. Still, he emerged with a plan. He would counter Pappy O’Daniel’s roadshow with a circus of his own: a series of “Patriotic Rallies” featuring plenty of pageantry to compete with the showmanship of O’Daniel. There was the swing ensemble dubbed The Patriots; a 285 lb Sophie Parker to sing The Eyes of Texas, several blackface comedians, a troupe of dancing girls, and the best Master of Ceremonies in Texas, Harfield Weedin – all performing in front of a massive backdrop depicting Johnson and President Roosevelt shaking hands.
Earning legitimate votes was a necessary part of statewide campaigns in Texas, but it was not sufficient to win a statewide campaign. While elections were run more or less legitimately in some parts of Texas, in other parts vote tallies were largely controlled by the padrones or jefes or judges who controlled local political machines. The political bosses in the counties of the Rio Grande Valley were especially notorious. There was Judge Bravo in Zapata County, Judge Raymond in Webb County, Sheriff Poole of La Salle County, the Guerra Boys of Starr County, and the boss of bosses in the Valley, George Parr, the “Duke of Duval County”, whose family’s political machine had so thoroughly disenfranchised the white population through the control of Mexican votes that most whites left the county to the Parrs and their allies to rule as a fiefdom in which a small white elite sat astride a population largely comprised of impoverished Mexicans.
These bosses controlled the vast majority of votes in their counties and steered them to their preferred candidates — and they preferred candidates who paid them well. The way that votes were rustled up in the Valley varied. In some places, the ballots were already filled out. The Mexican ‘voter’ marched into the polling place by a half-breed deputy training a pistol on him, where he would ceremoniously take the already-filled-out ballot and put it in the ballot box, receiving his drink of tequila and a handshake on the way out. In other places, they were accompanied to the voting booth by a guard to ensure filled it out correctly. In even more civilized precincts, where the illusion of secrecy was preserved, Mexicans received a number stapled to the ballot to show that their poll tax had been paid. This way it could be tracked who voted for which candidate but without the need to hold anyone at gunpoint. If additional votes were needed, the jefes sent armed men across the border to pick up loads of additional voters from Mexican towns like Reynosa. Sometimes the bosses dispensed with the charade altogether and just filled out all the paperwork themselves, without the pageantry of participatory democracy. And of course, the graveyards were yet another source of votes.
In statewide elections, these machine counties went to the highest bidder. In Pappy O’Daniel’s 1940 re-election campaign, George Parr’s Duval County gave him 3,728 votes to 180 for the other seven candidates. But in the 1941 race, Johnson had the bigger war chest, and he arranged to buy the votes controlled by Parr and the other bosses of the Valley. In the closing weeks of the campaign, the Belden poll — Texas’ version of the Gallup poll — showed a steadily increasing vote share for Johnson. A week before the election, Johnson took his first lead, a single percentage point advantage over O’Daniel. With each new survey that week, Johnson widened the gap. In the final Belden poll, he had 31% of the vote, while O’Daniel had 26%, with the other candidates splitting the rest of the votes. The Texas press declared that a Johnson victory was a sure thing. Johnson himself was ecstatic. The crippling depression he experienced with O’Daniel’s entry into the race was replaced with euphoria. Johnson, along with his staff, friends, and family, switched into celebration mode.
Then, he made a mistake.
On the afternoon of Election Day, after voting that morning and taking a long sleeping-pill-induced nap, Johnson awoke to news from a campaign aide that the early returns confirmed his imminent victory. He was leading, and his lead was expanding with each new update. The aide also told him that George Parr and the other South Texas bosses had been calling campaign headquarters trying to find out when they should report official vote totals for their counties. Johnson told them to report them immediately, and soon they did. Duval County had gone for O’Daniel by 95% the year before. Now Johnson won it by 95%. Other counties in the Valley similarly flipped from nearly unanimous for O’Daniel to nearly unanimous for Johnson. This expanded Johnson’s lead to a seemingly insurmountable ~13,000 votes. The morning after Election Day, newspaper headlines declared Johnson as the apparent Senator-elect.
But the Rio Grande Valley was not the only part of Texas with political bosses and machine politics. Not all votes were counted on election day in Texas. Some rural precinct results would not be reported to the state for several days. While in some cases this could be explained by a precinct being isolated and without telephone or telegraph service, it was widely known that in most cases these precincts didn’t come in until the judge administering the election knew how many votes were needed by the candidate buying them. Then the judge would take the ballot box home and calmly count the votes in private.
For this reason, the established practice of smart statewide campaigns in Texas was to avoid reporting results from precincts they controlled until the very end. Johnson failed to adhere to this rule, possibly from exuberance, or possibly because he knew that O’Daniel alienated the political establishment in Texas so much that he no longer had the logistical means to pull off the necessary steal. But Johnson’s biggest mistake was that he only focused on O’Daniel, and not O’Daniel’s most bitter enemies: the beer and liquor lobby. O’Daniel had appointed one fire and brimstone temperance preacher to the State Liquor Board and was on the verge of appointing another, which would have comprised a majority of the board and threatened to result in de facto prohibition in Texas. Sending O’Daniel to Washington would get Johnson out of Austin and the vacancy he left would be filled by Lieutenant Governor Coke Stevenson, who was a longtime wet and ally of the beer and liquor industry
While Johnson celebrated at his victory party, the beer and liquor lobbyists met unnoticed in a hotel across the street. They left Sunday morning, bound for those isolated counties that had yet to report their results. On Monday morning, late returns began rolling in from East Texas. Official vote totals from precincts already unofficially reported were revised to massively favor O’Daniel. The election was being stolen.
Johnson tried desperately to steal it back. He got on the phone with George Parr, but nothing could be done. Parr’s votes had been officially certified and reported per Johnson’s instructions and it was too late to change them. Johnson waited helplessly as each new update showed his lead being whittled down. Tuesday brought with it new revisions and the disappearance of Johnson’s lead. Pappy O’Daniel was going to the Senate by a margin of 1,311 fraudulent votes, and he was going because Johnson played the game almost to the end, but not all the way to the end. Johnson relaxed, and lost.
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After being elected to a full term in 1942, O’Daniel opted not to run for re-election to the Senate in 1948, opening a path for Lyndon B. Johnson to try again. This time another Governor was running, Coke Stevenson, a popular conservative Democrat. Unlike the special election in 1941, Johnson was forced to choose between running for re-election to his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives or running for the Senate seat. Everything he had worked towards in his life up until that point – his feverish devotion to climbing the political ladder, the years of seniority he accumulated as a Congressman – would all be lost if he did not win. But Johnson had not spent the intervening years without preparing. In 1946, he arranged for the pardon of George Parr for a prior conviction for tax evasion. Prior to that, in the 1941 election, he bought the votes Parr controlled. But the relationship was more transactional at the time. When the votes he bought turned up short, Parr refused to go any further. By arranging for the pardon that wiped Parr’s record clean, Johnson bought more than votes — he bought loyalty.
Governor Stevenson began the race with a wide lead over Johnson: 64% to 28%. But Johnson campaigned like a man who had everything to lose. Equipped with a loudspeaker, he barnstormed Texas in a helicopter — a rare curiosity in those days — and urged people on the ground to come along and hear him at his next stop. At the stops, he told a story of a trip he had taken during WWII as a congressman to the Pacific Theater, but made it sound as if he had enlisted to fight in the war and had spent years personally bombing the Japanese. Alongside him at each rally, he arranged to have a wounded WWII veteran appear on stage to endorse him. He thundered about the need for preparedness, how the military needed to build up, and how it specifically needed to be built up in a way that made Texas richer. He also planted vicious lies and rumors in the press about Stevenson. In short, he did everything he could to win.
No candidate in the crowded field received a majority in the first primary election, so the race for the Democratic nomination went to a runoff between Johnson and Stevenson. Johnson campaigned even harder than before. He crisscrossed Texas in a manic fury, promising rewards and threatening punishment for those who did and did not vote for him, sometimes screaming at his audience when he felt they were not applauding him enthusiastically enough.
The runoff was held on Saturday, August 28th, 1948. Because it was a primary and not a special election as in the 1941 campaign, the Democratic State Central Committee ran the process instead of the state’s elections board. The vote count took even longer this time. By August 30th, there were still vote totals missing for 43 out of Texas’ 254 counties. Stevenson led Johnson by just 210 votes, 492,481 to 492,271. But this time Johnson had the Valley’s political bosses hold back the official vote tallies. The early lead shifted back and forth between the candidates, and by Monday evening Stevenson had a lead. He held such a lead until Thursday when it was announced that he won by 362 votes.
It was at this point that the real conspiracy began.
On Friday morning, George Parr came through. New results from Duval and Jim Wells counties were announced in what would become known as the Box 13 scandal. The new results gave Johnson an 87-vote lead, out of nearly 1 million votes cast. Luis Salas, the election judge who certified the tally, finally broke his silence in a 1977 interview with the Associated Press, in which he said Johnson told Parr, “If I can get 200 more votes, I’ve got it won.” The 200 votes were then added to Box 13 on Parr’s orders, filled out in the same handwriting and the same ink color, and recorded in the poll book as if they had come to vote in alphabetical order (the names had been copied from the poll tax list). Stevenson tried unsuccessfully to get the courts to remedy the obviously fraudulent votes from Box 13, but his case was dismissed for lack of federal standing. Johnson’s Democratic primary victory was certified, and, in the days of the Solid South, this meant he was set to become Texas’ next U.S. Senator.
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The 1948 U.S. Senate election would not be the last election Lyndon B. Johnson was in that would hinge on holding back votes from being reported. In 1960, when he was the Vice-Presidential candidate on the Kennedy ticket, Mayor Daley of Chicago delayed reporting of Cook County’s vote tallies until it became apparent how many votes for Nixon he needed to overcome to deliver Illinois to Kennedy.
The practice of holding back the reporting of votes is not unique to Lyndon B. Johnson or the State of Texas, nor is it a relic of the distant past. In Virginia, we call it ‘Fairfax Magic’, the stubborn tendency of Fairfax County to wait until vote totals for the Republican bastions were all in before coming up with enough magic to catapult the Democrat into the lead. This was infamously done in the 2014 U.S. Senate race when Ed Gillespie shocked the political world by coming just 17,000 votes away from unseating U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Mark Warner. Gillespie was leading until Fairfax County elections officials found some boxes of votes yet to be tabulated, and, wouldn’t you know it, they came in heavily for Warner.
Fairfax Magic frustrated Virginia Republicans until 2021, when the Republican bastions of Chesterfield and Virginia Beach held off on reporting their full tallies until Fairfax County had reported theirs. Once Fairfax’s mail vote was counted and finalized, Chesterfield and Virginia Beach finished their reporting and Virginia Republicans won their first statewide election in over a decade.
Holding back your vote tallies until your rival has reported theirs may be a relevant lesson for this upcoming election. What is certainly relevant is the deeper lesson Lyndon B. Johnson had to learn the hard way: elections do not end on Election Day.
Benjamin Braddock is an American writer and an Editor-at-Large at IM—1776. He can be followed @GraduatedBen.
