Читать книгу The Last Sheriff in Texas - James P. McCollom - Страница 14

8

No gringo placed a greater value on the vote than Johnny Barnhart. His November 29 birthday had caused him to miss the 1946 election by a month. Now twenty-two, almost twenty-three, he was voting for the first time. He was finally part of the process, and he felt he owned it. Being in Austin, in and out of the Capitol, he had access to all the inside dope on the rough Senate campaign. The Austin pros thought that Coke Stevenson would win the primary but not outright. Coke would face a runoff with either George Peddy, the anticommie, or Lyndon Johnson, the Washington insider who was making his last run for political office. Johnson had lost to Pappy O’Daniel and the Texas Doughboys in a run for the Senate in 1941 but managed to hold on to his seat in Congress. This time, if he lost, he would have to give it up.

Everyone knew this Senate race was going to be historic. But so was the sheriff’s race in Bee County. Vail Ennis would be running for the first time since the Pettus shootout and the Time magazine article. The county would decide whether his wounds at Pettus had redeemed him of his violent past. Johnny planned to go to Beeville for the primary and to Fort Worth for the Texas Democratic Convention in September, where—barring some huge political surprise—Coke Stevenson would be confirmed as the new U.S. senator from Texas.

On primary election day, Johnny voted at Precinct 21 in Beeville. When the polls closed at seven, he went downtown to the election party. Main was blocked off between Bowie and Corpus Christi streets. A large blackboard listing precincts and candidates was mounted on a scaffold in front of the Bee-Picayune office. The blackboard showed three names for sheriff: Ennis, Robinson, and Wachtendorf. G. M. Robinson had entered the race at the last minute. Nobody knew why. He was well-known in the northern part of the county but not otherwise.

Vail’s serious challenger was H. D. Wachtendorf, a Texas Ranger who had almost beat him in the previous election. In 1946, Wachtendorf carried almost half the precincts and won a 70 percent vote on the west side. The issue hadn’t been decided until the following morning, when votes from the city precincts had been counted and recounted. Precinct 1, all Anglos, decided for Vail.

Wachtendorf was a burly fellow who favored cowboy gear. He campaigned hard in 1946 and now again in 1948. During the month of July you couldn’t walk a block in downtown Beeville without seeing H. D. Wachtendorf—all business, the picture of a lawman, stocky, jaw set, eyes narrowed, watching for felons. H. D. Wachtendorf let folks know that he wasn’t impressed one bit by Vail Ennis’s reputation. He and Vail went back a long way. Both had been deputies (Wachtendorf the chief deputy) under Sheriff Will Corrigan in the early 1940s. If Wachtendorf had stayed in Beeville instead of going off to join the Rangers, Vail would never have been sheriff. Backing up Wachtendorf was Bud O’Neil, the county’s only real politician, the man who had organized the failed 1946 ouster movement. O’Neil’s group had money, and they printed a ton of Wachtendorf posters, papering the west-side bars and the downtown telephone poles.

The tone reflected the language of the ouster campaign (“unfit by temperament . . . to hold the office”). The issue was violence. The sheriff’s wounds at Pettus didn’t change the fact that two more men were dead, that there were now seven notches on his gun. Death followed this man wherever he went. Mere weeks after Pettus he had wrecked his Hudson, killing a highway patrolman who was riding with him. Violence—excessive violence . . .

Bud and his people placed a full-page ad for Wachtendorf in the Bee-Picayune—a blowup of a letter from Homer Garrison, the head of the Texas Rangers, saying Wachtendorf had served well. A full-page ad. Nobody could remember anyone ever buying a full-page political ad before.

•

The men at the American Café liked Bud O’Neil. Bud was a good enough man, but he just didn’t understand Texas. He had come here from the north, married a girl from one of the old Beeville families, and had several sons. But for all the time he had lived here, Bud O’Neil was still a Yankee.

Everyone in town was sorry about what happened to Floyd Lawson, the patrolman who was in the wreck. Floyd had been ordered to pick up a prisoner in Edna and asked Vail to go with him. On a pitch-black night in late February, a truck loaded with cedar had stalled just over a rise on the road north of Victoria, its lights off, no reflectors. Neither man saw it until the second before the Hudson ran under it, shearing off the top of the Hornet. Both Vail and Floyd were hospitalized. Vail got out in a couple of weeks. It looked like Floyd would recover, but he died in April. Nobody was sorrier than Vail about Floyd Lawson.

Texans understood that life was violent. Car wrecks were violent. Hunting was violent. Rodeos were violent. Weather was violent.

The 1948 election would decide whether or not Vail Ennis could enter his house justified. The Bee-Picayune noted that the race was “coming down to the wire.”

By seven thirty the street was crowded. Gentry Dugat, the newspaper’s burly oil and gas editor, was trying out the PA microphone with his hefty baritone: “Testing. Testing now. Again now . . .” The Bee-Picayune’s shop foreman, Bernard McWhorter, had climbed the scaffold, chalk in hand, prepared to fill in each precinct vote as it was reported. Inside the newsroom, Camp Ezell was manning the telephone. At seven forty-five, Gentry was ready to announce the first result.

“We have the vote from Precinct 18—the Colony community. Ennis six, Wachtendorf two, Robinson eight.”

But there would be more reports tonight, twenty-one in all, fifteen of them from outlying communities. Mineral, Blanconia, Papalote, Pettus, Skidmore, Clareville, Normanna, Caesar, Pawnee, Tuleta, Candlish, Tynan, Olmos, and Cadiz were still to come. Old-timers could read the history of the county on that blackboard. Mineral had once been Mineral City, a spa where people came for the curative waters; Papalote was known for attracting hell-raisers, cowboys in the 1880s, Bonnie and Clyde in the 1930s; the country dance hall at Olmos was one of the most famous polka palaces in South Texas. Pioneers settling the land around the Medio and Poesta and Blanco Creeks and farther west toward Live Oak County would become ranchers. Those going on down to Skidmore and Tynan, where the land was flat and black, would become farmers. Before the automobile, most of the communities had been self-contained, with their own churches, schools, and general stores. Tynan, just this side of the San Patricio county line, had a bank, lumberyard, two barbershops, and several stores before a highway connection to Skidmore was built in the early 1930s.

Of the many celebrations (parades, rodeos, parties, graduations) of Johnny Barnhart’s boyhood, this election-night gathering meant the most to him. His dad had brought him down to his first election party when he was twelve, and Johnny felt that he himself was a candidate. Because—in a way, in a big way—he was. The Barnhart family had moved to Beeville two years before. In 1938, he won the grade school declamation regionals at Kingsville. At the time, Colonel Ernest Thompson was running for governor of Texas. His campaign recruited the junior declamation champ to give speeches as part of their “Texans of Tomorrow” strategy. His name was in the Bee-Picayune: “Johnny Barnhart, 12, no doubt youngest politician in the campaign, was a big hit at the Ira Heard barbecue for Col. Ernest O. Thompson. Johnny said, ‘I think that Texas will be in better shape in nine years from now when I come of age if Colonel Thompson serves the state as governor for the next four years.’” With a flatbed truck for a platform and a new public address system, the “Texans of Tomorrow” campaign drew crowds on courthouse squares in towns across South Texas. He was inspired by the grand applause, the sense of purpose. It was the most important summer of his life. At twelve years old and four feet ten, the new boy in town won the regional in Kingsville and declaimed for the governor of Texas and would never worry again about being the shortest person in the room. He knew the exact spot where he had stood, back to the Rialto, during that first election party, watching a man he didn’t know writing magic numbers in chalk.

Gentry Dugat’s booming voice:

“Precinct 3—Blanconia. Wachtendorf twenty-three, Robinson nine, Ennis ten.”

Johnny saw dozens of familiar faces in the crowd. The old sheriff, Will Corrigan, stood off by himself, looking up at the board. The old cowboy, Johnny Murphy, was talking with Dick Jones, the bank president. Freddie Hobrecht, the fighter pilot war hero, was there. Miss Orrie Hynes from the bank. During his high school years as a soda jerk, Johnny had brought trays of Cokes and coffee from the Schulz pharmacy soda fountain, making his way through this crowd and listening to old men telling each other stories of past elections. But they didn’t like to talk about the elections between 1922 and 1932, when the community was split. Those were the years of the Ku Klux Klan. When they were over, people preferred to erase them from the county history. The elections of the 1930s were passive by comparison. Friendly. The town was a community again. In the late 1930s and 1940s, the only arguments had to do with the elections for president (Texans didn’t like Roosevelt’s New Deal) and governor (Pappy O’Daniel, Coke Stevenson). And sheriff, of course. Even in Vail’s first run in 1944, he had strong opposition. And the 1946 election had been bitter.

More results:

“Precinct 15, Olmos: Wachtendorf eight, Ennis forty-eight.”

“Precinct 7, Clareville: Wachtendorf one, Robinson one, Ennis sixty.”

Tonight, everyone was watching the count in the Senate race. Box by box, Coke Stevenson came out ahead, as people expected. Johnny remembered at age twelve watching the governor’s totals on this blackboard, knowing that this blackboard wouldn’t decide the winner, but feeling that it would foretell the winner. And it did. It always did. Like the rest of Texas, Bee County would vote for Coke, Lyndon Johnson, and George Peddy, in that order.

A slight Gulf breeze was enough to bring back the night during the summer of 1938 when his dad had brought him here. This was a celebration, one that brought this community together in a way that took his breath away, so filled it was with common understanding, with appreciation of the ways of a people, of Texans, of Americans. Scents. Angles of light. Landmarks. Streetlights. The darkness beyond the buildings. The gathering of huge men, all bigger than his dad. On that night he’d known he wanted to do this the rest of his life.

A murmur in the crowd. The word was that Box 1 had been counted. This was the county’s biggest, the original Beeville, the town laid out in 1860 on lines west and south from Block 1—the cemetery—to the bending Poesta Creek.

“Precinct 1. Wachtendorf sixty-five, Robinson sixty-four, Ennis three hundred seven.”

Johnny saw Vail in the crowd. People were congratulating him. Johnny went over to shake his hand. Vail looked down at him and smiled.

“Thank you, Johnny. Did you vote for me?”

“Yes, I did, Vail.”

In Johnny Barnhart’s memory, in one moment he is watching the crowd thin before the big blackboard, Vail Ennis there with well-wishers, breathing the late Gulf breeze coming easily over the courthouse lawn. In the next—the very next—he is choking in the smoke-smogged bedlam of the Democratic Party Convention in Fort Worth, squeezed into a middle-row seat between two huge men in Stetsons in the Venetian Ballroom of the Blackstone Hotel. The place is a cacophony of the shouts of hundreds of delegates drunk on bourbon or adrenaline, and the party’s Executive Committee is voting to decide whether Coke Stevenson or Lyndon Johnson will be the next U.S. senator from Texas.

A delegate named Clint Small is speaking to the crowd:

“Can we allow Precinct 13 in Jim Wells County to elect a United States senator?”

There are boos, shouts, guffaws. But Small continues.

“There were 202 votes added for Lyndon and one measly little vote added to Mr. Stevenson’s total in Jim Wells County . . .”

Someone yelled:

“Never mind Jim Wells County. How about Duval County?”

“There’s an iron curtain around that county.”

Are we going to let George Parr decide the Senate election?

The crowd shouted him down.

“I’m just about through . . .”

Hecklers and boobirds drowned him out.

Johnny, again the shortest person in the room, couldn’t see beyond the men surrounding him, each asking the next what was happening. There was no readable blackboard here, only blare, glare, shouts across the room, shouts returned, guffaws. The crowd to a man was swept up in the thrill of the wild night, waiting for a resolution to the most bizarre election in Texas history.

Coke Stevenson, Lyndon Johnson, and George Peddy finished one, two, three, in the primary. The voting in the runoff between Coke and Lyndon took one day—Saturday, August 28. The counting took a week. Stevenson versus Johnson was scored like a baseball game, inning by inning.

Sunday. Stevenson leads by 854 votes.

Monday. Johnson out ahead by 693.

Tuesday. Stevenson by 119.

Wednesday. A Houston paper reported Stevenson’s lead had “soared” to 349.

A final tally was turned in on Thursday, September 2, before the Bee-Picayune went to press. Camp Ezell’s headline was simple:

Coke Wins in Senate Race

But a weekly newspaper wasn’t prepared to cover an election like this one. By the time the Bee-Picayune was delivered to the newsstand, Lyndon Johnson had been credited with an additional 203 votes. The phantom votes, all from a precinct in Alice supervised by the Parr machine, were added to a count reported as final a week before.

They gave Johnson a margin of 162 (out of 988,154 votes counted) and gave Texas the symbol of rigged elections for generations to come:

Box 13

George B. Parr had done it again. This surprised no one. But people were amazed that he had done it so clumsily. The fraud was so obvious that even Parr couldn’t get away with it. Immediately, Coke Stevenson went to Alice to look at the voters’ list. The extra 203 voters for Johnson had been added in roughly alphabetical order, in the same handwriting, in blue ink. The first 841 voters—those reported at the close of the polls—were in black ink. The county Democratic committee took one look and decided to void the entire box. They would meet on Saturday so Coke’s nomination would be clarified by Monday, when the convention opened in Fort Worth.

That didn’t happen, either.

From Saturday morning to Monday evening, Coke Stevenson’s lawyers tried to get the Texas courts to open Box 13 and look inside, while Lyndon Johnson’s lawyers found one way (an injunction from an Austin judge to keep the Jim Wells Committee from meeting) after another (long, long readings by the two longest-winded lawyers in Texas) to delay such opening until it was too late.

Compared with the clarity of that simple blackboard in Beeville, the virtual blackboard at the Fort Worth convention was a cryptogram. For three hours lawyers talked—talked, talked, kept talking—in the sweltering smoke-filled ballroom, arguing why Box 13 should be opened, why it should not. At 9:48, the Executive Committee began voting on whether to accept Box 13 (“aye”) or reject it (“nay”).

At one in the morning, the vote stood 28–28.

“The whole atmosphere was tension,” recalled Democratic chairman Robert Calvert, presiding.

Clint Small was still appealing for Stevenson, to no avail. As the crowd laughed Small out of the ballroom, the last member of the Executive Committee—one Charlie C. Gibson—came back from the men’s room. The crowd stilled. Gibson made a moment of it. With no small dramatic flair, he said:

“Aye.”

And Lyndon Johnson’s political career was validated. There was absolute uproar, louder than ever, with much kissing now (there were plenty of female Democrats on the scene) to go with the smoking and drinking. Landslide Lyndon: 29 to 28.

The following night, the drawling Macbeth rose to accept his nomination. Pausing a moment, he then addressed the crowd in the unctuous cant that would become America’s voice to the world in the 1960s:

“There is no bitterness in my heart for my enemies.”

Memory transports one from 1938 to 1948, from a small-town street to a smoke-filled city ballroom, in an instant. Memory invokes atmospherics: the Gulf breeze over there, the acrid smell of sweat and tobacco over there. For Johnny Barnhart, both were nostalgic, fascinating.

So you were part of that mob . . .

“There was lots of drama in the air.”

It didn’t bother you that the vote was so obviously a fraud?

“Box 13? Yes. I heard the arguments before the committee for the convention that was to certify the vote. My impression was it was a matter of who stole the most votes in the most efficient manner. Certainly those in Duval were stolen votes, but the opposition had stolen that many or more in Fort Worth alone.”

So that made it all right?

“The question was, Shall we hold this election again, and if so, how do we do it?”

Do you remember how they laughed the Stevenson man out of the place?

“I remember there was a lot of commotion. A lot of commotion.”

Johnny Barnhart would have cause to remember a man being laughed out of a Texas political assembly.

•

South Texas was in Time magazine again. This time the icon was a political boss, not a gunslinger.

The Duke Delivers

Like his father before him, George Berham Parr, 47, is the political boss of oil-rich Duval County, in the southernmost appendix of Texas. He is also a banker, beer baron, oil promoter and lawyer. He went to jail for Federal income-tax evasion in 1936. After he got out, one year later, he began again to stretch his grip beyond his small core of about 5,000 Mexican American voters in Duval to take in the Democratic machines of several neighboring counties.

Last week many Democrats from north and west Texas, who had never considered the dapper “Duke of Duval” anything more than a local political princeling, found that he had become a powerful kingmaker. In the stretch of one of the closest political races in U.S. history, he was the man most responsible for Congressman Lyndon Johnson’s nomination over Coke Stevenson for the U.S. Senate. . .

Vail’s story had fit all the Western movie images. But where could movie fans put George Parr in a script about Texas? For Alfred Allee, the situation in Duval County had always made it look as if Santa Ana had won the war. Now with the election of 1948, George Parr had turned the whole state back to Mexico. And just when Major Hector Garcia was trying to persuade his people that they were Americans.

Had Time covered the 1948 Bee County election, it would have found the old Texas images intact. An embattled lawman had been justified, once more. Vail Ennis won eighteen of the twenty-one precincts. He tripled Wachtendorf’s vote and quintupled Robinson’s: Ennis 2,403, Wachtendorf 798, Robinson 532.

The west side went 3–2 for Vail. In his “sidelights on the election” feature, Camp Ezell included this:

A Latin American voter, who evidently could count but could not read, went to a county official Saturday and said in Spanish: “I want you to show me how to vote for Vail Ennis.” He added that he wanted to scratch all other candidates on the ballot. The official told the man to scratch the entire first column, the first 12 names and last 20 names of the second column, and that would leave Sheriff Ennis’ name unscratched. The voter scanned a sample ballot, counted according to instructions, and said: “I’ve got it.” He left immediately for his voting box.

Hector Garcia had a dilemma. In Duval, the man’s vote would have been made for him. Bee County had a violent sheriff. But he had honor.

“I hate to say it,” Elias Chapa would recall. “But he was honest.”

If someone had tried to bribe him . . .

“He woulda shot him.”