When newspaper reporters turned to their typewriters on June 7, 1954, to report the death of Maury Maverick, they summoned a wide variety of expressions to illuminate the many facets of his character and career: "New Deal evangelist," "political warhorse," "honest demagogue," "fiery little Texan," "political patriarch," "brilliant student," "able-organizer and administrator," "champion of small business," and "clean-up mayor of San Antonio."
The New York Times praised his "bulldog courage and disarming sincerity," and later members of Congress described him in such terms as "brilliant," "highly intelligent and intensely patriotic," "courageous and forthright," "shockingly frank, but refreshingly candid," and "a man of great vision and understanding."
Maury Maverick was all of these things and many more; he was one of the most colorful and vital figures of recent American political history. The story of his career and its impact upon our political life has been told only in fragments from time to time. The former New Deal congressman, mayor of San Antonio, and chairman of the World War II Smaller War Plants Corporation preempted the best of all possible titles for a study of his career when he chose A Maverick American as the title for his semi-autobiographical book published in 1937. He was a maverick American, not just a maverick Texan. He was truly "unbranded," the dictionary meaning of the term that his grandfather contributed to the American lexicon. He was, as well, a maverick legislator, mayor, and thinker.
The Mavericks were dissenters and independents before the political connotation was given to their name. Samuel Maverick of Pendleton, South Carolina (Maury's great-grandfather), and his son, Samuel Augustus Maverick, were sharply critical of the exaggerations of their fellow South Carolinians with respect to the allegedly oppresive Tariffs of 1824 and 1828. Samuel A. Maverick, a young lawyer and recent graduate of Yale, presented a closely reasoned argument against nullification, secession, and extreme states' rights postures in general. When his father delivered a speech to counter the arguments of his neighbor, John C. Calhoun, the younger Maverick challenged a heckler in the audience to a duel and slightly wounded the fellow in the contest.
The younger Samuel's unpopular position forced him to give up his aspirations for a political career in South Carolina, and, at his father's suggestion, he went to manage a plantation in Alabama. When stories of the great adventure in Texas began to reach him, he determined to go there. He arrived in the small village of San Antonio de Bexar in the fall of 1835, within weeks of the inception of the Texas Revolution.
After he had played one of the leading roles in the Texas Revolution, Samuel A. Maverick was a delegate to the convention that prepared the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836, but he had no hand in it. High waters delayed his arrival until March 3, the day after the document was completed. He was permitted to sign it, however, and he later participated in the drafting of the Constitution of the Republic of Texas.
The first Texas Maverick was a land speculator—with perhaps the largest single set of holdings in the state. His biographers depict him as a man of almost unbelievable integrity and modesty. Though twice elected mayor of San Antonio, many times to the Texas Congress and State Legislature, and finally Chief Justice of Bexar County, he is said never to have sought or campaigned for an office. He also showed the extraordinary tenacity and unbending will when doing what he thought right that was later exhibited by his grandson.
An example of the Maverick character is to be found in the Perote Prison story. In September 1842 the Mexican government sent a major expedition, headed by General Adrian Woll, to regain Texas. The forces invaded San Antonio, and, in the course of their victorious battle, Sam Maverick was taken prisoner. He and his fellow prisoners were force-marched eighteen hundred miles to Perote Prison in Mexico. During almost unspeakable hardships—chained and in ill health—Maverick had an opportunity to win freedom from President Antonio Santa Anna if the Texan would promise to support a token reannexation of Texas by Mexico.
The United States minister, General Waddy Thompson, reported that Maverick replied, "I cannot persuade myself that such an annexation on any terms, would be advantageous to Texas, and I therefore cannot say so, for I regard a lie as a crime, and one which I cannot commit even to secure my release; I must, therefore, continue to wear my chains, galling as they are." Thompson offered the comment, "Such an act recorded by Plutarch would have added another page as bright as that which perpetuates the noble constance and heroic virtue of Regulus." Thompson reported further that he was soon able, as a "personal favor" to him, to secure the release of Maverick and two other prisoners.
Six children survived from the ten born to Samuel A. and Mary Maverick. The youngest son, Albert, was the father of Maury Maverick. There is no colorful career to report for Albert Maverick, but there was nothing tame about his youth. As a boy he hunted, fished, and learned the ways of the Texas wilderness with a famed Indian fighter and scout, Polycarpio Rodriguez. The account of his school years is filled with recitals of youthful pranks and assorted mischief. A fellow student at the University of Virginia described Albert as having too much "animal spirit" for serious scholarship. It was alleged that he once stole the great iron gates at the entrance to the university, and Maury Maverick took great delight in chiding his father about an escapade in which the elder Maverick drank too much wine and performed the never-to-be-duplicated feat of climbing one of the university's stately columns.
After one year at the University of Virginia, Albert was advised that his professors had given him passing marks on the condition that he not return. The final phase of his education took the unusual form of a walking trip across England from Liverpool to Dover with some days spent in the British Museum, followed by a seven-month stay in Paris. The trip, and particularly the stay in Paris, seemed to be a sobering one. He found Paris to be a shocking "den of immorality" with some women showing their legs "as high as the knee," but he managed to find lodging with "a good honest family." He spent seven months studying independently and learning to speak French. On his return to the United States in March 1877, he went straight to Piedmont, Virginia, to claim his promised bride, Jane Lewis Maury, a direct descendent of the Reverend James Maury, Thomas Jeffereson's first teacher.
Maury Maverick frequently referred proudly to his namesake, Matthew Fontaine Maury, the famous nineteenth-century pioneer in the field of oceanography. His biographer's description of his characteristic attitudes toward matters academic bears an uncanny resemblance to the characteristics of Maury Maverick. Matthew Maury did poorly on examinations at the United States Naval Academy. His apparent mediocrity was attributed to the fact that his fellows made high grades by answering "mainly in terms of the books" without understanding what it was all about. "Maury's mind had original habits. He was by nature a trail-blazer. He could not so well follow other men in speech and thought—he thought and spoke for himself." Elsewhere he is described as "stout," "largely self-educated," and an opponent of "humbuggery"—a no less accurate portrait of Maury Maverick.
Almost immediately after his marriage to Jane Maury, Albert took her to the Maverick homestead in San Antonio. After a short stint in a low-paying clerical job, he tried ranching near Bandera, Texas, for a few years, but a severe drought drove the growing family back to San Antonio. There Albert Maverick managed the Maverick Land Office and made general investments in San Antonio real estate and business operations, activities for which he had little ability or interest. Though the tall, handsome Albert faithfully went "down to the office" on every working day until he was eighty-seven years of age, he didn't belong there. He became, by all accounts, a quiet, retiring, scholarly type, with a strong attachment to family and home. Unlike his father and son, he did not hold public office. This "beautiful man," as Mrs. Walter P. Webb describes him, was almost Thoreauvian in his love for nature and his joy in working with his hands, qualities that, despite vast differences in their personalities, were as evident in the life of Maury Maverick as in that of his father. Some of Albert Maverick's most absorbing activities were such things as keeping records of the chilling Texas northers as they swept in over the hills into San Antonio and carefully noting the arrival and departure of the purple martins that came to the large house he had erected for them near his veranda. He made saddles for all of his children and melted down Mexican pesos to fashion heavy buckles for the belts that he made for all of his sons. The family referred to them as Maverick belts, and Maury Maverick kept his until the day he died.
A biographer who had no difficulty finding noteworthy achievements and honors of other members of the Maverick family, said only that Albert was a "progressive citizen of San Antonio" and "a pioneer for the conservation of the natural beauty of our city, having publicly objected to the destruction of the cypress tress as early as 1882." Albert Maverick was generous "to the point of eccentricity," and he let the major part of an inherited fortune simply slip through his hands. He sustained serious losses in periods of financial panic and depression, but one reason for this was that he would not collect rent from distressed tenants.
Jane Maverick was a short, bustling woman with a strong, commanding personality. Albert was head of the house, but she was the manager. As Maury Maverick explained, "My mother has executive ability, running the place and doing the ordering and the talking for both. My father is a quiet man." Jane was no mere housewife. A houseful of children and a lack of formal education did not prevent her from becoming a literate woman, knowledgable about public affairs. She traveled occasionally, and in later years when the children were grown she made carefully prepared speeches to local clubs concerning her experiences.
Albert and Jane had eleven children; the eleventh was Fontaine Maury Maverick. Though he steadfastly maintained that he was brought by a wise and loquacious old stork, he was born on October 23, 1895, at the grand old Maverick home at 218 Avenue E, just off San Antonio's Alamo Plaza. His father put him down as a "cheerful" small boy, and Maury himself described his boyhood as "free and easy"—listening to the band on the square, buying tamales and Mexican sweets at the chili stands. He demonstrated quite early that he had inherited some of Papa's youthful mischief-making. Palmer Giles, a rancher who lives near Comfort, Texas, was a boyhood playmate and school chum of Maury Maverick. Giles tells a tale of one of the more extravagant stunts engineered by Maury at the age of seven or eight. The Giles and Maverick parents were chatting in the parlor while the boys went off to play. Maury and his brother George asked Giles if he would like to take a bath. Giles responded that he had had one that week, but Maverick repeated the question with a wink. He and George then led the preplexed Giles down a long porch to a large, completely tiled bathroom. The boys then took off their clothes, placed thick towels under and around the edges of the door, closed the door tightly on the towels, and proceeded to fill the entire bathroom with water about three feet deep. After frolicking about for a time, the boys drained and cleaned up the "swimming pool," and the parents were apparently none the wiser.
In 1905, when Maury Maverick was nine years old, the family moved to what they came to call Sunshine Ranch, in what is now suburban San Antonio but which was then in the countryside overlooking the city. There Albert built a large, plain two-story house with a long porch and an upstairs gallery designed to catch the prevailing breeze. The view from this spot is still impresive, but the visitor in those days could see "a wide-spreading valley, the wastes of green mesquite and yellow stubble, and the distant town half drowned in purple mist, the few high buildings very white and stately, suggesting Venice."
The Albert Mavericks were "getting along," but they were far from wealthy. Nonetheless, the big, plainly furnished house was a Sunday afternoon Mecca for many members of the Maverick clan and their friends. Everyone knew that the children were invited, and the atmosphere was one of warm family ties, great fun, and a vigorous exchange of ideas. Albert carved the roast with great aplomb and presided over the dinner with great dignity, but later the children gathered on the veranda to eat watermelon, cavort, and perform tricks, while the adults gathered inside for stimulating discussions. The Mavericks were a lively and opinionated bunch, and the discussions would often become arguments, but Jane Maverick would not permit the participants to engage in personalities.
Maury Maverick once wrote that his mother gave him "many spankings to no avail," but that he deserved one thousand from his father who gave him only two, but he enjoyed the sort of relationship with both of his parents that most boys would order if they could. The occasional firmness and parental advice was tempered by understanding, deep affection, and often a dash of wit. Maury was no more than ten or eleven years of age when he announced (inspired perhaps by his father's youthful adventures) that he was going to California. He saddled up his pony and gathered a few provisions as his mother and father tried to dissuade him. When they saw that he was determined, they exacted the promise from him that he would stop for a week at the Giles' Ranch near Comfort. After Maury had left, Mrs. Maverick called Mrs. Giles and said, "My little boy is leaving for California on his pony. Please delay him as long as possible when he gets to the ranch." Maury and his weary pony survived the hot seventy-mile trip through rugged country, and the strategy worked. He and his playmate, Palmer Giles, spent half the summer doing all the things that boys of ten and eleven do in that wild hill country, and then Maury saddled up and headed for home.
Much of the correspondence between Maverick and his parents reveals affectionate joshing and the indulgence of doting Mama and Papa. When Maury was attending the University of Texas he wrote to Papa to request some money to attend a football game in Houston. He explained that the trip would involve night travel, requiring enough money for a "birth" both ways. Albert responded, "I'm glad I can send you the money; I had no idea you were in such a delicate condition." (This was often the style in which Albert chided various of his children into better spelling and writing habits.) When his son was a lieutenant in France, Albert wrote (after occasionally sending him a hundred dollars), "Call on Gen. Persh., & see your pay is doubled. Say it is imperative because your father insists on your employing a guardian & I want him to be a responsible person."
In one of his books Maury Maverick jocularly characterized his mother as having "slightly Faschist tendencies" and at another point referred to her as a "Mussolini." Thus the first pass to the gallery of the United States House of Representatives that freshman Representative Maury Maverick sent to his mother was filled out in the name of "Signora Mussolini." Another card, however, asking that courtesies be extended at the White House, was made out to a "Little Jane Maury." The cards were attached to a pseudo-formal letter that read:
Dear Mrs. Maverick:
I hope you will visit Washington sometime and hear me speak.... Try to remember this: it is harder to be a congressman than a mother. You only have eleven children and 65 grandchildren. I have a quarter of a million.
Respectfully,
Maury Maverick
(Your Congressman)
Mama responded archly with a note addressed to the "Most hon. Congressman," giving him a "special invitation to Sunshine Ranch," but she concluded, "Please don't bring your quarter of a million children." The note was signed, "Signora Mussolini."
There was nothing typical about the education of Maury Maverick. He volunteered the information, not proudly, but candidly, that he "never graduated from anything." He began a program of desultory (at first) self-education at the age of twelve or thirteen that was to continue to his death. There were many serious books in the Maverick home, and the family read and discussed them. Maverick said that he was reading Greek philosophy at the age of twelve....
In addition to reading "every issue" of Appeal to Reason in his early teens, Maverick read Robert Hunter's Poverty at the age of thirteen. Hunter's book examined the extent, evils, and necessary remedies of poverty in the United States and mentioned suggestions and criticisms from such leading economists as Richard T. Ely and John R. Commons. In this book Maverick read of the downtrodden "struggling up the face of a barren precipice," because of the "brutal power of the economic forces which dominate their lives." The impact of books of this type and readings of this sort was obvious in Maverick's lifetime of evangelistic efforts in behalf of all sorts of programs to alleviate the condition of the poor.
The Southwestern intellectual equivalent of derring-do pulp magazines and other schoolboy contraband when Maverick was a boy was the Iconoclast, a paper written in Waco, Texas, by William Cowper Brann, a character as fabulous as Maverick. Brann was a self-taught philosopher-journalist who left home for a newspaper career at the age of thirteen. Another maverick, he spent his spare time reading "science, philosophy, history, biography and general literature." He wrote some of the most colorful prose that was ever applied to paper in the United States. Defense of intellectual freedom was his forte, but he was likely to direct a withering blast at anything that happened to strike his fancy. "He was a hater of shams and defied every form of fraud, hyposcrisy and deceit...." Roy Bedichek refers to Brann as a "provincial Voltaire" who opposed injustice, cruelty, senseless repression and "hocus pocus," but "in the heat of controversy he was, like the great Voltaire himself, guilty of each of these abominations, as who is not?" The paper is said to have reached a circulation of ninety thousand at the time of Brann's death—extraordinary even today for a publication of its type. Editorial comment on his death came from every part of the United States.
Maverick was too young to have subscribed to this paper, but he said that he read the two-volume collection at the age of eleven. He never stated that Brann influenced him, but there is a considerable parallel between some of the best of Brann and the character and attitudes of Maverick. This is particularly true of the readiness of both men to leap to the defense when any attempt at suppression of freedom and expression was made. Another strong parallel was to be found in the opposition to sham and hypocrisy evidenced by both men. While reading one of Brann's speeches, Maverick marked with approval: "One may ... have Plato at his fingers' ends and ever remain a fool."
But drawing too much of a parallel would be an injustice to Maverick. Brann's bottle of vitriol poured forth racist outbursts—even to advocating the killing of the "buck Negro"—and his motives were often questionable. Also, Maverick expressed disagreement with Brann's essentially negative approach. For example, Brann said of his role as an iconoclast, pessimist, and skeptic, "I am no perfectionist. I do not build the spasmodic sob nor spill the scalding tear because all men are not Sir Galahads in quest of the Holy Grail, and all women with two pair of reversible wings and the aurora borealis for a hat-band." This statement must have piqued Maverick the reformer at some later reading, for he wrote opposite in the margin, "I am not envisioning a perfect society—but at least a moving one."
Maverick's claims concerning his early reading were apparently not idle boasts. At least as early as the age of seventeen, he was keeping an annotated notebook with the title, "Books I Have Read." Most of the works listed were political and social histories, with some novels of the same genre. Maverick did not merely read such books, he studied them. An appreciation of how effectively he used books can be gathered from the following entry, written when he was nineteen:
Civil History of the Confederate States—J. L. M. Curry, 1901—B. F. Johnson-Richmond, Read June 1915.
The author should take into consideration the fact that the Civil War was over in '65, and that Confederate money is now no good. He is too extreme—rather narrow-minded. He is almost as bad as some old narrow-minded northerners who write about how they saved the North or rather the "union" against the rebels, etc. and talk about the "noble blacks" and the war as one of "civilization vs. barabarism."
In another entry, Maverick described The Citadel by Samuel Merwin as the story of a young member of Congress sent there "by the interests." Maverick then suggested that the political novel form "could be used by professors who write on Political and Social Economy. It would be sure to create public interest and educate the public, who otherwise would read trash." Thus young Maverick anticipated the current use of novels as vehicles to learning in political science courses in the colleges and universities.
Despite Maverick's references to the dominant role of his mother, his father was the primary influence on Maury's early ideas. Albert Maverick and his son read and discussed together the works of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, and the elder Maverick taught his son the lessons of free inquiry and freedom of expression. The atmosphere in the home was conducive to the development of liberal views on most subjects. As to religion, for example, Maverick's parents were devout in their own way, but they were not regular churchgoers. As Maverick explained, his father did not try to dictate his children's thoughts; rather, he hoped that they would develop their own. "He merely offers information, so that they will not go into the world as a set of nitwits. As for our economic or religious opinions, he cares nothing." Something of the father's views are reflected in this representative excerpt form his fragmentary diary, written during the depression years:
May 7, 1932—The money interests who own our Government got our baby President Hoover, several weeks ago, to make a special appeal to the people not to hoard money. What a mockery, & how transparent! The golden stream of interest (usury) flows east and north ... to the overfilled coffers of the usurers, who own & act through the banks concerned only in increasing their capital—not in the increasing misery of the people. The government should own all the banks, & interest by degrees, abated, and made illegal. Employment should be furnished to the people, in road building & public works—to make them self-respecting & not paupers, & more, a limit must be set to a man's possessions & service become the badge of honor, service for all, for the common good.
The range of Albert Maverick's knowledge and interests is revealed in this passage from a letter to Lieutenant Maury Maverick in 1917: "Let us hope help can get to Italy in time to ward off a surrender, & mingle our tears over Kerensky, discredited. Every man is doomed to failure in the case of Russia—hordes of semi-civilized wild people suddenly given power, & German intrigue & strategy will profit by it. Peace is a long way off."
Maverick's early self-education was not confined to books and father-son discussions. Family gatherings were often the occasion for discussions and, more likely, heated debates on public affairs. His home and relatives' homes were fairly frequent stopping-off points for important public figures—it was in this way that he met William Jennings Bryan, for example. Maury's watchful eye also caught the political ferment that was going on about him during his grammar school and high school years. He told of his earliest recollection of being induced to do some serious thinking for himself by the sight of a man being mobbed and driven from San Antonio's Alamo Plaza as he tried to make a speech. As a grammar school student in 1909, he watched and heard Francisco I. Madero and his supporters plan the revolution by which Madero was soon to become president of Mexico. Two years later, at San Antonio's Main Avenue High School, Maverick and his friends organized a discussion club called the Atheneum Association. Shortly after its organization, General Bernardo Reyes came to San Antonio to attempt to establish a revolutionary force to overthrow Madero. Reyes was living with his family and some assistants on San Pedro Avenue, near the high school. Students generally favored Madero, and they subjected Reyes' home to rock throwing and other harassment. The Atheneum group sought to make ammends by inviting Reyes to speak to the student body, and Maury Maverick was the spokesman for the group. His friend Hobart Huson said, "Maury made a brave, but excruciating, effort as interpreter," but nonetheless he was able to convey the message to Reyes.
The school authorities had not been consulted, and they strongly opposed the invitation. Other school clubs adopted resolutions against having Reyes speak. Association members were attempting to find another location for the speech, but before they could do so, Reyes returned to Mexico. Huson concluded that "Maury Maverick got his first lesson and experience in creating publicity, which served him well in future years."
In 1912, without having completed high school, Maverick boarded a steamer at Galveston for Virginia Military Institue by way of New York and Washington. He rode most of the trip in the steerage, though he had first-class passage. He discussed socialism, Henry George and the single tax, Karl Marx, and the "Wall Street exploitation" of Cuba with the steerage passengers. He ate the steerage fare and typically began to discuss ways and means of getting something done about it. The first mate labeled him an agitator and ordered him to eat in the first-class accommodations.
In Washington, sixteen-year-old Maverick stayed for a time with his uncle, Congressman James L. Slayden, an outstanding pacifist, and insisted on being introduced to Congressman Victor Berger and Senator Robert M. LaFollette. Maury's recollections of his year at Virginia Military Institute consists of two parades celebrating the election of President Woodrow Wilson and an "average" scholastic record. He kept a "Maury Maverick Memory Book" in which he recorded the expected pranks, "gripes" at cadet officers, demerits, and such entries as "Penalty drill today in overcoats. Cold." A letter of July 10, 1917, in the "Memory Book" certified that Maverick had "a good record [at VMI]" and "successfully completed the topics of instruction in the fourth class." The book also revealed the youthful Maverick to be harboring the typical homesickness and sentimental attachment to Sunshine Ranch and his native Texas. Snapshots depict a stocky, tanned youth with a shock of unruly hair and an air of mischief—indeed, beneath one photograph Maverick wrote, "a creation of the devils: devilishly short, and devilishly ugly."
On his return to Texas in 1913, Maverick enrolled at the University of Texas "in journalism," according to his account. It appears, however, that he enrolled in a basic prelaw curriculum and elected a course in journalism during his sophomore year. He did work on the Daily Texan (the student newspaper) as a reporter and later as an issue editor from time to time during the 1914-1915 academic year. The scanty records available show that he took two years of English, German, and public speaking and one year each of mathematics, English history, geology, American history, journalism, and government. His grades were poor.
By his own admission and the testimony of professors, Maury Maverick had little patience for the formal aspects of his schooling. He not only found his courses to be dull and turned to his own reading list, but he also spent considerable time in frivolity and roistering about the campus. Professor Brooks thought that Maverick had merely fallen victim to the middle-aged man's common obsession of imagining himself as a "regular heller" in his undergraduate days, but it is just as likely that Maverick did not exaggerate his student high jinks. After one drinking spree at a football game, he scrawled some outrageous obscenities on a postcard and mailed it to a friend, and it was only by the intervention of some influential friends of the family that he was saved from indictment by a federal grand jury. In his first book Maverick gave a lengthy recital of expulsions and near expulsions for hazing students, "rotten-egging professors," painting the water tank and "being a very poor student." The late Walter Prescott Webb, a distinguished American historian and close friend of the Mavericks, delighted in telling the story of Maverick's lament to the dean, "Why do you always call me in when something goes wrong around here?" Dr. Lewis H. Haney, one of Maverick's instructors and now professor emeritus of economics and lecturer at New York University, testifies, "My recollections of Maury as a student are that he took little interest in scholarly attainments, and did not apply himself diligently to his studies. He had more interest in outside activities on the fun-making and social side of college life."
Maury admitted to participation in the publication of an underground newspaper, the Blunderbuss, which appeared on the University of Texas campus each April Fool's Day. It had the primary objective of lampooning and even slandering members of the faculty. The issue printed April 1, 1915, bears the unmistakable stamp of Maury Maverick, though the identity of editors and writers was carefully concealed. A front-page story concerning "egg-throwing" has the flavor of Maverick-via-Rabelais—whose works he reread dozens of times. Also, the paper has several fictitious items about Maury Maverick, such as "Mr. Maury Maverick has established a select matrimonial bureau at his apartment on Nineteenth Street. The Blunderbuss desires to wish him success in his undertaking as we know no one knows 'em better than he does."
But there were items on the plus side of the ledger. Dr. Haney said that Maverick had an "alert and active mind. He was an independent thinker to the extent of being a non-conformist." He banded with some fellow recalcitrants in the organization of a group known as the Campus Buzzards. "We proclaimed ourselves," he said, "as carrion philosophers and permitted no reading except that which was prohibited." He learned about the things that interested him by attending bull sessions with some of the younger professors, going to labor meetings, and listening eagerly to such speakers as Scott Nearing, "who had the impudence to suggest that lynching of Negroes should stop." One of the young professors who joined these bull sessions, poet and author Stark Young, wrote of Maverick, "I remember him as one of the vivid figures in my Texas acquaintance. He had a vigorous, independent and original way of thinking and speaking."
Maury's unsuccessful second year at the University of Texas exhausted Papa's patience; it was time for the young man to get to work. Maury received an offer of a job as a reporter on the Amarillo Daily News on August 18, 1915, and he accepted immediately. The job paid sixty dollars per month for, as Maury put it, "Title: city editor. Real position: local reporter." Maverick seemingly did well at the News. One of his journalism instructors (addressing him as "Execrable Copy Reader, Pathetic Reporter and Sad City Editor") told Maverick that he would soon "be able to write as good a story as any of them." His aunt and mentor, Ellen Maury Slayden, who wrote Washington Wife, said, "This is good newspaper work. I had no idea Maury could do so well." She later wrote to him:
My dear old Boy,
You made a terrible hole in the family circle when you went away....
I feel kind of proud of you myself, because, you see, I had quite a hand in raising you.
I am really surprised at your good lines, but I am afraid you are elaborating your news with a little too much imagination, and overworking your superlatives.
Ellen Slayden suggested to him that a year out of college would help him: he could go back "as a man and not just a boy who has to work off his foolishness." But encouragement and admonitions were not enough to keep Maverick on the job in Amarillo. Letters from his mother indicated that he was suffering from a combination of discouragement over his low pay and position and homesickness. Mrs. Maverick told him to stick to the job—that his father had started to work in his youth at thirty-five dollars a month and that the family was essentially broke at the moment. Aunt Ellen gave similar advice and held out the promise of better things. She implied that she would help him to go to Columbia University the next year to study under Talcott Williams, the outstanding journalist and critic, and she enclosed a piece entitled "The Creed of a Great Newspaper."
Despite the influence that Mrs. Slayden exerted upon Maury in other matters, it was to no avail on this occasion. In a few days he had presumably persuaded his parents to permit him to return to the University of Texas—this time to the Law School. Maverick later boasted that he had "jammed all my three years of law into one." Though this statement may sound extravagant, it is not far from the absolute facts. His record card in the University of Texas Law School shows that he took thirteen courses with an average grade of 79. The record indicates that he received a grade of 80 in "International Law A" by taking the examination without having attended classes. Dr. A. Leon Green, distinguished professor of law and one of Maverick's instructors, says that these scores are only respectable and would not represent the high level of achievement as the same scores would today. Nonetheless, Maverick's feat was rather remarkable. He took and passed the Texas bar examination in Austin in May 1916. It is impossible to determine the level of his performance on the examination because the Clerk's Office of the Texas Supreme Court has no records of such matters prior to 1919.
Dr. Green says that Maverick continued some of the pranks and frivolty in law school, but he adds: "I never doubted Maury's ability, and his salty way of putting things even then was extremely refreshing. He gave no quarter to any one and asked none. Were he in law school today he would be tops in any company. Law teaching has finally caught up with his spirit. This is confirmed by the fact that in his later years he was a favorite with law students and faculties all over the country. It is a pity he died when he was needed most.... His is a rare spirit and should be an inspiration to all youngsters who aspire to public life or who have an interest in public men and affairs."
Professor Brooks, who was president of the American Political Science Association in 1940, said of Maury's outlandish study habits: "Evidently his intellectual curiosity was insatiable. Given a really understanding tutor he would have forged ahead at a tremendous pace." Maverick did not have a tutor, but he was able to profit in his youth and early manhood from the sage advice of another self-educated Maury of rather remarkable attainments—his Aunt Ellen. She never attended a "real school," but she read widely and traveled to international peace meetings with her husband, James L. Slayden, a congressman from San Antonio. Her abilities were such that she contributed articles to Century magazine and various newspapers on such topics as political problems in Mexico.
As early as the spring of 1916, while still a law student, Maury Maverick was attempting to get into some military service. He sought the help of his uncle, Congressman James L. Slayden, and that of Senator Morris Sheppard in an effort to secure a commission in the U.S. cavalry. Maverick hoped to get into the fighting in Mexico. Sheppard wrote that he remembered him "quite well" from a meeting in Amarillo and that it would be a pleasure to recommend him for a commission if war with Mexico should break out.
With characteristic audacity Maverick seized what he thought was the ultimate opportunity to realize his ambition for a commission. General John J. Pershing was stopping over in San Antonio at a time when Maverick was attending a dance at a local hotel. Pershing and a fellow officer were looking in on the dance when Maverick spotted the general and dashed over to introduce himself. Then he asked his dancing partner to dance with the startled Pershing and asked another girl to dance with Pershing's friend. The officers stayed for awhile and seemed to enjoy themselves immensely. The next day Maverick called General Pershing and asked if he would like to see the historic sites of San Antonio "in my car." After some hesitation, Pershing agreed, and Maverick begged enough money from his father to rent a car for the excursion. He then picked up the same girls and proudly drove his captive general and his aide around the city. At the end of the sightseeing tour, Maverick thought the time was ripe to put the bite on the grateful general. But when he asked Pershing to help him get a commission, the crestfallen Maverick heard the general say, "Son, I'll tell you what to do. You go out to Fort Sam Houston and enlist, and you can tell them you have my recommendation."
When the United States did become involved in World War I, Maverick was one of the first men in San Antonio to enlist in the Army. In the spring of 1917 he was sent to the Federal Reserve Student Training Camp at Camp Funston, Leon Springs, Texas, where he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army Reserve on June 11, 1917. He kept up a constant barrage of letters, mainly to Representative Slayden, in an attempt to get an overseas assignment. He tried to get transferred to the air corps and even threatened to resign his commission and join the Canadian forces in order to get overseas." Slayden told him to "keep his shirt on," that policies could not be changed for an individual: "Even [Theodore] Roosevelt who has influence with hundreds of thousands of people almost as crazy as he is could not alter the predetermined course of events."
Maury was sent to join the First Colorado Infantry at Trinidad, Colorado, in September, 1917, and it was soon ordered to the Fortieth Division training base at Camp Kearney, Linda Vista, California. He was put in charge of a machine-gun company and was promoted to first lieutenant in the National Guard on December 21, 1917.
Maverick's first baptism of fire was in a different sort of war, which he was to fight in for the rest of his life—the struggle for human rights and human dignity. Many of the men under his command were of Mexican descent. Despite Maverick's repeated speeches emphasizing our great heritage of liberty and the necessity for "making the world safe for democracy," when questioned as to why they were fighting, these men could only answer, "De draft board, he send me here." Maverick persuaded the division commander that these men were being misunderstood and abused simply because they did not understand English. He organized language classes for the men and was doing reasonably well with them when a graver problem arose—two of the men deserted and were picked up in Mexico. Maverick was appointed to defend them. He reported, "I studied all about a soldier's constitutional rights—and also got some books on the subject of natural rights. At the trial, I quoted the statements of James Otis and Sam Adams on Natural Rights, made preceding the American Revolution." He went on to argue that these men did not understand what the war was about, that they knew nothing of American customs or the English language, and that it was therefore improper for them to have been drafted. He said he could not tell them why we were fighting, because he really didn't know either. Maverick was threatened with court-martial himself, but the commander relented and issued a memorandum (which Maverick did not mention in his own account of this affair) commending the Texas lieutenant for "his interest in conducting classes for soldiers of Mexican extraction." On the basis of Maverick's contention that the two men had acted out of ignorance rather than cowardice and that they needed help, the commander said that he desired that "this officer [Maverick] take personal charge of the instruction of the two men."
In the summer of 1918 Maverick was shipped overseas. After several days of "drunken brawling" in England, he landed in Cherbourg on September 4, 1918, as the band on the dock played the Marseillaise. In two days he was in the serious and gory business of fighting a war. He joined the First Division at Sarcy, France, as it was moving up to Saint-Mihiel and the front. During the battle of Saint-Mihiel, Maury was working with the regimental headquarters, directing the bringing up of ammunition. While reconnoitering a route for his ammunition wagons, he happened upon twenty-six German soldiers who, as Maury explains with unmatched candor, demanded to be captured and conducted to the rear. Before and after this battle, Maverick had written to his parents that the German soldiers were cowardly, "immoral to obscenity," and that they would not die "like men." He was soon to make a radical change in his views.
After the battle of Saint-Mihiel, Maverick sought and obtained a transfer back to his company and was made executive officer under Lieutenant Frank Felbel, a more experienced officer. There is none of the usual Maverick humor in his grim account of his part in the Argonne offensive, for which he received the Silver Star for gallantry in action. In powerful writing that compares favorably with that of Erich Maria Remarque, he tells a story of stumbling, almost blind, into the Argonne forest at two o'clock on the morning of October 1, 1918, of a loss of communications, of the sudden loss of his company commander, of companions blasted to pieces before his eyes, of heroics by inadvertency or instinct, and then of shell fragments biting into his shoulders and back as he stumbled through shell holes. In the unpublished account he dictated shortly after his experiences, he said: "How did you get back? The way it was with me, I could walk a little bit you see; I was staggering around. I tried to walk and then I got wounded again. I got lost and went back to the German lines. I went in the opposite direction to where I wanted to go and then I had to crawl back.... I crawled back all the way."
After this experience Maverick said that the "Germans were good fighters—I did not find any 'Kamerad' stuff that is talked about." He later said he did not deserve his medals and offered two pithy asides on the subject of heroism and medals. "The line between coward and hero is sometimes very indistinct. Men are suddenly brave or suddenly cowardly. In one moment of emotion they are likely to be branded for life, one way or the other—and wrongly.... Medals are not to reward brave men, but to keep men brave, and make them fight. The ruling classes have always attempted to build up the hero idea. It stops men from thinking."
In a moment when he was "half-drunk and bored," shortly after arriving in France, Maverick sat on the side of the road to Saint-Mihiel and wrote a half-serious, half-facetious will in which he specified that all young male heirs must never shirk military service. On June 8, 1931, perusing his notes and records as he often did, he wrote that he was ashamed of the document and attached the following commentary:
This document is kept in order that possibly some young man may run across this—and possibly I will save him from being a damned fool. If you go to war—but DON'T DO IT—don't get dramatic—NOBODY GIVES A DAMN ABOUT YOU, except your parents, and they can't help. This will is a fine example of VALOR (bunk), Unselfishness (childish egotism), and the rest of the traits the BIG BOYS work on us to go and murder somebody as their collectors. This letter is a true example of human vanity and false family values.
Remember—it takes MORE GUTS to refuse to fight, than it does to prance around in a uniform, and get shot at.
The almost fatally wounded Maverick finally made his way back through French-American lines to a field hospital, where he collapsed from loss of blood. When the field hospital was brought under enemy shell fire, he was moved to Base Hospital 115 at Vichy. After extensive surgery, it took him more than a month to get back on his feet, and he never fully recovered from the effects of his wounds. He apparently recovered enough, however, for a bit of revelry in Paris before the return voyage to New York in December of 1918. After a two-week sojourn in New York, he was sent to the Base Hospital at Fort Sam Houston, San Antonio, where he was discharged on February 16, 1919. On January 1, 1920, Maverick received a copy of general orders citing him for "gallantry in action and especially meritorious service," for which he was later awarded the Silver Star.
Almost immediately after Maverick had returned to his law practice in San Antonio, he was on his way abroad again, mainly to do some legal research in Dublin, Ireland, concerning a legacy left to the Right Reverend J. W. Shaw, archbishop of New Orleans. This trip lasted from early March to August of 1919. It is not treated in Maverick's semiautobiographical A Maverick American, and it is worth noting here only for whatever insight it offers into the development of the future politician. On the first leg of his trip he stopped off to see his devoted mentor, Aunt Ellen, who reported that "seeing Maury was just one more delight that I hadn't counted on. He ... fussed with & abused his Uncle Sully & me as if he had been 3 yrs. old. His Uncle Sully was so overcome when he saw his wounds that he had to turn away & couldn't speak."
Scraps of records that Maverick kept indicate that much of his time was spent in traveling about the British Isles with major stops in Dublin, Edinburgh, and London. Though he apparently made a nice vacation out of this trip, he maintained the serious interests that were a part of his continuing self-education. He developed the habit at this time of jotting notes concerning people he had met and places he had visited and the habit of reading and studying as he traveled. In Dublin he bought a book of instructions on how to learn the Irish language and a series of public-affairs pamphlets such as The Nature and Rights of Property and Origin and Nature of Civil Authority by Reverend M. M. O'Kane, both published in Belfast in 1917, as well as Ulster's Opportunity: A United Ireland (Dublin, 1917) by "an Irish K.C."
It seemed that during this trip Maury's indulgent and devoted mother and aunt were engaged in a contest to determine which of them could present the most extravagant evidence of his prowess as a lady killer. Mama wrote that she had told a girl who complained that Maury's love letters were of no more than four lines that she "thought he was doing beautifully when one considered how many love letters you had to write." Less than two weeks later she made the following report: "The entire town is consumed with curiosity about your trip to Europe. Some girls insisted on knowing where you were & Ellen S. told them 'the Crown Prince of G. was suing for a divorce & that you were correspondent.' To Mac Houston she told 'that you had been hastily called to the Peace Convention to take Clemenceau's place.'"
But Maverick's days as a peripatetic bachelor were numbered. Shortly after he returned to San Antonio in the summer of 1919, he was attending a party at what is now the Texas Military Institute. A pretty, vivacious young woman was there named Terrell Louise Dobbs, who was living with her aunt and uncle, Dr. and Mrs. Thomas Terrell Jackson, in San Antonio. A friend, George Clifton, said to Miss Dobbs, "I want to introduce you to Maury Maverick; he's going to give a party at Sunshine Ranch, and he'll invite you." The two met, and Maverick invited her to the party. Maury Maverick was anything but handsome, indeed his nickname was "Ug," but women were attracted to him, and he was cocksure and persistent. Miss Dobbs sensed his design at first meeting and wrote to her sister, "This man thinks he's going to marry me, but he's not." She later received the formal invitation and a dance program that had been hand painted by Mrs. Albert Maverick, but she did not go to the party. Instead she went on a trip to Port Aransas with her aunt and uncle. The day after his party, Maverick called Miss Dobbs and announced that he was coming to Port Aransas. She met him at the ferry, and he asked her to marry him on the spot. She refused, and explains today with a coquettish air, "I was only ninetten, and besides, I had a few other things going on at the time."
Thereafter, Maverick moved steadily. He came to the house ostensibly to see her uncle and went to political meetings with him. But all the while Maverick was bombarding her with flowers, and he gradually ran off his less persistent rivals until Miss Dobbs agreed in December that she would marry him. They were married May 22, 1920, in San Antonio.
Terrell Maverick had wanted to be a June bride, but had she been there would have been no time for a honeymoon trip, because Maury Maverick had committed himself to be on hand in San Antonio to campaign for his uncle, Representative James L. Slayden, who faced a tough contest that he was to lose. This was Mrs. Maverick's initiation into politics, and, as she explained in 1962, "From that summer political activities in general and the Democratic primary elections in particular have dominated and enriched my life." It was an exciting life that she led as the wife of Maury Maverick—I was never bored," she said. It is doubtful that she ever bored her husband or anybody else for that matter. She is to this day a pretty, petite woman of great charm, enthusiasm, and verve. She had little formal education, but, like Ellen Slayden, she learned rapidly and outstripped many people with formal educations.
Maury Maverick was the dominant figure in his family, but Mrs. Maverick said, "Though I learned a lot from him, he didn't smother me." Her role was not limited to that of the attractive wife and mother who stands in the background of the spotlighted public figure. She had her own views, and Maverick respected and sought them. She not only accompanied him at political conventions and the like, but she was an active participant in her own right on many occasions. She gave him good-humored but unflattering criticisms of his speeches and decisions, and she helped to assuage his wounds, both real and political. Her talents can be readily perceived in the preface she wrote for Ellen Slayden's Washington Wife.
Two children were born to Maury and Terrell Maverick—a son, Maury, Jr., on January 3, 1921, and a daughter, Terrelita, on January 10, 1926. Maverick was, like his father, a devoted man. He had a good relationship with his children, not unlike that with his own father. He spent as much time with his children as he could, taking them on trips and swimming excursions. He also passed on to his children his father's love of nature and animals. Maverick once returned from a trip to Mexico with a pair of javelinas (peccaries), which he named Anthony and Cleopatra. Kept in the yard as pets, one eventually died and the other had to be shipped off to the zoo when it playfully sank its teeth into a visitor's hand. On another occasion he brought back a black bear and a mountain lion, which he gave to the San Antonio Zoo.
Maury, Jr.'s first recollection of his father was the sight of a "tremendous series of scars" that covered his body, and the agony that he suffered. Young Maury recalled that when he was about the age of seven his father would get up in the middle of the night and sit in a bathtub of hot water to ease the recurring pains from his wounds. Maury, Jr., would wander into the bathroom and stand there while his father talked to him about such subjects as world peace. "Papa always talked to me like an equal of sorts—always took me with him," said Maury, Jr., as he explained how his father showed him around Washington and introduced him to "great old-time newspaper people" and political leaders. He particularly remembers meeting Senator George Norris, regarded by his father as "the greatest living American."
The correspondence between Maury Maverick and his son and daughter in their youth reveals the same sort of affectionate jibes and good-humored criticism that was used by Albert Maverick—though Albert would not have been as earthy as this father and son. After one of several complaints from teen-aged Maury, Jr., concerning his assignment to latrine duty at Texas Military Institute, the parental advice was:
As for being corporal of the crapping can, there was once a great General in Athens who came back, and purposely to insult him, they put him in charge of the garbage and trash of the city and the emptying of the crappers. In order to humiliate his enemies, he made Athens the cleanest and most beautiful city in the world.
Therefore, if you wish to be famous, keep the toilets clean and you will go down in history as the greatest corporal who ever lived.
On another occasion, Maverick's teen-aged scion wrote to complain bitterly that he had not received a football letter to which he was sure he was entitled. He said that since his father had taught him that "you can't cuss" in letters, he would have to say that he had been "sexual intercoursed."
Richard B. Henderson
Maury Maverick, A Political Biography
The New York Times praised his "bulldog courage and disarming sincerity," and later members of Congress described him in such terms as "brilliant," "highly intelligent and intensely patriotic," "courageous and forthright," "shockingly frank, but refreshingly candid," and "a man of great vision and understanding."
Maury Maverick was all of these things and many more; he was one of the most colorful and vital figures of recent American political history. The story of his career and its impact upon our political life has been told only in fragments from time to time. The former New Deal congressman, mayor of San Antonio, and chairman of the World War II Smaller War Plants Corporation preempted the best of all possible titles for a study of his career when he chose A Maverick American as the title for his semi-autobiographical book published in 1937. He was a maverick American, not just a maverick Texan. He was truly "unbranded," the dictionary meaning of the term that his grandfather contributed to the American lexicon. He was, as well, a maverick legislator, mayor, and thinker.
The Mavericks were dissenters and independents before the political connotation was given to their name. Samuel Maverick of Pendleton, South Carolina (Maury's great-grandfather), and his son, Samuel Augustus Maverick, were sharply critical of the exaggerations of their fellow South Carolinians with respect to the allegedly oppresive Tariffs of 1824 and 1828. Samuel A. Maverick, a young lawyer and recent graduate of Yale, presented a closely reasoned argument against nullification, secession, and extreme states' rights postures in general. When his father delivered a speech to counter the arguments of his neighbor, John C. Calhoun, the younger Maverick challenged a heckler in the audience to a duel and slightly wounded the fellow in the contest.
The younger Samuel's unpopular position forced him to give up his aspirations for a political career in South Carolina, and, at his father's suggestion, he went to manage a plantation in Alabama. When stories of the great adventure in Texas began to reach him, he determined to go there. He arrived in the small village of San Antonio de Bexar in the fall of 1835, within weeks of the inception of the Texas Revolution.
After he had played one of the leading roles in the Texas Revolution, Samuel A. Maverick was a delegate to the convention that prepared the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836, but he had no hand in it. High waters delayed his arrival until March 3, the day after the document was completed. He was permitted to sign it, however, and he later participated in the drafting of the Constitution of the Republic of Texas.
The first Texas Maverick was a land speculator—with perhaps the largest single set of holdings in the state. His biographers depict him as a man of almost unbelievable integrity and modesty. Though twice elected mayor of San Antonio, many times to the Texas Congress and State Legislature, and finally Chief Justice of Bexar County, he is said never to have sought or campaigned for an office. He also showed the extraordinary tenacity and unbending will when doing what he thought right that was later exhibited by his grandson.
An example of the Maverick character is to be found in the Perote Prison story. In September 1842 the Mexican government sent a major expedition, headed by General Adrian Woll, to regain Texas. The forces invaded San Antonio, and, in the course of their victorious battle, Sam Maverick was taken prisoner. He and his fellow prisoners were force-marched eighteen hundred miles to Perote Prison in Mexico. During almost unspeakable hardships—chained and in ill health—Maverick had an opportunity to win freedom from President Antonio Santa Anna if the Texan would promise to support a token reannexation of Texas by Mexico.
The United States minister, General Waddy Thompson, reported that Maverick replied, "I cannot persuade myself that such an annexation on any terms, would be advantageous to Texas, and I therefore cannot say so, for I regard a lie as a crime, and one which I cannot commit even to secure my release; I must, therefore, continue to wear my chains, galling as they are." Thompson offered the comment, "Such an act recorded by Plutarch would have added another page as bright as that which perpetuates the noble constance and heroic virtue of Regulus." Thompson reported further that he was soon able, as a "personal favor" to him, to secure the release of Maverick and two other prisoners.
Six children survived from the ten born to Samuel A. and Mary Maverick. The youngest son, Albert, was the father of Maury Maverick. There is no colorful career to report for Albert Maverick, but there was nothing tame about his youth. As a boy he hunted, fished, and learned the ways of the Texas wilderness with a famed Indian fighter and scout, Polycarpio Rodriguez. The account of his school years is filled with recitals of youthful pranks and assorted mischief. A fellow student at the University of Virginia described Albert as having too much "animal spirit" for serious scholarship. It was alleged that he once stole the great iron gates at the entrance to the university, and Maury Maverick took great delight in chiding his father about an escapade in which the elder Maverick drank too much wine and performed the never-to-be-duplicated feat of climbing one of the university's stately columns.
After one year at the University of Virginia, Albert was advised that his professors had given him passing marks on the condition that he not return. The final phase of his education took the unusual form of a walking trip across England from Liverpool to Dover with some days spent in the British Museum, followed by a seven-month stay in Paris. The trip, and particularly the stay in Paris, seemed to be a sobering one. He found Paris to be a shocking "den of immorality" with some women showing their legs "as high as the knee," but he managed to find lodging with "a good honest family." He spent seven months studying independently and learning to speak French. On his return to the United States in March 1877, he went straight to Piedmont, Virginia, to claim his promised bride, Jane Lewis Maury, a direct descendent of the Reverend James Maury, Thomas Jeffereson's first teacher.
Maury Maverick frequently referred proudly to his namesake, Matthew Fontaine Maury, the famous nineteenth-century pioneer in the field of oceanography. His biographer's description of his characteristic attitudes toward matters academic bears an uncanny resemblance to the characteristics of Maury Maverick. Matthew Maury did poorly on examinations at the United States Naval Academy. His apparent mediocrity was attributed to the fact that his fellows made high grades by answering "mainly in terms of the books" without understanding what it was all about. "Maury's mind had original habits. He was by nature a trail-blazer. He could not so well follow other men in speech and thought—he thought and spoke for himself." Elsewhere he is described as "stout," "largely self-educated," and an opponent of "humbuggery"—a no less accurate portrait of Maury Maverick.
Almost immediately after his marriage to Jane Maury, Albert took her to the Maverick homestead in San Antonio. After a short stint in a low-paying clerical job, he tried ranching near Bandera, Texas, for a few years, but a severe drought drove the growing family back to San Antonio. There Albert Maverick managed the Maverick Land Office and made general investments in San Antonio real estate and business operations, activities for which he had little ability or interest. Though the tall, handsome Albert faithfully went "down to the office" on every working day until he was eighty-seven years of age, he didn't belong there. He became, by all accounts, a quiet, retiring, scholarly type, with a strong attachment to family and home. Unlike his father and son, he did not hold public office. This "beautiful man," as Mrs. Walter P. Webb describes him, was almost Thoreauvian in his love for nature and his joy in working with his hands, qualities that, despite vast differences in their personalities, were as evident in the life of Maury Maverick as in that of his father. Some of Albert Maverick's most absorbing activities were such things as keeping records of the chilling Texas northers as they swept in over the hills into San Antonio and carefully noting the arrival and departure of the purple martins that came to the large house he had erected for them near his veranda. He made saddles for all of his children and melted down Mexican pesos to fashion heavy buckles for the belts that he made for all of his sons. The family referred to them as Maverick belts, and Maury Maverick kept his until the day he died.
A biographer who had no difficulty finding noteworthy achievements and honors of other members of the Maverick family, said only that Albert was a "progressive citizen of San Antonio" and "a pioneer for the conservation of the natural beauty of our city, having publicly objected to the destruction of the cypress tress as early as 1882." Albert Maverick was generous "to the point of eccentricity," and he let the major part of an inherited fortune simply slip through his hands. He sustained serious losses in periods of financial panic and depression, but one reason for this was that he would not collect rent from distressed tenants.
Jane Maverick was a short, bustling woman with a strong, commanding personality. Albert was head of the house, but she was the manager. As Maury Maverick explained, "My mother has executive ability, running the place and doing the ordering and the talking for both. My father is a quiet man." Jane was no mere housewife. A houseful of children and a lack of formal education did not prevent her from becoming a literate woman, knowledgable about public affairs. She traveled occasionally, and in later years when the children were grown she made carefully prepared speeches to local clubs concerning her experiences.
Albert and Jane had eleven children; the eleventh was Fontaine Maury Maverick. Though he steadfastly maintained that he was brought by a wise and loquacious old stork, he was born on October 23, 1895, at the grand old Maverick home at 218 Avenue E, just off San Antonio's Alamo Plaza. His father put him down as a "cheerful" small boy, and Maury himself described his boyhood as "free and easy"—listening to the band on the square, buying tamales and Mexican sweets at the chili stands. He demonstrated quite early that he had inherited some of Papa's youthful mischief-making. Palmer Giles, a rancher who lives near Comfort, Texas, was a boyhood playmate and school chum of Maury Maverick. Giles tells a tale of one of the more extravagant stunts engineered by Maury at the age of seven or eight. The Giles and Maverick parents were chatting in the parlor while the boys went off to play. Maury and his brother George asked Giles if he would like to take a bath. Giles responded that he had had one that week, but Maverick repeated the question with a wink. He and George then led the preplexed Giles down a long porch to a large, completely tiled bathroom. The boys then took off their clothes, placed thick towels under and around the edges of the door, closed the door tightly on the towels, and proceeded to fill the entire bathroom with water about three feet deep. After frolicking about for a time, the boys drained and cleaned up the "swimming pool," and the parents were apparently none the wiser.
In 1905, when Maury Maverick was nine years old, the family moved to what they came to call Sunshine Ranch, in what is now suburban San Antonio but which was then in the countryside overlooking the city. There Albert built a large, plain two-story house with a long porch and an upstairs gallery designed to catch the prevailing breeze. The view from this spot is still impresive, but the visitor in those days could see "a wide-spreading valley, the wastes of green mesquite and yellow stubble, and the distant town half drowned in purple mist, the few high buildings very white and stately, suggesting Venice."
The Albert Mavericks were "getting along," but they were far from wealthy. Nonetheless, the big, plainly furnished house was a Sunday afternoon Mecca for many members of the Maverick clan and their friends. Everyone knew that the children were invited, and the atmosphere was one of warm family ties, great fun, and a vigorous exchange of ideas. Albert carved the roast with great aplomb and presided over the dinner with great dignity, but later the children gathered on the veranda to eat watermelon, cavort, and perform tricks, while the adults gathered inside for stimulating discussions. The Mavericks were a lively and opinionated bunch, and the discussions would often become arguments, but Jane Maverick would not permit the participants to engage in personalities.
Maury Maverick once wrote that his mother gave him "many spankings to no avail," but that he deserved one thousand from his father who gave him only two, but he enjoyed the sort of relationship with both of his parents that most boys would order if they could. The occasional firmness and parental advice was tempered by understanding, deep affection, and often a dash of wit. Maury was no more than ten or eleven years of age when he announced (inspired perhaps by his father's youthful adventures) that he was going to California. He saddled up his pony and gathered a few provisions as his mother and father tried to dissuade him. When they saw that he was determined, they exacted the promise from him that he would stop for a week at the Giles' Ranch near Comfort. After Maury had left, Mrs. Maverick called Mrs. Giles and said, "My little boy is leaving for California on his pony. Please delay him as long as possible when he gets to the ranch." Maury and his weary pony survived the hot seventy-mile trip through rugged country, and the strategy worked. He and his playmate, Palmer Giles, spent half the summer doing all the things that boys of ten and eleven do in that wild hill country, and then Maury saddled up and headed for home.
Much of the correspondence between Maverick and his parents reveals affectionate joshing and the indulgence of doting Mama and Papa. When Maury was attending the University of Texas he wrote to Papa to request some money to attend a football game in Houston. He explained that the trip would involve night travel, requiring enough money for a "birth" both ways. Albert responded, "I'm glad I can send you the money; I had no idea you were in such a delicate condition." (This was often the style in which Albert chided various of his children into better spelling and writing habits.) When his son was a lieutenant in France, Albert wrote (after occasionally sending him a hundred dollars), "Call on Gen. Persh., & see your pay is doubled. Say it is imperative because your father insists on your employing a guardian & I want him to be a responsible person."
In one of his books Maury Maverick jocularly characterized his mother as having "slightly Faschist tendencies" and at another point referred to her as a "Mussolini." Thus the first pass to the gallery of the United States House of Representatives that freshman Representative Maury Maverick sent to his mother was filled out in the name of "Signora Mussolini." Another card, however, asking that courtesies be extended at the White House, was made out to a "Little Jane Maury." The cards were attached to a pseudo-formal letter that read:
Dear Mrs. Maverick:
I hope you will visit Washington sometime and hear me speak.... Try to remember this: it is harder to be a congressman than a mother. You only have eleven children and 65 grandchildren. I have a quarter of a million.
Respectfully,
Maury Maverick
(Your Congressman)
Mama responded archly with a note addressed to the "Most hon. Congressman," giving him a "special invitation to Sunshine Ranch," but she concluded, "Please don't bring your quarter of a million children." The note was signed, "Signora Mussolini."
There was nothing typical about the education of Maury Maverick. He volunteered the information, not proudly, but candidly, that he "never graduated from anything." He began a program of desultory (at first) self-education at the age of twelve or thirteen that was to continue to his death. There were many serious books in the Maverick home, and the family read and discussed them. Maverick said that he was reading Greek philosophy at the age of twelve....
In addition to reading "every issue" of Appeal to Reason in his early teens, Maverick read Robert Hunter's Poverty at the age of thirteen. Hunter's book examined the extent, evils, and necessary remedies of poverty in the United States and mentioned suggestions and criticisms from such leading economists as Richard T. Ely and John R. Commons. In this book Maverick read of the downtrodden "struggling up the face of a barren precipice," because of the "brutal power of the economic forces which dominate their lives." The impact of books of this type and readings of this sort was obvious in Maverick's lifetime of evangelistic efforts in behalf of all sorts of programs to alleviate the condition of the poor.
The Southwestern intellectual equivalent of derring-do pulp magazines and other schoolboy contraband when Maverick was a boy was the Iconoclast, a paper written in Waco, Texas, by William Cowper Brann, a character as fabulous as Maverick. Brann was a self-taught philosopher-journalist who left home for a newspaper career at the age of thirteen. Another maverick, he spent his spare time reading "science, philosophy, history, biography and general literature." He wrote some of the most colorful prose that was ever applied to paper in the United States. Defense of intellectual freedom was his forte, but he was likely to direct a withering blast at anything that happened to strike his fancy. "He was a hater of shams and defied every form of fraud, hyposcrisy and deceit...." Roy Bedichek refers to Brann as a "provincial Voltaire" who opposed injustice, cruelty, senseless repression and "hocus pocus," but "in the heat of controversy he was, like the great Voltaire himself, guilty of each of these abominations, as who is not?" The paper is said to have reached a circulation of ninety thousand at the time of Brann's death—extraordinary even today for a publication of its type. Editorial comment on his death came from every part of the United States.
Maverick was too young to have subscribed to this paper, but he said that he read the two-volume collection at the age of eleven. He never stated that Brann influenced him, but there is a considerable parallel between some of the best of Brann and the character and attitudes of Maverick. This is particularly true of the readiness of both men to leap to the defense when any attempt at suppression of freedom and expression was made. Another strong parallel was to be found in the opposition to sham and hypocrisy evidenced by both men. While reading one of Brann's speeches, Maverick marked with approval: "One may ... have Plato at his fingers' ends and ever remain a fool."
But drawing too much of a parallel would be an injustice to Maverick. Brann's bottle of vitriol poured forth racist outbursts—even to advocating the killing of the "buck Negro"—and his motives were often questionable. Also, Maverick expressed disagreement with Brann's essentially negative approach. For example, Brann said of his role as an iconoclast, pessimist, and skeptic, "I am no perfectionist. I do not build the spasmodic sob nor spill the scalding tear because all men are not Sir Galahads in quest of the Holy Grail, and all women with two pair of reversible wings and the aurora borealis for a hat-band." This statement must have piqued Maverick the reformer at some later reading, for he wrote opposite in the margin, "I am not envisioning a perfect society—but at least a moving one."
Maverick's claims concerning his early reading were apparently not idle boasts. At least as early as the age of seventeen, he was keeping an annotated notebook with the title, "Books I Have Read." Most of the works listed were political and social histories, with some novels of the same genre. Maverick did not merely read such books, he studied them. An appreciation of how effectively he used books can be gathered from the following entry, written when he was nineteen:
Civil History of the Confederate States—J. L. M. Curry, 1901—B. F. Johnson-Richmond, Read June 1915.
The author should take into consideration the fact that the Civil War was over in '65, and that Confederate money is now no good. He is too extreme—rather narrow-minded. He is almost as bad as some old narrow-minded northerners who write about how they saved the North or rather the "union" against the rebels, etc. and talk about the "noble blacks" and the war as one of "civilization vs. barabarism."
In another entry, Maverick described The Citadel by Samuel Merwin as the story of a young member of Congress sent there "by the interests." Maverick then suggested that the political novel form "could be used by professors who write on Political and Social Economy. It would be sure to create public interest and educate the public, who otherwise would read trash." Thus young Maverick anticipated the current use of novels as vehicles to learning in political science courses in the colleges and universities.
Despite Maverick's references to the dominant role of his mother, his father was the primary influence on Maury's early ideas. Albert Maverick and his son read and discussed together the works of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, and the elder Maverick taught his son the lessons of free inquiry and freedom of expression. The atmosphere in the home was conducive to the development of liberal views on most subjects. As to religion, for example, Maverick's parents were devout in their own way, but they were not regular churchgoers. As Maverick explained, his father did not try to dictate his children's thoughts; rather, he hoped that they would develop their own. "He merely offers information, so that they will not go into the world as a set of nitwits. As for our economic or religious opinions, he cares nothing." Something of the father's views are reflected in this representative excerpt form his fragmentary diary, written during the depression years:
May 7, 1932—The money interests who own our Government got our baby President Hoover, several weeks ago, to make a special appeal to the people not to hoard money. What a mockery, & how transparent! The golden stream of interest (usury) flows east and north ... to the overfilled coffers of the usurers, who own & act through the banks concerned only in increasing their capital—not in the increasing misery of the people. The government should own all the banks, & interest by degrees, abated, and made illegal. Employment should be furnished to the people, in road building & public works—to make them self-respecting & not paupers, & more, a limit must be set to a man's possessions & service become the badge of honor, service for all, for the common good.
The range of Albert Maverick's knowledge and interests is revealed in this passage from a letter to Lieutenant Maury Maverick in 1917: "Let us hope help can get to Italy in time to ward off a surrender, & mingle our tears over Kerensky, discredited. Every man is doomed to failure in the case of Russia—hordes of semi-civilized wild people suddenly given power, & German intrigue & strategy will profit by it. Peace is a long way off."
Maverick's early self-education was not confined to books and father-son discussions. Family gatherings were often the occasion for discussions and, more likely, heated debates on public affairs. His home and relatives' homes were fairly frequent stopping-off points for important public figures—it was in this way that he met William Jennings Bryan, for example. Maury's watchful eye also caught the political ferment that was going on about him during his grammar school and high school years. He told of his earliest recollection of being induced to do some serious thinking for himself by the sight of a man being mobbed and driven from San Antonio's Alamo Plaza as he tried to make a speech. As a grammar school student in 1909, he watched and heard Francisco I. Madero and his supporters plan the revolution by which Madero was soon to become president of Mexico. Two years later, at San Antonio's Main Avenue High School, Maverick and his friends organized a discussion club called the Atheneum Association. Shortly after its organization, General Bernardo Reyes came to San Antonio to attempt to establish a revolutionary force to overthrow Madero. Reyes was living with his family and some assistants on San Pedro Avenue, near the high school. Students generally favored Madero, and they subjected Reyes' home to rock throwing and other harassment. The Atheneum group sought to make ammends by inviting Reyes to speak to the student body, and Maury Maverick was the spokesman for the group. His friend Hobart Huson said, "Maury made a brave, but excruciating, effort as interpreter," but nonetheless he was able to convey the message to Reyes.
The school authorities had not been consulted, and they strongly opposed the invitation. Other school clubs adopted resolutions against having Reyes speak. Association members were attempting to find another location for the speech, but before they could do so, Reyes returned to Mexico. Huson concluded that "Maury Maverick got his first lesson and experience in creating publicity, which served him well in future years."
In 1912, without having completed high school, Maverick boarded a steamer at Galveston for Virginia Military Institue by way of New York and Washington. He rode most of the trip in the steerage, though he had first-class passage. He discussed socialism, Henry George and the single tax, Karl Marx, and the "Wall Street exploitation" of Cuba with the steerage passengers. He ate the steerage fare and typically began to discuss ways and means of getting something done about it. The first mate labeled him an agitator and ordered him to eat in the first-class accommodations.
In Washington, sixteen-year-old Maverick stayed for a time with his uncle, Congressman James L. Slayden, an outstanding pacifist, and insisted on being introduced to Congressman Victor Berger and Senator Robert M. LaFollette. Maury's recollections of his year at Virginia Military Institute consists of two parades celebrating the election of President Woodrow Wilson and an "average" scholastic record. He kept a "Maury Maverick Memory Book" in which he recorded the expected pranks, "gripes" at cadet officers, demerits, and such entries as "Penalty drill today in overcoats. Cold." A letter of July 10, 1917, in the "Memory Book" certified that Maverick had "a good record [at VMI]" and "successfully completed the topics of instruction in the fourth class." The book also revealed the youthful Maverick to be harboring the typical homesickness and sentimental attachment to Sunshine Ranch and his native Texas. Snapshots depict a stocky, tanned youth with a shock of unruly hair and an air of mischief—indeed, beneath one photograph Maverick wrote, "a creation of the devils: devilishly short, and devilishly ugly."
On his return to Texas in 1913, Maverick enrolled at the University of Texas "in journalism," according to his account. It appears, however, that he enrolled in a basic prelaw curriculum and elected a course in journalism during his sophomore year. He did work on the Daily Texan (the student newspaper) as a reporter and later as an issue editor from time to time during the 1914-1915 academic year. The scanty records available show that he took two years of English, German, and public speaking and one year each of mathematics, English history, geology, American history, journalism, and government. His grades were poor.
By his own admission and the testimony of professors, Maury Maverick had little patience for the formal aspects of his schooling. He not only found his courses to be dull and turned to his own reading list, but he also spent considerable time in frivolity and roistering about the campus. Professor Brooks thought that Maverick had merely fallen victim to the middle-aged man's common obsession of imagining himself as a "regular heller" in his undergraduate days, but it is just as likely that Maverick did not exaggerate his student high jinks. After one drinking spree at a football game, he scrawled some outrageous obscenities on a postcard and mailed it to a friend, and it was only by the intervention of some influential friends of the family that he was saved from indictment by a federal grand jury. In his first book Maverick gave a lengthy recital of expulsions and near expulsions for hazing students, "rotten-egging professors," painting the water tank and "being a very poor student." The late Walter Prescott Webb, a distinguished American historian and close friend of the Mavericks, delighted in telling the story of Maverick's lament to the dean, "Why do you always call me in when something goes wrong around here?" Dr. Lewis H. Haney, one of Maverick's instructors and now professor emeritus of economics and lecturer at New York University, testifies, "My recollections of Maury as a student are that he took little interest in scholarly attainments, and did not apply himself diligently to his studies. He had more interest in outside activities on the fun-making and social side of college life."
Maury admitted to participation in the publication of an underground newspaper, the Blunderbuss, which appeared on the University of Texas campus each April Fool's Day. It had the primary objective of lampooning and even slandering members of the faculty. The issue printed April 1, 1915, bears the unmistakable stamp of Maury Maverick, though the identity of editors and writers was carefully concealed. A front-page story concerning "egg-throwing" has the flavor of Maverick-via-Rabelais—whose works he reread dozens of times. Also, the paper has several fictitious items about Maury Maverick, such as "Mr. Maury Maverick has established a select matrimonial bureau at his apartment on Nineteenth Street. The Blunderbuss desires to wish him success in his undertaking as we know no one knows 'em better than he does."
But there were items on the plus side of the ledger. Dr. Haney said that Maverick had an "alert and active mind. He was an independent thinker to the extent of being a non-conformist." He banded with some fellow recalcitrants in the organization of a group known as the Campus Buzzards. "We proclaimed ourselves," he said, "as carrion philosophers and permitted no reading except that which was prohibited." He learned about the things that interested him by attending bull sessions with some of the younger professors, going to labor meetings, and listening eagerly to such speakers as Scott Nearing, "who had the impudence to suggest that lynching of Negroes should stop." One of the young professors who joined these bull sessions, poet and author Stark Young, wrote of Maverick, "I remember him as one of the vivid figures in my Texas acquaintance. He had a vigorous, independent and original way of thinking and speaking."
Maury's unsuccessful second year at the University of Texas exhausted Papa's patience; it was time for the young man to get to work. Maury received an offer of a job as a reporter on the Amarillo Daily News on August 18, 1915, and he accepted immediately. The job paid sixty dollars per month for, as Maury put it, "Title: city editor. Real position: local reporter." Maverick seemingly did well at the News. One of his journalism instructors (addressing him as "Execrable Copy Reader, Pathetic Reporter and Sad City Editor") told Maverick that he would soon "be able to write as good a story as any of them." His aunt and mentor, Ellen Maury Slayden, who wrote Washington Wife, said, "This is good newspaper work. I had no idea Maury could do so well." She later wrote to him:
My dear old Boy,
You made a terrible hole in the family circle when you went away....
I feel kind of proud of you myself, because, you see, I had quite a hand in raising you.
I am really surprised at your good lines, but I am afraid you are elaborating your news with a little too much imagination, and overworking your superlatives.
Ellen Slayden suggested to him that a year out of college would help him: he could go back "as a man and not just a boy who has to work off his foolishness." But encouragement and admonitions were not enough to keep Maverick on the job in Amarillo. Letters from his mother indicated that he was suffering from a combination of discouragement over his low pay and position and homesickness. Mrs. Maverick told him to stick to the job—that his father had started to work in his youth at thirty-five dollars a month and that the family was essentially broke at the moment. Aunt Ellen gave similar advice and held out the promise of better things. She implied that she would help him to go to Columbia University the next year to study under Talcott Williams, the outstanding journalist and critic, and she enclosed a piece entitled "The Creed of a Great Newspaper."
Despite the influence that Mrs. Slayden exerted upon Maury in other matters, it was to no avail on this occasion. In a few days he had presumably persuaded his parents to permit him to return to the University of Texas—this time to the Law School. Maverick later boasted that he had "jammed all my three years of law into one." Though this statement may sound extravagant, it is not far from the absolute facts. His record card in the University of Texas Law School shows that he took thirteen courses with an average grade of 79. The record indicates that he received a grade of 80 in "International Law A" by taking the examination without having attended classes. Dr. A. Leon Green, distinguished professor of law and one of Maverick's instructors, says that these scores are only respectable and would not represent the high level of achievement as the same scores would today. Nonetheless, Maverick's feat was rather remarkable. He took and passed the Texas bar examination in Austin in May 1916. It is impossible to determine the level of his performance on the examination because the Clerk's Office of the Texas Supreme Court has no records of such matters prior to 1919.
Dr. Green says that Maverick continued some of the pranks and frivolty in law school, but he adds: "I never doubted Maury's ability, and his salty way of putting things even then was extremely refreshing. He gave no quarter to any one and asked none. Were he in law school today he would be tops in any company. Law teaching has finally caught up with his spirit. This is confirmed by the fact that in his later years he was a favorite with law students and faculties all over the country. It is a pity he died when he was needed most.... His is a rare spirit and should be an inspiration to all youngsters who aspire to public life or who have an interest in public men and affairs."
Professor Brooks, who was president of the American Political Science Association in 1940, said of Maury's outlandish study habits: "Evidently his intellectual curiosity was insatiable. Given a really understanding tutor he would have forged ahead at a tremendous pace." Maverick did not have a tutor, but he was able to profit in his youth and early manhood from the sage advice of another self-educated Maury of rather remarkable attainments—his Aunt Ellen. She never attended a "real school," but she read widely and traveled to international peace meetings with her husband, James L. Slayden, a congressman from San Antonio. Her abilities were such that she contributed articles to Century magazine and various newspapers on such topics as political problems in Mexico.
As early as the spring of 1916, while still a law student, Maury Maverick was attempting to get into some military service. He sought the help of his uncle, Congressman James L. Slayden, and that of Senator Morris Sheppard in an effort to secure a commission in the U.S. cavalry. Maverick hoped to get into the fighting in Mexico. Sheppard wrote that he remembered him "quite well" from a meeting in Amarillo and that it would be a pleasure to recommend him for a commission if war with Mexico should break out.
With characteristic audacity Maverick seized what he thought was the ultimate opportunity to realize his ambition for a commission. General John J. Pershing was stopping over in San Antonio at a time when Maverick was attending a dance at a local hotel. Pershing and a fellow officer were looking in on the dance when Maverick spotted the general and dashed over to introduce himself. Then he asked his dancing partner to dance with the startled Pershing and asked another girl to dance with Pershing's friend. The officers stayed for awhile and seemed to enjoy themselves immensely. The next day Maverick called General Pershing and asked if he would like to see the historic sites of San Antonio "in my car." After some hesitation, Pershing agreed, and Maverick begged enough money from his father to rent a car for the excursion. He then picked up the same girls and proudly drove his captive general and his aide around the city. At the end of the sightseeing tour, Maverick thought the time was ripe to put the bite on the grateful general. But when he asked Pershing to help him get a commission, the crestfallen Maverick heard the general say, "Son, I'll tell you what to do. You go out to Fort Sam Houston and enlist, and you can tell them you have my recommendation."
When the United States did become involved in World War I, Maverick was one of the first men in San Antonio to enlist in the Army. In the spring of 1917 he was sent to the Federal Reserve Student Training Camp at Camp Funston, Leon Springs, Texas, where he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army Reserve on June 11, 1917. He kept up a constant barrage of letters, mainly to Representative Slayden, in an attempt to get an overseas assignment. He tried to get transferred to the air corps and even threatened to resign his commission and join the Canadian forces in order to get overseas." Slayden told him to "keep his shirt on," that policies could not be changed for an individual: "Even [Theodore] Roosevelt who has influence with hundreds of thousands of people almost as crazy as he is could not alter the predetermined course of events."
Maury was sent to join the First Colorado Infantry at Trinidad, Colorado, in September, 1917, and it was soon ordered to the Fortieth Division training base at Camp Kearney, Linda Vista, California. He was put in charge of a machine-gun company and was promoted to first lieutenant in the National Guard on December 21, 1917.
Maverick's first baptism of fire was in a different sort of war, which he was to fight in for the rest of his life—the struggle for human rights and human dignity. Many of the men under his command were of Mexican descent. Despite Maverick's repeated speeches emphasizing our great heritage of liberty and the necessity for "making the world safe for democracy," when questioned as to why they were fighting, these men could only answer, "De draft board, he send me here." Maverick persuaded the division commander that these men were being misunderstood and abused simply because they did not understand English. He organized language classes for the men and was doing reasonably well with them when a graver problem arose—two of the men deserted and were picked up in Mexico. Maverick was appointed to defend them. He reported, "I studied all about a soldier's constitutional rights—and also got some books on the subject of natural rights. At the trial, I quoted the statements of James Otis and Sam Adams on Natural Rights, made preceding the American Revolution." He went on to argue that these men did not understand what the war was about, that they knew nothing of American customs or the English language, and that it was therefore improper for them to have been drafted. He said he could not tell them why we were fighting, because he really didn't know either. Maverick was threatened with court-martial himself, but the commander relented and issued a memorandum (which Maverick did not mention in his own account of this affair) commending the Texas lieutenant for "his interest in conducting classes for soldiers of Mexican extraction." On the basis of Maverick's contention that the two men had acted out of ignorance rather than cowardice and that they needed help, the commander said that he desired that "this officer [Maverick] take personal charge of the instruction of the two men."
In the summer of 1918 Maverick was shipped overseas. After several days of "drunken brawling" in England, he landed in Cherbourg on September 4, 1918, as the band on the dock played the Marseillaise. In two days he was in the serious and gory business of fighting a war. He joined the First Division at Sarcy, France, as it was moving up to Saint-Mihiel and the front. During the battle of Saint-Mihiel, Maury was working with the regimental headquarters, directing the bringing up of ammunition. While reconnoitering a route for his ammunition wagons, he happened upon twenty-six German soldiers who, as Maury explains with unmatched candor, demanded to be captured and conducted to the rear. Before and after this battle, Maverick had written to his parents that the German soldiers were cowardly, "immoral to obscenity," and that they would not die "like men." He was soon to make a radical change in his views.
After the battle of Saint-Mihiel, Maverick sought and obtained a transfer back to his company and was made executive officer under Lieutenant Frank Felbel, a more experienced officer. There is none of the usual Maverick humor in his grim account of his part in the Argonne offensive, for which he received the Silver Star for gallantry in action. In powerful writing that compares favorably with that of Erich Maria Remarque, he tells a story of stumbling, almost blind, into the Argonne forest at two o'clock on the morning of October 1, 1918, of a loss of communications, of the sudden loss of his company commander, of companions blasted to pieces before his eyes, of heroics by inadvertency or instinct, and then of shell fragments biting into his shoulders and back as he stumbled through shell holes. In the unpublished account he dictated shortly after his experiences, he said: "How did you get back? The way it was with me, I could walk a little bit you see; I was staggering around. I tried to walk and then I got wounded again. I got lost and went back to the German lines. I went in the opposite direction to where I wanted to go and then I had to crawl back.... I crawled back all the way."
After this experience Maverick said that the "Germans were good fighters—I did not find any 'Kamerad' stuff that is talked about." He later said he did not deserve his medals and offered two pithy asides on the subject of heroism and medals. "The line between coward and hero is sometimes very indistinct. Men are suddenly brave or suddenly cowardly. In one moment of emotion they are likely to be branded for life, one way or the other—and wrongly.... Medals are not to reward brave men, but to keep men brave, and make them fight. The ruling classes have always attempted to build up the hero idea. It stops men from thinking."
In a moment when he was "half-drunk and bored," shortly after arriving in France, Maverick sat on the side of the road to Saint-Mihiel and wrote a half-serious, half-facetious will in which he specified that all young male heirs must never shirk military service. On June 8, 1931, perusing his notes and records as he often did, he wrote that he was ashamed of the document and attached the following commentary:
This document is kept in order that possibly some young man may run across this—and possibly I will save him from being a damned fool. If you go to war—but DON'T DO IT—don't get dramatic—NOBODY GIVES A DAMN ABOUT YOU, except your parents, and they can't help. This will is a fine example of VALOR (bunk), Unselfishness (childish egotism), and the rest of the traits the BIG BOYS work on us to go and murder somebody as their collectors. This letter is a true example of human vanity and false family values.
Remember—it takes MORE GUTS to refuse to fight, than it does to prance around in a uniform, and get shot at.
The almost fatally wounded Maverick finally made his way back through French-American lines to a field hospital, where he collapsed from loss of blood. When the field hospital was brought under enemy shell fire, he was moved to Base Hospital 115 at Vichy. After extensive surgery, it took him more than a month to get back on his feet, and he never fully recovered from the effects of his wounds. He apparently recovered enough, however, for a bit of revelry in Paris before the return voyage to New York in December of 1918. After a two-week sojourn in New York, he was sent to the Base Hospital at Fort Sam Houston, San Antonio, where he was discharged on February 16, 1919. On January 1, 1920, Maverick received a copy of general orders citing him for "gallantry in action and especially meritorious service," for which he was later awarded the Silver Star.
Almost immediately after Maverick had returned to his law practice in San Antonio, he was on his way abroad again, mainly to do some legal research in Dublin, Ireland, concerning a legacy left to the Right Reverend J. W. Shaw, archbishop of New Orleans. This trip lasted from early March to August of 1919. It is not treated in Maverick's semiautobiographical A Maverick American, and it is worth noting here only for whatever insight it offers into the development of the future politician. On the first leg of his trip he stopped off to see his devoted mentor, Aunt Ellen, who reported that "seeing Maury was just one more delight that I hadn't counted on. He ... fussed with & abused his Uncle Sully & me as if he had been 3 yrs. old. His Uncle Sully was so overcome when he saw his wounds that he had to turn away & couldn't speak."
Scraps of records that Maverick kept indicate that much of his time was spent in traveling about the British Isles with major stops in Dublin, Edinburgh, and London. Though he apparently made a nice vacation out of this trip, he maintained the serious interests that were a part of his continuing self-education. He developed the habit at this time of jotting notes concerning people he had met and places he had visited and the habit of reading and studying as he traveled. In Dublin he bought a book of instructions on how to learn the Irish language and a series of public-affairs pamphlets such as The Nature and Rights of Property and Origin and Nature of Civil Authority by Reverend M. M. O'Kane, both published in Belfast in 1917, as well as Ulster's Opportunity: A United Ireland (Dublin, 1917) by "an Irish K.C."
It seemed that during this trip Maury's indulgent and devoted mother and aunt were engaged in a contest to determine which of them could present the most extravagant evidence of his prowess as a lady killer. Mama wrote that she had told a girl who complained that Maury's love letters were of no more than four lines that she "thought he was doing beautifully when one considered how many love letters you had to write." Less than two weeks later she made the following report: "The entire town is consumed with curiosity about your trip to Europe. Some girls insisted on knowing where you were & Ellen S. told them 'the Crown Prince of G. was suing for a divorce & that you were correspondent.' To Mac Houston she told 'that you had been hastily called to the Peace Convention to take Clemenceau's place.'"
But Maverick's days as a peripatetic bachelor were numbered. Shortly after he returned to San Antonio in the summer of 1919, he was attending a party at what is now the Texas Military Institute. A pretty, vivacious young woman was there named Terrell Louise Dobbs, who was living with her aunt and uncle, Dr. and Mrs. Thomas Terrell Jackson, in San Antonio. A friend, George Clifton, said to Miss Dobbs, "I want to introduce you to Maury Maverick; he's going to give a party at Sunshine Ranch, and he'll invite you." The two met, and Maverick invited her to the party. Maury Maverick was anything but handsome, indeed his nickname was "Ug," but women were attracted to him, and he was cocksure and persistent. Miss Dobbs sensed his design at first meeting and wrote to her sister, "This man thinks he's going to marry me, but he's not." She later received the formal invitation and a dance program that had been hand painted by Mrs. Albert Maverick, but she did not go to the party. Instead she went on a trip to Port Aransas with her aunt and uncle. The day after his party, Maverick called Miss Dobbs and announced that he was coming to Port Aransas. She met him at the ferry, and he asked her to marry him on the spot. She refused, and explains today with a coquettish air, "I was only ninetten, and besides, I had a few other things going on at the time."
Thereafter, Maverick moved steadily. He came to the house ostensibly to see her uncle and went to political meetings with him. But all the while Maverick was bombarding her with flowers, and he gradually ran off his less persistent rivals until Miss Dobbs agreed in December that she would marry him. They were married May 22, 1920, in San Antonio.
Terrell Maverick had wanted to be a June bride, but had she been there would have been no time for a honeymoon trip, because Maury Maverick had committed himself to be on hand in San Antonio to campaign for his uncle, Representative James L. Slayden, who faced a tough contest that he was to lose. This was Mrs. Maverick's initiation into politics, and, as she explained in 1962, "From that summer political activities in general and the Democratic primary elections in particular have dominated and enriched my life." It was an exciting life that she led as the wife of Maury Maverick—I was never bored," she said. It is doubtful that she ever bored her husband or anybody else for that matter. She is to this day a pretty, petite woman of great charm, enthusiasm, and verve. She had little formal education, but, like Ellen Slayden, she learned rapidly and outstripped many people with formal educations.
Maury Maverick was the dominant figure in his family, but Mrs. Maverick said, "Though I learned a lot from him, he didn't smother me." Her role was not limited to that of the attractive wife and mother who stands in the background of the spotlighted public figure. She had her own views, and Maverick respected and sought them. She not only accompanied him at political conventions and the like, but she was an active participant in her own right on many occasions. She gave him good-humored but unflattering criticisms of his speeches and decisions, and she helped to assuage his wounds, both real and political. Her talents can be readily perceived in the preface she wrote for Ellen Slayden's Washington Wife.
Two children were born to Maury and Terrell Maverick—a son, Maury, Jr., on January 3, 1921, and a daughter, Terrelita, on January 10, 1926. Maverick was, like his father, a devoted man. He had a good relationship with his children, not unlike that with his own father. He spent as much time with his children as he could, taking them on trips and swimming excursions. He also passed on to his children his father's love of nature and animals. Maverick once returned from a trip to Mexico with a pair of javelinas (peccaries), which he named Anthony and Cleopatra. Kept in the yard as pets, one eventually died and the other had to be shipped off to the zoo when it playfully sank its teeth into a visitor's hand. On another occasion he brought back a black bear and a mountain lion, which he gave to the San Antonio Zoo.
Maury, Jr.'s first recollection of his father was the sight of a "tremendous series of scars" that covered his body, and the agony that he suffered. Young Maury recalled that when he was about the age of seven his father would get up in the middle of the night and sit in a bathtub of hot water to ease the recurring pains from his wounds. Maury, Jr., would wander into the bathroom and stand there while his father talked to him about such subjects as world peace. "Papa always talked to me like an equal of sorts—always took me with him," said Maury, Jr., as he explained how his father showed him around Washington and introduced him to "great old-time newspaper people" and political leaders. He particularly remembers meeting Senator George Norris, regarded by his father as "the greatest living American."
The correspondence between Maury Maverick and his son and daughter in their youth reveals the same sort of affectionate jibes and good-humored criticism that was used by Albert Maverick—though Albert would not have been as earthy as this father and son. After one of several complaints from teen-aged Maury, Jr., concerning his assignment to latrine duty at Texas Military Institute, the parental advice was:
As for being corporal of the crapping can, there was once a great General in Athens who came back, and purposely to insult him, they put him in charge of the garbage and trash of the city and the emptying of the crappers. In order to humiliate his enemies, he made Athens the cleanest and most beautiful city in the world.
Therefore, if you wish to be famous, keep the toilets clean and you will go down in history as the greatest corporal who ever lived.
On another occasion, Maverick's teen-aged scion wrote to complain bitterly that he had not received a football letter to which he was sure he was entitled. He said that since his father had taught him that "you can't cuss" in letters, he would have to say that he had been "sexual intercoursed."
Richard B. Henderson
Maury Maverick, A Political Biography