Tales of the New World

'This Historic Liberalism of Texas'

Friends and Fellow Americans:

I wish first to talk with you about the history of our political heritage here in Texas—a heritage which is often erroneously described by speakers as a great conservative heritage.

The Republic of Texas was born in a rampaging sea of revolt. Men spoke and wrote boldly of their rights. It was not a conservative beginning. On the contrary it carried with it all the impact that a forward and thrusting liberalism of its time could muster.

Some men came to Texas out of a sense of adventure, but most came because of adversity. A substantial portion were hard-working but barely solvent farmers. A large number, as Stanley Seigel points out in his History of the Republic of Texas, left their homes in the old South one step ahead of the local sheriffs who were ready to imprison them for non-payment of debts. Others were regarded as out-and-out undesirables, and they came in such extensive numbers that Texas became known in some quarters as the "Botany Bay" of the United States.

Whatever they were—saints or sinners—they were not conservative and timid gentlemen. They moved over Texas fighting and dying for liberty with a Bible in one hand and a rifle in the other.

Early Documents

These early Texans were not mercenaries. Listen, listen to the vibrant liberalism of their documents of liberty—a symbol of hope for succeeding generations of the family of man.

From the Declaration of Independence of the Republic of Texas:

"The Mexican government has failed and refused to secure the right of trial by jury—that palladium of civil liberty.... It has failed to establish any system of public education... and unless a people are educated and enlightened it is idle to expect... the capacity for self government.... It has rendered the military superior to the civil power.... It denies us the right of worshiping the Almighty according to the dictates of our own conscience.... We, therefore, the delegates... in appealing to a candid world... do hereby resolve and declare that our political connection with the Mexican Nation has forever ended, and that the people of Texas do now constitute a free, sovereign, and independent Republic."

From Section two of the Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the Republic of Texas:

"All political power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority and instituted for their benefit; and they have at all times an inalienable right to alter their government in such manner as they think proper."

Here our Texas forefathers provided in the original constitution for the violent overthrow of government should it become necessary; and this same provision is in the present state constitution.

"Monopolies are contrary to the genius of a free government, and shall never be allowed" is a section in our state constitution which was first handed down to us by the men of 1836. No one pays any attention to that provision—least of all the state authorities in Austin.

Present Issues

Keeping in mind this historic liberalism of Texas, let us turn to the presidential year of 1960 and talk about some of the planks of the Democratic platform of which Senators Kennedy and Johnson are running.

(Maverick here read parts of two planks supporting jobs without discrimination and the rights of man for all men.)

We Americans who were born in revolution and we Texans who were born a second time in the crucible of revolt ought to be the first to understand that people all over the world want their rights and freedom irrespective of the color of their skin, be it on the East Side of San Antonio or on the African continent.

In other times portions of the world have revolted over issues of religion, taxation without representation, or the subjection of the civil authority by the military.

Today in this world that we live in, the question of race is the issue of the hour. The North Carolina AFL-CLO recently recognized this at its convention on March 18, 1960, when it unanimously passed a resolution expressing approval of the Negro student sit-ins.

Now will we Texans whose ancestors walked the bloody road to freedom past Gonzales, Goliad, the Alamo, and San Jacinto have compassion in our hearts for those who are now walking that same bloody road?

Admittedly this is a controversial subject, but as Senator Kennedy recently remarked, "... the United States today cannot afford to be either tired or Tory—meaning it cannot be reactionary.... However difficult, however discouraging, however sensitive these issues (of civil rights) must be—they must be faced."

The Democratic nominee for President of the United States is right for a number of reasons.

From the standpoint of common sense and the survival of the United States he is right—for this is a world more than three-fifths occupied by colored people who are watching America to see if it will live up to its written word.

This is a world where over 400 million colored people occupy India, a China with more than 650 million people, and an awakening Africa as large as the United States, Western Europe, India, and the Chinese mainland put together.

The United Nations had in the beginning only 51 member countries. Today, after new nations have thrown off the shackles of colonialism, there are 82 member nations, and a tomorrow there will be 100, with a large percentage of the increase coming from Africa.

Let no man talk smugly about minority groups of one kind or another. I—a white man—belong to the smallest minority in the world from a numerical standpoint. Therefore, let us all remember that all men are entitled to their basic constitutional rights, black or white, rich poor in Dallas' Highland Park, fat people, skinny people, Barry Goldwater, Jimmy Hoffa, or Lynn Landrum. This is so because of the Constitution of the United States of America and it is not contingent upon the outcome of some election or popularity contest in any of the many counties of the State of Texas.

Race and Economics

Now let's talk about grass roots pocket-book economics as it relates to the question of race.

I adopt the language of Boris Shiskin of the Department of Civil Rights, AFL-CIO: "When minority workers remain outside trade union ranks and do not have the benefits of union-maintained standards, they are forced to accept lower conditions and inferior benefits in their employment. They thus become the source of unfair competition undermining the prevailing union work-standards."

Mr. Shiskin, of course, is saying there that when a member of a minority group, solely because he is a minority, is prevented from carrying a union card, be it by management or especially so by organized labor—he is forced to scab to feed himself and his family and thereby takes you down with him. Prejudice, gentlemen, comes in expensive packages.

(At this point, Maverick spoke in favor of Democratic planks for medical care benefits for the aged as part of social security; a $1.25 hourly minimum wage and its extension to "the really poor, the helpless, and the unorganized"; welcoming "the world revolution"; help for classrooms and teachers; slum clearance and other federal aid to urban communities; collective bargaining and an end to "anti-labor excesses"; federal aid to the arts; and adequate U.S. military capacity.)

I have talked too long and so as I begin to conclude my remarks I think of a few of our fellow Americans who have touched this world and made it a better place.

I think of Abraham Lincoln. Surely no President ever knew the agony he did, and like all men who rise above the ordinary, there is a permanent freshness to his words.

In terms of the here and now and of this world we live in—I recall that Mr. Lincoln once said:

"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise to the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves."

I think of Sam Houston, the old hero of San Jacinto, who went to his grave in East Texas a man hated by many for having refused to vote for the secession of Texas from the union, thereby proving to us that a man can love the people the most not only by agreeing with them—but sometimes by standing up to them.

I think of a cigar maker, Samuel Gompers, the first president of the American Federation of Labor, an office he retained with only one interruption from 1895 until he died on December 13, 1924, at San Antonio, Texas.

In my mind's eye I can see Gompers standing before this convention asking all of you—pointing his finger at you—"Do you care enough about freedom to let a man carry a carpenter's, or plumber's, or electrician's union card without reference to the color of his skin? Do not forget, gentlemen," Gompers seems to say to us, "that I know something about belonging to a minority—for I was an immigrant and a Jew."

And in conclusion I think about Franklin Roosevelt, who once wrote to me, "When the people in Texas are told the truth long enough and often enough you do not have to fear that they will not do the right thing. Lyndon Johnson will tell you that, your father will tell you that, and I tell you."

And I can see F.D.R. laboriously working his way to this speaker's rostrum—each of his legs in a prison of steel. There is silence and then once again the old man talks to us again:

"Listen to me you union men—will you answer the challenges of 1960? I told you what to do the day I died. I told you that the only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith."

And now let's get on with facing the decisions of our times. Yes, let us move forward with strong and active faith.





* * *

The most famous economist of this century in Texas was the late Dr. Bob Montgomery of the University of Texas. I just have to tell you about the time Grandma ran Dr. Bob off her property.

Every Sunday out on the Babcock Road, we Mavericks gathered at what we called the Sunshine Ranch, really a dairy run by my Uncle Jim.

One Sunday my father showed up with Dr. Montgomery. "Mama," he said, "this is Dr. Bob Montgomery, the famous economist."

"The communist?" Grandma asked, cupping her hand to her ear.

"Mama, I said 'economist.'"

"Yes, I know you said 'communist.' You quit using that word. Get that man off this property."

"Mama, this is Dr. Bob Montgomery, a much-respected economist."

"Maury, if you say that word 'communist' one more time I'll slap your face. Get that man off my property."

So we all got in a car and drove off with Dr. Bob.

* * *

The most impressive sex lecture I ever had in my life was from my Maverick grandmother. As you'll see, she didn't moralize. She just wanted some good manners.

I was getting fresh with a girl on Grandma's porch. It was during high school days.

"Maury, Jr.," she said. "you quit that."

"Oh, Grandma, you used to do the same thing back in Virginia behind shutters."

Pow! I got it in the kisser in front of everybody.

"What do you think shutters are for, you young fool?" Grandma asked.




Grandma never let me forget our ancestors back in Virginia. They included an overabundance of Episcopal preachers, army and navy officers, the most important military person being Commodore Matthew Fontaine Maury, the oceanographer, who lived out his last days as commandant of cadets at Virginia Military Institute.

Then she would say: "You come from French Protestants. Your people were run out of France by the Roman Catholic Church."

"But, Grandma, that happened more than three hundred years ago."

"I don't care," Grandma would always reply, "it was terrible what those Catholics did."

Well, when she was in her upper nineties, she began to talk about death. One day while in bed she brought the subject of death up with the comment, "Maury, Jr., I don't have much time left. I think you should get a priest to talk with me."

"Grandma, do you want a Roman Catholic priest or an Episcopal priest?"

Total silence. Her eyes were completely closed.

Had Grandma died of a heart attack?

Suddenly, both eyes opened, saucer big. She propped herself up on her elbows. Pow! I got it in the kisser.

I went to the door, turned around, and waved at my grandmother. She shook her fist.

* * *

Grandma was the cop in the family. She had to be because on those Sunday reunions we Mavericks would go after one another like Kilkenny cats. Those were the great cats of Ireland that fought one another so hard there was nothing left but their tails.

She was self-educated, a victim of the Civil War. There were no schools when Grandma was growing up. Her older sister, Ellen, later a society columnist, was formally educated, dated Woodrow Wilson and decided he was a stuffed shirt. But Grandma never saw the inside of a school. She never bragged on the Civil War as if it had been a good thing, and I was always proud of the fact that she used to tell me: "President Abraham Lincoln was a decent man."

A beautiful young woman when young, she had eleven children, the youngest of which was my father, whose real name at birth was Fontaine Maury Maverick. Although my father dropped his first name when in high school, Virginians insist on using it, and so when I go back to Charlottesville, the old-timers will say, "This is Fontaine's boy."

By the time I grew up, Grandma, worn out with so many children, looked a little like Benito Mussolini, and on occasion acted like him a lot to keep the family discipline. She remains one of the most powerful influences in my life.

On the tombstone for my grandparents it reads: "They lived together for seventy-two years and made many people happy..." Brothers and sisters, she was the cat's meow.

Papa Maverick

A tempestuous man, my father couldn't open the ice box without getting into a fight with the milk bottle, or so I thought sometimes. He could be heavy medicine, and I had to get away from him now and then, but I knew he was something out of the ordinary. The inscription to him by Carl Sandburg sticks in my mind: "For Maury Maverick—fighter, freedman, fool, poet, zealot of freedom...."

I am well aware of the fact that my father had about as many enemies in this town as friends. One time as a child, when I was worried about him, I went to see my cousin Reagan Houston.

"Maury, Jr.," said Cousin Reagan, "your father is the only politician I have ever known who will deliberately cross the street to start a fight with someone who is minding his own business. He loves this city as few people do, but he feels compelled to fight half the town. Whatever his faults, he is not a person who indulges in self-pity. Maury can take it and so should you. Now get the hell out of my office."

My father was the youngest of eleven children. Grandma Maverick told me: "The day your father was born, he just walked out wearing a diaper, a stovepipe hat, and with his fists up ready to protect himself from the teasing of his ten older brothers and sisters." That may be how he got his combative personality.

* * *

When I was a child, we would play the alphabet game together on Sundays. Starting with the letter "A" he would tell me to think of places we could visit. "A" for Alamo, what else? Off to the Alamo we would go. At the Alamo he would tell me: "Our Anglo ancestors were brave people fighting for liberty, but they also tried to maintain the system of slavery. Get all sides of history and figure out the truth. If you have any sense, it will make you love our country more intelligently."

My old daddy was mayor of San Antonio from 1936 to 1938 and was the first mayor in these parts to bring doctors to the City Health Department who were board-certified public health specialists.

The doctors told him, and so did the policemen who had common sense, to let the prostitutes operate in a specific location, have health clinics to help prevent venereal disease, provide police patrols to keep young men from getting their throats slit, and let the military set up their own clinics for its soldiers.

That was done until the preachers stopped it. The prostitutes scattered all over the town, disease went up, crime generally increased and so did rape.

* * *

[My father designed] a cross during the worst of the Depression following the last days of Herbert Hoover as president. My father had set up a cooperative camp, but let him tell the story as quoted from his autobiography:

I had organized a colony. The Bonus Army [a collection of out-of-work World War I veterans who, at the height of the Great Depression, demanded a bonus promised them in 1945 be paid in 1932 instead were driven on President Herbert Hoover's orders from their Washington, D.C., shantytown and] run out of [town], and some had come to San Antonio. The contingent of veterans and their families camped at the San Antonio Fairgrounds and were starving and sick.

I made arrangements with the railroad company to get free freight cars to be used for houses. We had a population of 250-300. Here in the new colony some men, or a whole family, would come into camp and ask for something to eat and a place to stay. Quite often they would be alive with lice and weak with fever and disease. I made a deal with doctors to deliver babies at $10 each. . . . We put kids in school. . . [Maury, Sr., disliked much about the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church but, as a symbolist, collected Christian crosses, which he regarded as clenched fists.] With friend, Charles Simmang, an engraver, they designed a symbol in the shape of the cross. . . . At the top of the cross there was a representation of the world showing the continents of North and South America, expressing the hope that we might have peace. In the middle there was the Alamo, a symbol of sacrifice. There was a cap of liberty, and also a wheel of industry, and a plowshare, on the basis of equality.

If you look at the cross, you will also see the working tools at the bottom—the dignity of labor—and above that a clenched fist—the right of protest. The lone star stands for independence, and in back of the cross there is a glory.

I am of the opinion my father was a deeply religious person, although I am not sure what the much-abused word "religious" means—it is almost embarrassing to use the term. But I do know with certainty—no "think" here—that he had a general suspicion of organized religion and of "men of cloth." He would tell me that one of the reasons this is a great country is because under our Constitution you could tell a preacher to go to hell.

Here are some of the things he would say about religion when I was a little boy, things I didn't hear at St. Mark's Episcopal Church: "Maury, Jr., let me tell you about Jesus. He was a loudmouth brave little jew, a rabbi who put the pants on the stuffed-shirt Romans and stuffed-shirt Jews. If he came back to earth he would get run out of every church and synagogue in town. You know what we people in the New Testament were around the time of the crucifixion? In terms of political reform we were the CIO Jews, and the ones who held to the Old Testament were the American Federation of Labor Jews. The AFL Jews were the establishment Jews. We were the radical Jews. Since then things have sometimes become reversed. Too often we Christians are the reactionaries. We have needlessly hurt people, and we have shunted aside the radicalism of Jesus.

My father collected [other] crosses and crucifixes, mostly Catholic, by going to Mexico on trips specifically to find them. He did the same thing in Ireland. But his favorite cross was a simple wood one made out of the original timbers of the Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia, and over which Patrick Henry uttered the spine-tingling words: "Give me liberty, or give me death!" He asked for that simple cross when he went into the hospital to die.

"You remember this, Maury, Jr.," he told me from under an oxygen tent. "Part of the cross must always be a clenched fist against economic and social injustice."

After he died, the nurses packed everything but the cross next to his bed. There it was by itself, the old rugged cross. . . .

* * *

During his last eight years of his life, Maury, Sr., never touched a drop of alcohol, but he had his share in his younger days.

One time he told me, laughing as he said it, for he loved Roman Catholic Archbishop Robert Lucey: "Maury, Jr., I saw you drinking one of those sissy cocktails at that party last night. You are a disgrace to the Maverick family. Son, don't you know the only way to drink is to drink a pint of whiskey as quick as you can and get in a fistfight over the Catholic Church?"

* * *

As I remember it, my father especially gravitated to three clergymen: Rabbi Ephraim Frisch of Temple Beth El, Jesuit Father Carmen Tranchese of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and Archbishop Robert Lucey, who told me one time: "Maury and I got into a lot of trouble together. When I'd open my mouth your father would stick his foot in it."

When my father did participate in organized religion, it sometimes would turn out to be a disaster. The worst was one day across from Travis Park at St. Mark's Episcopal Church. After services were over and while he was shaking hands with the preacher, one of San Antonio's most important "high society" women came up and in a loud voice accosted him with the comment: "Why, Maury Maverick, what are you doing in church? I've heard talk around town that you were a communist, but I guess you couldn't be if you go to the Episcopal Church."

Poor old Papa's face went livid. With the voice that would have been the envy of a drill sergeant, he said back to the woman: "I hear talk around town that you are an old whore, but I guess you couldn't be if you go to the Episcopal Church." Episcopalians began to scatter like chickens, the preacher rolled his eyes in back of his head, and I damn near wet my pants. God Almighty, that was a nightmare.

Speaking of nightmares, my old man was criminally indicted one time for purportedly conspiring to pay poll taxes. In the old days, thousands of Mexican-Americans were in effect disenfranchised through the poll tax. The jury came back with a unanimous verdict of not guilty. His lead lawyer, Carl Wright Johnson, was a magnificent trial attorney. If you want a lesson in life, try standing by our father waiting for a jury to come in and tell you it might send him to the pen.

* * *

Then there was an episode noted by Don Carleton in his book Red Scare!, when Maury, Sr., agreed to let Emma Tenayuca, then a communist and labor organizer, and some of her colleagues to speak at the Memorial Auditorium. Carelton wrote: "The Communist Party in Texas decided to hold its 1939 state convention in San Antonio and applied for a permit to meet in the Municipal Auditorium.

Mayor Maury Maverick's decision to grant the permit unleashed a whirlwind of protest in the city from the Catholic leaders, American Legion spokesman, the Ku Klux Klan and others. [The] city auditorium was surrounded by a hostile mob of an estimated five thousand people. The mob descended on the building, heaving bricks and swinging clubs. The police estimated that seventy-five percent of the rioters were between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five."

I saw my father's career come to an end [that] night when, as mayor, he [did indeed] let a handful of communists and sympathizers gather at the Municipal Auditorium. For days every newspaper in town whipped up the idea of hatred. [The night of the riot] my entire family hid out at the home of John Wood to keep from being murdered. Parts of the mob came to our home looking for us; others went out to intimidate my grandparents.

My father understood the mob, made up mostly of blue-eyes like he was, but he never got over the mob being led by a Jew, a Catholic priest, and a Lebanese-American. "Those are all three minorities who have suffered and ought to be the first to stand up for free speech," he said. Life was never the same for him or anyone in our immediate family after that riot. Even today that is true. Have you ever had a mob trying to find you to kill you?

My old man knew he had rung the bell pretty good with the help of his wife, Terrell: He was the only congressman from the South to vote for the Anti-Lynching Law, co-author (inspired by Dr. Dudley Jackson) in establishing the National Cancer Institute, one of the prime movers in beautifying the San Antonio River and La Villita, and the first mayor to bring modern municipal government to San Antonio.

The last time I saw him on the streets of San Antonio was in the morning at La Villita, where he would go several times a week to see if the place was being cleaned up from before.

"I'm washed up in San Antonio politics, but I'm still the mayor of La Villita," he would tell me now and then, as he did that day.

[But while still mayor, Maury, Sr. continued the battle. There is the story that began:] "Mayor Maverick, this is Elizabeth Graham calling you from the Conservation Society, and I want you to know that we are not going to permit you to put flush toilets in the Governor's Palace."

"Why not?" my father asked.

"Because it would not be authentic. They did not have flush toilets in the days of the Spanish governors."

"Yes, that's right, Elizabeth, and in the days of the Spanish governors they didn't have children of tourists urinating in the back patio. It smells bad, and the health department says I have to do something."

"Maury, we grew up together as children and I'm telling you there will be no flush toilets."

A few days later house painters began to put up scaffolding in front of the Governor's Palace. Elizabeth Graham, Floy Fontaine, and all the dear ladies wanted to know what was going on.

"The mayor told me," said Juan Rodriguez, the foreman of the job, "to paint the Governor's Palace red if you don't let me put in flush toilets."

Wanda Ford, Graham's daughter and my first cousin, tells a different version, but I have just told you, so help me God, how flush toilets came to the Governor's Palace.

* * *

During World War I Maury, Sr., served as first lieutenant, Twenty-eighth Infantry, First Division, where he won the Silver Star for gallantry, captured twenty-six German soldiers single-handedly, and was severely wounded in the shoulder.

Judith Doyle, one of his biographers, wrote: "On November 16 (1934) the nurses at the (Mayo Brothers) clinic wheeled (Lieutenant Maury Maverick, Sr., U.S. Army retired and congressman-elect) into the operating room, where he remained under anesthesia for over five hours. The surgeons removed the large tumor (caused by shrapnel) and sawed off the backs of five of his vertebrae from his skull to his shoulders."

At one point someone rushed out of the operating room and warned the anxiously waiting Terrell to prepare for the worst. But Maverick pulled through, and the nurses rewarded him with a medal of St. Jude, the saint of impossible causes. By New Year's Day, he was stumbling along a chilly Washington alley, leaning on Lyndon Johnson's arm. Two days later he stood on the floor of the House and took his oath (as U.S. Representative from Bexar County).

My father was horribly wounded from World War I combat and remained partially cripple to his death. My first memory was to hear him cry out in pain at night. My mother would fill the tub with hot water, and I'd go sit with my dad. We had big talks about war, and he would tell me: "You must never be for war. Never."

He took all his medals and pasted them to a death's head as a protest against war.

But then, years later, Hitler began to move.

We would listen at night over the transatlantic radio to Ed Murrow, who had the spine tingling sign-on, "London Calling!" One night there had been an especially cruel bombing of London. You could hear the fires burning and the screams of Englishmen. My father's back was turned to me. It was hot and the sweat was running down those crevices in the body where the German shells had ripped away his flesh and bone.

Murrow signed off.

Slowly my father turned around, and for the first time in my life I saw him crying. Great tears were rolling down his face. "Maury, Jr.," he said, "we have to go to war. We have to kill that son of a bitch Hitler."

But even his combat wounds got Maury, Sr., into trouble, as he explained in his autobiography, A Maverick American, which Heywood Broun thought as good as Erich Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front regarding the chapters about war.

On a hospital ship going home, a chaplain held a prayer meeting and proclaimed that the German soldiers were such cowards that they had to be chained to their machine guns.

"If they were cowards," interrupted Lieutenant Maverick, "then it didn't take any courage for us to whip them. What do you know about combat?" He called the chaplain words that [Express-News publisher] Charlie Kilpatrick, a southern gentleman, will not let me repeat in this family newspaper.

Lieutenant Maverick, twenty-two years old and a former cadet at Virginia Military Institute, was placed under arrest. A wireless was sent to New York to have him investigated for possible court-martial. Upon the ship's docking, an investigation was conducted, but nothing came of it.

In World War I, reserve officers were retired in rank for serious injuries. So, until the day he died, my father was "Lieutenant Maverick."

My father also hated to have a voter come up to him and say: "I bet you don't know my name." He equally hated having people slap him hard on the back because he had been brutally wounded there in World War I.

Anyway, we were out pressing the flesh one election time in a German-American community in Bexar County. A big, beefy guy came up and hit my father on the back and knocked him down. While he was down, the man yelled at him in front of many people: "I bet you don't know my name."

Papa got up, swung from the ground, and knocked out the beloved voter, and then shouted, "No, you German son of a bitch—I don't know your goddamn name, and I don't want to know your name."

We lost that box three hundred to one, but it was a moment to cherish.

* * *

I have the obituaries about my father from the major newspapers of America and even some from London and Paris, but what might be a real treat is to quote from World War I combat letters he wrote to his father, Albert.

I never saw the letters myself until about a year ago when my cousin, Jane Welsh Reyes, gave them to me. I have given the letters to the Barker Historical Center at the University of Texas-Austin.

Without further ado here are excerpts from some of those war letters, all written in 1918 and 1919:

"Dear Papa: The First Division always gets the real fighting. The First never fights except to win a battle. When we travel we are placed from point to point on weak spots of where offenses are contemplated."

"Dear Papa: A score and three ago, my forefathers brought forth upon the great continent of America a lad none other than myself, born in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

"And now, as the world is in the throes of gripping battles, he, the lad born in the very shadows of that immaculate building, the Alamo, finds himself in France in order that those who have no conscience (the Germans have none) may die, and those who have may live."

"To tell the truth, Papa, I really should not let you know, but I have been wounded. Tell no one!"

"For suppose, Papa, that you should say so and a spy should hear it (and spies are everywhere). The spy would tip the imperial government of Germany off, and the Germans would then be unafraid, and would probably advance instead of retreating."

"Papa, be careful. Must democracy die? I say no, it shall not. Keep Quiet. No great victory was ever built upon unbridled license of foolish talk."

"Dear Papa: The Germans claim 'Gott Mit Uns' (God is with us), but we Americans have got mittens which keep our hands as warm as Germans. George (his brother) came to see me (in the hospital). I have some grapes, chocolate, dried fruit, chewing gum, and tobacco."

"When I came here I could not move; now I can get out of my bed and stay on my feet a few seconds. When I came I looked out the window and all was green and beautiful, but now the leaves are yellow and falling to the ground."

"I am some sixty miles from the front, but starting on the minute with my birthday (October 23) the heavy guns talked. Well, I am tired and I guess I will lay my head down. Love."

"Dear Papa: Not too many moons will pass and Maverick in a flashy suit will get in a palatial taxi and say, 'Home, James.' I will see a major general in the path of my motor and I will say, 'James, run over the general.' Then I will see an 'old buck private' and I will say, 'Enter my limousine and ride.' I shall know no rank, I shall curse my enemies and love my friends. Again I will be human."

"Well, Jerry [the Germans] has given in. I cannot describe it, and if I should tell you all I saw, you would think me sentimental. But suffice to say every Frenchman and Frenchwoman was out on the streets."

"The veterans of 1870, with rather oldish voices, collected on the streets. In one bunch, some twenty or thirty, some with guitars, sang 'Madalone,' a happy, jolly song."

"Then the old Frenchmen stopped. They sang the 'Marseillaise' ... the Frenchmen stopped laughing; they took off their hats and cried."

"That night (in Paris) the Frenchmen swelled into the thousands. A band began playing the 'Marseillaise' again. Of course, the Frenchmen all started crying again. Then the band played 'The Star-Spangled Banner' but there was no singing for we Americans don't know the words. But it meant more to us than ever before. I know where my thoughts were—to America, to Bexar County, Sunshine Ranch on Babcock Road and home."

"Dear Mr. Maverick: The Red Cross wishes to notify you of the return to this country of First Lieutenant Maury Maverick, Twenty-ninth Infantry, Company M., who landed at Staten Island, New York, December 28, 1919."

"Dear Papa: At the Lambs, 130 West 44th Street, New York. This club is composed of the most brilliant actors in the world along with playwrights. I have met [Fatty] Arbuckle, world-famous comedian. He was born on the Cibolo Creek, eighteen miles from San Antonio. I have also met Gene Buck, playwright for the follies, John Barrymore, John J. McGraw [baseball player] and other men equally famous...."

In his autobiography, A Maverick American, my father wrote of going "over the top" and of the time he was wounded.... I leave you with a few excerpts from those chapters:

"Into the Argonne we marched. Frank Felbel, a little Jew, was commander of my company. He was shy. He spoke of art and the opera. 'Maverick,' said Felbel, interjecting like a professor, 'did you ever read Le Bon's Psychology of War?'"

"...[A] great shrieking noise came, then a dull explosion. Gas! Gas! Soon we marched on. We were getting lost. I stumbled. It was the body of a dead man, and he was soft and rotting and slippery.... It was near the village of Exermont."

"We started to advance again. A shell burst over my head. It tore away part of my shoulder blade and collarbone and knocked me down. I looked at my four runners, and I saw that the two in the middle had been cut down to a horrid pile of red guts and blood and meat. Felbel was dead, and there was no officer to take my place. I got up and reformed the lines again."

"But I was losing so much blood. I finally got to a field hospital. I passed out. But when I did wake the Germans were shelling. I was in the ward for severe cases. There were ten of us, three Germans and seven Americans. A German close to me had most of his face shot out. From him I first learned of pensions and social insurance. He said they came from German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck...."

* * *

I hesitate to describe the deathbed scene because my old friend, Herschel Bernard, claims that my father never would have had time to die if all the death scene stories I tell really happened.

But this is a true story, a story Willie Morris made famous in his book North Toward Home, and one LBJ loved to tell.

My father looked like death that last day of his life as I sat by him trying to make small talk. Finally, I couldn't take it any longer and started to walk out of the hospital room to regain my composure.

"Maury, Jr.," he called out just as I made it to the door, "come back here. I want to give you a compliment."

"What is it, Papa?"

"Son, I want you to know you didn't turn out to be as big a horse's ass as Elliot Roosevelt."

"Oh, Papa!" I said. We embraced and both started laughing. Thirty minutes later my father was dead.

* * *

Some years later, [President Lyndon B.] Johnson got mad at me 'cause I was defending [Vietnam] war resisters. He had one of his aides call me up and tell me my father was wrong. Johnson said I was a horse's ass. I'll never forget that.

Texas Ancestors: Mary & Sam Maverick
The Sweet and Sour of Ancestors

I am up a creek without a paddle about doing this particular column on a book entitled Turn Your Eyes Toward Texas by Paula Mitchell Marks

By the time I get through with my writing for this Sunday, my cousin, Ellen Dickson, who wanted me to review the book, may wish she had left me alone.

I had decided to refuse to do a review of the book because I first thought Turn Your Eyes Toward Texas would be a bootlicking good old Texas family book, but the truth is that although it is generally favorable to my ancestors, it also rawhides Sam Maverick on occasion.

For example, the author quotes one J. David Stern in William Safire's book, The New Language of American Politics, as saying: "Old man Maverick, Texas cattleman of the 1840s, refused to brand his cattle, because it was cruelty to animals. His neighbors said he was a hypocrite, liar, and thief because Maverick's policy allowed him to claim all unbranded cattle on the range. Lawsuits were followed by bloody battles and brought a new word to our language."

I question that statement. At least the family version is that he knew almost nothing about cattle, that he had been paid a debt in cattle, did not brand them and let them run at will. None of my aunts and uncles and cousins, including the ones who would take a drink — tell the truth and shame the devil — ever mentioned cattle.

The word "maverick" got around the world, by the way, through the cattle boats that went to the distant corners of the globe. Rudyard Kipling used the word in his poetry.

What Sam Maverick did do that concerns me is that he was at one time the biggest land speculator in the Republic of Texas and later the United States. "Only the czar of Russia owns more land," was the common expression in San Antonio.

One must take the sweet and sour of his or her ancestors. Turn Your Eyes Toward Texas relates: "It was not easy to look down on the many cultured Mexicans living in San Antonio, but Anglo-American newcomers often managed to do so. To Maverick's credit he was to speak out against such prejudice." That's the sweet part. The sour part: My great-grandparents brought the first black slaves to San Antonio after the fall of the Alamo.

Sam and Mary came with their slaves from Alabama. As their party made Cibolo Creek east of San Antonio, Indians threatened attack. The black slaves, a man named Griffin in particular, saved the day.

A few years ago, when we Maverick's celebrated 150 years in San Antonio, an Episcopal priest at St. Mark's asked us to give thanks.

I gave thanks to those black people, and, as I looked around the church and saw some three hundred relatives, all descendants of Sam and Mary Maverick, it dawned on me that it was at least arguably proper to say that none of us would have been sitting there if it had not been for the bravery of the slaves.

I wonder sometimes if there are descendants of those slaves in San Antonio. I would like to thank them. And apologize.

Sam's wife was a Tuscaloosa, Alabama, girl, six feet tall and eighteen years of age when she married her thirty-three-year-old husband. Formally educated, she was one of the few Anglo women, if not the only one, in the San Antonio of 1838 who could fully read and write English. Her diary of early San Antonio is considered a treasure by historians.

Time and time again she was threatened with death through warfare with the Indians in and around San Antonio. As an old ACLU lawyer, I have guilt feelings about the way the Indians were treated, but during those moments when she faced death, I rather think my great-grandmother would have told me to go to h--- if I had been alive and mentioned the ACLU.




Sam and Mary's children began to marry. According to Turn Your Eyes Toward Texas, "The younger Sam Maverick married Sally Frost in 1872. That same year George married Mary Elizabeth Vance of Castroville, and in 1873, Willie married Emily Virginia Chilton. The only surviving daughter, Mary Brown, would wed in August of 1874, selecting future ambassador to Belgium, Edwin H. Terrell, and youngest Maverick sibling, Albert, would marry in 1877, taking as his bride Jane Lewis Maury."

All those Maverick children in turn had more children than you can shake a stick at. My grandparents, Albert and Jane Lewis, had eleven, the youngest of which was my father, Maury. You would have thought those Mavericks were Roman Catholics, they had so many children, but in truth they were passionate Episcopalians.

Warts and all, Sam Maverick had a pretty good throw of the dice. I think about that when I sit by his grave, in the cemetery on East Commerce. I go there fairly often.

In 1835 while living in San Antonio he was a scout for [Texas revolutionist] Ben Milam, who died in his arms from combat. Before the battle started [Mexican] General Martín Perfecto de Cos nearly executed Sam, but a local Mexican intervened and saved his life.

The next year he was elected by the defenders of the Alamo to be one of their delegates to Washington-on-the-Brazos and there signed the Declaration of Independence of the Republic of Texas. He was, in 1839, the third American mayor of San Antonio and later its senator to the Republic of Texas.

Taken prisoner by a Mexican army in 1842 and marched to Perote prison, halfway between Mexico City and Veracruz, Sam was placed in chains. [When Mexican authorities released Samuel, they gave him those shackles, which are now at the University of Texas at Austin.]

Those chains haunt me. Time and time again when I was a little boy my father, sometimes full of bootleg whiskey, would give me the treatment about them. We would act as if we were in the U.S House of Representatives, this is Grandpa's barn, the chickens roosting on the rafters and with Beck, the mule, acting as the speaker.

"Will the gentlemen yield for an observation on liberty?" Papa would thunder. Then, God Almighty, what a lecture I'd get on the Bill of Rights and Jefferson's need now and then for revolution.

Remember the 'Real' Alamo

My old pal, Gus Garcia, may his soul rest in peace, invited me to be the only Anglo lawyer in the United States to be co-counsel on the U. S. Supreme Court case that declared unconstitutional the exclusion of Mexican-Americans from the right to serve on juries.

That was when Gus stood before the High Court and referred to Sam Houston as "that wetback from Tennessee" and made the judges laugh....

Gus Garcia was wrong in contending that Mexican-Americans should have no interest in the Alamo. Anglo historians are entitled to an even harder rap on the knuckles for they, along with Gus, have ignored the "Tejanos" or Mexicans who died at the Alamo....

The cat, therefore is about to slip out of the bag about the "Tejanos"—the Texas-Mexicans at the Alamo who had strong ideas about liberty, completely distinct from the likes of the hated Santa Anna to the south and the encroaching Anglos from the north, one of whom was my great-grandfather, Sam Maverick, who was elected by the defenders of the Alamo to sign the Declaration of Independence of the Republic of Texas. (It was the luckiest election any Maverick ever won in San Antonio.)

But Anglos, forgetting the Tejanos, have used the Alamo as a racist symbol. John Wayne's movie, The Alamo, had a then-record budget, but the script had some of the worst mistakes in the history of Hollywood. The actors referred to the Rio Bravo (an old name for the lower part of the Rio Grande) as the river running near the Alamo. In one scene Colonel Travis explains to his fellow defenders that the Alamo is north of the Sabine, which is strange because the Sabine is the boundary between Texas and Louisiana. In another scene, Fannin is said to be marching south to San Antonio from Goliad. Every time I have ever gone to Goliad it has been the other way around....

Professor Don Graham gives all Texans, Anglo and Mexican-American, some good advice with these words: "What the Alamo story needs more than anything else is the application of critical intelligence to its traditions, legends, and stock images. And that, of course, is what it has least often had. Confronted directly, the Alamo story seems to make the eyes glaze. The heroes take on the smooth patine of public statuary seen from a distance. In fiction or film such pageant-like figures are deadly...."

There is a play about the Alamo by the late Ramsey Yelvington called A Cloud of Witnesses. In technique it draws from the Greek theater, the morality play of the Middle Ages, the Japanese, and from the ballad singer.

At the conclusion Satan suddenly appears in a puff of smoke, the fires of hell swirling around him. He mocks the dead defenders, who by then are standing at the front of the stage with the women of Gonzales humming their song of death in the background. A dialogue develops with the Devil. The Alamo defenders, Abamillo, Badillo, Espalier, Esparza, Fuentes, Guerrero, Losoya, and Nava, have their say along with the rest.

Then in one voice the slain Texans, Anglo and Mexican, speak their final words, "Only this we know: We died there, and from our dust the mammoth thing freedom received a forward thrust. The reverberations we continued are something to which man may respond or not respond, at pleasure."

Well, there is an excess of nonsense written about the Alamo. How can anyone write with total objectivity on such an explosive subject? Worse still, too often the Alamo is presented in a way that makes it a jingoistic insult to present-day Mexican-Americans....

Now and then I walk through the Alamo grounds. It's a good place to think about our country, for courage is courage whether it is a Cleto Rodriguez in World War II or blacks dying out of proportion to their numbers in Vietnam. Or, yes, the blue-eyed ones, who, legend has it, first listened in the dark of the night to the battle of John McGregor's bagpipe versus the fiddle of former Congressman Davy Crockett and then died hard.

The Alamo is a controversial, even sore, subject in this city, but even its critics have taught me some things—black people like G. J. Sutton and hell-raising Mexican-American intellectuals like the late Gus Garcia. And there have been old Anglo friends and relatives, poems, books, plays, Walter Lord, and wonderful librarians who have all combined to give me an expanded view. What we see with our mind's eye is more important than with the physical eye.

In that sense, warts and all, I care deeply about the old Alamo.




Critics Can't Dim Alamo Symbolism

In the summer of 1960 I received a letter from Jack Fischer, then the editor of Harper's magazine, asking that Walter Lord be shown around because he was coming to Texas to do a book on the Alamo.

Fischer grew up on a farm across which, he claimed, the boundary lines of Texas and Oklahoma ran. Successor to Bernard De Voto in writing a historically famous column, "The Easy Chair," Jack was a one-time working newspaper reporter, an immensely decent editor who loved our country in a way no yahoo could understand. I was glad to accommodate him.

Walter Lord turned out to be a delight. Bright, friendly, and the first to laugh at himself, he quickly won the approval of the good sisters at the Alamo library.

We left for Goliad on a fact-finding expedition. A hundred and twenty some odd years earlier, Travis had asked Fannin to join him in San Antonio. What was the extent of communication between the two? We discovered a thing or two about that, but as an interesting sidelight we came upon a nugget of history, the original journal of Dr. Joseph H. Barnard, the surgeon who was spared at the Goliad massacre.

In the journal there was this remedy by the doctor for curing colds: "Tincture of Cannabis India, three ounces...."

When his book, A Time to Stand, was finally published, Walter raised some questions about the Alamo. Did Travis really draw a line? (There is no concrete proof that he did.) Did Travis wear the fancy uniform artists put him in? (No.) Did David Crockett surrender? ("It's just possible that he did.") How many Mexican casualties? ("Best estimate seems about six hundred killed and wounded.") What flag did the Texans fly? ("Probably the azure flag of the New Orleans Greys.")

What's the truth generally about the Alamo? Were there any warts? Yes.

The battle was fought in direct violation of General Sam Houston's orders to abandon the place. Like a wildcat strike, it was a wildcat battle.

While the defenders spoke of liberty for themselves, they were perpetuating the institution of slavery. After the battle was over, the black slaves in the Alamo were spared by Santa Anna. One slave named John chose to fight alongside the Texans; he was put to death. History does not even do John the dignity of giving him a last name.

G. J. Sutton, the late black legislator, used to rawhide me about the Alamo and slavery. In between denouncing my ancestors, he would call John the dumbest black in history for fighting with the Anglo-Texans. Even if they had won, John would have remained a slave, Sutton said, glaring at me all the time....

"The Alamo" - Some Misconceptions

Even some well informed people refer to the chapel of the Alamo as "The Alamo." Since being mayor of San Antonio I hear guides tell people in front of the chapel that here is the Alamo--that here died our immortal heroes, and so on.

To correct this misunderstanding, I have had prepared the map on the opposite page. The black lines show "The Alamo," containing about two acres and having walls, barracks, houses, convent and convent garden, and the Alamo chapel. The red lines show the present or new structures.

In the battle, all the walls had to be manned by the 180-odd Texan soldiers. Military experts agree that there were hardly fifteen per cent of the necessary men and munitions to defend the place.

That must be remembered, for the Texans never had a chance.

In the middle of the Alamo Plaza is the Alamo Cenotaph, built by Federal funds for the celebration of the Texas Centennial. And it will be seen that the walls extend far into the present post office, west to a point eight feet behind, and parallel to the present building line on the east side. Also the arcades extending south from the facade of the Alamo are recent, put there for artistic effect.

In back of the Alamo, never a part of it, is the park, which contains the Alamo Museum, and the Daughters of the Texas Revolution Building.

When I was a boy I can remember seeing pictures of the battle, indicating Mexicans scaling the walls of the chapel, as though the battle was all fought there. I think it only proper that this popular misconception be corrected before it is too late.

Maury Maverick
Southwestern Historical Quarterly
April, 1941

Griffin: Forgotten Slave a True Hero

Maverick: Reverend Black, this is a delicate matter, but my great-grandparents, Sam and Mary Adams Maverick, owned a black slave by the name of Griffin, a forgotten hero of the 1842 Dawson Massacre, which was fought near the western boundary of present-day Fort Sam Houston. He was killed in combat by Mexican soldiers under the command of Colonel J. M. Carrasco while defending the city of San Antonio. My cousins and I want to erect a historical plaque in his honor and memory. Do you think we could do that in a way black people in San Antonio would accept it as an honor to Griffin and as an acknowledgment of the dignity of black people?

The Reverend Claude Black: It could be a fine thing, but before black people will accept it in the spirit you say you intend it, you Mavericks must first say slavery was morally wrong.

Slavery was morally wrong. Let me say it again: Slavery was morally wrong. One June 22, 1991, at Raymond Russell Park, some four hundred of us Mavericks celebrated 156 years in San Antonio. That's nothing compared to Mexican-Americans with an Indian ancestry, but not bad for a gringo.

Thanks to the research of Dr. Donald Everett, retired history professor from Trinity University, and our cousin, Ellen (Mrs. Frank) Dickson, Jim Maverick's daughter, we made initial plans to erect a plaque in honor of a black man named Griffin.

Griffin is a forgotten hero of the Texas Revolution. Our great-grandfather, Sam Maverick, wrote: "I feel his death as the hardest piece of fortune we have suffered in Texas. Poor faithful, brave boy! I owe thee a monument and a bitter tear of regret for thy fall. I mourn thee as a true and faithful friend and brother, a worthy dear brother in arms."

When I was a little boy my father used to take me to the Alamo and say, "Maury, Jr., not all right was on one side in the battle of the Alamo. The Anglo Texans wanted freedom and land for themselves, but they had black slaves in the Alamo. After the battle we Mavericks were the first to bring black slaves to San Antonio. Don't be a bully about the Alamo."

According to the Handbook of Texas: "From the first, the Negro has shared and shaped Texas history." Some historians claim that the first black in Texas was a man named Estevanico, a Moorish slave. By 1791 blacks numbered 24 percent of the population of Texas.

The Institute of Texan Cultures has a booklet entitled The Afro-Americans that states Moses Austin first came to San Antonio with a slave. The Austin colony, later run by Stephen F. Austin, could not have survived without the blacks, all slaves, yet history does not give those blacks the credit they deserve. Some of their descendants live in San Antonio.

On December 7, 1837, my great-grandparents left Tuscaloosa, Alabama, with a group of slaves under the command of Griffin and with "a large carriage, a big Kentucky wagon, and three extra saddle horses and one blooded filly."

At Cibolo Creek, just before they reached San Antonio, Indians threatened an attack, but the blacks, armed with rifles, beat off the Indians.

Griffin was killed by Mexican soldiers in the Dawson Massacre, which occurred during the invasion of San Antonio under the command of General Adrian Woll.

Nicholas Mosby Dawson had assembled a group of fifty-three men in La Grange to go to the aid of Matthew "Old Paint" Caldwell and Jack Hays, who were to fight and win at Salado Creek. But en route to the Salado, Dawson's men were intercepted by the Mexicans under the command of J. M. Carrasco.

As for Griffin's heroism at the Dawson Massacre, Everett wrote about that by quoting Colonel Carrasco this way: "Mexican Colonel J. M. Carrasco later testified to Samuel A. Maverick as to the feats performed by the 'valiant black man.' Carrasco described Griffin as 'the bravest man I have ever seen.'"

In her memoirs, Mary Adams Maverick wrote this of Griffin the day he was killed: "He was a man of powerful frame, and he possessed the courage of the African lion.... When his ammunition became useless because of the proximity of the enemy, he fought with the butt end of his gun and when the gun was broken, he wrenched a limb from a mesquite tree and did battle with that until death closed his career. He received more than one mortal wound...."

Even when it is friendly, it is hard for a white person to write about blacks without being accused of being patronizing. I admit to a guilt complex, but not being patronizing.

The truth is that blacks have been my teachers from the late state representative G. J. Sutton, who was my client for twenty-five years in my lawyer days, to the Reverend Black. Don Albert, the East Side trumpet player, was another teacher and so was state representative Lou Nelle Sutton. And there were others, such as the nearly hundred-year-old John Inman, the radical of the East Side in his youth who goes back so far he was once the chauffeur of George Brackenridge.

I called retired Chief Justice Carlos Cadena, who in his lawyer days with Gus Garcia was responsible for the Hernandez case giving Mexican-Americans the right to sit on juries. Cadena told me: "We relied heavily on cases black people had won. In fact, before the blacks won their civil rights cases, Alonzo S. Perales and M. C. Gonzales repeatedly lost their civil rights cases for Mexican-Americans, and so we ride significantly in the stirrups of those black people."

June 23, 1991

* * *

The Mavericks had their most difficult journey ahead of them when they departed Spring Hill for San Antonio. Their northerly route led them through another sparsely settled region, with a broken wagon wheel and the chills that struck brother Robert, Griffin, and Jinny slowing the party. When they found one frontier dwelling, it was inhabited primarily by fleas.

Such problems and irritations paled, though, beside a visit from a Tonkawa Indian war party. The Maverick entourage had camped while having the wagon wheel fixed and was making preparations to move on in late afternoon when seventeen Tonkawas, bison hunters who ranged through Central Texas, began filtering into the camp.

Mary Maverick had seen Indians before, of course, but not like these. Civilized Creeks and Cherokees had occupied eastern Alabama lands during her maturing years, and in the summer of 1836 they and other members of the Five Civilized Tribes had camped throughout the Tuscaloosa area, having been pushed farther west by Pres. Andrew Jackson's Indian removal policy. In Texas at Spring Hill, Mary had encountered Sam Houston's Indian peace negotiator old Cherokee Chief Bowles, whose desire to dance with the ladies and half-Indian, half-civilized garb she regarded with amused ethnocentrism.

These Tonkawas had nothing of the "civilized" about them. Fresh from a battle with the Comanches, painted and well armed, they "displayed in triumph two scalps, one hand, and several pieces of putrid flesh from various parts of the human body," Mary would remember. The Indians appeared interested in two things—the party's horses and one-year-old Sammy. Mary held him up for their inspection but steadfastly refused to let them hold him, believing, she would write, "that they, being cannibals, would like to eat my baby and kill us all and carry off our horses." No passive stereotype of a nineteenth-century lady, she also made sure the Indians could see her pistol and bowie knife.

Maverick and the other men continued cooly readying for travel while Jinny, who was to prove equally unperturbed in further Indian encounters, complained mightily about not getting to fix supper. As the party quietly moved out, the Indians followed through a bright moonlit night. Finally, about midnight, the Tonkawas began to drop away; by the time the travelers reached the banks of the Cibolo and made camp, only two Indians remained.

In later years, Mary Maverick was to complain to her diary that though she had tried to be a good slave owner, she could not "see that one loves me or cares consistently to please me." She was forgetting one by then long dead—her man Griffin, who stationed himself in front of her tent with gun and ax and called the two remaining intruders, "Come this way if you dare, you devils, and I'll make hash out of you!"

The Indians slipped away without incident, and the Maverick party continued toward the relative safety of San Antonio, now traveling up the San Antonio River valley and passing by the ranchos of various well-established Mexican Texans.

...The Mavericks had put slaves Griffin and Wiley to work cultivating a labor above the Alamo, but they had had to give it up after the Indians chased the two workers into the river and stole their animals.

...At the news of her husband's capture and removal, Mary had called Griffin to her and asked him to pose as a runaway bound for Mexico in hopes of freeing or aiding his master. He gladly assented, she later reported, adding that he had responded to the offer of freedom by saying, "I do not want any more than I have, master has always treated me more like a brother than a slave." Thus, Griffin joined the party, "armed to the teeth and riding a good mule." He was carrying ransom funds, "the only man of the command who had any money."

As the group, now fifty-three strong, neared the Salado battle, they were surprised by a Mexican cavalry detachment that immediately brought up artillery. As the artillery inflicted casualties on the American force, Dawson and some of his men tried to surrender, only to be cut down. Three of the party escaped, but fifteen were taken captive, among them Mary's uncle. Griffin fought valiantly but was one of the thirty-five slain.

Paula Mitchell Marks
Turn Your Eyes Toward Texas

Early Rebel Relatives - Sons of Liberty Inspire Patriotism

On March 5, 1770, the first five men who gave their lives for this country were killed in what has come to be known as the Boston Massacre. They were: Crispus Attucks, a black man with an American Indian heritage, Samuel Gray, Patrick Carr, James Caldwell and my distant cousin, Samuel Augustus Maverick. They are buried in a common grave about four feet from the grave of Samuel Adams.

A protest meeting was held by the colonists at the Old South Meeting House, where one orator proclaimed that every March 5, in that very same meeting place, "discontented ghosts with hollow groans appear to solemnize the anniversary of the Fifth of March."

By pure accident I was in the Old South Meeting House, March 5, 1984, to be with the "discontented ghosts with hollow groans." You may not believe it, but my cousin Sam Maverick began talking to me. This is the exchange we had:

"Cousin Maury, I see that you visited our single grave next to the grave of Samuel Adams, the 'great agitator' who led this nation at Boston into revolution. It is an unusual burial ground. To the rear of us is the grave of Paul Revere. Beyond that are the graves of the parents of Benjamin Franklin. Nearby is the grave of the woman who wrote the famous Mother Goose rhymes."

"What happened that day you were killed, Sam?"

"I was only seventeen years old and an apprentice carpenter. About 150 of us young people were gathered before the Custom House. Samuel Adams called us 'Sons of Liberty' and stirred us up to make trouble. A solitary Redcoat sentry—we called them Lobsterbacks—was walking his post. There were taunts. Crispus Attucks threatened the sentry with a stick. A nineteen-year-old bookseller, Henry Knox, who was later chief of Washington's artillery and our first secretary of war, warned the Lobsterback not to fire his rifle."

"What happened next?"

"The sentry shouted, 'Turn out the main guard.' And with that, officer-of-the-day Captain Thomas Preston came running at us with nine soldiers. We were a mob by then, swinging clubs, throwing pieces of ice. It was then the British killed us."

"What about the funeral, Cousin Sam?"

"We were killed on March 5th, and the funeral was on the eighth. It was a propaganda bird nest on the ground for Samuel Adams, who, with Paul Revere's drawings, turned Boston into a city of manifest frenzy. All shops were closed and the bells of the community were tolled. Our bodies were taken to the very spot we were shot. Five hearses came for us and we were brought to the middle burial grounds and all put in a single grave. That day, though the British issued a proclamation saying we were street ruffians, Samuel Adams scattered about Boston shouting patriotic verses that stirred the colonists up even more."

"What about Samuel Adams?"

"Adams lived from 1722 to 1803 and was considered a failure in life as a businessman and a lawyer. His cousin, John Adams, who later defended the Lobsterbacks who shot us, was embarrassed on occasion by Sam, but Samuel Adams was a profound force for liberty and revolution.... The British governor called him the 'greatest incendiary in the empire.' That was the equivalent of calling him a 'terrorist' in those days. The word 'incendiary' caused the otherwise sensible Englishmen in London to quit thinking, just as the word 'terrorist' causes you living Americans to be dumb about the current world revolution."

"What do you mean by that?"

"The British perceived me to be a terrorist. I hope my more than 250 blood relatives in San Antonio understand that, according to British history, they have a terrorist for an ancestor."

"Why, Sam, the other night at a family party I bragged on you, and one of my relatives said you were 'a nice young English gentleman.'"

"No, that's not so. I was a revolutionary, a man of violence. ...Cousin Maury, you have to accept the truth: you come from people who were called 'terrorists' during the days of the American Revolution."

"Sam, you are asking me to pay too great a price in agreeing I come from terrorists. Why, today all over America, the newspapers, television stations and especially the [slippery] editorial writers put down contemporary revolutions about the world by using the word 'terrorist' as a kind of buzz word to keep the rank and file from thinking. My God, man, I love my cousins, but... I'll get run out of town if I admit you were a terrorist."

"Maury, be serious. In all of history people have been called terrorists. Take the Texas Revolution when the Mexicans called Stephen F. Austin a terrorist and thought they could put down a great revolution with arms. Do you know what Austin wrote in regard to the Mexican government?"

"No."

"Austin wrote, 'I have informed you many times and I inform you again it is impossible to rule Texas by a military system.... Upon this subject of despotism I have never hesitated to express my own opinion, for I consider [military violence] the source of all revolutions and of the slavery and ruin of free peoples.'"

"What's the point?"

"Maury, the point is that neither the Russians nor we Americans are going to put down the world revolution forever. And get this in your head: It isn't a question of communism or capitalism nearly as much as it is a question of nationalism. For God's sake, Cousin Maury, memorize the words of Stephen F. Austin regarding your own Texas Revolution. You living Americans are not going to win in revolutionary situations with military might...."

"Sam, that is some history lesson. And, yes, you were a terrorist, and I'm proud to proclaim that."

"Maury, we are running out of time. You tell my Texas relatives hello, and tell the people to have confidence in the spirit of the American Revolution. Let the light of American liberty inspire the world."

"Good-bye, Cousin Sam."

"Good-bye, Cousin Maury."

With that I began walking out of the Old South Meeting House. As I made it to the door, once again, I heard the "hollow groans of discontented ghosts."

Postscript: There is no exaggeration in today's column. It is a true story, word for word, so help me.

Resonant Conscience - Maverick Emerges

Since the election of Ralph Yarborough, Texas politics has been less interesting and less fundamental because of the absence of a rising liberal leader in whom the state's considerable but mostly latent liberalism could find its expression and result. Although he made a good showing against Ben Ramsey, Don Yarborough did not develop, last spring, into this leader: he seemed still to have too much to learn, and to be too "political," too cautious. Rep. Bob Eckhardt of Houston is a state leader of unrivaled stature among liberals, but his career, being as important as it is, has tended toward a steadier program of ascent. There are other able liberal leaders, but most of them are principally local figures.

Therefore, the sudden emergence of Maury Maverick, Jr., as the most likely and best qualified liberal candidate should a U.S. Senate race develop next year is by all odds the best Texas political news since the sweep of the San Antonio House delegation by the Franklin Spears coalition.

As a member of the House in the early fifties, when the legislature was controlled by unrestrained interests of private privileges, when the state government was ridden through with thieves and bribery, and when McCarthyism—Texas style—was making cowards of most politicians, Maverick stood forth, alone when necessary, for his convictions. A "worrier," he would pace the floor of the House, head hanging down, chest collapsed, as the debauches of democratic government were passed off on an inattentive press and an uninformed people. His bursts of protest at the microphone and his lonely nays on the voting board are remembered now by those few whose spirits followed his slouching image back and forth across the well of the House.

We were disappointed this year when Maverick worked for Johnson for President; but while we make no excuses for this, we would recall that Maverick led the fight in the Bexar County caucus at the state convention for the liberals' loyalty oath, even though Johnson bitterly opposed it.

The people who know Maverick know that he is a person of integrity, a liberal of independent spirit, a militant friend of civil liberties and civil rights, and one of those resonant consciences without which political debate would be hollow sloganeering and democracy mere merchandising.

His speech at the labor convention last week created the climate of idealism and courage in which the delegates decided to endorse the Negroes' lunch-counter sit-ins as the same kind of social pioneering by which the unions themselves won their place in American life.

A careful student and a proud inheritor of Texas history, Maverick fixes thereon the unmistakeable antecedents of contemporary Texas liberalism.

Although he is the son of a legendary Texas congressman, it is more important that he is a son of the bright liberal heritage of his state and nation.

We hope he runs for the Senate if a race develops. We believe he could win while fighting for the most controversial principles—which he would most certainly do.

The Texas Observer
August 19, 1960

D.B. & the Texas Legislature

D.B. and I served our first term together in the Texas House of Representatives in 1951.

John McCully, then a newspaperman and a partner of Stuart Long, came to me and said: "You're going to meet a man named D.B. Hardeman. He will talk conservative at first but will vote liberal. He's smart as a whip and a good fellow. Don't run him off because of what he says at the outset."

As we liberals began to discover one another—John Barnhart of Beeville, Bob Mullen of Alice, Doug Crouch of Denton, Jamie Clements of Crockett, Edgar Berlin of Port Neches, Jim Sewell of Corsicana, and Bob Wheeler of Tilden, among others—D.B. would tell us, "Now let's give Governor Allan Shivers a chance to do right. He was one of my campaign managers when I ran for editor of the Daily Texan at the University of Texas."

But Shivers turned more and more to the right, and D.B. began to turn more and more to the left, although he never called himself a "liberal" because he didn't like the term. He used the term "progressive." Whatever term you prefer, Hardeman, according to the AFL-CIO, had a perfect voting record for both of the terms he served in the House.

On a long-range, day-in, day-out basis, D.B. was the most important member of the Texas House of Representatives I ever served with in my six years as a legislator. He was not important in the sense of power or committee assignments because he was not then the Speaker's man. In those days he fought the Speaker. But he was important as an intellectual, and as a high-minded person. Above all he was important because he brought the liberals together, taught them how to count votes, and even persuaded them to be polite to one another.

We gathered at least three nights a week at D.B.'s apartment and plotted floor fights for the next day, sometimes drinking too much and on occasion making fools out of ourselves. As an aside, I could always tell when it was the end of the month and D.B. was broke—he started drinking cheap whiskey and lived off Brussels sprouts.

But at those nightly meetings, usually around midnight, D.B. would be in his baggy shorts—a libation in one hand, a book in the other—and deliver a stirring oration, urging us to go out on the floor of the House the next morning and fight the honey-money lobbyists.

D.B. had a quality of kindness about him which was his strength, but also his weakness and the reason, I think, he never held high office, such as U.S. senator or even higher.

He just couldn't hurt anybody. In politics, figuratively speaking, one must on occasion plunge a knife into an adversary. D.B. understood this, would talk about it late at night, advocate it, and promise to personally do it the next morning. But he never would and with those of us who loved him it became an affectionate joke.

When the time came for D.B. to retire, my wife, Julia, and I had a significant hand in getting him to make his home in San Antonio. In less than a year he had made more friends than you can shake a stick at. Especially young people.

About two years before D.B. died—his middle name was Barnard—I began efforts as a lawyer to bring to Texas the remains of his great-grandfather, Dr. Joseph Henry Barnard, "The Surgeon of the Goliad Massacre," as he is known in Texas history books.

Dr. Barnard, a hero of the Texas Revolution, had unexpectedly died on a visit to Canada in 1861. On the same day that D.B. died in the Nix Hospital in San Antonio, the remains of Dr. Barnard arrived at the funeral home in Austin.

After former governor Dolph Briscoe gave the eulogy for D.B., who had been Dolph's best man, we buried D.B. and his great-grandfather next to one another midway along the west fence of the State Cemetery in Austin, a stone's throw from Stephen F. Austin, Big Foot Wallace, and D.B.'s favorite history professor, Dr. Walter Prescot Webb.

Then we went over to the home of Jean and Russell Lee—Russ was one of the New Deal's great photographers of hungry people during Depression days—and had a few drinks and told D.B. Hardeman stories.

Maury Maverick, Jr.

* * *

In 1952 Stevenson was coming to Texas, and there was nobody to run the campaign. Our Democratic politicians had run off. So Sam Rayburn just had to do it as a civic duty. He'd never managed a campaign, including his own. He knew nothing about managing a campaign. He knew a lot about politics, but not about campaign managing. He had very little money, and he didn't know where to begin.

Well, in the Texas Legislature a group of us on the liberal side—the loyal Democratic side—had gotten to be very close friends. Maury Maverick, Jr., was one of the group; and one of the boys we loved very much was Jim Sewell, who'd lost his sight in World War II—a wonderful man, later a district judge in Corsicana.

Now, when Maury Maverick, Jr., gets an idea about something, he runs his friends absolutely to the asylum, and his enemies over the wall! Maury decided that Mr. Rayburn should have Jim Sewell as his campaign manager for Adlai Stevenson. Mr. Rayburn had never heard of Jim Sewell, never met Jim Sewell. But Maury sent telegrams. He sent oversized postcards. He sent special-delivery letters. He just drove the old man out of his mind until Rayburn finally said, "Well, let's talk to this fellow Sewell."

Rayburn fell in love with Jim Sewell, like the rest of us, and asked Jim to be the campaign manager. Jim agreed. Jim phoned me and asked if I'd come to Dallas and handle the organization. I said yes, I'd be glad to do it.

So there were three of us: there was Jim, myself, and Ray Roberts (who took Mr. Rayburn's seat in Congress). Roberts was the administrator—the office manager. Ray had done this work in the Navy and was very good at it. It was the best-run office I've ever seen in a campaign. It was the only one I ever saw where anyone could find anything in the files. An interesting sidelight on this was that (with all those charges of corruption in Washington, and so forth) Ray was the commander of a Naval Reserve unit near Dallas. It was an office administration unit, so Ray got half a dozen of his boys and put them in civilian clothes and hid them away in his office in the Adolphus Hotel. They actually handled all the files and much of the paperwork. I just knew the Dallas News was going to find out about it and blast us. Here we had called to active duty these Naval Reserve boys, and they were hidden away working on Adlai Stevenson's campaign, being paid out of the Federal Treasury and out of the Pentagon budget! But we got through, and so far as I know, that has never been revealed—certainly never in print. [Luter, No. 1, December 27, 1969]

* * *

This is a little footnote to history. Governor Stevenson was coming to Texas, to appear in Dallas-Fort Worth and then in Houston. But in those days you had a very different situation. Because of the racial issue, neither the presidential nor vice-presidential candidate of either the Democratic or Republican party could spend the night in the South during the national campaign—because there were no hotels that would rent a room to a black. The candidate would fly in, make a speech in Atlanta, and fly out to sleep in Baltimore or Philadelphia. That was both parties.

Well, a group of younger Texas Democrats got together in San Antonio when Jim Sewell made a speech, and they phoned me. (I was the only person left in the state headquarters. Mr. Rayburn had gone over to the Louisiana line to make a speech there, and I was in charge of the little headquarters in Dallas.) So they phoned me and said, "We've got the answer! We've got the answer!"—former vice president John Nance Garner, who was the hero of many conservatives in those days lived in Uvalde, Texas—"We've got the answer! Stevenson's got to go to Uvalde and pay homage to Mr. Garner, and that will line up the conservative vote for us!" Well, I still didn't know Mr. Rayburn; but he had the suite on the floor above me, so about eleven o'clock at night I typed out a little note, saying that I'd had this call urging that Stevenson go to Uvalde to see Mr. Garner, and I stuck that under his door. Well, it was past midnight when the phone rang:

"This is Sam Rayburn. Come up here!"

So I went up there, and he said, "Mix yourself a drink." He had on his robe and slippers, and he had this piece of paper in his hand. He said, "Stevenson's going to Uvalde."

Well, this created a problem, because the airfield that had been built at Uvalde during World War II wasn't big enough to accommodate Stevenson's plane: How do you get him in there and get him out of there? Well, the only way possible they could think of to avoid the hotel situation—since there is always the possibility a black newspaperman, or a black liaison officer, or a representative of the NAACP, or somebody, will be on the trip—was to charter a train in Dallas, travel all night long, have a ranch-style breakfast at Mr. Garner's, and take the train back to San Antonio. Stevenson could make a couple of speeches in San Antonio, then fly to Houston and out of the South that night. That's what was done.

One of the great thrills of my life was the Stevenson campaign in 1952. His speeches were probably the highest quality of any speeches since those of Woodrow Wilson in 1912 when he outlined the New Freedom. They thrilled many people, including myself. His frankness, his candor, and the beauty of his language have set a lot of people on fire. A lot of people have never gotten over that campaign even now, almost thirty years later.

Aboard that train was Jim Sewell, the blind man; Dolph Briscoe, later to be governor of Texas: Maury Maverick, Jr.; and myself—all young guys, unimportant in the state political hierarchy. Stevenson had the little dinky parlor car—something left over from the 1890s—on the back end of the train. That morning, before we got to Uvalde, Mr. Rayburn sent for "the four young guys who were up to their necks in the campaign" and had us come back to the parlor car to be introduced to Adlai Stevenson. That was one of the great thrills of my life!

* * *

There is another story about the train trip to Uvalde. We were on this train and it was sort of a lark, you know. A special train was a lot of fun, and the newspapermen and a lot of others sat up much too late drinking. About four o'clock in the morning Maury Maverick, Sr., came through the press car with an armload of mimeographed things. Maury had gotten on board in San Antonio early in the morning, and he had this mimeographed speech of Adlai Stevenson's—in Spanish! He gave it to all the newspapermen.

Well, word got back to Carl McGowan or Bill Blair, and they hit the ceiling. They didn't know anything about this speech attributed to Adlai Stevenson—I'm sure Maury must have made an English translation of it—and here was Stevenson making all sorts of pledges and promises to the Latin American community, and about the Good Neighbor Policy, and what have you. The Stevenson staff just hit the ceiling. They got frantic and went through the train taking up all these speeches, trying to get them all back—confiscate them.

Maverick was unruffled. Maury Maverick, Sr., had been a great friend of Stevenson's back in their early days in Washington together. Someone asked, "Maury, why did you do this?" He said, "Oh, well. It didn't hurt anything to try. It's all right. I don't care if they confiscate them, because I've seen to it that it's already in print in La Prensa, the Mexican paper."

So, Stevenson made a speech on Latin American affairs which was never official. Maury Maverick, Sr., wrote it without telling anybody, because he knew they'd say no. He just committed Stevenson on the things he thought he ought to be committed on and got it out to the Latin American community. This was the phantom Latin American speech of Adlai Stevenson. [Luter No. 1, December 27, 1969]

Reminiscences of D. B. Hardeman
Compiled by Larry Hufford

A Visit with Cactus Jack Garner

"Mr. John Nance Garner will see you at your convenience. Come on out," the invitation read.

Come on out I did the following day from San Antonio to Cactus Jack's home in Uvalde, Texas, a community named after Juan de Ugalde, an Eighteenth Century officer who soldiered for the Spanish Crown from the wilds of Peru to the Ghost Mountains of what is now Big Bend National Park.

"Come in here, boy, if your name is Maverick," a strong voice called. "James Slayden got me Bandera County in my first Congressional District. He helped me to go to Congress. I don't fancy interviews much anymore, but I'll talk to you on account of Jim. Come in, boy. Come in." (Congressman James Slayden was my great-uncle.)

A sole attendant in the old and modest frame house led me to the former Vice-President of the United States. I saw a small, ninety-three-year-old man with bushy eyebrows and alert eyes who somehow reminded me of Saint Nick.

"Sit down in that chair," Mr. Garner commanded. Then, after pointing a warning finger at me, he said, "Let's get something straight. Don't you talk politics to me. When I left Washington the last time, all the newspaper reporters came down to the train to see me off. I told them I'd never cross the Potomac River again. Those newspaper boys gave me a big 'ha-ha,' but I still haven't crossed the Potomac so the 'ha-ha' is on them. No politics now, boy, understand?"

"Mr. Vice-President, I don't want to talk politics either. The magazine I am writing for isn't political. We want to know about the first member of your family who came to Texas, about any contact you had with the Indians, your early childhood, and what it was like when you first started in law practice."

"All right, son," Mr. Garner replied, "get your pencil out and let's get going.


"In the early part of 1842, my widowed grandmother, Rebecca Walpole Garner, left the mountain country of Tennessee with a mess of children. She drove an ox wagon by herself to Blossom Prairie, Texas.

"Her dead husband's name was John Nance Garner. She gave that same name to my father, who gave it to me. That's three John Nance Garners in a row.

"My father fought as a Confederate cavalryman, and after the Civil War he came home and married Sarah Guest, my mother. She was pure Irish. Her father came from Dublin."

"Mr. Garner, were you born in a log cabin like one of the history books says you were?"

"No. It was a log house with five or six rooms. A good house, too."

"Did you ever have any trouble with the Indians?"

"I never experienced any Indian raids or difficulty. Sometimes we would ride up to the Oklahoma Indian country and watch them play their brand of baseball. They had sticks with cups on the end which they would use to scoop up the ball. They would bloody each other. The first time I saw them do this I was only twelve and Lord-to-mercy I was so scared I cried. They were the only Indians I ever saw. I never saw any Indians later on in south Texas."

"Mr. Garner, one of your biographies describes you during your boyhood days as being active as a cat and full of the devil. What about that?"

"Boy, two cats! Two devils!"

We both laughed, and then I asked him about his educational background.

"Well, I walked three miles to a one-room school which wasn't open much more than four or five months a year because it was the Reconstruction Period and times were poor.

"I had an old maid aunt, Miss Kitty Garner, who taught me the most. She made me learn my A-B-C's from an old blue-back speller. That was a good book. It would say 'd-o-g dog,' and 'h-o-g hog.' And then there would be a picture of a dog and a hog.

"In those days I was a good little short-stop. Had to play short-stop. Too little to play anything else. Our team was called the Possum Trot Nine and we played town ball. You play town ball with a rubber ball."


"Tell me how you got to be a lawyer."

"Well, I went to Clarksville, the county seat of Red River County, and studied for a spell in the law offices of Captain M. L. Sims, an ex-Confederate officer. I got my license before I was twenty-one. Ran for City Attorney. Got beat, too."

"How did you happen to go to Uvalde?"

"One day old Doc Clark thumped my chest and told me I had tuberculosis in my left lung. He said I had to go to a dry climate, and said if I'd go to Uvalde he would give me a letter of introduction to his brother, John H. Clark, a lawyer. So I got on a train and late one night in December, 1892, or maybe it was January, 1893, I arrived at Uvalde."

"Mr. Garner," I interrupted, "one of the books about you reports that you had $151.25 in your pockets that night. Is that correct?"

"No, it isn't. I had $152.25 in my pockets."

"When did you first meet your law partners?"

"The next morning after I got off the train. It was at Mr. Clark's office. They were John Clark and Tully Fuller. Mr. Clark was the oldest, then Tully, then me. We decided that Mr. Clark would get three-sixths of the partnership income, Tully would get two-sixths, and I'd get one-sixth. We shook hands and that was that.

"It was a good law firm. Our offices were near the Sewell and Estes Saloon where I liked to have a drink now and then. I always admired good whiskey and drank it until a few years ago. But I have never been intoxicated in my life.

"When I was Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and later Vice-President, I would meet some of the boys in a room at the Capitol after a day's work. We called it the Board of Education. I'd pour the first drink at 5 p.m. Then at 5:30 and only at 5:30, they got a second drink. Finally, there was a third drink at 6:00 p.m. and that was all, because I always believed that a man who didn't know how to drink was a plain darn fool."

"How did you meet your wife, Mr. Garner?"

"On a train going to San Antonio. She got on at Sabinal and then I was introduced to her for the first time. Her name was Mariette Elizabeth Rheiner, but I soon came to call her Etty. She and my mother were the finest women who ever lived."

"Mr. Garner, I know you became County Judge of Uvalde County, but didn't you also serve in the Texas House of Representatives?"

"Yes, indeed. That's where I got the name 'Cactus Jack'."

"How's that?"

"Well, resolutions were being offered to select the official state flower of Texas. I sent up a resolution naming the cactus bloom. Been called Cactus Jack ever since."

"And then you went to Congress?"

"Yes. I was on the Redistricting Committee which set up the new Congressional District from which I was elected. It ran from Corpus Christi to Brownsville up the Rio Grande to Del Rio."

The time had come for me to quit asking questions. Would he offer me a drink? That is the acid test in determining if you got along with the old man.

"Boy, do you want a drink?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well, the doctor won't let me drink anymore. But you take a drink and strike a blow for liberty for both of us." We walked to the kitchen.

"Pour yourself a drink, Maverick."

"Yes, sir."

"Son, that isn't a drink. Pour yourself a real drink."

"Yes, sir."

On my way out I couldn't help asking him one "political question." I knew the answer would be a good one, if he would only tell me.

"Mr. Garner, didn't some northern congressmen throw some votes your way which helped you to become Speaker of the House?"

"Yes. He was a little fighting Italian from New York and my friend. His name was Frijole."

"Frijole?"

"Yes, Frijole. Like frijole beans. I never could pronounce his first name. His last name was LaGuardia. Got to be Mayor of New York City. A fine man, he was."

Now I was at the door. It was time to part. "Thank you, Mr. Garner, for the nice visit."

"Son, when you came in here I told you I was glad to talk to any relative of Jim Slayden."

"I regret I never knew him. He died when I was a baby."

"Well, you missed something."

"Thank you and goodbye, Mr. Vice-President."

"Goodbye, boy."

True West
October, 1962

Jeannette Rankin Celebrated for Courage of Convictions

It was December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor, in the House of Representatives. John McCormack of Boston, trembling as he did it, moved to suspend the rules so that the resolution calling for a declaration of war could be taken up against Japan.

Speaker Sam Rayburn ordered that the clerk read the resolution, which stated in part: "Resolved, that the state of war between the United States and the imperial government of Japan is hereby formally declared."

Rayburn then laid the resolution out for a vote. The moment he did, U. S. Representative Jeannette Rankin rose and said, "Mr. Speaker, I object."

There was a silence in the House that went to the bone. Rayburn, his face crimson red, cried out: "You're out of order." Old Sam rolled the resolution over Rankin like a freight train, but time after time she rose to address the chair, saying, "Mr. Speaker, I would like to be heard."

Hisses from the gallery. Members of the house began to shout, "Sit down, sister." But "sister" wouldn't sit down, and when her fellow legislators whispered to her: "They really did bomb Pearl Harbor," she replied, "Killing more people won't help matters."

Then when the speaker called her name in alphabetical order, Rankin rose and said: "As a woman I can't go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else." By then the gallery was booing her.

When she left the floor of the House, the crowd was so hostile she had to take refuge in a telephone booth until the Capitol police escorted her back to her office, where she was forced to lock the door from the public.

The press universally came down on the lady from Montana like a ton of bricks; but one old newspaper editor, one of the most decent in the country, William Allen White, saluted her courage although disagreeing with her vote.

Here is part of White's editorial: "Probably one hundred men in Congress would have liked to do what she did. Not one of them had the courage to do it. The Gazette entirely disagrees with the wisdom of her position. But Lord it was a brave thing.... When in one hundred years from now, courage, sheer courage based on moral indignation, is celebrated in this country, the name of Jeannette Rankin, who stood firm in folly for her faith, will be written in monumental bronze not for what she did, but for the way she did it."

A year later, on December 8, 1942, the anniversary date, in a farewell speech to the house, she said that although the United States would probably win the war, it would not win the peace. This prediction was confirmed, Rankin said some years later, by the Korean and Vietnam wars. Further, she predicted that revolution was coming to Asia, that the white man in general and English in particular had to cease colonial domination.

The first and all-consuming political fight in Rankin's life was her effort to make it so that women would have the right to vote. In 1910, she was the first woman to address the Montana legislature. Her subject was women's suffrage.

In 1917 Rankin went to the U. S. House of Representatives as the first woman in the history of our country to do so. Christopher Morley, a famous writer of the time, wrote the following poem making fun of her and the idea of a woman in Congress:

Her maiden speeches will be known
For charm and grace of manner
But who on earth will chaperone
The member from Montana?

In 1918, while on the floor of the House fighting for the right of women to vote, she said: "They have stood back of men. The women have done all that they were allowed to do, all that the men have planned for them to do...."

On another occasion she declared on the floor of the House: "The boys at the front know something of democracy for which they are fighting. Those courageous lads, paying with their lives, testified to the sincerity of their fight when they sent home their ballots in the New York election and voted two-to-one in favor of woman suffrage at home."

Ranking was particularly offended by southern congressmen who led the fight against women voting for fear that might give blacks the idea that they also should have the right to vote.

When she was about to take her stand against World War I, the speaker, Uncle Joe Cannon, gave her a "listen, woman" lecture, but when the clerk called her name she rose to her feet and said: "I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war. I vote no."

World War I was not as popular as World War II, and so on that day of voting there was a flurry of applause for her in the gallery.

But then the Montana papers went after her. The Helena Independent said that she was "a dagger in the hands of the German propagandists, a dupe of the Kaiser, a member of the Hun army in the United States, and a crying schoolgirl."

The preachers of Montana thundered that she was a disgrace to womanhood and that her behavior proved how inadequate women were for the demands of political office.

Jeannette Rankin died in her sleep a few weeks short of her ninety-third birthday at Carmel, California. At the very last of her life, still fighting for justice, she was working on a project with Ralph Nader.

In 1941, when her patriotism was attacked, she placed her "creed" in the Congressional Record. Watch. "I believe in national defense against racial antagonisms. I believe in national defense against the persecutions of minorities. I believe in national defense against state coercion of the individual's conscience. I believe in national defense against those who use patriotism as a cloak in order to reap profits. I believe in national defense against an economic system which lacks sufficient opportunity for the young. I believe in national defense against demagogues. I believe in national defense against the futile faith that a strong army and navy is all that is needed to preserve and perpetuate freedom. I believe in a national defense against any 'ism' harmful to human personality which, under God, is sacred."

Because of my wife, Julia, and because of the women journalists I have come to know at the Express-News (my two immediate bosses are women young enough to be my children), I have become, more than ever, an ardent backer of the rights of women in all walks of life. They are treated unfairly and it is a disgrace.

I would urge all who believe in equal rights for women to dust off the name of Jeannette Rankin and to place her in their pantheon of heroes.

Maury Maverick, Jr.
Texas Iconoclast

Mormons In Texas

All America remembers Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Latter Day Saints of Jesus Christ, and his successor, Brigham Young. Few recall the Mormons who went to the Republic of Texas with Lyman Wight, then an apostle known as the "Wild Ram of the Mountains."

Born May 9, 1796, at Fairfield, Connecticut, Wight distinguished himself in the War of 1812 as a sixteen-year-old soldier in the Battle of Sackett's Harbor. Later he became a member of "The Quoroum of Twelve" which directed the Mormon Church.

Smith's murder in 1844 was followed by a scramble for power. Brigham Young, the new, high prophet, eventually set out for Salt Lake Valley, while Lyman Wight, contending that he was the true successor, began floating down the Mississippi River on March 28, 1845, with 150 men, women and children aboard four boats.

Wight and his followers first saw Sam Houston's Republic when they crossed the Red River on November 10, 1845, moving to an evacuated fort several miles northeast of the present site of Fort Worth. Here they remained for the winter, a winter which saw the annexation of Texas by the United States.

The Mormons broke camp on April 24, 1846, crossed the Trinity River near the small village of Dallas, and pushed on to the Colorado. Six miles north of Austin they established their first Texas camp of any real importance. Present-day residents of the capital city still refer to the saints' camp as "Mormon Springs," a site now covered by the waters of Lake Austin.

To this young village, the Mormons contributed a number of firsts. Furniture was built from hackberry trees on an organized basis. They were the first to build a community saw and gristmill. Appropriately enough, the first jail in Austin was constructed by the saints, who also established themselves as the first professional home builders.

Among Austin residents, Wight evidently was the only male in the colony regarded as a polygamist. Even today there are those who identify a structure fifteen miles east of Austin on the old Webberville Road as the place "The Wild Ram of the Mountains" lived with his three wives in a "general store and temple." Others will deny Wight practiced polygamy and would resent the description of him in the La Crosse Wisconsin Tribune as a "sinner of the most pronounced type, hardest swearer, freest drinker in the vicinity; a man who combined a love for wine, women and wassail with professions of temperance."


A rampaging Colorado River, which destroyed their mill, and a desire for greater privacy, prompted a search for a new colony site. The Pedernales River near Fredericksburg had plenty of good water and timber and was abounding with game and honey. Here the village of Zodiac was built in June, 1847, around a temple, a general store, a school, a cabinet shop and a gristmill. The concept of private property was not followed and the whole community held title to everything exceeding the actual needs of the individual.

The influence of Lyman Wight's colony apparently became felt among the Mormons who had followed Brigham Young to Salt Lake City, for in December 1848 it is recorded that two of Young's disciples came to Texas, seeking to bring Wight and his followers back into the fold. They reputedly threatened Wight with disfellowship should he refuse.

Wight is said to have replied that "nobody under the light of the sun except Joseph Smith or John Smith could call him from Texas to go to Salt Lake City," and that "he had as much authority to call them from Utah as they had to call him from Texas." Before a year went by, the threat was carried out and Wight was excommunicated for failing to join the regular church at Salt Lake.

In 1850, Lyman Wight was elected Chief Justice of Gillespie County. His tenure was brief. After falling out with his county commissioners, he was removed from office for refusing to attend sessions of the court.

The Texas Mormons, however, were helpful to their German immigrant neighbors, many of whom were intellectuals who had fled persecution at the hands of the German monarchy. Coming to Texas under the auspices of an organization known as Verein zum Schutze deutscher Edwinanderer, they were mostly a people who knew little about planting and harvesting of crops. In 1946, the Fredericksburg Standard in its Centennial Edition recounted, "...had it not been for these strange, kind people, many of the early (German) pioneers would have starved to death for it was the Mormons who showed them how to raise many of the things best suited for Texas soil and climate necessary for survival in this great wilderness...The Mormons were undoubtedly the first real pioneers in Gillespie County."

While the Mormons knew how to farm, they never found a way to cope with the flash-floods of Texas streams. When the stone burrs of the Zodiac gristmill were washed away, the saints retreated to a new location on Hamilton Creek.

Lyman Wight's son, Levi, described the move years later in an autobiography, "It was thought best by the community to seek other fields of labor and adventure, consequently we removed about fifty miles and located in Burnet County (and) built another mill on fine privileges.

"We now experienced frequent visits by the Indians of the western wilds of Texas. As their visits became more frequent, they began to give some trouble which increased to a rapid rate until several times they took all our horses, killed our milch cows, and drove our oxen to such a distance that it took us sometimes several days to recover them. They finally took and re-took our horses until we saw them no more. Of our neighbors, the men were often killed, women and children carried off to suffer torture worse than death...."

The stone burrs of the new grist mill, roughly cut from marble excavated in the general vicinity, proved to be unsatisfactory. Time after time the mill broke down.

One morning Wight called his followers together and announced that through a divine revelation he knew the location of the sorely needed stone burrs lost on the Pedernales. If the angel "Moroni" could give Joseph Smith the source for the Book of Mormon, then surely Wight, the successor High Priest in the minds of his followers, could locate the lost mill stones!

Noah Smithwick in his book, The Evolution of State, describes the incident: "Straight he bore as one in a dream, his divining rod in his hand; his awestruck disciples following in silence. Pausing at last in the middle of a sand bar deposited by the flood, he struck down his rod. 'Dig right here,' he commanded. His followers never doubting, set to work, and upon removing a few feet of sand, lo and behold, there were revealed the buried mill stones. Wight said he saw them in a vision and his followers believed it.

"...if there were any polygamous families, I did not know them....All titles of respect were discarded, men and women universally (were) called by their first names....The proselytes were permitted to retain their Gentile names....But those (male) children born in the fold received their baptismal names from the Book of Mormon--Luami, Albinandi, Romali, Cornoman....There was (not) anything objectionable in the Mormons as neighbors....Some of them were honest and industrious, others were shiftless and unreliable; and this must ever prove the potent argument against community holdings...the thriftless get just as much as the thrifty."


By December, 1853, Lyman Wight and his followers were on the move again, this time through the counties of Llano, Mason, Gillespie, Kerr and Bandera. Wight's son-in-law, Spencer Smith, noted in his diary, "29th, Monday (March, 1854), We have concluded to move across the river to take village lots in a new place called Bandera City. We have chosen our lots and commenced a school house today." Here the saints remained for the spring and summer, moving in the early fall some twelve miles down the Medina River to a new camp called Mountain Valley.

There they returned to their old trade of manufacturing furniture and cypress shingles.

Indian attacks began to mount. Repeated requests to the military for protection were ignored. Wight and nineteen others on March 18, 1855, wrote Major Robert S. Neighbors, Indian Agent at San Antonio, "...It seems very curious to us that troops are raised and sent five or six hundred miles from where an Indian ever roamed and leave our frontiers without protection....Who has lost horses in the White Mountains? It must be the Rangers if anybody as they are the only ones in all probability that was ever there....While Congress is spending six or eight months to find out whether it is best to reinforce the army or not, the Indians are killing, men, women and children and driving off large quantities of stock and nothing to hinder....We make this one more appeal."

A week later Neighbors replied to the saints, making a scathing denunciation of the U.S. Army but offering no help: "The Indian Agents have done all in their power to quiet the Indians: but so long as the military branch of the government continues to harass the friendly Indians and make indiscriminate war on them we must expect a continuance of Indian depredations....It is impossible for the Indian Agents to make peace, or quiet the Indians until the troops stop making war....

"It will also be impossible for me to make any progress in settling down and quieting the Indians until the troops are brought out of the Indian country...they are now in the Comanches' hunting ground and the Comanches are compelled to live in or near our settlements where there is no troop to harass them....So you may thank General Smith for the presence of the Commanches in your homes."

Despite the lack of help from the Army and the Texas Rangers, the Mormons managed to defend themselves against the Indians, but their small commercial ventures met with repeated failures.

Financial reverses coupled with the threat of the Civil War finally brought defeat. A foe of slavery and loyal to the Union, Wight decided to return North, but hardly had the migration started when he died unexpectedly March 31, 1858, about eight miles out of San Antonio. His body was returned to Zodiac and interred in the Mormon cemetery, not far from a road which now leads to Vice President Lyndon Johnson's ranch.

After that, the saints scattered to the winds. Some went to Shelby County, Iowa. Others went to Mexico, California and Salt Lake City. Three of Wight's sons remained in Texas and became soldiers in the Confederate Army.

Not long after the old prophet's death, the Galveston News wrote an epilogue to the early Texas Mormons:

"We believe we have omitted to notice the death of Mr. Lyman Wight who for some thirteen years past has been the leader of a small and independent Mormon settlement in Texas....These Mormons have proved themselves to be most excellent citizens of our State, and we are greatly indebted to the deceased leader for the orderly conduct, sobriety, industry, and enterprise of his colony. Mr. Wight first came to Texas in November, 1845, and has been with his colony on our extreme frontier ever since, moving still farther west as settlements formed around him, thus always being the pioneer of advancing civilization affording protection against the Indians. He has been the first to settle five new counties, and prepare the way for others."

April, 1963

Maverick Foresees a Rosy-Fingered Dawn

JULY 3, 1955 — I will not say that the dawn of a new era is with us in Texas, but I will say that the dawn of a new era is within the foreseeable future in Texas, and I would not have said that as much as a year ago.

Much has happened in the last year, and even more has come to pass since Jan. 20, 1953, when Governor [Allan] Shivers said in his inauguration speech: "Ineptness or corruption in the administration of a democratic government can and will be corrected by the people, if they are given the facts and opportunity to act upon them. This is a responsibility we must all share."

Yes, much has happened in recent times, and especially since the time when the words I just quoted were uttered — for we have seen shame and disgrace come to the good name of Texas. We have seen 25 insurance companies go broke with creditors and policy holders suffering untold economic disasters. We have seen our [oil-rich] tidelands leased to powerful men and corporations at royalty figures far less than what the Federal Government got for its tidelands, and worst of all we have witnessed the theft of the people's money from the Veterans Land Board.

In the latter part of 1953, the Texas School Land Board consisted of Bascom Giles and stand-ins for Governor Shivers and Attorney General John Ben Shepperd, who did not attend that board's meetings any more regularly than they did those of the Veterans Land Board. The School Land Board leased about 20 percent of the tidelands on a one-eighth royalty basis with minimum cash bonuses of $5 per acre.

It is interesting that when Price Daniel was Attorney General, he demanded that any bid of a lease within two miles of a producing [oil] well had to contain what is known as a high-royalty bidding feature, which meant that the bidder who offered the highest royalty got the bid. This excellent practice was discontinued when Price Daniel left the office of Attorney General and was only re-activated the month before last after the light of publicity turned toward the land office.

Now the important thing about all this is that the Federal Government — unlike the State of Texas — demanded and received bids starting on a bisis of one-sixth royalty and with a minimum cash bonus of $15.00 per acre.

In May of this year — for the first time — the State of Texas demanded royalties and bonuses on an equal par with Uncle Sam — and in fairness a good deal of the credit for this must go to Earl Rudder, the present Land Commissioner.

An important point to remember about the School Land Board is that its members were exactly the same members who made up the Veterans Land Board, one of whom was Mr. Bascom Giles. It is my thought — and prediction — that a great deal can be found out if we really have a thorough investigation of the School Land Board.

An effort was made to have such an investigation during the last session of the Legislature. The State Auditor, a man by the name of Cavness, testified before a committee that it would be necessary that he receive an appropriation of some $80,000 to thoroughly and adequately investigate the Land Board. Through the efforts and leadership of Rep. D.B. Hardeman, such an appropriation was made in the House, but it disappeared when it got to the Senate.

These factors — the veterans' land scandal, the insurance scandal, and what I think will ultimately be an equally important factor — the leasing of the tideland — are contributing issues toward what I believe will be a new era in Texas politics.

But there are other things which must be considered.

It is my opinion that in my six years in the Texas Legislature the immediate past session — with all its limitations and disappointments — was the finest session that I ever served in.

For example, session before last the bill which would have meant repeal of cross-filing under which a man could run as a Republican and a Democrat was defeated in the Senate after a hard and bloody fight. This last session, as lead author, I introduced the cross-filing repeal bill thinking that again we would have a bloody fight on our hands. To my pleasant surprise the bill sailed through the House and Senate with complete ease. Legislators who had once fought and defeated the bill changed their tune and this time voted for it.

That was a good sign. It meant that somehow, someway, the people were making it clear that they wanted intellectual honesty in party affairs — that perhaps we should have a two party state, as I think we should, but above all, let us be Democrats or Republicans and openly make a stand for what we think is right.

In the last session of the Legislature there was no book burning legislation like we had session before last, when a bill was introduced to remove all books from public libraries which degraded Texas history, American history and so on. Much of the credit can be attributed to Texas newspapers editorializing in a way which made it clear that no longer would they tolerate bush-league McCarthys. Thus the atmosphere was devoid of fear, suspicion, and censorship. . . .

Probably the most pleasant surprise of the session for me was the calm manner in which the members of the House and the Senate reacted to the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision on education [Brown v. Board of Education]. Frankly I thought that we would see an onslaught of bills all aimed at causing racial tensions and perhaps including features which would attempt to do away with public schools as was done in Mississippi. Yet only on one occasion was the subject mentioned — and that was two days before final adjournment. Not one unfriendly bill, of an anti-racial basis, was even introduced.

Much is taking place in the political thinking of Texas and even more will take place if you who belong to this proud and patriotic organization — G.I. Forum — will only re-double your efforts.

Up and down the Rio Grande and in connected areas, old dynasties which were the perfection of the so-called patron system are beginning to crumble. Anglo politicians are saying with increasing frequency that you can't hood-wink the Latin-American vote, you can't fool or intimidate them into voting for you, and you cannot take advantage any longer of the lack of education which often so grossly existed. Old time Latin American politicians, who so long contributed to what I called the patron system, are well on the road to being men who are no longer with great influence and power.

As I said I am not quite sure just what all these things mean, but I am convinced, completely convinced, that we are now solidly on the way to better days, to a greater harmony and to the acquisition of more rights for all of mankind in Texas.

Fifty Years of the Texas Observer

Remembering Maury Maverick Jr.

Maury was the only person I've ever known who made being cantankerous a virtue.

Maury looked at the world from and oblique angle. You could see it in the way he stood, one hand in his pocket, his head cocked to the side as if to say you can't see things right if you're looking at the world straight on. In fact, Maury had one of the most expressive heads I've ever seen. Sometimes it looked like it weighed him down—with the weight of the world inside, as when he'd be sitting at a table and put his head down and wag it back and forth like a cudgel while muttering about the forces of darkness and what they were doing to our democracy.

Maury was a study in contradictions. He was a proud Marine veteran of World War II with a Quaker's soul. He was devoted to Tom Paine, Jefferson, and Madison and believed deeply and passionately in this country as an idea but was so let down by it in practice. He cussed like the ex-Marine, trial lawyer son of Maury Maverick Sr. would, but was a Zen Buddhist when he communed with nature, birds, dogs, and trees. He constantly and proudly referred to his Maverick heritage but carried the burden of his father's fame and expectations to his grave. (He often told the story of visiting his father on his deathbed, who told Maury, "Well at least you didn't turn out to be as big a horse's ass as Elliot Roosevelt.")

He was someone who cared deeply about people but had a hard time communicating and could never make small talk. So you'd often get bluster or gruffness or criticism. I'd get calls at the Observer—and for some stretches it was after every issue—where I'd pick up the phone and the voice would say, "Maury Maverick. You know you might be right about everything you say, but your stories are too damn long." I took that to mean that he liked the stories. And he thought they were too damn long. He was probably right.

Then there was his sense of humor and that glint in his eye—even when it didn't work too well for seeing. He could be playful. He wouldn't let you get away with anything. He'd say something to try to rouse a response, say something on the edge of appropriate as a way of checking your pulse. For instance, Maury helped me apply for conscientious objector status. I'd had a rabbi who wouldn't write a letter of support. Fortunately, the temple's religious director, Milton Bendiner, wrote a good letter about war, peace, and the concept of Shalom on my behalf.

Maury constantly reminded me of how lucky I was to have four years of a college deferment before being called in the draft. As I was walking out of his office, after we'd completed the process, he called me back to give me one more message: "Now don't go out there and fly bombers for those Israelis." He couldn't resist saying that.

Maury was a people's hero. He'd stand up for you if you were ordinary folk whose rights were beat to shreds. He fought for civil rights and civil liberties in the days of Jim Crow and Joe McCarthy. He fought the Red Scare as a member of the Texas Legislature. He successfully defended Texas Communist Party Secretary John Stanford's rights against search and seizure. He showed the U.S. Supreme Court, including Justice Hugo Black, that among the items seized were the writings of Pope John XXIII and those of Justice Black. You know he enjoyed that. He talked about the wounds from those battles like they were old war wounds. But you also knew they took their toll. As Ronnie writes, Maury probably represented more conscientiousness objectors during the Vietnam War than anyone in the country. And most of them were farm boys from the inner city who'd only begun to think about war once they were already in the service. Maury worked to get them out. That was a hard row to hoe.

Back in the early '80s, I'd heard that the legendary Emma Tenayuca had returned to San Antonio. I wondered if I could interview her for the Observer. Since she'd been run out of town for her politics four decades earlier, she kept a low profile. There was only one way to meet her. I talked to Maury and he set it up. He told her I was "good people." When I was finally able to meet and interview her, she told me it was only because Maury had said I would be okay. He was the only person in San Antonio she trusted outside her family. Maury was good people.

And he built a network of good people and urged them on. He never gave up, never thought the fight wasn't worth waging. Until his dying day, and beyond in his last column, he engaged the world to make it better.

On the day Maury died, Dave Richards wrote his friends: "It is by no means clear to me that we will see another like him in our lifetime—the only thing I suppose is he didn't have to listen to Bush's state of the Union or hear the results of the Israeli election. Peace and Freedom are precious commodities."

Geoff Rips
The Texas Observer
February 14, 2003

Farewell to Maury

"An 82-year-old man, childless and ailing, could have had a lonely funeral. That's not what's happening today," said Maury Maverick Jr.'s "sort of double cousin," lawyer Merrill Maverick Clements, speaking for the family to about 1,00 people who filled O'Neil Ford's spectacular Trinity University chapel, overflowing into the choir's balcony, the morning of February first at Maury's funeral service. Among those present were former U.S. House Speaker Jim Wright, Maury's former Texas House colleagues Babe Schwartz, Bob Wheeler, Bob Mullen, and Johnny Barnhart, family, friends, the county judge, two former mayors, dissenters he had defended, and strangers who admired his columns in the San Antonio Express-News for 20 years. As Rev. Raymond Judd, Jr., said, "he'd get a kick out of this."

He died of kidney failure the morning of January 28 after an operation. The writer Jan Jarboe Russell, whom he phoned most mornings at about 8:30 for 30 years, was with him during his final space of lucidity the night before. "He said three things to me clearly," Jan said. "He said, 'I'm dying, and I don't know what to do.'" Jan replied, "None of us knows what to do, Maury. And you're right, you are dying." "Should I have had the operation?" he asked. There was no question about that: 15 doctors had concurred. "Yes, you should of, you had to," Jan said. "Are we at war yet?" he asked her. "No, we're not," she said. "Thank God for that," he said. Earlier he had told her that "if Bush leads us into war, he's leading us straight into a trap." For two decades the Express-News, and then the Hearst chain, had stuck with him through tumult and outrage over some of his columns; the Sunday after his funeral his last one appeared. He quoted the U.S. Catholic Bishops opposing a U.S. attack, and he signed off by asking, "What say the leaders of other religions in San Antonio about a war in Iraq?"

Maury was the son a great and famous man, Congressman, then mayor, Maury Maverick Sr. of San Antonio, the leader of the Young Turks in the U.S. House who rebelled when Roosevelt abandoned his own New Deal in 1935 and 1936. When young Maury was 6, his father, lying in a bathtub, called his boy over to him and had him put his hands in the severe shrapnel scar he bore in his shoulder from World War I. "Never forget," the father said to the boy. "This is the price of liberty." As the boy grew his father charged him: "You have a famous name. Speak up, and help the ribbon clerks." Sometimes Maury Jr. was tormented with anxiety and fear, but all his life he was true to his father and to the ribbon clerks.

During his career as a lawyer he handled more than 300 cases pro bono; he was the most active lawyer in the country for conscientious objectors in the military service against the Vietnam war. Childless, he had many children. With attorney Lou Linden, Maury established the legal precedent that conscientious objectors could be exempted not only on religious, but also on ethical grounds, as long as they objected to all wars. On that very basis my own son Gary refused to kill in Vietnam. Jan was like a daughter to him. He helped Didi Drabble, now on the Philidelphia Inquirer, get started on her career. He got Cary Clack on as an Express-News columnist; Clack lists among "Maury's children" poet Naomi Shihab Nye (who rendered beautifully, to the throng for Maury, Frank Dobie's poem "The Mustangs"), along with attorneys, a businessman, a teacher, and other journalists.

At the chapel Father Bill Davis said that one day he was "walking the 18 holes" at the Brackenridge Park golf course with Maury Jr. when Maury said to him, "Bill, I don't believe in your God, I'm a pantheist." Gesturing toward some cardinals flying over them he told the priest, "Those are my cardinals. You've got yours." Maury worshiped at a certain tree along that walk, once he hugged it while I was walking with him, and he greeted the purple martins returning every spring. Davis said, "Maury, with his cardinals and purple martins and all these things, he's about the closest thing to St. Francis that I've really ever met."

Rev. Claude Black, who preaches on the East Side of San Antonio, said that when he became friends with Maury it was a time when he, a black man, could not attend the University of Texas or use white restaurants, and "If we had not had the same values we could not have been friends." Black continued: "I knew him as a man who wanted this nation to live up to its promises.... The name is patriot, loyal to the promises of this government.... He was a mediator, a person who heard the cries for justice in the community, and you know that there's somebody in the community who understands your cry.

He was buried beside his father and mother at San Jose burial park. The crowd at the green tent sang "Amazing Grace." A jazz band played, circling them. With his widow Julia and other family arrayed and dancing quietly at the side of the casket, a pretty woman named Carolyn fulfilled his request for the occasion by doing a seemly, but sexy, hoochee-koochee. A male neighbor had heard Maury say he also wanted a stripper at his funeral and, unbeknownst to Julia, had hired one to perform. Dressed flimsily in a black lace outfit, with an improvised black lace face veil mounted in her hair, a softly fleshy young woman only Renoir would regard as voluptuous shimmied and slowly stripped at the casketside and displayed with g-string, her very white derriere. Julia, in fairly good humor, quietly asked anyone with a coat on to throw it over her, but no one did.

When he was lowered into a deep rectangular hole some of us dropped leaves and flowers down on him; Terrellita, his sister, dropped in two cactus pads. We took turns, dropping shovels of dirt from the waiting back-hoe. Then the back-hoe filled in the hole and men in workclothes smoothed the dirt. In her column the next day Jan Jarboe Russell wrote:

"One morning, many years ago, I awoke in a deep funk, the kind of despair that murders the soul and makes the simplest tasks—making coffee, getting dressed, going to the office—seem impossible." The telephone rang around 8:30, and Maury said "Hey, kid, what's going on in the world?"

"In response," Jan continued, "I whined. Maury shut me down cold. 'Stop bellyaching,' he said in his bulldog voice. 'I know things are tough, but I want you to get off your ass and go do something brave for your country.'" With him gone now, "every day, I'll shake myself from sleep, go out and try to do something brave for my country. You do the same."

Ronnie Dugger
The Texas Observer
Feb. 14, 2003

Rights of "the People," As Indians Call Themselves
"America Loses By Ignoring Indian Heritage"

Most Mexican-Americans of Indian descent do not know who they are. Stop any ten such persons and ask: "What do you know about your Indian ancestry?" You will get a blank stare nine times....

Why this lack of knowledge?

There are all kinds of unhappy reasons for this, "thanks" significantly to the Spanish—secular and religious—and later to us gringos. It is the kind of demeaning thing that caused Porfirio Diaz, the mostly Indian former president of Mexico, to send off to Paris for a cream that, he thought, would lighten the color of his skin. It is reflected in all the school systems of Bexar County by the lack of textbooks or courses which adequately tell students about the people of Indian heritage.

The school authorities of Maine have come out with a textbook that I think is one of the most exciting books I have ever read: Maine Dirigo, I Lead, produced by Maine Studies Curriculum Project, Down East Books, Camden, Maine. I found out about it from the Quakers.

The chapter on Indian history begins with an Indian by the name of 'Moomoom' who tells the junior high school students of Maine about himself and his people. Let's pretend we are sitting around a campfire. Brothers and sisters, you be quiet now, you hear me? Listen to the old man talk: "I am Moomoom of the Penobscot Nation. 'Moomoon' in my language is a nickname for "grandfather."...I have seen many changes in my lifetime, but only one thing hurts me very much. It is the way many people still 'see' me and my people. This story I have to tell is a painful one for me. It is true that nearly everything written about my people has been written by non-Indians. When Europeans first came to the area now known as Maine, they wanted our land, and they even fought to take it away from my people. What they wrote about us was not always true. Some things were lies. Others were just misunderstandings. To begin, let me say that many Native Americans do not like the name that Columbus gave us. We are not really Indians and this is not India. We are Sioux or Seminole or Wabanaki.... One thing that history books often say is that the Europeans 'discovered' the Americas. I must tell you that it was my people who discovered this land.... By the time Columbus stumbled on the West Indies, there were at least fifteen to twenty million native people in North and South America...."

Our Indian friend Moomoom then criticizes the use of the term 'prehistory." Once again, let's listen to the Indian grandfather: "Another thing we do not like is the way a part of our history is called 'prehistory' just because it happened before Europeans came here. In our view, everything that has happened to us is part of our history. Our history was not written; it was oral history passed down by word of mouth.... Unfortunately "prehistory" is an English word which means that part of history which happened before there was anyone who could write it down or record it.... From our point of view, however, this word "prehistory" seems to say that our legends and oral histories of what happened before the Europeans came here are not history.... When explorers arrived here, they did not understand us. What they said about us showed only the European point of view and not our point of view. Since everything written about us was written by Europeans, nearly everything said about us was biased from the European point of view. "Bias" is an important word for you to know when you study history. It means seeing events from only one point of view and forming an opinion before looking at all of the facts.... As an excuse for what they were doing, most Europeans said their people were better than ours. Many called us 'savages....' Puritans in Massachusetts, especially, said we were 'children of the Devil.' Seeing us in those biased ways made it seem right for them to treat us badly. Indeed, most Europeans had the same opinions of native people in South America, Mexico, and elsewhere...."

We folks of European descent have devastated the land and nature, and Moomoon doesn't think much of that. He went on: "Until the Europeans came here, we depended on the land for everything.... We could not afford to damage [the land] as the Europeans often did.... In the early spring, we moved to the hills to tap the maples for their sweet sap. Later we moved down to the streams...to catch fish.... To us, the whole nature was sacred. Our survival depended on the survival of everything else. In fact, we thought of animals as our relatives.... We did not kill young animals and took only what we needed. We gave thanks to the spirit of every animal and plant we needed to kill for our use."

And on the subject of religion, Moomoom has his doubts about Christianity: "Most early writers could not see the spiritual side of our lives. When they saw some of our spiritual practices, they called us...'pagan,' just because we were not Christian. Because we saw everything as sacred, the Europeans thought we worshipped many gods. In fact, we recognize only one force of good in the world: the Creator or the Great Spirit. When missionaries tried to convert us, they felt they had to tell us that our Great Spirit was the Devil."

Finally, Moomoom has some thoughts about land ownership: "Perhaps the most important area of misunderstanding between our culture and that of the Europeans was in our different understanding of what it means to own land.... We could no more sell land than we could sell the water or the air.... Kings and queens made people believe they own land.... It was [kings and queens] who often granted territory...without considering our aboriginal rights...."

Well, the campfire is low, and it is time to bid Moomoom good-bye. I thank him for his thoughts and thank the folks who wrote the magnificent book Maine Dirigo, I Lead.

To the people of Mexican descent with Indian heritage, let me close out today's column with a question: Why don't you know more about your Indian ancestry? You need to know about it, and so do we gringos. If we did, we might have a better understanding of the family of man.

In peace, friendship, and respect.