Everything about Coke Stevenson totally explained
Coke Robert Stevenson (
March 20,
1888 –
June 28,
1975) was the
United States Governor of
Texas from 1941-1947. He was the only
20th century Texas
politician to have served as
Speaker of the
Texas House of Representatives, as
Lieutenant Governor, and then as governor.
He was born near the geographic center of Texas in
Mason County to Robert Milton and Virginia Hurley Stevenson, His parents named him, not for Governor
Richard Coke, but after
Methodist bishop Thomas Coke. As a teenager, he went into the business of hauling
freight. In 1913, Coke Stevenson became president of the
First National Bank in
Junction, the seat of
Kimble County. He was thereafter the Kimble County Attorney from 1914 to 1918 and Kimble County Judge (chief county administrator) from 1919-1921. In 1928 he was elected to the Texas House and served there from 1929-1939, when he became lieutenant governor.
Stevenson succeeded to the governorship on
August 4, 1941, when Governor
W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel resigned to take a seat in the
U.S. Senate, which he won in a
special election. A dramatic contrast to the flamboyant and unpredictable O'Daniel, Stevenson's approach was so
conservative and taciturn that his critics accused him of doing nothing. Stevenson was reelected in 1942 and 1944 by substantial margins, and when he left the governorship in January 1947 he was the longest-serving governor in the history of
Texas and had presided over a broad and deep economic recovery during the years of
World War II.
He ran for the U.S. Senate in 1948, and was defeated in a furious and controversial
Democratic Party primary runoff by Austin Congressman
Lyndon B. Johnson. The disputed final margin of victory for Johnson was eighty-seven votes, the closest senatorial margin in the nation's history. Stevenson challenged the count, but
United States Supreme Court Justice
Hugo L. Black declared that the matter would rest with the 59-member Democratic State Central Committee. That panel by a 29-28 vote sustained Johnson's margin of victory. The tie-breaking vote was cast by the
Temple publisher Frank W. Mayborn (1903-1987), who at the urging of Johnson's then campaign manager,
John B. Connally, rushed back to Texas from a business trip in
Nashville, Tennessee, to break an otherwise 28-28 tie.
After the loss to Johnson, Stevenson retired to Junction; disenchanted with the Democratic Party, he supported
Republicans for the rest of his life, including
Richard M. Nixon and
Barry Goldwater. He died in
San Angelo. Stevenson was a major figure in the second volume of
Robert Caro's biography of
Lyndon Johnson, which covers the disputed 1948 election for the
U.S. Senate. Caro characterized the conservative Stevenson as a reluctant, honest statesman.
Some critics of Caro's analysis believe that he portrayed Stevenson in an overly heroic manner in order to be a clear contrast to Johnson. Stevenson was a traditional Democratic Texas politician. Although he was very popular, he was a racist. In 1943, for example, when Stevenson was governor, a black man was lynched in
Texarkana, Texas. When asked about the lynching, Stevenson said, "Well, you know these
Negroes sometimes do those kinds of things that provoke whites to such action."
Caro capably refutes their claims in an afterword to the paperback edition of
Means of Ascent. His rebuttal originally appeared in the 2/3/1991 NYT Book Review, and illustrates that Stevenson, while very much a man of his day, was also the throwback western original that Caro portrayed.
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