Yellow Dogs and Republicans by Ricky Dobbs

Yellow Dogs

Allan Shivers served as the governor of Texas from 1949 until 1957. Not only did his tenure represent a transformational time in Texan politics and culture; Shivers practically catalyzed the changes himself, according to Dobbs in Yellow Dogs and Republicans. Texas had been a staunchly Southern Democratic State. Like other Southern States, Texas held long-entrenched ideals of White Supremacy, racism, and patriarchy. Conservative Southern politics changed at first due to the Great Depression and the government's response to it. In particular, President Roosevelt's New Deal programs helped Texans to mitigate the mire of the Great Depression via essential programs and social services. Southerners started to appreciate federal funding for their woes. However, the differences between old and new ways of life in Texas started to reveal a rift developing in the society that could only be solved by diversifying the political landscape. Dobbs claims that Allan Shivers capitalized on the rifts, seizing the moment to change Texas's character for the next fifty years and counting.

One of the changes that took place in the wake of the Great Depression was urbanization. Prior to the 1950s, Texans were mostly poor rural dwellers. Urbanization hit Texas like a storm, causing it to become one of the most rapidly developing states in the South. Home ownership among white Texans skyrocketed. Empowered by increased wealth and upward social mobility, white middle class Texans enjoyed and used their improved access to channels of political power, too. White middle class Texans therefore did the unthinkable: the started to entertain the idea of voting for a different party other than the Democrats.

Another major change that took place in America during the middle of the twentieth century was shifting race relations. The Civil Rights movement would not happen until after Shivers' tenure in Texas. However, the stirrings of black social, political, and economic empowerment were already being felt across the nation. The Brown v. Board of Education decision shattered many Texans' dreams of perpetual white dominance of American social institutions. Thus deprived of their unlicensed and unmitigated racism, many white Texans viewed the party of their parents' choice the party of yesterday. Shivers understood the racist sentiments and capitalized on Texan culture to create new options for white voters.

Although he would operate locally as a Democrat to appeal to the maximum number of Texans, Shivers strategically leveraged his power to build a bridge for Texans to be able to vote Republican in federal elections. Shivers' strategy went beyond simple bargaining with Republicans in Washington. He made sure to please all necessary constituencies in his home state by warming relations between politics and big business. Dobbs also claims that Shivers succeeded in Texas because he banked on a charismatic style of leadership.

The Democratic Party in Shivers' time is akin to the Republican Party of the post-Reagan era. Therefore, Shivers' legacy cannot be justly considered in isolation of the fact that the Democratic and Republican parties were essentially trading places during the middle of the century. The ideological shifts within both parties started with Roosevelt and the New Deal, which tacitly and in some cases overtly helped Southern Blacks to achieve a modicum of economic aid to improve their condition. Clinging hard to their racist ideologies, many Texans believed the New Deal represented an affront to all things Southern.

Shivers came from a family of white slave owners. His ancestors were not wealthy plantation owners, but their small-scale earnings allowed them sufficient funds to afford slaves as status symbols. Shivers' grandfather fought with the Confederate Army in the Civil War, further shaping Allan Shiver's identity as a strict Southerner with white supremacist ideals. The emancipation of the slaves that ensued from Southern defeat dealt a serious economic blow to the Shivers family, as it did for all other white slave-owners who must have felt that the big, bad federal government was stealing their "belongings" from them. Interestingly, Dobbs points out that slaves often stayed with their white families after emancipation because they essentially had nowhere else to go, and feared lynching and other new and deadly forms of persecution.

Allan Shivers grew up in a political household, with a father who stood for staunch conservative Southern Democrat values. He grew up in a poor logging community in Tyler County, but his family was able to propel itself into the upper echelons of Texan society. Theirs was a religious Baptist family, and one that financially benefitted from the oil boom. Essentially, Shivers symbolizes the ultimate Texan. His personal background and his personality made him a natural fit for politics, especially as Shivers was smart enough to realize how important good political connections are for business.

By the time Shivers became Lieutenant Governor, a two-party Texan political landscape was already in place. Shivers sided squarely on the conservative end of the spectrum, preserving social injustice and racial inequalities by stymying efforts at promoting economic well-being for Tejano and Mexican farm laborers, and fighting to keep Texan schools as segregated as possible within the provisions of the new federal mandate. As a decisively pro-business politician, Shivers did all he could in Texas to prevent labor unions and even picketing. As Dobbs puts it, support for Shivers' approach to labor issues remained firm for years, especially in light of the dissatisfaction with Roosevelt's New Deal and its impact on business. Conservative Southerners like Shivers also grew unhappy with President Truman, too, partly because of Truman's friendliness toward civil rights issues. Shivers and his cronies began to support a states' rights-based agenda to distinguish Texas and its Democratic Party politics from the federal government.

The 1952 election was the first watershed moment, during which Shivers and the wealthy elite of Texas associated and aligned themselves with Republicans in Washington while remaining Democrat at home. The new Democrats were dubbed Shivercrats. Shifting national political identity toward the Republican Party represented a type of "defection," but it allowed core Texan white values to remain the same as they had been for years. Eisenhower understood the importance of winning over the valuable voters in Texas, and campaigned heavily there with Shivers' support.

Texans still needed a reason to change their party politics domestically, within state borders. Dobbs credits television for some of the changes that took place in Texan society to alter its political demographics. Prior to 1954, most Texans viewed politics through a local lens. National issues were deemed unimportant, for like other white supremacist Southern state governments, they still felt cut off from the North, hard done by after the downfall of the Confederacy, and underserved by what they perceived as a government that did not have its best interests at heart. Television, however, changed things. Through the tube, wealthy Texan voters were able to tune into presidential politics and recognized the shift that was taking place in Washington. Republicanism in Washington resembled the Democratic Southern ideals of Texans of Shivers' and his parents' generation.