Where Have All the Liberals Gone?

Was “liberal” always a dirty word in Dallas? No, not necessarily, though there have been times when it was wise for liberals to assume one disguise or another to insure their survival here. This was not true, however, of George Clifton Edwards, the lawyer, whose defense of the poor and close association with the NAACP could have been termed radical only in the early decades of this century. Nor was it true of Carl Brannin, who ran for Governor on the Socialist ticket in 1936. Elmer Scott brought little theatre, chamber music, lecturers, and ideas to Dallas with no conservative cover to ease their way into the Bible Belt, and G.B. Dealey’s Dallas Morning News, as often as not, was a voice of pro-gressivism, especially in its battle against the Ku Klux Klan.



The changing tone in Dallas politics can be seen in the career of Federal Judge Sarah T. Hughes, who ran successfully in the Thirties for the State Legislature and District Court as an implicit liberal. But when she ran for Congress in 1946, the conservatives organized for the first time and threw the race to J. Frank Wilson. That was the year that the Hard Core Right emerged in Dallas.



The Liberals went underground for the most part, rearing their heads from time to time to fight against the widening of Turtle Creek and for an abstract art show at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. (Hard to believe the things that were once fought over: Stanley Marcus was particularly effective in the latter skirmish.) They bled and almost died for Adlai Stevenson in the Fifties, and surfaced again in 1960 to defend Jack Kennedy from Richard Nixon. This was an act of courage, since 1960 was the year that John Birch Society leader Robert Welch held a rally here that drew over a thousand people. It was also the year that Republicans perfected their canvassing techniques and nailed down North Dallas forever for the GOP.

Except for Democratic campaigns and other capers, it was lie-low time for Dallas liberals until 1965, the year of apotheosis. Then we few, we happy few, found each other and saw that it was good. Then we realized they really needed us.

Hadn’t the Kennedy Assassination laid bare before the world the torment in Dallas? Wasn’t it true that United Nations Ambassador Adlai Stevenson had been hit on the head by a local anti-U.N. picket in October, 1963? Hadn’t Lady Bird Johnson been roughed up by some Right-Wingers on the streets of Downtown Dallas in the campaign of 1960? Wasn’t it the case that Don Fielding, a liberal activist, had been mysteriously excluded from the hierarchy of the Boy Scouts because of his public stands on the public schools?

Fielding said as much himself in his book, Education and Assassination, a polemic that tells us much about the state of our minds in the mid-Sixties, especially in linking the awful events of November, 1963, to the liberal uprising in Dallas. While the title may seem strained today, in 1965, Don Fielding was right on target.

It was the assassination that gave us a political base. No one knew then that Memphis and Los Angeles and Silver Springs would obliterate that peculiar moral authority that energized our Mission Impossible: the League for Educational Advancement in Dallas.

Few on either side like to admit it, but LEAD and its rival, the Committee for Good Schools, were formed for precisely the same reason: to elect qualified people to the school board. CGS was launched by the city’s business leadership in 1950; LEAD came along in 1965. It started as the fledgling project of fighting-mad liberals who wanted to do something about the schools and fight the Dallas establishment in the process. It became the finely-tuned political instrument of Dr. Norman Kaplan, then Professor of internal medicine at Southwestern Medical School, whose first challenge was dealing with Don Fielding and others like him, who wanted to shed blood in the streets, preferably their own, more than they wanted to win.

Fielding and Kaplan had few similarities. While both were bright sons of the Jewish community who had managed to retain full heads of dark, handsome hair longer than most men, one was emotional and the other coolly professional. While both were combative, one found identity and fulfillment in swimming upstream; the other preferred to ride the available wave wherever his skill and agility would take him. Kaplan was the sort of man who would rather be right and president. Where Fielding bore too many scars to tolerate well the Dallas business leadership, Kaplan came fresh to the battle, determined to co-opt as much Downtown support as he could muster.

Kaplan was a rare breed in Dallas: an intellectual with jugular instincts. (He was to the liberals what Dr. Mel-vin Bradford of the University of Dallas is today to the Wallace conservatives.) Kaplan was armed with the New Republic and the works of Harvard’s Christopher Jencks, and he was determined to see these ideas implemented in Dallas schools. He was also a canny politician who saw the opportunities that lay north and south of him.

To the north were newcomers to Dallas, many of them scientific and technical people, who had brought with them exacting standards for their children’s education, and had found a system exhausted by post-war expansion, whose leadership had never heard of Christopher Jencks.

To the south was a restive black population, freed finally from the poll tax, but trapped still in separate, not-so-equal schools, whose leadership had never acknowledged the federal lunch program, let alone heard of Jonathan Kozol or Dr. Kenneth Clark, or for that matter, Dr. Martin Luther King.

Kaplan dreamed of a colition, and right away he saw the key – always the key for Dallas liberals – a common enemy. He had just the man: Dr. W T. White, autocratic septuagenarian Superintendent of Schools, who had no time (or money) for Special Education, Team Teaching, Public Kindergartens, Programming, Planning, Budgeting Systems, Teacher Accountability, Terminal Behavioral Objectives for Continuous Childhood Education, or any of the other innovations being tested at that very moment in Washington by young Turks like Dr. Nolan Estes, whose day in Dallas would come.

LEAD would make it so.

LEAD did make it so.

In 1967 the coalition elected to the School Board Dr. Emmett Conrad, surgeon, from the south and Dr. Marvin Berkeley, then of Texas Instruments, from North Dallas. Doctors, medical or philosophical, were very big in those days. We were proud of our academic achievements, which we felt were not sufficiently recognized or appreciated by the Downtown Establishment.

We would show them.

Indeed we did.

It took only one more election to put LEAD in control of the School Board, and then Dr. Conrad was heard to say, “Now we are they.”

But who were we, really?

With few exceptions, what we represented was a rift between the business and professional communities in Dallas. We were the harbingers in this city of conservative writer Kevin Phillips’ Mediacracy. Spawned by the knowledge industry (universities, foundations, the media); funded by a booming economy; fueled by the energies of the New Frontier and the Great Society, and yes, by Mayor Erik Jonsson’s ambitious Goals for Dallas; we felt ready, indeed we felt called, to challenge and to civilize the Business Culture that had dominated Dallas for the past two decades.

What we were missing was a durable constituency.

Our natural power base was in the intellectual community, which was (and still is) too small to support extensive political action. Labor wasn’t (and isn’t) strong enough to offer much staying power by itself. Nor was there in the Dallas of those days a group of radical chic, who might embrace our cause because it was fashionable.

More than any place else, LEAD looked to the blacks to find a constituency. We looked to the browns as well, but their voting strength was not comparable. The marriage was convenient, but short-lived. The only common interests were replacing Dr. White and generating more tax money for innovative programs. Certainly LEAD wanted to correct the unfair allocation of funds within the district – Kaplan said recently that in the early Sixties, Dallas Schools in some instances were spending for blacks-but nobody pressed for accelerated school integration. That was down the road, and it would lead to political disaster.

Even without busing, the LEAD coalition carried within it the admixture of its own dissolution. It started disintegrating in 1969. That’s when the white liberals became concerned that in picking candidates for black areas of the city, they were only perpetuating the patronizing traditions of the South. So, full of moral vigor and resolution, they turned to their black partners and said, “Pick your own candidate this time.”

It didn’t take long for LEAD to be seized with deep regret.

I still remember those meetings at Milton Tobian’s house (by now this restless, intellectual scion of the cotton business was president of LEAD), where we fretted, agonized, quarrelled over the black community’s choice: Arthur Fred Joe, a postman.

What did he know about Christo-pher Jencks?

What did he know about Terminal Behavior Objectives for continuous Childhood Education?

What did he know about getting elected?

Milton was desolate. So was Norman Kaplan. So, I blush to tell you, was I.

Those meetings nearly tore the organization apart. Never has so much idealism been invested in the practice of politics. Theologians from SMU’s Perkins seminary spoke to the ethics of the situation. Liberal businessmen painfully put aside the friendships they had carefully nurtured in the minority community and began to counsel “realism.” Black and brown board members caucused in the dining room, exhilarated by their break with the White Shadow Power Structure, plotting their next moves, which would take them nowhere.

LEAD voted in the end to cooperate with CGS and jointly endorse Jan Bromberg, Jerry Wheat, and Dr. Dan Foster.

This peace began LEAD’s passing. The first to see it was Don Fielding, whose political paranoia had a way of producing unerring perceptions. Detente with CGS, he warned, would only bring grief. He warned that a well-funded CGS would be back stronger than ever, and run all over a LEAD grown weak and out-of-shape from lack of exercise that comes with campaigning. State Senator Oscar Mauzy said the same thing as he viewed with alarm from the sidelines. Both turned out to be exactly right.

By 1972, the Year of the Apocalypse for Dallas liberals in more ways than this one, LEAD was all but finished. It fell victim to the times, overrun by issues like drugs, discipline, and of course, busing.

Ironically, few in LEAD ever favored busing, but liberals made milder noises against it than conservatives did. Naturally. They didn’t want to offend their black constituents. But the blacks had already caught on. They had realized sooner than most liberals that their vital interests overlapped only at the margins. Gradualism is fine for those who have already arrived. It’s less acceptable to those still struggling to get there.

How could 1972, which looked so good for liberals, turn out to be so bad?

They got rid of Lt. Governor Ben Barnes and Governor Preston Smith, but got Dolph Briscoe.

They found Sissy Farenthold; but then lost her.

They got quotas and proportional representation in the Democratic Convention, but they lost the election so badly that they were saddled with the blame.

They got single-member districts in the Legislature, but lost the blacks to their own politics and unleashed the Republican and Redneck Right. (Economic and social conservatives, respectively, according to William Rusher of the National Review.)

The liberals were caught in the middle, left alone to look for a new style if they were going to win any turf at all.

What did they do?

Some like Mary Greene and Carl Brannin, kept the old faith, she tending the barricades at the Tri-Ethnic Committee, he at the Dallas Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Other Old Heads made openings to the Right.

We saw Mike McKool, who had run for Democratic County Chairman in 1966 as John Connally’s nemesis, wooing and winning some Establishment support in his state senate race of ’68, and running for Congress in ’74 with the full-fledged backing of Trinity River Canal conservatives.

We saw Oscar Mauzy, who had won his Senate seat in 1966 over the dead body of Conservative Democrats, supporting Ben Barnes for governor against Sissy Farenthold in ’72 and Dolph Briscoe against Farenthold in ’74.

It was not so much that the Old Heads grew older as it was that they grew wiser in the ways of Texas politics.

And everybody’s gotta be someplace.

So what happened to the other liberals?

Some, like Senator Ron Clower and Representatives John Bryant and Jim Mattox, found a home in Populism, whose hard core consists of mother lodes like City Councilwoman Rose Renfroe. They don’t do so badly together, either. Even Wallace leader Dr. M.E. Bradford admitted to me once that every populist has to be a little bit liberal. (Don’t kill me, Rose!)

Others, like semi-liberal Congressman Alan Steelman, Councilman Richard Smith, SMU Urban Institute’s Jo Fay Godbey, and Rosemary Henderson of the City Plan Commission, have turned to the environmental movement, which might be called the most conservative of them all.

Council members Adlene Harrison and Garry Weber straddle both camps. They rail equally against developers and utilities. So does Milton Tobian, now director of Texas Common Cause, who’s spent the last two years fighting against the Highway Trust Fund and for a state utilities commission.

Expert political managers like Judy Bonner Amps followed (or, in some cases, led) various of the above into Populism and Environmentalism and taught them how to win elections there.

Dan Weiser, wizard of redistricting, presided over the rise and fall and regrouping of the liberal community with the serenity that belongs only to the master of the situation. His is the fastest calculator in the West.

Often as not, the interests of Populist liberals coincide with those of black and brown politicians, and they find they can work together fairly easily. This is not always true for environmental liberals. Urban design is not necessarily a high priority for minorities. Their problems are more basic I wonder sometimes if they don’t suspect in the environmental movement a dirty little secret: cleaning up the city can mean cleaning out poor blacks and browns. But this may not be so, and if it is, it will be alleviated. The day is coming, and is already here, when anybody with an interest in the city instead of the suburbs, must eventually, inevitably, collide or collaborate with the environmentalists. They are preempting the territory.

So that’s where the liberals went.They have not gone undergroundagain like they did in 1946. They’vejust taken on some protective coloration. And why not? In Dallas, a liberalby any other name almost alwayssmells more sweet.