Monday, May. 22, 1939
Unbrcmded Bullfrog
Unbranded Bullfrog
A maverick in the Southwest is a stray, unbranded calf; finders, keepers. The name comes from Samuel Augustus Maverick who landed in Matagorda, Tex. from South Carolina early in 1835 with a Yale education, $36,000 in gold and so much energy that when he died he left ten children and more land than almost anyone in the U. S. Only cattle he owned were 453 head, acquired for a debt, which he put on an island and forgot. When their unbranded offspring wandered ashore, cowmen would whoop, "There's a Maverick!" and rope it.
Samuel Augustus Maverick signed Texas' declaration of independence, fought in its war with Mexico, served in its Congresses, helped it join the Union. Just 100 years ago this month he was sworn in as second mayor of what is today the nation's southernmost big-little city, then the cow-town of San Antonio.
Two-legged Mavericks now abound in the Southwest and some of them still have the erect, patrician bearing of Samuel Augustus. But the only one whose name & fame are national is a startling, stubby exhibitionist with the appearance of an agitated bullfrog. He does not glory in his full name, Fontaine Maury-Maverick, but in his War record, his intellectual honesty and in the hell he raised for four years in Washington as first Representative from Texas' new 20th District. It was his boast that he never cast a sectional vote, that he out-dealt the New Dealers, that he typified the rising political leadership of the new industrial South, Democratic, of course, but independent as an unbranded yearling. He voted for the anti-lynching bill and against Franklin Roosevelt's Big Navy,/- questioned the wisdom of WPA, orated against cocktail parties and hat-doffing in elevators. He led a group of two score House youngsters called the Young Turks for their extreme views, some mushy, some daring, some plain cockeyed.
Last year the 30-year-old city machine in San Antonio, led by suave, grey Mayor Charles Kennon Quin, got tired of hearing Maury Maverick (who beat Quin for Congress in 1934) tell the country what a civic pesthole his city was. They put up a hard-hitting attorney named Paul Kilday, knocked Maury Maverick out of Congress.
Having learned the joys of being a conspicuous little frog in the national pond, Maury Maverick went home vowing to become the biggest frog in San Antonio. He formed a Fusion party (named after Fiorello LaGuardia's in New York) and went after Mayor Quin's machine. He centred his campaign on the squalid life of San Antonio's peon pecan shellers (the biggest voting bloc), got Eleanor Roosevelt down to look at them, accused Quin & Co. of a long list of offenses at least one of which --padding the city payroll with 555 voters --brought Quin an indictment (later quashed). Mayor Quin replied by branding Maury Maverick a Communist, a C. I. 0.-lover, an irresponsible rabble rouser. A third candidate, 29-year-old Leroy Jeffers, entered the race shouting that beneath Maury Maverick's white shirt was a Red undershirt. That let Maury go into his War dance about his Argonne shell wound, crying, "That undershirt was red [with Maverick blood] so that little boys like Leroy Jeffers could be protected. . . !"
Last week Maury Maverick's Mexicans mostly voted for him, the Negroes voted for Boss Quin, whites sprinkled their votes fairly evenly. In the final roundup, Maury Maverick was found to have succeeded his grandfather by 18,445 votes to 15,441 for Quin, 11,172 for Jeffers. Grandson Maury promptly took a pre-oath of office administered by his father, Albert Maverick, 86, standing in front of Grandfather Samuel's portrait (see cut). In with Maverick to replace the Quin machine go three out of four city commissioners, including bulky Louis Lipscomb, Princeton 1923 footballer, as fire & police chief.
Recovering from his labors with coffee & aspirin, Maury Maverick croaked: "I'm going to be a stuffed shirt. I got beat for Congress for not being one."
His first act was to head for Austin to try to beat a bill, which he had previously supported, to place San Antonio employes under civil service.
Acquaintances suspect that Mayor-elect Maverick will take off from his new stance in a 1940 leap toward the U. S. Senate.
* After his maternal grandfather's nephew, Matthew Fontaine Maury, a commander in the Confederate Navy, whose oceanographic researches led to the laying of transatlantic cables.
/--Military aviation is one of San Antonio's biggest industries. Randolph Field, "West Point of the Air," is there. Maury Maverick was for consolidating the Army & Navy's air forces into a third major arm of national defense.
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