THERE IS ONE MAN, mayor of an American city, who is having a grand time. It is Maury Maverick down in San Antonio, Texas. Maury has lost none of his magnificent swagger. He is full of laughter, is eternally busy. He is like a man attempting to lift an entire city on his shoulders—carry it forward into something new.
I suspect there are many people in San Antonio who have no great fondness for Maury. They managed to beat him for reëlection to Congress but it may well turn out that they will end by being glad he is back there at home, in his own city, among his own people. There is something very Texan about Maury. There is a Texas sweep to the man. He is Texas in a way I imagine that other Texan—Jack Garner—never was, never could be. Out there, where they know their Cactus Jack personally, they speak of him always with a sort of nervous tolerance, for, while Cactus Jack evidently has power, it isn't a broad, sweeping Texas kind of power. It seems to be the sort of power that comes from interest on the dollar invested, the mortgage-foreclosing sort of power.
As for San Antonio, it strikes a man, coming there, looking about, as just the typical American city. The city's magnificence is magnificent. Its squalor, like that in the poor quarters of so many American cities, is something to alarm and frighten you.
You come into the city by car, out of the far west, as I did, from Los Angeles and Tucson—so many millions and millions of acres to half-feed a steer, a few goats and sheep wandering over the barrenness—and there you are, on a flat rich plain, cotton growing up to your shoulders, vast pecan groves, vegetables of all sorts to be shipped north by the carload, the trainload.
The city is half Mexican; nearly all of the labor of that country is done by Mexicans. They are everywhere. As voters they have always been purchasable. Why not? If I had to live as most of them have to live, be paid for my labor as they have been paid, I'd sell anything.
As everyone knows who knows the South, Maury Maverick comes from a family of distinction. There are the Maurys of Virginia, the Mavericks of Texas. He must have gone through something any boy or young man from such a Southern family has necessarily to go through.
Are you going to ride on that, be what is called a Southern gentleman, stay up there on the heights? Knowing, as you must if you have a working brain at all, on what all the distinction you are holding onto rests?
Cheap labor, Negro and Mexican, pounded down and down, ignorance that has gone on for a century, "hill billies," Florida and Georgia "crackers," Mexican "greasers." One-party states—rotten bureaucracies built up, as they must be in any one-party state. The thing that, in the end, must kill all the totalitarian states, either in America or Europe, going on in our South. The nonsense always being carried on about the old South—that unlike the North and the Middle West it was not commercial. The Old South trying to hark back to the Greeks, to justify its "peculiar" institution. As though it didn't take money to buy Negro slaves. If slavery was not the very height of commercialism, what was it?
A young alive man like Maury Maverick, with his alert brain, realizing all that, not wanting to live on "family," be a stuffed shirt.
So this young man goes to Congress, gets there by buying the Mexican vote. There is no doubt of that. But he bought it in a new and legal way. The Mexicans down there were not classified as white men. They were classified as Negroes in the census and other records, federal and state. Maury forced the classification of the Mexicans as white men. That's the way he got them, bought them. He restored to them a little of their self-respect. If you ask me, I imagine they will keep voting for him till hell freezes. He's got them really bought.
A pretty interesting fact, I'd say, now when we are all trying so hard to square ourselves with the American nations to the south of us, wanting their markets, of course. But also, a little, wanting something else, even understanding, cultural understanding, wanting even to make some amends for brutalities of the past.
The Mexicans and the sympathetic natives sent Maury to Congress, as a Southern New Dealer. But when he came up for reëlection the second time, the machine politicians and the special interests managed to gang up on him. They beat him.
I imagine it was the New Deal's fault. They had sent a representative of the National Labor Relations Board down there where the pecan-shellers, in the huge pecan industry, were getting an average of about $1.75 a week. . . . Mexican women trying to keep families going by prostitution. A mess, one of the ugliest messes in the U.S.A.
I was down there when that was going on, went to some of the hearings, heard some of the rich pecan kings speak of labor, Mexican labor, with sneering contempt.
"You can't do anything with that kind of cattle." The air full of that sort of feeling. At the same time the beauty spots of the city all relics of what an earlier Mexican civilization had built.
So they beat Maury for Congress. He was upsetting the apple cart. He was, they cried, a Red, a Communist. I imagine there was plenty of money spent. They got him. They thought they had him down for keeps. They figured that, because he was a New Dealer, he would probably get an appointment in Washington, or be sent, say, to some other country as an ambassador. And that would be O.K., too. He would be out of their hair.
But Maury didn't do it. He fooled them. He came home, put his name up for mayor in his own home city. He got into a real fight. He is one who doesn't mind a fight. He likes it.
And he won out. They used up all the ammunition they had, hit below the belt, yelled communism, but he beat them.
And there he was, right away, in trouble up to his eyes.
There had been a permit given for a Communist meeting, not by Maury but by his predecessor. Was he going to revoke it? Was he going to let them meet?
"Sure," said Maury.
"What about free speech?"
"Let 'em spout."
I am sure the man realized, as any man who knows his America must realize, that all this talk about a Communist danger in this country is just plain bunk. That the real reason for all this Red-baiting has its foundation in the fact that, in San Antonio for example, pecan-shellers are now getting $2.50 a day instead of $1.75 a week. That the U.S.A. is a deeply capitalistic country with just a bit of awakened consciousness that our underdogs have been made too underdog, that the real revolutionary danger is in the $1.75 a week, not in Earl Browder or Mike Gold.
So Maury said, "No, I'll not revoke the permit. Let 'em spout," and immediately crowds gathered in the street before the city hall.
They howled. They threw bricks. They threatened to hang Maury to a lamp post but he stood pat. He stood pat in the same way the Little Flower, LaGuardia, did about the Bund meeting in the Garden, in New York. Thinking, believing, that the best way to get the atmosphere cleared was to let them spout.
So that blew over and they tried to get Maury in another way. He had, they said, paid the poll tax for certain union members. It seems that it is against the law to pay another man's poll tax in Texas. In my own state, Virginia, where I live now, both of the old parties do it openly. The Byrd organization does it, and what there is of the Republican crowd does it. In our congressional district, I have been told, it costs a man around $30,000 to be elected to Congress. The money goes into paying up poll taxes. What else?
But in Texas, you can't. Down there they can send you to the penitentiary for doing it. But you can spend money to put on a campaign to get people to pay their own poll taxes.
Maury gave the money—$250—to the Garment Workers' Union, with its lawyer's consent.
The lawyer sold him down the river.
Maury says the union attorney wanted to dictate who should be chief of police in San Antonio.
Maury said, "No."
He said, "They elected me, not you, mayor of this town."
"Do your worst," he said, and the man apparently tried.
"Were you scared, Maury?"
"Hell, yes. I didn't think I'd look good in a cell. I wanted to do things in this town. I'm stuck on my town. I've got a hunch it can be the most beautiful, the most healthful city in America. I'm a Texan. I believe in Texas. I have plans. I want to work. I don't want to be in jail. Sure I was scared."
They didn't get him. He is working.
He said, "Listen, boy. I don't want to be a Huey Long or a Bilbo. I don't want to appeal to anything cheap. I'm no charlatan. I want to work, make this town what it can be. Sure they tried to get me. Maybe if I had been them I'd have done the same. They tried to get me but they failed. O.K.
"I'm not going to be revengeful. Yesterday was yesterday. What about doing one Texas town right? This is an empire, down here. I'm a native of a town I like and I want to make the world like it. And boy, am I going to make it a town!"
He seems to be doing it. He's young, isn't old and cynical, isn't tired. He got eleven millions from the U.S.A. while in Congress to tear out some seventy acres of the worst, the most terrible slums in America. He has driven the big-time gamblers out of his town. He says of the poor little prostitutes, "I'll make them keep off the streets but I'll not arrest and bilk them."
He takes you around, proudly, swaggeringly. He is carrying on the beautifying of the bank of the river that flows through the city. Has got all of the men he can find at work. The merchants, coming to realize that workers getting $1.75 a week are rotten customers, are going over to him.
There was an old Mexican town, called "La Villita," right in the heart of San Antonio—a few old houses, very simple and therefore beautifully built, within walking distance of all the big modern hotels. He is restoring that, making it a part of the new city of his dreams. He is working, half playing, full of energy, a real Texan, not wanting to be a stuffed shirt, not, it seems, revengeful for what they have tried to do to him, trying to keep his head.
He strikes me as American youth, at its best, a man with the courage and energy to try again in another American city what so many men have tried only to meet defeat. It seems to me our one hope—such American youth.
Sherwood Anderson, The New Republic, March 25, 1940
I suspect there are many people in San Antonio who have no great fondness for Maury. They managed to beat him for reëlection to Congress but it may well turn out that they will end by being glad he is back there at home, in his own city, among his own people. There is something very Texan about Maury. There is a Texas sweep to the man. He is Texas in a way I imagine that other Texan—Jack Garner—never was, never could be. Out there, where they know their Cactus Jack personally, they speak of him always with a sort of nervous tolerance, for, while Cactus Jack evidently has power, it isn't a broad, sweeping Texas kind of power. It seems to be the sort of power that comes from interest on the dollar invested, the mortgage-foreclosing sort of power.
As for San Antonio, it strikes a man, coming there, looking about, as just the typical American city. The city's magnificence is magnificent. Its squalor, like that in the poor quarters of so many American cities, is something to alarm and frighten you.
You come into the city by car, out of the far west, as I did, from Los Angeles and Tucson—so many millions and millions of acres to half-feed a steer, a few goats and sheep wandering over the barrenness—and there you are, on a flat rich plain, cotton growing up to your shoulders, vast pecan groves, vegetables of all sorts to be shipped north by the carload, the trainload.
The city is half Mexican; nearly all of the labor of that country is done by Mexicans. They are everywhere. As voters they have always been purchasable. Why not? If I had to live as most of them have to live, be paid for my labor as they have been paid, I'd sell anything.
As everyone knows who knows the South, Maury Maverick comes from a family of distinction. There are the Maurys of Virginia, the Mavericks of Texas. He must have gone through something any boy or young man from such a Southern family has necessarily to go through.
Are you going to ride on that, be what is called a Southern gentleman, stay up there on the heights? Knowing, as you must if you have a working brain at all, on what all the distinction you are holding onto rests?
Cheap labor, Negro and Mexican, pounded down and down, ignorance that has gone on for a century, "hill billies," Florida and Georgia "crackers," Mexican "greasers." One-party states—rotten bureaucracies built up, as they must be in any one-party state. The thing that, in the end, must kill all the totalitarian states, either in America or Europe, going on in our South. The nonsense always being carried on about the old South—that unlike the North and the Middle West it was not commercial. The Old South trying to hark back to the Greeks, to justify its "peculiar" institution. As though it didn't take money to buy Negro slaves. If slavery was not the very height of commercialism, what was it?
A young alive man like Maury Maverick, with his alert brain, realizing all that, not wanting to live on "family," be a stuffed shirt.
So this young man goes to Congress, gets there by buying the Mexican vote. There is no doubt of that. But he bought it in a new and legal way. The Mexicans down there were not classified as white men. They were classified as Negroes in the census and other records, federal and state. Maury forced the classification of the Mexicans as white men. That's the way he got them, bought them. He restored to them a little of their self-respect. If you ask me, I imagine they will keep voting for him till hell freezes. He's got them really bought.
A pretty interesting fact, I'd say, now when we are all trying so hard to square ourselves with the American nations to the south of us, wanting their markets, of course. But also, a little, wanting something else, even understanding, cultural understanding, wanting even to make some amends for brutalities of the past.
The Mexicans and the sympathetic natives sent Maury to Congress, as a Southern New Dealer. But when he came up for reëlection the second time, the machine politicians and the special interests managed to gang up on him. They beat him.
I imagine it was the New Deal's fault. They had sent a representative of the National Labor Relations Board down there where the pecan-shellers, in the huge pecan industry, were getting an average of about $1.75 a week. . . . Mexican women trying to keep families going by prostitution. A mess, one of the ugliest messes in the U.S.A.
I was down there when that was going on, went to some of the hearings, heard some of the rich pecan kings speak of labor, Mexican labor, with sneering contempt.
"You can't do anything with that kind of cattle." The air full of that sort of feeling. At the same time the beauty spots of the city all relics of what an earlier Mexican civilization had built.
So they beat Maury for Congress. He was upsetting the apple cart. He was, they cried, a Red, a Communist. I imagine there was plenty of money spent. They got him. They thought they had him down for keeps. They figured that, because he was a New Dealer, he would probably get an appointment in Washington, or be sent, say, to some other country as an ambassador. And that would be O.K., too. He would be out of their hair.
But Maury didn't do it. He fooled them. He came home, put his name up for mayor in his own home city. He got into a real fight. He is one who doesn't mind a fight. He likes it.
And he won out. They used up all the ammunition they had, hit below the belt, yelled communism, but he beat them.
And there he was, right away, in trouble up to his eyes.
There had been a permit given for a Communist meeting, not by Maury but by his predecessor. Was he going to revoke it? Was he going to let them meet?
"Sure," said Maury.
"What about free speech?"
"Let 'em spout."
I am sure the man realized, as any man who knows his America must realize, that all this talk about a Communist danger in this country is just plain bunk. That the real reason for all this Red-baiting has its foundation in the fact that, in San Antonio for example, pecan-shellers are now getting $2.50 a day instead of $1.75 a week. That the U.S.A. is a deeply capitalistic country with just a bit of awakened consciousness that our underdogs have been made too underdog, that the real revolutionary danger is in the $1.75 a week, not in Earl Browder or Mike Gold.
So Maury said, "No, I'll not revoke the permit. Let 'em spout," and immediately crowds gathered in the street before the city hall.
They howled. They threw bricks. They threatened to hang Maury to a lamp post but he stood pat. He stood pat in the same way the Little Flower, LaGuardia, did about the Bund meeting in the Garden, in New York. Thinking, believing, that the best way to get the atmosphere cleared was to let them spout.
So that blew over and they tried to get Maury in another way. He had, they said, paid the poll tax for certain union members. It seems that it is against the law to pay another man's poll tax in Texas. In my own state, Virginia, where I live now, both of the old parties do it openly. The Byrd organization does it, and what there is of the Republican crowd does it. In our congressional district, I have been told, it costs a man around $30,000 to be elected to Congress. The money goes into paying up poll taxes. What else?
But in Texas, you can't. Down there they can send you to the penitentiary for doing it. But you can spend money to put on a campaign to get people to pay their own poll taxes.
Maury gave the money—$250—to the Garment Workers' Union, with its lawyer's consent.
The lawyer sold him down the river.
Maury says the union attorney wanted to dictate who should be chief of police in San Antonio.
Maury said, "No."
He said, "They elected me, not you, mayor of this town."
"Do your worst," he said, and the man apparently tried.
"Were you scared, Maury?"
"Hell, yes. I didn't think I'd look good in a cell. I wanted to do things in this town. I'm stuck on my town. I've got a hunch it can be the most beautiful, the most healthful city in America. I'm a Texan. I believe in Texas. I have plans. I want to work. I don't want to be in jail. Sure I was scared."
They didn't get him. He is working.
He said, "Listen, boy. I don't want to be a Huey Long or a Bilbo. I don't want to appeal to anything cheap. I'm no charlatan. I want to work, make this town what it can be. Sure they tried to get me. Maybe if I had been them I'd have done the same. They tried to get me but they failed. O.K.
"I'm not going to be revengeful. Yesterday was yesterday. What about doing one Texas town right? This is an empire, down here. I'm a native of a town I like and I want to make the world like it. And boy, am I going to make it a town!"
He seems to be doing it. He's young, isn't old and cynical, isn't tired. He got eleven millions from the U.S.A. while in Congress to tear out some seventy acres of the worst, the most terrible slums in America. He has driven the big-time gamblers out of his town. He says of the poor little prostitutes, "I'll make them keep off the streets but I'll not arrest and bilk them."
He takes you around, proudly, swaggeringly. He is carrying on the beautifying of the bank of the river that flows through the city. Has got all of the men he can find at work. The merchants, coming to realize that workers getting $1.75 a week are rotten customers, are going over to him.
There was an old Mexican town, called "La Villita," right in the heart of San Antonio—a few old houses, very simple and therefore beautifully built, within walking distance of all the big modern hotels. He is restoring that, making it a part of the new city of his dreams. He is working, half playing, full of energy, a real Texan, not wanting to be a stuffed shirt, not, it seems, revengeful for what they have tried to do to him, trying to keep his head.
He strikes me as American youth, at its best, a man with the courage and energy to try again in another American city what so many men have tried only to meet defeat. It seems to me our one hope—such American youth.
Sherwood Anderson, The New Republic, March 25, 1940
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