SINCE Maury Maverick comes from one of the most famous families in the history of the West, and from the heart of the Texas cow country as well, his personal appearance, the first time you see him, is apt to be something of a surprise. Without anticipating a Tom Mix or a William S. Hart or the currently popular singing cowboy Mr. Dick Foran, one might justifiably expect a Maverick—of the Texas Mavericks—not to be on the chubby side. That's the side he's on, however, big-boned and full-cheeked, with a curving waistline that is beginning to crease over his belt. His waistline does not disturb him (though it disturbs his wife) for he is convinced that by the time this session of Congress is over it will have diminished considerably. This seems reasonable enough because he has already lost seventeen pounds, without benefit of any exercise whatsoever. He works, as any of his colleagues will tell you, like a horse—a brewery horse: one of those Percherons that used to pull the shined-up wagon in the Fourth of July parade.
There is much about him that suggests a Percheron: that feeling of rugged, untiring energy, for instance. He works on an average of from twelve to fourteen hours a day—and, as if his congressional duties were not enough, he is constantly taking on other jobs. Right now he is writing a book, suffering all the pangs of authorship. He pecks on his typewriter until one or two o'clock in the morning and, seeing him on the floor of the House the next day, or leading a conference in his office, you wonder how he manages to keep going.
Since most Representatives look like small-town lawyers, druggists, bookkeepers (and many of them are), it means nothing to say that Maverick does not look like a Congressman. It may be said, however—which is not to be said of most of his companions—that Washington has not brushed off on him at all. Back in San Antonio he used to be a lumberman and it is harder to stop acting like a lumberman than it is to start acting like a Congressman. This combination of accidents—being a lumberman in the cow country—has given him more than his share of bluffness, the immediate impression he gives of being what Broadway calls a "right" guy, has made him one of the best vote-getters in Texas—especially among the Mexicans. Maverick calls them, almost sentimentally, "my Mexicans": and they, not so sentimentally, talk about him as "our Maverick." If Maverick knows who his friends are, he also knows his enemies. He gives them no quarter, but neither does he hate them. "Of course the Country Club crowd and the oil crowd are against me" he says. "Why shouldn't they be against me? They'd be fools if they weren't. I'm against them."
Maverick moves clumsily, and walks with an uncertain, almost rolling gait, but this is the result of a laminectomy that he likes to call one of the most sensational operations in the history of American surgery. It also left him with a seven-inch scar that runs down from the base of his skull. His eleven-year-old daughter, Terrilita, says he is very proud of it. The laminectomy, which is an operation on the spinal cord, had to be performed because of the riddling Maverick's body took when he was commanding a company in the Argonne. He came back from France with the scars of eight different wounds, one of them a hole in his shoulder big enough to put your fist in, three medals, a few pieces of shrapnel that he still carries around, and a bitter, relentless, impassioned hatred of war. He also remembers the way war smells, and the grotesque postures of the violently slain, and a friend who was haunted by the ghosts of five bayoneted Germans until he went mad. He knows the forces that operate to make wars, and the class that profits by war, but his pacificism, fundamentally, is more of an emotional than an intellectual conviction.
As much as he hates war, he hates fascism even more. He sees in fascism the end of all social and human dignity and insists it must not happen here. He would not, however, involve the United States in any alien anti-fascist crusade. He thinks it would be easy to sell this country another war to save something—perhaps Democracy again—and thus involve us in a new European conflict. He thinks that if we get into another war, for whatever reason, we will risk the danger of domestic fascism. "If European civilization has to end it has to end," he says. "I know many people will criticize me for feeling the way I do, but I don't think it's our job to save Europe. Our job is to save the United States."
When Maverick talks about something in which he is interested, like neutrality, he becomes very intense. He talks, it might be added, a great deal. He is a good talker, with an easy command of profanity, and talks at you, directly, instead of just in your general direction the way most people do. His speech is full of slang and Americanisms, which he uses without any mental quotation marks, and he is scornful of the borrowed words and phrases that clutter up the radical vocabulary. One of his best stories is about what happened when Rex Tugwell tried to explain a few things about the New Deal to a crowd of Westerners.
"Rex kept using all those big words—he kept talking about nodules—and just by looking at the crowd I could tell he wasn't getting over. Rex had a lot to say and it was a good speech. The only trouble was that nobody understood it. By God, I didn't understand it myself!"
Maverick interjects many questions into his conversations, which must be answered, and it is quite possible that this is his way of making sure your attention does not stray. He listens almost as well as he talks but if you play his game and ask him questions, he is likely to take the bone of conversation into his own teeth and run off with it again.
He talks a great deal about his ancestors. Washington is noted for its inhabitants who have ancestors—it is surprising how many minor politicians were born in log cabins of parents who were direct descendants of George Washington, Lighthorse Harry Lee and Thomas Jefferson—but Maverick can play this game with the best of them. He seems to have a corner on most of the lesser heroes in American history.
Maury's famous grandfather, old Sam Maverick, one of the signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence and the man who gave the word "maverick" its dictionary meaning, is only one of them. Also included in his genealogy, among various others, are the explorers Lewis and Clark, and the historic Judge Lynch whose abuses of authority gave rise to the expression "lynch law." Unlike most people with ancestors, however, Maverick sets them up merely to shoot them down. He takes considerable pleasure, for instance, in pointing out that the first Lynch to come to his country (the father of the Judge) was sold on his arrival to the highest bidder as an indentured servant. Ancestors, he contends, are a lot of bunk. "They were people just like us," he says. "They came here because of economic pressure back home. People go abroad to see where their ancestors came from and some guide shows them a castle where an old lord lived. They think their ancestor was the lord. He wasn't. Their ancestor was the guy who took a potshot at the lord and had to get out of the country."
His connection with the original Judge Lynch is interesting because he is the only Southern Congressman to go on record as favoring the passage of the federal anti-lynching law. His position is extremely simple. "I want that law passed because I don't want Negroes to get lynched." There was much comment in the press when he first declared himself in favor of the bill, but so far he has not received a single letter of complaint. He has, on the contrary, received numerous expressions of approval—most or which, it is to be happily noted, came from people in the South. Whether his lead will be followed by other Southern Representatives and Senators is questionable, but, dropping the role of informal biographer for a moment, I would like to call the above facts to their attention. Being honorable and decent, gentlemen, may not cost you as many votes as you think.
Maverick was born in San Antonio and likes to have it understood that he isn't one those Congressmen who were born in log cabins. "I was born in a rock house—a big rock house." He is forty-one years old and was the eleventh and youngest child of Albert and Jane Maverick. It is possible that from his mother (recently, at the age of seventy-two, she began painting) Maverick gets his interest—somewhat astonishing in a Congressman—in art and letters. It might be pointed out, for the benefit of the cynical who are used to politicians who develop peculiar interests as soon as they get into the papers, that Maverick has been collecting examples of Mexican art, and reading voluminously, since his lumberman days.
Mexico, I think, has been more important in shaping Maverick's political philosophy than anything else. San Antonio is one of those cities, New Orleans is another, where exiled South and Central American revolutionaries—particularly the Mexican ones—used to come, and perhaps still come, to organize and finance new revolutions. As a boy in San Antonio, Maverick used to see these Mexicans—small dark men, generally, very polite, yet always intense and mysterious—conversing on the benches in the square or walking shoulder to shoulder in the hot yellow sunlight. Then they would disappear, the Mexican quarters would be full of rumors, a few days later a new revolution would break out below the Rio Grande. The revolution would fail or succeed and the dark mysterious men with their perfect manners would either return to San Antonio, if they were still alive, or else be heard of as the leaders of a new Mexican government. The idea of governmental change, even of revolution, is therefore not new or strange to Maverick. He grew up with it. It is the core of all his political beliefs.
Putting Maverick into any particular political frame is almost impossible. He simply won't fit. He believes that a large number of key industries should be owned by the government, but he is not a socialist. Smeared as a Red during the last campaign, he is anything but a communist. He disagrees with the communist concept of government and thinks, furthermore, that communism is alien both to temperament and psychology of the American people. He would probably have to be listed, if any listing is necessary, as a left progressive—following, in a general way, the line established by the elder LaFollette and Senator George Norris: whom he considers, incidentally, the greatest living American.
"The most important change in our national life" he says, "is the difference with which men have come to regard private property. The average American is beginning to realize that only by the protection of certain common rights—in politics and in the general national resources—can he hope to retain his civil liberty and his own property.
"We have to work out our own destiny and we have to work it out in our own way. There are a lot of things that have to be done and we have to do them. We can't look to Europe for any solution. It's simply up to us."
He has a knack for putting things simply and the way he states his political philosophy is this, in five short words:
"Let's do what it takes."
Hamilton Basso, The New Republic, April 21, 1937
There is much about him that suggests a Percheron: that feeling of rugged, untiring energy, for instance. He works on an average of from twelve to fourteen hours a day—and, as if his congressional duties were not enough, he is constantly taking on other jobs. Right now he is writing a book, suffering all the pangs of authorship. He pecks on his typewriter until one or two o'clock in the morning and, seeing him on the floor of the House the next day, or leading a conference in his office, you wonder how he manages to keep going.
Since most Representatives look like small-town lawyers, druggists, bookkeepers (and many of them are), it means nothing to say that Maverick does not look like a Congressman. It may be said, however—which is not to be said of most of his companions—that Washington has not brushed off on him at all. Back in San Antonio he used to be a lumberman and it is harder to stop acting like a lumberman than it is to start acting like a Congressman. This combination of accidents—being a lumberman in the cow country—has given him more than his share of bluffness, the immediate impression he gives of being what Broadway calls a "right" guy, has made him one of the best vote-getters in Texas—especially among the Mexicans. Maverick calls them, almost sentimentally, "my Mexicans": and they, not so sentimentally, talk about him as "our Maverick." If Maverick knows who his friends are, he also knows his enemies. He gives them no quarter, but neither does he hate them. "Of course the Country Club crowd and the oil crowd are against me" he says. "Why shouldn't they be against me? They'd be fools if they weren't. I'm against them."
Maverick moves clumsily, and walks with an uncertain, almost rolling gait, but this is the result of a laminectomy that he likes to call one of the most sensational operations in the history of American surgery. It also left him with a seven-inch scar that runs down from the base of his skull. His eleven-year-old daughter, Terrilita, says he is very proud of it. The laminectomy, which is an operation on the spinal cord, had to be performed because of the riddling Maverick's body took when he was commanding a company in the Argonne. He came back from France with the scars of eight different wounds, one of them a hole in his shoulder big enough to put your fist in, three medals, a few pieces of shrapnel that he still carries around, and a bitter, relentless, impassioned hatred of war. He also remembers the way war smells, and the grotesque postures of the violently slain, and a friend who was haunted by the ghosts of five bayoneted Germans until he went mad. He knows the forces that operate to make wars, and the class that profits by war, but his pacificism, fundamentally, is more of an emotional than an intellectual conviction.
As much as he hates war, he hates fascism even more. He sees in fascism the end of all social and human dignity and insists it must not happen here. He would not, however, involve the United States in any alien anti-fascist crusade. He thinks it would be easy to sell this country another war to save something—perhaps Democracy again—and thus involve us in a new European conflict. He thinks that if we get into another war, for whatever reason, we will risk the danger of domestic fascism. "If European civilization has to end it has to end," he says. "I know many people will criticize me for feeling the way I do, but I don't think it's our job to save Europe. Our job is to save the United States."
When Maverick talks about something in which he is interested, like neutrality, he becomes very intense. He talks, it might be added, a great deal. He is a good talker, with an easy command of profanity, and talks at you, directly, instead of just in your general direction the way most people do. His speech is full of slang and Americanisms, which he uses without any mental quotation marks, and he is scornful of the borrowed words and phrases that clutter up the radical vocabulary. One of his best stories is about what happened when Rex Tugwell tried to explain a few things about the New Deal to a crowd of Westerners.
"Rex kept using all those big words—he kept talking about nodules—and just by looking at the crowd I could tell he wasn't getting over. Rex had a lot to say and it was a good speech. The only trouble was that nobody understood it. By God, I didn't understand it myself!"
Maverick interjects many questions into his conversations, which must be answered, and it is quite possible that this is his way of making sure your attention does not stray. He listens almost as well as he talks but if you play his game and ask him questions, he is likely to take the bone of conversation into his own teeth and run off with it again.
He talks a great deal about his ancestors. Washington is noted for its inhabitants who have ancestors—it is surprising how many minor politicians were born in log cabins of parents who were direct descendants of George Washington, Lighthorse Harry Lee and Thomas Jefferson—but Maverick can play this game with the best of them. He seems to have a corner on most of the lesser heroes in American history.
Maury's famous grandfather, old Sam Maverick, one of the signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence and the man who gave the word "maverick" its dictionary meaning, is only one of them. Also included in his genealogy, among various others, are the explorers Lewis and Clark, and the historic Judge Lynch whose abuses of authority gave rise to the expression "lynch law." Unlike most people with ancestors, however, Maverick sets them up merely to shoot them down. He takes considerable pleasure, for instance, in pointing out that the first Lynch to come to his country (the father of the Judge) was sold on his arrival to the highest bidder as an indentured servant. Ancestors, he contends, are a lot of bunk. "They were people just like us," he says. "They came here because of economic pressure back home. People go abroad to see where their ancestors came from and some guide shows them a castle where an old lord lived. They think their ancestor was the lord. He wasn't. Their ancestor was the guy who took a potshot at the lord and had to get out of the country."
His connection with the original Judge Lynch is interesting because he is the only Southern Congressman to go on record as favoring the passage of the federal anti-lynching law. His position is extremely simple. "I want that law passed because I don't want Negroes to get lynched." There was much comment in the press when he first declared himself in favor of the bill, but so far he has not received a single letter of complaint. He has, on the contrary, received numerous expressions of approval—most or which, it is to be happily noted, came from people in the South. Whether his lead will be followed by other Southern Representatives and Senators is questionable, but, dropping the role of informal biographer for a moment, I would like to call the above facts to their attention. Being honorable and decent, gentlemen, may not cost you as many votes as you think.
Maverick was born in San Antonio and likes to have it understood that he isn't one those Congressmen who were born in log cabins. "I was born in a rock house—a big rock house." He is forty-one years old and was the eleventh and youngest child of Albert and Jane Maverick. It is possible that from his mother (recently, at the age of seventy-two, she began painting) Maverick gets his interest—somewhat astonishing in a Congressman—in art and letters. It might be pointed out, for the benefit of the cynical who are used to politicians who develop peculiar interests as soon as they get into the papers, that Maverick has been collecting examples of Mexican art, and reading voluminously, since his lumberman days.
Mexico, I think, has been more important in shaping Maverick's political philosophy than anything else. San Antonio is one of those cities, New Orleans is another, where exiled South and Central American revolutionaries—particularly the Mexican ones—used to come, and perhaps still come, to organize and finance new revolutions. As a boy in San Antonio, Maverick used to see these Mexicans—small dark men, generally, very polite, yet always intense and mysterious—conversing on the benches in the square or walking shoulder to shoulder in the hot yellow sunlight. Then they would disappear, the Mexican quarters would be full of rumors, a few days later a new revolution would break out below the Rio Grande. The revolution would fail or succeed and the dark mysterious men with their perfect manners would either return to San Antonio, if they were still alive, or else be heard of as the leaders of a new Mexican government. The idea of governmental change, even of revolution, is therefore not new or strange to Maverick. He grew up with it. It is the core of all his political beliefs.
Putting Maverick into any particular political frame is almost impossible. He simply won't fit. He believes that a large number of key industries should be owned by the government, but he is not a socialist. Smeared as a Red during the last campaign, he is anything but a communist. He disagrees with the communist concept of government and thinks, furthermore, that communism is alien both to temperament and psychology of the American people. He would probably have to be listed, if any listing is necessary, as a left progressive—following, in a general way, the line established by the elder LaFollette and Senator George Norris: whom he considers, incidentally, the greatest living American.
"The most important change in our national life" he says, "is the difference with which men have come to regard private property. The average American is beginning to realize that only by the protection of certain common rights—in politics and in the general national resources—can he hope to retain his civil liberty and his own property.
"We have to work out our own destiny and we have to work it out in our own way. There are a lot of things that have to be done and we have to do them. We can't look to Europe for any solution. It's simply up to us."
He has a knack for putting things simply and the way he states his political philosophy is this, in five short words:
"Let's do what it takes."
Hamilton Basso, The New Republic, April 21, 1937
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