Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, Augustth, 1948 in the Democratic primary for Senate in Texas, Koch

Stevenson leads Linden Johnson by account of 492,481 to 492, 271.

Stevenson is up by about 200 votes or so.

It is a real nail-biteriter and Stevenson would go on to maintain

that lead win the nomination become a two-time senator then the vice president

then one of the most influential presidents in American history not to mention

Stevenson is the subject of a five-part

biography but the legendary writer Robert Caro oh wait I'm sorry none of that

happened to Koch Stevenson all of that did happen to L.B.J. and that may be because in the weeks after the vote

tally in the 1948 Senate Texas primary where L.B.J. was initially down to Stevenson a batch of ballots appeared

of mysterious origin all waited very heavily towards LBJ all with the same

handwriting on them we'll get into that.

But that mysterious batch of ballots

came to be known as Box 13.

It appeared and it swung the primary to Johnson,

who did end up winning and becoming a senator and president and all those things that I mentioned before.

So a shout out before we get going to listener Michael and a few others I think who have suggested this is a topic and also the 1948 election, which is just really interesting in its own right.

We will get into it.

Box 13, the very shady 1948 Texas Senate primary.

Our special guest for this episode is Mark Lawrence, Professor of History at UT Austin, and

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