Howdy and welcome to Wise About Texas, the podcast about Texas history, culture, and everything Texan.

I'm your host, Ken Wise.

We're putting this episode out near November 3rd, which is Election Day here in Texas.

I pick this day on purpose for this episode because Texas has a long history of colorful elections,

and they always make good stories.

We'll certainly cover many of them during the

course of this podcast, but we're going to start with one of our most famous elections, one that led

directly to the election of a president of the United States and changed our national history forever.

That's the U.S. Senate election of 1948. So let's go back to the 40s and get wise about Texas.

Back in 1941 on August the 4th, there was a special election for one of our senators

because of the death of Senator Andrew Jackson Houston, who happened to be the son of San Jacenot's hero, Sam Houston.

The governor then, Wilbert Lee Pappy O'Doniel entered the race against, among others,

a New Deal congressman from the hill country named Lyndon Baines Johnson.

By the way, this race was a Democratic primary because since Texas was essentially a one-party

state, whomever won the Democrat primary almost certainly would win the general election.

O'Danyl won that race with a controversial flood of late election returns

that came in and handed him the election.

Before that Senate election, Governor O'Doniel had run for governor in 1938.

He did so by hitting the road with a band, a Bible, and an affected hillbilly personality.

He wasn't even born in Texas, as a matter of fact, and he also had a professional public relations man directing all of those efforts.

By the way, his band was called

the Lightcrest-Doh boys, although he called him the hillbilly boys on the campaign trail.

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