How do you? 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. 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 Jacino-Cero Sam Houston. The governor then Wilbert Lee Papi O'Daniel, 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'Daniel 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'Daniel 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.

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