1948 Texas Senate Election: Box 13, George Parr, and the Lawsuit

The 1948 Texas Senate election and the Box 13 scandal turned on 200 late-added ballots from a single precinct in Jim Wells County that flipped a statewide Democratic primary to Lyndon B. Johnson by 87 votes out of nearly a million cast. Johnson defeated former Governor Coke R. Stevenson, earned the nickname “Landslide Lyndon,” and survived a fraud challenge that reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Stevenson insisted until his death in 1975 that the seat had been stolen.

Who Was Running

Stevenson entered the race as the favorite. A rancher and lawyer from the Hill Country, he had served two terms as Speaker of the Texas House beginning in 1933, then as lieutenant governor, then as governor from August 1941 through two full terms of his own — the longest consecutive gubernatorial tenure in Texas up to that point.¹² He left office popular and with a treasury surplus.

Johnson was a sitting congressman making his second run at the Senate. He had lost a 1941 special election to W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel by 77 votes and viewed the 1948 open seat as his last realistic path to higher office.³ His campaign was funded heavily by George and Herman Brown of Brown & Root, who supplied cash and company aircraft. Herman Brown reportedly told Johnson “the money would be there, as much as was needed, when it was needed.”⁴

The Runoff and the Six-Day Delay

The July 24 first-round primary produced no majority. A third candidate, George E. B. Peddy, drew off enough conservative support to force a runoff, though Stevenson finished more than 70,000 votes ahead of Johnson.⁵ The runoff was held August 28.

Johnson already ran extraordinarily strong in the South Texas counties controlled by political boss George B. Parr. In the first primary he had taken more than 80 percent across Parr’s six core counties and 98 percent in Duval County itself, where the count was 3,707 to 66.⁵ On runoff night Johnson trailed. By the following morning he was still 854 votes behind.⁶

Six days later, on September 3, the Jim Wells County Democratic Executive Committee certified its final returns. Precinct 13 in the town of Alice now reported Johnson with 965 votes instead of the 765 originally recorded. Stevenson’s total barely changed.⁶ Those 200 votes flipped the statewide result. The final official count was 494,191 for Johnson to 494,104 for Stevenson.¹

What the Poll List Showed

The tampering left visible marks. The last 200 entries on the Precinct 13 poll list, and their matching tally marks, were written in blue ink. Every earlier entry was in black.⁶ The added names appeared in alphabetical order, in a single handwriting. The “7” in the original tally of 765 had been altered to read as a “9.”⁷ The presiding election judge for Precinct 13 was Luis “Indio” Salas, a local official tied to the Parr machine.

George Parr and the South Texas Machine

Box 13 was the product of a machine, not a rogue precinct. George Parr’s father, Archer Parr, had built the operation in Duval County beginning around 1907, acting as a patrón to Mexican-American voters, paying poll taxes, stationing armed guards at polls, and altering returns.⁸ George expanded the reach into neighboring counties and added leverage as a banker, oil promoter, and beer distributor.⁹

In the 1948 runoff the machine delivered lopsided margins. A TIME account gave Duval County returns of 4,622 for Johnson and 40 for Stevenson.⁹ Jim Wells County, where Alice sits, was in the same orbit. Historians have credited the machine’s 1948 performance with launching Johnson’s national career.¹⁰

Stevenson’s Trip to Alice

Stevenson refused to concede. He hired lawyers and traveled to Alice himself, recruiting retired Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, then 64, to walk with him. As the group approached the Texas State Bank of Alice, where the election records were held, Hamer kept his right hand poised above his gun. Groups of Parr’s armed pistoleros reportedly parted as the men passed.⁶

Inside, official B. F. “Tom” Donald first allowed Stevenson and Hamer to view the Precinct 13 tally sheet. When Stevenson began copying the names down, Donald pulled the sheet away.⁷ Earlier investigators sent by Stevenson had been met with armed deputies and submachine guns and told to leave the county.⁶ The original Box 13 was never recovered; accounts of its fate range from being thrown into the Rio Grande to being burned at a local motel.

The Party Certification Vote

While Stevenson pushed in Alice, the fight moved to the State Democratic Executive Committee. After a debate one account described as filled with “many harsh accusations,” the committee concluded fraud had occurred on both sides and voted 29 to 28 to certify Johnson as the nominee. The deciding vote came from committee member Charley Gibson, brought in at the last minute by Johnson’s supporters.¹¹ The State Democratic Convention then declared Johnson the nominee.

The Federal Lawsuit and Justice Black

Stevenson sued in federal court. On September 15, 1948, he sought an injunction to keep Johnson off the November ballot. Federal Judge T. Whitfield Davidson in Dallas granted a temporary restraining order that day, and on September 22 issued a temporary injunction citing evidence of fraud in Jim Wells, Zapata, and possibly other counties. Davidson appointed former U.S. Attorney William Robert Smith Jr. as a special master to investigate.¹²¹³

The special master opened hearings in Alice on September 27. Witnesses described the blue ink, the alphabetical listing, and the matching handwriting. One voter testified that no one was behind him in line when he voted twenty minutes before the polls closed, cutting against the story of a late rush of 200 voters. By September 28 the special master was reportedly close to either finding a surviving copy of the Box 13 tally sheet or confirming that all three copies had been destroyed.¹³

Johnson’s lead lawyer was Washington attorney Abe Fortas. With the ballot-printing deadline approaching, Fortas first sought a stay from Fifth Circuit Judge J. C. Hutcheson Jr., who ruled on September 24 that he could not act alone before October 4. Fortas moved to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, who served as Circuit Justice for the Fifth Circuit.¹³

Black heard four hours of argument in his chambers on September 28 and ruled orally the same day, staying Davidson’s injunction. He put the order in writing the next morning. His reasoning rested on federalism. He wrote that there was “no statutory justification of a Federal court enjoining the steps of an election” and that “it would be a drastic break with the past to permit a Federal judge and the Federal courts to go into the business of conducting a contest over elections held in a state.”¹⁴

Although the stay formally froze only the injunction, Judge Davidson read it as halting the investigation in Alice, which never resumed.¹³ On October 4 the full Supreme Court voted 8–0 to leave Black’s stay in place, denying both Stevenson’s motion to lift it and Johnson’s motion to stop the district court proceedings. Three days later, on October 7, the Fifth Circuit reversed Davidson’s injunction outright, holding that federal courts had no jurisdiction over a state party primary contest, and ordered Stevenson’s suit dismissed.¹² A Jim Wells County grand jury looked into the matter separately and returned no indictments.⁷

The 1977 Confession

The fraud remained officially unproved for nearly three decades. In 1977, Associated Press reporter James W. Mangan tracked down Luis Salas, the Precinct 13 election judge. In an interview published July 31, 1977, Salas said flatly: “Johnson did not win that election; It was stolen for him. And I know exactly how it was done.” Salas said George Parr had ordered roughly 200 votes added to Box 13, that the names came from people who had not voted, and that they were entered in alphabetical order.¹⁵

What the 87 Votes Bought

With the courts out of the way, Johnson appeared on the November ballot and, in a state where the Democratic nomination decided the seat, won comfortably. From there he rose to Senate majority whip, then majority leader, then vice president, then the presidency in 1964.¹³

The Fortas connection also lasted. Johnson appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1965, a debt traced directly to 1948.¹⁶ At Hugo Black’s eightieth birthday party in 1966, Johnson told the room: “if it weren’t for Mr. Justice Black at one time, we might well be having this party. But one thing I know for sure, we wouldn’t be having it here.”¹³

Robert Caro’s 1990 book Means of Ascent concluded that Johnson won by “87 spurious votes” through outright theft.¹⁷ Legal scholars have also pointed to Justice Black’s chambers ruling as an early example of the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket,” a consequential order issued outside full briefing and argument.¹³

George Parr’s machine ran South Texas for another quarter century before federal tax and perjury investigations broke it apart. Parr was convicted of tax evasion and killed himself on April 1, 1975, while facing sentencing.¹⁸ Stevenson retired to his ranch near Junction, never held office again, and died the same year as Parr, still saying the seat had been stolen from him.¹⁹

1
University of Texas. Coke Stevenson
2
National Governors Association. Coke R. Stevenson
3
TIME. Texas Close Thing
4
Texas Observer. The Candidate From Brown and Root
5
The New Yorker. The Johnson Years – All or Nothing
6
The New Yorker. The Johnson Years – The Stealing
7
Texas Monthly. Go Ask Alice
8
Texas State Historical Association. Parr, Archer
9
TIME. The Duke Delivers
10
Texas State Historical Association. Dukes of Duval County
11
Eastern Illinois University. 1948 Texas Senate Primary
12
Justia. Johnson v. Stevenson, 170 F.2d 108
13
Steve Vladeck. Justice Black and the 1948 Texas Senate Race
14
The New York Times. Texas Ballot Writ Is Stayed by Black
15
NY1 / Associated Press. Window Into History – Tapes Detail LBJ’s Stolen Election
16
Minneapolis Federal Reserve. Fortas – The Rise and Ruin of a Supreme Court Justice
17
The New York Times. Robert Caro’s Big Dig
18
The New York Times. Texas Politician Dead, Ruled Suicide
19
NY1 / Associated Press. Uncovering Lyndon B. Johnson’s Stolen Election