With Election Day just two weeks away, Sen. Charles Culberson spent Oct. 21, 1916 doing what he did best – nothing. Why bother campaigning when a fourth term was already in the bag?
Looking for an appealing replacement for Gov. Jim Hogg in 1895, power broker E.M. House picked the handsome attorney general. Although his glaring lack of principles moved one politician to observe that 40-year-old Charlie Culberson “would be all right if he had a little more iron down his backbone,” Colonel House considered the shortcoming an asset rather than a liability.
Following his mentor’s meticulous plan, the Democratic nominee survived a strong Populist challenge to win the gubernatorial election of 1894 with 55 percent of the popular vote. He took the oath of office in the tenth and final congressional term of his father, David Culberson.
After four mediocre years in Austin, Gov. Culberson set his sights on the U.S. Senate. Relying upon the Colonel’s connections in the state legislature, which still chose the members of the exclusive club, he easily secured a seat.
Culberson received passing grades for his first-term performance, good enough to renew his lease for six more years and also to be picked as minority leader by his Democratic colleagues in 1907 and again in 1909. But a year later undisclosed “health problems” suddenly forced him to resign that important position.
Texans felt sorry for their stricken senator and wished him a rapid recovery from the mysterious malady. However, concerned constituents might not have been so sympathetic had they known his actual ailment was alcoholism. Bound by the strict code of silence of that era, the Washington press corps kept Charlie’s dirty little secret.
Frequent and extended stays at expensive health spas soon earned Culberson the tongue-in-cheek title of “the sick man of the senate.” His condition steadily deteriorated until the spring of 1913, when he suffered a complete collapse that put him out of commission for the rest of the year.
An angry Jim Wells blamed the loss of a prime patronage post on his lengthy absence. “If ‘the noblest Roman of them all,’ our dear friend Charlie Culberson, had been in his seat in the senate,” fumed the South Texas political boss, “none of this would have happened!”
Culberson eventually returned to work, but a relapse in 1915 sent him into seclusion for six months at his cottage in Maine. Insiders presumed the shadow senator would call it a career, especially since the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment meant he must ask the voters instead of his cronies in the Lone Star legislature for a fourth term.
With Culberson out of the way, Oscar B. Colquitt was a cinch to fill the vacancy, a prospect that sent shivers down the collective spine of the Wilson administration. A caustic and constant critic of the president he called “the greatest failure” in White House history, the outgoing governor had to be stopped at any price.
E.M. House and other nationally prominent Texans begged Culberson to stay on the job for the sake of the president. Flattered by all the attention, he finally agreed as long as he did not have to campaign. Anxious to keep the inebriated incumbent under wraps, the Colonel gladly agreed.
The dissipated Democrat acknowledged in his January 1916 reelection announcement that he was in no shape to personally get out the vote. Culberson neglected to mention, however, that he did not plan to even show his face in the Lone Star State before the election.
As expected, the final count of the primary ballots that July gave Colquitt a comfortable lead over his five competitors. Culberson, to no one’s serious surprise, lagged far behind in third place until last minute “returns” from the Valley boosted him into the run-off.
Colonel House and his clever cohorts understood that their crippled candidate could not catch the confident Colquitt by running on his scandalous record. So in desperation they turned the second round into a presidential referendum and a test of patriotism.
Capitalizing on Colquitt’s pro-German pronouncements on the European war, Culberson’s handlers hoodwinked the voters into choosing between Woodrow Wilson and the Kaiser. Knocked off balance by the low blow, Colquitt was reduced to railing against Washington interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state.
Charlie Culberson rode a ground swell of patriotic passion to victory. Trailing Colquitt by 32,000 votes in the initial primary, he beat him by a whopping 78,000 in the second.
Proudly standing up for apple pie and the president, the gullible electorate gave a hopeless drunk six more years in the United States Senate.
Bartee welcomes your comments and questions at [email protected] or P.O. Box 130011, Spring, TX 77393.
