[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n Jan. 13, 1903, the day he began his third term in the Texas House of Representatives, Pat Neff was elected Speaker making him at age 31 the youngest in the history of the Lone Star legislature.
Two years later, the rising star caught everybody by surprise with the announcement that he would not seek another term. The burned-out politician went home to Waco and back to his original calling, the practice of law.
In a matter of months, Neff’s many admirers practically drafted him for McLennan County attorney. At first, he wanted no part of it but in time warmed to the idea. Over the next six years, he tried 422 cases and won convictions in all but 16 for an impressive 96 percent success rate. Putting his Prohibitionist principles into practice, he was the first prosecutor in the state of Texas to send a bootlegger to prison.
After more than a decade of self-imposed political exile, Neff suddenly decided in 1919 to run for governor. If the incumbent had loved politics as much as his newspaper business, the challenger would not have stood a snowball’s chance. But William P. Hobby bowed out, and Joseph Weldon Bailey, the former U.S. Senator who seven years earlier had resigned in disgrace over a corruption scandal, took his place as the odds-on favorite.
Neff started his uphill campaign with little support, even less money and no organization whatsoever. He crisscrossed the Lone Star State in his own personal automobile giving as many as seven speeches a day in 152 of the 254 counties. In 37 counties, where no gubernatorial candidate had ever shown his face, people presumed he had taken a wrong turn.
Neff broke the long-standing Texas tradition of not mixing politics and religion by campaigning as a proud and unapologetic “hard-shell” Baptist. Preachers responded with strong Sunday morning endorsements that caused entire congregations to embrace the underdog.
On the flip side of the coin, Neff’s strait-laced morality and personal peculiarities produced a river of ridicule and the charge that he was “not man enough” to govern Texas. Typical of these attacks was this editorial in the Quanah Observer:
“Neff has never shot a gun. He has never baited a fishhook. He has never touched tobacco in any form. He does not know one card from another and he cannot play any kind of social game. Pattie wore lace on his nighties and was never known to be away from home after sundown.” Editorial in the Quanah Observer
In his prime, Joe Bailey would have mopped the floor with Pat Neff. The few true believers, who turned out for the old warhorse, cast enough ballots to give him a 2,500-vote lead in the opening round of the 1920 Democratic primary. But in the head-to-head runoff, Neff beat Bailey by 80,000 votes and effectively ended Bailey’s once illustrious public career.
The voters, who swept Neff into office, knew what they were getting with him – a man of faith with a strict moral code and zero tolerance for drinking, gambling and prostitution in brazen defiance of the laws of the state and nation. For them it was not a question of if the new chief executive would crack down on an infamous Central Texas boomtown but when.
Neff dragged his heels for nearly a year before finally declaring martial law in Mexia and sending in the National Guard. His belief that the weekend warriors with the assistance of the Texas Rangers and federal agents could complete the clean-up in a couple of weeks proved to be overly optimistic. The armed occupation lasted for a record 47 days until the governor pulled out the Guardsmen and declared the boomtown a safe place for law-abiding citizens to live.
Three months later, a nationwide railroad strike brought a call for another dose of martial law this time in Denison. The Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railway, better known as the Katy, insisted the governor dispatch the Guard to the North Texas town in order to keep the trains rolling. Neff, in the closing days of his reelection bid, balked at taking the politically unpopular step before the voters went to the polls.
Returning to Austin to celebrate his Election Day victory on July 22, 1921, the governor ignored reporters’ questions about the powder keg in Denison. But President Wilson’s secretary of war was not so easily put off. Acting on the cabinet officer’s instructions, an army colonel was waiting for Neff at the capitol with a blunt message to mobilize the National Guard or else.
The “else” was a threat to send a thousand troops stationed at San Antonio to the strike site if the Texas governor refused to comply. The colonel informed Gov. Neff that he had one hour to issue the martial law decree and call up the Guard.
Washington had him over a barrel, and Pat Neff knew it. But the exasperated governor took comfort in the fact that he would not have to face the voters’ wrath for subjecting a second Texas town to military rule.
Bartee welcomes your comments and questions at [email protected] or P.O. Box 152, Friendswood, TX 77549 and invites you to visit his web site at barteehaile.com.
