Yellow Dogs and Republicans by Ricky Dobbs Essay

Yellow Dogs

Allan Shivers served as the governor of Texas from 1949 until 1957. Not only did his tenure represent a transformational time in Texan politics and culture; Shivers practically catalyzed the changes himself, according to Dobbs in Yellow Dogs and Republicans. Texas had been a staunchly Southern Democratic State. Like other Southern States, Texas held long-entrenched ideals of White Supremacy, racism, and patriarchy. Conservative Southern politics changed at first due to the Great Depression and the government's response to it. In particular, President Roosevelt's New Deal programs helped Texans to mitigate the mire of the Great Depression via essential programs and social services. Southerners started to appreciate federal funding for their woes. However, the differences between old and new ways of life in Texas started to reveal a rift developing in the society that could only be solved by diversifying the political landscape. Dobbs claims that Allan Shivers capitalized on the rifts, seizing the moment to change Texas's character for the next fifty years and counting.

One of the changes that took place in the wake of the Great Depression was urbanization. Prior to the 1950s, Texans were mostly poor rural dwellers. Urbanization hit Texas like a storm, causing it to become one of the most rapidly developing states in the South. Home ownership among white Texans skyrocketed. Empowered by increased wealth and upward social mobility, white middle class Texans enjoyed and used their improved access to channels of political power, too. White middle class Texans therefore did the unthinkable: the started to entertain the idea of voting for a different party other than the Democrats.

Another major change that took place in America during the middle of the twentieth century was shifting race relations. The Civil Rights movement would not happen until after Shivers' tenure in Texas. However, the stirrings of black social, political, and economic empowerment were already being felt across the nation. The Brown v. Board of Education decision shattered many Texans' dreams of perpetual white dominance of American social institutions. Thus deprived of their unlicensed and unmitigated racism, many white Texans viewed the party of their parents' choice the party of yesterday. Shivers understood the racist sentiments and capitalized on Texan culture to create new options for white voters.

Although he would operate locally as a Democrat to appeal to the maximum number of Texans, Shivers strategically leveraged his power to build a bridge for Texans to be able to vote Republican in federal elections. Shivers' strategy went beyond simple bargaining with Republicans in Washington. He made sure to please all necessary constituencies in his home state by warming relations between politics and big business. Dobbs also claims that Shivers succeeded in Texas because he banked on a charismatic style of leadership.

The Democratic Party in Shivers' time is akin to the Republican Party of the post-Reagan era. Therefore, Shivers' legacy cannot be justly considered in isolation of the fact that the Democratic and Republican parties were essentially trading places during the middle of the century. The ideological shifts within both parties started with Roosevelt and the New Deal, which tacitly and in some cases overtly helped Southern Blacks to achieve a modicum of economic aid to improve their condition. Clinging hard to their racist ideologies, many Texans believed the New Deal represented an affront to all things Southern.

Shivers came from a family of white slave owners. His ancestors were not wealthy plantation owners, but their small-scale earnings allowed them sufficient funds to afford slaves as status symbols. Shivers' grandfather fought with the Confederate Army in the Civil War, further shaping Allan Shiver's identity as a strict Southerner with white supremacist ideals. The emancipation of the slaves that ensued from Southern defeat dealt a serious economic blow to the Shivers family, as it did for all other white slave-owners who must have felt that the big, bad federal government was stealing their "belongings" from them. Interestingly, Dobbs points out that slaves often stayed with their white families after emancipation because they essentially had nowhere else to go, and feared lynching and other new and deadly forms of persecution.

Allan Shivers grew up in a political household, with a father who stood for staunch conservative Southern Democrat values. He grew up in a poor logging community in Tyler County, but his family was able to propel…