This Best but Last Chance
Representative Bill Daniel's Fight for a State Courts
and Office Buildings in Texas, 1949-1954

 

By DAVID B. GRACY II
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Texas at Austin, 1995

 

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November 2, 1954, was about as anxious a day as any that State Representative Bill Daniel had spent in his three terms as a member of the Texas House of Representatives. That night, after the votes had been counted, he would know whether his foremost legislative initiative of the past six years had been wasted. The issue was not whether he would be reelected. After three unopposed terms representing Liberty, Chambers, and Hardin counties, he had chosen to return to his law practice and business interests, and not to seek another term. What he waited to find out was whether the voters of Texas would approve Constitutional Amendment No. 4 to construct building both to house the Supreme Court and the Attorney General’s department and to centralize a host of other state agencies scattered over central Austin. He had every reason to worry. Texans had a reputation for defeating proposals that involved spending money. But this, he had told everyone who would listen, was far more than a vote on money and buildings. In the balance hung the smooth and efficient running of state government.

 

Any visitor to the capitol during the years after World War II could not help but see it. The contrast was stark. From the outside, the 66-year-old pink granite building stood as imposing and stately as on the late spring day in 1888 when it had been opened. Its cast iron dome soared 313 glorious feet into the sky and still dominated the Austin skyline. The length almost of two football fields and, at its widest point, the width almost of one, four stories tall, plus a basement, the building offered nearly nine acres of floor space divided by seasoned capitol architect Elijah Myers (He had designed three state capitol buildings before this crowning culmination of his work.) into 250 rooms. The Texas state capitol upon its completion was large enough to hold all of the departments of state government save the General Land Office. But no matter, the General Land Office had occupied its own building on the southeast corner of the spacious capitol grounds for almost forty years before Myers’s masterpiece, the second capitol building on the site, had gone up. From the outside, the building boasted of a state that was steady, stable, and spacious.

 

Inside, the building presented a very different atmosphere. The capitol was dreadfully overcrowded. If the visitor wanted to see his Representative, he had to climb the long staircases to the second or third floor or wait his turn on one of the two small, original, ancient elevators that served the building. When the two talked, the conversation was public, since only the Speaker of the House had private rooms in which to conduct business.

 

Down any hallway, the visitor would see groups of secretaries at desks jutting out from the walls. (House members were assigned one, and half of another secretary each for clerical assistance.) Secretaries not in the hallways were quartered in closets and other odd spaces wherever they could be accommodated. Most of these odd spaces were none of architect Myers’s planning, but rather the result of putting up temporary plywood partitions in offices and halls to create work space.

 

Toilet facilities for the visitor and capitol staff, with one rest room per floor, were so inadequate for the use they received that a person rarely found them in a decent condition. And that, wrote one state bar leader, described the men’s rest rooms. “The toilet facilities for women are still less adequate,” he stated bluntly.

 

As difficult as it was for visitors and legislators, the situation was worse for the departments of government. The Supreme Court, for one, had tripled in size over the past sixty years from its original three justices, for which its space had been designed, to nine justices and their staffs in the late 1940s. To house its employees, the court had to office three secretaries and one clerk in the court’s conference room. During the many hours in which the justices conferred, “these employees…must either sit idle at their desks and listen to the court’s deliberations or wander around in the halls until the conference is concluded.” That was not the worst of it. “The three briefing attorneys of the Supreme Court,” a disgusted attorney reported, “inhabit a windowless area built of temporary partitions inside one of the halls, under conditions which the least prosperous young lawyer in the state would hardly endure.” Even with this crowding, the offices of the court, originally housed on the third floor adjacent to the courtroom, had become dispersed over three floors of the capitol from one end of the building to the other, making the conduct of judicial business a challenge of geography. “Anyone walking through widely-separated, inadequate, poorly-lighted quarters of the Supreme Court of Texas,” Texas Bar Association President R. G. Story summed up the feelings of many in March, 1949, “will instinctively wonder why the largest state with its vast wealth has failed to provide suitable physical facilities.”

 

Particularly galling to those who relied upon the court’s library and archives, the condition, accessibility, and safety of the books and records no longer could be assured. “The old and valuable records of the courts are inadequately stored and subject to constant hazard of fire,” wrote the chairman of the State Courts Housing Committee of the Texas Bar Association, who observed parenthetically, “as, indeed, is also the personnel of the courts themselves.” As for the library, so little control could be exercised over the books under the crowded conditions that the staff had resorted to sequestering particularly important volumes to secure them from the thieves who had been plaguing the collection. Likely some of the culprits were attorneys for whom conditions had deteriorated to such an intolerable level that being caught with a stolen book was preferable to returning the item with the prospect of never finding it again.

 

Those who wondered at the situation of the Supreme Court must have been dumbfounded by that of the Attorney General’s department. Lawyers and support staff were scattered throughout the building. In one of the several locations of the staff, two dozen attorneys worked without offices, crammed into a room known locally as “the bull pen.” The only capitol workers laboring under more disagreeable conditions, a contemporary allowed, were those “located in the cellar among the steam pipes.” In the view of one seasoned attorney, “Any lawyer who will inspect the Attorney General’s Department and compare it with the quarters of a law firm of an equivalent number of lawyers will doubtless marvel that the legal rights of this great state are actually protected as well as they are.”

 

Many state agencies had long since given up the fight to remain in the venerable old building. The State for years had been renting progressively more space in office buildings, even in older residences, throughout central Austin. There was the old Austin Tribune Building housing the Railroad Commission and other agencies, the International Life Insurance Company Building, the space in which cost the state $85,000 annually, and also “a dilapidated old apartment house behind the capitol sheltering the Board of Pardons and Paroles. Permanently valuable state records belonging to the Texas State Archives, a division of the Texas State Library, filled quarters in the basement of the Capitol and spilled into rented buildings elsewhere in the city. Those papers heaped in a dairy barn on the grounds of the state hospital in north Austin, the local paper reported, lie prey to dampness, mildew and rats.” Daniel recalls even finding a copy of the Texas Declaration of Independence on the dirt floor.

 

Any one who cared to look saw readily that the network of State offices in the capitol and in Austin fostered lost motion, miscommunication, and frustration in conducting the business of the State. The thoughtful observer recognized, too, that the cause of the overcrowding and sprawl was growth in government, which mirrored growth in the population and economy of the state. Since completion of the capitol, the population of Texas had mushroomed by more than sevenfold to nearly 8 million persons. The state’s economy reflected a similarly dramatic change. Where the Texas of the late nineteenth century boasted of ranching and agriculture as its foundation, by mid-twentieth century, fewer than one in three Texans still lived on a farm. Following World War II, the economy rested on an industrial base. But demand for Texas oil was driving production steadily upward. In 1951, it would pass the one-billion-barrel-per-year mark and shortly become the mainstay of the economy, where it would remain for more than three decades.

 

State government naturally grew both to regulate the growing economy and to provide services to the citizens. Governor Beauford H. Jester reflected the mixed attitudes toward this change in government when he, on the one hand, opposed new taxes to provide expanded services, and, on the other, took advantage of bulging revenues from the burgeoning economy to enlarge state spending and activity.

 

No serious observer could argue that the growth in the Texas economy and, following upon it, the growth in state government would stop. The question then became, how long would state leaders ignore the crisis in the housing of its highest courts and state workers?

 

That was the kind of question that tantalized Bill Daniel, “let’s-do-it-now Bill Daniel” as the Austin newspaper characterized him. It was the kind of issue he found challenging, too, because, however much it needed doing and however much people talked about it, the issue did not have the attention of the powers that be. To ever be resolved, the issue needed a champion.

 

Daniel identified with underdogs. He always felt himself to be an underdog. Born with one leg and one arm shorter than the other and with a curvature of the spine, and having suffered the debilitating effects of polio, young Daniel, who loved the out-of-doors and physical activity, never could romp and compete in sports as well as his school mates. Some of them laughed at him, others taunted him. Each insult stung. From as early as he could remember, Representative Daniel had had to battle handicaps.

 

To those who did not know him in 1949, Representative Bill Daniel, vigorous and handsome in his thirties, could appear to be just an overly ambitious person who enjoyed a good tussle more than almost anything else. As a powerful civil and criminal defense lawyer in the state and federal courts and a successful prosecuting County Attorney handling both county and state cases, he had earned a reputation as a fighter and a winner. But people did not know him fully who knew him only by the thorough preparation and dogged determination that characterized his practice of the law.

 

Daniel fought on principle and out of compassion. He got it, he said, from two men. One was his father, Marion Price (“M.P.”) Daniel, Sr. whom he deeply respected, a successful newspaper editor and publisher, then head of his own land and cattle business in Liberty County, who throughout his fifty-five years, had practiced a Christian ethic of giving, both of money and service, to those less fortunate than he. For more than half his life, the elder Daniel gave annual scholarships to young men and women attending Baylor University. During the Depression, he organized the first Democratic Party in Liberty County and served as President of the Liberty County Taxpayers Association. The other was the renowned French attorney, Emile Zola, who accepted cases on principle, rather than on the size of the anticipated fee. Combining his admiration and respect for these two men, young Daniel regularly devoted a part of his energy to taking up, for the love of service, countless worthy causes that needed attention.” Making Texas state government more efficient for all the citizens of the state through better housing of its offices was, for him, just such a cause.

 

Daniel began the campaign routinely enough in 1949, as a freshman legislator would, by filing a bill that drew attention to the problem and presented his solution. Daniel’s measure called for the construction of two state buildings: first, a State Courts and Records Building to house the Supreme Court, the Court of Criminal Appeals, the Attorney General’s department, and the state library and archives and, second, a general office building for the remaining state agencies. The structures could be provided, he believed, for $6 million since the State already owned the property on which they could be built—the lots on the south side of the intersection of Eleventh Street and Congress Avenue at the foot of capitol hill in front of the capitol. To supervise construction, the bill established a council composed of the governor, lieutenant governor, speaker of the house, chief justice of the Supreme Court, and Attorney General.

 

However routine the filing of the bill might look, Daniel recognized that to pass the measure, he needed to make it an issue on his colleagues’ minds. The freshman representative must find a way to translate overcrowding and inefficiency into terms anyone could understand. For the capitol, one of the most obvious was ugliness. Making his way through the building, he counted no less than 147 temporary plywood partitions creating work space by intruding on the beautiful terrazzo tile and carved wood interior of the venerable structure. For the state agencies scattered about town, the terms were distance, inconvenience, and expense. Daniel set out on foot to visit each location and, he was often said, “wore out boot leather trudging more than 190 blocks (approximately 10 miles) to complete the trip. Moreover, he determined that the annual rental totaled in excess of $175,000, which did not include utilities and maintenance. To help him dramatize the need for the bill, he marshaled the pens of prominent attorneys and jurists, such as Attorney Jim Elkins and Bar Association President R. G. Storey. Who produced vivid word pictures for those who had not heard about or personally experienced the overcrowded, scattered, and inadequate conditions.

 

Members of the House found Daniel’s facts embarrassing and persuasive. Dozens clamored to cosponsor his bill. Since House rules required members to obtain House permission to add their names as cosponsors, acting on request after request after request stalled the progress of legislation. So severe did the situation become that Austin’s daily paper carried news of the bottleneck on it front page. H.B. 4 moved almost by unanimous consent through House committee hearing and floor debate. As a gesture of support, State Senator George Moffett took up Daniel’s cause and introduced a companion bill in the Senate. But Governor Beauford Jester, “let’s-study-it-first-and-act-later” Beauford Jester as the Austin American-Statesman termed him, was unimpressed. He had his own plan for a massive capital improvement project costing $18 million. Justice Meade Griffin, the first chair of Texas Bar Association’s State Courts Housing Committee and a Jester appointee to the Supreme Court, went to the governor with Daniel in behalf of H.B. 4, but failed to persuade him. In the senate, landlords content with the comfortable state rental arrangement fought Daniel’s bill stubbornly. When the session ended, H.B. 4 had been passed by overwhelming votes in the House. In the Senate, however, the bill never reached the floor as opponents, led by Lieutenant Governor Ben Ramsey, kept it bottled up in committee.

 

Though his bill had failed, Daniel had shown strength in passing it through the House, and he had developed a liaison with the group that stood to be his most formidable ally, the Texas Bar Association.

 

As preparations began more that a year later in 1950 for convening the 52nd Legislature, Daniel must have wondered at the depth of the Bar Association’s commitment. Griffin’s replacement as head of the Bar Committee, Houston attorney William N. Bonner, focused his attention on a building housing only the legal functions of government. Both Daniel and Griffin knew that a bill to that effect could not succeed, and acted quickly to educate Bonner. Griffin told Bonner “that it would be a mistake to go forward without attempting at least to secure the active cooperation of Bill Daniel of Liberty.” Daniel first reminded Bonner of the importance of coalition and that, because “no member of the Legislature now has any type of office for himself or his secretaries,” Daniel’s fellow House members made natural allies. Representative Daniel then asked “than no effort be made by our [Bar] Committee to leave the legislators wholly unprovided for as a present.” Bonner agreed to follow the established lead, but told Griffin gratuitously that, in his opinion, with one and one-half secretaries each, House members “may appear [to have]…too many.”

 

As the session proceeded through the spring of 1951, the strength of the coalition Daniel recruited to his bill, H. B. 269 in the 52nd Legislature, grew. He succeeded in obtaining endorsement for the measure from, among others, the powerful Daughters of the Republic of Texas. Several daily papers gave it editorial support. In addition to the leadership of the Bar Association, justices on the state’s highest courts, including Daniel’s good friend, St. John Garwood of the Supreme Court and James R. Norvell of the Court of Civil Appeals in San Antonio, increasingly came out in behalf of the measure. But the one ally in whom Daniel could take the greatest satisfaction up to that time was attorney Bonner himself. He actively and “openly attacked all selfish landlords, the then Lieutenant Governor, and any other private or special interests” that opposed getting the State out of the wasteful rental business.”

 

Daniel meant not to lose his bill in the Senate again by the parliamentary tactics employed by Lieutenant Governor Ben Ramsey of preventing it from being brought up for action. With the increasing public support behind him, Daniel lobbied senators until he had obtained more than twenty pledges of support in writing. In the face of their eroding strength, the bill’s opponents took a sly new tack. They introduced a measure to sell the two lots at Eleventh and Congress on which Daniel proposed that the new state buildings be constructed. No to just any bidder would the properties be sold, but specifically to the First Baptist Church of which Daniel’s older brother, Attorney General Price Daniel, was an active member. To Representative Daniel’s shock and indignation, this pitted brother against blood brother. In addition, it flouted the principle of separation of church and state. Methodist Bill Daniel bristled in defense, and promptly told his Baptist brother there would be no quarter in the coming fight, regardless of the embarrassment that might result. Representative Daniel openly opposed and succeeded in defeating the measure. At the same time, he shepherded his H.B. 269 through the House in a month, less than half the time consumed in the previous session. By a final vote of 133 to 5 his colleagues sent the bill to the Senate for action.

 

In the upper chamber, members of the Senate State Affairs Committee kept their promise to Representative Daniel and voted out the bill unanimously. The last hurdle to sending the measure to the governor for signature was action on the floor. There, too, in the person of the presiding officer, lay the largest obstacle. Unswayed by the growing support Daniel had been able to must, Lieutenant Governor Ramsey once again doggedly refused to recognize any senator desiring to bring up the bill. Thus H.B. 269 died in the senate for the second session in a row.”

 

Disappointed but not disillusioned, disgusted but not defeated, Daniel, returned again unopposed to the House in January, 1953, for his third term. In characteristic fashion, he took the offensive. Not two weeks into the session, on January 26, he filed H. B. 149 to authorize construction of the two buildings, to fund them with revenue bonds, and to create a Texas Building Commission (composed of the governor, the attorney general, and the chairman of the state board of control) to oversee the project.”

 

That same day, Daniel issued an open memo outlining his bill. “I consider this a real ECONOMY measure,” he wrote, emphasizing “economy” by capitalizing and underlining the word. He could hardly promote it otherwise. The previous two legislatures had been unable to avoid raising taxes to cover growing expenditures for direct services, such as hospitals and mental institutions. And as the 53rd Legislature began, it was not at all clear that the lawmakers would be able to avoid yet another increase. What was plain, however, was that no member seemed ready to defend to his constituency a vote to increase the state tax burden simply to buy bricks and mortar.

 

Doing nothing, Daniel assured his colleagues, however, cost money—irrecoverable money. The price of rental space had escalated to more than $300,000 a year and still did not provide adequate quarters. Employees were cramped, and some agencies were spread among several locations throughout Austin. Daniel’s solution was to issue revenue bonds to construct the buildings and to retire the bonds using the money presently paid out in rent. In this way, he pleaded, his plan “is a MONEY-MAKING project for the State.” After the bonds had been paid out in approximately seventeen years, the State would have both its office space and its former rent money to use in other ways. Moreover, in the meantime and from then on, legislators would gain the vacated space in the capitol for committee rooms and offices for members. House members, who always had liked Daniel’s plan, passed his bill by the same wide margin as previously, did it early in the legislative term, and completed the work in half the period required in the previous session.”

 

In the senate, Daniel began his campaign this time with a warning. In his memo of January 26 he wrote pointedly, but without calling names, that “I trust this bill will receive no arbitrary treatment this session.” Success he knew, though, depended on having the right people interested in the measure. To carry his bill in the upper chamber, he recruited the genial and popular Senator Moffett, who a few years before had supported Daniel’s initiative.

 

To further offset the continuing hostility of Lieutenant Governor Ramsey, Daniel and his colleagues gained the support of Governor Allan Shivers. The Governor, however, having signed two tax measures already questioned the idea of using revenue bonds, and, instead, suggested the alternative of devoting the unused portion of the Confederate Pension Fund to the construction. Tapping this revenue, though, required voter approval, as it could be accomplished only by amending the state constitution. Daniel fretted at introducing this new step in achieving his end. But if it brought the governor’s support and that support helped bring passage, he would gladly accept it.

 

With all proponent parties agreed, a bill calling for the referendum was drawn and styled Senate Joint Resolution 10, with Moffett sponsoring it in the Senate and Daniel Substituting it for his H.B. 149 in the House. The new measure passed the Senate on March 30, the House on April 30, and received the governor's signature on May 12. A year later, during a special session, the House and Senate reconfirmed their stand by uniting unanimously behind Daniel’s H.C.R. 44 urging the people of Texas to adopt the amendment in the November election.

 

Upon the signing of S.J.R. 10, the arena of action shifted. For the past five and one-half years, Daniel had been fighting mostly at close quarters in the legislature, where victory or defeat hinged at least as much on the support of opposition of a few politicians as on the merits of the measure. Moreover, defeat meant defeat only during the present legislature. An issue lost in one legislature always could be resurrected in the next. With S.J.R. 10 the law of the land, the focus of attention became the full electorate. While that meant that no one person could scuttle passage, it meant, too, that the matter, if lost, could not be revived for years, far longer than Daniel intended to remain in the House.

 

Daniel had told his colleagues in January, 1953, that “This measure is popular with the citizenry of Texas, who are ashamed of the present conditions, and who want it passed.” With the adoption of S.J.R. 10, he had to prove his words. As he told Bar Association President Glenn Turner in May, “We now have the duty and far-reaching problem of educating the people with the facts which so unquestionably support this cause as one of merit, economy, and pride for this great State.” That was ll they had to do.

 

“I do not see how the people can turn it down,” Daniel wrote on May 14, 1954, as the campaign began, unless it were killed by voters who, on principle, struck through all of the amendments no matter their nature. The Texas electorate more than once had done just that, and Daniel had put his finger on the problem. In the drawing in April, 1954, for places on the ballot, SJR. 10 ended up in the middle of the pack, fourth out of eleven. “Passage next November of the important constitutional amendment that will provide a badly needed State Courts Building for Texas will require more educational effort than previously anticipated,” the Texas Bar Journal notified attorneys around the state. Justice St. John Garwood knew it to be true and wrote the new president of the Bar Association in June that “if something is not done to educate the people about it, I am afraid it will be another sacrifice to public inertia.” Should the legal community falter now, the Texas Bar Journal concluded, “this best but last chance” would be lost.

 

For the May 22 issue of the Texas Bar Journal, Daniel accepted the call of his colleagues and wrote at length in support of the amendment, urging lawyers to inform their friends and clients “of this golden opportunity” to have “free” buildings paid for from money already in the state treasury.

 

During the state bar convention in San Antonio later that month, Daniel addressed the general session, exhorting the attorneys to “take it as an individual responsibility” to promote passage. At the climax of his remarks, Daniel looked into the eyes of his listeners and challenged each one to say to himself or herself: “I am but one, but I am that one. I cannot do all things, that is true, but I can do some. What I can do, I should do and, by the grace of God, I will do.” Daniel’s words brought the attorneys to their feet with a standing vote of acclamation for the amendment and passage of a unanimous resolution of support. Through the summer and fall, Representative Daniel and his colleagues spoke at every gathering they could attend across Texas carrying the same message that a vote for Amendment No. 4 served the best interest of the people of Texas. “Besides the elements of beauty and dignity, efficiency and convenience,” Daniel repeated time after time after time, “it will save [the taxpayers]…over a quarter of a million dollars each year.

 

On Tuesday night, November 2, 1954, Daniel anxiously awaited the returns that would tell whether his six-year campaign to solve the over-crowding and resulting inefficiency of state government had found favor with the electorate. And then the word came. Constitutional Amendment No. 4 had passed!

 

Telegrams of congratulations few among the active proponents of the measure. “We all realize that without your efforts past and present the amendment would not have been submitted or passed,” Justice Garwood wired Daniel. “The Court all joins in warmest regards to you.” Senator Moffet, too, knew where the credit lay. In appointing Daniel to the role of Principal Architect in the Masonic ceremony laying the cornerstone of the new courts building, he wrote that “You are peculiarly suitable for this because you definitely did play the role of Legislative Architect in furthering the passage of measures which have brought about the construction of this [courts] building.” The whole truth about the matter,” Justice Meade Griffin summed up all of the congratulatory messages to Daniel, “is that you are the one who deserves the credit for the passage of that amendment. I well recall the persistent work you put forth for more than six years in order that the Court and other State officials might have adequate housing facilities here in Austin. Whatever buildings may be erected will be lasting memorials to your foresight, patriotism and unselfish devotion to the best interest of the peoples of Texas.”

 

While Daniel had done what no one else had done—focus the issue and then personally push it, with no financial support beyond his own resources, to a successful conclusion—he knew that credit for its passage lay, too, with the voters. Through the capitol press corps, he thanked the electorate, reminded voters of the accomplishment the buildings represented, and assured them once more that the structures would cost them not one penny in additional taxes.”

 

State officials and workers moved into the Supreme Court and Attorney General’s buildings and into the Sam Houston State Office Building in 1959. After the six-year battle, the underdog had won!

 

But that was not the enc. Passage of Amendment No. 4 on the November, 1954 ballot did more than fund particular construction projects, which in turn provided adequate space in which to centralize, concentrate, and thereby improve the functioning of a number of state offices. In fact, it set a pattern for funding construction and began a period of physical expansion that saw in quick succession the erection of the State Library and Archives Building (housing the General Land Office), the Texas Employment Commission Building, and the John H. Reagan Building, a period of expansion that, with the capitol annex recently opened north of the venerable old building, has extended over more than thirty years. More than solving the problem of a moment, Representative Bill Daniel’s work laid a foundation for an era of expansion not concluded yet.

 

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