Yellow Dog Democratics And The Rick Perry Presidency

Texas Governor Ponders Presidential Bid

by Winsip Custer CPW News Service

Following his consideration of a new Texas flag that removes the Bonnie Blue flag, the battle flag of the Confederacy, from the left panel of the current state flag Governor Rick Perry is now considering a run for the Presidency of the United States in 2012.

"What is unclear is whether the nation will rally behind a man who seems to be so opportunistic about his politics.  He is clearly playing the un-race-race-card in this upcoming race. But Texas is the wildest of wild cards and the joker in the Governor's mansion is not to be counted out too quickly," said the author of The Texas Triumvirate, Dr. Willie De Leon Brown Walker.

Walker's book explains how Texas during the Civil War had built upon Andrew Jackson's fear of a strong central government and how three people in Texas became for the rest of the nation, either champions of democratic and populace values or a smokescreen for deflecting justified criticism of a state whose economy is based on worldwide oil exploration.   Walker argues that Texas, with one of the strongest world economies, is able to spin and re-spin, cast and recast its image so that it destabilizes critics and stays on top of the ever-changing economic slush pile. In first talking to Dr. Walker and without having read his book, I asked if his title referred to the popular Texas tale spinners, J. Frank Dobie, Walter Prescott Webb and Roy Bedichek.  "Hell no," he said.  "I meant Texans Frankie Carter Randolph, Billie McClain Carr and Molly Tyler Ivins," said Walker.  "Dobie, Webb and Bedichek are amateurs compared to those three wild and whimsical whirling dervishes.  The thesis of the book is that Texas is the place where America's deep seated fear of populace values and its love of money make the strangest of bedfellows like frogs and snakes whirling together in a high speed blender.  In this environment you can never really be sure where anyone stands on anything....like LBJ's support of Civil Rights at home while marching poor boys into brush cutter of the Vietnam War.  Like Texas' call to "Remember the Alamo" while laying a super highway across its own border through NAFTA and GATT.  Like decrying any attempts for labor to organize while embracing the placement of maquidoras across the border that pay less than $8000/year in salaries to workers there and laying them off here," said Walker.

Frankie Carter Randolph was a founding member of the Houston Junior League. She was also the heiress of the Kirby Lumber Company fortune.  Kirby's fortunes were made in supplying lumber to Texas and the world and the piney woods of East Texas soon became the oil gushing Spindletop oil fields of Texas legend.  Frankie's father was the business colleague of wealthy Houstonians Jesse Jones and John Henry Kirby.

Before his death in 1940 Kirby was the founder and five time president of the Southern Pine Association and two-time president of the National Lumber Manufacturer's Association. As head of the National Association of Manufacturers he accused FDR of conspiring with American laborers against U.S. businesses.   His company provided the railroad ties that Harriman's Union Pacific needed for his tracks alongside which ran the telegraph poles holding the copper wire utilizing the new invention of James Walker Fannin's cousin, Samuel F. B. Morse.  During World War I Kirby was the southern lumber director for the United States Shipping Board Emergency Fleet Corporation and served two terms in the Texas legislature as well as a delegate to the Democratic national convention.  This would put him in company with  Frank George Wisner, father of Frank Gardiner Wisner who as a special U.S. envoy blew Obama's message to Hosni Mubarak in the wake of the recent Egyptian freedom movement. Wisner Sr. was on War Industries Board of the lumber branch during World War II, while his banking partner, Philip Stimson Gardiner (Frank Senior's maternal uncle), was secretary of the War Council of the YMCA, going to France and England for service with the American Expeditionary forces in 1917. In those days, that was the closest thing there was to a civilian intelligence agency.   The Sr. Wisner who was in the OSS when it became the CIA would also be responsible for negotiating with Nazi Reinhard Gehlen the flow of former Nazi's out of Germany through the CIA's Operation Paperclip.


But the Southern Democrats in Texas didn't look anything like Obama's Democrats.  Kirby rejected any movements that threatened wealth.  He was convinced that organized labor would destabilize the contented and relatively prosperous Texas workers.  FDR's New Deal would destroy America, he believed, so he worked vehemently against FDR, as did others like William Rhodes Davis, Hitler's American agent whose Texas oil shipments went out of the port of Brownsville to Hitler's Koch-built refineries in Germany.   Had World War II started in 1933 instead of 1940, it may have saved Kirby's declining lumber business, but he had already made his fortunes.  Nonetheless, he struck back at FDR by organizing the Southern Committee for Upholding the U.S. Constitution, a name that camouflages the bigoted nature of  the committee's values as well as the groups primary funding source....the DuPont family... whose munition and chemical sales were always improved by raw conflict, civil disputes and cross-border warfare.  Tucked as their factories were along the Texas bayous they were close to Houston's petroleum refineries, Beaumont's port and the Spindletop field further inland as well as to the world's largest sulfur dome at Freeport....an essential ingredient in gun powder.  Texas became synonymous with the "arsenal of freedom"....but whose?

"I was told when I came to Texas that Democrats here are like Republicans everywhere else," said Walker.  "What they meant by that is that they are conservative, often gun toting, and that they have, over time, made their own peace with the Northern Robber Barons who in funding the Texas Revolution, and who in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, turned their powers against the Southern Jacksonian Democrats and Jeffersonian agrarian farmers and plantation owners by using the slavery issue to pry the Southerners' hands off of the Southerners' assets.  It's been said that if the Southerners had been smart....or really stupid, but at least open minded....they would have trumped the Northern robber barons, enlisted their slaves in a freedom fighting army of future factory owners and laborers and headed North in 1859.  One farrow year and the crops would have come back stronger than ever and they'd have owned it all and been the heroes of the world instead of Dixie dodo birds.  There would have been no need for a 1950's Civil Rights Movement and subsequent amendments to the Constitution and Kirby's criticism of FDR would have been moot," said Walker.

Walker pointed out that Frankie Carter Randolph who died in 1972, had made her money through marriage into the Kirby coffers and birth into the W.T. Carter Lumber Company forturnes which like Kirby had been made in East Texas lumber.  "If they were able to hold on to their forrests and haul their lumber to Harriman's Union Pacific in Moscow, Texas they got rich and richer," said Walker, "but it didn't seem to go to their heads.  The Carter's were as down to earth as an Irish potato or a watermelon vine kind of like June Carter Cash, Johnny's wife.  People need help?  They'd give it or figure some way to really help.  It was in their nature.  So it was fitting that this charter member of the Houston Junior League would also fund Texas' first populace magazine, The Texas Observer," said Walker.

"So is the magazine really on the up and up?" I quizzed.  "What do you mean?" he asked.  "I mean, has it been commandeered by those who don't share Frankie Carter Randolph's values anymore?  Is it a clearing house of keeping tabs on those who might be seen as dangerous to the current Republican/Democratic hegemony of Texas politics?"

"That's an excellent question," said Walker.  "You're worried that Frankie Carter Randolph is the sister-in-law of Lillie Neuhaus of the family closely associated with William Stamps Farish, head of the Bush family trust and the Bush connections to Harriman and Union Pacific?  You'd have to look at Houston politics today to answer that question.  Take Sheila Jackson Lee, for example, the Houston-based U.S. Representative to Congress.  She doesn't appear to have the same values as Frankie Randolph or her close associates, Billie Carr or Molly Ivins,  as evidenced by her cell phone conversation in the midst of a press conference.  Her husband, a Yale Law School graduate and one of the most powerful educators in Houston has had his trouble with students who believe that he is walking anywhere but in the shadow of FDR as evidenced by his treatment of Houston students.  If you bring these facts to light and show that Frankie Carter Randolph is as different from Rick Perry as FDR was from Henry Ford, you'll have your answer.  Playing the race card doesn't work anymore, not in this age of the internet where YouTube video and newspaper archive and book digitalization make spinning a prevarication much more difficult," said Walker as he seemed to move away from the question like a ship moving away from a jagged shoreline.   "But I for one am glad of that fact, since I am a Texas Aggie and now that we are desirous that Governor Perry's new Texas flag will replace the Bonnie Blue, hopefully with the burgundy of my beloved school, Texas A&M," said Walker.


"What Perry is hopeful of doing is jettisoning those parts of the United States that aren't able to pull their own weight.  States where the best principles of Darwinian economics have not been allowed to take root and grow because of the heavy hand of the GOP's legacy of runaway Federalism that shifted to the Democrats and which in time was appropriated by well-meaning but misguided leadership across the board...misguided in Perry's opinion... as was Henry Ford or Charles Lindberg, or Harvey Firestone, or the other American capitalists who hated FDR and would have employed General Smedley Butler to remove him by force in an America coup d'etat.   So Perry will work like any good  fight promoter to control both corners while making money off of the ticket sales and concessions while the two idiots in the ring bludgeon each other," said Walker.


I asked Mr. Walker "who, then, is really controlling the 'corners' in America's political battles if it is not sincere Replicans and sincere Democrats?"


"As with Lincoln who worked for the railroad companies, it's the big boys," said Walker.
"Who are the big boys?" I asked Walker.
"Ask Obama whose wife worked for Mary Todd Lincoln's Republican Springfield, Illinois law firm," said Walker.  "Ask Shiela Jackson Lee.  Ask her Yale educated husband," said Walker.