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Excerpt from Oral History Interview with Maury Maverick, October 27, 1975. Interview A-0323. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) See Entire Interview >>

Measuring the progress of liberalism in Texas

Maverick talks about the state of liberal politics in Texas, arguing that liberalism, had ultimately made little progress, in large measure because of the lack of a youthful constituency to perpetuate liberal politics into the 1970s.

Citing this Excerpt

Oral History Interview with Maury Maverick, October 27, 1975. Interview A-0323. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Full Text of the Excerpt

MAURY MAVERICK:
Gambling, the numbers and he would deliver votes, you know. He would deliver ten or fifteen pretty big precincts and so the police let him operate. The Suttons and the Bellingers were always in different camps. Socially, they were friends, but they were politically in different camps.
CHANDLER DAVIDSON:
Well, let me ask you, to wrap this up, Maury, a very general sort of question like they ask people on television talk shows. You've been involved in liberal politics back since your dad's time in the 1930s and 1940s and so you have a rather long term perspective from which to judge the progress or the lack of it, that liberalism has made in Texas. What progress has it made? Is it a more viable organization than it was thirty years ago? Has it accomplished much?
MAURY MAVERICK:
I think that it has accomplished a lot, but I think that one of the great defects in it has been that younger people haven't come along. Everything went into Ralph Yarborough's campaigns, just Ralph, Ralph, Ralph. I was a part of that and would be again. Now Ralph Yarborough is an old man and I don't know any young people or middle-aged people coming along in Texas today, with the possible exception of Bob Eckhardt, and he is getting to be an old man himself. I don't know any young people that would… I think that state of liberalism in Texas is very bad. I don't know any young people at all. Also, there is the structured thing of having blacks electing blacks and browns electing browns. I don't know what is going to happen. I don't see any young, snappy, swell young liberals with broad statewide appeal today. In that sense, I think that we are worse off than we were.
CHANDLER DAVIDSON:
The labor movement doesn't seem to have produced any young leaders either, does it?
MAURY MAVERICK:
No. I don't know much about it. The labor movement backed me for the United States Senate. I think they are sorry that they did….