Treasures of the Texas Collection –Jack Hightower
Hi! I’m your host, Robert Darden. Today on "Treasures of the Texas Collection," we have with us Brad Owens, who teaches journalism at BaylorUniversity. Brad, I know you're a political junkie, have been covering politics and around politics most of your life, and that you were raised in rural Texas. So I expect that the subject of today's program strikes a lot of chords with you as well as our listeners.
Bob, I've spent a couple of weeks studying Jack Hightower, a former Congressman, state legislator, state Supreme Court justice and Baylor trustee. Jack Hightower is what we'd call a "Straight Arrow," and about as "Old School" as they come. He is a fascinating man, a guy we can learn a lot from.
The Texas Collection, and the Poage Library, also on the Baylor campus, have a tremendous store of documents from Hightower's career, plus oral-history interviews. The collection includes Mr. Hightower's collection of thousands of books and items of memorabilia related to Abraham Lincoln, Sam Houston and a variety of figures in Americana and Texana.
And I think many of the figures who are prominent in Judge Hightower's collection have something in common with him. They specifically represent the ideal of the humble, rural, self-made statesman – this unique archetype in American life.
So, who is Jack Hightower?
Well, if you believe some of the most respected of Texas political writers, Jack Hightower is Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. That's how Art Wiese of the Houston Post described Hightower in the mid-1970s, in a profile that came out just as Hightower started his first of five terms in Congress. Wiese wrote:
"Anyone who ever watched Jimmy Stewart in that classic film of the 1930s remembers a freshman legislator burning with good intentions and civics-class concepts like virtue, honesty and decency in government."
Wiese describes a lawyer with a modest legal practice in Vernon, Texas, who had been a Baptist Sunday School teacher for 20 years, who didn't drink, smoke or curse. And Jack Hightower had just knocked off a four-term Republican incumbent, Bob Price, who had Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan out working for him on the campaign trail.
The Jimmy Stewart thing is an easy metaphor, one that's been used countless times since the movie came out in 1939. But it holds up well in this case.
Man, that’s high praise indeed.
A couple of years into Hightower's tenure in Congress, the legendary Texas Monthly political writer Paul Burka profiled Hightower this way:
"In his first term, he has come to symbolize a figure straight out of the solid and upright nineteenth-century tradition: An American Gothic congressman."
Burka quoted one of Hightower's fellow Congressmen, a liberal Democrat, who said,
"I guess one reason I like Jack so much is that there are so damn few really decent people like that up here."
A Capitol Hill journalist quoted in Burka's piece said:
"He still believes in the old myths, and denies that they are myths."
Good line. He came up in politics the old-fashioned way, didn't he?
Yes. Hightower graduated from Baylor Law in 1951, a few months after marrying his wife, Colleen, who was raised in the nearby town of Tulia. Hightower was from Memphis, Texas, and he set up a law practice in Vernon, just after he graduated from Baylor Law, because Vernon was a little more promising place to hang his shingle. He served a term in the Texas House in the mid-'50s, was a District Attorney in the 46th Judicial District, and then served in the Texas Senate from 1964-75. And while serving in the part-time Texas Legislature – the pay was $10 a day for the first hundred days of a legislative session – he was a partner in a firm in Vernon.
Hightower was elected to Congress in the same year that President Nixon resigned from office because of the Watergate scandal. Hightower was one of many Democrats to unseat incumbent Republicans that year.
In Congress, Hightower served on the House Agriculture Committee and the Select Committee on Hunger. He expressed concerns at the time about the disillusionment of American voters in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam. He was classified as one of the most conservative Democrats in Congress.
Still, Hightower had a long, constructive career.
Right.He spent 10 years in Washington before being defeated in 1984 by Beau Boulter. That election, also, had a strong national pattern. Boulter was one of a big crop of Republicans who came in on the coattails of Ronald Reagan's landslide re-election victory.
Hightower never moved his three daughters to Washington. He steered clear of the cocktail party and reception circuit. Hightower once told the Baylor Line alumni magazine that Colleen's attitude about Washington and his work there was supportive, but far from star-struck:
"She doesn't like my job," he said, "but she understands it."
Hightower lived in an efficiency apartment in Arlington, Virginia, slept on a sofa bed with his feet hanging off the end, and voted his conscience. Democrats to the left and Reagan Republicans to the right had to admit that Jack Hightower was scrupulously honest. And he had an appetite for hard work on committees and the detail work of serving his people in Washington. He represented 33 counties, and he took pride in his constituent service and his personal attention to the people in the Panhandle.
It must not have been easy being positioned at the right of his own party, just as the Republican right was rising.
No, it wasn't. A lot of people say the current highly partisan, unpleasant climate in Congress dates back to those very years. Vietnam, then Watergate, the various social shocks the country went through in the 1960s, and then the Reagan Revolution – since that time, national politics have become much more a cultural conflict. And fund-raising and campaigning more and more seem to require politicians to demonize their adversaries.
To me, that is a key element in Jack Hightower's story – another point where he went against the grain.
After being turned out of Congress, he came home, and it wasn't long before he got drawn back into state politics. In one of the oral-history interviews in the Baylor collections, Hightower recounts a conversation he had with Jim Mattox, the Texas Attorney General, the upshot of which was that Hightower came to Austin and ran Mattox's office as First Assistant AG.
I think a lot of people would think of Jim Mattox and Jack Hightower as a very odd couple.
Very much so. You may remember that Mattox was known as Mad Dog, and he worked hard to earn that handle. This was an era in Austin politics that was largely dominated by three people, all Democrats, and none of them cut from soft cloth: Mattox; Bob Bullock, who served as comptroller and then lieutenant governor; and Ann Richards, who served as treasurer, and then, of course, as governor.
Mattox, Bullock and Richards were about as hard-nosed and combative as anyone you'll ever see in political office. All three were, by Texas standards, pretty liberal, and their styles could be described as “bare knuckles.” All Baylor alumni, by the way.
Hightower's personal style, and his politics, were quite different.
That’s right –but he found common ground and was able to work with them and have an influence on them.
Years later, Hightower remembered that first telephone conversation with Mattox this way. It kind of makes me wish there was more of this kind of comity in politics today. Hightower told the story:
"Jim's approach was to say, 'Jack, you're more conservative than me. You have friends that won't even answer my phone calls. I sure need you in my office.'"
Hightower recalled, "I knew that was true, but I didn't know he knew it."
So Hightower took the job, and he and Mattox made a good team. Jack later recalled,
"Jim was a good campaigner, and to my surprise, he was a damned good attorney general."
And Hightower finished his political career on the bench, correct?
Yes. Having been a prosecutor as a young man, and then serving primarily as an administrator under Mattox in the state Attorney General's office, Jack Hightower finally became Judge Hightower, serving from 1987 to 1994 on the Texas Supreme Court.
One offshoot of his tenure on the Supreme Court was that Hightower took an interest in a large but at that time completely disorganized trove of historical artifacts belonging to the state supreme court. He helped organize the Texas Supreme Court Historical Society to catalogue that material, and was founding president.
President Clinton appointed Hightower to the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science, and he served as a commissioner from 1999 to 2005, reporting to Congress on the needs of the country's libraries.
Bob, Judge Hightower has said that law is history, that the two are really one in his mind. And this fascination with history is the other side of Judge Hightower's public career that I think is worth a look. It's a way of life, not just an interest in history but a respect for history and its lessons. And that has been part of Mr. Hightower's life from the beginning.
Let's hear a few words from Hightower himself. This is from an oral history interview he did in 2008.
AUDIO CUT FROM INTERVIEW: "I suppose I've been called a bibliophile. I've been called a bibliomaniac. But it's just a reflection of my love for books. I can't remember when I didn't want books. I remember writing Santa Claus and asking for books. So I have a collection that's a collection of a lifetime."
Judge Hightower has donated more than 2,700 autographed books, including some signed by presidents from John Quincy Adams to George W. Bush. The collection also includes original copies of state legislation from the 1800s. He remembers finding the first autographed book in a shop in Austin in 1953, during his first term in the Legislature. It was signed by E.M. Pease, who was governor of Texas before and after the Civil War.
AUDIO CUT FROM INTERVIEW: "This is the oldest book I have in my collection. 1647. Readings of the Famous Lawyer Sir Robert Brook, 1647. But it's signed by Roger Brooke Taney, who wrote the famous Dred Scott decision. He died in 1864. And of course, Lincoln was president at the time. He was succeeded by Samuel Palmer Chase, who was Lincoln's secretary of the treasury, and then Lincoln put him on the Supreme Court. And here's Samuel P. Chase, History of the Federal Government."
It is the books and memorabilia related to American history – and especially to Abraham Lincoln – that are closest to Hightower's heart.
AUDIO CUT FROM INTERVIEW: "I guess what really got me turned on in history is the fact that Daddy would tell stories of his father, who was a Confederate soldier. And he would tell those stories. Well, that also made me interested in Lincoln. Of course, Lincoln was anathema to Confederates, but I was interested in the whole thing. ... I have a picture out in the office that was signed by my third-grade teacher, who said I was her favorite history student. "
So he got started really early in life.
Sure did. Hightower vividly remembers the presidential campaign of 1932, when he was just six years old.
His parents, who owned a flower shop in Memphis, Texas, were great admirers of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Money was tight, but Hightower's parents found ways to feed his imagination with books. And he had an elementary-school teacher, as he mentioned, who encouraged his interest in history and politics.
Hightower remembers riding the train to Dallas in 1936 with his father, going to see the Texas Centennial exposition. And he connects the dots from that day to this, immersing himself in American history, and even playing a little part in it.
"I have been bitten by the history bug as long as I can remember," Hightower told a writer with the Waco Tribune-Herald. "I remember my father taking me to meet a Confederate war veteran in Memphis, Texas. I asked him if he had ever seen Lincoln, and he said, 'No – if I had, I would've shot him.'"
So even during the Great Depression, without the technology our kids have access to today, this young man was able to see the world – and the past, and to imagine the future – through books and the stories he heard from his family.
Hightower remembers listening to W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel and the Light Crust Doughboys on WBAP radio. And President Roosevelt made enough of an impression on him that he started wanting to be president of the United States.
Many years later, he was able to trace his genealogy. He discovered that one of his great-great-great-grandfathers, Richard Stanford, had been a member of Congress from North Carolina in the late 1700s and early 1800s, and that Stanford's father had served in the American Revolution as a soldier in the North Carolina Volunteers.
That’s pretty cool. Now, I know Jack Hightower eventually served on the board of trustees at Baylor, but I understand that he was poking around in Baylor's history long before that.
Yes indeed. Hightower, his wife and his three daughters all graduated from Baylor, and his time on the board of regents spanned the presidential transition from Judge Abner McCall, a close friend, to Herbert Reynolds.
Hightower served as a Baylor trustee from 1972-1981, and has also served on the board of Wayland Baptist University and Midwestern State University, as well as serving on the board of the Baptist Standard newspaper, and holding many high positions with Masonic institutions in Texas.
One of the items in the archives that I especially enjoyed reading was something called "These Forty Acres" – Hightower's history of the Baylor campus, written for an undergraduate course. It's well written, and it tells the story not only of some landmarks that are long disappeared, but of a way of life.
Hightower graduated from Baylor in 1949 after a two-year hitch in the Navy at the end of World War II. He tells a little story about being stationed in San Francisco and sneaking over to attend the formation of the United Nations. Hightower had gotten in one summer of college before going into the Navy. When he returned to Baylor, Hightower actually worked in the Texas Collection for several years, and was a protege of the legendary historian and librarian Guy B. Harrison.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, Baylor wasn’t all that impressive.
Actually, all Baylor amounted to was a pair of run-down buildings located near the site of the Carroll Library – now the home of the Texas Collection. The real estate was covered with Russian thistles and sand burrs. There were no telephones, the buildings were heated with wood and coal stoves, and the "facilities" were out back.
Today, we wouldn't recognize the campus he wrote about, or the campus he studied on. And not just the landmarks but the way of life are long gone.
The undergraduate historian wrote:
"An ancient oak on these grounds" – this would be on the old Speight homestead, at Fifth Street and Speight -- "was, according to legend, supposed to mark the burial spot of an Indian princess," Hightower wrote. He traced the construction of the campus, and recounted the rules protecting the propriety of Baylor women living in the dormitories. There was a tree swing on one of the massive oaks in what is now the quadrangle area.
"It was positively against the rules," Hightower wrote, "for a boy to be seen between Fifth Street and the fence. When going past the dormitory, the boy must walk right along the side of the street and keep moving."
Sounds like a different universe. You’ve told me that a fish pond – of all things – was even installed in front of Burleson Hall in 1915.
That’s right. Hightower wrote: "The pond was designed to hold botanical specimens, but was more often host to various students, who were tossed in by their classmates." Also among those dunked in the fish pond was a certain "dignified librarian."
Hightower dug through various unpublished papers and theses, and he interviewed Lily Russell, director of public relations at Baylor, in 1947. They talked about the ambitious master plan for construction at Baylor. The plan included nineteen buildings, including the Armstrong Browning Library, Tidwell Bible Building, Marrs McLean Gymnasium, and four women's dormitories.
The Student Union Building, to be the first air-conditioned structure on the campus, had been started in 1939, but work had stopped because construction materials and labor were not available during the war, and the SUB was completed in 1947.
I take it that the post-war period, when Hightower and so many other veterans came back to school, was a time of rapid growth at Baylor.
Yes, and that was I think the third major phase of expansion. Another, in the 1960s, supported the children of those veterans -- the baby boomers. And of course, we've just seen a massive construction campaign here in the past few years.