David Riesman and Nathan Glazer
THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE
DISCONTENTED CLASSES
I n the 1930s Maury Maverick, who died this year, was
a quite exceptional but far from untypical representative of the
Texas political outlook: free-swin ging, red-tape cutting, "a man's
a man for a' that. " Born to a famous Texas name which had
entered the common speech, he enjoyed living up to it by defending
the downtrodden: the Spanish-Americans of San Antonio; the small
businessmen; and, most courageously, the Communists and their
right to be heard in the municipal auditorium. In the Maverick era
Texas was reputed to be the most interventionist state in the Union,
providing some of the firmest support to Roosevelt's foreign policy.
Its influential Congressional delegation, which included Sam Ray–
burn as well as Senator Tom Connally and a less cautious Lyndon
Johnson, were Roosevelt's stalwarts as often in domestic as in foreign
policy. But not many years later Maverick had turned into a political
untouchable, and Texas competed with the North Central isolationist
belt in violent opposition to the old Roosevelt policies no less than
to the policies of Truman, his successor and legitimate heir. Admiral
Theobald's exposure of Roosevelt's "plot" to get us into war by en–
couraging thel bombing of Pearl Harbor is probably taken more ser–
iously in Texas than anywhere else in the United States.
Texas, a state whose wealth and population have greatly in–
creased in the recent past, demonstrates in extreme form the manner
in
which the psychological hazards of prosperity have helped shift
the character of American politics and political thinking since the
Second World War. We can date the change even more precisely
than that. In the election of 1948, Roosevelt's successor, more une–
quivocally and guilelessly committed to many New Deal policies and
attitudes than F.D.R., won an election against a candidate far more
