Legends & Lore of the Texas Capitol by Mike Cox

Author:Mike Cox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2017-11-23T05:00:00+00:00

Travis and O’Reilly—less than a year after the San Antonio journalist rode through Austin with the message for the president—would take part in an episode on the floor of the Texas Senate that, while it nearly erupted in bloodshed, amounts to one of the strongest stands for freedom of the press in the state’s history.

By 1910, Travis had already helped to cover two regular sessions of the legislature and several special sessions. That summer, Governor Tom Campbell called a fourth special session of the Thirty-First Legislature.

“The Legislature was a lot more important in those days than it is now,” Travis recalled years later. “I suppose we didn’t have so many news services as we’ve got now, but it was quite an honor to record its proceedings.”

Back then, literally everything the legislature did got news coverage, and the lawmakers were not always pleased with the way things came out in the papers. That year, a cloud of scandal hung over the capitol dome. Speaker of the House Austin M. Kennedy, a former newspaper publisher from Mexia who first gained election to the lower chamber in 1898, was suspected of misdeeds in office. On the Senate side, members expelled one of their own for accusing some of his colleagues of playing poker with lobbyists and assorted other ethical issues. Travis had written about all that, but it was the Speaker who reacted to Travis’s coverage with enmity.

“Kennedy just hated my guts,” Travis said, laughing. “There were a lot of rumors around about him getting rake-offs on furniture for the Speaker’s quarters. He had a secretary that would buy this furniture at a discount and he’d split it with her. [Then called a stenographer, the woman had been on the House payroll at $120 a month (around $2,500 in today’s dollars) even though she had not moved to Texas until the sixth week of the special session.] Anyhow, he decided to meet those rumors head-on. So he demanded an investigation.”

Being Speaker (albeit having been elected to the post by only a six-vote majority), Kennedy appointed a three-member committee—two of them close friends—to conduct the probe.

“So I began writing up that investigation as a whitewash,” Travis said. “That made old Kennedy hate me worse than ever.”

A report that would clear the lawmaker was imminent, but Kennedy made a mistake when he addressed the committee. He gave out advance copies of his speech to all the statehouse reporters but Travis, which turned out to be the worst political blunder he ever made.

“He made it very pointed that I was not to have any copies of his speech because I hadn’t treated him right,” Travis said. “Well, the result of that was that I attended this session and the other newspapermen didn’t. I sat there and took notes on it. And he launched into a tirade in the course of which he mentioned rumors that they hadn’t gotten into at all and accused the governor of instigating all these charges against him.”

At the end of the speech, one of the committee members, John T.

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