The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 104, July 2000 - April, 2001 Page: 318

Southwestern Historical Quarterly

Maverick is at his most iconoclastic as a civil libertarian and activist lawyer,
happiest when challenging settled beliefs, institutions, and practices. It is a role
he savors. "Someone in our society must be in a position to say no to churches,
labor, big business, and popular ideas that may not really be good without being
thrown out of office the next day by a popularity poll" (p. 77). In various court-
rooms across the land, he has successfully argued against unwarranted searches
and seizures, helped overthrow the exclusion of Hispanics from trial juries in
Texas, and represented conscientious objectors to a war in Vietnam he believed
unconstitutional. His columns decry state-orchestrated prayers over the public-
address system before football games and attack the death penalty as cruel and
unusual punishment unequally applied. He extols the American Civil Liberties
Union and its representation of individuals as diverse as Madalyn Murray O'Hair
and Oliver North. Even his critics, of whom there are many, cannot accuse
Maverick of failure to take a stand where controversy might be involved.
Despite some annoying errors regarding the date of certain events and the
publication of particular columns, this is an enjoyable work which students of
mid-twentieth-century Texas should read.
Austzn Communzty College L. Patrick Hughes
Frankze: Mrs. R. D. Randolph and Texas Liberal Polztzcs. By Anne Fears Crawford.
(Austin: Eakin Press, 2000. Pp. xiii+143. Foreword, preface, acknowledg-
ments, afterword, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 1-57168-351-8. $22.95,
cloth.)
Frankze is a brief biography of Mrs. R. D. (Frankie) Randolph, a leader of the
Texas Democratic Party in the 1950s and 196os. Mrs. Randolph served as an
aggressively liberal Democratic National Committeewoman, but is best remem-
bered as a patroness of the Texas Observer, the feisty voice of Texas liberalism in
those decades.
Author Ann Fears Crawford sensibly focuses on Randolph's political activities,
while providing a sketch of her family and background. Randolph stood out
among Texans of her generation (born 1894) in that she embraced liberalism
in spite of a life of wealth and privilege. From a childhood in her family's Piney
Woods "company town," she became a Houston debutante, and in 1918 married
a rising young banker, Deke Randolph. Mr. Randolph apparently cared little for
politics, but his banking fortune funded his wife's activism.
Randolph entered the rough world of Texas politics through a curious
route-the Junior League of Houston. Municipal reform campaigns led to a
party leadership role in Harris County, where many Democrats remained
"Loyalists" in 1952 when Governor Allan Shivers led conservative "Shivercrats"
into the Eisenhower camp. Randolph became a tireless and intimidating cam-
paigner for the Loyalist faction and its subsequent iterations.
From the 1952 election until her death in 1972, Frankie Randolph's story is
one thread of the tangled web of Texas Democratic politics. The era was domi-
nated by Lyndon Johnson, Sam Rayburn, Shivers, Ralph Yarborough, and John

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