Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog

As many of you know, the race to be the next Governor of Texas is one of the most closely-watched in the country right now. Rick Perry, the longest-serving governor in the state’s history, has declined to run for another term. Although we’re still the midst of the party primaries right now, it’s looking like Attorney General Greg Abbott (R) will be squaring off against State Senator Wendy Davis (D) come November.

There haven’t been many competitive female candidates for governor in Texas over the decades. There was Ann Richards, of course (served 1991-95), and Miriam “Ma” Ferguson served two non-consecutive two-year terms in the 1920s and 1930s. Although Ma Ferguson was Texas’ first female governor, she’s not generally thought of as a trailblazer for women, having entered politics after her husband, Governor Jim Ferguson, was impeached and made ineligible to hold public office in the state. Ma campaigned explicitly on the platform of “two governors for the price of one.”

Then in the early 1970s there was Frances “Sissy” Farenthold, who twice sought the Democratic nomination for governor, but was defeated both times by Dolph Briscoe, who went on to win the general election. This was at a time when both the Democratic and Republican parties were in transition, and statewide office in Texas has increasingly been a Republican prerogative ever since.

So with that as a little bit of background, I was surprised to learn not long ago that Katie Daffan (right, c. 1906) ran briefly for governor in 1930. Oddly, an important fact like that doesn’t appear in her Handbook of Texas biography. Cousin Katie, who I’ve mentioned frequently here, was my grandmother’s first cousin, although Katie was some years older. My mother knew Katie when she was a child and Katie was in her mid-fifties, about in the same period she ran for governor. My mother thought the world of Cousin Katie, who seems to have been a sort of Auntie Mame character to her, who took her on shopping trips to Houston, where Katie was literary editor for the Houston Chronicle at the time, and generally indulged her in all sorts of ways my grandmother wouldn’t.  Katie apparently cut quite a figure; my mother recalled that Katie had apparently decided that the styles of her young adulthood in the 1890s were just about right, and wore them for the rest of her life. The dresses were not a particular challenge, because those could always be made up from old patterns, but she never could figure out where Katie got new, high-button shoes decades after they went out of style.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Katie Litty Daffan was the living embodiment of the the Lost Cause and Confederate memory in Texas in the first part of the Twentieth Century. She served five terms as president of the Texas Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, was Secretary (and only female member) of the Hood’s Texas Brigade Association, served for seven years as Superintendent of the Confederate Women’s Home in Austin. She enjoyed considerable success as an author and newspaper columnist, writing a textbook that was used for many years as a standard text in public schools across the state.

Katie was married, very briefly, in 1897 to Mann Trice, the Texas State Assistant Attorney General. That marriage folded within a few months, though, and Katie resumed using her maiden name, and never remarried. Katie died in 1951, at age 76, when she was hit by a car while walking home from an all-night diner at 4:30 in the morning. She walked in the middle of the street because there weren’t any streetlights and the sidewalks were broken and uneven.

At any rate, I came across this newspaper item outlining Katie’s platform for her campaign. It’s full of happy bromides that few would challenge — who doesn’t endorse Texas having “a good highway system”? — but it’s quite a collection of positions that certainly don’t line up easily with either of today’s two major parties. Dallas Morning News, March 25, 1930:

In the end, Katie didn’t file the paperwork for the Democratic primary, so her name never appeared on the ballot. There ended up being twelve candidates in the primary anyway, and Ross Sterling went on to win the general election that fall. He was succeeded two years later by — wait for it — Ma Ferguson again.

As far as I know, Katie never offered any specific reason for not following through on her announced run for Texas governor, choosing instead to publicly thank her friends and supporters once the filing deadline for the primary had passed and she was officially off the ballot, in early June. A bigger question, that I can’t answer, is why she announced for governor in the first place. It’s yet another curious story about Cousin Katie that leaves as many questions as it answers. Wherever she is, though, I’m pretty sure Katie’s still enjoying the attention.

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