Everything about William A Blakley totally explained
William Arvis "Dollar Bill" Blakley (
November 17,
1898 –
January 5,
1976) was an
American senator and
businessman from the
State of
Texas. He served two incomplete terms as Senator, the first in
1957, the second in
1961. He was part of the
conservative wing of the Texas
Democratic Party and is remembered for running against
liberal Democrat
Ralph Yarborough in the
1958 election and losing to
Republican John Tower in the
1961 special election, yielding the first Republican senator from Texas since
Reconstruction.
Blakley was born in
Miami Station, Missouri, but moved shortly thereafter with his parents to
Arapaho, Oklahoma. He worked a
ranch hand as a young man, earning the nickname "Cowboy Bill." Blakley served with the
United States Army in the
First World War; he was admitted to the
bar in
1933 and joined a law firm in
Dallas, Texas. In following years, his interests expanded into
real estate, ranch land,
banking and
insurance; by
1957, he was estimated to be worth $300 million.
In 1957,
Allan Shivers opted not to run for a fourth term as
Governor of Texas; Senator
Price Daniel moved from his Senate seat into the governorship. Like Shivers and Daniel, Blakley was an "Eisenhower Democrat" who had supported
Dwight Eisenhower over the national Democratic Party candidate
Adlai Stevenson in
1952 and
1956. Blakley, who had gained prominence in Texas politics for his business successes, was at the time building a $125 million shopping center and a 1,000-room hotel in Dallas. Governor Shivers, who had been considering appointing a Republican candidate to the Senate seat, instead appointed Blakley to the United States Senate pending a special election for the seat. Blakley, pressured by the Democratic Party in the interests of cooling tensions from the gubernatorial election, didn't opt for the full remaining term as senator, and served for less than four months from
January 15 to
April 28. Ralph Yarborough succeeded him in the special election, winning with a minority of the vote when the conservatives divided three ways (thereafter, Texas law was changed requiring a runoff between the two leading candidates in a special election, if no one had a majority in the first round). He left the Senate saying "I shall go back to my boots and saddle and ride toward the Western sunset."
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When the seat came up again the following year in the ordinary election cycle, Blakley ran in the primary against Yarborough as the conservative "Shivercrat" candidate. Blakley ran with the backing of the governor, Yarborough's colleague in the Senate,
Lyndon Johnson, and the southern bloc of senators who disagreed with Yarborough's progressive, anti-
segregation platform. The
Speaker of the House,
Sam Rayburn (a fellow Texan) backed Yarborough in the election, after supporting Blakley's temporary senate seat the year before. Rayburn's support proved to be worth more; Blakley was defeated in the primary, and Yarborough kept his Senate seat by a margin of 680,000 to Blakley's 486,000.
In
1961, upon
Lyndon Johnson becoming
Vice President of the United States, Blakley was appointed to fill Johnson's vacated Senate seat. Contention again appeared between the liberal and conservative wings of the Democratic Party for the nomination in the special election that would follow; Blakley maintained that he'd vigorously resisted
John F. Kennedy's "
New Frontier" legislation, which was unpopular with Texas conservatives. Ralph Yarborough, consequently, didn't endorse Blakley among the array of 71 candidates who ran without party designation. Blakley ran a weak second with 191,818 (18.1 percent) votes to Republican
John Tower's 327,308 (30.9 percent), with the remaining votes divided among five other major Democratic candidates, including future U.S. House Speaker
Jim Wright of
Fort Worth, with 171,328 (16.2 percent). In the special election runoff, some Texas liberals refused to vote for a Democratic candidate who seemed as conservative as the Republican one, and some Texas conservatives viewed Blakley's conservatism as lukewarm. Blakley, at 62, was older than his Republican opponent,
John Tower, 35. Tower won the seat in the special election runoff with 448,217 votes (50.6 percent) to Blakely's 437,872 (49.4 percent), a margin of 10,343. Blakely was the first Democratic senator to lose to a Republican in Texas in more than eighty years.
After losing the Senate election, Blakley left politics and returned to his business interests. He died in Dallas on
January 5,
1976, and is buried in Restland Memorial Park.
A library at the
University of Dallas is named after him.
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