Wilbert Lee O'Daniel was an American conservative Democratic Party politician from Texas, who was hosting a popular radio program. He was also the 34th Governor of Texas (1939-1941) and United States Senator (1941-1949).
Background
Wilbert Lee O'Daniel was born on March 11, 1890, in Malta, Ohio, the son of William O'Daniel and Alice Ann Thompson Earich. His father, a Union veteran, was a farmer, factory worker, and construction crewman; his mother, a widow when she married William O'Daniel, was a housewife, but after her second husband's early death, she worked as a seamstress and washerwoman. In 1895, when his mother married an old classmate, Charles H. Baker, O'Daniel moved with his family to Baker's farm near Arlington, Kansas, about twenty miles southwest of Hutchinson.
Education
After completing public school in Arlington in 1906, O'Daniel opened a small restaurant there and in a year earned enough for tuition at a business college in Hutchinson. He finished the two-year course in eight months even though he was holding two part-time jobs.
Career
Hired by a milling company upon graduation, O'Daniel advanced from stenographer to bookkeeper and then sales manager, moving from Arlington to a larger milling company in Kingman, Kansas, in 1912.
Four years later he organized his own business, the Independent Milling Company, and expanded his marketing into Texas. In 1919 his firm merged with a Kansas City company, and O'Daniel left the organization.
In 1921, in the midst of the postwar recession, O'Daniel established the United States Flour Mills Company in New Orleans in order to facilitate export marketing. In 1925 the family moved to Fort Worth, Texas, where O'Daniel began a ten-year association with Burrus Mill and Elevator Company, an extensive northern Texas and Oklahoma concern. While he rose to the position of president of the Fort Worth mill, O'Daniel also introduced laboratory and experimental operations into milling and began to advertise on radio.
In 1930, O'Daniel joined with Bob Wills to create a radio program, "Light Crust Doughboys" (later "Hillbilly Boys"). O'Daniel himself wrote over 150 songs and programs on religion, education, families, thrift, morals, heritage, politics, and Americanism. The income from such songs as "Beautiful Texas, " "Texas Rose, " "Bluebonnet Waltz, " "Alamo Waltz, " and "Them Hillbillies Are Politicians Now" helped O'Daniel launch his new Hillbilly Flour Company and resulted in a grass-roots letter campaign that encouraged him to enter - and easily win - a hotly contested Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 1938 over twelve opponents.
O'Daniel could vote in neither the primary nor the election, as he had refused to pay the poll tax, but his "Pass the Biscuits, Pappy" platform (based on a radio advertising slogan from which his nickname was derived), which lauded the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, pensions, family life, mother love, schools, commerce, and simple government, attracted mass sing-along rallies throughout Texas. O'Daniel garnered nearly 52 percent of the primary vote in the one-party state, obviating the need for a runoff. Before the runoff primaries for other races, O'Daniel unprecedentedly endorsed candidates for the Democratic nomination and state supreme court and thus divided the party before the Democratic convention.
O'Daniel governed Texas much as he had presided over his own businesses and the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, which he had headed in 1933. His cabinet functioned like a board of directors of a business corporation, an approach that blurred distinctions between the three branches of government and alienated an entrenched bureaucracy. Despite his inexperience and failure to repeal the poll tax, to institute a "transactions tax, " and to increase old-age pensions, O'Daniel was reelected in 1940, the first candidate for governor of Texas to secure more than a million votes.
In 1941, halfway through his second term, he campaigned to fill a vacated seat in the United States Senate and defeated twenty-five other candidates, ranging from veteran politicians to a relatively new congressman named Lyndon B. Johnson. O'Daniel was reelected to a full term in the Senate in 1942. For the next six years, he served without distinction. He identified increasingly with the conservative, isolationist Republican bloc.
In 1948 he retired from the Senate and sold real estate in Washington, D. C. He then moved to a home in Dallas and started an insurance company that he headed until his death. He twice again sought the Democratic nomination for governor - in 1956 and 1958 - but was defeated. He died in Dallas eleven years after his last attempt to reenter politics.
O'Daniel's election successes are often attributed to showmanship and radio. But contemporary newspaper accounts suggest that voters responded to his sincerity and proindustry position. By demonstrating the value of public relations and mass media, O'Daniel changed the nature of electioneering in Texas. Most historians hold that O'Daniel was a better campaigner than administrator of the offices to which he was elected.
Achievements
Wilbert O'Daniel together with Bob Wills createed a radio program, "Light Crust Doughboys" (later "Hillbilly Boys"), in 1930.
O'Daniel wrote over 150 songs and programs on different themes, the income from which helped him to launch his new Hillbilly Flour Company and to enter and win Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 1938.
O'Danial served as the 34th Governor of Texas (1939-1941).
Membership
Wilbert O'Daniel was a member of the Democratic party and United States Senate (1941-1949).
Connections
On June 30, 1917, Wilbert Lee O'Daniel married Merle Estella Butcher; they had three children.
Father:
William O'Daniel
He was a Union veteran, farmer, factory worker, and construction crewman.
