Dallas Republican One-Of-A-Kind Congressman In The 1950s
In an open letter to congressional colleagues on Dec. 22, 1964, a bitter Bruce Alger blamed his failed bid for a sixth term in part on a national magazine that branded him one of the five worst members of the U.S. House of Representatives.
In an open letter to congressional colleagues on Dec. 22, 1964, a bitter Bruce Alger blamed his failed bid for a sixth term in part on a national magazine that branded him one of the five worst members of the U.S. House of Representatives.
The last Republican from the Lone Star State to serve in the House was Harry M. Wurzbach, the choice of a predominantly German district in the 1920s. Since his death a quarter of a century earlier, the delegation had been exclusively Democratic.
The Republican candidate carried Texas in the presidential election of 1952, but Dwight Eisenhower’s historic feat did not produce two-party parity. Two years later, the short-handed GOP contested only a dozen of the 150 legislative races and a mere six of the 22 congressional matches.
As usual, every Republican crashed and burned — everyone, that is, except handsome Bruce Reynolds Alger. The 36-year-old realtor and World War II bomber pilot upset the political applecart by winning the House seat reserved for Dallas County.
Credit for the breakthrough went not to the victor but the vanquished, a testy former mayor of Big D. Wallace Savage angered so many liberals in the Democratic primary that most cast their ballots for his opponent or boycotted the general election altogether. After Savage publicly spurned their support, blacks too stayed home enabling Alger to spring his 53-percent surprise.
Although the newcomer hitched a ride on the coattails of the popular president, he did not share Ike’s moderate views. Bruce Alger was a Newt Gingrich conservative, when the future Speaker of the House was still in grade school.
To slim down a federal bureaucracy the Dallasite believed too big for its britches, he prescribed a crash diet of tax cuts, slashed spending, business deregulation, and a restoration of states’ rights. By consistently carrying his lean-and-mean philosophy to its logical conclusion, he soon earned a reputation as a right-wing radical.
Alger certainly had the courage of his convictions and never shied away from attacking federal programs which enjoyed broad support. He denounced social security as a “shakedown” and suggested senior citizens should turn to private charities instead of the government. As the lone dissenter in the school-milk debate, he reasoned, “If they leave our tax money back in Dallas, parents will be able to pay for their kids’ lunch.”
Alger was an ardent anti-communist, who urged constituents to guard against the Moscow menace at home and abroad. “If we do not rally at the grass roots,” he warned in a 1956 speech, “we will have a Socialist Labor government in four or eight years with a man like Walter Reuther at the head.”
At the same time, however, Alger kept his distance from the paranoid fringe. A separate-but-equal foe of racial integration, he nevertheless refrained from referring to the civil rights movement as a communist plot. The John Birch Society, an influential force in Dallas during the 1950s and 1960s, may have considered him one of their own, but the cagey congressman never joined the extremist group.
Alger skillfully mixed rigid ideology with pragmatic politics. He stunned fellow Republicans by refusing to campaign against fellow congressmen explaining he had to stay on good terms with the 21 Democrats in order to get anything done in Washington.
Democrats at first dismissed the Alger upset as a fluke and predicted a prompt return to the status quo. But Henry Wade, the Dallas district attorney, suffered a stinging rebuke at the polls in 1956 as did state senator Barefoot Sanders in ’58 and Joe Pool in ’60.
The next year, a college professor from Wichita Falls replaced Alger as the golden boy of the Texas Republican Party. John Tower’s unprecedented triumph in a winner-take-all special election to fill a Senate vacancy boosted morale and paved the way for substantial gains in 1962.
Alger survived the scandalous fallout from a messy divorce to post his fifth consecutive ballot-box victory. West Texans ended his lonely vigil by sending Ed Foreman of Odessa to D.C.
Democrats took their revenge two years later with an epic landslide that decimated the ranks of Republican officeholders. Voters evicted nine out of 10 state legislators and both GOP congressmen, including the seemingly invincible ideologue from Dallas.
The Goldwater debacle played a major role in the ouster of Alger by ex-mayor Earle Cabell, but more decisive factors dictated his demise. His failure to achieve passage of a single bill or resolution during his 10-year tenure disillusioned all but his most devoted followers, and Dallas’ loss of eight federal agencies underscored his inability to bring home the bacon convincing business leaders as well as “The Morning News” to switch sides.
The repudiation of 1964 permanently scarred Bruce Alger, who left Texas in a huff. He returned to Dallas in 1976, but in more than three decades the charismatic David that once scared the bejabers out of the Democratic Goliath has kept a low public profile.
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