| PARR, GEORGE BERHAM (1901-1975). George B. Parr, the
political boss of Duval County for more than thirty years, son of Elizabeth Allen and
Archer Parr, was born in San Diego, Texas, on March 1, 1901. At thirteen he served as his
father's pageboy in the Texas Senate. Despite a disastrous educational record, which
included brief enrollments at Texas A&M, the University of Texas, Southwestern
University, and a trade school in Kansas City, George Parr entered the University of Texas
law school as a special student in 1923 and passed the state bar examination three years
later without earning a law degree. In 1923 he also married Thelma Duckworth of Corpus
Christi. After a divorce and remarriage in the late 1930s, their relationship ended with a
second divorce in 1949. From his marriage to Thelma and a later one to Eva Perez, Parr had
two daughters. The disinclination of his brothers, Givens and Atlee, to pursue political
careers paved the way for George to become the political heir apparent to his father, who
had ruled Duval County since 1907. George Parr entered the political arena in 1926, when
Archer chose him to complete Givens's term as Duval county judge. George was soon managing
local affairs as the aging boss, already in his late sixties, struggled with various
physical ailments and became increasingly preoccupied with state and national matters. In
fact, George even surpassed his father in the role of "El Patr?n" for the
impoverished Mexican-American laborers who formed the majority of the county population
and served as the mainstay of the Democratic machine. He became far more fluent in Spanish
than Archer, tirelessly learned the names of his constituents and their children, and
provided help in times of need in return for one concession-absolute loyalty. Under his
leadership, both corruption and paternalism flourished in Duval County.
Not even a conviction for income-tax evasion in 1934 and his subsequent imprisonment
for nine months in 1936 and 1937 destroyed Parr's growing political power. His handpicked
candidates continued to sweep county elections, and by the time of his father's death in
1942, Parr stood as the undisputed boss of Duval County-in both a political and an
economic sense. He amassed a sizable fortune with income from banking, mercantile,
ranching, and oil interests and, of course, from the public treasury. His political
influence extended into other South Texas counties as well. With pardon from President
Harry Truman in 1946, he even reclaimed the right to run for public office, and later held
the posts of county judge and sheriff for his home county.
The remainder of Parr's political career was highlighted by a seemingly endless series
of spectacular scandals, involving election fraud, graft on the grand scale, and violence.
His most celebrated scheme decided the outcome of the United States Senate race between
Coke R. Stevenson and Lyndon B. Johnson in 1948. With Stevenson the apparent winner,
election officials in Jim Wells County, probably acting on Parr's orders, reported an
additional 202 votes for Johnson a week after the primary runoff and provided the future
president with his eighty-seven-vote margin of victory for the whole state. Amid charges
of fraud, the voting lists disappeared. Even more sordid controversies followed. As strong
challenges from the Freedom party, consisting mainly of World War Iv veterans, developed
in several South Texas counties, including Duval, two critics of Parr's rule and the son
of another met violent deaths. While denying Parr's involvement in two of the killings,
his biographer, Dudley Lynch, concedes that the evidence against Parr in the shooting of
the son of Jacob Floyd, an attorney for the Freedom party, was both "highly
circumstantial" and "highly incriminating." After this third murder,
Governor Allan Shivers, Texas attorney general John Ben Shepperd, and federal authorities
launched all-out campaigns to destroy the Parr machine. Investigations of the 1950s
produced over 650 indictments against ring members, but Parr survived the indictments and
his own conviction for federal mail fraud through a complicated series of dismissals and
reversals on appeal. In the face of another legal offensive in the 1970s and a rebellion
within his own organization, he finally relented. While appealing a conviction and
five-year sentence for federal income tax evasion, the Duke of Duval committed suicide at
his ranch, Los Harcones, on April 1, 1975. See also BOSS RULE.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dallas Morning News, August 18, 19, 20, 1974. Dudley Lynch, The
Duke of Duval: The Life and Times of George B. Parr (Waco: Texian Press, 1976).
Evan Anders
The Handbook of Texas Online
Back
Home
Page created Jan. 14, 2005 |