The Texas State Network--in More Ways Than One

Elliott Roosevelt and TSN Radio

In the beginning of the summer of 2012 I was working on research involving Elliott Roosevelt's radio station in Fort Worth, leading up to revealing how the men who had initially supported his father, FDR, rallied around him in the hope of sucking power from the Presidency to themselves. This is the next segment of the research at that link.

Elliott's first introduction to radio, it is said, came through his work in advertising—handling radio accounts for Albert Frank company, Paul Cornell, Inc., and Kelly, Nason and Roosevelt, Inc. in New York. As sales manager for three stations owned by Alva Pearl Barrett through his Southwest Broadcasting company, Elliott became director of the Southwest division of Hearst Radio, Inc. bought the stations in 1936, then made him its president until January, 1938 when he began forming his own network. At Texas State Network, which began operation on September 15, 1938, Elliott also had a two-day-a-week show called "Texas in the World News" over KFJZ, which was quickly added to TSN.

A Texas Strategy Flouted

It had begun in 1932 with the political strategist, Colonel E.M. House of Texas , who had worked from behind a curtain in 1912 to select, elect and reelect in 1916 the last Democrat to national office, Woodrow Wilson.

Col. House also chose Franklin Roosevelt and encouraged him early on  to run for office. House knew Sara Delano Roosevelt from visits to his summer home in Essex County, Massachusetts, about three miles away from his friend, T. Jefferson Coolidge, of Manchester, whose father had worked for Russell and Company with Warren Delano, FDR's grandfather.

The Delano and Coolidge families had both been steeped in the opium trade in the previous century. But Colonel House died in 1937, and neither Roosevelt nor Garner saw the need to continue the misformed relationship merely to keep a dead man happy.

After two terms as vice president, Garner was fed up with both the President and with being his subordinate. So too were the money men who had accumulated the capital at the instigation of House in 1932, alas, a story reserved for another day! Garner, through his supporters, was prepared to pour the bucket of warm piss which was the vice presidency on FDR's son, if not on the President himself.

When Radio Was New

FDR assigned Elliott "the task of putting in place an infrastructure from which to launch FDR's final run for the Presidency in 1940," although, of course, the younger man's first love was really air transportation.

The Associated Press reported in August 1938 as follows:

The state of Texas today granted a charter to the Texas State Network, Inc., Fort Worth Broadcasting company incorporated by Elliott Roosevelt, Harry A. Hutchinson and Raymond E. Buck. The firm, which has 1,000 shares of no par value capital stock ($50,000 paid in), proposes to operate 23 Texas stations tied in with 108 stations of the Mutual Broadcasting company.

...The president's son bid last spring for managership of the Dallas station but the commission renewed its contract with Mgr. John Thorwald instead. Roosevelt then advanced the counter proposition. Thorwald said in Dallas the network's key stations would be WRR in Dallas and KFJZ or KTAT of Fort Worth.

A.P. Barrett

The KTAT call letters came from Texas Air Transport (TAT), an airline company whose stock was purchased in 1928 by Alva Pearl Barrett, a former state senator, who years earlier had sold the San Antonio land which became Fort Sam Houston to the U.S. Army. Barrett then moved to Fort Worth and became a pioneer in commercial aviation in that city.

The competition to capture contracts to carry federal airmail was fierce as early as 1925, and it was Mayor H.C. Meacham and his ally, the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, who fought for it the hardest. Their vision of owning an international mail route was achieved when TAT became the third U.S. transport company to deliver mail to a foreign country by establishing a route via Laredo, Texas, to Mexico. Don Pyeatt has written an excellent history of the development of this airline, in which he states:

In February 1929, Alva Barrett incorporated Southern Air Transport (SAT) in Fort Worth as a holding company for the purpose of acquiring numerous independent transportation related companies. SAT bought Gulf Air Lines (GAL), TAT Flying Service, Airports Engineering and Construction Company and Dixie Motor Coach Bus Lines and merged them into the new company. SAT's headquarters was in Barrett's Aviation Building in downtown Fort Worth and operated from terminals at Meacham Field at Fort Worth and Love Field at Dallas. C.R. Smith of Fort Worth was named vice-president and treasurer of SAT and Tom Hardin became a vice-president and general manager of both TAT and SAT. Silliman Evans, a former political writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and a personal friend of Amon G. Carter, was named Public Relations Director.

Texas Air Transport and KTAT

In 1930 Raymond E. Buck moved into Fort Worth's brand-new Aviation Building at the corner of Main and 7th Streets, built by his client, Texas Air Transport, which also owned its own radio station, KTAT.

Glasscock memorial

Buck's civil law practice began in Fort Worth soon after WWI ended. The son of an eminent appellate judge whose paternal roots were planted in Forth Worth in the 1860s, Raymond was also related to another group of Fort Worth attorneys named Lattimore, one of whom was married to Judge Buck's sister Emma Buck Lattimore.

In 1921 Raymond E. Buck married Katherine Camp of Fort Worth, a granddaughter of Catherine Glasscock, whose birth in Texas in 1837 made her an eligible candidate for the Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT); thus their sons could easily have joined the Sons of the Republic of Texas (SRT).  Katherine Buck's grandmother was a niece of George Washington Glasscock, who arrived with his brother, Joseph Milligan Glasscock, in Texas (then part of Mexico) in 1835. Both men fought in the Siege of Bexar, which began the year prior to the battle at the Alamo, and Joseph died a hero in 1839. We have written many times here about the SRT, a secrecy-loving fraternity that linked Texian descendants all over the state.

In 1938 KTAT became KFJZ Radio when newspapers reported it had been purchased by the wife of Elliott Roosevelt. She acquired 313 shares, Elliott one with one share going to Harry A. Hutchinson, a resident of Benbrook, who was listed in the city directory for Fort Worth as the general manager of the Elliott Roosevelt Properties. 
 
Legal paperwork may have been handled by R.E. Buck, whose father, Judge Raymond Halbert Buck, had long been close politically to Vice President John Nance "Cactus Jack" Garner. Years later Buck himself told Jeb Byrne, an advance man for the 1963 Presidential visit of JFK, that he himself had been friends of Vice President Lyndon Johnson for many years.

Buck had acquired an interest in the radio station in his own name (possibly as a front for Barrett). Barrett's office was located in the Aviation Building, which was later called the Trinity Life Insurance Building.

In addition to his law practice, he owned interests in other businesses in insurance, banking and corporate matters. He was, for example, vice chairman of Fred Korth's Continental National Bank in Fort Worth. A brief summary of his major clients was furnished by long-time secretary, Mary Marett, given in 1975:

• General counsel and director for Southern Air Transport (SAT);
• Associate counsel for American Airlines (of which Amon G. Carter was the largest shareholder, and Cyrus Rowlett Smith was chairman);
• Associate counsel for General Dynamics; and 
• President of Midway Airport Corp., a corporation set up in 1942, before it evolved into today's D-FW International Airport.

JFK's stetson from Ray Buck

In 1963 Raymond Buck, a longtime friend of Lyndon Johnson, was president of the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, which sponsored a "non-partisan" breakfast as the central event of JFK's presidential visit to Fort Worth. It was Buck who presented President Kennedy with cowboy boots and a stetson hat shortly before he traveled to Dallas, where he was assassinated.

Elliot's radio network was operated from KTAT as the flagship, with its offices in the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth, while the Roosevelts made their home west of town at a ranch in Benbrook. He had divorced his first wife in 1933 to marry Ruth Googins, the daughter of a Swift meat-packing magnate who helped to create Cowtown. The Hotel Texas, where President Kennedy spent the last night of his life, was a couple of blocks west of the packing plants. The plants remained there until the 1970s, when the area became the popular Stockyards District.

Elliott Roosevelt's Radio Network

Creating "Cowtown"

Joseph B. Googins, manager of the Swift meat packing company, moved to Fort Worth from Chicago shortly after Fort Worth city fathers enticed Swift, in June 1901, to build a rail head plant in the Texas city. Although Amon Carter is sometimes given credit for securing the move which created numerous jobs in the Fort Worth stockyards, newspaper articles in 1901 credited Winfield Scott and L.V. Niles with the making the trip to Chicago proposing the move.

This construction promised to save the Chicago packers money to drive live cattle to Chicago for slaughter. Googins then became a wealthy Fort Worth businessman, one of the seven original directors of the Fort Worth Belt Railroad of the first board in 1903. Other

Swift and Armour owned the land jointly where plants were built.

directors included George B. Robbins, who was also director of the Armour Co., and  O.W. Matthews, manager and secretary of the Fort Worth Stock Yards Company.

Amon Carter was one of the six incorporators of the Star-Telegram in 1909, along with its president and editor, Louis J. Wortham (no obvious relation of Suite 8-F member Gus Wortham). L.J. Wortham had been close to Paul Waples who formed the Texas World's Fair Commission for the St. Louis exposition in 1904 before launching, with Amon G. Carter and others, the afternoon Star, which later merged with The Telegram.

Googins served as a vice president for a time of Stock Yards National Bank at 115 E. Exchange and helped develop the city of North Fort Worth Townsite area now known as the Stockyards neighborhood. It should not be overlooked that Googins had migrated to Texas from Chicago, where he undoubtedly had connections to agencies handling the advertising of meat products, a business detail that would factor into Ruth's later involvement in radio ownership.

Corner of N. Commerce and Exchange in north Fort Worth.  

In the photo at right, the Stockyards offices and the Exchange Club building are in the center, across the street from the Stockyards Bank of which Googins had been an officer before his death in 1922. Eleven years later his daughter, Ruth, met one of the sons of then recently-inaugurated President Franklin Roosevelt, Elliott, who just happened to be in the city on his way to Arizona, as shown in the wedding announcement below:

Elliott Roosevelt to wed Fort Worth girl,
1933

Political Wedding?

In 1939 Ruth purchased a radio station--one made famous in an earlier day by local "Elmer Gantry" type preacher named J. Frank Norris. Radio was the Facebook and Google of those days--giving advertisers a platform from which to spread the capitalistic bilge to influence the public to buy whatever they were selling at the time. Those who financed President Franklin Roosevelt in the early 1930's hoped they were buying political power, and they spread their money around to his children in the hope of advancing their own cause, namely deeper pockets for themselves.

Anti-Roosevelt author Emanuel M. Josephson in 1948, looking back on that capital investment in radio, wrote  in The Strange Death of Franklin D. Roosevelt: A History of the Roosevelt-Delano Dynasty, America's Royal Family:

In 1938, with the support of Charles F. Roeser and Sid W. Richardson, Texas oil operators, who invested $500,000, Elliott set up a chain of 23 radio stations in Texas. This provided him, according to the Washington Times-Herald of August 29, 1945, with an income of $76,000 a year, more than his father earned as President of the United States. The enterprise is reported to have lost $100,000 in the first three months. The Transcontinental Broadcasting Company was liquidated in 1941.

Breaking into Radio

The formal announcement about Elliott's new radio network was made in Chicago on Halloween 1939, after Elliott and six investors, mostly from the Missouri area, incorporated in Delaware, hoping to compete with CBS, NBC and the Mutual Network. Elliott's stock ownership was represented on the board by John T. Adams, general manager of the Texas state network, was named chairman of the board of the Transcontinental Broadcasting System.

Elliott had flown to New York at the end of November to reveal that the headquarters of the network would be in the General Electric building at 570
Lexington avenue—51st and Lexington —in New York City and would take up three floors of the building. William A. Porter, a Washington attorney, was given the job of vice president, and H.J. Brennan was the treasurer. Porter had handled Elliott's role in the Federal Communications Commission's monopoly investigation of the radio industry when the President's son, as head of the Texas State Network, testified in February 1939.

About Elliott, the November press announcement stated:

Fresh out of Princeton, young Elliott got his first job with the advertising firm of Albert Frank- Guenther Law, Inc. He lasted two years before talk, occasioned by the surpassing eagerness of companies to become his clients, forced him to move on. He tried the aviation business, but the clamor attending several deals made life unbearable. The future seemed no brighter when he went to work for William Randolph Hearst, as vice president of Hearst Radio, Inc., in charge of four stations in Texas and Oklahoma, and president of Hearst- owned KFJZ in Fort Worth.... 

In June, 1937, Elliott's wife, the former Ruth Googins of Fort Worth, contracted in her own name to buy KFJZ. Price of the  100-watt station was $57,000. Three months later, Elliott bought another 100-watter, KABC, in San Antonio, under his own name for $55,000. Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt put their two stations together in the Frontier Broadcasting System, made a go of it. And last: year KFJZ and KABC became the outlets of the Texas state network, Elliott Roosevelt president. Today, TSN has 23 member stations, a base advertising rate of $1,218.37 per hour, and calls itself the fourth largest network in the world.

Since he's been in the radio business, Elliott has made news out of all proportion to the importance of his little station. As a regular commentator on his own network, he got in solid with Texans by becoming one of the state's biggest boosters—second only to Amon Carter. He set himself "right'' politically by becoming a pal of John Nance Garner, which nicely counterbalances his presidential relationship. And he's become a national figure since Emerson Radio began sponsoring his comments on a coast- to- coast hookup on Mutual Broadcasting System. 

The inference could be made that Elliott's real boss, however, was his father, who was already looking ahead to the technological changes taking shape that were to change the face of political campaigning. Elliott was given the task of putting in place an infrastructure from which to launch FDR's final run for the Presidency in 1940:

Blackett-Sample-Hummert

Selling Soap and Politics?

Blackett-Sample-Hummert (B-S-H), founded in 1923 in Chicago, where Ruth Googins was born, wrote ads for Procter and Gamble, producing daytime radio dramas promoting the company's soap products--thus inspiring the term "soap operas”." According to Time Magazine, "in 1938 B-S-H had placed orders for $9,000,000 worth of air time. This was about one-eighth of all money paid for radio network time and over $3,700,000 more than B-S-H's nearest competitor spent."

Possibly the purchase of the network had been inspired as a result of a column written by Drew Pearson and his then-partner, Robert S. Allen, in 1936, which called B-S-H a "group of high-pressure ad men ... hatching ideas to unsell Roosevelt to the country and sell Landon in his place. Their aim is to get away from the barnstorming campaign speech, the baby-kissing, the torch-light processions, and make the housewife and the workingman anti-Roosevelt conscious." Pearson credited Hill Blackett, the senior member of the firm with developing "a new type of campaign ... at republican national headquarters in Chicago." He then went on to illustrate how the campaign would work:

First move in this campaign is a set of blackboards to be placed in grocery stores, on which will be chalked up three headings: PRICE—TAXES—TOTAL.

Thus the butcher, explaining the high price of meat to the housewife, merely points to the blackboard and shows how much of the total price she pays is allegedly made up of taxes. There is no indication anywhere about the blackboard that it is supplied by the republican national committee, and that is the beauty of the scheme. It automatically drives home the idea that Roosevelt is responsible for high taxes, without being labeled propaganda. This is the general type of campaigning the new idea-men are proposing. It is reported to have democratic strategists somewhat worried.

Note.—One brain child of the idea-man pictures a large Brazilian steer, supposed to represent the Importation of meat under Hull's reciprocity treaty. Fact is, however, that fresh meat from any South American country is flatly embargoed by an act of congress, over which Hull has no control. Canned meat comes not from Brazil, but from Argentina and Uruguay.

Hill Blackett had grown up in Iowa, then managed an advertising company in Oakland before moving to Winnetka, Illinois. He was head of public relations for the Republican National Committee in 1936, and his firm was located in downtown Chicago at 221 N. LaSalle.