Texas Speakers Oral History Project

In November 2003, in cooperation with Speaker Tom Craddick and his wife Mrs. Nadine Craddick, the Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin launched "A Speaker from Its Own Members: A Project Documenting the History of the Speakers of the Texas House of Representatives." From its inception to April 2005, Center for American History historians Dr. Patrick Cox and Dr. Michael Phillips have interviewed Speaker Craddick and nine former Texas House speakers.

The speaker of the Texas House, along with the governor and the lieutenant governor, ranks among the three most powerful officeholders in Texas politics, yet speakers have enjoyed relatively limited visibility. Few Texans are fully aware of the office's significance. As documented in these interviews, the powers of Texas House speakers expanded greatly following the expansion of the Texas economy in the aftermath of World War II. In this time, speakers began to shape the state’s budget, its tax policies and the quality of Texas public schools and universities.

The era covered by the project, beginning in 1951, marks a particularly dramatic time in Texas history. In this period, speakers reacted to the Brown v. Board of Education decision and the subsequent desegregation of Texas public schools. Speakers responded to the rise of the space industry and other modern technologies that transformed the economy of Texas. Speakers dealt with the state's explosive population growth following World War II even as they coped with a more complex economy and a rising demand for government services in education, transportation and health care.

Speakers rose and fell with the rising fortunes of conservative and liberal factions within the Texas Democratic Party and with the ascendancy of the state Republican Party, culminating in the GOP's eventual capture of the state government in the 2000 elections. They also struggled with the Sharpstown political scandal, subsequent attempts to limit the power of the speaker's office, the failed effort to rewrite the state Constitution in the 1970s, and the dramatic growth in the power and influence of the Speaker in the modern era. Readers and researchers will learn not only how modern Texas was created in the mid-twentieth century, but also the motives, reactions, celebrations, regrets and fears of those most involved in the state’s tumultuous political upheavals in the last half century.