Creekmore Fath; served FDR, other Democrats; 93
WASHINGTON - Creekmore Fath, a lawyer who was one of the last of the FDR New Dealers, died Thursday of renal failure at his home in Austin. He was 93.
Mr. Fath held several positions in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration and played a key role in several important Texas elections, including the controversial 87-vote “landslide’’ that sent Lyndon B. Johnson to the Senate in 1948.
In 1940, Mr. Fath left a fledgling law practice in Austin to become a staff attorney with a US House committee chaired by Representative John Tolan, a California Democrat, that was investigating the plight of destitute migrant workers.
Twenty-three years old and unfamiliar with the ways of Washington, Mr. Fath didn’t know that he had signed on to work for a select committee slated to disband when a new Congress convened in 1941. When he found out, he suggested asking first lady Eleanor Roosevelt to testify before the committee as a way to generate publicity and keep the committee in business. He reminded committee members that she had expressed concern in her newspaper columns for the Okies and other Dust Bowl migrant workers.
“OK, Creekmore, you take care of that,’’ Tolan said. The veteran lawmaker laughed, and his fellow committee members laughed with him. They knew, as Mr. Fath did not, that no first lady had ever testified on Capitol Hill.
The next morning, Mr. Fath called the White House and talked to Malvina Thompson, the first lady’s secretary. “I told her I desperately needed to use Mrs. Roosevelt at a hearing in December, that I wanted to use her as the gimmick,’’ he recalled.
Eleanor Roosevelt invited him to tea at the White House the next afternoon, and, after clearing it with her husband, agreed to testify. The panel stayed in business.
Later, Thompson told Mr. Fath that Eleanor Roosevelt agreed to meet with him because he was the only one who had ever admitted that he wanted to “use’’ her. Thompson also told Mr. Fath that the first lady had said, “I wanted to meet him because he sounds like he’s 14 years old.’’
Creekmore West Fath was born in McAllister, Okla., and grew up in the small West Texas town of
When Mr. Fath arrived in Washington, he was tall, prematurely bald, and politically astute, and he soon developed a gravitas that inspired confidence. “Creekmore Fath has the best political judgment of anyone his age in Washington,’’ President Roosevelt was quoted as saying.
In 1941, Roosevelt appointed Mr. Fath counsel to the St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project. Later, Mr. Fath became counsel to the Senate Committee on Patents, which was investigating German cartels under Adolf Hitler and their involvement with American corporations.
After serving in the Army from 1943 to 1945, during which time he was assigned to the White House, he worked in the Office of War Mobilization and the Department of Interior.
In 1947, he married Adele Hay, whose grandfather, John Hay, had been President Abraham Lincoln’s secretary and then secretary of state under Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. The couple moved to Austin, where Mr. Fath resumed his law practice.
He also announced for Congress as an unreconstructed New Dealer. He and his wife campaigned in a car with a canoe roped on top and painted with the slogan, “Fath for Congress . . . He Paddles His Own Canoe.’’ He finished third in the primary.
There was no Texas Republican Party to speak of in the 1940s and 1950s, but the state’s liberal and conservative Democrats were bitter enemies. Mr. Fath and his fellow liberals considered themselves “loyal Democrats,’’ unlike Texas Governor Allan Shivers and Senate candidate Price Daniel, who called themselves Democratic Regulars and who regularly supported the Republican presidential candidate. Lyndon Johnson often tried to play both sides.
Mr. Fath never liked Johnson, but in 1948, he agreed to help him in his US Senate race against former Governor Coke Stevenson, whom Mr. Fath considered a racist.
Johnson won the Democratic primary by 87 highly questionable votes, the outcome hinging on a notoriously corrupt South Texas county that reported election results late. A Johnson partisan told Mr. Fath: “Well, they were stealing in East Texas. We were stealing in South Texas. So God only knows who really won the election, Creek. But today, God was on our side by 87 votes.’’
For the next four decades, Mr. Fath practiced law and worked for liberal Democrats. He also amassed a personal library of more than 45,000 volumes, including many rare books and first editions. In a high-ceilinged library behind his Austin home, he shelved original editions of almost every presidential campaign biography since the founding of the republic.
Although still active politically, he was out of the public eye for the past couple of decades of his life. He reappeared briefly in 1996, when his wife arranged with the Faths’ friend Bill Clinton for a sleepover at the White House to celebrate her husband’s 80th birthday. President Clinton was intrigued that the granddaughter of Lincoln’s secretary would be staying in the Lincoln Bedroom.
