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(Identify the item), Reports, Committee to Investigate Job Selling, House of Representatives, Texas Legislature. Archives and Information Services Division, Texas State Library and Archives Commission.
The Texas Legislature's House Committee to Investigate Job Selling was active between the First and Second Called Sessions of the 43rd Legislature, 1933-1934. The committee was the direct outgrowth of an investigation carried out by the House Appropriations Committee earlier during the First Called Session of the 43rd Legislature.
On Monday, October 9, 1933, during the First Called Session, Representative Burns offered a simple resolution [#32 according to the committee report] proposing that the House Appropriations Committee investigate reports inferring that certain members of the Livestock Sanitary Commission, and possibly other governmental departments, were engaged in trafficking and selling jobs. The resolution was adopted immediately with the amendment that it was to report back to the Legislature by Friday, October 13th (the last day of the First Called Session of the 43rd Legislature). The Committee heard testimony during that week and reported back that the testimony strongly implicated Dr. E.F. Jarrell, a member of the Livestock Sanitary Commission, in the sale of state jobs and specified how the sales appeared to have been conducted. The Committee believed they had enough information to officially charge Jarrell with such transactions, but he had just submitted his resignation to the Governor and to pursue the matter further, beyond turning the evidence over to county authorities and grand juries, would be a waste of the Legislature's time. However, the report recommended that the committee continue its work until January 1, 1934 to investigate rumors and statements that similar job selling was occurring in other state departments.
Later that day, October 13th, Representative Burns resubmitted the resolution proposing the original investigation by the Appropriations Committee (on this occasion it was numbered Simple Resolution 45) in order to provide the authority to continue the investigation. The resolution passed again, but was amended to stipulate that the committee should not be composed of the Appropriations Committee but should contain five Representatives to be selected by the Speaker of the House. The new committee, composed of Representatives Burns, Graves (Chair), Chastain, Long, and Daniel, most if not all of whom were also members of the Appropriations Committee, became the House Committee to Investigate Job Selling.
The Job Selling committee met in Austin and Laredo during November and December of 1933 to take testimony from various witnesses. It submitted its report to the Second Called Session of the 43rd Legislature on February 15, 1934. The report stated, among other things, that “there was a state-wide traffic in the selling of state positions” and that there was no way of telling how pervasive the problem was since the only witnesses who were candid were those who had paid for jobs and not received them. The committee recommended that the next session of the Legislature prepare and pass a bill making it a felony to engage in anything resembling exchanging state jobs for money or other goods of value.
Records consist of two reports, 1933-1934, created by the Texas Legislature's House Committee to Investigate Job Selling. The committee was to investigate reports and allegations of Texas state officials and employees exchanging jobs for money and/or other goods of value. The first report may be the original report delivered by the committee to the Legislature. The document is signed by four of the committee members and shows signs of source editing. The second report is larger, containing testimony, exhibits, and minutes that document the whole of the committee's work. The second report also contains a copy of the report to the Legislature.
To prepare this inventory, the described materials were cursorily reviewed to delineate series, to confirm the accuracy of contents lists, to provide an estimate of dates covered, and to determine record types.
The records are arranged in the order in which they arrived.
Nancy Enneking, August 2000
Accession number: 2000/183
These records were transferred to the Archives and Information Services Division of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission by the Texas Secretary of State on May 23, 1940, but the records were not assigned an accession number until 1982. For purposes of control an individual accession number was assigned to this set of proceedings on August, 7, 2000.