Master of the Senate (153 page)

Assisting Oltorf in his assignment was attorney Gus Garcia, a law school friend of Connally’s, whom Connally had enlisted to advise the Longorias during the hearings. Gus Garcia was an eloquent and flamboyant courtroom attorney, but eloquence was not what was required here, and Garcia understood that. At the close of the hearings, he would write Johnson, “Your name was bandied about a bit, but we managed to leave the correct interpretation in the record—namely, that you did nothing except follow Mrs. Longoria’s instructions.” He had had no choice, the attorney wrote Johnson, but “to introduce a letter from you to her, in which you stated that you would follow her instructions. You also expressed your sympathy in that letter, but there is nothing in it which would harm you politically.” As for the telegrams that Johnson had sent in those first moments of the Longoria affair, the telegrams that said “
I DEEPLY REGRET TO LEARN THAT THE PREJUDICE OF SOME INDIVIDUALS EXTENDS EVEN BEYOND THIS LIFE
,” the telegrams that said “
I AM HAPPY TO HAVE A PART IN SEEING THAT THIS TEXAS HERO IS LAID TO REST WITH THE HONOR AND DIGNITY HIS SERVICE DESERVES
,” the telegrams that said “
I AM PROUD TO BE OF ASSISTANCE
”—Gus Garcia was able to assure Johnson now that he and Oltorf had been able to keep those wonderful telegrams from being introduced in the hearings (because, he explained in his letter, “Frank and I decided” that they “might be distorted by your political enemies”). When Dorothy Nichols, one of his secretaries, brought Gus Garcia’s letter to Johnson’s attention, he had her give it to Connally to draft a reply, with a note: “John—Senator says you’ll have to answer this; be careful about it.” And John was. The letter Gus Garcia received over Lyndon Johnson’s signature was carefully noncommittal except for one sentence: “I trust that the incident will shortly be a closed chapter.”

The committee’s majority drafted a report that was the expected whitewash; “There was no discrimination on the part of the undertaker at Three Rivers,” the draft concluded. A liberal state senator, Rogers Kelley, was to call the document “a slap in the face of more than one million Latin-American citizens of the State of Texas.” The report was signed, however, by only four of the five committee members. Declaring that “I could not concur in their majority report without violating both my sense of justice and my intellectual honesty,” Oltorf refused to sign it, and issued his own minority report which was so persuasive that one of the four later withdrew his signature, and, as one analysis put it, “the two dissensions so undercut the credibility of the majority report that the committee found itself on the defensive,” and the report was quietly tabled without any action by the full legislature.

T
HE
L
ONGORIA AFFAIR
was a turning point—“a catalyst,” the
Texas Monthly
was to say in 1986, “for the modern civil rights movement of the Mexican-Americans in Texas.” Before that affair, Hector Garcia was to recall, the G.I. Forum “had nothing to do with civil rights. It was strictly a veterans affairs organization.” By demonstrating so vividly how “prejudice and hatreds” poisoned “all aspects of our lives in the state of Texas,” the affair broadened the Forum’s focus to include all aspects of civil rights, and moved the organization into the political arena in which those rights could be secured. New chapters sprang into being; membership burgeoned. Almost two decades would have to pass before this new Mexican-American movement became as significant a force in Texas political calculations as the docile old Mexican-American bloc vote, but the birth of that new force dates from the Longoria affair. The furor over the burial of the Army private from Three Rivers galvanized the movement, and filled it with energy and purpose.

And it did so because of Lyndon Johnson—because of his compassion and his genius for making that compassion politically meaningful. Without him, the Longoria incident might simply have faded away—have become only one more quickly forgotten episode in the long history of racial discrimination in Texas. In an instant, hearing of the injustice to Felix Longoria, Lyndon Johnson’s heart had been enlisted in the Longoria cause, and in that same instant he had found the perfect gesture, a grand gesture, to right the wrong that had been done, to right it gloriously—“By God, we’ll bury him at Arlington!”—and the perfect words, the words of those stirring telegrams, that brought an audience to its feet and made it feel that it had a champion at last. It was his gesture and words that had taken a local incident, probably only one of a score of similar incidents that had gone unremarked outside the boundaries of the towns involved, and had made it, as one writer was to put it, “into one of those signal events that stir consciences” across an entire state.

The Longoria affair was not a turning point for Lyndon Johnson, however.
For a moment, it had seemed that it would be—a magnificent turning point. Prior to the morning on which Dr. Garcia’s telegram arrived at the Senate Office Building, Johnson’s record on civil rights had been, during his almost twelve years on Capitol Hill, almost entirely one of opposition. In the first hours after the telegram, he had galvanized the cause, seized its flag and charged to its fore. But as opposition mounted, the flag had been quickly dropped. On that night in the Corpus Christi elementary school, it had seemed that the Mexican-Americans of South Texas had found a champion, an Anglo leader who would lend his name to their cause. But Lyndon Johnson’s concern had been to keep his name from being linked to their cause. Summing up the Longoria affair for the author of this book in 1986, John Connally would explain Johnson’s “backtracking” by saying it was consistent with his entire life: “He never wanted to be a dead hero.”

The damage control was effective. It didn’t work with Representative Gray of Three Rivers, whose bitterness over the incident never abated. “He hated Johnson forever because of it,” John Connally was to say. But most of the Anglo border county leaders remained Johnson’s allies.

Nor did Johnson’s backtracking in the Longoria battle hurt him with the rank and file of South Texas’ Mexican-Americans. The dexterity with which he had handled his retreat from the field—simply removing his name, and his presence, from the fight without any dramatic public statement—meant that most of the Mexican-Americans who had cheered his earlier, dramatic championing of the Longorias’ cause were unaware that he had stopped doing so. Realization that the Senator could have used the legislative hearings as a platform for their cause, or that a statement could have been issued from Washington, required a political awareness and experience still in short supply in 1949 within this newly militant group. Johnson’s silence was as nothing beside the gesture he had made in having their compatriot buried in Arlington. The Longoria episode was to have a permanent and prominent place in the Mexican-American consciousness; Felix Longoria would become in a way a martyr, and the Senator who had arranged for the hero to be buried in a hero’s grave became a hero himself. Teachers in South Texas’ Mexican schools recounted the episode to their students. Accompanying Johnson on a 1953 swing through South Texas to shore up support for his 1954 re-election campaign, George Reedy would never forget the chant with which Mexican-Americans greeted his boss: “Olé Johnson, Olé Johnson! Tres Rios, Tres Rios, Tres Rios!”

As for the Mexican-American leader, Lyndon Johnson quickly began to bind Hector Garcia to him. Shortly after the legislature’s investigation had been completed, he agreed to address Garcia’s G.I. Forum, and the doctor was grateful: “He addressed our group, and of course it was a great occasion because at that time it was rare to have any politician or certainly a U.S. Senator addressing [a] Mexican group.” When there was an opening on the U.S. Border Patrol or for some other minor federal job, Johnson began asking Garcia to
recommend someone. And he did small favors for Garcia, the little favors that a federal officeholder could do for his constituents—but that no officeholder had been doing for South Texas’ Mexican-Americans. The veterans who made up the backbone of the Mexican-American movement were entitled to veterans’ benefits; Johnson saw that they got them. And once a mother of a Corpus Christi boy in the Marine Corps came to the doctor’s office, saying that her son was in a guardhouse at Camp Pendleton in California, and that no one at the base would give her any information about him. “All I want is to talk to my son and find out what is happening to him,” she said. “Perhaps he is dead. I am going to pieces, doctor.” Garcia could see, he recalls, “that she
was
going to pieces.” He called the base and got a major, who refused to give him any information, even after Garcia said, “You are doing a very cruel thing to this woman. A mother needs talking to her son.”

“I got on the telephone, and I called Senator Johnson,” Garcia recalls, “and five minutes after he hung up this major was calling apologetically.” Garcia was a very adroit politician—his G.I. Forum was to become the largest Mexican-American organization in the country, with chapters in twenty-eight states—and he knew how much the fact that he could produce such assistance helped him retain a position of leadership with his people. “These are the favors I do for people, through people like Johnson,” he would say. “I’m the helpful go-between.” Explaining Garcia’s adherence to Johnson, Dr. Pycior says: “He [Johnson] answers their letters. He treats them with dignity. It’s pathetic that such small things can [mean] so much. But you’ve been beaten down for so long—to have a senator treat you like a human being, that means a lot.”

Cementing the alliance between the two men further was the promise it might represent for the future of Hector Garcia’s people. The physician was totally bound up with their cause, and Johnson convinced him that he, too, wanted to advance that cause, but that he would be able to do so only if he continued to hold power, and therefore he couldn’t take steps that would hurt him politically. As Pycior wrote, “Garcia thought that Johnson could not afford to risk his political advancement by supporting controversial issues.” For that reason, Garcia was to say, he understood why Johnson had had to back away from the Longoria affair. “Johnson … certainly may have been subjected to some of the pressures of state politics…. Yet his heart was all right.”

Binding other Mexican-American leaders to Johnson was the same combination of patronage and promises. When Reynaldo Garza of Brownsville, whose ambition was to be the first Latin-American federal judge, was wavering over whether to support Johnson or Governor Shivers in intra-party maneuvering, Johnson put it to him flat: “Reynaldo, Allan Shivers is going to be out as Governor and I’ll still be up in Washington, and I know I can do more for you than he can.” (“After I got appointed federal judge some years later, I ran into Allan Shivers,” Garza recalls. “He told me, ‘Well, he was right, wasn’t he? He could do something for you.’”) In a particularly dramatic example of what
Johnson could do for a leader, he arranged an attractive job with Brown & Root for Manuel Bravo, when Zapata County’s feared
jefe
became tired of politics. And he convinced these leaders—convinced them absolutely—that he wanted to help Mexican-Americans, and was only waiting for the right time to do so. He kept reminding them—movingly—of his days in Cotulla. “Johnson had a real empathetic relationship with the Mexicans in Texas,” George Reedy was to say.

A
LOT OF BINDING
was necessary. Although in later years—after the great civil rights achievements of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency—Garcia would say that Johnson had consistently stood with the Mexican-Americans over the years, the records of the time show this to have been very far from the case. For if, when controversy erupted in the Longoria affair, their champion had vanished from the field, when he reappeared, it was not to be on their side.

Each harvest season, hundreds of thousands of Mexican farm workers crossed the Rio Grande into Texas to work on the huge South Texas farms owned by the powerful Anglo “growers.” Some were imported legally under the “bracero” program, through which wages and hours were established by contracts (their terms unbelievably unjust to the migrants; wage scales were often set at about twenty cents per hour) approved by the federal government. Others simply swam or waded across illegally, and hence were called “wetbacks.” Legal immigrants or illegal, however, these Mexicans were pitiful figures, working under the scorching South Texas sun for endless hours each day at “stoop labor,” bent over the notorious “short hoe,” crammed at night into hovels without electricity or running water. They had come because they had no choice: there was no work for them in Mexico; “exiled from [their] homeland by the threat of starvation, unselfishly hoping to mitigate the woes of [their] … relatives by sending them a few dollars each week or month.” Once on those immense ranches—feudal domains, most of them—the migrant worker was, as one study put it, “entirely at the mercy of his … employers. Once within the walls or fences of … a ranch or farm, he has no recourse to appeal, no bargaining power, no protection of any kind…. If he expresses dissatisfaction with the treatment he receives, his employer can merely expel him, whereupon he will be caught by the officers and taken back to face worse privation in Mexico.” Some of the worst of the growers, in fact, expelled these migrants anyway; they would wait until the harvest was completed, and then call the sheriffs or Border Patrol, report their workers as illegal aliens; they would be arrested and deported, without even the few dollars they had earned.

This exploitation of their countrymen made the bracero issue an overriding concern to the Mexican-Americans of South Texas on humanitarian grounds; they called the bracero program “rent a slave.” And it was overriding on economic grounds as well: in the opinion of most Mexican-American leaders, it was the willingness of these Mexicans to work the same jobs they were
working, and accept such low wages, that kept their own wages low. The unrestricted flow of migrant workers was held to be the principal reason why the rise of Mexican-Americans to the middle class had been so much slower than that of the Irish or other immigrant groups. If there was a single issue most important to Mexican-Americans in the 1950s, it was this issue. And on this issue, throughout the 1950s, Lyndon Johnson supported not them but their opponents. They wanted the government to require working conditions and wages in bracero contracts equal to those prevailing in the United States and to cut off the flow of illegal immigrants, both by increasing appropriations to the United States Immigration Service and by increasing criminal penalties for growers who knowingly hired illegal aliens. “Something must be done and I believe that charging a heavy fine to those persons who insist on hiring wetbacks … will do it,” one Mexican-American leader wrote Johnson. But the Anglo
patróns
wanted a surplus labor supply, and it was these
patróns
who controlled the votes Lyndon Johnson had needed, and might need again. One of his first actions after becoming Democratic whip in 1951, therefore, was to muster Democratic support, crucial for its passage, for a bill renewing the bracero program with its harsh contracts. When it passed, on May 28, he wrote to a committee of thirty-three large growers: “Delighted to inform you that the Senate and House conferees have agreed … [o]n the Mexican labor bill …” J. C. Looney, one of the attorneys who represented the committee—and who had helped “coordinate” Johnson’s 1941 and 1948 Senate campaigns in the valley—wrote Johnson to assure him that “the people in the valley who are handling the situation and who are certainly influential… know what you are doing.” They would express their gratitude, he told Johnson, but “without… publicity that could backfire.”