The Path to Power (10 page)

Instead, there was Bryan. As trainload after trainload of cheering delegates arrived at the Democratic convention in Chicago, silver badges gleaming from their lapels, silver banners fluttering in the breeze, the
New York World
said, “They have the principle, they have the grit, they have the brass bands and the buttons, they have the votes. But they are wandering in the wilderness like a lot of lost sheep, because no … real leader has yet appeared among them.” Then, when one after another of the silver movement’s would-be leaders had proved, during the debate on the party platform, that the
World
was right, young Democrat William Jennings Bryan nervously made his way up the aisle and, speaking on behalf of farmers against Eastern interests, said, “We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned; we have entreated and our entreaties have been disregarded; we have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came. We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more.
We defy them!
” Suddenly the mighty throng of 20,000 sweltering men and women were on their feet, cheering each sentence with a roar—even before the last sentences:

The silver Democrats did not leave the Democratic Party but took it over instead; “the Boy Orator of the Platte” became the party’s Presidential nominee.

Ironically, however, this development was to mark the doom of the People’s Party: the Democrats had stolen the Populists’ thunder; at their own convention three weeks later, the Populists had little choice but to nominate Bryan, too, and thus lose their identity as a separate party. And the party with which they had allied themselves lost the election. The Bryan race for President was more a cause than a campaign. “A religious frenzy” was what William Allen White of Kansas called it. “Sacred hymns were torn from their pious tunes to give place to words which deified the cause and made gold—and all its symbols, capital, wealth, plutocracy—diabolical. At night, from ten thousand little white schoolhouse windows, lights twinkled back vain hope to the stars.” But the hope was vain; the cause was as lost as the
one for which many of the Populists had fought thirty years before—Bryan’s campaign was gallant but underfinanced, and the Republican Party, run by Mark Hanna, who shook down railroad corporations, insurance companies and big-city banks for campaign contributions on a scale never before seen, won what one historian calls “a triumph for big business, for a manufacturing and industrial rather than an agrarian order, for the Hamiltonian rather than the Jeffersonian state.” In the 1898 elections, the disorganized Populists were all but wiped out. In 1900 Hanna’s President, McKinley, was able to push through the Gold Standard Act. The Populists ran a candidate for President as late as 1908, but by then there were few surviving Populist officeholders. Some were in Texas, one of the last states where Populism remained strong, but even in Texas, after the debacle of 1896, the spirit was out of it.

Perceptive historians find great significance in the campaign of 1896—“the last protest of the old agrarian order against industrialism”—but in the Hill Country, life remained as mean and meager as before. It was worse, in fact. For a while after 1900, conditions improved for farmers throughout most of the rest of America, but that prosperity didn’t penetrate into the Hill Country; the land was too far gone and the weather too dry for any lasting improvement. More and more Hill Country farmers lost their land; each census—1900, 1910, 1920—showed an increase in the number of farms being operated by tenant farmers. The People’s Party was all but dead in the Hill Country—by 1904, there would be only twenty-three voters registered in the party in Blanco County—and the things the party had asked for seemed, if mentioned at all, only unrealizable dreams. The People’s Party seemed, in the hills, just another legend that old men talked about as they talked about the cattle drives.

B
UT WHAT
, really, had the People’s Party—the farmers who called themselves “Alliancemen”—asked for? Only that when men found themselves at the mercy of forces too big for them to fight alone, government—their government—help them fight. What were the demands for railroad and bank regulation, for government loans, for public-works projects, but an expression of a belief that after men have banded together and formed a government, they have a right, when they are being crushed by conditions over which they have no control, to ask that government to extend a helping hand to them—if necessary, to fight for them, to be their champion?

They had asked too early, that was all.

Franklin Roosevelt wasn’t their President yet.

Lyndon Johnson wasn’t their Congressman.

A
MONG THE NINE CHILDREN
of Sam Ealy Johnson and Eliza Bunton Johnson were three sons. In the opinion of Hill Country ranchers—convinced, as ranchers, of the importance of breeding—all three were basically Buntons, not only in their height and other striking physical characteristics but in the fierceness of their passions, in their soaring ambition and in the capacity for leadership that was described in the hero John Wheeler Bunton as “commanding presence.” In the ranchers’ opinion, however, all three sons possessed also a fatal taint of the Johnson blood line: Johnsons, they said, had all the Buntons’ temper, pride, arrogance and idealism, together with dreams even more ambitious, but they had none of the Bunton hardness, the canniness and pragmatism, that alone could keep idealism and ambition from bringing ruin in a country as hard as the Hill Country. All three sons, it was noted, were idealists, romantics, dreamers—and unfortunately, in the adjective the ranchers applied to them, “soft” inside. One son fled the Hill Country: if his life was not particularly successful, it was at least not tragic. The other two—one of whom was Lyndon Johnson’s father, Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr.—stayed.

Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr., was born in 1877 (his father was relieved to see he was a boy; because his first four children had all been girls, his friends had begun calling him “Gal” Johnson) and was ten years old when his family moved from Buda back up to the Pedernales.

Already the family could tell he had the “Bunton strain.” His mother, a family memoir relates, “looked with great tenderness on this child whose dark eyes, black curls and white skin were a Bunton inheritance. …” As a boy, he was always tall for his age—he would eventually be an inch over six feet—and he had the Buntons’ large nose, huge ears, thick, bushy, black eyebrows and piercing eyes.

When he was a little boy in Buda, it was already apparent that he was very intelligent. “He had a quick mind, keen perception and an amazing
memory,” the memoir says. “An elder sister memorizing a poem of thirty-two verses for recital the last day of school was astounded to hear the child, Sam, far below school age recite it in its entirety.” He was conspicuously mature: “at an early age [he] acquired an unusual poise and assurance.” When the family moved to the Pedernales farm, another quality—burning ambition—became noticeable in the eleven-year-old boy. “The tasks and delights of farm life presented a challenge to Sam; he must ride faster; plow longer, straighter rows; pick more cotton than his companions.” (“This sense of competition,” his wife was to write, “was a strong urge throughout his life.”)

As he grew into his teens, Lyndon Johnson’s father became ambitious to become something more than a farmer. It was hard for Hill Country families to send their children to school, because they were needed to help work the farms and because even public schools charged tuition, and low though it was—only a few dollars—most Hill Country families couldn’t afford to pay it. But Sam was grimly determined to go to school. “Once,” the family chronicler relates,

Then the barber in Johnson City, a small town fourteen miles down the Pedernales that had been named for its founder, Sam’s cousin James Polk Johnson, became ill and retired. Buying the barber’s chair and tools on credit, Sam taught himself to cut hair, practicing on friends, and thereafter went to school during the day while earning his tuition by giving haircuts in the evening.

There are hints that the strain was too much for his health. What his wife later described as “indigestion” forced him to quit high school. His parents sent him to West Texas, where his uncle, Lucius Bunton, had moved—being a Bunton, he had already built up the largest ranch in Presidio County—“hoping that on the ranch … he might regain his health.”

“After a few months,” the memoir relates, the teen-ager came home, “determined to teach school.” Realizing this ambition was difficult in the Hill Country—in its 24,000 square miles, there was not a single college and not a single state-accredited high school whose graduates would be admitted by a college. But it was possible to obtain a state-issued teacher’s certificate without graduating from high school—by passing a special state examination. “With thirteen books, the required subjects for examination for a teacher’s certificate, a bottle of pepsin tablets and a sack of dried fruit (doctor’s recommendation),” Sam moved in 1896 to the nearby home
of his Grandfather and Grandmother Bunton—having accumulated enough money to retire, Robert Holmes Bunton had moved to the Hill Country; he could therefore enjoy it without having to make his living from it—so that he could have a quiet place to study. Passing the examination (“In later years he often recalled with pleasure that he made 100% in both Texas and United States history; he always loved history and government”), he taught for the next three years in one-room Hill Country schoolhouses. During the year in which he taught in a community named Rocky, he boarded with a family which had as a frequent visitor Captain Rufus Perry, the legendary Indian-fighter and Texas Ranger; years later, the family remembered how intently the young teacher sat listening, his dark eyes gleaming in the firelight, as the old man told stories of great adventures.

Teaching did not satisfy Sam Johnson’s ambitions. He wanted to be a lawyer; “he had the type of mind for it and he loved law,” his wife was to write. “But,” she wrote, “he found it necessary to make a living immediately”; he returned to his father’s farm on the Pedernales, working it together with Sam Ealy, Sr., for a year or two, and thereafter, when his father grew too old to work, renting it from him and working it himself. He may not have wanted to be a farmer, but a farmer was what he was.

For a few years, he was successful. Rain was plentiful and winters mild; “Little Sam,” as he was called to differentiate him from his father, earned enough to hire several hands and even to start trading in cotton futures in Fredericksburg.

He cut quite a figure in that beaten-down country. Tall, skinny, gangly, considered handsome despite those huge ears because of his pale skin and dark hair and eyes, he had the Bunton arrogance and air of command; a Johnson City resident old enough to remember Sam and his two brothers, Tom and George (and their six sisters) says, “All the Johnsons strutted, except George. And he strutted a little. Hell, the Johnsons could strut sitting down.” He dressed better than the other Hill Country farmers and ranchers; in the evening, after work, he would put on a suit and tie. And he was invariably well mounted; he often said something that older Hill Country residents remembered his father and his father’s brother Tom saying—when the original Johnson boys had been young: “You can tell a man by his boots and his hat and the horse he rides.” And he occasionally carried a long-barreled Colt six-shooter—one of the few guns still worn in the Hill Country.

But the air of command came naturally to him, and he was open and friendly. The rutted dirt track that was the only road between Austin and Johnson City and Fredericksburg ran along the Pedernales, right by the Johnson farm, and travelers tried to schedule their trip “to make it to little Sam Johnson’s by nightfall in order to spend the night and enjoy a good time.” It was, however, noticeable that although Hill Country men were farmers or ranchers, Sam’s best friends were three men who weren’t: Jay
Alexander was an engineer; Dayton Moses and W. C. Linden were lawyers. Sam Johnson was a farmer, but he was a Bunton, and he burned to be something more.

After six years on the farm, a chance came along. By unwritten agreement, representation in the Texas House of Representatives was rotated among the four Hill Country counties that constituted the 89th District, and 1904 was the year for Gillespie County, the county in which the Johnson farm was located, to send a man to Austin. Urged on by Judge Clarence W. Martin, a former Representative who had married one of Sam’s sisters and moved to Gillespie to practice law, Sam filed for the Democratic nomination—and won it unanimously. His acceptance speech, delivered from the back of a wagon at a barbecue held in a grove of live-oak trees near Stonewall, revealed that he had inherited the Buntons’ “eloquent tongue.”

“I am aware that by many persons, it is considered in the nature of a joke to become a candidate and to be elected as a member of the Legislature,” he said. Yet, he said, when he considered what “the duties of that office are … when properly and conscientiously” performed he felt himself handicapped by the lack of a formal education. “I … hesitate as to whether my ability and attainments are such that will enable me to properly perform that duty.” Being awarded the nomination hadn’t removed those doubts, he said; “I take it, that it is an act of kindness upon your part … a testimonial that you are willing to aid me to reflect your desire and purposes by giving to me your help and assistance. … In application and faithfulness to duty, I shall hope to in a measure make up for any shortcoming that I may possess in qualifications.”

The Populist Party may have been dead, Populist principles weren’t—at least not to the gangling young man on the wagon. He saw his campaign as part of a national cause. “This is a momentous eve in the history of our nation, and the question has been presented to us in a clearcut form—Whether the principles and tradition of a Republic shall be longer perpetuated, or whether we shall meekly surrender to the great trust combines the interests of the nation.” The power of big business, he said, “has assumed proportions that even the wildest fanatical dreamer could not have anticipated, and it is now up to the people what their verdict shall be. We have the Republican Party on the one hand, the champion of the Federalist tendencies of government, while the Democrats are striving for a return to fundamental principles and a return to the Constitution as taught by Jefferson, Jackson and their followers—which is clearly the only hope for the perpetuity of our government. If I can be the means in my own feeble and humble way to assist in a slight degree even of bringing about such results, then I shall feel that my duty has been performed.”

Running ahead of the rest of the Democratic ticket, with his largest margins coming from Johnson City and the small towns along the Pedernales
that knew him best, Johnson easily defeated his opponent, a German-American lawyer from Fredericksburg, who won only heavily German—and heavily Republican—Gillespie County. His mother pointed out that he had won his first public office even younger than had his famous forebear; John Wheeler Bunton had been twenty-eight, she noted; Sam was only twenty-seven. And when, in January, 1905, he arrived at the towering red-granite Capitol in Austin and walked into the House of Representatives Chamber, he had suddenly found a home.

The young man who had hated the cornfields found that he loved the cloakrooms. Loved them—and knew how to maneuver in them. Relatively uneducated and thoroughly unsophisticated, he seemed to know instinctively the steps of the legislative dance. He seemed, in fact, born to the roll call and the Rules of Order. And he had the unteachable gift for the persuasion that is so integral a part of the legislative life; he roamed the rows of desks as if he had spent his life among them instead of among rows of cotton. He gave few speeches, but he was talking constantly in the cloakrooms and on the floor—with a distinctive mannerism: when trying to win another member to his point of view, the tall, gangling young man would grasp the Representative’s lapel and lean very close to him, face right up to face, while he talked.

Several influential Texans, among them his brother-in-law Clarence Martin, had been trying for several years to persuade the Legislature to purchase and restore the Alamo; the old mission had fallen into disrepair, and part of it was being used as a warehouse. But previous attempts had foundered on the question of financing—legislators were outraged that the owners had raised the price to $65,000—and disputes over jurisdiction. Johnson drafted his own Alamo Purchase Bill, providing that it would be administered by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, and then persuaded more influential legislators to sponsor the measure—he let one of them, an elderly Confederate hero, sign it first, so that it bore his name—and it passed. (Wrote a local newspaper: “Santa Anna took the Alamo—that was 1836. Sam Johnson saved the Alamo—that was 1905.”) Johnson wanted a bill passed banning calf-roping contests, a competition he had long felt was brutal to the animals as it was practiced by cowboys at local fairs; although many anti-roping bills were introduced in 1905, it was his that was selected as best and passed. On many issues, Johnson wasn’t on the winning side, in a Legislature dominated by “the interests,” for he stuck to his Populist ideals, advocating, for example, a franchise tax on corporations and an eight-hour day for railroad workers. But on the bills he personally introduced (for example, one exempting Blanco County from a state law requiring counties to pay a fifty-cent bounty for every wolf shot—the
Blanco News
said the county was so poor it would be bankrupted if it was forced to pay) he had a remarkable record: he was, a newspaper reported, one of the few legislators “who did not fail on a single measure.” He worked as a team with two other
Democratic legislators identified with Populist causes—“Honest Buck” Gray and Claud Hudspeth, “the Cowboy from Crockett County”—and a newspaper reported: “Mr. Gray, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Hudspeth are … a trio that command the respect and confidence of their fellow members.” Johnson had a gift not only for making men go along with him but for making them like him. He was famed for his practical jokes, such as the one he played on Representative J. J. Blount, who not only took frequent naps at his desk in the Chamber but kept a big alarm clock on it to wake him up. Once Blount set the alarm to allow himself a two-hour snooze. As soon as he fell asleep, Johnson walked over to his desk, moved the alarm forward and walked away. A minute or two later, the alarm went off. Blount jumped to his feet, saying, “It’s time to go to work! What are we here for?” as the House roared. Decades later, men who had served with Sam Johnson in the Legislature would remember him with fondness; one, Sam Rayburn, on receiving a letter from him in 1937, would reply: “I am mighty glad to get a letter from you and in this wise renew friendships of years ago. You are one man that I served with in the Legislature of Texas that I have always remembered with interest and kindly feeling.”