The Path to Power (128 page)

The new attraction worked. Night after night, the
American-Statesman
commented, Johnson was now “addressing thousands where three weeks ago he was talking to hundreds.” To keep the audience at the rally until its end—despite the dullness of the candidate’s speech—the bonds and stamps were
not distributed until after the speech. The squirrel cage device from which the winning tickets would be drawn was placed in a prominent position on the stage, and it stood there all the time Johnson was talking. Its presence had the hoped-for effect: the crowds stayed to the end. As the
State Observer
noted in a description of a typical Johnson rally, despite the heat and the swarms of bugs attracted by the spotlights, 15,000 persons “stood crowded together” until Johnson had finished speaking. “They all kept their eyes on the speakers’ stand. They jealously guarded hundreds of lottery tickets. They were all waiting for the free money.”

The reaction of Texas journalists to “free money” was summed up in the
Granger News’
two-word comment:
“Glory be!”
National journalists who came to Texas to watch the campaign were more caustic. “At political rallies, Johnson drew the crowds by handing out defense bonds and stamps, thereby demonstrating his patriotic fervor and simultaneously proving that he was a handy man to have around between paydays,” wrote Jack Guinn in the
American Mercury
.

National journalists were somewhat startled by the campaign as a whole. “The current election campaign in Texas to fill the late Morris Sheppard’s seat in the United States Senate contains so many elements of the ridiculous that at times it is difficult to take it seriously,” wrote Roland Young in
The Nation. Time
magazine called the campaign the “biggest carnival in American politics.”

But beneath that carnival atmosphere, a grim battle was taking place.

Two Johnson tactics much more subtle than his rallies were proving much more effective.

One was based on the devotion to O’Daniel and the faith in Pass-the-Biscuits-Pappy among the poor people of Texas. Lying in the hospital, Lyndon Johnson had devised a stratagem that made O’Daniel’s popularity work against him. Johnson’s thousands of workers—not only his teams of paid, expert campaign workers but the REA employees bringing electricity to the farms, the meter readers of the electric co-ops, the soil-conservation experts and county agents and other federal employees who spent their days traveling from farm to farm—were told to use a new argument: Pappy O’Daniel is a great Governor and a great man. We need him in Texas. Let’s keep him in Texas.

This argument was particularly persuasive when it was linked to pensions. Dozens of weekly newspapers—the only source of news to so many rural families in Texas—made the link by reprinting a
Fort Worth Press
article sent to them by Johnson headquarters, under a headline suggested by the headquarters: WILL THE OLD FOLKS KILL THEIR GOLDEN GOOSE?

Pappy is fighting for our pensions, a county agent would remind a farm family who had invited him to share their dinner. The Legislature is keeping us from getting those pensions. If Pappy leaves for Washington, there won’t be anyone left in Austin to fight for pensions. We need him in Austin. But the argument was effective even when it wasn’t linked to pensions. For to many of O’Daniel’s faithful, the strongest reason for not electing him to the Senate was their love for him. They didn’t want him to leave them, to go to faraway Washington; they couldn’t bear to lose him. The argument was working. Recalls one Johnson campaign worker: “I said, ‘O’Daniel’s made us a good Governor—let’s keep him there.’ I said, ‘Don’t send Pappy way up there to Washington with all those professional politicians.’ And that argument really touched. They loved Pappy. They didn’t want him to go away.”

O’Daniel’s campaign manager, his Secretary of State, William J. Lawson, saw that the argument was indeed “touching.” The evidence was piled on a long table in Lawson’s office in the Capitol. On his Sunday-morning broadcasts, O’Daniel was, both before and after he announced for the Senate, using the tactic that had worked so well for him in his previous campaigns: asking his listeners to write and tell him if they thought he should run for Senator. As always, the response was immense. It would begin coming in Tuesday morning, and would keep coming on Wednesday. Each delivery brought so many letters and postcards to the Post Office branch in the Capitol that Lawson would have to recruit a crew of porters to haul the big mail sacks back to his office. Secretaries would go through the mail, dividing into separate piles on the table the replies urging him to go to the Senate and those urging him not to.

At first, the piles were very unequal. Lawson, who counted them, says, “At first, it was maybe ninety to ten that he should run for the Senate. ‘We’ll support you. Anything you want, we’ll help you.’” This response duplicated that of 1938 and 1940, and O’Daniel was sure it would continue, and that the result of those campaigns would be duplicated in 1941. “He got a little smug,” Lawson says. “He didn’t think he was going to have to [actively campaign].” But it didn’t continue. The pile urging O’Daniel to run began, day by day, to grow smaller, the pile urging him not to began to grow higher. One day, to Lawson’s shock, the latter pile was bigger than the former. And, day by day, this trend continued.

“I didn’t see any reason why it should change, in just two or three weeks, like this,” Lawson says. Although he had previously taken little interest in the campaign—believing none was necessary—“I went down to the hotel lobbies and the restaurants” frequented by politicians, “and over and over again, I heard the same explanation: ‘Well, Bill, here’s what’s doing it. It seems that Lyndon Johnson’s people in all the counties had started this rumor: “O’Daniel is a great Governor. Why send him to Washington? Keep him here. He’ll be more valuable here.”’ Johnson’s previous arguments had been too complicated for the people out there to grasp. But just a little simple lie—‘He’s doing more for you than any Governor ever did; it’d be silly for us to vote to send him to Washington’—they could grasp that. And that spread like wildfire.”

Johnson saw that it was touching. After just a week back on the campaign trail, he had sufficient confidence in the argument to use it publicly. Over statewide radio hook-ups, he pointed out that although the federal government would match a state’s contribution to Social Security up to $20 per recipient per month, Texas, because of the state’s empty treasury, had been putting up only $4.75. Instead of a possible $40 per month, he told his listeners, “Your pension checks will average $9.50” until the state’s contribution rises. “The best thing you can do is to keep your Governor on the job until you get that forty dollars a month, and while he is holding that end up for you here, Lyndon Johnson, as your Senator in Washington, can work with President Roosevelt toward” increased federal pensions. Waving a twenty-dollar bill before the audience at his rallies, he said, “Your Governor can’t raise that money in Washington.” So effective was the argument that Johnson’s strategists considered printing up a new bumper sticker, KEEP PAPPY IN TEXAS, but that tactic was considered too blatant.

Soon there was harder evidence that this argument was touching. In McLennan County, for example, a mass meeting of local pension clubs and “friends of Governor W. Lee O’Daniel” was called “to discuss a resolution urging the Governor’s withdrawal from the campaign,” in order, a spokesman for the clubs said, “to ensure that ‘a friend of the pensioner’ would remain in the Governor’s chair.”

T
HE GOVERNOR HIMSELF
was hardly aware of this threat to his plans. With crucial appropriations stalled by a hostile Legislature, the state government was in disarray, and he had pledged not to leave Austin until the bills were passed and the Legislature had adjourned. At the end of May—two weeks after he had announced he was running—he still had not made a single campaign appearance; his campaigning consisted solely of his Sunday-morning broadcasts. Not out among the people, he was not aware of their feelings. Nor did he see any reason to be; “he had expected to win just by announcing,”
Lawson said. When Lawson told him he was behind both Johnson and Mann, his reaction was disbelief; it wasn’t until he had checked around the state himself that he found that Lawson was correct. “He didn’t like to lose,” Lawson said. He told his Secretary of State to get the campaign in gear.

But Johnson’s second subtle tactic—one quieter (and even more effective) than the first—kept those gears from turning. The legislative session had already dragged on far longer than normal; and O’Daniel, sure it would not last much longer, announced that he would open a statewide speaking tour on June 2 in Waco. But working for Johnson behind the scenes in Austin were two men with a lot of legislators in their pockets: Alvin Wirtz, 1940 head of the Roosevelt campaign in Texas, and Roy Miller, 1940 head of the Stop Roosevelt campaign in Texas. The crucial appropriations bills remained unpassed, and every attempt to have the Legislature adjourn—or recess—was defeated. The Governor brought Molly, Mickey-Wickey, his hillbilly band and his big sound truck with the Capitol dome on top to Waco on the 2nd, but immediately after that one speech, he had to return in it to Austin. Canceling his speaking dates for the following week, he said he hoped he would be able to start his statewide tour by June 9. During the week of the 2nd, however, no fewer than eight separate plans for adjournment or recess were presented—and if one was approved by one house, it was disapproved by the other. The Governor had to cancel the next week’s engagements, too—and then the next; the 1941 Legislature was staying in session longer than any other Legislature in the state’s history. On June 16, desperate, he announced that he was sending his children out in his place, each with half the hillbilly band; Molly, speaking in Waco the next day, said that “Dad got a raw deal from the Legislature, which for some unknown reason, won’t adjourn.” But the kids and the band were no substitute for Pappy himself, and “many voters were resentful after he had made engagements and cancelled them.” As late as June 18, just ten days before the election, he still hadn’t gotten out on the road. Pappy O’Daniel was perhaps the greatest campaigner in the history of Texas—but Lyndon Johnson wasn’t letting him campaign.

A
ND ALWAYS
there was the money.

The “free money” given away at the “Patriotic Rallies” was a very minor item in their cost. There were the salaries of Harfield Weedin, and of the two singers, the harmonica player, the accordion player, and the band (or bands). There was the cost of transporting the cast—and the flags and the huge, rolled-up canvas of the Galveston handshake—around the state, which meant the rental of a bus and the salary of a driver. Weedin had been wary when he was approached to put the show together. “I had worked in Texas politics before, so the cash was always in advance,” he says. But he
had learned quickly that he could stop worrying: the Lyndon Johnson campaign was unlike other political campaigns. There was money available to pay for the talent and the transportation—and for much more besides. Johnson wanted big crowds, so he wanted newspaper advertising before each rally, and soon a Houston advertising agency was “up to their ears with artwork and getting the necessary plates and mats prepared.” And when, on May 26, Weedin and his troupe arrived in Wichita Falls for the first rally, he got a better indication of the financial resources at Johnson’s disposal. “Full pages had been purchased in each of the Wichita Falls papers,” and in every weekly newspaper for a hundred miles around. (Weedin also noticed that in the ads for the “All-Out Patriotic Revue” presented by “Friends of Roosevelt,” “not one word was mentioned that there would also be an address by Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson, candidate for Senator from Texas.”) And, Weedin adds, “Naturally, Congressman Johnson’s words were too important to be wasted upon only the few thousand people assembled at the rally, so his speeches were always broadcast—and on a tremendous number of stations which joined together to form a network for each occasion.” For six weeks, the Lyndon B. Johnson Show was on the road (“Big Spring, Eastland, Abilene, Denison, Waco, Dallas, Amarillo, Austin, San Angelo, Corpus Christi, Harlingen, Marshall, San Antonio, and so on, night after night—Man! Texas is a big state! One hop alone, from Harlingen to Marshall, was over eight hundred miles,” Weedin recalls), and for six weeks the money never ran out. In fact, more and more was spent. A press agent, an ace reporter from the
Houston Post
, was hired, and advance men were attached to the entourage. And when Johnson’s campaign managers realized that Weedin was a celebrity local politicians wanted to meet, he was removed from the bus and flown (along with the press agent) from stop to stop in an oilman’s ten-seat Lockheed with built-in bar so that he would arrive in advance of the troupe and could entertain the local VIP’s in a hotel suite stocked with whiskey. Weedin was very impressed; campaign funds of unprecedented magnitude “sprang from nowhere,” he says.

Every aspect of the campaign was being carried on in a similarly unprecedented scale: the banks of typists and telephoners on the hotel mezzanine in Austin, and in campaign headquarters in El Paso and Lubbock and San Angelo and Houston and Corpus Christi, the posters and placards with which, as one observer put it, Lyndon Johnson seemed to be trying to “plaster the state,” the billboards, of which new crops blossomed weekly, the newspaper advertising. The impact of the Johnson money was particularly strong on the airwaves, of course. Radio was rapidly becoming the most potent political weapon, but it was a weapon that could be wielded only by those who could afford it. Although Johnson’s radio campaign had already been on a scale new to Texas, he wanted that scale expanded—greatly expanded. Mayor Tom Miller was as strong a speaker as he himself was weak. After
hearing Miller make one particularly effective speech, he told the Mayor he wanted it on the air every day “from now until election. Please contact John Connally and arrange to make that speech this week over statewide hook-up.” Roy Hofheinz, the young Harris County Judge who was one of his campaign managers, was a great speaker; Johnson wanted Hofheinz on the air more often. He wanted other supporters on the air more often. And he wanted advance advertising for those speeches—plenty of advertising.