The Path to Power (17 page)

In 1923, Sam Johnson sponsored—and saw passage of—what he regarded as his most notable piece of legislation.

Campaigning for re-election in 1922, Governor Pat M. Neff, in a speech at Johnson City, called for legislation to protect farmers and ranchers in poorer sections of Texas who, anxious to participate in the flood of oil wealth beginning to be pumped out of other areas of the state, were easy victims of “high-pressure salesmen” peddling phony oil stocks. Johnson knew, as he said later, that his own constituents “had been fleeced out of thousands of dollars by the rankest kind of promotion swindles,” but he had not known how widespread the swindles were. “The Governor’s speech … gave me an insight and a grasp of the conditions that had never come into my mind before.” Drafting regulations for the advertising and sale of oil stock, he embodied them in legislation creating a Securities Division of the State Railroad Commission to enforce them. Introducing this legislation in January, 1923, he said, “I want to leave this bill on the statute books.” “No measure offered before the Legislature has created more comment than the ‘Blue Sky’ Bill
*
of Sam E. Johnson,” reported the
San Antonio Express
, and the need for the measure was quickly demonstrated by letters he received from “literally hundreds of victims of these nefarious oil sharks”—and by the reaction of the sharks themselves. Money—“The word around the Dris-kill was that it was quite a sum,” McFarlane says—was offered to him; his daughter Rebekah says, “A man offered him a lot of money to let it die—he wouldn’t have to do anything; just let it sit in committee.” But Sam refused the bribes, and when the bill passed—with his name on it; it would be known as the “Johnson Blue Sky Law”—he was very proud. Wilma Fawcett, his daughter Josefa’s best friend, remembers that “Whenever we wanted permission from him to do something, Josefa would say, ‘Let’s get him talking about the Blue Sky Law; then he’ll be in a good mood and he’ll say ‘all right.’”

Sam Johnson loved being a legislator. The job satisfied his idealism, his need for recognition and gratitude, and as Willard Deason, who came to
know him very well, says: “He was ambitious to stand in the forefront, not for money, no, but to be in the forefront. He would rather serve in the Texas Legislature than have the largest ranch in Blanco County.” And he was very good at legislating. His son Lyndon had wished “it could go on forever,” and for a while it seemed it could.

B
UT IT WAS NOT
in the Legislature that Sam Johnson had to earn his living. He had to earn his living in the Hill Country.

“Real-estatin’” sounded impressive, especially as reported by Reverdy Gliddon’s friendly
Blanco County Record
(“Hon. S. E. Johnson … recently closed up several big land deals, particulars of which will be given later”), but it wasn’t profitable, not when the value of real estate kept going down. And in the Hill Country, while land values sometimes rose—sometimes rose for three or four or even five years in a row, when rain was plentiful and cotton crops good and men’s hopes on the rise—the long-term trend was inexorably down. Sam worked hard at real-estatin’—in the intervals when he wasn’t in Austin for a legislative session or driving a hundred miles to obtain a deposition that would help a Civil War veteran get his pension; if he received a telephone call about some ranch he might be able to buy cheap, no matter how late the hour, how remote the ranch, or how bad the road, he would throw on his suit jacket, crank up his car, and head out into the night. But, no matter how cheap Sam bought a ranch, all too frequently he had to sell it cheaper. His agile, restless mind was constantly conceiving new, non-real-estate, business ventures, but they, too, often turned out badly; his brother Tom, who went into several with him, commented ruefully: “If you want a business to be jinxed, just go into it with Sam.” When Sam did make money, moreover, he didn’t save it; sometimes it went into a new venture, sometimes into ostentation—new boots, new clothes, a new, expensive car (“You can tell a man by his boots and his hat and the horse he rides”); sometimes, because he had the Johnson extravagance, the gift for the grandiose gesture, into an expensive present for his wife; always into maids and laundry women—or into a fiver to tide over a veteran until the pension started coming. And, most importantly, Sam Johnson either didn’t understand the reality of the land itself, of the soil on which all enterprises in the Hill Country (which had no oil wells, no manufacturing to speak of, nothing but farming and ranching) rested; or, perhaps more likely, he refused to accept that reality as he had refused to compromise with the realities of Austin, stubbornly shouting Populist slogans when Populism had been dead for twenty years, stubbornly holding to ideals in an arena in which ideals were largely irrelevant, and so exerting, despite his seniority, no significant influence on major legislative decisions. In Austin—in the Legislature—idealism was irrelevant; in the Hill Country, it was fatal.

His father died in 1915, his mother in 1917. The principal asset of her
estate was the Johnson farm, those 433 acres up on the Pedernales. Dividing it up among the eight surviving children was obviously impractical, and when Sam refused to consider selling it to an outsider, John Harvey Bright of Houston, who had married one of Sam’s sisters, offered to buy out the other heirs.

Sam wouldn’t hear of that. He suspected that once Bright owned the ranch, he would sell it. This was the
Johnson Ranch
they were talking about. It was the family place, the place where they had all been raised. The Pedernales Valley was “Johnson Country,” he said, always had been; it had been in that valley that the original Johnson brothers rounded up their great herds. Were they going to sell the Johnson’s stake in that valley? Bright made an offer to the other relatives; Sam raised it. Bright made a new offer; Sam raised again. Sam’s attitude was the old Johnson attitude, the attitude of the original brothers, who had disdained to haggle and bargain over every last penny because haggling and bargaining was beneath them. Whatever Bright offered, Sam said, he’d offer more. And finally, to get this tiresome bidding over with, he offered considerably more. He offered $19,500. The bid was accepted.

There was pride behind Sam’s bid, the old Johnson pride—and there was ambition, vaulting ambition, big dreams on the old Johnson scale; Sam talked, in fact, about making the whole Pedernales Valley “Johnson Country” again; about restoring the once-grand Johnson fortunes. He persuaded Tom, who loved him (and who in this one instance ignored the remonstrances of his practical German wife, whose frugality and ability to lend a sturdy hand with the farm work kept him solvent), to purchase a smaller 125-acre ranch on the Pedernales, and to join with him in leasing the adjacent Klein ranch so that they would have enough land to really work with. The first Sam and Tom Johnson had had bad luck; maybe this Sam and Tom Johnson wouldn’t.

But there was also in Sam’s bid a failure to see—or to accept—reality; the old Johnson failure—or refusal—to understand what had been happening to the land in which he was investing so much money. Not seeing was easy, of course; the Hill Country always made not seeing easy. The land’s decline, an historian says, was “gradual enough that men could lull themselves into not seeing it until too late.” The land along the Pedernales had hardly been worked at all during the six years since Sam had moved to Johnson City, and Sam assured his brother that six years of lying fallow must have restored much of the land’s original fertility. Once, in the old days of which Sam loved to talk, the land had been rich; Sam apparently believed, or made himself believe, that it could be rich again—maybe not as rich as in the old days, but rich enough. Maybe it would never be possible to raise cattle on it again (although Sam did not really believe that; he talked about one day starting up a herd again), but when he had last worked it, six years ago, he had gotten a respectable cotton crop out of it; now, he felt
sure, he would be able to get a larger crop out of it. And—and this was apparently the crucial factor in his thinking—ever since the Armistice, cotton prices had been soaring. By 1919, when Sam was bidding against Bright, it was fetching an unprecedented forty cents per pound, and Texas newspapers were filled with speculation that it would soon soar to fifty cents per pound, or sixty.

The price of the land was only part of the expense of starting up the farm after a six-year lapse. The house had to be fixed up so that he and Rebekah and the children could live in it. Sharecroppers had to be hired, and their houses had to be fixed up. Tractors and other farming equipment had to be bought or rented—naturally, because it was Sam, good, modern equipment so that he could raise the maximum amount of cotton and take maximum advantage of those high cotton prices that were soon going to be much higher. Such expenses cost as much again as the land; by the time Sam moved onto the farm in January, 1920, he had invested slightly more than $40,000 in it. To raise this amount, he sold the little hotel in Johnson City. He sold a two-story stone store that he had been leasing to storeowner Withers for a steady monthly income. He sold every piece of property he owned—and then, since he still didn’t have enough, he placed on the 433 acres a mortgage of $15,000, and borrowed additional money from at least three banks, going deeply into debt.

And the trap which had closed around the first Sam Johnson closed around the second.

H
E STRUGGLED AGAINST
its jaws. The man who had never wanted to be a farmer was a farmer now, and it was going to be as a farmer that he worked out his destiny: the mortgage, combined with the bank loans, was so big that it was a mortgage not just on his farm, but on his fate. And if he had possessed the lawmaker’s courage, he possessed the farmer’s courage, too. The stand he made now in a cotton field was as gallant as any he had made in a cloakroom. He battled that farm on the Pedernales, trying to make its soil pay out the dreams he had planted in it.

But it couldn’t.

A single gully symbolized Sam Johnson’s struggle, the struggle that he made, not in a suit and hand-tooled boots beneath the painted dome of the Capitol, before applauding galleries, but in sweat-reeking work clothes and mud-smeared work shoes, alone except for a couple of Mexican sharecroppers, or, sometimes, completely alone, a lonely figure in the empty Hill Country landscape, under that empty Hill Country sky. The gully was a long, wide gash that rains had, over decades, cut into the ground all the way from the hill pastures that Sam had rented from the Kleins, across the Johnson fields and down to the river, a gully, in Ava’s words, “deep enough to walk elephants in.” A lot of cotton could be planted in that gully. Taking
a team and wagon down along the Pedernales toward Fredericksburg, Sam filled the wagon with the richest river-bottom soil he could find, heaving it up into the wagon in hours of labor that must have been difficult for a forty-two-year-old man who hadn’t done farm work for years. Then he drove the wagon home, and shoveled the soil into the gully. And he repeated the trip over and over until there was soil enough in the gully to plant cotton. And then the first spring rainstorm of 1920 was a “gully-washer”; a flash flood roared down the gully and swept the soil away. Sam needed that gully, needed the cotton that could be grown in it, and by now he knew he needed it badly. He filled it up again, again planted cotton seeds in it. If only the next few rains could be gentle, if only the seeds could be given a chance to put out roots that would hold the soil in place until cotton plants could flower, and then drop more seeds, which would put out more roots—and bind the soil fast. But before the seeds could sprout, there was another gully-washer; seeds and soil were washed away again. That gully symbolized Sam’s hopes, and what happened in it symbolized what the Hill Country did to hopes. “He planted it, and planted it,” a relative recalls. “And he never got a crop out of it. Not one.”

The story of Sam and the farm is the story of the Hill Country. Six years of lying fallow would indeed revitalize most farms—but not Hill Country farms; arid Hill Country limestone turned into soil too slowly, and, being on hills, washed away too easily. When, in the spring of 1920, he and his hands began plowing his hilly fields, they found that the topsoil was terribly thin: on the average, not more than two inches deep. Beneath the soil was “hardpan”—harder, less fertile, soil mixed with clay—and even the hardpan wasn’t very deep. Sam had to set his plows so that they dug no deeper than eight inches; any deeper, and the plows would be hitting rock. The farm’s “bottom land” along the Pedernales and its tributary creeks was deep and fertile. But that first gully-washer—and the ones that followed it—sent the Pedernales on a real tear. When it receded, it sucked the bottom land back with it. And not only the bottom land. “Sam’s land all drained toward the river,” Ava explains. “That was part of the reason the topsoil was so thin: because it had kept getting washed away in the rains. And because it was so thin, what there was of it was just barely holding on. If you left it alone, it would have very slowly built up. But the minute you put a plow in it, it would wash away in the next rain. After Sam started to plow it, you could see his land running away. Every time rain hit it, you could see the topsoil running down the hills and into the river.”

Still Sam fought. The only way to grow cotton in hardpan is to plow it after every rain. After every rain, Sam plowed it. During his earlier years on the farm he had spent a lot of time at the cotton gins in Albert and Stonewall, playing cotton futures; he was never at the gins now. He drove his hands, and he drove himself. “Uncle Sam was just not a farmer type,” Ava says. “He was not a man of the soil. Not physically, and not in his head
neither. But he tried very hard to be a farmer then,” Ava says. “I still remember how hard he tried.”

But trying didn’t count in the Hill Country, just as hoping didn’t count, just as wishful thinking didn’t count, just as a belief that you should hold on to the family place and a willingness to fight for that place didn’t count. What counted in the Hill Country was the reality of the soil. “He had seen his daddy make good on the land, at least fairly good,” Ava says. “But the soil had been okay then. Now it was just wore out. It was just plain too thin.”