The Path to Power (28 page)

After he returned from California, he worked for the State Highway Department.

The work started at dawn. Six a.m. sharp was the time the State Highway Department cars left Courthouse Square for the job site, with the road gang on board. And this time the job wasn’t merely gravel-topping, or smoothing off, a road. This time the job was building a road.

Because little mechanical equipment was available, the road was being built almost entirely by hand. It wasn’t being paved, of course; in 1926, Hill Country roads were still made of that rocky Hill Country “caliche” soil that was as white as the limestone of which it was composed, and as hard. For a while, to earn his two dollars a day, Johnson “drove” a “fresno,” a two-handled metal scoop pulled by four mules. He would stand behind the scoop, between its handles. Because he needed a hand for each handle, the reins leading to the mules were tied together and wrapped around his back, so that man and mules were, really, in harness together.

Lifting the handles of the scoop, Johnson would jam its front edge into the caliche. Urging the mules forward, he pushed as they pulled—pushing hard to force the scoop through the rocky soil. When the scoop contained a full load, he pressed down on the handles, straining with the effort, until the scoop rose free of the ground. Then, still pressing down on the handles with all his might, the reins still cutting into his back, he directed the mules to the dumping place, where he would pull up the handles to dump the heavy load. “This was a job which required … a strong back,” says one description of the work. “This, for a boy of … seventeen, was back-breaking labor.”

When he wasn’t operating the fresno, Johnson worked with Ben Crider, who had come back from California, as a pick-and-shovel team. “He’d use the shovel and scoop the dirt up, and I’d pick it up out of the ground, or vice versa,” Crider recalls. And, Crider says, such work was “too heavy” for Johnson. He would come home at flight—work started at daybreak, it ended at dusk—exhausted. His skin—that soft white Bunton skin—refused to callus; blister formed on top of blister on his hands, which were often bleeding. He still tried to impress the other workers—at lunch hour, one says, he “talked big … he had big ideas … he wanted to do something big with his life”—but if he had ever had any difficulty seeing the reality of his life, it must have been clear to him now. He was down in that hated Hill Country rock, down in that rock for two dollars a day, down working beside youths who knew that Kitty Clyde had jilted him because her father had predicted
he was going to end up doing work like the work he was in fact doing. And the home he went to at night was again a home to which people brought charity; Sam fell sick again, and stayed sick for months, and without income, there was, again, no money in the house for food, and other families would bring cooked dishes to the Johnsons.

He had started work in Winter. “It was so cold,” Ben Crider recalls. “That was the worst part of it—getting so cold you had to build a fire to thaw out your hands before you could handle a pick and shovel. And we have done that many a day—build us a fire and thaw and work all day.” Spring was more pleasant, but Spring was followed by Summer, the Hill Country summer where laborers toiled beneath that almost unbearable Hill Country sun with their noses and mouths filled with the grit that was the dried soil the wind whipped into their faces. And Summer became Autumn and then Winter again; the first cut of the wind of this new Winter may have slashed into Lyndon Johnson’s consciousness the realization that this wasn’t his first year on the road gang any more, that he had been working on it for an entire year, and now a second year was starting, and he was still on the road gang. He had boasted to his cousins in Robstown that he was going to work with his brains and not his hands. That had been in 1924. Now it was 1927, and he was still working with his hands. The boy who had wanted so desperately to escape from the cage that was Johnson City had not done so.

So many others had, moreover. The streets of the little town were empty now of many of the faces he had grown up with. Not only Kitty Clyde but all his classmates were away at college. All three Redford boys were at college, as were his cousins Ava and Margaret. Even Louise Casparis, who had been his mother’s maid, was going to college now. But, almost three years after he had graduated from high school, Lyndon wasn’t going to college. All during his boyhood, he had boasted to his friends that he wouldn’t work with his hands. Well, his friends weren’t working with their hands any more. But he was.

Still he wouldn’t go. Instead, determined not to continue his education as his parents wanted but desperate to stand out, to be somebody—born with a flaming ambition but born in an area that offered ambition no fuel; driven into desperation by the conflict between lineage and landscape—he flailed frantically, trying to stand out every way but their way.

He was seizing now on anything that might offer prestige. He took to talking frequently about the Baineses’ “Southern blood”—which, he emphasized to Ava and Margaret, they possessed, too; once, Ava recalls, Lyndon warned her sternly not to dance with a certain young man because “he’s common.” At dances, Lyndon dressed differently from other men—and acted differently. Entering a small, bare Hill Country dance hall with his friends, wearing a brightly colored silk shirt, his hair elaborately pompadoured and waved and glistening with Sta-comb, he would walk in front of them,
swaggering and strutting—or, rather, so awkward was he, trying to swagger and strut; when his friends attempt to imitate the way he looked, they stick their stomachs far out, pull their shoulders far back, and let their arms flap awkwardly far away from their bodies, so that they look quite silly—and that is how they say Lyndon looked. Even Ava, so fond of him, says, “A lot of times he looked smart-alec, silly-like.” His “big talk” grew bigger; he was frequently predicting now that he would be “the President of the United States” one day.

But, always, there was reality. Dress as he might at night, every morning at six o’clock he had to be in Courthouse Square, wearing work clothes. The job he hated was the only job available. And then even that was not available. Ferguson man Sam Johnson had worked for “Ma” Ferguson in the 1926 Gubernatorial campaign, but she had been defeated by Dan Moody. And no sooner was Moody inaugurated, on January 18, 1927, than he began replacing all the Ferguson men in the Highway Department with his own followers. Sam Johnson and his son were notified that they wouldn’t have their jobs much longer. The “sense of insecurity” which Emmette Redford says “hung over everyone” certainly hung over the Johnsons then; there were the taxes on the house, and the mortgage, to be paid—over all of the Johnsons now hung the knowledge, every time they looked at their house, that it might not be theirs much longer.

Then, one Saturday night in February, 1927, Lyndon Johnson went to a dance.

It was held in Peter’s Hall in Fredericksburg, a big, bare barn of a building undecorated except for benches ranged against the walls—music was provided by a German “Ooom-pah-
pah
” band—and most of the men were wearing plain shirts and trousers, with here and there a suit. But Lyndon was wearing a shirt of white silk crepe de Chine (he had been saving for weeks to buy it; he boasted to his friends that it cost “more than ten dollars”) with broad lavender stripes and big French cuffs in which he had inserted a pair of huge, gleaming cufflinks he had “borrowed” from his father. At the dance was a pretty, buxom Fredericksburg girl with big blue eyes and blond hair whose father was a well-to-do merchant. She was “going with” a young German farmer whose first name was Eddie, but as soon as the group from Johnson City arrived—Lyndon, his cousins Ava and Margaret, Harold Withers, Cora Mae Arrington, and Tom and Otto Crider—Lyndon told his friends, “I’m just going to take that little Dutch girl away from that old boy tonight, just as sure as the world.” And, Ava says, “He just sauntered across the hall—he looked so silly, I can’t keep from laughing; you don’t know how funny it was; really, you can’t imagine; I can just see him
swaggering
up to this little old country girl; he’d been to California, he had a lot of new airs—and he just sauntered across the hall, just smiling like the world was his with a downhill pull,” and pulled her out on the floor.

Eddie, who was standing talking with some friends, didn’t pay any attention at first, but Lyndon bent over and put his cheek against hers, and the Johnson City group could see the farmer get angry. And after Lyndon had brought her back to her seat after one set, the music started again, and he pulled her back onto the floor and repeated his actions. “They had up on the wall, NO CHEEK-TO-CHEEK, and Lyndon of course was a lot taller than she was, and he bent down and put his cheek next to hers, and he had made this ol’ boy so mad he like to have died.” And he was acting, Ava says, “like ‘I’ve got it made—she’ll be mine in no time.’ Smart-alec.” When the third set began, he started to dance with Eddie’s girl again, but Eddie walked over and tapped him on the shoulder and asked him to step outside.

“Nice” Hill Country girls wouldn’t “go outside” dance halls then, so for a while Ava and Margaret and Cora Mae Arrington could only speculate about what might be happening, but finally Margaret said, “Well, I’m going to see,” and all three ran out. And when they did, they saw that, as Ava puts it, “Lyndon was getting
really
beat up!

“Lyndon was so awkward and this boy was so big and fast,” Ava says. “He’d knock Lyndon down, and Lyndon would get up, and shout, ‘I’ll
get you!’
and run at him, and he never got to hit him once that I can recall. He didn’t even get close to him. He’d yell, ‘I’ll
get you!’
and run at that Dutch boy, and the Dutch boy would hit him—whoom! And down Lyndon would go again.” Blood was pouring out of Lyndon’s nose and mouth, running down his face and onto the crepe-de-Chine shirt. The Criders, afraid he was going to be badly hurt, started to interfere, but Fredericksburg’s old, tough sheriff, Alfred Klaerner, had been present at the dance, and Sheriff Klaerner had had, for some time now, more than enough of Lyndon Johnson. “We’ll just stand back and let them have it out,” he said, stepping in front of the Criders, and when Otto kept coming, the sheriff knocked him backward and said: “If you try that again, I’ll stick the whole bunch of you in jail.” The Johnson City group stood silent, and the beating went on.

“Lyndon never got in a lick,” Ava says. “It was pitiful. Every time he got up, that old boy knocked him down—he had fists like a pile-driver. Lyndon’s whole face was bloody, and he looked pretty bad.” And finally, lying on the ground, he said: “That’s enough.”

When Lyndon had recovered a little, Ava says, he realized that one of his father’s cufflinks was missing, and he got “very upset,” After a while, someone found it and gave it back to him, but there was nothing anyone could do about the shirt; it was thoroughly bloodstained. But it wasn’t Lyndon’s injuries that most impressed Ava, it was his demeanor. “Lyndon was always so talkative, so lively,” she says. He had lost fights before—“Lyndon
always
lost”—but as soon as they were over, he would always be chattering away in no time. But all the way home to Johnson City, he didn’t say a word. The group stopped at Flatt’s Creek to clean him up, and he still didn’t say anything. “He was very subdued,” Ava says. “He acted like
a guy who had had all the wind taken out of his sails.” When they took up a collection and gave him enough money to pay his fine—while he had still been lying on the ground, Sheriff Klaerner had bent over and handed him a summons for disorderly conduct—Lyndon thanked them, but in a voice so low that Ava had never heard it before. Possibly his depression was due to the beating he had taken—“He’d had fights before, but he’d never gotten walloped like this,” she says—but his cousins didn’t think so. After they had dropped him off at his house, he walked inside without a word, and Ava and Margaret agreed that they had seen Lyndon in a similar mood only once before: when he had come back from California. And, Ava says, she and Margaret agreed that the reason for the depression was the same both times: “Something had made him realize that he wasn’t cock of the walk.”

W
AS AVA RIGHT
? Did the dance teach Lyndon Johnson the same lesson that his California experience had taught him? Was he silent and depressed by the realization that his hopes were doomed? Realizing how hard it was to be somebody in the Hill Country, he had tried twice, in running away to Robstown and California, to escape from it, but to escape without following the course his parents wanted him to take. But both attempts had failed. On his return from the second, had he tried to be something
in
the Hill Country—and had he had pounded into him, every morning that he put on the work shirt, that he couldn’t be? Hadn’t there been an increasing desperation in his actions during the past year; hadn’t the boasting become wilder, the shirts brighter and more expensive, the nighttime pranks more and more frenetic? And had, then, his beating by the hard fists of the Hill Country farm boy, his humiliation before his friends, been a final pounding into him of the reality about the Hill Country, where the physical was all that mattered. Had the beating been a final confirmation of the realization that he was never going to be somebody as long as he stayed in Johnson City—that even at a dance in a bare hall he couldn’t be somebody—that there was no choice for him but to get out, even if the only way out was his parents’ way? Is it possible to read into his “That’s enough” a surrender not just in a dance-hall fight but in the larger fight he had been waging for years: the fight to be somebody without following the course his parents wanted him to take? No one can say. No one knows what Lyndon Johnson thought that night, on the way home and lying in bed, and no one will ever know. But the next morning, he told his parents he would go to college.

W
HEN, HOWEVER
, he left for college the following week, he did not leave in a spirit of reconciliation with his parents. He would not, in fact, even permit his father to drive him to San Marcos, preferring to hitchhike the thirty miles, carrying a cardboard suitcase, rather than accept a favor from
him. And he didn’t attend college in that spirit, either; the values he took from college were not at all what his parents had envisioned, as was perhaps symbolized following graduation by his lifelong reluctance—a reluctance so strong that it was seldom broken—to read books. They wanted him to go to college to learn about literature and art, Beauty and Truth. He wanted to be somebody, to stand out, to lead, to dominate. He may not yet have known how to accomplish
that
, but he certainly knew how
not
to accomplish it: his parents—the lesson of their lives—had taught him. In Austin, he had seen the legislators who accepted the beefsteak, the bourbon and the blondes, who lived at the Driskill while his father lived at the boardinghouse. His father had refused to be like them, and he had seen what happened to his father. His mother had believed that poetry and beauty were the most important things in life, and she had refused to ever stop believing that, and he had seen what happened to his mother. The most striking characteristic of both his parents was that they were idealists who stuck to their ideals. They had been trying ever since he was a little boy to teach him that what mattered was principle, and sticking to principle.