The Path to Power (60 page)

1935 was the year of the Public Utilities Act—the bill to curb the power of giant utility holding companies over their operating subsidiaries. To Populists, these holding companies symbolized the entrenched economic power of the Northeast—and its effect on “The People” throughout the country. Electric rates were unjustly high for consumers—and particularly for farmers—because of the siphoning off of local power companies’ cash by the holding companies up in New York; electricity was unavailable to most farmers because the decision-makers in New York, interested only in profit potential, saw too little in rural electrification. For decades, Populist legislators had attempted to enact state legislation to curb utilities—and had been defeated in almost every significant attempt by the utilities’ awesome power in state capitals; as a member of the Texas State Legislature twenty years before, Rayburn himself had fought unsuccessfully against them. Rayburn knew now that only the power of the federal government could curb the power of the holding companies, and now, at last, there was a President who knew it, too (as Governor of New York, Roosevelt had fought these giants in their lair, and had lost). The President demanded, and Corcoran and Cohen drafted, and Rayburn and Senator Burton K. Wheeler, the old Populist from Montana, introduced legislation that included a clause—dubbed the “Death Sentence” clause—which gave the Securities and Exchange Commission power to compel the dissolution of holding companies.

The mere mention of lobbyists brought the deep red flush to Ray-burn’s head; wrote a friend, “He hates [them] with a venomous hatred.” 1935 was the year of the utility lobby. “You talk about a labor lobby,” Roosevelt said. “Well, it is a child compared to this utility lobby. You talk about a Legion lobby. Well, it is an infant in arms compared to this utility lobby.” This was, he said, “the most powerful, dangerous lobby … that has ever been created by any organization in this country.”

The lobbyists played dirty—it was during the Death Sentence fight that there began the first widespread whispers that the President was insane—and they played rough. The flood of almost a million messages that inundated Congressmen was reinforced by the threat direct: Congressmen were told bluntly that money, as much as was needed, would be poured into their districts to defeat them in the next election if they voted for the
Public Utilities Act. This time, Rayburn’s control of his committee was broken. When, after six weeks of bitter hearings, the bill was reported out, it came to the floor with the Death Sentence provision removed, and the bill emasculated.

I hate to be licked. It almost kills me
. Three times, against the wishes of congressional leaders of his own party, Rayburn demanded a roll call on the Death Sentence. He had the White House on his side—on Roosevelt’s orders, Corcoran was working tirelessly beside him—and Senator Hugo Black’s hearings were providing the White House with new ammunition as they revealed that the utilities had spent $1.5 million to generate the “spontaneous” mailings, which had actually been produced by using names picked broadscale from telephone directories. But in Texas, newspapers were calling him a Communist, and accusing him of trying to “murder” a great enterprise. John W. Carpenter, president of Texas Power & Light, asked a banker in Rayburn’s district “to estimate how much it would cost to beat Sam Rayburn. … He said they had the money to do anything.” With a storm of abuse rising about him in the House Chamber (and with Carpenter and other utility executives sitting in the House gallery, their presence a silent warning to the Congressmen), he lost all three roll-call votes by overwhelming margins. But there was still the conference committee. No friends were made in this one; so bitter did feelings run during its two months of meetings that other members barred Cohen and Corcoran, the bill’s drafters, from the committee room. But the bill that emerged from the conference—and that was passed—while far short of what Roosevelt and Rayburn had originally hoped for, nonetheless contained the mandate they wanted for the SEC to compel holding companies’ reorganization. Sam Rayburn issued a rare public statement: “With the Securities Act of 1933, the Stock Exchange Act … of 1934, and this Holding Company bill to complete the cycle, I believe that control is restored to the government and the people, and taken out of the hands of a few, and that the American people will have cause to believe that this administration is trying and is establishing a government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

Rayburn received little credit at the time for his role in the passage of this legislation. “Few people, if they depend on the public prints for their information, know much about him,” the
New York Times
noted. “It is doubtful if there is any member of his ability who is less conspicuous, less self-heralded, and less known outside the influential group with which he is immediately in contact.” And he has received little credit from history, in part because he left almost no record of his deeds in writing; not in memoirs, not even in memos—as David Halberstam says, he “did all his serious business in pencil on the back of a used envelope.” (When asked how he remembered what he had promised or what he had said, he would growl: “I always tell the truth, so I don’t need a good memory to remember what I said”)—in part because, shy, he shrank from publicity: “Let the other
fellow get the headlines,” he said. “I’ll take the laws.” It is possible to read detailed histories of the New Deal and find hardly a reference to Sam Rayburn.

Occasionally, when he was old, he would refer to what he had done. In 1955, Drew Pearson was interviewing him about the regulatory commissions when Rayburn suddenly blurted out: “I was in on the borning of every one of those commissions. … I wrote the law that passed the Federal Communications Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. … I wrote the law for the Civil Aeronautics Board. …” But the people to whom he was speaking would not usually understand what the old man was talking about. During the Eisenhower administration, a young congressional aide was expounding on the brilliance of John Foster Dulles when Rayburn suddenly said: “I cut him to pieces once, you know.” What do you mean? the aide asked. When was that? The old man grunted and refused to answer. But his name is on the Securities Act of 1933 (the Fletcher-Rayburn Act), and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (the Fletcher-Rayburn Act), and the Public Utilities Act of 1935 (the Wheeler-Rayburn Act), and on other pieces of New Deal legislation that, for a while at least, took control “out of the hands of a few,” and restored it to “the people.” And those who fought beside him knew what he had done. SEC Chairman William O. Douglas was to recall that “[We] called it affectionately the ‘Sam Rayburn Commission,’ since he had fathered [it].” The three great pieces of legislation embodied principles for which the People’s Party—the party of the great orators, Bryan and Tom Watson and Old Joe Bailey—had been fighting for half a century. But the Populist perhaps most responsible for the achievement represented by their collective passage was the least eloquent of Populists: the man who had achieved the power to bring their dreams to realization not by speeches but by silence. (Rayburn, of course, gave credit to someone else—in his own, quiet way. Although over the course of his many years in Washington, autographed photographs of many notables had joined the pictures of Robert E. Lee on his office walls, in his home back in Bonham, resting on his desk, there was, after all these years, still only one picture, the picture of Sam Rayburn’s first hero. But now, when Congress adjourned and he came home and unpacked his suitcase, he lifted out of the suitcase and placed beside the picture of Robert E. Lee a picture of Franklin D. Roosevelt.)

E
VEN BEFORE
he had attained power, Sam Rayburn, with his grim face beneath the gleaming bald head, had been a formidable figure. Now there was power behind the presence—substantial power: the committee chairmanship as well as patronage on the grand scale, for he had been given not only the naming of some commissioners and top staff members of the new
regulatory agencies,
*
but a voice in the White House dispensation of patronage to other Congressmen; a columnist noted that while his aversion to publicity made him “a man in the shadows,” he was one of the handful of Congressmen “who made the wheels go around” in the House. The full force of his personality, held under check so long, was unleashed at last. On the issues he cared deeply about, he was immovable. “If you were arguing with him and raised a point, he’d give you an answer,” says a fellow Congressman. “If you raised the point again, you’d get the same answer again. The exact same answer. You realized, that was the conclusive remark. That was the end of that conversation.” He almost never raised his voice, and he never threatened; the most he might say—in a low, mild, almost gentle, tone—was, “Before you go on here, I want to tell you this—you are about to make a mistake, a very big mistake.” And he never asked for anything, a vote or a favor, more than once. If you turned Sam Rayburn down once, men learned, he would never ask you again—for anything.

He would never ask a man to do anything against his own interests. “A Congressman’s first duty is to get re-elected,” he would say, and he would advise young Congressmen: “Always vote your district.” If a Congressman said that a vote Rayburn was asking for would hurt him in his district, Rayburn would always accept that excuse. But Rayburn knew the districts. And if the excuse wasn’t true, Rayburn’s rage would rise. Once, for example, it erupted against a Congressman from a liberal district who took orders from the district’s reactionary business interests only because he didn’t want to offend them. The Congressman had often used the excuse of public opinion in his district, and, because Rayburn had never challenged him on it, and had stopped asking for his support, was under the misapprehension that Rayburn believed that excuse. One evening, however, after the Congressman had voted against a bill Rayburn supported, he approached Rayburn, who was standing with a group of friends, and with a winning smile said he sure wished he could have voted with him, but that such a vote would have hurt him in his district. Rayburn did not reply for a long moment, while the deep red flush started to creep up his head. Then, says one of the men who were standing with Rayburn, in a recollection confirmed by another, Rayburn said:

“Now, I never asked for your vote on this bill. I never said a word to you about this bill. I knew you wouldn’t vote for this bill, and I never said a word to you about it. But you came across the room just now and told me you wish you could have voted with me.

“So I’m going to tell you something now. You
could
have voted with me. I’ve known that district since before you were born, and that vote wouldn’t have hurt you one bit. Not one bit. You didn’t vote with me because you didn’t have the guts to.”

The flush on the huge head was so dark now that it looked almost black. The men standing with Rayburn backed away. “So don’t you come crawling across the room telling me you wish you could have voted for the bill. ’Cause it’s a damn lie. It’s a damn lie. And you’re a damn liar. You didn’t vote for the bill ’cause you didn’t have the guts to. You’ve got no guts. Let me tell you something. I didn’t raise the issue, but you did. You came across the room. So let me tell you something. The time is coming when the people are going to find out that all you represent is the Chamber of Commerce, and when they find that out, they’re going to beat your ass.”

A young state legislator who had considered challenging the Congressman for his seat had dropped the idea because he didn’t have enough political clout. Not a week after his confrontation with Rayburn, the Congressman walked into the House Dining Room for lunch and saw the legislator sitting there—at Rayburn’s table. When the legislator returned home, he had all the clout he needed, and the Congressman’s political career was over. Rayburn drove him not only out of Congress, but out of Washington. He tried to stay on in the capital, looking for a government job or a lobbying job, but no job was open to him. And none would ever be—not as long as Sam Rayburn was alive.

The temper—backed by the political power—made men afraid of Rayburn. They tried to gauge his moods. “When he would say ‘She-e-e-e-t,’ drawing the word out, I knew he was still good-natured,” recalls House Doorkeeper “Fishbait” Miller. “But if he said it fast, like ‘I don’t want to hear a lot of shit from you,’ I knew I was in trouble.” Some Congressmen, says House Sergeant-at-Arms Kenneth Harding, were “literally afraid to start talking to him.” Says Harding: “He could be very friendly. But if he was frowning, boy—stay away. I mean, if he was coming down a corridor and he was frowning, people were literally afraid to start talking to him. They feared to get close to him. They were afraid of saying the wrong thing.” And if the great heavy head wore not only a frown but that dark red flush, “when he came down a corridor,” it was “a stone through a wave. People would part before him.”

B
UT IF MEN WHO SAW SAM RAYBURN
only in the halls of Congress feared him, men who also saw him outside those halls pitied him.

As a child, loneliness had been what he dreaded most. “Loneliness breaks the heart,” he had said. “Loneliness consumes people.” Now he was a man, who had attained the power he had so long sought. But he had learned that even power could not save him from what he dreaded.

During the hours in which Congress was in session, of course, he was
surrounded by people wanting to talk to him, clamoring for his attention, hanging on his every word.

But Congress wasn’t always in session. It wasn’t in session in the evenings, or on weekends. And when Congress wasn’t in session, Sam Rayburn was often alone.

He had wanted so desperately not to be alone. He had wanted a family—a wife and children. Driving through the Washington suburbs with a friend not long after he first arrived in the capital, he had said, as they passed the Chevy Chase Country Club, “I want a house that big,” and when the friend asked him why, he said, “For all my children.” Adults, another friend says, “were scared of Rayburn, but children weren’t. They took to him instinctively. They crawled all over him and rubbed their hands over his bald head.” He would sit talking to a little girl or boy for hours—with a broad, gentle grin on that great, hard face to which, it sometimes seemed, no man could bring a smile. Friends who saw Sam Rayburn with women realized that his usual grim demeanor concealed—that, in fact, the grimness was a mask deliberately donned to conceal—a terrible shyness and insecurity. He was always afraid of looking foolish; he would never tell a joke in a speech because, he said, “I tried to tell a joke once in a speech, and before I got through, I was the joke.” And this fear seemed accentuated when he was with women. He had fallen in love once—with the beautiful, dark-haired, eighteen-year-old sister of another Texas Congressman, his friend Marvin Jones; Rayburn was thirty-six at the time. Although he wrote Metze Jones regularly, nine years passed before he asked her to marry him; friends say it took him that long to work up the nerve. And when—in 1927, when Rayburn was forty-five—they finally became engaged, he asked her to make the engagement short; “I was in a great hurry to get married … before she changed her mind,” he wrote a friend. The marriage lasted three months. Rayburn never spoke of what had happened; so tight-lipped was he on the subject that most men who met him in later years never learned he had been married. (Once, when he was an old man, he was talking to a group of Girl Scouts, one of whom asked why he wasn’t married. “Oh, I’m so cranky that nobody would have me,” he said. “
I’ll
marry you,” one of the girls said. Rayburn laughed.) Fishbait Miller, who knew about the marriage—in working with Rayburn for thirty years, he learned things about Rayburn despite Rayburn—says that even after Metze remarried, Rayburn “kept watch over her from a distance”; when her daughter from the second marriage contracted polio, the girl was admitted immediately to the famed polio treatment center at Warm Springs despite the long waiting list. (“It is true that someone can be powerful and you can feel very sorry for him,” Miller says. “I felt sorry for Rayburn because he lost the woman he loved.”) For years thereafter, Rayburn had not a single date. He may, in fact, never have had more than a few scattered dates; no one really knows.
After Metze left him, Sam Rayburn was alone. He moved into two rooms in a small, rather dingy apartment house near Dupont Circle, where he lived for the rest of his life.