The Path to Power (63 page)

Complicating the problems of all forty-eight state directors was the strictness of the criteria by which NYA headquarters in Washington would determine the acceptability of proposed “work projects.” To avoid displacement of adult workers, for example, the projects could not involve work that would otherwise be undertaken by state or local government. To ensure that the limited NYA funds went primarily to young people rather than to contractors or suppliers, NYA Bulletin No. 11 required that 75 percent of project allocations be spent on wages (this requirement reduced the amount that could be spent on the materials and equipment essential for work projects to an unrealistically low level). Complicating the state directors’ problems further was the lack of guidance from Washington. Recalls one director: “When we asked Washington: ‘What kind of work?’ we were told: ‘That’s up to you. …’ But we didn’t know, we couldn’t possibly have known what kind of work these youths wanted or needed.”

Complicating the problems of the Texas NYA director—the youngest of the forty-eight directors and one of the few without public works or administrative experience—was the factor that complicated
every
problem in Texas: its vast size. Every attempt to establish a statewide public works program in Texas had been hamstrung by the variations in climatic, cultural, social and economic conditions in a state 800 miles from top to bottom, and almost 800 miles wide, a state that, had it been located in the East, would have covered all the states of New England, as well as New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia. Since, moreover, the state was divided into 254 counties, public works programs could not feasibly be
planned on a county-by-county basis, as would be possible in other states. Nibbling at the problem would not solve it. A statewide program, one applicable to all counties, and unaffected by sectional variations, was what was needed. Lyndon Johnson had to find a public works project that no one else had thought of, that required only minuscule expenditures on the materials and equipment that normally were staples of public works projects, and that had huge, sweeping, statewide scope.

It was while discussing Lyndon Johnson’s early days with the NYA that his wife first told this author, “Lyndon was not the supremely confident person he seemed, you know.” L. E. Jones, who had returned to Austin but worked part-time for the NYA for a few weeks, says, “They had to spend the money, and they had to do it fast. This was a decision that Lyndon had to make. … Making the decision was hard. I remember the interminable wrangling over what’s going to be our first project. They just couldn’t decide. Everybody had a different idea.”

Finally, after weeks of discussion, someone—no one remembers who—hit on the idea of building “roadside parks” adjoining the state’s many new highways: areas of an acre or two that would be leveled and paved with gravel, and in which would be set a few picnic tables, a few benches and three or four barbecue pits as well as shrubs and shade trees. Without even comfort stations, by Eastern standards such small areas would scarcely justify the name of parks, but in barren Texas, where it was possible to drive a hundred miles with no place to picnic except the ground, they would be welcome. They would, moreover, improve highway safety. Lack of such facilities had caused accidents because motorists had been forced to park on highway shoulders or (because many highways in Texas were built with only narrow shoulders or with none at all) on the edge of the roadway itself while they picnicked or relieved themselves, or, on long trips, slept at night. Only a few months before, a family of five had been killed near San Antonio when a car rammed theirs while they were sleeping under it during a rainstorm.

The State Highway Department enthusiastically agreed to furnish not only the necessary land and materials—mostly cement and wood for the benches and tables—but also the transportation (young workers would be taken to each site in departmental trucks) that was an important consideration in so sparsely populated a state. And when the Department also agreed to furnish the supervision (by departmental foremen), the roadside parks became projects which met fully the NYA’s requirement that 75 percent of the cost go directly for young people’s wages. The little parks met as well the criteria peculiar to Texas; suitable to all climates, they could be built everywhere in the state, and the Highway Department, a statewide organization, was of course the sponsor. Since the Department had had no plans to build such parks, the projects would not displace regular departmental employees. One additional criterion, not referred to in NYA bulletins,
remained: for political reasons, as Jones puts it, the project “had to not only be good, but look good; it had to be something that would be popular.” So important was this to Johnson that he had persuaded Maury Maverick to let him hire his speechwriter, an ex-newspaperman named Herbert C. Henderson, to write up each proposal that had been discussed “to see how it sounded.” No previous proposal had seemed right, but when Henderson finished writing up this one, Jones says, it “turned out to be perfect.” When Johnson realized that he had a project at last, his relief could not be contained. “He was beside himself with happiness.” Jones, the near-perfect typist, had to stay up all night copying Henderson’s description to be sent to Washington for official approval. And then, as dawn was breaking over Austin, Johnson walked with Jones to the post office, to see with his own eyes that the precious proposal was placed properly in a mailbox. Within a few days, a handful of young men carrying picks and shovels rode out of Austin on a Highway Department flatbed truck to begin building, on Route 8 near Williamson Creek, the first roadside park in Texas. If there had been desperation to find the right program, once they found it, there was desperation to get it under way. “Lyndon was like a crazy man,” Jones says. “He just worked night and day, he just worked his staff to distraction.” By June, 1936, 135 parks would be under construction, and 3,600 youths would be earning thirty dollars per month working on them.
*

H
IS QUOTA
, of course, was not 3,600 jobs, but 12,000. Some were created by additional projects connected with the Highway Department. NYA workers built “rural school walks”—gravel paths paralleling heavily traveled highways—to encourage children to stay out of the road while walking to school. They trimmed back trees and shrubs to improve visibility at dangerous intersections and curves. They filled in the erosion-caused ditches that lined many Texas highways and whose slopes were so steep that a car veering even a few feet off the road could overturn in them; and, to inhibit future erosion, they built drainage ditches. They graveled the last several hundred feet of dirt roads which intersected paved highways, because when rain turned these roads to mud, cars dragged the mud onto the highways and made them slippery. They built graveled “turn-outs” by farmers’ mailboxes in areas where mailmen had created a traffic hazard when they stopped their cars on the pavement. These were small projects—even smaller than the roadside parks—but they would furnish another 2,800 jobs.

To create more jobs, “local” projects—projects involving only a
single town—were necessary. As with the Highway Department projects, NYA regulations required that the materials and equipment be supplied by an “outside” sponsor. Johnson asked local officials to suggest improvements they wanted to see made in their towns.

In some places, the response was: “We don’t want any federal handouts,” and in other towns, the small “in” group didn’t want any innovations that might interfere with its power; one area that particularly resisted the NYA, for example, was Karnack, Lady Bird’s home town—because of Lady Bird’s father. Cap’n Taylor “ran things in Karnack,” Bill Deason recalls, and in the whole northern end of Harrison County. “And he said, ‘You just stay out of the north end of the county. I’ll take care of the folks up here.’” But such resistance wasn’t widespread, because most towns were desperate over the plight of their young people. A more serious problem was the lack of initiative and ability to think along new lines. “Even if they wanted the [federal] money, they didn’t have any imagination,” Deason says. “We tried terrifically not to have any of that leaf-raking that was being criticized so much elsewhere, but so often they didn’t have any worthwhile ideas of what projects might be worthwhile to do.” Johnson overcame these problems. “Lyndon Johnson had to
sell
,” Bill Deason says. “And I’ve told you before, he was the greatest salesman I’ve ever seen. He would say, ‘Now, I’ve got a mission to do, and the money to do it with. Now you’ve got to get us a worthwhile program.’” Proposals for local “work projects” began to be sent in to the NYA offices on the sixth floor of the Littlefield Building in Austin.

W
ORK PROJECTS
provided income for young men and women who were out of school. The other half of the NYA program was to keep young men and women
in school
—to provide them with jobs on campus that would allow them to earn enough to continue their education. Implementing the student-aid portion of the program required little creativity. The number of students who could be employed—in colleges, 12 percent of the previous year’s enrollment; in high schools, 7 percent—had been set by directives from Washington, as had broad guidelines as to the type of job that would be acceptable, and the amount that could be paid: up to twenty dollars a month for an individual student, although the average payments within a single institution could not exceed fifteen dollars. But the program required desperate haste.

September was approaching—September, when tens of thousands of young Texans would have to drop out of school unless they received help. The NYA state directors had not been appointed until late July, the enrollment and salary quotas had not been issued until August 15, and these guidelines had to be interpreted state by state and then explained to the college deans and high school principals who would have to select the jobs that
met them. And the size of Texas made explaining more difficult than in other states, even after the NYA allowed Johnson to divide the state into four districts, each with its own District Director. “There was [still] a lot of travel involved,” Deason was to recall. “These young district men [directors] we had out there would maybe be setting up a project in one county seat today and trying to get another started a hundred miles away the same day. He might work until eleven-thirty in the morning at one, and just jump in his car and get to the other one by one or two in the afternoon and try to work there.”

Attempts to make haste were snarled by a human factor: the reluctance of college and high school administrators to decide which students would be given the precious NYA jobs. Twelve percent of their students might be eligible for NYA aid, but a much higher percentage needed such aid; 29,000 college students would apply for the 5,400 jobs available in Texas. Futures—the chance for an education, the chance to get off the farm—hung in the balance on administrators’ decisions, and they knew it. Dean Victor I. Moore of the University of Texas, who during the Spring term, a few months before, had dug deep into his own meager savings to keep a few students in school, arrived at the NYA offices with the list of the 761 students he had selected out of more than 3,500 applicants, and, as he handed the list to Deason, said: “I feel like I have blood on my hands.” Shrinking from such decisions, other administrators delayed submitting the necessary lists to the NYA as the precious days passed.

Adding to the snarl was red tape. To ensure that student aid would go only to bona-fide students, the NYA required that all aid recipients carry at least 75 percent of the normal academic schedule. Compliance with this requirement had to be certified by the college for each student, and then by the NYA. To ensure that the jobs provided by the college would not deprive adults of work, the NYA required that NYA jobs not be work that could be done out of the regular college budget. To avoid alienating organized labor, pay scales had to be set at the hourly rates for comparable labor in the area. And to avoid criticism that the students were “boondoggling,” the jobs had to be necessary, not “make work.” Compliance with these requirements—and with a dozen more—had to be certified. For each student employee, therefore, the college had to fill out long, complicated forms—in quadruplicate, so that while the college kept one copy, others could be sent to the state NYA, the WPA and the State Department of Education. Only after certifications from all three agencies had been received by the Federal Disbursing Office in San Antonio would the desperately needed checks be mailed out—not to the students, but to the NYA office, which would in turn, under national NYA procedures, distribute them to the colleges, which would in turn distribute them to the students. When dealing with high school students, only students whose families were on relief were eligible; no application could be processed by the NYA until certification
of such fact was received from either the Texas Relief Commission or the WPA; both these agencies, swamped with their own work, and believing that it was more important to get heads of families certified for their own programs than to certify students, gave low priority to NYA certifications. And if a form was filled out incorrectly, the WPA would simply return it, often after weeks had passed. The NYA’s Washington office added to the confusion by continually issuing new sets of regulations which often contradicted one another. By late August, many state directors were telling Washington that they could not possibly implement the programs in time for September registration.

T
HE
NYA’
S TEXAS OFFICES
had originally been a three-room suite in the seven-story Littlefield Building, one of the tallest buildings in the little city of Austin; now the NYA office expanded into five rooms, and then six and seven, all crammed with people, as the staff expanded and expanded again.

The staff was very young. With few exceptions, its members shared two characteristics: they had gone to college at San Marcos, and they had graduated only recently; of the first twenty-six men Lyndon Johnson appointed to administrative posts in the Texas NYA (women in the NYA offices worked only as secretaries), nineteen were in their twenties.