The Path to Power (25 page)

When, moreover, Johnson City teen-agers used the phrase “No opportunities,” they were talking about more than career opportunities. The lack of money was not the lack they felt most.

The roar of the Twenties was only the faintest of echoes in those vast and empty hills—a mocking echo to Hill Country farmers who read of Coolidge Prosperity and the reduction in the work week to forty-eight hours and the bright new world of mass leisure, while they themselves were still working the seven-day-a-week, dawn-to-dark schedule their fathers and grandfathers had worked; a mocking echo to Hill Country housewives who read of the myriad new labor-saving devices (washing machines, electric irons, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators) that had “freed” the housewife. Even if they had been able to afford such devices, they would not have been able to switch them on since the Hill Country was still without electricity.

America—confident, cocky, Bull Market, hip-flask, Jazz-Age America—was changing in the Twenties, changing with furious and exciting speed; even much of Texas, still geographically isolated from the rest of the country,
was changing, as oil made a boomtown out of Beaumont and war-born industries stayed on to turn Houston and Dallas and even Austin into fast-growing cities. But little of the excitement managed to penetrate those hills. It was the Age of Radio; even the poor had radio; forests of antennas had sprung up on tenement-house roofs; even the rural poor had radio, which was ending the isolation of many rural areas by, in the words of historian David A. Shannon, “bringing the world” not only to “the middle-class home” but to “the tar-paper shack with an immediacy never before known. … By the middle of the decade, few people were out of earshot of the loudspeaker.” But the Hill Country did not have radio; with the exception of a few crystal sets whose operators sat hunched over the needle they kept maneuvering to bring into their earphones sounds from New York almost two thousand miles away, no one in the Hill Country heard the voice which, during the Democratic National Convention of 1924, became familiar to the rest of America as it bellowed over and over, “Alabama—twenty-four votes for Underwoo—ood!” It was the Age of Movies; by the time “the boys … came trooping home” from the war in 1919, Shannon says, “the movie had set up its flickering screen in every crossroads village.” But the man who wrote that had never headed west out of Austin: movies in Johnson City, shown on the whitewashed wall of the second floor of Harold Withers’ “Opera House,” as Harold, Jr., provided background music by playing the same scratchy phonograph record over and over, were shown very infrequently; people couldn’t afford to pay the fifteen-cent admission charge too often. To the extent that the 1920’s were the age of radio and the movies, and of country clubs, golf, joy-riding and cheek-to-cheek dancing—of a new mass culture—the Hill Country was not a part of the 1920’s.

And the children of the Hill Country knew it. Not only were they not current on events, they knew they weren’t current—and they were ashamed. During Lyndon Johnson’s high-school years, the school’s students held a debate on the League of Nations. They sent away to the University of Texas extension service for articles, and studied them, and the students felt they understood the subject. But, they recall, it was the only international—or national—subject they understood. “You know, you couldn’t
get
any information out here, even if you wanted it,” Louise Casparis says. “In bad weather, even the newspaper wouldn’t come in—maybe for a week at a time. We were completely cut off out here. We knew about the League, but that was all we knew about. That was the pathetic thing.” Truman Fawcett remembers that, during the years when Sam Johnson was still a politician, Lyndon would bring posters of the Democratic candidates for Governor and other state-wide offices around to shops and ask shopowners for permission to put them in the window. “And we had never even heard of most of them,” Fawcett says. “Their names were names we had never even
heard!
” Says Louise Casparis: “You just would hardly understand the situation back there that we grew up in, because, you know, we had no radio, no newspapers to
amount to anything—no
nothing!
We were just what you would call back in the woods, compared to the rest of the world.”

They felt poor, they felt “back in the woods”—and they felt bored. “It was a rather drab little city,” Lyndon Johnson’s sister Rebekah says. Says Emmette Redford:

There seemed no way out of that round. Once there had been excitement in Blanco County, but that excitement had ended when the last Comanche had faded away to the north. In the half-century since then, the round of life had changed hardly at all. If a teen-ager wanted to see what lay ahead of him, all he had to do was look across Courthouse Square—at the old men, once youths who had stood chatting in the square as they themselves were doing now, who appeared promptly at noon every day (they had, after all, nothing else to do) and sat playing dominoes for matchsticks until it became too dark to play anymore.

And what of the unusual teen-ager, the one more interested in the outside world, more intellectually active, more ambitious or, perhaps, simply more restless than the other teen-agers in Johnson City? Few Johnson City teen-agers—no more than a handful, really—graduated even from the eleventh grade, which was the last grade in its high school. Fewer still went off to college. And of those who went to college, almost none came back to their hometown. “So what was left in Johnson City,” says one who did come back, “were people who didn’t have much education, and weren’t much interested in current events or in the larger world. It wasn’t just that we didn’t have anything to read—we didn’t have anyone to talk to.”

And what, specifically, of the one teen-ager most interested in the outside
world, the teen-ager who put up the political posters? How did he feel about living out his life in the Johnson City round? Was that last high-school spring, so idyllic on the surface, an idyll for him?

The contemporary most like Lyndon Johnson, in the opinion of Johnson City residents, was a youth three years older, Emmette Redford. “We had two boys who grew up here who became presidents,” they say—and indeed Professor Redford, whose presidency was of the American Political Science Association, is the only other person who came out of Johnson City in the 1920’s to achieve any substantial measure of nationwide prestige even in a limited field. What were Redford’s feelings about Johnson City?

“Well,” he says slowly, “I had no resentment. I liked the people out there. They were friendly, good people.” He pauses, for quite a long time. Then he says, in a very different tone: “My feelings were
escape
, you see. It was a dull kind of life. It was boring. My God, it was boring! And there was always this feeling of insecurity, that you’d never have any of the comforts of life. And I couldn’t see any way of ever obtaining any security in Johnson City. I couldn’t see any way of accomplishing anything at all there. There were no opportunities in Johnson City. So my feelings were I had to get out of that town. I had to escape. I had to get out!”

Emmette Redford was a member of a family respected in Johnson City. What was it like to live in Johnson City and be a member of a ridiculed family—a family like the Johnsons?

During this period of his life, Lyndon Johnson was to say, he dreamed—over and over—the same terrible dream. In it, he was sitting alone in a small cage, “bare except for a stone bench and a pile of dark, heavy books.” An old woman walked by, holding a mirror, and, catching a glimpse of himself in it, he saw that he had suddenly turned from a teen-age boy into a gnarled old man. When he pleaded with the old woman to let him out, she would instead walk away. And when he awoke, dripping with sweat, he would be muttering in the night: “I must get away. I must get away.”

Many of Lyndon Johnson’s “dreams” were related to interviewers for a carefully calculated effect, but this dream, real or invented, seems to reveal true feelings, for these feelings are corroborated by outside, independent sources—the recollections of people who knew him—as well as by his actions. Emmette Redford wanted to get out of Johnson City. Lyndon Johnson was desperate to get out.

H
E REFUSED TO GET OUT
by the road his parents had mapped for him, though. And by refusing to take that road, he gave them one of the most painful wounds it was within his power to inflict on them. They had always assumed—this couple to whom their children’s education was so terribly important—that he would go to college. But now he said he wouldn’t.

His mother kept trying to reason with him, telling him, in the words of Ben Crider, the older boy whom she enlisted in the struggle, that without an education “you couldn’t get anywhere in life,” that “she knew he had the qualifications, and she wanted him to be important, … to make good.” She never, in the memory of Lyndon’s friends and siblings, raised her voice or lost her temper, just kept trying to persuade him to go, telling him that he had a good brain and should work with it, instead of his hands, to get ahead, telling him that if he didn’t go to college he would never learn to appreciate the beauties of literature or art, would never really learn the history in which he was so interested—kept trying to persuade him and encourage him, telling him she knew he would do well there. “Her big struggle was to get Lyndon” to go to college, Crider says—and she never gave up. Describing the struggle, Louise Casparis says: “‘Hope springs eternal’ was written about her.” Sam at first tried to reason with him, telling him that without an education all he could look forward to was a life of physical labor. Then he flatly ordered him to go. When Lyndon flatly refused, he tried insulting him, shouting, “You don’t have enough brains to take a college education!”

Neither his mother’s pleading nor his father’s shouting moved him, however. His need to stand out, to “be somebody,” to dominate, hadn’t abated; now, more than ever, his friends recall, “Lyndon was always talking big”; once, when he said he would be a Congressman one day, and Fritz Koeniger laughed, Lyndon said, “‘I’ll see you in Washington’—and he wasn’t kidding at all.” But, according to a girl who went to the only college in the Hill Country—Southwest Texas State Teachers College at San Marcos—to whom he confided some of his feelings during the summer following his graduation from high school, he was afraid he couldn’t be somebody at college. Academic standards were much lower at Southwest Texas than at the University of Texas, but Lyndon was afraid they were too high for him: Johnson City High wasn’t an accredited school; before a Johnson City graduate could be admitted, in fact, he had to take examinations to prove he was up to college level in his courses. Says the girl, Lyndon’s cousin Elizabeth Roper Clemens: “He didn’t have a full education, and he knew it.” And, Mrs. Clemens says, although tuition at Southwest Texas was low—much lower than the university, for example—he would have to work while at school, “and going to school as just another poor boy—well, that wasn’t something Lyndon wanted to do.”

But perhaps there was something else behind Lyndon’s attitude. College, the world of books, of Truth and Beauty, of the poetry his mother loved, of the ideals and abstractions so dear to his mother and father both, was the very essence of his parents’ way of life—of everything important to these two people. He had seen what their way had got them. He had seen what it had got
him
. And he refused to go to college.

I
F HE WOULDN’T
go to college, his father said, he’d have to go to work.

The state was gravel-topping six miles of the highway between Johnson City and Austin with gravel from the banks of Miller Creek. First, so rocky were those banks, the gravel had to be loosened with pickaxes. Then it had to be shoveled into mule-drawn wagons. The boards that formed the beds of the wagons had been loosened, and after the mules had hauled the wagons into position on the highway, the boards would be turned so that the gravel fell through onto the road, where it was smoothed out with rakes. Only the pickaxing was easy. For what the axes loosened was not soil but that hard Hill Country rock, so that the shovelfuls that had to be lifted up into the wagons were heavy. And the wagon boards had to be turned by hand, turned with piles of rock on top of them.