The Path to Power (95 page)

And there was the suspicion, generations old, of a people who felt that they had been victimized by railroads and utilities. The first letter sent out on behalf of the PEC—by secretary-treasurer Hugo Klappenbach—sought to allay those suspicions in a rallying cry that might have been sounded by a lecturer of the old Farmers’ Alliance. “This line is being built by the consumers it serves and they are the owners,” he said. “… It will not try to cover up the investments it has either.” The management is local people, “and does not have to wait for some group of New York financiers to grant permits or concessions.” “Let’s stand together and build our own electric distribution lines and then have the voice in the control.” Creation of the
PEC, he said, would free the Hill Country from dependence on the Northeast: “We may see the opening up of manufacturing interests here where the raw materials are grown. Why should we continually send our wool to Boston? Why not manufacture it here or anyway … get it ready to spin right where it is grown?” But many Hill Country residents could not believe that they would really keep the “voice in the control.” Lyndon Johnson was sitting on the porch of his cousin Ava’s home one afternoon, talking about the PEC, when Ava’s husband, Ohlen Cox, suddenly burst out: “I don’t believe it’s going to work, Lyndon. The Northerners will pull the strings, and buck you down.” And the reluctance sprang from ignorance about the potential benefits of the product they were being asked to buy. To many Hill Country families, electricity meant light bulbs—a benefit, to be sure, but not, in the view of many, a benefit worth risking losing one’s farm for. “Something you had never had or experienced—are you going to miss it?” Babe Smith asks. The county agents and community leaders were not having much success in the sign-up campaign. Babe Smith remembers a meeting in the Kempner schoolhouse attended by perhaps one hundred farmers and their families. At the beginning of the meeting, Smith passed out PEC applications; only two of the farmers signed them. So Johnson tried
his
hand at persuasion. “He played on the emotions of the women,” Smith says. He talked about his mother, and how he had watched her hauling buckets of water from the river, and rubbing her knuckles off on the scrub board. Electricity could help them pump their water and wash their clothes, he said. When they got refrigerators, they would no longer have to “start fresh every morning” with the cooking. “You’ll look younger at forty than your mother,” he told them. Because he was the Congressman—and, to rural people, therefore an object almost of awe—and because he was “very persuasive,” they listened to him attentively. But they didn’t sign up. On the Fourth of July, 1938, he drove with Smith from picnic to picnic—Smith had brought along a Sears, Roebuck catalogue to show them the washing machines and refrigerators that they could use if they had electricity—but collected only a few handfuls of signed applications. “In the car going to the next town, he [Johnson] would say: ‘What’s the matter with these damned people? You offer them something …’ He’d get discouraged.” Despite months of effort, the county agents had collected nowhere near the number required—not three per mile, but fewer than two. The Pedernales Electric Co-op appeared stillborn. Johnson warned the farmers that if they didn’t establish a cooperative to purchase the electricity created by the dams, TP&L might buy it—and offer it only at rates they could never afford. In a speech entitled “Our South,” he said, “I believe we should use that power. I believe that river is yours, and the power it can generate belongs to you.”

“So,” says one of the PEC’s first directors, “we went back to Lyndon. The only man who could talk for us.”

He had tried to talk to the REA, going all the way up to the new
Administrator, John Carmody, but had had no luck. There was only one man left to talk to. Johnson asked Corcoran to get him in to see the President.

In later years, Johnson told many stories—each different—of what he said to the President, and what the President said to him when Corcoran finally, after considerable difficulty, obtained an audience for him. According to his story on one occasion, Roosevelt picked up the telephone while Johnson was still in the room, called Carmody and said, “John, I know you have got to have guidelines and rules and I don’t want to upset them, but you just go along with me—just go ahead and approve this loan. … Those folks will catch up to that density problem because they breed pretty fast.” On September 27, 1938, a telegram arrived at the temporary Johnson City office of the Pedernales Electric Co-operative: the REA, it said, had granted the PEC a loan of $1,322,000 (shortly to be raised to $1,800,000) to build 1,830 miles of electric lines that would bring electricity to 2,892 Hill Country families.

I
N SO IMPOVERISHED AN AREA
, the very existence of a large-scale—and government-financed—construction project was significant. The average wage in the Hill Country had been about a dollar or $1.50 per day, but workers on government projects were paid the minimum wage in the area: forty cents an hour or $3.20 per day. Three hundred men would be employed on the PEC project, but when Babe Smith arrived to open the PEC’s first hiring office, in Bertram, several times three hundred men were standing in line to apply for these jobs. Many were given to men who had wanted electricity but had not been able to raise the five-dollar deposit; they paid it out of these wages. Herman Brown—Brown & Root had been given the contract to construct the PEC lines—was able to hire men who were known to be very hard workers. They needed to be. The poles that would carry the electrical lines had to be sunk in rock. Brown & Root’s mechanical hole-digger broke on the hard Hill Country rock. Every hole had to be dug mostly by hand. Eight- or ten-man crews would pile into flatbed trucks—which also carried their lunch and water—in the morning and head out into the hills. Some trucks carried axemen, to hack paths through the cedar; others contained the hole-diggers. “The hole-diggers were the strongest men,” Babe Smith says. Every 300 or 400 feet, two would drop off and begin digging a hole by pounding the end of a crowbar into the limestone. After the hole reached a depth of six inches, half a stick of dynamite was exploded in it, to loosen the rock below, but that, too, had to be dug out by hand. “Swinging crowbars up and down—that’s hard labor,” Babe Smith says. “That’s back-breaking labor.” But the hole-diggers had incentive. For after the hole-digging teams came the pole-setters and “pikemen,” who, in teams of three, set the poles—thirty-five-foot pine poles from East Texas—into the rock,
and then the “framers” who attached the insulators, and then the “stringers” who strung the wires, and at the end of the day the hole-diggers could see the result of their work stretching out behind them—poles towering above the cedars, silvery lines against the sapphire sky. And the homes the wires were heading toward were their own homes. “These workers—they were the men of the cooperative,” Smith says. Gratitude was a spur also. Often the crews didn’t have to eat the cold lunch they had brought. A woman would see men toiling toward her home to “bring the lights.” And when they arrived, they would find that a table had been set for them—with the best plates, and the very best food that the family could afford. Three hundred men—axemen, polemen, pikers, hole-diggers, framers—were out in the Edwards Plateau, linking it to the rest of America, linking it to the twentieth century, in fact, at the rate of about twelve miles per day.

Still, with 1,800 miles of line to build, the job seemed—to families very eager for electricity—to be taking a very long time. After the lines had been extended to their farms, and the farms were wired, they waited with wires hanging from the ceiling and bare bulbs at the end, for the lines to be energized. “It will not be long now until mother can throw away the sad irons,” the
Blanco County News
exulted. But month after month passed, for the lines could not be energized until the entire project was substantially completed. As the months passed, the Hill Country’s suspicion of the government was aroused again. Brian Smith had persuaded many of his neighbors to sign up, and now, more than a year after they had paid their five dollars, and then more money to have their houses wired, his daughter Evelyn recalls that her neighbors decided they weren’t really going to get it. She recalls that “All their money was tied up in electric wiring”—and their anger was directed at her family. Dropping in to see a friend one day, she was told by the friend’s parents to leave: “You and your city ways. You can go home, and we don’t care to see you again.” They were all but ostracized by their neighbors. Even they themselves were beginning to doubt; it had been so long since the wiring was installed, Evelyn recalls, that they couldn’t remember whether the switches were in the ON or OFF position.

But then one evening in November, 1939, the Smiths were returning from Johnson City, where they had been attending a declamation contest, and as they neared their farmhouse, something was different.

“Oh my God,” her mother said. “The house is on fire!”

But as they got closer, they saw the light wasn’t fire. “No, Mama,” Evelyn said. “The lights are on.”

They were on all over the Hill Country. “And all over the Hill Country,” Stella Gliddon says, “people began to name their kids for Lyndon Johnson.”

L
YNDON JOHNSON
was so energetic and ingenious a Congressman that a knowledgeable observer called him “the best Congressman for a district that
ever was
.” He was, moreover, secure in his congressional seat. In 1938, he would be one of eight Texas Congressmen who did not have an opponent in the Democratic primary, or in the general election in November. In 1940, he would again be unopposed. But a Congressman was not what Lyndon Johnson wanted to be. No sooner had he won the Tenth District seat than he was trying to leave it—as rapidly as possible.

On the day after he had been elected to the House of Representatives, while he was still in the hospital recuperating from his appendicitis attack, he had begun preparing for the next step toward his great goal by writing National Youth Administration officials to urge that Jesse Kellam’s appointment as Texas NYA director be made permanent. His success in securing that appointment for his loyal Number Two man had ensured that his statewide organization would be kept in place, and he worked continuously to build it up and to utilize it. NYA work was only part of what his NYA men were doing all across Texas: whenever one visited a town to check on an NYA project, he was supposed also, says one, “to go to the Courthouse to see the Mayor” and other local politicians, and to see “the school people” and the postmasters, who were often key figures in a local political structure. The NYA man was instructed to put in a good word for Congressman Johnson, and to ask if, although Johnson was not the Mayor’s own Congressman, there was any service Johnson could perform for him or for his town. He was also told to keep his ears open for political gossip, and report it to “the Chief.” And these reports were not ignored. Says one NYA man, J. J. (Jake) Pickle, “I would write him long letters. And he would call me about them. He would re-explore what I had said. ‘Why did he say that? Repeat that.’”
The practice in Johnson’s Washington office was, moreover, the same now that he was a Congressman as it had been when he was a congressional secretary: no matter how busy the office might be, requests from “important people”—people with money or political clout—from the other twenty congressional districts in Texas were to be given urgent priority.

Every Wednesday, the Speaker’s Dining Room on the ground floor of the Capitol was reserved for a luncheon meeting of the Texas congressional delegation: two Senators, twenty-one Representatives (and, of course, should he want to sit in, Vice President Garner). At one luncheon each month, members of the delegation were permitted to bring occasional guests, either VIP’s from their districts who happened to be in Washington or Washington notables. But such invitations were issued sparingly. Says James H. Rowe, who spent a lifetime in the inner circles of power: “It was a great honor to be invited. I think that, in a lifetime, I got there five times or maybe six.”

At the other luncheons, guests were generally not permitted—no matter how important they might be. It was understood that these lunches were for business: to plan strategy or to iron out differences within the delegation so that Texas would present its customary united front. “You couldn’t bring guests except on that one day,” Congressman George H. Mahon of Lubbock recalls. “That was the unwritten law.”

Lyndon Johnson did not obey this law, and he violated it in a manner particularly infuriating to the other members of the delegation: he invited to the “closed” lunches not only his constituents—but theirs. On one Wednesday, for example, Amon Carter, Jr., son of the publisher of the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
, and the paper’s editor, James Record, were in Washington, and they asked Fort Worth’s Congressman, Wingate Lucas, if they could come to the famous delegation luncheon. But Lucas had once before asked Sam Rayburn for permission to bring an influential constituent to a closed session and had been refused. “There was no one I would rather take,” Lucas says. “These were my two key supporters. But it was a closed session. I told them I couldn’t take them. I went to the luncheon, and I was sitting there, and Lyndon Johnson walks in, and who do you think was with him?” Seeing Lucas, young Amon waved at him. Lucas sheepishly waved back.

(Johnson was able to violate the law because its enforcer was Rayburn, the delegation’s leader. Rayburn was customarily very strict about the “no outsiders” rule because the outsiders were, he knew, likely to be the big businessmen and lobbyists he hated. But when Johnson asked permission to bring a guest, Rayburn frequently gave it.)

Another unwritten but very firm law prohibited a Congressman from interfering in the affairs of other districts. Johnson did not obey this law, either. Asking the White House for an increase in funding for the Reserve Officers Training Corps at Texas A&M University, in Luther A. Johnson’s
Sixth District, he wrote that although the university was not in his district, “it is mine by adoption.”

And when federal grants were given in other districts—even grants for projects with which Johnson had had absolutely no connection—his tactics could be even more irritating.

Normally, if a project receiving a grant was located in a district with a Democratic Congressman, officials of the federal agency giving the grant would telephone that Congressman so that he could announce it, and thereby get credit for it. If the project was in Texas, however, Johnson’s friends in the agencies would often telephone him instead—and it would be Johnson who made the announcement. “I had been pushing for an extension of the Public Health Service Hospital in Fort Worth,” Lucas recalls. “Lyndon hadn’t had anything to do with it. But when it came about, Lyndon announced it, without even bothering to notify me.” And even when agency officials notified the district Congressman, they notified Johnson as well, and the efficiency of his staff, coupled with his long cultivation of the wire-service reporters, ensured that it was his name, not the other Congressman’s, that would be attached to the announcement.

“A lot of the delegation was sore as hell,” says the AP’s Lewis T. (“Tex”) Easley. They were, in fact, so sore that Johnson found it expedient to beat a retreat—but only a partial retreat. “He realized it was getting them too mad,” Easley says. “So after a while, he would announce it jointly.” The shift didn’t do much to alleviate tensions. After several “joint” announcements of federal projects in Corpus Christi, Dick Kleberg, his former employer and the friendliest of men, could scarcely bring himself to nod to Johnson when they passed in the halls.

T
HE ILL-FEELING
engendered in the Texas delegation by such tactics was exacerbated by Johnson’s personality. His efforts to dominate other men succeeded with one or two fellow Texans (most notably, quiet, unassertive Representative Robert Poage of Waco), but with most of the delegation, tough, successful politicians in their own right, they aroused only resentment—as did his efforts to dominate every room in which he was present. As he strolled through the House Dining Room at lunchtime, acting if he were some visiting celebrity, nodding to left and right, “head huddling” with one man or another, or as he sat at a table, talking too loudly, other Congressmen muttered under their breaths. Albert Thomas of Houston would sit staring at Johnson, snarling
sotto voce
: “Listen to that sonofabitch talking about himself.” Other mutters were occasioned by what Lucas calls “insincerity.” Johnson “was so insincere,” Lucas says. “He would tell everyone what he thought they wanted to hear. As a result, you couldn’t believe anything he said.” Ewing Thomason of El Paso had served in the Texas Legislature with Sam Johnson, and initially had gone out of his way to
befriend Sam’s son. Approaching Thomason in the dining room one day, Lyndon Johnson promised him his support on a controversial issue. “Ewing,” he said earnestly, “if there’s anyone you can believe, it’s me.” Then he swung across the room and started talking to several Congressmen who happened to be opposing Thomason on the issue. Thomason muttered: “There’s that sonofabitch telling them the same thing he told me.”

Mutter though they did, however, few cared to raise their voices—for they didn’t want Sam Rayburn to hear them. “Rayburn had this very strong feeling for Lyndon,” Lucas says. “And that feeling protected Lyndon. Nobody in the delegation wanted to get Rayburn mad.”

T
HE OTHER MEMBERS
of the delegation understood why Johnson was making speeches—and friends—all across Texas.

He certainly made no secret of the fact that he wanted to be a United States Senator, says George Mahon, who, without such ambitions himself, was tolerant of Johnson. Chatting with Mahon in the cloakroom, or walking back to the Cannon Building with him, Johnson would frequently pull out a newspaper clipping dealing with local conditions—not conditions in Austin, but in Houston, or Dallas, or Lubbock. “He would always have an editorial from the Dallas paper or the El Paso paper, and he would sit down next to you on the floor [of the House] and tell you or ask you [about it]. …” Influential citizens from other districts were cultivated not only when they were visiting Washington, but back home as well. He solicited speaking invitations from cities all across Texas, and, Mahon says, “When he was in town, he would court them, would call them up. And, of course, if someone important, like a Congressman, calls you up, you’re flattered.” Mahon began to realize that “in my district [which was almost 300 miles from Johnson’s], he [had] made friends with the key people. He courted the right people in the right places [all over] the state. He had statewide ambitions from the day he came up here.”

But Lyndon Johnson’s fellow Texans saw no possibility that those ambitions would be realized—at least not for years and years. Neither of the state’s two Senators, Tom Connally and Morris Sheppard—both in their early sixties—was considering retirement, and their immense popularity made remote indeed the possibility that either would
be
retired by the electorate. Should one of the two seats become vacant for some reason, Lyndon Johnson would not be the first choice to fill it. That would be Governor Allred, who wanted the job, or any one of several other state officials with a statewide reputation. Johnson would not be first even among the state’s Congressmen; several would be more logical choices—most notably Maury Maverick, a White House favorite, or the energetic and ambitious Wright Patman, who was widely known for his authorship of the Patman Bonus Bill and several pieces of Populist legislation. There was,
in the view of the Texas delegation, no realistic chance of a junior Congressman competing with such figures—particularly not a junior Congressman from the Tenth District. The isolation of that district—the expanse of empty plains that surrounded it and cut it off from the rest of Texas—had kept its Congressman unknown in most of the huge state. Says a Dallas political figure: “I had never even
heard
the name of Lyndon Johnson at that time.”

None of the Texas delegation saw the real ambition—the goal toward which a Senate seat, like a congressional seat, would be only a stepping-stone. Had they seen it, they would have scoffed at it, and not only because of Johnson’s youth and lack of power. While Texans would later maintain that their state was more part of the West than the South, during the pre-war years they regarded themselves as Southerners, and among Southerners on Capitol Hill it was an article of faith—bitter faith—that no Southerner would ever be President of the United States. When, in 1946, his congressional colleagues gave Sam Rayburn a car, the plaque on it would read: “To Our Beloved Sam Rayburn—Who would have been President if he had come from any place but the South.” But no member of the delegation saw the true goal, none got even a glimpse of it. When, in fact, his congressional colleagues were discussing the possibilities of a Southerner obtaining national office, Johnson would aver that there was no chance of that, and that a Southerner would be foolish to leave a secure seat on Capitol Hill to try for national office: “
This
is our home; this is where we have our strength,” he would say.

Others did see the real goal—despite him. George Brown, of course, knew after that day on the blanket at the Greenbrier when Johnson turned down wealth in the interests of some unstated ambition. Rowe, who was keenly observant in his quiet way—and who spent more time with Johnson than any of the other young New Dealers—says, “From the day he got here, he wanted to be President.” And one time, at least, Johnson did reveal himself. One evening, alone with Welly Hopkins, he burst out: “By
God
, I’ll be President someday.” But even the few who guessed the goal at which Lyndon Johnson was really aiming could not imagine how he could ever realize it. A Senate seat was not the only path to it—national power of another type, behind-the-scenes power, might help him along the road—but men conversant with such power—the young New Dealers he had cultivated—could not see how he could possibly obtain some of it, at least not in any foreseeable future. They were his friends, but they were only young and junior members of the Administration. The fact that he was also young and junior was emphasized by the difficulty Corcoran had experienced trying to get him even a few minutes with the President to obtain approval of the Pedernales Electric Co-operative loan.

As soon as he had arrived in Washington in May, 1937, Johnson had attempted to capitalize on the glow of the Galveston meeting, using every
possible opening, no matter how slim; during 1937, he requested autographed pictures not only from the President but from the President’s son, James, from presidential secretary Marvin McIntyre, from every White House staffer he had met, however briefly—and the requests were accompanied by reminders of the circumstances of his election (sending a copy of the Galveston photograph to “My dear Marvin,” Johnson noted that “This photograph was taken … shortly after my election to Congress in the hot fight over reorganization of the Judiciary”), and by reminders of his loyalty; his letters referred to Roosevelt as “the Chief.” On Christmas Eve, 1937, he had delivered to the President, to his son, to McIntyre, and to other White House staffers the huge turkeys (so big they seemed to have been “crossed with a beef”), accompanied by carefully composed notes. “Dear Mr. McIntyre,” one said, “The other day I went up into the hills of Central Texas where I was born to pick out the finest turkey I could get my hand on for the President. … I’m asking my secretary to deliver this turkey to you at the White House, for the President. … And I want to tell you that one of the reasons my own Christmas is so pleasant and joyous is due to the fact that with a million things to do, you have also had time to take a youngster on the hill under your wing when he needed it and to give him a lot of help, encouragement and advice. I am very grateful. Most sincerely yours, Lyndon.”