American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  How escape caste and class? Some blacks conducted desperate little rebellions of their own, almost invariably to be crushed. Some quietly hunkered down in their own protective storm cellars of home or community. Some acculturated, imitating white ways, but color was still the impassable barrier to “uppity niggers.” Many fled to the North or other parts of the South. During the 1950s the Southeast registered a net loss of almost 1.5 million blacks. Between 1940 and 1960 the percentage of the nation’s blacks living in the Southeast fell from 61 to 45, with the black farm population dropping by about two-thirds.

  Blacks were tempted north in much the same ways European immigrants had been tempted west, by glowing reports of jobs, schools, “freedom,” but often they found that they had merely exchanged their rural ghettos for urban ones. Migratory workers, black and white, followed the crops north, moving as the crops ripened—citrus fruit and tomatoes and potatoes in Florida, corn and snap beans in the Carolinas, berries and fruits in Virginia and Maryland, then the table vegetables of New Jersey and New York and, late in the fall, the potatoes of Maine. Encountering working and living conditions like those of the California Okies, many East Coast migrants returned home bitterly disillusioned about freedom north of “south of freedom.”

  Even more remarkable was the migration of southern blacks within the South. Hundreds of thousands living in rural areas moved into southern cities; hundreds of thousands living in the “core” or “solid” South moved to the “rim” states, especially Florida, Louisiana, and Virginia. Some never made it, returning home or ending up as migratory labor within the South. But for countless blacks the move from country to city, from heartland to “rim,” brought better jobs, schools, and living conditions. A few even won white-collar positions, though most black women became household or service workers, and the number of them employed in private households increased during the 1950s.

  On the surface, early in the 1950s the economic and political system of the Deep South seemed little changed. Underneath, a vast social transformation was underway, including the emergence of young black activists and a dramatic rise in the number of black children, more of whom now were getting some schooling. But whether blacks would break out of their social and psychological bonds depended on a liberating leadership that still lacked power at either the national or the community level.

  Many rural whites in the South were poverty-stricken too, in their lack of good education, housing, nutrition, medical care, but they did not share these conditions with the blacks; the two races were often more sharply segregated in low-income areas than in middle-class. Entrenched white poverty extended to Appalachia, which included northern sections of Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee as well as all of West Virginia and parts of five more northern states. Southern Appalachia in particular presented the familiar pathology of poverty—“low income, high unemployment, lack of urbanization, low educational achievement, and a low level of living,” as one report summarized it. Typically poor Appalachian whites lacked even the “niggers” to look down on, but in coal-mining towns where the companies had recruited blacks from the South, the races lived, prayed, and schooled separately. A white coal miner related that after he had worked agreeably with a “colored boy” for some weeks and then quit merely to take a better job, his former boss looked him up and told him, “Jackson, if you will come back to work for me I’ll fire every damn Nigger on the job.”

  It was a land of magnificent mountain ranges and wretched little “hollers,” of abundant natural resources and human deprivation, of fierce family feuds and touching personal loyalties. In eastern Kentucky lay Harlan County, “bloody Harlan,” ravaged in the 1930s by strikes, lockouts, and the killing of striking coal miners and scabs. But beginning in Appalachia, reaching across most of Tennessee, and extending into adjacent states stretched a vast experiment in the taming of nature and the betterment of human lives. This was the Tennessee Valley Authority. One of the New Deal’s most daring and enlightened ventures, the TVA by 1960 had grown into a huge complex of thirty dams mainly on the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, flood-control projects, electric power generating plants, river-traffic expansion, fertilizer production, forestry protection and technology, malaria control, recreational development. The Authority’s significance lay in the way these activities interlinked and impinged upon people’s lives and enterprises. In an area of the country dominated by the caprices of nature and the limited vision of leaders, here was a project that connected commerce with flood prevention, promotion of traffic with water control, river-taming with cheap electricity, parks with regional development, altogether a supreme effort at rational planning. In a benign transformation of the people’s environment—at least until the advent of nuclear power—a new inland world was created, of lakes gleaming like diamond pendants along the once turbulent Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, of sailing and fishing, swimming and camping, hiking and animal watching.

  Far to the west, past the Mississippi River and Louisiana and eastern Texas, lay that part of the South that appeared the least southern of all. The hill country of central Texas sat in the south-center of the plains that stretched down the middle of Texas west of the Balcones Escarpment. The hill country, west of Austin and northwest of San Antonio, was grassy, giving way to brush, thin-soiled, dry, windy, and subject to drought—a poor land barely supporting poor people. To the hill country settlers had come throughout the last century, to raise cattle and cotton. By the end of the century the hill country was in a long decline, as cattle ate away the grass that shielded the soil even as cotton drained the soil itself. Here Lyndon B. Johnson was born in the summer of 1908; this land shaped him as a Southerner and politician.

  Within a few years Lyndon was showing qualities that would mark him for the rest of his life; he was bossy, competitive, restless, and ornery. For a time he and his father, Sam Ealy, and mother, Rebekah Baines, and four siblings lived in a warm family circle. He adored his mother and admired his father, a Democratic state representative of populist principles. And Lyndon heard much about his idealistic grandfather who had been an unsuccessful populist candidate for the Texas legislature. But by the time Lyndon was in his teens, gangling, big-eared, thin-faced, he was rebelling against Sam, who had fallen on hard times in a down cycle of the boom-and-bust economy of central Texas. Now the family lived in relative poverty and—Lyndon suspected—was the butt of ridicule for having lived high on the hog and fallen so low.

  The solution for young Johnson was escape. He fled to the company of older men and women in the neighborhood; journeyed south and worked eleven hours a day in a huge cotton gin, boiling hot and thick with lint and dust; made his way west to California, where he clerked in a cousin’s law office; returned home and worked with a road gang; and finally went off to college, to Southwest Texas State Teachers College at San Marcos. Some of LBJ’s enduring traits were shaped at San Marcos, as he played up to the college president and faculty, bossed the younger students, manipulated school elections, organized the underrepresented students against an elite group of star athletes—a strange mixture of bootlicker and bully, in the eyes of critical schoolmates. He took a year off to make some money by teaching in the “Mexican school” in Cotulla, a town of crumbling shanties situated on a desolate plain fifty miles from the Rio Grande.

  Almost everywhere young Johnson went he saw poverty—at home in his own family, among the cotton gin workers, at college, where some of the students were poorer than he. He found abject poverty in Cotulla, where there was no school lunch hour because the pupils had no lunch, and no playground except a debris-littered vacant lot. Undaunted, LBJ threw himself into the job, inspiring and disciplining the students, motivating the teachers, galvanizing much of the town. Promoted to principal at the very start, he demonstrated an insatiable need for respect and deference, but he exhibited as well a big heart. Discovering that the school janitor could not speak English, he spent hours before and after class time tutoring him—he also insisted th
at the school be spanking clean.

  Graduated from San Marcos in 1930, Johnson carried his competitiveness and his compassion, his raw ambition and his populist instincts, into a series of jobs—public-speaking teacher in Houston, Texas state director of the National Youth Administration, aide to a Texas congressman, candidate for Congress. If LBJ’s political character was foreshadowed in college, his political career was portended in his first campaign for the House. When the incumbent representative died in 1937 and the governor called a special “sudden death” election (that is, no runoff ), Johnson heard that the widow of the deceased was thinking of running. To head her off he announced at once—before the body was cold, as some Texans saw it— and she stayed out. There followed a wild melee as LBJ, twenty-eight years old and one of the most obscure of the contenders, scoured the district for votes, scrounged the countryside for money, and wrapped himself around with FDR’s coattails. His gargantuan energy, along with one of the biggest war chests Texas had seen for a House race, brought him a convincing win over eight rivals.

  In Washington and Texas politics the young congressman showed a flair for combining political savvy, feverish energy, and corporation money. When the Roosevelt White House suddenly needed funds in 1940 to help beleaguered Democratic candidates for Congress, Johnson raised tens of thousands of dollars. Increasingly, as he planned to run for the first Senate seat available, he was drawn toward the world of the Texas rich—into the “endless chains of inter- and intra-city, family and club, formal and informal relationships which characterize the Texas monied establishment,” in Neal Peirce’s words. This world had several dimensions.

  Jesse Jones, banker, publisher of the Houston Chronicle, financial backer of the Democratic party, FDR’s head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and Secretary of Commerce, typified the old dominion of agriculture and lumber and banking and real estate. Intertwined with this business dominion was the “old” establishment of oil based on the huge fields of southern Texas—notably Spindletop—and controlled by such big eastern corporations as Standard Oil, Gulf, and Sun. The drilling of the sensational five-billion-barrel East Texas fields in the early 1930s—the “poor man’s pool”—had enriched hundreds of wildcatters who promptly became the nouveaux riches—the très très riches—of Texas. Bitter quarrels often erupted within and among these groups but in crucial ways they stood together: they were Texans, proud and independent; they were almost casual gamblers, whether in oil or in stocks, on crops or on cards; they stood united against both “Wall Street capitalism” and western egalitarian populism; and no business group in the country had a better grasp of the politics of economics and the economics of politics.

  The young congressman had an uncanny ability to draw political money from older businessmen, in part because he knew how to defer to them, flatter them, listen to them. And he needed big money when a Senate seat opened up in 1941—again because the incumbent had died. Embarking on a huge statewide campaign requiring a big and costly personal organization, once again running on FDR’s coattails, he raised tens of thousands of dollars from both Texas contractors and Washington New Dealers— only to be ignominiously defeated by Governor “Pappy” (“Pass the Biscuits”) O’Daniel and his hillbilly band that included two of Pappy’s sons, fiddler Patty Boy and banjo-playing Mickey Wickey. When a second Senate seat opened in 1948, Johnson waged another campaign of furious energy and big campaign contributions, but with a difference. This time he distanced himself from the memory of FDR and even from Truman; and this time he won—but with a margin of fewer than 100 votes out of 900,000 cast, leaving him with an imperishable nickname in Texas, “Landslide Lyndon.”

  The Senate that Lyndon Johnson entered in January 1949 was already peopled by famous men—the reserved and formidable Richard Russell of Georgia, FDR’s 1938 purge target Walter George, the racist Mississippian James Eastland, the liberal Republican Wayne Morse of Oregon, the Senate president and United States Vice President, Alben Barkley. Johnson’s own “Class of 1948” glittered with younger talent: Estes Kefauver, Huey’s son Russell Long, civil rights leader Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, the dean of the liberal Democrats, Paul Douglas of Illinois. But three years later, as Doris Kearns noted, it was none of the above who was elected Democratic party whip, but rather the little-known newcomer from Texas. Two years later, Johnson was chosen Minority Leader, and two years after that, when the Democrats regained control of the upper chamber, he became the Senate Majority Leader.

  How could this “youngster” rise so fast in what looked like a gerontocracy? In part because he deferred to the gerontocrats—men like Russell who stood guard over Senate rules and customs. Once again LBJ showed his capacity to adjust to his environment—and then dominate it. From his old roles of Texas populist and flag waver for FDR and the New Deal he shifted easily into the transactional leadership of a parliamentary coalition broker. The Senate and he seemed made for each other, as he quickly mastered its procedures, nosed out its corridors and cloakrooms of power, calculated the influence of parties, blocs, and individual senators.

  The Senate mastered him as well. It softened the sharp edges of his personality, dampened down the fire of his populist ideology, and forced him to operate within its own channels. As Democratic leader, Johnson was perched at the center of a four-way clustering of Senate power. On his farther left were the liberal Democrats, mainly from the North and led by such senators as Humphrey and Douglas. To his immediate left sat the moderate Republicans headed by politicos close to the Eisenhower White House and by East and West Coast Republicans. Just to the right sat a cluster of conservative Democrats, mainly Southerners like Russell and Eastland, entrenched in powerful committees such as Finance and Judiciary. And to the farther right were the congressional Republicans, headed by Everett Dirksen of Illinois and largely responsive to the conservative business interests of the nation’s hinterland. LBJ’s talents lay in keeping his distance from each of these groups even while he traded with all of them.

  His talents were put to the test by the harshest challenge the Senate had faced since the 1937 Court fight or even the League of Nations struggle. Johnson’s wheeling and dealing, his coalition making and unmaking, his geeing and hawing, worked reasonably well as long as he was trading with the White House and among the Senate parties over bread-and-butter legislation. He brokered between Eisenhower’s modest proposals for housing, farm, defense, and education and programs opposed or supported by congressional factions. There were limits: Republicans would not retreat on the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act, which LBJ had defended; Democrats fought off major erosion of New Deal and Fair Deal legislation. But these were mainly “quantitative” measures on which the Majority Leader could skillfully cut deals involving the size of appropriations and the extent of regulations.

  The storm that gathered during the 1950s was not over such quantifiable matters, however, but over a transcending moral and ideological issue. This was freedom for southern and other Negroes. For many decades major civil rights legislation had been the great “undoable” for the United States Senate. The old, southern-dominated Democracy had lived off racism politically. FDR hated discrimination, whether in the South or the North, but feared to throw an explosive issue into Congress that would shatter his North-South Democratic coalition; as World War II approached he set up a Fair Employment Practices Committee under pressure from militant blacks, but he only weakly defended it against its enemies. Year after year, Truman’s broad civil rights proposals to Congress were killed in committee or on the floor. “Negroes could protest, presidents could recommend, party platforms could endorse, the House of Representatives could act,” James Sundquist noted, “but no civil rights bill could become law without a change in the Senate rule requiring a two-thirds majority to end debate.” And the filibuster rule itself could be protected by a filibuster. In the House the Rules Committee, controlling the traffic flow of bills, was almost equally lethal, and in both chambers southern committee gerontocrats shielde
d by the seniority rule stood in phalanxes against civil rights spear carriers.

  A grim interplay of personality, politics, and place, the civil rights battle by the mid-1950s was so convoluted as both to demand and to defy untangling. The two cardinal issues were black voting rights in the South and desegregation of schools and other public facilities. With notable exceptions northern presidential Democrats favored both a voting rights bill and school desegregation; presidential “waterside” Republicans, including the Eisenhower Administration, supported vote legislation but backed a school bill only to the degree that they feared that northern Democratic appeals to black voters might swing the next election; congressional Democrats would accept a weak voting bill but indignantly opposed a school bill; and congressional Republicans put either or both issues at the bottom of their priority lists. With racial tension mounting in the South, the government of the United States seemed mired in deadlock over civil rights.