At first, the hope was embodied in cooperatives: Alliance warehouses to which all the farmers of a district would bring their bales and pool them in a single lot on which bids would be taken not only from the local buyers who previously had been able to bid without competition but from cotton buyers all over the South; Alliance purchasing agents who could deal directly with manufacturers of plows and other farm implements and sell them directly to individual farmers, thereby eliminating not only the middleman’s profits but also the enormously high interest the manufacturers charged for selling on credit. Although it proved impossible, even after warehouses and purchasing centers had been established throughout the rest of Texas, to establish them in the Hill Country—one mass sale that was held at Fredericksburg proved a disaster; without a railroad, the buyers said, the cotton could be shipped out only at prohibitive cost—the Hill Country farmers brought their cotton in long caravans of wagons sixty, seventy, a hundred, miles to Austin, and when their bales brought at the Alliance warehouse there prices a dollar or two above what they had expected, they rode home with their empty wagons flying the blue flags that had became the symbol of victory in the Texas Alliance. (In Fort Worth and Dallas, too, the blue flags were flying. By 1885, the Texas Alliance had 50,000 members; by 1886, 100,000; by 1890, 200,000. A spokesman exulted that the Alliance had become “a power in the land.” Alliance lecturers began to fan out from Texas to farm counties in other states with a simple message: Join the Alliance, build a county cooperative, a county general store if need be, and get free of the credit merchant. Observers in a dozen farm states echoed the words of one in Mississippi, who said the Alliance has “swept across” that state “like a cyclone.”)
Outside forces broke the cooperatives. The big Eastern manufacturing houses refused to sell to them, insisting on retaining their middlemen. Not only Eastern manufacturers and banks but local merchants and banks refused credit to members of cooperatives. Railroads and grain-elevator companies used all their power against the farmers—and won, because farmers could not escape the simple fact that they could not sell their crop if they did not own it; and it was the furnishing merchant who owned it. The Alliance then attempted to free the farmer from the merchant by establishing a central state exchange in Texas to market the state’s entire cotton crop from one central point while giving the farmers the money they needed for the next year at bearable rates. (The Southern Exchange planned to get the money from banks, using notes given by the farmers as collateral.) The Exchange opened in Dallas in September, 1887, and the bankers tried to break it by refusing to accept the notes as collateral—by refusing, in fact, to give the Exchange money “upon any terms or any security.” And when the Alliance, in desperation, was forced to turn to its own members for money, the Hill Country gave all it could—the thirty-four members of the New Chapel Alliance of Blanco County assessed each of its members a dollar; the assessment would be paid, the secretary wrote Alliance headquarters, “as soon as the cotton comes in.” The Hill Country Alliance men stood firm behind their leaders. The banks, and the press they dominated in Texas, tried to smear the head of the Exchange, Charles W. Macune, by blaming its financial crisis on him; the farmers of Hays County in the Hill Country chipped in their pennies for a telegram which said their Alliance “loves Dr. Macune for the enemies he has made.” Bankers in other states, determined to break the Exchange, joined the Texas bankers in cutting off credit. Alliance leaders proclaimed June 9, 1888, as “the day to save the Exchange,” and asked the farmers to demonstrate their solidarity. Early on that Saturday morning, long caravans of farm wagons—including some from the Hill Country—began to clatter into almost two hundred county seats throughout Texas. The farmers stood for hours in the blazing summer heat. They stood silently. They held banners—lettered by their wives—which said: THE SOUTHERN EXCHANGE SHALL STAND.
The Southern Exchange fell; its members pledged enough for it to survive, but couldn’t pay their pledges. The Alliancemen had tried—through cooperatives and boycotts, and endless wagon treks to distant markets, and contributions that came out of their wives’ butter-and-egg pennies—to help themselves, and had failed, and the lesson they had learned was that they couldn’t help themselves. The forces they were fighting were too big for them to fight. They turned to a force that was big enough to fight—and win—on their behalf, if only it could be motivated to do so: their government.
It was only right, the farmers believed, that their government do so. Government was a basic cause of their troubles, they felt, and government must be the means to redress those troubles. Government, through its vast subsidies of land and money and its biased laws, had made it possible for railroads to become powerful, and now railroads were strangling the farmers; should not government, on their behalf, now regulate railroads? Government had protected manufacturers at their expense by high tariffs; should not government now lower tariffs? Government had, by abrogating much of its effective control over the currency, allowed bankers to regulate it, forcing farmers to pay off their liens and mortgages in dollars worth more than the dollars they had borrowed; should not government now take back control of currency and make repayment easier, not harder, for debtors? Government had, by forcing the country onto the gold standard, caused the constant, unending fall in the price of cotton and all the farmers’ other crops; should not the gold standard be ended in favor of silver? Government had acted against their interests in so many ways (the first platform of the Populist Party seemingly laid all wrong to government: “Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the legislatures, the Congress. … From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice, we breed two great classes—tramps and millionaires.”). Should not there be now a broadscale enactment of laws redressing this imbalance? Government had acted to oppress the farmers in a thousand ways; shouldn’t it now stretch forth its hand to help them—in a thousand ways? (Some of the ways being suggested were new to America: the march of Jacob S. Coxey’s pitiful little “army” of unemployed on Washington in 1894 was an attempt to dramatize his theory that the government should help the unemployed with a system of federal public-works relief.) “The powers of government—in other words, of the people—should be expanded,” said the 1892 platform of the People’s Party, “… to the end that oppression, unjustice and poverty shall eventually cease in the land.”
For a while, their hopes were very high. The Alliance lecturers who had brought the word out of Texas had fanned agrarian revolt into flames. In 1890, taking command of the Democratic Party in a dozen states, the Alliancemen won control of their legislatures, elected six Governors and sent to Washington four Senators and more than fifty Congressmen (including Davis H. Waite of Colorado, known as “Bloody Bridles” Waite because he had declared that it was better “that blood flow to the horses’ bridles rather than our national liberties should be destroyed”). In Kansas, the third party was known as the People’s Party, and in 1892 that name was adopted by the new national party—and its candidate polled more than a million votes, and twenty-two electoral votes (because in the South the Populists, as they were becoming known, refused in general to play white-supremacist politics, all twenty-two were in the mountain states, where they not only elected two Governors but captured twice as many counties as both major parties combined and in a single election established themselves as the majority party). Except for the Republicans, no new party had ever done so well in its first bid for national power. In the Congressional elections of 1894, the Populists rolled up more than a million and a half votes, making heavy inroads into the Democratic vote in the South and West, and it appeared likely that the increasing number of Democrats who saw silver as the crucial issue would desert the Democratic Party in 1896 and make the Populists a major party in America—after all, an analogous situation in the 1850’s had resulted in the demise of the Whigs and the creation of the Republican Party.
Instead, there was Bryan. As trainload after trainload of cheering delegates arrived at the Democratic conventi
on in Chicago, silver badges gleaming from their lapels, silver banners fluttering in the breeze, the New York World said, “They have the principle, they have the grit, they have the brass bands and the buttons, they have the votes. But they are wandering in the wilderness like a lot of lost sheep, because no … real leader has yet appeared among them.” Then, when one after another of the silver movement’s would-be leaders had proved, during the debate on the party platform, that the World was right, young Democrat William Jennings Bryan nervously made his way up the aisle and, speaking on behalf of farmers against Eastern interests, said, “We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned; we have entreated and our entreaties have been disregarded; we have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came. We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them!” Suddenly the mighty throng of 20,000 sweltering men and women were on their feet, cheering each sentence with a roar—even before the last sentences:
Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country. … Having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!
The silver Democrats did not leave the Democratic Party but took it over instead; “the Boy Orator of the Platte” became the party’s Presidential nominee.
Ironically, however, this development was to mark the doom of the People’s Party: the Democrats had stolen the Populists’ thunder; at their own convention three weeks later, the Populists had little choice but to nominate Bryan, too, and thus lose their identity as a separate party. And the party with which they had allied themselves lost the election. The Bryan race for President was more a cause than a campaign. “A religious frenzy” was what William Allen White of Kansas called it. “Sacred hymns were torn from their pious tunes to give place to words which deified the cause and made gold—and all its symbols, capital, wealth, plutocracy—diabolical. At night, from ten thousand little white schoolhouse windows, lights twinkled back vain hope to the stars.” But the hope was vain; the cause was as lost as the one for which many of the Populists had fought thirty years before—Bryan’s campaign was gallant but underfinanced, and the Republican Party, run by Mark Hanna, who shook down railroad corporations, insurance companies and big-city banks for campaign contributions on a scale never before seen, won what one historian calls “a triumph for big business, for a manufacturing and industrial rather than an agrarian order, for the Hamiltonian rather than the Jeffersonian state.” In the 1898 elections, the disorganized Populists were all but wiped out. In 1900 Hanna’s President, McKinley, was able to push through the Gold Standard Act. The Populists ran a candidate for President as late as 1908, but by then there were few surviving Populist officeholders. Some were in Texas, one of the last states where Populism remained strong, but even in Texas, after the debacle of 1896, the spirit was out of it.
Perceptive historians find great significance in the campaign of 1896—“the last protest of the old agrarian order against industrialism”—but in the Hill Country, life remained as mean and meager as before. It was worse, in fact. For a while after 1900, conditions improved for farmers throughout most of the rest of America, but that prosperity didn’t penetrate into the Hill Country; the land was too far gone and the weather too dry for any lasting improvement. More and more Hill Country farmers lost their land; each census—1900, 1910, 1920—showed an increase in the number of farms being operated by tenant farmers. The People’s Party was all but dead in the Hill Country—by 1904, there would be only twenty-three voters registered in the party in Blanco County—and the things the party had asked for seemed, if mentioned at all, only unrealizable dreams. The People’s Party seemed, in the hills, just another legend that old men talked about as they talked about the cattle drives.
BUT WHAT, really, had the People’s Party—the farmers who called themselves “Alliancemen”—asked for? Only that when men found themselves at the mercy of forces too big for them to fight alone, government—their government—help them fight. What were the demands for railroad and bank regulation, for government loans, for public-works projects, but an expression of a belief that after men have banded together and formed a government, they have a right, when they are being crushed by conditions over which they have no control, to ask that government to extend a helping hand to them—if necessary, to fight for them, to be their champion?
They had asked too early, that was all.
Franklin Roosevelt wasn’t their President yet.
Lyndon Johnson wasn’t their Congressman.
3
The Johnson Strut
AMONG THE NINE CHILDREN of Sam Ealy Johnson and Eliza Bunton Johnson were three sons. In the opinion of Hill Country ranchers—convinced, as ranchers, of the importance of breeding—all three were basically Buntons, not only in their height and other striking physical characteristics but in the fierceness of their passions, in their soaring ambition and in the capacity for leadership that was described in the hero John Wheeler Bunton as “commanding presence.” In the ranchers’ opinion, however, all three sons possessed also a fatal taint of the Johnson blood line: Johnsons, they said, had all the Buntons’ temper, pride, arrogance and idealism, together with dreams even more ambitious, but they had none of the Bunton hardness, the canniness and pragmatism, that alone could keep idealism and ambition from bringing ruin in a country as hard as the Hill Country. All three sons, it was noted, were idealists, romantics, dreamers—and unfortunately, in the adjective the ranchers applied to them, “soft” inside. One son fled the Hill Country: if his life was not particularly successful, it was at least not tragic. The other two—one of whom was Lyndon Johnson’s father, Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr.—stayed.
Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr., was born in 1877 (his father was relieved to see he was a boy; because his first four children had all been girls, his friends had begun calling him “Gal” Johnson) and was ten years old when his family moved from Buda back up to the Pedernales.
Already the family could tell he had the “Bunton strain.” His mother, a family memoir relates, “looked with great tenderness on this child whose dark eyes, black curls and white skin were a Bunton inheritance. …” As a boy, he was always tall for his age—he would eventually be an inch over six feet—and he had the Buntons’ large nose, huge ears, thick, bushy, black eyebrows and piercing eyes.
When he was a little boy in Buda, it was already apparent that he was very intelligent. “He had a quick mind, keen perception and an amazing memory,” the memoir says. “An elder sister memorizing a poem of thirty-two verses for recital the last day of school was astounded to hear the child, Sam, far below school age recite it in its entirety.” He was conspicuously mature: “at an early age [he] acquired an unusual poise and assurance.” When the family moved to the Pedernales farm, another quality—burning ambition—became noticeable in the eleven-year-old boy. “The tasks and delights of farm life presented a challenge to Sam; he must ride faster; plow longer, straighter rows; pick more cotton than his companions.” (“This sense of competition,” his wife was to write, “was a strong urge throughout his life.”)
As he grew into his teens, Lyndon Johnson’s father became ambitious to become something more than a farmer. It was hard for Hill Country families to send their children to school, because they were needed to help work the farms and because even public schools charged tuition, and low though it was—only a few dollars—most Hill Country families couldn’t afford to pay it. But Sam was grimly determined to go to school. “Once,” the family chronicler relates,
his father gave him some cattle saying, “This is all I can do on your schooling this year.” Each weekend the young high school student turned butcher, slaughtered and cu
t up a steer and sold steaks and soupbones to tide him over until next “butchering day.”
Then the barber in Johnson City, a small town fourteen miles down the Pedernales that had been named for its founder, Sam’s cousin James Polk Johnson, became ill and retired. Buying the barber’s chair and tools on credit, Sam taught himself to cut hair, practicing on friends, and thereafter went to school during the day while earning his tuition by giving haircuts in the evening.
The Path to Power Page 8