There are hints that the strain was too much for his health. What his wife later described as “indigestion” forced him to quit high school. His parents sent him to West Texas, where his uncle, Lucius Bunton, had moved—being a Bunton, he had already built up the largest ranch in Presidio County—“hoping that on the ranch … he might regain his health.”
“After a few months,” the memoir relates, the teenager came home, “determined to teach school.” Realizing this ambition was difficult in the Hill Country—in its 24,000 square miles, there was not a single college and not a single state-accredited high school whose graduates would be admitted by a college. But it was possible to obtain a state-issued teacher’s certificate without graduating from high school—by passing a special state examination. “With thirteen books, the required subjects for examination for a teacher’s certificate, a bottle of pepsin tablets and a sack of dried fruit (doctor’s recommendation),” Sam moved in 1896 to the nearby home of his Grandfather and Grandmother Bunton—having accumulated enough money to retire, Robert Holmes Bunton had moved to the Hill Country; he could therefore enjoy it without having to make his living from it—so that he could have a quiet place to study. Passing the examination (“In later years he often recalled with pleasure that he made 100% in both Texas and United States history; he always loved history and government”), he taught for the next three years in one-room Hill Country schoolhouses. During the year in which he taught in a community named Rocky, he boarded with a family which had as a frequent visitor Captain Rufus Perry, the legendary Indian-fighter and Texas Ranger; years later, the family remembered how intently the young teacher sat listening, his dark eyes gleaming in the firelight, as the old man told stories of great adventures.
Teaching did not satisfy Sam Johnson’s ambitions. He wanted to be a lawyer; “he had the type of mind for it and he loved law,” his wife was to write. “But,” she wrote, “he found it necessary to make a living immediately”; he returned to his father’s farm on the Pedernales, working it together with Sam Ealy, Sr., for a year or two, and thereafter, when his father grew too old to work, renting it from him and working it himself. He may not have wanted to be a farmer, but a farmer was what he was.
For a few years, he was successful. Rain was plentiful and winters mild; “Little Sam,” as he was called to differentiate him from his father, earned enough to hire several hands and even to start trading in cotton futures in Fredericksburg.
He cut quite a figure in that beaten-down country. Tall, skinny, gangly, considered handsome despite those huge ears because of his pale skin and dark hair and eyes, he had the Bunton arrogance and air of command; a Johnson City resident old enough to remember Sam and his two brothers, Tom and George (and their six sisters) says, “All the Johnsons strutted, except George. And he strutted a little. Hell, the Johnsons could strut sitting down.” He dressed better than the other Hill Country farmers and ranchers; in the evening, after work, he would put on a suit and tie. And he was invariably well mounted; he often said something that older Hill Country residents remembered his father and his father’s brother Tom saying—when the original Johnson boys had been young: “You can tell a man by his boots and his hat and the horse he rides.” And he occasionally carried a long-barreled Colt six-shooter—one of the few guns still worn in the Hill Country.
But the air of command came naturally to him, and he was open and friendly. The rutted dirt track that was the only road between Austin and Johnson City and Fredericksburg ran along the Pedernales, right by the Johnson farm, and travelers tried to schedule their trip “to make it to little Sam Johnson’s by nightfall in order to spend the night and enjoy a good time.” It was, however, noticeable that although Hill Country men were farmers or ranchers, Sam’s best friends were three men who weren’t: Jay Alexander was an engineer; Dayton Moses and W. C. Linden were lawyers. Sam Johnson was a farmer, but he was a Bunton, and he burned to be something more.
After six years on the farm, a chance came along. By unwritten agreement, representation in the Texas House of Representatives was rotated among the four Hill Country counties that constituted the 89th District, and 1904 was the year for Gillespie County, the county in which the Johnson farm was located, to send a man to Austin. Urged on by Judge Clarence W. Martin, a former Representative who had married one of Sam’s sisters and moved to Gillespie to practice law, Sam filed for the Democratic nomination—and won it unanimously. His acceptance speech, delivered from the back of a wagon at a barbecue held in a grove of live-oak trees near Stonewall, revealed that he had inherited the Buntons’ “eloquent tongue.”
“I am aware that by many persons, it is considered in the nature of a joke to become a candidate and to be elected as a member of the Legislature,” he said. Yet, he said, when he considered what “the duties of that office are … when properly and conscientiously” performed he felt himself handicapped by the lack of a formal education. “I … hesitate as to whether my ability and attainments are such that will enable me to properly perform that duty.” Being awarded the nomination hadn’t removed those doubts, he said; “I take it, that it is an act of kindness upon your part … a testimonial that you are willing to aid me to reflect your desire and purposes by giving to me your help and assistance. … In application and faithfulness to duty, I shall hope to in a measure make up for any shortcoming that I may possess in qualifications.”
The Populist Party may have been dead, Populist principles weren’t—at least not to the gangling young man on the wagon. He saw his campaign as part of a national cause. “This is a momentous eve in the history of our nation, and the question has been presented to us in a clearcut form—Whether the principles and tradition of a Republic shall be longer perpetuated, or whether we shall meekly surrender to the great trust combines the interests of the nation.” The power of big business, he said, “has assumed proportions that even the wildest fanatical dreamer could not have anticipated, and it is now up to the people what their verdict shall be. We have the Republican Party on the one hand, the champion of the Federalist tendencies of government, while the Democrats are striving for a return to fundamental principles and a return to the Constitution as taught by Jefferson, Jackson and their followers—which is clearly the only hope for the perpetuity of our government. If I can be the means in my own feeble and humble way to assist in a slight degree even of bringing about such results, then I shall feel that my duty has been performed.”
Running ahead of the rest of the Democratic ticket, with his largest margins coming from Johnson City and the small towns along the Pedernales that knew him best, Johnson easily defeated his opponent, a German-American lawyer from Fredericksburg, who won only heavily German—and heavily Republican—Gillespie County. His mother pointed out that he had won his first public office even younger than had his famous forebear; John Wheeler Bunton had been twenty-eight, she noted; Sam was only twenty-seven. And when, in January, 1905, he arrived at the towering red-granite Capitol in Austin and walked into the House of Representatives Chamber, he had suddenly found a home.
The young man who had hated the cornfields found that he loved the cloakrooms. Loved them—and knew how to maneuver in them. Relatively uneducated and thoroughly unsophisticated, he seemed to know instinctively the steps of the legislative dance. He seemed, in fact, born to the roll call and the Rules of Order. And he had the unteachable gift for the persuasion that is so integral a part of the legislative life; he roamed the rows of desks as if he had spent his life among them instead of among rows of cotton. He gave few speeches, but he was talking constantly in the cloakrooms and on the floor—with a distinctive mannerism: when trying to win another member to his point of view, the tall, gangling young man would grasp the Representative’s lapel and lean very close to him, face right up to face, while he talked.
Several influential Texans, among them his brother-in-law Clarence Martin, had been trying for several years to persuade the Legislature to purchase and restore the Alamo; the old mission ha
d fallen into disrepair, and part of it was being used as a warehouse. But previous attempts had foundered on the question of financing—legislators were outraged that the owners had raised the price to $65,000—and disputes over jurisdiction. Johnson drafted his own Alamo Purchase Bill, providing that it would be administered by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, and then persuaded more influential legislators to sponsor the measure—he let one of them, an elderly Confederate hero, sign it first, so that it bore his name—and it passed. (Wrote a local newspaper: “Santa Anna took the Alamo—that was 1836. Sam Johnson saved the Alamo—that was 1905.”) Johnson wanted a bill passed banning calf-roping contests, a competition he had long felt was brutal to the animals as it was practiced by cowboys at local fairs; although many anti-roping bills were introduced in 1905, it was his that was selected as best and passed. On many issues, Johnson wasn’t on the winning side, in a Legislature dominated by “the interests,” for he stuck to his Populist ideals, advocating, for example, a franchise tax on corporations and an eight-hour day for railroad workers. But on the bills he personally introduced (for example, one exempting Blanco County from a state law requiring counties to pay a fifty-cent bounty for every wolf shot—the Blanco News said the county was so poor it would be bankrupted if it was forced to pay) he had a remarkable record: he was, a newspaper reported, one of the few legislators “who did not fail on a single measure.” He worked as a team with two other Democratic legislators identified with Populist causes—“Honest Buck” Gray and Claud Hudspeth, “the Cowboy from Crockett County”—and a newspaper reported: “Mr. Gray, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Hudspeth are … a trio that command the respect and confidence of their fellow members.” Johnson had a gift not only for making men go along with him but for making them like him. He was famed for his practical jokes, such as the one he played on Representative J. J. Blount, who not only took frequent naps at his desk in the Chamber but kept a big alarm clock on it to wake him up. Once Blount set the alarm to allow himself a two-hour snooze. As soon as he fell asleep, Johnson walked over to his desk, moved the alarm forward and walked away. A minute or two later, the alarm went off. Blount jumped to his feet, saying, “It’s time to go to work! What are we here for?” as the House roared. Decades later, men who had served with Sam Johnson in the Legislature would remember him with fondness; one, Sam Rayburn, on receiving a letter from him in 1937, would reply: “I am mighty glad to get a letter from you and in this wise renew friendships of years ago. You are one man that I served with in the Legislature of Texas that I have always remembered with interest and kindly feeling.”
Sam Johnson was a born legislator. He had never displayed much enthusiasm for mending wire fences, but he mended his political fences industriously. He made a point of becoming good friends with the editors of the local newspapers back in the Hill Country, even the editor of the Gillespie County News, which had supported his opponent, and after the 1905 legislative session, the News editorialized:
Hon. S. E. Johnson … has succeeded in passing more bills, probably, than any other member of the present Legislature. Mr. Johnson accomplishes his ends by quiet and consistent attention to duty, by unfailing attendance on committee meetings and the sessions of the House, and consistently refraining from the making of speeches. His businesslike idea of legislation and uniform courtesy has won him a host of friends, who stand by him when votes are needed. …
He is one of the most active and influential of the younger members of the House, and is an ideal Representative in that he works much and talks little.
When, in 1906, he decided to try to break the county-rotation tradition, even the newspaper in Llano County, which according to tradition was entitled to the seat next, supported him. Llano nevertheless put up its own candidate—the closest the county could come to a big businessman, David Martin, owner of the Martin Telephone Company—but Johnson, with the Blanco News urging, “Boys, get out and shell the woods, and let the people choose … whom they will send to Austin to help make our laws,” won even Martin’s county in the Democratic primary, rolling up a four-county margin so large that the Republicans did not bother to run an opponent against him in the November elections.
BUT SAM wasn’t only a Bunton. He was also a Johnson, and he possessed none of the Buntons’ tough practicality that enabled them to realize their dreams—or at least not to be destroyed by them. And the Johnsons’ dreams were even bigger than the Buntons’—and suffused with a romantic unreality. 1906 was a year of political victory for Sam Johnson, but it was also a year of financial disaster. Having gambled and won on the cotton-futures market in 1902 and 1903 and 1904, in 1905 he had gambled more, buying on margin, overextending himself—as his father, having gambled and won on the cattle drives of 1868 and 1869 and 1870, had gambled too much and lost on the cattle drive of 1871. Few details are known except for his son Lyndon’s statement that “My daddy went busted waiting for cotton to go up to twenty-one cents a pound, and the market fell apart when it hit twenty.” Sam lost everything he had invested—and more. And when, in 1906, he borrowed money and bought on margin, he lost again. When he went back to the Legislature after his reelection in November, 1906, he went as a man several thousand dollars in debt.
The Legislature was not the place for a man like Sam Johnson to get out of debt. Texans’ early distrust of the federal government—nourished by Washington’s indifference to its new state, and particularly by Washington’s failure to protect the frontier against Indians—had been extended to their own state government during Reconstruction, when the openly corrupt Carpetbagger Legislature looted the state and imposed heavy taxes on its people to pay for the liberality. “The more the damn Legislature meets, the more Goddamned bills and taxes it passes,” one Texan put it—and when Texans regained control of their state government, their new state constitution, essentially an anti-government document, tried to ensure that the Legislature would meet infrequently; it provided that sessions be held only every other year and, as an inducement to legislators to keep even these sessions short, that the legislators’ salary of five dollars per day be paid only for sixty days; if the sessions ran longer, they were to receive two dollars per day.
Low salaries didn’t bother many of the legislators, for it was not legislators but lobbyists—lobbyists for oil companies, railroads, banks, utilities—who did the presiding in Austin: in the capital’s bars and brothels, where they dispensed “beefsteak, bourbon and blondes” so liberally that some descriptions of turn-of-the-century legislative sessions read like descriptions of one long orgy; in its backrooms, where decisions were made; even on the floor of the Legislature, which lobbyists roamed at will, often sitting at legislators’ desks and sometimes even casting votes on behalf of absent Representatives. Many of the elected representatives of a generally impoverished people, representatives who had come to Austin poor themselves, went home poor no more, and even most of those who refused to trade votes for cash generally accepted—because they considered their salaries too low to cover their expenses—lobbyists’ offers to pay for their Austin meals and hotel bills.*
But Sam Johnson accepted nothing. It was not that he shunned the whorehouses and the bars; he didn’t—he is remembered as an enthusiastic participant in the wildest of Austin’s parties. He is remembered, in fact, as being a loud and boastful reveler—somewhat foolish when in his cups. But if he was foolish, he was foolish on his own money; he insisted on paying for his own drinks and his own women. And if he is remembered as being loud, he is also remembered as being honest—conspicuously honest; a rather quixotic figure, in fact, in the Austin atmosphere. Once, finding a lobbyist sitting at his desk in the House, he angrily ordered him up; when the lobbyist, thinking he was joking, was too slow to obey, Johnson reached down, grabbed his jacket and pulled him out of his chair. Thereafter, he either introduced or was one of the few supporters of—the legislative record is not clear on the point—a bill to regulate lobbyists’ conduct. (It never got out of committee.)
The most controversial issue before the Texas House of Representatives in 1907 was the reelection of United States Senator Joseph Weldon Bailey.
Bailey, an imposing figure in his “dull black frock coat, flowing tie, and big, black slouch hat,” was one of the great old Populist orators. His thundering speeches against Eastern capitalists, wrote one who had heard them, “were phrased in the best English, though he was prone to draw on his imagination for history when required to make his point. His voice was melodious. …” As Minority Leader of Congress during the 1890’s, “he dominated the Democratic minority like an overseer and conducted himself like a conqueror.” A close friend of Bryan’s, he had “influenced the Great Commoner in the formulation of his most celebrated doctrines, among them the Bryan metal theory.”
But according to his enemies, Bailey was a Populist who had sold out. In 1906, he was accused of having accepted huge legal fees from railroads, the big East Texas lumber interests and the Standard Oil Company—from Standard Oil alone, he later admitted, his annual retainer was $100,000 (four times as large as the budget, including the Governor’s salary, of the entire executive branch of the State of Texas). His term as Senator ran out in 1907, and some members of the Legislature—Legislatures still elected Senators—were talking of getting a new one, or at least of postponing the vote while the House investigated Bailey’s affairs.
When the Legislature met, however, Bailey was in Austin “to drive into the Gulf of Mexico the peanut politicians who would replace me with someone who would rattle around in my seat like a mustard seed in a gourd!” Backing him were the railroads and oil interests, who had a big stake in keeping him in the Senate. They wanted a vote before any investigation began—and they wanted the vote unanimous. The pressure they brought to bear—combined with the power of Bailey’s name; the Senator was, at that time, possibly the most famous and powerful politician in Texas—brought, sooner or later, almost all of the 133 members of the House over to their point of view. When the vote on his reelection was held, following a series of pro-Bailey speeches greeted with roaring cheers by most of the members, only seven refused to go along. Sam Johnson, who had been one of the first to call for the investigation, was one of the seven.
The Path to Power Page 9