To some Austin observers, Sam Johnson’s stand—not only on Bailey but on all the Populist positions that he refused to surrender—made him something of a hero. The House Chaplain, who described him as “a quiet worker” whose “pleasant, gentlemanly ways secure to him the friendship of all the members,” said he “will bear gentle reproof, but will kick like a mule at any attempted domination.” Others put it more simply. A saying about Sam Johnson was widespread in Austin at this time. “Sam Johnson,” it went, “is straight as a shingle.” But the legislative session dragged on. On five dollars a day—and then two dollars a day—Sam had to pay his expenses at Austin as well as the salaries of the laborers he had to hire to work the farm when he was away. He couldn’t do it. And his creditors were dunning him for the money he had lost on the cotton-futures market—and for smaller amounts, too. In August, 1905, for example, he had filled a forty-cent prescription at O. Y. Fawcett’s drugstore in Johnson City. In November, he still hadn’t been able to pay the forty cents, and when he came in for another prescription, Fawcett made him pay cash. At the end of the year, Fawcett asked him if he could pay up so that the account could be balanced, and Sam said he couldn’t. He began to get a bad reputation with some of the local merchants, bad enough, in fact, so that when, in 1907, he asked a Johnson City girl, a schoolteacher named Mabel Chapman, to marry him, Mabel, at the insistence of her parents, refused and instead married another suitor. And then in August, 1907, he did get married, and by 1908, he and his wife were expecting a child. He may have felt at home in that paneled, high-ceilinged House of Representatives, but it was a house he couldn’t afford to stay in. All four counties in the 89th District wanted him to run again in 1908, for an unprecedented third term, but he decided not to do so. State jobs—better-paying than legislative seats—were available to many retiring legislators, as were jobs with the railroads and the oil companies and the banks, but Sam Johnson, who had refused to go along with the railroads and the oil companies and the banks—who had refused to come to terms with the reality of Austin—was offered no job. By the time his first child, Lyndon, was born, on August 27, 1908, Sam Johnson had lugged his dreams and ideals back to the Hill Country.
*The use of blondes to influence the Legislature was so widespread that one legislator, a preacher, introduced a bill that would have made adultery a felony. The joke in Austin was that its passage would result in the immediate jailing of most legislators. So, one by one, almost every legislator stood up and proposed an amendment, which the House laughingly passed, by prearrangement, exempting residents of his own district (including, of course, himself) from the bill.
4
The Father and Mother
SAM JOHNSON HAD, moreover, married someone as romantic and idealistic as he.
Rebekah Baines had been raised, on the outskirts of the little Hill Country town of Blanco, in a large two-story stone house painted a smooth and gleaming white. A house of Southern graciousness, it should have been set behind a long green lawn, among tall and stately trees; instead, it towered over the stunted mesquite around it, and over the spindly little fruit trees in the recently planted orchard on one side. Grass grew in its front yard only in brown, scattered clumps. It seemed very out of place near Blanco’s rickety wooden stores and dog-run log cabins.
For a while, Rebekah’s father was the area’s most prominent attorney. Descended from a long line of famous Baptist preachers—his father, the Reverend George Washington Baines, had been president of Baylor, the Texas Baptist university—Joseph Wilson Baines had been a schoolteacher and then a lawyer, a newspaperman (founder of the influential McKinney Advocate) and Secretary of State under Governor John (“Old Oxcart”) Ireland. Moving to the Hill Country in 1900, he was elected to the Legislature—to the same seat Sam Johnson would later hold—and practiced law and rented land to tenant farmers, accumulating “quite a fortune.” But the qualities most remarked about him were his piety (“A Baptist, strict in doctrine … he was the chief pillar in the Blanco Church”; “for clean speech and morals, he could hardly have been surpassed”); his love of beauty in literature and nature; and his principles, both as a legislator “public-spirited, profoundly concerned for the welfare of the people … high in ideals,” and as a lawyer who, his law partner said, “was always more concerned about doing right and acting honorable than he was about the success of the suit.” A Hill Country historian wrote of Joe Baines: “He loved the good and the beautiful.”
Rebekah was devoted to her father. It was he, she was to recall, who taught her to read, and “reading has been one of the great pleasures and sustaining forces of my life. … He taught me the beauty of simple things. He taught me that ‘a lie is an abomination to the Lord.’ … He gave the timid child self-confidence.” As an elderly woman, looking back (with some exaggeration) on her girlhood, she would write:
I am grateful for … that simple, friendly, dearly loved town, Blanco. I love to think of our home, a two-story rock house with a fruitful orchard of perfectly spaced trees, terraced flower beds, broad walks, purple plumed wisteria climbing to the roof, fragrant honeysuckle at the dining room windows whose broad sills were seats for us children. Most of all I love to think of the gracious hospitality of that home, of the love and trust, the fear of God, and the beautiful ideals that made it a true home.
But Blanco was in the Hill Country. “On account of disastrous droughts, protracted four years,” and “by over-kindness to farm tenants and by overconfidence in men,” as his brother put it, Baines’ farming operations “brought financial ruin.” He lost his home, moving in 1904 from “dearly loved” Blanco to the German community of Fredericksburg, where he built a smaller house for his family and tried to establish a new practice. But his health had fled with his fortune, and he died in November, 1906; his wife had to sell the house, move to San Marcos, and take in boarders.
Rebekah later wrote that she had “adjusted readily and cheerfully to the financial change”—she worked in the college bookstore to earn enough money to graduate from Baylor—but that she had experienced greater difficulty adjusting “to life without my father, who had been the dominant force in my life as well as my adored parent, reverenced mentor, and most interesting companion.” Shortly before he died, while Rebekah, having graduated, was back in Fredericksburg teaching elocution and working as a “stringer” for the Austin newspaper, he had suggested that she interview the young legislator who had won the seat he himself had once held. She would recall that when she did—in 1907, shortly after Sam had been turned down by Mabel Chapman—“I asked him lots of questions but he was pretty cagey and I couldn’t pin him down; I was awfully provoked with that man!” but she also recalled that he was “dashing and dynamic,” with “flashing eyes”—and, however unlike her father he may have been in other respects, the two men were similar in the one she thought most important: she could talk with him, as she had with her father, about “principles.” As for Sam, she said, “He was enchanted to find a girl who really liked politics.” Soon, in what she called a “whirlwind courtship,” he was riding the twenty miles to Fredericksburg to visit the slender, blonde, blue-eyed elocution teacher, and taking her to hear political speeches at the Confederate Reunion and in the Legislature—“We heard William Jennings Bryan, who we both admired extravagantly”), and on August 20, 1907, they were married and he brought her to the Pedernales.
NOTHING IN HER LIFE had prepared her for life there.
As they rode away from comfortable, bustling Fredericksburg and its neat green fields, the land faded to brown, and then gray. It became more and more rocky, more and more barren. The farmhouses were farther and farther apart. Dotting the hills were hulks of deserted farmhouses, crumbling rectangles of logs out of which reared tall stone fireplaces which stood in the hills like tombstones—monuments to the hopes of other couples who had tried to earn a living there. And then, finally, they came to the house in which she was to live.
It was a small shack on a long, shallow slope l
eading up from the muddy little river.
A typical Hill Country dog-run, it consisted of two boxlike rooms, each about twelve feet square, on either side of a breezeway. Behind one of the rooms was the kitchen. One end of the porch had been enclosed to form a tiny “shed-room”; the roof was sagging as if pulled down a little by the added weight on that side, and the porch slanted down, too. The walls of the house were vertical boards. Out back were a barn—little more, really, than a lean-to shelter for animals—and the toilet facilities, a pair of flimsy, tilted “two-holers.” In front of the house was a swinging wooden gate, set not in a wooden fence but in a fence made of four strands of barbed wire which enclosed the front yard. The yard was mostly dirt with a few clumps of grass or weeds stuck up here and there. Sam had painted the house a bright yellow to welcome her.
Rebekah’s father had created a niche in the Hill Country, and had raised a daughter who fitted into that niche: a college graduate, a lover of poetry, a soft-spoken, gentle, dreamy-eyed young lady who wore crinolines and lace—and broad-brimmed, beribboned hats with long veils; “She had a flawless, beautiful white skin and never held with this business of going out in the sun and getting tan; she felt that women should protect themselves from the sun,” recalls one of her daughters. Now, overnight, at the age of twenty-six (Sam was almost thirty), she was out of the niche—a fragile Southern flower suddenly transplanted to the rocky soil of the Pedernales Valley.
Transplanted, moreover, to a world in which women had to work, and work hard. On washdays, clothes had to be lifted out of the big soaking vats of boiling water on the ends of long poles, the clothes dripping and heavy; the farm filth had to be scrubbed out in hours of kneeling over rough rub-boards, hours in which the lye in homemade soap burned the skin off women’s hands; the heavy flatirons had to be continually carried back and forth to the stove for reheating, and the stove had to be continually fed with new supplies of wood—decades later, even strong, sturdy farm wives would remember how their backs had ached on washday. And Rebekah wasn’t strong. With no electricity in the valley, all cooking had to be done on a wood stove, and the wood for it—and for the fireplace—had to be carried in from the pile outside, and just carrying those countless loads of wood was hard for a frail woman who had never in her life done physical labor. The pump on her back porch made it unnecessary for Rebekah to lug buckets of water up from the Pedernales as most of the women in the valley had to do, but even working the pump was hard for her. Rebekah was a good cook, but of what the other farm wives called “fancy” foods: delicate dishes, for elegant meals. Now, at “the threshing,” the fifteen or twenty men who came in to help expected to be served three huge meals a day. The farm wife had a hundred chores; Sam hired girls to help Rebekah with them, but the girls were always quitting—no girl wanted to live out there in those lonely hills—and even when there was a maid in the house, there was so much work that Rebekah had to do some of it. When, in later years, Rebekah Johnson wrote a memoir, she painted her life on the ranch in terms so soft that it was all but unrecognizable to those who knew her. But seeping through the lines of one paragraph is emotion they believe is true:
Normally the first year of marriage is a period of readjustment. In this case, I was confronted not only by the problem of adjustment to a completely opposite personality, but also to a strange and new way of life, a way far removed from that I had known in Blanco and Fredericksburg. Recently my early experiences on the farm were relived when I saw “The Egg and I”; again I shuddered over the chickens, and wrestled with a mammoth iron stove. However, I was determined to overcome circumstances instead of letting them overwhelm me. At last I realized that life is real and earnest and not the charming fairy tale of which I had so long dreamed.
Years later, in a statement that may have been more accurate, she would write to her son, Lyndon: “I never liked country life, and its inconveniences. …”
It was not, however, the work that was the most difficult aspect of farm life for her.
From Rebekah’s front porch, not another house was visible—not another human structure of any type. Other houses were scattered along the Pedernales—and some not far away; Sam’s parents now lived just a half-mile up the road, and not much farther away lived two of Sam’s sisters, with their husbands. And there was his brother Tom—it was a Johnson valley again; there were Johnson brothers, again named Sam and Tom, working on the Pedernales as there had been forty years before. But the Johnsons were a boisterous crew. They told jokes—the kind of jokes Rebekah’s father had so disliked. They might pass around a bottle—and her father had taught her what a sin that was. Going to church on Sundays was great fun for them; they would all meet at Grandfather Johnson’s, each family behind its own team, and race, shouting back and forth, pulling up in front of the Christadelphian church in a flurry of dust and laughter. That wasn’t the way to go to church! After services, they would gather around the piano in the church and sing—all the Johnsons could sing; Sam had once won a medal in a singing contest. It was not at all like the quiet, reflective Sundays in the Baptist church in Blanco that had been so important to Rebekah’s father and to her.
In other ways, too, she couldn’t fit in. She was a college graduate, and a college graduate who loved what she had learned, who loved to recite poetry, and to talk about literature and art, and who had spent her life in a home filled with such talk. The other Johnson women were farm wives, raised on farms; when necessary, they worked in the fields beside their men; Rebekah’s sister-in-law, Tom’s wife, was a sturdy German girl quite capable, if Tom fell behind in the plowing, of hitching up a second team and handling a whole quarter-section by herself. In conversation, the Johnson women were as earthy as Rebekah was ethereal. Many of them “had their letters” and that was all; they could sign their names and laboriously pick out words in a newspaper, but they didn’t read books, and didn’t talk about them. Some of the women on nearby farms in the valley, and in the rolling hills that stretched away from it, didn’t have even their letters; the German women didn’t even speak English. Without a telephone, Rebekah could talk only with the people in the valley, and there wasn’t a person in the valley with whom Rebekah enjoyed talking.
Sam was “opposite”—loud and boisterous, impatient and cursed with a fierce temper—but he and Rebekah were very much in love. “She was so shy and reserved all the time,” says a girl who lived with them on the Pedernales for several months. “Then she’d hear Sam coming home. Her face would just light up like a little kid’s, and out she’d go flying down to the gate to meet him.” They loved to talk together—long, serious talks, usually about politics; the girl recalls the two of them sitting beside the coal-oil lamp late into the evening, talking about “things I couldn’t understand.” But when Sam was away, Rebekah had no one to talk to.
And Sam was often away, traveling to Austin on legislative business or to Johnson City to deliver cotton to the gin or pick up supplies, or all over the vast Hill Country to buy and sell farms—in 1908, he had decided to try to supplement his farm income by going into the real-estate business. And it wasn’t always possible to come straight home when his business was concluded; more than once, having spurred a mount or whipped a team through the sixty miles of mud that constituted the only road between Austin and Stonewall in a wet spell, he would come to a creek too high to ford.
When Rebekah walked out the front door of that little house, there was nothing—a roadrunner streaking behind some rocks with something long and wet dangling from his beak, perhaps, or a rabbit disappearing around a bush so fast that all she really saw was the flash of a white tail—but otherwise nothing. There was no movement except for the ripple of the leaves in the scattered trees, no sound except for the constant whisper of the wind, unless, by happy chance, crows were cawing somewhere nearby. If Rebekah climbed, almost in desperation, the hill in back of the house, what she saw from its crest was more hills, an endless vista of hills, hills on which there was visible not a single house�
��somewhere up there, of course, was the Benner house, and the Weinheimer house and barn, but they were hidden from her by some rise—hills on which nothing moved, empty hills with, above them, empty sky; a hawk circling silently high overhead was an event. But most of all, there was nothing human, no one to talk to. “If men loved Texas, women, even the Anglo pioneer women, hated it,” Fehrenbach has written. “… In diaries and letters a thousand separate farm wives left a record of fear that this country would drive them mad.” Not only brutally hard work, but loneliness—what Walter Prescott Webb, who grew up on a farm and could barely restrain his bitterness toward historians who glamorize farm life, calls “nauseating loneliness”—was the lot of a Hill Country farm wife.
Loneliness and dread. During the day, there might be a visitor, or at least an occasional passerby on the rutted road. At night, there was no one, no one at all. No matter in what direction Rebekah looked, not a light was visible. The gentle, dreamy, bookish woman would be alone, alone in the dark—sometimes, when clouds covered the moon, in pitch dark—alone in the dark when she went out on the porch to pump water, or out to the barn to feed the horses, alone with the rustlings in the trees and the sudden splashes in the river which could be a fish jumping, or a small animal drinking, or someone coming, alone in the storms when the wind howled around the house and tore through its flimsy walls, blowing out the lamps and candles, alone in the night in the horrible nights after a norther, when the freeze came, and ice drove starving rodents from the fields to gnaw at the roofs and walls, and she could hear them chewing there in the dark—alone in bed with no human being to hear you if you should call.
The Path to Power Page 10