The Hill Country broke Sam Johnson’s health. He sold the farm in September, 1922, moved back into Johnson City, and took to his bed with a long-drawn-out illness. The closing was in November; Sam had to get out of his sickbed to place his signature on the documents which formalized the dissolution of his dreams. He got out of bed again to go to the legislative session which began in January, 1923—where he introduced the Johnson Blue Sky Law—but collapsed in Austin and spent most of the session in bed there. Returning to Johnson City thereafter, he had to spend still more weeks in bed. The precise nature of his illness is not known; it has been called both “pneumonia” and “nervous exhaustion.” Visitors to the Johnson home recall that he was white and gaunt, and that there was a severe outbreak of boils or “carbuncles” on his face. Many of the visitors were bringing covered plates of food—not just for the sick man but for his family, for by this time, it was common knowledge: there was no food in the Johnson house—and no money to buy any.
It broke him in other ways, too. His face, despite those piercing eyes, had always been friendly and smiling. Now it was grim and bitter, his mouth pulled tight and down. And his temper was worse. Sam had always had a violent temper, but its eruptions had been infrequent and short-lived. Now he would fly into a rage, particularly at his wife and children, at the slightest provocation. What people thought of him had always been so important to Sam. Even during that first terrible year, even as he was going broke out there on that farm, he had tried to keep up the front whenever he came into town: “Hon. S. E. Johnson and his little son Lyndon, of Stonewall, were among the prominent visitors in Johnson City on Wednesday of this week,” the Record had reported in 1920. “Mr. Johnson has one of the largest and best farms in this section of Texas, and has been kept quite busy of late supervising its cultivation.” In August of that year, when the doom of his dreams must have been clear to him, he saw editor Gliddon and spoke of more “big land deals.” Now there was no point in trying to keep up a front any longer. When he got out of bed, he still wore suits and high, stiff collars, and his voice and laugh were still loud. But the air of “great confidence” was gone. There was something defensive about him now.
UNDERSTANDABLY DEFENSIVE. For Sam Johnson, who could walk into a room and know in an instant who was for him and who was against him, was a man who knew what people were thinking. And what they were thinking about him had changed—rapidly and completely. In a span of time that seems to an outsider remarkably brief, he had been transformed in the eyes of his home town from a figure of respect to a figure of ridicule.
Perhaps such a transformation would have occurred to any man who fell from high to low estate so rapidly—and so publicly and dramatically—in a small town where everyone knows everyone else’s business, particularly when the town had for years believed that he was a shrewd and successful businessman, always negotiating “big land deals” that enabled him to buy big cars and to hire a chauffeur, and then suddenly the town learned that it had all been a bluff, that the deals and the cars were nothing but a front. But the gossip about Sam Johnson was harsh and ruthless even for a small town.
In part, this was because of the nature of Johnson City. Gossip was so powerful a force in many small towns partly because of their isolation: there wasn’t much for people to be interested in except each other’s lives. Johnson City—this tiny huddle of homes in the midst of the vast, empty Texas hills, this “island town”—was unusually isolated. It was a town which, as late as 1922, still possessed neither a movie house nor a single radio, a town very deficient in things to do, and its residents’ interest in each other was, as more than one visitor remarked, very intense. Especially their interest in their most famous neighbor, the only resident of their town with even the slightest claim to fame: Hon. S. E. Johnson.
Johnson City was, moreover, a religious town—hard-shell, hellfire, revivalist, Fundamentalist, Old Testament religious. In most of its little houses, no matter how meagerly furnished, there lay on the dining-room table or on the mantelpiece a big black, leather-bound Bible, its front cover flapping up from frequent use. In few of those houses could be found a deck of cards or set of dominoes. “They were tools of the Devil,” says John Dollahite, one of Lyndon Johnson’s classmates. “My father wouldn’t allow a deck of cards in the house.” No dancing was allowed, of course, not in the house or out, and as for drinking—John’s father, Walter Dollahite, could scarcely bear to look at the little saloon that was, from time to time, open in Johnson City; its swinging doors were the passage to Hell. Not even a drink of beer was permitted; “sneaking a beer by Jesus is like trying to sneak daylight by a rooster,” Dollahite was fond of saying. Half the town was Baptist, and most of the other half—members of the Methodist Church or the Church of the Disciples of Christ—was trying, in Stella Gliddon’s words, to “out-Baptist the Baptists.” Lest legs show, girls were required to wear long, thick stockings—black until a girl reached her teens, when white was permitted. The fierceness of the town’s prejudices and the rigidity of its intolerance led Stella Gliddon to call it “almost a Puritan town. In those days, people were considered bad for things that we take for granted now. They were the friendliest people, but they were very religious people, too.” Such people had never forgiven Sam Johnson for believing in the Darwinian theory, or for admiring Al Smith, or for voting against Prohibition. The irregularity of his attendance at church—it was rumored, correctly, that he went at all only to please Rebekah—had been noted, as had the fact that his daughters had more than once appeared in public in knee socks. As for the fact that he was known to drink—well, these people knew what would come of that. Sam Johnson was the kind of man who in a town like Johnson City would ordinarily have been held up to children as an example of what they must avoid; ordinarily, people would have long predicted that he would follow in the path of his father and uncle, who had gone broke and failed to pay their debts. But in a town so impoverished and, because it was so religious, so conditioned to believe that worldly success betokened divine favor, Sam’s apparent success in business outweighed all other factors, and as long as the townspeople thought he had money, they respected him despite his faults. But as they realized the truth, they turned on him with a fury made all the harsher because it had been so long pent up.
Their condemnation was harsher still—vicious, in fact—because of the way Sam acted now, in his time of adversity. Humbleness was called for now, and humbleness was not a Johnson trait. Sam’s “Johnson strut,” in fact, had lost none of its arrogance. The Johnsons—Sam and Rebekah, too—had considered themselves better than anyone else; now it turned out they were worse, but they still acted as if they were better, and people who had always resented this attitude no longer had reason to hide their resentment. One of the bankers who had once been proud to have Sam greet him on the street was now heard to sneer that he was always “playing cowboy and stomping in boots into the bank.” Bankers at least had—in Sam’s unpaid loans—reason for their new attitude toward him. The rest of the Hill Country had no such reason. What it had reason for was gratitude—for the pensions he had arranged, for the loans he had given, for the highway he had gotten built. Instead, there was relish and glee in the Hill Country’s reaction to Sam Johnson’s fall. John Dollahite’s grandfather was one of those for whose pension Sam had worked. In discussing Sam today, however, John Dollahite does not mention the pension until asked. What is mentioned—at length—is Sam Johnson’s illness, for Dollahite has it all diagnosed. “Due to drink,” he explains. “You see, too much liquor thins your blood and you don’t have the resistance to throw off things.” Sam Johnson, he says, “was nothing but a drunkard. Always was.” Shortly after Sam’s downfall, O. Y. Fawcett, proprietor of Johnson City’s drugstore, coined a remark which soon gained wide circulation. “Sam Johnson,” he said, “is too smart to work, and not smart enough to make a living without working.” The disparagement even became public. At a barbecue at Stonewall in the spring of 1923 (which Sam was too ill to
attend), one of the speakers, August Benner, who was planning to run again against Sam in the elections that fall, said: “I tell you, ladies and gentlemen, Sam Johnson is a mighty smart man. But he’s got no sense.” People who were present at that barbecue still recall how the audience roared with laughter at this mot.
Sam didn’t run in the next election, which was won by an old enemy, Fredericksburg lawyer Alfred P. C. Petsch. He announced that he was leaving politics “for business reasons”—how people snickered at that! One reason Sam didn’t run again could indeed be called “business”: he could no longer afford to give up months of each year at inadequate salary. But another reason may have been fear that if he ran again, he would lose: that Benner’s gibe and the laughter which greeted it were indications of how low he had slipped in public esteem. And from that standpoint, his decision may have been correct. Just how low he had slipped would be revealed a little more than a year later, when the Austin-Fredericksburg Highway was completed, and a barbecue was held to celebrate the official opening of the road for which Sam Johnson had worked for so many years. A dozen prominent Hill Country citizens were invited to speak. Sam Johnson was not among them.
FOR A TIME, he was in the real-estate and insurance business, but he couldn’t earn enough to live on. He went to Austin and tried to get a job in government. Many retired legislators—those who didn’t go to work for “the interests” at sizable retainers—were given well-paid sinecures in the state bureaucracy. But Sam had fought the interests, and the bureaucrats who did their wishes. Although, with ten years in the Legislature, he had retired as one of its senior members, there was no sinecure for him. For some weeks, it appeared there might be no job at all. When, finally, he was offered one, it was a one-year appointment at a salary of only two dollars per day. He had no choice but to accept. Thereafter he served the district he had served as State Representative—as a part-time game warden.
He was unable to pay off his back bills at Johnson City stores, and storeowners began writing “Please!” on their monthly statements. Afraid of antagonizing—and losing the business of—his brother and the rest of the large Johnson clan, they hesitated to cut off his credit, but he kept falling further and further behind. “My Dad was liberal-like,” says Truman Fawcett, “but he [Sam] finally owed him over two hundred dollars. He had to cut him off.” After a while, Sam had to pay cash not only at O. Y. Fawcett’s drugstore but at every store in Johnson City. “After a while he owed everyone in town,” Truman Fawcett says. “They all cut him off.”
Sometimes he didn’t have cash. He took to patronizing stores in Fredericksburg or Dripping Springs—or in towns even farther away—where he could charge his purchases. “He’d change towns,” Fawcett explains. “And while he was charging at these other towns—until they cut him off, too—he’d save a little cash money and put down some money on his bills here. But he couldn’t ever catch up.” Fawcett says that he himself believes that “He had intentions of paying his bills, Sam did.” But then he adds dryly, “At least, I think he did.” And Fawcett is kinder than other merchants who reminisce about Sam Johnson. Some of his debts were, by Hill Country standards, quite large; there is not only contempt but anger in the phrase the other merchants use about him: “He was a man who didn’t pay his bills.”
Eventually, he ran out of towns. The Buntons—who always had cash money—lent him some, but not enough. In 1925, he had to go back to Austin, hat in hand, to ask for another government job. He was given one. His work to obtain better roads for the Hill Country finally paid off for Sam Johnson. Rough stretches of the Austin-Fredericksburg Highway were being regraded. Sam was given a job on the highway of which he had been the leading sponsor: a job building it—with his hands. He was made foreman—working foreman—of a road-grading crew. The job paid fifteen dollars per week. Stella Gliddon recalls the first day Sam Johnson went to work on his new job. “Until that day, I never saw Sam Johnson without a tie on,” she says. “He always wore a nice shirt and suit. But then when he went to work on the road gang, he wore khaki pants like everyone else.”
REBEKAH JOHNSON had never been able to do much housework. And now she had no maid to do housework for her. The daughters of other Johnson City women helped their mothers keep house, but Rebekah’s didn’t—at least not to any appreciable extent. “She could never raise her voice to them,” says Wilma Fawcett. “Her whole life was for the welfare of her children. And she was just too sweet to discipline them.”
As each birth seemed to cost Rebekah more of her health and energy (after Lucia’s, in 1916, she would frequently have to spend weeks in bed) and as the reality which she had always found so harsh grew harsher, she seems to have slipped further into romantic dreaming, giving up the job as newspaper stringer to write poetry, talking more and more about her ancestors, the illustrious Baineses and the even more illustrious Deshas of Kentucky, who had produced, in the eighteenth century, a Governor of Kentucky—emphasizing that they were aristocratic Southerners. More and more, and to a striking extent, her life centered on her children, particularly on her eldest. She had always been a proud woman; now, as pride became harder to maintain, it took on a somewhat strident quality. She said, often enough so that her children’s friends recall her saying it: “Some children are born to follow. My children were born to lead.” No one could criticize her children to her, or even venture a hint that they had done anything wrong. “She was like a tiger sticking up for her children,” Wilma Fawcett says. Particularly for Lyndon. “She really had everything tied up in that fellow.” Says Louise Casparis, who worked in the Johnson home until they could no longer afford to pay her, “She loved her other children, but not to the extent which she loved him.” In her eyes, he couldn’t do anything wrong. Once, her sister-in-law Kitty told her about a fib in which several children, including Lyndon, had participated. Rebekah said she was sure Lyndon hadn’t, because he never told fibs. When Kitty said, “All children tell stories,” Rebekah replied, more shocked and angry than anyone had ever seen her: “My boy never tells a lie.”
Yet, however much she loved her children and stuck up for them, Rebekah was, in the view of Johnson City, unable—utterly unable—to take care of them. When her mother visited—which she did often now that Rebekah needed help in the house, sometimes staying for weeks at a time—she did the housework, but Johnson City housewives who visited the Johnsons when “Grandmother Baines” wasn’t in residence were shocked. Ava still remembers seeing in the Johnson sink something she had never, in all her life, seen in the sink in her own home—dirty dishes piled up, unwashed, so many that Ava felt they hadn’t been washed for several days. Rebekah had always dressed her children differently from the other children in Johnson City: Lyndon and Sam Houston in sailor outfits or linen suits, Rebekah and Josefa and Lucia in dresses and pinafores and lace bonnets. Now the clothes were still different—but they weren’t pressed, and after a while Johnson City found out why. Wilma Fawcett says that “when the laundry came back, honest to God, they’d just dump it in the bathtub and every child picked out what they wanted to wear to school that day, and it was never ironed unless they ironed it.” Sometimes, now, the fancy clothes of the Johnson children—especially the younger ones—would appear to be not only unpressed but unwashed, too.
As finances got tighter and tighter, it sometimes seemed as if the children didn’t have enough to eat. Children in Johnson City were continually eating at one another’s houses; children who ate at the Johnsons’ remember very small meals. Recalls Ohlen Cox: “I remember sausage and eggs—and that was for dinner. That was all there was, and there wasn’t a lot of that.” Clayton Stribling says, “We were poor, but we always had enough to eat. But once I ate over at the Johnsons’, and there was just bread and a little bit of bacon, and the bacon was rancid, too.” Often when Rebekah wasn’t feeling well, she wouldn’t cook dinner, and now there wasn’t much cash to buy dinner at Johnson City’s lone café. Other children vividly remember the younger Johnson children, Josefa
, Sam and Lucia, eating there—“a little dab of chili for the whole bunch.” Sometimes—not often, but sometimes—there was no cash in the house at all. The time that Sam lay ill after he lost the farm wasn’t the only time that relatives and neighbors brought meals to the Johnson house out of charity. One Christmas, there was nothing to eat in the house until Sam’s brother Tom arrived with a turkey and a sack of Irish potatoes.
The women of Johnson City, who scrimped to save every penny, who baked their own bread to save the nickel cost of a store-bought loaf, might understand why Rebekah didn’t scrimp (“She just wasn’t brought up the way the other women were”), but they still felt that spending cash money for food from a café was the most wanton kind of waste. They were, many of them, as poor as the Johnsons, but their children had enough to eat. “She lived above the means of what they had—that was the only reason her children were hungry.” And they therefore resented helping her. Tom’s daughter Ava remembers that every time her mother made preserves or canned corn, her father would insist that she can or jar enough to take some to his brother and his family. “Sam’s kids are hungry, Kitty,” Tom would say. “We’ve got to feed them.” And Ava remembers that sometimes her mother, that frugal German lady, would protest. Once, Ava vividly recalls, Kitty Johnson and Vida Cammack were canning corn together in the kitchen. When Tom insisted they can some for Sam’s kids, Kitty replied, “I don’t see why I have to do this every time, Tom. It seems like she could can her own stuff.” Mrs. Cammack, Ava recalls, pointed out that Sam had a garden, and that there was plenty of corn ripe in it if only Rebekah would can it. “I think we’ve done enough for them,” Mrs. Cammack said. And, Ava recalls, while the two women canned a hundred cans for each of their own families, for Sam and Rebekah “they canned twenty cans, and called it good [enough].”
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