The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  Not only men and women were working in the Hill Country in 1924 and ’25. Teenage boys and girls were out in the fields, too. And even the girls had to work like men.

  The picture is shadowed not only by poverty but by fear. Johnson City teenagers understood why they had to work. “Looking back now on those days, it seems as if everyone, just about, was worried about meeting the payments on their mortgage,” one says. “I know we sure were.” Not having a home—being forced to take your possessions and move, to get into your rickety car, and drive off, God knows where, with almost no money in your pocket—that was the abyss. And in 1924 and ’25, many Hill Country families were on the very edge of that abyss, and their children knew it. “We had a sense of insecurity,” Emmette Redford says. “With very few exceptions—very few—a sense of insecurity hung over everyone around there.”

  Poverty, fear—and a sense of hopelessness. For there seemed no way out of the poverty. A dentist couldn’t make money in Johnson City; the only dentist had long since left (the town’s dental needs were met by a traveling dentist who came through every few months). A doctor couldn’t make money; Doc Barnwell was always complaining that “Half the town is walking around and I haven’t been paid for [delivering] them yet.” A lawyer couldn’t make money. As for men who sold insurance or real estate, “I used to wonder,” Redford says. “How much real estate could you sell in that country?” Most of the people in the Hill Country made their living from the land, and those teenagers who thought about the land understood that, as Redford says, “You go ten, fifteen miles east of Austin and you begin to see black soil and prosperous cotton farms, and big houses on the farms. But there was no black soil around us. And there were no big houses. I had a feeling even as a boy: in this town, there were no opportunities.”

  When, moreover, Johnson City teenagers used the phrase “No opportunities,” they were talking about more than career opportunities. The lack of money was not the lack they felt most.

  The roar of the Twenties was only the faintest of echoes in those vast and empty hills—a mocking echo to Hill Country farmers who read of Coolidge Prosperity and the reduction in the work week to forty-eight hours and the bright new world of mass leisure, while they themselves were still working the seven-day-a-week, dawn-to-dark schedule their fathers and grandfathers had worked; a mocking echo to Hill Country housewives who read of the myriad new labor-saving devices (washing machines, electric irons, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators) that had “freed” the housewife. Even if they had been able to afford such devices, they would not have been able to switch them on since the Hill Country was still without electricity.

  America—confident, cocky, Bull Market, hip-flask, Jazz-Age America—was changing in the Twenties, changing with furious and exciting speed; even much of Texas, still geographically isolated from the rest of the country, was changing, as oil made a boomtown out of Beaumont and war-born industries stayed on to turn Houston and Dallas and even Austin into fast-growing cities. But little of the excitement managed to penetrate those hills. It was the Age of Radio; even the poor had radio; forests of antennas had sprung up on tenement-house roofs; even the rural poor had radio, which was ending the isolation of many rural areas by, in the words of historian David A. Shannon, “bringing the world” not only to “the middle-class home” but to “the tar-paper shack with an immediacy never before known. … By the middle of the decade, few people were out of earshot of the loudspeaker.” But the Hill Country did not have radio; with the exception of a few crystal sets whose operators sat hunched over the needle they kept maneuvering to bring into their earphones sounds from New York almost two thousand miles away, no one in the Hill Country heard the voice which, during the Democratic National Convention of 1924, became familiar to the rest of America as it bellowed over and over, “Alabama—twenty-four votes for Underwoo—ood!” It was the Age of Movies; by the time “the boys … came trooping home” from the war in 1919, Shannon says, “the movie had set up its flickering screen in every crossroads village.” But the man who wrote that had never headed west out of Austin: movies in Johnson City, shown on the whitewashed wall of the second floor of Harold Withers’ “Opera House,” as Harold, Jr., provided background music by playing the same scratchy phonograph record over and over, were shown very infrequently; people couldn’t afford to pay the fifteen-cent admission charge too often. To the extent that the 1920’s were the age of radio and the movies, and of country clubs, golf, joy-riding and cheek-to-cheek dancing—of a new mass culture—the Hill Country was not a part of the 1920’s.

  And the children of the Hill Country knew it. Not only were they not current on events, they knew they weren’t current—and they were ashamed. During Lyndon Johnson’s high-school years, the school’s students held a debate on the League of Nations. They sent away to the University of Texas extension service for articles, and studied them, and the students felt they understood the subject. But, they recall, it was the only international—or national—subject they understood. “You know, you couldn’t get any information out here, even if you wanted it,” Louise Casparis says. “In bad weather, even the newspaper wouldn’t come in—maybe for a week at a time. We were completely cut off out here. We knew about the League, but that was all we knew about. That was the pathetic thing.” Truman Fawcett remembers that, during the years when Sam Johnson was still a politician, Lyndon would bring posters of the Democratic candidates for Governor and other statewide offices around to shops and ask shopowners for permission to put them in the window. “And we had never even heard of most of them,” Fawcett says. “Their names were names we had never even heard!” Says Louise Casparis: “You just would hardly understand the situation back there that we grew up in, because, you know, we had no radio, no newspapers to amount to anything—no nothing! We were just what you would call back in the woods, compared to the rest of the world.”

  They felt poor, they felt “back in the woods”—and they felt bored. “It was a rather drab little city,” Lyndon Johnson’s sister Rebekah says. Says Emmette Redford:

  About all there was out there was three fundamentalist churches, a school with six rooms in it, and the courthouse. Occasionally, there would be a case for the Justice of the Peace Court, which handled traffic violations and minor offenses. And three or four times a year, the District Court, which handled the big cases then, would come into town, and would meet for a week, and the town would fill up with visiting lawyers, and the district attorney and the district judge would come in. And occasionally drummers would come in, or outside preachers for revival meetings at the churches, and in political campaigns, candidates for office would come through—not too often, though. Aside from that, the contact with the outside world was very limited. There was no movie, no form of paid entertainment whatsoever. My God, there wasn’t even a café half the time. If you were a kid, you went to school five days a week. On Saturdays, everybody comes into town. The kids play with each other. On Sundays, you go to church. Now, that was about the round of life.

  There seemed no way out of that round. Once there had been excitement in Blanco County, but that excitement had ended when the last Comanche had faded away to the north. In the half-century since then, the round of life had changed hardly at all. If a teenager wanted to see what lay ahead of him, all he had to do was look across Courthouse Square—at the old men, once youths who had stood chatting in the square as they themselves were doing now, who appeared promptly at noon every day (they had, after all, nothing else to do) and sat playing dominoes for matchsticks until it became too dark to play anymore.

  And what of the unusual teenager, the one more interested in the outside world, more intellectually active, more ambitious or, perhaps, simply more restless than the other teenagers in Johnson City? Few Johnson City teenagers—no more than a handful, really—graduated even from the eleventh grade, which was the last grade in its high school. Fewer still went off to college. And of those who went to college, almost none came back to their hometo
wn. “So what was left in Johnson City,” says one who did come back, “were people who didn’t have much education, and weren’t much interested in current events or in the larger world. It wasn’t just that we didn’t have anything to read—we didn’t have anyone to talk to.”

  And what, specifically, of the one teenager most interested in the outside world, the teenager who put up the political posters? How did he feel about living out his life in the Johnson City round? Was that last high-school spring, so idyllic on the surface, an idyll for him?

  The contemporary most like Lyndon Johnson, in the opinion of Johnson City residents, was a youth three years older, Emmette Redford. “We had two boys who grew up here who became presidents,” they say—and indeed Professor Redford, whose presidency was of the American Political Science Association, is the only other person who came out of Johnson City in the 1920’s to achieve any substantial measure of nationwide prestige even in a limited field. What were Redford’s feelings about Johnson City?

  “Well,” he says slowly, “I had no resentment. I liked the people out there. They were friendly, good people.” He pauses, for quite a long time. Then he says, in a very different tone: “My feelings were escape, you see. It was a dull kind of life. It was boring. My God, it was boring! And there was always this feeling of insecurity, that you’d never have any of the comforts of life. And I couldn’t see any way of ever obtaining any security in Johnson City. I couldn’t see any way of accomplishing anything at all there. There were no opportunities in Johnson City. So my feelings were I had to get out of that town. I had to escape. I had to get out!”

  Emmette Redford was a member of a family respected in Johnson City. What was it like to live in Johnson City and be a member of a ridiculed family—a family like the Johnsons?

  During this period of his life, Lyndon Johnson was to say, he dreamed—over and over—the same terrible dream. In it, he was sitting alone in a small cage, “bare except for a stone bench and a pile of dark, heavy books.” An old woman walked by, holding a mirror, and, catching a glimpse of himself in it, he saw that he had suddenly turned from a teenage boy into a gnarled old man. When he pleaded with the old woman to let him out, she would instead walk away. And when he awoke, dripping with sweat, he would be muttering in the night: “I must get away. I must get away.”

  Many of Lyndon Johnson’s “dreams” were related to interviewers for a carefully calculated effect, but this dream, real or invented, seems to reveal true feelings, for these feelings are corroborated by outside, independent sources—the recollections of people who knew him—as well as by his actions. Emmette Redford wanted to get out of Johnson City. Lyndon Johnson was desperate to get out.

  HE REFUSED TO GET OUT by the road his parents had mapped for him, though. And by refusing to take that road, he gave them one of the most painful wounds it was within his power to inflict on them. They had always assumed—this couple to whom their children’s education was so terribly important—that he would go to college. But now he said he wouldn’t.

  His mother kept trying to reason with him, telling him, in the words of Ben Crider, the older boy whom she enlisted in the struggle, that without an education “you couldn’t get anywhere in life,” that “she knew he had the qualifications, and she wanted him to be important, … to make good.” She never, in the memory of Lyndon’s friends and siblings, raised her voice or lost her temper, just kept trying to persuade him to go, telling him that he had a good brain and should work with it, instead of his hands, to get ahead, telling him that if he didn’t go to college he would never learn to appreciate the beauties of literature or art, would never really learn the history in which he was so interested—kept trying to persuade him and encourage him, telling him she knew he would do well there. “Her big struggle was to get Lyndon” to go to college, Crider says—and she never gave up. Describing the struggle, Louise Casparis says: “‘Hope springs eternal’ was written about her.” Sam at first tried to reason with him, telling him that without an education all he could look forward to was a life of physical labor. Then he flatly ordered him to go. When Lyndon flatly refused, he tried insulting him, shouting, “You don’t have enough brains to take a college education!”

  Neither his mother’s pleading nor his father’s shouting moved him, however. His need to stand out, to “be somebody,” to dominate, hadn’t abated; now, more than ever, his friends recall, “Lyndon was always talking big”; once, when he said he would be a Congressman one day, and Fritz Koeniger laughed, Lyndon said, “‘I’ll see you in Washington’—and he wasn’t kidding at all.” But, according to a girl who went to the only college in the Hill Country—Southwest Texas State Teachers College at San Marcos—to whom he confided some of his feelings during the summer following his graduation from high school, he was afraid he couldn’t be somebody at college. Academic standards were much lower at Southwest Texas than at the University of Texas, but Lyndon was afraid they were too high for him: Johnson City High wasn’t an accredited school; before a Johnson City graduate could be admitted, in fact, he had to take examinations to prove he was up to college level in his courses. Says the girl, Lyndon’s cousin Elizabeth Roper Clemens: “He didn’t have a full education, and he knew it.” And, Mrs. Clemens says, although tuition at Southwest Texas was low—much lower than the university, for example—he would have to work while at school, “and going to school as just another poor boy—well, that wasn’t something Lyndon wanted to do.”

  But perhaps there was something else behind Lyndon’s attitude. College, the world of books, of Truth and Beauty, of the poetry his mother loved, of the ideals and abstractions so dear to his mother and father both, was the very essence of his parents’ way of life—of everything important to these two people. He had seen what their way had got them. He had seen what it had got him. And he refused to go to college.

  IF HE WOULDN’T go to college, his father said, he’d have to go to work.

  The state was gravel-topping six miles of the highway between Johnson City and Austin with gravel from the banks of Miller Creek. First, so rocky were those banks, the gravel had to be loosened with pickaxes. Then it had to be shoveled into mule-drawn wagons. The boards that formed the beds of the wagons had been loosened, and after the mules had hauled the wagons into position on the highway, the boards would be turned so that the gravel fell through onto the road, where it was smoothed out with rakes. Only the pickaxing was easy. For what the axes loosened was not soil but that hard Hill Country rock, so that the shovelfuls that had to be lifted up into the wagons were heavy. And the wagon boards had to be turned by hand, turned with piles of rock on top of them.

  The hands turning those boards—and lifting those shovels, and tugging those rakes through rock—were young hands, for most of the workers were Johnson City teenagers. Some of the hands were callused, the hands of boys accustomed to farm work. But the hands of fifteen-year-old Lyndon Johnson weren’t. Nor was Lyndon strong, or physically coordinated, or accustomed to working; one night, the foreman, Floyd Ferrell, came home and sarcastically told his wife: “That boy can’t even hold a shovel.” For Lyndon, the work was almost as brutal as it was for the girls working beside him; in that Summer of 1924, two dollars a day, the wage the state was paying, was precious in the Hill Country, and any pair of hands that could bring it home had to do so—“We had to work like men,” says Ava (her pretty sister, Margaret, was working, too, during their school vacations; despite their mother’s thriftiness, their father was on the verge of losing his farm to the bank that Summer). “That was work I’ll never forget.” Lyndon had always hated physical labor—Ava remembers him, at the age of no more than nine or ten, whispering to her as they and their friends picked cotton in someone’s stony fields, a score of skinny little backs stooped over in the burning sun: “Boy, there’s got to be a better way to make a living than this. I don’t see that there’s any future in this.” This road work—the only work available in a drought-stricken Hill Country—was even harder than p
icking cotton, and Lyndon hated every minute of it. Ava remembers him tugging at a wagon board beside her and grunting, “There’s got to be a better way.” But he did it—rather than do what his parents wanted.

  More and more frequently now, he wouldn’t get up on time. Coming into his room, his father would say harshly: “C’mon, Lyndon, get up—every boy in town’s got an hour’s start on you. And you never will catch up.” He continued to sneak the car out at night, and his father grew angrier and angrier. Then, one night, while driving a group of older boys to a bootlegger’s still, he ran the car into a ditch and wrecked it, and, standing there on the lonely country road, said: “I just can’t face my father.”

  “Money was scarce,” recalls one of the boys present, “but we put in our nickels and dimes and got Lyndon enough money” so that he could run away from home; he slept in the wrecked car, in the morning hitchhiked to Austin, and from there took a bus 160 miles south to Robstown, in the cotton country near Corpus Christi on the Gulf, where his cousins, the Ropers, lived. When he arrived, his cousin Elizabeth recalls, he said that “working on that highway was just too much for him, and he wanted to find a job where he could use his brains instead of his hands.”

  But the only job he could find in Robstown was in a cotton gin. The Roeder & Koether Gin Company was a long, low building filled with the clank of pulleys, the roar of machine belts, the whine of the high-speed saws that cut the cotton lint away from the seeds, and the heavy thuds of the huge hydraulic pump press that hammered the cotton into bales and pounded steel belts around them. Hot as it had been out on that highway in the Hill Country sun, it was hotter inside the gin, with the Gulf Coast sun beating down on its tin roof and fires roaring under the big steam boiler. The air in the gin was so thick with the dust and lint that drifted up in clouds from the cotton as it was pounded into bales by the pump press that men working in it sometimes found themselves gasping for breath. And Lyndon, working amid the roar and the whine and the pounding that must have been very loud to a boy from the Hill Country, where the gins were tiny, almost toylike devices compared to this, was put to work—eleven hours a day—keeping the boiler supplied with wood and water. And it was explained to him that if he ever let the water run out (or if the pop-off valve for some reason failed to work, and too much steam was kept pent up inside), the boiler would explode. Several had exploded in Robstown gins that summer; he was terrified.