The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  Other secretaries similarly used their Congressmen’s names on the telephone to gain entrée, although not as brazenly (or as frequently; it was almost matter of course for Johnson to introduce himself as Congressman Kleberg now). But what he did with that entrée was not at all usual. “He was smiling and deferential,” Tommy Corcoran, a keen observer of the Washington scene, was to say of Johnson, “but hell, lots of guys can be smiling and deferential. He had something else. No matter what someone thought, Lyndon would agree with him—would be there ahead of him, in fact. He could follow someone’s mind around—and figure out where it was going and beat it there. …” And he touched every base; leaving a bureaucrat’s office, he smiled and chatted with his assistants and his secretaries until, soon, he had entire bureaus, top to bottom, willing to help him.

  He was pushing farmers as well as bureaucrats. Confused by the complexity of the new programs and distrustful of government promises that they would actually receive money for plowing up crops, farmers all across America were hesitating to sign AAA applications and plow-up contracts. Many of the Agricultural Extension Service’s county agents, whom the AAA had been counting on to educate farmers about the new programs, didn’t understand the programs, and others, Republican-appointed, long in their jobs and deeply conservative, were unwilling to cooperate with “socialism.” Lyndon Johnson educated his district himself; hour after hour he sat in Room 1322 telephoning his county agents; when he heard about an influential farmer who was balking, he telephoned the farmer. The nationwide progress of the cotton sign-up program was so slow in 1933, despite two appeals by Roosevelt for cooperation, that on July 11 Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace was forced to announce that the program would be canceled if the sign-up rate did not double. At the time Wallace made that announcement, the sign-ups from the Fourteenth Congressional District of Texas had already far exceeded the district’s quota. Applications and plow-up contracts from other districts became stalled or lost in the South Building because the bureau to which they were addressed no longer handled them, and no one seemed to know who did. Johnson knew—and he saw to it that applications from his district were sent to the right office. After they arrived, he would show up at that office and get them moved to the top of the huge piles awaiting action. With approval from a dozen different bureaus required for each contract, contracts from other districts might be stalled for months. Johnson would show up at each bureau—and contracts from the Fourteenth District were approved and back in the mail within days. In a White House ceremony on July 28, 1933, President Roosevelt presented the first AAA check for plowed-under cotton. Its recipient was farmer William E. Morris—of the Fourteenth District’s Nueces County.

  THE COTTON PLOW-UP PAYMENTS enabled South Texas farmers to make their monthly mortgage payments, but were insufficient to enable them to pay their arrears. The machinery established by Roosevelt for assistance with these arrears—the mortgage-refinancing Federal Land Bank—was not yet in gear. Not only was refinancing more complicated than plowing up crops, refinancing required an appraisal of each individual farm, and during the first three weeks of September alone, 2,631 desperate Texas farmers applied for refinancing to the Federal Land Bank’s Houston office—whose appraisal staff consisted of nine men. Before the machinery could get in gear, many farms would be lost. Banks and mortgage companies, already overstocked with farms they could not sell, did not want more farms if they could instead get the money they were owed on them, but, by Fall, they had decided they could wait for it no longer. In October, sheriffs tacked up foreclosure notices on sixty-seven farms in the Fourteenth District, farms for which the Roosevelt rescue operation was going to come too late.

  With Congress in recess, the district’s Congressman was home in Corpus Christi. The farmers appealed to him for help, asking for a meeting. The Congressman was not disposed to grant them one, seeing no way in which he could help them, but his secretary said the meeting should be held. He had thought of a plan.

  Only the furnishing of new collateral would persuade the mortgage companies to wait for their money. The farmers felt they didn’t have any collateral, and in the traditional sense they didn’t: their savings, even the butter-and-egg money, were long gone; not only every acre of land but every piece of machinery was already mortgaged. But Lyndon Johnson had thought of new collateral: crops that hadn’t been planted yet. The farmers, he thought, should each agree to give their mortgagor a landlord’s share—a third—of the 1934 crop in exchange for a year’s extension on the mortgage. The mortgage companies might not normally agree to this, but Johnson felt they would now if they could be given assurances that the extension would enable them to get their money, not only current interest payments but the arrears as well. And Johnson had conceived an innovation that would give farmers enough money to pay their arrears. The richness of the black loam of the Gulf Coast had made its farmers prosperous in good times. Johnson wanted to use the richness of the soil to help them in bad times as well. He wanted the Federal Land Bank to agree to take soil productivity into account in deciding how much to lend on a farm. Such an innovation would mean considerably more money for each farmer than the Federal Land Bank had previously been willing to lend—enough money to pay the mortgage arrears. The mortgage companies would also, he knew, want assurances that they would get their money on time—within the year’s extension. At the present slow pace at which the Federal Land Bank had been moving, no one could be assured of that. So he wanted the pace accelerated. He wanted the Land Bank to promise the mortgage companies that it would give priority to loan applications from the Fourteenth District. He needed, in other words, commitments both for a new policy and for speed in implementing it.

  He got them. To obtain the commitments, two requirements had to be met. A Federal Land Bank official had to be persuaded to come to Corpus Christi and meet personally with the farmers; Johnson was sure that a face-to-face meeting with these desperate men could not help but win the official’s sympathy. And the official had to be high enough in rank to give commitments on the Land Bank’s behalf, so that his sympathy would be translated into the immediate action needed. In dealing with the Land Bank, he had a weapon available: the deputy governor of the bank’s parent body, the Farm Credit Administration, was W. I. Myers, an old friend of Dick Kleberg. Tracking down Myers, who was visiting Dallas, Johnson put Kleberg on the phone with him—and the old friend agreed to come to Corpus Christi himself for the meeting, and to bring with him the president of the Federal Land Bank’s Houston office, A. C. Williams. Then Johnson began telephoning; all day, he telephoned bankers and mortgage-company representatives; at night, when they were in from the fields, he telephoned farmers. And on the evening of October 27, sixty-seven farmers—sixty-seven men who had given their lives to their land, and then had received notices saying that the land would be taken away from them—trooped onto the broad, shady porch of Dick Kleberg’s enormous home overlooking the Gulf in Corpus Christi to meet there with the men who had sent the notices—“the largest gathering of farm credit leaders ever held in South Texas,” the Caller termed it—and with the two men who could provide the money to save their land. Kleberg’s tall, skinny secretary explained his proposal, and everyone accepted it: the farmers agreed to write letters to the mortgage companies promising them a third of their crop; the government promised to speed—and to liberalize—mortgage refinancing; and the mortgage holders agreed to accept the letters and the promises, and to take down the foreclosure notices. Myers went off to the King Ranch for a few days of hunting—after first, at Johnson’s discreet urging, telephoning the head of the Land Bank appraisal division in Houston. Within a week, all sixty-seven farms had been appraised and refinanced; by the end of the year, Federal Land Bank mortgages, stretching out amortization payments from five years to fifteen, and reducing interest payments from 8 percent to 4, had been given to every endangered farm in South Texas.

  DURING THAT SUMMER of 1933, as farmers plowed up tens of millions of acres
of cotton (whipping their mules, which had been trained not to step on plants, to make them pull the plows over the cotton rows), farm prices rose to ten cents a pound, but by Autumn they were falling again. Because of bureaucratic difficulties, moreover, many farmers had not received their first AAA payments.

  If what he was trying didn’t work, the President had promised, he would try something else. In October, he tried something else: to offset the drop in prices, he established a Commodity Credit Corporation to lend ten cents a pound on cotton to farmers who agreed in advance to participate in the 1934 crop-reduction program. This shored up prices, and as Winter began, the AAA and Farm Credit Administration programs began to take hold: benefit payments, commodity loans and mortgage refinancing contracts began to flow out to farmers, the currency expansion they had so long demanded at last took place—for American farmers, the long, desperate decades were finally over. For the first time, moreover, farmers could plan ahead without the fear that forces beyond their control made planning senseless; for the first time they possessed a measure of meaningful control over their destiny: beyond its immediate benefits, AAA programs gave farmers what they had thought they could never have—a kind of insurance against ill fortune: As the Corpus Christi Caller put it: they can “know almost to the cent how much money they will receive in benefit payments during the year [despite] the vagaries of the weather. …”

  Whatever the New Deal program, Johnson reaped for his district every dollar it could provide. He urged district farmers to repay their 1933 crop-reduction loans as quickly as possible, so that they could get new loans—so that, as a press release from Congressman Kleberg’s office put it, “the record for this section would remain on the favorable basis established and so that this section would be in a position to ask for consideration on any farm matters which might arise in the future.” On November 19, 1933, the AAA announced that the Fourteenth Congressional District of Texas had the best loan-repayment record of any of the nation’s 435 congressional districts. And in 1934, the district received the type of “consideration” Johnson had had in mind; it was the first congressional district to have every one of its crop-reduction loan applications approved by the AAA. (Eighty-five percent of its farmers had applied for these loans, a figure that may itself have been the highest for any congressional district in the nation—the figures are unclear on this point.)

  Most Congressional offices closed during the five or six-month congressional recess; during the recess, Johnson returned with Kleberg to Corpus Christi—but kept either Latimer or Jones in Washington, so that the office of the Fourteenth District never closed. Assistance was always available with applications for loans from the AAA, or the Federal Land Bank, or the new Homeowners Loan Corporation that was established to provide urban homeowners with the same protection against foreclosure as farmers. So effective was this assistance that, by the end of 1934, the Caller said that “Corpus Christi and the South Texas area [are] suffering less under the business depression than any other section of the nation.” This statement may have been an exaggeration, but specific figures are impressive testimony to Johnson’s diligence. The Fourteenth District was the first of the nation’s 435 congressional districts to have all its AAA loan applications approved; as for Federal Land Bank applications, during the first ten months the program was in operation—the only ten months for which this figure is available—not a single loan request from the Fourteenth District was turned down. Although district-by-district figures are not available for the Homeowners Loan Corporation, 450 HOLC loans were made in Corpus Christi alone, a figure which appears to be the highest in the United States for a city of its size. As other New Deal programs—CWA, PWA, WPA—were inaugurated, the district received more than its share of these, too—so many CCC camps (one, at Floresville, was named for Kleberg), for example, that when, in 1936, the government established limits to the number in any one district, the Fourteenth was a distinct embarrassment.

  Four hundred and thirty-five Congressional districts: among them districts represented by Congressmen of long seniority whose favor even a President had to court; among them districts represented by Congressmen who chaired powerful committees; among them districts represented by Congressmen who were allies of the New Deal; among them districts represented by Congressmen who worked hard for their districts. Few districts fared better under the New Deal’s programs than this district with a junior Congressman who opposed the New Deal, a Congressman who seldom visited his office—this district whose only asset on Capitol Hill was a young secretary who worked for it with a frantic, frenzied, almost desperate aggressiveness and energy.

  15

  The Boss of the Little Congress

  AVETERAN TEXAS POLITICIAN, watching Lyndon Johnson, at the age of twenty-one, ramrodding eight tough districts in a Lieutenant Governor’s race, had called him a “wonder kid” of politics. Welly Hopkins, watching him work “all the byways” of Blanco, Comal, and Guadalupe counties, had spoken of his “very unusual” political ability. The same ability had been evident even earlier—in San Marcos, where Lyndon Johnson had not only captured campus politics, but had created campus politics. Now what his brother called his “natural vocation” was to be seen on a larger stage.

  There existed in Washington an organization called “The Little Congress.”

  It was a moribund organization. Formed in 1919 to provide congressional secretaries with experience in public speaking and a knowledge of parliamentary procedures, it was modeled on the House of Representatives and held debates under House rules. But it had degenerated into little more than a social club, whose desultory meetings, held in the Cannon Building’s chandeliered Caucus Room, were attended by no more than a few dozen secretaries.

  But the White Stars of San Marcos had also been considered a social club. In April, 1933, Johnson approached a few carefully selected fellow residents of the Dodge Hotel and asked them to help him become the “Speaker,” or presiding officer, of the Little Congress.

  As in the House of Representatives, seniority and line of succession had determined the selection of previous Speakers: at each election, only one new officer, a sergeant-at-arms, always an older man with long Washington tenure, was chosen; the other officers each simply moved up one notch, the former sergeant-at-arms being nominated for clerk and the clerk being nominated for Speaker; there was never any opposition. Johnson, however, had a plan to sidestep this practice.

  The plan depended on secrecy. By counting votes, says William H. Payne, who ran for sergeant-at-arms on the Johnson ticket, Johnson had determined that so many new secretaries had been brought to Capitol Hill in March by the new Congressmen elected in the Roosevelt landslide that their votes would give him the Speakership—if the older secretaries, who still far outnumbered the newer ones, did not realize what he was planning and turn out in force at the April meeting. To minimize chances of discovery, he waited to launch his campaign until only a day or two before the election, and when he campaigned, he campaigned not in person but by telephone—remaining in Kleberg’s office and calling new secretaries in other congressional offices to ask for their votes—so that there would be as little activity visible as possible. He had discovered another cache of votes: although only congressional secretaries had attended past meetings of the Little Congress and there existed a general impression that only secretaries were eligible for membership, the organization’s bylaws actually made any person on the “legislative payroll”—which included Capitol Hill mailmen, policemen and elevator operators appointed under congressional patronage—eligible, so long as he paid his two-dollar dues. Johnson told Latimer to round up his mailmen friends, and bring them to the meeting—and he told Latimer not to tell them about the meeting until the last possible moment. He asked a friendly elevator operator to do the same with the other elevator men—and repeated the enjoinder of secrecy. And on the night of April 27, 1933, as a few handfuls of Little Congress regulars sat all but lost in the rows of seats in the spacious Cau
cus Room, they were taken completely by surprise when, just as the meeting was about to begin, there suddenly burst into the room enough people with unfamiliar faces to elect as Speaker a tall, thin twenty-four-year-old from Texas, whom few of the older men even knew. “Who is that guy?” one asked as Johnson came forward to take the gavel.

  (When, the next day, the older men collected their wits, they had other questions: about the honesty of the election. Many of the votes that had elected Johnson, they said, had been cast by men not eligible to vote. Many of the mailmen and elevator operators who had shown up for the first time had not paid their dues, they said, and hence were not members of the Little Congress. Moreover, they said, many of the new voters could not be members even if they paid dues: Johnson’s supporters, they charged, had simply rounded up every Capitol Hill employee they could find, whether or not the employee had been appointed under congressional patronage. There were complaints that, as Lucas puts it, “He stole that election.” If the charge was true, the election was, of course, the second he had stolen.)

  JOHNSON’S ACCEPTANCE SPEECH was somewhat derivative from a speech delivered a month before by another man lately come to Washington. “My election,” he said, “will mark a New Deal for all Little Congresses.” (He also promised to “be mindful” of the “forgotten man,” by naming committees on “an equitable basis of membership and seniority.”) Derivative or not, however, a new deal was what he delivered: he transformed the Little Congress of Capitol Hill as he had transformed the White Stars of College Hill. He turned a social organization into a political organization—into an organization, moreover, to serve his own ends.

  One of those ends was entrée—the entrée a congressional staffer needed but found so hard to obtain. Henceforth, Johnson announced, meetings would be held not every month but every week, and would include not only debates but speeches by “prominent figures.” And although the new Speaker declared that the reason for this innovation was to make the meetings livelier, his teenage assistants knew that there was another reason as well: says Latimer, “It gave him an excuse to go and see Huey Long or Tom Connally or a Texas Congressman who was head of a committee he thought he might need for something, and invite them to speak, and once he got in to see somebody, the Chief, being the way he was, would make them remember him.”