The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  In thinking of the youth problem, moreover, September always loomed ahead; September when schools opened, and America’s children either entered their doors—or didn’t. In September, 1934, no fewer than 700,000 boys and girls of high school age had failed to enroll in high school. Now the September of 1935 was approaching, and unless something was done, that number would be even higher; hundreds of thousands more young people would join the ranks of that lost generation.

  Eleanor Roosevelt—whose empathy with the young, with those who would rather light the candles than curse, was always so deep—had sat on platforms, many platforms, where lecturers told young people that their problems were their own fault, and she had not agreed.* The plight of youth, Mrs. Roosevelt felt, was the fault of society; “a civilization which does not provide young people with a way to earn a living is pretty poor,” she said. Having grasped the dimensions of the problem early—it had been in May, 1934, that she spoke of her “real terror” about it—she had early begun pressing her husband to alleviate it with some program which would help youngsters stay in school and out of the ranks of the unemployed, and which would also give youngsters out of school both jobs and the training for better jobs. Nor was this all she wanted for them. “We have got to [make] these young people … feel that they are necessary,” she said. And, she said, they should be given “certain things for which youth craves—the chance for self-sacrifice for an ideal.” What she envisioned was some sort of youth service for the country on a broader scale, and incorporating more formal education and vocational training, than the immensely popular Civilian Conservation Corps, which had been created during the Hundred Days.

  Her husband, whose inventor’s pride in the CCC (which was largely his personal inspiration) perhaps made him reluctant to concede the need for additional measures, and who saw that a program such as the one his wife was suggesting would be bitterly opposed—not only because the education lobby would fear that federal intervention in education would lessen its control of the schools, but because of traditional fears that such a program would inject politics into the schools—did not at once agree. Fulton Oursler witnessed one discussion between them on the subject, a discussion that became rather heated when Eleanor called the CCC “too militaristic.” (Franklin: “It’s the last thing in the world it really is.” Eleanor: “Well, after all, my dear, it is under the supervision of the Army.” Franklin: “That does not make it militaristic”) The President made the additional point that there was no specific young people’s problem, but only a problem of the whole people (“Another delegation could come to you, representing men over forty who can’t get jobs. … Such movements as a youth movement seem to be especially unnecessary”). But Mrs. Roosevelt knew how to appeal to her husband; she shifted, Joseph P. Lash relates, “to the political argument. The young people would soon be voters. … Franklin relaxed. ‘There is a great deal to what you say. …’ Her husband was a ‘practical politician,’ she later said. If other arguments failed, he was always sensitive to the ‘purely political’ argument.” Then some of his advisors—even Harry Hopkins and Aubrey Williams—warned him that the establishment of a youth agency in the government might boomerang politically by raising the cry that he was trying to regiment America’s youth the way Germany was doing. “If it is the right thing to do for the young people, then it should be done,” he replied. “I guess we can stand the criticism, and I doubt if our youth can be regimented in this or any other way.” (“That was another side of him,” Lash has written. “He was not only the politician.”) “I have determined that we shall do something for the Nation’s unemployed youth,” he declared. “They must have their chance.” The National Youth Administration was created to give it to them.

  SINCE, to defuse the “regimentation” charge, it had been decided “that the NYA should operate with … a minimum of centralized control,” each of the forty-eight state directors was to be allowed “the widest latitude” to create, organize and administer his own program. Even during the period of the NYA’s greatest activity, when it was employing half a million youths, its national office in Washington would never grow to more than sixty-seven persons, including secretaries.

  The Texas State Director’s initial creation was a staff.

  In assembling it, Lyndon Johnson’s ability to read men was put to the proof—and was proven. The men he wanted were the men he had cached in patronage jobs while he had been Dick Kleberg’s secretary. In selecting them to be the recipients of his patronage, he had been gambling that when at some future date he called them, they would come to him. Now he called, and they came—even those who did not want to.

  Not a year before, Willard Deason, bowing to Johnson’s arguments, had forsaken a promising career in education for a career in law. Now Deason was summoned for another chat.

  No more was heard about the beauties of the law. Flying to Austin on July 27, 1935, the day after his appointment was announced, Johnson, meeting with Deason, dwelt instead on the beauties of the National Youth Administration. “I had never heard of it,” Deason recalls, and his eagerness to join it was not enhanced by the meager salary—$2,100—he was offered. But Johnson, he says, was “the greatest salesman”; the marching orders had been changed—and Deason obeyed them. Feeling that his job as attorney with the Federal Land Bank was “a real stepping stone,” he agreed at the July 27 meeting to leave it only for two weeks: when Johnson pleaded with him to “help me get this thing started,” he said he would use his two-week vacation to do so. But during those two weeks, Johnson persuaded him to take a six-month leave of absence from the Land Bank job—and at the end of the six months, Deason left it permanently.

  His reluctance was matched by Jesse Kellam’s. Kellam, the tough exfullback who had been given the State Education Department position that had been the best job at Johnson’s disposal, had been promoted to the department’s fourth-ranking post, a high-paying, prestigious, secure position as State Director of Rural Aid; and, with his memories of his terrible years in Lufkin still vivid, he had no intention of leaving it. But Johnson persuaded him to take a two-week leave of absence. At the end of those two weeks, he persuaded him to take another two. And at the end of that period, Kellam left his state job for one that paid less than half as much.

  Similar scenes were repeated a dozen times—always with success. Even Ben Crider, hardly installed in the federal post that was “the best job I ever had,” left it. Lyndon Johnson’s appointment had allowed him to bring together, in a single office, the men he had scattered through the federal bureaucracy.

  To the nucleus of a staff thus formed, Johnson added new recruits whose personalities documented yet again the fact that what Johnson called “loyalty”—unquestioning obedience; not only willingness but eagerness to take orders, to bow to his will—was the quality he most desired in subordinates. Many of the men he hired now were former White Stars from San Marcos. They were not the brightest of that band of brothers, but rather those who, like Wilton Woods, had demonstrated at college a capacity for subservience. Men who had been leaders of the secret fraternity—and who had revealed a capacity for success in the postgraduate world—were not hired. One of the bright White Stars, Horace Richards, had been given a job while Johnson was Kleberg’s secretary, but had insisted on offering, and arguing for, his own opinions. He was not given an NYA job.

  The personalities of the new, non-San Marcos recruits documented the same point. The one young man from the Hill Country besides the malleable Crider to be hired had, as a boy, demonstrated the greatest willingness to allow young Lyndon Johnson to assume the place he wanted: “the forefront,” “the head of the ring.” Sherman Birdwell of Buda had, as a boy, not only followed Lyndon Johnson around obediently while their parents were visiting together, but had even attempted to imitate his way of talking and walking (and who, indeed, continued as a man to do so).

  CREATING A STAFF proved easier than creating a program. Directives from NYA headquarters in Washington mandated t
he creation of 12,000 public works jobs for young Texans. Lyndon Johnson’s only experience with public works had been his job on a Highway Department road gang in Johnson City. Now he had to create—create out of nothing—a public works program huge in size and statewide in scope. And once it was created, he had to direct it—to manage it, to administer it. His only administrative experience was his work as Kleberg’s secretary; the only staff he had previously directed—this twenty-six-year-old who would now be directing scores of men—had consisted of Gene Latimer, L. E. Jones, and Russell Brown.

  Complicating the problems of all forty-eight state directors was the strictness of the criteria by which NYA headquarters in Washington would determine the acceptability of proposed “work projects.” To avoid displacement of adult workers, for example, the projects could not involve work that would otherwise be undertaken by state or local government. To ensure that the limited NYA funds went primarily to young people rather than to contractors or suppliers, NYA Bulletin No. 11 required that 75 percent of project allocations be spent on wages (this requirement reduced the amount that could be spent on the materials and equipment essential for work projects to an unrealistically low level). Complicating the state directors’ problems further was the lack of guidance from Washington. Recalls one director: “When we asked Washington: ‘What kind of work?’ we were told: ‘That’s up to you. …’ But we didn’t know, we couldn’t possibly have known what kind of work these youths wanted or needed.”

  Complicating the problems of the Texas NYA director—the youngest of the forty-eight directors and one of the few without public works or administrative experience—was the factor that complicated every problem in Texas: its vast size. Every attempt to establish a statewide public works program in Texas had been hamstrung by the variations in climatic, cultural, social and economic conditions in a state 800 miles from top to bottom, and almost 800 miles wide, a state that, had it been located in the East, would have covered all the states of New England, as well as New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia. Since, moreover, the state was divided into 254 counties, public works programs could not feasibly be planned on a county-by-county basis, as would be possible in other states. Nibbling at the problem would not solve it. A statewide program, one applicable to all counties, and unaffected by sectional variations, was what was needed. Lyndon Johnson had to find a public works project that no one else had thought of, that required only minuscule expenditures on the materials and equipment that normally were staples of public works projects, and that had huge, sweeping, statewide scope.

  It was while discussing Lyndon Johnson’s early days with the NYA that his wife first told this author, “Lyndon was not the supremely confident person he seemed, you know.” L. E. Jones, who had returned to Austin but worked part-time for the NYA for a few weeks, says, “They had to spend the money, and they had to do it fast. This was a decision that Lyndon had to make. … Making the decision was hard. I remember the interminable wrangling over what’s going to be our first project. They just couldn’t decide. Everybody had a different idea.”

  Finally, after weeks of discussion, someone—no one remembers who—hit on the idea of building “roadside parks” adjoining the state’s many new highways: areas of an acre or two that would be leveled and paved with gravel, and in which would be set a few picnic tables, a few benches and three or four barbecue pits as well as shrubs and shade trees. Without even comfort stations, by Eastern standards such small areas would scarcely justify the name of parks, but in barren Texas, where it was possible to drive a hundred miles with no place to picnic except the ground, they would be welcome. They would, moreover, improve highway safety. Lack of such facilities had caused accidents because motorists had been forced to park on highway shoulders or (because many highways in Texas were built with only narrow shoulders or with none at all) on the edge of the roadway itself while they picnicked or relieved themselves, or, on long trips, slept at night. Only a few months before, a family of five had been killed near San Antonio when a car rammed theirs while they were sleeping under it during a rainstorm.

  The State Highway Department enthusiastically agreed to furnish not only the necessary land and materials—mostly cement and wood for the benches and tables—but also the transportation (young workers would be taken to each site in departmental trucks) that was an important consideration in so sparsely populated a state. And when the Department also agreed to furnish the supervision (by departmental foremen), the roadside parks became projects which met fully the NYA’s requirement that 75 percent of the cost go directly for young people’s wages. The little parks met as well the criteria peculiar to Texas; suitable to all climates, they could be built everywhere in the state, and the Highway Department, a statewide organization, was of course the sponsor. Since the Department had had no plans to build such parks, the projects would not displace regular departmental employees. One additional criterion, not referred to in NYA bulletins, remained: for political reasons, as Jones puts it, the project “had to not only be good, but look good; it had to be something that would be popular.” So important was this to Johnson that he had persuaded Maury Maverick to let him hire his speechwriter, an ex-newspaperman named Herbert C. Henderson, to write up each proposal that had been discussed “to see how it sounded.” No previous proposal had seemed right, but when Henderson finished writing up this one, Jones says, it “turned out to be perfect.” When Johnson realized that he had a project at last, his relief could not be contained. “He was beside himself with happiness.” Jones, the near-perfect typist, had to stay up all night copying Henderson’s description to be sent to Washington for official approval. And then, as dawn was breaking over Austin, Johnson walked with Jones to the post office, to see with his own eyes that the precious proposal was placed properly in a mailbox. Within a few days, a handful of young men carrying picks and shovels rode out of Austin on a Highway Department flatbed truck to begin building, on Route 8 near Williamson Creek, the first roadside park in Texas. If there had been desperation to find the right program, once they found it, there was desperation to get it under way. “Lyndon was like a crazy man,” Jones says. “He just worked night and day, he just worked his staff to distraction.” By June, 1936, 135 parks would be under construction, and 3,600 youths would be earning thirty dollars per month working on them.*

  HIS QUOTA, of course, was not 3,600 jobs, but 12,000. Some were created by additional projects connected with the Highway Department. NYA workers built “rural school walks”—gravel paths paralleling heavily traveled highways—to encourage children to stay out of the road while walking to school. They trimmed back trees and shrubs to improve visibility at dangerous intersections and curves. They filled in the erosion-caused ditches that lined many Texas highways and whose slopes were so steep that a car veering even a few feet off the road could overturn in them; and, to inhibit future erosion, they built drainage ditches. They graveled the last several hundred feet of dirt roads which intersected paved highways, because when rain turned these roads to mud, cars dragged the mud onto the highways and made them slippery. They built graveled “turnouts” by farmers’ mailboxes in areas where mailmen had created a traffic hazard when they stopped their cars on the pavement. These were small projects—even smaller than the roadside parks—but they would furnish another 2,800 jobs.

  To create more jobs, “local” projects—projects involving only a single town—were necessary. As with the Highway Department projects, NYA regulations required that the materials and equipment be supplied by an “outside” sponsor. Johnson asked local officials to suggest improvements they wanted to see made in their towns.

  In some places, the response was: “We don’t want any federal handouts,” and in other towns, the small “in” group didn’t want any innovations that might interfere with its power; one area that particularly resisted the NYA, for example, was Karnack, Lady Bird’s home town—because of Lady Bird’s father. Cap’n Taylor “ran things in Ka
rnack,” Bill Deason recalls, and in the whole northern end of Harrison County. “And he said, ‘You just stay out of the north end of the county. I’ll take care of the folks up here.’” But such resistance wasn’t widespread, because most towns were desperate over the plight of their young people. A more serious problem was the lack of initiative and ability to think along new lines. “Even if they wanted the [federal] money, they didn’t have any imagination,” Deason says. “We tried terrifically not to have any of that leaf-raking that was being criticized so much elsewhere, but so often they didn’t have any worthwhile ideas of what projects might be worthwhile to do.” Johnson overcame these problems. “Lyndon Johnson had to sell,” Bill Deason says. “And I’ve told you before, he was the greatest salesman I’ve ever seen. He would say, ‘Now, I’ve got a mission to do, and the money to do it with. Now you’ve got to get us a worthwhile program.’” Proposals for local “work projects” began to be sent in to the NYA offices on the sixth floor of the Littlefield Building in Austin.

  WORK PROJECTS provided income for young men and women who were out of school. The other half of the NYA program was to keep young men and women in school—to provide them with jobs on campus that would allow them to earn enough to continue their education. Implementing the student-aid portion of the program required little creativity. The number of students who could be employed—in colleges, 12 percent of the previous year’s enrollment; in high schools, 7 percent—had been set by directives from Washington, as had broad guidelines as to the type of job that would be acceptable, and the amount that could be paid: up to twenty dollars a month for an individual student, although the average payments within a single institution could not exceed fifteen dollars. But the program required desperate haste.