During those final days, desperate, he nerved himself to do things he had shied from doing.
Emmett Shelton was campaigning hard for his brother Polk—the Shelton campaign was the only one at all comparable to Johnson’s in energy, although Polk’s dogged refusal to change his stand on the Court proposal kept him continually on the defensive—and Emmett Shelton was what Johnson only claimed to have been: a great debater at San Marcos. Whenever, during the campaign, his path had crossed Johnson’s, he had attempted to shame Johnson into debating him. Arriving in a town to find Johnson’s campaign car there, he would park his own right alongside, and would use his loudspeaker to challenge Johnson to debate. Johnson, aware of his weakness in debating, had refused to do so. In one particularly painful incident, Shelton had parked directly outside a store in which Johnson was shaking hands and had stayed there, blaring, over and over, a challenge to Johnson to come out and debate, for quite some time—and Johnson had not come out, refusing to leave the safety of the store until Shelton had driven away. Now, however, their paths crossed again—in Smithville on a Wednesday on which hundreds of farmers had come into town for a prize-drawing set up by the merchants—and, this time, when Shelton repeated the challenge, Johnson at last turned on his tormentor. To Shelton’s sorrow.
Shelton, speaking first, said Johnson was not only too young for the post he sought but too “new in the district,” and “comes from the smallest county, Blanco.” He accused him of trying to buy the race with large campaign contributions from the “Interests.” Stepping up to the microphone to reply, Johnson said, “I am not going to attempt to answer all the wild charges made here this afternoon by a dying, desperate candidate, but there’s one I have to plead guilty to—and gladly. Sure, I was born in the small county of Blanco. But I can’t believe that’s against me. I didn’t have any jurisdiction in the matter.” The crowd chuckled at that, and laughed outright at his next sally, which reminded these country people that Polk Shelton wasn’t one of them; “If my mother had known that you wanted a city slicker or a ward boss for a candidate, maybe she’d have been able to do something about it.” His reply to the charge that he was too young subtly reminded the audience where Shelton stood on the Court issue: “I’d rather be called a young whippersnapper than an old reactionary,” he said. “And as for buying the race, I do want you to know that my campaign is financed by my own meager savings, and that I am not getting a dime from special interests.” Then he briskly stepped down. “Although given only five minutes,” the Austin Statesman reported, he “won the crowd so well he received four spontaneous bursts of applause and drew two heavy laughs.”
DESPITE HIS DENIALS, money—the ingredient with which his campaign was so plentifully supplied—added additional impetus to his dash down the homestretch.
Although most of it was spent on traditional campaign devices, during the last two weeks of the campaign, more and more of it was spent on radio time. Early in the campaign, Johnson had purchased fifteen minutes every evening for a week on Austin’s only station, KNOW, and had raced back to the capital every evening to speak over the air. But since few voters owned radios, few heard his speeches. Federal Communications Commission regulations, moreover, required that political speeches be written, and delivered verbatim from the text, and Johnson’s delivery of prepared addresses proved even more stilted and pompous over the air than in person; listening to them in his living room, Sam Johnson would chew his cigar in dismay, and Rebekah, the public-speaking teacher, would frantically make notes in her little notebook. For some time thereafter, Johnson had given radio only cursory attention.
Now, however, searching for any means of pulling up on Avery, he bought more air time. And he began to notice that voters who approached him the next day to tell him they had heard him on the radio did so with smiles that were both shy and impressed. An aura of celebrity, he realized, could help to offset an aura of youth. Johnson had the funds to take advantage of this discovery. He purchased time—a lot more time, hour-long blocks of time—not only on KNOW but on the more powerful San Antonio stations that reached into the district. During the campaign’s final ten days, in fact, Johnson was on the radio more than the other seven candidates combined.
Prominent supporters, reading fifteen-minute speeches written by his staff, and rewritten, line by line, by him, were also put on the air. The response to this tactic was immediate and gratifying—and it did not come only from listeners. More than one “lead man” who had refused to commit himself to Johnson was lured into his camp by the chance to appear on radio. And as one Johnson supporter followed another to the microphone, some proved surprisingly effective. His father’s onetime real estate partner, old Judge N. T. Stubbs (who began his talk by saying, “I come tonight as one who … could be classed among the pioneers of this section”), was very persuasive as he replied (in words Johnson himself wrote) to charges that Johnson was trying to “buy” the campaign with huge outlays of cash: “We homefolks know how ridiculous that charge is. … We know that Lyndon Johnson’s campaign has been financed by his own small savings, by contributions of his family and friends, received a few dollars at a time.” Purchasing still more time, Johnson put the old Judge on the air again and again. His opponents’ charges about Johnson’s unprecedented expenditures were buried under Johnson denials, broadcast thanks to Johnson’s unprecedented expenditures.
HIS MOST PRODIGAL EXPENDITURE, however, continued to be not of money but of himself.
The steadily worsening weather—the norther that had begun on March 26 was to rage for four days, with such fury that the American called it a “blizzard”—turned the district’s roads into mud. Most of the candidates curtailed their campaigning. Avery, for example, was to venture outside Austin only once during the campaign’s final two weeks. Brownlee, belatedly realizing that he had waited too long to begin, had scheduled a “blitz” of the district beginning the day the Senate adjourned. That day turned out to be March 27, when the storm was at its height. Brownlee postponed the blitz to March 30, and then to April 1. Johnson stepped up his campaigning, running harder and harder, covering large sections of the district in a single day—speaking, each day, in as many as a dozen little communities, visiting, between speeches, scores of farms and ranches.
On the evening of April 2, eight days before the election, a Johnson speech in Brenham was broadcast over a San Antonio radio station—and one listener in San Antonio heard something in his voice that worried her. Sitting alone in her apartment, Estelle Harbin, who knew Johnson so well, suddenly felt that he was “worn out” in a way he had never been before; “seemingly limitless” though his energy appeared, it had limits nonetheless, she knew—and, listening to his voice, she began to wonder if he was pushing himself beyond them.
The same thought was worrying others who knew Johnson well. “He was very tired,” Gene Latimer says. “He had been tired for a long time. He had stayed tired ever since the beginning of the campaign. I had seen him tired before, but this was beyond that. I was getting a little concerned.”
Desperate for sleep now, Johnson bought a black mask to cover his eyes in the car, but that didn’t help; it wasn’t light that was keeping him awake. The piercing eyes sank deeper into their sockets. He grew thinner and thinner; the flesh seemed to be almost melting off his face now; gaunt and cadaverous, he might have been a candidate by El Greco. Lady Bird blamed his loss of weight on improper eating habits: “He ate very irregularly and very unbalanced meals, which made me very angry because I’m a great believer in nutrition. He would just stop at some country store and buy a can of sardines and some crackers, or some cheese. …” But when she gave him a “proper meal,” he would gag on it. He didn’t get much down, and what he did eat, he sometimes couldn’t keep down. He seemed to be vomiting more and more frequently. He kept complaining about stomach cramps, but he had always complained so much about physical ailments (and, of course, had vomited before in moments of tension, as at the finals of the state debat
e championships) that the complaints weren’t taken seriously, even though he sometimes doubled over in pain. His complaints were further discounted, moreover, because he was not curtailing his activities; he was working more, not less. On April 3, for example, he lost his voice completely, and though it returned the next day, it returned as a croak, so rasping that it was almost painful to hear. But he didn’t cancel speeches, only scheduled more.
On Tuesday, April 6, four days before the election, at a rally in a courtroom of the Travis County Courthouse in Austin, he stood during his speech behind the railing which separated the court from the spectators’ benches, and some of the spectators said he almost seemed to be holding the railing for support, as he leaned far over it, his hand outstretched to them, appealing for their votes. That his efforts—combined with his opponents’ lack of effort—were bearing fruit was obvious now. The editor of Brownlee’s hometown newspaper told an Austin American reporter that Brownlee “has waited too long to get his campaign into action, and his friends feel he has already lost the race.” And when the reporter asked who was winning, the editor said he didn’t know, but that Johnson had spoken in the county the night before “and he gained many votes by the speech.” The American had published a new poll on April 4, and politicians in Austin could hardly believe its findings: Avery wasn’t in first place any more. Two other candidates were ahead of him: Merton Harris and Lyndon Johnson. Now, on Wednesday, April 7, three days before the election, another American poll showed Harris and Johnson running “neck and neck” in “as closely fought a political race as central Texas has ever seen.” A large bloc of “sideline votes”—votes still undecided—would probably decide the outcome, the article said. Lyndon Johnson awoke Thursday morning, with two days to go, nauseated and in pain. At eight o’clock he paid a call on Mayor Miller, to ask again for the mayor’s support with Austin voters, and to receive in reply only another rude rebuff. During the rest of the day, Johnson campaigned in Austin himself, “reaching,” as the American put it, “as many voters personally as possible.”
Thursday evening at eight o’clock, Johnson was scheduled to address another rally in the Travis County Courthouse. Before the speech, Ray Lee recalls, “Mr. Johnson was drooping about his apartment in Austin, saying he didn’t feel good. We didn’t attach enough importance to it. He was tired and withdrawn. So we urged him to rest awhile and go to sleep if possible.” Keach was off on another assignment, and Lee volunteered to drive Johnson to the auditorium. “I got back to his house about a quarter to seven and he was in the bathroom. He said that he was in pain and that he had taken purgatives but he couldn’t get any relief” but “after a few minutes we got in the car and went down to the courthouse.” The crowd of 400 persons was perhaps the biggest of the campaign, and it was applauding and cheering the familiar lines (“There is only one issue the voters of the Tenth District face. That is, whether they stand with the President …”) when Johnson, who again had been supporting himself on the rail while speaking, doubled over, white-faced, and sat down, with his arms across his stomach. Some of the audience came up and, after hearing about the pain, told him he must have appendicitis, but he got up, and after apologizing to the audience for the interruption, finished the speech. Then, as the audience filed past him, he began shaking hands. Sherman Birdwell, coming up to congratulate him, noticed that “he was covered with perspiration and he was constantly wiping his brow.” He whispered to Birdwell: “I’m sick. Stand here beside me.” He had shaken almost all the hands when he had to sit down again. This time, he couldn’t stand up, and, Lee, with Birdwell helping him, got him out to the car, and drove him home, and then to Seton Hospital; doctors there said, Lee and Mrs. Johnson recall, that “his appendix was on the point of rupturing.” They operated almost immediately.
“THERE HAD BEEN such mad rushing for so long,” Lady Bird Johnson recalls. “And then everything came to a sudden dead stop. There was this dreadful day of hiatus, and then the election.”
Shortly after the polls closed on Saturday evening, Sam Stone’s Williamson County vote—3,180—was announced, putting him some 2,400 votes ahead of Johnson. But outside Williamson, Stone did very poorly, and, as the votes came in from other counties, Johnson soon passed him. He soon passed all the other candidates, and pulled steadily ahead throughout the evening. The official totals for the major candidates showed Houghton Brownlee with 3,019 votes; C. N. Avery with 3,951; Stone with 4,048; Polk Shelton with 4,420; Merton Harris with 5,111—and Lyndon Johnson with 8,280, 3,000 votes more than his nearest opponent.
“When I come back to Washington,” Johnson had vowed, “I’m coming back as a Congressman.” Now, less than two years later, he was coming.
*A ninth candidate entered briefly, but dropped out; he would receive twelve votes in the election. A University of Texas economist, Robert “Professor Bob” Montgomery, whose possible candidacy had caused Johnson much anxiety because as a recognized New Dealer he would have drawn much of the pro-Roosevelt vote, decided at the last moment not to run.
*Negroes could not vote in party primaries in Texas, but this was not a primary, but a federal election.
22
From the Forks of the Creeks
ANALYZING IN DETAIL the results of the special election for Congressman in the Tenth Congressional District of Texas in 1937—breaking it down by ethnic groups or age brackets or educational levels—is an unrewarding exercise, for the results are both too small and too fragmented to have much significance.
Although the district’s population was estimated at 264,000, only 29,948 persons, one out of every nine residents of the district, went to the polls. And of those voters, only 8,280 cast their votes for Lyndon Johnson. Johnson won the election, in other words, with less than 28 percent of the vote—with only one out of every four votes cast. He won, moreover, with the votes of little more than 3 percent of the district’s population; he was Congressman from a district in which only one out of every thirty-two persons had voted for him.* Johnson had been elected with the fewest votes—by far the fewest votes—of any of the nation’s 435 Congressmen.
In a broader context, however, the election was significant for two reasons. One, of course, was that it set Lyndon Johnson on the path of elective office that would lead him to the Presidency, and that would lead America to the Great Society and to Vietnam. The other was the identity of the people who set him on that path.
They were not the people of the plains. Half the district consisted of prairies, and Johnson lost that half; in the district’s five plains counties, in fact, Johnson finished not first but fourth, trailing Harris by a total of more than 800 votes. Johnson’s support came from the hills, from the five counties in the district that lay on the Edwards Plateau. Not only did he win four of those five counties, losing only in Stone’s Williamson County, but he won them by overwhelming margins. If his home county, Blanco, gave him 688 votes to 82 for his nearest opponent, Hays County’s support was also impressive: 940 votes for Johnson, 270 for his nearest opponent.
And within those five counties, the distribution of his votes was striking. Although—to the surprise of all forecasters (and Mayor Miller)—he won Austin on the edge of the plateau, it was the precincts west of Austin, the boxes in the hills, that gave him a substantial margin in Travis County. The votes he received in Williamson County came, in large proportion, not from Georgetown and Taylor, the two “big” towns just below the plateau, but from the hills to the west. And in Blanco, Burnet and Hays counties, the other Hill Country counties, the results followed, in general, an identical pattern: the deeper in the hills a precinct, the more isolated and remote—and poor—its people, the stronger the showing that Lyndon Johnson made in it. He was the candidate of the Hill Country, of one of the most remote, most isolated, most neglected—and most impoverished—areas of a wealthy nation. His 3,000-vote plurality—a plurality whose dimensions had been utterly unsuspected—came principally from the farmers and the ranchers he had visited one by one,
from the people in whom he had invested time no other candidate for Congress had ever given them, from the people who had, on Election Day, repaid that investment in kind, giving up their own time—the time so valuable to them—to make the trip, sometimes quite a long trip, to the polling place to cast their votes for Lyndon Johnson.
His very willingness to travel to these people may have been an important reason that they supported him. Not only were they neglected, they felt neglected—they had always felt neglected; the people of the Hill Country had had to plead even to the People’s Party. “If we do live away up here on the Pedernales River, amid rocks, cliffs and waterfalls, cedars and wild oaks, we are not varments, but have hearts just like men.” “Brethern, in sending out lecturers, please remember our isolated corner, and send us in time of need” “We had an ‘encampment’ and honestly expected the presence of a ‘Big Gun’ with it, but, no we were sadly left, as usual.” When, finally, a candidate for Congress made the effort to come to them, muddying his shoes to walk across fields to talk to them, they were grateful for his coming.
But his effort was no more important than the philosophy he expressed. Saying he was a poor man like them, he also said he was fighting for the President who was helping the poor—for the only President who had ever helped the poor, for the President who, with bank regulation and railroad regulation and government loans and public works projects, had held out government’s helping hand to the poor instead of the rich. The people of the Hill Country had been asking for such programs for a long time. In half a century, only two long caravans had come out of the Hill Country. One had borne pictures of Lyndon Johnson. The other had borne blue flags.
The Path to Power Page 66