The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  Most of all, they hated them because they were so hot.

  When the big iron stove was lit, logs blazing in its firebox, flames licking at the gratings that held the pots, the whole huge mass of metal so hot that it was almost glowing, the air in the kitchen shimmered with the heat pouring out of it. In the Winter the heat was welcome, and in Spring and Fall it was bearable, but in the Hill Country, Summer would often last five months. Some time in June the temperature might climb to near ninety degrees, and would stay there, day after day, week after week, through the end of September. Day after day, week after week, the sky would be mostly empty, without a cloud as a shield from the blazing sun that beat down on the Hill Country, and on the sheet-iron or corrugated tin roofs of the boxlike kitchens in the little dog-run homes that dotted its hills and valleys. No matter how hot the day, the stove had to be lit much of the time, because it had to be lit not only for meals but for baking; Hill Country wives, unable to afford store-bought bread, baked their own, an all-day task. (As Mrs. O’Donnell points out, “We didn’t have refrigerators, you know, and without refrigerators, you just about have to start every meal from scratch.”) In the Hill Country, moreover, Summer was harvest time, when a farm wife would have to cook not just for her family but for a harvesting crew—twenty or thirty men, who, working from sun to sun, expected three meals a day.

  Harvest time, and canning time.

  In the Hill Country, canning was required for a family’s very survival. Too poor to buy food, most Hill Country families lived through the Winter largely on the vegetables and fruit picked in the Summer and preserved in jars.

  Since—because there was no electricity—there were no refrigerators in the Hill Country, vegetables or fruit had to be canned the very day they came ripe. And, from June through September, something was coming ripe almost every day, it seemed; on a single peach tree, the fruit on different branches would come ripe on different days. In a single orchard, the peaches might be reaching ripeness over a span as long as two weeks; “You’d be in the kitchen with the peaches for two weeks,” Hill Country wives recall. And after the peaches, the strawberries would begin coming ripe, and then the gooseberries, and then the blueberries. The tomatoes would become ripe before the okra, the okra before the zucchini, the zucchini before the corn. So the canning would go on with only brief intervals—all Summer.

  Canning required constant attendance on the stove. Since boiling water was essential, the fire in the stove had to be kept roaring hot, so logs had to be continually put into the firebox. At least twice during a day’s canning, moreover—probably three or four times—a woman would have to empty the ash container, which meant wrestling the heavy, unwieldy device out from under the firebox. And when the housewife wasn’t bending down to the flames, she was standing over them. In canning fruit, for example, first sugar was dropped into the huge iron canning pot, and watched carefully and stirred constantly, so that it would not become lumpy, until it was completely dissolved. Then the fruit—perhaps peaches, which would have been peeled earlier—was put in the pot, and boiled until it turned into a soft and mushy jam that would be packed into jars (which would have been boiling—to sterilize them—in another pot) and sealed with wax. Boiling the peaches would take more than an hour, and during that time they had to be stirred constantly so that they would not stick to the pot. And when one load of peaches was finished, another load would be put in, and another. Canning was an all-day job. So when a woman was canning, she would have to spend all day in a little room with a tin or sheet-iron roof on which a blazing sun was beating down without mercy, standing in front of the iron stove and the wood fire within it. And every time the heat in that stove died down even a bit, she would have to make it hotter again.

  “You’d have to can in the Summer when it was hot,” says Kitty Clyde Ross Leonard, who had been Johnson’s first girlfriend. “You’d have to cook for hours. Oh, that was a terrible thing. You wore as little as you could. I wore loose clothing so that it wouldn’t stick to me. But the perspiration would just pour down my face. I remember the perspiration pouring down my mother’s face, and when I grew up and had my own family, it poured down mine. That stove was so hot. But you had to stir, especially when you were making jelly. So you had to stand over that stove.” Says Bernice Snodgrass of Wimberley: “You got so hot that you couldn’t stay in the house. You ran out and sat under the trees. I couldn’t stand it to stay in the house. Terrible. Really terrible. But you couldn’t stay out of the house long. You had to stir. You had to watch the fire. So you had to go back into the house.”

  And there was no respite. If a bunch of peaches came ripe a certain day, that was the day they had to be canned—no matter how the housewife might feel that day. Because in that fierce Hill Country heat, fruit and vegetables spoiled very quickly. And once the canning process was begun, it could not stop. “If you peeled six dozen peaches, and then, later that day, you felt sick,” you couldn’t stop, says Gay Harris. “Because you can’t can something if it’s rotten. The job has to be done the same day, no matter what.” Sick or not, in the Hill Country, when it was time to can, a woman canned, standing hour after hour, trapped between a blazing sun and a blazing wood fire. “We had no choice, you see,” Mrs. Harris says.

  EVERY WEEK, every week all year long—every week without fail—there was washday.

  The wash was done outside. A huge vat of boiling water would be suspended over a larger, roaring fire and near it three large “Number Three” zinc washtubs and a dishpan would be placed on a bench.

  The clothes would be scrubbed in the first of the zinc tubs, scrubbed on a washboard by a woman bending over the tub. The soap, since she couldn’t afford store-bought soap, was soap she had made from lye, soap that was not very effective, and the water was hard. Getting farm dirt out of clothes required hard scrubbing.

  Then the farm wife would wring out each piece of clothing to remove from it as much as possible of the dirty water, and put it in the big vat of boiling water. Since the scrubbing would not have removed all of the dirt, she would try to get the rest out by “punching” the clothes in the vat—standing over the boiling water and using a wooden paddle or, more often, a broomstick, to stir the clothes and swish them through the water and press them against the bottom or sides, moving the broom handle up and down and around as hard as she could for ten or fifteen minutes in a human imitation of the agitator of an automatic—electric—washing machine.

  The next step was to transfer the clothes from the boiling water to the second of the three zinc washtubs: the “rinse tub.” The clothes were lifted out of the big vat on the end of the broomstick, and held up on the end of the stick for a few minutes while the dirty water dripped out.

  When the clothes were in the rinse tub, the woman bent over the tub and rinsed them, by swishing each individual item through the water. Then she wrung out the clothes, to get as much of the dirty water out as possible, and placed the clothes in the third tub, which contained bluing, and swished them around in it—this time to get the bluing all through the garment and make it white—and then repeated the same movements in the dishpan, which was filled with starch.

  At this point, one load of wash would be done. A week’s wash took at least four loads: one of sheets, one of shirts and other white clothing, one of colored clothes and one of dish towels. But for the typical, large, Hill Country farm family, two loads of each of these categories would be required, so the procedure would have to be repeated eight times.

  For each load, moreover, the water in each of the three washtubs would have to be changed. A washtub held about eight gallons. Since the water had to be warm, the woman would fill each tub half with boiling water from the big pot and half with cold water. She did the filling with a bucket which held three or four gallons—twenty-five or thirty pounds. For the first load or two of wash, the water would have been provided by her husband or her sons. But after this water had been used up, part of washday was walking—over and over—that long wa
lk to the spring or well, hauling up the water, hand over laborious hand, and carrying those heavy buckets back.* Another part of washday was also a physical effort: the “punching” of the clothes in the big vat. “You had to do it as hard as you could—swish those clothes around and around and around. They never seemed to get clean. And those clothes were heavy in the water, and it was hot outside, and you’d be standing over that boiling water and that big fire—you felt like you were being roasted alive.” Lifting the clothes out of the vat was an effort, too. A dripping mass of soggy clothes was heavy, and it felt heavier when it had to be lifted out of that vat and held up for minutes at a time so that the dirty water could drip out, and then swung over to the rinsing tub. Soon, if her children weren’t around to hear her, a woman would be grunting with the effort. Even the wringing was, after a few hours, an effort. “I mean, wringing clothes might not seem hard,” Mrs. Harris says. “But you have to wring every piece so many times—you wring it after you take it out of the scrub tub, and you wring it after you take it out of the rinse tub, and after you take it out of the bluing. Your arms got tired.” And her hands—from scrubbing with lye soap and wringing—were raw and swollen. Of course, there was also the bending—hours of bending—over the rub boards. “By the time you got done washing, your back was broke,” Ava Cox says. “I’ll tell you—of the things of my life that I will never forget, I will never forget how much my back hurt on washdays.” Hauling the water, scrubbing, punching, rinsing: a Hill Country farm wife did this for hours on end—while a city wife did it by pressing the button on her electric washing machine.

  WASHDAY WAS MONDAY. Tuesday was for ironing.

  Says Mary Cox, in words echoed by all elderly Hill Country farm wives: “Washing was hard work, but ironing was the worst. Nothing could ever be as hard as ironing.”

  The Department of Agriculture finds that “Young women today are not aware of the origin of the word ‘iron,’ as they press clothes with lightweight appliances of aluminum or hollow stainless steel.” In the Hill Country, in the 1930’s an iron was iron—a six-or seven-pound wedge of iron. The irons used in the Hill Country had to be heated on the wood stove, and they would retain their heat for only a few minutes—a man’s shirt generally required two irons; a farm wife would own three or four of them, so that several could be heating while one was working. An iron with a wooden handle cost two dollars more than one without the handle, so Hill Country wives did their weekly loads of ironing—huge loads because, as Mary Cox puts it, “in those days you were expected to starch and iron almost everything”—with irons without handles. They would either transfer a separate wooden handle from one iron to another, or they would protect their hands with a thick potholder.

  Since burning wood generates soot, the irons became dirty as they sat heating on the stove. Or, if any moisture was left on an iron from the sprinkled clothes on which it had just been used, even the thinnest smoke from the stove created a muddy film on the bottom. The irons had to be cleaned frequently, therefore, by scrubbing them with a rag that had been dipped in salt, and if the soot was too thick, they had to be sanded and scraped. And no matter how carefully you checked the bottom of the irons, and sanded and scraped them, there would often remain some little spot of soot—as you would discover when you rubbed it over a clean white shirt or dress. Then you had to wash that item of clothing over again.

  Nevertheless, the irons would burn a woman’s hand. The wooden handle or the potholder would slip, and she would have searing metal against her flesh; by noon, she might have blister atop blister—on hands that had to handle the rag that had been dipped in salt. Ironing always took a full day—often it went on into Tuesday evening—and a full day of lifting and carrying six-or seven-pound loads was hard on even these hardy Hill Country women. “It would hurt so bad between the shoulders,” Elsie Beck remembers. But again the worst aspect of ironing was the heat. On ironing day, a fire would have to be blazing in the wood stove all day, filling the kitchen, hour after hour, with heat and smoke. Ironing had to be done not only in the Winter but in the Summer—when the temperature outside the kitchen might be ninety or ninety-five or one hundred, and inside the kitchen would be considerably higher, and because there was no electricity, there was no fan to so much as stir the air. In a speech in Congress some years later, Representative John E. Rankin described the “drudgery” a typical farm wife endured, “burning up in a hot kitchen and bowing down over the washtub or boiling the clothes over a flaming fire in the summer heat.” He himself remembered, he said, “seeing his mother lean over that hot iron hour after hour until it seemed she was tired enough to drop.” Rankin was from Mississippi, but his description would have been familiar to the mothers of the Edwards Plateau. The women of the Hill Country never called the instruments they used every Tuesday “irons,” they called them “sad irons.”

  Washing, ironing—those were chores that were performed every week. Then, of course, there were special occasions—harvest time and threshing time, when a woman had to cook not just for her family but for a crew of twenty or thirty men; the shearing, when, because there was no electricity and her husband had to work the shears, she had to crank the shearing machine, pedaling as if she were pumping a bicycle up a steep hill, pedaling, with only brief pauses, hour after hour; “He was always yelling ‘Faster, faster,’” Mrs. Walter Yett of Blanco recalls. “I could hardly get up the next morning, I was so tired after that.” Washing, ironing, cooking, canning, shearing, helping with the plowing and the picking and the sowing, and, every day, carrying the water and the wood, and because there was no electricity, having to do everything by hand by the same methods that had been employed by her mother and grandmother and great-great-great-grandmother before her—“They wear these farm women out pretty fast,” wrote one observer. In the Hill Country, as many outside observers noted, the one almost universal characteristic of the women was that they were worn out before their time, that they were old beyond their years, old at forty, old at thirty-five, bent and stooped and tired.

  A Hill Country farm wife had to do her chores even if she was ill—no matter how ill. Because Hill Country women were too poor to afford proper medical care, they often suffered perineal tears in childbirth. During the 1930’s, the federal government sent physicians to examine a sampling of Hill Country women. The doctors found that, out of 275 women, 158 had perineal tears. Many of them, the team of gynecologists reported, were third-degree tears, “tears so bad that it is difficult to see how they stand on their feet.” But they were standing on their feet, and doing all the chores that Hill Country wives had always done—hauling the water, hauling the wood, canning, washing, ironing, helping with the shearing, the plowing and the picking.

  Because there was no electricity.

  THE LACK OF ELECTRICITY meant that the days of the people of the Hill Country were filled with drudgery; at night they were denied the entertainment—movies, radio—that would have made the drudgery more bearable. The radio could, moreover, have ended the area’s isolation. The feeling of the Hill Country youngsters of the 1920’s—Lyndon Johnson’s generation—that “we were completely cut off out here,” that “we were back in the woods, compared to the rest of the world,” that “everything had already happened before we found out about it,” was the feeling of the 1930’s generation as well. Because there was no electricity, the only radios in the Hill Country were the occasional crystal sets with earphones and poor reception. Amos ‘n’ Andy, Lum ‘n’ Abner, Ma Perkins—theirs were voices familiar to most of America; it was a rare inhabitant of the Edwards Plateau who had heard them even once. “What we missed most was the fireside chats,” says Mary Cox. “I mean, we loved Franklin D. Roosevelt in this country, and we kept reading about these wonderful fireside chats. But we never got to hear them.”

  Even reading was hard.

  Evening was often the only time in which Hill Country farm couples could read (“There was no other time,” says Lucille O’Donnell. “There was never a m
inute to read during the day, it seemed”), but the only light for reading came from kerosene lamps. In movies about the Old West, these lamps appear so homy that it is difficult for a city dweller to appreciate how much—and why—some farm dwellers disliked them so passionately.

  Lighting the kerosene lamp was a frustrating job. “You had to adjust the wick just right,” says Curtis Cox of Bryan. “If you turned it too high, it would flame up and start to smoke. The chimney—that’s the glass part—would get all black, and your eyes would start to smart.” Keeping it lit was even more frustrating. It burned straight across for only a moment, and then would either flare up or die down to an inadequate level. Even when the wick was trimmed just right, a kerosene lamp provided only limited illumination. The approximately twenty-five watts of light provided by most such lamps was adequate for children doing their homework—although surveys would later find that the educational level of rural children improved markedly immediately upon the introduction of electricity—but their parents, whose eyes were not so strong, had more difficulty. Mary Cox says that she couldn’t read with their lamp for more than a short period: “I always loved to read,” she recalls. “But I couldn’t enjoy it on the farm. It was hard on the eyes, a strain on the eyes. I had to force myself to read at night.” Lucille O’Donnell came to Burnet from Virginia, where she had liked to read in bed; she couldn’t do that on her farm, she says, because she couldn’t afford the kerosene. When she did read at night, she couldn’t read in bed. Her husband, Tom, “would be asleep,” she recalls, “and I would put the lamp beside him on the bed, and sit on that little stool and read in the most awkward position.” Pointing to deep vertical lines between her eyebrows, more than one Hill Country farm wife says: “So many of us have these lines from squinting to read.”