The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  The circle of light cast by a kerosene lamp was small, and there were seldom enough lamps in the home of an impoverished farm family. If a family had so many children that they completely surrounded the one good lamp while studying, their mother could not do her sewing until they were finished. And outside the small circles of light, the rooms of a farmhouse were dark. “The house looked scary,” says Mary Cox. “If I was alone at night, it was awfully lonely.” And, of course, there were no lamps in the outhouse. Many a Hill Country farm wife echoes the words of Betty MacDonald: “I had a horrible choice of either sitting in the dark and not knowing what was crawling on me or bringing a lantern and attracting moths, mosquitoes, nighthawks and bats.”

  NO RADIO; no movies; limited reading—little diversion between the hard day just past and the hard day just ahead. “Living was just drudgery then,” says Carroll Smith of Blanco. “Living—just living—was a problem. No lights. No plumbing. Nothing. Just living on the edge of starvation. That was farm life for us. God, city people think there was something fine about it. If they only knew …”

  So many conveniences taken for granted in American cities were unknown on the Edwards Plateau: not just vacuum cleaners and washing machines but, for example, bathrooms, since, as a practical matter, indoor plumbing is unfeasible without running water, which requires an electric pump. In the Summer, bathing could be done in the creek (when the creek wasn’t dry); in the Winter, it entailed lugging in water and heating it on the stove (which entailed lugging in wood) before pouring it into a Number Three washtub. Because bathing was so hard, “you bathed about once a week,” Bernice Snodgrass says. Children went barefoot, so “we’d make them wash their feet [at the pump outside] you know. We [adults] would wash our face and hands and ears in washpans but we didn’t take a bath but once a week.” There were few toilets, and most Hill Country outhouses were the most primitive sort. Many had no pit dug under them. “It would just drop on the ground,” Guthrie Taylor recalls. “No, it wouldn’t be cleared away”; every so often the flimsy little shelter would just be moved to another spot. Since toilet paper was too expensive, pages from a Sears, Roebuck catalogue, or corncobs, were used. And some families did not have outhouses. When the Snodgrasses moved to Mount Gaynor from Austin, Bernice Snodgrass says, “We were the only people in the neighborhood that had one. You know what everybody else did? They went out behind the barn, or behind a tree, or something.” Frederick Law Olmsted had found the same situation—houses at which there was “no other water-closet than the back of a bush or the broad prairies”—on his journey through the Hill Country in 1857. He had been shocked then, because the America he knew had advanced beyond such primitive conditions. Now it was 1937; four more generations had been living in the Hill Country—with no significant advance in the conditions of their life. Many of the people of Lyndon Johnson’s congressional district were still living in the same type of dwelling in which the area’s people had been living in 1857: in rude “dog-run” shelters one board thick, through which the wind howled in the winter. They were still squatting behind a bush to defecate. Because of their poverty, they were still utterly bereft not only of tractors and feed grinders, but of modern medical assistance—and were farming by methods centuries out of date.

  ALTHOUGH THEY UNDERSTOOD that, as Louise Casparis says, “we were behind the rest of the world,” natives of the Hill Country did not realize how far behind the rest of the world.

  How could they be expected to realize? Without many books to read—or, in general, newspapers, either, except for those pathetic four-page local weeklies; without radio to listen to, with only an occasional movie to watch—how was news of advances in the rest of the world to reach them? Since many of them never saw that world for themselves—an astonishingly high proportion of Hill Country residents would never visit even Austin or San Antonio—the Hill Country’s awareness of the outside world was dim. The life of Hill Country natives was, moreover, the same life that their mothers and fathers—and grandmothers and grandfathers—had lived; how were they to know, except in general, vague, terms, that there was another kind of life? When they heard about the wonders of electricity, they thought electricity was the electricity they saw in Johnson City, the dim, flickering lights hardly better than lamplight; the wonders they imagined were the electric iron and the radio, little more; “I remember when someone started telling me about these washing machines,” recalls Ava Cox. “A machine that washed? I couldn’t picture that at all!” Even the concept of the toilet was difficult for them to accept completely; when Errol Snodgrass, newly arrived in Mount Gaynor, began not only to build an outhouse but to dig a pit underneath it, a neighbor asked him: “What do you want that pit for?” And when he explained, Bernice Snodgrass recalls, the reaction of the neighborhood was, “‘They’re so highfalutin that they have to have a toilet.’ They thought an outhouse with a pit under it—they thought that that was what people meant when they spoke about a toilet!” Natives of the Hill Country couldn’t understand why families that had moved away from the Hill Country never returned. It is not, therefore, by lifelong residents of the Hill Country that the contrast between life there and in the outside world is most clearly enunciated, but by newcomers: from families which, due to economic necessity, moved to the Hill Country in the 1930’s.

  The Depression had cost Brian and Mary Sue Smith their home and their once-profitable automobile-repair shop in Portland, Texas, a town near Corpus Christi. In 1937, they moved with their three children to the Hill Country—to a fifty-three-acre farm near Blanco—because “that was the only place where land was cheap enough so we could buy a farm.”

  Portland had electricity—had had it for years. “You never even thought about electricity,” Mrs. Smith says. “I just accepted it. I mean, if I thought about it, I suppose I would have thought, ‘Doesn’t everyone have electricity?’”

  Now she found out that not everyone did.

  The Smiths had brought their radio, a big black Atwater Kent with an amplifying horn on top, to their new home, but it could not be played. “You know, it was very lonely on that farm,” Mrs. Smith says. “The quiet was nice sometimes. But sometimes it was so quiet it hurt you.” They had brought their washing machine, but that could not work, either. Mrs. Smith loved to read, but “The light was hard on your eyes. My eyes just weren’t good enough to read at night.” In Portland, she had crocheted at night, but she found the light was too dim for her to do that at night. And, of course, there was no time to do it during the day; what time wasn’t consumed by her household chores was taken up husking, shelling and grinding corn by hand for feed for the 150 hens whose eggs she was selling; by cranking the sheep-shearing machine. Soon after she arrived on the farm, her husband became very ill, and for more than a year she had to care for the livestock too, and to plow behind a pair of mules—although she had never plowed before. “Up before daylight. Build the fire in the wood range. Put on the biscuits. Go out and milk the cows. Breakfast. Work was all there was. It was a bare existence.”

  Getting the water, from a well some 200 yards from the house, was the chore that bothered her most. “The children had had running water in Portland, of course, and they acted like they still had it,” she says. When she started meeting other Hill Country women, she noticed that many of them were round-shouldered, and they told her it was from carrying heavy buckets of water. She didn’t want to be round-shouldered. But there seemed no solution. “Carry and carry. Back and forth. Sometimes I would get awfully discouraged. When I first moved there [to the Hill Country], I felt like a pioneer lady, like one of the women who had come here in covered wagons. I said, if they could do it, I could, too. But it was very hard. After you spent all morning lugging those big buckets back and forth, you felt more like an ox or a mule than a human being. Portland was just a little town. It was no great metropolis. But moving from Portland into the Hill Country was like moving from the twentieth century back into the Middle Ages.”

  *Because so m
uch water was required in washing, the introduction of a gas-operated washing machine by the Maytag Company in 1935 did not help the farm wife much, even if she could afford to buy it, which most Hill Country wives could not: she still had to fill and refill the machine with water.

  28

  “I’ll Get It for You”

  AS LATE AS 1935, farmers had been denied electricity not only in the Hill Country but throughout the United States. In that year, more than 6 million of America’s 6.8 million farms did not have electricity. Decades after electric power had become part of urban life, the wood range, the washtub, the sad iron and the dim kerosene lamp were still the way of life for almost 90 percent of the 30 million Americans who lived in the countryside. All across the United States, wrote a public-power advocate, “Every city ‘white way’ ends abruptly at the city limits. Beyond lies darkness.” The lack of electric power, wrote the historian William E. Leuchtenberg, had divided the United States into two nations: “the city dwellers and the country folk”; farmers, he wrote, “toiled in a nineteenth-century world; farm wives, who enviously eyed pictures in the Saturday Evening Post of city women with washing machines, refrigerators, and vacuum cleaners, performed their backbreaking chores like peasant women in a preindustrial age.”

  For two decades and more, in states all across the country, delegations of farmers, dressed in Sunday shirts washed by hand and ironed by sad iron, had come, hats literally in hand, to the paneled offices of utility-company executives to ask to be allowed to enter the age of electricity. They came in delegations, and they came alone—an oft-repeated scene was that of the husband whose wife had been taken seriously ill, and who had been told by the doctor that she could no longer do heavy work, begging the “power company” in vain to extend electricity to his farm; an Arkansas rural leader, “Uncle John” Hobbs, would, even years later, begin to cry remembering the day “he pleaded with the Arkansas Power & Light Company in vain to build a line to his home, a short distance from one of their lines, when his wife was ill and desperately needed the help electricity could provide.” But in delegations or alone, the answer they received was almost invariably the same: that it was too expensive—as much as $5,000 per mile, the utilities said—to build lines to individual farms; that even if the lines were built, farmers would use little electricity because they couldn’t afford to buy electrical appliances; that farmers wouldn’t even be able to pay their monthly electricity bills, since, due to low usage, farm rates would have to be higher—more than two times higher, in fact—than rates in urban areas.

  Studies had long disproved the utilities’ figures. A 1925 survey in Wisconsin found that the cost of lines would be not $5,000 but $1,225 per mile. As for the argument that farmers wouldn’t pay their bills, as Clyde Ellis, then a young spellbinder in the Arkansas Legislature, was to comment bitterly, “There may have been an element of truth in this, considering the exorbitant rates the companies quoted.” Why, rural leaders such as Hobbs and Ellis demanded, wouldn’t the power industry learn from Henry Ford, who had proved that the cheaper you make a good commodity, the higher will be your returns; if the power companies kept farm rates low, farmers would buy more electricity. If they kept rates high, the effect would be an endless circle: farmers would use little power because of high rates, and utilities would continue charging high rates because of low usage. Experiments—notable ones had taken place in Red Wing, Minnesota, and in Alabama—had conclusively proved that within two or three years after farmers had obtained electricity and seen the savings possible from its use (the increased value of their milk and eggs once spoilage was reduced by refrigeration paid many times over for the cost of using refrigerators), their usage of electricity soared—to a point where there was substantial profit for the utilities.

  When the utilities ignored these studies their true attitude became clear: not that rural electric service could not be profitable, but that it would not be as profitable as urban service. Or as surefire. Waiting two or three years for usage to build up was what industry called a “capital risk”; why take a risk for a profit when there existed, in the urban market, profit without risk? “It hardly seems fair that the farm wife had to wait for electricity so much longer than her counterpart in the city for she needed electricity much more,” an historian was to write. But fairness—or social conscience—was not the operative criterion for the utilities; their criterion was rate of return on investment. As long as the rate was higher in the cities, they felt, why bother with the farms? Their attitude was reinforced not only by their political power but by their contempt for country people. Whenever the utilities’ mask was stripped away, the arrogance showed through. Alabama Power & Light refused to reduce its rates more than a token amount even after it was allowed to buy electricity at a very low cost from the government-owned dam at Muscle Shoals. When a farmer offered to pay the cost of building a power line to his house, the utilities said they would allow him to do so—but that when it was built, they, not he, would own it. Their policies were quite firm, because they did not want to establish any precedent that might be used as an argument against them. If they once began to lower rates, who knew where such reductions might lead? If they once began to extend lines into rural areas, there would be no end to the demands for more extensions. So no exceptions were permitted. In Lyndon Johnson’s own district, Texas Power & Light policy governing the one electric line permitted only farms within fifty yards of the line to hook up to it. Several scores of farmhouses were near the line, but farther away than fifty yards. Some were not much farther away, and these farmers offered to pay the additional cost involved. TP&L was quite firm in its refusals to allow them to do so; if the company made an exception for one farmer, it was explained, it might have to make exceptions for others in other areas of the state as well. Farmers whose homes were just beyond the fifty-yard limit, farmers who could see those lines every day of their lives, were unable to use them, while they had to watch their wives year by year slaving at tasks that electricity would have made so much easier. Some of these farmers, in desperation, said they would move their houses so that they would be within fifty yards. TP&L said that it still would not hook them up. Moving houses would set a precedent, a company spokesman explained: Who knew how many farmers would try to move houses near electricity? Where would it all end?

  ATTEMPTS TO UTILIZE GOVERNMENT to bring electricity to America’s farms had begun decades before, fueled by the argument that most of America’s power was hydroelectric, generated by the water of its rivers; that this power was, therefore, a natural resource; and that such a resource belongs to the people as a whole, and not to any vested interest. As John Gunther was to ask: “Who and what should own a river, if not the people as a whole?” But these attempts had been stymied by the powerful utilities lobby and by the Republican Party which embodied its principles. Much of the battle had centered on the 40,000-square-mile valley of the Tennessee River, because during World War I the government had built there, at Muscle Shoals in Alabama, a dam to produce the power required for the production of the synthetic nitrates used in explosives. The dam, with its associated factories, cost a total of $145 million, and after the war the question arose as to who was to get the permanent benefits of this government investment: private utilities or the valley’s impoverished inhabitants, of whom only two in a hundred had electricity. All through the Twenties, Senator George W. Norris of Nebraska fought to keep Muscle Shoals from being transferred to private ownership. Twice he had guided legislation authorizing government ownership and operation through Congress, only to have one bill vetoed by Coolidge and one by Hoover, who said that the legislation was “the negation of the ideals upon which our civilization is based.” All through the Twenties, therefore, the dam at Muscle Shoals remained idle, a symbol of the lack of success of all attempts to break the private monopoly of electric power in America. In 1933—as late as March 3, 1933—attempts to give ordinary citizens some control over the power generated by their rivers had been crushe
d by the utility lobby.

  Then came Roosevelt. The vision of men like Norris (and Roosevelt’s cousin Theodore) was his vision, too. As a young State Senator twenty years before, he had been concerned with cheaper electric power. The hydroelectric power of the United States, he had said, should be developed “for the benefit of the people of the United States.” As Governor, his vision had been thwarted; it was intolerable, he said, that the “stupendous heritage” of the power of the St. Lawrence River should be monopolized by utility holding companies (it was on a typed copy of a speech assailing the utilities that he scribbled a new introduction: “This is a history and a sermon on the subject of water power, and I preach from the Old Testament. The text is ‘Thou Shalt Not Steal’”). He had sought to allow the people—through a state authority—to develop their own power, but the proposal was defeated by the barons who controlled the state’s Republican Party and the State Legislature. His vision was, in fact, in some ways, more sweeping even than Norris’. Discussing the Tennessee Valley, he leaped from electric power to broader questions, which he saw as associated: “Is it possible?” he asked an expert on the valley, to relate the question of electric power at Muscle Shoals to the prevention of floods, to erosion, to soil conservation through retirement of marginal farmland, to reforestation, to diversification of industry, to a general improvement in the standard of life of the valley’s impoverished people? During the interregnum between his election and inauguration, he and Norris visited the Tennessee Valley together. Upon Norris’ return to Washington, someone asked him: “Is he really with you?” Answered the old man: “He is more than with me, because he plans to go even farther than I did.” Two months after his inauguration, the Tennessee Valley Authority was created—to build twenty-one dams, and bring electricity to tens of thousands of farm families.