The circumstances of the children’s lives interfered with everything he was trying to do, and he saw that, saw that their lives were permeated with injustice.
“I swore then and there,” Lyndon Johnson was to say, “that if I ever had a chance to help those underprivileged kids I was going to do it.” It was at Cotulla, Lyndon Johnson was to say, “that my dream began of an America…where race, religion, language and color didn’t count against you.”
And Lyndon Johnson won these victories for America’s downtrodden because he possessed not only the quality of compassion, but a rare gift for translating compassion into the only kind of accomplishment that would be meaningful.
As was shown in The Path to Power, that gift first became apparent in Lyndon Johnson’s first governmental job—as a twenty-four-year-old assistant to a do-nothing Texas congressman from a district on the Gulf of Mexico, even further south than Cotulla. At a time when no one (certainly not the congressman) could think of a way to save from imminent foreclosure the district’s hundreds of Depression-wracked farms which were so far behind in their tax and mortgage payments that they seemed hopelessly beyond the reach of the newly elected President Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson thought of a way—a unique and complex refinancing plan—and persuaded banks, mortgage companies, and two federal agencies to implement it fast enough so that the farms were saved, sometimes only hours before the foreclosure sale began. And, as was also shown in the opening volume, the gift came to flower in Johnson’s first elective office, after that victory he won as a twenty-eight-year-old congressman, when he brought electricity to thousands of lonely farms and ranches in the Hill Country—a victory, against seemingly impossible odds, that displayed not only a remarkable determination to mobilize the powers of government to help the downtrodden but a remarkable ingenuity in expanding and using those powers, in transmuting sympathy into action: governmental action. If Lyndon Johnson wanted to hurt, he also wanted to help—and no one could help like Lyndon Johnson.
LYNDON JOHNSON was not to become the champion of the poor, particularly the poor of color, solely because of his compassion or his governmental genius, however. Indeed, had his accomplishments on their behalf depended solely on those traits, they might never have become reality.
As his life proved.
Strong as was the compassion, the need to help, it was not the strongest force in Lyndon Johnson’s life. His character had been molded by his youth in a tiny, isolated Hill Country town: by the interaction there of humiliation with heredity, by the impact of insecurity and shame on that potent inherited strain that gave him not only a huge nose and ears but also a huge need to be “in the forefront,” to “advance and keep advancing.” It was the fires of that youth that had made his needs, the imperatives of his nature, drive him with the feverish, almost frantic, intensity that journalists called “energy” when it was really desperation and fear, the fear of a man fleeing something terrible. And those fires had hardened the clay of his character, a clay hard in its very nature, into something much harder—into a shape that would never change. Compassion, sympathy—the desire to help, impulses that might be called noble—constituted one of those imperatives, a strong one. But during his youth, he had seen, and felt, the result of noble impulses; it was such impulses—his father’s idealism—that had played such a large role in his family’s fall “from the A’s to the F’s.” It was therefore not compassion that most fully satisfied his needs, but rather power. It was not the desire to “help somebody” but to “be somebody” that drove him most strongly—that is the motivation mentioned most prominently not only by the companions of his youth (“If he couldn’t lead, he didn’t care much about playing”) but of his more mature years as well. Unrelenting ambition—the need not merely to advance but to “keep advancing”—had been the trademark of generations of Buntons. And it was the strongest driving force of the man who had inherited—so clearly in the opinion of the Hill Country—the “Bunton strain.” Sometimes the two forces—compassion and ambition—ran on parallel paths, but sometimes they didn’t. And whenever those two forces collided, it was the ambition that won, as had been demonstrated at half a dozen turning points in his early career, even within his congressional district. “The best congressman for a district there ever was” lost much of his interest in helping his constituents when, following his defeat in the 1941 senatorial campaign, it appeared that he would never reach the Senate, and that his work for his district might not lead to political advancement but would have to be an end in itself.
When the element of race had been added to the collisions between the two forces—compassion and ambition—the collisions became more dramatic; the result was unvaryingly the same.
The foreclosure and electricity accomplishments had been achieved largely on behalf of white farmers. There had, however, been a period in Lyndon Johnson’s early life—between July 26, 1935, when he left the congressional assistantship, and February 23,1937, when he began running for a congressional seat of his own—during which his career had been intimately involved with blacks and Mexican-Americans, for during this period he was the director for the state of Texas of the New Deal’s National Youth Administration, an agency whose goal was to extend a helping hand to young people of all races and colors.
The NYA had been created, in June, 1935, to help students stay in high school or college by providing them with part-time campus jobs that would allow them to earn enough—fifteen or twenty dollars per week—to continue their education, and to help young people who were not in school by creating small-scale public works projects on which they could be employed and thus earn some income while improving the civic estate.
Lyndon Johnson, at twenty-six the youngest of the NYA’s forty-eight state directors (he may, in fact, have been the youngest person to be entrusted with statewide authority for any major New Deal program) and one, besides, who had absolutely no administrative experience and now was suddenly administering a multimillion-dollar statewide program, threw himself into his job with energy and passion, the passion “to see that everything was done that should be done.”*
The young people of Texas whom Lyndon Johnson wanted to help included young blacks and Mexican-Americans. He was very anxious to help them. Sometimes, indeed, his outrage at society’s indifference to their plight burst out of him, as if he could not contain it. Once, while he was waiting to explain NYA programs to a businessmen’s luncheon club in San Antonio, one of the club’s members tried to tell him that most of the programs were unnecessary. “All these kids need to do is get out and hustle,” he said. Turning on the man, Johnson said sarcastically: “Last week over here I saw a couple of your kids hustling, all right—a boy and girl, nine or ten. They were hustling through a garbage can in an alley,” looking for something to eat.
When he spoke to blacks and Mexican-Americans, he made them believe—believe completely—in his commitment to helping them. For Texas’ black colleges, financially pressed in good times and in desperate condition during the Depression, NYA assistance was a blessing, and Johnson always telephoned the administrators of those colleges personally to tell them it was coming. “You have any boys and girls out there that could use some money?” he would ask. He made them believe, as well, that he was stretching the limits of his authority to help them, that he was giving them not merely their fair share of the NYA allocation for Texas, but more than their fair share. “He’d send us our quota of money,” says O. H. Elliot, bursar of the black Sam Houston College in Huntsville. “Then, off the record, he’d say, ‘I’ve got a little extra change here. Can you find a place for it?’” (“We could always find a place for it,” Elliot adds, saying that part of the extra money was used for faculty salaries; “We couldn’t have paid our faculty except for Mr. Johnson.”) “It sorta sold us on him even before he ran for elective office,” he says. “He cared for people.” New Deal administrators from the NYA’s Washington headquarters who visited Texas were taken on elaborate, carefully choreographe
d tours, and were impressed, not only by Johnson’s overall accomplishment—after a trip to Texas in February, 1937, NYA Southwestern Regional Representative Garth Akridge called him “easily one of the best men directing one of the best staffs in one of the best programs with the most universal and enthusiastic support of any state in the Union”—but by his record on behalf of minorities. NYA Assistant Director Richard R. Brown, who was often in touch with Johnson (“He always called me Mr. Boss Man,” Brown recalls) and who visited Texas several times, says, “I think that Lyndon made every effort there to reach as many blacks as could be done…. I would say that for a Texan he had a rather broad tolerance for races.” (The possibility that Johnson was making a special effort to leave that impression with Brown is raised by the fact that, while during other staff meetings he occasionally referred to blacks as “niggers,” when, during a staff meeting attended by Brown, one of Johnson’s assistants made a remark that was mildly racially disparaging, Johnson said, ‘You can’t use that term here.’” Brown was indeed impressed: “I felt that he was a very tolerant, a very broad-minded young man.”)
At meetings in Washington, Johnson spoke to members of the NYA’s headquarters staff with his customary eloquence; impressed with his desire to help black youth, they spread the word among prominent black figures in New Deal circles. One such figure, Robert C. Weaver, would later recall that an NYA administrator, Frank Home, “kept talking about this guy in Texas who was really something. His name was Lyndon Johnson, and Home said Johnson didn’t think the NYA was for middle-class people; he thought it was for poor people, including Mexican-Americans and Negroes…. This guy in Texas was giving them [blacks] and Mexican-Americans a fair break. This made quite an impression on me.” Praising his “energy” and “vigorous imagination,” the NYA’s dynamic black Director for Negro Affairs, Mary McLeod Bethune, was to describe Johnson as “one who has proven himself so conscious of and sympathetic with the needs of all people.” Brown recalls that “whenever Lyndon’s name came up she would say such things as, ‘Well, he’s a very outstanding young man. He’s going to go places. He’ll be a big man in this country.’”
AFTER LYNDON JOHNSON BECAME PRESIDENT, and during the decades since his death, this impression would be resurrected, and would grow, its growth fueled in part by the oral histories assiduously collected by the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library (“He never asked what color people were. If we had the money, we hired the kids. It was as simple as that”—Bill Deason), in part by Johnson’s vivid, indeed fascinating, recollections of his NYA days, and in part by the fact that as President, he had indeed won great battles by fighting with all his might on behalf of minorities, a fact which understandably increased people’s willingness to believe that he had been waging the same fight as a young man. The impression became a cornerstone of the Johnson legend. Biographers, understandably influenced by his later civil rights victories, painted a picture of a Lyndon Johnson who during his entire adult life had always battled wholeheartedly for minorities—who had done so, for example, as Texas NYA Director, fighting gallantly, in the face of southern bigotry, to give minorities more than their fair share of his resources. After her long exposure to Johnson’s eloquence, Doris Kearns Goodwin was to write that “Johnson did put together special NYA programs for the black young, often financed by secret transfers of money from other projects that had been approved at upper levels of the bureaucracy.”
In some respects, this picture is accurate, quite dramatically so. At Prairie View Normal and Industrial College, in Waller County, young black men built dormitories to house young black women. These young women worked two and a half hours a day and studied “domestic science” for four, learning how to cook, clean house, take care of children and do other household work, and this “domestic training” program was then expanded to four black colleges. A staffer from NYA national headquarters in Washington was to report back that in Texas “I have found what I have been hoping to find for colored girls…. I believe I know the Negro condition in the southern states, and no one would be more delighted to see them have the kind of training that Mr. Johnson is setting up in Texas. The Texas Director is doing what many of us are talking.” And Johnson was to tell Ms. Goodwin that only his determination to circumvent NYA regulations on behalf of black colleges made the Prairie View project possible. The NYA’s allocation for supplies and equipment, he told her, was supposed to be spent for “equipment, shovels, etc., and nothing for fancy things like dormitories…. What I did was to go around and get people to donate money for the equipment in white areas and then apply that saving to Prairie View and use it to build dorms which they so badly needed.” Some projects must have given Lyndon Johnson great personal satisfaction. One was to transform the debris-littered vacant lot in front of Cotulla’s “Mexican school” into a neat plaza; another NYA grant allowed the school to hire its first “library assistant.”
On closer inspection, however, the picture is less clear, in part because of the most important appointment Lyndon Johnson made as NYA Director: the chairmanship of the Texas NYA’s nine-member State Advisory Board.
Intent on having the NYA as decentralized as possible within the overall guidelines set up in Washington, its national director, Aubrey Williams, considered the state advisory boards “crucial.” He wanted them to have not pro forma but active involvement in tailoring NYA programs to each state’s different needs. And the chairman Johnson selected was Alvin Wirtz, whose racism was so virulent that he could not restrain himself even at a Georgetown dinner party at which Virginia Durr began advocating giving Negroes the vote. Wirtz responded, “Look, I like mules, but you don’t bring mules into the parlor.”
Having grasped, while he was still a congressional secretary, Wirtz’s carefully concealed but immense behind-the-scenes power in Austin, Johnson had begun cultivating “Senator’s” friendship at that time, with the success documented by Wirtz’s inscription that he loved Lyndon “as if he were in fact my own son.” Now, immediately after his appointment as Texas NYA Director, the cultivation was intensified. With the whole city of Austin to choose from, Johnson rented for the NYA office a suite on the sixth floor of the Littlefield Building, directly below Wirtz’s law office on the seventh floor, and constantly—“daily, several times a day,” Luther E. Jones recalls—ran up the stairs to seek the lobbyist’s advice about NYA matters. And Johnson drew Wirtz closely into the NYA’s work, not only consulting him constantly but even persuading him to accompany him on field inspection trips through the state.
And the picture is also less clear because of appointments Johnson didn’t make.
Shortly after he was appointed to his NYA post, in July, 1935, he was told by NYA administrators in Washington that in a state with as large a Negro population—approximately 855,000—as Texas, there should be at least one Negro member of the State Advisory Board. Johnson did not accept the suggestion. Instead, he created a separate five-member Negro Advisory Committee (which he said would advise him on the best methods of using the money the Texas NYA was allocating to black youth programs). This committee, he was to tell the NYA administrators, was composed of “the outstanding members of the race,” men, he said, “who enjoy the confidence of white people and who are respected by white people for their work and ideas.”
The creation of a separate Negro committee did not satisfy the NYA administrators. In only a few states did the State Advisory Boards play a role as active as Aubrey Williams had envisioned for them. In most states, they had no significant function: they were indeed only advisory. In some states, they met only infrequently—Johnson’s effort to get his board chairman to take a more active role was unusual. But the NYA headquarters staff in Washington considered the presence of a leading Negro citizen on the Advisory Board important, since it made blacks feel they had a role in the program, a voice in setting its policies, instead of merely receiving handouts from it. They pressed Johnson to appoint at least one black to the overall board, and when Johnson continued
to decline to do so, the NYA’s National Deputy Administrator, John J. Corson, telephoned him in early August and discussed the matter with him “thoroughly.” On August 20, when Johnson came to Washington for a conference of all forty-eight state directors, Corson raised the matter again, telling him that the NYA administration was in agreement that the appointment should be made. When, on September 17, it still had not been made, Corson wrote Johnson, setting out formally the fact that there was a “large number of Negro youth in Texas” and that “in order that there may be just recognition of this group, we believe it would be advisable to give them the means of expression which the appointment of a Negro leader on the Advisory Committee would permit.”
To this letter, Johnson responded with one of his own—long and eloquent. In five single-spaced and emotional pages, he told Corson that such an appointment would have a “disastrous result” both for what the NYA was trying to accomplish for Negroes and in terms of race relations in Texas. “The racial question during the last one hundred years in Texas…has resolved itself into a definite system of mores and customs which cannot be upset overnight,” he said. “So long as these are observed there is harmony and peace between the races in Texas. But it is extremely difficult to step over lines so long established and to upset customs so deep-rooted, by any act which is so shockingly against precedent as the attempt to mix Negroes and whites on a common board.”
Were he to “place a Negro on this Board,” he said, “I know…and everyone acquainted with the situation in Texas knows, that… three results would be inevitable”: every one of the board’s present nine members “would resign immediately”; he himself would have to resign as state director because “my judgement would thereafter always be at a discount in Texas, and I would be convicted of making a blunder without parallel in administrative circles in the state. I might even go so far as to say that I would, in all probability, be ‘run out of Texas.’” The third “inevitable” result of the appointment, he said, would be “to cost us the cooperation of Negro leaders in Texas.” “To one unacquainted with conditions in Texas, this may seem paradoxical,” Johnson wrote, “but I sincerely believe that an investigation will reveal that Negro leaders would have no confidence in any of their number who permitted his name to be proposed as a member of the Board, because of the friction they know would certainly ensue.” The “turmoil” and “publicity” that “would inevitably follow” such an appointment “would react to the detriment of the Negroes and all their projects…. Both the whites and the Negroes would be thrust farther apart than ever by such a move.” He himself had already launched programs to help Negro youths, he said, and “I feel confident that in these ways the NYA of Texas will be able to do vastly more to benefit Negro youths than by setting them on the firing line of public opinion in Texas, to be shot at by the whites and dodged by the Negroes.”
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 115