The Path to Power (11 page)

Sam Johnson was a born legislator. He had never displayed much enthusiasm for mending wire fences, but he mended his political fences industriously. He made a point of becoming good friends with the editors of the local newspapers back in the Hill Country, even the editor of the Gillespie
County News
, which had supported his opponent, and after the 1905 legislative session, the News editorialized:

When, in 1906, he decided to try to break the county-rotation tradition, even the newspaper in Llano County, which according to tradition was entitled to the seat next, supported him. Llano nevertheless put up its own candidate—the closest the county could come to a big businessman, David Martin, owner of the Martin Telephone Company—but Johnson, with the
Blanco News
urging, “Boys, get out and shell the woods, and let the people choose … whom they will send to Austin to help make our laws,” won
even Martin’s county in the Democratic primary, rolling up a four-county margin so large that the Republicans did not bother to run an opponent against him in the November elections.

B
UT SAM
wasn’t only a Bunton. He was also a Johnson, and he possessed none of the Buntons’ tough practicality that enabled them to realize their dreams—or at least not to be destroyed by them. And the Johnsons’ dreams were even bigger than the Buntons’—and suffused with a romantic unreality. 1906 was a year of political victory for Sam Johnson, but it was also a year of financial disaster. Having gambled and won on the cotton-futures market in 1902 and 1903 and 1904, in 1905 he had gambled more, buying on margin, overextending himself—as his father, having gambled and won on the cattle drives of 1868 and 1869 and 1870, had gambled too much and lost on the cattle drive of 1871. Few details are known except for his son Lyndon’s statement that “My daddy went busted waiting for cotton to go up to twenty-one cents a pound, and the market fell apart when it hit twenty.” Sam lost everything he had invested—and more. And when, in 1906, he borrowed money and bought on margin, he lost again. When he went back to the Legislature after his re-election in November, 1906, he went as a man several thousand dollars in debt.

The Legislature was not the place for a man like Sam Johnson to get out of debt. Texans’ early distrust of the federal government—nourished by Washington’s indifference to its new state, and particularly by Washington’s failure to protect the frontier against Indians—had been extended to their own state government during Reconstruction, when the openly corrupt Carpetbagger Legislature looted the state and imposed heavy taxes on its people to pay for the liberality. “The more the damn Legislature meets, the more Goddamned bills and taxes it passes,” one Texan put it—and when Texans regained control of their state government, their new state constitution, essentially an anti-government document, tried to ensure that the Legislature would meet infrequently; it provided that sessions be held only every other year and, as an inducement to legislators to keep even these sessions short, that the legislators’ salary of five dollars per day be paid only for sixty days; if the sessions ran longer, they were to receive two dollars per day.

Low salaries didn’t bother many of the legislators, for it was not legislators but lobbyists—lobbyists for oil companies, railroads, banks, utilities—who did the presiding in Austin: in the capital’s bars and brothels, where they dispensed “beefsteak, bourbon and blondes” so liberally that some descriptions of turn-of-the-century legislative sessions read like descriptions of one long orgy; in its backrooms, where decisions were made; even on the floor of the Legislature, which lobbyists roamed at will, often sitting
at legislators’ desks and sometimes even casting votes on behalf of absent Representatives. Many of the elected representatives of a generally impoverished people, representatives who had come to Austin poor themselves, went home poor no more, and even most of those who refused to trade votes for cash generally accepted—because they considered their salaries too low to cover their expenses—lobbyists’ offers to pay for their Austin meals and hotel bills.
*

But Sam Johnson accepted nothing. It was not that he shunned the whorehouses and the bars; he didn’t—he is remembered as an enthusiastic participant in the wildest of Austin’s parties. He is remembered, in fact, as being a loud and boastful reveler—somewhat foolish when in his cups. But if he was foolish, he was foolish on his own money; he insisted on paying for his own drinks and his own women. And if he is remembered as being loud, he is also remembered as being honest—conspicuously honest; a rather quixotic figure, in fact, in the Austin atmosphere. Once, finding a lobbyist sitting at his desk in the House, he angrily ordered him up; when the lobbyist, thinking he was joking, was too slow to obey, Johnson reached down, grabbed his jacket and pulled him out of his chair. Thereafter, he either introduced or was one of the few supporters of—the legislative record is not clear on the point—a bill to regulate lobbyists’ conduct. (It never got out of committee.)

The most controversial issue before the Texas House of Representatives in 1907 was the re-election of United States Senator Joseph Weldon Bailey.

Bailey, an imposing figure in his “dull black frock coat, flowing tie, and big, black slouch hat,” was one of the great old Populist orators. His thundering speeches against Eastern capitalists, wrote one who had heard them, “were phrased in the best English, though he was prone to draw on his imagination for history when required to make his point. His voice was melodious. …” As Minority Leader of Congress during the 1890’s, “he dominated the Democratic minority like an overseer and conducted himself like a conqueror.” A close friend of Bryan’s, he had “influenced the Great Commoner in the formulation of his most celebrated doctrines, among them the Bryan metal theory.”

But according to his enemies, Bailey was a Populist who had sold out. In 1906, he was accused of having accepted huge legal fees from railroads, the big East Texas lumber interests and the Standard Oil Company—from Standard Oil alone, he later admitted, his annual retainer was $100,000 (four times as large as the budget, including the Governor’s salary, of the entire executive branch of the State of Texas). His term as Senator ran out in 1907, and some members of the Legislature—Legislatures still elected Senators—were talking of getting a new one, or at least of postponing the vote while the House investigated Bailey’s affairs.

When the Legislature met, however, Bailey was in Austin “to drive into the Gulf of Mexico the peanut politicians who would replace me with someone who would rattle around in my seat like a mustard seed in a gourd!” Backing him were the railroads and oil interests, who had a big stake in keeping him in the Senate. They wanted a vote before any investigation began—and they wanted the vote unanimous. The pressure they brought to bear—combined with the power of Bailey’s name; the Senator was, at that time, possibly the most famous and powerful politician in Texas—brought, sooner or later, almost all of the 133 members of the House over to their point of view. When the vote on his re-election was held, following a series of pro-Bailey speeches greeted with roaring cheers by most of the members, only seven refused to go along. Sam Johnson, who had been one of the first to call for the investigation, was one of the seven.

To some Austin observers, Sam Johnson’s stand—not only on Bailey but on all the Populist positions that he refused to surrender—made him something of a hero. The House Chaplain, who described him as “a quiet worker” whose “pleasant, gentlemanly ways secure to him the friendship of all the members,” said he “will bear gentle reproof, but will kick like a mule at any attempted domination.” Others put it more simply. A saying about Sam Johnson was widespread in Austin at this time. “Sam Johnson,” it went, “is straight as a shingle.” But the legislative session dragged on. On five dollars a day—and then two dollars a day—Sam had to pay his expenses at Austin as well as the salaries of the laborers he had to hire to work the farm when he was away. He couldn’t do it. And his creditors were dunning him for the money he had lost on the cotton-futures market—and for smaller amounts, too. In August, 1905, for example, he had filled a forty-cent prescription at O. Y. Fawcett’s drugstore in Johnson City. In November, he still hadn’t been able to pay the forty cents, and when he came in for another prescription, Fawcett made him pay cash. At the end of the year, Fawcett asked him if he could pay up so that the account could be balanced, and Sam said he couldn’t. He began to get a bad reputation with some of the local merchants, bad enough, in fact, so that when, in 1907, he asked a Johnson City girl, a schoolteacher named Mabel Chapman, to marry him, Mabel, at the insistence of her parents, refused and instead married another suitor. And then in August, 1907, he did get married, and by 1908, he and his wife were expecting a child. He may have felt at home in that paneled, high-ceilinged House of Representatives, but it was a house he couldn’t afford to stay in. All four counties in the 89th District wanted him
to run again in 1908, for an unprecedented third term, but he decided not to do so. State jobs—better-paying than legislative seats—were available to many retiring legislators, as were jobs with the railroads and the oil companies and the banks, but Sam Johnson, who had refused to go along with the railroads and the oil companies and the banks—who had refused to come to terms with the reality of Austin—was offered no job. By the time his first child, Lyndon, was born, on August 27, 1908, Sam Johnson had lugged his dreams and ideals back to the Hill Country.

S
AM
J
OHNSON HAD
, moreover, married someone as romantic and idealistic as he.

Rebekah Baines had been raised, on the outskirts of the little Hill Country town of Blanco, in a large two-story stone house painted a smooth and gleaming white. A house of Southern graciousness, it should have been set behind a long green lawn, among tall and stately trees; instead, it towered over the stunted mesquite around it, and over the spindly little fruit trees in the recently planted orchard on one side. Grass grew in its front yard only in brown, scattered clumps. It seemed very out of place near Blanco’s rickety wooden stores and dog-run log cabins.

For a while, Rebekah’s father was the area’s most prominent attorney. Descended from a long line of famous Baptist preachers—his father, the Reverend George Washington Baines, had been president of Baylor, the Texas Baptist university—Joseph Wilson Baines had been a schoolteacher and then a lawyer, a newspaperman (founder of the influential
McKinney Advocate
) and Secretary of State under Governor John (“Old Oxcart”) Ireland. Moving to the Hill Country in 1900, he was elected to the Legislature—to the same seat Sam Johnson would later hold—and practiced law and rented land to tenant farmers, accumulating “quite a fortune.” But the qualities most remarked about him were his piety (“A Baptist, strict in doctrine … he was the chief pillar in the Blanco Church”; “for clean speech and morals, he could hardly have been surpassed”); his love of beauty in literature and nature; and his principles, both as a legislator “public-spirited, profoundly concerned for the welfare of the people … high in ideals,” and as a lawyer who, his law partner said, “was always more concerned about doing right and acting honorable than he was about the success of the suit.” A Hill Country historian wrote of Joe Baines: “He loved the good and the beautiful.”

Rebekah was devoted to her father. It was he, she was to recall, who taught her to read, and “reading has been one of the great pleasures and
sustaining forces of my life. … He taught me the beauty of simple things. He taught me that ‘a lie is an abomination to the Lord.’ … He gave the timid child self-confidence.” As an elderly woman, looking back (with some exaggeration) on her girlhood, she would write:

But Blanco was in the Hill Country. “On account of disastrous droughts, protracted four years,” and “by over-kindness to farm tenants and by overconfidence in men,” as his brother put it, Baines’ farming operations “brought financial ruin.” He lost his home, moving in 1904 from “dearly loved” Blanco to the German community of Fredericksburg, where he built a smaller house for his family and tried to establish a new practice. But his health had fled with his fortune, and he died in November, 1906; his wife had to sell the house, move to San Marcos, and take in boarders.

Rebekah later wrote that she had “adjusted readily and cheerfully to the financial change”—she worked in the college bookstore to earn enough money to graduate from Baylor—but that she had experienced greater difficulty adjusting “to life without my father, who had been the dominant force in my life as well as my adored parent, reverenced mentor, and most interesting companion.” Shortly before he died, while Rebekah, having graduated, was back in Fredericksburg teaching elocution and working as a “stringer” for the Austin newspaper, he had suggested that she interview the young legislator who had won the seat he himself had once held. She would recall that when she did—in 1907, shortly after Sam had been turned down by Mabel Chapman—“I asked him lots of questions but he was pretty cagey and I couldn’t pin him down; I was awfully provoked with that man!” but she also recalled that he was “dashing and dynamic,” with “flashing eyes”—and, however unlike her father he may have been in other respects, the two men were similar in the one she thought most important: she could talk with him, as she had with her father, about “principles.” As for Sam, she said, “He was enchanted to find a girl who really liked politics.” Soon, in what she called a “whirlwind courtship,” he was riding the twenty miles to Fredericksburg to visit the slender, blonde, blue-eyed elocution teacher, and taking her to hear political speeches at the Confederate Reunion and in the Legislature—“We heard William Jennings Bryan, who we both admired extravagantly”),
and on August 20, 1907, they were married and he brought her to the Pedernales.

N
OTHING IN HER LIFE
had prepared her for life there.

As they rode away from comfortable, bustling Fredericksburg and its neat green fields, the land faded to brown, and then gray. It became more and more rocky, more and more barren. The farmhouses were farther and farther apart. Dotting the hills were hulks of deserted farmhouses, crumbling rectangles of logs out of which reared tall stone fireplaces which stood in the hills like tombstones—monuments to the hopes of other couples who had tried to earn a living there. And then, finally, they came to the house in which she was to live.

It was a small shack on a long, shallow slope leading up from the muddy little river.

A typical Hill Country dog-run, it consisted of two boxlike rooms, each about twelve feet square, on either side of a breezeway. Behind one of the rooms was the kitchen. One end of the porch had been enclosed to form a tiny “shed-room”; the roof was sagging as if pulled down a little by the added weight on that side, and the porch slanted down, too. The walls of the house were vertical boards. Out back were a barn—little more, really, than a lean-to shelter for animals—and the toilet facilities, a pair of flimsy, tilted “two-holers.” In front of the house was a swinging wooden gate, set not in a wooden fence but in a fence made of four strands of barbed wire which enclosed the front yard. The yard was mostly dirt with a few clumps of grass or weeds stuck up here and there. Sam had painted the house a bright yellow to welcome her.

Rebekah’s father had created a niche in the Hill Country, and had raised a daughter who fitted into that niche: a college graduate, a lover of poetry, a soft-spoken, gentle, dreamy-eyed young lady who wore crinolines and lace—and broad-brimmed, beribboned hats with long veils; “She had a flawless, beautiful white skin and never held with this business of going out in the sun and getting tan; she felt that women should protect themselves from the sun,” recalls one of her daughters. Now, overnight, at the age of twenty-six (Sam was almost thirty), she was out of the niche—a fragile Southern flower suddenly transplanted to the rocky soil of the Pedernales Valley.

Transplanted, moreover, to a world in which women had to work, and work hard. On washdays, clothes had to be lifted out of the big soaking vats of boiling water on the ends of long poles, the clothes dripping and heavy; the farm filth had to be scrubbed out in hours of kneeling over rough rub-boards, hours in which the lye in homemade soap burned the skin off women’s hands; the heavy flatirons had to be continually carried back and forth to the stove for reheating, and the stove had to be continually fed with
new supplies of wood—decades later, even strong, sturdy farm wives would remember how their backs had ached on washday. And Rebekah wasn’t strong. With no electricity in the valley, all cooking had to be done on a wood stove, and the wood for it—and for the fireplace—had to be carried in from the pile outside, and just carrying those countless loads of wood was hard for a frail woman who had never in her life done physical labor. The pump on her back porch made it unnecessary for Rebekah to lug buckets of water up from the Pedernales as most of the women in the valley had to do, but even working the pump was hard for her. Rebekah was a good cook, but of what the other farm wives called “fancy” foods: delicate dishes, for elegant meals. Now, at “the threshing,” the fifteen or twenty men who came in to help expected to be served three huge meals a day. The farm wife had a hundred chores; Sam hired girls to help Rebekah with them, but the girls were always quitting—no girl wanted to live out there in those lonely hills—and even when there was a maid in the house, there was so much work that Rebekah had to do some of it. When, in later years, Rebekah Johnson wrote a memoir, she painted her life on the ranch in terms so soft that it was all but unrecognizable to those who knew her. But seeping through the lines of one paragraph is emotion they believe is true:

Years later, in a statement that may have been more accurate, she would write to her son, Lyndon: “I never liked country life, and its inconveniences. …”

It was not, however, the work that was the most difficult aspect of farm life for her.

From Rebekah’s front porch, not another house was visible—not another human structure of any type. Other houses were scattered along the Pedernales—and some not far away; Sam’s parents now lived just a half-mile up the road, and not much farther away lived two of Sam’s sisters, with their husbands. And there was his brother Tom—it was a Johnson valley again; there were Johnson brothers, again named Sam and Tom, working on the Pedernales as there had been forty years before. But the Johnsons were a boisterous crew. They told jokes—the kind of jokes Rebekah’s father had
so disliked. They might pass around a bottle—and her father had taught her what a sin that was. Going to church on Sundays was great fun for them; they would all meet at Grandfather Johnson’s, each family behind its own team, and race, shouting back and forth, pulling up in front of the Christadelphian church in a flurry of dust and laughter. That wasn’t the way to go to church! After services, they would gather around the piano in the church and sing—all the Johnsons could sing; Sam had once won a medal in a singing contest. It was not at all like the quiet, reflective Sundays in the Baptist church in Blanco that had been so important to Rebekah’s father and to her.

In other ways, too, she couldn’t fit in. She was a college graduate, and a college graduate who loved what she had learned, who loved to recite poetry, and to talk about literature and art, and who had spent her life in a home filled with such talk. The other Johnson women were farm wives, raised on farms; when necessary, they worked in the fields beside their men; Rebekah’s sister-in-law, Tom’s wife, was a sturdy German girl quite capable, if Tom fell behind in the plowing, of hitching up a second team and handling a whole quarter-section by herself. In conversation, the Johnson women were as earthy as Rebekah was ethereal. Many of them “had their letters” and that was all; they could sign their names and laboriously pick out words in a newspaper, but they didn’t read books, and didn’t talk about them. Some of the women on nearby farms in the valley, and in the rolling hills that stretched away from it, didn’t have even their letters; the German women didn’t even speak English. Without a telephone, Rebekah could talk only with the people in the valley, and there wasn’t a person in the valley with whom Rebekah enjoyed talking.

Sam was “opposite”—loud and boisterous, impatient and cursed with a fierce temper—but he and Rebekah were very much in love. “She was so shy and reserved all the time,” says a girl who lived with them on the Pedernales for several months. “Then she’d hear Sam coming home. Her face would just light up like a little kid’s, and out she’d go flying down to the gate to meet him.” They loved to talk together—long, serious talks, usually about politics; the girl recalls the two of them sitting beside the coal-oil lamp late into the evening, talking about “things I couldn’t understand.” But when Sam was away, Rebekah had no one to talk to.

And Sam was often away, traveling to Austin on legislative business or to Johnson City to deliver cotton to the gin or pick up supplies, or all over the vast Hill Country to buy and sell farms—in 1908, he had decided to try to supplement his farm income by going into the real-estate business. And it wasn’t always possible to come straight home when his business was concluded; more than once, having spurred a mount or whipped a team through the sixty miles of mud that constituted the only road between Austin and Stonewall in a wet spell, he would come to a creek too high to ford.

When Rebekah walked out the front door of that little house, there
was nothing—a roadrunner streaking behind some rocks with something long and wet dangling from his beak, perhaps, or a rabbit disappearing around a bush so fast that all she really saw was the flash of a white tail—but otherwise nothing. There was no movement except for the ripple of the leaves in the scattered trees, no sound except for the constant whisper of the wind, unless, by happy chance, crows were cawing somewhere nearby. If Rebekah climbed, almost in desperation, the hill in back of the house, what she saw from its crest was more hills, an endless vista of hills, hills on which there was visible not a single house—somewhere up there, of course, was the Benner house, and the Weinheimer house and barn, but they were hidden from her by some rise—hills on which nothing moved, empty hills with, above them, empty sky; a hawk circling silently high overhead was an event. But most of all, there was nothing human, no one to talk to. “If men loved Texas, women, even the Anglo pioneer women, hated it,” Fehrenbach has written. “… In diaries and letters a thousand separate farm wives left a record of fear that this country would drive them mad.” Not only brutally hard work, but loneliness—what Walter Prescott Webb, who grew up on a farm and could barely restrain his bitterness toward historians who glamorize farm life, calls “nauseating loneliness”—was the lot of a Hill Country farm wife.