The Path to Power (143 page)

Losing on cotton futures:
Sam himself would say that he had lost only because of the San Francisco earthquake, but the only one who believed this story was his wife, who wrote: “The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 wiped out his cotton holdings and saddled him with a debt of several thousand dollars” (Johnson,
Album
, p. 25). Among the relatives familiar with the real story are Cox, SHJ, RJB.
“My daddy”:
Quoted in Steinberg, p. 565.

“The damn Legislature”:
Quoted in Fehrenbach, p. 435.
Austin atmosphere:
Among many descriptions, Frantz,
The Driskill
, and Steinberg,
Rayburn
, pp. 17, 19, 21.
An enthusiastic participant:
Joseph.
Ordering out the lobbyist:
McFarlane.
Bill regulating lobbyists:
HJ, Regular Session, 30th Legislature
, pp. 76, 660, 754.

“Dull black”:
SAE
, April 14, 1929.
“Were phrased”:
Bower, quoted in Steinberg,
Sam Johnson’s Boy
, p. 9.
“Influenced” Bryan:
Pool, p. 148.
The Bailey case:
McKay, pp. 21–24; Steinberg,
Rayburn
, pp. 17, 18.
“Drive into the Gulf”:
Cocke, p. 633.
Only seven:
Pool, p. 29; Bearss, p. 64; Steinberg,
Rayburn
, p. 18.

“A quiet worker”:
Chaplain W. J. Joyce, in
HJ, 30th Legislature
, p. 427.
“Straight as a shingle”:
McFarlane; Percy Brigham, quoted in Porterfield, p. 32.
The Fawcett account:
Fawcett, “Account Book,” p. 277.
Mabel Chapman refusing:
Wilma Fawcett, Cox.
Offered no job:
RJB, SHJ.

See Sources for Chapter 3.

Rebekah’s girlhood:
Johnson,
Album
, pp. 28–30.
Her house:
Album
, p. 29;
SAE
, Oct. 3, 1963.
Her father:
Album
, pp. 75–87, 29; Moursund, pp. 11–12.

Meeting Sam Johnson:
Album
, pp. 17, 25, 30; Steinberg,
Sam Johnson’s Boy
, p. 10.

Their home:
Photographs, Bearss, Plates XXIX, XXX; Cox, Gliddon.
“Flawless”:
RJB.
Women working:
See Chapters 27, 28.
Girls quitting:
Lambert, who was one of them.
Normally:
Album
, p. 30.
“I never”:
Rebekah to Lyndon, May 30, 1937, “Family Correspondence, Johnson, Mrs. Sam E., Dec. 1929–Dec. 1939,” Box 1,
Family Correspondence
.

Going to church; contrast with other women; with Tom’s wife:
Cox; RJB; Hatcher, OH, pp. 13–14.
“Opposite”:
Cox. Rebekah says, “In disposition, upbringing and background [we] were vastly dissimilar. However, in principles and motives, the real essentials of life, [we] were one” (
Album
, p. 25).
“Then she’d hear Sam”:
Lambert.
“If men”:
Fehrenbach, p. 302.

Quotation:
Album
, p. 32.
Tablecloths:
Saunders, OH, p. 14.
Teacups:
RJB; Mrs. Johnson.
Sam bringing Mrs. Lindig:
Hatcher OH, pp. 3, 4, and quoted in Bearss, p. 69.
“The attending”:
Album
, p. 17.
“Always dignified”:
Hatcher, OH, p. 3.
“You will be drowned!”:
Hatcher, quoted in Bearss, p. 69.

“The end of the earth”:
Gliddon.
“Closed”:
Barnwell.
Climbing the belfrey:
Cecil Redford.
“Probably”:
SHJ, p. 8.
Only college degree:
Gliddon.
Green sneaking into the classroom:
His daughter, Wilma Green Fawcett.
“I don’t want”:
RJB.

No room in Sanitarium; her illness thereafter:
SHJ, RJB.
Rebekah as a homemaker:
Casparis, Cox, Cynthia Crider Crofts, Wilma and Truman Fawcett, Stribling.
Rebekah as a teacher:
Cox; Crider OH. Ava is the one who hummed.
“She teached”:
Crider OH, p. 8.
“We didn’t”:
Cox.
“The highlight”:
Waugh, “The Boyhood Days.”
Ava’s experience:
Cox.
“I had heard”:
J. R. Buckner, quoted in Pool, p. 56.
“Gentle, gentle”; “quite the contrary”:
Gliddon OH.
“Highly organized”:
Album
, p. 27.
“Mr. Sam lost”:
Casparis.
“That’s not”:
Cynthia Crider Crofts.
Most of them recall:
Casparis, Lambert, Stevens. See A Note on Sources.
“He used”; “German blood”; “You could see”; “One minute”:
Casparis, Stevens, SHJ, Cox.
“In disposition”:
Album
, p. 25.
“The Bainses”:
Rebekah Johnson quoted in
HP
, June 20, 1954, Sec. 6, p. 6.
“It was something:”
Casparis.

“Men who”:
Cox.
$32,375 sale:
Fredericksburg Standard
, Jan. 22, 1916.
Putting on the plays:
BCR
, May 11, 1923; Bearss, pp. 103, 104.
Johnson City Record:
Bearss, pp. 75–76; Waugh, “The Boyhood Days”; Gliddon.

Sam’s buying ranches, etc.:
Fredericksburg Standard
, Nov. 28, 1919.
Gliddon’s experience:
Gliddon.
Haunish episode:
RJB.
At the Fredericksburg bank:
Walter OH; Petsch.
“Broad-minded”:
Wilma Fawcett.
Selected as a member of draft board:
Bearss, p. 76.
No opposition:
Fredericksburg Standard
, Jan. 18, 1918.

“A flying mass”:
Lucia Johnson Alexander, in
AS
, May 13, 1965.
“I’ve bought”:
SHJ, RJB.
“I argue”:
Deason.
Spelling bees, debates, listening to records:
Gliddon, quoted in Bearss, pp. 103–4; Gliddon; Cox; Wilma and Truman Fawcett.

See Sources for Chapter 3.

His mother wanted:
RJB, SHJ.
The naming:
“Rough Draft,” pp. 4, 5. Besides other, minor, differences, the sentence “He thought of his three lawyer friends” has been edited out of the published
Family Album
.
“Dark eyes”:
Album
, p. 22.
“Professed”:
“Rough Draft,” p. 2.
“The Bunton eye”:
Cox.

“Raised his hand”:
Rebekah Johnson’s notes on first page of photographs following p. 32 in the
Album
.
Ordered fifty:
Kowert, “Lyndon B. Johnson.”
Telling him stories:
Album
, p. 19.
The Stonewall picnic:
“Rough Draft,” p. 5.
Neighbors remembered:
Gliddon.

“A highly inquisitive”:
“Rough Draft,” p. 5.
Her fright:
Cox, Gliddon; Mrs. Lucia Johnson Alexander to Bruce, April 14, 1971, quoted in Bearss, p. 72.
Relatives:
Cox; Hatcher OH, p. 11; RJB.
The bell:
Mrs. Alexander to Bruce.
Hiding in haystack:
Lambert.
In cornfield:
Mrs. Alexander to Bruce.
“He wanted attention”:
Lambert.

Running away to school:
Loney, “Miss Kate and the President,” p. 2; Saunders OH, p. 13;
Album
, p. 19; Cox; Hatcher OH p. 12.
“My mother used to lead me”:
Johnson, in “The Hill Country: Lyndon Johnson’s Texas,” quoted in
NYT
, May 8, 1966.
Ava picking him up:
Cox.
Unless she held him on lap:
Deadrich, quoted in Loney, “Miss Kate,” pp. 3, 6.
Dressed differently:
Loney, “Miss Kate,” p. 3; Cox.
Writing his name big:
Kowert, “Lyndon B. Johnson.”
China clown:
Bearss, p. 71; Cox.

On the donkey:
Cox.
“The head of the ring”:
Hatcher OH, p. 12.
Hugo’s pie:
Cox.

“Lyndon took a liking”; a “five-pointer”; “a natural born leader”:
Crider OH, pp. 2, 17, 13.
“Take his ball and go home”:
Edwards. Among others who knew this: SHJ.

In Maddox’s barbershop:
Emmette Redford, Cox, Gliddon, SHJ; Crofts OH.
Father made him stop:
SHJ.
“Competition”; populism:
Cox.
Debates:
Gliddon. They are also described by Cox, RJB.
“There was no”:
Redford.
Dropping out of games:
Pool, p. 58; Cox; see also
Nichols, p. 439, who says, “His father told me that Lyndon … would listen to [his father’s] conversations with neighbors and friends instead of indulging in play as would the usual child.”
Craning his neck:
RJB; Steinberg,
Sam Johnson’s Boy
, p. 21.
Hobby visit:
Kowert, “Lyndon B. Johnson.”

“I loved”:
Kearns,
Lyndon Johnson
, pp. 36–37; Cox, Gliddon.
“Tell him”:
Steinberg, p. 26.
“If you can’t”:
Dallas Herald
, Nov. 24, 1963.
“Someone who really knew”:
McFarlane.
Benner’s claims of fraud:
San Angelo Standard-Times
, March 31, 1968.
Celebration in San Antonio:
RJB.
Sitting in the swing:
Cox, Fawcett.
Liked to dress like his father:
Cox.
“He was right”:
Hatcher OH, p. 21.
Carrying the
Congressional Record:
Stribling.
Imitating his father:
Patman, in Steinberg, pp. 28, 3, and OH. In the NBC broadcast, his first teacher, Kate Deadrich, said that when he came to school, “He would wear his father’s cowboy hat and then would have his father’s boots. A little bit difficult for him to have them, but he had them over his little shoes.”
Sam’s ambitions limited:
Patman, in Steinberg, p. 28.
The difference:
Fawcett, Gliddon, Redford.

Ear-popping:
Barnwell; Rountree OH, p. 14.
“Let me tell you”:
Gliddon.
“He was a Bunton!”:
Cox.

See Sources for Chapter 3.

“Warm applause”:
SAE
, Feb. 27, 1918.
Sam’s description:
Joseph, McFarlane; Patman OH.
“The cowboy type”:
Patman, quoted in Steinberg,
Sam Johnson’s Boy
, p. 3.
“Caught in the tentacles”:
JCR-C
, Oct. 28, 1937. Here the phrase is used without quotation marks, but numerous Johnson City residents say that it is exactly the phrase Sam used.
Sulphur tax:
McFarlane.

Anti-German hysteria:
Gould, p. 225; Pool, pp. 36–38; Fehrenbach, p. 644.
Fredericksburg Square; “maelstrom”; Sam’s speech:
Fredericksburg Standard
, March 23, April 6, 1918;
State Observer
, June 10, 1940.
Remembered with admiration:
Phinney.
Privately buttonholing:
SAE
, March 6, 1918.
“At a time”:
W.A. Trenckmann, editor of Austin’s
Das Wochenblatt
, in a letter dated Aug. 17, 1920, published in
Fredericksburger Wochenblatt
, Oct. 14, 1920.

Sam Johnson was also a leader in the fight against the Ku Klux Klan, although, contrary to the opinion of some Lyndon Johnson biographers that this fight required political courage, it did not. Sam’s son, Sam Houston Johnson, has written (
My Brother
, pp. 29–31) that the Klan “threatened to kill him on numerous occasions,” and that once Sam Ealy and his two brothers, Tom and George, dared them to “come on ahead,” and spent the night waiting on the porch with shotguns, while the women cowered in the cellar below (the Klan never showed up). But both accounts are at least slightly exaggerated. Sam Johnson, with his sympathy for the underdog, detested the Klan’s persecution of Mexican-Americans—he used the phrase “Kukluxsonofabitch” so often that, Sam Houston says, “I never realized that ‘son of a bitch’ was a separate word, standing all by itself, until I got to high school”—and, in the Legislature, he did speak and vote against measures it backed; one plea, for racial tolerance, won statewide notice; Carl L. Phinney, chief clerk of the House at the time, remembers “very vividly” the “powerful statement.” But the House was split about evenly on the Klan, and in Johnson’s own district, it was not really a force at all.

Optometrists:
Kemp, “Representative Sam Johnson.”
“High time”:
McFarlane. This was a characteristic phrase. In one of his campaign speeches against Benner, he said, as Cox recalled it for Pool (p. 45), “It is high time that a person stands up and lets the world know how he stands.”
“He was not”:
Patman OH, pp. 2, 3.

Concerted effort:
BCR
, April 22, 1921.
A “leading good-roads” man:
Johnson’s work on the highway is detailed in
House Journal, Regular Session, 36th Legislature
, 1919, pp. 308–9; 1920, pp. 196–97. 503.