The Path to Power (18 page)

The summer of 1920 was a hot summer. That blazing Hill Country sun burned all the way down through that thin soil, scorching away the nutrients in it. The cotton plants weren’t as strong as they should have been, therefore, and not as resistant as they might have been to the sun—and some of them burned, too. “They came up just so high, and then the hot sun would get on them, and the leaves would curl up,” Ava recalls. They didn’t produce nearly as many pounds of cotton as Sam had expected to sell at forty or fifty or sixty cents per pound.

That didn’t matter much, though. For all through that summer and fall of 1920, as Sam Johnson’s cotton was dying, so was the cotton market. Wall Street speculation was part of the cause, as was an unforeseen worldwide deflation in the price of manufactured goods; moreover, while cotton prices had been driven up immediately after the war by heavy demand from Europe, in 1920, European countries began growing their own cotton again. When Sam went to sell his cotton in the fall of 1920, the price was no longer forty cents per pound. It was eight cents per pound.

The trap had closed. The Hill Country was a land that broke romantics, dreamers, wishful thinkers, idealists. It broke Sam Johnson.

It broke him financially—beyond hope of repair. The yearly interest on the $15,000 mortgage he had placed on the farm came to $1,050; by 1922, with cotton prices still low, he couldn’t make the quarterly interest payments. And in 1925 half the principal would be due, and in 1927 the other half; by 1922, it was clear even to Sam Johnson that there was no hope that he would be able to make those payments. He had to sell the farm for whatever he could get, which was $10,000 from a thrifty German named Ove J. Striegler.

Sam didn’t get to keep the $10,000; it all went to the mortgage holder, the Loan and Abstract Company of Fredericksburg. Sam had tried to save the family place, the place that symbolized so much to him. Instead, he had lost it. There was no Johnson Ranch any more. It was the Striegler Ranch now.

And the mortgage was only part of what Sam owed. He still owed banks the money he had borrowed to pay for tractors, horses, seed and fertilizer, and for refurbishing three houses. He still owed merchants for the grocery and clothing bills run up over two years by his two sharecropper
families, bills they were unable to pay because their share of the cotton proceeds was too small—bills he had guaranteed. He moved off the farm owing money to banks and merchants the whole length of the Pedernales Valley. The total amount of his debt cannot be determined. His daughter Rebekah puts the amount at $40,000, his son Sam Houston puts it at $30,000, and it doesn’t really matter which of the two amounts is accurate: in the Hill Country, one would be as impossible to pay as the other. Sam Johnson was in debt so deeply that he would be in debt until he died. He almost didn’t have a place to move to: he had mortgaged the Johnson City house for $2,000, and had been unable to meet the $160-per-year interest payments, and now the principal was due. The only reason that the Citizens Bank of Fredericksburg, with whose president Sam had once joked so cordially, didn’t foreclose on the house was that his brothers, Tom and George, persuaded the bank to extend the mortgage by co-signing it and by paying the back interest themselves. Had they not done so, their brother, and his wife and five children, would have had no home.

The Hill Country broke Sam Johnson’s health. He sold the farm in September, 1922, moved back into Johnson City, and took to his bed with a long-drawn-out illness. The closing was in November; Sam had to get out of his sickbed to place his signature on the documents which formalized the dissolution of his dreams. He got out of bed again to go to the legislative session which began in January, 1923—where he introduced the Johnson Blue Sky Law—but collapsed in Austin and spent most of the session in bed there. Returning to Johnson City thereafter, he had to spend still more weeks in bed. The precise nature of his illness is not known; it has been called both “pneumonia” and “nervous exhaustion.” Visitors to the Johnson home recall that he was white and gaunt, and that there was a severe outbreak of boils or “carbuncles” on his face. Many of the visitors were bringing covered plates of food—not just for the sick man but for his family, for by this time, it was common knowledge: there was no food in the Johnson house—and no money to buy any.

It broke him in other ways, too. His face, despite those piercing eyes, had always been friendly and smiling. Now it was grim and bitter, his mouth pulled tight and down. And his temper was worse. Sam had always had a violent temper, but its eruptions had been infrequent and short-lived. Now he would fly into a rage, particularly at his wife and children, at the slightest provocation. What people thought of him had always been so important to Sam. Even during that first terrible year, even as he was going broke out there on that farm, he had tried to keep up the front whenever he came into town: “Hon. S. E. Johnson and his little son Lyndon, of Stonewall, were among the prominent visitors in Johnson City on Wednesday of this week,” the
Record
had reported in 1920. “Mr. Johnson has one of the largest and best farms in this section of Texas, and has been kept quite busy of late supervising its cultivation.” In August of that year, when the
doom of his dreams must have been clear to him, he saw editor Gliddon and spoke of more “big land deals.” Now there was no point in trying to keep up a front any longer. When he got out of bed, he still wore suits and high, stiff collars, and his voice and laugh were still loud. But the air of “great confidence” was gone. There was something defensive about him now.

U
NDERSTANDABLY DEFENSIVE
. For Sam Johnson, who could walk into a room and know in an instant who was for him and who was against him, was a man who knew what people were thinking. And what they were thinking about him had changed—rapidly and completely. In a span of time that seems to an outsider remarkably brief, he had been transformed in the eyes of his home town from a figure of respect to a figure of ridicule.

Perhaps such a transformation would have occurred to any man who fell from high to low estate so rapidly—and so publicly and dramatically—in a small town where everyone knows everyone else’s business, particularly when the town had for years believed that he was a shrewd and successful businessman, always negotiating “big land deals” that enabled him to buy big cars and to hire a chauffeur, and then suddenly the town learned that it had all been a bluff, that the deals and the cars were nothing but a front. But the gossip about Sam Johnson was harsh and ruthless even for a small town.

In part, this was because of the nature of Johnson City. Gossip was so powerful a force in many small towns partly because of their isolation: there wasn’t much for people to be interested in except each other’s lives. Johnson City—this tiny huddle of homes in the midst of the vast, empty Texas hills, this “island town”—was unusually isolated. It was a town which, as late as 1922, still possessed neither a movie house nor a single radio, a town very deficient in things to do, and its residents’ interest in each other was, as more than one visitor remarked, very intense. Especially their interest in their most famous neighbor, the only resident of their town with even the slightest claim to fame: Hon. S. E. Johnson.

Johnson City was, moreover, a religious town—hard-shell, hellfire, revivalist, Fundamentalist, Old Testament religious. In most of its little houses, no matter how meagerly furnished, there lay on the dining-room table or on the mantelpiece a big black, leather-bound Bible, its front cover flapping up from frequent use. In few of those houses could be found a deck of cards or set of dominoes. “They were tools of the Devil,” says John Dollahite, one of Lyndon Johnson’s classmates. “My father wouldn’t allow a deck of cards in the house.” No dancing was allowed, of course, not in the house or out, and as for drinking—John’s father, Walter Dollahite, could scarcely bear to look at the little saloon that was, from time to time, open in Johnson City; its swinging doors were the passage to Hell. Not even a drink of beer was permitted; “sneaking a beer by Jesus is like trying to
sneak daylight by a rooster,” Dollahite was fond of saying. Half the town was Baptist, and most of the other half—members of the Methodist Church or the Church of the Disciples of Christ—was trying, in Stella Gliddon’s words, to “out-Baptist the Baptists.” Lest legs show, girls were required to wear long, thick stockings—black until a girl reached her teens, when white was permitted. The fierceness of the town’s prejudices and the rigidity of its intolerance led Stella Gliddon to call it “almost a Puritan town. In those days, people were considered bad for things that we take for granted now. They were the friendliest people, but they were very religious people, too.” Such people had never forgiven Sam Johnson for believing in the Darwinian theory, or for admiring Al Smith, or for voting against Prohibition. The irregularity of his attendance at church—it was rumored, correctly, that he went at all only to please Rebekah—had been noted, as had the fact that his daughters had more than once appeared in public in knee socks. As for the fact that he was known to drink—well, these people knew what would come of that. Sam Johnson was the kind of man who in a town like Johnson City would ordinarily have been held up to children as an example of what they must avoid; ordinarily, people would have long predicted that he would follow in the path of his father and uncle, who had gone broke and failed to pay their debts. But in a town so impoverished and, because it was so religious, so conditioned to believe that worldly success betokened divine favor, Sam’s apparent success in business outweighed all other factors, and as long as the townspeople thought he had money, they respected him despite his faults. But as they realized the truth, they turned on him with a fury made all the harsher because it had been so long pent up.

Their condemnation was harsher still—vicious, in fact—because of the way Sam acted now, in his time of adversity. Humbleness was called for now, and humbleness was not a Johnson trait. Sam’s “Johnson strut,” in fact, had lost none of its arrogance. The Johnsons—Sam and Rebekah, too—had considered themselves better than anyone else; now it turned out they were worse, but they still acted as if they were better, and people who had always resented this attitude no longer had reason to hide their resentment. One of the bankers who had once been proud to have Sam greet him on the street was now heard to sneer that he was always “playing cowboy and stomping in boots into the bank.” Bankers at least had—in Sam’s unpaid loans—reason for their new attitude toward him. The rest of the Hill Country had no such reason. What it had reason for was gratitude—for the pensions he had arranged, for the loans he had given, for the highway he had gotten built. Instead, there was relish and glee in the Hill Country’s reaction to Sam Johnson’s fall. John Dollahite’s grandfather was one of those for whose pension Sam had worked. In discussing Sam today, however, John Dollahite does not mention the pension until asked. What is mentioned—at length—is Sam Johnson’s illness, for Dollahite has it
all diagnosed. “Due to drink,” he explains. “You see, too much liquor thins your blood and you don’t have the resistance to throw off things.” Sam Johnson, he says, “was nothing but a drunkard. Always was.” Shortly after Sam’s downfall, O. Y. Fawcett, proprietor of Johnson City’s drugstore, coined a remark which soon gained wide circulation. “Sam Johnson,” he said, “is too smart to work, and not smart enough to make a living without working.” The disparagement even became public. At a barbecue at Stonewall in the spring of 1923 (which Sam was too ill to attend), one of the speakers, August Benner, who was planning to run again against Sam in the elections that fall, said: “I tell you, ladies and gentlemen, Sam Johnson is a mighty smart man. But he’s got no sense.” People who were present at that barbecue still recall how the audience roared with laughter at this
mot
.

Sam didn’t run in the next election, which was won by an old enemy, Fredericksburg lawyer Alfred P. C. Petsch. He announced that he was leaving politics “for business reasons”—how people snickered at that! One reason Sam didn’t run again could indeed be called “business”: he could no longer afford to give up months of each year at inadequate salary. But another reason may have been fear that if he ran again, he would lose: that Benner’s gibe and the laughter which greeted it were indications of how low he had slipped in public esteem. And from that standpoint, his decision may have been correct. Just how low he had slipped would be revealed a little more than a year later, when the Austin-Fredericksburg Highway was completed, and a barbecue was held to celebrate the official opening of the road for which Sam Johnson had worked for so many years. A dozen prominent Hill Country citizens were invited to speak. Sam Johnson was not among them.

F
OR A TIME
, he was in the real-estate and insurance business, but he couldn’t earn enough to live on. He went to Austin and tried to get a job in government. Many retired legislators—those who didn’t go to work for “the interests” at sizable retainers—were given well-paid sinecures in the state bureaucracy. But Sam had fought the interests, and the bureaucrats who did their wishes. Although, with ten years in the Legislature, he had retired as one of its senior members, there was no sinecure for him. For some weeks, it appeared there might be no job at all. When, finally, he was offered one, it was a one-year appointment at a salary of only two dollars per day. He had no choice but to accept. Thereafter he served the district he had served as State Representative—as a part-time game warden.

He was unable to pay off his back bills at Johnson City stores, and storeowners began writing “Please!” on their monthly statements. Afraid of antagonizing—and losing the business of—his brother and the rest of the large Johnson clan, they hesitated to cut off his credit, but he kept falling
further and further behind. “My Dad was liberal-like,” says Truman Fawcett, “but he [Sam] finally owed him over two hundred dollars. He had to cut him off.” After a while, Sam had to pay cash not only at O. Y. Fawcett’s drugstore but at every store in Johnson City. “After a while he owed everyone in town,” Truman Fawcett says. “They all cut him off.”