The Path to Power (19 page)

Sometimes he didn’t have cash. He took to patronizing stores in Fredericksburg or Dripping Springs—or in towns even farther away—where he could charge his purchases. “He’d change towns,” Fawcett explains. “And while he was charging at these other towns—until they cut him off, too—he’d save a little cash money and put down some money on his bills here. But he couldn’t ever catch up.” Fawcett says that he himself believes that “He had intentions of paying his bills, Sam did.” But then he adds dryly, “At least, I think he did.” And Fawcett is kinder than other merchants who reminisce about Sam Johnson. Some of his debts were, by Hill Country standards, quite large; there is not only contempt but anger in the phrase the other merchants use about him: “He was a man who didn’t pay his bills.”

Eventually, he ran out of towns. The Buntons—who always had cash money—lent him some, but not enough. In 1925, he had to go back to Austin, hat in hand, to ask for another government job. He was given one. His work to obtain better roads for the Hill Country finally paid off for Sam Johnson. Rough stretches of the Austin-Fredericksburg Highway were being regraded. Sam was given a job on the highway of which he had been the leading sponsor: a job building it—with his hands. He was made foreman—working foreman—of a road-grading crew. The job paid fifteen dollars per week. Stella Gliddon recalls the first day Sam Johnson went to work on his new job. “Until that day, I never saw Sam Johnson without a tie on,” she says. “He always wore a nice shirt and suit. But then when he went to work on the road gang, he wore khaki pants like everyone else.”

R
EBEKAH
J
OHNSON
had never been able to do much housework. And now she had no maid to do housework for her. The daughters of other Johnson City women helped their mothers keep house, but Rebekah’s didn’t—at least not to any appreciable extent. “She could never raise her voice to them,” says Wilma Fawcett. “Her whole life was for the welfare of her children. And she was just too sweet to discipline them.”

As each birth seemed to cost Rebekah more of her health and energy (after Lucia’s, in 1916, she would frequently have to spend weeks in bed) and as the reality which she had always found so harsh grew harsher, she seems to have slipped further into romantic dreaming, giving up the job as newspaper stringer to write poetry, talking more and more about her ancestors, the illustrious Baineses and the even more illustrious Deshas of Kentucky, who had produced, in the eighteenth century, a Governor of
Kentucky—emphasizing that they were aristocratic Southerners. More and more, and to a striking extent, her life centered on her children, particularly on her eldest. She had always been a proud woman; now, as pride became harder to maintain, it took on a somewhat strident quality. She said, often enough so that her children’s friends recall her saying it: “Some children are born to follow. My children were born to lead.” No one could criticize her children to her, or even venture a hint that they had done anything wrong. “She was like a tiger sticking up for her children,” Wilma Fawcett says. Particularly for Lyndon. “She really had everything tied up in that fellow.” Says Louise Casparis, who worked in the Johnson home until they could no longer afford to pay her, “She loved her other children, but not to the extent which she loved him.” In her eyes, he couldn’t do anything wrong. Once, her sister-in-law Kitty told her about a fib in which several children, including Lyndon, had participated. Rebekah said she was sure Lyndon hadn’t, because he never told fibs. When Kitty said, “All children tell stories,” Rebekah replied, more shocked and angry than anyone had ever seen her: “My boy never tells a lie.”

Yet, however much she loved her children and stuck up for them, Rebekah was, in the view of Johnson City, unable—utterly unable—to take care of them. When her mother visited—which she did often now that Rebekah needed help in the house, sometimes staying for weeks at a time—she did the housework, but Johnson City housewives who visited the Johnsons when “Grandmother Baines” wasn’t in residence were shocked. Ava still remembers seeing in the Johnson sink something she had never, in all her life, seen in the sink in her own home—dirty dishes piled up, unwashed, so many that Ava felt they hadn’t been washed for several days. Rebekah had always dressed her children differently from the other children in Johnson City: Lyndon and Sam Houston in sailor outfits or linen suits, Rebekah and Josefa and Lucia in dresses and pinafores and lace bonnets. Now the clothes were still different—but they weren’t pressed, and after a while Johnson City found out why. Wilma Fawcett says that “when the laundry came back, honest to God, they’d just dump it in the bathtub and every child picked out what they wanted to wear to school that day, and it was never ironed unless they ironed it.” Sometimes, now, the fancy clothes of the Johnson children—especially the younger ones—would appear to be not only unpressed but unwashed, too.

As finances got tighter and tighter, it sometimes seemed as if the children didn’t have enough to eat. Children in Johnson City were continually eating at one another’s houses; children who ate at the Johnsons’ remember very small meals. Recalls Ohlen Cox: “I remember sausage and eggs—and that was for dinner. That was all there was, and there wasn’t a lot of that.” Clayton Stribling says, “We were poor, but we always had enough to eat. But once I ate over at the Johnsons’, and there was just bread and a little bit of bacon, and the bacon was rancid, too.” Often when
Rebekah wasn’t feeling well, she wouldn’t cook dinner, and now there wasn’t much cash to buy dinner at Johnson City’s lone café. Other children vividly remember the younger Johnson children, Josefa, Sam and Lucia, eating there—“a little dab of chili for the whole bunch.” Sometimes—not often, but sometimes—there was no cash in the house at all. The time that Sam lay ill after he lost the farm wasn’t the only time that relatives and neighbors brought meals to the Johnson house out of charity. One Christmas, there was nothing to eat in the house until Sam’s brother Tom arrived with a turkey and a sack of Irish potatoes.

The women of Johnson City, who scrimped to save every penny, who baked their own bread to save the nickel cost of a store-bought loaf, might understand why Rebekah didn’t scrimp (“She just wasn’t brought up the way the other women were”), but they still felt that spending cash money for food from a café was the most wanton kind of waste. They were, many of them, as poor as the Johnsons, but their children had enough to eat. “She lived above the means of what they had—that was the only reason her children were hungry.” And they therefore resented helping her. Tom’s daughter Ava remembers that every time her mother made preserves or canned corn, her father would insist that she can or jar enough to take some to his brother and his family. “Sam’s kids are hungry, Kitty,” Tom would say. “We’ve got to feed them.” And Ava remembers that sometimes her mother, that frugal German lady, would protest. Once, Ava vividly recalls, Kitty Johnson and Vida Cammack were canning corn together in the kitchen. When Tom insisted they can some for Sam’s kids, Kitty replied, “I don’t see why I have to do this every time, Tom. It seems like she could can her own stuff.” Mrs. Cammack, Ava recalls, pointed out that Sam had a garden, and that there was plenty of corn ripe in it if only Rebekah would can it. “I think we’ve done enough for them,” Mrs. Cammack said. And, Ava recalls, while the two women canned a hundred cans for each of their own families, for Sam and Rebekah “they canned twenty cans, and called it good [enough].”

That the Johnsons weren’t “resented” even more than they were was because no one took them seriously any more. Some pitied them, Sam in particular. “People pitied him because of his wife,” Ava says. “She was such a swell person, and smart—but she was not a helper. She was not a person to get up of a morning and get the kids dressed and off to school.” Everyone knew how Mabel Chapman had turned him down, and, Wilma says, “I used to think at the time it was a shame he hadn’t married her, because she would have managed his house and managed his children. And Rebekah just couldn’t manage at all.” But most ridiculed them. They weren’t disliked so much as laughed at. August Benner’s description of Sam had been sharpened: people said about him: “Sam Johnson’s a smart man, but the fool’s got no sense”—and that was the definitive word on him, that and the word “drunkard.” Tears may come to Stella Gliddon’s eyes when she tells about
the first time Sam Johnson didn’t wear a tie, but she is the exception; there is a glint of amusement and pleasure in the eyes of others who talk about Sam and the highway, even if not many are as blunt as John Dollahite, who says, chuckling: “He did a lot for that road, all right, Sam did.”

As for Rebekah, when the women of Johnson City heard her remark that “Now is the time to put something in children’s heads,” they said, “Maybe she ought to try putting something in their stomachs.” The Johnson home, these women say—in adjectives an interviewer hears over and over again—was “filthy, dirty. It was a
dirty
house!” And the Johnson children, these women say, were just little dirty ragamuffins. Sam and Rebekah Johnson had always been resented for their pretensions. Now, with those pretensions exposed in all their hollowness, the Johnsons were ridiculed. In Johnson City terms, they did, indeed, appear ridiculous. They were the laughingstock of the town.

W
ITH THE CHANGE
in the Johnsons’ fortunes, their relationship with their son Lyndon changed as well. The change was dramatic—so dramatic that it is possible to date it.

Descriptions of Sam Johnson’s relationship with his son in Austin—from fellow legislators, legislative staffers and others who saw them together there—provide two contrasting descriptions of that relationship. And the contrast is, in fact, as sharp as if there had been two Sam Johnsons in the Legislature, and hence two different sons. Some of these men vividly describe a son who idolized his father, who not only imitated him—his lapel-grabbing, his nose-to-nose conversational technique—so closely that “it was humorous to watch,” but who also tried, as one legislator put it, to “stand or sit as close to his father as he could get,” who, in another’s words, “stuck as close to Sam as his shadow,” and who, when Sam sent him on an errand, ran eagerly to obey. Others describe—just as vividly—a boy who not only refused to run errands for his father (“Whenever Sam wanted him to do something, Lyndon was always interested in doing something else”) but who refused to listen to his father or to obey him, who, in fact, defied him so blatantly that one legislator says that “There wasn’t a very friendly feeling between them at all. To tell you the truth, he wouldn’t pay much attention to anything his father wanted him to do.”

The difference in descriptions is explained by a difference in dates. The men who remember a son who loved and respected his father were those who observed the Johnsons in 1918 or 1919 or 1920—when the father was successful. Those who remember a different son were those who observed the Johnsons in 1921 or 1922 or 1923—when the father was a failure.

H
AD THE LEGISLATORS
visited the Johnson home, that shabby ranch in Stonewall at which the family lived “just long enough to go broke,” they would have seen the contrast etched in acid.

Lyndon Johnson had been so close to his parents—imitating his father, dressing like him, talking with him, politicking with him, listening to his mother’s stories, learning his alphabet and his spelling at her knee, choosing as his favorite poem “I’d Rather Be Mama’s Boy.” Now his father was still a father who went off to the Legislature and fought for “The People” and wouldn’t take any favors from the “the interests,” but he was also a father who was the laughingstock of the county. His mother still read poetry and told her children that “principles” were the important thing, and that “a lie is an abomination to the Lord,” but she was also a mother who didn’t iron, so that he often had to go out in rumpled clothes, and who didn’t cook, so that sometimes he went to bed hungry.

And he wouldn’t obey them. When Sam left on legislative or real-estate business, he would assign Lyndon various chores around the farm. Instead of doing the chores, Lyndon would parcel them out among his sisters and brother. He was a hard taskmaster with them—so “bossy” and domineering that, Wilma Fawcett says, “I had always thought I wanted to have an older brother—until I met Lyndon.” If the younger children didn’t do the chores, they weren’t done, for Lyndon wouldn’t do them; the woodbox on the back porch, which he was supposed to keep filled, would remain empty unless his mother lugged the wood herself. If his father found out what had been going on in his absence, he would lose his temper, particularly when he learned that Lucia or Sam Houston, who were, after all, little more than babies, had been doing heavy physical work, and he would spank Lyndon (he didn’t spank him more frequently only because Rebekah, hating the scenes between father and son, would often conceal Lyndon’s derelictions), and order him to do the chores himself. But the next time Sam left, Lyndon would again order the other children to do them. Lyndon’s attitude during Sam’s absences was striking; in the evenings, he would read the newspaper as his father did, and would lounge on his parents’ bed to do it. It is, of course, possible to place a Freudian interpretation on his behavior toward his father and some biographers do—but one complication must be taken into account: he was as hostile, defiant and cold to his mother as to his father. Her tears could make him sit sullenly through the violin lessons she had arranged for him, but nothing could make him practice; Rebekah finally told the teacher not to bother coming again. Meals were scenes of daily conflict, for to Rebekah table manners were as important as the tablecloth she insisted on using instead of oilcloth, as one of the last remnants of her cherished gentility. Lyndon’s manners now grew so bad that it was apparent to other children that he was deliberately trying to annoy his mother. He ate with loud, slurping noises, violently cramming huge spoonfuls of food into his mouth. Nothing she could do could make him stop; if he was sent away from the table, his manners would be the same when he returned. More than once, watching him eat, his mother began to cry.

His defiance of his parents was sharpest in the area they considered most important for their children: education. School was a painful experience for Lyndon during the family’s time back on the ranch. The nearby Junction School, which he had attended years before, had only eight grades. For the ninth, Lyndon had to attend the school in the tiny community of Albert, four miles away; most of the children there were German, and many of the classes were taught in that language. An outsider because he spoke little German (and that with an accent the other children found funny), Lyndon was mocked because, although he was twelve years old, he still rode a donkey instead of a horse to school—in part because he was physically very awkward and hence an unsure rider, in part, possibly, because his father was by this time in no mood to give him a horse of his own. After a while Sam relented and gave him a pony, but he would always remember the humiliation; “It helped a little when my mother told me that Jesus rode into Jerusalem on an ass,” he would recall. (Rebekah knew how best to appeal to her son: Lyndon’s desire to be “in the forefront”—to stand out, to be somebody—was as strong as ever; about this time, Lyndon got his first pair of long pants; he arranged for a photographer to come to the ranch to record the occasion—a trip his parents could ill afford. It was at the Albert School, moreover, at about this time—the time when his father was failing on the ranch—that he first made a remark that one of his schoolmates there, Anna Itz, remembers quite vividly. A group of children was sitting under the big hackberry tree near the school during recess, Mrs. Itz says, and “All of a sudden, Lyndon looked up at the blue sky and said, ‘Someday, I’m going to be President of the United States.’ We hadn’t been talking about politics or the Presidency or anything like that. He just came out with it.” The other children laughed at him, and said they wouldn’t vote for him, Mrs. Itz recalls. “He said, ‘I won’t need your votes.’”) Lyndon would not do his homework, and he became so boisterous in school that the teacher complained to his parents.

Nine was all the grades that the Albert School had; the next year (1921, when Lyndon was thirteen), he went to school in Johnson City, boarding during the week with his Uncle Tom and Aunt Kitty. One evening, Tom came out to the ranch and told Sam that he and Kitty “couldn’t handle Lyndon”; they couldn’t get him to do his homework. When his teachers hinted to his frantic mother that he might not be allowed to “pass on” to the next grade, she and Sam scraped together the tuition to send him, in the Summer of 1922, to the private San Marcos Normal School, thirty miles away, to make up his work. There he spent the allowance that his hard-pressed father had expected to last him through the whole eight-week session within a week, buying candy and ice cream for other students. Hitching a ride back to Johnson City, he joked about the matter with the Gliddons, and the next issue of their paper carried the following social item:

But it was no joke to his father. Enraged, he yanked Lyndon into his car, drove him straight back to San Marcos—and left him there without giving him a penny. “He cut Lyndon off and told him never to ask him for anything again,” Sam Houston says. Beneath the polite phrases of a letter his mother sent at this time to a teacher at San Marcos Normal, Flora Eckert, is a note almost of pleading for help.

The letter has a one-line postscript testament to mother love: “Miss E—When L. is homesick please pet him a little for me.” Lyndon made up the necessary work—but barely. And when he went back to Johnson City High School in the fall of 1922—his father, having sold the ranch for whatever he could get, had moved back to town—the clash of wills continued. His marks were somewhat better (mostly B’s)—not because he worked harder, but because he was so much quicker and more articulate than most of the other students in the little school (there were only ninety students in its eleven grades, and many attended only when farm chores permitted) and he had developed the ability to dazzle his teachers, some of whom did not have much education themselves. As Joe Crofts recalls:

At home, his mother was less easy to fool, and she developed a stratagem to help her son absorb knowledge. To a reporter, years later, she confided with a smile:

But while Mrs. Johnson would indeed, in later years, “confide” the story “with a smile,” smiles are not what Lyndon’s siblings and friends remember of the constant struggle to get him to do his schoolwork; they remember his father shouting angrily: “That boy of yours isn’t worth a damn, Rebekah! He’ll never amount to anything. He’ll never amount to a Goddamned thing!” And if Mrs. Johnson paints a pretty picture of following him to the gate “telling him tales,” the other children recall something else that occurred near the gate; his mother, of course, insisted that Lyndon wear shoes to school, but Lyndon would kick them off as soon as he got out of the gate, and leave them lying in the dust.

Rebekah’s recourse was tears. Her own mother was a tougher customer. Discovering that Lyndon’s brother, assigned to milk the cow, had bulked out the yield with water from the back-yard pump, Grandmother Baines said angrily, “Bend over, Sam Houston. I’m going to teach you a good Christian lesson right here and now.” When she was in residence at the Johnson home, the girls even cleaned up their room. But Lyndon, already resentful of her presence because he had hoped to be in charge during his father’s absences, would not accept any “Christian lessons.” Between the strict Baptist widow, who would never appear out of her room without every hair in place and her cameo pin precisely centered on her bodice, and the boy whose shoes were defiantly untied, there was, in his brother’s words, a constant “battle of wills.” Infuriated to see eight-year-old Sam Houston staggering under a heavy load of wood that Lyndon had assigned him to carry, Grandmother Baines would order Lyndon to bend over for a spanking, but he would defiantly dance out of her reach, or run out of the house. “More than once,” Sam Houston recalls, “she told my folks and anyone else who would listen, ‘That boy is going to wind up in the penitentiary—just mark my words.’”

Opposite, above:
Eliza and her husband, Sam Ealy Johnson, Sr. (with, left, her mother, Jane Bunton), in front of their “dog-run” on the Pedernales, c. 1897

Opposite, below:
Sam Johnson, Sr. (left), Eliza (fourth from left), and the Buntons in front of her father’s home in Stonewall, c. 1914