The Path to Power (91 page)

The people of the Hill Country were grateful for what the New Deal had done for them; little as had been the help they had realized from its programs, it was far more help than anyone had ever given them before. But their lives were not changed by the New Deal. The Hill Country was a country in which there was unbelievably little cash. In 1937 as in 1932, the Johnson City High School nearly missed basketball season—because the school could not afford a basketball; after several weeks of fund-raising, the News reported that “collections are coming in too slow on the basketball.” Store owners found that any item costing more than a dime was likely to go unsold. “People couldn’t pay for anything,” says Lucille O’Donnell of Burnet. “The people bought everything on credit. Whatever you bought, you would pay for it when the cotton came in. And whatever your cotton crop brought in, the storekeeper took off your bill. No money changed hands. I remember I didn’t have three cents to send a letter.” Their poverty forbade them most modern improvements. In the more prosperous counties of Texas, gasoline-driven tractors were in widespread use; in a typical Hill Country county—Kendall—there were, in 1933, three tractors. Hill Country farmers plowed their fields with mules and hand-held plows—plowed their fields as European peasants had been plowing fields for centuries. The people of the Hill Country lived at a level so low that the New Deal could not reach far enough down to reach them. A very long arm would be necessary if they were ever to be helped.

J
OHNSON DISPLAYED AGAIN
the ingenuity and energy in obtaining benefits for his constituents from the federal bureaucracy that he had displayed as a congressional secretary. Though some of these benefits were relatively small, and available only once, they provided a sorely needed lift to those who received them. In one area, floods had destroyed the crops of hundreds of farmers for the second successive year. In December, 1938, Johnson arrived at a meeting with the farmers accompanied by a second car full of men. When the farmers told him that the Farm Security Administration had responded to their pleas for emergency loans by refusing to make an exception to the requirement that loans be secured by collateral—a requirement impossible for most of them to meet because their land and possessions were already mortgaged—their Congressman pointed to the back of the room, where the men who had accompanied him were standing. They were officials of the Farm Security Administration, he said. He had brought them
along so they could hear the plight of the Tenth District for themselves. Two days later, on Christmas Eve, the farmers’ leaders received telephone calls from their Congressman. The FSA had just agreed to waive the collateral requirements for 400 Tenth District families because of “unusual conditions,” he told them. Each family would receive fifty dollars—enough to tide them over until federal seed loans became available in the Spring. At that very moment, he said, four FSA supervisors, accompanied by stenographers, were on their way to the area to speed the processing of the loans.

And some of the benefits Johnson obtained were not small—and were quite long-lasting.

One Agriculture Department program—“Range Conservation”—had the potential to be particularly helpful in this land of brush. Instituted in 1935, it was designed to encourage the removal of various varieties of brush by paying farmers to cut it down. But the program was not helping the Hill Country. In part, this was because the farmers and ranchers of the Hill Country simply did not know that their land
could
be made better; it had been arid and infertile, after all, for three generations. But there were other reasons as well. Some varieties of brush prevalent in the Hill Country were not covered by the program, and in addition the payment-per-acre schedule was low. This did not matter in more prosperous areas, where the work was done by hired hands receiving low wages, whose employers were amply reimbursed by the increased fertility of the cleared land. But the typical Hill Country farmer had no hired hands; his only resource was his own time, every minute of which seemed necessary for his very survival, and payments were too low to justify him using any for some possible future gain. Besides, to most Hill Country farmers, the possibility of future gain seemed very faint. Many didn’t even know about the program. The isolation of the Edwards Plateau—the distances (and inadequate roads) that separated its farms and ranches from Austin and San Antonio, their lack of radio and daily newspapers; the inadequacy of the amateurish weeklies—prevented its inhabitants from learning about developments with which farmers in other areas were familiar. The county agents of the land-grant colleges’ Agricultural Extension Service were supposed to explain new programs, but the Hill Country’s poverty made even explanations difficult; the federal government matched a county’s allocation for a county agent and his assistants; because most Hill Country counties couldn’t afford any contribution for assistants, its county agents had to spend much of their time on paper work—and much of the rest of it making veterinary calls in counties too poor to support a veterinarian. To the farmers, moreover, the county agents were merely “book farmers” whose theories would not work in the Hill Country’s harsh conditions. The experience of the few Hill Country ranchers who had signed up for the Range Conservation program did not encourage others to follow suit; the red tape involved was discouraging as was the slowness of the payments: in March, 1937, some payments still had not
been received for acreage that had been cleared in the Summer of 1936.

After May, 1937, county agents in the Tenth Congressional District began to receive frequent telephone calls from the district’s new Congressman. Gently at first, and then more and more firmly, he pushed them to call meetings of the farmers, and to educate them to the advantages of the Range Conservation program. Those who did not respond began to receive inquiries from their superiors, who said
they
had had a telephone call from the Congressman. This effort was not sufficient to get the job done, so Johnson took a more direct hand: his constituents were bombarded by repeated mailings from his office about the advantages of the program. And when this proved still not enough, he toured the district, and educated the farmers himself. “He’d come to the meetings and take off his shoes and loosen his tie,” recalls Camm Lary, an inspector for the program. He told the farmers that he had been a farmer like them. He had learned farming in the hard Hill Country soil, not out of some book, he told them, and he knew that if they removed the cedar, the land would get better. And he did more: he persuaded the Agriculture Department to include in its program the varieties of Hill Country brush not previously covered. He persuaded it to increase its payments to five dollars for each acre of brush removed, a figure high enough so that a Hill Country farmer could see a real cash reward in the job—whether or not it was successful in its purpose. He persuaded the Department to release enough funds so that the agent in Blanco County, the enterprising, dedicated Ross Jenkins, could hire outside cedar-choppers to come in and clear scores of acres on one farm, which was made a demonstration farm. The land was cleared, and after some months, truckloads of farmers from all over the Tenth District were brought to see hills which had been covered with cedar so dense that it had seemed almost a solid mass. Now the little trees with the voracious roots were gone, but the hills were not bare. Pushing up out of the hard caliche soil were new green shoots. Says Lary: “You could see that the grass was coming back.” A total of only 31,000 acres of cedar had been cleared in Blanco County during 1936 and 1937, the two years before Lyndon Johnson became Congressman. In 1938 alone, 63,000 acres were cleared; in 1939, 70,000 acres. In the Tenth District as a whole, hundreds of thousands of acres of brush were chopped away. By the end of 1940, the amount of land under cultivation in the district had been increased 400 percent.

And more than the grass came back.

Emil Stahl tightened his grip on the reins automatically every time his horse neared a certain spot in a cedar-infested pasture on his Albert farm. The ground was soft and damp there, and his horse would inevitably shy. Stahl had never thought much about it; the pasture had been covered with cedar for at least forty years that he could remember, and, anyway, the ground was too dry for growing or grazing. In 1938, however, he participated in what the Hill Country was coming to call the “cedar eradication program,”
and the acreage he cleared was the pasture around the soft spot. Within weeks after the cedar—and its voracious, moisture-gulping roots—had been chopped down, a spring broke through the soil on that spot, flowing faster and faster, with clear, cool water for his cattle. That year there was a nine-month drought in the Hill Country. All during those nine months, the spring kept his cattle alive. It never dried up.

As more and more brush was cut down, and more and more roots withered away, and no longer sucked water out of the ground, other farmers had experiences similar to Stahl’s. Warren Smith’s ranch contained a whole section that was, he says, “a solid cedar brake. … As soon as I cut the cedar, there was a stream running [through that section]. It used to be dry as dust.” Scott Klett lived on a ranch near Johnson City that had been owned by his father. The man from whom his father had bought the ranch seventy years before had mentioned to him that a spring had once been there, but in seventy years it had never flowed. Klett cut the cedar—and, he told the county agent, “the spring is running now.”

It had taken fifty acres of Warren Smith’s ranch to support a single cow, he says. Now, he told the county agent, “I’m running a cow to fifteen acres.” Al Young of Cypress Mill had been running a cow to thirty acres; now it was a cow to six acres. All over the Hill Country, there were more and more cows. The amount of cotton and other crops that the soil could produce steadily increased. The land of the Hill Country had once been lushly fertile. It would never be lush again, but after decades—generations—in which the land had been all but worthless, some of the fertility had begun to return, largely because of the efforts of one man.

He helped the Hill Country through his implementation of a score of New Deal programs. One improvement he made seems rather poignant when one remembers his father: in 1938 alone, 135 miles of paved farm-to-market roads were completed in Travis County, thanks to WPA grants Lyndon Johnson obtained; farmers were able now not only to grow more on their land, but to get produce to market before it spoiled. And roads were only one improvement. The Hill Country was soon dotted with new public works: public libraries, for example, and schools (including a new Johnson City High School, an agricultural school there, and new classroom buildings at San Marcos). Some families that had lost their homes, and were working as tenant farmers on land they had once owned, were able to buy back their land—thanks to the government-supported, low-interest loans the new Congressman obtained to enable them to pay out the purchase price over forty years at low interest. Lyndon Johnson didn’t invent any of the programs that provided this help for a people of a section of America which so badly needed help. He just got as much out of the programs as he could. “He got more projects, and more money for his district, than anybody else,” Corcoran says. By Johnson’s own estimate, he got $70 million. “He was,” says Corcoran, “the best Congressman for a district that
ever was
.”

O
BTAINING THE FINANCING
and the authorization for the four dams being built along the Lower Colorado had been difficult. Now Lyndon Johnson undertook a task more difficult still. By ensuring completion of the dams, he had ensured the creation of electric power, which would be generated by the fall of water through dam penstocks. Now he was going to try to get the power to the people. He was going to try to bring electricity to the Hill Country.

Electricity had, of course, been an integral part of life in urban and much of small-town America for a generation and more, lighting its streets, powering the machinery of its factories, running its streetcars and trolleys, its elevated trains and subways, moving elevators and escalators in its stores, and cooling the stores with electric fans. Devices such as electric irons and toasters (which were in widespread use by 1900), refrigerators (which were widely sold beginning in 1912), and vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, hot plates, waffle irons, electric stoves and automatic washing machines for clothes had freed women from much of the drudgery of housework. In the evenings, thanks to electricity, there were the movies, and by 1922, forests of radio antennae had sprouted on tenement roofs. By 1937, when Lyndon Johnson went to Congress, electricity was so integral a part of life that it was hard to remember what life had been like without it.

It was not a part of life in the Hill Country. In Lyndon Johnson’s congressional district, the sole source of power had been Texas Power & Light, a subsidiary of the New York-based utility holding giant, Electric Bond & Share. TP&L had, in 1927, agreed to “electrify” a handful of Hill Country towns (Johnson City was one), but not with power from its central generating station at Marble Falls; according to TP&L, which put the cost of building electric lines at $3,000 per mile, the limited use such small communities would make of electric power would never justify the investment required to build lines across the wide spaces of the Edwards Plateau. The TP&L “power plant” in each of these towns was, therefore, no more than a
single thirty-horsepower diesel engine; it generated only enough voltage for ten-watt bulbs, which were constantly dimming and flickering—and which could not be used at all if an electric appliance (even an electric iron) was also in use. Since the “power plant” operated only between “dark to midnight,” a refrigerator was useless. To most of the residents in these towns, such problems were academic: so high were TP&L’s rates that few families hooked up to its lines. And in any case, the diesel engine was constantly breaking down under the strain placed on it. On the rare occasions on which a movie was shown, there was as much suspense in the audience over whether the electricity would hold out to the end of the film as there was in the film itself. Recalls Lucille O’Donnell of Burnet: “I’d be watching
The Perils of Pauline
and I’d just be about to see whether or not the train was going to run over her and the lights would go out.” And the residents of these towns were the only inhabitants of the Hill Country with any electricity at all. TP&L refused even to consider building lines to the area’s tens of thousands of individual farms and ranches.

As a result, although the electric milking machine had been invented almost two decades before, the Hill Country farmer had to milk his cows by hand—arising at three-thirty or four o’clock in the morning to do so, because milking was a time-consuming chore (more than two hours for twenty cows) and it had to be finished by daylight: every hour of daylight was needed for work in the fields. Milking was done by the dim light of kerosene lanterns; although Sears, Roebuck was boasting in 1937 that a new, deluxe kerosene lamp provided as much illumination as a forty-watt electric bulb, the lamps in use in the Hill Country furnished—at most—twenty-five watts of light. Or it was done in the dark. And there was a constant danger of fire with kerosene lamps, and even a spark could burn down a hay-filled barn, and destroy a farmer’s last chance of holding on to his place, so many farmers were afraid to use a lantern in the barn. “Winter mornings,” recalls one, “it would be so dark … you’d think you were in a box with the lid shut.” Because without electricity there could be no refrigerator, the milk was kept on ice. The ice was expensive and farmers had to lug it from town at enormous cost in time. Though they kept it underground—covered with sawdust—it still, as farmer Chester Franklin of Wimberley puts it, “melted away so quick.” And often even the ice didn’t help. Farmers would have to take the milk out of their pit and place it by the roadside to be picked up by the trucks from Austin dairies, but often—on those unpaved Hill Country roads on which flat tires were a constant occurrence—the trucks would be late, and the milk would sit outside in the Hill Country heat. Even if it was not actually spoiled, the dairy would refuse to accept it if its temperature was above fifty degrees Fahrenheit—and when the truck driver pulled his thermometer out of the milk, a farmer, seeing the red line above fifty, would know that his hours of work in the barn in the dark had been for nothing.

Because there was no electricity, moreover, a Hill Country farmer could not use an electric pump. He was forced not only to milk but to water his cows by hand, a chore that, in dry weather, meant hauling up endless buckets from a deep well. Because he could not use an electric auger, he had to feed his livestock by hand, pitchforking heavy loads of hay up into the loft of his barn and then stomping on it to soften it enough so the cows could eat it. He had to prepare the feed by hand: because he could not use an electric grinder, he would get the corn kernels for his mules and horses by sticking ears of corn—hundreds of ears of corn—one by one into a corn sheller and cranking it for hours. Because he could not use electric motors, he had to unload cotton seed by hand, and then shovel it into the barn by hand; to saw wood by hand, by swinging an axe or riding one end of a ripsaw. Because there was never enough daylight for all the jobs that had to be done, the farmer usually finished after sunset, ending the day as he had begun it, stumbling around the barn milking the cows in the dark, as farmers had done centuries before.

But the hardness of the farmer’s life paled beside the hardness of his wife’s.

Without electricity, even boiling water was work.

Anything which required the use of water was work. Windmills (which could, acting like a pump, bring water out of a well into a storage tank) were very rare in the Hill Country; their cost—almost $400 in 1937—was out of the reach of most families in that cash-poor region, and the few that had been built proved of little use in a region where winds were always uncertain and, during a drought, non-existent, for days, or weeks, on end. And without electricity to work a pump, there was only one way to obtain water: by hand.

The source of water could be either a stream or a well. If the source was a stream, water had to be carried from it to the house, and since, in a country subject to constant flooding, houses were built well away from the streams, it had to be carried a long way. If the source was a well, it had to be lifted to the surface—a bucket at a time. It had to be lifted quite a long way: while the average depth of a well was about fifty feet in the valleys of the Hill Country, in the hills it was a hundred feet or more.

And so much water was needed! A federal study of nearly half a million farm families even then being conducted would show that, on the average, a person living on a farm used 40 gallons of water every day. Since the average farm family was five persons, the family used 200 gallons, or four-fifths of a ton, of water each day—73,000 gallons, or almost 300 tons, in a year. The study showed that, on the average, the well was located 253 feet from the house—and that to pump by hand and carry to the house 73,000 gallons of water a year would require someone to put in during that year 63 eight-hour days, and walk 1,750 miles.

A farmer would do as much of this pumping and hauling as possible
himself, and try to have his sons do as much of the rest as possible (it was Lyndon Johnson’s adamant refusal to help his mother with the pumping and hauling that touched off the most bitter of the flareups with his father during his youth). As soon as a Hill Country youth got big enough to carry the water buckets (which held about four gallons, or thirty-two pounds, of water apiece), he was assigned the job of filling his mother’s wash pots before he left for school or the field. Curtis Cox still recalls today that from the age of nine or ten, he would, every morning throughout the rest of his boyhood, make about seven trips between his house and the well, which were about 300 feet apart, on each of these trips carrying two large buckets, or more than sixty pounds, of water. “I felt tired,” he says. “It was a lot of water.” But the water the children carried would be used up long before noon, and the children would be away—at school or in the fields—and most of the hauling of water was, therefore, done by women. “I would,” recalls Curtis’ mother, Mary Cox, “have to get it, too—more than once a day, more than twice; oh, I don’t know how many times. I needed water to wash my floors, water to wash my clothes, water to cook. … It was hard work. I was always packing [carrying] water.” Carrying it—after she had wrestled off the heavy wooden lid which kept the rats and squirrels out of the well; after she had cranked the bucket up to the surface (and cranking—lifting thirty pounds fifty feet or more—was very hard for most women even with a pulley; most would pull the rope hand over hand, as if they were climbing it, to get their body weight into the effort; they couldn’t do it with their arms alone). Some Hill Country women make wry jokes about getting water. Says Mrs. Brian Smith of Blanco: “Yes, we had running water. I always said we had running water because I grabbed those two buckets up and ran the two hundred yards to the house with them.” But the joking fades away as the memories sharpen. An interviewer from the city is struck by the fact that Hill Country women of the older generation are noticeably stooped, much more so than city women of the same age. Without his asking for an explanation, it is given to him. More than once, and more than twice, a stooped and bent Hill Country farm wife says, “You see how round-shouldered I am? Well, that’s from hauling the water.” And, she will often add, “I was round-shouldered like this well before my time, when I was still a young woman. My back got bent from hauling the water, and it got bent when I was still young.”

The Hill Country farm wife had to haul water, and she had to haul wood.

Because there was no electricity, Hill Country stoves were wood stoves. The spread of the cedar brakes had given the area a plentiful supply of wood, but cedar seared bone-dry by the Hill Country sun burned so fast that the stoves seemed to devour it. A farmer would try to keep a supply of wood in the house, or, if he had sons old enough, would assign the task to them. (Lyndon Johnson’s refusal to chop wood for his mother was another source
of the tension between him and Sam.) They would cut down the trees, and chop them into four-foot lengths that could be stacked in cords. When wood was needed in the house, they would cut it into shorter lengths and split the pieces so they could fit into the stoves. But as with the water, these chores often fell to the women.

The necessity of hauling the wood was not, however, the principal reason so many farm wives hated their wood stoves. In part, they hated these stoves because they were so hard to “start up.” The damper that opened into the firebox created only a small draft even on a breezy day, and on a windless day, there was no draft—because there was no electricity, of course, there was no fan to move the air in the kitchen—and a fire would flicker out time after time. “With an electric stove, you just turn on a switch and you have heat,” says Lucille O’Donnell, but with a wood stove, a woman might have to stuff kindling and wood into the firebox over and over again. And even after the fire was lit, the stove “didn’t heat up in a minute, you know,” Lucille O’Donnell says—it might in fact take an hour. In part, farm wives hated wood stoves because they were so dirty, because the smoke from the wood blackened walls and ceilings, and ashes were always escaping through the grating, and the ash box had to be emptied twice a day—a dirty job and dirtier if, while the ashes were being carried outside, a gust of wind scattered them around inside the house. They hated the stoves because they could not be left unattended. Without devices to regulate the heat and keep the temperature steady, when the stove was being used for baking or some other cooking in which an even temperature was important, a woman would have to keep a constant watch on the fire, thrusting logs—or corncobs, which ignited quickly—into the firebox every time the heat slackened.

Most of all, they hated them because they were so hot.

When the big iron stove was lit, logs blazing in its firebox, flames licking at the gratings that held the pots, the whole huge mass of metal so hot that it was almost glowing, the air in the kitchen shimmered with the heat pouring out of it. In the Winter the heat was welcome, and in Spring and Fall it was bearable, but in the Hill Country, Summer would often last five months. Some time in June the temperature might climb to near ninety degrees, and would stay there, day after day, week after week, through the end of September. Day after day, week after week, the sky would be mostly empty, without a cloud as a shield from the blazing sun that beat down on the Hill Country, and on the sheet-iron or corrugated tin roofs of the boxlike kitchens in the little dog-run homes that dotted its hills and valleys. No matter how hot the day, the stove had to be lit much of the time, because it had to be lit not only for meals but for baking; Hill Country wives, unable to afford store-bought bread, baked their own, an all-day task. (As Mrs. O’Donnell points out, “We didn’t have refrigerators, you know, and without refrigerators, you just about have to start every meal from scratch.”) In the Hill Country, moreover, Summer was harvest time, when a farm wife would
have to cook not just for her family but for a harvesting crew—twenty or thirty men, who, working from sun to sun, expected three meals a day.