Master of the Senate (50 page)

It might have been expected that this gap in the lives of the two little girls would be filled by their mother, who had taken such risks to bear them—particularly
since she was a woman with such seemingly boundless warmth and patience for her husband’s colleagues and constituents. But this was not the case. Men and women who lived for a time at Thirtieth Place during 1949 and the early 1950s couldn’t believe Lady Bird’s attitude toward her children. “I never saw a mother-daughter relationship like it,” recalls Margaret Mayer. “Lady Bird let everyone know that, no matter what, Lyndon came first.” She spent her days with his constituents, her evenings accompanying him to Washington social events. When she was gone, the girls’ baby-sitter was one of Johnson’s secretaries, Willie Day Taylor, a gentle woman who Lady Bird says “became almost a second mother.” Sometimes, Mary Rather, or Ollie Reed, the Johnsons’ next-door neighbor, would act as baby-sitter. “The little Johnson girls are being raised by committee,” another neighbor said. “I felt deprived,” Lucy would admit years later. “I wanted a normal life. I wanted a father who came home at a reasonable hour, and a mother who made cookies. That wasn’t what we had.” “Why are you always going out, Mama?” Lynda Bird would ask. Their mother was going out because she had made her choice. “You either have to cut the pattern to suit your husband or cut it to suit your children,” she was to say. “Lyndon is the leader,” she was to explain to a journalist. “Lyndon sets the pattern. I execute what he wants. Lyndon’s wishes dominate our household.” Her friends could hardly credit the faithfulness with which that pattern was followed. “Lady Bird was so subservient and so under the spell of Lyndon Johnson that it made it difficult for the kids,” one says. Another, B. A. Bentsen, wife of Congressman (and later Senator) Lloyd Bentsen, talking about Lynda, says, “It was just so sad. She wouldn’t cry, but you could just tell she wished things were different.”

A
NOTHER QUALITY THAT
L
YNDON
J
OHNSON
had displayed on each stage of his march along the path to power was an utter ruthlessness in destroying obstacles in that path.

The obstacle in his path now was a man named Leland Olds, the chairman (and, in
The New Republic’s
phrase, “the central force and will”) of the Federal Power Commission, the five-member body that licensed and regulated facilities to create power from natural resources as well as the sale of that power to the public.

The furniture in the chairman’s office on the seventh floor of the FPC Building on Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue was federal bureaucratic standard issue, but not much else in that office was. On the big desk, near a rack holding several hickory pipes, lay a mathematician’s slide rule, worn with use. In a corner stood a cello, with classical scores open on a stand; Olds was considered one of Washington’s most accomplished amateur cellists. On the bookshelves, alongside the bound volumes of FPC regulations, were stacks of poetry magazines and dog-eared volumes on philosophy and history, one of which Olds might have been reading while coming to work that morning; he took the trolley instead of the bus because it was smoother, and he could read on it. On the coatrack would be a rumpled tweed sport jacket and the old felt fedora he had worn to work, tipped jauntily down over one eye. He would wander in shirtsleeves through the offices of the younger staff members: a brisk slender figure with a shock of graying hair, and lively pale blue eyes behind wire-rimmed spectacles, puffing on a pipe—“jolly, witty, completely informal, not at all aloof or reserved like the other commissioners, ready to talk about anything, like a professor talking with his students,” one staff member recalls. And when Leland Olds got caught up in a subject (as he often did when the talk turned to the morality behind the Commission’s policies or to the social benefits
those policies could provide farmers or the poor), he would talk faster and faster, the words tumbling over each other in a very boyish enthusiasm that sometimes made it seem as if the professor-student role had been reversed. He seemed less like a high-level federal bureaucrat than a scholar or a writer or—when he was talking about morality or social justice—like a social worker or a minister. And those four professions had indeed been Leland Olds’ professions until he was forty-one years old.

The son of a mathematics professor at Amherst, George D. Olds, who became the college’s president, and Marion Leland, the daughter of a prominent Boston family, Leland Olds, born December 31, 1890, “liked fun,” a college friend was to recall. Just under six feet tall, thin and wiry, with wavy dark brown hair and those striking blue eyes in a gaunt, high-cheekboned face, he was an ardent outdoorsman, a guide and blazer of trails in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, a tennis player good enough to reach the finals of the Eastern State College Championships, a long-distance runner who once, on a bet, ran and walked the almost forty miles from Amherst to Williamstown and arrived before the kickoff of a football game, and a brilliant student who graduated
magna cum laude
in mathematics. But perhaps the formative experience of Lee Olds’ college years occurred not on a campus but in a slum—during the two summers he worked at a vacation school that had been established by Grace Church in the nearby industrial city of Holyoke, Massachusetts. There the books by Riis and Dreiser and Norris came to life. In Holyoke, he was to say, “I learned at first hand the impact of the industrialism of that period on the lives of the children of wage earners.” Those summers of watching children work all the daylight hours in sweltering, windowless rooms gave him a determination, as he was to put it, to be “of service,” and after graduating in 1912, “I searched for some pursuit which would have some effect toward mitigating the evil of poverty.”

At first, the search took him into social work—on the staff of a settlement house in the South Boston slums. But a year of seeing the horrors of the sweatshop and hearing the tuberculosis coughs through the thin walls of the railroad flats taught him, he was to say, “a great deal… about the limitations of social work as a means of mitigating poverty.”

Then he turned to organized religion—to the growing Social Gospel movement in which some Protestant clergymen were attempting to secure social justice for the poor by adding a moral element to the reform movement, reminding businessmen, for example, that sweatshops were antithetical to Christian teaching. Olds had been quietly but deeply religious at college—he won Amherst’s Bond Prize for the best talk given at chapel—and his year in South Boston had led him, he was to recall, to believe that the evils of the new industrial order “were not going to be cured by economic and political measures alone, although these must not be neglected, but by what would be in the nature of a religious revolution” in which “people really applied the principles
of Christianity to their everyday business.” After studying for two years at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, he was ordained as a Congregationalist minister of a small church in a working-class parish in Brooklyn.

Leland Olds never talked much about the disappointments he suffered in that parish. One of his grandchildren was to write that he came to feel “that the church was not actively enough involved with the problems that faced society at that time,” but Olds himself would say only, “My experience suggested that I might accomplish more through teaching.” He enrolled in graduate school at Columbia University, studying European history, which he later taught at Amherst.

During World War I, however, he was hired as a low-level statistician by the government’s Industrial Relations Commission, and assigned to study the level at which wartime wages should be set. Going beyond the scope of his assignment to satisfy his own curiosity, and displaying a startling gift for analyzing huge masses of raw economic data, the former mathematics honor student concluded that the root cause of the poverty he hated so passionately was the fact that labor was not receiving its fair share of the nation’s increased productivity and wealth, and that labor unions must be given the right to bargain collectively. He realized that he wanted to teach not college students but the labor union activists who were closer to the front lines of the fight for social justice. He became the head of the research bureau of the American Federation of Labor, which was striking against the powerful Pennsylvania steel companies and railroads.

In one Pennsylvania steel town after another, Olds witnessed the brutality with which the strikes were suppressed; he himself was shot in the leg as he was watching police break up a demonstration. For the rest of his life he was to remember his shock at the discovery that the “great railroads were deliberately contracting out their locomotive repair work in order to create unemployment among their own employees.” He was to remember how the children of the railroad workers were hungry. And he was to remember, also, an “inspiring” conversation with a white-haired Roman Catholic priest in Braddock, Pennsylvania, who had allowed striking steelworkers to meet in his church, until mounted police rode their horses into it to break up the meeting.

The Pennsylvania struggle ended in defeat—the companies were simply too strong for the unions, Olds was to say—and he emerged from it convinced that labor’s only hope lay in the intervention of government on its side, that “railroad workers … must look forward either to government ownership of the railroads or to the political influence necessary to secure protective labor legislation,” that if workingmen were ever to earn a living wage, they must be guaranteed the right to organize—and that if government did not secure them that right, the American system of government would perish. “The preservation of the American democratic system required” this “evolution” of democracy, he believed—and to educate labor’s “rank and file” about this necessity, Olds turned from research to writing.

Because “the labor angle on news of strikes, negotiations and so forth was not adequately covered by the general press,” a wire service, the Federated Press—similar to the Associated Press and the United Press, which supplied articles for general-circulation periodicals—had been established in 1918 to provide labor-oriented articles. Most of its eighty subscribers were union newspapers and magazines such as the
Locomotive Engineers Journal
and the
Seattle Union Record
, although among its other subscribers was the Communist
Daily Worker.
The Federated Press had no money to hire an additional staff writer, but Olds’ brilliance as an economic analyst had attracted the attention of liberal and Progressive leaders, and, eager that Olds’ analyses continue, the civil rights activist Roger Baldwin persuaded a liberal foundation, the Garland Fund, to pay part of his $3,600 salary. In 1922 he went to work as Federated’s “industrial editor.”

It was the Twenties—the Twenties of Harding and Coolidge and Hoover, the Twenties of “normalcy” and complacency, the Twenties in which the federal government and courts, high and low, seemed to regard themselves as allies of Big Business, allowing corporations to break strikes and unions, relaxing even token regulations on business, and abandoning social reform. In the Twenties, tariffs and profits and the stock market rose and rose again—and wages, so inadequate to begin with, fell further and further behind, so that workers received a steadily smaller share in the prosperity their toil had helped to create.

In 1919, when reformers’ hopes for a fundamental redistribution of wealth and power—for a new social order—had been high, President Wilson had advocated “a genuine democratization” of industry; a “cooperation and partnership based upon … worker participation in control” of industry; unions and Progressives had more specific—and radical—planks: for nationalization of the railroads, and public operation—“along socialistic lines,” in William Allen White’s phrase—of natural resources like oil, water, and mines. In New York, Governor Alfred E. Smith was proposing not only a minimum wage law and an eight-hour day for women but state ownership of hydroelectric power. The AFL was urging nationalization not alone of railroads but of all key industries. So many liberal dreams had, for a moment, seemed within reach. Now, in the Twenties, labor was asleep again; the union movement, grown cautious and conservative, represented mainly the skilled crafts; the vast majority of America’s overworked, underpaid workers were not members of any union. Dreams had faded. Liberal intellectuals responded by revolting against traditional liberalism, becoming, in their frustration and discouragement, more radical, many believing that a fundamental transformation of American society was required if individualism was to be rescued from its entrapment by a society based on the profit motive. Attracted by the model of the Soviet Union, and feeling that America’s choice was between the ruthlessness of untrammeled private enterprise and a planned, governmental, collectivism, some advocated varied forms of democratic collectivism—perhaps a national economic council
representing business and labor as well as government—to preserve what was good in the American tradition.

Leland Olds was a part of this new, radical, liberal current. His gift for economic analysis and his outrage over social injustice fused in the articles he poured out, at least five a week, for the Federated Press between 1922 and 1929. When President Coolidge refused to cut the sugar tariff because of the “hardships” of sugar beet companies, Federated’s industrial editor analyzed the companies’ annual reports and found that their true annual profits were as high as 32 percent. And then, turning to Labor Department studies—studies all but totally ignored by the “general press”—he contrasted the profits with the human cost that had created them. These studies showed mothers and children as young as six working up to fifteen hours a day at dangerous jobs in the sugar beet fields, he wrote in a Federated Press article published on July 1, 1925; at night, families “huddled together in shanties which were not even waterproof, and with practically no decent provision for sanitation.” The Sugar Trust’s “exorbitant profits,” made “at the expense of women and little children … reveal the hypocrisy of President Coolidge in his apology for refusing to cut the sugar tariff.”