CHAPTER 1

ROOTS

TEXAS ANDLYNDONJOHNSON ARE INSEPARABLE.Both have been caricatured beyond recognition by historians. Texas stereotypes are legion, yet absurd for such a vast land, comprising 266,807 square miles, one-twelfth of the land area of the United States. One can travel eight hundred miles in a straight line without ever leaving the state. Texas is so diverse that it is the only member of the Union with a constitutional provision allowing it to divide into as many as five states (with, of course, the permission of the federal government). East Texas, with its coastal plain, piney woods, temperate climate, and high rainfall, is physically and culturally a westward extension of Louisiana. The north-central portion of the state, featuring rolling hills and numerous rivers, resembles Oklahoma and Kansas. The western portion of the state includes the Llano Estacado, or Staked Plain, a grassy, treeless, semiarid extension of the High Plains that rises to the Davis Mountains. South-central Texas is dominated by the Edwards Plateau, an area of low, angular hills, narrow valleys and thin, rocky soil, the eastern portion of which is known as the Hill Country.

The people of the Lone Star State are as diverse and unpredictable as its topography and climate. There are cowboys and Indians. There are also African Americans, Hispanics, Czechs, Jews, Chinese, Poles, Bohemians, Germans, Japanese, Italians, Moravians, and French Creoles, all of whom have interbred if not intermarried. Most famously, Texans are oilmen, cattle ranchers, farmers, and agribusinessmen. But they are also intellectuals, artists, social activists, scientists, and communitarians. The state boasts culturally active population centers that predate the founding of Jamestown. Texas is the birthplace of the Farmers’ Alliance and for a time, at the turn of the nineteenth century, host to a vigorous Socialist Party. Its people have embraced religion, but generally on Sunday and less frequently on Wednesday. God is to be worshipped but not necessarily strictly emulated. Texas is a land with a violent hand and an empathetic heart. Politically, the state is famed for its pragmatism and lack of ideology; this is true not because of too few values and ideas, however, but too many.

In its relationship with the federal government, Texas exhibited, in its first years as a state, attitudes that would prevail for the next hundred years. Much like the stereotypical welfare cheat that Texans would rail against in the midtwentieth century, the Lone Star State looked to the federal government to provide largesse without expecting to exert any authority or control in return. Texans were states righters to the core. The Anglo-Celts who had migrated from Appalachia and Missouri had in some ways never left the eighteenth century behind. For them the Union was an association of sovereign states. The national authority existed to shoulder the burden of tasks the states could not or would not take on for themselves—defend the Texas frontier against the twenty thousand hostile Amerindians who continually threatened it, for example. When Washington failed to live up to its perceived responsibilities, Texans developed and nurtured a burning resentment against it and its denizens.

In many ways, mid-nineteenth-century Texans were an anomaly. For those yeomen not defeated by the frontier, literacy was an obsession, the most important badge of civilization. When two or three gathered together, they invariably pooled their resources to start a community school, one-roomed enterprises that taught the equivalent of the first eight grades. Approximately 95 percent of the white population could read and write. In 1859 Baylor University, a Baptist institution, granted twenty-two bachelor degrees. In that year, Texas boasted forty academies, thirty-seven colleges, including Blum’s College for Males and Females, twenty-seven institutes, seven universities, two seminaries, and one medical college—some of these institutions more loosely defined than others. In 1860, there were seventy-one newspapers being published in Texas with a total circulation of about one hundred thousand. Politics, local and national, was a Texan preoccupation. Even on the frontier, families followed with great interest the impending crisis that would eventually split the union. The cultural and educational mother lode in virtually every region was the King James Version of the English Bible. It was not only the guide to Christian worship but also the principal work of literature. Texans learned of good and evil, power and corruption, hope and salvation from the Bible, absorbing a bit of Greek philosophy and Jewish mysticism along the way. The God of the Old Testament threatened the wayward with eternal damnation while the God of the New Testament promised them salvation. Not surprisingly, churches were even more important than schools to the communal life of the yeoman farmer. Their social significance was as great as their religious. Members congregated to worship, converse, eat, and court. Because there was little else to compete for the farmers’ attention, the churches, increasingly evangelical in nature, played a huge role in shaping value systems. They augmented already strong tendencies toward fundamentalism, temperance, and social democracy.

The true planter aristocracy in Texas was numerically minuscule, no more than two thousand families. To qualify one had to possess enough chattel to employ an overseer. Freed from the restraints of labor, the planting class dabbled in politics, worshipped their Episcopalian God, raced horses, fought duels, gambled, drank, and tolerated lesser mortals. The planter was gracious, hospitable, charitable, and decent, rather than puritanically moral. The slave aristocracy was accorded deference in Texas, but it was grudging, and though politically influential, it was not the force it was in Mississippi or South Carolina. Slaves were relatively well treated, not because planters and their overseers were kind-hearted; rather, they were practical men who refused to damage a prized commodity except under the most extreme circumstances. Ironically, but not atypically, this class would lead the way in Texas in opposing secession.

But Texas did secede—states rights was better than federal submission—and suffered the fate of the other members of the Confederacy. What happened after the Civil War did much to revive Texas’s dominant political culture. Reconstruction and all things associated with it—blacks, federal troops, carpetbaggers, and scalawags—were reviled. The denouement of Reconstruction in Texas came in 1874, when Richard Coke and a band of ecstatic Democrats seized control of the political machinery. A new constitution virtually emasculated central authority in the state. The terms of state officers, including the governor, were set at two years. With virtually all state offices elective, the governor was no more than a peer among equals. At the polls, conservative Republicans deserted en masse to the Democrats. In this one-party atmosphere, virtually devoid of ideology, politics consisted of a continual grab for power. Participation in the rebellion became an enduring status symbol. The Texas Rangers were resurrected, and a Frontier Battalion organized. Between 1874 and 1880, the Rangers policed the Indian and Mexican frontiers, earning their reputation as fearless, ruthless, and sometimes lawless restorers and maintainers of order.

The order that the Rangers compelled made possible the coming of the Cattle Kingdom, the Anglo-Celt’s economic and cultural response to the Great Plains. The cattle ranchers and drovers were in reality small businessmen who turned their enterprise into a legend. The Texas cowhand was neither northern nor southern, and cowherding was in many ways the first economic and cultural step reuniting North and South following the Civil War. The longhorn frontier, with its reverence for the horse and rifle, its buckskin, bunkhouses, dusters, and ten-gallon hats, bred certain characteristics. The cattle culture called for Darwinian efficiency. There was no room for waste, for mistakes, for wishful thinking. Those who prayed for rain rather than anticipating drought failed. Those who wished for peace and trusted Indians and Mexicans lost their cattle, if not their lives. Ideas and notions were valid in the West only if they worked. Natives, like wolves and bobcats, were beasts to be kept at bay or exterminated. Brave and generous to their fellows, residents of the cattle frontier were contemptuous of those who could not stand alone. Next to cattle thieving, the worst crime on the frontier was ineptitude. The cattle culture was the purview of the young because the old could not go west and survive. Women suffered disproportionately. Love and romance took a backseat to sexual gratification and utility in relations between the sexes. Frontier wives were immensely respected, if not understood; prostitutes and dancehall girls were valued, if not respected. In this male-dominated culture, reverence for fair play and for the principle of equality of opportunity took precedence over complicated legal codes imported from the East. Until the turn of the century, the penalty for killing another individual in a fair fight was less than that imposed for burglary, if any sentence was imposed at all.

The land into which Lyndon Johnson’s immediate ancestors came marked an intersection between the farming and cattle frontiers. The Hill Country of Texas lies along the eastern edge of the Edwards Plateau as it begins its ascent to the great Staked Plain. The first settlers found a land of big sky, abundant sunlight, violent storms, flash floods, and bone-chilling northers. The soil was generally thin, covering the limestone base rock that extended westward to constitute the foundation of the Edwards Plateau. The richest land was to be found in the river bottoms, in this case, the Pedernales and Blanco, western tributaries of the Colorado that paralleled each other. The landscape was gently rolling, covered by live oak, mesquite, and cedar, punctuated by picturesque limestone springs.

The first white men to take up permanent residence in the Hill Country were German immigrants. In late 1845 Henry Fisher and Burchard Miller sold their original land grant of some 3 million acres obtained from the Spanish to a group of German noblemen who hoped to extend the fatherland to Texas. The first German settlers arrived at Galveston, and after some indecision settled in New Braunfels. Following completion of the Fisher-Miller deal, John Meusbach led a wagon train of 120 families and established the community of Fredericksburg thirty miles northwest of New Braunfels on Barron’s Creek. Eclipsing the weather as a threat to the newcomers were the Comanche. Having mastered the horses first imported by the Spanish, these Native Americans, guided by the light of the moon, rode two hundred miles or more across New Mexico and West Texas to kill, kidnap, steal, and burn and then backtrack across the plains at breakneck speed. Eventually, Meusbach concluded his famous treaty with the Comanche, and the Germans lived in relative peace with that people, if not the Lipan Apache, thereafter. In 1848 German settlers organized Gillespie County with Fredericksburg as its county seat. The booming village then boasted more than a dozen commercial structures, including the Nimitz Hotel. Shortly after the Germans came to the Hill Country, other frontier farmers began building dog-run cabins along the picturesque Blanco River, whose valley was rich with fish and game.¹The Pittsburgh Land Company, owned by Captain James Callahan and John D. Pitts, established a small community, and in 1858 Blanco County was organized. It was at this point that the Johnsons arrived on the scene.²

Lyndon’s great-great-grandfather, John Johnson, was an Anglo-Celt immigrant whose parents settled in colonial Georgia. A veteran of the Revolutionary War, John was a successful farmer and the owner of two slaves.³His fourth son, Jesse, Lyndon’s great-grandfather, was one of those frontier farmers who stayed ahead of the expanding plantation system and behind the Indian-fighting frontier. The year Texas became a state, Jesse gathered up his slaves, eight of his ten children, his wife, and four grandchildren, and in covered wagons made the nine hundred?mile trek from Alabama to Lockhart, some twenty-five miles south of Austin.⁴It turned out to be an economic mistake. Despite the fertility of the black, waxy soil, Jesse Johnson did not prosper. At his death in 1857, his estate was in arrears.

Thus, Jesse’s sons, Andrew Jackson (Jack) Johnson, Jesse Thomas (Tom) Johnson, and Samuel Ealy Johnson (Sam), Lyndon’s grandfather, had to start virtually from scratch.⁵In 1859, attracted by the endless acres of shimmering prairie grass, Jack settled on the north bank of the Pedernales River, some twelve miles north of Blanco. He built a double-room, dog-run cabin and began raising sheep, horses, and cattle. Shortly thereafter, Tom and Sam followed. They constructed a rock cabin and pens and began gathering cattle in anticipation of a profitable drive north to Sedalia or Abilene. The Civil War intervened, however. Sam, the youngest, enlisted in the Confederate Army, Company B, DeBray’s regiment, in the fall of 1861. Tom would later join the Texas State Troops headquartered at Blanco, but he spent most of the war with his brother Jack raising stock for sale to the Confederacy.⁶

When Union occupying forces landed at Galveston, Sam Johnson returned to the Hill Country, but he found it difficult to leave the Civil War behind. Ger-man Unionists living between New Braunfels and Fredericksburg had been hunted and harassed throughout the war. Some fifty were hanged by Confederate state militia in Gillespie County alone.⁷During Reconstruction, the limestone hills witnessed numerous armed clashes between loyalists and warriors of the Lost Cause. “Bushwacking” became a common occurrence.⁸

The Johnson brothers had better things to do. Between 1867 and 1870, Tom and Sam made four six hundred?mile trips along the Chisholm Trail to Kansas. By 1871, they headed the largest cattle operation in Blanco County, their corrals occupying several dozen acres. In 1870 alone, Tom and Sam drove seven thousand head north, grossing nearly $100,000.⁹“I got my best experience,” reported one drover, “joining the ‘roundup’ for Sam and Thomas Johnson … with headquarter pens and branding stall at the mouth of Williamson’s Creek in Blanco County and headquarters at Johnson’s ranch on the Pedernales … The roundup of range hands and range boss usually gathered, road branded and delivered a herd of from 2,500 to 3,000 head of cattle, which a trail boss and his outfit received at headquarters ranch, but sometimes we delivered them at the Seven Live Oaks on the prairie west of Austin.”¹⁰The drives were long and arduous, featuring blistering heat, violent thunderstorms, dangerous river crossings, frigid northers, and occasional raids by hostile Indians.¹¹

The Johnson brothers were one of the best-known outfits in Kansas. “I am in Johnson’s camp now, out at the cattle pens,” Horace Hall wrote his father in November 1871. “The boys have sold all of their cattle and tomorrow they will commence ‘outfitting’ and then go to Texas.” The following spring Hall reported, “We have been gathering cattle for the past month and now they have two herds about ready to start … This is a beautiful country through here: mountains, clear rocky streams, live oaks, mesquite with rich valley and bottom lands for farming … abundance of game & Indians once a year.”¹²

In December 1867 Sam Johnson married Eliza Bunton. Sam and Eliza set up housekeeping in the cabin that the Johnson brothers had occupied as bachelors. Eliza was one of those Texas women who fought the frontier and won. With the black hair, black eyes, and ivory skin of her father, she cut a striking figure. Intensely proud of her family’s accomplishments, Eliza held up her ancestors, Joseph Bunton, a Revolutionary war hero, and Joseph Desha, who had served in Congress and as governor of Kentucky, as examples to her children.¹³In the early years, she accompanied Sam and Tom on their drives up the Chisholm Trail. After children came, she lived the more conventional and, in some ways, harder life of the frontier wife, toiling over a wood fire, hauling water, sewing, nurturing, and persevering.¹⁴One of the characteristics that Sam and Eliza shared, according to those who knew them, was their patrician bearing. “He was an aristocrat … Just natural,” recalled Ida Felsted, who knew the Johnsons as a child.¹⁵Patricians or not, the couple could not escape the dangers of the frontier. Well into the 1870s, Sam, Eliza, and their neighbors had to deal with the marauding Lipan Apache and renegade Comanche.

In the summer of 1869, Tom and Eliza Phelps of Blanco County were cut off by a band of Comanche while fishing in a creek near their house. Both were stabbed, bludgeoned, stripped, and scalped. Both died of their wounds. Sam joined the party of armed men organized to hunt down the Indians and avenge the Phelpses’ murder. Some of the war party doubled back, however, and Eliza Johnson and her infant daughter, Mary, were nearly caught at their well. Alerted by the war whoops, Eliza, with baby in arms, ran to the house. For hours the two hid in a space under the cabin, she stifling Mary’s cries with a dirty rag, while the Comanche ransacked the house. Eventually, the Indians rounded up their booty, including horses, and rode off. Eliza dared not move until, hours later, she heard her husband’s voice as he searched through the remains of their possessions.¹⁶In 1872, a force of Rangers met and defeated a band of Comanche at Deer Creek. Several of the wounded Texans were carried to the Johnson ranch for medical attention. It would be the last pitched battle between Indians and whites that the Hill Country witnessed.

The cattle business was boom or bust. From 1867 through 1871, Tom and Sam Johnson flourished. Flush with the profits from their drives, they bought thousands of acres in Blanco and Gillespie Counties, plus property in Austin. In late 1871, together with sixteen cowboys, the brothers drove several thousand head north to Kansas, only to find that the bottom had dropped out of the cattle market. Hoping that prices would rise, the Johnsons wintered their herd on the plains. Many of the animals froze to death, prices refused to rise, and upon their return to Texas, Sam and Tom had to sell much of their property to pay their debts.¹⁷The following year brought no relief. They drove smaller herds to market but found prices still depressed. A Comanche raid cost the brothers their remuda of horses and broke them. County tax rolls showed Tom worth a mere $180 in 1873; Sam was not listed at all. In 1872 Sam, Eliza, and their children decided to abandon the frontier and, with her father’s help, bought a farm near Buda, a community southeast of Austin. Tom Johnson died in 1877.¹⁸

Sam Johnson could never reconcile himself to the flat land and tame existence that he found in east-central Texas. He and Eliza owned an eight hundred?acre spread but cultivated only a hundred. What income the family had—there were six children by 1880—came from the sale of a few bushels of wheat and a bale or so of cotton each year. The Johnsons lived off the pigs, goats, chickens, and milk cows that populated their barnyard and the vegetables they could grow. They were certainly no worse off than any of their neighbors, however. The Panic of 1873 had plunged the entire country into a depression from which it took more than a decade to recover. Sam longed to return to his “mountains,” however, and in 1882 persuaded Eliza to allow him to sell their most elegant possession, a silver-mounted carriage with matched horses, to purchase a 950-acre spread on the Pedernales near Stonewall in Gillespie County. It was only twelve miles from the old Johnson ranch that by then had become the site of the tiny community of Johnson City. Tom and Sam’s spread had been bought by James Polk (Jim) Johnson, a nephew who had emigrated from Alabama. In 1889, Sam, Eliza, and eight of their nine children left Buda and returned to the Hill Country.¹⁹

Life on the Pedernales was more picturesque, perhaps, than life near Buda, but it differed little in substance. The Johnson property was beautiful. The grassy acres studded with live oaks and pecan groves sloped down to the lime-stone-bedded river. Like their neighbors, Sam and Eliza lived as subsistence farmers, raising wheat, some cotton, and living off their livestock and vegetables. By selling some of their land, the Johnsons were able to raise enough money to build a house, barn, smokehouse, and corral. Their home was a typical dog-run cabin with precarious porch in front and lean-to in back. Barbed wire fencing kept the chickens and children from wandering too far. The Johnsons refused to be impoverished by their lack of material wealth. Both read as widely as the availability of books allowed them, and Sam followed politics and civic events, for which he had a passion, in the newspaper. Avid conversationalists, Sam and Eliza raised their children to be aware of the world around them and not to live on received wisdom. After a traveling Christadelphian minister won an all-day debate with the local Baptist minister on the meaning of the Bible, Sam converted.

Christadelphianism seemed a strange choice for Sam Johnson. The Christadelphians (Greek for “brethren of God”) were a small Christian sect introduced into America in 1848 by an English physician named John Thomas. It was both democratic and judgmental. All brethren were equal in the sight of God. Institutional structure was weak to nonexistent; worship services, when they were held, were lay-initiated and -dominated. Smoking, drinking, and dancing were discouraged. Converts were required to study the New Testament and pass a test before being baptized by immersion. “Basic to Christadelphian social teaching and practice is the exhortation to be separate from the world, to love not the world nor the things which are in the world,” writes one of the sect’s historians.²⁰The brethren had little faith in political or legislative prescriptions for society’s ills because both were the work of men and not God.²¹They studied politics and civic life intensely, however, in search of signs of the coming Millennium.

Sam Johnson was by all accounts a friendly, gregarious man who enjoyed conversation and the company of his fellow human beings. He had been in battle, endured the dangers of the cattle drive, and prowled the streets of Abilene—hardly a Puritan. The Christadelphian sect had originated among the working poor of London, who were attracted by Christ’s promise that the last shall be first and the first last. Sam embraced Christadelphianism during the Populist revolt, attracted, no doubt, by its emphasis on brotherhood and social justice. He was also taken by the emphasis on the relationship of salvation to service to one’s fellow man, to the Christadelphians’ contempt for the institutional church, and by its near mystical reverence for nature.²²Because of his interest in politics, Sam Johnson chose to serve his Maker by running for public office.

Sam and Eliza may have struggled, but they did not, like so many other southern and midwestern farmers, lose their property during the prolonged agricultural depression that marred the last decades of the nineteenth century. The late 1880s and early 1890s saw falling grain and cotton prices and an epidemic of farm mortgage foreclosures. The principal problem facing American agriculturalists was overproduction, but as rugged individualists, they resisted the notion of involuntary or even voluntary limits on the amount and kinds of crops they raised. Increasingly, farmers blamed their woes on the railroads, grain warehousers, meatpackers, and the refusal of the federal government to inflate the currency. In 1877 in Lampasas, Texas, a group of farm activists created the Texas Farmers’ Alliance, which in turn formed cooperatives and pushed for state regulation of rail rates. The agricultural revolt produced a panoply of colorful grassroots politicians, “Sockless” Jerry Simpson, for example, and Mary E. Lease, who urged Kansas farmers to “raise more hell and less corn.” Harried and harassed, farmers decided that there was no option but establishment of a third national political party. In 1891, Texans formed a state People’s Party, which the following year became part of a national Populist Party. Among other things, the Populists advocated government ownership of the railroads and telephone and telegraph lines and government control of the financial system. In the fall of 1892, Sam Ealy Johnson Sr. offered himself as the Populist candidate for Blanco and Gillespie County’s seat in the state legislature. His Democratic opponent, bizarrely, was his son-in-law, Clarence Martin. Indeed, Clarence and his wife, Frank Johnson Martin, lived in a house not five hundred yards west of Sam and Eliza. Clarence Martin and Sam Johnson frequently rode in the same buggy to address political gatherings at Blanco City and in the rural pecan groves that dotted the countryside. After calling each other a wild-eyed radical and a soulless reactionary, the two would remount their buggy and head for home or the next meeting. Sam warned the voters that if something was not done about the moneylenders and middlemen who were sucking the farmers dry, there would be civil war. “Cleveland [Democratic President Grover, who favored hard money and the status quo] ought to be hung,” he told his neighbors. The Populist candidates made a respectable showing, but that was all. The Democratic party had moved leftward just far enough, embracing government regulation of rails and trusts, to coopt the political middle. Sam lost to Clarence two to one, but he hardly overestimated the passions aroused by the Populist moment. “Clarence Martin defeated his father-in-law,” theDallas Morning News reported, “but suffered a serious stab wound at a public speaking at Twin Sisters, Blanco County.”²³

Of Sam and Eliza’s nine children, the first four were girls. Sam loved them all but longed for a son, resenting the nickname, “Gal Johnson,” that some of his friends gave him. So frustrated was he that he named his second daughter, Clarence Martin’s future wife, Frank. Thus was the birth of Sam Ealy Jr. on October 11, 1877, an occasion of great joy in the Johnson household.

Little Sammie’s parents doted on him. Eliza insisted that his ivory skin and black curls linked him most strongly with the Buntons, and she constantly regaled her son with the exploits and achievements of the Buntons and Deshas. Sam Jr. was his father’s son, however; he dressed like him, walked and talked like him. He accompanied his father on some of his speaking trips when the latter ran for state legislature. A relatively unattractive youth, with huge ears and lips so thin as to be nonexistent, Little Sam was possessed of a dominating personality. Intense, active, ambitious, and gregarious, he made an impression on those he encountered. And he was self-made. According to some accounts, his parents were so poor, Sam Jr. had to pay his own way through public school in Johnson City. (In those virtually taxless days, public schools charged tuition.) The younger Johnson borrowed his father’s wagon for a time, slaughtered three steers his father had given him, and sold beef and soup bones in and around Stonewall. When the Johnson City barber retired, Sam bought his chair and tools, and after practicing on friends, began giving haircuts on Saturdays and after school.²⁴

The strain of having to grow up too young soon took its toll; Sam Jr. was felled with an attack of nervous stomach and forced to drop out of high school. His mother sent him to recuperate with her younger brother, Lucius Desha Bunton, and his family, who lived on a ranch near Marfa. His stay with his uncle, together with years of labor on his parents’ hardscrabble farm on the Pedernales, convinced Sam that there was a better way to live one’s life than being a tiller of the soil or raiser of livestock.²⁵

Physically rejuvenated by his months in west Texas, Sam returned to Johnson City determined to be a teacher. He had not completed high school however, and even if he had, there was no money for him to attend one of Texas’s new teachers colleges. In that day, however, degrees were not required to teach; one merely had to pass an exam. He borrowed the books necessary to prepare and moved in with his grandmother, Jane Bunton, herself a former school-teacher. Living primarily on antacids and dried fruit, Sam crammed. He not only passed the Texas state teacher’s exam, but earned perfect scores on the Texas and American history tests. His first assignment was in 1896 at the White Oak School near Sandy, a one-room institution featuring grades one through eight. Some of the students, Sam recalled, were older and larger than he. Sam Johnson was then nineteen. Like most teachers in Texas, he was forced to live with a family in the community. It was a life of isolation, poverty, and hard work. The winter term following found him at Hye, a German hamlet just a few miles from Stonewall. There he made the acquaintance of a fellow boarder, Captain Rufus Perry, a famous Indian fighter whose tales of derring-do made a lasting impression. Disgusted and disillusioned, Sam finished his teaching career in the spring of 1898 in a school near Rocky.²⁶

Ready for a fresh start, Sam Ealy Johnson Jr. made arrangements to lease a portion of his father’s farm. He moved into the first house Sam Sr. and Eliza had built on the property when they moved from Buda in 1889. His parents lived several hundred yards to the west, and beyond them was Clarence and Frank Martin’s house. For farmers, the years 1898 to 1906 were relatively prosperous, with commodity prices rising at home and abroad. Sam Jr. managed to live the life of gentleman farmer, working his place with hired hands. According to contemporaries, he could often be seen in Johnson City dressed in a suit and polished boots and riding a groomed horse. The very idea of bib overalls was anathema. He never changed from his “money spending into money making clothes,” as Ida Felton put it.²⁷Simple though his cabin was, it became something of a salon for those interested in politics and public affairs. His best friends, according to future wife Rebekah, were “W. C. Linden and Dayton Moses, lawyers of statewide repute; and Kay Alexander, teacher and engineer.”²⁸

Influenced, no doubt, by Linden, Moses, and his brother-in-law, Clarence Martin, who would become a district court judge for Gillespie County, Sam Jr. was strongly drawn to a career in the law. He decided, however, to delay law school and run for local office and was elected justice of the peace in 1902. The office was not the most challenging. “In those days they had dance halls in Stonewall and Albert and elsewhere,” according to Otto Lindig. “And if there wasn’t two or three fights in the dance hall that night, why the people didn’t enjoy themselves … They went to the Justice of the Peace and filed a complaint. Then the other man had to pay a fine.”²⁹Two years later, Martin persuaded Sam to stand for the seat in the state legislature that he had held. According to tradition, the position was rotated among the four counties in the district; in 1904 it was Gillespie’s turn. Sam campaigned on a platform that straddled the positions of his father and his brother-in-law. His speeches were somewhat apocalyptic, insisting that the very future of the republic depended on the struggle then being waged between the people and monopolistic corporations. When he got down to specifics, he hardly proved a socialist, however, favoring regulation of the railroads, taxation of the insurance industry and utilities, and a franchise tax on corporations. It was pure Theodore Roosevelt. Somewhat to Sam’s surprise, he won.

In Austin, Johnson soon earned a reputation for diligence and astuteness. In addition to regulation and taxation measures, he supported an eight-hour day for rail workers, a pure food bill, and state regulation of lobbyists. Most of these measures failed, but his Hill Country constituents, many of them former Populists, applauded their representative’s stands. Sam was at his best working the corridors of power behind the scenes, trading votes on bread-and-butter issues that would benefit the residents of Gillespie and Blanco counties in an immediate and material way. In 1906 the twenty-nine-year-old politician challenged the rotation tradition and was elected to a second consecutive term. Both theBlanco News and theSan Antonio Express supported him. That same year, financial disaster struck when the bottom fell out of the cotton market, and Sam was nearly wiped out. “My daddy went busted waiting for cotton to go up to twenty-one cents a pound and the market fell apart when it hit twenty,” Lyndon later recalled.³⁰His pay as legislator was $3.00 a day for the regular session and $5 for special sessions.³¹Aware of his neighbor’s plight, Rob Crider, who operated a grocery store near Hye, persuaded the stubbornly proud Sam to accept a $300 loan. His constituents deserved to have their man go to Austin “in style,” Crider remarked.³²At times, Sam had to borrow gas money to make the trip back and forth to Austin.

Still, vulnerable as he was, Sam Ealy Johnson remained notoriously independent. The legislature was dominated by lobbyists who brazenly bought and sold votes and entertained lavishly. The young man from the Hill Country was not a Puritan; he was no stranger to Austin’s saloons and brothels. He simply hated to be beholden. He “will bear gentle reproof, but will kick like a mule at any attempted domination,” the house chaplain remarked of Sam.³³

In 1906 a young reporter from theBlanco News interviewed Representative Sam Johnson in Austin. She was Rebekah Baines, the daughter of Joseph Baines, the man Sam had replaced in the legislature, and the future mother of Lyndon Johnson. The interview did not go well. Rebekah remembered being “awfully provoked” with the outspoken young lawmaker.³⁴Sam was taken with the young woman, with her interest in politics, and particularly with her education and family credentials. Indeed, Rebekah Baines was as proud of her ancestry as Eliza Bunton was of hers. Her forefathers had trekked to America in the eighteenth century from Scotland and her great-grandfather was something of a legend. Born in North Carolina in 1809, George W. Baines Sr. moved with his family first to Georgia, and then to Alabama, where he earned a B.A. from the state college at Tuscaloosa. After being ordained a Baptist minister, G. W. Baines served a stint in the Alabama legislature, but in 1850 he migrated to Texas, settling near Huntsville. His flock eventually included Sam Houston, who, out of gratitude for his conversion, loaned Reverend Baines $300 to help with his ministry.³⁵A rising star in the Baptist State Convention, Baines was elected president of Baylor University in 1861.³⁶

Joseph Wilson Baines, the Baineses’ third son and father of Rebekah, was born in Louisiana in 1846 and moved with his family to Texas in 1850. Joe Baines attended Baylor and served two years in the Confederate Army. Following Appomattox, he taught for a brief period, found it as impoverishing as did Sam Johnson Jr., but unlike him proceeded with the study of the law. Joe subsequently passed the state bar exam and joined the firm of Throckmorton and Brown in McKinney, Texas. Young Baines prospered, practicing law and editing theMcKinney Advocate , an influential Democratic newspaper. After campaigning hard for Governor John “Oxcart John” Ireland, Joe was appointed secretary of state, serving from 1883 to 1887. While teaching at Rowlett, he had married fifteen-year-old Ruth Huffman, one of his students. Ruth’s mother was a struggling widow with several children; despite her daughter’s tender years, she agreed to the union with the young Baptist teacher. The marriage lasted forty years.³⁷

Rebekah was born in Austin in 1881, twelve years into her parents’ marriage. In 1887, Joe Baines moved his family to the town of Blanco. For the next fifteen years he practiced law, served as an elder in the Baptist church, and accumulated a minor fortune in real estate. He somehow found time to serve a term in the state legislature. Rebekah remembered growing up in Blanco as idyllic. “I love to think of our home, a two-story rock house with a fruitful orchard of perfectly spaced trees, terraced flower beds, broad walks, purple plumed wisteria climbing to the roof, fragrant honeysuckle at the dining room window whose broad sills were seats for us children,” she later wrote of her youth.³⁸The house was filled with books and music, the hallmarks of an educated Baptist family. “At an incredibly early age, my father taught me to read,” she later recalled. “He taught me how to study, to think and to endure, the principles of mathematics, the beauty of simple things.”³⁹Rebekah loved Browning and Tennyson and, in fact, spent much of her imagining life in the world of the British romantics. Josepha Saunders, Rebekah’s sister, remembered, “I had such a happy childhood. Rode horseback, and went swimmin’, and … rode calves—everything else that was lots of fun. But now, sister never did that. She was more of a lady … I’ve seen her standin’ at the window, at the kitchen window, washing dishes, with the book up in the window.”⁴⁰The center of the girl’s life, apparently, was her father, “the dominant force in my life as well as my adored parent, reverenced mentor, and most interesting companion.”⁴¹“Most interesting companion” is an unusual term to use for a father when in one’s adolescence, but it seems to have been the truth. Wilton Woods remembered that Joe Baines had run for Congress and lost. Rebekah was devastated, unable to understand why voters had not turned out overwhelmingly for her father. According to Woods, however, “He seldom got out of the house … kind of a recluse … a very intelligent person and a most, most religious person.”⁴²There was no doubt about Joe Baines’s piety. “We had such a wonderful Christian home,” Josepha said.⁴³Not priggish, however. The girls were allowed to attend dances, a somewhat unusual departure for a turn-of-the-century Baptist family. But Joe abhorred alcohol and instilled that dislike into Rebekah.⁴⁴Not only was alcohol “an abomination to the Lord,” its use by an individual was an indication of his lack of discipline and general worthlessness. The father and his adoring daughter prized order, predictability. “He taught me obedience and self-control,” Rebekah recalled, “saying that without them no one is worthy of responsibility or trust.”⁴⁵

Like Sam Johnson Sr. and Sam Johnson Jr., Joe Baines crashed on the rocks of market fortunes. In 1903 he went broke, victimized by falling cotton prices and a real estate deal gone bad. It was a humiliating experience for a proud family. Rebekah, who was at the time attending Baylor, had to take a job in the bookstore to enable her to finish, and her brother, Huffman, had to drop out of the agricultural college to return home and help support his family. Or so Rebekah claimed. The record indicates that cotton prices fluctuated during this period, but not abnormally. More likely, health or personal scandal were responsible for the turmoil in the Baineses’ family. Joseph Wilson Baines moved his family to Fredericksburg, designed and built a modest house, was elected to the legislature, and made a desultory effort to practice law. Nothing seemed to lift his spirits, however; he fell ill and died a lingering death in 1906. Rebekah, meanwhile, had finished college and moved to Fredericksburg to rejoin her family. She taught elocution and wrote columns for several area newspapers.⁴⁶Her father’s death bore hard on her. “This was the first great sorrow of my life and it required all my determination and strength of will to adjust myself to life without my father.”⁴⁷She was being somewhat melodramatic. In fact, Joe Baines had quickly rebuilt his fortune; his decline was physical and mental, not economic. At the time she met Sam Ealy Johnson Jr., Rebekah was a self-confident, relatively affluent young woman in the unusual position of being free to choose marriage or a professional career.⁴⁸It was at this point that Rebekah began her courtship with Sam Ealy Johnson Jr.

During 1906 Sam Johnson made the seventeen-mile, three-hour horseback trip from Stonewall to Fredericksburg as frequently as he could. The couple was particularly drawn to political gatherings. Sam’s coup was a date to hear the famed William Jennings Bryan address the state legislature. Both were entranced by the great orator.⁴⁹When Sam proposed, Rebekah hesitated; the young politician could be rough and aggressive; he lacked formal education and was sometimes drawn to the wrong crowd. But he was dynamic and ambitious; he was also a Christian, having taken up his father’s Christadelphianism. Sam, she believed, had the makings of her sainted father in him; under her influence, he would continue to grow. The picture she conjured in her mind that persuaded her to accept marriage was compelling, “a personable young man, slender and graceful, immaculately groomed, agreeable and affable in manner and with great personal magnetism.”⁵⁰Moreover, at age twenty-five, Rebekah believed this might be her last, best chance. The couple married on August 20, 1907. Both would live to regret the decision.

There was no money for a honeymoon. The newlyweds made the trip from Fredericksburg to Stonewall and immediately settled in Sam’s house, the now somewhat improved cabin he had grown up in.⁵¹There were two bedrooms, each twelve feet square, with one a living room?bedroom and the other a bedroom opening to the kitchen?dining room in the rear. The Johnson cabin still boasted a rambling front porch covered by a slanting roof, with another porch and lean-to in the rear. The house was guarded in front by a barbed wire fence with a gate and in the rear by a rail fence. There was no yard to speak of, but from the front porch a grassy slope, dotted with oak and pecan trees, unfolded across two hundred yards to the Pedernales. To the rear of the house were cistern, pump, outhouse, smokehouse, and barn. The farm consisted of approximately five hundred acres, one hundred in cultivation and four hundred in pasture to support fifty or so head of cattle. According to Rebekah, the first year was trying in the extreme. “I was confronted not only by the problem of adjustment to a completely opposite personality, but alas to a strange and new way of life,” the new bride later wrote. “I shuddered over chickens and wrestled with a mammoth iron stove.” Thus began Rebekah Baines Johnson’s existence as a self-appointed martyr.

Life on the Johnson ranch was tough. Rebekah’s husband was in Austin part of the year. Her brother, Huffman, temporarily jobless, helped out for most of 1907. “They were busy on the farm and needed help … milking, feeding, hoeing, plowing, cutting wood,” he later explained. “We, like all farmers, were up early but late in getting the farm work done.”⁵²But what did Rebekah expect? After a year’s courtship, certainly she had visited the farm and Sam’s house. She had seen the rudimentary kitchen, the constant stream of chores. Perhaps in her imagination, her most frequent abode, others always took responsibility for life’s more mundane matters. During those early years she struggled with work—and with Sam. “She’d hear Sam coming home,” a girl who worked for them at the time remembered. “Her face would light up like a little kid’s, and out she’d go flying down to the gate to meet him.”⁵³But Sam Ealy Johnson Jr. was not a particularly easy man to love. Not unkind, just emotionally calloused. He liked to drink with his brother-in-law and his lawyer pals. “His idea of pleasure was to sit up half the night with his friends, drinking beer, telling stories, and playing dominoes,” Lyndon later told historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.⁵⁴He loved to dance, and she did not despite her parent’s tolerance of the practice. “I don’t think Rebekah ever went to a dance,” Otto Lindig recalled.⁵⁵Sam however, was dynamic, public-spirited, and Rebekah’s contact with the fascinating world of politics. Like her, Sam’s sense of family and its importance was intense.⁵⁶

The Hill Country was a hardscrabble existence, but the world was changing. A new century had begun, a progressive, activist, president sat in the White House, and a newly wed couple in central Texas believed that they could make a difference.

For Sam Ealy Johnson Jr., 1907-1908 were the most eventful years of his young political life. When Rebekah interviewed Sam in 1906, she had asked him his opinion of Texas’s charismatic, corrupt senator, Joseph W. Bailey, and he had pleased her by saying that he disliked and distrusted him. The Seventeenth Amendment providing for the direct election of senators not yet being in effect, the Texas legislature had elected Bailey, a long-time congressman, to a term in the Senate. He had campaigned as a champion of the common man against Wall Street, the railroads, and the trusts, but rumors began to drift back from Washington that Bailey was on the take from the very interests he had promised to police. The senator was a man of powerful personality, dramatically attired in black frock coat and black slouch hat, skilled at the histrionics that turn-of-the-century politicians so dearly loved. With Bailey up for reelection in 1907, the Texas legislature was forced to confront the charges concerning his misconduct. The oil and lumber interests that the senator had so dutifully represented and Bailey himself descended on Austin to lobby on his behalf. Sam Johnson was one of those called to the great man’s hotel room, but despite the pressure, he remained noncommittal.⁵⁷The house voted to conduct an official investigation but refused to put off the senatorial election. Bailey won a second term by a vote of eighty-nine to thirty-six. Seven members were listed as present but not voting, one of them was Sam Johnson. “It is a well known fact,” he explained, “that I have been for a full investigation of his conduct, and it would not be consistent for me to vote for him at this time.”⁵⁸It was a courageous act. Following his victory, Bailey promised to bury his enemies “face down so that the harder they scratch to get out, the deeper they will go toward their eternal resting place.”⁵⁹