CHAPTER 2

GROWING UP

LYNDON WAS BORN ONAUGUST27, 1908,A YEAR AND A week after Sam and Rebekah had spoken their wedding vows. The night Rebekah went into labor was stormy. It had rained all day, and the Pedernales was out of its banks. Fortunately, Sam was home. The nearest doctor was some twenty miles away. As soon as Rebekah’s contractions began, Sam sent for him, but she declared that the baby would not wait. The family decided that Sam Sr. should fetch the nearest midwife. He forded the Pedernales at a point several hundred yards upstream from his house and brought Mrs. Christian Lindig, a neighbor and experienced midwife, to Rebekah.¹The young mother’s imagination and displaced ambition would turn the birth of her firstborn into a near mystical experience: “Now the light came in from the east, bringing a deep stillness, a stillness so profound and so pervasive that it seemed as if the earth itself were listening … And then there came a sharp compelling cry.”²Thus did Rebekah Johnson give birth that day to both a man-child and a messiah complex.

The original birth document listed the child simply as “unnamed Johnson.” Sam and Rebekah had not settled on a name and were not able to do so for weeks thereafter. It was the custom in the Johnson household for Sam to rise first, dress, build a fire, and warm the house before Rebekah got up to cook breakfast. One morning two months or so after the baby’s birth, Sam got up, tended to his chores, and pronounced the room warm. Rebekah rebelled: “Sam, I’m not getting up to cook breakfast until this baby is named. He is nearly three months old … I’ve submitted all the names I know and you always turn them down.” Taken aback, Sam thought while he laced up his boots. He suggested Clarence for his brother-in-law and Dayton for his longtime friend. She rejected both. Finally they settled on Linden (for W. C. Linden), with the stipulation that Rebekah could spell it Lyndon. Thereupon she rose and made the brown biscuits that were Sam’s favorite.³“The reason Mother didn’t want him named Clarence, didn’t want him named Dayton, didn’t want him named after Judge Linden,” Sam Houston, Lyndon’s brother, recalled, was that “they were all three judges, and district attorneys, you know, and famous people, but they all drank.”⁴

Lyndon Baines Johnson was immediately and forever his parents’ favorite. His cousin Ava remembered him as a beautiful little boy with flashing brown eyes and golden curls, even if his ears were a bit prominent.⁵In the spring of 1909, Sam and Rebekah took him to a community picnic. According to his mother, Lyndon smiled and reached for every adult admirer. “Eddie Hahn … a leading citizen of the community exclaimed: ‘Sam, you’ve got a politician there. I’ve never afore seen such a friendly baby,’” a family member remembered.⁶Lyndon’s mother showered attention on him. Before he was two, he learned the alphabet from ABC blocks. At three, he could recite not only Mother Goose rhymes but snippets of poems by Tennyson, Longfellow, and others of his mother’s favorites. “I’ll never forget how much my mother loved me when I recited those poems,” he told an interviewer. “The minute I finished she’d take me in her arms and hug me so hard I sometimes thought I’d be strangled to death.”⁷Sam was no less attentive. He would give words for Lyndon to spell from Noah Webster’s speller; by four the child had acquired a small reading vocabulary. As he got older, Rebekah read him history and Bible stories. Reminding her that he was his father’s child, too, he always wanted to know if the stories were true.⁸

Lyndon’s grandfather’s house was just several hundred yards away, and the boy frequently listened to him tell tales of cattle drives and Indian skirmishes. As with all children there was mischief. “Lyndon and I was tired of riding that old puller mare,” Ava Johnson, a cousin, told an interviewer, “and we were going to get her fattened up and both of us took one of Aunt Rebekah’s wash tubs and we filled it full of oats … and pulled it out of that big barn out there … under the shed where old Coofy [the mare] was, and fed her that tub full of oats. Well we had a dead horse the next morning.”⁹

Grandmother Baines spent long stretches with the family and made most of their clothes on a treadle sewing machine. There was a party telephone line to Johnson City that Rebekah could use to order dry goods and staples from the general store, including, on one memorable occasion, a brand-new Garland stove. One of the men in the family would pick up orders in town, or occasionally a wagon would deliver. Ava Johnson remembered a Jewish peddler coming through the Stonewall area periodically. He would trade his finished goods for butter, vegetables, and meat. “I can well remember … the very same peddler … came by, stopped at Uncle Sam’s and sold them a pair of shoes for Lyndon. We went down and we had to compare shoes. Mine was black patent leather with a little red top. His was plain black. And Lord he thought those shoes of mine were the prettiest things, so we swapped shoes. When we got to the house, and Aunt Rebekah saw that—she just had a fit.”¹⁰

There were Fourth of July and Christmas celebrations at Uncle Clarence and Aunt Frank’s larger house further up river.¹¹The Lutheran church, situated across the Pedernales from the Johnson spread, was the center of life in Stonewall. “They had church in the mornings, on Sundays,” Byron Crider, a Johnson City resident, recalled, “and then they had dinner on the ground, and they’d bring their own food … and we’d all eat. Then the men would get out and they’d have shootin’ matches and play horseshoes and washers. That evening, they’d bust out the keg beer … and they had a German band. The women would sit around on the benches, around the edge of the dance hall and the men would go up and ask ’em to dance.”¹²One of Lyndon’s prize possessions was a stereopticon, an early version of the Viewmaster. He would sit for hours exploring the wider world by holding the black instrument and its slides up to the light.¹³

From the beginning, Lyndon and Rebekah Johnson formed a special relationship, according to both, one of mutual dependency that to a degree shut out Sam Ealy. LBJ recalled that his first memory of his mother was dramatic. “I was three or four years old,” he told writer Ronnie Dugger. “She was crying, it was nine or ten o’clock. Now father was a cotton buyer. He had to stay at the gin till twelve or one at night till the cotton was ginned. She was frightened, afraid. I told her I’d protect her. I remember standing there by the well.”¹⁴In later years Rebekah recalled to Virginia Durr that her eldest son constantly dreamed of rescuing her. “You know, I’m always so embarrassed and ashamed about my hands,” she confided. “Where we lived at down in the country when I was young, I had to do so much hard work, and my hands never recovered. Even as a little boy Lyndon used to say to me, ‘Oh, Mama, when I get big I’m going to see that you don’t have to do any of this hard work so you can have pretty white hands.’”¹⁵He later told an interviewer, “She never wanted me to be alone … She kept me constantly amused. I remember playing games with her that only the two of us could play. And she always let me win even if to do so we had to change the rules. I knew how much she needed me … I liked that … It made me feel big and important.”¹⁶

But the greatest source of Lyndon’s security was also the greatest source of his insecurity. If Rebekah became displeased with her son, if he disappointed her, she refused to touch him, talk to him, to acknowledge his existence. When he was seven or eight and the family had moved to Johnson City, Rebekah arranged dance and then violin lessons for her son. He eventually abandoned both, the violin after only eight months. “For days after I quit those lessons,” Lyndon remembered, “she walked around the house pretending I was dead. And then to make it worse, I had to watch her being especially warm and nice to my father and sisters.”¹⁷Who had the upper hand in the relationship was a matter of debate. According to Wilton Woods, it was mother: “She recognized early that he had more than an average share of brains, energy, and she wanted to keep control and she did it very cleverly. He almost concealed nothing from her, and I do mean nothing.”¹⁸Sam Houston Johnson disagreed. “They say … Lyndon was a mama’s boy, but I don’t think that’s so,” he observed. “More often than not our mother was doing Lyndon’s bidding, rather than the other way around.”¹⁹

Other children soon followed Lyndon, Rebekah Luruth in 1910 and Josefa Hermine in 1912. The apple of his parents’ eyes was not pleased. At four he began running away. “He wanted attention,” observed Jesse Lambert, the family maid at the time. “He would run away, and run away, and the minute his mother’s back was turned he would run away again, and it was all to get attention.”²⁰Lyndon’s escapades kept the family in turmoil. Rebekah feared he would fall into the river and drown or be bitten by one of the numerous Hill Country rattlesnakes. She had a toddler and a baby and couldn’t leave the house. Sam or a hired hand would search during one of Lyndon’s disappearing acts while she stood anxiously on the porch with babe in arms. Sometimes the runaway could be found hanging around Junction School, the community one-room facility adjacent to the Johnson property. Ava Johnson and her sister Margaret were already there and frequently encouraged Lyndon.²¹After repeatedly punishing her son, Rebekah decided to make a virtue out of a vice. She and the teacher at Junction School, Miss Katie Deadrich, agreed to petition the school’s trustees to admit Lyndon even though he was not yet five. When they concurred, he began accompanying Ava and Margaret to school—this time with his parents’ approval.

Junction School and its solitary teacher were typical of rural Hill Country, Texas. The one-room structure on the banks of the Pedernales housed the first eight grades and counted thirty-five students. At first, Miss Katie couldn’t understand the strapping four-year-old—“We had the Texas mingle accent, and I think he was more on the rolling of his r’s and things like that that made him an exception”—but with a little coaching from “Miss Rebekah,” Lyndon soon proved comprehensible. Junction’s youngest student invariably showed up in costume: cowboy outfit complete with his father’s Stetson and a toy gun or the classic Buster Brown uniform. He never strayed far from his teacher’s side, frequently clinging to her skirts. When it was time for his work, that is, for him to recite his lesson, Lyndon would “come up … stand here but he wouldn’t say a word until I took him on my lap … he had tosit on my lap … he would show the other kids what he could do.”²²

Rebekah Johnson was not one to suffer in silence. She did not like life on the farm and made no bones about it. If the truth be known, Sam Ealy wasn’t all that fond of it either. Whenever possible, he left the heavy work to hired hands.²³In September 1913, when Lyndon was five, Sam moved his family fourteen miles east to Johnson City. The term “city” was a misnomer. Lyndon’s new home was a community of 323 souls living on ten north-south numbered streets and eight east-west lettered avenues. To Stella Glidden, who moved from Fredericksburg, “a town where you could almost eat off the streets,” Johnson City was a wasteland. “I thought I had come to the end of the world,” she recalled.²⁴There were no paved streets, electric lights, or indoor toilets. Only two houses had bathtubs and running water.²⁵The roads connecting Johnson City to Austin, fifty miles to the east, and Fredericksburg, thirty miles to the west, were dusty and potted in the dry season and nearly impassable quagmires during wet spells.²⁶But compared to Stonewall, Johnson City was a thriving metropolis.

Sam bought Rebekah one of the finest houses in town, a six-room double-ell frame structure with flowerbeds and a white picket fence. Newcomers to the town quickly became aware of a friendly populace and an intense sense of community. “I wondered just why people would like a town like Johnson City, but it wasn’t long before I, too, liked it, because I found the people so warm and so friendly,” remembered Glidden. “It seemed after a period of about three months that I had lived in this little town all my life.”²⁷There were three churches: Methodist, Baptist, and Christian. None had a permanent pastor, and the members of all three attended the Sunday services of the church that happened to have clergy visiting that day. The frequent tent revivals attracted virtually everybody in town. These week-long affairs featured two services daily. Children would go swimming in the river after the last service, and then everyone would settle in for an evening picnic. “One thing about it is the cooperative spirit of the town—it was all one, you couldn’t tell one from the other,” Mamie Klett, a classmate of Lyndon’s, remembered. “Everybody cooperated and they had what they called Union Revivals, all the churches got in together and that happened each summer.”²⁸“In those days,” Otto Lindig said, “when a house was built all the neighbors helped. Maybe they had one carpenter, but all the neighbors helped … If one man worked two days and another man worked only half a day, they forgot about it.”²⁹

There were dance halls in neighboring German communities like Hye. “Everybody went to the dance, mothers, daddies, kids, and the babies would be put in the back on a pallet, and they danced till 4 o’clock in the morning,” remembered Gene Waugh, a local merchant.³⁰

Freight was brought in from Austin, first by mule team or horse-drawn wagon, and then by truck. In the summer, families imported ice in two to three hundred?pound blocks from the state capital for their sawdust-lined iceboxes.³¹At the center of the town’s life was the school. Germans had always valued education; Fredericksburg, Blanco, and Johnson City were exemplary in this regard. During the first quarter of the twentieth century, central Texas furnished the state with a disproportionate number of public school teachers.³²Johnson City’s institution of learning was a two-story, six-room structure that employed six teachers. Elementary classes were held in the three rooms downstairs; two of the upstairs rooms housed secondary students. The middle room featured a stage, and the classroom walls could be folded back to convert the upper floor into a theater-auditorium. Here the students and community members gathered for plays, declamations, interscholastic league contests, and commencements.³³

In Johnson City, Rebekah began leading what basically was a double life. First there was Rebekah the delicate, reclusive, martyr. She would later portray herself as the oppressed sophisticate, exiled to a rural hell, washing, drawing water, cooking, scrubbing the floors virtually alone while her husband rambled. Her health did suffer. The births of Sam Houston in 1914 and Lucia Huffman in 1916 were difficult and required long periods of convalescence. Two minor operations in 1917 added to her problems. Some neighbors did recall her as sickly and somewhat of a recluse during this period. She even failed to show up regularly for church. Sam hired maids, took in poverty-stricken girls in return for their keeping house, and induced relatives to come and help out. When there was no one to do the cleaning, the chores backed up. The children re-membered the sink piled high with dirty dishes for days on end. At times, the Johnson brood ran wild. Rebekah depended on Sam to administer discipline. When he was gone, which was frequently, she would sometimes call on the neighbors to give spankings.³⁴

Then there was Rebekah the cultural and literary doyen of Johnson City. “The fellow that mowed my lawn up there … his mother used to do all the washing and ironing for my mama,” Sam Houston recalled. “I never saw mama do any washing nor ironing in my life that I know of. Now, Grandmother made the kids [clothes], sewed and that, but Mother had an extremely wonderful education.”³⁵Indeed she did, and she was not going to let anyone forget it. Sam Johnson’s bride was a stubborn woman, determined to live the life she had imagined for herself. She struggled to maintain the trappings of genteel society the best she could under the circumstances. To those few neighbors who dropped by she served tea in paper shell china cups, always on a tablecloth, never on oilskin. “I was determined to overcome circumstances instead of letting them overwhelm me,” she later recalled.³⁶But Rebekah Johnson was no shrinking violet, no delicate flower. “His mother was actually hard,” George Reedy, an LBJ aide, later recalled. “She was awfully hard.”³⁷She was by training and avocation a teacher, a journalist, and an aspiring intellectual. “She had aristocratic manners and bearing and had been an elocution teacher … in her younger years,” said Fritz Koeniger.³⁸Lyndon remembered his mother’s bed always piled high with books. To appease his wife, Sam bought her a Victrola, and then the local weekly newspaper, theRecord-Courier , which she edited for a year. Rebekah also served as Hill Country correspondent for theDallas Morning News , theAustin American-Statesman , and theSan Antonio Express , signing her columns RBJ. Sam Houston remembered clipping the columns for his mother, who had to send them in to the home newspaper to receive payment.

Sam Johnson was one of the first men in Johnson City to own an automobile, a Ford Model T. He subsequently bought Rebekah a Hudson, in which she was chauffeured by Guy Arrington, the typesetter at her newspaper.³⁹Rebekah Luruth remembered that her father didn’t want her mother to learn how to drive. She badgered Arrington to teach her until he was forced to confess that Sam had made him promise not to.⁴⁰

By the time Lyndon was ten, Rebekah’s health had recovered somewhat, and she began to take an intense interest in community education and culture, offering elocution lessons to children who would come to the house after school. “She was quiet, soft-spoken, and quite a lady,” recalled Kitty Clyde Leonard, another of Lyndon’s classmates. “She helped the youngsters with all of their schoolwork and interscholastic league. She helped Lyndon with debate.”⁴¹After her oldest son reached high school, Rebekah worked with the teachers to put on plays, including the traditional senior play. She would select a script, hold auditions for parts, drill the young actors and actresses, and generally supervise the production. The commuity paid a nominal sum to seeWild Oats Boy, Jethro’s Daughter, and Diamond in the Rough.⁴²

There were things that Sam and Rebekah agreed on. Johnson City may have been a small pond, but the Sam Johnsons were going to be among the biggest fish in it. Even more than money, education was the badge of rural aristocracy. Truman Fawcett, who owned the drug store, denied that the Johnsons were poor. “I mean they were poor, but everyone was poor,” he observed. “We were all poor but not poverty stricken. But some families had more culture and more education than others, you know. Even my father’s family had some college education and other families did, too. They were poor, but they had what their standard of culture called for.”⁴³The Johnsons were educated, and they had the first bathtub in town. “They were the equivalent of the banker’s family,” Charles Boatner, a family friend, recalled, “the first family of Johnson City. They were the ones who got all the way to Austin and saw the world, and consequently they were the style setters.”⁴⁴Both Sam and Rebekah were determined that their children be seen as educated, cultured—witness Lyndon’s abortive dance and violin lessons. For Rebekah, the emphasis was on literature and history. “She’d just sit up in bed and read all day and all night, and try to make everybody else read all day and all night,” Lyndon told Isabelle Shelton. “Largely she was a great Browning woman, a great Tennyson woman, and she liked biographies because all the children liked biographies … and didn’t make any difference whether it was about [Texas governor] Jim Hogg … or Andrew Jackson, [or] Abraham Lincoln.”⁴⁵

Sam’s focus was on current events and politics. “He was a fella that thought that a child should read—read the newspaper—keep up with the current events,” cousin Ava Johnson remembered. “He would drill you on what was really happening.” On one occasion Sam asked her what the Socialist Party was. When she replied that she did not know, he gave her a copy of the Pathfinder magazine with an article on Eugene V. Debs, a past and future presidential candidate. “Sure enough, the next evenin’ he asked.” As a teacher, Sam was as impatient as Rebekah was patient. “If he asked you what 7 # 9 was—you didn’t say 7 # 9? You said 63—by the time he got it out of his mouth—or you went to the end of the class. It was almost a disgrace to be at the end of the class.”⁴⁶The entire family dressed well. “The first time I ever saw Lyndon,” recalled Stella Johnson Luxcon, “he was in Wither’s store down here about four years old. He had on a little white linen suit.”⁴⁷The legislator?real estate dealer and his journalist-teacher wife also shared an extreme competitiveness. There was Sam’s famous early morning instruction to Lyndon: “Get up, Lyndon, every boy in town already has a thirty-minute head start on you.”⁴⁸As a coach of boys and girls participating in interscholastic league events, Rebekah was legendarily tough. “She taught me speech for the county meet, and I won my little school,” Lyndon said. “[I] had a little playmate that went to another school … he was the son of a Lutheran minister, and he had quite a brogue … he spoke German … I felt so sorry for him because you could hardly understand him.” Lyndon persuaded Rebekah to give the child elocution lessons. On the day of the county contest, the boys rode with Rebekah together in the same car. Lo and behold, the judges turned out to be German and were engaged rather than offended by the playmate’s accent. He defeated Lyndon. Rebekah cried all the way home in anger and frustration.⁴⁹

Both Rebekah and Sam believed in the God of the New Testament. She was a Baptist, but a particular sort of southern Baptist. She and her father embraced science, education, and the arts. Both were committed to the Social Gospel. They might have been paternalistic, but they were a far cry from the Reverend J. Frank Norris of Fort Worth, who preached hell and damnation, led the anti-evolution crusade, and conducted a reign of terror against science teachers at Baylor.⁵⁰From Christadelphianism, Sam had taken its emphasis on equality, compassion, and community spirit. He was also attracted by its anti-institutionalism. “Dr. Shelton of Dripping Springs … he was the legislator of Hays County while Sam was representing Blanco County … [They] were friends and the two smartest men in the Hill Country when I lived there,” Ruth Goddard, a family friend, remembered. “There was always the heavy spiritual feeling. They had—I guess it is the mystical—but they were men of faith.”⁵¹

Sam cared about the land and its people. Rebekah cared about service and sacrifice as noble abstractions. The mix produced a potent commitment to social justice. Indeed, visitors to the Johnson household frequently were treated to the oratory of William Jennings Bryan playing on the Victrola. For the Johnsons, social justice, public service, and community building were unquestioned values.⁵²Sam agreed with Rebekah’s contention that there were only three things a son of hers could do to fulfill himself: teach, preach, or go into politics.⁵³

But there were more differences than agreements in the marriage. Increasingly, those schisms centered on lifestyle and on Lyndon. Sam bought and sold real estate in and around Johnson City, traded in cotton futures, and invested in various schemes. He was able to purchase the Withers Opera House and set up his offices in the ground floor rooms. “I make a specialty of handling Farm and Ranch Lands,” his ad in a 1916 edition of the Record-Courier ran. “Yours for a square deal.”⁵⁴On a typical day, Sam would rise, have his breakfast, go down to the local barbershop for his shave, and check in with his office.⁵⁵Then he would be out in the country in his Model T, inspecting property and visiting. By all accounts he was a charming, gregarious man. “When I was quite young, to me, he seemed the most elegant man,” said Ruth Goddard. She remembered Rebekah coming with him one time and not saying a word, unsmiling and aloof.⁵⁶Ruth Goddard considered Rebekah a prig. Sam Johnson was a real man, and his drinking did not make him any less so in her eyes. Lyndon recalled one Thanks-giving when his mother had cooked a turkey, set the table with the best dishes, and put on “her fancy lace dress and big wide sleeve.” She was saying the dinner prayer when a knock came at the door. It was a Mexican family who lived on the edge of town and whom Sam had befriended. They bore a large green cake as a gift. Instinctively, Sam invited the family, which included five children, for Thanksgiving dinner. “The dinner was loud. There was a lot of laughing and yelling. I liked it. But then I looked at my mother. Her face was bent toward her plate and she said nothing … After the meal, she stood up and went to her room. I followed a little behind her and heard her crying in her room.”⁵⁷“Sam Johnson was a good man,” Ruth Byers, a neighbor, declared. “Mrs. Johnson was a different person. She never would get close to anyone.”⁵⁸

There was another reason for Rebekah’s coolness. “The one thing that I remember about his father was he had the reputation of being the slowest driver in the whole country,” John Koeniger related. “He was known to drink and drive, but it was agreed that he was never in any danger because he drove so slowly. He liked to come through town and motion to some boy to come and go with him and open the gates for him, for which he paid a reward, maybe fifty cents or something like that.”⁵⁹In the evenings, Sam would go to town, play dominoes, visit with his cronies, drink beer at King Casparis’s, or go to a dance with Clarence, who was a champion square dance caller.⁶⁰As Sam’s economic circumstances deteriorated, he would degenerate into an episodic drunk.

Nevertheless, Sam was the man of the family and a self-conscious role model. According to Lyndon’s sister Rebekah, he spoiled the girls in the family. He would never return from an out-of-town trip without a doll or some other gift for them. “Now Mr. Johnson was great with the girls,” Charles Boatner said. “They all remember how he would come to their bed in the morning and, especially Lucia, carry her in by the stove to dress so she wouldn’t get her feet cold.”⁶¹He was determined that his eldest son be a man’s man. When Lyndon was five, Rebekah had still not cut his hair. Sam became increasingly upset at the child’s shoulder-length blond curls and at the Buster Brown, Little Lord Fauntleroy costumes his wife dressed him in. One Sunday, while Rebekah was away at church, Sam got out the scissors and cut Lyndon’s hair. When Rebekah returned she was so mad that she did not speak to her husband for a week.⁶²

Apparently, the degree of Sam’s harshness with his son depended on his alcohol consumption and the price of cotton. “When he had too much to drink, he’d lose control of himself,” Lyndon recalled. “He used bad language. He squandered the little money we had on the cotton and real estate markets.”⁶³Sam was particularly concerned that his son not embarrass him in public. One day, some of the men in the barbershop pulled a prank on Lyndon. He was in the habit of sauntering in and plopping himself down in the shoeshine chair. Seeing him coming, they filled the tin bottom that held the chair together with oil and mustard seed. Lyndon had no sooner seated himself than he jumped up yelling in pain from his rapidly blistering butt. He ran toward his father’s office on the bottom floor of the opera house, pulling his pants down. Some of Sam’s friends had gathered and were kibitzing. Instead of consoling the wailing Lyndon, Sam pulled a board off an apple crate and whipped him until he stopped crying. Rebekah, of course, was furious.⁶⁴

To compensate, she played the role of ostentatious nurturer, especially with Lyndon. In the evenings after dinner, Rebekah would assemble the children at the table and by the light of the kerosene lamp go over their lessons with them. All too frequently her eldest son was absent or inattentive. She would recall of Lyndon: “I would not catch up with the fact that [he] was not prepared on a lesson until breakfast time of a school day. Then I would get the book and put it on the table in front of his father and devote the whole breakfast period to a discussion with my husband of what my son should have learned the night before … That way and by following him to the front gate nearly every morning and telling him tales of history, geography, and algebra, I could see that he was ready for the work of the day.”⁶⁵Like many southern women of the period, Rebekah attempted to rule her family through guilt. There were frequent tears. Some of Lyndon’s earliest memories are of his mother crying, of her waiting anxiously late at night for his father’s return, of the frustrations of trying to lead a cultured life in rural central Texas, or of some perceived personal slight. Most of Rebekah’s emotional outbursts were designed to get people to do what she wanted them to do or to feel sorry for her. Tears of empathy were rare. “Oh, she’d see your leg broken in two, or she’d see your face cut open, and she’d look at it, and she’d never cry,” Lyndon told an interviewer.⁶⁶“My father loved to dance and loved the people much more than mother did,” Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt recalled. “She liked her few people … She was very reserved and she didn’t like any form of intimacy.”⁶⁷“He [Sam] was I believe more involved with other people perhaps than so much involved with his own family,” Truman Fawcett observed. “She was more involved with her family and he was more involved with other people.”⁶⁸Lyndon agreed: “She was a little bit too selfish as far as her children were concerned … She put them ahead of anything … even her own husband.”⁶⁹

Increasingly, Sam and Rebekah led separate lives. She had her books, plays, students, newspapers, and children. He had his cronies, business, dominoes, dancing, and politics. In time, the house on Ninth Street came to reflect the compartmentalization of their conjugal existence. “She had her front porch and he had his front porch,” Charles Boatner noted. “They were even decorated different. She had spools on her side of the porch and his was plain … He had his friends; she had hers.”⁷⁰“If you’d come in Daddy’s entrance, you could go in there and talk politics and drink and you wouldn’t be bothered about your language,” Sam Houston said. “But if you crossed over that line, not like the David Crockett line at the Alamo but it was damn near as bad, go over in the other part, why, there was no drinking in the other part and no cussing.”⁷¹The house in Johnson City featured two bedrooms, a living room?dining room with a large fireplace, a kitchen with a wood-burning stove, a screened-in back porch, and a front porch. By 1916 the family had grown to include Sam, Rebekah, Lyndon, little Rebekah, Josefa, Sam Houston, and Lucia. Sometimes the girls slept on the back porch, the boys in one bedroom, and the parents in another. More often, the females occupied one end of the house and the males the other. Sam Houston recalled that when he was about three and Lyndon was nine, he would spend cold nights moving back and forth from Lyndon’s to Sam Ealy’s bed in an effort to keep his father and older brother warm.⁷²

There were playmates galore and fascinating places to play. Ava and Margaret Johnson had moved to town. There was Kitty Leonard and Louise Edwards. The Crider and Redford boys were among Lyndon’s closest friends. They would wander down to the gin, watch the bales come tumbling out, and when there was a lull jump off the loading platform. “The man that ran the gin was Mr. Stanford,” Gerrard Casparis, a local businessman recalled. “He had a big negra fella working for him there—he was a big jolly fella. He’d stand on the ground and we’d get on that platform and jump off and he’d catch us!”⁷³From April through September the kids could swim and fish in the river. “We carried watermelons and cantaloupes down and threw them in the creek so that they’d be very cool,” Truman Fawcett’s wife recounted. “Then we swam at dinnertime and along about three-thirty we went down and ate watermelons and came back. The boys, if they got there first, went in swimming without bathing suits and we couldn’t go in swimming. And we quite often took their clothes off and tied them in knots because we were mad.”⁷⁴In the late summer and early fall, families would take turns throwing harvest parties for Johnson City’s children. The family vehicle would collect them, and they would spend part of the day picking cotton or gathering corn and the rest swimming and picnicking.⁷⁵

The large barn behind Sam and Rebekah’s house was a favorite playhouse. “I’ll tell ya one of the best things that we did in that in-town barn,” Ava Johnson recalled. “We had cob fights. We’d take the white cobs and the red cobs and we’d choose sides … And whenever they hit you with that cob you was supposed to fall … we always chose sides and Lyndon would always have to the be leader.”⁷⁶During one game Lyndon fell out of the hay door and broke his leg. “Oh, I’m killed, I’m killed,” he screamed. Emmette Redford ran and got Dr. Barnwell, who set Lyndon’s leg on Rebekah’s kitchen table. Lyndon demanded and got his mother’s wooden bed to convalesce in. “Margaret and I went by to see him, and gave him his lessons, and he wanted to play mumble peg (a game in which contestants try to throw and stick a knife in a target),” said Ava. “I said, well Lyndon, there’s no place to play mumble peg in here. He said, that’s what you think, and he … took that knife and stuck it in that bed—in the beadboard of that wooden bed.”⁷⁷

The willful little boy who ran away in bids for attention grew only more spoiled and turbulent. When he was six, his mother arranged for him to deliver a recitation at a Confederate reunion. He showed up at home the morning of the big day with his head shaved. Furious and humiliated, Rebekah canceled the performance. Stella Gliddon, who attempted to teach Lyndon violin and dance, found him arrogant and difficult, the “kind of little boy that his mother had to tell him three or four times to get in the stove wood.”⁷⁸Luiza Casparis, who taught the elder Johnson boy in elementary school, remembered him as “a little tart, a real hellion.” On one ocassion, she told him he would have to stay in from recess and make up work he had missed. Instead of obeying, he stalked out and, as he passed Casparis’s window, spat at her. As punishment, she locked him in the ice house in back of the school. He screamed, hollered, and pushed so hard on the door that when she opened it, he fell out and bloodied his nose.⁷⁹

At times, Lyndon’s need for attention and affection seemed overwhelming. He was constantly drawing attention to himself, playing practical jokes on his classmates and acting the clown. “He was very sensitive … and wanted so much for people to like him,” Georgia Cammack, a classmate, recalled. In dance class, he spent most of his time poking, pinching, and tormenting the little girls. He sometimes ran around with Joe Payne, a rough boy from Austin whose step-father Sam knew. “It’s hard to remember who was meanest, cause we both like to get in trouble, some kind of devilment,” Payne remembered. They threw rocks at black kids and chased them. When Joe visited Johnson City, the two boys stayed out most of the night. “We got a couple of horses out, run ’em up and down the street, and like they got the town Marshal on us about it.”⁸⁰

Lyndon’s taste for costuming continued into adolescence. Where most boys wore overalls, jeans, and, at most, khakis to school, he frequently dressed in slacks, white shirt, and bow tie. He reportedly possessed the only Palm Beach suit and straw boater in town.⁸¹But he was a joiner, not a loner. In the fall and spring, young males spent many nights hunting coon, possum, or virtually any nocturnal animal they could find. They’d hunt at night for varmints,” Othello Tanner recalled. “And when they’d get out there they’d hear another hunting party off down the ways, and they’d holler and meet each other somewhere, and probably would be 10 to 15 little boys and they’d wrestle the rest of the night. They’d get back in home 4 or 5 o’clock the next morning—time to get a little nap before daddy called ’em out.”⁸²

Frequently Lyndon had to be spanked to persuade him to go to class. School records for 1920 show him missing 50 of 180 school days. When he did attend, he often did not complete his written work. Rebekah would take his texts, read them, and orally prepare Lyndon for his exams. He cajoled the brighter girls in his class to “help” him with his homework, which frequently meant doing it for him. “He never would have got through high school, if it hadn’t been for Kitty Clyde to do his math and for me to write his book reports for him,” Louise Edwards recalled.⁸³Contemporaries remember that Lyndon was always drawn to the older boys because they had the power. “Most of the [Crider] boys were older because they had been held out of school to work on the farm and they kind of ran the school,” Truman Fawcett remembered. “We didn’t have any coaches and they’d say who could play baseball and basketball and who couldn’t. Lyndon got in with that bunch of boys.”⁸⁴

Among male schoolchildren at the turn of the century, bullying was almost a given. Lyndon could be found on both sides. “I can remember that Lyndon and Louie Rountree and one of the Crider boys had been teasing a boy in school that rode a horse to school,” Kitty Leonard said. He was big, rough, and crude, a real hayseed, even by Johnson City standards. “They had been tormenting him and one day he came to school prepared for them. He took his knife—took them all together and set them down … back of Gene Stevenson’s store—and had them eating peanut butter and crackers without any water until they couldn’t eat anymore … He was threatening them with his knife if they didn’t go on and eat it … So they ate, and ate, and ate, and ate, peanut butter and crackers, ’til they were almost choked to death—without having anything to drink.”⁸⁵

A number of his teachers remembered Lyndon as affectionate, compassionate, and loyal. He was aggressive with his fellow students, but never cruel or unkind, one recalled. “He would crawl up on my lap and pet and pat me,” reported another. Lyndon, the Crider boys, and the Redford brothers were inseparable. One or more slept over with him or he with them virtually every night. “I was the closest friend Lyndon ever had,” Ben Crider said. “We were so poor that Lyndon would give me half of anything he had,” Otto recalled.⁸⁶On Sam Houston Johnson’s first day in school, he was writing on the blackboard when the urge to urinate seized him. The first-grade teacher had neglected to tell her class the routine for asking to go to the outhouse. The little boy wet himself and burst into tears. The teacher summoned Lyndon, then in the sixth grade, who came in, cleaned up Sam, consoled him, and led him home without a sign of embarrassment or annoyance.⁸⁷

No doubt Lyndon’s behavior reflected the amount of turmoil at home at any given time. His mother’s tears of frustration and loneliness, his father’s absences and bouts with both the bottle and the market provoked rebelliousness and defiance. There was also the specter of his grandmothers. Eliza Johnson, the frontier wife of Sam Sr., suffered a stroke when Lyndon was four or five. She became a constant presence in his life, paralyzed, withering, increasingly in-comprehensible, until she died five years later. Eliza had to be carried to a wheelchair when visitors came, where she sat mute and drooling. “Her skin was brown and wrinkled,” Lyndon remembered. “Her body was twisted. I was afraid that I was meant to kiss her. I tried to imagine her as the strong pioneer woman she had once been. I remembered the amazing stories I had heard about her staggering courage … But age and illness had taken all life out of her face … She sat perfectly still. And I was terrified to sit beside her.”⁸⁸His other grandmother, Ruth Baines, was physically unimpaired but menacing in her own way, judgmental, humorless, disapproving. Lyndon remembered her as “very conservative, very Baptist, anti-boys.”⁸⁹

There is another explanation for Lyndon’s mercurial behavior as a child, his defiance, rebelliousness, his disdain for schoolwork, and his fits of temper. He was the classic gifted and talented child. He had reached the third grade by age seven. His mind “seized upon learning,” one of his teachers recalled. “Lyndon Johnson was the most intelligent man I ever met,” McGeorge Bundy would later say. (This from the dean of the College at Harvard.) School bored him, especially the endless recitations by other students; the waiting and patience that the multigrade, one- or two-room school experience required drove him to distraction. Ben Crider believed that the reason Lyndon sought the company of older boys and men was that “he was a very brilliant young man and the boys his age wasn’t his class mentally.”⁹⁰According to Luiza Casparis, “If there were some boys playing ball out in the yard and some men sittin’ around whittlin’ and talkin’, you wouldn’t find Lyndon out there with the boys. No, he’d be right in the middle of those men listenin’ and talkin’.”⁹¹At an early age he began to display the almost frantic energy that characterized the rest of his life.

When he was eight, Lyndon helped his mother at the offices of theRecord-Courier as a printer’s assistant and gopher. He got a job shining shoes at the local barbershop and persuaded Rebekah to run an ad in the paper touting his services. Shoe shining allowed the boy to earn money and simultaneously be privy to the gossip and political talk that he would love all of his life.⁹²Tom Crider remembered that when Lyndon was ten, a candidate for state office came to town to speak. “Ol’ Lyndon went right up on the platform and shook his hand.”⁹³Throughout his childhood, the family had a dog of one sort or another. When one gave birth, he put up a sign in the barbershop window: “See me first for hound pups. Lyndon B. Johnson.” He sold all of them.⁹⁴When he got older, Lyndon chopped cotton with the Redford boys and herded goats for twenty-five cents a day.

Somewhat to his mother’s chagrin, Lyndon came increasingly to identify with his father, especially after his Grandfather Johnson died in 1915. The years between 1914 and 1920 were the best of Sam Johnson’s life. He was one of the leading citizens of Johnson City, the owner of two automobiles, the opera house, and large tracts of real estate in and out of town. He dressed well—suit, Stetson hat, and four-in-hand tie framed by a stiff celluloid collar—and sported an educated, cultured wife.⁹⁵At his gregarious best, Sam became active in politics once again. In 1914 and 1916 Sam Ealy and his brother-in-law, Clarence Martin, were instrumental in helping Governor James E. Ferguson carry Blanco, Gillespie, Kendall, and Llano Counties. It should be noted that although Sam may have been, like Ferguson, a champion of the tenant farmer, he was not one of them. The Johnsons and Martins were part of a rural aristocracy that formed an integral part of virtually every community under five thousand in Texas: businessmen, lawyers, and doctors. They could be found in Copeland, Granger, Bartlett, and Belton. They owned automobiles, and their women dressed in the fashions of the day, purchased not at the local dry goods store but through the Sears and Roebuck catalogue.

After the United States entered World War I, Sam was appointed head of the Blanco County draft board. When the sitting state representative from his district resigned his seat in the legislature to enlist, Sam announced for the now open position. Such was his reputation that no one opposed him in the special election held in February 1918. He subsequently won a two-year regular term in November of that year.⁹⁶As the second phase of Sam Johnson’s political career got into full swing, Lyndon began to accompany his father everywhere—to the office, to political rallies, to country stores, post offices, and voters’ homes. At the barbershop, Lyndon insisted on sitting in the chair adjacent to his father’s and receiving a mock shave. “I wanted to copy my father always, emulate him, do the things he did,” Lyndon said later. “He loved the outdoors and I grew to love the outdoors. He loved political life and public service. I followed him as a child and participated in it.”⁹⁷

At six Lyndon was handing out campaign pamphlets at a rally for Ferguson’s first run at office. He would sit for hours on his father’s end of the front porch and listen to the political talk. Among his fondest memories was being on the campaign trail with Sam: “We drove in the Model T Ford from farm to farm, up and down the valley, stopping at every door. My father would do most of the talking. He would bring the neighbors up to date on local gossip, talk about the crops and about the bills he’d introduced into the legislature, and always he’d bring along an enormous crust of homemade bread and a large jar of homemade jam. When we got tired or hungry, we’d stop by the side of the road … I’d never seen him happier … Christ, sometimes I wished it could go on forever.⁹⁸

Sam Johnson was an outspoken supporter of women’s suffrage and an equally outspoken opponent of the Anti-Saloon League and its allies. But it was on the nativist issue that he distinguished himself. The legislative session that began in the spring of 1918 was dubbed “Burn the Germans” by one newspaper. And, in fact, the night skies in and around Austin were frequently alight with flames from German homes and businesses set afire by Texan super patriots aroused by the wartime rhetoric of George Creel, Woodrow Wilson’s propaganda chief, and his minions. The state legislature responded to nativist pressure by passing House Bill 15, a measure that made it a felony punishable by a term of two to twenty years in prison for “uttering in the hearing of another person … disloyal or abusive language … concerning the entry of the United States of America into or continuation of the war.”⁹⁹Representative Johnson rose on the floor of the House to oppose the bill that would bear heavily on his German American constituents. He denounced the measure as an unconstitutional violation of every American’s civil liberties, and he pled with his fellow citizens to temper their patriotism with reason and compassion. The bill passed, but Sam and other liberals did succeed in eliminating from it a provision that would have granted the right of arrest to every Texas citizen.¹⁰⁰

His stand against Prohibition was almost as unpopular with his colleagues as his position on free speech, but they both endeared him to his beer-drinking German constituents. “Although sentiment ran high during this session,” declared the Fredericksburg Standard, “Johnson stood by his promises and voted against prohibition and kindred measures. He knew from the start that the small bunch of liberals would lose out in the maelstrom of fanatical propaganda, but he stood by his promise and voted accordingly, notwithstanding unfounded and vicious attacks on his character as a loyal American citizen.”¹⁰¹

It was during the 1918 special session that Sam began taking Lyndon to Austin with him. For a nine-year-old boy, life in the state capital with his legislator father was intoxicating. Little did he know that from then on, his life and that of Austin would be forever intertwined.

 

LYNDONJOHNSONrecalled that as a nine-year-old he would sit in the gallery of the state House of Representatives for hours watching the proceedings on the floor and then would wander around the halls trying to figure out what was behind all the activity. Growing bolder, he would sit or stand by his father on the floor of the House. Though not officially a page, he would run errands for Sam and nearby legislators, who always tipped. One of Sam’s seatmates remembered Lyndon as a bright, energetic, friendly boy, a bit too aggressive, but overall, pleasing.¹⁰²As a legislator, a drinking man, and, no doubt, an admirer of the ladies, Sam Johnson moved in interesting crowds. Texas solons entertained and were entertained by lobbyists in the elegant Driskill Hotel on Sixth Street, a Victorian edifice completed in 1886 whose marble floors, arched columns, and walnut paneling were famous throughout the South.¹⁰³Lyndon saw it all.

A year after the end of the Great War, in November 1919, Sam Johnson mortgaged everything he owned to purchase the entire 433-acre farm his grand-father and granduncles had carved out on the Pedernales. Stimulated by wartime government purchasing, cotton prices had risen to unheard of levels—forty cents a pound—and Sam saw a chance to make his fortune. To his family’s dismay, he decided to rent out the house in Johnson City and move back to the Pedernales where he (or they) could oversee farming operations. Suddenly, Lyndon found himself in the eighth grade in Albert School, a one-room enterprise near Hye. One of his classmates remembered the eleven-year-old Lyndon riding to school on a donkey, with his long legs trailing in the dust. The students, as many as sixty, were taught in one room. They were predominantly German, and there was some fighting and name-calling between the German and non-German children, an aftertaste of the prejudices generated by the Great War. Lyndon shied away from athletics and music (Albert School had a twelve-piece “Ompah” band) and tried to focus on his books. Rebekah helped with declamation and drama contests.¹⁰⁴During his absences, Sam would leave Lyndon in charge, and he would dutifully organize his brothers and sisters to chop wood, gather eggs, slop the pigs, and tend the other livestock. Rebekah had domestic help to do the washing and cleaning. When Lyndon turned thirteen, plans had to be made for him to attend high school. The nearest was in Johnson City, so he moved in with his Uncle Tom and Aunt Kitty Johnson, who lived on a ranch near town.

Meanwhile, Sam Johnson was going broke. The year 1920 brought searing heat and drought; the land yielded only a fraction of its normal production of cotton. Then, in 1921 the bottom dropped out of the market. With the stimulus of the war gone, the European economy in shambles, and a surplus glutting the market, prices fell to seven cents a pound and rose only slightly throughout the remainder of the decade.¹⁰⁵Sam couldn’t pay his mortgages and had to sell the farm for a few cents on the dollar. In a matter of three years, according to Lyndon, his father lost $100,000 and was forced to carry a debt of some $40,000 for the rest of his life. In 1922, the family, humiliated, moved back into the house in Johnson City.¹⁰⁶Sam refused to let the second great financial crisis of his life drive him out of politics, however. In the fall of 1920 he announced for a second full term in the Texas House of Representatives. He again enjoyed the support of theBlanco County Record and theFredericksburg Standard. During the previous session he had helped push through the legislature a bill appropriating $2 million for the relief of drought-stricken farmers. In addition, he had pressured the state department of education to increase subsidies to rural schools to the point where every student was eligible for seven months of free education. Sam won easily in 1920 and again in 1922.

Sam was a progressive legislator, working to protect the public from fraudulent stock sales, for example. But his real claim to fame was his opposition to the KKK. The second Ku Klux Klan was founded in Atlanta in 1915 by a former Methodist minister-turned-huckster named William Joseph Simmons. In 1920, Simmons joined with a shrewd publicity expert, Edward Clarke, in a scheme to sell the organization. Agents tried first to convert the leading citizens of a given community on the theory that lesser mortals would follow. Clarke and Simmons hoped to grow rich by collecting from each new member a $10 initiation fee known as a “klectoken.” The Klan was a self-styled superpatriotic organization dedicated to protecting white womanhood, Protestantism, and the purity of the white race. It was anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-Negro (al-though in this, the heyday of Jim Crow, there was little left to do to further degrade African Americans), anti-immigration, and anti-alcohol. From September 1921 to December 1922, national membership in the new KKK grew from one hundred thousand to seven hundred thousand.¹⁰⁷

The Klan was immensely, if briefly, popular in Texas, where it was welcomed by the silk stocking set as a means to better control working-class whites, by working-class whites as a source of excitement and a means of escape from their social and economic plight (“A Knight of the Invisible Empire for the small sum of ten dollars,” H. L. Mencken observed. “Surely Knighthood was never offered at such a bargain.”), and by Protestant clergymen as a means to restore moral au-thority. According to one historian, it was the appeal to moral authority that was most important in the formation and growth of the Texas Klan, whose membership numbered between seventy-five thousand and ninety thousand by the close of 1921. The state recorded over eighty whippings administered by various Klaverns in that year alone. Among the victims were a Houston lawyer accused of fraternizing with blacks, a Beaumont doctor charged with performing abortions, a Houston attorney accused of annoying young girls, and a Bay City banker allegedly guilty of domestic abuse and infidelity. In Dallas a black bellboy suspected of pandering for white prostitutes was whipped and the letters KKK burned into his forehead with acid.¹⁰⁸

During the regular session of the legislature in 1922, Wright Patman, Sam Ealy’s deskmate, introduced a resolution putting the House on record as condemning the Klan by name and labeling it “un-American.” When that proposal failed, Patman offered a bill to make it an offense “for two or more persons to conspire together for the purpose of injuring, oppressing, threatening or intimidating any person” and to “go in disguise upon the public highways.” It died in committee.¹⁰⁹Sam spoke forthrightly and publicly for both measures. His stand was popular with his German constituents, but not with others. “The Ku Klux Klan had threatened to kill him on numerous occasions after he had made a widely publicized speech on racial tolerance before the state legislature,” Sam Houston recalled. “His words were quoted in newspapers all over the state, mostly in articles and editorials that condemned his stand, and almost immediately he started receiving anonymous phone calls and unsigned letters that threatened his entire family.”¹¹⁰

On one occasion, when Sam Ealy received a particularly offensive call, he exploded. “Now, listen here, you kukluxsonofa bitch,” he shouted into the receiver, “if you and your goddamned gang think you’re man enough to shoot me, you come on ahead.” Throughout the night, Sam, together with his brothers George and Tom, sat on the porch with their shotguns, waiting. Nobody came. From that day until he left the legislature in 1924, Sam always carried a pistol.¹¹¹

The Klan’s star declined as rapidly as it had risen. When some of its members in Tenaha kidnapped from a hotel a young woman whom they suspected of being a bigamist, stripped her to the waist, beat her with a wet rope, and tarred and feathered her, a wave of revulsion swept the state. Both the Texas Chamber of Commerce and the Texas Bar Association, led by a young San Antonio lawyer named Maury Maverick, voted to denounce the organization.¹¹²Lyndon later attributed his lack of bigotry to his father, citing his stand on the Klan.¹¹³But it was the hooded brotherhood’s hypocricy and holier-than-thou attitude rather than race that moved Sam Ealy. When theHouston Chronicle asked various legislators to give their view of the Klan, Sam responded, “I am for the old Ku Klux Klan, but not the new.” Patman contended that Johnson was remembering the organization’s struggle against northern radicalism in the wake of the Civil War, but he also acknowledged that his deskmate was not in favor of giving blacks the right to vote.¹¹⁴

The Johnson family’s attitude toward African Americans during the teens and twenties is largely a matter of speculation. There were only one or two blacks living in Johnson City, but near Fredericksburg a community of some forty African Americans resided on land they had acquired after the Civil War. Apparently several of them were successful farmers and stock raisers. Judge Baines, Rebekah’s father, did considerable business in “the Peyton Colony,” as it was called.¹¹⁵More than likely, Sam and Rebekah supported Jim Crow, but not the cruder forms of racism so evident in the South, including parts of Texas. They would have agreed with Booker T. Washington that in return for giving up the vote temporarily and accepting segregation, African Americans ought to enjoy every economic and educational opportunity and be allowed to climb white society’s ladder of civilization.

Lyndon could recall only one story from his childhood in any way touching black-white relations. One day Melvin Winters, a road crew boss for a private construction company, brought a gang of some forty black construction laborers to Johnson City to work on a road project. In the saloon, a local redneck and bully confronted Winters and warned him to get his charges out of town by sun-down. Winters refused and a mammoth fight broke out. It spilled out into the streets, attracting a crowd of townspeople, including Lyndon, who cheered for Winters. Finally, the road crew boss managed to get on top and began beating the man’s head against the sidewalk, yelling, “Do my niggers stay? Do my niggers stay?” “Yes,” replied the bully. “Yes.”¹¹⁶Sam Ealy may have once supported Joe Bailey, an avowed segregationist, but his personal beliefs made it impossible for him to be a thoroughgoing racist. “Though not exactly an atheist or agnostic, he never seemed to give much thought to a formal religion,” Sam Houston said. “Still, he was deeply committed to certain ideas that you might consider religious. He was certainly a believer in the dignity of all human beings regardless of race or creed, and some of that rubbed off on all of us.”¹¹⁷

During these years Sam’s financial problems bore heavily upon him. Visitors to the legislature noted that the once dapper, poised legislator from Johnson City seemed gaunt and stooped, “a cadaverish looking fellow with a [large] Adam’s apple.”¹¹⁸To save money, Sam began sleeping on a cot in a large tent with other impecunious lawmakers; they hired a cook and attempted to survive on a dollar a day. After the family moved back to Johnson City, he was stricken with an unknown illness that caused him to waste and suffer outbreaks of boils. He was so sick that he had to drop out of the legislature before it finished its term in 1923 and take to his bed.¹¹⁹Residents of Johnson City remember calling on Sam Johnson at home; he was so weak that he could not rise for days at a time and had the family put his bed on the porch, where he could receive visitors.

Sam retired from the legislature in 1924 at age forty-six. In the short run, the best job he could land was as a $2.00-a-day game warden. He could never get politics out of his blood, however. When his health allowed, he spent as much time as possible in Austin, mostly drinking at the Driskill bar. To his family’s intense embarrassment, Sam could sometimes be found sleeping off his binges in the wagon yard at Second and Congress.¹²⁰“When things went really bad,” a family friend observed, “he did start drinking too much. He didn’t do that always, but when things got too bad, you know, when the depression was at its worst, and the cattle market and the cotton market was really gone, his means of livelihood just vanished. And he had a wife and five children. Then he did get depressed, but other times he was an energetic, vital kind of man, like Lyndon.”¹²¹

In 1922, at age thirteen, Lyndon moved upstairs into Johnson City High School. The next three years were typical and relatively pleasant. Although not studious, Lyndon was a quick learner, and with his mother’s and girlfriends’ assistance, a successful student. The curricular emphasis was on English, history, math, and languages—Spanish and German. Science instruction was purely theoretical; laboratories were nonexistent. There was poetry memorization—“Evangeline” and “The Ancient Mariner”—and themes. “We had math assignments nearly every night of the world to do at home,” remembered classmate Louise Edwards. “We had two years of Algebra, then we had Plane Geometry, and Solid Geometry and Trigonometry.”¹²²Contemporaries remember young Johnson and the Redford brothers, Emmette and Cecil, continually preoccupied with politics and current events. Emmette, who would later become a professor of government at the University of Texas and president of the American Political Science Association, could usually be seen with a copy of theCongressional Record protruding from his back pocket.¹²³The Redford boys and Lyndon spent much of their free time at the courthouse when a trial was under way, listening to Clarence Martin or some other colorful country lawyer. “Well, there wasn’t anything in town except three churches and a courthouse,” Emmette later observed, “and although Lyndon and I gave some attention to what was going on in the churches … we were more interested in what happened at the courthouse.”¹²⁴

Sports were a prominent part of the lives of Johnson City High School students and, in fact, a focus for the entire community. “Down here at the three points where you come into town, where the highway comes this way and goes out that way was part of the Fawcett farm,” Truman Fawcett remembered, “and we had a big relay track out there with baseball rounds. It was under the auspices of the school. Both boys and girls ran track and relay and played ball.”¹²⁵Volleyball and tennis were available for Lyndon’s last two years. “Albert Morrison [a high school teacher] took a great interest in us,” Louise Edwards said. “He put up a tennis court, and of course, he had the one arm, but he got out there and trained us to play tennis.”¹²⁶Lyndon’s specialty was baseball, which he had played since he was six. Tall and rangy, he was a solid first baseman for the Johnson City nine. In basketball he was more successful as a cheerleader than as a player.

Lyndon’s real skill, however, lay in debate. He won his first contest in 1921 at Klaerner’s Opera House in Fredericksburg. The question of the day was whether to divide Texas into five states, as provided for in the state constitution. When he was a senior, he and John Casparis, a tenth-grader, won first in the Blanco County meet and finished third in the district at San Marcos.¹²⁷The topic for the county meet was the pros and cons of U.S. participation in the League of Nations, and for the district meet the relative merits of the Monroe Doctrine.¹²⁸

Lyndon graduated in 1924 at age fifteen. He was one of six students, including Louise Edwards, Emmette Redford, Kitty Clyde Leonard, and his cousin Margaret. It was an elite and unusually small group. When Principal Scott Klett came to Johnson City, he had found a wide discrepancy in the abilities and accomplishments of students within a given grade. He decided to do something about it. “I’m thinking some twenty-five or thirty children always in our group,” Louise Edwards recalled. “When we got into high school, we had a little shake-up. A new principal came … He decided that some children were too far advanced. [The others] were not doing the work that they should do for that particular grade. Our class was divided and a number of our classmates stayed behind and a few of us went on. I’m thinking there were just about ten of us out of the thirty that went on into the next grade. Then when we finished school in 1924, there were just six of us to graduate.”¹²⁹

Lyndon dated in high school, most frequently Kitty Clyde Leonard, a pretty girl whose classmates predicted a future as a model for her. Dating in that day and time usually meant walking together to church, to the opera house for a once-a-month showing of a movie, or to a “snap” party. “Some young fellas would come, ask the mother—‘Can we have a party tonight?’ And—yes,” remembered Mamie Klett. “Well then, they’d go out and spread the word around … There’s gonna be a party at such and such a house.”¹³⁰The girls would station themselves around the outside walls of the parlor. A boy would approach one and snap his fingers. The couple, holding hands, would go outside and station themselves under a tree. When the next couple came out, they would chase the pair around the house until they caught them, at which point they exchanged partners.¹³¹

But there was another social realm in which Lyndon moved, a rougher, more dangerous male world. When Principal Klett began dating Dena Meyer, one of the new young teachers at the high school, Lyndon and the Crider boys began spying on them. They would cling to the rear bumper of Klett’s car when he and his girl were on their way to park and then harass them. The boys would peer in the principal’s window in hopes of catching a glimpse of his love life. The young teacher he was dating did not last the year.¹³²Bootleg liquor was readily available; on more than one night Lyndon and the Criders failed to return home. Christian Lindig recalled that a group of Johnson City boys was constantly stealing his homemade wine. “I’m not calling any names,” Lindig said, “but one of them is the son of a representative.”¹³³Then there were the dance halls. Reingold, a tiny German community near Willow City, boasted a huge hall that featured beer, whiskey, and dancing at least once a month. “I know Myrtle [Shelly Crawl] … she was a real good dancer … the boys would come up there. She was married, but then she still danced with all the boys. And she said she remembered helpin’ teach Lyndon how to dance.”¹³⁴And the boys fought. According to Louise Edwards’s brother, he and Lyndon joined battle every Friday afternoon. “He wanted my girl friend and I wanted his, and we’d fight.”¹³⁵Apparently, Lyndon had a terrible temper. He rarely lost it, but when he did, he was completely out of control. An argument with another boy at the blacksmith’s shop degenerated into a fistfight. Lyndon picked up a small anvil and would have brained his opponent if one of the men present had not intervened.¹³⁶

When Lyndon was fifteen, he joined the Christian (Disciples of Christ) church. Explanations vary. His mother recalled that he was dating a girl who was a Disciple. Accompanying her to a revival, he became so caught up in the evangelical fervor that he allowed himself to be baptized. According to other sources, it was his cousins, Ava and Margaret, that attracted him to the Christian church. But there was more to it than that. Put off by the fire-and-brimstone sermons of his mother’s Baptist ministers, Lyndon began to look around for a kinder, gentler religion. The preachers, Lyndon later recalled, were “the Billy Graham type” who would get people to thinking they were “goin’ to hell in a hack … I got to believing it pretty deep.”¹³⁷“And they told me that the devil was going to get the whole outfit of us, real hell fire and damnation stuff.”¹³⁸Moreover, he had attended his father’s occasional Christadelphian camp meetings and was exposed continually to his father’s railing’s against Baptist preachers as teetotaling hypocrites who pandered to the guilt and prejudices of their congregations. Joining the more liberal Christian church seemed the answer to his dilemma. The inclusiveness and tolerance of the denomination, with its emphasis on good works, was to have a lasting impact on Lyndon. Rebekah was not pleased, however. “I marched right home and told Momma,” Lyndon said, “and she cried. She said that all of us were Baptists, and I was the only one that joined the Christian Church.”¹³⁹

A continual nagging sidebar to Lyndon’s life as a high school student was the conflict between his mother’s and father’s lifestyles, a conflict that he could not help but internalize. Rebekah joined a temperance society and continued to make no secret of her abhorrence of alcohol. Sam would periodically attempt to dry out; his neighbors recalled his constant, almost frenzied gardening. When Sam fell off the wagon, which was fairly often, he fell hard. John Casparis remembers that when Sam was still in the legislature, he would sometimes speak to the assembled student body in the upstairs auditorium of the Johnson City School. On more than one occasion, he was so intoxicated that he stumbled and fell going up and down the stairs. “Several times I’ve seen Sam come to the school just lit up like a country church and have to climb up the steps on his all fours.”¹⁴⁰Lyndon was mortified. There is the famous story of his standing outside the Johnson City saloon calling in a loud voice for his father to come home to his family.¹⁴¹

Sam Ealy and Lyndon’s relationship was complex: loving, fearful, competitive, protective. Later in life, Lyndon recalled for an interviewer that he frequently went hunting with his friends but did not like to kill the small animals, the squirrels and rabbits, that abounded in the Hill Country. Noticing that he never brought any game home, Sam challenged his son. Was he a coward who could not shed blood? Lyndon recalled that he took his .22, went into the hills, shot a rabbit, and proceeded to throw up. When his father was away, Lyndon would refuse to do his chores, disobeyed his mother, and got into his father’s personal things. When he returned, Sam would take a strap to the boy, but the pattern would only repeat itself. Later, after he was out of high school, Lyndon borrowed his father’s car for a blind date. When the girl in question realized that she was three years older than her escort, she refused to go out with him. There-upon, Lyndon gathered up a few of his friends for beer and joy riding. The luck-less youth hit a bridge and overturned the car. No one was hurt, but Lyndon was terrified. Instead of going home to face his father, he bought a bus ticket for New Braunfels, intending to hide out for a few days with an uncle who lived there. By the second day, Sam had tracked his son down. He phoned: “Lyndon, I traded in that old car of ours this morning for a brand-new one and it’s in the store right now needing someone to pick it up … I was wondering if you could come back, pick it up, and drive it home for me … I want you to drive it around the courthouse square, five times, ten times, fifty times, nice and slow. You see there’s some talk around town this morning that my son’s a coward, that he couldn’t face up to what he had done.”¹⁴²Lyndon dutifully returned and picked up the car.

The tension between his parents, his father’s unpredictability, his mother’s lofty expectations, spoken and unspoken, continued to produce rebelliousness and defiance. Lyndon’s table manners were atrocious. He would eat with loud slurping noises until his mother burst into tears and left the table. When his father was out of town, Lyndon would refuse to do his chores and boss the other children. He would use and abuse his parents’ personal possessions. “No one could boss him or persuade him to do anything he didn’t want to do,” Sam Houston recalled.¹⁴³

Parental conflict and mixed signals aside, Lyndon was able to live the life of a fairly normal teenager in rural Texas. His parents and siblings loved him, and he them. They wanted the best for him, and he knew it. He was part of a close-knit community that “cared when you were sick and knew when you died,” as Sam Ealy put it.¹⁴⁴Despite his ups and downs, Lyndon performed satisfactorily in school. He was extremely bright, as were the select group of classmates who survived together to enter the eleventh grade (the final grade in the Johnson City School). All of Lyndon’s contemporaries remarked on his confidence and social skills. “He had a very pleasing personality and a very lovable personality,” Georgia Edgeworth recalled. “If he wanted something, he could usually get it through persuasion. He was especially good with the elderly, remembering their names, visiting them when they were sick.”¹⁴⁵He seemed to have a confidence beyond his years, particularly in public venues.

One of the highlights of the school year was the senior play. Lyndon acted the lead in both the tenth and eleventh grades. The production his senior year was TheThread of Destiny , a plantation melodrama. “Lyndon was the hero, and I was the heroine,” Louise Edwards remembered. To earn money for a senior trip, the class took the production on the road. “The people at Cyprus Mills though—they thought it was right out of New York,” Edwards said.¹⁴⁶At the commencement exercises held in the Johnson City High auditorium, Lyndon, six feet tall, rail thin, with his curly black hair cropped short, read the class poem. The senior motto was “Give to the world the best that you have and the best will come back to you.”¹⁴⁷The official prophecy predicted that Lyndon Johnson would become governor of Texas.