CHAPTER 5

LADY BIRD AND THE NYA

THE YOUNG WOMAN WHO WOULD CAPTURELYNDON’Simagination hailed from a wealthy but troubled east Texas family. Claudia Taylor was born on December 22, 1912, in a seventeen-room southern mansion dubbed “the Brick House,” which lay tucked away in the piney woods near the hamlet of Karnack some fifteen miles from the Louisiana border. Her father, Thomas Jefferson “T. J.” Taylor, an imposing man, six feet, two inches and well over two hundred pounds, had come to east Texas in 1899 from Alabama. The son of a tenant farmer, T. J. had arrived under a cloud. Rumor had it that he and his brother had robbed a train. In Texas, he paid $500 for a section of land at the intersection of two trails and made plans to open a general store. Living in a boarding house for $5 a week, T. J. managed not only to build a dry goods operation but to establish a small agricultural and business empire.¹

By the time Claudia was born some thirteen years later, her father owned a fifteen thousand-acre cotton plantation, two general stores, a cotton gin, and a fishing business on nearby Lake Caddo. In fact, as Lady Bird recalled, her father, known to blacks as “Mr. Boss” and to whites as “Mr. Cap’n,” ruled Karnack and its environs as a feudal fiefdom. More than half of the residents of Harrison County were black, and many worked as sharecroppers for T. J. Taylor, buying the necessities of life at hugely inflated prices from his general store. “I worked for him sunup to sunset for fifty cents a day,” recalled Dorsey Jones, one of the oldest African Americans living in Harrison County.²

After establishing himself in Texas, Taylor returned to Alabama to marry Miss Minnie Lee Patillo, daughter of a Confederate officer who was also one of the largest landholders in Autauga County. Her father viewed T. J. as nothing more than a low-life criminal, and no members of the family, including Minnie’s beloved sister, Effie, attended the wedding.³The couple was married in Taylor’s brother’s house. Minnie, a bright but physically unattractive girl, stout with thin reddish-blond hair, had had a difficult childhood. Her father, Luke, liked to boast he was “the meanest man in Autauga County.” Her mother, Sarah, had been married previously and had two children by a man killed in the Civil War. She never got over him, and Luke resented both the dead man and his children. Sarah died bitter and broken, her family riddled with suicides and alcoholism. After Minnie ran off with T. J. Taylor, Effie took to her bed with migraines and ulcers.

Claudia’s past reeked of the Civil War, Reconstruction, slavery, of the burden of history borne by a land torn between cruelty and gentility, education and ignorance, promise and hopelessness. When she was five, a group of white men confronted a local black in the woods near Karnack. They accused him of “some crime,” she remembered. “The poor man was so terrified that he just took off running. The white men shot him in the back.” The little girl, shivering, heard the story in her father’s general store. Claudia’s favorite author was William Faulkner. “He describes a South I’m somewhat acquainted with,” she later told biographer Jan Jarboe Russell. “It has a dark side. It’s shadowy but yet it speaks to a world I know.”⁴

Minnie followed national and international affairs and was active in local politics. Not surprisingly, she was a committed suffragist.⁵Contemporaries recall her as somewhat aloof. “I remember that she wore this large hat with a veil and her carriage was excellent,” said Lucille McElroy, a Karnack resident.⁶She gave birth to her first son, Thomas J. Taylor Jr., on October 20, 1901, and her second, Antonio J., on August 29, 1904. The pregnancies damaged her health and further strained her relationship with her ever-absent husband.

By all accounts, T. J. Taylor was a shameless womanizer, making little effort to hide his affairs. Rumor had it that he had fathered a son by a local black woman. The child was nicknamed “Sugar” because he would periodically come by the general store and Taylor would give him bags of sugar. He made little effort to hide his faithlessness or his racism. A contemporary, Jack Hayner, remembered dropping in at the general store one morning with his hunting dog. When the dog persisted in sniffing Mr. Boss’s groin, he told Hayner, “I’ve been out with a nigger woman this morning. The dog’s got her scent.”⁷Shortly after the birth of her second son, Minnie Patillo Taylor took her children and left for Alabama.

Confronted with two ailing daughters, Luke Patillo turned to Dr. John Kellogg, who ran his famous sanitarium out of a six-story building in Battle Creek, Michigan. As the Patillos listened, Kellogg, dressed dramatically in a long white coat, lectured on the physical and psychological benefits of a strict vegetarian diet, exercise, sweat baths, and frequent enemas. Meanwhile, T. J. Taylor was ruthlessly building his business empire, silently, relentlessly competing with “Old Man Patillo.” He was rich and wanted people to know it. Mr. Cap’n paid the salary of the Methodist minister, whose sermons he listened to, and half of the Baptist minister’s, whose sermons he did not. He loved dependency. “You were nobody in this world without a white man standin’ behind you,” Dorsey Jones said. “Boss Taylor was a good stand-behind man.”⁸As long as you stayed and worked. Many a local black forfeited his land to T. J. Taylor for bad debt. Despite their differences, T. J. and Minnie reconciled briefly in 1910. He bought her the Brick House as a present.

On December 22, 1912, Minnie gave birth to a daughter, Claudia Alta, whom T. J. nicknamed Lady Bird after the nursery rhyme: “Lady Bird, Lady Bird, fly away home, your house is on fire and your children will burn.” (Actually, the rhyme T. J. had in mind begins, “Lady bug, Lady bug … ”)⁹The baby was bright-eyed and pretty, with fair skin and dark hair. The prominent Taylor nose, which would inevitably hook, was already evident. Minnie was thirty-nine and did not feel well enough to care for three children, so the two boys were sent away to the Raymond Riordan School for Boys in upstate New York. In 1918, at age forty-four, Minnie Taylor became pregnant again. Two months later, she fell down the circular staircase at the Brick House. Rushed to the hospital in Marshall, Minnie died on September 14, 1918. It was the defining moment of Lady Bird’s young life.¹⁰

There were rumors that T. J. had pushed his wife down the stairs. In 1909, during one of Minnie’s trips to Michigan, her husband filed for divorce, claiming that she had abandoned him and that she was mentally unbalanced. Their sons were then seven and five. In 1911, with Minnie still absent, the divorce was granted. At this point she returned, and in a retrial the divorce decree was overturned. Minnie feared the loss of custody of her children and of her inheritance. The reunion was hardly a joyous one.¹¹

Lying on her deathbed in Marshall, Minnie Taylor called her daughter to her. Lady Bird remembered, “She looked over at me and said, ‘My poor little girl, her face is dirty.’” She called for a washcloth and carefully wiped Lady Bird’s face. “ ‘Nobody at home to care for you but the Black nurse,’ she said. ‘Poor child.’” Minnie was more right than she knew. T. J., who waited almost a year to tell his two sons in boarding school that their mother had died, was not about to take up the task of raising a little girl. The period from September through December, when tenants brought their cotton to be ginned, was the busiest time of the year for Mr. Boss. A few months after Minnie’s death, T. J. put Lady Bird on the train and sent her off to Alabama. She bore with her a suitcase containing her worldly possessions and a sign around her neck that read “Deliver this child to John Will Patillo,” who was Minnie’s uncle.¹²Lady Bird had in effect become an orphan.

Lady Bird responded to the devastating loss of her mother by withdrawing emotionally. Instead of melting into a pool of self-pity, however, she transformed her pain into feelings of sympathy for her undeserving father and her brothers. After she arrived in Alabama, no one in the Patillo family was allowed to mention Minnie’s death. “No one dared say a word about it—including me,” Lady Bird later said.¹³A friend of Effie’s remembered the first time she saw Lady Bird. On an automobile ride into the country, the little girl, clad in a starched dress, sat silently on the back seat reading a book and munching fruit. The ability to withdraw, to rise above whatever storm threatened her psychological and emotional balance, would remain with her throughout the rest of her life. Both of her daughters, Lynda Bird and Luci Baines, would recall their mother as the most emotionally self-contained person they had ever met.

After a stay of several months in Alabama, it was decided that Effie and Lady Bird would move back to Karnack. Lady Bird could attend elementary school at the one-room Fern School, located on a wooded hill near the Brick House. In theory, Aunt Effie would take care of Lady Bird; in reality, it was the child who cared for the adult. Effie continued to be a self-conscious semi-invalid. Rarely was a trip made to Marshall without a visit to the drug store for a bottle of Lydia Pinkham’s Tonic. Nearly 40 percent alcohol by volume, Lydia Pinkham’s was the perfect medicine for Effie’s aching head and queasy stomach. When she was eleven, Lady Bird accompanied her aunt on one of her periodic visits to Battle Creek. She did calisthenics with Dr. Kellogg and caught a glimpse of the famous senator from Wisconsin, Robert “Fighting Bob” LaFollette. Lady Bird’s playmates at the Brick House were the children of Cap’n Taylor’s black employees. She even occasionally attended services at the local black church.

When it was time to enter the seventh grade, Lady Bird and Effie moved to nearby Jefferson, an important nineteenth-century inland port that had gone to seed. Jefferson was quintessential Old South, its social life dominated by the local chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy. It was here that Lady Bird developed her marked southern accent; for the rest of her days, unless making a conscious effort, she would roll her r’s and use the shorta in place ofi. When she was ready for high school, she and Effie moved back to the Brick House, and Lady Bird was transported to and from Marshall, a town of fifteen thousand, by one of T. J.’s employees.¹⁴

Two years after Minnie’s death, Lady Bird’s father married one of his employees, Beulah Wisdom, an attractive young woman with a business degree from a college in Tyler. Lady Bird was simultaneously attracted to and repelled by Beulah. She and Effie resented the intrusion; they were the women of Brick House. Beulah wore short skirts, bobbed her hair, and careened around Karnack and environs in her new car. Married to a rich older man, she made no attempt to hide her sexuality. Lady Bird admitted she was pretty, but “in a coarse and crude sort of way.”¹⁵But there was something about her independence and daring that was attractive. She was so un-Aunt Effie. During one of her trips to Battle Creek, Lady Bird, in a Beulah-like moment, paid $2.50 to ride in a biplane with an aviatrix. “It was the most exciting ride of my young life,” she later remembered.¹⁶In the clouds she was above it all, in control, free.

 

BY THE TIME SHE REACHED HIGH SCHOOL,Lady Bird had come to see books and learning not as an escape from reality but as a means for living a fuller and freer life. She made excellent grades, graduating third in her class. At Marshall High, she was neither popular nor unpopular. Her best friend, Emma Boehringer, was also a rival, a pretty girl who sometimes excluded Lady Bird from her clique. Although her father had money, the girl from Karnack did not pay much attention to fashion. She was sensible, self-effacing, down-to-earth. There were boyfriends, J. H. Benefield in Jefferson and later Thomas C. Soloman, but Lady Bird had to be escorted to the senior prom by the boyfriend of a friend whose mother felt sorry for her. Lady Bird’s real love was nature. She and her friends spent the summers roaming the woods, swimming in Lake Caddo, collecting the wildflowers to which she would later give so much of her life. She found consolation in her father’s power and money. And she realized that the root of his power was money. In 1928, she kept a running tab of monthly sales in Cap’n Taylor’s store—down to the penny. The total gross sales for that year alone for one store was $212,127.45. As an adult and successful businesswoman, Lady Bird would earn a reputation as a tight-fisted, no-nonsense manager. Not wealth particularly, but financial security was very important to her.

Graduating from high school at fifteen, Lady Bird enrolled in summer school at the University of Alabama. Her high school friend, Helen Bird, the daughter of the Episcopal priest in Marshall, talked her into attending St. Mary’s, an exclusive Episcopal girls’ school in Dallas, beginning in the fall. There, she made excellent grades, embraced Episcopalianism, but decided to transfer to the University of Texas for her final two years of college.¹⁷

When Lady Bird arrived in 1930, Austin was the place to be for a young person. Her friend, Emma Boehringer’s sister, Eugenia (“Gene”), picked her up in her car. They drove down Congress Avenue, passing the famous Driskill Hotel on their way to the Texas capitol, built of rosehued granite and modeled after the national Capitol. Gene drove her west to Zilker Park, which included the cold, clear-blue swimming hole of Barton Springs. Dominating the city was the sprawling UT campus, home to some 6,652 of the state’s brightest and most socially ambitious students. Despite paeans to gender equality, men came to UT to get an education that would land them a substantial job, and not a few women came to find a husband. Given the fact that men outnumbered women four to one, those interested in the latter goal could not have come to a better place. UT was typical of many state institutions: students could get an excellent education if they chose, or could graduate without getting much of one at all. Tuition was $25 a year, and for $10.50 students could buy a blanket “tax” that gained entry to all sporting and cultural events.

Lady Bird chose to stay in a boarding house with six other girls rather than in Scottish Rite, Littlefield, or one of the other large dormitories for women. Her roommate was Cecille Harrison, an outgoing blonde from San Antonio. Lady Bird pledged a sorority but was forced to drop out when her father objected to the organization as a waste of money.¹⁸For the next two years she ran with Gene, who worked as secretary to C. V. Terrell, head of the powerful Texas Railroad Commission. Lady Bird continued to dress down; her friends wore tailored ensembles with high heels, while she sported simple skirts and blouses and loafers. Despite her somewhat dowdy appearance, she had no trouble getting dates. Her companion for most of her last two years at UT was Duncan Dawson, “a handsome, smart man who was absolutely smitten with Lady Bird.”¹⁹Dawson covered the capital for the Dallas Morning News and was largely responsible for her decision to major in journalism.

Lady Bird was no prude. One afternoon, she and Wayne Livergood, a wealthy boy from Houston, and another couple drove to Nuevo Laredo. They drank gin and danced all night at a spot called the Bohemian Club. She, Cecille, and another friend became acquainted with Hiram King, a vice president of Sinclair Oil Company. A married man, King owned a large house on Mt. Bonnell. He frequently entertained the young women with cocktails and steaks. Her companions remembered the undue attention King seemed to be paying Lady Bird.²⁰Despite a relatively active social life, Lady Bird made As and Bs and graduated with two degrees, in journalism and history.²¹Politically, she and her friends were liberals. They all supported Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, who as governor would oppose the Klan, support repeal of Prohibition, and authorize $20 million in bread bonds to feed the hungry.

As her graduation present to herself, Lady Bird decided on a trip to Washington, D.C. Cecille Harrison agreed to accompany her. Gene Boehringer urged Lady Bird to go by the offices of Congressman Richard Kleberg and meet his handsome, dynamic young secretary, Lyndon Johnson. The two young women had a grand time touring the nation’s capital, but the trip did not include Lyndon. Instead, as she had planned, Lady Bird spent time with Victor McRea, a young man from Roby, who had just graduated from law school and taken a job with the postal service. Then, two weeks following her return to Austin, she stopped by Gene’s office at the Railroad Commission. Who should appear but Lyndon Johnson. He had a date with Dorothy Muckleroy, Gene’s roommate, who was there waiting. Before taking Dorothy to dinner, Lyndon asked all three out for a drink. “He was very, very good-looking.” Lady Bird later said. “Lots of hair, quite black and wavy, and the most outspoken, straightforward, determined young man I’d ever met.”²²While Gene and Dorothy were talking, Lyndon leaned over to Lady Bird and asked her to meet him for breakfast the next morning at eight at the Driskill Hotel Coffee Shop. Without really thinking, she agreed.

Lady Bird was attracted to Lyndon, but he had come on a bit strong. She decided to keep an appointment the next morning with Hugo Kuehne, an Austin architect she had hired to remodel the Brick House, and skip the date with young Johnson. In the summer of 1934, Beulah Taylor had taken up with one of her husband’s hired hands. Discovering the affair, Boss Taylor kicked both of them off his property. The divorce became final in September, and Taylor had asked Lady Bird to take charge of renovating the family home, which had fallen into disrepair. On her way to Kuehne’s office, which was next door to the Driskill, Lady Bird saw Lyndon waiting at a corner table. As she was leaving, he was still there. This time he saw her and waved her down. “I was sitting at the front table waiting for her, when I saw her come out of that office,” Lyndon said.

“I’ve always doubted whether she would ever have found the courage to walk in there otherwise.”²³

For the next hour she sat wedged into the coffee shop booth listening to a nonstop monologue by Lyndon on Lyndon. He related his family history, told her about Kleberg and his job. He was, she recalled, a young man who wanted to rise in the world by helping others. Lyndon seemed intoxicated with Roosevelt and the New Deal and bragged of his ability to maneuver the reactionary Kleberg into supporting legislation to help farmers, workers, small businessmen, and the jobless. “He began to tell me all about his job, his family,” she remembered. “And he just kept on asking the most probing questions: ‘What did you take in school? What’s your family like? What do you want to do?’ He was telling me all sorts of things I would never have asked him, certainly on first acquaintance.”²⁴“It was just like finding yourself in the middle of a whirlwind,” remembered Lady Bird of her breakfast. “I just had not met up with that kind of vitality before.”²⁵

After breakfast, the two got into the automobile Lyndon was driving, a showy Ford convertible complete with hand-tooled leather seats stamped with the King Ranch symbol, and spent the rest of the day driving around the hills of west Austin. Periodically, Lyndon would ask Lady Bird about her life and family, but before she could answer would interrupt with more about himself. He spoke glowingly of Rebekah and her capacity for self-denial. Lady Bird recalled the impression Lyndon’s description of his mother made: “I saw her as an absolutely lovely woman, who had given too much to her husband and family.”²⁶He made no secret that he had dated numerous other women, and he described his failed love affair with Carol Davis. Instead of being offended, Lady Bird was sympathetic and impressed. “My feeling was here was a very attractive man, who had all kinds of women interested in him,” she remembered. “I was a little amazed that he was at all interested in me.” At the close of the day, Lyndon asked Lady Bird to marry him. “You must be joking,” was her altogether appropriate reply, but she agreed to drive to San Marcos with him the next day to meet his parents.²⁷

The day with Sam and Rebekah was as strange for Lady Bird as the day before. Everything was so serious. Sam, Lady Bird noted, seemed “pretty much used up.” On this, the second day of their relationship, Lady Bird got the feeling Rebekah was evaluating her, judging her, seeing if she measured up. “I just wanted to reassure her that really I had no interest in taking her son away from her,” Lady Bird said, “and wasn’t at all sure that I wanted any part of him myself, and on the other hand if I did, it wouldn’t do her any harm.”²⁸From San Marcos Lyndon drove the somewhat stunned Lady Bird to Corpus Christi to show off the King Ranch. That night they had dinner with Ben Crider and then checked into separate rooms in a midtown hotel. The next day, Lyndon drove Lady Bird out to meet Alice King Kleberg, the family matriarch. At the close of the visit, she told the young couple that they were perfect for each other and advised them to get married. Back in the car, Lyndon informed Lady Bird that he had to go to San Antonio to pick up Malcolm Bardwell, secretary to newly elected Congressman Maury Maverick, and return to Washington. He again pressed her for a commitment to marry him. It was absurd to make such a momentous decision after such a short time, Lady Bird told him, but she invited him to stop by Karnack and meet her father on the way back to Washington.

Not surprisingly, Lyndon was impressed with the Brick House, the Taylor empire, and the Boss himself. More surprising, given that Lyndon continued to babble about himself and the New Deal throughout dinner, T. J. was impressed with his daughter’s suitor. “You’ve been bringing home a lot of boys,” he told Lady Bird after dinner. “This one looks like a man.”²⁹Taylor may have been impressed with Lyndon, but he also wanted to get his daughter out of the house. By then, Lady Bird’s father, sixty years old, had taken up with Ruth Scoggins, two years younger than Lady Bird. She would become his third wife.³⁰

As he left, Lyndon gave Lady Bird a book which he told her to think of as an engagement present. It was a collection of essays by a group of German journalists entitledNazism: An Assault on Civilization. “To Bird,” he inscribed it, “in the hope within these pages, she may realize some little entertainment and find reiterated here some of the principles in which she believes and which she has been taught to revere and respect.”³¹She responded with Voltaire’sCandide , whose absurdly optimistic protagonist reminded her of Lyndon. Over the next few weeks, the two continued their courtship by long-distance telephone and through the mail. As always, he was impatient when she did not respond to him immediately. “For three days, I’ve watched and waited for your second letter,” he wrote. “Honey, don’t be so long between notes.”³²

Lyndon was then enthralled by the dynamic liberal Maury Maverick, who was already beginning to attack some of FDR’s lieutenants as too conservative. “Maury Maverick and Malcolm Bardwell have been with me all week and every day has been a busy day for me,” he related. “We have visited dozens of departments to bring relief and satisfaction to … constituents.” Maverick took Lyndon to see the famous black Washington cleric, Elder Michaux, preach. “This was my first time to be in a Negro church,” he wrote, “but here I learned the effectiveness of psychology. I heard some of the best singing to be heard anywhere. All of the Negroes [were] laughing, shouting and happy. Why can’t we have more enjoyment and happiness?”³³Lady Bird began to respond. “And whenever do you play, Lyndon?” she wrote back. “There isn’t any time left for you to, you poor lamb. But I adore you for being so ambitious and dynamic.”³⁴In fact, Lyndon always found time to play. He went to the circus with Maverick and Bardwell. “Sunday and until early Monday with Bill & Mrs. White, Helen and Malcolm,” he wrote. “I dined, drank and danced. Monday night we drove several miles into Maryland and had dinner and music that almost made me leave for Texas and you that night.”³⁵

Johnson pressed Lady Bird to agree to marry as soon as possible; to his disappointment and frustration, she suggested they wait a year. Lyndon regaled her with all the adventures they would have, all the sights they would see: Civil War battlefields, New York City, the Smithsonian.³⁶She responded with descriptions of long, melancholy walks in the woods. “[Neighbor and friend Doris Powell and I] walked through the woods to the old Haggerty place—site of an old colonial mansion, now quite dilapidated and doleful looking,” she wrote. “It always gives me a very poignant feeling to go over there. It must have been a lovely place. There are the tallest magnolias I’ve ever seen, and great live oaks and myriads of crepe myrtle, and a carpet of jonquils and flags in the spring.”³⁷She told him of a favorite movie,The World Moves On: “The love-making is in the most flawless good taste I’ve ever seen on the screen. It makes me feel very set up about the human race to watch them.”³⁸Then later, “There’s nothing I like better than being comfortable in a nice cozy place and reading something amusing or well-written or interesting to someone I like.”³⁹His response: “This morning I’m ambitious, proud, energetic and very madly in love with you. I want to see people. I want to walk through the throngs, want to do things with a drive. If I had a box I would almost make a speech this minute. Plans, ideas, hopes, I’m bubbling over with them.”⁴⁰Lyndon continued to accuse her of being distant and aloof, but she was hardly that. “Darling” and “lamb” were some of her favorite appellations for him. There were frequent declarations of love and some teasing. “When I get up to Washington my brain will have reverted to the idiot state!” she wrote, hinting at a commitment. “So I’m going to buy me two or three up-to-the minute books on economics or government . . . And one good one on Russia, which I’m very interested in.”⁴¹

As Lyndon continued his romantic assault, Lady Bird, living in the yet to be remodeled Brick House, reading at night by kerosene lamp, became depressed, then frantic. What if this dynamic young man, her pathway to brave new worlds, found someone else? She got in the car and drove to Alabama to consult the perpetually bedridden Aunt Effie. “If he really loves you as much as he says he does, he’ll wait,” Effie advised.⁴²Oh God, Lady Bird thought, and if he does not, I’ll wind up just like you. Another aunt, Ellen Cooper Taylor, told her to follow her heart. During long-distance telephone calls, he kept up the pressure. Perhaps he should go into another line of work, one that was more secure and that paid better. The Klebergs had promised to obtain for him the presidency of Texas A&I College at Kingsville if he wanted it, but the life of an academic, particularly such a provincial one, was not very appealing. He had received an offer from General Electric in New York to work for them as a lobbyist at $10,000 a year, but money was not everything. He was called, he believed, to a life of public service.⁴³By this point, Lady Bird was distraught and confused. “Lyndon, please tell me as soon as you can what the deal is … I am afraid it’s politics. Oh, I know I haven’t any business—not any proprietary interest—but I would hate for you to go into politics. Don’t let me get things any more muddled for you than they are though, dearest … I still love you, Lyndon, I want to say it over and over, goodnight, not goodbye, Bird.”⁴⁴

Sensing that he had the object of his desire on the ropes, Lyndon intensified the courtship. “I see something I know I want,” he wrote back. “I immediately exert efforts to get it. I do or I don’t but I try and do my best … You see something you might want. You tear it to pieces in an effort to determine if you should want it … and conclude that maybe the desire isn’t an ‘everlasting’ one and that the ‘sane’ thing to do is to wait a year or so.”⁴⁵

While Lady Bird was visiting her relatives in Alabama and Mississippi, Lyndon had to return to Texas on business. They arranged to meet in Marshall and then drive to Karnack for dinner. Aunt Effie had written Lyndon pleading with him to delay marriage until spring at least so that Lady Bird could spend the winter with her in Florida. The next morning T. J. Taylor found Lyndon at the breakfast table, “blue.” “Mr. Taylor,” he said, “I guess I will be gone when you come from town today as I must be back in Austin tonight. I was so in hopes that I could persuade Bird to marry me [on] Thanksgiving, but her aunt says ‘no.’ And Bird seems to think she should regard her wishes.” Taylor sided with Lyndon, telling him that Effie was old and sick and had no right to require further sacrifice of Lady Bird. When he returned from town, the couple was gone. The maid told him they had left around ten o’clock “with four big grips.”⁴⁶Sometime between nine and ten Lady Bird had succumbed. “I’ll marry you,” she said. “When?” “Tonight,” he replied.⁴⁷

They decided to “commit matrimony,” as Lady Bird would describe her marriage to a friend, in San Antonio rather than Austin. It would offend her many friends, but this was in essence an elopement, and as such was best executed in an unfamiliar place. On the road, Lyndon pulled over and phoned Dan Quill, the postmaster in San Antonio and a fellow politico who had helped in the Kleberg campaign. Lyndon told his friend of his intention to marry at 8:00P.M. in Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church. Make all the arrangements, he instructed Quill, who was used to Lyndon’s habit of treating everyone as a willing coworker in a scheme of which he was the mastermind. While a triumphant Lyndon and an excited but apprehensive Lady Bird traversed the three hundred miles to San Antonio, Quill worked feverishly.⁴⁸

The first task was to persuade the Reverend Arthur R. McKinstry, who oversaw the wealthiest congregation in Bexar County, to perform the ceremony. He refused. The young couple needed counseling, their faith in God affirmed, their understanding of the burdens as well as the joys of marriage confirmed. The congressman’s secretary had to get back to Washington, Quill cajoled. McKinstry was mindful of Lyndon’s friendship with the powerful Mavericks and his position as assistant to San Antonio’s congressman. Reluctantly, he agreed.⁴⁹

Under Texas law, couples applying for a marriage license had to undergo a physical examination. Obviously there would not be time for that, so Quill filled out the marriage license himself and persuaded the deputy clerk at the courthouse to sign it. The breathless couple arrived in the Alamo City around six and checked into adjoining rooms at the Plaza Saint Anthony Hotel; Lyndon, Quill, and two lawyer friends of theirs retired to one and Lady Bird, alone, to the other. She phoned her college friend Cecille Harrison, and asked her if she would “come stand up with me,” that is, be her maid of honor, at St. Marks at eight o’clock. She agreed, pulled a black cocktail dress out of her closet, and headed for the hotel. Meanwhile, Lyndon and Dan Quill discovered that neither had procured a ring. Quill rushed off to the local Sears, Roebuck. He persuaded the clerk there to allow him to take ten or so rings of various sizes on approval. Lady Bird tried them on until she found one that fit.⁵⁰Quill returned the rest and paid $2.50 for the symbol of the complicated, famous relationship that would last for nearly forty years. Cecille arrived at the Saint Anthony to find Lady Bird sitting on a window seat looking pensively down at the street. “If you give me a quarter,” she told her friend, “I’ll jump out of this window.”⁵¹

Perhaps it was a premonition. But she quieted her fears, rose, and put on the lavender sheath she had bought in Corpus several weeks before. Prior to the ceremony, Lady Bird had read the wedding vows carefully, committing them to memory. She asked Lyndon if he had read them. He said yes, and she said she hoped so because “I want to make sure you understand what’s in them.”⁵²There were only twelve guests at the ceremony at Saint Mark’s. The wedding party celebrated with a dinner on the roof garden of the Saint Anthony. One of the guests, Henry Hirshberg, had sent for several bottles of wine from his private stock at home, and the group drank and danced until well after midnight. Cecille remembered what a handsome couple Lyndon and Lady Bird made, he at six foot three and she with her head nestled naturally in the hollow of his shoulder.

 

IN THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED,Lyndon would love Lady Bird in conventional and unconventional ways. “She was the best piece of ass I ever had,” he would confide indelicately to friends. But he meant it, and he loved her. He would buy her clothes, entrust business and political matters to her, solicit and take her advice on public and private questions; she was virtually the only per-son he was to so trust as president. He also yelled at her, humiliated her in public and private, ignored her emotional needs, and cheated on her. Through it all, she seemed undiminished. Lady Bird attended to his every need, laying out his clothes, waiting dinner until all hours, suffering continual invasions of her privacy, abandoning her daughters to be with him, and acquiescing in his dalliances. “He took her completely for granted,” said family friend Virginia Durr, “and he expected her to devote every waking hour to him, which she did.”⁵³

But Lady Bird reveled in her husband’s energy and ambition. She was part of his great mission to serve mankind. She enjoyed the power that he wielded. Lyndon simultaneously provided escape from the world of Aunt Effie and protection from the chaos and destruction that lurked in every brave new world. As a southern woman, she was conditioned by heritage and experience to suffer and to sacrifice with dignity and integrity. “Ours was a compelling love,” she told Jan Jarboe Russell. “Lyndon bullied me, coaxed me, at times even ridiculed me, but he made me more than I would have been. I offered him some peace and quiet, maybe a little judgment.”⁵⁴To another interviewer. “He needed somebody around him who was soft and gentle and laughed, and who was tough about his or her own priorities and feelings of the right course of action, but perfectly glad to hear him out.”⁵⁵

And what was she to him? With her hooked nose and somewhat irregular features, Lady Bird was certainly not the most beautiful woman Lyndon had ever met. She was certainly not the most sophisticated or confident. And yet she was attractive, educated, and unintimidated. He sensed that she could love him like his mother, but without the guilt and emotional manipulation. She was obviously capable of putting his interests and career first, of making them her own. Her calmness was capable of quieting the emotional and psychological storms that frequently swept over him. Lyndon loved her for all of those things but in the end could not keep from subsuming her, treating her as an appendage. “He never paid any attention to Lady Bird when she was around,” journalist John Chancellor observed,” and when she wasn’t around, he seemed to miss her badly.”⁵⁶The fact that she was fully aware and accepting of the terms of the relationship did not excuse him, but they both must be given credit for the truth that she was strong enough to have left him at any time. And he knew it.

By mutual agreement, Lyndon and Lady Bird opted for a honeymoon in Mexico. They spent their first night in the Grand Ancira Hotel in Monterrey. The following day, the newlyweds took the train to San Luis Potosí, enjoying the quaint hotel there and the incredible bargains in the marketplace. From Monterrey, they made the long rail trip to Mexico City. Lady Bird tried to interest her mate in the countryside—she was particularly fascinated by the in-numerable shrines to the Virgin Mary—but all he could talk about was Washington and what he was going to do to help save the nation from poverty and become the greatest congressional secretary of all time. In Mexico City, they climbed the pyramids and visited the floating garden of Xochimilco, which dated from the time of the Aztecs. There they posed for a photo standing in the prow of a gondola, he in formal double-breasted suit with his arm around her and she in a dark dress holding a bouquet of flowers.⁵⁷What Lyndon seemed to have liked most about the honeymoon was sex. Lady Bird did not complain about her aggressive husband, but on their return to San Antonio before leaving for Washington, she made a hurried appointment with a gynecologist.⁵⁸

Instead of renting an apartment, Lyndon and Lady Bird resided for over a month in the basement of the Dodge. He had lived in close quarters with others all his life, frequently sharing a bed with relatives and roommates. He seemed to have no concept of private space, hating to be alone even when he went to the bathroom. She had grown up at times as an only child. After weeks of sharing a bathroom with others and having to hide under the covers in the early morning while Lyndon and his friends discussed the forthcoming business in their room, she persuaded him to rent a one-bedroom apartment at 1910 Kalorama Road overlooking Rock Creek Park.

Lady Bird learned to be Lyndon Johnson’s wife. He expected her to man the home front, to do the cooking and cleaning, to pay the bills, to be ready to entertain at a moment’s notice. She knew how to do none of these things at first. Every month, Lyndon kept $100 of his $267 paycheck and gave the rest to Lady Bird to run the household. She had to write checks intermittently to Rebekah and his siblings. Both came to resent this unending drain on their resources. Indeed, Lady Bird’s relationship with the Johnson clan was at times strained. She thought the other children resented Lyndon’s success and what they thought was their mother’s favoritism toward him. She became particularly peeved when Sam Houston, who was attending law school, moved in with them, sleeping on a cot in the living room. To his friends and sometimes to Lyndon, Sam Houston was a weak but lovable playboy who drank too much. To Lady Bird he was a loudmouthed, self-indulgent lush. Typically, she kept her feelings to her-self, but a letter from Lyndon to his mother revealed the strain the younger brother was causing: “I don’t know what to do—I am borrowing money this month to get by on … Sent S. H. $100 in January [he had finally moved out]—$50 in February to school and additional $20 or more spending money … and now he is yelling for more … I can’t continue to bear his expenses when he spends more than I do and apparently can’t find time to do more than call for more.”⁵⁹With Rebekah, Lady Bird was correct, deferential, but distant. She was aware that her mother-in-law saw her as nothing more or less than a tool to sustain her son and help advance his career.⁶⁰

Lyndon was frequently absent. The trips to Mt. Vernon and Washington-area museums that he had promised during their ten-week courtship did not materialize. When she saw him, it was frequently in the company of staffers or journalists whom he had brought home for a late dinner. “He’d call Bird—I used to hear him—and say, ‘get the furniture insured. I’m having the newspapermen out to the house on Friday night!’ ” Russ Brown recalled. “He’d get several cases of whiskey, and everybody would get crazy with booze.”⁶¹Even within the Texas Society, Lyndon’s main social circle, Lady Bird was a virtual unknown. Arthur E. “Tex” Goldschmidt, a fellow Texan who worked in the Department of Interior, wrote his wife in August 1938, “Lyndon and his wife (I never knew there was one before … ) took me to a curb service place for a late meal after a day that started about 6:30A.M.”⁶²

Mainly, Lady Bird later recalled, Lyndon took getting used to. Everything about him was exaggerated. Once, while riding in Rock Creek Park, he helped her mount a young skittish stallion and then slapped him on the rump. The horse bolted, bucking, nearly throwing Lady Bird. When she managed to dismount, she rushed up to him: “Damn you! I could have been killed.” He brushed it off as a prank. Lyndon Johnson never apologized. On another occasion, the couple went to see the movie version of John Steinbeck’sThe Grapes of Wrath. In the darkness of the theater, Lady Bird was moved to hear her husband sobbing quietly at the fate of the Joad family. “He had a tender, sentimental side which he didn’t show very often,” she remembered.⁶³He wanted his wife to dress attractively, sexy but respectable, with bold colors and straight skirts. Finding her needing makeup, he would bark, “Put your lipstick on. You don’t sell for what you’re worth.”⁶⁴Lady Bird took comfort in the belief that such outbursts were an indication that she was attractive to her husband.

During those first months in Washington, the couple with whom Lyndon and Lady Bird spent the most time was Maury and Terrell Maverick. The new bride tried out her domestic skills on her fellow Texans, with mixed results. Of a simple dinner of baked ham, rice, and lemon pie, Terrell later recalled of the starch, “It tasted like library paste.”⁶⁵Both the Johnsons felt deeply drawn to the charismatic Maury, whose views were to have a major impact on Lyndon.

The Mavericks were one of the first families of Texas. Samuel Maverick had fought in the Texas Revolution and was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Maury could count on his family tree both James Madison and Meriwether Lewis. After a stint in the American Expeditionary Force during World War I, he studied law and settled down to practice in San Antonio. By the time he was twenty-four, Maury had been elected president of the San Antonio Bar. According to his brother, Maverick was one of the country’s leading experts on Erasmus. He was attracted to the writers of the Enlightenment and novelists such as James Joyce and Anatole France. He read everything he could by and about Thomas Jefferson. In his copy of George Bernard Shaw’sAndrocles and the Lion , Maury underlined passages in the preface that linked Christianity with social justice.⁶⁶

That Maverick would opt for a life in politics was, of course, inevitable. His chance came in 1929, when reformers led a revolt against the city machine that controlled San Antonio, a machine, said its critics, beside which Tammany Hall was pale in comparison. In 1930 Maury was elected city tax collector as part of the “clean government” slate. In 1934 he decided to run for Congress as a representative of the Twentieth District, newly carved out of the old Fourteenth. He won the primary over his nearest rival by some three thousand votes, despite being attacked as a communist for belonging to the American Civil Liberties Union.⁶⁷

In Washington, Maverick embraced the New Deal, quickly emerging as the uncrowned head of the left wing of the Democratic party. “As for me I am throwing in with the Yankees and the liberals,” he told his constituents in one audacious speech, “the agriculture boys of the West—and the big-city Democrats too. That is the only way the Democratic party can do a good job and serve America.”⁶⁸He proved a staunch champion of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which he characterized as an attempt to substitute care and forethought for the wasteful, hit-or-miss methods of rugged individualism. He believed that the state had an obligation to help those who could not help themselves; relief projects like the Works Progress Administration topped his list of legislative priorities. Personally, Maverick was humorous, compassionate, crude, erudite, and combative. Standing a little over five feet, in constant pain from a serious war wound, he had, in the words of a contemporary, “taken a running broad jump onto the nation’s front pages.”⁶⁹In speech he was tough and blunt; opponents were “bastards” and “sons-of-bitches.” He despised pretense and superficiality. Maury Maverick was, in short, Lyndon’s kind of politician.

Meanwhile, Mamie Kleberg, convinced that Lyndon had conspired with her husband’s lover to keep the affair from her and subsequently to see that she had a soft landing, plotted to get him fired. Lyndon was too active in his own behalf, she told the clueless Richard; he was promoting himself at the expense of his boss and clearly intended to run against him in 1936. For a while, the congressman resisted, but he was no match for his wife, and in the spring of 1935 he told Johnson that he would have to look for another job. In desperation, Lyndon went to see Maverick and another fellow Texan, Sam Rayburn, who was a leading candidate to become speaker of the House in the next session. Both were sympathetic, but neither had positions available on their staffs. Providentially, the Roosevelt administration had just created a new agency, the National Youth Administration, a division of the WPA intended to keep students in school through a system of work study and to provide part-time employment and job training for those who were not students but who were unemployed. The head of the NYA was Aubrey Williams, a southern liberal who was an ardent New Dealer and an early advocate for black civil rights. Rumor had it that DeWitt Kinard, a former state legislator, would head the operation in Texas, but before he could be appointed, Lyndon heard about the job from Malcolm Bardwell and decided that the NYA would be the perfect springboard from which to launch a political career of his own.⁷⁰

 

LYNDON,Arthur Perry, Senator Morris Sheppard’s assistant, and Bardwell met in Maverick’s office to plot strategy. Subsequently, Rayburn went to see Senator Tom Connally, who was not exactly enthusiastic about the New Deal and its myriad agencies, but agreed to support Lyndon for a job that was on his patronage list. Meanwhile, Maverick went straight to the top, calling on both FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt about his protégé. Roosevelt at first protested that he was not going to entrust a major state relief agency to an untested twenty-six-year-old. But Maverick listed Lyndon’s qualifications and insisted that youth required youth to lead it out of the Depression. Eventually the president relented, and Lyndon was named Texas director of the NYA.⁷¹

The multibillion-dollar WPA was designed to put heads of households to work, but it wasn’t enough. New Dealers like Harry Hopkins and Eleanor Roosevelt had become worried that the Depression would cause the nation to lose the services as well as the interest of an entire generation of young people. As of 1935, 20 percent of America’s 22 million youth were out of school, on relief, or, more often, wandering the countryside looking for work. These numbers would continue to grow unless the federal government did something. Texas was typical in its numbers but unique in its sprawl and diversity. When Lyndon was sworn in on July 25, 1935, some 125,000 Texans between sixteen and twenty-five were on relief and many thousands more would have to forgo the 1936-1937 school year if they did not receive aid.⁷²

Directing the National Youth Administration was a perfect fit for Johnson. It would allow him to get his name in newspapers throughout Texas as a community builder and benefactor of the state’s youth. Through his ferocious energy and organizational skills, he could ensure that the NYA operated efficiently and effectively, thus blunting possible criticism from conservatives. “When I come back to Washington, I’m coming back as a congressman,” he had told Malcolm Bardwell before leaving the capital.⁷³One of the first things he would tell his staff was to ensure that all letters and publications used his full name, Lyndon B. Johnson, not some abbreviation or variation. “But I don’t understand why,” one asked. He replied, “Oh, some day you’ll understand why.”⁷⁴Most important, the NYA job appealed to his idealism.

Throughout his life, Lyndon Johnson was happiest when he was on some kind of crusade for one segment of humankind or another. What greater cause in the eyes of God, mother, country, and state than to help young people stay in school or train for gainful employment? There were a number of options for dealing with needy youth, he told a group of educators in September 1935: “We could starve them to death; we could send them to school; we could kill them through war. Obviously the answer lies in sending some of them to school; giving some of them vocational training; finding work projects for others. That briefly is the work cut out for the NYA.”⁷⁵

After attending a White House send-off for state directors, Lyndon and Lady Bird departed for Austin. The day he arrived, the new NYA director called a press conference and delivered his version of Roosevelt’s “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself ” speech. He called at the capitol, where he secured Governor James V. “Jimmy” Allred’s public endorsement and then departed for a whirlwind tour of the state’s major cities to publicize his program. Returning to Austin, Lyndon turned his attention to staffing his agency while Lady Bird moved their possessions into the comfortable San Gabriel Street home of Professor Robert Montgomery, the UT economist who was on leave working in Washington. Lyndon first called Willard Deason, who was then employed by the Federal Land Bank in Houston, and asked him to go to work for the NYA. Deason replied that he was not ready to give up his job but that he would come to Austin and help his old friend set up the NYA office. He came and subsequently agreed to take a six-month leave of absence from his Houston position.⁷⁶

With Deason on board, Lyndon called former SWT classmates Jesse Kellam and Sherman Birdwell and asked them to meet him at the Post Office Café in San Marcos at 7:30 the next morning. For an hour and a half he talked nonstop, giving them his vision of what the NYA could do for Texas, for kids “who couldn’t buy pencils and paper much less shoes.”⁷⁷Birdwell, who agreed to go to work as Lyndon’s finance director at $2,200 a year, recalled the experience of being recruited by Johnson: “His intensity made you feel like this is the most important thing in the world, not just to Lyndon Johnson, but the most important thing in the world, and you want to be part of it … He [made] helping these young people an accomplishment to be done that would be so important to you that you just felt like, ‘I’ve got to do this for these young people. I mean, I’m the only chance they’ve got. Me!’ ”⁷⁸Kellam, a former SWT football player and Black Star who had collaborated with The Brains, was a tougher sell but eventually agreed to leave his post as assistant to State School Superintendent L. E. Woods to go to work as deputy director of the Texas NYA at $3,900 a year. Lyndon’s compensation had been set at $7,500 per year, a princely salary in 1935.⁷⁹

To help conceptualize and publicize the program, Lyndon hired Herbert Henderson, a freelance writer and newspaper reporter who had played a key role in Maverick’s congressional campaign. To oversee his NYA field representatives, the director hired Charles P. Little, then with the Texas Relief Commission. The Little courtship was typical. “I received a call from a man by the name of Lyndon B. Johnson,” Little later recalled,

about four o’clock on a Friday afternoon … He said, “I want to talk to you about a job.” I said, “Well, thank you, but I have a job right now and am doing quite well … ” He said, “Well, I still would like to talk with you.” I said, “well, the first time I’m in Austin, sometime next week, why don’t I call you and make a date for us to discuss what you have in mind, even though I want you to understand I’m perfectly happy where I am.” He said, “No, next week is too late.” I said, “Well, how about Monday morning? I could drive in on Sunday and see you the first thing Monday morning.” Lyndon said, “Well, Monday morning is not quite good enough either.” … I said, “Well, what is it you have in mind?” … He said, “How long would it take for you to drive in here? … I’ll be in my office at nine o’clock tonight” … Great day! What kind of man was this? I went into Lyndon’s office at nine o’clock that night. He was sitting at his desk … We sat and talked until midnight … He was the first man, I suppose, that I had talked to in these depression years who had hope and vision for the future. Bear in mind the time that we’re talking about is the time when there was no hope for anything … When I left there, I had accepted a job for a hundred and fifty dollars a month, which was sixteen dollars less than what I was earning.”⁸⁰

The headquarters of the Texas NYA were located on the sixth floor of the Littlefield Building in downtown Austin. Lyndon and his staff were crammed into a tiny suite that included rooms 601, 603, and 605. Birdwell and Jones recalled that the sense of urgency was incredible. They worked sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, week after week. Typically, Lyndon would have his employees eat their lunches at their desks and return to work after dinner. Birdwell remembered many a night working by kerosene lantern and then finding his way down six flights of steps in the dark because the electricity in the Littlefield Building went off at 10:30 every evening.⁸¹Even then, the staff would sometimes retire to the Montgomery house, where Deason and Jones rented rooms, for late-night planning sessions on the living room floor.

In the beginning there were four districts in the state with four men in the field. Within a year there were twelve districts with fifteen to twenty supervisory staff operating out of Austin and another twenty in the field.⁸²At the close of one eight-hour Sunday meeting of district representatives, Lyndon put both hands in his pockets. “I carry Ex-Lax in this pocket to get me going … and I carry aspirin in this pocket … Take both Ex-Lax and aspirin, but we have got to get the job done and we’re going to do it.”⁸³He ranted and raved when he felt the office wasn’t keeping up with the workload. He doled out tongue lashings, threats to fire, and ridicule. “Why don’t I just fire you,” he shouted at one staffer. “Then you can go back to making fifty dollars a month. You know why you were making fifty dollars a month, don’t you? Because that’s what you were worth.”⁸⁴When Herbert Henderson went on a binge and missed a day of work, Lyndon terminated him on the spot.⁸⁵He would drive his workforce to the point of rebellion and then back off. “Maybe once a month he would say, ‘Well, now let’s play awhile.’ Saturday after noon we would take off and all day Sunday and there would be no meetings. We would play golf, ride horseback or go to San Antonio for the weekend.”⁸⁶As always, Lyndon led by example. He was the first in the office, and unless he had business in the field, the last to leave. Suffering through repeated colds and flu, he drove himself mercilessly.

At first, there were no clear guidelines for the state youth administrations. Deason recalled that initially, Lyndon and the staff would stay up long into the night at the Montgomery House trying to decipher the changing regulations as they came down from Washington. With the opening of school looming and the threat that thousands of Texas youth would drop out, Lyndon decided to cast caution to the wind and forge ahead. Fundamental to the Texas youth effort was the school aid program, whereby secondary students could earn up to $6 and college students up to $15 a month doing odd jobs around their institutions, emptying trash cans, trimming lawns, grading papers for professors. By the start of the school year, Herbert Henderson and the secretaries had mailed forty-five hundred letters to administrators across the state and placed notices in eight hundred newspapers. The office was inundated with inquiries from every point in Texas. To Johnson’s frustration, only 1,266 student applications for part-time jobs had been processed by September 1935.⁸⁷

The sticking point was the WPA and its state offices in San Antonio. In many states, WPA directors insisted that the NYA report to them and act as a WPA subsidiary. Texas was no different. The WPA office was slow to process certifications for students showing that their family was on relief, a prerequisite for receiving student aid, because it felt heads of household were a priority. Lyndon’s original annual budget was a half-million dollars, and Harry Drought, the state WPA director, was determined to see that it not get any larger. “LBJ was a man who could not abide mediocrity,” said Willard Deason. “He had a speed which was usually overdrive. He expected everybody else to operate that way, and they didn’t.”⁸⁸Matters came to a head when Drought tried to have Sherman Birdwell fired for pushing too hard to have district WPA offices grant certificates to prospective NYA applicants. “Mr. Drought called Washington and told them to fire me off the NYA,” Birdwell said. “Mr. Johnson had already talked to Washington and a decision was made at that time, for the first time and for the future, that no one hired or fired NYA supervisors except Mr. Johnson.”⁸⁹Gradually, then quickly, the logjam began to break. By November, 8,500 students were receiving aid from the NYA; by May 1936, 11,000, and by the end of the first full year of the NYA’s operation, 12,342 Texas boys and girls were being helped.⁹⁰

The NYA’s college program went more smoothly, in part because there were only eighty-five colleges and universities in Texas, whereas there were more than two thousand high schools. Unlike high school students, college aid recipients had to be certified only by their institutions. Many performed simple clerical or janitorial work for their pay, up to $15 a month, but others toiled in their respective disciplines: chemists and biologists in laboratories, English and history majors in libraries and archives. As of the end of September 1935, the NYA was funneling aid to 5,036 undergraduates. Unfortunately, more than 21,000 had applied for help. At UT alone there were 3,500 applicants for 761 jobs. “I have done the most difficult job I have ever done in my life,” the dean of students complained to Jesse Kellam. “In making these selections, I feel that I have blood on my hands.”⁹¹Week after week, Lyndon pressed Washington for more funds, and he had some success. By the end of the 1935-1936 academic year, the number of recipients approached 5,500, but at the same time, the number of applicants had risen to 29,000.⁹²An innovation unique to the Texas program was the Freshman College Center. Aimed at high school graduates who had to stay at home and work to support their families, these centers, eventually some twenty in number, allowed down-and-out but ambitious young people to take one or two tuition-free courses from instructors paid with NYA funds. They were the forerunners of community or junior colleges that would prove instrumental in opening up higher education to the American working class.⁹³

For those young people who were not interested in college, there were work projects coupled with vocational training. Teams of Texas youths between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one would labor at construction and other jobs of benefit to the community and simultaneously learn how to weld, lay bricks, or sew. The problem with this WPA-style approach was funding. The NYA had only enough money to pay the part-time salaries of the youths so employed. The state or some other agency would actually have to cover materials, equipment, and housing. It was Gladys Montgomery, Robert’s wife, who came up with the idea of a statewide system of roadside parks where motorists could safely pull off to rest, picnic, change a tire, or relieve themselves. She got the idea after a family of five was rammed from behind and killed while waiting out a rainstorm on the San Antonio highway.⁹⁴

The idea immediately captured Lyndon’s imagination. The state would provide the materials and living arrangements, and the NYA would pay the salaries of young workers. The public welfare would be promoted through a system of parks that would enhance travelers’ comfort and safety. The Littlefield staff worked overtime to complete the paperwork, and Johnson managed to obtain approval from Washington days instead of weeks. Governor Allred and the Texas Highway Department, which eventually would become the single largest employer in the state, fell in line. By the summer of 1936, thirty-six hundred young men were at work building 125 permanent roadside parks. This work project in turn led to others. The NYA and the Highway Department put unemployed youth to work planting shrubs, building erosion barriers, and painting guard rails and highway signs. Next to the roadside parks, the most enduring and famous of the NYA projects was La Villita in San Antonio, a restored and operating nineteenth-century Mexican village built in the heart of one of the city’s worst slums. The reconstruction and maintenance employed hundreds of Hispanic youths, paid with NYA money.⁹⁵

 

NO GROUP BENEFITED MOREfrom New Deal relief projects than African Americans, and this was perhaps truer in Texas than elsewhere. Always “the last hired and the first fired,” blacks suffered disproportionately from the Depression. Indeed, as one observer noted, “The Negro was born in depression. It only became official when it hit the white man.”⁹⁶

By 1932, black unemployment in the United States had reached 50 percent; those who managed to hold on to their jobs suffered average wage reductions of 40 percent. Approximately 40 percent of those employed were tenant farmers or share croppers with incomes of less than $200 per year. Initially, most New Deal agencies routinely discriminated against African Americans, especially in regard to relief benefits and wages, and virtually all adhered to stringent segregation practices. The president rejected the pleas of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and similar organizations to sup-port a federal antilynching bill and in general to exert his influence in behalf of civil rights for blacks. Although Roosevelt was no stalwart champion of racial justice, his refusal to heed such pleas stemmed not so much from a lack of sympathy as from fear that he would antagonize powerful white congressmen from the South and jeopardize his New Deal legislative agenda.

It was Mrs. Roosevelt and key New Dealers such as Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes and relief czar Harry Hopkins who used their influence to eliminate discrimination and segregation in New Deal agencies and programs. As a result, increasing numbers of African Americans shared in the benefits available from federal work and relief projects; others gained appointment to administrative and judicial posts in New Deal agencies. A group of these administrators, known as the “black cabinet,” conferred with and advised the president on issues relating to African Americans. In addition, in 1936, for the first time blacks were accredited as delegates to the Democratic National Convention. By the close of the decade, 11 percent of Civilian Conservation Corps workers were black and the Farm Security Administration was giving 23 percent of its aid to black farmers. Of all the New Deal agencies, the NYA had the best civil rights record; 20 percent of its annual budget went to black youngsters. Although programs and work sites were generally segregated, black projects were supervised by black administrators.

As of 1935, some 855,000 African Americans lived in Texas; nearly a quarter were sixteen to twenty-five years of age. Most resided in decaying ghettos in Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio, in squalid tarpaper shacks on the outskirts of towns, or in rickety farm cabins. In rural areas, indoor plumbing and running water were virtually nonexistent. Ancient maladies like tuberculosis, malaria, and cholera ravaged young and old alike. But like black populations everywhere, Texas Negroes boasted middle and upper classes. Thousands of black high school and college students called out to Lyndon Johnson and the National Youth Administration for help.

If Johnson had had his preference, the Texas NYA would have been completely color-blind. Governor Jimmy Allred recalled that as the NYA was getting under way, he summoned its young director to his office. “Now, Lyndon,” he said, “I know what you’re about to do. You’re passing out this money and you are planning to give some grants to Prairie View [A&M, an all-black institution in Texas] … I think, Lyndon, that you possibly have a fine future in politics; you can go far. But I want you to know that Texas is not ready for people to give federal money to Negroes at Negro schools.” At that point, Lyndon stood up and came around to the side of Allred’s desk. “Well,” he said, “you have nothing else to say, Governor?” No, Allred replied. “I want to express my appreciation to you for inviting me in here, calling me in. There were some important things I could have been doing, but I came because you are the governor and you called me. It’s just been such an inspiration to me. I’ll never forget this moment, this time with you, to be able to see what a man like you, whom I know to be a good practicing Christian, to have this splendid example that you’ve just given me of the Christian spirit as applied to your fellow human beings. It’s very touching.” What was he going to do, Allred asked? “I’m going back to my office and I’m going to double the money I’m giving to Prairie View and I’m sending it down there this afternoon.”⁹⁷

Shortly thereafter, the NYA director met with local black leaders in the basement of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Austin and announced that, of course, black youths would be included in all programs. He held similar meetings in Houston and San Antonio. From these contacts he put together a Negro Advisory Committee to help with the operation of student aid, work projects, and freshmen centers.⁹⁸On October 12, 1935, according to a local newspaper account, he chaired a meeting in Dallas “attended by the Colored Advisory Committee and one hundred leaders from all parts of the state … Every phase of the National Youth Administration program as it pertains to the colored people of Texas was discussed thoroughly in a session lasting all day.” As of March 1936, the NYA was providing aid to 887 high school students and 473 college students. Of the twenty freshmen centers, fifteen were open to African Americans, 471 of whom were enrolled.⁹⁹

Occasionally, money would be freed up from other programs. “We couldn’t have paid our faculty except for Mr. Johnson,” recalled O. H. Elliott, bursar of Huston-Tillotson College. “He’d send us our quota of money. Then, off the record, he’d say, ‘I’ve got a little extra change here. Can you find a place for it?’ We could always find a place.”¹⁰⁰Robert C. Weaver, later to be the first black cab-inet member, recalled that Frank Horne, Lena Horne’s uncle, who also worked for the NYA, kept talking about this fellow Lyndon Johnson in Texas. “Johnson didn’t think the NYA was for middle-class people, the way a lot of congressmen did,” Horne said. “He thought it was for poor people, including Mexican-Americans and Negroes.”¹⁰¹The year was 1936. It would be eight years before the Supreme Court inSmith v. Allwright would invalidate the white primary in Texas.

But the state director realized that there were limits. Initially, National Di-rector, Aubrey Williams and his deputy, John Corson, believed that NYA programs ought to be integrated, and they pressed Johnson and other state directors to put at least one black on their state advisory boards. After due consideration, Lyndon refused. He had consulted with many prominent individuals, both white and black, he wrote Corson. “The racial question during the last 100 years in Texas … has resolved itself into a definite system of mores and customs which cannot be upset overnight,” he said. “But it is exceedingly difficult to step over lines so long established and to upset customs so deep-rooted, by any act which is so shockingly against precedent as the attempt to mix negros and whites on a common board.” If a black were placed on the board, he told Washington, all nine white members would resign, he would have to resign (and “in all probability, be ‘run out of Texas’ ”), and black leaders would refuse to cooperate. “Their leaders,” he said, “are interested in the progress of their race and its development, not by such manifestations of force against the will of white leaders, but by harmony and cooperation.”¹⁰²

At the same time, many of the work projects around the state were integrated. Black, whites, and Hispanics labored side by side whenever it was feasible. “There was no distinction between them,” Sherman Birdwell said. “Your NYA boys and girls at that time were an entirely different breed of cat than you’ve got now … Since they first had to be eligible, they had to be members of a WPA family … So these people were used to hard work, and they were used to working on a farm. When you’re chopping cotton, you’re chopping alongside of a Negro.” Sometimes, he said, “we found more literate blacks than we did whites,” and they would be made timekeepers who were paid more and had some authority. “Where we would run into trouble would be the Mexicans and the Negroes, particularly if a Negro would try to give orders to the Mexican boy.”¹⁰³

 

•   •   •

IN1936, Bob Montgomery returned from his sojourn in Washington, and Lyndon and Lady Bird moved into one side of a two-storey duplex just off 34th Street at No. 4, Happy Hollow Lane.¹⁰⁴Luther Jones and Willard Deason lived with them for a while, as did Aunt Effie. “She was like a piece of Dresden china,” Deason recalled, “something out of a storybook, immaculately dressed with lace around her neck and long, flowing skirts … and very well-educated, very refined. She had but one mission, and that was to try to take care of Lady Bird … As a matter of fact, Lady Bird was taking care of her.”¹⁰⁵

Occasionally Lady Bird accompanied Lyndon on his innumerable trips across the state to publicize the program. “Bird left with me last week,” Lyndon wrote Welly Hopkins, “and we visited El Paso, Lubbock, Amarillo, Abilene, and Brownwood. We really had a very enjoyable trip. Spent two or three days in El Paso and several evenings across in Juarez.”¹⁰⁶There were continual visits from dignitaries, including black leader Mary McLeod Bethune, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the president himself. Lyndon had hoped for a personal meeting with FDR when he came, but there was no time. Instead, the director assembled some fifty NYA workers along the president’s route of travel between Dallas and Fort Worth and, with him at their head, had the youths stand at attention and present shovels as the president, thoroughly amused, passed in review.¹⁰⁷

Friends and acquaintances, admirers and detractors, never failed to comment on young Johnson’s behavior. “A tornado,” “a whirlwind,” “steam engine in pants,” were some of the terms journalists used to describe him. Lyndon was never still. Even when lounging in a chair at home he was thinking, planning, giving orders. In social situations, he talked continually, always determined to be the center of attention. If in the presence of a star, he had to orbit as closely as possible. He was never alone; he never seemed to want to be alone. His physical health reflected the stress. There were kidney stones, gall stones, endless colds degenerating into pneumonia at least seven or eight times by the time he was forty. Lyndon Johnson was raised to be responsible—for his mother, for his sib-lings, for the residents of the Hill Country, for the Tenth Congressional Dis-trict, for Texas, for the nation, for the world. His mother was relentless. “You have always been one whom others can lean upon in times of trouble and the role of devoted son and strong and protective big brother is yours by nature and inheritance as well as by training … I am very proud and fond of my big boy,” Rebekah wrote to him in 1938.¹⁰⁸

Sam Houston continued to drink and run up hotel and other bills, bills that were inevitably presented to Lyndon for settlement. Occasionally, he proved to be more than his brother could bear. One night in 1934, when Sam was living with Lyndon and Lady Bird in their one-bedroom apartment in Washington, Lyndon came home from playing golf. He had had too much to drink, it was raining, and he was soaking wet. As he came through the door, he caught sight of his brother sleeping one off on his cot in the living room. Lady Bird woke to the sound of her husband screaming at Sam. She went in and found a soaking wet Lyndon holding up Sam by his shirt, shaking him: “I want Sam Houston to look at me,” he told her. “Yes, by God, I want you to take a damned good look at me, Sam Houston. Open your eyes and look at me. I’m drunk, and I want you to see how you look to me, Sam Houston, when you come home drunk.”¹⁰⁹None of this, however, diverted the director from his appointed tasks.

The NYA’s accomplishments made Lyndon a minor celebrity in Texas and in New Deal circles in Washington. Garth Akridge, NYA southern regional director, reported that Johnson “has developed within his organization a spirit, a devotion to duty, and a sense of personal loyalty that is little short of remarkable … The public seems to be back of the program and the press is supporting it almost 100%.” Aubrey Williams continually held up the Texas program as an example to the rest of the state directors. Both Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McLeod Bethune sang its praises publicly and privately. As one of Williams’s staff put it, Lyndon Johnson was “easily one of the best men directing one of the best staffs in one of the best programs with the most universal and enthusiastic public support of any state in the Union.”¹¹⁰He was twenty-eight years old.