CHAPTER 7

PAPPY

OTHER THAN THE WELFARE OF THE PEOPLE OF THETenth District, the fate of the New Deal, and Alice Glass, LBJ’s principal preoccupation during his first two terms as congressman was the United States Navy and its role in defending the nation should war with the Axis powers prove inevitable. During this period, the House Naval Affairs Committee under the chairmanship of Georgia Democrat Carl Vinson was one of the islands of preparedness in a sea of congressional indifference.

Vinson was the typical cigar-chewing, good-old-boy southern legislator—or so it seemed. He was “about once removed from the cracker barrel,” a member of the Capitol Hill press corps put it. “His collar is two sizes too big, his tie ordinarily has spots blotched on it, and his office spittoon is rimmed with a two-inch circle of ashes, matches, and crumpled cigar-wrappers.”¹He liked to be called “Admiral” by younger committee members, and he referred to them as “En-sign,” “Commander,” or “Captain,” depending on his estimation of their contributions. But he was devoted to the interests of the navy and was no fool. He demanded that the naval brass who came before his committee make their case effectively, and he then moved heaven and earth to see that their needs were met. In this, however, he frequently was stymied by the chair of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, David Ignatious Walsh, from Massachusetts. The successor to Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who had stood down Woodrow Wilson over the League of Nations, Walsh was something of an isolationist. Vinson hated him for this and also because Walsh was a homosexual, whom the Georgian accused of preying on Naval Academy cadets.²

Johnson and another young member of the House committee, Warren Magnuson, of Washington State and the Puget Sound Naval Base, quickly made it clear to the Admiral that they were enthusiastic supporters of his preparedness crusade. They also proved adept at cultivating him personally. Vinson’s wife, “the sweetest woman ever to put on a dress,” was an invalid; every day at 4:45 Vinson left for home to attend to her, never emerging until the next morning. Johnson and Magnuson got into the habit of dropping by to pay their respects to Mrs. Vinson and of filling in the Admiral each morning on the previous day’s political news and gossip. They became Vinson’s pets. “Lyndon and I were very young and very aggressive,” Magnuson recalled, “and we were more available than the older members to travel on special chores for Carl Vinson. When a problem arose with the Pacific Fleet or at a Navy yard, Carl would say, ‘You two fellows go and find out about it for the committee.’ ”³

Typically, Johnson used his growing influence on the Naval Affairs Committee to benefit his home state. On June 11, 1940, the federal government appropriated $46 million for the construction of a naval air station at Corpus Christi. The contract, negotiated on a cost-plus basis rather than a competitive bid, a first in American history, went to a trio of companies, the chief of which was Brown and Root. Work on the 14,500-acre facility employed over nine thousand men.⁴

 

LYNDONJOHNSONwas one of the relatively few Americans who paid much attention to the anti-Semitic overtones of Nazism and one of only a handful who did anything about Hitler’s prewar persecution of the Jews. In the spring of 1938, Charles Marsh brought to Johnson’s attention the plight of twenty-five-year-old Austrian conductor Erich Leinsdorf. A brilliant Jewish musician, Leinsdorf was fleeing Nazi persecution and seeking political asylum in the United States. Johnson was bound to do his patron’s bidding but was genuinely struck by the young man and his art. With his temporary visa about to expire, Leinsdorf was faced with the prospect of returning to Austria to confront the tender mercies of the Austrian Nazis. LBJ arranged a six-month extension for Leinsdorf and a trip to Cuba, from whence he could apply for permanent residency.⁵

From Leinsdorf and from Jim Novy, one of the leaders of Austin’s four hundred-member Jewish community, Johnson learned of the fate facing European Jewry if Hitler had his way. Novy, a contributor to the Democratic party, had known the congressman since his Kleberg days. In the spring of 1938, Novy, his brother, Louis, and LBJ devised a plan. Jim would go to Poland and Germany and “get as many Jewish people as possible out of both countries,” while Johnson’s office arranged for the necessary paperwork. In all, Novy managed to bring back forty-two Jews, including four relatives.

In the spring of 1940, with France falling and Britain under siege, Johnson worked with the Austin Jewish community and Jesse Kellam, head of the Texas National Youth Administration, in a scheme to funnel as many European Jews as possible through Cuba, Mexico, and other Latin American countries into the United States. Once they had gained temporary entry into Latin America, Johnson and his co-conspirators would arrange through visas, fake passports, and every other possible means to get them into Texas, where Kellam would put them to work on NYA projects or as work trainees. Because it was illegal to house and train noncitizens at NYA facilities, Operation Texas was kept secret for over twenty years.⁶In 1963, Lyndon and Lady Bird attended the dedication of a new synagogue in Austin. She recalled, “Person after person plucked at my sleeve and said, ‘I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for him. He helped me get out.’ ”⁷

 

JOHNSON’S BUDDING LIBERALISMthreatened to put him at odds with the conservative wing of the Democratic party in Texas. Since 1928, when Texas went for Herbert Hoover over Al Smith, the state had featured two parties in fact, if not in name. That the Civil War and Reconstruction made membership in the GOP untenable for most Texans did not keep them from espousing the values of traditional Republicanism: rugged individualism, states’ rights, the equation of material success with social and even spiritual validation, fiscal conservatism, distrust of unions, strict construction of the Constitution, and antipathy toward anything that smacked of collectivism, socialism, and, of course, communism.

Constituting the core of Texas conservatism was the upper class, consisting of the wealthiest families, the managers of the largest corporations and agribusinesses, and the great landowners. Conspicuous for their money and the radicalism of their views, if not their numbers, were Texas oilmen. Living in River Oaks and on Memorial Drive in Houston, in Olmos Park, Terrell Hills, and Alamo Heights in San Antonio, in Highland Park in Dallas, and in Westover Hills in Fort Worth, members of the Texas elite were bound together by common lifestyle and common political ideology. They sent their children primarily to the University of Texas, where they enrolled in the best fraternities and sororities, and they used their money and status to control a political system devoted above all else to the preservation of the status quo. The instrument through which they exerted their domination was the legislative lobby, numbering several hundred by 1940 and devoted overwhelmingly to the interests of big business and big agriculture. Contributions from lobbyists frequently approached the total salary of the legislator being supported. Upper-class conservatives controlled most of the state’s newspapers. In 1956, when liberal Ralph Yarborough ran for governor, not a single one of the state’s 114 dailies endorsed him.⁸

The ostentatious lifestyles of these oil and land barons during the interwar period gave rise to the national caricature of Texans as dandified cowboys with more money than they knew what to do with. Amon Carter and his crowd acted out the stereotype. Carter had made his fortune wildcatting for oil and controlled the political life of Fort Worth and much of west Texas. His retreat and showplace was Shady Oak Farm, which featured an open-fronted saloon and a stuffed horse adorned with signs reading “Texas Horse’s Ass, You’ve met the New York kind,” and “the national Bird—Old Crow.” Here Carter hosted huge parties through which he rode on his palomino pony clad in ten-gallon hat, sheepskin chaps, and six-guns. He could put on rodeos or have a full-curtained stage erected for more dignified entertainment. Shady Oak became a kind of celebrity trap, and none were immune. “There the dignified Elsa Maxwell fired Amon’s sixguns,” Carter’s biographer writes, “yippeeing like a soiled dove from Hell’s Half Acre. It was there FDR, seated in the rear of a Packard open sedan, cast for and caught a five-pound bass, and there one of the world’s richest men, banker Otto Kahn, insisted on paying for his grub by mowing the lawn.”

For Carter and his guests’ entertainment, Lord Sidney Rothermere, chairman of the board of the LondonDaily Mail and owner of seventy other English publications, donned a huge, high-crowned black hat, the kind worn only by enemies of Hopalong Cassidy, and “held up” passing guests.⁹All of this while ordinary Americans were struggling against the ravages of the Depression.

 

THERE WAS ANOTHERTEXAS,culturally and politically, that outsiders rarely saw. Progressive political activists—teachers, lawyers, ministers, union organizers—attempted to rally the state’s manual workers in behalf of populist causes. Their would-be constituents were the people who laid pipelines, put up telephone poles, painted houses, labored in the canneries of south Texas’s “Winter Garden,” caught shrimp, or rode the range as cowboys. In 1940, the Texas manual workforce was 40 percent of the total, a group larger than either the nonmanual or the farm workforce, and that percentage grew until 1960.

Compared to the upper classes, manual workers were politically disorganized. Residing primarily in hundreds of inner-city enclaves and industrial suburbs, these individuals joined churches and fraternal organizations not primarily concerned with maintaining and advancing class interests. One scholar estimates that fewer than one-third of this group voted in any election at any time. Lower on the socioeconomic ladder were welfare recipients, day laborers, and farm workers. Some three-fifths of Texas’s 2 million poor were blacks or Hispanics. They were even less likely to vote.¹⁰

The upper classes, through the white primary and through a one-party sys-tem that often made it impossible to identify candidates with stands on specific issues, helped perpetuate this disorganization and nonparticipation. “The people [of Texas] are as honest, liberal, progressive and wide-awake as the people of any state in the Union,” Alvin Wirtz wrote Eliot Janeway in 1945. “But we have had a minority group in this state which has been enriched by oil or other fortuitous circumstances entirely apart from the merit of the individual. These men have used their money to obtain influence out of all proportion to their deserts. The [state] capitol is much worse than the Temple when Jesus had to scourge the money changers.”¹¹

As Lyndon Johnson, Maury Maverick, and other up-and-coming politicians recognized, there was a strong if latent populist impulse in Texas. In statewide elections in 1912, at the height of the Progressive Era, the Socialists had polled the second largest vote after the Democrats.¹²The driving ethos of frontier farming communities like Johnson City was communitarian. “Whole church congregations, sometimes virtually whole communities where shifting economic conditions brought hard times, came to the plains of Nebraska and Kansas and other western states,” one historian has observed. “They came to found communities where they could enjoy a corporate life.” Rugged individualism was only part of the frontier story; house raisings, school and church building, community harvesting, and cooperative cattle roundups were important as well.¹³

Cultural conservatism was not to be confused with political conservatism. There was no proven link between a preference for country and western music, pickup trucks, cowboy boots, the phenomenon of the “good old boy,” and the Texas two-step on the one hand and antiunion attitudes and a regressive sales tax on the other.¹⁴Johnson had come to believe by the end of his first year in Congress that if blacks and Hispanics could be enfranchised and empowered and if the white working class could be persuaded to make common cause with them, the balance would shift to progressives. It was, he would come to believe, the only alternative to continued second-class citizenship for not only Texas, but the entire South.

 

AS THE ELECTION OF1940APPROACHED, however, the prospects for a progressive triumph in Texas, indeed, in the nation as a whole, seemed to be fading. The state, like the nation, was increasingly preoccupied with the lingering Depression and the war clouds gathering in Europe and Asia. Union activists were beginning to appear in Texas, and the plutocracy was gripped once again by fears that working-class leaders would seize on economic issues to build an interethnic alliance among whites, blacks, and Mexican Americans. Though they were in principle Republicans, there was no reason for conservatives to abandon the Democratic party; a one-party system continued to be a convenient tool to confuse and subdue the working classes. Rather, the task seemed to be to wean the party away from the New Deal. This effort came to focus on the presidential candidacy of John Nance Garner.

Garner was the archetypal Texas individualist, with boots, cowboy hat, tobacco plug, and Horatio Alger credo.¹⁵Ambition was more important than ideology to “Black Jack” Garner, however, and he remained quiet as Roosevelt’s first-term vice president. With the waning of the New Deal, the court-packing plan, the popular reaction against CIO-led sit-down strikes in the automobile industry, and FDR’s unsuccessful effort to purge conservative southern congressmen from the Democratic party in 1938, Garner began to make his move. More and more openly, he spoke against the New Deal. A 1939 article in Time termed the dispute between Roosevelt and Garner “an undeclared war” and quoted New Dealers who labeled Garner “the leader of reaction against six years of enlightened reform.”¹⁶

Most observers believed that FDR would not challenge the two-term tradition established by George Washington, but never sanctioned in the Constitution, and run again in 1940. The drubbing he had received in the 1938 midterm elections, when Republicans gained eight seats in the Senate and nearly doubled their numbers in the House from 88 to 170, coupled with the fact that conservative Democrats won throughout the South, seemed to indicate that the New Deal was on the wane and FDR’s fortunes with it. In March, the Texas legislature passed a resolution endorsing “that sterling American and outstanding statesman, John N. Garner,” for president. Out of gratitude for past favors done, Rayburn announced his support for “Black Jack” for president. In December 1939, Garner officially declared. Shortly thereafter, Roosevelt told a meeting of his cabinet, “I see that the Vice President has thrown his bottle—I mean his hat—into the ring.”¹⁷Thereafter, the president steadfastly refused to take his name out of consideration.

Garner’s apostasy created a dilemma for LBJ. “Lyndon and I spent a great deal of time talking about the Senate,” said Warren Magnuson, “because we both wanted to be senators.”¹⁸If FDR’s star was indeed on the wane, it appeared to be in Johnson’s interests to throw in with Garner and Rayburn. His contacts in the White House—Corcoran, Ickes, Hopkins—advised him not to jump ship, however. The old man had not made up his mind, and if he were not assured that his successor would support both his domestic and foreign policies, he would probably run.

LBJ never hesitated. Throughout 1938 and 1939 he demonstrated repeatedly that he was an administration man. In the House he voted against the Hatch Act, a measure prohibiting federal employees from taking an active part in political campaigns. The Garner camp had pushed it, fearing that hundreds of “Roosevelt’s employees” would take an active part in the 1940 Democratic Convention, just as they had in 1936. In surveying congressional votes on twenty-three of the most controversial pieces of legislation supported by the ad-ministration, theDallas Morning News found that only six congressmen had voted yea every time. LBJ was one of them.¹⁹

In May 1940, Texas Democrats gathered at Waco in their quadrennial convention to select and instruct delegates to the national nominating convention. As the Roosevelt and Garner forces prepared for a knock-down, drag-out battle, FDR contacted Johnson. “I want you to see the Texas delegation goes for Garner,” he said. Johnson: “Mr. President, what are you talking about?” “People are proud of their leaders,” he replied. “If I go in there and take the people away from their leader—I don’t need those votes. I’d rather John Garner have the votes. I want to be magnanimous.”²⁰

In April, Roosevelt had decisively beaten Garner in Democratic primaries in Wisconsin and Illinois. More fundamentally, the German blitzkrieg against Belgium, the Netherlands, and France was creating an overwhelming determination among American voters not to change horses in midstream. With FDR’s guidance, Johnson and Rayburn drafted a compromise “Harmony Resolution.” Under its terms, the delegation would vote for Garner on the first ballot as Texas’s favorite son candidate. Members would then be released to vote their choice on subsequent ballots, however. Participation in any “Stop Roosevelt” movement was strictly prohibited.

The delegates who gathered in Waco were not initially in a harmonious mood. Garnerites and Third Termers, led by Maury Maverick, shouted each other down, demonstrated, and engaged in sporadic fisticuffs. After three hours, some semblance of order was restored, and the convention accepted the Harmony Resolution. Rayburn was named head of the delegation, with LBJ chosen as vice chairman.²¹

By 1940, Roosevelt and his advisers had come to see the Johnson-Rayburn faction in Texas as the hope of the future, a progressive counterweight to Garner, Houston business tycoon Jesse Jones, Roy Miller, Amon Carter, and other Republicans masquerading as Democrats. The events of 1940, Tommy Corcoran told FDR, helped “crystallize a new leadership in Texas around your man, Lyndon Johnson. Local control of the Texas situation is desperately important.” Mutual acrimonies splitting ‘the Texas crowd’ presented “an extraordinary opportunity to get control … The two growing points in the Texas situation are Rayburn and Johnson, who, with his sponsor, Wirtz, has taken over all the strength Maury Maverick once had on a much more intelligent plane … The natural place to build up Johnson … is as Secretary of the National Democratic Committee.”²²

FDR was tempted. Despite the president’s personal popularity, prospects for the 1940 congressional campaign looked bleak. The Democrats enjoyed a large majority in the House, but Roosevelt’s political intelligence told him that as many as 101 of the Democratic seats were in jeopardy. If the GOP could win forty-seven, they would have a majority in the lower chamber for the first time in ten years, unseating Rayburn as speaker and threatening the administration’s preparedness program. LBJ, who ran unopposed in 1940, was certainly willing. “We may lose fifty close House seats,” he wrote Roosevelt on October 1. “Call on me for anything at any time. P.S. We lost eighty-two seats in 1938. The present forty-five margin gives me the night-sweats at three a.m.”²³FDR was reluctant, however, to appoint such a junior person to such an important post. When Rayburn and House Majority Leader John W. McCormack of Massachusetts suggested to him that he name Johnson as the unofficial congressional campaign manager for the House, the president jumped at the idea. “Sold,” he told them. “That was my idea, too. That boy has got what’s needed.”²⁴Although he was not so officially designated, Johnson acted as liaison between the Democratic National Committee and the House Congressional Campaign Committee.

There was no time to waste. With five weeks to go in the election, the financial arm of the DNC had raised less than $10,000 of the $100,000 promised. “You could have cut the gloom around Democratic congressional headquarters with a knife,” journalist Drew Pearson wrote. “The campaign committee, headed by Representative Pat Drewry, a charming and dawdling Virginian, had collapsed like the minister’s one-hoss shay.”²⁵After huddling with FDR, Johnson rented office space in the Munsey Building in downtown Washington at 1329 E Street, NW. Within hours he had it furnished with desks, chairs, a divan, and telephones. From that evening until the election, he, John and Nellie Connally, and Herbert Henderson began working eighteen-hour days.

In 1940 the average congressional campaign cost around $5,000; in big urban districts, twice that amount. Coordinating with Sam Rayburn, Johnson turned to Texas, seeking money from both friends and enemies of FDR and the New Deal. A few high rollers could have easily provided the entire $100,000 that was needed, but federal law prohibited direct campaign contributions by corporations, and the Hatch Act limited individual contributions to $5,000. Of course, as with all campaign finance laws, there were ways around the restrictions. George and Herman Brown came through immediately, funneling $30,000 to LBJ through business associates.²⁶

Ironically, the big strike came when Johnson and Rayburn persuaded oilmen Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson to chip in between $60,000 and $70,000, again through third-party donations of the $5,000 maximum. “Bring in a Republican Congress, with a new Speaker and new committee chairmen,” Rayburn warned them, “and they’ll tear your depletion allowance and intangible-drilling write-offs to pieces.”²⁷Finally, Johnson used his entrée with the Jewish community, since 1936 an important element in the New Deal coalition. “I think he got most of the money out of Texas,” Jim Rowe recalled, “and then he got some from New York. I remember he went to New York several times and spoke to people, largely to Jewish groups, I believe.”²⁸

Roosevelt arranged for a direct telephone line from the dining room in his mother’s house in Hyde Park, New York, so that he could talk to Johnson and other campaign managers on election night. Just after midnight, LBJ, who was attending a party with Jim Rowe and others in Georgetown, called the Boss. How many seats will we lose, FDR asked his thirty-two-year-old protégé. “We’re not going to lose … We’re going to gain,” Johnson told the president.²⁹

And gain they did. Although FDR’s plurality in 1940 was half what it had been in 1936, and the Democrats lost three seats in the Senate, the party actually enjoyed a net gain of six in the House. Roosevelt was enormously impressed. So were political pundits. “To the boys on the Democratic side of the House of Representatives,” wrote Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen in their widely syndicated “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column, “many of them still nervously mopping their brows over narrow escapes, the hero of the hair-raising campaign was no big shot party figure … The Democrats’ unknown hero was Representative Lyndon Baines Johnson, a rangy, 32-year-old … who … has political magic at his finger tips.”³⁰

 

GREAT POLITICAL CAREERSare built on hard work, instinct—but also luck. Johnson’s longing glances at the Senate had seemed pointless so far; Texas’s two senators, Morris Sheppard and Tom Connally, were firmly entrenched. “Connally was in,” D. B. Hardeman, recalled, “it looked like he was good for years, and Sheppard looked like he was good for years. And they were both unbeatable.”³¹

But just as it had in 1937, fate intervened. On April 4, 1941, Senator Sheppard died suddenly of an intracranial hemorrhage. He was sixty-five.³²“I happened to have been the first one to tell Mr. Johnson that there was a vacancy in the Senate,” Walter Jenkins recalled. “I was on the police desk at the front door of the New House Office Building, and early that morning someone came in and said that Morris Sheppard had just died. I picked up the phone on the desk and called Mr. Johnson. He said, ‘Well, I won’t be in this morning.’ ”³³

Johnson huddled with Wirtz, who urged him to run. There was little to lose, he observed. Sheppard’s seat would be filled by a special election, which meant that LBJ would not have to give up his position in the House. A week later, the two met with Charles Marsh and Harold Young, a Texas attorney on Vice President Henry Wallace’s staff, to map a campaign strategy.

The first task, all agreed, was to obtain FDR’s explicit endorsement of LBJ’s candidacy. Fond of Johnson though he was, the president was at first reluctant. Virtually all of the liberal southerners he had endorsed for Congress in the attempted 1938 purge had been defeated. Johnson was young and virtually unknown outside his district. Roosevelt did not need to tie himself to another loser. Corcoran, Rowe, and Ickes all went to bat for LBJ, however. The alternatives to Johnson were “too frightful for contemplation,” Rowe told the president.³⁴

Roosevelt and his advisers were particularly concerned that the red-baiting chair of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Congressman Martin Dies from east Texas, would replace Sheppard. Roosevelt called his protégé to the White House to confer. He wanted to support him, the president said, but he did not want to lead him down the garden path. Johnson was equally circumspect in the meeting. He wanted to run, he said, but he was young, the field would be strong, and he did not want to embarrass the White House.³⁵Both decided that he should return to Texas and test the waters.

During the ensuing whirlwind tour, Johnson addressed a joint session of the state legislature. His speech, urging support for the administration’s foreign and defense policies, elicited a standing ovation.³⁶In Washington, a reporter asked FDR if he would be willing to endorse Congressman Johnson for Senator Sheppard’s seat. “I can’t take part in a Texas primary,” Roosevelt replied. “If you ask me about Lyndon himself … I can only say what is perfectly true—you all know he is a very old and close friend of mine. That’s about all. Now don’t try to tie those two things together!”³⁷The White House press corps erupted with laughter. “F.D.R. Picks Johnson to Defeat Dies,” read a Dallas Morning News headline.³⁸Significantly, however, Governor W. Lee O’Daniel appointed eighty-six-year-old Andrew Jackson Houston, the son of the father of the republic, to be interim senator, an appointment that would leave O’Daniel with all options open.

Despite the president’s unofficial endorsement, Johnson’s chances appeared bleak. A statewide survey taken by pollster Joe Belden, who would effectively apply George Gallup’s techniques to state politics, gave LBJ only 5 percent of the vote. The leaders were Dies with 9 percent, Attorney General Gerald Mann with 26 percent, and the still undeclared O’Daniel with 33 percent. All in all, twenty-nine candidates threw their hats, boots, bottles, aprons, and guns into the ring.³⁹

For LBJ, Mann was the most problematic. A handsome former football star at Southern Methodist University who hailed from Sulphur Springs, Mann had a reputation for honesty, integrity, and courage. He had earned a law degree from Harvard while at the same time ministering to a Congregationalist church in Gloucester, Massachusetts. After serving as assistant attorney general and secretary of state, he was elected state attorney general in 1938 at age forty. He compiled an excellent record prosecuting loan sharks and antitrust violators and was offered the post of chief justice of the state supreme court; he turned it down to run for another term as attorney general. A strong supporter of the New Deal, Mann was most likely of all the candidates to cut into Johnson’s natural constituency.

Dies was also a threat. As self-anointed superpatriot and chair of HUAC, Martin Dies was set to capture the conservative vote. While endorsing the administration’s preparedness programs, he charged repeatedly, to the glee of Garner and his supporters, that New Deal agencies were rife with communist agents. Communists and Nazis were under every bed, some 7 million in the United States alone, he declared; abroad, a “secret” army larger than the entire American armed force plotted invasion.⁴⁰

Within days of Johnson’s announcement, his campaign team began to come together. Wirtz resigned his position in the Interior Department to act as LBJ’s chief strategist. Although Claude Wild was once again named campaign manager, it was the twenty-four-year-old John Connally who actually oversaw day-to-day operations from his headquarters on the sixteenth floor of the Stephen F. Austin Hotel.⁴¹

Connally, who had married his college sweetheart, Nellie Brill, in December 1940, had grown increasingly close to Johnson. Fashioning himself after LBJ, he quickly became one of the best-known congressional aides on the Hill and, like LBJ before him, secured the speakership of the Little Congress. Contemporaries remarked on the almost symbiotic relationship that developed. Adopting many of Johnson’s mannerisms, Connally did not hesitate to perform the toughest assignments. He was and would be regarded as LBJ’s hatchet man. “LBJ,” read one cryptic note dated 1939, “delivered $300.00 in cash to Maury on the floor today. Jbc.”⁴²The 1941 campaign was to be John Connally’s baptism of fire. He worked feverishly and effectively, but in the end, his inexperience would cost LBJ the election.

Johnson opened his campaign, as he had in 1937, with a giant rally in San Marcos. The ever loyal President Cecil Evans had SWT alumni bussed in from all over the state. The auditorium was packed with three thousand people when a somewhat overstimulated Johnson strode to the microphone. In a booming voice he read from a prepared script: his campaign theme, he said would be “Roosevelt and Unity.”⁴³If elected, he would continue to work for full parity payments for farmers, old-age pensions of up to $40 a month for those sixty years of age and over, and state control over conservation of natural resources. He pledged undying support for the administration’s military buildup and at-tempts to confront and contain the Axis powers. “If the day ever comes when my vote must be cast to send your boy to the trenches,” he declared prophetically, “that day Lyndon Johnson will leave his Senate seat and go with him.”⁴⁴

Between May 3 and 10, the candidate covered two thousand miles and delivered five radio addresses. Virtually all were high-minded appeals to care for those who could not care for themselves, to ensure that all Americans had an equal opportunity to enjoy the fruits of prosperity, and for unity in the face of the international crisis. “For two weeks,” he told his listeners, “I waited to announce in the hope some candidate would have the courage to commit himself to all-out support for the President and his foreign policy. This was not done. Therefore, I am in the race … National defense is the job. War is near our borders.”⁴⁵To his dismay, the crowds proved unresponsive—not to his message, but to his delivery. Johnson was not a gifted orator, particularly when reading from a prepared text. He came across as artificial, forced, a voice completely untethered from the message.

Although he would not officially declare until the third week in May, Governor O’Daniel was already running hard. A new Belden poll taken on May 3 gave him 33.8 percent of the vote, with Mann second at 28.2 and Dies third with 27.9. Lyndon was a distant fourth at 9.3 percent.⁴⁶

Hailing originally from Ohio, where his father worked in a plow factory, Wilburt Lee O’Daniel had graduated from business college at age eighteen. In 1935, O’Daniel started his own firm, the Hill Billy Flour Company. Each sack of his company’s product was emblazoned with a goat, beneath which was the slogan “Pass the biscuits, Pappy.” From the day the first sack hit the market he was known far and wide as Pappy. By 1938, he had formed his family into a band: Pat on the banjo, Mike on the fiddle, and Molly teaming with Texas Rose on vocals. Within months the cornpone ensemble was reaching hundreds of thousands of Texans over a statewide radio hookup.

While his offspring strummed and hummed in the background, the handsome, beaming Pappy delivered homilies on the virtues of motherhood, Texas, the Ten Commandments, and the Golden Rule. He even composed songs for the program, “Your Own Sweet Darling Wife” and “The Boy Who Never Gets Too Big to Comb His Mother’s Hair” being among the most notable.⁴⁷“At twelve-thirty sharp each day,” a national publication reported, “a fifteen-minute silence reigned in the state of Texas, broken only by mountain music, and the dulcet voice of W. Lee O’Daniel.”⁴⁸A political career was inevitable.

In 1938 Pappy asked his radio audience what they thought of the idea of his running for governor. He subsequently reported that more than fifty thousand voiced their approval. Ignoring his inexperience, O’Daniel campaigned blithely on the teachings of the Bible and a promise of a $30-a-month pension for every Texan over the age of sixty-five. To the disgust of Texas elite—economic, political, and intellectual—Pappy captured 573,000 votes, 51 percent of the total. In 1940 his total climbed to 645,000 or 54 percent of the whole, which made him the most prolific vote getter in the state’s history.⁴⁹

 

WITHO’DANIEL MOPPING UP RURAL VOTESacross the state, and polls showing him last, an overwrought Johnson took to his sickbed. The sec-ond week in May he succumbed to a bout of severe depression complicated by a throat infection. As his fever rose, Lady Bird and his doctors made arrangements to hospitalize him. Connally; Wirtz; Roy Hofheinz, a Harris County judge; and Everett Looney, an Austin attorney, would fill in for him. As Johnson was preparing to leave for the hospital, Connally and Gordon Fulcher, publicity director for the campaign, tried to persuade him to sign a press release announcing his forthcoming hospitalization. He was upstairs in his bedroom, “nearly out of his head from the fever, not rational, and bellowing that we were not to put out a press release under any circumstances.”⁵⁰“Congressman,” Connally replied, “you can’t hide for a week. You can’t check into one of the finest hospitals in Texas and expect people not to notice. You can’t cancel out a week’s schedule, have a substitute give your speeches, and not have every newsman in the state wondering where you are … We are going to tell them where you are.” Johnson was unrelenting. “Well, if you do, I’ll never speak to you again. And you can get the hell out of my house.”⁵¹

Lady Bird followed Connally and Fulcher down the stairs, asking them to ignore Lyndon’s advice. Connally duly issued the press release and refused to have anything to do with Johnson until Charles Marsh intervened. “After a few more days, we began to talk again about the campaign and what needed to be done,” Connally said. “But that was one of the first serious encounters we had, and there would be others as the years passed.”⁵²

Ironically, by the time Lyndon emerged from the hospital some two weeks later and hit the campaign trail, his poll numbers had increased to 17.6 percent. O’Daniel’s total had fallen ten points to 22 percent, while Mann and Dies were neck-and-neck at 26 percent.⁵³It now appeared that the young man from the Hill Country had a fighting chance.

Marsh decided to step in and take charge of the care and feeding of the candidate. “Personally, I believe that the watching of the physical Lyndon Johnson is the most important single thing to get every ounce into this thing,” he wrote Gordon Fulcher. See that he sleeps and get him a rubdown to see that he does, he ordered. Greens, salads, vegetables, and a glass of hot water on rising to prevent constipation. “I don’t think you will need to watch alcohol.”⁵⁴The candidate’s mental development must be attended to as well. “I am hoping for intellectual curiosity which will cause him to substitute an hour of new food daily, not pertaining to the business of government … [but] geography, background history, a smattering of science, especially pertaining to agriculture, and possible general thinking called philosophy or psychology, which had nothing to do with an immediate object.”⁵⁵

There were style suggestions. “Your voice high-tones under emotion,” Marsh advised Johnson. “You can’t lose the emotion, but you must lose the high notes. Your gestures should be natural, but you must weed out about 50 percent. You have learned domination of slower and smaller people by pounding the table like a machine gun. When you are speaking, the physical pounding would stop the sense.”⁵⁶

Marsh himself was subject to terrible mood swings. Sometime during 1941, he paid several visits to a sanitarium for personal treatment. He had already admitted to drinking too heavily, not exercising, and obsessing. Out of those visits came a remarkable, rambling essay on manic depression which he may or may not have shown to LBJ but certainly wrote with him in mind. “The great actor,” Marsh opined, “is always the natural one—the one who, in a delicate shading, merges his own personality in an imperceptible marriage with the character to be acted, so that only one, and not two, is seen and heard by the audience … the man who presumes to serve his world in sanity … His first business is the truth of it all—his private attitude toward the expression of his truth … This double word [manic depressive] should not be thrown away. It defines a person of great force who may have temporarily been out of line in service through a curving, or a stoppage, or a backtracking of sane force in action serving others. A manic-depressive then is merely one of great force out of the line of the universal oneness which is the sane movement of force through human life.”⁵⁷

LBJ’s physician, J. Willis Hurst, later speculated on the possibility that LBJ suffered from a bipolar disorder. “I think [it is] perfectly normal … Extremely interesting people do display many emotions, ranging from anger, to humor, to unpredictability, to all kinds of things: up to a point this of course is entirely normal. Now, whether or not you want to say that his swings in all of this, his emotional swings, reached the abnormal state, would be a very debatable issue. I would be unwilling myself to say that these were outside the normal range.”⁵⁸

 

WITH DIRECTION AND ENCOURAGEMENT FROMWIRTZ,the Roosevelt administration joined the fray in Johnson’s behalf. By the end of May, the congressman’s office was able to report hundreds of thousands of new WPA dollars to fund public works projects in Texas. Newspapers began to swing into line. LBJ outbid Mann for the support of Houston Harte’s extensive chain of publications.⁵⁹O’Daniel, who had several times advocated large tax breaks to draw industry to the state, who steadfastly opposed any type of minimum wage law, and who advocated jail terms for workers who dared strike, enjoyed the support of much of the business community and their mouthpieces, but there were exceptions. Introduced to Amon Carter, publisher of theFort Worth Star Telegram , “Lyndon got right up in his face—talked to him thirty minutes, standing right up next to him,” said insurance executive and Johnson supporter Raymond Buck. “At the end of that time, Amon was sold,” and theTelegram came out for Johnson.⁶⁰

Financial backing was never a problem for LBJ in the 1941 campaign. Grateful for the Marshall Ford and Corpus Christi contracts and poised to take their place as major defense contractors, Herman and George Brown pledged to spend whatever was necessary to secure Johnson’s election. “We never were in danger of running out of money,” Herman later told Eliot Janeway, “but we damn near ran out of names [i.e., of third parties through whom checks could be funneled].”⁶¹There was no exact accounting of campaign donations and expenditures. When Alvin Wirtz found that Wilton Woods, who managed the Austin campaign office, was keeping an account, he ordered him to destroy it. In response to numerous complaints of campaign finance fraud, the IRS conducted an investigation from 1942 through 1944. Its tax agents estimated that Brown and Root had contributed some $300,000, much of it illegally.⁶²The reason nothing came of the investigation, aside from the fact that it occurred during a Democratic administration, was that “it was rather a customary way of doing business in Texas politics to take money wherever you could get it,” as one veteran politico put it. O’Daniel had collected millions of dollars over the years at his many rallies. Following the performances, his children passed small barrels labeled “Flour, not Pork,” in which supporters were invited to drop nickels, dimes, and quarters.⁶³None of it was reported.

Brown and Root were not Lyndon’s only financial angels. Welly Hopkins, who had represented the United Mine Workers, raised several thousand dollars from labor sources.⁶⁴And, of course, there was Charles Marsh and his Fort Worth partner, Sid Richardson. Marsh, an idealistic newspaperman, had financed Richardson’s oil ventures during the early years of the Depression and was largely responsible for the latter’s financial success. By 1941, the elevation of Lyndon Johnson to high national office had become something of an obsession, even though the candidate was making a cuckold of him. In fact, in 1940, Marsh offered LBJ complete financial independence so that once in office, he could act solely in accordance with his conscience and the public interest. During a conversation in which a run for the Senate was being discussed, Marsh suddenly said, “I want to give you my half of the oil properties that I own with Sid Richardson and you will have the money and you won’t be responsible to any special interest.”⁶⁵In 1965 that property was worth $100 million. Stunned, LBJ sat for a moment; he realized that Marsh was absolutely serious. With some embarrassment, he refused. Better to be beholden to several interests than just one.

In fact, the strategy and substance of LBJ’s 1941 campaign were largely the work of Marsh, a disciple of Henry A. Wallace and his “Century of the Common Man” philosophy. “Johnson will grow more frank, more direct, and I hope more powerful, with each new experience and with age,” he wrote an acquaintance. “You and I both know that men grow and men shrink … These men (and Rayburn is merely a high-class one) shrink as they pass fifty, as [Senator Tom] Connally has shown, because they are so completely aware of themselves in their later years. They become defensive in holding on to that which they have … Johnson won’t do this … He will drive through Washington … The ladies of the evening won’t get him as the feminine camp followers of the drawing rooms flatter. On that front to date he is the victor, because he has always, thus far, known what he wants, and when he wants it.”⁶⁶

LBJ would be the engine of Marsh’s vision. A devout if profane believer in the Christian God, Marsh looked to Johnson to lead the South out of its political and economic bondage and the downtrodden, disadvantaged, and oppressed of all regions to a better life. “We [Johnson and Marsh] agreed that a whole could be no healthier than its parts,” he observed to a friend. “We agreed that every small community in the South was in danger of its life. We saw that the North and East had the factories and the brains.” The North and East had “looted” the South and Southwest during the Great War; “only weather and space saved Texas until oil came along.”⁶⁷

Like Wallace, Marsh looked forward to an American free of domination by a privileged plutocracy, to a countervailing society in which educated farmers and workers cooperated with public-spirited business people. Also like Wallace, Marsh believed that American foreign policy should be aimed in the short run at defending and liberating Western Europe, but in the long run at helping the peoples of Afro-Asia and Latin America with their transition from colonialism to independence.⁶⁸

 

AS THE CAMPAIGN ENTERED ITS LAST MONTH,LBJ and his team increasingly viewed Pappy O’Daniel as the man to beat. Pappy had announced his candidacy from the Governor’s Mansion over a statewide radio hookup. He ridiculed the Roosevelt-Johnson relationship by mimicking the president’s endorsement of LBJ as “mah old, old friend.” During a news conference that followed, reporters reminded O’Daniel that he had sponsored legislation to force state officeholders who ran for jobs other than the ones they held to resign. Did he plan to give up the governorship? “I should say not,” he replied indignantly.⁶⁹On his radio show, he told listeners, his campaign would be based on “one hundred percent approval of the Lord God Jehovah, widows, orphans, low taxes, the Ten Commandments, and the Golden Rule.”⁷⁰He put together a traveling show that featured a bus equipped with a special dome in the shape of the state capitol. Pat, Mike, and Molly were accompanied by Leon Huff, the “Texas Songbird.” It was a hillbilly spectacle to rival all hillbilly spectacles.

O’Daniel was the archetypal political evangelist offering up the traditional contradictory mix of Christian family values and laissez-faire capitalism spiced with a little social welfare for the elderly. It was frequently said of O’Daniel that his aim in life was to save the soul of the poor man and the wealth of the rich man.⁷¹

Johnson’s response was to wage two separate campaigns, one substantive and one show. The issue, he said in his serious speeches, was “support of Roosevelt against appeasement and in defiance of dictators.”⁷²He assumed that war was inevitable and declared his backing for a two-ocean navy, a fifty thousand-plane air force, and a 2 million-man army. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas happened to be driving through Texas with his family on his way to vacation in his beloved West during the campaign. His car pulled into Big Spring just when LBJ was holding some three thousand in thrall. “Everytime he mentioned your name,” Douglas wrote FDR, “the crowd cheered. Every time he mentioned [Charles] Lindbergh the crowd booed.”⁷³When O’Daniel criticized Roosevelt as a backslapping politician who could not operate a peanut wagon, Johnson commented, “It must have comforted Hitler to hear the governor talk like that.”⁷⁴

LBJ’s other theme was unity. “We must refuse to elect any man … who will in any way lend aid to discord, division, or disunity.”⁷⁵Liberals noted with dismay that in his zeal for unity, LBJ came close to labor baiting. “Texas labor has been free of strikes and disturbances,” he told his audiences, “free of radical leadership and membership.” He was quite ready to use troops to break strikes. “We’re going to support the $21-a-month draft boy the president sends to open plane plants where communist agitators and radical labor leaders close them.”⁷⁶Still, to the extent that it took an active role in the Texas Senate campaign, organized labor supported LBJ.⁷⁷

Then there was the LBJ version of the “Pass the Biscuits, Pappy” campaign. “We finally decided if you couldn’t beat ’em, you might as well join ’em,” Lady Bird declared, “so we got ourselves a band and had ourselves a starlet,” saying more than she meant. The Johnson campaign hired Houston radio personality Harfield Weedin, paying him $1,000 a week and giving him carte blanche. He put together a two-hour patriotic review designed to link LBJ with FDR, the red-white-and-blue, and democracy’s struggle against fascist aggression. The gala, performed repeatedly during the last three weeks of the campaign, began with musical numbers by a twenty-three-piece swing band, the Patriots, dressed in white dinner jackets, red carnations, and blue trousers. Mary Lou Behn, the tour’s sex symbol, followed, singing such hits as “San Antonio Rose” and “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart.” Finishing up the review was Sophia Parker, a 285-pound songstress who labeled herself the “Kate Smith of the South,” belting out “I Am an American” and “The Eyes of Texas Are upon You.” Weedin then came on stage to narrate a thirty-minute hagiographic history of the Roosevelt administration, featuring FDR as savior of his country, first from the Hoover Depression and then from Nazi aggression. Finally, with the master of ceremonies and company marching in step to the tune of “God Bless America,” Lyndon made his appearance. Not even his wooden delivery could dissipate the crowd’s enthusiasm.⁷⁸

Polls taken a week before the election showed LBJ in a virtual dead heat with O’Daniel and Mann. Then, on June 22, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, giving vast reinforcement to Roosevelt and Johnson’s claim that Nazi Germany was bent on world domination and that the surviving democracies must band together to stop it. Belatedly, O’Daniel tried to identify himself with FDR. Not only had he voted for him in 1936, he said, but he had written a campaign song for him in 1932 and offered up numerous radio prayers in his behalf. It was too little, too late; the last poll before the election showed Lyndon clearly in the lead with 31.2 percent, with O’Daniel second at 26.7 and Mann third at 25.2.⁷⁹

 

ON ELECTION DAY,Lyndon and Lady Bird drove to Johnson City to vote. Friends noted that he had not regained the weight he had lost while in the hospital and had again developed a nervous rash. Sleep had come only fitfully during the last stages of the campaign. Back in Austin from Johnson City, he took a sleeping pill and then awoke around 10P.M. to catch the first returns. They were encouraging. When LBJ went to bed in the early morning hours of June 29, he led O’Daniel by three thousand votes. When he awoke, the margin had increased to five thousand with 96% of the vote in. It seemed impossible with four major candidates in the field that Johnson would not come out on top. Jubilant, his staff raised the candidate on their shoulders and paraded him around the Stephen F. Austin Hotel. “Lyndon Johnson Elected Senator,” ran the banner headline in theDallas Morning News. But, as one Texas sage put it, “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.”⁸⁰

There were quite a number of powerful Texans who wanted to see Pappy elected to the Senate to get him out of the state. Chief among these were the liquor, beer, and horse racing interests, who feared a fundamentalist Christian attack on their livelihoods. If the election could be swung to O’Daniel, Lieutenant Governor Coke Stevenson, no friend of Prohibition, would become governor. The day after the polls closed, some fifteen state legislators met with Stevenson and former Governor Jim Ferguson to lay plans to swing the election to O’Daniel. All had been heavily subsidized in the past by the state’s brewers and distillers.⁸¹After the Texas Election Bureau declared LBJ the winner, reporters asked O’Daniel if he was going to concede. “Mrs. O’Daniel is in the Governor’s Mansion praying,” was his only reply.⁸²

As of Monday, eighteen thousand votes, mostly in east Texas, remained uncounted. The Stevenson-Ferguson forces did not know how many they needed to put Pappy past Johnson, and in their inexperience John Connally and Lyndon Johnson blundered by telling them. Bloc voting was typical in Texas, and corruption was a multicandidate sport. The counties from San Antonio to the Rio Grande, many of them with heavy Hispanic populations, were controlled by political machines such as those of the Mavericks in San Antonio, George Parr in Duval County, and Manuel Cuellar in Zapata County.⁸³As anticipated, the region delivered up to 90 percent of the vote for Johnson in some counties.

Anxious to show that they were in the lead, Johnson and Connally told their managers to report the vote totals to the election bureau as soon as possible. George Parr, the boss of Duval County, kept telling them when they would call, “Look, you’re children; you don’t know what you’re doing. You’re going to get all your votes out on the table and they’ll come in with however many votes it takes to beat you.”⁸⁴By Sunday night, the Stevenson-Ferguson forces had the information they needed. “We … intercepted a telegram from Coke Stevenson … that went out Sunday to various key county men in East Texas … to hold up counting the votes until further notice from W. Lee O’Daniel’s campaign headquarters. Surprisingly enough, the voting trends in those counties showed a very interesting and surprising change beginning Monday morning.”⁸⁵

Once it was clear that Martin Dies could not win, Ferguson and Stevenson had persuaded him to allow county judges to shift some of his votes to O’Daniel. By Wednesday the governor had a 1,311-vote lead. Johnson’s managers appealed to their south Texas allies to do something. But there was nothing to be done. The county judges could switch votes, but it was more difficult to manufacture them, especially after the fact.

In an effort to block the O’Daniel forces, the Roosevelt administration sent FBI agents into the Piney Woods to investigate electoral wrongdoing. The probe did not begin, however, until July 3, two days after Pappy had been declared the official winner. Joe Belden conducted a postelection survey of east Texas voters that revealed “an amazing change of votes” from the reported count, especially from Dies to O’Daniel.⁸⁶“It is certain that the Texas voters got bilked and lost control of their state again by a merger of stupid drys with smart wets under Ferguson and brewery money who financed the deal and backed by the Senate coronation men who hate Roosevelt and Johnson as the developers of public water power,” Marsh grumped in a letter to a friend.⁸⁷

Not surprisingly, Connally and his coworkers wanted to contest the results.⁸⁸H. M. Greene, Lyndon’s professor from his SWT days, argued that it would be immoral to allow such a blatant case of political theft to go unchallenged. A surprisingly philosophical LBJ would have none of it, however. “Well boys, I’ve listened to all the arguments and heard all these figures,” he said. “It looks to me like we’ve been beat. You just don’t turn one of these elections over. I don’t see how we can do it. We’d better just admit that we’re defeated and be a good loser. There might be another time.”⁸⁹Without his participation, the Texas legislature on July 3 authorized an investigation, and the chair of the State Democratic Executive Committee wired the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Elections asking for a probe. Nothing came of either initiative, thanks largely to Alvin Wirtz. “Hell … I hope they don’t investigate me,” Johnson laughingly remarked to his brother.⁹⁰There had been as much vote buying by the Johnson campaign as the O’Daniel. And there were all those illegal contributions. The best thing to do was take your medicine and wait until the next election.

 

“LYNDON,apparently you Texans haven’t learned one of the first things we learned up in New York state,” Roosevelt subsequently told him, “and that is that when the election is over, you sit on the ballot boxes.”⁹¹“Did you ever see a shooting gallery with its circular, rotating discs with lots of pipes and rabbits on the circuit?” Lyndon subsequently asked Tommy Corcoran. “Well, when you miss one the first time, you get a second chance. And the sonofabitch who trimmed you will always come up again.”⁹²“A memory of Lyndon that I will always cherish,” Lady Bird said, “was the way he looked, walking away to catch the plane to Washington after his defeat had been announced. I still see him striding off, looking very jaunty, and putting extra verve into his step.”⁹³O’Daniel would have to face a contest for a regular six-year term in 1942. “I thought I could be elected the next year as a martyr,” LBJ later told Ronnie Dugger.⁹⁴

Viewed in broader terms, LBJ’s 1941 Senate campaign was remarkable. Beginning with but 5 percent of the vote and little visibility outside the Tenth District, he had defeated (numerically, if not officially) a football hero turned law enforcer, a red-baiting racist, and a political evangelist. At thirty-three, Lyndon Johnson had become a force to be reckoned with in state and national politics. It was all the more astonishing considering how few signs of progressivism were visible in Texas at the time. Unions were just beginning to gain a foothold in the petrochemical and shipping industries, but were not yet seen as a major institutional magnet for the have-nots. Segregation would not be challenged untilSmith v. Allwright in 1944. Political machines, urban and rural, still held sway. The rural ethic remained extremely strong in Texas. “The boys at the forks of the creek,” declared one observer, “see the cities becoming big and wealthy, commercial and financial interests merging for their own benefit … and they doubt the disinterestedness of their political friends and register their disapproval of anything they sponsor … on the theory that no good can come out of Nazareth.”⁹⁵Yet, a plurality of voters had responded to Johnson’s commitment to social justice.

 

LIKE OTHER PORTIONSof the South and West, Texas was struggling in the late 1930s and 1940s to comprehend the new American nationalism that was then emerging and to identify the state’s place in it. Industrialists and financiers like the Brown brothers and Houston banker Jesse Jones wanted the blessings of federal regulation and largesse without federal control. Liberals like Lyndon Johnson and Charles Marsh, however, saw the state becoming part of a larger national community in which a commitment to social justice was an integral part of the patriotic creed.⁹⁶

Indeed, it might be said that, through his support for the New Deal not only in fact but in theory, and for FDR’s campaign to defend free world democracies from fascist aggression, LBJ was the voice of American nationalism calling on Texans to abandon their parochialism, their fears, their deliberate ignorance and become part of an emerging consensus in behalf of social justice and internationalism. “One cannot separate the thought of the future of democracy from the continuity of our own country as we know it,” Johnson declared in his speech to the Texas legislature. “An American is not born of a certain blood or ancestry. Through the history of our country, there has predominated a common belief in the rights of man. A belief so strong it has welded together into one nation every nationality.”⁹⁷Modernization would create the economic capacity for a general prosperity, and a sound social policy would guarantee access to that prosperity. His fellow Texans who thought otherwise, who were in fact modern-day Luddites, deserved pity, not anger. “Because I am of the common people, I say let us be kind and gentle to the backward people who seek to ride the horse and buggy days into our day” he opined to one audience. “They will catch up and their children’s children will march down the road to work and self contentment.”⁹⁸