BUT HIS FATHER was also a Johnson.
In the Legislature—where he was greeted with "warm applause" by those Representatives who remembered him when, in 1918, after a nine-year absence, he rose to be sworn in—he hadn't changed. He was still, at the age of forty-one, tall and skinny, and he still clomped into the House Chamber in his hand-tooled boots, and he still wore his pants tucked into the boots, and a big Stetson hat, and sometimes a gun, a long-barreled old-style Colt six-shooter (although he may have been the only legislator who still did, and he looked more than a little foolish doing so; Edward Joseph would regularly take it away from him on Saturday nights when Sam was roaring drunk, afraid he'd hurt somebody with it). He still played practical jokes in the House Chamber, and was a leading customer of the bars and whorehouses along Congress Avenue, and he was still loud and boastful when he was sober ("Sam was the cowboy type, a little on the rough side … he shouted slogans when he talked," Wright Patman says) and very loud and boastful when he was drunk, and sober or drunk, he loved to talk about how his father had driven cattle to Kansas and about the days of the old frontier, which made him seem very foolish in the eyes of some of the legislators.
And he was still "straight as a shingle."
A small band of legislators didn't live at the Driskill, where the bills were routinely picked up by lobbyists, but at small boardinghouses below the Capitol; the members of this band didn't accept free lodging from the lobbyists, and they didn't accept the "Three B's" ("beefsteak, bourbon and blondes") which the lobbyists provided to other legislators—several lobbyists maintained charge accounts at Austin whorehouses for their legislator friends. And they didn't accept anything else, either. Says one of them, W. D. McFarlane: "The special-interest crowd controlled the Legislature. We people down under formed the opinion that the legislators—most of them were lawyers—were taking fees from the special interests. We were taking the people's fees." The ranks of this band were thin—very thin—and were constantly growing thinner. McFarlane remembers to this day how one legislator, a friend who often ate dinner with him and Wright Patman—the three of them joking, a little bitterly, about the huge steaks that were being consumed at the Driskill while they ate the hash or chili that was all they could afford on their five-dollar per diem (two dollars after sixty days)—suddenly grew a little reticent during their conversations, and then stopped eating with them altogether, and then cast some votes that shocked them, and then, as soon as the session ended, "moved to Houston—he had hired out to them." But when Sam Johnson arrived, the members of the little band knew they had a new recruit. The slogans he shouted were the old Populist slogans. The People's Party had been effectively dead for twenty years—but Sam Johnson still believed in the party's slogans. He shared with the other members of this little band an almost mystical belief in "The People," and he believed that it was the duty of government to help them, particularly when they were, as he put it in a speech once (Sam Johnson may have been uneducated, but he had a gift for a phrase), "caught in the tentacles of circumstance." Shortly after he arrived, there was a vote that showed McFarlane that, as he put it, "Sam wasn't part of the special-interest majority." Sulphur had been discovered in Texas—in such abundance that three Texas counties were already producing eighty percent of all the sulphur produced in the world. Companies that mined it were determined to keep as much of the profits as possible for themselves, and their chief lobbyist, Roy Miller, once the legendary "Boy Mayor of Corpus Christi," who wore a pearl-gray Borsalino instead of the customary Stetson, kept his silver hair long and waved, and possessed the mien as well as the mane of a Southern Senator, dispensed the "Three B's" with the most liberal hand in Austin. Miller's strategy was to accept a state tax on sulphur production, but at a token rate. Only a handful of legislators fought—in vain—for a higher tax, and Sam Johnson was one of them. This in itself wasn't conclusive evidence to McFarlane and others who had seen men start out like Sam only to be gradually lured by the "interests," but they noticed something about Sam that convinced them he never would. While Sam would drink with Roy Miller and the other lobbyists who held court every afternoon at the huge Driskill bar, he would insist on "buying back"—for every drink Miller bought him, they recall, Sam insisted on buying Miller one in return.
He wasn't afraid to stand alone in a hostile House, as he had ten years before, against Joe Bailey. In 1918, anti-German hysteria was sweeping Texas. Germans who showed insufficient enthusiasm in purchasing Liberty Bonds were publicly horsewhipped; bands of armed men broke into the homes of German families who were rumored to have pictures of the Kaiser on the walls; a State Council of Defense, appointed by the Governor, recommended that German (and all other foreign languages) be barred from the state forever. Hardly had Sam Johnson arrived in Austin in February, 1918, when debate began on House Bill 15, which would make all criticism, even a remark made in casual conversation, of America's entry into the war, of America's continuation in the war, of America's government in general, of America's Army, Navy or Marine Corps, of their uniforms, or of the American flag, a criminal offense punishable by terms of two to twenty-five years—and would give any citizen in Texas the power of arrest under the statute. With fist-waving crowds shouting in the House galleries above, legislators raged at the Kaiser and at Germans in Texas whom they called his "spies" (one legislator declared that the American flag had been hauled down in Fredericksburg Square and the German double eagle raised in its place) in an atmosphere that an observer called a "maelstrom of fanatical propaganda." But Sam Johnson, standing tall, skinny and big-eared on the floor of the House, made a speech—remembered with admiration fifty years later by fellow members—urging defeat of Bill 15; although its text has been lost, the theme of the speech was that patriotism should be tempered with common sense and justice, and its peroration centered on the fact that the first American boy to die on the bloody battlefields of France was of German descent. Sam's speech didn't hurt him politically—it could only increase his popularity among the Germans of Gillespie County, and in the other three counties of his district he was so popular that nothing could hurt him—but he went beyond what was politically necessary for him by privately buttonholing members of the committee considering the bill to urge its defeat—and, almost singlehandedly, he succeeded in persuading the committee to delete from it the section that would have given any citizen the power of arrest. Germans who followed his efforts on the scene felt themselves in his debt; the editor of Austin's German-language newspaper, Das Wochenblatt, later wrote: "At a time when hate propaganda … was at its worst … he showed courage and fidelity to the trust which [we] put in him. [He] proved himself a true friend in those dark days when so many who had owed their success in public life to their German fellow citizens proved to be their worst enemies."
Sometimes he seemed almost to relish standing alone. He fought—against the powerful Texas Medical Association—for the right of optometrists to practice in Texas, and his son would later say that the fact that optometrists had "little money and influence" and were "opposed by a powerful enemy at the time my father took up their cause was—for me—a sufficient explanation of why he chose to stand beside them. Those were the kinds of causes Sam Ealy Johnson enjoyed." One night at dinner, the small band of legislators was discussing whether or not it was silly for them to fight battles that they couldn't possibly win; Johnson said it wasn't. "It's high time a man stood up for what he believes in," he said. And these legislators saw that he was willing to do so. "He was not an educated man, anything like that," one of them was to recall, but "he was a good man, and he was highly respected by his people and the members of the Legislature. When he said something, it was that way—no mealy-mouth business, no ifs, ands or buts."
The larger causes for which Sam fought in the Legislature were lost before the fight began; the efforts to force producers of sulphur, oil and natural gas to pay through taxes enough to ameliorate the living conditions of the people of the state from whose earth they were mining such immense wealth never even came close to realization. Efforts to regulate banks, railroads—any of what the little band called "big interests"—never even got out of committee. Their speeches and slogans were hopeless exercises, irrelevancies when the reality of legislative action was considered. In more narrow fights, however, fights which did not affect the interests, Sam Johnson was, in a quiet, behind-the-scenes way, still as effective as he had been during his earlier career.
Being in the Legislature was no longer considered a joke, for the people of the Hill Country were coming to understand how much they needed government—and how much they needed a Representative who could put its power on their side. The symbol of their need was a road, the highway linking the Hill Country to Austin that alone could make feasible the importation of commodities at prices they could afford and allow them to get their produce to market fast enough and in good enough condition to make a profit on its sale. And Sam Johnson got them their road.
Work on the highway had been begun in 1916, but had since been abandoned. Johnson was the prime mover in getting it resumed. CONCERTED EFFORT GETS FEDERAL AID RESTORED, the Blanco County Record headlined. HON. S. E. JOHNSON RENDERS VALUABLE ASSISTANCE. By the time he left the Legislature, he had a reputation as one of its "leading good-roads men"—and State Highway 20 had been opened all the way from Austin to Fredericksburg.
But Sam believed government should do more than build roads. His ideals were as shiny as his boots. McFarlane vividly remembers him saying at dinner one night, his face very earnest: "We've got to look after these people—that's what we're here for." He was talking about "lower-middle-class people," McFarlane says, about "poor people"—about all people who were caught within "circumstance's tentacles." When drought hit West Texas hard in 1919 and 1920 and the farmers scattered across its vast, naked plains pleaded for help, Sam was a leading figure—perhaps the leading figure—in persuading the Legislature to take the step, unprecedented for Texas, of providing it. Recalling how he obtained a $2 million legislative appropriation for seed and feed, the seed "to be planted by those who are too poor and unable to obtain seed," the feed "for the work stock of such people," the Blanco Record Courier said years later:
Because of his influence and insistence, Texas was one of the first states to recognize the public emergency which arises from a long series of private disasters—the foundation stone upon which has been built the modern conception of government as exemplified in the administration of President Roosevelt.
Impressive as was the West Texas relief bill to his fellow legislators, who knew how difficult it was to win any public-assistance concessions from the business-dominated, philosophically reactionary Legislature, the small, less noticeable measures Johnson pushed through for his own district—for example, the state aid for schools that allowed the free term to be extended to seven months—were more impressive still. Passage of his bill to force the big cattle-buying houses to pay small ranchers for their stock promptly, his colleagues told reporters, "was a great victory for Rep. Johnson." Businessmen, bankers—"there were plenty of legislators constantly looking after their interests," McFarlane says. "The farming people and the working people—if somebody didn't speak up and take their point and represent them, unless somebody really had their interests at heart, spoke up and took care of their interests, they had no one to look after their interests. And Sam Johnson did speak up on their behalf. I remember Sam Johnson as a man who truly wanted to help the people who he felt needed help." McFarlane was not the only member of the small band of legislators who felt that way about the Gentleman from Blanco County. Fifty years later, Wright Patman, now a powerful United States Congressman who had met and dealt with the nation's most renowned public figures, would be talking to an interviewer about President Lyndon Johnson, when suddenly he changed the subject slightly.
"Of course," Wright Patman said, "his father, Sam E. Johnson, was the best man I ever knew."
"LOOKING AFTER" people was something Sam Johnson did even on his own time.
"He had a kind of idea of government as something that could do things personally for people," Emmette Redford says, and since there was no one else to provide personal service in the Hill Country, he provided it himself, obtaining pensions for elderly constituents who had once been Texas Rangers or Army scouts, or for the widows of soldiers who had served in the Spanish-American War but who didn't know how to apply for pensions, driving to San Antonio or Austin or even Houston to help people (some of whom couldn't even read) find the relevant records or to steer them through the bureaucratic mazes of state or federal agencies. He obtained pensions even for constituents who didn't know they were entitled to them: "He was always the person we went to, whenever assistance was needed," Stella Gliddon says. "If there was some legislation to be passed, it was always to Mr. Sam that people went, and he was always there to do it."
For the work he did in the Legislature, he was paid five dollars—or two dollars—per day. For this "personal service" work he got nothing, not even expenses. And this work cost him not only money but time—because of the distances involved and the condition of the roads, immense amounts of time. He regarded such work, however, as part of being a legislator, and he is remembered in the Hill Country as being, in the words of J. R. Buckner, editor of the San Marcos Record, "on the job all the time."
In 1923, Sam Johnson sponsored—and saw passage of—what he regarded as his most notable piece of legislation.
Campaigning for re-election in 1922, Governor Pat M. Neff, in a speech at Johnson City, called for legislation to protect farmers and ranchers in poorer sections of Texas who, anxious to participate in the flood of oil wealth beginning to be pumped out of other areas of the state, were easy victims of "high-pressure salesmen" peddling phony oil stocks. Johnson knew, as he said later, that his own constituents "had been fleeced out of thousands of dollars by the rankest kind of promotion swindles," but he had not known how widespread the swindles were. "The Governor's speech … gave me an insight and a grasp of the conditions that had never come into my mind before." Drafting regulations for the advertising and sale of oil stock, he embodied them in legislation creating a Securities Division of the State Railroad Commission to enforce them. Introducing this legislation in January, 1923, he said, "I want to leave this bill on the statute books." "No measure offered before the Legislature has created more comment than the 'Blue Sky' Bill* of Sam E. Johnson," reported the San Antonio Express, and the need for the measure was quickly demonstrated by letters he received from "literally hundreds of victims of these nefarious oil sharks"—and by the reaction of the sharks themselves. Money—"The word around the Dris-kill was that it was quite a sum," McFarlane says—was offered to him; his daughter Rebekah says, "A man offered him a lot of money to let it die—he wouldn't have to do anything; just let it sit in committee." But Sam refused the bribes, and when the bill passed—with his name on it; it would be known as the "Johnson Blue Sky Law"—he was very proud. Wilma Fawcett, his daughter Josefa's best friend, remembers that "Whenever we wanted permission from him to do something, Josefa would say, 'Let's get him talking about the Blue Sky Law; then he'll be in a good mood and he'll say 'all right.'"
Sam Johnson loved being a legislator. The job satisfied his idealism, his need for recognition and gratitude, and as Willard Deason, who came to know him very well, says: "He was ambitious to stand in the forefront, not for money, no, but to be in the forefront. He would rather serve in the Texas Legislature than have the largest ranch in Blanco County." And he was very good at legislating. His son Lyndon had wished "it could go on forever," and for a while it seemed it could.
BUT IT WAS NOT in the Legislature that Sam Johnson had to earn his living. He had to earn his living in the Hill Country.
"Real-estatin'" sounded impressive, especially as reported by Reverdy Gliddon's friendly Blanco County Record ("Hon. S. E. Johnson … recently closed up several big land deals, particulars of which will be given later"), but it wasn't profitable, not when the value of real estate kept going down. And in the Hill Country, while land values sometimes rose—sometimes rose for three or four or even five years in a row, when rain was plentiful and cotton crops good and men's hopes on the rise—the long-term trend was inexorably down. Sam worked hard at real-estatin'—in the intervals when he wasn't in Austin for a legislative session or driving a hundred miles to obtain a deposition that would help a Civil War veteran get his pension; if he received a telephone call about some ranch he might be able to buy cheap, no matter how late the hour, how remote the ranch, or how bad the road, he would throw on his suit jacket, crank up his car, and head out into the night. But, no matter how cheap Sam bought a ranch, all too frequently he had to sell it cheaper. His agile, restless mind was constantly conceiving new, non-real-estate, business ventures, but they, too, often turned out badly; his brother Tom, who went into several with him, commented ruefully: "If you want a business to be jinxed, just go into it with Sam." When Sam did make money, moreover, he didn't save it; sometimes it went into a new venture, sometimes into ostentation—new boots, new clothes, a new, expensive car ("You can tell a man by his boots and his hat and the horse he rides"); sometimes, because he had the Johnson extravagance, the gift for the grandiose gesture, into an expensive present for his wife; always into maids and laundry women—or into a fiver to tide over a veteran until the pension started coming. And, most importantly, Sam Johnson either didn't understand the reality of the land itself, of the soil on which all enterprises in the Hill Country (which had no oil wells, no manufacturing to speak of, nothing but farming and ranching) rested; or, perhaps more likely, he refused to accept that reality as he had refused to compromise with the realities of Austin, stubbornly shouting Populist slogans when Populism had been dead for twenty years, stubbornly holding to ideals in an arena in which ideals were largely irrelevant, and so exerting, despite his seniority, no significant influence on major legislative decisions. In Austin—in the Legislature—idealism was irrelevant; in the Hill Country, it was fatal.
His father died in 1915, his mother in 1917. The principal asset of her estate was the Johnson farm, those 433 acres up on the Pedernales. Dividing it up among the eight surviving children was obviously impractical, and when Sam refused to consider selling it to an outsider, John Harvey Bright of Houston, who had married one of Sam's sisters, offered to buy out the other heirs.
Sam wouldn't hear of that. He suspected that once Bright owned the ranch, he would sell it. This was the Johnson Ranch they were talking about. It was the family place, the place where they had all been raised. The Pedernales Valley was "Johnson Country," he said, always had been; it had been in that valley that the original Johnson brothers rounded up their great herds. Were they going to sell the Johnson's stake in that valley? Bright made an offer to the other relatives; Sam raised it. Bright made a new offer; Sam raised again. Sam's attitude was the old Johnson attitude, the attitude of the original brothers, who had disdained to haggle and bargain over every last penny because haggling and bargaining was beneath them. Whatever Bright offered, Sam said, he'd offer more. And finally, to get this tiresome bidding over with, he offered considerably more. He offered $19,500. The bid was accepted.
There was pride behind Sam's bid, the old Johnson pride—and there was ambition, vaulting ambition, big dreams on the old Johnson scale; Sam talked, in fact, about making the whole Pedernales Valley "Johnson Country" again; about restoring the once-grand Johnson fortunes. He persuaded Tom, who loved him (and who in this one instance ignored the remonstrances of his practical German wife, whose frugality and ability to lend a sturdy hand with the farm work kept him solvent), to purchase a smaller 125-acre ranch on the Pedernales, and to join with him in leasing the adjacent Klein ranch so that they would have enough land to really work with. The first Sam and Tom Johnson had had bad luck; maybe this Sam and Tom Johnson wouldn't.
But there was also in Sam's bid a failure to see—or to accept—reality; the old Johnson failure—or refusal—to understand what had been happening to the land in which he was investing so much money. Not seeing was easy, of course; the Hill Country always made not seeing easy. The land's decline, an historian says, was "gradual enough that men could lull themselves into not seeing it until too late." The land along the Pedernales had hardly been worked at all during the six years since Sam had moved to Johnson City, and Sam assured his brother that six years of lying fallow must have restored much of the land's original fertility. Once, in the old days of which Sam loved to talk, the land had been rich; Sam apparently believed, or made himself believe, that it could be rich again—maybe not as rich as in the old days, but rich enough. Maybe it would never be possible to raise cattle on it again (although Sam did not really believe that; he talked about one day starting up a herd again), but when he had last worked it, six years ago, he had gotten a respectable cotton crop out of it; now, he felt sure, he would be able to get a larger crop out of it. And—and this was apparently the crucial factor in his thinking—ever since the Armistice, cotton prices had been soaring. By 1919, when Sam was bidding against Bright, it was fetching an unprecedented forty cents per pound, and Texas newspapers were filled with speculation that it would soon soar to fifty cents per pound, or sixty.
The price of the land was only part of the expense of starting up the farm after a six-year lapse. The house had to be fixed up so that he and Rebekah and the children could live in it. Sharecroppers had to be hired, and their houses had to be fixed up. Tractors and other farming equipment had to be bought or rented—naturally, because it was Sam, good, modern equipment so that he could raise the maximum amount of cotton and take maximum advantage of those high cotton prices that were soon going to be much higher. Such expenses cost as much again as the land; by the time Sam moved onto the farm in January, 1920, he had invested slightly more than $40,000 in it. To raise this amount, he sold the little hotel in Johnson City. He sold a two-story stone store that he had been leasing to storeowner Withers for a steady monthly income. He sold every piece of property he owned—and then, since he still didn't have enough, he placed on the 433 acres a mortgage of $15,000, and borrowed additional money from at least three banks, going deeply into debt.
And the trap which had closed around the first Sam Johnson closed around the second.
HE STRUGGLED AGAINST its jaws. The man who had never wanted to be a farmer was a farmer now, and it was going to be as a farmer that he worked out his destiny: the mortgage, combined with the bank loans, was so big that it was a mortgage not just on his farm, but on his fate. And if he had possessed the lawmaker's courage, he possessed the farmer's courage, too. The stand he made now in a cotton field was as gallant as any he had made in a cloakroom. He battled that farm on the Pedernales, trying to make its soil pay out the dreams he had planted in it.
But it couldn't.
A single gully symbolized Sam Johnson's struggle, the struggle that he made, not in a suit and hand-tooled boots beneath the painted dome of the Capitol, before applauding galleries, but in sweat-reeking work clothes and mud-smeared work shoes, alone except for a couple of Mexican sharecroppers, or, sometimes, completely alone, a lonely figure in the empty Hill Country landscape, under that empty Hill Country sky. The gully was a long, wide gash that rains had, over decades, cut into the ground all the way from the hill pastures that Sam had rented from the Kleins, across the Johnson fields and down to the river, a gully, in Ava's words, "deep enough to walk elephants in." A lot of cotton could be planted in that gully. Taking a team and wagon down along the Pedernales toward Fredericksburg, Sam filled the wagon with the richest river-bottom soil he could find, heaving it up into the wagon in hours of labor that must have been difficult for a forty-two-year-old man who hadn't done farm work for years. Then he drove the wagon home, and shoveled the soil into the gully. And he repeated the trip over and over until there was soil enough in the gully to plant cotton. And then the first spring rainstorm of 1920 was a "gully-washer"; a flash flood roared down the gully and swept the soil away. Sam needed that gully, needed the cotton that could be grown in it, and by now he knew he needed it badly. He filled it up again, again planted cotton seeds in it. If only the next few rains could be gentle, if only the seeds could be given a chance to put out roots that would hold the soil in place until cotton plants could flower, and then drop more seeds, which would put out more roots—and bind the soil fast. But before the seeds could sprout, there was another gully-washer; seeds and soil were washed away again. That gully symbolized Sam's hopes, and what happened in it symbolized what the Hill Country did to hopes. "He planted it, and planted it," a relative recalls. "And he never got a crop out of it. Not one."
The story of Sam and the farm is the story of the Hill Country. Six years of lying fallow would indeed revitalize most farms—but not Hill Country farms; arid Hill Country limestone turned into soil too slowly, and, being on hills, washed away too easily. When, in the spring of 1920, he and his hands began plowing his hilly fields, they found that the topsoil was terribly thin: on the average, not more than two inches deep. Beneath the soil was "hardpan"—harder, less fertile, soil mixed with clay—and even the hardpan wasn't very deep. Sam had to set his plows so that they dug no deeper than eight inches; any deeper, and the plows would be hitting rock. The farm's "bottom land" along the Pedernales and its tributary creeks was deep and fertile. But that first gully-washer—and the ones that followed it—sent the Pedernales on a real tear. When it receded, it sucked the bottom land back with it. And not only the bottom land. "Sam's land all drained toward the river," Ava explains. "That was part of the reason the topsoil was so thin: because it had kept getting washed away in the rains. And because it was so thin, what there was of it was just barely holding on. If you left it alone, it would have very slowly built up. But the minute you put a plow in it, it would wash away in the next rain. After Sam started to plow it, you could see his land running away. Every time rain hit it, you could see the topsoil running down the hills and into the river."
Still Sam fought. The only way to grow cotton in hardpan is to plow it after every rain. After every rain, Sam plowed it. During his earlier years on the farm he had spent a lot of time at the cotton gins in Albert and Stonewall, playing cotton futures; he was never at the gins now. He drove his hands, and he drove himself. "Uncle Sam was just not a farmer type," Ava says. "He was not a man of the soil. Not physically, and not in his head neither. But he tried very hard to be a farmer then," Ava says. "I still remember how hard he tried."
But trying didn't count in the Hill Country, just as hoping didn't count, just as wishful thinking didn't count, just as a belief that you should hold on to the family place and a willingness to fight for that place didn't count. What counted in the Hill Country was the reality of the soil. "He had seen his daddy make good on the land, at least fairly good," Ava says. "But the soil had been okay then. Now it was just wore out. It was just plain too thin."
The summer of 1920 was a hot summer. That blazing Hill Country sun burned all the way down through that thin soil, scorching away the nutrients in it. The cotton plants weren't as strong as they should have been, therefore, and not as resistant as they might have been to the sun—and some of them burned, too. "They came up just so high, and then the hot sun would get on them, and the leaves would curl up," Ava recalls. They didn't produce nearly as many pounds of cotton as Sam had expected to sell at forty or fifty or sixty cents per pound.
That didn't matter much, though. For all through that summer and fall of 1920, as Sam Johnson's cotton was dying, so was the cotton market. Wall Street speculation was part of the cause, as was an unforeseen worldwide deflation in the price of manufactured goods; moreover, while cotton prices had been driven up immediately after the war by heavy demand from Europe, in 1920, European countries began growing their own cotton again. When Sam went to sell his cotton in the fall of 1920, the price was no longer forty cents per pound. It was eight cents per pound.
The trap had closed. The Hill Country was a land that broke romantics, dreamers, wishful thinkers, idealists. It broke Sam Johnson.
It broke him financially—beyond hope of repair. The yearly interest on the $15,000 mortgage he had placed on the farm came to $1,050; by 1922, with cotton prices still low, he couldn't make the quarterly interest payments. And in 1925 half the principal would be due, and in 1927 the other half; by 1922, it was clear even to Sam Johnson that there was no hope that he would be able to make those payments. He had to sell the farm for whatever he could get, which was $10,000 from a thrifty German named Ove J. Striegler.
Sam didn't get to keep the $10,000; it all went to the mortgage holder, the Loan and Abstract Company of Fredericksburg. Sam had tried to save the family place, the place that symbolized so much to him. Instead, he had lost it. There was no Johnson Ranch any more. It was the Striegler Ranch now.
And the mortgage was only part of what Sam owed. He still owed banks the money he had borrowed to pay for tractors, horses, seed and fertilizer, and for refurbishing three houses. He still owed merchants for the grocery and clothing bills run up over two years by his two sharecropper families, bills they were unable to pay because their share of the cotton proceeds was too small—bills he had guaranteed. He moved off the farm owing money to banks and merchants the whole length of the Pedernales Valley. The total amount of his debt cannot be determined. His daughter Rebekah puts the amount at $40,000, his son Sam Houston puts it at $30,000, and it doesn't really matter which of the two amounts is accurate: in the Hill Country, one would be as impossible to pay as the other. Sam Johnson was in debt so deeply that he would be in debt until he died. He almost didn't have a place to move to: he had mortgaged the Johnson City house for $2,000, and had been unable to meet the $160-per-year interest payments, and now the principal was due. The only reason that the Citizens Bank of Fredericksburg, with whose president Sam had once joked so cordially, didn't foreclose on the house was that his brothers, Tom and George, persuaded the bank to extend the mortgage by co-signing it and by paying the back interest themselves. Had they not done so, their brother, and his wife and five children, would have had no home.
The Hill Country broke Sam Johnson's health. He sold the farm in September, 1922, moved back into Johnson City, and took to his bed with a long-drawn-out illness. The closing was in November; Sam had to get out of his sickbed to place his signature on the documents which formalized the dissolution of his dreams. He got out of bed again to go to the legislative session which began in January, 1923—where he introduced the Johnson Blue Sky Law—but collapsed in Austin and spent most of the session in bed there. Returning to Johnson City thereafter, he had to spend still more weeks in bed. The precise nature of his illness is not known; it has been called both "pneumonia" and "nervous exhaustion." Visitors to the Johnson home recall that he was white and gaunt, and that there was a severe outbreak of boils or "carbuncles" on his face. Many of the visitors were bringing covered plates of food—not just for the sick man but for his family, for by this time, it was common knowledge: there was no food in the Johnson house—and no money to buy any.
It broke him in other ways, too. His face, despite those piercing eyes, had always been friendly and smiling. Now it was grim and bitter, his mouth pulled tight and down. And his temper was worse. Sam had always had a violent temper, but its eruptions had been infrequent and short-lived. Now he would fly into a rage, particularly at his wife and children, at the slightest provocation. What people thought of him had always been so important to Sam. Even during that first terrible year, even as he was going broke out there on that farm, he had tried to keep up the front whenever he came into town: "Hon. S. E. Johnson and his little son Lyndon, of Stonewall, were among the prominent visitors in Johnson City on Wednesday of this week," the Record had reported in 1920. "Mr. Johnson has one of the largest and best farms in this section of Texas, and has been kept quite busy of late supervising its cultivation." In August of that year, when the doom of his dreams must have been clear to him, he saw editor Gliddon and spoke of more "big land deals." Now there was no point in trying to keep up a front any longer. When he got out of bed, he still wore suits and high, stiff collars, and his voice and laugh were still loud. But the air of "great confidence" was gone. There was something defensive about him now.
UNDERSTANDABLY DEFENSIVE. For Sam Johnson, who could walk into a room and know in an instant who was for him and who was against him, was a man who knew what people were thinking. And what they were thinking about him had changed—rapidly and completely. In a span of time that seems to an outsider remarkably brief, he had been transformed in the eyes of his home town from a figure of respect to a figure of ridicule.
Perhaps such a transformation would have occurred to any man who fell from high to low estate so rapidly—and so publicly and dramatically—in a small town where everyone knows everyone else's business, particularly when the town had for years believed that he was a shrewd and successful businessman, always negotiating "big land deals" that enabled him to buy big cars and to hire a chauffeur, and then suddenly the town learned that it had all been a bluff, that the deals and the cars were nothing but a front. But the gossip about Sam Johnson was harsh and ruthless even for a small town.
In part, this was because of the nature of Johnson City. Gossip was so powerful a force in many small towns partly because of their isolation: there wasn't much for people to be interested in except each other's lives. Johnson City—this tiny huddle of homes in the midst of the vast, empty Texas hills, this "island town"—was unusually isolated. It was a town which, as late as 1922, still possessed neither a movie house nor a single radio, a town very deficient in things to do, and its residents' interest in each other was, as more than one visitor remarked, very intense. Especially their interest in their most famous neighbor, the only resident of their town with even the slightest claim to fame: Hon. S. E. Johnson.
Johnson City was, moreover, a religious town—hard-shell, hellfire, revivalist, Fundamentalist, Old Testament religious. In most of its little houses, no matter how meagerly furnished, there lay on the dining-room table or on the mantelpiece a big black, leather-bound Bible, its front cover flapping up from frequent use. In few of those houses could be found a deck of cards or set of dominoes. "They were tools of the Devil," says John Dollahite, one of Lyndon Johnson's classmates. "My father wouldn't allow a deck of cards in the house." No dancing was allowed, of course, not in the house or out, and as for drinking—John's father, Walter Dollahite, could scarcely bear to look at the little saloon that was, from time to time, open in Johnson City; its swinging doors were the passage to Hell. Not even a drink of beer was permitted; "sneaking a beer by Jesus is like trying to sneak daylight by a rooster," Dollahite was fond of saying. Half the town was Baptist, and most of the other half—members of the Methodist Church or the Church of the Disciples of Christ—was trying, in Stella Gliddon's words, to "out-Baptist the Baptists." Lest legs show, girls were required to wear long, thick stockings—black until a girl reached her teens, when white was permitted. The fierceness of the town's prejudices and the rigidity of its intolerance led Stella Gliddon to call it "almost a Puritan town. In those days, people were considered bad for things that we take for granted now. They were the friendliest people, but they were very religious people, too." Such people had never forgiven Sam Johnson for believing in the Darwinian theory, or for admiring Al Smith, or for voting against Prohibition. The irregularity of his attendance at church—it was rumored, correctly, that he went at all only to please Rebekah—had been noted, as had the fact that his daughters had more than once appeared in public in knee socks. As for the fact that he was known to drink—well, these people knew what would come of that. Sam Johnson was the kind of man who in a town like Johnson City would ordinarily have been held up to children as an example of what they must avoid; ordinarily, people would have long predicted that he would follow in the path of his father and uncle, who had gone broke and failed to pay their debts. But in a town so impoverished and, because it was so religious, so conditioned to believe that worldly success betokened divine favor, Sam's apparent success in business outweighed all other factors, and as long as the townspeople thought he had money, they respected him despite his faults. But as they realized the truth, they turned on him with a fury made all the harsher because it had been so long pent up.
Their condemnation was harsher still—vicious, in fact—because of the way Sam acted now, in his time of adversity. Humbleness was called for now, and humbleness was not a Johnson trait. Sam's "Johnson strut," in fact, had lost none of its arrogance. The Johnsons—Sam and Rebekah, too—had considered themselves better than anyone else; now it turned out they were worse, but they still acted as if they were better, and people who had always resented this attitude no longer had reason to hide their resentment. One of the bankers who had once been proud to have Sam greet him on the street was now heard to sneer that he was always "playing cowboy and stomping in boots into the bank." Bankers at least had—in Sam's unpaid loans—reason for their new attitude toward him. The rest of the Hill Country had no such reason. What it had reason for was gratitude—for the pensions he had arranged, for the loans he had given, for the highway he had gotten built. Instead, there was relish and glee in the Hill Country's reaction to Sam Johnson's fall. John Dollahite's grandfather was one of those for whose pension Sam had worked. In discussing Sam today, however, John Dollahite does not mention the pension until asked. What is mentioned—at length—is Sam Johnson's illness, for Dollahite has it all diagnosed. "Due to drink," he explains. "You see, too much liquor thins your blood and you don't have the resistance to throw off things." Sam Johnson, he says, "was nothing but a drunkard. Always was." Shortly after Sam's downfall, O. Y. Fawcett, proprietor of Johnson City's drugstore, coined a remark which soon gained wide circulation. "Sam Johnson," he said, "is too smart to work, and not smart enough to make a living without working." The disparagement even became public. At a barbecue at Stonewall in the spring of 1923 (which Sam was too ill to attend), one of the speakers, August Benner, who was planning to run again against Sam in the elections that fall, said: "I tell you, ladies and gentlemen, Sam Johnson is a mighty smart man. But he's got no sense." People who were present at that barbecue still recall how the audience roared with laughter at this mot.
Sam didn't run in the next election, which was won by an old enemy, Fredericksburg lawyer Alfred P. C. Petsch. He announced that he was leaving politics "for business reasons"—how people snickered at that! One reason Sam didn't run again could indeed be called "business": he could no longer afford to give up months of each year at inadequate salary. But another reason may have been fear that if he ran again, he would lose: that Benner's gibe and the laughter which greeted it were indications of how low he had slipped in public esteem. And from that standpoint, his decision may have been correct. Just how low he had slipped would be revealed a little more than a year later, when the Austin-Fredericksburg Highway was completed, and a barbecue was held to celebrate the official opening of the road for which Sam Johnson had worked for so many years. A dozen prominent Hill Country citizens were invited to speak. Sam Johnson was not among them.
FOR A TIME, he was in the real-estate and insurance business, but he couldn't earn enough to live on. He went to Austin and tried to get a job in government. Many retired legislators—those who didn't go to work for "the interests" at sizable retainers—were given well-paid sinecures in the state bureaucracy. But Sam had fought the interests, and the bureaucrats who did their wishes. Although, with ten years in the Legislature, he had retired as one of its senior members, there was no sinecure for him. For some weeks, it appeared there might be no job at all. When, finally, he was offered one, it was a one-year appointment at a salary of only two dollars per day. He had no choice but to accept. Thereafter he served the district he had served as State Representative—as a part-time game warden.
He was unable to pay off his back bills at Johnson City stores, and storeowners began writing "Please!" on their monthly statements. Afraid of antagonizing—and losing the business of—his brother and the rest of the large Johnson clan, they hesitated to cut off his credit, but he kept falling further and further behind. "My Dad was liberal-like," says Truman Fawcett, "but he [Sam] finally owed him over two hundred dollars. He had to cut him off." After a while, Sam had to pay cash not only at O. Y. Fawcett's drugstore but at every store in Johnson City. "After a while he owed everyone in town," Truman Fawcett says. "They all cut him off."
Sometimes he didn't have cash. He took to patronizing stores in Fredericksburg or Dripping Springs—or in towns even farther away—where he could charge his purchases. "He'd change towns," Fawcett explains. "And while he was charging at these other towns—until they cut him off, too—he'd save a little cash money and put down some money on his bills here. But he couldn't ever catch up." Fawcett says that he himself believes that "He had intentions of paying his bills, Sam did." But then he adds dryly, "At least, I think he did." And Fawcett is kinder than other merchants who reminisce about Sam Johnson. Some of his debts were, by Hill Country standards, quite large; there is not only contempt but anger in the phrase the other merchants use about him: "He was a man who didn't pay his bills."
Eventually, he ran out of towns. The Buntons—who always had cash money—lent him some, but not enough. In 1925, he had to go back to Austin, hat in hand, to ask for another government job. He was given one. His work to obtain better roads for the Hill Country finally paid off for Sam Johnson. Rough stretches of the Austin-Fredericksburg Highway were being regraded. Sam was given a job on the highway of which he had been the leading sponsor: a job building it—with his hands. He was made foreman—working foreman—of a road-grading crew. The job paid fifteen dollars per week. Stella Gliddon recalls the first day Sam Johnson went to work on his new job. "Until that day, I never saw Sam Johnson without a tie on," she says. "He always wore a nice shirt and suit. But then when he went to work on the road gang, he wore khaki pants like everyone else."
REBEKAH JOHNSON had never been able to do much housework. And now she had no maid to do housework for her. The daughters of other Johnson City women helped their mothers keep house, but Rebekah's didn't—at least not to any appreciable extent. "She could never raise her voice to them," says Wilma Fawcett. "Her whole life was for the welfare of her children. And she was just too sweet to discipline them."
As each birth seemed to cost Rebekah more of her health and energy (after Lucia's, in 1916, she would frequently have to spend weeks in bed) and as the reality which she had always found so harsh grew harsher, she seems to have slipped further into romantic dreaming, giving up the job as newspaper stringer to write poetry, talking more and more about her ancestors, the illustrious Baineses and the even more illustrious Deshas of Kentucky, who had produced, in the eighteenth century, a Governor of Kentucky—emphasizing that they were aristocratic Southerners. More and more, and to a striking extent, her life centered on her children, particularly on her eldest. She had always been a proud woman; now, as pride became harder to maintain, it took on a somewhat strident quality. She said, often enough so that her children's friends recall her saying it: "Some children are born to follow. My children were born to lead." No one could criticize her children to her, or even venture a hint that they had done anything wrong. "She was like a tiger sticking up for her children," Wilma Fawcett says. Particularly for Lyndon. "She really had everything tied up in that fellow." Says Louise Casparis, who worked in the Johnson home until they could no longer afford to pay her, "She loved her other children, but not to the extent which she loved him." In her eyes, he couldn't do anything wrong. Once, her sister-in-law Kitty told her about a fib in which several children, including Lyndon, had participated. Rebekah said she was sure Lyndon hadn't, because he never told fibs. When Kitty said, "All children tell stories," Rebekah replied, more shocked and angry than anyone had ever seen her: "My boy never tells a lie."
Yet, however much she loved her children and stuck up for them, Rebekah was, in the view of Johnson City, unable—utterly unable—to take care of them. When her mother visited—which she did often now that Rebekah needed help in the house, sometimes staying for weeks at a time—she did the housework, but Johnson City housewives who visited the Johnsons when "Grandmother Baines" wasn't in residence were shocked. Ava still remembers seeing in the Johnson sink something she had never, in all her life, seen in the sink in her own home—dirty dishes piled up, unwashed, so many that Ava felt they hadn't been washed for several days. Rebekah had always dressed her children differently from the other children in Johnson City: Lyndon and Sam Houston in sailor outfits or linen suits, Rebekah and Josefa and Lucia in dresses and pinafores and lace bonnets. Now the clothes were still different—but they weren't pressed, and after a while Johnson City found out why. Wilma Fawcett says that "when the laundry came back, honest to God, they'd just dump it in the bathtub and every child picked out what they wanted to wear to school that day, and it was never ironed unless they ironed it." Sometimes, now, the fancy clothes of the Johnson children—especially the younger ones—would appear to be not only unpressed but unwashed, too.
As finances got tighter and tighter, it sometimes seemed as if the children didn't have enough to eat. Children in Johnson City were continually eating at one another's houses; children who ate at the Johnsons' remember very small meals. Recalls Ohlen Cox: "I remember sausage and eggs—and that was for dinner. That was all there was, and there wasn't a lot of that." Clayton Stribling says, "We were poor, but we always had enough to eat. But once I ate over at the Johnsons', and there was just bread and a little bit of bacon, and the bacon was rancid, too." Often when Rebekah wasn't feeling well, she wouldn't cook dinner, and now there wasn't much cash to buy dinner at Johnson City's lone café. Other children vividly remember the younger Johnson children, Josefa, Sam and Lucia, eating there—"a little dab of chili for the whole bunch." Sometimes—not often, but sometimes—there was no cash in the house at all. The time that Sam lay ill after he lost the farm wasn't the only time that relatives and neighbors brought meals to the Johnson house out of charity. One Christmas, there was nothing to eat in the house until Sam's brother Tom arrived with a turkey and a sack of Irish potatoes.
The women of Johnson City, who scrimped to save every penny, who baked their own bread to save the nickel cost of a store-bought loaf, might understand why Rebekah didn't scrimp ("She just wasn't brought up the way the other women were"), but they still felt that spending cash money for food from a café was the most wanton kind of waste. They were, many of them, as poor as the Johnsons, but their children had enough to eat. "She lived above the means of what they had—that was the only reason her children were hungry." And they therefore resented helping her. Tom's daughter Ava remembers that every time her mother made preserves or canned corn, her father would insist that she can or jar enough to take some to his brother and his family. "Sam's kids are hungry, Kitty," Tom would say. "We've got to feed them." And Ava remembers that sometimes her mother, that frugal German lady, would protest. Once, Ava vividly recalls, Kitty Johnson and Vida Cammack were canning corn together in the kitchen. When Tom insisted they can some for Sam's kids, Kitty replied, "I don't see why I have to do this every time, Tom. It seems like she could can her own stuff." Mrs. Cammack, Ava recalls, pointed out that Sam had a garden, and that there was plenty of corn ripe in it if only Rebekah would can it. "I think we've done enough for them," Mrs. Cammack said. And, Ava recalls, while the two women canned a hundred cans for each of their own families, for Sam and Rebekah "they canned twenty cans, and called it good [enough]."
That the Johnsons weren't "resented" even more than they were was because no one took them seriously any more. Some pitied them, Sam in particular. "People pitied him because of his wife," Ava says. "She was such a swell person, and smart—but she was not a helper. She was not a person to get up of a morning and get the kids dressed and off to school." Everyone knew how Mabel Chapman had turned him down, and, Wilma says, "I used to think at the time it was a shame he hadn't married her, because she would have managed his house and managed his children. And Rebekah just couldn't manage at all." But most ridiculed them. They weren't disliked so much as laughed at. August Benner's description of Sam had been sharpened: people said about him: "Sam Johnson's a smart man, but the fool's got no sense"—and that was the definitive word on him, that and the word "drunkard." Tears may come to Stella Gliddon's eyes when she tells about the first time Sam Johnson didn't wear a tie, but she is the exception; there is a glint of amusement and pleasure in the eyes of others who talk about Sam and the highway, even if not many are as blunt as John Dollahite, who says, chuckling: "He did a lot for that road, all right, Sam did."
As for Rebekah, when the women of Johnson City heard her remark that "Now is the time to put something in children's heads," they said, "Maybe she ought to try putting something in their stomachs." The Johnson home, these women say—in adjectives an interviewer hears over and over again—was "filthy, dirty. It was a dirty house!" And the Johnson children, these women say, were just little dirty ragamuffins. Sam and Rebekah Johnson had always been resented for their pretensions. Now, with those pretensions exposed in all their hollowness, the Johnsons were ridiculed. In Johnson City terms, they did, indeed, appear ridiculous. They were the laughingstock of the town.
*State securities-regulating measures were known as "Blue Sky" laws because one legislator said that promoters were unloading everything but the blue sky on gullible investors.