AS LATE AS 1935, farmers had been denied electricity not only in the Hill Country but throughout the United States. In that year, more than 6 million of America's 6.8 million farms did not have electricity. Decades after electric power had become part of urban life, the wood range, the washtub, the sad iron and the dim kerosene lamp were still the way of life for almost 90 percent of the 30 million Americans who lived in the countryside. All across the United States, wrote a public-power advocate, "Every city 'white way' ends abruptly at the city limits. Beyond lies darkness." The lack of electric power, wrote the historian William E. Leuchtenberg, had divided the United States into two nations: "the city dwellers and the country folk"; farmers, he wrote, "toiled in a nineteenth-century world; farm wives, who enviously eyed pictures in the Saturday Evening Post of city women with washing machines, refrigerators, and vacuum cleaners, performed their backbreaking chores like peasant women in a preindustrial age."
For two decades and more, in states all across the country, delegations of farmers, dressed in Sunday shirts washed by hand and ironed by sad iron, had come, hats literally in hand, to the paneled offices of utility-company executives to ask to be allowed to enter the age of electricity. They came in delegations, and they came alone—an oft-repeated scene was that of the husband whose wife had been taken seriously ill, and who had been told by the doctor that she could no longer do heavy work, begging the "power company" in vain to extend electricity to his farm; an Arkansas rural leader, "Uncle John" Hobbs, would, even years later, begin to cry remembering the day "he pleaded with the Arkansas Power & Light Company in vain to build a line to his home, a short distance from one of their lines, when his wife was ill and desperately needed the help electricity could provide." But in delegations or alone, the answer they received was almost invariably the same: that it was too expensive—as much as $5,000 per mile, the utilities said—to build lines to individual farms; that even if the lines were built, farmers would use little electricity because they couldn't afford to buy electrical appliances; that farmers wouldn't even be able to pay their monthly electricity bills, since, due to low usage, farm rates would have to be higher—more than two times higher, in fact—than rates in urban areas.
Studies had long disproved the utilities' figures. A 1925 survey in Wisconsin found that the cost of lines would be not $5,000 but $1,225 per mile. As for the argument that farmers wouldn't pay their bills, as Clyde Ellis, then a young spellbinder in the Arkansas Legislature, was to comment bitterly, "There may have been an element of truth in this, considering the exorbitant rates the companies quoted." Why, rural leaders such as Hobbs and Ellis demanded, wouldn't the power industry learn from Henry Ford, who had proved that the cheaper you make a good commodity, the higher will be your returns; if the power companies kept farm rates low, farmers would buy more electricity. If they kept rates high, the effect would be an endless circle: farmers would use little power because of high rates, and utilities would continue charging high rates because of low usage. Experiments—notable ones had taken place in Red Wing, Minnesota, and in Alabama—had conclusively proved that within two or three years after farmers had obtained electricity and seen the savings possible from its use (the increased value of their milk and eggs once spoilage was reduced by refrigeration paid many times over for the cost of using refrigerators), their usage of electricity soared—to a point where there was substantial profit for the utilities.
When the utilities ignored these studies their true attitude became clear: not that rural electric service could not be profitable, but that it would not be as profitable as urban service. Or as surefire. Waiting two or three years for usage to build up was what industry called a "capital risk"; why take a risk for a profit when there existed, in the urban market, profit without risk? "It hardly seems fair that the farm wife had to wait for electricity so much longer than her counterpart in the city for she needed electricity much more," an historian was to write. But fairness—or social conscience—was not the operative criterion for the utilities; their criterion was rate of return on investment. As long as the rate was higher in the cities, they felt, why bother with the farms? Their attitude was reinforced not only by their political power but by their contempt for country people. Whenever the utilities' mask was stripped away, the arrogance showed through. Alabama Power & Light refused to reduce its rates more than a token amount even after it was allowed to buy electricity at a very low cost from the government-owned dam at Muscle Shoals. When a farmer offered to pay the cost of building a power line to his house, the utilities said they would allow him to do so—but that when it was built, they, not he, would own it. Their policies were quite firm, because they did not want to establish any precedent that might be used as an argument against them. If they once began to lower rates, who knew where such reductions might lead? If they once began to extend lines into rural areas, there would be no end to the demands for more extensions. So no exceptions were permitted. In Lyndon Johnson's own district, Texas Power & Light policy governing the one electric line permitted only farms within fifty yards of the line to hook up to it. Several scores of farmhouses were near the line, but farther away than fifty yards. Some were not much farther away, and these farmers offered to pay the additional cost involved. TP&L was quite firm in its refusals to allow them to do so; if the company made an exception for one farmer, it was explained, it might have to make exceptions for others in other areas of the state as well. Farmers whose homes were just beyond the fifty-yard limit, farmers who could see those lines every day of their lives, were unable to use them, while they had to watch their wives year by year slaving at tasks that electricity would have made so much easier. Some of these farmers, in desperation, said they would move their houses so that they would be within fifty yards. TP&L said that it still would not hook them up. Moving houses would set a precedent, a company spokesman explained: Who knew how many farmers would try to move houses near electricity? Where would it all end?
ATTEMPTS TO UTILIZE GOVERNMENT to bring electricity to America's farms had begun decades before, fueled by the argument that most of America's power was hydroelectric, generated by the water of its rivers; that this power was, therefore, a natural resource; and that such a resource belongs to the people as a whole, and not to any vested interest. As John Gunther was to ask: "Who and what should own a river, if not the people as a whole?" But these attempts had been stymied by the powerful utilities lobby and by the Republican Party which embodied its principles. Much of the battle had centered on the 40,000-square-mile valley of the Tennessee River, because during World War I the government had built there, at Muscle Shoals in Alabama, a dam to produce the power required for the production of the synthetic nitrates used in explosives. The dam, with its associated factories, cost a total of $145 million, and after the war the question arose as to who was to get the permanent benefits of this government investment: private utilities or the valley's impoverished inhabitants, of whom only two in a hundred had electricity. All through the Twenties, Senator George W. Norris of Nebraska fought to keep Muscle Shoals from being transferred to private ownership. Twice he had guided legislation authorizing government ownership and operation through Congress, only to have one bill vetoed by Coolidge and one by Hoover, who said that the legislation was "the negation of the ideals upon which our civilization is based." All through the Twenties, therefore, the dam at Muscle Shoals remained idle, a symbol of the lack of success of all attempts to break the private monopoly of electric power in America. In 1933—as late as March 3, 1933—attempts to give ordinary citizens some control over the power generated by their rivers had been crushed by the utility lobby.
Then came Roosevelt. The vision of men like Norris (and Roosevelt's cousin Theodore) was his vision, too. As a young State Senator twenty years before, he had been concerned with cheaper electric power. The hydroelectric power of the United States, he had said, should be developed "for the benefit of the people of the United States." As Governor, his vision had been thwarted; it was intolerable, he said, that the "stupendous heritage" of the power of the St. Lawrence River should be monopolized by utility holding companies (it was on a typed copy of a speech assailing the utilities that he scribbled a new introduction: "This is a history and a sermon on the subject of water power, and I preach from the Old Testament. The text is 'Thou Shalt Not Steal'"). He had sought to allow the people—through a state authority—to develop their own power, but the proposal was defeated by the barons who controlled the state's Republican Party and the State Legislature. His vision was, in fact, in some ways, more sweeping even than Norris'. Discussing the Tennessee Valley, he leaped from electric power to broader questions, which he saw as associated: "Is it possible?" he asked an expert on the valley, to relate the question of electric power at Muscle Shoals to the prevention of floods, to erosion, to soil conservation through retirement of marginal farmland, to reforestation, to diversification of industry, to a general improvement in the standard of life of the valley's impoverished people? During the interregnum between his election and inauguration, he and Norris visited the Tennessee Valley together. Upon Norris' return to Washington, someone asked him: "Is he really with you?" Answered the old man: "He is more than with me, because he plans to go even farther than I did." Two months after his inauguration, the Tennessee Valley Authority was created—to build twenty-one dams, and bring electricity to tens of thousands of farm families.
In 1935, the monopolization of the nation's hydroelectric power was being attacked on three fronts. Regulation of private utilities had been strengthened by revitalizing the Federal Power Commission. The Rayburn Utilities Holding Company Act had begun breaking up the giant monopolistic systems which had so tightly controlled—and limited, in the interest of profit—the production and distribution of electricity. And great government-financed dams, such as Marshall Ford and "Big Buchanan," were being built across rivers throughout the West.
Roosevelt wanted the electricity generated at these dams to be made available not to utility companies but to farmers, and to be available so inexpensively that it would "become a standard article of use … for every home within reach of an electric light line." On May 11, 1935, he signed an executive order establishing a Rural Electrification Administration. For a year, rural electrification went slowly, partly because of the difficulty of meeting requirements of the relief act, partly because REA Administrator Morris Cooke wanted to enlist power companies in the rural-electrification effort—and felt the lure of government loans would draw them in. For a while, Cooke was optimistic on this score. The companies agreed to form a committee to study the subject. Then the committee issued its report: farmers, it said, were already the "most-favored" class of consumers, "There are very few farms requiring electricity for major farm operations that are not now served." In January, 1936, therefore, the Roosevelt administration introduced a bill that would remove REA from the relief set-up and make it an independent agency, and that would allow it to make self-liquidating loans to cooperatives established by the farmers themselves. Provision was also made for small loans to individual families, to enable them to wire their homes and purchase appliances.
The bill, drafted by Corcoran and Cohen, was introduced in the Senate by Norris. Agriculture Chairman Marvin Jones expected to introduce it in the House. But Sam Rayburn knew that the REA measure would face bitter opposition from the power lobby that, just a year before, had almost beaten his Holding Company bill, and he very much wanted it to pass. "Can you imagine," he was to say, "what it will mean to a farm wife?" And, he told the House, there were other arguments in favor of rural electrification. "We want to make the farmer and his wife and family believe and know that they are no longer the forgotten people, but make them know that they are remembered as part of—yea, they are the bulwark of the Government." To the utility lobbyists' argument that farmers were too "unsophisticated" to organize cooperatives or handle complicated legal questions, and too poor to pay electric bills, Rayburn replied that "the lobbyists did not take into account the spirit and determination of the people who form the backbone of this nation." He felt that Jones was not tough enough to force the bill to passage. Pounding into the office of House Parliamentarian Lewis Deschler, he laid the bill on Deschler's desk. "Give it to me," he said, and left without waiting for a reply.
Rayburn was needed. Although the REA bill had sailed through the Senate, in the House, more susceptible to pressure from the utilities, there was trouble. Members of his Interstate Commerce Committee—Corcoran's "conservative sons-of-bitches" who a year earlier had gutted the Holding Company bill—objected violently to the provision that made private companies ineligible for REA loans. Hostile though he was to the power companies, Rayburn was willing to compromise on this issue; what he wanted was electricity for farmers; he didn't care who gave it to them; he felt, furthermore, that it was silly to exclude from so difficult a task as rural electrification the only organizations that had equipment and trained personnel. The bill was reported out of his committee by the margin of one vote. On the floor, Rayburn had less trouble; his quiet, terse remarks cut to the heart of an argument; to the free-enterprisers, he replied by citing statistics on Texas: "When free enterprise had the opportunity to electrify farm homes—after fifty years, they had electrified three percent," he was to say. But the speech that mattered most was one given not on the floor of the House but in a Capitol corridor—to one man.
The man was Norris. Old now—seventy-six—and somewhat rigid in his long-held views, full of hatred, moreover, for the utilities he had fought so gallantly, he was also full of pride of authorship in the REA legislation and was reluctant to agree to any changes when the House-Senate conference committee met under his chairmanship. "It was in the conference committee … that the real battle developed," he was to recall. "I discovered at the very first meeting I had a stubborn, embittered fight on my hands. … Days and weeks passed. We held many conferences, and while in those deliberations discussion always was courteous, conducted in a high moral tone, the issue was sharply joined and exceedingly bitter." Rayburn, whose efforts were chiefly responsible for maintaining the courtesy and the high moral tone, was working, member by member, point by point, to effect a workable compromise, but after weeks of meetings, he was still short of his goal. And then Norris flatly said that compromise was impossible. He would take the issue of rural electrification to the voters in the next congressional campaign, he said; he had no doubt it would be a very effective issue. "I am going to quit the conference," he said. "I will not call another meeting of the conference committee."
Rayburn had managed to get the bill out of his Interstate Commerce Committee by a single vote. If it went back to committee, he might not ever be able to get it out again. If Norris carried out his threat, rural electrification might be dead. Sam Rayburn's people didn't need a campaign issue, they needed electricity. Hurrying after Norris, he caught up to him in the hallway, and pleaded with him—Sam Rayburn who hated to ask for anything—to reconsider. "Now Senator, don't be discouraged. I think we are going to reach an agreement. After that little speech of yours, I believe we will come together. … Just let it rest awhile." After Rayburn had taken the edge off the old man's anger, Rankin talked to him, and Norris agreed not to quit the conference. Rayburn kept working in his quiet way. When, after some weeks, the conferees returned to the bargaining table, writes the most thorough historian of the affair, "a mood of compromise was apparent." The conflict over inclusion of the utilities was compromised by allowing them to be eligible for REA loans, but giving preference to non-profit bodies such as cooperatives. On May 11, 1936, Congress passed the new REA bill. Within the next eighteen months, electricity was brought to half a million American farms. Hundreds of thousands of other farmers were forming cooperatives so that they could get electricity, too—and rural electric rates were beginning to drop in many areas. The times were changing—and they were changing fast.
THEY WEREN'T CHANGING for the Hill Country.
The hopes that had been raised there by the creation of the REA had been dashed when the REA announced the minimum requirements for electrification.
The REA Act required loans to be self-liquidating; before a farmers' electrical cooperative could obtain a loan, therefore, the REA had to be satisfied that the cooperative would be able to repay it, together with annual interest of about 3 percent, within twenty-five years. The crucial criterion the REA established to ensure this was population density: the agency said it would make no loan in any area in which the electrical lines to be built would serve an average of less than three farms per mile.
Even so low a figure was dangerous, critics said; not three but seven customers per mile—seven good customers, heavy users of electricity, not poor farmers but farmers equipped with electrical appliances—was the bare minimum necessary to repay a 3 percent loan, they said. And the REA—all too aware that failure to comply with the Act's self-liquidating provision might give congressional conservatives ammunition to use against the agency—would go no lower. Approaching the REA late in 1936, a delegation from the Hill Country was told that the three-per-mile criterion would not be waived; even the powerful Congressman Buchanan, intervening on their behalf, had been unable to persuade the new agency. Developments in other parts of Texas proved that the agency was, in fact, determined not to waive the three-per-mile minimum even for wealthy ranchers who might be expected to be heavy users of electricity: in one area of West Texas, for example, prosperous ranchers guaranteed the REA a minimum payment of seventy-five dollars per month per ranch; their application was turned down "on the ground that it could never pay out."
The REA would not even consider electrifying areas as sparsely populated as the Hill Country—because it simply could not afford to do so. The REA's first administrator, Morris Cooke, had estimated that an investment of a billion and a half dollars—a figure far beyond the agency's anticipated budget—would be necessary to bring electricity to even "fifty per cent of all rural [homes]" within ten years. As for the rest: "Of course, there are many farms which cannot be reached for many years. There are farms in neighborhoods too sparsely settled to afford power. …" Early in 1938, representatives of five Hill Country counties—Barnet, Blanco, Llano, Gillespie and Hays—who were planning to form a "Pedernales Electric Co-operative" met in Austin with an REA representative, Russell Cook. Cook put it to them straight: "You have too much land and not enough people." Says one of the men at the meeting: "He was just very discouraging. He said, 'You want to go [lay lines] to one of the most remote areas of the whole country. We simply can't do that. It's impossible.'"
The words were familiar to the people of the Edwards Plateau. The Plateau's implacable geography had always been too strong for men. The distances; the hilly terrain; the lack of rainfall; the rocky sparseness of the limestone soil—these forces, forces over which they had no control, had kept the population small and had condemned them, and their parents and grandparents before them to isolation and poverty. These factors had kept them from getting a railroad. Why shouldn't these same factors keep them from getting electricity? They had not been able to persuade even the People's Party—the party which had been spawned on the Plateau—to send them lecturers because they were "too thinly settled … away up here on the Pedernales River." Why should the New Deal be any different? New Deal programs that had helped farmers in other areas hadn't helped the Hill Country much. More important, perhaps, the New Deal had given other farmers hope. After five years of the New Deal, hope in the Hill Country was still in almost as short supply as cash. Why should REA be any different from AAA?
And then other words began to be heard in those hills.
One of the first men to whom they were spoken was a rancher named E. Babe Smith who had, by coincidence, been raised in Lampasas, birthplace of the People's Party, before moving to northeastern Burnet County, an area so isolated that it was known as "The Dark Corner of Burnet County"; Smith's grandmother had lived there for fifty-five years, and had never during that time visited even once the town of Marble Falls, forty miles away. In Lampasas, Smith had had electricity—from a diesel engine—from sunset to ten o'clock every evening ("when it wasn't breaking down"), and when in 1936, he had heard that the Rural Electrification Administration was organizing a cooperative in Bell County, and that lines would be built to Bartlett, only forty miles away from his ranch, he had gone to the Bell Co-operative office to see if the lines could be extended into his area. But, he recalls, "They said there was no way I could be served, that we were just too sparsely populated; they said, 'You're just too thin'; they said there was no hope." Smith, a slender man, six-feet-three-inches tall, a man of considerable determination—he had managed to earn a degree from Southwestern University in Georgetown—was a rancher other ranchers respected, and when the Pedernales Electric Co-operative was being organized, he was asked to join the Burnet County delegation to the PEC meeting in Johnson City. He refused, however. "I said, 'No sense my going. I been to Bartlett. No hope for me.'" His corner was the dark corner; he felt it was going to stay dark.
Then Roy Fry, a Burnet druggist and politician, asked Smith to meet with the district's new Congressman.
The meeting took place in Fry's Rexall Drug Store. The three men sat behind the prescription counter, Fry on a stool, Babe Smith and Lyndon Johnson on packing cases; when a customer entered, Fry would interrupt the conversation to wait on him.
The Buchanan and Roy Inks dams were almost completed, and would be producing power shortly, Johnson told the two men. With REA help, that power could be brought to the dark corner. Smith demurred, the area would never get an REA loan, he said. Johnson replied: "I'll get it for you. I'll go to the REA. I'll go to the President if I have to. But we will get the money!" On June 20, 1938, the PEC held a second meeting, in the Courthouse in Johnson City, for county agents and community leaders. Although the 108-mile round trip took five hours because "there was not a foot of paved road between here and Johnson City," Smith went to this meeting. "Lyndon Johnson had inspired me," he says. "He had made me feel there was a chance."
DESPITE JOHNSON'S EFFORTS—"He had been talking to other people all over the area just like he had me," Babe Smith says—only sixty persons came to the PEC meeting. "And not all of them were believers," Smith says. The Gillespie County Agent, Henry Grote, delivered an angry lecture to the young Congressman, telling him that in attempting to obtain electricity for farmers, "You're not doing farmers any favor." They would not be able to pay their electric bills, would sink into debt, and would lose their farms. Other men at the meeting were not enthusiastic because of their lack of understanding of electricity's many uses on a farm. "A lot just felt it meant the light bulb and that was all," Smith says. "And they weren't sure that that was worth the expense." Even those who were in favor of electricity felt, as Smith felt, that "We cannot meet the three-to-the-mile."
Standing in front of the Judge's bench, Johnson explained that electricity could run farm equipment as well as lights. He said that if lines were laid out carefully, and every person along them was signed up, he believed that a three-per-mile average could be obtained. Most important, in Smith's words, "He inspired everyone with the feeling that there was at least a chance." If you get the people signed up, he told them, he would get the REA loan. "And he made us believe it." They agreed to try to get as many signatures as possible, and the REA-required five-dollar deposit, on applications for electric service, and on easements to allow the REA to string lines across their land.
In that sparsely populated area, these signatures had to be obtained the same way votes were obtained—one by one. And they were harder to get than votes.
The reluctance of the people sprang from simple poverty—"It cost five dollars, and a lot of people didn't have five dollars," says Guthrie Taylor. And it sprang from fear.
They were afraid of the wires. The idea of electricity—so unknown to them—terrified them. It was the same stuff as lightning; it sounded dangerous—what would happen to a child who put its hand on a wire? And what about their cows—their precious, irreplaceable few cows that represented so much of their total assets? "They were so worried," Lucille O'Donnell recalls. "They would say, 'What'll happen if there's a storm? The wires will fall down and kill [electrocute] the cattle.'" Or they were worried that the wires would attract lightning—which would kill the cattle. Or that the crews that came to repair downed lines would leave the gates open, and let their cows loose. "They simply could not afford to lose their livestock," Mrs. O'Donnell says. And they were afraid of the papers—the papers that they were being asked to sign. The people of the Hill Country were leery of lawyers: lawyers meant mortgages and foreclosures. Legal documents—documents they did not understand—turned them skittish: Who knew what hidden traps lay within them? Were they signing something that would one day allow someone to take their land away? In vain, the county agents and community leaders tried to explain to the farmers that they were not being asked to surrender control of their land. Many farmers, as one report put it, "had the idea that in signing an easement they were mortgaging their property to the U.S. Treasury." Thousands of easements were required—not only from farmers who wanted electricity but from farmers who didn't, because the lines had to cross their land—and it was difficult to persuade the farmers to give them. They were afraid of debt—terrified of debt, for in the Hill Country it was felt that once you went into debt you never got out, that once you went into debt it was only a matter of time before you lost your land. At meetings, Smith recalls, "people would say, 'How much is it going to cost to run that line to my farm?' 'Five hundred dollars.' 'You're not going to convince me that when I sign that application, I'm not going to be responsible for that five hundred dollars. You're not going to convince me that I'm not going to be putting a debt on my farm.' I tried to explain to them that this [the Pedernales Electric Co-operative] was a corporation, and that the government was going to look to the corporation to pay back, but they couldn't accept the idea of corporate responsibility." (For families so afraid of debt, the minimum monthly charge for the electricity—$2.45 for twenty-five kilowatts—was also a source of concern.)
And there was the suspicion, generations old, of a people who felt that they had been victimized by railroads and utilities. The first letter sent out on behalf of the PEC—by secretary-treasurer Hugo Klappenbach—sought to allay those suspicions in a rallying cry that might have been sounded by a lecturer of the old Farmers' Alliance. "This line is being built by the consumers it serves and they are the owners," he said. "… It will not try to cover up the investments it has either." The management is local people, "and does not have to wait for some group of New York financiers to grant permits or concessions." "Let's stand together and build our own electric distribution lines and then have the voice in the control." Creation of the PEC, he said, would free the Hill Country from dependence on the Northeast: "We may see the opening up of manufacturing interests here where the raw materials are grown. Why should we continually send our wool to Boston? Why not manufacture it here or anyway … get it ready to spin right where it is grown?" But many Hill Country residents could not believe that they would really keep the "voice in the control." Lyndon Johnson was sitting on the porch of his cousin Ava's home one afternoon, talking about the PEC, when Ava's husband, Ohlen Cox, suddenly burst out: "I don't believe it's going to work, Lyndon. The Northerners will pull the strings, and buck you down." And the reluctance sprang from ignorance about the potential benefits of the product they were being asked to buy. To many Hill Country families, electricity meant light bulbs—a benefit, to be sure, but not, in the view of many, a benefit worth risking losing one's farm for. "Something you had never had or experienced—are you going to miss it?" Babe Smith asks. The county agents and community leaders were not having much success in the sign-up campaign. Babe Smith remembers a meeting in the Kempner schoolhouse attended by perhaps one hundred farmers and their families. At the beginning of the meeting, Smith passed out PEC applications; only two of the farmers signed them. So Johnson tried his hand at persuasion. "He played on the emotions of the women," Smith says. He talked about his mother, and how he had watched her hauling buckets of water from the river, and rubbing her knuckles off on the scrub board. Electricity could help them pump their water and wash their clothes, he said. When they got refrigerators, they would no longer have to "start fresh every morning" with the cooking. "You'll look younger at forty than your mother," he told them. Because he was the Congressman—and, to rural people, therefore an object almost of awe—and because he was "very persuasive," they listened to him attentively. But they didn't sign up. On the Fourth of July, 1938, he drove with Smith from picnic to picnic—Smith had brought along a Sears, Roebuck catalogue to show them the washing machines and refrigerators that they could use if they had electricity—but collected only a few handfuls of signed applications. "In the car going to the next town, he [Johnson] would say: 'What's the matter with these damned people? You offer them something …' He'd get discouraged." Despite months of effort, the county agents had collected nowhere near the number required—not three per mile, but fewer than two. The Pedernales Electric Co-op appeared stillborn. Johnson warned the farmers that if they didn't establish a cooperative to purchase the electricity created by the dams, TP&L might buy it—and offer it only at rates they could never afford. In a speech entitled "Our South," he said, "I believe we should use that power. I believe that river is yours, and the power it can generate belongs to you."
"So," says one of the PEC's first directors, "we went back to Lyndon. The only man who could talk for us."
He had tried to talk to the REA, going all the way up to the new Administrator, John Carmody, but had had no luck. There was only one man left to talk to. Johnson asked Corcoran to get him in to see the President.
In later years, Johnson told many stories—each different—of what he said to the President, and what the President said to him when Corcoran finally, after considerable difficulty, obtained an audience for him. According to his story on one occasion, Roosevelt picked up the telephone while Johnson was still in the room, called Carmody and said, "John, I know you have got to have guidelines and rules and I don't want to upset them, but you just go along with me—just go ahead and approve this loan. … Those folks will catch up to that density problem because they breed pretty fast." On September 27, 1938, a telegram arrived at the temporary Johnson City office of the Pedernales Electric Co-operative: the REA, it said, had granted the PEC a loan of $1,322,000 (shortly to be raised to $1,800,000) to build 1,830 miles of electric lines that would bring electricity to 2,892 Hill Country families.
IN SO IMPOVERISHED AN AREA, the very existence of a large-scale—and government-financed—construction project was significant. The average wage in the Hill Country had been about a dollar or $1.50 per day, but workers on government projects were paid the minimum wage in the area: forty cents an hour or $3.20 per day. Three hundred men would be employed on the PEC project, but when Babe Smith arrived to open the PEC's first hiring office, in Bertram, several times three hundred men were standing in line to apply for these jobs. Many were given to men who had wanted electricity but had not been able to raise the five-dollar deposit; they paid it out of these wages. Herman Brown—Brown & Root had been given the contract to construct the PEC lines—was able to hire men who were known to be very hard workers. They needed to be. The poles that would carry the electrical lines had to be sunk in rock. Brown & Root's mechanical hole-digger broke on the hard Hill Country rock. Every hole had to be dug mostly by hand. Eight- or ten-man crews would pile into flatbed trucks—which also carried their lunch and water—in the morning and head out into the hills. Some trucks carried axemen, to hack paths through the cedar; others contained the hole-diggers. "The hole-diggers were the strongest men," Babe Smith says. Every 300 or 400 feet, two would drop off and begin digging a hole by pounding the end of a crowbar into the limestone. After the hole reached a depth of six inches, half a stick of dynamite was exploded in it, to loosen the rock below, but that, too, had to be dug out by hand. "Swinging crowbars up and down—that's hard labor," Babe Smith says. "That's back-breaking labor." But the hole-diggers had incentive. For after the hole-digging teams came the pole-setters and "pikemen," who, in teams of three, set the poles—thirty-five-foot pine poles from East Texas—into the rock, and then the "framers" who attached the insulators, and then the "stringers" who strung the wires, and at the end of the day the hole-diggers could see the result of their work stretching out behind them—poles towering above the cedars, silvery lines against the sapphire sky. And the homes the wires were heading toward were their own homes. "These workers—they were the men of the cooperative," Smith says. Gratitude was a spur also. Often the crews didn't have to eat the cold lunch they had brought. A woman would see men toiling toward her home to "bring the lights." And when they arrived, they would find that a table had been set for them—with the best plates, and the very best food that the family could afford. Three hundred men—axemen, polemen, pikers, hole-diggers, framers—were out in the Edwards Plateau, linking it to the rest of America, linking it to the twentieth century, in fact, at the rate of about twelve miles per day.
Still, with 1,800 miles of line to build, the job seemed—to families very eager for electricity—to be taking a very long time. After the lines had been extended to their farms, and the farms were wired, they waited with wires hanging from the ceiling and bare bulbs at the end, for the lines to be energized. "It will not be long now until mother can throw away the sad irons," the Blanco County News exulted. But month after month passed, for the lines could not be energized until the entire project was substantially completed. As the months passed, the Hill Country's suspicion of the government was aroused again. Brian Smith had persuaded many of his neighbors to sign up, and now, more than a year after they had paid their five dollars, and then more money to have their houses wired, his daughter Evelyn recalls that her neighbors decided they weren't really going to get it. She recalls that "All their money was tied up in electric wiring"—and their anger was directed at her family. Dropping in to see a friend one day, she was told by the friend's parents to leave: "You and your city ways. You can go home, and we don't care to see you again." They were all but ostracized by their neighbors. Even they themselves were beginning to doubt; it had been so long since the wiring was installed, Evelyn recalls, that they couldn't remember whether the switches were in the ON or OFF position.
But then one evening in November, 1939, the Smiths were returning from Johnson City, where they had been attending a declamation contest, and as they neared their farmhouse, something was different.
"Oh my God," her mother said. "The house is on fire!"
But as they got closer, they saw the light wasn't fire. "No, Mama," Evelyn said. "The lights are on."
They were on all over the Hill Country. "And all over the Hill Country," Stella Gliddon says, "people began to name their kids for Lyndon Johnson."