AFTER THE ROOSEVELT-GARNER FIGHT in Texas, Lyndon Johnson would always have entrée at the White House. But after the fight ended, in May, 1940, that entrée was again restricted. Lyndon Johnson no longer had a reason to see the President. Impatient—after the death of his father and uncle, almost desperately impatient—to move along the route he had mapped out for himself, he had no means of doing so.
And then this genius of politics found a way.
The way was money. At first, again, the money was Herman Brown's.
Thanks to the profits from the Marshall Ford Dam and the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station contracts, there was plenty of it. However, in political terms, the most significant aspect of Brown's bankroll was not its size but its availability for any purpose Johnson specified. George Brown had promised that Lyndon need only tell him "when and where I can return at least a portion of the favors. Remember that I am for you, right or wrong, and it makes no difference if I think you are right or wrong. If you want it, I am for it 100%." Most politicians are forced, in mapping out the next step in their careers, to choose a step that can be financed. Johnson did not have this problem; he could concentrate solely on which step would be best for his career. Whatever road he chose, he could be sure it would be paved by money from Brown & Root. Furthermore, the aims of the Congressman coincided with those of the corporation. The man with the obsession to build—build big—knew that the way to build big was through Washington. Influence within the national government was what Herman Brown needed, and influence within that government—political power that reached beyond Texas—was what Lyndon Johnson wanted. Each of them could obtain what he wanted through the other.
The most obvious use of readily available money for someone aiming at national political power was in the campaign of the man whose strong hands held the reins of national power in such a firm grip. With the great financial resources of the Republican Party solidly behind the campaign of Wendell Willkie, the President's re-election campaign was in severe financial difficulties, and these difficulties were a prime source of conversation in Washington, and of concern to Johnson's New Deal companions. Around him, in conversations in the cloakroom or on the floor of the House, at cocktail parties and dinner parties, swirled talk of campaign funds, and of where to get them. Furthermore, Johnson could have adduced from his own recent experience with Roosevelt that the President might not prove ungrateful for campaign contributions. Having already provided such contributions to Roosevelt for a state campaign, it seemed the obvious course, the logical course, for Lyndon Johnson to provide contributions for the President's national campaign, and indeed men such as Charles Marsh suggested this course to him.
It was not a suggestion he accepted. No one can know why, but it is possible to list several considerations which may have influenced his decision. In a presidential campaign he would be only one of many contributors—considering the scale of contributions from New York and other financial centers of the Northeast, not even one of the biggest. The President's gratitude would be proportionate. Moreover, any tangible power and patronage that might result from Roosevelt's gratitude would be held at Roosevelt's whim—and could be withdrawn at his whim. Independent power could not result from such a situation, any more than if he had accepted the President's offer of the REA post. Using Herman Brown's money in Franklin Roosevelt's campaign would probably not get Lyndon Johnson what he wanted; it was necessary for him to find another way of using it.
And he did.
One facet of Lyndon Johnson's political genius was already obvious by 1940: his ability to look at an organization and see in it political potentialities that no one else saw, to transform that organization into a political force, and to reap from that transformation personal advantage. He had done this twice before, transforming a social club (the White Stars) and a debating society (the Little Congress) into political forces that he used to further his own ends. Now he was to do it again.
This time, the organization was the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Like the Little Congress at the moment when Lyndon Johnson's gaze fell upon it, the committee was a moribund organization. Established in 1882 to assist Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives with services and campaign funds, its usefulness had seldom if ever reached a significant level. During the 1930's, under the chairmanship of Patrick Henry Drewry, a diminutive, soft-spoken Representative from the Virginia Tidewater, even that level had been reduced, for Drewry was ill-suited to the role of aggressive fund-raiser, not only because of personal considerations—"He was every inch a country gentleman; he could never ask anyone for a dime," says a friend—but because of moral and philosophical ones as well: the very concept of the massive use of money in political campaigns was repugnant to him, and, as a staunch states righter, he saw dangerous implications for the independence of the nation's elected representatives in the distribution of money through a monolithic central committee. He had therefore decreed that the committee's maximum contribution to a Congressman would be $250. Few candidates received even this amount. The dichotomy within the Democratic Party, with its bitterly antagonistic liberal and conservative wings, kept the committee's bank account small: big contributors were unwilling to provide money which might then be channeled by the committee to candidates with opposing political views; for a wealthy liberal, the idea that his money might help finance the campaign of a conservative Midwest Congressman was distasteful—as distasteful as the idea that his money might help a New York liberal was to a wealthy conservative. (Drewry's lack of enthusiasm for distributing money was especially marked when the distributee was to be a Northern liberal.) The committee's funds had traditionally come primarily from two sources—contributions from Congressmen themselves, and handouts from the Democratic National Committee—and during Drewry's chairmanship, these sources had slowed to a trickle. For some decades, the committee had requested $100 from each Democratic member of the House to fund its operation; under Drewry, this request had been reduced by 1938 to $25—and when few members honored it, Drewry made only a token effort to collect.
Democrats who turned to the committee* for non-financial help were also likely to be disappointed; although the committee had a speakers' bureau, headed by E. J. MacMillan, the bureau functioned only in non-presidential election years; when a presidential election was taking place, Congressmen who telephoned to ask for a Cabinet member or other "name" speaker to appear in their districts found MacMillan gone—he was invariably drafted by the National Committee and sent to New York to help in the "national" campaign. The committee's other staffer was its capable secretary, Victor Hunt ("Cap") Harding, a political scientist from California and one of the House of Representatives' deputy Sergeants-at-Arms. During a campaign, Harding would take an office—generally only one room—in the National Press Building at Fourteenth and F streets so that he could accept whatever contributions happened to come in without violating the law which forbade the accepting of campaign contributions in a federal building. During campaigns, therefore, when the Congressional Campaign Committee should have been most active, its office, a dim, green-carpeted room in the basement of the Cannon House Office Building, was often utterly deserted—a condition which sometimes was only slightly improved even on the rare occasions when Drewry scheduled a meeting of the "committee" itself, which consisted of one Congressman from each state; more than once, the only persons who bothered to show up were Drewry and Harding.
In 1940, Democratic congressional candidates were even more desperate than usual for cash. The amounts they needed were, in most cases, small—ridiculously small not only by the standards of later eras but in comparison with the amounts spent during the pre-war era in statewide races and in the presidential campaign. The amounts varied greatly; congressional races in the urban centers of the Northeast could cost tens of thousands of dollars, but in the rest of the nation the situation was far different. In 1928, for example, Ruth Baker Pratt spent $12,000 in her campaign for a House seat from New York City. That was several times the total amount spent that year by all six candidates for the three congressional seats in the State of Oregon. A detailed study of expenditures in House races in that state between 1912 and 1928—the most detailed study available for the pre-war period—showed that of thirty-eight candidates for Congress, only three had spent as much as $3,000. Twenty-four of the 38 had spent less than $1,000. This situation had not changed much in 1938. In that year, the six candidates—three Democrats and three Republicans—for Oregon's three seats spent a total of $12,987, a little more than $2,000 per candidate. In most other Western and Midwestern states, the range that year was the same. "In the great majority of cases campaigning for a seat in the House of Representatives is not an expensive business," wrote Louise Overacker, the era's leading academic expert on campaign finance. Discussions with Congressmen of that era indicate that most campaigns cost less than $5,000. And their recollections are confirmed by insiders who had an overview of the situation, such as Thomas Corcoran and James Rowe. In politics, says Rowe, "Five thousand dollars was a hell of a lot of money in those days."
Little as Democratic congressional candidates needed in 1940, however, there was small hope that they would get it from their Congressional Campaign Committee. Because the nation's business community was so overwhelmingly Republican, funds were traditionally in short supply at Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Biltmore Hotel in New York. The party had been outspent by the GOP in every national election since 1920, and the gap had been huge in 1936. And never had the supply of funds been shorter than in 1940. Fueled by rage at Roosevelt and possessed of an attractive candidate to run against him ("For the first time since Teddy Roosevelt," said Time, "the Republicans had a man they could yell for and mean it"), the GOP was gearing up—and shelling out—for a supreme effort to put its own man in the White House. After the election, a Senate committee would determine the ratio of expenditures between the two parties as almost two and a half to one. The Democrats, anxious to put such seasoned speechmakers as Harold Ickes on the air, found that they simply "did not have the money to spend" on more than a few such nationwide broadcasts. The five great radio speeches by Roosevelt himself that were to boost his popularity during the last days of the campaign would not have been broadcast had not Richard Reynolds, of the North Carolina tobacco family, appeared on the scene with a last-minute $175,000 loan to pay for the radio time. The National Committee needed every dollar it could raise for the presidential race, and was going to be able to spare very little funds indeed for its poor relation in Washington.
Even had funds been ample at the Biltmore, there would have been little disposition to divert them to the National Press Building. Farley, bitter at the President he believed had deceived him, resigned in August as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. His replacement, Edward J. Flynn, Boss of the Bronx, did not possess Farley's national acquaintance. "I did not know many" Senators and Congressmen, he was to recall. They were aware, moreover, that Flynn's loyalty ran only to the President; "Many of them were suspicious of me and displayed no great enthusiasm over my appointment. They fully realized that the appointment was purely personal on the President's part and that he had not consulted with them before he made it. …" Flynn was not particularly enamored of them, either: attempting to enlist the fund-raising help of prominent Senators and Congressmen, he found that "few if any" were willing to help. Tensions could not be eased by the National Committee staff, for it was a new staff brought in by Flynn, and it consisted of men he knew—New York men, unfamiliar with the embattled campaigners from Capitol Hill, and hence not particularly anxious to assist them in their campaigns.
For many Democratic Congressmen, raising funds of their own was going to be harder in 1940 than ever before. "The year 1936," Alexander Heard has noted in his landmark study of campaign financing, The Costs of Democracy, "was a turning point in the history of political party fund-raising. The policies and methods of Franklin Roosevelt's first term produced political alignments more along economic-class lines than any since the McKinley-Bryan era." Democratic Congressmen from large cities—where burgeoning labor unions were expressing their appreciation for pro-labor New Deal policies with lavish campaign contributions—were aided by these new alignments. Other Congressmen—and that included most Congressmen—were hurt. Once, a Congressman from a rural district or a district that included a small city had been able to rely on contributions from the district's businessmen. By 1940, these businessmen—and their contributions—had turned against the New Deal.
The outlook had not been particularly bright for congressional Democrats even before campaign finances were included in their calculations. In 1938, the Democrats had lost eighty-two seats in the House. Since they had gone into that election with an overwhelming congressional majority from the Roosevelt landslide of 1936, they still held a substantial 265-to-170 margin, but polls early in 1940 showed that about sixty additional Democrats could expect to lose their seats in 1940. And the campaign financial picture added to the gloom. Recent studies had documented the decisive role of money in elections; in one study of 156 state and local elections, all but eleven had been won by the side that reported spending the most money. Politicians had long since reached the same conclusion. Professionals firmly believed that, as Heard put it, "the side with more money has a better chance of winning." In only two of the twenty presidential elections since 1860 had the party which spent less money come out the winner; those were the elections of 1932 and 1936, and the rule had been shattered by the Depression combined with the extraordinary popularity of Roosevelt—but now the Depression was over and so, apparently, was at least some of Roosevelt's popularity, and the old rule could be expected to reassert itself. At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in July, pols could be heard muttering gloomily about the lack of funds. Some of them turned to Rayburn for help. Nan Wood Honeyman of Portland, Oregon, once the only female member of Congress, had been defeated in 1938, and had learned the necessity of adequate campaign financing. In 1940 she was attempting to win back her seat, and at the Convention asked Tommy Corcoran and Rayburn for help. Corcoran, in his breezy, confident way, "asked how much it would take—'two, three, five thousand?'—indicating a willingness to do the necessary." When the amount needed was set at $5,000, Corcoran said he would contribute $2,000, apparently by tapping private sources in New York, and Mrs. Honeyman said she could raise $2,000 herself from local contributions. That left $1,000, and on the last day of the Convention, Rayburn, in a conversation at which Johnson was present, agreed to find her some funds. As it turned out, however, he was unable to do so. His hope that the Congressional Campaign Committee would be funded by the National Committee more generously than usual was already dimming. When he attempted to convince Flynn to set aside $100,000 for help in congressional campaigns, the reaction was reserved. He repeated his plea by letter ("A great many of these fellows need help"), adding: "Let me say to you again … how important it is to re-elect a Democratic House. I remember when President Wilson lost the House in 1918, his path was made rather rough by the Republicans investigating everything that had been done. …" Rayburn then threatened "to keep the funds raised by the congressional committee separate from the National Committee treasury and use them for the members of Congress in need of campaign assistance," but the Congressional Committee's lack of fund-raising ability made this threat an empty one. No further word came to Portland from Corcoran, whose time and money-raising abilities were, shortly after the Convention, assigned to the presidential campaign, and when Mrs. Honeyman contacted Rayburn through an intermediary in Washington, he was forced to reply in embarrassment that he would see that she got help "when and if there are funds available to the Congressional Campaign Committee." He was forced to give a similar answer to other candidates who asked for assistance. At a dispirited Democratic caucus on the subject of fund-raising, the only suggestion Rayburn could make was that Congressmen who had ample funds or safe seats should contribute to the campaigns of those of their colleagues who were broke or in danger—but that suggestion would not solve the problem, as Rayburn himself knew even as he made it.
But Lyndon Johnson knew how to solve the problem. He himself could provide the party with substantial funds, and he could provide them fast. And he appears to have been able to generalize from his experience with Brown & Root. Leaving the gloomy caucus with Edouard Izac, another young Congressman, Johnson said, according to Izac, "'Sam Rayburn's all wet. That isn't the way you raise money for the Democratic Party.' Lyndon's idea was to go to the contractors and get the money."
He knew more. He knew, in fact, of a source of money that was available only to Sam Rayburn—and that even Sam Rayburn didn't know about.
Oil money had long been a factor in politics in the United States. In Texas, oil had come in not long after the century; the Spindletop field on the Gulf Coast, which would eventually prove out at a hundred million barrels, one-tenth as much oil as had been produced previously in America, blew in on January 10, 1901. The robber barons who had tapped the oil fields of the Northeast had been using the sale of black gold to purchase politicians for decades before that; the Standard Oil Company, one historian said, did everything possible to the Pennsylvania Legislature except refine it. But the new oil fields of the Southwest had, through the first three decades of the twentieth century, been controlled by the same companies that controlled the old oil fields of the Northeast; with their control of pipelines, markets and refineries—and the capital needed to explore and drill—they bought out or forced out the discoverers of the Texas fields so thoroughly that in 1930 75 percent of the oil in Texas was owned by Standard Oil and its offshoots and rivals such as Humble, Magnolia, Gulf and Sun, and the owners of the other 25 percent had to sell their oil to these companies, who owned the refineries and pipelines, at prices so low that they were effectively prevented from accumulating capital of their own. The companies, and the families back of them, that poured money into politics in Texas—Gulf Oil (the Mellons), Sun Oil (the Pews), Standard Oil (the Rockefellers)—were the same companies and families who had been financing the Republican Party—and selected Democrats—for decades in Washington and in various states of the Northeast. Their political alliances on the national level had long been made and cemented.
But after 1930, there were new sources of oil money, for 1930 was the year of the great East Texas pool.
The first success among the test wells being "poor-boyed" (drilled on credit, with frequent halts to raise money to go a few hundred feet deeper) by long-broke wildcatters in a poverty-stricken area of East Texas was eight miles east of Henderson. The oil that gushed out of it on October 6, 1930, splashing down on the rusty drill and on the derrick floor set among the pine trees, was believed to come from an isolated pocket, because the major oil companies had been advised by their geologists that there was little oil in the area. The second well that blew in, two months later, was near Kilgore, thirteen miles to the north. That must come from an isolated pocket, too, geologists said. At any rate, being so far from the first well, it certainly couldn't come from the same field. A month later, another well came in, near Longview, twelve miles farther north. Three separate fields, the geologists said: certainly no one field could be that big. But with the major companies uninterested, hundreds of small oil prospectors, men who had been wildcatting for years, most without success, rushed into the area. They found that East Texas was a "poor man's pool," not only because, with the majors not aggressively buying up land, oil leases could be obtained at reasonable prices, but because, at 3,500 feet, the oil was relatively close to the surface and the drilling was relatively inexpensive; since the East Texas oil was a high-grade, light-gravity oil with little sulphur contamination, it could even be refined cheaply; some—very few, but some—of the wildcatters could refine their own oil and sell it to gasoline companies. By the end of 1931, in some weeks, wells were being sunk at the rate of one per hour. And no matter where they drilled, it seemed, not only between Henderson and Longview but to the north and south (and the east and west), when they reached a depth of about 3,500 feet and took a sampling of the sand, it came up resembling brown sugar—sugar that had been dipped in oil. By 1934, it was apparent that underneath those barren, dried-out cotton fields and miles of stunted pine trees was an ocean of oil more than forty-five miles long. By 1935, the East Texas pool was producing more oil than any state had ever produced—more than any nation had ever produced. Spindletop, with its hundred million barrels, had been huge. The East Texas pool had five billion barrels—fifty times as much as Spindletop.
And it was owned not by the majors, but by the independents.
The majors moved in and bought the independents out, of course; Humble alone wound up with 16 percent of the East Texas pool; by 1938, the majors controlled 80 percent of the field. But there was a difference. The East Texas field was unprecedentedly huge, and, to an extent true of no previous field, it had originally been owned by the wildcatters—so that this time, when they sold out, they came away rich. The owner of the first well to hit sold out for a relative pittance, but the owners of the second came away with $2 million, the owners of the third with $2.5 million. Some, like Sid Richardson, took their money and put it into other oil fields—in the Panhandle and in West Texas and down near Houston—and some of these fields came in, too, and this time they didn't have to sell out at all; they could keep the profits themselves. There was by this time so much money that even if they had to share it with the majors, what was left over was millions of dollars. Hugh Roy Cullen, for example, brought in the Tom O'Connor Hill in 1934. He had to share it with Humble—but what he was sharing was half a billion barrels. And, more independent because they now had financial resources of their own, the new owners no longer had to share on the former disadvantageous terms. More and more often, in fact, they didn't have to share at all. "More independent oil fortunes came out of the East Texas field than from any other place in the world," an historian of the industry has written. "This was primarily because of the size of the field. Out of the thousands of tracts and town lots, there was something for almost everyone." And because of this, the East Texas field "became a point of departure from the old pattern of Texans going, hat in hand, out of the state to solicit funds for expansion and development." H. L. Hunt, for example, built his own pipelines, and was soon filling up the tank cars of the Sinclair Oil Company with his own oil.
Little awareness of this development existed among even the shrewdest of politicians in Washington. The names of many of the new rich were not even known, and the wealth of others was drastically underestimated. In August, 1935, Harold Ickes forwarded to President Roosevelt an "interesting document" which Ickes said had been "handed to me by a man in the oil game who thought it ought to reach you." It was a list of oilmen who had contributed that year to the Democratic National Committee—most of the contributions were for $1,000 or less—together with a brief description of the contributors. Of one of them, Herman Brown (Brown had begun buying oil leases), the writer says only: "Do not know of him." One "S. W. Richardson" is described as "in debt and borrows money to develop leases from Charles Marsh. …" Of only two names on the list—Clint Murchison and his partner, Dudley Golding—is there an awareness of the size of their fortune ("Golding & Murchison came into the East Texas Field several months after it started with no money and [after] a little over three years … sold out … for about five million dollars"). Neither the author of the document—nor, apparently, Ickes—had any idea of the true financial circumstances of the men on the list. And this was still the situation in 1940. In part this was due to the rapidity with which their circumstances had changed: Sid Richardson had indeed long been in debt, but at the time the memo was sent, that description of him was out of date by several years—and several millions of dollars. And in 1937, he hit the Keystone Sands in West Texas. By 1940, his income was close to $2 million a year.
But while the politicians had no knowledge of these oilmen, the oilmen had a deep interest in national politics. They enjoyed many federal favors. The most widely known, of course, was the 27.5 percent oil-depletion allowance, the loophole that, as Theodore H. White was to put it, "gives oil millionaires magic exemption from tax burdens that all other citizens must bear" by making 27.5 percent of their income free from tax. But there were many others, also important in oilmen's bookkeeping, if less known—for example, the law that allowed the immediate writing-off of intangible drilling and development costs on successful wells. And the owners were vitally interested in keeping those favors, which were under almost constant attack. Hardly had the Roosevelt administration entered office when Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., called the depletion allowance "a pure subsidy to a special class of taxpayers" that should be eliminated. In 1937, Morgenthau renewed his plea, calling the allowance "perhaps the most glaring loophole," and Morgenthau's boss joined in, calling depletion and other loopholes attempts "to dodge the payment of taxes."
And the wildcatters were concerned with national policy not only because of favor but because of fear. As oil from the East Texas pool glutted the market and the price of oil plummeted, the industry was in turmoil and the positions of majors and independents swirled back and forth in confusion, but in general the wildcatters feared federal regulation. The occasion of the memo to Roosevelt—and of the donations which it reported—was a bill, introduced by the Oklahoma Populist, Senator Elmer Thomas, in 1935, that would have directly regulated the industry. That bill was blocked (in favor of Texas Senator Tom Connally's "Hot Oil Act," which left the setting of production quotas with the Texas Railroad Commission, a body which would be controlled by the wildcatters). Protected by the Railroad Commission from the price-cutting practices of the "majors," the "independents" were soon flourishing, but the threat of federal regulation was a constant cloud on an otherwise limitless horizon. They had plenty of money; they needed a way to make it felt in Washington—they needed a path through which the power of their collective purse could be brought to bear on the federal government.
Of the members of the federal government, the only one they knew well enough to be comfortable with was Sam Rayburn. Richardson was from Fort Worth, and many other wildcatters lived in nearby Dallas. Ray-burn's district adjoined Dallas, of course, and he had many close friends among the politicians there. On his frequent visits to the city, he had come to know Richardson and some of the other wildcatters while they were still poor-boying wells, searching for wealth on a shoestring. Becoming rich, other wildcatters moved to Dallas—the nearest large city and also the city whose banks first revealed a willingness to finance the wildcatters' new ventures—and made their headquarters there. Rayburn met these men, too, usually through a pair of old friends who were intimately connected with the wildcatters, former State Attorney General William McCraw and William Kittrell, the veteran Texas lobbyist. Rayburn actively disliked the "old" oilmen, the wealthy shareholders in major companies like the Magnolia, whose 6,000-pound flying red horse atop the Magnolia Building dominated downtown Dallas and, at night, when it was outlined in 1,162 feet of ruby neon tubing, the plains for thirty miles around; and he disliked the oil-company corporate executives and lawyers, the lobbyists. And the feeling was mutual; traditional oil interests disliked Sam Rayburn as much as the utilities; attempting to remove him from Congress, they would fruitlessly pour money into his district year after year. But Rayburn liked Sid Richardson, whom he had known for years as a broke young man, and he liked many of Richardson's friends. And when they had asked him for help, he had helped them. They had told him that the Thomas bill was a device of the big companies to kill off the little fellows—little fellows like themselves. If they had very recently—thanks to the East Texas pool—graduated out of the "little fellow" class forever, he did not grasp that fact. (He was never to grasp it fully—a fact that was to have grave consequences for the United States in decades to come.) The bill was, they said, a device of Wall Street to keep Texans—them—from ever getting a share of their own state's wealth. They should be allowed to handle their own problems until it was proved they couldn't, and since all this oil was in Texas, this seemed like one problem that Texas should definitely be allowed to handle. Roosevelt at the time was working closely with Rayburn on the SEC Bill; the President told Ickes (who would, under the proposed legislation, be given the federal regulatory power), "I do not want to cross wires with Sam Rayburn about this matter." And the Thomas bill was tabled.
Rayburn was no stranger to the use of money in politics. As Garner's campaign manager not only in 1940 but in 1932, he had asked for contributions to his friend's campaign, and had gotten them. But, perhaps because he was uninterested in money himself, when he thought about campaign contributions, he had a tendency to think small. When he thought large, he thought in terms of Texas, and of the kind of Texans who gave large contributions to politicians, and this old money—cotton money and cattle money—was, almost entirely, Garner money. He knew how much Garner's backers hated Roosevelt, and he knew that in 1940 they were contributing to Wendell Willkie, and that their money would not be available to him.
If there was new money in Texas on the same scale as the old—oil money, the wildcatters' money—he had not yet come to understand that fact. Not having even the vaguest notion in 1940 of the extent of the wildcatters' recently acquired wealth, he could not see its potential for politics. The scale of contributions they had made in 1935—a scale calculated largely in the hundreds; a thousand dollars was a generous contribution—was the scale on which he still thought. And as for using their money on a national scale—the obtaining and distribution of funds to scores of Congressmen across the country—what relationship did a task of such a magnitude have with, say, squat, silent, unassuming Sid Richardson, still wandering around Fort Worth in a rumpled suit and living in the same small, shabby bachelor quarters at the Fort Worth Club where he had always lived? Says Richard Boiling: "He thought that his people were little people. He missed the fact that the independents had become giants. … He knew they had money, but he had no idea of the extent of the money."
Rayburn did not, moreover, understand—perhaps because he was a man who could not be bought, and this reputation, and the fear in which he was held, kept anyone from explaining his position to him—how important he was to the wildcatters, how the protection he had extended to them in the past, and the protection they were hoping he would continue to extend to them in the future, was one of the most significant factors in the accumulation of their wealth. The Speaker, according to the unanimous opinion not only of his allies of this period, but of his opponents, had not the slightest idea of the potential of his position for political fund-raising for Congressmen on a national level.
But Lyndon Johnson saw the potential.* Henry Morgenthau and the demands of justice had persuaded Franklin Roosevelt that the oil-depletion allowance should be reduced or eliminated; it was only Congress which had kept it intact. The administration had wanted federal control of Texas oil; it was Congress which had kept that control in the hands of Texas. The wildcatters' strength in Washington was in Congress, yet these men were not acquainted with many Congressmen. The one they did know well enough to talk to frankly, to explain their problems to, was Sam Rayburn; their strength in Washington was, in the final analysis, that one man. Now, as Speaker, Rayburn was the single most powerful Congressman. It was in their interest to keep him in power, to keep him Speaker. And that meant keeping the Congress Democratic. Johnson realized that money could be raised in Texas to keep Congress Democratic. And because Johnson realized the stakes involved, he realized that the money available was big money.
BUT CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS from contractors (from, that is, all contractors but one) and from the wildcatters would have to be obtained through others. Since they had not previously contributed to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, an element of uncertainty existed as to whether they could be persuaded to give now. More important, there was an element of uncertainty as to whether they could be persuaded quickly; with the November election day approaching, it would be difficult to get their money in time. Because of Herman Brown, however, Johnson possessed a source of funds—substantial funds—about which there existed neither uncertainty nor delay. He knew that if he could obtain the position he wanted, he would have—instantly; at his command—substantial sums of money to use in it. If he were put in charge of the Congressional Campaign Committee, he could guarantee that it would have funds. He asked Sam Rayburn to put him in charge.*
Rayburn did not do so.
The relationship between him and Lyndon Johnson during the year and a half following the July, 1939, confrontation over the Texas delegation's resolution on the Garner-John L. Lewis explosion will probably never be charted definitively. Around the Speaker's personal feelings had been erected a wall as impenetrable as the wall with which Lyndon Johnson surrounded himself. But there were hints as to its course.
The confrontation itself had not angered him; if anything, he seemed rather proud of the way Lyndon had stood up to him. "Lyndon is a damned independent boy, independent as a hog on ice," he said when someone asked him about the incident. But despite Lyndon's attempts to conceal the fact that it was really he who was turning Roosevelt and the New Dealers against Rayburn, the Majority Leader may have realized at the last moment the role being played by this young man of whom he was so fond. On the very day on which his secret campaign to undermine Rayburn in Roosevelt's eyes had triumphed—on April 29, 1940, the day the President had forced the Majority Leader to accept as co-signer on the "harmony" telegram "kid Congressman" Lyndon Johnson—Johnson attempted to act as if no reason for a break between them existed. A Washington Post article stated that Johnson "praised the work done by Rayburn in achieving the compromise" and "predicted he would lead the Garner-pledged Texas delegation 'with other men of liberal makeup.'" A week later, he made a private overture. Rayburn's roommate during his first year in the Texas Legislature, R. Bouna Ridgway, wrote Johnson a note advocating Rayburn's nomination as Vice President at the upcoming Democratic National Convention (and recalling his roommate's character: "He was so quiet and reserved. Honorable, honest and 100% true to a friend"). Johnson had not written to Rayburn for a year—since the time, in fact, that he had begun his career as the New Deal spy in Rayburn's meetings. Now, perhaps using the Ridgway note as an excuse to resume communications, he sent it to Rayburn with a covering note of his own ("Here is a letter from one of the rank and file boys who I am happy to know is a great admirer of yours …") signed, "Your friend, Lyndon." Previously, when Johnson had written Rayburn, the Majority Leader's replies had been warm; the three lines of his reply to Johnson this time spoke volumes:
Thank you for sending me the letter from my old-time, dear friend, Bouna Ridgway.
With every good wish, I am, sincerely yours,
Sam Rayburn
As part of the compromise that had ended the Roosevelt-Garner fight in Texas, the White House had insisted that Johnson be made vice chairman of the state's delegation to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Rayburn was chairman, so at the convention the two men were frequently thrown together, and often heard together of candidates' financial problems. But when Johnson (who of course was himself unopposed for re-election) raised the possibility that the solution to the problems was his appointment as head of the Congressional Campaign Committee, Rayburn gave him no encouragement.
Then Johnson attempted to gain a role in the financing of Congressmen's campaigns by another method. He tried to become the liaison between the Congressional Committee and the Democratic National Committee which furnished much of its funds. Rayburn was not amenable to this suggestion, either. On August 20, Rayburn told a Flynn aide that there would indeed be a congressional liaison man, but neither of the names he mentioned was that of Lyndon Johnson. "I think it will be John McCormack and probably Charlie West," he said.
Johnson continued maneuvering. The young New Dealers who were his friends received from him continuing stories of the desperate straits of Democratic Congressmen, of the likelihood that the Democrats would lose the House, of Drewry's inefficiency, of Drewry's lack of enthusiasm for the candidacies of New Deal Congressmen. These stories were reported at the White House—along with Johnson's interest in being of help in an overall effort to elect Democratic Congressmen—and the suggestion was made, according to some sources, by the President himself, that Johnson should in some vague way be attached to the Congressional Campaign Committee, or to the Democratic National Committee itself, to assist them.
Johnson, however, appears to have had in mind not an assistantship but independent, formal, authority of his own. His next attempt to get it may have been an attempt to circumvent Rayburn: an approach directly to the President, through the malleable Agriculture Committee chairman, Marvin Jones. On September 14, Jones went to see Roosevelt and then sent a letter, drafted by Johnson, suggesting that "If we are to get the results that we desire, Lyndon's work should be supplementary to the regular work done by both the Democratic Congressional Committee and the National Committee rather than an assignment to aid them with their regular functions." A letter drafted by Johnson for Flynn's signature—to be sent out by Flynn to all Democratic members of the House of Representatives—further spelled out the authority he had in mind, and in addition included a reference to the President, which might have thrown the weight of at least a hint of presidential authority behind Johnson's efforts. Had Johnson's draft been sent out by Flynn, Flynn would have been saying:
Dear Congressman _:
… The President has discussed with me some of the problems you will face in November and I have assured him that the Democratic National Committee will do everything possible to give you the maximum assistance in your coming campaign.
In order that we may work most effectively with you in this connection, I have asked one of your Democratic colleagues in the House, Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, to act as liaison officer between my office in the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic congressional candidates.
This would, of course, have made Johnson the arm of the Democratic National Committee in dealing with Congressmen.
Roosevelt, however, did not want to give him such formal authority. He eliminated the reference to "liaison officer." All the letter, as edited by Roosevelt, says is that, in order that the Democratic National Committee "may work most effectively with you" in your campaign, Johnson will "assist me [Flynn] and the Democratic National Committee in aiding the congressional candidates."
Roosevelt told Johnson he would give the letter to Flynn, and asked Flynn to see the young Congressman, but Flynn balked at giving Johnson even the informal post. Meeting with Johnson in his room at the Carlton Hotel on September 19, he said he would be glad to send out the letter—if it met with Rayburn's approval.
Rayburn's approval was not forthcoming.
Then Johnson thought he saw an even better opening. On September 23, the National Committee's secretary, Chip Robert, resigned. Johnson pulled strings to obtain this post, using the argument that in it he could serve as a liaison with the Congressional Committee. Influential Democrats such as Claude Pepper, a Longlea visitor, wrote or telephoned the White House to urge the appointment. Johnson persuaded Drewry to write Roosevelt that he would have "no objection" to it. Roosevelt may have considered making it; the possibility was raised with Rayburn, who had become Speaker the week before, but Rayburn's response was that the appointment would be satisfactory to him if it was satisfactory to Flynn—which, of course, Ray-burn knew it wasn't. Flynn, who had been less than enthusiastic about Johnson's appointment even to an informal liaison role with the committee, had stronger objections to his being made its secretary. He said, in fact, that if Johnson was appointed, he would resign.
With or without formal appointment, Johnson saw no way around Flynn's opposition, particularly without Rayburn in his corner. He drafted a letter to Roosevelt saying that after discussing
the matter of my participation in the Congressional campaigns with Ed Flynn and several of my colleagues here on the Hill … I have come to the conclusion that because of the shortness of time and the possible resentment of such informal participation in the sphere [of] influence of well-established outfits, it would be inadvisable to make further attempts to work out the suggested arrangement with Mr. Flynn.
He redrafted the letter before sending it to Roosevelt, in the reworking revealing some of his techniques, for the missive's five brief paragraphs contain subtle denigration of the work of the man he wanted to replace ("Certainly the job is there to be done. My own youth and inexperience may be in error, but I feel tonight that we do stand in danger in the lower House"); flattery ("I know in your wisdom you will work it out"); subtle pointing out why he was well suited for the job (the campaign, he said, was "effective in cities" but not "in the fifty per cent remaining"—which, of course, was in rural areas such as the one he represented); and a personal touch (noting that "we lost eighty-two seats in 1938," he said that the present forty-five margin "gives me the night-sweats at three a.m.").
Despite the letter, Roosevelt would agree to Johnson's participation only on the original, very informal, basis. A note from FDR to McIntyre on October 4 said: "In the morning will you call up Congressman Lyndon Johnson and tell him that Flynn strongly recommends that we proceed on the original basis as worked out between him and Congressman Drewry which will give Johnson a chance at once to send out the letters which were agreed on, but which made no reference to the President, and that he should do this right away. …" Johnson, however, was still reluctant to accept so informal a role, particularly without Rayburn's support, and that support was still not forthcoming.
But Sam Rayburn was becoming desperate.
If the Democrats lost control of the House, he would lose the Speakership he had just assumed after twenty-eight years of waiting—and every indication was that they were going to lose.
Since 1938, when the Republicans had almost doubled their House holding, from 88 seats to 170, every special election necessitated by the death of a member had confirmed the trend toward the GOP. In 1940, the trend had been accelerating. In the seven special elections held since the first of the year, the Republican share of the vote had risen an average of 6 percent. Democrats had hoped that that trend would be reversed in a presidential election year, but those hopes had been dealt a body blow just three days before Rayburn had become Speaker, for on September 13, in congressional voting in Maine, the Democratic vote in the three Maine congressional districts was down—by the same 6 percent. That 6 percent figure was especially ominous because, in 1938, no fewer than 100 of the 265 Democratic seats had been won by less than 6 percent of the vote. The Republicans needed to gain only forty-eight seats to take control of the House in 1940—and elect their own Speaker. Democrats and Republicans alike felt that the GOP would gain more than that number. "Regardless of the outcome of the Presidential election," the New York Herald Tribune reported on September 15, "Republicans are confident and Democrats fearful that the next House of Representatives will be organized and controlled by the Republican Party for the first time in ten years. … Those who deal with figures cannot avoid the 'trend' which set in in the congressional elections of 1938 and its continuation in all congressional off-year elections since then. …" Democrats couldn't even get back home to campaign. Deepening crisis in Europe and the Far East, and the need for new crisis legislation—the Selective Service Act, funding for new military bases—forced Congress to remain in session all Summer and into September. September drew to a close, and no major new legislation was before Congress, and the gleeful Republicans, backed by the press ("In such a time of crisis the institution through which the will of the American people is expressed ought not to leave Washington," editorialized the New York Times), insisted that it stay in session. As Arthur Krock wrote on September 24:
… the Democratic House majority is in real danger whoever may win the Presidency. That is what is disturbing the Democratic members as the time of the session lengthens, and the Republicans, while equally anxious to campaign, count on that to keep the adjournment cake and eat it too. They would then go to the country, crying out against adjournment "at such a time" and making all the political hay which could be gathered in season.
And in to many of the Democratic members, trapped in Washington, poured reports that they were in trouble back home, and that time was growing too short to repair the damage. Sam Rayburn had spent twenty-eight years in Congress waiting to be Speaker; was he to be Speaker for only four months?
Over and over again Rayburn was told that a principal reason for the impending electoral disaster was lack of money. Visiting the Chicago headquarters of the party's Midwest Division, Charles Marsh reported that "Chicago is a skeleton, because no money has trickled from New York West yet. I walked through a graveyard … with yawning offices everywhere. Apparently no money for payrolls, no definite amounts to make planning for radio and speaker's bureau." Roosevelt's personal popularity would pull the President through, Marsh predicted, but it wouldn't pull enough Congressmen with him. "I believe the lower house of Congress may be lost by not getting money West now."
And there was no money. In August, Rayburn had asked Flynn to set aside $100,000 to help congressional candidates. At the end of September, the Democratic National Committee had not contributed a penny. On October 2, a letter from Flynn's finance chairman, Wayne Johnson, must have made Rayburn realize how remote was the chance of significant financial assistance to his "fellows" from the DNC: Congressman William D. Byron of Maryland had made a personal trip to National Committee headquarters at the Biltmore to ask for financial help; Johnson wrote Rayburn, "Will you see what you can do to help Congressman Byron if his need is as acute as he thinks." As for the National Committee, Wayne Johnson wrote, "We have had such difficulty in getting money to keep things running to date that I don't know how much we will have to help the Congressional Campaign Committee."
Then, over the weekend beginning October 5, premonition turned to panic, for on that weekend, Democrats, desperate over discouraging reports from their districts, began drifting away from Washington; by October 8, when an informal "recess" was finally arranged, more than a hundred members had already left for home on what the Times called "French Leave," and others, the Times reported, were threatening "to quit the capital regardless of what the body decides to do about … remaining in daily session." And when they arrived back in their districts, they found that the reports were all too true. In district after district, Democratic Congressmen who had won by comfortable margins in 1936, and by smaller margins in 1938, returned home in 1940, with less than a month to go before the election, to find that they were behind, and that their opponents' campaigns were well organized and well financed, with plenty of help from Washington—while they were getting no help at all.
Michigan's Sixteenth Congressional District, which included part of Detroit, and adjoining Dearborn, site of a giant Ford Motor Company plant, had once been considered a safe Democratic district. Running for his third term in 1936, Congressman John Lesinski had polled 61 percent of the vote, defeating his Republican opponent by 21,000 votes. But in 1938, the margin had been reduced to 10,000—55 percent. And in 1940, the Republican candidate in the Ford-dominated Sixteenth was a Ford: Henry's cousin Robert. Arriving back in Dearborn to begin his campaign, Lesinski found "hundreds" of Robert ford for congress billboards, and numerous other indications of "unlimited financial backing"—including no fewer than a dozen well-staffed campaign headquarters. Clearly, the district wasn't safe any longer. It contained voters of fifty-eight nationalities, so literature printed in foreign languages was a necessity. In the 1936 and 1938 elections, the Democratic National Committee had sent truckloads of foreign-language pamphlets to the district—100,000 in Polish alone. Now Lesinski was informed that not one piece of foreign-language literature had been received in the district. When he telephoned the Biltmore to find out when some would be arriving, he could not even get through to anyone who could give him a reply. Compiling a detailed list of the minimum needed—50,000 pamphlets in Polish, 5,000 each in Hungarian, Ukrainian, Italian and Russian—he telegraphed it to the Biltmore, and this time he got a reply. The pamphlets had been set in type, he was told, but there was no money available to print them. And he couldn't get campaign buttons. He pleaded for a visit by Roosevelt to his district, reminding Washington of the great crowds the President had drawn in Detroit in 1936, but he couldn't get Roosevelt. That was understandable and standard for any campaign; every Congressman wanted a popular President in his district. But Lesinski couldn't even get a picture of Roosevelt! So few posters of the President were available that they were framed under glass to preserve them and carried from one rally to another; not one could be spared, Lesinski was to write, to hang in his own headquarters! John Lesinski knew he was in trouble. He needed all the help he could get. And he couldn't even get a poster.
Lesinski's experience was being repeated, that first part of October, in scores of congressional districts. In 1940, radio was still not the most expensive campaign item for Congressmen; most spent more money on billboards. "When you saw a lot of billboards for your opponent," recalls a man who ran many congressional campaigns in the pre-war era, "you knew that he must have a well-financed campaign in other areas, too." Now, in district after district, the Congressman arrived home to find his opponent's face staring down at him from billboards—and to realize what that meant. And when he wrote or telephoned his Congressional Campaign Committee for help, he found that not only cash but the most basic types of other campaign materials were difficult to obtain. In previous elections, the committee had relayed requests for buttons, posters, bumper stickers, literature, nationally prominent speakers, to the parent Democratic National Committee, and Farley's efficient staff, sympathetic to Congressmen and experienced in solving their problems, had done their best to meet their requests. Now, with Farley and his staff abruptly gone, and with Farley's replacement, Flynn, interested almost exclusively in Roosevelt's election, the National Committee, its resources more limited than ever, was all but ignoring Congressmen's requests.
Overshadowing every other problem for the returning Congressmen was their shortage of campaign funds. Lesinski had pleaded with Drewry for help; what he received was a check for $100, a very small amount of ammunition with which to fight a Ford. That was not an ungenerous contribution by Drewry's standards, particularly given the state of the Congressional Committee's bank account. The long-awaited subvention from the Democratic National Committee finally arrived on October 10. It was not the $100,000 for which Rayburn had asked, but $10,000. Parceled out among seventy-eight candidates in contributions of $100 or $200, it was an amount too small to make a difference in the fight on which hung Sam Rayburn's fate. Not since the New Deal had swept into office in 1932 had Democratic candidates for Congress needed more help—and instead they were getting less help. Tallying the frantic telephone calls from the Congressmen, Democratic congressional leaders realized that the fight was being lost. With Roosevelt's once-substantial lead slipping week by week until Gallup polls in early October showed Willkie pulling into a virtual dead heat, the outlook for the House worsened. "You could have cut the gloom around Democratic congressional headquarters with a knife," Pearson and Allen were to recall. "The campaign committee, headed by Representative Pat Drewry, a charming and dawdling Virginian, had collapsed like the minister's one-horse shay. Activity had so bogged down that hard-pressed candidates had quit even asking for help. For the Republicans it looked like a lead-pipe cinch to regain control of the House."
Sam Rayburn realized the situation, and if he hadn't, a letter misdirected to Congressional Committee secretary Cap Harding would have helped him realize it by giving him additional evidence of the financial odds against House Democrats. Contributions to the Republican Party from A. Felix du Pont, Jr., and his wife, Lydia, had been delivered to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee by mistake. The checks were for $3,000 and $4,000, respectively. And they were from just two du Ponts. No fewer than forty-six du Ponts were active Republican contributors. Apparently still unwilling to put Lyndon Johnson in charge of the congressional effort, Rayburn now tried frantically to find someone else. But no one else wanted the job. Recalls one of Rayburn's aides: "It appeared that the Democrats were … going to lose the House. No one wanted to risk his political future by being congressional campaign manager for the House." Rayburn talked to "two or three other people," but found "nobody available." Earlier in October, he told Roosevelt what he had told Flynn: "that if this House were lost—even though he was re-elected—it would tear him to pieces just like it did President Wilson after the Republicans won the House in 1918." He asked Roosevelt to appoint Johnson to the post he wanted, Chip Robert's now-vacant National Committee secretaryship. Flynn again refused to accept that appointment, but Johnson now agreed to accept the informal role with the Congressional Committee that he had earlier refused. Apparently changing his mind yet again, Flynn appears to have demurred even at this, but on October 13, Rayburn begged Roosevelt to get Johnson into the congressional campaign in some capacity, formal or informal, and to do it fast. The President agreed to do so. He reportedly said: "Tell Lyndon to see me tomorrow." Lyndon saw the President the next day —October 14—at breakfast, and that afternoon not only Flynn but Drewry sent out the letters that assigned Johnson a role in the campaign.
The role could hardly have been more informal. Drewry's letter said only that Johnson would "assist the Congressional Committee." No specific position or title was mentioned. While the role may have been informal, however, it was a role not on the district level or the state level, but on the national level. Rushing out of the White House, Lyndon Johnson placed a call to Houston—to Brown & Root.
*Actually, services were supposedly dispensed not by the Congressional Campaign Committee but by the Democratic National Congressional Committee, but these committees were actually the same body, operating out of the same office and with the same staff; the two names had been adopted to avoid various complications of campaign-financing laws.
*He appears to have seen it from the beginning. Although no oil had been discovered in his district, a local attorney, Harris Melasky, had begun representing some of the formerly broke wildcatters who owned wells in East Texas; Johnson went to a lot of trouble cultivating Melasky in 1938 and 1939—although none of Johnson's advisors in the district could figure out why.
*Whether he asked to be formally appointed chairman in Drewry's place, or whether he would have been satisfied to have Drewry remain, as a figurehead, while he accepted another post, is uncertain; some sources believe the former, some the latter.