When Johnson traveled, speechwriters and advance men traveled with him; Mann often traveled alone except for a single aide who had volunteered to be his driver.
The influence of money in the campaign was magnified in the media. When Gerald Mann received an endorsement from a respected daily newspaper, it appeared once—in that newspaper; perhaps, if he was lucky, the paper might repeat its endorsement once. But when Lyndon Johnson received an endorsement, it was reprinted, in ads or in “news stories” written in his headquarters, in scores of weeklies throughout the daily’s circulation area—week after week. It was reprinted in brochures mailed—week after week—to voters across the entire state. It was reprinted on the hundreds of thousands of throwaways placed in voters’ hands by campaign workers—NYA employees, Brown & Root employees, electric cooperative meter readers and repairmen, FHA mortgage appraisers—who reinforced to the voters, face to face, the message in the flyers they were being handed. The most glowing phrases of such an endorsement were shouted, or recited in honeyed tones, on radio broadcasts over and over, day after day. Mann’s speeches might be persuasive to the voters who were actually standing in front of him when he gave them, and, perhaps, listeners to a local radio station, but that was all. Johnson could not speak well, but when he spoke, it was to large areas of the state, for his speeches were broadcast over statewide radio networks. Men—local lead men and stemwinders who had come to admire the young Attorney General—wanted to speak for Mann, but after the first few weeks of the campaign, the money to send them on the road ran out. All too often, Mann’s headquarters was handicapped in responding even to a specific request to furnish a prominent speaker for the meeting of some local organization. When such a request came in to Johnson headquarters, the speaker was sent, all expenses paid, often accompanied by a claque to arouse enthusiasm in the audience. Newspaper advertising drummed up attendance. When a similar request came in to Mann’s headquarters, expense money would have to be scraped up before a commitment could be made to send a speaker. Often, it couldn’t be scraped up, and the opportunity was lost. Hardeman, hardly a prominent Texan, wound up making some speeches himself because he had no money to send anyone else.
Mann was mercifully unaware of the full extent of Johnson’s advertising, for traveling long hours every day around the state, he would see only the local newspapers. “I was out campaigning, so I would see only one ad, not hundreds at a time,” he recalls. His staff tried to shield him from the truth: “You want to keep the candidate believing he’s going to win, so you don’t tell him things like that,” Hardeman says. But, a perceptive campaigner, Mann knew something was happening, something bad. “I could tell by the crowds,” he recalls. “I don’t know how to describe this—out on the stump, you can feel if things are going right,” and now he began to feel that things were going wrong. “The crowds were just not as large any more, or they were just not as enthusiastic as they should be.” And gradually the explanation dawned on him. “As I traveled around, I could just feel the effect of Johnson’s money. The advertising, and the employing of people, and in every county in the state there were federal bureaus—they were really putting out so much money I could just feel what was happening.” Mann was correct, but, without sufficient funds of his own, he couldn’t do anything about it. He was campaigning now as Lyndon Johnson had campaigned in 1937—day and night, weekday and weekend, spending sixteen to eighteen hours a day in a car. He became so exhausted that he could “fall asleep on a moment’s notice in a car. If I hadn’t been able to do that, I couldn’t have been able to keep going. You can look at a map and see how big Texas is, and how far apart these towns are, but you can’t imagine it until you try to get from one place to another.” He was, he says, “almost automated”: he could sleep until his car pulled into a town, wake up and jump out of the car, make a speech, get back into the car—and go right back to sleep. And he was campaigning like this day after day. But even such an effort could not help him against the weight of Lyndon Johnson’s money. Mann was running a traditional Texas campaign, and running it brilliantly. But it couldn’t compete with the new type of campaign, Lyndon Johnson’s type of campaign.
THERE WAS ONE GLARING DIFFERENCE between Lyndon Johnson’s 1941 campaign and his 1937 campaign—the candidate himself.
The candidate of 1941 bore little resemblance to the skinny, gawky, nervous youth of four years before. When he took off his suit jacket, it became apparent that the only part of Lyndon Johnson that was still thin was his shoulders, conspicuously narrow in proportion to the middle of his body which had became quite wide. His belt sagged a little around the beginning of a paunch, and his rear end was now quite large. The jacket was seldom doffed, but not through concern over his bulk. His speeches, he instructed his speechwriters, were to be “senatorial”—statesmanlike and dignified—and he wanted his appearance to match, as the handkerchief painstakingly arranged in his breast pocket matched his necktie. His suits, most of them with a vest, were of good materials, mostly dark blue. There was often a carnation in his lapel, and his white shirt was starched and stiff; gold cufflinks gleamed on the sleeves. Bare-headed in 1937, now he often wore a hat, not a Stetson but a fedora, which he would wave to the crowds, and there was frequently a briefcase under his arm from which he would remove the text of his speech as ostentatiously as if it had been papers of state; to read the speech he would fussily put on a pair of eyeglasses. The gaunt face of 1937 was a broad, heavy face now: flesh had filled in the lines and filled out the cheeks; there was a full-fledged double chin, and the big jaw jutted now out of heavy jowls. The candidate of 1937 had looked so young; the candidate of 1941 was not young at all; he looked at least a decade older than his thirty-two years.
The difference was accentuated by his bearing. In 1937, he had been as ineffective reading a prepared speech as he was persuasive speaking extemporaneously. Now he almost never gave an extemporaneous talk, and he was, if possible, even worse now at reading prepared speeches—but in a very different way. In 1937, he had given the impression of being afraid to look at his audience lest he lose his place in the text. He still did not look at his audience nearly as much as his mother, the elocution teacher, would have liked, but fear was no part of the impression he made now. On a stage, he was a dominant, powerful figure, tall, long-armed; the spotlight glittered on his gold-rimmed eyeglasses, glistened off the waves of his black, carefully pomaded, shiny black hair and highlighted the pale whiteness of his skin, the blackness of the heavy eyebrows that the glasses did little to conceal, and the sheen of beard that was present on the jutting jaw no matter how closely he shaved. A powerful figure, but not a pleasant one. The modest tone in the text of most of his speeches (Charles Marsh, who wrote many of them, was constantly urging upon the candidate at least a public humility) was belied by the domineering tone in which they were delivered. Johnson shouted his speeches in a harsh voice almost without inflection except when he was especially determined to emphasize a point, when his voice would rise into a bellow; the tone was the tone of a lecturer uninterested in any opinion but his own: dogmatic, pontifical, the tone of a leader demanding rather than soliciting support. Reinforcing the tone were the gestures, as awkward as ever but now authoritarian to the point of arrogance. He spoke with his big head thrust aggressively forward at his listeners, and sometimes it would thrust forward even more and he would raise his hand and repeatedly jab a finger down at them. Sometimes he spoke with one hand on a hip, with his big head thrown back a little, shouting over their heads. His attitude went beyond mere inability to learn public speaking. His rare smiles were so mechanical that they seemed calculated to let the audience know they were mechanical, as if he wanted to let them know that he didn’t need them, that he was the leader and they the followers. Early in the campaign, the ability of his advance men, the skill with which they were organized, and the waves of radio and newspaper ads which preceded each speech ensured large crowds at his rallies, and, spurred on by introductions from the best l
ocal orators (only the best were hired) and by the cheers of the Johnson campaign workers and federal and Brown & Root employees with which it was liberally seeded, the audience would welcome him with enthusiasm. As he spoke, though, the enthusiasm would steadily diminish; all too often, by the end of a speech the only cheers would be the cheers of his claque. His speeches were invariably long—too long, not infrequently an hour or more; the audience would begin to drift away relatively soon, and by the end of a speech it would often be embarrassingly smaller than it had been at the beginning. Word about Johnson’s lack of speaking ability began to get around: despite the unprecedented publicity, crowds at Johnson’s rallies began growing smaller than expected.
The difference was as noticeable after the speech as during it. During the 1937 campaign, a handshake from Lyndon Johnson had been an exercise in instant empathy; circulating among an audience with a face glowing with friendliness, he would keep a voter’s hand in his for long minutes while he asked him for his help and told him that he too was a farmer, and wanted to help farmers; he had established rapport with the rapidity of a man who had a “very unusual ability to meet and greet the public.” Now, in 1941, that ability was not often in evidence, for Johnson did not often choose to use it. In part, of course, this was because there were so many more voters to meet and greet now, but the difference went beyond that circumstance. When, after a speech, Johnson shook hands with voters lined up to meet him, he did so in a manner so mechanical that a friend from Washington commented on it—Justice Douglas happened to be in Big Spring to make a speech on the night Johnson spoke there. “As LBJ came to the close of his speech, he shouted, ‘I want all you good folks of Big Spring to line up and shake the hand of the next Senator from Texas, Lyndon B. Johnson.’” And Douglas noticed that “Lyndon gave each of them two pumps with the arm and one slap on the back before greeting the next comer.” The two-pump, one-slap technique was, in fact, one that Johnson had rehearsed; he boasted that, using it, he could, with his aides prodding the voters past him in a fast-moving single line, shake forty-two hands per minute. The method was efficient, but not effective. Far from establishing rapport with voters, he only managed to emphasize the feeling that he was not one of them, and that, while he might be asking for their help, he didn’t really need it. And he would not allow a voter more than a hurried word or two, if that; Bill Deason says, “He never missed anybody on the street. … He shook hands with every one of them, but he never let them involve him in an argument. He moved fast. …”In fact, he seldom let them involve him in a conversation; the candidate moved through crowds in a cordon of officious aides who pushed people aside, none too gently, hurrying him along as he flashed mechanical smiles to left and right. And his aides were around him, and hurrying him along, because he had ordered them to. He wasn’t always so coldly mechanical, of course. With “important people”—some local politician he recognized on the line of voters—his face would light up, and his greeting would be warm and unhurried, his handshake again as good as a hug. On some nights, his greeting of the public would also be warm, reminiscent of the campaigning of 1937, but such nights did not occur frequently during the first six weeks of the 1941 campaign. In 1941, his campaigning was as strikingly cold and mechanical as it had been strikingly warm and individual four years before; indeed at times his manner was almost contemptuous, making it clear that the individual to whom he was speaking simply didn’t matter.
There was another difference between the two campaigns. Johnson was campaigning hard in 1941, was still putting in long days on the campaign trail, but there was a marked drop in his energy level. The desperation, the frantic, driving work was gone. He wasn’t, in fact, even the hardest-working candidate. Gerald Mann in 1941 displayed the willingness Johnson had displayed in 1937: the willingness to do everything—to work day and night, without regard to hours—in order to win. The Attorney General was determined to go everywhere, to shake the hand of every voter who wanted to shake his. Mann had done it twice before, and in 1941, he was doing it again. Johnson’s speeches were, thanks to money, reaching more voters, through being broadcast, but Mann was determined to overcome that difference with sheer physical effort. Johnson was making far fewer speeches, visiting far fewer towns. He concentrated largely on the big cities, where, of course, the votes were concentrated, and in the big cities he concentrated on the big men. Arriving, he would huddle, generally in a suite in the hotel in which he was staying, with the city’s political and business bosses—in Texas, often the same men. Then he would make telephone calls or rest until the evening’s rally. The pace was still grueling—the travel between cities made any campaign in Texas grueling—but it was much slower than the 1937 pace. It was the pace of a man confident of victory. Implicit in Johnson’s delivery of speeches, and in his manner of greeting voters, was the feeling that with the mighty President behind him, he couldn’t lose.
And, indeed, for the first six weeks of the campaign, the President’s support, combined with Johnson’s money and organization, suggested that Johnson’s confidence was well founded. Although the May 12 Belden Poll showed Mann still far in front of Johnson, 28 percent to 9 percent, both his advisors and Johnson’s—and the state’s veteran political observers—felt that the poll was not accurately measuring the rapid shift toward Johnson, an opinion that would be confirmed by the May 26 poll, which found that Johnson had narrowed the gap from nineteen points to eight—19 percent for Johnson to 27 percent for Mann. Out on the campaign trail, Mann realized that the shift was continuing—and accelerating. He knew—and Austin knew—that Johnson was going to win.
THEN, HOWEVER, a twenty-ninth candidate, Governor O’Daniel, entered the race—and any resemblance to Johnson’s first, victorious, campaign ended on the spot.
Until he had run for Governor three years before, W. (for Wilbert) Lee O’Daniel had never had the slightest connection with politics—not as a candidate, not as a campaign worker, not even as a voter; he had never cast a ballot. He was a flour salesman and a radio announcer. He had turned to radio—in 1927—to sell more flour. At the time, newly arrived in Texas, he was the thirty-seven-year-old sales manager for a Fort Worth company that manufactured Light Crust Flour. An unemployed country-and-western band asked him to sponsor it on a local radio station. The Light Crust Doughboys were not notably successful until one day the regular announcer was unable to appear, and O’Daniel substituted for him; finding that he liked the job, he decided to keep it.
He began whistling along with the band. He began composing tunes, and writing lyrics. Then he began writing little poems that he recited himself.
After a while not all the songs were about flour. They were tributes to Texas (“Beautiful, Beautiful Texas,” “Sons of the Alamo”) and to cowboys (“The Lay of the Lonely Longhorn”). There were hymns to an old horse and to “The Orphan Newsboy.” Many were about motherhood: “The Boy Who Never Grew Too Old to Comb His Mother’s Hair” was a particular favorite, as was another which began: “Mother, you fashioned me/ Bore me and rationed me. …” The songs were about current events: when the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped, the Light Crust Doughboys sang (to the tune of “My Bonny”), “Please Bring Back My Baby to Me”; when Will Rogers was killed, O’Daniel wrote: “Someone in heaven is thinking of you; someone who always was loyal and true; someone who used to be close to your side, laughed when you laughed and cried when you cried.” More and more, the songs and poems were about religion—old-time, Fundamentalist, evangelical religion; “It was good for Lee O’Daniel, and it’s good enough for me,” the Doughboys sang.
He began giving short talks that were almost sermons. In 1938, most Texans still lived on farms, and even those farm boys who had recently arrived in the state’s fast-growing cities were still farm boys, whose customs, tastes, vocabulary and view of life were those of country people. This view was simplistic, homespun, and very, very firm. A country boy himself—he had been raised in poverty on farms in Ohio and Kansas—W. Lee O’Daniel understo
od country people, and he knew how to appeal to their feelings and prejudices. He talked about how poor people should stick together and help each other, about how they should listen to their mothers; while the Doughboys played—pianissimo—“Marvelous Mother of Mine,” he began one program: “Hello there, mother, you little sweetheart. How in the world are you anyway, you little bunch of sweetness? This is your big boy, W. Lee O’Daniel.” And, while the band softly played “Shall We Gather at the River” in the background, he talked about religion: “You young folks who want jobs. You farmers who want crops. All of you folks who want things. How do you expect to get them when you are slapping your Savior in the face?” He urged his listeners to go to church, to love one another, to tell the truth, to avoid sin.
It was not the content of these rambling, informal little homilies that made them so popular, nor the soft violins playing familiar sentimental tunes in the background. It was the voice in which they were delivered. The voice was warm and friendly and relaxed—captivatingly natural. And yet it was also fatherly, soft but firm. It was a voice you could trust. For years, radio experts didn’t understand this. As one reporter put it, they “didn’t think very much of him. They figured it was the band that was putting the program over.” But after a few years, the band broke up, and he replaced it with another, and then another, and the popularity of the show kept growing. In an era in which most radio messages were hard sell, the flour salesman from Fort Worth had, as one chronicler was later to put it, “either stumbled into, or deliberately figured out, that a microphone is an ear and not an auditorium—and you don’t make public speeches to microphones, you don’t shout into them any more than you would shout into your sweetheart’s ear when you wanted to tell her you loved her. O’Daniel learned early that he had Texas by the ear and from that day on he cooed and caroled and gurgled into it.” In 1935, he stopped selling flour for others and started selling it for himself. He organized his own company, Hillbilly Flour, and started his own show. It opened with a woman’s request to him to “Please pass the biscuits, Pappy,” and then, above the fiddles and guitars of the Hillbilly Boys, the voice of a “Pappy,” friendly and fatherly, would be heard. On this show, there was less music and more O’Daniel—and the show’s popularity leaped. By 1938, it had more listeners than any other daily show in the history of Texas radio. Most advertisers wanted their shows to be heard in the evening, when the men were home from work; O’Daniel wanted his show to go on when men weren’t home; he wanted to talk to lonely housewives. And when his show went on, a half-hour past noon, he talked to them. He told them how to mend broken dishes and broken hearts. He told them how important families were. He told them how important they were—because they were mothers. “He talked to the housewives of Texas,” one reporter wrote, “like a big brother and a pal, a guide, philosopher and friend.” And “at twelve-thirty sharp each day a fifteen-minute silence reigned in the State of Texas, broken only by mountain music, and the dulcet voice of W. Lee O’Daniel.” A newsboy who delivered his papers at midday in the little North Texas town of Decatur recalls that in summer his customers’ windows were open, “and you never got out of the sound of the Hillbilly Boys—or of Pappy’s voice.”
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