Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  • • •

  THIS PATTERN WAS REPEATED after Lyndon Johnson had become a congressman—in the single instance during his early congressional career in which his work as congressman became significantly involved with constituents whose skins were brown or black. Again there was a spontaneous, emotional, passionate outpouring of indignation and outrage, of sympathy and tenderness, of ingenuity to conceive a solution to the problem, and of energy to drive the solution to reality, and again this was followed, as soon as it became apparent to him that that solution would conflict with his ambitions, by a calculated, pragmatic drawing back that left in place the appearance of the solution but not the reality.

  This conflict was precipitated by the passage, in September, 1937, a few months after Lyndon Johnson’s election to Congress, of the Wagner-Steagall Housing Act, which made federal loans available for low-cost slum-clearance projects administered by local agencies.

  At the moment that President Roosevelt signed the bill, Johnson was seeking every available source of funds for projects that would help his constituents, and the Housing Act seemed to provide an ideal opportunity. Some fifteen thousand Austin residents—the great majority of them Mexican-heritage or black Americans—were living in slum shanties, most of them without even electricity, running water, or indoor bathrooms. Johnson had, furthermore, won his seat in a special election in which blacks could vote, and he had carried most of the black vote, partly because of cash payments to leaders of the black community, but partly because of an emotional appeal he had made to other leaders of that community who were motivated by less selfish considerations. Meeting with them in the basement of a black Methodist church, with no reporters present—“It might have been dangerous otherwise,” one of the group was to explain—the young candidate had told them, in the recollection of another member of the group, that “I think I can help you,’ that if he got to Congress he could do such things as recognizing the Negroes for their votes, we together could recognize their voting rights…. He was very disposed toward us, and he was asking for our help.” He had made his appeal so persuasively that, a third member was to say, “I’ll never forget that meeting.” The new Housing Act seemed to provide an ideal means of providing the help Johnson had promised.

  At first, Johnson was fervently caught up in the idea of providing that help. Walking around the Austin slums when he returned to the city from Washington over Congress’s Christmas recess in December, 1937, he was as filled with indignation and outrage and a desire to do something as he had been in Cotulla, and he told Austin Mayor Tom Miller, “Now look, I want us to be the first in the United States if you’re willing to do this, and you’ve got to be willing to stand up for the Negroes and the Mexicans.” When Miller agreed, Johnson gave a radio speech. Its title was “The Tarnish on the Violet Crown” (the short-story writer O. Henry had dubbed Austin “The City of the Violet Crown” because of the purplish haze which hung over the hills outside the city at dusk). And the title was no more vivid than his description, filled with heartfelt understanding, of the horror of what he had seen on a second walking tour, which he had taken on Christmas Day:

  Within five blocks, a hundred families, an old man with TB, dying, a child of eleven, all of them Mexicans…. I found one family that almost might be called typical living within one dreary room, where no single window let in the sun. Here they slept, here they cooked and ate, they washed themselves in a leaky tin tub after hauling the water two hundred yards. Here they raised their children, ill-nourished and sordid. And on this Christmas morning, there was no Santa Claus for the ten children, all under sixteen, that scrambled around the feet of a wretched mother bent over her wash-tub, while in the same room her husband, the father of her brood, lay dangerously ill with an infectious disease.

  He poured himself into the project with all his energy; when the new United States Housing Authority announced its first three grants in January, 1938, they were to two large cities, New York and New Orleans, and one much smaller one, Austin, Texas—“because,” Leon Keyserling, the Authority’s deputy administrator, was to explain, “there was this first-term congressman who was so on his toes and so active and so overwhelming that he was up and down our corridors all the time.”

  When it came to spending the grant, however, passion ran into pragmatism—and passion lost without much of a fight. Far from being short of allies, the new congressman had solidly behind him on this issue not only the city’s mayor but its only large newspaper, Charles Marsh’s Austin American-Statesman, which ran story after story about families living in tents or in shacks made of tin cans. He even had surprisingly strong support from the community as a whole, for Austin was a very liberal city for Texas; at a public hearing before the City Council in January, 1938, every one of the 340 residents present voted to support the proposal. But it was not their views that were decisive. There was strong opposition from conservative realtors and businessmen, including Herman Brown, whose antipathy to “gimmes”—to “niggers” and “Meskins”—was intensified in this instance because he viewed federally subsidized low-cost housing as competition with private real estate enterprise (including profitable slum buildings, of which he owned more than a few in Austin). And on the other side also was Brown’s lawyer, Alvin Wirtz. Lyndon had already convinced Wirtz and the Browns that, as George Brown puts it, “Lyndon was more conservative, more practical, than people understand. You get right down to the nut-cutting, he was practical. He was for the niggers, he was for the little boys, but by God … he was as practical as anyone,” and he didn’t want that impression weakened. Johnson named the top officers of the newly created Austin Housing Authority, which would administer the grant. As chairman he named E. H. Perry, but Perry, an elderly, mild-mannered, retired cotton broker was only a figurehead; the Authority would really be run by its vice chairman. To that post Johnson named Alvin Wirtz.

  In the event, therefore, the Austin low-income housing program was not quite what Negroes and Mexican-Americans—or Austin’s liberals—had hoped for. It was not only that the new housing units were segregated by race, although they were—strictly segregated; there were three separate garden-apartment developments, one for Mexicans, one for blacks, and one for whites. Some of Johnson’s critics in Austin would later call the project “Housing for the Poor, by Race,” but, given the fact that Austin was in some respects a southern city, this criticism was unfair. There was, however, another aspect of this low-income housing that was quite striking, given Johnson’s desire to help African-Americans and Mexican-Americans—particularly, in regard to housing, Mexican-Americans, since his Cotulla experience had made him so sensitive to their plight. The federal Housing Authority generally adhered to a directive handed down by Interior Secretary Harold Ickes that its housing projects reflect “the racial composition of the neighborhood where they were located.” Although the overwhelming majority—90 percent by some estimates—of the inhabitants of Austin’s slums were blacks or Mexican-Americans, almost as much of this new housing was built for whites as for blacks and Mexican-Americans combined. In his speeches and talks with Austin leaders, Johnson had emphasized housing for the Mexicans and Negroes, the people he wanted to help. When the new apartments were built, there were 40 apartments for Mexicans, 130 apartments for Negroes, and 162 units for whites. As for other low-income public housing that would be built in Austin during Johnson’s ten remaining years as the city’s congressman—there wasn’t any. Austin’s slums grew steadily larger, but not a single new unit of low-income housing was built there.*

  THE PATTERN WAS REPEATED in Lyndon Johnson’s votes in the House of Representatives. Near the end of his eleven years in the House, he assured a constituent that he had “voted against all anti-poll tax, anti-lynching, and all FEPC legislation since I came to Congress.” He was not overstating the case. He routinely lined up on the southern side in votes on civil rights measures, excusing himself to liberal constituents by saying he was not “against” blacks but rather “for�
�� states rights: he had a 100 percent record against not only legislation aimed at ending the poll tax and segregation in the armed services but even against legislation aimed at ending lynching. The votes he thus cast had little significance—none of the legislation would have passed had he voted the other way—and neither did the few speeches he made in the House, violent as was their language. In 1947, he denounced President Truman’s “Fair Deal” program as “a farce and a sham,” saying that it was “the province of the state to run its own elections,” and that “I am opposed to the anti-lynching bill because the federal government has no more business enacting a law against one form of murder than another.” What might have mattered more was not such public manifestations as votes and speeches but behind-the-scenes efforts in the House cloakroom or in the aisle at the rear of the Chamber, where members quietly buttonhole colleagues to argue for or against legislation, but the pattern held here, too. It was about civil rights measures as well as other liberal legislation that Johnson’s liberal colleagues say he wouldn’t take stands, that, as Edouard V. M. Izak of California put it, “He just simply was not interested…. He was very, very silent.”

  ALTHOUGH BOTH COKE STEVENSON, Johnson’s major opponent in the 1948 race for the Senate, and the third man in the race, George E. B. Peddy, were segregationists and expressed themselves in racist terms, civil rights was not an issue in that campaign. Johnson ensured that it wouldn’t be an issue with a statement about President Truman’s civil rights program that he made in his opening rally on May 22, 1948, in Wooldridge Park in Austin. Repeating his attack on the program as “a farce and a sham,” he added that it was “an effort to set up a police state in the guise of liberty. I am opposed to that program. I have voted AGAINST the so-called poll tax repeal bill; the poll tax should be repealed by those states which enacted them. I have voted AGAINST the so-called anti-lynching bill; the state can, and DOES, enforce the law against murder. I have voted AGAINST the FEPC; if a man can tell you whom you hire, he can tell you whom you can’t hire.”

  During the 1948 campaign, Johnson occasionally reiterated this unambiguous opposition to the main tenets of the civil rights movement of the 1940s, but civil rights never became an issue. A survey of 147 Texas newspapers showed that civil rights “was hardly mentioned during the 1948 campaign.”

  Johnson received heavy majorities in African-American areas in Texas cities, in part because Washington figures like Mary McLeod Bethune and Robert Weaver sent word to African-Americans in Texas that Johnson was “really something,” in part because African-American college and school officials who had met him during his NYA tenure felt he “really cared about people,” in part because in meetings in small groups or one-on-one with black leaders of these areas, he convinced them that despite his public statements he was really on their side—but perhaps mostly because these leaders felt that, no matter what his true opinions, he was preferable to his two opponents. “For U.S. Senator, we have chosen Lyndon B. Johnson,” the Houston Informer declared. “Though he is no angel, he is about as good as we have seen in the race.” As one study put it, “Johnson was the best Texas minorities could get in 1948.” Ed Clark was to say, “They had no choice. Where else were they going to go?”

  AFTER HE BECAME PRESIDENT, Johnson wanted his image to be that of a man who had “never had any bigotry,” who had been a longtime supporter of civil rights. The memory of the Wooldridge Park speech would blur that image, so he did his best to make sure it wouldn’t be remembered. Stapled to the text of the speech in the White House files was the following admonition:

  “DO NOT RELEASE THIS SPEECH—NOT EVEN TO STAFF, WITHOUT EXPRESS PERMISSION OF BILL MOYERS. As background, both Walter Jenkins and George Reedy have instructed this is not EVER TO BE RELEASED.”

  *For an account of Johnson’s work with the NYA that does not touch on its racial aspects, see Chapter 19 of The Path to Power.

  *It should perhaps also be noted that those figures that were submitted by Johnson aroused skepticism at the time: in January, 1937, for example, a memorandum from the NYA’s Area Statistical Office in Washington noted a “considerable difference” between the number reported by Johnson for “youth employed on projects” and the number recorded by the statistical office. For example, the memorandum states that for July, 1936, Johnson reported 10,673 youths employed and the Statistical Office found only 7,050 employed.

  *The only public housing of any type built in Austin during these years was 1,641 units, not of low-income housing but of veterans’ housing, created in 1946 and 1947 for returning World War II veterans and their families. These units were primarily barracks moved to Austin from deactivated Army camps and used to house veterans attending the all-white University of Texas. Twenty units—not barracks but trailers—were provided for a black college in Austin: Sam Houston College.

  32

  “Proud to Be

  of Assistance”

  IT WAS JUST EIGHT DAYS after Lyndon Johnson had been sworn in as a United States senator, in 1949, that the pattern—of true, deep compassion surrendering to true, deeper pragmatism—was repeated, in a fast-paced drama that revealed the pattern very clearly indeed.

  The prologue to the drama had taken place more than three years earlier, in June, 1945, on Luzon Island in the Philippines, when a twenty-six-year-old Mexican-American private, Felix Longoria, a truck driver from a small South Texas town called Three Rivers, volunteered for a patrol and was killed in a fusillade of Japanese bullets, leaving a wife, Beatrice, and a young daughter. He was buried in a temporary military cemetery on Luzon for three years, and in December, 1948, his body was shipped home, and the Army notified his widow, who had moved to Corpus Christi. She said she wanted the body brought to Three Rivers for funeral and burial, and on Monday, January 10, 1949, she took a bus back there to arrange for her husband to be buried in his hometown. When, however, she arrived at Three Rivers’ only funeral parlor, the Rice Funeral Home, the owner, T. W. Kennedy Jr., told her that she could not use its chapel for the service because “the whites won’t like it.”

  Once, Beatrice Longoria might have simply accepted that edict, for before Pearl Harbor, Mexican-Americans in South Texas had generally accepted discrimination meekly, but during the war, Mexican-American soldiers had served not in segregated units as had blacks but alongside white soldiers (and had compiled the country’s highest ethnic group representation in combat service and Medal of Honor awards), and had returned home in a different frame of mind, and in 1948, several hundred Mexican-American veterans in Corpus Christi had formed the American G.I. Forum to make sure they received the medical and educational benefits to which they were entitled under the G.I. Bill. As soon as Mrs. Longoria got back to Corpus Christi, she contacted the Forum’s president, physician and former Army major Dr. Hector Garcia. Dr. Garcia telephoned Kennedy, and told him that Mrs. Longoria wanted to use his funeral home. Kennedy repeated his refusal, at first simply giving the same explanation—“The white people just won’t like it”—but when Garcia had the temerity to persist, saying, “But in this case the boy is a veteran, doesn’t that make any difference?,” he lost his temper and furnished additional reasons. “That doesn’t make any difference,” he said. “You know how the Latin people get drunk and lay around all the time. The last time we let them use the chapel, they got all drunk and we just can’t control them…I’m sure you’ll understand.”

  Dr. Garcia understood. Hanging up the phone, he sent seventeen telegrams to military officials, congressmen and senators, including one to the new junior senator from Texas, in which he asked for “immediate investigation and correction” of Kennedy’s “un-American action” which “is in direct contradiction of those same principles for which this American soldier made the supreme sacrifice in giving his life for his country and for the same people who now deny him the last funeral rites.”

  The telegram was delivered to Suite 231 in the Senate Office Building at 8:49 the next morning, and was opened by either John Conna
lly or Walter Jenkins (neither can now remember which one) and when Lyndon Johnson arrived at the office about an hour later, it was shown to him—and there was hardly a moment’s pause before his response. “By God,” he said, “we’ll bury him in Arlington!” He told someone to get him the official in charge of Arlington National Cemetery, burial place of America’s heroes, determined that indeed Private Longoria was eligible for burial there—any soldier, sailor, or marine who died in active service or held an honorable discharge could be buried there, with full military honors: three volleys from a firing squad, a bugler blowing taps, four uniformed flag-bearers holding the American flag over the casket as it was lowered into the grave, and then the presentation, by a soldier of the same rank or higher as the dead serviceman, of the flag to the next of kin, the soldier saluting and saying: “The Government presents to you this flag under which he served.”