Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER ONE
The Heritage
From Andrew Jackson to Ronald Reagan, the image of the self-made man
has effectively served occupants of the White House. All who could, made
much of their rags to riches odyssey. "When I was young, poverty was so
common we didn't know it had a name," Lyndon Johnson often said. A
poor boy in a remote Texas town isolated from the mainstream of early
twentieth-century American life, he grew up without indoor plumbing or
electricity and sometimes made do on a bare subsistence diet. The rural
small towns in which he received his elementary, secondary, and college
schooling did little to broaden his horizons.
Yet Lyndon came to maturity believing he was special--a young man
destined for exceptional things. And he was. Fueled by his early poverty, his
ambition, like Lincoln's, "was a little engine that knew no rest." It helped
carry him to the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, the vice
presidency and the White House. But ambition alone did not give him the
wherewithal, the inner confidence, to imagine himself in the Congress or the
Oval Office. His family history gave initial stirrings to such dreams. In one
of the many paradoxes that would shape his life, Lyndon was not simply an
impoverished farm boy who made good, but the offspring of prominent
southern families. Although he suffered painful self-doubts throughout his
life, his heritage was a constant source of belief in a birthright to govern and
lead. Stories told by his parents and grandparents about famous, influential
ancestors were a mainstay of his early years. From the first, he thought of
himself not as a poor boy consigned to a life of hardship, but as an heir of
Johnsons and Buntons, Baineses and Huffmans, men and women who
commanded the respect of their contemporaries and shaped public affairs.
A Texas journalist remembers how Lyndon "reveled in stories of Johnsons
and Baineses who'd fought marauding Indians, of old uncles who drove cattle
up the famous trails, of a hardy pioneer spirit in his
genes. `Listen, goddammit,' he once said, `my ancestors were teachers and
lawyers and college presidents and governors when the Kennedys in this
country were still tending bar.'"
First there were the Johnsons. They had apparently migrated from
England to Georgia, where John Johnson, Lyndon's great-great-grandfather,
lived in Oglethorpe County in 1795 after service in the Revolutionary War as
a teenager. At his death in 1828, John Johnson owned a few hundred acres in
three different counties and two female slaves he bequeathed to his heirs.
Jesse Johnson, John's fourth child and Lyndon's great-grandfather, was part
of the mass nineteenth-century American migration west. After the War of
1812 he was one of the first settlers in Henry County in western Georgia,
where he farmed for some twenty years and served as a sheriff and a judge.
In 1838, however, he moved his family further west to Randolph County,
Alabama. He prospered there as a businessman and acquired seventeen
slaves. But in 1846 after Texas had entered the Union, Jesse joined the flood
of southern migrants from Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee
drawn by the lure of fertile cheap land in the Lone Star state. Jesse led his
wife, eight of his ten children, four grandchildren, and several slaves in
covered wagons across Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and east Texas,
nearly 900 miles over rutted roads and rushing rivers, to Lockhart in Caldwell
County in the plains southeast of Austin. There, during the remaining ten
years of his life, he acquired 330 acres of land valued at $2000 and another
$740 in cattle, horses, oxen, and household goods, $525 less than the claims
later made by creditors on his estate.
If Jesse Johnson did not exactly prosper in Texas, his sons fared
somewhat better. Andrew Jackson Johnson, Jesse Thomas Johnson,
Lyndon's great uncles, and Sam Ealy Johnson, Lyndon's grandfather,
migrated to Blanco County in the Hill Country west of Austin. A frontier in
the late 1850s with a population of fewer than two thousand, principally
Germans and Mormons, the area was notable for its infertile soil, low
rainfall, springtime flooding by the Pedernales and Blanco rivers, and hostile
Apache and Comanche Indians. The lure of the Hill Country for the Johnson
brothers was "stock raising," the hope of making a fortune in the cattle
business. The principal feature of the area then was its miles and miles of
grass, "grass knee high," "grass as high as my stirrups," as two of its early
settlers described it. But it was grass that had grown up over centuries on "a
narrow, thin, layer of soil atop ... limestone," and if initially the Hill
Country was ideal pasture land, it would not be so for long. In the forty
years after 1860, huge herds of cattle transformed the landscape. Eating the
grass faster than it could grow, the stock left the land with nothing to anchor
its top soil. And when periodic drenching rains washed it away, scrub brush
sprang up in its place, making the hills and valleys unsuitable for grazing
or agriculture of any kind.
When Jack, the oldest of the Johnson brothers, came to Blanco County in
1859, however, the region seemed like a farmer's paradise, a lush grassland
where everything would grow. Settling on the north side of the Pedernales
about four miles northeast of the present Johnson City, he lived there for six
years, prospering as a cattle supplier for the Confederacy during the Civil
War. His younger brother Tom also came to Blanco County during the war.
After serving briefly in the Texas State Troops in 1864, he acquired a
320-acre spread on the Pedernales, where he began raising livestock.
Sam, the youngest of the brothers, enlisted in a cavalry regiment at the age
of twenty-two in 1861 and served as a private throughout the war. In
1862-63 he participated in the successful defense of Galveston Island in the
Gulf of Mexico, and in the spring of 1864 he saw action in the Red River
campaign, the unsuccessful attempt by Union troops to force their way up
the Red River Valley, capture Shreveport, Louisiana, and carry the war into
Texas. At the battle of Pleasant Hill, northwest of Natchitoches, Sam
Johnson had his horse shot out from under him by Union artillery, and the
26th Texas Cavalry lost one-third of its men. Seeing "men and horses shot in
every conceivable way," carrying a wounded comrade on his back from the
battlefield, and holding wounded soldiers immobile during amputations, Sam
Johnson never forgot what the regimental chaplain described as the
"unutterable hardships and, suffering ... hunger, sickness, and unbearable
toils" of the fighting in the western Louisiana parishes along the Red
River.
At the end of the war in 1865, Sam Johnson took up residence with his
brother Tom in a log ranch house on the 320-acre spread. Circumstances
now favored them as they never would again. During the war the cattle
running free on the range had greatly multiplied--not only in number but
also in value. A growing population in the north had increased the demand
for beef. When the railroad reached Sedalia, Missouri, in 1866 and then
Abilene, Kansas, in 1867, it provided a reliable means of getting livestock to
the east, so the market for longhorn steers boomed. Two-dollar-a-head cattle
in Texas sold for $10 in Sedalia the year after the war, and in 1867
four-dollar Texas steers brought between $40 and $50 in Abilene.
The Johnson brothers aggressively joined the cattle drives north. In the
years between 1867 and 1870 they made four annual five-week treks of over
600 miles along the Chisholm Trail to Abilene. Each foray was more
successful than the last: despite rainstorms, stampedes, quicksand, cattle
rustlers, and outlaws, the Johnsons made huge profits. By 1870 they had
become the most successful trail drivers operating in Blanco,
Gillespie, Llano, Hays, Comal and Kendall Counties. That year they drove
7000 cattle to market and returned home with $100,000 in $20 gold coins
stuffed in saddlebags. Flushed with success, they spent their money freely,
paying some of their creditors more than they were owed, and buying
thousands of acres of ranch land in Blanco, Hays, and Gillespie counties and
real estate in Fredericksburg and Austin. In 1871, Tom Johnson was worth
almost $17,000, making him the second largest taxpayer and property
owner in Blanco County. Sam, with $15,000 in assessed value, was not far
behind.
But the good times were short-lived. When the Johnsons broke camp in
1871, they headed up the trail with about 10,000 head, most purchased on
credit. As in past years, the journey to Kansas was difficult--eighteen-hour
days, a scarcity of water, stampedes and sleepless nights dogged them and
the sixteen cowboys making the drive. But the difference this time was a glut
of cattle, twice as many as had been sent up the Chisholm Trail in 1870 and
four times the number driven to market in 1869, a total of perhaps 700,000.
"There are not only cattle `on a thousand hills' but a thousand cattle on one
and every hill," a newspaper recorded. The result was financial disaster for
the Johnsons, who sold their cattle for well below what they hoped to get.
As a consequence, they could not meet their debts at home and had to sell off
most of the land they had bought in the preceding five years. The following
year was no better. Although sending a smaller herd to market, they suffered
fresh losses. A terrible drought in the summer of 1872 coupled with a
Comanche raid that cost the Johnsons between 250 and 300 horses worth
about $20,000 broke their financial resources. The Blanco County property
rolls for 1873 show Tom Johnson with holdings of only $180, and Sam
Johnson not even on the rolls. In 1872 or 1873, Sam left the Pedernales for
Lockhart and then Buda, just south of Austin, where, with his father-in-law's
help, he bought a farm.
Sam Ealy Johnson's in-laws were the Buntons, a family whose lustre
shone more brightly than the Johnsons' and whose record of public service
and political prominence was an even greater source of Lyndon's belief in his
suitability for high public office. According to family lore, the line began in
fourteenth-century Scotland, where several generations served in the Scottish
Parliament. The first of the American Buntons was John Buntine I, who
migrated to Rowan County, North Carolina, in 1758. He and three sons,
John II, Robert, and James, were believed to have served in the
Revolutionary War. In 1800, John II settled in Sumner County, Tennessee.
His son Joseph Robert Bunton, Lyndon's great-great-grandfather, married
Phoebe Ann Desha, a descendant of French Huguenots who had migrated to
Pennsylvania and then Tennessee. Her brother Joseph Desha was a
congressman from Kentucky for thirteen years, 1806-19, and governor of the
state from 1824 to 1828. Another brother, Robert, was a congressman from
Tennessee for four years, 1827-31.
The first of the Texas Buntons was John Wheeler Bunton, Joseph and
Phoebe's son and Lyndon's great-great uncle. Arriving in Texas from
Tennessee in 1833, John Wheeler was a central figure in the fight for
independence from Mexico. Standing six feet four inches in height and
holding a college degree and some training in the law, Bunton was an
imposing figure, physically and intellectually. After participating in the
successful siege of San Antonio in December 1835, he served as a delegate
to the constitutional convention of March 1836, where he signed the Texas
Declaration of Independence and was a member of the committee that
wrote a constitution for the new republic. When the convention adjourned
in late March, he rejoined the army and three weeks later fought in the
decisive battle of San Jacinto. His "towering form could be seen amidst the
thickest of the fight. He penetrated so far into the ranks of the defenders of
the breastworks that it is miraculous that he was not killed. But he came
out of the deadly conflict unscathed." In the painting, The Surrender of
Santa Anna, which hangs in the Texas date capitol, John Wheeler Bunton is
portrayed observing the event. Elected twice to the Congress of the new
country, Bunton wrote the bill that established the Texas Rangers. But for
unknown reasons he quit politics in the early 1840s and lived the rest of his
life as a rancher and cotton planter in Bastrop and Hays counties, just east
of the Hill Country. In the latter he built a traditional Old South
mansion--a two-story house with white verandas attended by slaves and
surrounded by cotton fields and pastures.
Robert Holmes Bunton, John's younger brother and Lyndon's
great-grandfather, did not leave Kentucky for Texas until 1858, when he was
already forty years old. Like John, Robert was "a large impressive man,
standing six feet and three inches in height and weighing about two hundred
and sixty pounds.... A handsome man with fair skin, coalblack hair, and
piercing black eyes," he was also "an excellent conversationalist" who was
remembered best for his discourses on government and politics. After
serving for four years in the Civil War, during which he won a battlefield
commission as a lieutenant, Robert, like Tom and Sam Johnson, made and
lost a small fortune in the cattle business. Unlike the Johnson brothers,
however, Robert Bunton was a shrewd businessman who staved off ruin in
the declining cattle market. Instead of continuing to raise stock for which
there was little demand, he rented his pastures in Lockhart to cattlemen
from south Texas who needed feeding and resting grounds for the herds
they were driving north to Abelene. As a consequence, he survived the downturn of
the early seventies and had enough money to help stake his daughter, Eliza
Bunton, and her husband, Sam Ealy Johnson, to the farm at Buda.
Eliza Bunton, Lyndon's grandmother, was eighteen when she married Sam
Johnson in December 1867 and moved to the Pedernales. She was a beautiful
young woman with "patrician bearing, high-bred features, raven hair, piercing
black eyes, and magnolia-white skin." She took great pride in her family and
loved to talk about her famous relatives--John Wheeler Bunton, Governor
Joseph Desha of Kentucky, a cousin, Mary Desha, co-founder of the
Daughters of the American Revolution, and her brother Joe in the Texas
Rangers. She often reminded her children to be worthy of their heritage, and
through her own life gave them an example with which they could identify. A
"heroine" of the southwest Texas highlands, a "leading pioneer" woman,
Eliza Johnson accompanied her husband on the trying cattle drives north and
conquered the terrors of the frontier. Living in near isolation in a drafty log
cabin in which she cooked and baked in a Texas skillet, a boiling pot hung
over a fireplace, she hauled water and firewood, canned fruits and vegetables,
washed, sewed, and made her own soap in an almost endless round of work
days. "This life," one historian records, "was hardy, dirty, terribly
monotonous, lonely, and damagingly narrow.... Few of the Americans who
later eulogized it would care to relive it."
In the six or seven years after the Civil War, it was also full of danger. In
the summer of 1869, Tom and Eliza Felps of Blanco County, a young
couple, were abducted and killed by Comanches. Tom was "shot, stabbed,
and stripped of his clothes. Eliza Felps lay naked, the shaft of an arrow
protruding from her breast. She had been scalped while still alive, but had
managed to crawl some distance before dying." Sam Johnson rode with the
posse that unsuccessfully chased the Indians. Eliza Johnson almost suffered
a similar fate. One day while Sam was gone, Eliza sighted a party of
Comanches riding toward her through the mesquite. Racing to the cabin
before they detected her, she took refuge with her baby daughter, Mary, in a
cellar beneath a trap door. Using a stick pushed through a crack to pull a
braided rug over her hiding place, she tied a dirty diaper over the baby's
mouth to keep her from crying. The Indians ransacked the cabin and stole
horses from the barn before riding off. Eliza waited in the cellar until Sam
returned home that night.
The sixteen years beginning in 1873 that Sam and Eliza lived on the plains
in Buda east of the Hill Country were less eventful. They were also a time of
economic austerity when Sam barely made a living as a farmer. By 1880 he
and Eliza had managed to acquire over 800 acres in property valued at $3000
and livestock worth $500. But they had only 100 acres under cultivation; the
annual yield was a mere 200 bushels of corn, 100 bushels of oats, 250
bushels of wheat, and 4 bales of cotton, all worth just $560. Paying a hired
hand $200, Sam and Eliza had only $360 left to support their family, which
now consisted of six children. Failing
to prosper at Buda and eager to return to the Hill Country, Sam and
Eliza put a down payment on a 950-acre spread along the Pedernales near
Stonewall in Gillespie County in 1882. The new farm was only twelve
miles from their old ranch, which had been bought by James Polk Johnson,
Sam's nephew, who in 1879 laid out the town of Johnson City near its site.
Eliza raised the money for the new place by selling a silver-mounted carriage
and matched span of horses, which had been given to her by Sam's brother
Tom as a wedding present. During the next six years the Johnsons sold off
all their property in Buda. In 1889, after Sam had an altercation with a local
troublemaker who had killed number of people and now threatened him with a
similar fate, he and Eliza returned with eight of their nine children to the
Pedernales in Sam's beloved "mountains."
Although they remained there for more than twenty-five years, the rest of
their lives, it was never easy. Like their neighbors, they were subsistence
farmers living with a minimum of the physical comforts other Americans
had begun to enjoy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. To
make a go of it, they mortgaged 600 acres of the farm and sold another 160
acres of it during the next twelve years. The money from the mortgage was
apparently used to help build a house, outhouses, barn, smokehouse,
cistern, and corrals and dig a well. Later, another house, barn, and well were
added to the property some 500 yards away, where Sam's daughter Frank
and her husband Clarence Martin lived for a number of years. The houses, as
one writer describes them, were little more than "shanties" connected by a
"dog-run," the open corridor between two cabins connected by a sagging
roof in which animals relieved themselves. A poorly constructed front porch
surrounded by a dirt yard that was spotted with tufts of grass and weeds
and fenced by barbed wire completed the picture of the Johnson living
quarters.
On 170 acres, which Sam brought under cultivation, he raised corn, wheat,
and cotton, the latter being his cash crop used to purchase "staples," which
were stored in the smokehouse. Except for these "staples," the farm was
self-sufficient, yielding potatoes, cabbages, turnips, beans, watermelons, and
peaches. Several times a year "the family butchered holes. Bacon and hams
were cured and hung in the smokehouse, while lard was rendered and sausage
made and stored." There was enough to eat, but, as one of Sam's
contemporaries recalled, "there was no money, and you had a hard time
getting by." If cotton prices fell or you had a poor crop, there was not
enough cash to buy seed and supplies and pay the mortgage and taxes. The
only alternative was to go deeper into debt or lose your land, which occurred
anyway if additional poor years forced you to the end of your credit.
Happily for Sam, this did not happen to
him, but, as one of Lyndon's biographers, concludes, "the Johnsons arrived
back on the Pedernales poor, and lived there almost thirty years- during
which they grew poorer."
Sam Johnson may have been poor but he was never defeated by his
poverty. He is recalled as being gregarious, a participant in all the neighborly
gatherings, where he "met his friends with a handshake, friendly greetings
and a hearty resounding laugh." He was widely known for his hospitality
and eagerness for conversation about serious issues, philosophy, politics,
and theology. "He encouraged his children to engage in games that required
them to think, such as dominoes, hearts, pitch, and whist." He laid great
value on the power of reason, the ability to persuade others with the written
and spoken word. He loved a good debate and could be moved by a cogent
argument. When a Christadelphian minister bested the local Baptist preacher
in an all-day debate about the Bible, Sam quit the Baptist church and became
a Christadelphian. On matters of religion, however, he was not a strict
rationalist. He once knocked one of his sons across the room for belittling
the Scriptures.
Politics as well could arouse his passions. He had an intense interest in
current events and would ford the Pedernales every other day to get an
Austin newspaper mailed to him in Stonewall. His sense of injustice about
the plight of Texas farmers moved him to join the Texas People's party,
which had been formed in 1891. Like other Populists, he worried about
farmers losing their land. People in Blanco County remembered the sign on
an abandoned farmhouse in the drought year of 1886: "200 miles to the
nearest post office; 100 miles to wood; 20 miles to water, 6 inches to hell.
God bless our home! Gone to live with the wife's folks." To aid farmers who
clung to the land, Sam advocated a government program which would help
tenants buy their farms. Because he felt so strongly about the issue, he ran
for the state legislature in 1892 as a Populist. His opponent in the campaign
was Clarence Martin, his son-in-law, who ran as a Democrat. Riding together
to a speaking, Sam would cuss Clarence as "a reactionary so-and-so" and
Clarence would call Sam a wild radical. Afterward, they would "get back on
the double buggy on the front seat and ride to the next speaking." Enraged by
the "enemies" of the farmer--railroads, bankers, and conservative gold or
tight-money Democrats like former President Grover Cleveland, who was
trying to regain the White House in 1892--Sam warned voters that a
Populist defeat would mean civil war and declared that Cleveland "ought to
be hung." Although Populist candidates for governor and lieutenant-governor
carried the Hill Country, they lost the statewide elections. Clarence,
moreover, defeated Sam two-to-one. If he were discouraged, Sam didn't give
up hope. He maintained a keen interest in politics, which
he passed along to his oldest son, Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr., who twelve years
later won the seat his father had sought in the state legislature.
Sam, Sr., and Eliza had nine children. The first four born between 1868
and 1875 were girls. Although Sam called them "the four prettiest little girls
in ten counties," he longed for a son and greatly resented being called "Gal
Johnson" by neighbors poking fun at him. He was apparently so frustrated
by the birth of a second daughter in 1870 that he named her Frank. The
arrival of Sam Ealy, Jr., on October 11, 1877, therefore, filled the parents
with joy. Each took special pride in the boy. Eliza focused on the Bunton in
him--dark eyes, black curls, and "magnolia-white" skin. She also saw
evidence of the Deshas in his "quick mind, keen perception, and ... amazing
memory." As a pre-schooler, he astounded an older sister by repeating a
poem of thirty-two verses she had been memorizing for a school recital.
Sam treated his son as all his own. He not only named him Sam but also
dressed him as nearly as possible like himself and took Sam, Jr., with him
whenever possible. Growing tall, six feet, one inch, with a large nose, "thick,
bushy, black eyebrows ... piercing eyes," "enormous ears ... and a habit of
pulling in his chin until it almost disappeared inside his collar," "Little Sam,"
as people came to call him, may have resembled the Buntons, but he was
"Big" Sam's son. He was gregarious, friendly, outgoing. He "was the
cowboy type, a little on the rough side, but he had good principles.... He
shouted slogans when he talked." Most of all, he was fiercely competitive
with an urge to dominate people. As a boy, he needed to "ride faster; plow
longer, straighter rows; and pick more cotton than his companions." He
"was a very persuasive man"; Congressman Wright Patman, who served
with him in the Texas House of Representatives, recalled, "he would get
right up to you, nose to nose, and take a firm hold."
His ambition and drive were evident in his struggle to gain an education.
His parents could ill afford to send him to the one-room schoolhouse in
Johnson City. Not only did they need his help on the farm but they lacked
the small tuition fee required to attend the public school. "Once his father
gave him some cattle, saying, `This is all I can do on your schooling this
year.'" Undaunted, "Little Sam" "turned butcher, slaughtered and cut up a
steer and sold steaks and soupbones to tide him over until the next
`butchering day.'" He also took up barbering. When the town barber became
ill and had to retire, he bought his barber chair and tools on credit, and after
practicing on friends, began giving haircuts on Saturdays and after school.
Before he could finish high school, however, he was stricken by what the
family called "indigestion," or some kind of nervous condition. To cure his
ills, he was sent to rest on a ranch near Marfa in southwest Texas owned by
Lucius Desha Bunton, his mother's younger brother. There is no record of his few
months there, but when he returned to Stonewall, it was with a determination
to become a schoolteacher and self-supporting. Since he had not earned a high
school diploma and had no prospect of getting to a teachers' college, he set
his sights on passing a state-certification exam. With thirteen books needed to
prepare him in the academic subjects covered in the exam, "a bottle of pepsin
pills and a sack of dried fruit (doctor's recommendation)," he took up
residence with grandmother Jane Bunton, a former schoolteacher, who
tutored her favorite grandson "Sammie." After only a few weeks of intensive
preparation he passed the exam, scoring grades of 100 percent on the Texas
and United States history sections.
His teaching career was short-lived. In the fall of 1896, at the age of
nineteen, he took a job in the small Hill Country community of Sandy, where
he taught in a typical one-room, rural Texas school "with pupils of all sizes
and ages, some older and larger than he." A second year in a school near Hye,
a hamlet between Stonewall and Johnson City, persuaded him that teaching
would barely allow him to earn his keep. His only strong memory of this
period was of sitting around the fire in a boarding house listening to Captain
Rufus Perry describe his experiences as an Indian fighter and Texas
Ranger.
In 1898, at the age of twenty-one, he returned to Stonewall, where he
rented his father's farm and lived in his parents' house. For several years he
enjoyed considerable success. Mild weather, good crops, and high cotton
prices allowed him to accumulate some money, which he used to hire
farmhands and successfully speculate in cotton futures. People remember
him at this time as self-confident, even arrogant, with an "air of command."
Like "all the Johnsons," he "strutted." And he dressed differently from the
other farmers, more formally, often in the evenings wearing a suit and tie with
attractive boots and hat and riding a well-groomed horse. His best friends
were not local farmers and townsfolk but two "lawyers of statewide repute"
and a "brilliant" engineer who would sometimes visit him at the farm.
Sam, Jr., wanted to be more than a farmer. And Clarence Martin, his
brother-in-law, who had defeated Sam, Sr., for the seat in the Texas House,
encouraged him. After studying law and serving as a justice of the peace in
Blanco and as a state legislator, Martin became a district judge in Gillespie
County. At Martin's suggestion, Sam, Jr., ran successfully for justice of the
peace in 1902. For two years he "married more boys and girls than any
pastor in Gillespie County because he just charged $5."
In 1904, Sam, Jr., ran for the 89th District seat in the Texas House of
Representatives that Martin had held from 1893 to 1895. By an unwritten
rotation rule, the four counties making up the district took turns
sending men to fill the seat. Since a Gillespie County man was slated to have
the job from 1905 to 1907, Martin urged Sam, Jr., to stand for the position.
Although he had some doubts about his suitability for the office, he ran
anyway. Many persons consider it "in the nature of a joke to become a
candidate and to be elected as a member of the Legislature," he announced in
a campaign speech, but he viewed it as a serious undertaking. He also felt
that his determination to speak for the people against the interests made him
worthy of the office. Like his father before him, he saw an apocalyptic
struggle between democracy and corporate power. The issue in the election,
he said, was "whether the principles and tradition of a Republic shall be
longer perpetuated, or whether we shall meekly surrender to the great trust
combines the interests of the nation."
Winning the Democratic primary and then three of the four counties in the
general election, Sam went to Austin ready to do battle with the state's
conservative business and financial interests. Although he found ample
opportunity to vote with a minority of "agrarian liberals" supporting
unsuccessful bills to tax insurance, telephone, and sleeping and dining car
companies, to regulate rates charged by public utilities, to establish a
pure-food standard, to levy a franchise tax on corporations, to create a
juvenile court system in the state, and to give railroad workers an eight-hour
day, he quickly established himself as a practical legislator guiding less
dramatic bills through the House. The architect of measures to purchase and
restore the historic Alamo Mission in San Antonio, to bar brutal calf-roping
contests, and to exempt Blanco County from paying a bounty on every wolf
shot, a charge that would have worked financial hardship on the county, Sam
Johnson was described by a newspaper as one of the few legislators "who
did not fail on a single measure." His political astuteness was also reflected in
the fact that the 1907 legislative session, responding to a rising tide of
progressism in the state, passed some of the reform legislation Sam favored.
When Sam decided to break the rotation tradition by standing for a second
term, he gained widespread support from local Hill Country newspapers and
won the Democratic primary by such large margins in all four counties that
he ran unopposed in the general election of 1906.