Master of the Senate (149 page)

Determining whether Mexican-Americans received an equitable share of the Texas NYA’s funds is impossible because of the failure to keep separate statistics of Mexican-heritage recruits. But Lyndon Johnson, using the NYA to set up what would be a statewide political organization—
his
statewide political organization—didn’t want to antagonize local officials, so in Texas, in contrast to the practice in many other states, the NYA did not itself select those high school students who would receive its grants but allowed local school officials to do so. “It was up to the [school] superintendent to determine who needed it most,” a Texas staffer was to say. And, as Dr. Pycior writes, “Thus the same people who enforced the segregation selected the trainees.” Although no precise figures are available, Dr. Pycior says, “most of the Mexican-heritage trainees in the NYA worked as common laborers” on projects like the roadside parks that required only unskilled labor. “A few learned skilled jobs…. A small number received college aid….” At the Residential Training Centers, she says, Mexican-American women were hired “in numbers far below their actual unemployment rate.” (“These residential facilities barred black women,” she adds.)

As Texas Director of the National Youth Administration, then, Lyndon
Johnson set up a statewide organization in a state more than a quarter of whose population—more than a million and a half people—had skins that were not white. But no member of the organization’s Advisory Board, and, so far as can be determined, no member of its headquarters staff, had a skin that was not white. As for the deputy directors and other administrators out in the field across the huge state, “Johnson did not hire Mexican or African-American staff members,” Dr. Pycior writes. If there were any blacks or Mexican-Americans among them, their number was certainly small. And that fact calls to mind the paternalistic condescension of Johnson’s remarks about black Americans and Mexican-Americans in his diary and on the photographer’s tape, for regardless of the amount of money he was allocating to young people of these races, very few members of those races were allowed to decide how the money was spent or to supervise its expenditure.

Lyndon Johnson certainly wanted to help black and Mexican-American youths in Texas—wanted very much to help them. His spontaneous outburst of anger at the San Antonio businessman—“I saw a couple of your kids hustling, all right”—and the fact that he threw himself into the creation of public works projects that would employ black youths as eagerly as he did into the creation of “white” projects, and that he showed as much energy and ingenuity in helping black colleges and black high school students as white, demonstrates that his heart was in helping them. But again, it had not been the heart that ruled but the head. The compassion, though genuine, had taken a back seat to calculation; the Texas journalist Ronnie Dugger, who covered Johnson for many years, was to write, in an incisive phrase, of his “real, though expendable, compassion.” In Johnson’s unending, silent calculations about the best way to further his career, it was the Alvin Wirtzes and the Herman Browns who were the key figures, not some powerless black leaders, and in his direction of the NYA program, it was not the philosophy that perhaps had captured his emotions which he followed, but the diametrically opposed philosophy of the Wirtzes and Browns. And, of course, the correctness of his course—if ambition was the guiding star—was proven when, on February 23, 1937, the congressman from the Tenth District suddenly died. Lyndon Johnson was in Houston, touring NYA projects there, when he saw a newspaper headline announcing the death. He was far from a logical candidate in a district containing many experienced, well-known politicians. Not only was his age a drawback but so was the fact that many of the district’s political leaders—and most of its voters—had never even heard of him; on the day Johnson saw the headline, the
Austin American-Statesman
ran a list of possible candidates, a list that included not only the favorites but long shots as well, and Lyndon Johnson was not even mentioned. Speeding back to Austin, however, Johnson pulled up in front of the Littlefield Building and went not to the sixth floor but to the seventh, and asked Wirtz to give him the support he needed to enter the race. And Wirtz agreed on the spot.

•    •    •

T
HIS 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:

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.
*

T
HE 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.”

A
LTHOUGH BOTH
C
OKE
S
TEVENSON
, 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.”