A Companion to Lyndon B. Johnson

Mitchell B. Lerner

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781444333893
• eBook ISBN: 9781444347470
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

This companion offers an overview of Lyndon B. Johnson's life, presidency, and legacy, as well as a detailed look at the central arguments and scholarly debates from his term in office.

• Explores the legacy of Johnson and the historical significance of his years as president
• Covers the full range of topics, from the social and civil rights reforms of the Great Society to the increased American involvement in Vietnam
• Incorporates the dramatic new evidence that has come to light through the release of around 8, 000 phone conversations and meetings that Johnson secretly recorded as President

Part I

Pre-Presidential Years

Chapter One

The Changing South

Jeff Woods

Lyndon Johnson's contemporaries could not decide whether he was really a Southerner. Hubert Humphrey insisted that Johnson “did not consider himself a Southerner” while A. Willis Robertson said that he and other Southerners “called him Southern.” Clinton Anderson commented that “while he was Democratic leader, Lyndon Johnson was as Southern as hominy grits.” On the other hand, Stuart Alsop suggested that LBJ was a “Westerner at heart rather than a Southerner.” William S. White avoided any definitive conclusion, reminding readers that the Texan came from a historically Confederate State while declaring that he had never heard LBJ speak nostalgically about the old South. Johnson himself did not help to clarify things in his memoir, The Vantage Point (1971). He explained that in “Stonewall and Johnson City I never was part of the Old Confederacy,” yet, “that Southern heritage meant a great deal to me.”

Left with such incongruous viewpoints, historians have drawn a wide range of conclusions about LBJ as Southerner. Ronnie Dugger, in The Politician: From Frontier to Master of the Senate (1980), placed Johnson at the crossroads of regions: “He was a wild Christian, a woman-ridden outlaw, complexly mixed from the day of his birth in the slave-owning whites' honor-ridden South, the Indian-fighting range riders' West, and the state that gloried in itself as if it was still a nation . . . And just here, in the rocky fracture of the one great American state that is both South and West, Lyndon Johnson received his being” (pp. 26–7). Paul Conkin, in Big Daddy from the Pedernales: Lyndon B. Johnson (1986), drew a similar conclusion: “Born at the unclear boundaries of South and West, he [Johnson] never fully identified with either and, as political need dictated, alternatively claimed one or the other” (p. 7). In Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1908–1960 (1991), Robert Dallek argued that LBJ, despite “Southern roots,” was not a “professional Southerner” like Richard Russell, and his main contribution lay in his “nationalization of the South and the West” (pp. 7–8, 139, 380). Robert Caro, in The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate (2002), by contrast, emphasized a twenty year period when Johnson had been “not merely a member of the Senate's Southern anti-civil rights bloc, but an active member . . . one of the South's strategists” (p. xv). In The White House Looks South (2005), Bill Leuchtenberg analyzed a broad range of commentary on Johnson's Southernness to conclude that however hard LBJ tried to become a national politician, the Texan “could never altogether overcome his reputation as a sectionalist” (p. 332). And Randall Woods, in LBJ: Architect of American Ambition (2006), focused on Johnson's personal vision for the region, suggesting that LBJ was most Southern in his tireless advocacy for an economically, politically, and socially modern South (pp. 134–5).

Part of the problem in describing Johnson as a Southerner rests in static, reductionist definitions of the “South.” Southern historians have provided a familiar checklist of essential regional characteristics. Ulrich Phillips in his 1928 American Historical Review article “The Central Theme of Southern History” identified the first and most essential of Southern traits, its preoccupation with race. Twelve Southerners in I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930) added the idea that agrarian traditions, besieged by industrialization and modernization, were fundamentally Southern. W. J. Cash in The Mind of the South (1941) mixed in religious bigotry, anti-intellectualism, and a history of bondage that set the South apart from the North and adrift from the national quest for equality and liberty. Sheldon Hackney in an article entitled “Southern Violence,” for the American Historical Review (1969) and John Shelton Reed in his book The Enduring South (1972) aggregated and synthesized traits to conclude that the South's underlying characteristic was a regional sense of grievance and a particular “siege mentality” based on its experiences during Reconstruction. David Hackett Fischer's book Albion's Seed (1989) associated the South primarily with its Scotch Irish linguistic and cultural roots, while Ray Arsenault in “The Folklore of Southern Demagoguery,” an article found in the book Is There a Southern Political Tradition? (1996), identified a unique Southern political style that played on the passions and prejudices of the region's people. And Bertram Wyatt-Brown's Honor and Violence in the Old South (1986) identified unique Southern constructions of honor and codes of violent behavior.

These attempts to describe the heart of the Southern identity, while enlightening, emphasize continuity over change. Yet as C. Vann Woodward reminded his readers in The Burden of Southern History (1968), the standard list of Southern characteristics, however accurate in a given period, “often changes markedly over the years, sometimes under one's very eyes” (pp. ix, 27–8). John Egerton in The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America (1974) went as far as suggesting that the South over time was even losing its distinctiveness. More recently James C. Cobb's Away Down South (2005) argued that Southern identity was best explained not by a list of static traits but by the points at which those traits were challenged and changed. Recognizing continuity within change and the relativity of perception, Cobb maintained, was the key to understanding the South.

Johnson, like the South, was far from static. His and the region's identity shifted depending on active personal and political relationships. Along with many of his fellow Southerners, LBJ was sometimes parochial, demagogic, and preoccupied with race, while at other times he was nationalist, moderate, and progressive. He changed, and the South changed. Johnson biographers, as a whole, have described this ebb and flow while not always fully recognizing its significance. Five phases of LBJ's Southern identity emerge from these works – his ancestry and youth; his pre-political career; his time as a regional representative; his move to become a national leader; and his presidency. Tracing biographers' treatments of Johnson's evolving identity as a Southerner through these phases reveals a South as dynamic as the man himself.

The facts of Johnson's upbringing and heritage have been repeated by historians without significant variation. Johnson was born and raised in Texas, a state of the old Confederacy. The Hill Country of his youth was agriculturally dependent and suffered the residual effects of slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction. Johnson biographers agreed that he was most definitely Southern by the particular geographic and historic circumstances of his birth. LBJ's great-great-grandfather on his father's side was an Anglo-Celt immigrant, Georgia farmer, and slave owner. His father's grandfather was a slave holder in Alabama who migrated with his family to Texas the year Texas became a state. His father's father and uncles fought for the Confederacy, and his father inherited Populist political leanings. Johnson's mother's family originally came to North Carolina from Scotland. Her grandfather was a Baptist preacher and legislator in Alabama who migrated to Texas in the 1850s. Her father was a Confederate veteran. She attended Baylor University as a literature major and at one point even planned to make a career of writing novels about the Old South. LBJ married a Southerner as well. Lady Bird Johnson grew up in a Southern mansion on a cotton plantation near the border between Texas and Louisiana. Her family had deep roots in Alabama and boasted several Confederate veterans.

That Johnson spoke Southern, some historians have suggested, was indicative of his regional identity as well. As Kent Germany pointed out in a Miller Center article entitled “‘I'm Not Lying About That One’: Manhood, LBJ, and the Politics of Speaking Southern” (2002), Johnson shared a common language with Southerners that reinforced his bond with regionalists throughout his life. LBJ and other Southerners talked about hunting, football, the weather, honor, manhood, politics, and even race in an idiosyncratic Southern way. Perhaps most tellingly, Robert Caro highlighted in Means of Ascent (1990), when Johnson wanted to, he had the “slow drawl of the South: when Lyndon Johnson said ‘Negroes,’ for example, it came out, despite all that speech coaches could do, as ‘Nigroes,’ close to ‘niggers’” (p. xviii).

Yet several historians have pointed out that Johnson was never as fully Southern as blood, soil, and accent might suggest. His father had been something of a political rebel and had foresworn some of the more typical Southern routes to power, like acquiescing to the Ku Klux Klan. Nor was Johnson's hometown environment fully Southern in its racial makeup or attitudes. Ronnie Dugger wrote in The Politician (1980), Lyndon Johnson may have “absorbed the Southern heritage from his parents, but there was little in the daily life of the town to make him a racist” (p. 71). Dugger drew on comments Johnson himself made in The Vantage Point (1971): “There were no ‘darkies’ or plantations in the arid hill country where I grew up. I never sat on my parents' or grandparents' knees listening to nostalgic tales of the ante-bellum South.” Being Southern gave him “a feeling of belonging and a sense of continuity,” but he was embarrassed by the “certain parochial feelings that flared up defensively whenever Northerners described the South as ‘a blot on our national conscience’ or ‘a stain on our country's democracy’” (p. 155). Several biographers, in addition, argued that the place and environment of Johnson's birth and youth made him western as much as Southern. Ronnie Dugger, Paul Conkin, and Randall Woods, among others, emphasized that Texas was at the crossroads of regions. The state was big enough and diverse enough to claim many cultural identities. And some historians deemphasized region as a critical influence altogether. Johnson's Southern roots are certainly downplayed in Doris Kearns' Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (1976), while things Southern are conspicuously missing from Robert A. Caro's biography of Johnson's early years The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power (1982). On the whole, the South as commonly conceived was certainly a part of Johnson's heritage and upbringing but proved only marginally useful to historians in identifying who he was.

Historians' discussions of Johnson's early career addressed endemic Southern problems, namely race, education, and poverty. Most agreed that Johnson did not easily fit the poor, anti-intellectual, racist Southern stereotype, but he nevertheless had to conform in particular ways to his time and place in a Southern setting. His teaching job in Cotulla marked the first test of his public decisions about racial prejudice and segregation. In his first job out of college, Johnson taught at a segregated Mexican-American grade school near the Mexican border. Robert Dallek in Lone Star Rising (1991) noted LBJ's compassion for his students amidst the poverty, prejudice, and illiteracy of Cotulla. Their wretched living conditions, Dallek wrote, struck a “sympathetic chord” in Johnson that inspired the Texan's desire to nourish their “little brown bodies,” minds, and souls. Dallek's rendering implicitly contrasted Southern and non-Southern traits in Johnson. Johnson's whipping of Spanish students who dared speak English in class arguably smacked of a stereotypically Southern nativism, but Johnson's compassion for minorities and desire for their equal status in society did not (pp. 78–80). Other biographers examining Johnson's early career offer alternative arguments for balancing LBJ's Southern and non-Southern traits. Randall Woods in LBJ (2006) emphasized the political risk Johnson took on behalf of Mexican children. The larger Southern white population of Cotulla, Woods argued, considered LBJ's embracing of the latino community “dangerously subversive” (pp. 62–5). Robert Caro in Master of the Senate (2002), on the other hand, concluded that Johnson's “compassion” invariably took a back seat to “calculation.” He argued that LBJ was more complicit than not in the segregationist system that kept minorities subservient. Johnson's experience teaching Mexican students, Caro maintained, was less a rebellion against Southern racial norms than racist paternalism (pp. 732–4).

LBJ's work with black minorities as director of Texas's National Youth Administration (NYA) offered historians additional points of debate regarding Johnson's Southern racial attitudes. Ronnie Dugger (1980) demonstrated that as NYA director, “Johnson began using his public power covertly on behalf of blacks.” LBJ visited Negro colleges, offered surplus funds earmarked for white colleges to black colleges, and applied administrative savings to black needs (pp. 187–8). Randall Woods concluded that “if Johnson had had his preference, the Texas NYA would have been completely color-blind,” but the author also added that “the state director realized there were limits.” As Johnson put it to Chuck Corson, “the racial question during the last 100 years in Texas, has resolved itself into a definite system of mores and customs which cannot be upset overnight” (p. 113). Johnson's recognition of Southern political realities in part drove his reluctance to appoint a black member to the NYA state advisory board. Robert Dallek concluded that “it was clear to him [Johnson] that a reputation as a successful state director and all that would mean for his political future partly depended on satisfying the demands from Washington for action in behalf of blacks without touching off local racial antagonisms.” Dallek (1991) acknowledged the idea that “Lyndon's position on blacks was purely expediency,” but he added that while the Texan's “Southern roots and an attitude common to his place and time moved him in private to speak of blacks as ‘niggers’ and describe them in official correspondence as ‘negroes,’ he was warmly disposed to giving disadvantaged blacks opportunities for education and employment which allowed them to help themselves” (pp. 137–9).

Biographers agreed that Johnson was at his most Southern in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Even though LBJ was a devoted New Dealer, Ronnie Dugger explained, Southern political expectations limited the Texan's ability to support legislation that posed an overt challenge to segregation. LBJ supported the minimum wage and farming legislation that helped his black and Mexican constituents, “but on legislation that could be recognized as pro-black, Johnson seemed to be just another Southern racist” (pp. 21...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Blackwell Companions to American History
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Pre-Presidential Years
• Part II: Lyndon B. Johnson's White House
• Part III: Domestic Policy
• Part IV: Vietnam
• Part V: Beyond Vietnam
• Part VI: Final Reckonings
• Bibliography
• Index