The Galveston County Daily News

President Franklin Delano Roosevelts visit to Galveston in 1937 was a triumph for young Lyndon Johnson, who had just been elected to Congress. From left, Roosevelt, Johnson, Gov. James Allred and Galveston Mayor Adrian Levy.

A May 11, 1937, meeting on the Galveston wharves is a big part of how Lyndon Johnson became president.

It was where the lanky, 27-year-old congressman first met Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That meeting gave Johnson the stroke to win a huge political victory: cutting through the bureaucracy to power up the lonely hills of Central Texas.

That victory set him on the road to the White House.

To get electricity to Americans who were toiling without it, Congress in 1935 created rural electric cooperatives and cracked down on the holding companies that effectively denied farmers and ranchers in the far-flung reaches of the country access to the power grid.

But even those steps didn’t bring power to the rugged Hill Country of Central Texas. It was still too poor and too sparsely populated to qualify for loans established under the new Rural Electrification Administration.

DARK DRUDGERY

It’s hard now to appreciate what farm life was like without electricity. Not only was the darkness only partially dispelled by dangerous, stinky kerosene lamps, the work farm families had to perform was far more difficult.

In his biography of Johnson, historian Robert A. Caro describes how much more difficult just one chore — laundry — was without the help of electricity.

It would take a woman an entire day to scrub each item, then stir and punch at it in a huge vat of water boiling over an open fire, then rinse it. The chore could be especially brutal at the height of summer when temperatures frequently topped 100 degrees.

It took another whole day using “sad” irons heated on wood-fired stoves to press the wrinkles out of those clothes. They were called sad irons because the stoves could make Hill Country shacks unbearably hot — and because women frequently burned themselves with the red-hot lumps of cast iron.

Caro writes that the lack of electric fans, irons, vacuum cleaners, lights, stoves, toasters, heaters, radiators, curling irons and other conveniences made the lives of Hill Country farm wives sad for another reason.

The backbreaking work, combined with diets that often were inadequate, aged them prematurely. By age 40, many were stooped from hauling thousands of buckets of water up from wells or nearby creeks. With electric pumps, they’d be spared that toil.

Their husband’s lives also were far more difficult without electricity. They lacked the milking machines, silage fans and electric-powered machinery that made their electrified counterparts much more productive.

And they lived in constant fear of burning down barns and houses with their kerosene lamps. In such a marginal existence, either loss would be catastrophic.

POPULAR PRESSURE

Many in the Hill Country clamored for electric power, but they were rebuffed by the privately owned Texas Power and Light: the sole source of electricity in Johnson’s congressional district.

TP&L routinely refused to run power lines to far-flung farmhouses, arguing that it wouldn’t be profitable to have so few customers for each mile of power lines they’d have to put up.

Roosevelt was elected president in no small part on his promise to curb the power of holding companies that controlled utilities serving a vast swath of the country. As a state senator and later as governor of New York, FDR had argued that electricity production should be publicly owned to ensure that it was widely available at a fair price.

To bring power to farms, he created the Rural Electrification Administration. It made loans to rural electric cooperatives so that farmers, in essence, could power up their places themselves. Roosevelt had no more ardent disciple than Johnson. He was such a fan that early in his career he styled himself LBJ to imitate the president’s moniker, FDR.

LBJ, a poor-but-ambitious kid from Johnson City, ran for his first term in Congress in a special election in 1937.

At the time, FDR was trying to pack the Supreme Court with additional justices. He was frustrated that the sitting nine were blocking New Deal legislation.

Roosevelt was getting hammered over this blatant power grab. But Johnson ran for his Hill Country seat in strong support of the plan.

When Johnson won, it was for Roosevelt a rare bit of good news. So when Roosevelt took a fishing trip in the Gulf of Mexico in May, he was happy to meet the brand-new congressman when his boat docked in Galveston.

To disguise the fact that he had been crippled by polio 17 years earlier, Roosevelt used his arms to swing himself down the gangplank and leaned on a rail for a lengthy photo session with Johnson and Gov. James Allred. The president then toured the crowded streets of Galveston in an open car with Johnson trailing behind.

A presidential photo-op was more than an obscure freshman congressman could ask for. But Johnson did far batter than that. Roosevelt invited the young congressman to ride with him in his private rail car to College Station.

Throughout his early career, Johnson displayed a knack for befriending older, more powerful men. He did it again with the president. When the presidential train reached College Station, FDR invited the young congressman to continue with him even farther, to Fort Worth.

POWER CONFERRED

What the men talked about was lost to history. But the results of the conversations weren’t. When Roosevelt got back to Washington, he told his lieutenants running New Deal agencies to help Johnson any way they could.

Johnson’s main problem was with the rules of one of those agencies — the Rural Electrification Administration. It said that the Hill Country wasn’t populated densely enough to justify a loan to start an electric co-op.

After trying everything else he could think of, Johnson got a second meeting with the friend he’d made in Galveston. After it, the president called the head of the electrification administration.

On Sept. 27, 1938, the Pedernales Electric Cooperative was notified that it would qualify for a loan, despite rules to the contrary. That cooperative serves thousands of Hill Country inhabitants up to this day.

Like municipal utilities in towns such as Austin, Kerrville and New Braunfels, the co-op is publicly owned as FDR and LBJ advocated. Each is serving its residential customers far more cheaply than are companies serving the deregulated part of the state. Pedernales, for example, is selling power at 8.7 cents a kilowatt hour. Meanwhile, prices for customers in this part of Texas’ deregulated market now range from 10 cents to almost 14 cents.

It took more than a year after the Pedernales charter for the lights to go on in the Hill Country. But when they did, families in the area were so happy that some even named their children after Lyndon Johnson.

Electrification had profoundly improved the lives of his constituents. And it cemented Johnson’s reputation as someone who could get the government to do big things to improve the lives of average people, even though he wasn’t yet 30.

In the next three decades, he would practice that New Deal philosophy more effectively than any other except, perhaps, FDR himself.