I’m currently making my way through ‘The Path to Power’ by Robert Caro, the first in a soon-to-be, five-book biography series on the life of Lyndon B. Johnson. It is regarded as the most comprehensive biography of any American politician. This being Caro’s magnum opus, his forty-year writing project. It is obviously a granular treatment of the subject, he is presented as he was in plain light. I think Johnson’s character is best summed up in the quote “He wanted to dominate every room he was in. If he couldn’t lead, he didn’t want to play — wouldn’t play.” He displayed throughout his life a determination that is bewildering and incomprehensible to me. He puts me in mind of a different president, one who though has taken a very different path, is nonetheless similarly not steered by ideology, but by sheer ambition.

           Lyndon’s father, Sam Johnson, was a lot of things: a failed politician, a drunk, heavy-fisted, and bookish. He and his wife Rebecca, residents of Johnson City, Texas, were likely the most learned individuals in the settlement of a few hundred when they moved there in 1913. They owned a dog, Lyndon’s dog, named “Bigham Young.” In all the secondary literature I’ve come across, the name is misrepresented as “Brigham Young,” the figure the dog’s name is clearly intended to parody with tongue-in-cheek intent.

           It may seem strange that, in the early-20th-century Texas Hill Country, Brigham Young, the Mormon president-prophet of the Latter-day Saints (the Mormon Church) who died in 1877 would still loom large in people’s imagination. There are a few possible reasons for this, after the death of Joseph Smith, the first prophet and founder of the Mormon church there were a number of splinter groups that emerged, there was a succession crisis, the most prominent claimant was of course Young himself who led his people west to found Utah. Another such claimant was a man, Lyman Wight who led followers south into Texas hill country, they had various failed settlement attempts around the hill country, and the splinter group eventually faded away with Wight’s death in 1858. This whole episode I think would have brought “the Mormon question” more vividly into local memory.

           The phrase “the Mormon question” first entered everyday headlines in Missouri, 1838, when Governor Lilburn Boggs issued his infamous “Extermination Order,” branding the Mormons enemies and calling out the militia to drive them from the state. Joseph Smith’s assassination at Carthage Jail six years later only deepened the sense that the new faith hovered somewhere between rebellion and heresy, and when Brigham Young led tens of thousands west across the plains (1846-47) the press watched as though an entire people were staging a dramatic exit from the Republic itself.

           By the late 1850s, those anxieties reached a boil. Federal troops marched on Salt Lake during the Utah War (1857–58), and lurid reports of the Mountain Meadows Massacre (in which dozens of emigrants were slaughtered in southern Utah) confirmed every worst suspicion in the national imagination. In Washington, the rhetoric tightened: the 1856 Republican platform had already paired slavery and polygamy as the “twin relics of barbarism,” and Congress made good on the threat with the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act of 1862, outlawing plural marriage in the territories and clipping the church’s legal wings.

           In August 1877 Brigham Young died, six weeks later Sam Johnson was born in Buda, Texas, just south of Austin. I can see copies of the ‘Weekly Democratic Statesman’ Austin’s main paper of record sitting on the family breakfast table, it would have been covering Young’s death and the fallout. It was at the time the biggest story in the United States. I believe this coincidence played some part in the Johnson family mythology. “The old order changeth, yielding place to new, / And God fulfils Himself in many ways.” Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Passing of Arthur (1869). In many ways LBJ was like his father in character and spirit, but where his father had failed his son would succeed.

           Being as the Johnson family were a family of readers I would speculate that the book ‘Roughing It’ by Mark Twain published in 1872 would also have been within the family repertoire. Twain recounts a fictional narrative in which he stopped in Salt Lake City in 1861 and was granted a cordial audience with Brigham Young, using the meeting as an opportunity to mock the prophet’s piety and the absurdities of his polygamist lifestyle with dry humor. ‘Roughing It’ also offers a romanticized expression of the go-west motif, going to California to find one’s fortune. In 1924 Lyndon did just that, he ran away at the age of fifteen to find his fortune in California. After a year however, working in a law office, he realized the futility of his efforts and returned to the Hill Country in order, ultimately, to attend Southwest Texas State Teachers College, now known as Texas State. Where the family dog’s teasing name poked fun at one empire-builder, young Lyndon took the hint and from that moment did nothing that would not further his ultimate goal, his ultimate ambition.

📚 Bibliography

1. Caro, Robert A. The Path to Power. Vol. 1 of The Years of Lyndon Johnson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.

2. For example it is misrepresented in this article. Rulon, Philip Reed. “The Education of Lyndon Baines Johnson.” Presidential Studies Quarterly, vol. 12, no. 3, 1982.