LBJ's Texas White House "Our Heart's Home"

CHAPTER 2 Buying the Family Ranch

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By the time Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as U.S. senator from Texas early in 1949, he had established a reputation as a seasoned, powerful, and astute politician. His reputation as a legendary fund-raiser was only enhanced by his victory. Johnson's campaigns were among the best financed in the nation. More than a decade in the U.S. House of Representatives; experience in the New Deal; and close relationships with the pinnacles of power, including individuals such as Sam Rayburn and Franklin D. Roosevelt, gave Johnson national influence that far exceeded that of a typical first-term senator. A political machine in Texas that included Herman and George Brown of the construction firm of Brown and Root, powerbrokers such as Alvin Wirtz, and after the 1948 election close ties with the political operatives of the Rio Grande Valley made Johnson very much more than a political survivor. He had come a long way from the Hill Country, from his experiences in San Marcos and Cotulla, but in his mind he still had a great distance to travel.

At the swearing in, alongside fellow first-term senators and Democrats J. Allen Frear of Delaware, Paul H. Douglas of Illinois, and Robert S. Kerr of Oklahoma, Johnson intuited the need to find a place for himself in the Senate, the elite club of ninety-six men that was the most exclusive governing body in the United States. Johnson had grappled his way to the Senate, but success there was predicated on a different set of values and behaviors than those of a campaign or in the House of Representatives. Entry into this club of peers conferred a level of prestige that a seat in the House did not. Its leaders had long tenure, seniority, and prestige based on term after term of service. Johnson's ability to play the role of son, as he had first with Rayburn and later with Roosevelt, seemed likely to serve him well in the Senate.

He had also entered the Senate as the result of a pivotal election, a watershed of change in American society. The 1948 election was the first post-World War II presidential election, the first to meld the practices and assumptions of the past with the new realities of the postwar United States, the first in sixteen years without the dominant political presence of Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was a time of great change in American society, near the beginning of a twenty-eight-year period of unparalleled economic prosperity, a time when Americans across social, class, and caste lines received greater opportunities as their expectations rose. It was also an era of rapid technological change, and keeping abreast of that change proved problematic in myriad ways. The 1948 presidential election became most memorable for the photograph of reelected president Harry S. Truman holding aloft a copy of the Chicago Tribune with a headline mistakenly proclaiming his defeat. Pollsters had used telephone books to poll voters and thus reach their erroneous conclusion, wrongly assuming that everyone in the nation subscribed to a telephone service. A significant portion of Truman's support came from a segment of the population that could not or did not use the telephone.

In contrast to the newspaper's mistake, Johnson had used his understanding of the impact of technology to further his 1948 campaign for the Senate. He devised sophisticated multiple statewide polling strategies that were designed to detect issues to which voters would respond, and his polls far exceeded in number and in depth the ones used by other candidates. After being slowed by an operation to remove a kidney stone, Johnson resorted to campaigning by helicopter, another technological innovation, to get his message out in his campaign against former Texas governor Coke R. Stevenson. He clearly understood the key feature of postwar politics—the need to disseminate a candidate's message, image, and perspective quickly and widely—as well as a more sullied but crucial aspect of postwar politics, the negative campaign. Johnson made both part of his political repertoire.¹

When he won the election by the slenderest and most contested of margins, Lyndon Johnson entered a political venue primed for change. The Senate class of 1948 was as different as the population that had elected it. Eighteen new senators took office, fourteen of whom were Democrats. Besides Johnson, a number of other new electees from across the country, including Kerr, Douglas, Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, Russell Long of Louisiana, and Clinton P. Anderson of New Mexico, arrived in the Senate chambers for the first time. Johnson regarded them both as peers and as competitors. The derogatory sobriquet "Landslide Lyndon," attached to him as a result of his eighty-seven-vote margin over Stevenson, separated him from other newcomers. He initially reveled in this, for it proved him a political competitor, a feature of his character of which he was particularly proud. Nor did he stand out in the Senate class of 1948 as the only incoming senator who had been accused of impropriety; the reactionary Robert Kerr of Oklahoma faced charges that he had exceeded the three thousand-dollar state limit on campaign spending by sixty-two thousand dollars. Despite the controversies surrounding Johnson, and to a lesser degree Kerr, the influx of new blood represented the changing experiences of the nation, the ascent of World War II veterans, and the passing of leadership from one generation to the next.²

The Senate retained its hierarchical features. Leadership in the chamber depended on the seniority for which senators strove, on a slow and steady rise through legions of individuals with more than two or sometimes even more than three terms of service. The Democratic majority had been solid since 1932. Many of its members had entered in the Franklin D. Roosevelt landslide that year and had grown up during the New Deal and the war. They prized their status and position and expected newcomers to wait in line for their turn at leadership.

Lyndon Johnson, however, had not run for the Senate to wait in line. He "took to the Senate as if he'd been born there," his aide Walter Jenkins remembered. "From the first day on it was obvious that it was his place—just the right size; he was at his best in small groups . . . with ninety-five others, he knew he could manage that." His political ties and experiences in the House gave him valuable seasoning and relationships that he put to use. He was appointed to the Armed Services Committee, chaired by Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, who was considered by many the most powerful man in the Senate and an individual who typified the kind of people with whom Johnson sought to develop Firm relations. Described as "reserved, formal, conscientious, and gifted," Russell was, like Rayburn, a lonely bachelor. The Johnsons brought him into their family, now including two young daughters, who called the senator "Uncle Dick." As early as Thanksgiving 1949, Russell came to Texas to visit the Johnsons. Warm relations between the new senator and his powerful superior on the Armed Services Committee followed.³

During his early years in the Senate, Johnson had to serve two sometimes contradictory masters: the conservative and almost reactionary Texas electorate and the Senate club that could give him a major national reputation. With his characteristic aplomb, he negotiated this very fine line, appealing to the strident anticommunist and antilabor sentiment in Texas while positioning himself for the more centrist pose that leadership in the Senate required. The relationship with Russell helped him straddle the demands of his constituents and his personal aspirations of leadership.

Johnson's friendship with Russell revealed more than his characteristic need to ingratiate himself with older and more powerful men. It also reflected the new senator's desire to belong, and belonging in the Senate was no small accomplishment. The Senate was a politically diverse but socially conservative club. The men who made up its membership had come from all walks of life, and the combination of ambition and ego that had helped them reach their office and its accompanying privileges made the sociocultural standards of the chamber daunting. Most senators were wealthy men. Even in the 1940s, it took much money and support to reach the Senate. Personal and family fortunes as well as association with the leaders of powerful industries were usually the underpinning of successful senatorial campaigns. Unique in American politics for their remarkable longevity, senators celebrated a kind of inbred insularity.

The level of affluence in the Senate was particularly dramatic. Newcomer Robert Kerr was an extremely wealthy man, a member of the famous Kerr Oil Company family; Clinton P. Anderson had built an insurance empire in New Mexico. Older senators also had substantial assets. Many were descended from the makers of the great fortunes of the post-Civil War industrial expansion. Others relied upon more newly made wealth. Although not given to the displays of ostentatious wealth that have come to characterize American politics since the 1940s, members of the Senate wore their affluence openly and proudly. Many treated the office of senator as the accomplishment of a lifetime, a pinnacle of achievement that set senators apart from other elected officials.

The Johnsons' economic fortunes had improved during the 1940s. After Lyndon Johnson's political career stalled, he sought to alleviate the financial problems that had dogged his life. With money inherited from Lady Bird's father, the Johnsons purchased a radio station in Austin, KTBC, that had previously been limited by its frequency location at the crowded end of the radio dial and by the restrictions on its license, which forced it off the air at sunset. Using his connections in the federal bureaucracy, Johnson succeeded in having the restrictions lifted and the location of the station frequency moved to the opposite and opening end of the dial. The radio station became the beginning of an economic empire in mass communications that allowed Johnson to note in 1948 that his family was worth more than one million dollars.⁴

Among senators, this was an average fortune, but compared to men such as Kerr, Johnson was not really well-off. What made him exceptional in the "club" was his ability to work the organization—to meet and develop relationships with its leaders and to understand the roles necessary for rise in the Senate and be willing to play them. His cultivation of Richard Russell was archetypical. Russell was widely considered the most powerful person in the Senate. Of all the new senators who sought to curry favor with the Georgian, Johnson developed the closest relations and as a result acquired power more rapidly than any other newcomer. This trait—the ability to build power by working the members of the Senate—caught the eyes of the most astute observers there. One Senate colleague described Johnson as "an intensely ambitious man, anxious to get power and hold on to it, a rather curious mixture of pragmatism and idealism."⁵ In this, Lyndon Johnson differed from other elected officials. He understood the intricacies of power and relationships in a way that most others did not and desired the rewards of their exercise far more than anyone else could. Much more than displaying the trappings of wealth, this was his way of belonging.

Johnson's understanding of power led to a meteoric rise in the Senate. In spite of the fact that his initial seat was in the back row of the Democratic side of the chamber, the customary position for newcomers, and in spite of the number of senators with greater experience ahead of him, Lyndon Johnson quickly rose to positions of leadership. He benefited from the Republican victories in 1950, which slashed the Democratic majority in the Senate from twelve to two. After the election, he became the Senate Whip—the assistant majority leader—a position that prior to his arrival had been largely ceremonial. Johnson turned this circumscribed position into a powerful one. His extraordinarily rapid rise to even the initially minor position of whip reflected his long-standing desire for power and his need to belong.⁶

The social trappings of the Senate required a kind of public pronouncement of stature to confirm membership. Ownership of land, preferably in the form of a country estate, was a preferred way to announce arrival. Johnson had first recognized the sociocultural importance of a country estate during visits to Charles Marsh's Longlea. There, as he mulled over an offer that could have made him a wealthy man, he could see the physical advantages that wealth gave. A place in the country was a great symbol of power, proof of the owner's ability to dictate terms to others. All who came to such a place arrived at the behest of the owner and in essence owed a favor for the visit. It was a social venue, one in which the owner could promote a budding relationship without giving away any of the power or control Johnson so craved.

All powerful people, it seemed to the still sometimes naive Johnson, had such retreats, places where their dominance was secure. His benefactors, Herman and George Brown, owned Huntland, where Johnson would be overcome by his heart attack in 1955. In the Senate, many important people had their own estates. Russell had a country estate in rural Georgia; Kerr, Anderson, Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, and Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon all owned large farms or ranches. In the halls of the Senate, they could put aside political differences and discuss their common avocation of owning property. Nor was the postwar generation bound to the hills of Maryland, Virginia, and the other central states of the East Coast that surrounded Washington, D.C., in the way their predecessors had been when they sought locations for their properties. With the advent of air travel, places far away could serve as more than out-of-session homes. Such retreats could become important parts of political images and, even more significantly, of the kind of posturing that was an integral part of the process of becoming powerful in the Senate. Such political maneuvering was clearly within Johnson's capability. Full membership in the social side of this elite club, Johnson believed, required a piece of land he could call his own.⁷

For Lyndon Johnson, the selection of such a place reflected both the pull of home as well as a way to conquer once and for all any remaining insecurities about his place in his home town and in the Hill Country. Beginning in 1948, he and Lady Bird searched for a country home to purchase near Stonewall or on the Pedernales River. Johnson wanted, suggests biographer Paul Conkin, to be close to the land and people he knew and revered.⁸ His various residences in Washington, D.C., and Austin had never really been homes in the most meaningful sense. For Johnson in particular, they had simply been stops on the way up the ladder—places of little significance and meaning; places to rest, eat, sleep, and occasionally relax.

His desire to return to the Hill Country also reflected a strategy to overcome Johnson's insecurities about his past. Never a man to be humble about success, Johnson had attained the opportunity to return in triumph to the town where he had been raised, to a town that had been alternately wonderful and hard to his family, a town that had seen his family's successes and problems. Lyndon Johnson had prevailed. He was a U.S. senator, one of only ninety-six individuals in the highest legislative body in the land. No one, including his personal tormentors—the people who had been pleased when the Johnson family experienced hard times—could say that he was not a success. Returning to the Hill Country demonstrated crucial truths Johnson sought to prove over and over again: that he was worthy of his heritage and that it was not the successes of the Johnsons and Buntons but their failures that were the true aberrations.

The ranch became the vehicle through which Johnson planned to gain full status among his peers during his first term in the Senate. Besides reflecting Johnson's need to be admitted into the club that made up the core of Senate leadership, the ranch gave him pragmatic assets as well. The other landed senators shared a bond that masked political and party differences, that gave them an avenue of discourse that transcended politics and conferred a kind of equality upon their extrapolitical interactions. With Russell, the most powerful man in the Senate, at their head, these landed senators set the tone of debate in the early 1950s. Initially Johnson was outside that immediate circle, but his close relationship with Russell gave the younger man the opportunity to join this clique. Purchase of a ranch allowed Johnson to mimic the status of the senators he sought to emulate, in effect to pretend to be their equal despite his short term of service. It secured a place among these peers for this fiercely ambitious young senator.

In the Hill Country, a mere three-quarters of a mile from the dogtrot cabin where Johnson was born, the Martin place continued to deteriorate. Since 1909, it had belonged to Lyndon Johnson's Aunt Frank and Uncle Clarence Martin, Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr.'s sister and brother-in-law. Clarence Martin was a prominent Hill Country attorney when he and his wife purchased the house and he later became a judge. The largest dwelling owned by any member of the Johnson clan along the Pedernales River, the home was a center for family events. Lyndon Johnson recalled that some of the fondest memories of his youth were set in the Martin's stone-and-frame house. His emotional ties to the place were strong. When Johnson was a child, he and his extended family celebrated holidays and held summer family reunions there, and the young Johnson and his siblings were often called upon to declaim or recite poetry in front of the fireplace. At Christmas, relatives congregated around the house, the youngsters shooting off firecrackers and playing with Judge Martin's hunting dogs. Lyndon Johnson remembered the place as "the big house on the river." A year after he married Lady Bird in 1934, he brought her to the Martin place for a visit when he showed her the Hill Country on their return to Texas. It attested to the prominence of his clan. The house in the grove of trees set back from the Pedernales River had special resonance in his life.⁹

By the time the Johnsons next visited the property, in the fall of 1950, fifteen years that had changed their lives had passed. Johnson had become a congressman and then a U.S. senator, and the Johnsons were no longer the impecunious young people they had been in the 1930s. Many changes had also occurred along the Pedernales River. Clarence Martin died in 1936, followed in 1948 by his hard-living son, Tom Martin, Lyndon Johnson's benefactor during his interlude in California and later his political opponent after the younger Martin's return from the West in 1940. After her husband's death, Frank Martin continued to live in the house but had difficulty keeping it in good condition. By the time Lady Bird saw it in 1950, the once beautiful property, the "big rambling house on the Pedernales," seemed ramshackle and dilapidated. It had "gone down, down, down." To her, it had become "a Charles Addams cartoon of a haunted house." During this 1950 visit, when former senator and National Security Council Resources Board chairman Stuart Symington and his wife, Evie, accompanied the Johnsons, Lyndon Johnson suggested to his aunt that she move into Johnson City, where many of her friends resided and where she could easily reach a physician. Several weeks later, much to Lady Bird's shock, Lyndon Johnson exclaimed of the ranch: "Let's buy it!" Lady Bird Johnson later wrote that she should have known what her husband had planned.¹⁰

The transaction to acquire the property went smoothly, for any problems had been solved before Lyndon Johnson sought to purchase the ranch. Prior to Tom Martin's death in 1948, Aunt Frank Martin had deeded the land to him and her daughter-in-law, Lela Martin, in return for a life estate. After Tom Martin's death, his mother sought to regain full title to the property. Possibly at Lyndon Johnson's behest, she successfully challenged her daughter-in-law's claim, and this paved the way for the senator to gain the 240-acre ranch in exchange for a lifetime right to the Sam Johnson house in Johnson City and a $100-per-month stipend for the rest of the older woman's life.¹¹

The Martin place was so dilapidated at the time of the purchase that it had only its setting facing the water as an advantage. Despite the beautiful view of the Pedernales, the property could not have produced sufficient income to support Aunt Frank. Without Lyndon Johnson's intervention, the property likely would have further deteriorated. Although people in the area suggested that Lyndon Johnson maneuvered his cousin-in-law out of the property, the end result seemed fair to everyone. Lela Martin apparently received compensation for the property; Aunt Frank Martin had long coveted the Johnson City house; and Johnson received the house on the river, the raw material from which to fashion a country estate.¹²

The property the Johnsons acquired had a typical Texas land history. The house was located on the headright claim of Rachael Means, a widow and a native of Georgia who was listed as a resident of the Sabine District in the first Texas census, completed between 1829 and 1836. She; her son William; his wife, Francis; and their two small children had made the long trek typical of early Texians, as they were then called, perhaps hoping to acquire some of the land that was advertised as free for the taking within the empresario grants given to men such as Moses Austin and Stephen F. Austin. William Means fought in the Texas Revolution, rising to the rank of colonel. He was assigned to guard the baggage at the camp opposite Harrisburg during the Battle of San Jacinto, the battle outside of modern Houston at which the Texians avenged the Alamo and the massacre at Goliad, routed the Mexican army, and opened the way for their victory over Mexican president General Antonio López de Santa Anna. The Means's residence in Texas during the revolution qualified them for grants of patents of land from the Republic of Texas, and on April 30, 1845, Rachael Means was granted Survey Tract Number 6 on the Pedernales River, a section of approximately 4,605 acres. The illiterate Means made her mark with an x to convey power of attorney to her son to sign the land grant documents.¹³

The land she acquired was adjacent to a number of other claims that abutted the Pedernales River. Most of these had been land grants issued by the Mexican government during its brief tenure in Texas. Land grants in the Hill Country served as outposts, barriers against the indios barbaros, the Comanches and Kiowas who terrorized Spanish and Mexican Texas.
The Spanish had used such grants and settlements in New Mexico against the Utes, Navajos, and Apaches, and the Mexican government had sought similar protection for its citizens in Central Texas. The residents of these grants, particularly north and west of San Antonio, were often magnets for raids by marauders, an effective by-product of a settlement strategy that was designed to use the residents to keep attackers away from major communities. The Texas Revolution transformed both the meaning and the legal standing of these grants, and by the 1840s they were in jeopardy as a result of the dramatic influx of Anglo-American settlers. The "Texas game"—the principle of governing by populating—obviated previous laws and customs and rapidly overwhelmed Spanish Texas. As Anglo-Texans pushed into the Hill Country, the precepts of their culture had already been institutionalized in the new republic.¹⁴

During the 1840s, Anglo-Texans pushed up the rivers into Comanche country in the Hill Country and western Texas, forcing a geographic extension of the confrontation between two proud and vain peoples, the resident Comanches and the incoming Anglo-Texans. Grants to citizens of the Republic helped create community in rural Texas and also provided a barrier and sometimes an inviting target for Comanche raiders. The homesteads along the Brazos, Trinity, and Little Colorado Rivers were crude. To European travelers, they seemed uncivilized, but the people who were willing to brave such conditions served an important function as they laid the basis for state institutions. Life was always hard for people who lived on this periphery.¹⁵

The Means family did not reside long on the Pedernales, and within a generation, the property passed to other hands. In 1872, Martha Means, one of Rachael Means's heirs, conveyed the right to sell the land to B. Marshall Odum of Austin, the son of Rachael Means's daughter Margaret Means Odum. On May 11, 1876, Odum sold the deed to a two-thirds interest in the Means property, Survey Tract Number 6 in Gillespie County, for $12,000 to C. C. Howell, who conferred it to George B. Zimpelman twelve days later for the same sum. With the purchase, Zimpelman appears to have concluded an arrangement that had begun some years before. In 1869, no taxes were paid on the land, but in 1870, six years before the deed to the property was transferred to him, Zimpelman began to pay taxes on 3,070 acres of the original Means grant, the two-thirds portion later transferred to him. Zimpelman continued to pay the taxes on the tract throughout the 1870s. Whether he resided on the land or even visited it remains unclear, but a new generation of owners had taken control. During his ownership of the property, Zimpelman, an Austin attorney, temporarily resided in Mexico, and he empowered his attorney and possible law partner, James V. Bergen, to handle his affairs. The transfer of land away from pioneer families was a by-product of the growth of Texas and of the hard lot of its subsistence livestock farmers in the Hill Country and elsewhere. Such transfers also negated the social goals that underlay the idea of land grants in Texas. Absentee ownership was not something the architects of the Texas Revolution expected.¹⁶

In the spring of 1882, the property again changed hands. Through Bergen, Zimpelman sold 650 acres to William Meier, who with his wife and four children had migrated from Germany to Texas. A generation after the initial Adelsverein—the German protective society begun in the 1840s that was sponsored by idealistic Prussian noblemen dedicated to founding a new fatherland in America—German surnames had come to predominate in the Hill Country. The Meiers appear to have been relatively late arrivals; at least one of their children was born in Germany in 1870, while the other three were native Texans, placing the arrival of the family thirty or more years after the first round of Germans embarked on their journey to the New World. The Meiers reached a settled world, for the so-called Indian menace had been subdued a decade before. But the fortunes of Hill Country people and their land had begun to decline in the early 1870s. By the 1880s, prosperity for most family economic units was a distant memory. The Meier family agreed to a purchase price of $1,950, payable in three installments of $650 during 1882-84, and settled their new property.¹⁷

As did most agricultural people of the time, the Meiers supplied the majority of their own needs. William Meier built a one-room log cabin for his family, and in the fall of 1882, the six Meiers moved in. They were typically poor rural people. The one-room home had no kitchen. Cooking took place in a skillet over an open fire behind the cabin, and one daughter remembered potatoes as the staple of the family diet. School was an infrequent luxury for the Meier family. Most days, the children worked in the cotton fields alongside their father.¹⁸

Like most family farmers in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Meiers made little economic headway. They lacked access to the transportation networks that could distribute what they grew, for railroads had not yet reached the Hill Country, and the prices for most crops continuously fell because of the increase in production that resulted from the mechanization of agriculture and the expansion of international agricultural trade. The Meiers were small-crop farmers, increasingly anachronistic on the American agricultural scene. The family acquired independence but little wealth during their first years in the Hill Country. So difficult was their situation that Meier was unable to pay Zimpelman in a timely manner. Only in 1890 did he secure a release of the lien from the previous owner after selling 300 acres of the farm in two separate transactions and producing the final $1,000 he owed on the land.¹⁹

By the early 1890s, the Meier family had begun to steady their economic situation. In 1894, William Meier—by then know as "Stinkanzer" or "Polecat" Meier because of an incident in which he brought home a stinking skunk that he thought was a kitten because of his lack of a sense of smell—granted a 50-acre plot to his daughter Ida Meier Degel and his son-in-law Wendelin and another plot to his son, William. At about the same time, Meier and his wife, Wilhelmina, contracted to have a stone house built on their property. Three local men constructed the house, which took a little more than a year to build, and it was ready for the wedding of the Meiers' youngest daughter, Clara, in January, 1896.²⁰

By the turn of the century, the first generation of Meiers to live on the property could see that their time was short. They continued to divest themselves of their property, giving away all their land to their children but keeping a lifetime estate on the rock house. William Meier, Jr., purchased most of the land and bought out his sisters as a result of an agreement with his parents. Two years later, he agreed to pay his parents $200 per year for the duration of either of their lives as a belated consideration of the arrangement that transferred the farm to him. Within one year, he had paid his parents a lump sum of $800 and absolved himself of further obligation.²¹

The Meiers believed they owned the property free and clear, but the heirs of Rachael Means sought to contest this ownership. As in many other similar cases that involved the transition from Spanish, Mexican, or Texas Republic-era ownership, the plaintiffs contended that only a portion of the property had been sold, but subsequent owners had come to believe that they owned the entire tract instead of the two-thirds shown in the documents from the 1870s. A lawsuit was filed in Gillespie County court that challenged the rights of some of the owners of portions of Survey Tract Number 6, the Meier clan among them. In an extended legal fray, the Meiers and a number of other defendants were vindicated.²²

This process of challenges to title was only unusual in this instance because the plaintiffs and defendants were Anglo-Americans. Throughout the Southwest, the change in jurisdiction from Spanish to Mexican to, in Texas, Texican and finally American systems of law created loopholes that often worked to divest prior owners of their land. Racial origin was a frequent consideration in what often seemed an organized legal process of confiscation. In California, the Gold Rush of 1849 served as a precursor to the divestiture of many old Californio families of their large Mexican-era grants; in New Mexico, the Mexican War led to a seventy-year period during which Spanish-speaking residents of the state lost much of their land in American courts, received little compensation, and found no legal remedies. In Texas, the experience of Juan Seguín—an important military figure in the Texas Revolution and later mayor of San Antonio, who along with other Tejanos was forced from his land and run out of Texas largely because of his Mexican heritage—illustrated the torturous transition and the difficulties inherent in it.²³

Between the death of the elder Meiers and 1909, the property twice changed owners. In September, 1906, Charles Wagner, Jr., of Burnet County purchased the stone house, 350 acres of the property, and a range of farm implements, household equipment, and other goods for $8,500. Before he was to take possession of the farm on January 1, 1907, Wagner sold it to a Blanco County rancher, James G. Odiorne, for $8,300. Wagner's decision to sell so quickly suggests that Financial or personal reverses had forced him to give up the property. Odiorne and his family moved to the property and lived there until early 1909, when Clarence Martin purchased the ranch, which was adjacent to his wife's parents' homeplace.²⁴

With the Martins' purchase, the property ceased to have value simply for what its fields produced. Clarence Martin's extensive law practice and his later appointment as a judge provided the source of family income and prestige. Instead of being the home of poor and marginal farmers or even of more affluent ones, the property now belonged to people of means, the family of a prominent regional attorney. It acquired a kind of status, a condition that almost one-half a century later increased its attractiveness to Lyndon Johnson.

In 1909, the stone house appeared much as it had immediately after its construction in the 1890s. A frame addition to the north side had been added about 1900, making the Meier property one of the most impressive in the region, but the stone portion remained the defining structure on the property. Neighborhood dances and other social events were often held at the house, reflecting its social importance.²⁵ As befit the stature of an attorney and gentleman farmer such as Clarence Martin, the house he and his family acquired already had local significance.

In 1912, the Martins enlarged the house, adding a two-story frame wing connected to the rock house by a front porch and central rooms. This more than doubled the floor space in the home, allowing the Martins to have a music room and a parlor. It also helped make the home the center of family activities on the Pedernales, the place where the young Lyndon Johnson, his parents, and many of their relatives in the Pedernales Valley congregated.²⁶ The great Fireplace and raised hearth that fronted it gave the front room a type of grandeur that was unparalleled in the typically more modest homes along the Pedernales River. For Lyndon Johnson, this particular room was the scene of many family events he later remembered with great fondness.

From 1909 until the middle of the 1930s, the ranch house was home to a prosperous Hill Country family. Clarence Martin served as a judge, and members of the Johnson clan continued to reside in the immediate vicinity of the house. When Lyndon Johnson brought his new bride to the Martin place in 1934, he was following what had become family tradition: he was taking Lady Bird to the nicest, most genteel place within the extended familial network of Johnsons in the Hill Country, the best location from which to show off the Hill Country and his extended family's prominent position in it. Looking out at the river from the well-appointed house of that era must have confirmed the impression that Lyndon Johnson always sought to put forward: the Johnsons were people of substance.

After Clarence Martin's death in 1936, however, the Martin place began to decline. Alone, Johnson's now-widowed Aunt Frank, more than sixty-Five years old, could not properly maintain the house and its surroundings. Throughout the late 1930s and the first half of the 1940s, she had a difficult time finding able farmhands. Even after Tom and Lela Martin, her son and daughter-in-law, returned to the Hill Country in 1940, the situation did not improve. Tom Martin had been a heavy drinker most of his life and remained unable to oversee activities at the property effectively. The work was too physically strenuous for Frank Johnson. Income from her fields and pecan orchards declined, and she could not undertake the repairs necessary to maintain the property. Hired help came and went, working mostly ineffectually and without supervision. After fourteen years without close and able management, the once stately place had become rundown and ramshackle.²⁷ Under the circumstances, Lady Bird Johnson's reaction to the house in 1950 was probably generous.

To those close to Johnson, his purchase of the ranch seemed an unusual choice for a man as driven by politics as he. The property was isolated, and communications to it could be tenuous. Johnson would not have ready access to information at his new home, and from it he could not easily and quickly get to the seats of power where he could work his political magic. Just months before attorney, political powerbroker, and Johnson political mentor Alvin Wirtz died of a heart attack at the University of Texas-Rice University football game, he told the young senator, "Lyndon, I wouldn't fool with that old house." Hearing of the purchase, Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn remarked, "Now he'll have something to talk about besides Congress."²⁸ To those who understood his seemingly insatiable urge to engage himself in the person-to-person persuasion of politics, the choice of the Stonewall ranch as the location for a permanent home did seem unusual.

But the ranch had political and personal meaning for Senator Johnson. Wealthy Texans always had ranch property, and in the Senate owning an estate was always an asset. As Johnson emerged as a force in the Senate, the ranch served as a combination of confidence builder and calling card that helped him announce his arrival. In his mind, it pushed him toward peer status with the more powerful members of the Senate, with whom he sought relations. Johnson recognized the ranch as a political asset as well as a piece of his personal heritage. For the newcomer, his ownership of the property mirrored the established status of men two terms his senior. At a very young age he shared not only the political office of such veterans as Russell but also the trappings of these older, more established individuals. For the junior senator from Texas, the ranch was a major step in making the transition from the subservient, obsequious, and sometimes sycophantic role of professional son to that of peer.²⁹

The ranch also provided Johnson with a place to "recharge his batteries," as Lady Bird Johnson became fond of saying. Lyndon Johnson had begun to experience health problems, usually associated with dramatic campaigns. In his first run for the House in 1936, he entered the hospital on election eve with an appendix that nearly burst. He began his successful Senate campaign in 1948 with a severe kidney stone. Johnson almost left the race because of the malady, but a trip to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota allowed a difficult removal of the stone. Even in doubled-over pain, Johnson debated the political cost of leaving the state for medical treatment; he did not want even the slightest implication that Texas doctors were not sufficiently competent to treat the condition. Nor was Johnson a man who took good care of himself. He smoked too much, regularly enjoyed alcohol, ate erratically, and pushed himself beyond any reasonable limit. Johnson simply did not like to rest. By the early 1950s, and particularly after the unexpected death of Wirtz in 1951, Johnson had begun to worry about the relatively short life spans of the men in his family. The ranch gave him an environment where he could decompress, where he could rest without feeling that he needed to take political action somehow and somewhere. Instead, from the time of his purchase of the property, he immersed himself in the details of the ranch, learning every aspect of ranching and ranch management. At the ranch he found solace and peace, commodities in increasingly short supply as he advanced in the world of politics.³⁰

The ranch also provided an important link between his past and his aspirations. Johnson had grown up, if not on the ranch, in its immediate environs. He knew the people of that region personally and well, and they knew him—his precociousness, his bluster, and his failings as well as his many positive traits. Johnson had been humiliated by his father's economic demise, by the disregard with which the Johnson family had been treated in the aftermath of the collapse of the family cotton enterprise in the early 1920s. Seeing himself as important almost since birth, he could not stand the loss of stature that accompanied the Johnsons' fall from economic prosperity. As Lyndon Johnson's father became the target of pity and sometimes cruel mockery, the younger man's resolve to prove the family's tormentors wrong must have grown. For as proud a man as Johnson, the purchase of the ranch after his election as U.S. senator served as vindication of the family's presence in the Hill Country.

The ranch also reflected beliefs very close to Johnson's heart. He did believe, as he told his Mexican-American students in the dusty town of Cotulla, that in America people could rise on their merits. His purchase of the ranch and the cleansing of the stain on his family heritage were in his own view surely proof of that belief, demonstrable evidence that people could rehabilitate themselves and their families by a combination of will, work, and intelligence. The ranch was a symbol; proof of the rewards of perseverance; testimony to the fact that if someone worked long enough and hard enough, he or she could put the miseries of the past permanently behind them and reach new heights. This view was a forerunner of the perspective that would later become national policy in Johnson's Great Society programs.

The purchase of the ranch also signaled a homecoming for Johnson, a return to the place in the world that had the most meaning to him. Lyndon Johnson above all was a man of the Texas Hill Country. That place and its vagaries, its erratic rainfall, its poor soil, and its tight-knit sense of community shaped him—made him perhaps not into a form so hard and distinct that nothing could change it, as Robert Caro argues, but shaped him nonetheless. Coming home to the old Martin place, ever after the LBJ Ranch, the old stone house that held bright and warm memories for Johnson, was an expression of the importance of place to Americans. The country along the Pedernales River was Lyndon Johnson's homeplace; when he bought his ranch there, he articulated a kind of rootedness that seemed at odds with the mobility of the United States in the aftermath of World War II.

His letters about the Hill Country reflect that sense of rootedness. Late in the 1950s, Johnson wrote his mother from Washington, D.C., that he "long[ed] to be back in the Hill Country where there is good sunshine. I want to be roaming up and down the river with my beagle dog as I did when I was a boy." This combination of nostalgia, of a feeling of belonging, and of the widely held sense that his physical health had improved because of his purchase of the ranch demonstrated that in Johnson's own mind at least, he had truly come home.³¹

The purchase of the ranch gave Johnson one more piece of the many he believed he needed to make a run for national power. In his own view, it defined him as a national leader, providing the trappings with which to surround ambition, the roots from which to sell himself and his views to the larger world. First in the Senate and later to the public as a whole, Johnson would have to present himself as a fully rounded person with all the attributes necessary to manage the many responsibilities that accompanied leadership. The ranch enhanced Johnson's belief that he possessed those qualities. His ownership of the property served to begin to erase whatever fears of failure he had internalized from his family's experience. Buying the ranch made Lyndon Baines Johnson whole in a manner that no other single material acquisition or accomplishment ever did. The distance to leadership and power was considerably shorter after the purchase than it had ever been before.