Steinbeck identified the crux of the southern politician problem: was the governor merely a rabble-rousing entertainer, or could he truly speak for the whole nation? Reflecting on his bright moment from the perspective of 1964, Clement said he knew that people were cheering his speech, but he was just as sure that some in the audience were laughing at him. That year, the Texan Horace Busby, a special assistant to President Johnson, told Bill Moyers that LBJ, with his southern drawl, should in effect be the anti-Clement when he delivered his nomination acceptance speech. “Forensics should be modern, untinged with an old fashioned style,” Busby said. “Alliteration should be minimized.”75
The Tennessee governor with the Elvis-like movements did not win the vice presidential nomination in 1956. Second place on the ticket went instead to Senator Estes Kefauver, another Tennessean, but one who expressed a somewhat softer hillbilly persona—after all, he had earned a Yale degree. Back in 1948, Kefauver had worn a coonskin cap when he ran for office, after his opponent called him a sneaky “pet coon” who was flirting with communism. In 1956, Kefauver was meant to add to the presidential ticket what one reporter aptly referred to as the “calculated common touch”—the point being that there was nothing authentic about Kefauver’s pose. He was a “spurious hillbilly,” a cheap ploy to offset presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson’s lack of popular appeal. The Illinoisan was called an “egghead,” a bore. Stevenson and Kefauver lost, of course.76
Meanwhile, Clement hosted Elvis at the governor’s mansion, and in 1958 did the performer a good turn by speaking before a Senate Communications committee in defense of hillbilly music and rock and roll. Vance Packard, author of the bestselling Hidden Persuaders, was testifying before the committee, insisting that mountain music was polluting the national taste. An outraged Clement defended hillbillies as pure Elizabethans and their “nasal harmonies” as a genuine expression of the American dream. A tart Chicago reporter comically expressed his surprise that the governor “did not volunteer to fight a duel with accordions at ten paces.”77
Kefauver of Tennessee was a traditional liberal, Folsom of Alabama a populist, and Clement of Tennessee a moderate on race issues; yet they all had to play the showman to get ahead in political life. Clement had set his sights on higher national office, only to be shut down on the night of his keynote address. It was Lyndon Baines Johnson, the seasoned Texan, who—alone among the rural southern contingent that threw their hats into the vice presidential ring during the 1950s and 1960s—eventually captured the presidency on his own accord.
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As mastermind and deal maker in the Senate, Majority Leader Johnson was considered the second most powerful man in the nation after the president. He was an admirer of Henry Clay of Kentucky, the “great compromiser.” (As president, he would hang Clay’s portrait in the Oval Office.) Cultivating an at times paternalistic role among Senate Democrats, Johnson kept close watch on his colleagues’ tastes and interests. “A man who can’t smell the mood of the Senate,” he professed, “has no business being leader.” He seemed a cross between a schoolteacher (which he had been) and a sheriff, a tougher, more fearsome version of Andy Griffith’s Mayberry character. What he had in common with the television sheriff was the rustic art of personal persuasion. His repertoire involved storytelling, verbal cudgeling, and physical contact, and he profited from an intimate knowledge of the psychology and personal quirks of every senator with whom he did business. The Senate was that “small town” over which Lyndon Johnson held sway as its modern-day lawman.78
When he accepted the largely thankless position of vice president in 1960, Johnson became Kennedy’s dutiful lieutenant. Only his unexpected elevation to the presidency on November 22, 1963, altered the public’s reception to his earthy southern persona. For a time, he acquired the kind of sympathy he had never enjoyed previously among the liberal intellectuals of his party. He was neither cool nor sophisticated like JFK, whose outward style reflected the jaunty confidence of his privileged upbringing. While some in the press continued to disparage his down-home ways, his close associates countered by insisting that he was “not some cornball rural hick.” Nevertheless, like the southern politician of the hillbilly school, LBJ loved to be flamboyant. On the campaign trail, he used his Texas vernacular to forge an intimate bond with the crowds. One columnist praised him for “digging down deeply into the basic urges of ordinary people.” Country-boy traits treated as liabilities before 1963 suddenly became an asset as the nation grieved the loss of its young president.79
In 1963, LBJ’s tour in Kentucky included photographs of the president conversing with poor Appalachian families.
#215-23-64, Inez Kentucky, LBJ Library Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Austin, Texas
Johnson’s signature set of programs known as the Great Society attached to a different, and positive, variant of his southern identity. Upon passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965, the president flew to Stonewall, Texas, to sign the bill at the one-room schoolhouse where he had taught during the Great Depression. While there, he referred to himself the “son of a sharecropper.” His willingness to tackle poverty could be traced to his embrace of a modern South. In 1960, when he first ran for president, he echoed Howard Odum’s creed: his goal was to prevent a “waste of resources, waste of lives, or waste of opportunity.” By the time he launched the Great Society, the legislation he promoted focused on two distinct classes: the poor urban black population and the mountain folk of Appalachia. Seeing the Great Society as the new New Deal, Johnson connected his reform to the work of Eleanor Roosevelt, invoking her sentimental appeal to hillbillies. Lady Bird Johnson went to the Kentucky hills, where she distributed lunches and dedicated a new school gym; her husband sat himself down and talked with families.80
As they followed him on his five-state tour, cameramen captured images of the president on the porches of run-down shacks, affectionately listening to the mountain people—it was nothing if not a James Agee/Walker Evans flashback to the thirties. The problems facing Appalachia were acute: a high rate of joblessness compared to the rest of the country (in some places three or four times the national average); deteriorating housing; an uneducated workforce; and a ravaged environment wrought by strip mining. Mountain farm families had been stripped of the legal right to their property when coal-mining companies, aided by state courts, were given the prerogative to ruin fields, destroy forests, build roads wherever they chose, and pollute the water supply. In the end, the Johnson administration secured passage of the Appalachian Regional Development Act, providing infrastructure, schools, and hospitals. The president subsequently stated that seeing the poverty there firsthand had convinced him of the necessity of the Medicare Act. And so fighting rural poverty remained a central plank in Johnson’s overall “War on Poverty.” But even these bold policies proved inadequate to manage the massive devastation that the blighted regional economy had already experienced.81