With approval from a dozen different bureaus required for each contract, contracts from other districts might be stalled for months. Johnson would show up at each bureau—and contracts from the Fourteenth District were approved and back in the mail within days. In a White House ceremony on July 28, 1933, President Roosevelt presented the first AAA check for plowed-under cotton. Its recipient was farmer William E. Morris—of the Fourteenth District’s Nueces County.
