Wild’s enlistment in the campaign could not make the leaders support Johnson, but it would ensure their attendance at—and their permission to hold—the “barbecues” (political rallies highlighted by “speakings”) integral to Texas politics. And Lyndon Johnson’s barbecues were barbecues such as this impoverished district had never seen. Ed Clark describes them as “all the barbecue you could eat and take home, and all the beer you could drink”—at each barbecue, in other words, beef and beer for hundreds of persons. Emmett Shelton describes them in a more pithy term: a “giving away.” “Before then,”
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