The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson #1)

by Robert A. Caro

Sam also introduced his son before his first campaign speech, which was delivered from the front porch of the Johnson home. Despite unpleasant memories of the “native-born citizen’s” boyhood personality and family background, Blanco was predisposed to support him. In the rural counties of Texas—counties in which frontier privations and dangers were so fresh a memory and neighborliness therefore so prized a virtue—it was rare indeed for a county not to support its “home man” in a congressional race. Reinforcing this predisposition in Blanco County was the unusual depth of the county’s poverty and isolation. Because its residents not only were poor, but felt poor—felt poor and isolated and utterly cut off from the rest of the world—the success of a Blanco boy in that world was unusually important to them; it gave them a reason for self-respect.