These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

If the Depression, and alike the New Deal, created a new compassion for the poor, it also produced a generation of politicians committed to the idea that government can relieve suffering and regulate the economy. In 1937, lanky former Texas schoolteacher Lyndon Baines Johnson was elected to Congress, where he worked to obtain federal funds for his district for projects like the construction of dams to improve farmland. When LBJ was a boy, his father had lost his farm. He’d grown up dirt-poor. Six foot three, with long ears and no discernible end to his energy, Johnson had hitchhiked to a state teachers college and, after graduating, taught at an elementary school in Cotulla, Texas, sixty miles north of the border. The students were Mexican American; there was no lunch break, because the children had no lunch to eat. Johnson organized a debating team and taught them how to fight for their ideas. When he ran for Congress, he printed signs that read “Franklin D. and Lyndon B.” Like his hero, LBJ embraced the radio, campaigning on radio stations like KNOW in Austin and KTSA in San Antonio and once—in an act of inspired populist appeal—broadcasting from a barbershop.