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. The meeting immediately marked Lyndon as a strong Roosevelt manand gave him access to administration officials who could help his congressional career.Roosevelt had already made this possible by talking toCorcoran, Ickes, and Hopkins.And they, in turn, talked to others aboutJohnson, especially Corcoran, who commanded extraordinary influence.Ickes also talked up Lyndon.At lunch one day, he told Eliot Janeway, thebusiness editor of Time, that he ought to meet this new kid Lyndon Johnson. When Janeway returned to New York that evening from Washington,he had a call from Edwin Weisl, a Wall Street lawyer and personal counselto Harry Hopkins, who wanted to know if Janeway had ever heard of somekid called Lydie Johnson. Together, Corcoran recalls, the New Dealerscreated an atmosphere, a consensus about the new boy and his immediate future in the House. Lyndon also made special efforts to win the approval of House leaders.And he quickly convinced them that he was an effective legislator and reli 38 :: lyndon b.johnsonable Democrat. He made a very profound impression from the outset uponhis colleagues, John W.McCormack of Massachusetts, the later MajorityLeader and Speaker of the House, recalled. .His interest in committeework on the floor of the House clearly marked him out as one who was destined for greater responsibilities and higher honors. McCormack believedthat Roosevelt s regard for Johnson was certainly.helpful to him, but Johnson earned his position and his prestige and his standing as a result ofhis own contributions in committee and in the House. No one in the House was more important to Lyndon, however, thanSam Rayburn.At the age of fifty-five, after twenty-four years in the House,Rayburn had become Majority Leader in January 1937.A bachelor with fewinterests outside of the House of Representatives, which he once describedas my life and my love, Rayburn was a lonely man.Lyndon and Lady Birdbecame his surrogate family.The warmth of their relations extended to doings on the Hill.At theclose of business every day, Rayburn invited a favored few to join him at the Board of Education, his hideaway office directly under the HouseSpeaker s formal office.There, they socialized and, as John Nance Garner,who originated the phrase, said, struck a blow for liberty with some bourbon and branch water. Only two House members had keys and didn t haveto gain admittance, Rayburn said. I had one key; Lyndon Johnson hadthe other. Like so many others who entered government service in the thirties,Lyndon s sense of participation in something larger than himself helpedmake him a committed New Dealer.The fact that he represented a strongpro-Roosevelt district also played a part.But his whole life experience wasat the core of his identity as a southern New Dealer or liberal nationalistwho aimed to integrate the South into the mainstream of American economic life.The plight of the children at Cotulla and his sense of exhilaration at being able to help them, the feelings of accomplishment whenanswering the cries for aid from people in Kleburg s district, the sufferingcaused by the Depression and the humane response of FDR s government,all made Lyndon a strong believer in using Federal power for the good ofneedy Americans everywhere, but especially in the South.By 1938 39 some Administration leaders thought of Lyndon Johnson asthe best New Dealer from Texas. He was viewed as someone who not onlybacked the Roosevelt administration but also did all he could to obtain Federal benefits for his constituents, including the most needy.No group inJohnson s district benefited more from his actions than impoverished HillCountry farmers.Money was in such short supply in the early thirties that The Congressman :: 39the area functioned as a barter economy.Moreover, with the land so unpro-ductive only 35,000 acres or 10 percent of Blanco County was under cultivation in 1933 New Deal programs, which paid farmers for reducing theircrops, could provide little cash to the Hill Country.But Johnson found waysto help.In 1938 41, when hundreds of farmers couldn t qualify for FarmSecurity Administration loans because they had no collateral, Johnsonpersuaded the FSA to waive the requirement and give each of 400 familiesa $50 loan.In addition, he facilitated the implementation of a RangeConservation program in the Hill Country that cleared thousands of acresof soil-depleting brush and increased the amount of land under cultivationby 400 percent in three and a half years.At the same time, he helped provide federal funds for paved farm-to-market roads which facilitated theshipment of increased produce to market before it spoiled.He also obtainedmillions of dollars in WPA grants for building projects.And then there wasthe conservation and public power through dam building on the LowerColorado River, which brought cheap power to the region and rural electrification that transformed people s lives.In this, Lyndon joined a group ofself-serving altruists who used the dams simultaneously to acquire wealthand influence.No one used the dam-building more to their advantage than Brown &Root, a construction company in Austin controlled by George and HermanBrown
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