All through the South and West, a belief had been rising among men who felt themselves trapped by forces beyond their control, a belief that, faced by forces too big for them to fight, they needed help in fighting them. This feeling had been rising—slowly but steadily—since the Civil War. Farmers would sweat and slave over their land, and sow and

His 3,000-vote plurality—a plurality whose dimensions had been utterly unsuspected—came principally from the farmers and the ranchers he had visited one by one, from the people in whom he had invested time no other candidate for Congress had ever given them, from the people who had, on Election Day, repaid that investment in kind, giving up their

The power of money was less ephemeral than power based on elections or individuals. It could last as long as the money lasted, exerting its effect not only on an incumbent but on his successors. And there was enough oil in Texas so that it would last, in political terms, a long time. Lyndon Johnson had become the conduit for the oilmen’s money. To

The President had asked Corcoran what he could do to cheer “Lyndon” up, and had accepted Corcoran’s suggestion: Roosevelt was to address the national convention of Young Democrats in Lexington, Kentucky, in August; Corcoran suggested that the President put Johnson on the program with him. Roosevelt did so. When Johnson came in to see him, the

The initial Brown & Root contribution to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee was $30,000—more money than the committee had received from the Democratic National Committee, which had in previous years been its major source of funds.

Lyndon Johnson’s appointment had allowed him to bring together, in a single office, the men he had scattered through the federal bureaucracy.

Texans were elected on December 7, 1931, not only to the Speakership of the House but to the chairmanships of five of its most influential committees. Lyndon Johnson’s first day in the Capitol was the day Texas came to power in it—a power that the state was to hold, with only the briefest interruptions, for more than thirty years.

Congressmen who were worried about money to ensure their return to Capitol Hill had learned that all the money they needed was available from Texas—from Texas and from the new industrial order of the Southwest, of which Texas was the heart—and that Lyndon Johnson, more than any other single figure, controlled it.

Four years before, campaigning in a district whose voters hardly knew his name, Johnson had overhauled far better-known and more experienced candidates partly through the use of money on a scale unprecedented in that district. Now he was using money on the same scale in twenty-one districts—all across Texas. Lyndon Johnson, in his first campaign