Road Trip Through History: The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum
More than a month ago I promised you a report on our visit to the LBJ Library. I fully expected to sit down and write it later that week. The fact that I wandered off into other historical by-ways is simply a reflection of how easily I'm distracted, not on the quality of the museum.
The Johnson Library was an eye-opener for me. Johnson was the president of my early childhood. My memories of him are limited to black and white photographs, set against a mental background of images from the Vietnam War. Laid over that was the image of Johnson as a major reform president, thwarted by the conflicting demands of the Great Society and the war*--the result of writing a book on the history of socialism.** I left the museum with a stronger sense of Johnson as man and as president--and a deep respect for his accomplishments. Historian Robert Dallek describes Johnson as "a tornado in pants". That's pretty dang accurate.
Here were some of the things that took me by surprise:
- Johnson's first job was teaching school in a rural district in Texas. His students were underprivileged Hispanics, who struggled against both poverty and discrimination. That experience shaped his political goals. If a president ever deserved to be known as the "education president" it was LBJ.
- Pictures of the young LBJ with lots of hair.
- After the attack on Pearl Harbor, LBJ (then 33) was the first member of Congress to volunteer for active duty.
- The sheer scope of reforms that his administration put in place, from civil rights bills to Head Start, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Medicare, the Clean Air Act. Johnson submitted eighty-seven bills to the first session of the eighty-ninth Congress. Eight-four of them passed.
I was particularly taken with a series of stations titled "Please hold for the president". You pick up a telephone and hear actual phone calls made by President Johnson to members of his cabinet, members of Congress, and other political figures. It gave me chills to listen to him assure Martin Luther King, Jr. of his support for the civil rights movement. It amused me to hear Ladybird critique one of his speeches--she gave it a solid B. A tender conversation with Jacqueline Kennedy soon after her husband's assassination brought tears to my eyes. And a call where the secure White House line got crossed with a long distance call between two ordinary American homes was laugh out loud funny.
If you're in Austin, take the time to visit.***
*"Guns and butter" is a hard motto to live up to.
**Blatant self-promotion alert
**Heck, if you're near any presidential library, take the time to visit. We've been blow away by both the Truman and Johnson libraries this year.
Word With a Past: Doing A Land Office Business
In 1785, the newly created United States, burdened by debts incurred in its war for independence, passed a Land Ordinance Act authorizing the Treasury Department to sell land in the public domain as a source of revenue.*
Acting on the principle of "survey before settlement", tracts of land were surveyed into townships and plat parcels, then sold at auction to the highest bidder, or at least the minimum price set by Congress. Eager settlers poured across the Allegheny Mountains into first the Ohio lands and later the Indiana and Illinois territories. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 brought new opportunities for settlement in the "empty" territory west of the Mississippi.** Between 1800 and 1812, Congress created 19 land districts in the frontier territories and the Treasury Department sold more than 4 million acres of public land. In 1812, Congress created the General Land Office to manage the quickly growing sale of public lands.
Settlers were so eager to file land claims that district land offices were busy places. By 1832, so many claims for land had been filed that there was a backlog of some 10,500 land "patents" waiting for an official signature to make them final.*** "Land-office business" became a metaphor for a brisk business of any kind. It still is--even when the real estate market takes a turn for the worse and a two bedroom coop just won't sell.
*If you've been hanging around History in the Margins for a while, this may sound familiar. America's first interstate, the National Highway, was funded in large part by selling off bits of what became Ohio.
**Which were of course, not actually empty.
***At first all land patents were signed by the president of the United States. On March 2, 1833, Congress passed a law allowing a GLO clerk to sign on the president's behalf.
Seed of the Future:Yosemite and the Evolution of the National Park Idea
Seed of the Future: Yosemite and the Evolution of the National Park Idea is a beautiful book, with gorgeous pictures and heavy paper that made me hesitate to underline and write in the margins.*
It is also an excellent work of history. Written by award-winning filmmaker and writer Dayton Duncan in conjunction with the Yosemite Conservancy, Seed of the Future tells the story of the National Parks System through the lens of the Yosemite Land Grant, which pre-dated the creation of Yellowstone as the first national park by eight years. (Who knew?)
The Yosemite story as Duncan tells it is one of natural marvels, national pride, successful PR, political infighting, attempted land grabs, and determined individuals. Teddy Roosevelt and naturalist John Muir make their expected appearances. Ralph Waldo Emerson and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted play unexpected roles. (Unexpected to me at any rate.) The park's first guardian, Galen Clark, is heroic in his dedication.
The heart of the story is not the action or the characters--gripping though they are--but the development of a new idea about public space. Today the idea of preserving wild areas for public use is so common that we take it for granted.** When Congress passed the Yosemite Grant Act in 1864, the idea of saving wilderness for public use was unheard of. Distributing public land for private use was more common, at least in the United States. The Homestead Act that allowed the head of a household to claim 160 acres with little more than sweat equity was passed only two years before. The Yosemite Grant Act occurred in a narrow space where ideas about democracy, wilderness, the Sublime, tourism and health came together.
If you're interested in national parks, American history, or how big ideas are created from many small ones, you'll enjoy Seed of the Future. Even if all you do is look at the pictures.
* How do you have a conversation with a book if you don't mark it up? And more important from your perspective, how do I remember what I want to say in a blog post?
**Taking preservation for granted is dangerous. Like many of our liberties, the idea of preservation must itself be protected.
Image courtesy of the Library of Congress