Our biographer opens his work at the beginning—chronologically as we were promised in the introduction. Not with our subject’s childhood or the particular circumstances that shaped it, but really with the place and times of his grandfather’s generation.

I find this 100-page mini-history of the Hill Country fascinating, but is it really worth it and necessary to understand Lyndon Johnson and advance the broader goals Caro sets forth in the introduction? (In a few months we might ask the same question about the 100-page mini-biographies of Richard Brevard Russell and Hubert Horatio Humphrey.) The Hill Country does not fit into our traditional understanding of both the American South, with its plantations and cotton, and the West, with its freedom and opportunity. It’s made quite clear to us how poor its inhabitants are, which is probably why the Hill Country was so much more receptive to the People’s Party and its crypto-socialist message than other areas of the country.

In addition to the roots of Lyndon Johnson’s liberalism—we could call it the Johnson strain in LBJ’s political identity—the stage is also set for the flipside of his political identity, the Southern conservative part, not just in the introduction but in the very first sentence of chapter 1. This will be better resolved in Master of the Senate, but we are meant to be impressed when when Lyndon’s white-haired grandfather rides around exclaims “A United States Senator was born this morning!” In any other part of the country a grandfather might predict that the new-born would be president, but because Lyndon Johnson was, despite what we learn about the Hill Country and its 30-inch isohyet, still a southerner, and United States Senator was the highest office a southerner could hope to attain.

In most of the 20th century, being from the South was limiting, being from the Hill Country even more so—which is why Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr., would never reach higher office than the Texas House of Representatives—and LBJ would eventually break free of those limits, but it would take a long time to fully break free of the oilmen who financed his political career and the considerable lengths he would have to go to advance it, the Bunton strain of the political LBJ.

Random observations:

• What exactly does the Macbeth quote at the beginning mean?
• William Jennings Bryan argued in the Cross of Gold speech for bimetallism, which in the language of modern economics was a policy to credibly increase the money supply in order to stop deflation and promote growth. We are essentially engaged in the same economic debate today.
• Caro draws a lot of his Texas and Hill Country history from T.R. Fehrenbach’s Lone Star, which I wholeheartedly recommend. Rick Perry recently got in trouble for distorting Fehrenbach’s comparison between Texas and Israel.
• There seems to be a suggestion that many Hill Country kids were very smart and if they had had better science labs and fewer excellent civics teachers in the schools, LBJ might have been a scientists. Hm.
• All this talk about Johnson’s physical cowardice and petulant behavior will come up again.
• What should we make of all this fuss about ear-pulling and nickels?

What did you guys take away from Part I?