Taylor Branch on Johnson

One last piece from Taylor Branch's Pillar of Fire before I leave it. One of the most fascinating characters in the book is Lyndon Johnson, whose unexpected support for the civil rights movement was a huge factor in its success. If you've ever read anything about Johnson, or heard any of the astonishing White House tapes from his administration, you've probably come across stories like this one:

Johnson himself was a gadget person, but he preferred earthier uses: high-powered showerheads, special blades to cut thick steaks into the shape of Texas, an amphibious jeep that he loved to drive into his lake by "mistake" with unwitting passengers, and, mounted on his Lincoln touring convertible, a horn whose sounds stimulated the mating instincts of nearby cattle, producing sights that mortified those whom Johnson gleefully called "citified" guests.

And then there are stories of Johnson the master politician and manipulator, using his charisma, power, and understanding of people to get exactly what he wants:

The President announced on the way that he wanted [Sargent] Shriver to launch his new war on poverty.

Shriver replied nervously that he remembered reading in Pakistan or somewhere that Johnson had mentioned poverty in a speech, but he was sure the President could find someone better qualified. Besides, he was more than occupied as Director of the Peace Corps. Johnson said Shriver could run the Peace Corps and poverty at the same time, and Shriver escaped with a promise to consider the flattering proposal. Not knowing Johnson, he assumed the next move was his.

The next day, Saturday, February 1, a White House operator startled Shriver at home, and Johnson's voice came on the line: "I'm gonna announce your appointment at the press conference."

"What press conference?" asked Shriver.

"This afternoon," said Johnson.

"Oh, God," whispered Shriver, who began sputtering that he knew nothing about poverty. Johnson brushed him off. "You can't let me down," he said, "so the quicker we get it behind us the better." Shriver in full panic waved silently for his family to prompt him with excuses. "Could you just say that you've asked me to study this?" he suggested to Johnson, who said, "No, hell no." When Shriver begged politely for time--"I must say that I would prever it if I had forty-eight hours"--he got back a resounding preview of the morning headlines: "You're Mister Poverty."

"You got the responsibility," Johnson told him. "You've got the authority. You got the power. You got the money. Now, you may not have the glands."

"The glands?" asked Shriver.

"Yeah," said the President.

"I've got plenty of glands," said Shriver.

As with TR, the more I learn about Johnson the more I want to know. I going to have to read Robert Caro's biography after all. For now though, I want to end with one last exhortation, echoing what I said at the start of the week: read Taylor Branch's America in the King Years. I still have one volume to go, and it's already the best history writing I've ever read.

Vernon Dahmer

After I raved about Taylor Branch's America in the King Years yesterday, I figured I ought to give you an example of why I'm praising it so highly. Here, from volume two, Pillar of Fire, is Branch giving a quick but detailed biographical sketch of Mississippi farmer Vernon Dahmer--and using that sketch to explore the underlying complexity of the very concept of race, especially as employed in the highly charged American South of the 1960s:

Staying on alone at the farm, [SNCC worker Hollis] Watkins gradually learned that the Dahmer family's Faulknerian bloodlines wandered across racial boundaries and taboos. Vernon Dahmer's mother, Ellen Kelly, had been one of four light-skinned mulatto daughters born during Reconstruction to a white plantation owner named Kelly, for whom their farm region north of Hattiesburg was named Kelly Settlement. Old man Kelly had no wife or other children, and he honored his mulatto family far beyond accepted custom. In the 1890s, Ellen Kelly caused something of a family crisis by entertaining a marriage proposal from George Dahmer, a most unusual white man--born illegitimately in 1871 to a transient German immigrant and a white woman who, during the chaos and destitution that followed the Civil War in Mississippi, had gone on to marry an ex-slave with whom she produced eight dark-skinned children raised as George Dahmer's younger siblings.

To the ex-Confederate planter Kelly, the problem with George Dahmer as a suitor for his daughter Ellen was not so much his bastard status or the racial confusion of a genetic white man living within Negro culture, but his lack of higher education. Kelly withheld consent until young George Dahmer completed courses at Jackson State, Mississippi's Reconstruction-built Negro college, but then he blessed the newlyweds with a full share of his estate: forty acres, a cow, two calves, and a feather bed. Although some of the surviving white cousins contested these gifts to Negroes as the folly of a lunatic bachelor, the bequest stood, and in time George and Ellen Dahmer gained possession of additional Kelly acreage.

In December of 1908, four months after Lyndon Johnson was born in the Texas Hill Country, Vernon Dahmer arrived as the eighth of twelve Dahmer children. He may have become the superior farmer of the lot in any case, but competition decreased significantly when three of his five brothers married "out of the race" into white society in the North, one as a church pastor. Not all family members on either side of the color line were aware of the secret. Among Vernon Dahmer's most delicate tasks as an adult was to maintain ties among the witting ones even while engineering an innocent extinction of bonds in the next generation. Life's passages--births, marriages, deaths--posed the most difficult decisions about which distant ones could be notified, and how to do so without risking the fateful curiosity of the unwitting. With time, the simplest family communications across the color barrier became trying and dangerous. On the Negro side, parents faced the crippling issue of whether to acknowledge the possibility that especially light-skinned children might cross over, and if so, whether it was mutually safe and emotionally tolerable to seek the counsel of those who had gone before.

Vernon Dahmer narrowed such dilemmas by choosing successively darker wives. After fathering three sons during the Depression who grew up to look like him and his father, George--that is, by all appearances as white as the governor of Mississippi--he married a darker woman who bore three discernibly Negro sons during the 1940s, and two years after the second wife died, he married Ellie Dahmer in 1952 and produced a son, Dennis, and a daughter, Bettie, his young tractor driver, also clearly of African descent. In public, Dahmer learned to expect different reactions according to which sets of children were in his company. Among strangers, he could pass with his eldest children as a white family so long as Ellie was not along, whereas with her and the younger children he functioned separately across the color line as an ambassador. On Southern highways, he easily picked up food from the first-class "white" side of segregated restaurants if his family remained hidden in the car. Less pleasantly, white strangers who encountered the entire family assumed sometimes that Dahmer was a white boss among servants. Some made collegial remarks to him about his niggers.

Dahmer was murdered by the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in January of 1966 for his work in support of voting rights. In 1998, more than thirty years later, the leader of the local Klan chapter, Samuel Bowers, was convicted, on the fifth try, of Dahmer's murder. Bowers died in prison last fall.

The complexities of race that Dahmer lived out, and the racism he fought against, are, of course, still with us. To take only one obvious example: Barack Obama, despite his multi-racial heritage, is almost exclusively identified as black, a point which will be hammered home over and over, with ever-less-subtle hints of racism, in the coming months. The lesson the GOP took from the 1960s was that they needed to make racism a prominent part of their playbook; should Obama's campaign continue to gather steam, we'll soon see them deploying the nastiest parts of it.

America in the King Years

As I wrote just last week, I'm not usually inclined to recommend books generally, to all readers, instead hedging my recommendations with caveats and explanations, rooting everything fully in my own sensibility. Part of what I enjoy about reading good critics--James Wood and Michael Dirda, for example--is learning, over time, what they like and dislike and where their tastes and mine overlap; learning their sensibilities means both that I gain some appreciation for books I might otherwise not have noticed or liked and that I learn when and how far to trust their recommendations.

I've also written on this blog about how personal reading decisions are, how people read for different reasons and in different ways. I don't really believe that people should be reading a certain type of book in a certain way or that reading those books will make you a better person. Will serious reading of Tolstoy make you think deeply about how people live their lives? Sure, but so, in a different way, will reading Watership Down. If I had a book-related motto, it would be read what you want to read; take those minutes or hours to simply be, separate from the world and concentrating deeply on something that requires your active participation, your collaboration, your bringing to bear your lifetime of thoughts and experience Do that, and I'll call it good.

So if you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll realize how unusual it is that I'm saying the following: Every American who wants to understand this country should read Taylor Branch's America in the King Years. I read the first volume, Parting the Waters (1988) last January and it was so utterly involving that I had to take a break. I spent my Martin Luther King's Birthday holiday this year reading the second volume, Pillar of Fire (1997), and I'm going to have to take another break before I tackle the similarly acclaimed third volume, At Canaan's Edge (2006).

In the first two books, Branch performs the seemingly superhuman feat of covering every aspect of the civil rights movement from 1955-1963, with all its successes and failures, dramatic moments and dull meetings, charismatic leaders and brave followers--and making it spellbinding. The cast of characters is tremendous; King himself, at the center through the first volume, by the second volume is only the most important voice of many, disappearing from the narrative for pages at a time. Branch gives us real insight into countless figures, including the Kennedys, Malcolm X, Lyndon Johnson, Bayard Rustin, Bob Moses, J. Edgar Hoover, Adam Clayton Powell, James Bevel, John Doar, and Fannie Lou Hamer. Without ever sacrificing the tone of a serious historian, Branch makes moments of high drama such as James Meredith's integration of Ole Miss as gripping as any thriller, and he's equally good at explaining the intricate political maneuvering, both high- and low-level, that underlay every bit of forward progress. Somehow, he makes it easy to keep track of the movement's proliferation of acronym-named organizations and their leaders, as well as dozens of different protest actions in cities across the United States. There truly is never a dull moment.

Branch accomplishes both of what I see as the historian's highest goals, fully bringing the period and its people to life and making clear the very real possibility that these events, many of them completely familiar to us by now, could easily have happened in a different way, or not at all. The two goals are deeply interconnected: placing us so firmly in the time constantly (if indirectly) reminds us that progress is not inexorable and that history is the product of individual decisions, in this case often ones of jaw-dropping bravery at great personal cost. It's a stunning achievement, and it makes America in the King Years the best history writing I've ever read, hands down.

At the same time, by bringing to life the complexity underlying the simplistic national narrative of progress in civil rights, Branch points the way to an understanding of the following forty years of politics, from Nixon to Reagan to Bush, from the crumbling of the Solid South to the continuing (but nearly finished) realignment of the Republicans and Democrats into Southern vs. Northern, Rural vs. Urban, lily-White vs. multi-racial parties. If I were to teach a class in contemporary politics (for which I'd be astonishingly unqualified), I'd start my syllabus with this trilogy, Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001), and Garry Wills's Nixon Agonistes (1970); from them alone, I think even a novice student of American history could gain a working understanding of how we've ended up where we are as a nation.

But start with Taylor Branch. It will make you think in complicated ways about race, rights, American history, personal responsibility, bravery, non-violence, organization, power, and an uncountable host of other topics. In other words, I guarantee it will be worth your time.