One of the most important tasks of the historian is to put events, movements, people, places, etc., in historical context. It really gets to the heart of the questions of “why and how” did something happen. Robert Caro takes this to new levels when it came to providing the “context” of Lyndon B. Johnson’s (LBJ) youth in west Texas. What was it like? What relationships did he have with his family? What role did the environment play in his development?
An urban New Yorker, graduate of an Ivy League university, and Jew could not have been more distant from background of the thirty-sixth president. Caro quickly realized that he had no understanding of where LBJ had come from and decided that the only solution was to immerse himself in west Texas. To wit, his superhumanly supportive wife, Ina Caro, quipped, “Why can't you do a biography of Napoleon?” (p.103) Nonetheless, the couple departed for hill country in 1976, only three years after LBJ’s death. It stood to reason that Caro could meet enough of his subject’s contemporaries that he could get a good flavor of what it must have been like for LBJ.
The Caros lived in Johnson country for three years, getting to know his former classmates and neighbors and emerged from the experience with a much better understanding of the environment that made LBJ. It was a hot, dusty, isolated country, mostly poor, and without electrification or running water. To some extent this explains LBJ’s notorious crudity, but also what inspired the future congressmen, senator, and president to his New Dealerism.
Family, of course, provided another context, that was rooted in the same place. Caro got to know LBJ’s surviving siblings. One of the most interesting parts of Workingis his description of how he finally tricked Sam Johnson, Lyndon’s youngest brother, to tell him what the family life had really been like. The problem was that Sam was a notorious bullshitter and Caro discounted most of the information that he received from that source. But how could he get some reliable information from Sam? In a most novel approach, Caro convinced the National Park Service to let him into the LBJ childhood home, put Sam Johnson at the kitchen table, stood behind him, and asked him questions, ones designed to probe deeper into the visceral experience of being at the Johnson kitchen table. Sam seemed almost hypnotized by the experience and described the family scene in intimate detail. And it proved that the kitchen table was not to be a warm and fuzzy place where family members came to break bread after a weary day; instead, it was a place of frequent clashes, some even violent, between Lyndon and his father. Poor Sam Johnson, the elder and father of the Lyndon and Sam, was a classic ne’er-do-well, prone to drink, hyperbole, and poor decisions, especially in financial matters. Young Lyndon came to see his father as a loser and source of embarrassment. This upbringing imparted a relentless drive to succeed. One can also see where LBJ got his west Texas populism, hunger for wealth, womanizing, and willingness to skirt legality.
I am not arguing that every graduate student should immerse themselves in some obscure, out-of-the-way place for three years during their dissertation to understand context. Certainly not! I did not follow that path myself, other than visiting the Bronx Zoo, which I had to do anyway for my research on William Temple Hornaday. Moreover, from what I picked up somewhere, what had once been Hornaday’s father’s farm is mostly paved over and subdivided. As many hardships as farm life possessed in the 1990s when I started my research, it would be hard, I would think, to get the same sense of what life was like 150 years before from an Iowa immersion. That level of understanding for me came through more clearly in his mother’s letters to her family Indiana in the 1850s and to her son Minos Miller during the Civil War. Her letters ooze with regret for having left a more settled and comfortable life for scratching out a new homestead from the earth in what still felt very much like the frontier. Despite Hornaday’s later accounts of an idyllic childhood, it was a hardscrabble, tough life. It was a story that only his mother told.
But, what I am saying, is that Caro calls to mind that context can have multiple definitions in historical and biographical writing. It was within Caro’s means to come into direct contact with the world of LBJ. He understood that was the case and acted to maximize its fleeting advantages.
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