Special Collections and Archives

Interview for the LBJ 100 Oral History Project

Bob Barton Jr. talks about the common history of the Johnson family and his own family, starting around 1870s, when they all lived in settlements in Hays County. He goes on to tell stories about the Johnson family and Lyndon's rise into politics.  Barton also talks about the political landscape of San Marcos and the antiwar movement on campus.

Full audio is available for this interview. Reading Room access only.

Transcript (PDF) not available.

Interview with Bob Barton

Interviewer: Barbara Thibodeaux

Date of Interview: March 6, 2008

Location: Office of the Hays Free Press, Kyle, Texas

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THIBODEAUX: Bob Barton, a Hays County native, longtime newspaper publisher, former state representative, former Hays County Democratic Party Chair, and a 1954 Texas State University history graduate.  Mr. Barton is currently the publisher of the Hays Free Press serving Hays County and southern Travis County.

THIBODEAUX: This recording is part of the LBJ Centennial Celebration Oral History Project sponsored by Texas State University. Today is March 6, 2008. My name is Barbara Thibodeaux. I am interviewing Bob Barton at the Free Press in Kyle, Texas.                 

Mr. Barton, even though you have agreed to the terms and conditions of the release pertaining to this interview in writing, will you also verbally acknowledge your acceptance with a yes or a no?

BARTON:  Yes.

THIBODEAUX:  Thank you very much.

I thought we’d talk today—I don’t even know where to start with you. (laughs)

BARTON:  Okay.

THIBODEAUX:  Just maybe some background information because I know your family goes so far back, and I’m not sure if they may have known the Johnson family early on.

BARTON: Well, of course, Lyndon’s grandfather lived in Mountain City, which was the original settlement here before there was a Buda or a Kyle, or lived near the edge of Buda actually, of what’s now Buda but was not then. So, yes, our families go back into the 1870s, not necessarily intimately but as a member of the same community, which was generally called Mountain City. And it was no town, it was just a settlement strung along the stagecoach line between Manchaca Springs and San Marcos. So they did go a way back, and because I’m an amateur historian, I’ve certainly done some reading of the early newspapers and gathering of some recollections and perhaps some mythology involving the Johnson family in the period, of course, before Lyndon was born and about the time his father was born was when they lived there. So, yes, I do have some information that goes far back.

I was not an intimate friend or even a friend of Johnson. I was someone who probably voted for him every time he ran when I was an adult. And my grandfather and his father had a friendship, to answer you generally.

THIBODEAUX:  Can you describe that relationship?

BARTON: Well, let me go back—and I don’t know what sort of order you want. There’re some great—Johnson—I think his grandfather after the Civil War moved to what is now the city limits of Buda on Onion Creek and had a farm there at what was then called the Mountain City Onion Creek area and participated in community affairs and was active in. One of his daughters, who would’ve been Lyndon’s aunt, was “queen of the may” there sometime in the ‘70s, very active in the community.

And old-timers tell the tale of Lyndon’s grandfather intervening in a argument where one of the local “bad men” [Speaker is saying, “With quotation.”] I don’t know how bad he was—but at least an aggressor—interrupted a fight between two men. The loser in it being a unnamed farmer or neighbor of his, and in the exchange of the dialogue between Johnson and the winner of the fight, this man threatened Johnson’s—to either whip him or shoot him. I’ve heard it both ways. And that that was one of the reasons—and perhaps not the major reason—that he moved on to Blanco County and the Johnson City area, where he already had relatives. I’m sure it’s more complicated than that. He had a large—quite a number of children, five or six—I don’t know how many. You know or somebody does—and that that was one of the reasons that he decided to leave. Those were—I’m sure, opportunities to do better would’ve been a factor.

I had an old great-uncle that lived—Edwin Nivens—who lived to be ninety and told a story. Of course, Lyndon was congressman and then senator and then president, so this must have been about the time—he lived to be almost a hundred. So it would’ve been sometime during Lyndon’s presidency that his story on—his recollection about the Johnson family was that when they moved and left Buda, that Edwin Nivens, having been the first baby born after the town was founded in 1881, that he was a small child. And when they left the neighborhood that they either stopped or visited with the Johnson family and the Nivens family and that Lyndon’s father had taken a fancy to a marble, what he called a steely, which was a steel marble that you played—and was somewhat younger than he was and cried to have it. His father made him give it to Lyndon’s father, and so in a jocular mood said, “I don’t know if I’ll vote for Lyndon or not because his daddy took my favorite marble when I was a little boy and never did…I cried about it.” So there were those sort of relationships.

Lyndon’s father moved to Johnson City or to the Johnson City area and then in the ‘90s—and you’d have to check the—his father ran for the legislature as a populist back during the part of the 1890s when the populists and the democrats were struggling and farm prices were bad and business was bad. So he did some campaigning here and all over. And some of the early day Hays County newspapers have a little bit of information there, and he ran and lost but carried the Buda section—or what by that time it was Buda—because at least most of the people there remembered him with fondness. When he left the county, it was at least because he’d done a good deed, according to that particular story. Then much later when Lyndon’s father was in the legislature—so there was that connection.

So that when his father got elected to the legislature after the turn of the century, that I think he came by buggy to Buda or caught the train in Buda and would ride to the legislature for the session at least. So they retained friendships there that lasted into Lyndon’s time. There were still families and Lyndon was good at mining that sort of relationship that gave you some feeling of belonging. So at least the Buda area in those have a claim to some familial relationship with them.

THIBODEAUX:  So did your father have any type of relationship with Lyndon?

BARTON:  Of course, Lyndon when he was running the National Youth [Administration, NYA] —when he came back to Texas from having worked with Congressman [Richard] Kleberg, that he took the NYA job, he was living in Austin. And so he renewed acquaintanceships and through running NYA, plus he’d gone to, of course, school at Texas State. My grandfather, Henry Barton, had married a—courted in the 18—late ‘90s a woman from Willow City, which is in Gillespie County, but it’s in the vicinity of Johnson City. Anyway, and so his story was that he and Lyndon’s father had courted together during that time, so those were connections that everybody have. Some of them perhaps exaggerated, you know, as Lyndon rose somewhat to fame. But that was not an intimate relationship.

Lyndon, of course, ran for that first election. In fact, when I was down for the Obama rally, my earliest recollection of his going there in the summer, I believe, of ’37 when Lyndon announced for Congress when Buchanan died and along with six or seven other people in the Tenth Congressional District. And he ran—I have vague recollections of going with my father. My father was superintendent of the schools at Buda at the time. My grandfather was—nearly everybody were New Dealers in those first years into the ‘30s at least. So he’d been a farmer and ran a cotton gin and because—I’m sure familiar relationships and there were only a handful of republicans in any of the small towns, one or two families, so that when the presidential—the times that republicans won the presidential election, somebody was going to get to be postmaster, which was a good job. So every town had one or two republicans and one or two drunks, you know. Maybe more than one or two drunks. So, yes, there was that sort of friendly relations and obviously some neighborhood recollections that created friendships within one of Lyndon’s—and you probably need to—he’s dead. Sherman Birdwell is dead, but he worked for Lyndon as a NYA guy, then continued to—he ran one of the funeral homes in Austin. Anyway, there were a lot of connections through the years that Lyndon—because he had some Kyle connections too with the Bunton family, which were related on his father’s side too. His father had married into the Bunton family. So he mined that too, as all good politicians do. Most of these are before my time, but his congressional career started in ’37.

So I cut my teeth with his first election for the Senate, which he—thereafter the war and the big Coke Stevenson fight. Most of the people here were loyal to him although there was an anti-Lyndon faction that—I’m sure you’ve talked with the Henry Kyle family or you will.

THIBODEAUX:  No, not yet.

BARTON:  Not yet, but I hope you do. I mean, Henry’s no longer around, but there were others that went to the—hard feelings there had developed over campus politics, I think, at Texas State. But there were a number of families here fell out with him over parochial or local interest here in Kyle. Hearing about it later after I came here and went into business more than fifty years ago back in the newspaper business—and I’ve been in and out—but it was strong Lyndon Johnson country during certainly the ‘30s and the ‘40s. He carried it in his early—his reelection bids and then did quite well in his Senate career when he first ran for the Senate.

Then later I graduated from high school in Buda in ’47. You know, he sent letters to every graduate in his whole district. In that sort of constituent services he was quite, quite good at. But I never had a personal relationship with him. A good bit of age difference, and my moving into the present in 1956 at the first—I was an active populistic maybe liberal democrat, so even by the time he’d gotten in the Senate, I wasn’t always with him on issues. I was—he tended to be more conservative—in my youth was an anti-—but he was nominated by oil interests and big business interests, and I have great admiration for what he did, of course, as far as the civil rights bills of the ‘90s [60s]. I ended up being an opponent of the war with Vietnam, and so there were some periods of alienation—of some alienation in some of those periods. But he had great, great skills.

I was mentioning back in the early ‘50s. As a very young man the first state democratic convention I went to there was a fight. And it sounds very parochial now between the—I tended to be a Ralph Yarborough democrat, which was the most liberal wing of the Democratic Party, so we did not always get along. But I was very friendly with the Johnson people, so the first convention I went to—state convention in ’56 when Lyndon was a favorite son but not really given much chance of winning.

But the state convention divided. We had had a big fight between the forces of Governor Shivers and Lyndon Johnson, and by that time Ralph Yarborough had been elected to the United States Senate. So when Yarborough and Johnson didn’t always get along, but Sam Rayburn got them altogether. So there were loyalist democrats and there were Shiver democrats. So I got elected, I believe, as an alternate that year among Judge Will Burnett and Ernest Morgan and a number of Lyndon loyalists. We had a very—again, sounds very parochial now—a big fight between who would be national committeewoman from Texas and many of Johnson’s closest supporters in San Marcos. Judge Burnett and Ernest Morgan and others that were there, Yancey Yarborough, all were delegates. And some of us—I was in my mid-twenties—were alternates, and we sat up in the balcony. But they got into this big fight over who would be national committeewoman, and the most liberal of the committeewomen that Johnson—a woman called Frankie Randolph was running. Lyndon was trying to stop her being elected even though we’d all sided together earlier to support him for favorite son.

On that, they split into factions. It was so close that he started calling in individual delegations to lean on his people that were torn both ways. San Marcos was particularly torn because the leader for Mrs. Randolph from Houston was a prominent San Marcos man. Now I can’t call Smith’s…

THIBODEAUX:  J. Edwin?

BARTON:  J. Edwin Smith.  J. Edwin Smith was the campaign manager for Mrs. Randolph. So some of these men were terribly torn because they were good friends—some of them had gone to school with both Lyndon and Smith. So their solution late in the day was one by one they would call those of us who were alternates and say, “We’re going home. We promised J. Edwin we’d support his candidates, but Lyndon will call us in and lean on us and call up old friendships. It’s just too hard. We’re going home and you all are delegates.” So you need to talk to Al Lowman. You maybe have already talked to him. (laughs) He and a guy named Henry Armbrister in Buda, who’s now a very ultraconservative but he would remember this. I remember the three of us replacing Judge Burnett, who wasn’t scared of the devil or anybody else, but he didn’t want to—and replaced two or three of them. So the one chance I had to have a one-on-one relationship with Lyndon, we went off and hid to keep from having to—or made ourselves scarce. (Thibodeaux laughs) So that’s the way I remember it. They may disagree. At least I can speak for myself, so none of us went. We had the moral—at least I didn’t—to be able to withstand his arm around you and leaning on you a little bit.

Then when he ascended to the presidency in the election of ’64, I was living in Austin but had a business in San Marcos, so we had a spirited campaign, and I was not deeply involved in the organization of the county for him. But we had a guy named Bill Malone, who’s an ex-professor there, had just come to San Marcos, a historian, who now lives in Minnesota and is retired and had taught at other schools later on. He and a guy named Charles Chandler, who I believe was a sociology prof. there, had written a song that we had a lot of fun with called “His Name is Lyndon, but it’s not Andrew Johnson,” which was funny and humorous and they sang it at rallies.

So in the ’64 election and even after he was elected in his own right, there was a large element of us in San—I mean, a small element perhaps—more liberal people who were with him on his civil rights and much of his legislation, but were frowned upon still by the—we were still sort of a one-party state. And the republicans were very, very weak at that time. So we had, in my viewpoint and others’ viewpoint, the majority of the people in the Democratic Party really weren’t democrats. So we had that strife.

So I remember the convention probably of ’66 before we’d gotten deep in the war, where the county democratic convention was dominated by Lyndon loyalists, but those of us who were too liberal were basically in the minority. Even though in the big library box in San Marcos, I remember having a roomful of people. We were in the—progressive liberals or whatever they were called were in the minority. And we introduced a string of resolutions, all of them backing things that Lyndon was supportive of, but his older friends, more conservative friends, established friends, started the business establishment, voted against every one of those, and then they voted to endorse Lyndon and sent people pledged to Lyndon. As I recall, maybe Dr. Bill Pool, who was a progressive liberal supporter and had a little more prominence and perhaps was on the city council at the time, I think they chose him as the one token liberal to be on the delegation to the state convention that year. 

But he did some wonderful things. I was in business, ran the Colloquium Bookstore for twenty-five years and was certainly active in the business and political. But I was at that time considered a renegade—you know, I became sort of a member of the majority as we divided into two parties. But so I really had no particular—other than being in the crowd when he frequently came there to speak. When he announced—introduced his legislation in San Marcos in the assembly to create the Job Corps was a neat time. So I have positive memories of him and reflecting backward thirty years, there was a lot more good to him than bad. And he cared about poor people. He made compromises, as all politicians do, as a young man to get where he’d gotten. He probably wouldn’t have gotten there if he had not. (laughs)

I’ve just been reading some recollections of someone that had worked for Sam Rayburn, whom I did admire, who’d always been a little bit more—he represented a district that he could afford to be more liberal than perhaps Lyndon could. I make excuses for him. (Thibodeaux laughs) At some of those times, I actually was so anti-war that it was not a very—I worked for a guy named Fagan Dickson, who ran against Jake Pickle in ’68 right before Lyndon was going to run and then withdrew. This Fagan Dickson, who lived and was an Austin lawyer and had been old liberal warhorse. I’d gone and volunteered and worked the rural counties for him in his congressional race, and he ran on a platform and had signs up, “Bring Lyndon Home,” as a protest against the war. Of course, then Lyndon withdrew and Fagan quit his campaign, but was still on the ballot. It was not a very friendly reception in San Marcos or Georgetown or any of the towns because Lyndon was much loved by people that cared about him. So there was sort of a third group of us in fairly small minorities that certainly weren’t republicans were more on the war.

Of course, then it happened on campus too. There was marches and that sort of thing against the war. That’s pretty much my story, and I’m sticking it with. (Both laugh) But I’ll be glad to answer any questions or whatever.

THIBODEAUX:  Well then, I think I’ll back up, but I do want to get back to the war protest in just a little bit because—

BARTON:         Okay.

THIBODEAUX:  —there seems to be amnesia among many people when it comes to that.

BARTON:         Yes, they are. I’m old and can be more honest than some. Maybe I’m no more honest. I’m jaundiced in my viewpoints, of course.

THIBODEAUX:  (laughs) I did read in a recent article that you mentioned that you had just some memories of what life was like before rural electrification.

BARTON:  Yeah. It’s one of the reasons people loved Lyndon here regardless of his politics. Because I do think—and I was a child, I mean, seven or eight, when the rural—we had—I lived in downtown Buda and we had electricity. I moved to the country during the war and we didn’t have—the house we moved into didn’t have electricity, and things were frozen. So I lived several years with lamps when I was a teenager. So I even—but the vast difference it made. It was enormous, and he is due a great—I mean, there were other people working on it, but he capitalized on the movement and had the strength and the ability to—the tremendous ability—to lean on people and to manipulate people. When I mentioned his charm and his energy was so great, that at the age of twenty-six when I had a chance to visit with him, I didn’t want to visit with him because I was pretty confident that if he leaned on me, I’d end up voting the way he wanted to.

But back to the electricity, it was an enormous—he was a New Dealer in that campaign he ran. President Roosevelt endorsed him and he ran for packing the court. I was too young with that and he might’ve been more liberal than I was at the same place in life.

And all sorts of people loved him, and they still loved him when he became—I think he predicted that his action on the civil rights bill would lose the South for the democrats for many years to come, and it proved to be true. So it was an act of courage, and I think—their family was—if you read—they were genteel poor is what they were. His mother well-educated, but they lived just above the poverty line, and I think apparently—I’ve read a lot about his father was kind of a ne’er do well, a good politician, was a popular man, but had a hard time making a living. It’s a very—that first [Robert] Caro book about how fragile—we’re on the edge of the desert, and more bad times through the years than good. My family’s been in the agriculture or ranching business here since, well, maybe in the early years. My great-great-grandfather came as a Mexican land grant, and he was probably a land speculator. But very quickly they tried to make a living out of agriculture and some years did quite well and were by rural standards modestly well off, but by the standards of the Census Bureau would be somewhere in the middle class or down a step or two most of those years.

And the Johnsons were just like that except they were that political—I mean, both his grandfather and his father, I think, were political animals and popular perhaps in practical. I once told—I’d read his grandfather when he ran for the legislature as a populist, it was the—Grover Cleveland was president. And I had found this little tidbit of information in one of the old San Marcos papers that was anti-populist—so it may not have been true—quoting Lyndon’s grandfather as saying in some speech—and they used it against him—that somebody ought to shoot Grover Cleveland. Well, I made the mistake of telling Luci—trying to tell Lynda, I guess—she and Chuck [Robb] had some gathering—just in some causal moment about—I was bragging on him for being a populist. And she looked at me like, you know, what—I’m sure she thought I was demeaning the family and I was trying to say I had admiration for him ever since his—and then I may have said something like, you know, “I wish Lyndon’d been more like his grandfather.” But I may have said that at the time, I don’t—or I probably felt that at times. But anyway, history is going to prove him to be like most people, flawed in some ways but had greatness about him and did some wonderful courageous things.

THIBODEAUX:  The elections between—because he was congressman for, like, about eleven years—

BARTON: Right.

THIBODEAUX:  —and then senator for a while. Did he ever have any competition during those years?

BARTON:  Yeah. Of course, that first election, which I don’t remember but I’ve read about it, he ran with the support of the New Dealers here at a time where a New Dealer was very, very popular. I don’t mean this in a bad way, but he was a smart man and he assessed the situation to being 100 percent Franklin Roosevelt man in 1937 was not a dumb thing to do. And a number of the candidates against him really would’ve been republicans if there’d been a Republican Party. There was a very small Republican Party, and they wanted to keep that way because mainly it was the way you got in line to be a postmaster, you know. I don’t think he had—perhaps in his second reelection, but as congressman, I mean, he dominated the scene. He never had a serious opponent after that first election, I don’t believe.

Then the Coke Stevenson race, which I was a teenager then and in high school, in this area he was still extremely popular. I haven’t looked recently. I’m sure he carried Hays County. He carried it all the way. Goldwater got, I don’t know, 35 percent of the vote or something. So there was unanimity among the business community and among—because of the burial of the young man that got—the Hispanic that got killed and then Johnson intervened, and because of his experiences as a schoolteacher in—what—Cotulla, I believe. He always had strong support within the minorities. The minority community didn’t vote in very large number, nor were they encouraged to vote by the people that were Lyndon supporters. I mean, he probably evaluated it. He was as liberal as he could be and be a senator. I’m critical of him—parts of me are critical of him for taking that attitude, but then he wouldn’t have done a lot of good—if he hadn’t been there, he wouldn’t have done the good things that he did.

THIBODEAUX:  So you started at Southwest Texas State Teachers College— 

BARTON:  I did.

THIBODEAUX:  —in 1950.

BARTON:  No. I actually went there in the fall of—I was still seventeen years old. I went to college for a year and commuted and then went—in the Berlin Crisis I went into experimental universal military training at eighteen for a year. Then when the Korean War broke out, I’d been back in school a year, so it took me six years—I went to the army twice. I volunteered in the Korean War and went back for a little over a year. So I was there—I finally graduated in January of ’54, I believe, or something.  

THIBODEAUX:  So what was, I guess, the political landscape of San Marcos like?

BARTON:  I worked on a couple of out-of-state newspapers, and I came back and went into the—my father-in-law was a local merchant here in Kyle and then he also was a Ford tractor dealer. So we bought—I was working out-of-state on a newspaper, and he bought the Ford tractor dealership in Austin, so I moved to Austin for three or four years, but I really wanted to come back to Hays County. So we founded Colloquium Bookstore there in ’63. So I came back in spirit for a year or two in actuality but lived in Austin for a year or two. So I came back to San Marcos.

And it was quite a different town. It was full of second-class citizens including the students. So I was fairly deeply involved in city politics in the late ‘60s and mainly the early ‘70s or most of the ‘70s, where we used some of the idealism of Lyndon. I mean, that wasn’t the spark of it, but people that, as I said earlier, that we had a rebellion within the community of uniting Hispanics, which was the largest group. Not many African Americans, lots of students, but a great divergent of—they wanted to talk about the war. The police for a period of time treated them somewhat as second-class citizens. It was not an easy thing to build a coalition between students and culturally conservative Hispanics on cultural issues, except the war and the antipoverty program that Lyndon, of course, had started, and all the work that a lot—the emergence of a lot of Hispanic and smaller numbers because they were a smaller community of African Americans and some student leaders. So it were some fun—I don’t know if fun’s a good word—but an interesting and exciting time. And I was somewhat insulated from the one I have—my mother’s side, my uncle had been a president of the old Coronal College [Methodist College in San Marcos from the 1870s to about 1920], and her grandfather had been the Methodist preacher. So I was sort of old family removed by a good many years in San Marcos and because I wasn’t a BISM, I wasn’t born in San Marcos, but I was a BIHC, born in Hays County, so made some excuses among some people for the fact that I was on the wrong side politically at least with some really good people in San Marcos. Most of that through the years, you know, dissipated considerably.

THIBODEAUX:  I’ve always heard that on campus it was still pretty conservative, pretty mild. Was there a bigger antiwar movement in San Marcos?

BARTON: We had two things. We had the antiwar movement and the anti—

THIBODEAUX:  McCrocklin?

BARTON:  —President McCrocklin got in trouble over, and I was fairly deeply involved in that because I had friends. Most of the profs. that exposed that or revealed that or whatever you want to say, it was backed up later by UT. And those were not—I mean, there were a lot of good people on both sides, but that. But the antiwar—we had lots of marches and lots of—and I was in a—I went to bond for people on—I, myself, was and am anti-drug, but I was not unfriendly to people that got picked up for marijuana or something.

And I operate a business that economically was not dependent on the goodwill of my fellow Anglo merchants. Some of them I was unfriendly with and they were unfriendly with me, but I was insulated somewhat because I was dealing—that was where my natural inclinations were, but it was nice not to have the pressure of— 

One of my acquaintances—and now really friends—in some bitter argument—and I’m not going to mention his name because we’ve long since healed the breach—but he was also in business in San Marcos. In this argument he in a moment of heat said, “You’re so wrong and you’ve done so many bad things that I’m going to organize a boycott of your business,” and I think then he went home and thought about it for a while. And he was in a business that dealt with students, and so he called me the next morning early and said, “Let’s have breakfast together.” He said, “I was just hotheaded and I don’t want to start—and please don’t try to organize one against me,” which I don’t think I would’ve done, I didn’t do and we became—

So there was great fear. When students were given the right to vote, some people in town thought San Marcos was going to hell in a hand-basket. Of course, I was very much for—we found out in the 1972 election when Richard Nixon ran, that most of the students voted the way their parents did.

THIBODEAUX:  Yeah.

BARTON:  And those of us that were for the democratic candidates in those years got wiped out. We were in the vast—it wasn’t much better with Stevenson. There was some in internal city politics—there was, I think, a progressive spirit that developed. Then even that is—those old divisions no longer exist. New ones exist, and I’ve lived back down here where I grew up for the last twenty years, so I’m not intimately involved with that, but there was.

And the antiwar thing was a—it did develop. The bond that—it was one of the bonds and it worked out that the police got better. I mean, there was a period of time where long-haired students were harassed, and there were people that didn’t want students—didn’t want people to vote at eighteen. Of course, we also had a period of time where you could drink at eighteen too, which was a big economic thing. I think most people—I’m sure I supported the right to it. I’m not upset by it being twenty-one again.

THIBODEAUX:  That brings to me a question. I’ve read that there was a cross-burning in your yard.  

BARTON: Okay. There was. You’ve done a lot of reading. Yeah, there was. During the—I can’t remember whether it was in the McCrocklin days or the—it was more of local politics than anything, I think. I was one of the principal Anglos in that coalition, which numerically was more student. There were what people called then the liberal element. That’s profs. and others within the San Marcos community. This was after Martin Luther King being shot and Bobby Kennedy being shot. Of course, a little earlier of John Kennedy being shot. So there were strong feelings on both sides, and I was—in fact, Bill Crook’s—Elizabeth Crook told me—no, I believe she wrote in the article that she wrote about—I don’t know if you’ve read in Texas Monthly. In fact, you probably ought to talk to some of the Crook family. Have you?

THIBODEAUX:  I did talk to Eleanor.

BARTON: Bill was supportive and liberal and progressive, whatever word you want to use during that period of time—so we were very friendly. But he also had because of the wealth of the family and he’d been an intimate of—more than most anybody except some of the old-time families—of Lyndon’s. But Eleanor [Elizabeth, Bill Crook’s daughter] about the cross-burning said her dad was always jealous because they burned a cross on my yard and two or three days later, Celestino Mendez, who just got beat for county commissioner there—he came back from that—they burned one on—he was the leader of what we called then the Independent Party because we were so disgusted with at least overt racism of the Democratic Party. There was a period of time in the ‘70s that we called ourselves the Independent Party and were independent of the established democrats, and I don’t know when that—we sort of moved out on the fringes, the old-line democrats started in greater numbers becoming republicans, and it was a lot easier to get along with each other.

I’ve just been through—we had three hundred people in Kyle the night before last at our democratic convention the first time. The last we’d had that kind of contentiousness was in the ’72 when Gene McCarthy—and the last big fight in San Marcos was that year when, again, sort of over the last remnants of the Vietnam War that passions were that great. Although this was much more—this was just democrats, now, (laughs) so most of the people that we were fighting with in San Marcos, the large percentage of them had gone on to the Republican Party. Even though a lot of the Reagan democrats are coming home, in my opinion, because of the great—we voted twenty thousand people, and the republicans voted eight this week and we had a hotter election.

But, yeah, that’s right. The cross-burning was—I’ve always—the cops came and got it, and leading a busy life, I wished many a time I’d got—it’d be a great relic to hang on your wall. So but anyway, Crook was jealous of the fact that he hadn’t gotten one because he was very supportive of what we were doing not always as open. I mean, he had other fish to fry and that sort of thing. But he’s a good guy, and his wife’s a wonderful person. Mary Elizabeth, she was a small—in her article in the Texas Monthly about the boycott of the—I don’t know if you’ve—it didn’t have to do with Lyndon Johnson. We had an organized boycott of the schools because of dress codes in San Marcos and so we organized a boycott of the schools in great, great—a third of the city was perhaps boycotted for one day, and they had something down in the park. But she wrote about it because she was all decided. She and my older son were good friends there and still are, but she was more interested in making grades, and she’s talking about how disappointed her father was in it and how regretful that he hadn’t—although he was supportive of us, he wasn’t directly involved. Anyway, it’s a good story and she’s a good storyteller. Yeah.

THIBODEAUX:  I was surprised to read that the Good Government—good citizens committee—

BARTON: Good Government League, yeah.

THIBODEAUX:  —Good Government League—thank you. It just went right out of my mind—existed in San Marcos.

BARTON: Well, we scared them pretty badly, you know. We had hippies in our—and it was that period of time. Though really they were frightened. As I say, even some of them probably voted for Nixon. We got awakened to the fact that it was harder—we held the coalition together on local elections, and most students were not. Most students didn’t march in the antiwar parades. But it was popular and it was sort of the Obama thing with a different flavor to it, I think. And this is really the crowd they had the other night in San Marcos, ten or twelve thousand people, except they’re so dad-gum well-behaved. They listened. (laughs)

THIBODEAUX:  That was my words that I used to describe it too. I was there, and I was telling someone, “They were just well-behaved.”

BARTON: They were. Now, I was in the back of the—I’d had a ticket to sit up on the front row, but I had a young friend that had driven in from A&M, so I gave him my ticket. So I went back and stood on the other side of the river behind everybody, and it was just—I was delighted by people caring about something and/or curiosity. But it’s a new world. They were instead of yelling slogans and cursing and some of them being high on drugs, all of them had their cameras in the air taking pictures. (laughs) So it’s in that sense refreshing.

Now, I was just—when you walked in—doing some—I’m a statistical nut, so I was doing some compiling, and I’m a big Obama supporter. So we took this county and we’re going to have a county convention in three weeks I was gathering some—the Obama people are getting ready to organize to try to maximize or help as much as we can. I was just getting ready to do this—nowhere near ten thousand of them voted. A lot of them didn’t—we did well in Hays County, and I’m happy. And it’s better than it’s been in a long time, but it’s interesting.

I’ve lived long enough to reflect backwards, and I wish I could reflect a little further back. I find Caro’s book—I was fascinated with particularly that first book by all the fights on the campus between the various factions. I knew Henry Kyle. We were usually adversaries although he was so far to the right that we got along pretty well, I guess. (laughs) But his hatred—I’m sure you’ve—have you talked to anybody about that he and Alex Kercheville both refusing to use LBJ as their business addresses?

THIBODEAUX:  Yes. That is such a funny story. (Barton laughs) And that whole campus thing is kind of confusing to me because so far I haven’t been directed to any Black Stars to interview. But it’s kind of hard to understand if it was just friendly competition.

BARTON: I don’t think it was friendly.

THIBODEAUX:  Yeah. Or kind of rivalry.

BARTON: At least the fringes of it weren’t friendly in later years. 

THIBODEAUX:  Yes.

BARTON: And Henry would’ve been a great interview, and probably you ought to talk to his son, H. C., who has moderated greatly, and I think—I mean, he’s an antiwar—I don’t know if he’s even—he may have come back to the Democratic Party, I don’t know. But he’s, I know, on some—but I would imagine that he would be a pretty good interview to talk about his father and probably be pretty honest. I don’t know, but I have some admiration for him about his evaluations of stuff, and we’re not close friends by any stretch of the imagination.

THIBODEAUX:  Well, good. He’s on my list.

BARTON: Okay.

THIBODEAUX:  I think I kind of put him at the bottom since he was a son of a participant.

BARTON: And you didn’t get on this—because Smith, he’s been dead. He had some great stories. Too bad you—he probably has written some about Lyndon. I didn’t really get to know him until he moved back to San Marcos and we—I’d told him the story about he being—I had a great admiration for him because of back to the story where these guys went home for them because Lyndon was a powerful person, and he could lean on his friends. They took the smart way out. They were not going to vote—they had to choose between Smith and Lyndon, and they weren’t going to choose, and that’s probably a greater compliment to Smith than it is to Lyndon. (laughs)

THIBODEAUX:  Actually, my husband and I knew the Smiths in Houston and socialized with them.

BARTON:  Oh, did you?

THIBODEAUX:  Yeah, toward the end of his life.

BARTON: And of course, his carrying that fighting the— (equipment interruption)

THIBODEAUX:  We have twenty-five hours. (laughs)

BARTON: Need any help?  

THIBODEAUX:  Yeah. We’re in good shape. (laughs)

BARTON: Oh well, I don’t think I will last that long.  It may be on something. They put out a little booklet—I’ve forgotten who—somebody in the history department—on Smith before he died that I’ve got a copy of, and he told some of these stories.

THIBODEAUX:  Oh good, because I wanted to get that from the library. I just haven’t done it yet. We are good to go.

BARTON: Okay. Back to the Smiths—I don’t remember his stepfather’s name, but you’re going to come up with it. It’s not important. But anyway, the Ku Klux - two or three of them according to Smitty - called on him and said, “We understand you’re paying your black meat cutter the same thing you’re paying the white meat cutter.” His stepfather turned around in his small room there, reached back and got a great big meat cleaver and slammed it down on the table right there and said, “Yeah, I do, and what do you want to do about it?” The guy hastily beat a retreat and never heard from him again. So he was inspired by that example within in his own family to go off to—when he became a lawyer—to practicing because I think he had, he’d been a White Star, right?

THIBODEAUX:  Yes.

BARTON: And so there’d been a close friendship, but I witnessed that delegation of three or four or five San Marcans that would not go against—they’d pledged Edwin Smith that they’d support him and they were not going to violate that even if it meant thumbing their—not—maybe not but at least disappearing, as those of us that succeeded them did. But it was an exciting time.

The ‘70s were a great time to live in San Marcos, and we’re not ever going to recreate that feeling of comradeship and stuff—I mean, those just happen once or twice in life, although I have to admit this Obama thing has a taste of it. For this large crowd—except we were even more—the differences between those of us who are for Obama and those of us including some of employees that are for Hillary, we can laugh and joke about it without really totally splitting the blanket over it.

So there is enough animosity—I still remember that big convention we had. The last one—I mentioned the Gene McCarthy one, but then in ’72 when we had the McGovern thing that we had a convention there in the old Masonic Lodge that now is somebody’s private residence, that there were somewhere—seventy-five of us there, and we voted. There were something like sixty-seven for the conservative ticket and had seven or eight of us for McGovern. (laughs) And there was—you could almost reach out and touch the animosity in the crowd between us because that was before many people that belonged over in the Republican Party had gone. So it’s a much more civil discourse by having a two-party system than a no-party system.

THIBODEAUX:  But that period of time with the Shivercrats and the Yarborough and the Johnson factions, that’s really a fascinating story.

BARTON: Well, let me tell you one other story that’s directly related to Lyndon that I don’t know if you can work it in. In the 19 – I haven’t told you this one—56 precinct convention here in Kyle when Shivers—Sam Rayburn had something to do with it—when Shivers aligned himself openly with Eisenhower and decided to run as a favorite son, and Rayburn persuaded or cajoled Johnson into finally making a stand against Shivers. At that time we had two gubernatorial—in presidential years you had a caucus for the presidential race and then one later for the governor’s race.  You had two state conventions.

Kyle had only one voting precinct there, and we were a town of eight hundred, but we had the countryside. Strong feelings already existed from the—we had a strong element—a business element here that was anti-Johnson and then there were some extremely loyal Johnsonites. And there were others of us that were more closely aligned with Yarborough because he’d become senator, and statewide because everybody had ties to Rayburn. We’d gotten nearly—I think, nearly all those communities—maybe all of them—and many of us were also Lyndon Johnson people, just Yarborough was first and he was second.

We agreed sort of by osmosis to break into two camps and I was a young—had just married and was living here and still am running this little—it was a tiny country paper. But we organized for that convention not really through any hard work, just everybody—Johnson had things up, and I’m sure Shivers had them, and there were meetings beforehand. But we met over here in a summer afternoon because the first one was in the early summer, and I have since found the list of the people that attended it.

About twenty years ago in the courthouse before it got remodeled, they were very careless with the historical records, and I went down to the basement to where water was seeping in. And there were a bunch of—really probably didn’t belong in the county—but there was the minutes of earlier day democratic conventions from the ‘40s up to that period of time. I reached down and picked it up and decided I’d just walk out of there with it and stole it, I guess, except it was going to go to the trash pile. In there were the minutes of that meeting for a number of precincts including ours, very circumspect and not detailed, but in there was a list of everybody that attended. And I got with the friend who was a—I was teaching school then and had the newspaper on the side here—and we sat down between us and we, out of that hundred and twelve people that attended of this small town, we could still remember thirty years later which side everybody was on.

But we had a raucous convention. We had a man that’d just opened a pipe nipple factory had some in here from Houston, and he was violently anti-Johnson. And the local mayor here was anti-Johnson, so we divided into—got there with a hundred plus—it was slightly over a hundred people there, and filled up our old city hall over here, and it was completely crowded. So the only way to divide—the previous conventions had had ten or twelve people there for fifty years, so they decided to divide the room. Well, he had had a good many Hispanic employees—oh, 90 percent except for his—out at this factory. He’d told some of them he’d give them a bonus or something if they’d come to the convention. They had never been. So there were only three Hispanic guys there.

The merchant over here that ran the Bon Ton where the city hall is now, who was my father-in-law’s partner. And my father-in-law although he was wealthier than most people in town, he was also an old-line pure democrat. So we decided to test vote then as even now if the people realize it is on who’s going to be key deciding. To find out how people stand, we nominated my father-in-law because he probably had some debtors inside of that (laughs) room, and he was really wasn’t a speaker or anything.

So we couldn’t get an accurate count. We divided the room into two parts. Well, these three Hispanic guys, they were on a first name basis with many of the people on our side, so Cecil Bales, who ran the Bon Ton over here and other people, put their arms around these guys and got them over in the Lyndon Johnson- Yarborough crowd. Joe Brown had his forces standing up—had his foreman stand up waving desperately for these guys to come over there and join the Shivers side. We divided the room, as I remember, we won by only three or four. Those guys—if they’d switched, if they’d voted—anyway, we won that election. I mean, we won our precinct as they did in San Marcos.

Max Smith, who was Gwen Smith’s brother, was the state representative in San Marcos and a big, big force. He was the head of the Appropriations Committee and very anti-Johnson and probably he was a native of San Marcos. Maybe—I don’t think he went to college there, but maybe he did. But anyway, he’d fallen out with him long ago, ultraconservative. He’d been a big leader, so people in San Marcos were having the same sort of feuds, but ours developed in—we had a bridge club here—because only those three Hispanics. No blacks at all came to it. We won that by that narrow margin and had our county convention and supported Johnson for favorite son. That wasn’t—I don’t remember that as well as I remember this because we had our governor’s convention then about two months later, roughly the same crowd show up.

It was the run-off for the democratic primary, which was the election in those days. So it was just after seven o’clock after the polls closed, and we had the same large crowd. Same—we divided the room, and about that time it was extremely close on this election. Divided the room, and we had an even count between the two of sixty-to-sixty or forty-five-to-forty-five. I don’t have the minutes on that one.

The superintendent of the schools walked in. Well, they were all—at that time schoolteachers were getting twenty-four hundred and seventy dollars a year, so they tended to be all liberal and openly. Probably didn’t use loyalist democrats or whatever word we want to use. He walked in there where all his teachers, many of whom he was friendly with, and he was a big Lyndon Johnson man. But then he looked over to the other side of the room, and all of his school board members were over on that side of the room. (laughs) He didn’t hesitate long. He walked over and we lost that one because at the same time we heard that we had this prominent family that had been in this bridge club that I told you that had kind of really created hard feelings about it and had put a strain on their next meeting of their bridge club.

So we saw this fairly large woman who was married to a guy who was an old-line democrat who was deaf and dumb—or not dumb, deaf. Using the old-fashioned words inaccurately. And you heard all this grunting. We had very high windows over here. This lady, his wife, was halfway out the window trying to climb out not to have to be counted on the liberal or the Johnson side because it had already put all this strain, and he was grunting and trying to pull her back in.

As a result from that, the hard feelings developed. The guy that ran the pipe nickel factory out of anger at Cecil Bales, who had persuaded those Hispanics earlier, he bought a grocery store and went in competition with Bales and my father-in-law. So that was the most memorable up until the other night where it wasn’t that kind of animosities but tremendous confusion.

Both sides were so nervous that they took—well, one, you had to wait an hour and a half to let the lines go down, and then you had take thirty minutes to—they were making everybody put down their voter registration number one by one. So half the crowd—we did persuade both sides—I think, persuaded most people to stay and get signed in, so they would count. But it was a different sort of excitement and really a friendly—because we have got more than one party, and the people that really hated each other politically at least were not in the same room. They were off upstairs with the—some of us joked because they didn’t have many here even though the republicans could meet in a phone booth almost. But anyway, so it brought back recollections of that—the fire that existed during really more in that Shivers fight than the later ones where some of us were still on the reservation, but they were starting to peel off.

THIBODEAUX:  There was a lot of finessing and manipulating and—

BARTON: There was. Yes. And there was the other night too. It’s just more friendly. I know at least here we had no angry words that I experienced.

THIBODEAUX:  I’ve got more questions. (laughs)

BARTON: Oh, sure. I’ve been running off at the mouth. I’m sure my— 

THIBODEAUX:  No.

BARTON:  —cohorts here are tired of it, and you are probably getting a little weary.

THIBODEAUX:  No, not at all.

I do have questions about some of the Great Society programs that—

BARTON: Okay. Sure.

THIBODEAUX:  —and really in legacy. I’m more interested in LBJ’s greatest legacy here in Central Texas—

BARTON: Okay.

THIBODEAUX:  —not in the United States. So this can be your opinion.

BARTON: Okay.

THIBODEAUX: What do you think was probably his greatest legacy in this area?

BARTON: Well, for me at least, it’s his civil rights period there where he really made it possible for me to embrace—I mean, he at least took a stand that allows me to embrace black female friends openly, to be increasingly honest with each other, to even disagree with each other sometimes. And that’s made a tremendous difference in our communities, and it’s enabled us to reach the place where some people—I had a friend of mine at the coffee table who still uses—I don’t consider him a racist—but he still uses language that is racist. He came up to me and he dislikes Hillary a whole lot, and so I just sort of friendly in open session said, “If you really dislike Hillary, you need to vote for Obama in the democratic primary.” He said, “I don’t know if I can vote for a nigger or not,” (laughs) “but I sure do dislike her.” Well, he caught me on the street in front here a couple days after the last day of it. He said, “I want you to know that I voted for that n--, and I don’t feel too bad about it. Now, I may vote for McCain in the fall.” Well, that—some language hasn’t—he’s not. I have friends that frown when I—immediately dislike him if they don’t know him. He’s not a bad person, and as is true forty years ago. One of the biggest racists in town, who just opposed integration of the schools enormously, is a carpenter who sat down every day at lunch. He had many black friends. Now, there was a pecking order, and I’m not trying to excuse him. And he hated integration until we got our first black athletic hero, and then he was no longer a black man, he was a Kyle Panther. And that’s what the reaction of many people have had to Obama. Most people don’t see in black-and-white as much as they really think they do, and it’s so pleasant—not to have to—if he gets the nomination, just as Hillary. There are people that hate her for being a woman or a smart uppity woman. So it’s not gone, but I do think that the effects of the Great Society thirty years later are starting to payoff. We do have eighteen-year-old people and sixteen-year-old people that are colorblind, and I know of some not excluding a couple of people maybe within my hearing area— (end of CD) —that disagree with me. I think there are some young women that no longer see the glass ceiling that women friends who are forty years old and older still see because it existed and it was so painful.

Maybe I’m giving Lyndon too much credit for that but because the Lyndon Johnson of the ‘50s wouldn’t have done that. Or people will argue. I think there are people that will argue that that was in his heart all the time, he was just a pragmatic man, and he knew how far he could go and he’d kiss up to people that he had to kiss up to. I’m not sure about that, and really the effects are the same whatever his motivation. So to me there is no comparison to the openness of the society, and that to me is his greatest tribute.

Now, you know, I’ve told my friends—I’d been in the legislature briefly in the ‘80s. And I had run against Bill Cunningham, who’s a friend of mine and had worked for me, but he’s the PEC PR guy, that what happened to him all of a sudden and Burnett, who we’ve been adversaries at times, but just got bounced out. His reputation is greatly injured, the guy that was president of PEC—that they were just doing what A. W. Moursand and Lyndon—I mean, there was that kind of—because as long as the majority of the people or a substantial number of the people had lived in a time where there wasn’t any electricity, they excused all that. By god, you could go to—I grew up on a dairy and had to milk by hand instead of with electricity, it was horrible enough as it was. I have somewhat older friends that were living in the country the day they turned on the—and they can tell you what day it was still. They’re in their eighties. And that was a—but people don’t have that sentimentality now. The suburbanites not having—you know, electricity is a given. It’s Lyndon or PEC nor cut any slack for that. But also, I think he was influenced by growing up in a pretty hard society when the difference between being rich or poor or what comfortable and not comfortable was not very much you could change, as they did with the—I mean, he came out of—at least on the Bunton side—out of some affluence and hardscrabble Johnson family on the other side, to some degree.

THIBODEAUX: Well, that’s basically all the questions that I have. Is there anything else you would like to offer.

BARTON: No. I think I’ve given you—shot the entire herd. (laughs)

THIBODEAUX:  You answered all my questions before I asked them, so I appreciate that.

BARTON: Well, good.

THIBODEAUX:  The one question I had was about drawing a comparison with today’s election, and so I’m glad that you talked about that.

BARTON: Well, some of us have had—you ought to be old enough to—and there are not very many of us around—but I do think—and I have talked to Johnny Armstead, who died this last week, and I missed the funeral yesterday because I was—we had a paper to put out. We’ve talked. She’s somebody—Rose Brooks is another friend of mine from San Marcos back—politically. It’s just so relaxing and not so—I was living in Austin during that—still hadn’t moved to San Marcos when Kennedy was killed and the Martin Luther King period there. And there was among white liberals a feeling of living almost—I mean, that you were almost ghettoized or certainly ostracized if you were a liberal on race at a period of time there in Texas. And there was some resentment for a period of time among liberals and I think even if we didn’t have really personal relationships with Lyndon of standing up for him and he didn’t stand up for us. But when you reflect backwards it probably was perhaps the only way—you do what you can do. He was a master at doing as much as you can, and if there weren’t those of us who were saying, You didn’t do enough, I guess you would never do enough. There is a role for the pioneer to be a little bit further—I don’t know if it’s front or behind—but hearing the beat of a different drummer that there is a role for those people too.

THIBODEAUX: Thank you, Mr. Barton. I really— 

BARTON: Well, I had a good time.

THIBODEAUX:  —appreciate it. I did too.

(End of interview)