Lyndon’s Granddaddy: Samuel Ealy Johnson Sr., Texas Populism, and the Improbable Roots of American Liberalism

Portrait of Sam Ealy Johnson Sr.: Civil War veteran, trail driver, Populist, and grandfather of Lyndon Baines Johnson. Courtesy LBJ Library.

In January 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson delivered his first inaugural address since winning a landslide victory over Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election. Johnson used the occasion to enunciate his vision for what he called “the Great Society,” an unprecedented use of government power intended to fight poverty, end discrimination against minorities and women, clean up the environment, provide health care to the elderly, and improve education. “In a land of great wealth,” Johnson declared, “families must not live in hopeless poverty. In a land rich in harvest, children just must not go hungry. In a land of healing miracles, neighbors must not suffer and die unattended. In a great land of learning and scholars, young people must be taught to read and write.”¹

Most historians today view the mid-sixties and LBJ’s Great Society as the high point of American liberalism, an idealistic time when more Americans than ever before—or since—believed that widespread public problems could be addressed through public solutions. Of course, Johnson did not invent modern liberalism; LBJ himself credited Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal for having shaped his political consciousness: “If you look at my record,” he once said, “you would know that I am a Roosevelt New Dealer. As a matter of fact,” he added, “John F. Kennedy was a little too conservative to suit my taste.”²

But crediting the New Deal with creating LBJ’s—or America’s—version of liberalism still begs the question of the true roots of that liberalism. LBJ, after all, was born in 1908 and thus was a grown man and a college graduate with two years spent teaching school and a year as a congressional staffer when FDR took office and launched the New Deal. And the congressional majority that enacted the New Deal’s legislation and the millions of voters who elected those representatives surely must have had some political experiences that allowed them to embrace the new role of government in American society that Roosevelt envisioned. What were those experiences?

Political historians have sometimes located the roots—or at least some of the roots—of American liberalism in the progressive movement of the early twentieth century. Indeed, Lyndon’s father, Sam Ealy Johnson Jr., was elected to the Texas legislature six times between 1904 and 1922. His career coincided with the first term of progressive governor Thomas Campbell and also included service alongside the future New Dealer and powerful U.S. House speaker, Sam Rayburn. As a legislator, Johnson championed some modestly progressive measures, including a relief bill for drought-stricken ranchers and a law regulating the sale of railroad securities. As a youngster, Lyndon sometimes accompanied his father to the legislative sessions in Austin.³ But in a very real way, both Lyndon and Sam stood in the shadows of Lyndon’s grandfather and Sam’s namesake, Sam Ealy Johnson Sr., a man about whom surprisingly little has been written. The following essay will explore the life and career of “Big Sam” Johnson, as friends and family called him to distinguish between him and his son Sam Jr. It may be a stretch to trace a direct line between the political thought and career of Big Sam in 1890s and the architect of the Great Society in the 1960s, but I believe that it is an exercise worth doing and one that may shed some important light on the roots of modern American liberalism.

Sam Johnson’s story begins with his birth in Alabama in 1838, the youngest of ten children. After a stint in Georgia, the family moved west to Texas, settling near Lockhart in Caldwell County, south of Austin, in 1846. Sam’s father died when he was seventeen and his mother a year later, but he was lucky to have two older brothers, Jack and Tom, who...