The Hill Country, Electricity, and Lyndon Johnson
After I gave a short talk last week about the relationship between high-speed internet access and economic growth (to a violently skeptical crowd - one person asked, “Why do we care whether someone 100 miles outside Texarkana has access to the Internet?”), someone came by my office and suggested that I take a look at Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson.
Caro describes just how hard it was to get through life in West Texas Hill Country without electricity. Wash day and ironing were unbelievably grueling. Tired arms, tired backs, big fires in hot weather, endless trips to haul the water; the irons (made of iron, heated on a wood stove) burned hands and left blister on top of blister. No entertainment - no radio, no light to read by. A bare and difficult life.
Johnson managed to get money from the Rural Electrification Administration to bring 1800 miles of power lines into Hill Country. It took an awfully long time for power to actually reach houses. Here’s the end of the story (or the beginning):
[I]t had been so long since the wiring was installed…that they couldn’t remember whether the switches were in the ON or OFF position.
But then one evening in November, 1939, the Smiths were returning from Johnson City..and as they neared their farmhouse, something was different.
“Oh my God,” her mother said. “The house is on fire!”
But as they got closer, they saw the light wasn’t fire. “No, Mama, ” Evelyn said. “The lights are on.”
They were on all over the Hill Country. And all over the Hill Country …. people began to name their kids for Lyndon Johnson.