Cotulla
How Democrats lost their way
Interstate 35 begins in Duluth, Minnesota at the Canadian border and runs southward, splitting the United States down the middle through Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma, along land as flat as a dime, until it reaches the Hill Country of Texas. There, at the Edwards Plateau, among Ashe Juniper trees and hills of limestone and granite, the Southwest begins. Just south of those hills, hills carved by wind, water, and time, the land sweeps into a flat, desert plain. And just 89 miles south of San Antonio, where that vast plain begins, there’s a little town called Cotulla.
In 1928, the town—just 68 miles north of the Mexican border—had just over 3,000 inhabitants, all but a quarter of whom were Mexican. Today, the numbers aren’t that different. Yet, 96 years ago, laws of racial segregation applied to most of Cotulla’s residents. The South in Southwest still applied. In Texas, both Black and Mexican Americans were held down by Jim Crow laws, stripped of their ability to vote, or to eat in a “white” restaurant, or even to see their children go to a racially diverse school. In Cotulla, the white residents lived on the west side of town, west of the Missouri-Pacific Railroad tracks, while the Mexican Americans lived on the east side, close to the Nueces River, in tin-roofed shanties without running water, working on ranches and farms for wages so meager that they could barely afford to eat.
And their children—all of whom were assigned to the segregated Welhausen School—were by default, the worse off of all. At school, there was no lunch period because the children had no lunches. There was no bus stop because there was no bus. There were no after school programs because there were no extra curriculars. And even if there were, no teacher ever stayed a minute past the closing bell to keep them company.
That is, until Lyndon Johnson arrived.
Johnson, then just 20, had found the relatively lucrative $125 per month teaching job in Cotulla through San Marcos Teacher’s College, where he was a student. More than the experience, Johnson needed the money. He was poor himself—as a child growing up destitute in the Hill Country of Texas, neighbors would bring food by so the Johnson children could eat. Johnson had seen his father rise to political power in the Texas House of Representatives, helping relieve the desolation of his native Hill Country, which lacked electricity and running water, only to lose his job and his family’s money and land. In the years to come, Sam and Lyndon Johnson would come to loathe one another—the son always worrying that he, too, would end up like his father.
But Johnson, of course, was like his father. As Robert Caro recounted, “Whatever he made—or borrowed—he spent.” In the Summer of 1928, Lyndon survived on $30 in “egg money” his Aunt Lucy saved, a $75 loan from the Blanco State Bank, his $15 monthly salary as the assistant to the president of San Marcos College, and $30 per month as the editor of the school paper. It all should have been enough to cover the $400 annual tuition for school. But then there the too-expensive clothes, and too-expensive haircuts, all to impress his dates, none of whom ever seemed too taken with him. That September, he took the job in Cotulla, his very first teaching job—riding south in the new Model A roadster he just bought for $400.
He moved next to the Missouri-Pacific railroad tracks into a room which he shared with another boarder, in a house set up on three-foot-high stilts so that the huge termites that terrorized the Mexican homes could be kept at bay. At night, he would have been able to hear the snoring of his roommate, the gnawing of the giant termites below, and the moaning cattle inside the train cars that passed each night on their way southward to Laredo. Yet every morning, Johnson would be up with the sun, always the first to arrive at the low, red bricked schoolhouse.
Upon seeing Johnson—20 years old, 6’4”, white, and the only male teacher—the school’s superintendent, W.T. Donaho, named Johnson the principal on sight. The first thing Johnson noticed, the first thing anyone would notice, was the desolation. "Mexican children going through a garbage pile, shaking the coffee grounds from the grapefruit rinds and sucking the rinds for the juice that was left,” he would later recall seeing. From there, Johnson—with his first ounce of real-world power—moved with the swiftness of an autocrat. He demanded baseballs, bats, volleyballs and nets from the school board so the children could have a proper recess. He arranged debate clubs, spelling bees, and track meets with other schools and insisted—demanded, in fact—that every student, all of whom were born into Spanish-speaking homes, speak English at all times. If he heard “¡Buenos días!,” he spanked the student. If he heard “Dios mío” during a stickball game, he spanked the student. If a student didn’t do his homework, he made the student stay after school—with him. Even teaching a 32-person class in a school in one of Texas’ most impoverished and remote towns, Lyndon Johnson demanded greatness.
Among his pupils was the school’s janitor, Thomas Coronado, whom he taught English lessons before and after school each day. But as Coronado recounted in later years, “He made it very clear to me that he wanted the school building to be clean at all times.” Once, after one of his students, Daniel Garcia, teased Johnson when he thought he wasn’t looking, Johnson lost it and told the class that they “were looking at the future President of the United States.”
But, in 1928, Johnson was still barely getting by. Like 60 percent of Americans today, he lived paycheck to paycheck—paying off his car, the $75 loan from the bank, and other accrued debts. As his landlady said in later years, “He was broke from payday to payday, always borrowing a dollar here and a dollar there.” Sometimes, others would see him get off the stilted porch of the house by the railroad tracks and see him stare off into the vast, empty land, wondering like so many Americans then and today, can I make this work?
35 years after he finished his nine months in Cotulla, President Lyndon Johnson declared a War on Poverty in the United States. In a message to Congress on March 16, 1964, Johnson asked, “What does this poverty mean to those who endure it?” “It means a daily struggle to secure the necessities for even a meager existence,” he said. “It means that the abundance, the comforts, the opportunities they see all around them are beyond their grasp. Worst of all, it means hopelessness for the young.”
He continued, “The young man or woman who grows up without a decent education, in a broken home, in a hostile and squalid environment, in ill health or in the face of racial injustice—that young man or woman is often trapped in a life of poverty…The war on poverty is not a struggle simply to support people, to make them dependent on the generosity of others. It is a struggle to give people a chance.”
Today, Democrats don’t talk like that anymore and in this election, it showed. In La Salle County—where Cotulla sits—Donald Trump won 60.1% of the vote, up from his winning 55.5% in 2020. By comparison, in 2016, Hillary Clinton won 54.8% of the vote in La Salle County; in 2012, Obama won 58.6%, and in 2008, he won 59%. Slowly but surely, working class voters like those in South Texas slipped away from Democrats.
Just south of La Salle County is Webb County, the largest county in South Texas with a population of 260,000, which includes the border city of Laredo, the last stop on Interstate 35. It also contains the second highest proportion of Hispanic people in the United States. Webb County voted for Joe Biden in 2020, just as it had voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Barack Obama in 2012 and 2008. But in 2024, Webb County voted for Donald Trump.
Among the varied reasons for this is the fact that the Democratic Party, the party which under Lyndon Johnson delivered the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Food Stamp Act, the Medicare and Medicaid Act, the Head Start Act, the Clean Air Act, the Fair Housing Act, and the War on Poverty, no longer communicates that it understands the needs of the American people, especially the working people it once served best.
Though it was never in play, Vice President Harris did visit Texas once in the final stretch of the campaign, at a rally in Houston with Beyonce on October 25. In her remarks—11 days before the Election— she didn’t use the words “wages”, “economy”,“jobs”, “immigration” or “border” once.
Simply put, Democrats have been unable to effectively make their case and are unable to present that they have a touchstone to reality like President Johnson once did. As he would remark years later, “I still see the faces of the children who sat in my class. I still see their excited eyes speaking friendship.” In 2024, the Democratic Party talked about important parts of reality—abortion here, democracy there—but the American people talk about other realities too. They talk about the people passing through the border just 68 miles away, the payments on the car they maybe couldn’t afford, the cost of their child’s surgery, the upcoming due date on their loan from the bank…and the sound of the trains and the termites at night.
Sources:
Robert Caro. The Path To Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 1. 1982.
https://www.lbjlibrary.org/life-and-legacy/landmark-laws
https://www.politico.com/2012-election/results/president/texas/
https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/texas/
https://apps.npr.org/2024-election-results/texas.html?section=P
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/elections/2008/results/states/president/texas.html
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2024/10/25/remarks-by-vice-president-harris-at-a-campaign-event-houston-tx/
Beautifully written, from start to finish. Powerful. And I never knew any of this about President Johnson. If our new leaders have never experienced poverty, how can they be moved to fix it? That is the challenge of our time.
And I've actually been to Cotulla, stayed there on my way to Mexico. It's just as Tim Barnicle says.
Thank you Tim for this inspiring reminiscence of LBJ’s example for today’s lost Democratic Party woefully in need of bread crumbs to show the way of LBJ.