The Curious Case of the Johnson City Windmill
By: Jacob Rosen
Tags: History, Politics, Helicopter, Lbj, Texas

Courtesy of the collections of the LBJ Library

Imagine for a minute that you’re a Texas farmer in the year 1948. It’s noon and the sun is beating down through a cloudless sky. You’re milking one of your prized cows, Margret, the air is clean and calm. All is well. When all of a sudden you hear a low hum in the distance. Thinking it’s another distant car lost on its way to Austin, you ignore it. But the noise, a percussive beating sound, keeps getting louder until you see a grey hulk of metal in the sky like nothing you’ve ever seen before. Great huge blades slice the air as the craft seems to float in the sky. Margret the cow bellows in concern and, kicking over the milk pail, thunders across the pasture. Your chickens cluck manically as a voice bellows from inside the machine, almost like the booming proclamation of God, “Hello down there! My name is Lyndon Johnson and I’m running to be your state senator. It’s a mighty nice farm you’ve got here and I want you to keep it. Sorry, I can’t stay long, I’ve got a rally to get to, but I hope I can count on your vote in this upcoming primary. So long!”

With a smile and a wave of a grey Stetson hat, he’d be off, the helicopter roaring towards the horizon leaving a ringing in your ear and a lasting impression in your mind. Lyndon B. Johnson was a man of progress, of innovation and wonder, but most of all, of money.

While some Americans had seen newsreels of helicopters used during World War II, much of Texas’s rural Hill Country had only started to gain access to electricity and the simplest of appliances. If any of them had heard of helicopters, through news programs on the radio, they had never seen the machines and been subject to their awesome power.

Used as an attraction to bolster a campaign that was rapidly growing desperate, Johnson and his team flew the Sikorsky S-51, and later a Bell 47, to small towns and cities across Texas. Landing in fields and leaving crowds of hundreds in stunned silence, Johnson would get out, wave his signature Stetson hat, and deliver a stump speech about the evils of communism, his support of the Taft-Hartley act, or an imitation of his campaign rival, Coke Stevenson. His rhetoric was secondary, however, to the awesome persuasive power of his machine. Dubbed the “Johnson City Windmill” and “Johnson’s Flying Windmill” by the press, this strategy proved genius after he was able to draw crowds, out in fields and baseball diamonds, the likes of which had not been seen since the run of W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel in 1941. These efforts were effective as estimates clock the number of people Johnson reached at 175,000, a boon in Johnson’s bid against the favorite, Stevenson. The Port Arthur newspaper said, after a rally in the city, “Johnson’s flying windmill greatest political innovation since the invention of the ballot”, and they were right.

I say all this to highlight a particular part of LBJ’s political genius, his grasp of Aristotelian spectacle in the aid of conveying a message. The message itself was simple, vote for me! Aiding in the successful implementation of that message, Johnson was using spectacle in a way that complimented his presence as a public figure. With an astounding talent for meeting and greeting, Johnson, after activating his audience’s sense of wonder, appealed to them as people. Shaking hands until his own bled, he allowed those he campaigned in front of to see the man behind the machine. His bold introduction to these rallies was well suited to the most well-funded candidate in Texas history at the time. If he had approached his campaign with modesty as he did when he was running his first congressional race, it wouldn’t have fit the picture with all the money that was behind him.

This story, I believe, is a message for campaign efficacy. Not necessarily an endorsement of spectacle for its own sake, but suiting the action to the candidate. There is an eerie dissonance created by multi-million dollar politicians, with tremendous monetary support behind them, donning blue jeans and baseball caps to discuss family values. White-collar people in blue-collar drag. When Johnson stepped out of the windmill, cowboy hat in hand, there was no doubt that this was an outsider, yes, but one who had not forgotten his roots, bringing this fancy machine to the people, for the people. Even though he could converse about the hard life he had growing up in the Hill Country, there was no doubt he was out of it now and equipped to help those who still lived that reality. Votes are cast as much for authenticity as they are for policy. If a candidate is upfront about their wealth, as long as it circles around to wanting to extend help to their constituents, less can be done to assail their character. If you do everything possible, Johnson was fond of saying, you’ll win.

The ears of the lone farmer may still be ringing after the Johnson city windmill flies away and it may take time to coax Margret back to the field for milking. Though one thing is certain, those encounters, and the importance of spectacle in campaigns, were not soon to be forgotten.