Did LBJ Love El Paso?

Did LBJ love El Paso?

In El Paso mythology, the late President Lyndon B. Johnson was a “friend” of El Paso and Mexico.  In a recent article by Diana Washington, she reports on this “love” and supposed altruism that LBJ exhibited for El Paso and Mexico.

LBJ saw politics as a means to riches.  For many decades he had a monopoly on the news media in Austin, Texas.  Austin had a single TV station (LBJ’s)  up until the 1970s while smaller cities in the State had TV stations of all three major networks.  Everyone in Austin knew that LBJ had a cozy relationship with the FCC and their refusal to license other stations in Austin was no doubt due to his influence.   He made frequent campaign and “informational” speeches on his station.

Soon after he became President, LBJ began to focus on “settling” the so-called “problem” cause by shifts in the course of the meandering Rio Grande.  The Rio Grande, like all major rivers, had a marsh plain of, variably, a mile or two in width within which the river often, after floods, settled into new courses due to the sandy nature of the marsh plain.  Under old Treaties with Mexico, the center of the Rio Grande was always described as the international boundary between the U.S. and Mexico. Nature frequently shifted the boundary until flood control projects beginning in 1906 at the Elephant Butte Lake in New Mexico.  That project was not completed until some ten years later.  Construction of flood control levees, diversion dams and irrigation canals soon followed.  By 1938 there were levees all along both sides of the Rio Grande from Elephant Butte, southward all the way  to Hudspeth County where there was a more narrow, sparsely populated marsh plain, where the Rio Grande winds its way through the narrows of the mountain ranges of the Big Bend.    

The so-called “Chamizal problem” that LBJ ostensibly sought to settle became a “problem” only as El Paso and Juarez began to grow into major ports of entry for imports and exports.  Real estate values near the ports of entry soared in value in the 1930s.  As part of the “Chamizal Agreement” LBJ and Mexican political leaders agreed on a new course for the Rio Grande that would split the valuable real estate in the old marsh plain between Mexico and the U.S. As a guarantee against future flooding and changes in the course of the Rio Grande, the river channel was re-directed and cement-lined from a point just upriver from the Paso del Norte Port of Entry to a place near the south end of Concepcion Street in East El Paso.

In reality, there had not been and danger of a flood changing the Rio Grande’s course again through the marsh plain since the completion of the last flood control projects in 1938.  The U.S. and Mexico shared control of the new International Boundary and Water Commission that monitored the flow of water in the Rio Grande and supervised the allocation of irrigation and city water between the two countries. 

As construction of the new “Chamizal Project began, excavations attested to the fact that the marsh plain had, not in the too distant past, been worthless real estate--up until about the beginning of the 1930s.  Excavations in the old marsh plain turned up what proved to be an antique collector’s paradise because the plain obviously had once been a dump for everything from old, up to 1920s-vintage,  junked automobiles, to ordinary trash and garbage. 

For those of us who witnessed it, the re-channeling of the Rio Grande was a huge undertaking, and obviusly only the largest of the construction companies could qualify as bidders. The winning bidder of the main contract was Brown and Root Construction Company.  That seemed okay—until we learned that controlling interest of the humongous company was in the name of …Lady Bird Johnson, LBJ’s spouse.  Anyone who believes that the bidding on the contract was fair and on the up and up, would also believe that LBJ was a totally honest politician. LBJ and lady Bird’s investment in Brown and Root was probably foreseen as lucrative about the same time that LBJ saw the possibility of “settling the Chamizal dispute.” So former school teacher, lawyer and alleged relative of Sam Houston, LBJ, not only projected himself as a “peace maker:” but also a “friend of El Paso,” and more conveniently for him, one of America’s newest millionaires.

The Rio Grande has shifted its course at many places along the Rio Grande (called the Rio Bravo in México),many times in history, but it only became a “problem” when the real estate became valuable. If the benefactor of the profits from the Chamizal Settlement had been a Republican, the mainstream media, including the El Paso Times, would never let us forget it.  Only because of the Internet are a few people enlightened about the mythology of LBJ’s “interest” in El Paso.