The obituaries for Lady Bird Johnson last week focused mainly on her advocacy for highway beautification, largely failing to note that nearly all of the 200 laws related to the environment during the Johnson administration had her stamp on them, including the Wilderness Act of 1964, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Program, the Land and Water Conservation Fund and many additions to the national parks system. She worked to protect the redwoods and block the damming of the Grand Canyon.
The environmental movement was just being born ”” Rachel Carson had published “Silent Spring” the year before Johnson took office ”” but it found in Lady Bird its most effective advocate. She hoped to leave the country more beautiful than she found it, and there is no doubt that she did so ”” beginning with her efforts at cleaning up the slums of the nation’s capital to the creation of the National Wildflower Research Center here in Austin.
From the start, however, the centerpiece of Mrs. Johnson’s legacy was crippled by compromises with the billboard lobby. You wouldn’t know it from last week’s coverage, but Lyndon Johnson realized when he signed the bill that it was a failure. “We have placed a wall of civilization between us and between the beauty of our land and of our countryside,” he reflected. “This bill … does not represent what the national interest requires. But it is a first step, and there will be other steps.”
There were no other steps.
Billboards are certainly an issue, but my memories of the 50s and 70s are that they were much worse then. Maybe I just don’t notice them anymore.
Lady Bird Johnson was one of the great people of our times and a Texas treasure that has passed on. It’s not always noted that she was a successful business woman in her own right and, actually, Lyndon married up.
Thinking of great Texas women: Ma Ferguson (I can’t even remember her real name, nor Pa’s), Viola Pitts (Fort Worth local leader), Miss Ima Hogg (yes, a real person and a great lady), Ann Richards, Lady Bird Johnson, Barbara Jordan, Barbara Bush, Elizabet Ney, Annette Strauss (Dallas mayor), business women life Mary Kay Ash, Ebby Halliday, and how many others?
I’m missing some obvious ones, but it’s been a long day.