This Week In History: Lady Bird Johnson was Born on December 12, 1912
December 17, 2021
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Lady Bird Johnson's Road to Beautification
By: Kaysey Richardson
"Where flowers bloom, so does hope." -Lady Bird Johnson
Claudia Alta Taylor was born in a small town in Texas, on December 22, 1912. At birth, she was given the nickname Lady Bird by one of her caretakers who stated that she was “as beautiful as a Lady Bird.” From that moment on,the nickname stuck. Lady Bird grew up in a rapidly changing world. The emergence of automobiles and highways led to a spark in urbanization and caused an influx of people moving into cities. Lady Bird Johnson made it her life’s focus to clean up cities and highways. Not stopping at one mission, she also wanted to demonstrate to the public the enjoyment of visiting national parks around the United States. Overlapping her quest to make America beautiful and preserve nature, Lady Bird was on the frontline of the war on poverty. She redefined environmentalism by not only focusing on preservation of the countryside, but also adding beauty and nature to urbanized areas. The early efforts made by Lady Bird Johnson to help maintain the beauty of nature, demonstrates that urbanization and the natural environment can coincide if we take necessary measures in integrating the two.
Lady Bird Johnson as First Lady:
Lady Bird Johnson’s time in the White House included guiding her husband to pass several environmental bills and personal projects. Although the first year she did not choose a project to focus on, she would become well-known for highway beautification. Highway beautification included the removal of junkyards, limiting the number of billboards along the highway, and the planting of hundreds of thousands of flowers along the highway. Living in Washington DC, she realized how dirty and unsanitary the conditions of cities were. The city cleanup would intertwine with another issue that Lady Bird recognized: the war on poverty. Throughout her time as the First Lady, Johnson would also go on several trips to national parks to promote the natural beauties of the United States. The position that Lady Bird Johnson took as the First Lady changed what it looked like to be in that position. Since Lady Bird Johnson, every First Lady is faced with the question, “What will be your project?” For Lady Bird, this project would be something that she worked on for a lifetime.
The early phases of becoming First Lady were challenging. For the remainder of 1963, much of Lady Bird’s tasks were centered around taking care of her husband and helping her family become comfortable in their new home at the White House. One of Lady Bird’s first missions upon moving into the White House was to introduce herself to the staff that she would be working with. Lady Bird began familiarizing herself with the entirety of the White House in an effort to learn as much as she could about her new residence. Johnson recalled in her diary, “I feel like I am suddenly onstage for a part that I have never rehearsed.”
The responsibilities of this new position were intimidating but did not stop Lady Bird’s drive to take initiative of her role as the First Lady. At the beginning, Lady Bird decided that her job as the First Lady would “emerge in deeds, not words.” In early 1964, Johnson made early efforts to beautify the places around her by planting a live oak tree in Cincinnati Eden Park to honor her husband. Later that summer, Lady Bird opened the American Landmarks Celebration on the garden steps of Woodrow Wilson’s home, making Wilson’s house a national historical landmark.
Lady Bird’s mission to clean up the cities began with Washington DC. There were many different ways in which she would begin to make Washington DC beautiful. For example, Lady Bird participated in tours around the DC where she would plant flowers within the city and hosted an anti-litter campaign called Potomac Pickup in an effort to demonstrate how people of the city could get involved. Other aspects of the beautification process in Washington DC included the preservation of old, historic buildings: A project that began under John F. Kennedy. Lady Bird Johnson’s efforts to clean the city of Washington DC not only offered the city the opportunity to embrace natural beauty, but also the opportunity to enhance the lives of children who were not living in wealthy neighborhoods by making playgrounds and parks available for everybody, everywhere.
In May of 1965, Lady Bird began her “Landscape-Landmark Tour” throughout Virginia where she visited historical landmarks throughout the state. The purpose of the Landscape-Landmark tour was to encourage tourists to visit parks, historic landmarks, and natural beauty within the United States. Her first stop was to dedicate a wayside shelter in the Scottish town of Dumfries on the side of Highway I95. The shelter located at the side of the highway was a tourist facility where people could stop to rest, roam around, and explore their natural surroundings. Lady Bird as well as the state of Virginia’s intention was to have stops like this every 20-40 miles on the highway to encourage tourists to make detours and witness their state’s innate beauty. After the wayside shelter dedication, Lady Bird and her peers drove down Interstate 95 to examine what had been done by the Associated Clubs of Virginia for Roadside Development. They witnessed azaleas, dogwoods, pansies, and marigolds that the ACVRD had planted. Lady Bird felt that the way in which Interstate 95 was beautified was a model for what could be done across the United States.
Her next stop on the “Landscape-Landmark Tour” was a tour of Monticello, a mansion near Charlottesville that was built by former president Thomas Jefferson. At Monticello, Lady Bird presented to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation a seedling from a chestnut tree on the White House lawn, a tree that Thomas Jefferson himself had planted. Along the way, Lady Bird helped to plant petunias, candy tuft, spirea, lilacs, and azaleas alongside the roads of Virginia. Before ending her tour, Lady Bird stopped at the University of Virginia’s Botanical Gardens to take a tour. She then headed by plane to the historical town, Abingdon, in the mountains of Virginia to watch a play at the infamous Barter Theater.
The Landscape-Landmark Tour was significant for a multitude of reasons. For one, it allowed Lady Bird to examine road building techniques that were used to adapt to natural landscaping. Lady Bird and her group briefly went off of Interstate 95 to compare the countryside beauty of I95 to a road that was parallel and filled with gas stations, billboards, neon signs, and deteriorating buildings. By observing a highway that had successfully beautified its countryside to a road that was populated with billboards and filth, Lady Bird was able to see that beautification can be done as well as what still needed to be done to move forward. This was also an opportunity to speak to locals about highway beautification and appreciate historic and natural beauty in and around their own cities.
Most importantly, this tour almost directly resulted in the Highway Beautification Act of 1965. On October 22, 1965 President Lyndon Johnson signed the Highway Beautification Act into law. The bill regulated advertising on Interstate Highways and the Federal-aid Primary System. It would cover over 260,000 miles of highways and controlled the size, spacing, and lighting of signs that were allowed. Furthermore, the act would set standards for controlling junk yards, scrap metal processing facilities, and garbage dumps that were located within 1,000 feet of the highway and required the sites to be fenced from view or removed. Although Lyndon Johnson signed the act into law, he credited the hard work of his wife for its success.
The Landscape-Landmark Tour was not the only tour that Lady Bird would go on during her time in the White House. In the months to follow, Lady Bird would visit cities across the country where she would plant trees, pick up litter, speak about highway aesthetics, and praise each city’s beauty. She gave many speeches along her tour such as at a conference in Manhattan, New York called “Keep America Beautiful” and met with park executives around the nation. One significant stop was in Milwaukee where she was gifted twenty-five hawthorn trees to plant in Washington DC parks, assisted in dedicating a new three-domed horticultural conservatory, and planted a chestnut seedling in a local park.
In 1966-1967 Lady Bird Johnson went on another set of trips in an effort to promote Lyndon Johnson’s “See America First” program. This program was designed to allow for tourists to become familiar with their homeland, historical sites, and the outdoor scenery that surrounded them. The tour was followed by an immense amount of media coverage to give those who watched the visits on television at home pride in their country, a desire to preserve its natural beauty, and to go visit these national parks and places on their own. On this tour Lady Bird visited the Redwood Forests, Big Bend National Park, floated the Rio Grande, and visited tons of cities to applaud their beautification.
On one trip that was documented in Time Magazine in 1966, Johnson floated down the San Antonio River and cited San Antonio as a model for the beautification and preservation efforts of other American cities. She stated, “Here is a great example of what can be done. It says to every city—look around and find the individual charm, the bounty of nature, the heritage of the past with which to rebuild.” Following her trip to San Antonio, Lady Bird traveled to Big Bend National Park, where she hiked up the Lost Mine Trail and ate dinner beside a campfire while watching the sunset. Like Big Bend National Park, many parks that she visited on her trip were not well-known to people and did not see many visitors throughout the year. She chose these sites with the intention to promote out of the way areas that were right under the noses of the citizens of America.
Lady Bird Johnson was aware of environmental issues in the United States that had not previously been acknowledged. The role that Lady Bird Johnson took as a First Lady would become an inspiration and set the tone for what the modern First Lady would look like. In shaping her beautification campaign, Lady Bird would nurture a systematic project in ways that no First Lady prior to her had done before. Her hands-on commitment to helping to beautify the nation, preserve the environment, and help create a more habitable urban life would demonstrate Lady Bird’s leadership role that she took on as the First Lady. The projects that Lady Bird Johnson focused on as the First Lady would be something that she continued to pursue for the rest of her life. Lady Bird Johnson would indeed leave behind a lifetime of flowers.
Lady Bird Johnson’s Life After the White House:
After her life in the White House, Lady Bird Johnson did not slow down. Only five years after leaving the office, Lyndon Johnson passed away on January 22, 1973 of a heart attack, leaving Lady Bird widowed for the final decades of her life. Following her husband’s death, she continued her interest in beautification and preservation on a smaller and local level in Texas. In the early 1970’s Lady Bird began to work with the Town Lake Beautification Project along the Colorado River. She dedicated her energy to beautifying the Riverfront in Austin, a city she had always held dear to her heart. Her project included the creation of hiking, biking, and running trails that would intertwine in the city as well as flowers and trees being planted alongside the river
The biggest project that Lady Bird would undertake was on her seventieth birthday in 1982. On this day, Lady Bird would give over sixty acres of land on the Colorado River, right outside of Austin, and enough money to fund the National Wildflower Research Center. The purpose of Lady Bird’s Wildflower Research Center was “to learn as much as we can about wildflower propagation and growth and to be a clearinghouse to spread that knowledge to developers, park managers, and private citizens everywhere.” The knowledge that would be discovered at the center would be utilized to help create landscaping that was made up of flowers and plants that are sustainable and native to the areas in which they are grown. Other goals of the research center are to encourage plant conservation which results in the improvement of water quality, offers habitats for wildlife, and improves human health and happiness.
Lady Bird Johnson’s impact on the environment was incredibly significant. Born in the countryside of Texas, she understood the importance and beauty of her natural surroundings. Coinciding with this understanding, Lady Bird also recognized the impact of urbanization on an environmental and social level. Lady Bird’s ability to see that the world around her was changing at a rapid pace, gave her insight on changes that needed to be made, and steps that needed to be taken. Unlike those before, a big part of her environmental movement was adding nature to her surroundings alongside preserving what was already there. In a time where many did not understand, she recognized the impact that the ecosystem had on everyday lives. Lady Bird Johnson showed the United States that by improving the natural landscape, the standard of life also would improve. Although Lady Bird Johnson has long since passed away, her legacy continues to live on.
