A former first lady and Texan paid tribute to another former first lady and Texan on Thursday in an essay focused on their shared dedication to environmental conservation.
Laura Bush, wife of George W. Bush, the 43rd president of the United States, described how Lady Bird Johnson’s nationwide “beautification” initiative left an imprint on the country. It also strengthened the conservation movement in the 1960s, Mrs. Bush writes in the latest essay written for the In Pursuit series, a nonpartisan civics initiative by More Perfect, spotlighting the leadership lessons of American presidents and selected first ladies.
In her essay, When You Plant a Seed, You Beautify a Nation, Mrs. Bush details how Mrs. Johnson championed the Highway Beautification Act, also known as “Lady Bird’s Bill,” which spiffied up the appearance of the nation’s expanding highway system that became “littered with billboards, junkyards, and overgrown invasives.”
Over time, scholars have noted how the term “beautification” diminishes the vision and work Mrs. Johnson pursued through her initiative. Even Mrs. Bush saw through the simplistic and feminine framing of the term when, in the essay, she addressed critics of that time who dismissed Mrs. Johnson’s ideas “as trivial” in comparison to the unfolding Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War.
Mrs. Johnson believed all neighborhoods “deserved to be attractive” regardless of their affluence.
“She knew that beauty and justice were not separate concerns,” Mrs. Bush writes. “A neglected environment mirrored a neglected community. And by restoring beauty, she believed, a nation could restore dignity.”
Mrs. Bush credited Mrs. Johnson for the opportunity millions of Americans have had for decades now to see that “conservation and beauty were not niceties, but essential parts of a healthy, civil society.”
From her pilot city of Washington, D.C., her satellite project in Austin, Texas, to hundreds of other communities across the country, Mrs. Johnson inspired other beautification initiatives in the 1960s. Some instances documented involved turning vacant urban lots into neighborhood pocket parks and planting native flora and coordinating non-mowing cycles allowing wildflowers to re-seed. Mrs. Johnson, herself, worked with the American Association of Nurserymen to protect wildflowers and eventually she promoted the planting of wildflowers along America’s highways.
Mrs. Bush recognized the significance of Mrs. Johnson’s initiative long before she served as first lady.
“I had always admired Lady Bird, the first Texas first lady, and had been so proud that she recognized the great natural beauty of our home state and nation,” Mrs. Bush wrote in her 2010 memoir Spoken from the Heart. “When we drive our vast highways, past waving grasses and blooming flowers, acres of bluebonnets or black-eyed Susans or Queen Anne’s lace, that is the legacy of her touch, of how she worked to beautify America with native plants and wildflowers.”
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