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Hip Hip Hooray for LBJ!

Texas celebrates homeboy Lyndon Baines Johnson today.

From 1963 until 1969, Johnson served as the thirty-sixth president of the United States. He is best known for his controversial decisions during the Vietnam War and for his aggressive social welfare agenda, known as the Great Society programs.

In a speech at the University of Michigan in 1964, the year that Robert Rauschenberg included him in this lithograph, Johnson said:

"The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning.

"The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community. ...

"But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor."

Pictured: Robert Rauschenberg, born 1925, Mark, from the portfolio, Dante's Inferno, 1964, lithograph on paper, 15 5/8 x 16 1/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the NMAA/NPG Library, Smithsonian Institution.