BIG TEX
THE FIRE STARTED IN BIG TEX’S RIGHT BOOT. IT WAS October 2012. Big Tex was fifty-two feet high and sixty years old. He had come into being when the chamber of commerce of Kerens, Texas, decided to build the world’s largest Santa Claus as a lure to draw Christmas shoppers to their little East Texas town. Beneath his Santa suit of painted oilcloth was a sturdy armature made of drill pipe and structural steel scavenged from nearby oil fields. The giant Santa generated considerable attention at first, but after a windstorm blew away his clothes and the initial excitement of his presence wore off, the figure was sold to the State Fair of Texas in 1951 for $750. He was retrofitted as a cowboy and placed in front of the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, where he greeted fair visitors for the next six decades.
Big Tex had a massive hinged jaw that opened and closed to an approximation of the welcoming words “Howdy, folks!” broadcast over loudspeakers by an announcer with an impeccably unhurried Texas accent. His outfits changed somewhat over the years, but he always wore a cowboy hat and jeans and a belt buckle as big as a turkey platter. His right arm, bent at the elbow, waved stiffly at fairgoers. His left arm, flung out awkwardly against the blue sky in a gesture meant to seem expansive, looked painfully broken.
For all his creepiness, Big Tex was beloved, a nostalgic reminder of a midcentury time when Texas had agreed to embrace a gentle caricature of itself as a cowboy state, outsized and outlandish, proudly unconcerned with taste. Big Tex was a homely, homegrown icon, the sort of thing that was featured along with the Alamo and the Astrodome on souvenir dinner plates and illustrated tourist maps.
The cause of the fire was an electrical short at the base of the figure, but the first indication that something was wrong with Big Tex appeared much higher up when greasy black smoke began to seep from beneath his shirt collar. Soon, bright flames crept up to consume his face and cowboy hat, and then they appeared along the crotch and seams of his jeans. Within a few minutes the conflagration was complete, nothing left but his blackened steel frame, his right hand, and the outlines of his charred face.
In less than a year, in time for the next state fair, a new Big Tex was erected in the same spot. The updated version cost half a million dollars, was three feet taller and nineteen thousand pounds heavier. But the sight of the new Big Tex being unveiled could not eclipse the weirdly horrifying image of the old one in flames. It’s too much to say that the original Big Tex was a symbol of a simpler time—there have been no simple times in Texas history—but it belonged to a different Texas, a Texas that had not yet entered an age of ironic reflection. The new Big Tex was sort of a joke in the way the old one never had been. Everyone understood that it had been reconstructed simply for nostalgia’s sake, to fill an empty place in the Lone Star psyche. But it was no longer possible for a single image—that of a waving, welcoming cowboy—to truly evoke the heaving twenty-first-century mix of cultural allegiances and colliding identities that Texas had become.
Both the original Big Tex and the new one stood dead center in the very place where that old half-mythical cohesive identity had been codified and triumphantly proclaimed to the world. Fair Park, which is a few miles east of downtown Dallas, is not just the location of the annual state fair and the Cotton Bowl football stadium. It was also the site of the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition, the gigantic birthday party that Texas staged for itself on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of its independence from Mexico. One of the core goals of the exposition was to “Texanize Texans,” to acquaint the citizens of the state with the marvels of its industrial might and its unparalleled history. It was also an announcement to the rest of the world of the state’s poignantly unguarded self-love, a way to “mirror the accomplishments of Texas to all the sons and daughters of earth.”
Most of the art moderne buildings of the great exposition are still there in Fair Park, hauntingly so. When there is no football game in the Cotton Bowl, no state fair in session, the grounds are often empty. The vast exhibition edifices, with their gilded sculptures and heroic friezes, still flank the grand esplanade, where fountains lining a seven-hundred-foot reflecting pool are programmed to erupt in rhythm with “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” But the place looks like an abandoned movie set from some futuristic epic of long ago. The exposition had been created on the scale of a World’s Fair. It was rushed into being with remarkable speed, more than fifty new buildings thrown up in the hinterlands of Dallas in less than ten months. There were life-size robotic dinosaurs, a reproduction of the Globe Theatre, a colossal cash register on top of the National Cash Register Building that tallied up the number of each day’s visitors—an average of about 36,000. The exhibition halls displayed new advances in electricity, transportation, and domestic life. There was a meant-to-be-progressive Hall of Negro Life, where visitors could learn about black Americans’ “patient, loyal, patriotic attitude toward their country and . . . their gifts of soul and song.” And somehow, there in the middle of Dallas, which would become famous as one of the most morally repressive cities in the country, there was a sanctioned “Streets of Paris” section, whose artistic focal point was live naked women. The best glimpse of them was via an attraction that passed itself off as an artist’s studio, where patrons were handed a pad and pencil and shuffled quickly along so that they could “sketch” a nude model.
This glimpse of what passed for European sophistication was predictably popular, but the biggest crowd pleaser at the Centennial Exposition was Cavalcade of Texas, an extravagantly ambitious outdoor pageant chronicling the history of Texas from the arrival of the first European explorers to the great cattle drives in the waning years of the nineteenth century. It took place on what was billed as the world’s largest stage, a performance space 300 feet wide and 170 feet deep. The stage was commodious enough to accommodate an artificial lagoon representing the Gulf of Mexico, in which a full-scale Spanish caravel sailed onto the Texas shore in the opening minutes of the production. Eighty-foot-high mountain peaks formed the back of the stage, and there were rocky cliffs and broad plains across which thundered mounted Indians and stagecoaches and herds of longhorn cattle.
Film footage of Cavalcade of Texas is scarce, though there is a glimpse of the great stage in an old Gene Autry movie, The Big Show, that was filmed at the exposition. And you can still find copies of the souvenir program in libraries and for sale online. When you page through this booklet, it’s immediately apparent how earnest and comprehensive the intentions were for this extravaganza. It began with Indians holding aloft torches and chanting to the sun god and ended with Judge Roy Bean, the frontier magistrate who idiosyncratically represented “the law west of the Pecos.” In between were Spanish castaways and conquistadors, French interlopers, American colonists, the Alamo and the Texas Revolution, Comanche raids, the rise and eventual dissolution of the independent Republic of Texas, secession, and the Civil War.
The Indians were played by white men in wigs and breechcloths whose bodies were sprayed with swarthy makeup. The “Pantomime Cast”—so named because the performers mouthed their lines while actors in a backstage sound room spoke them over a powerful public-address system—numbered 300 people. They are all listed in the program, and though the show prominently featured Spanish friars and explorers and the Mexican army, only 2 or 3 of the actors out of 300 have Hispanic surnames. Texans in 1936 would not have expected otherwise. The state’s history was seen through an unbothered Anglo perspective. Other races or cultures had participated in that history, but were not considered part of its triumphant conclusion. And conclusion feels like the right word. Even though the souvenir program declared, “The Cavalcade of Texas will march on forever!” and even though the Centennial Exposition set a swaggering course for the future, there was a detectable sense that the history of Texas was essentially a settled issue. The question of whom Texas belonged to was presented at the exposition as the immutable result of four centuries of conflict. The future would bring wonders and hazards of all sorts, but Texas would never again be a fragmented, fought-over place. It had cohered into a singular nation-state whose people were pridefully united in their narrative of the past.
But just as the great panoramic stage could only hint at the breadth of the real Texas landscape—an immensity of plains and prairies and broken escarpments, deserts, fertile river valleys, spectral forests, wild coastal marshes merging into the stormy waters of the Gulf of Mexico—the moment in time when the Centennial Exposition took place enforced its own limitations on how Texas history could be understood. Every moment in time does that, of course. Every writer who attempts to portray history, including me every bit as much as Jan Isbelle Fortune and Clinton Boltons, the authors of the script of Cavalcade of Texas, is a hostage to contemporary values and unexposed biases.
There’s a stopped-clock feel to the grounds of the exposition that reinforces the idea that this place, and this moment in Dallas, was meant to function as a bulwark against the erosive identity waves of the future. When you walk into the Hall of State, one of the few buildings left from the great fair that still aspires to serve its original purpose, you sense the ghostly emptiness even more. The Hall of State was originally called the State of Texas Building. It still sits at the head of the reflecting pool, the focal centerpiece of the grand esplanade. It was built to impress and to last—“the Westminster Abbey of the Western World,” as a former Texas governor described it. It is partly a museum, with historical exhibits scattered here and there (including one honoring the inventor of the frozen margarita machine), but mostly it is a maximum-impact visual statement, its great central room dominated by a blindingly gold lone star emitting sun rays of Texas optimism. In front of the great room is the Hall of Heroes, with bronze statues by the San Antonio sculptor Pompeo Coppini of Sam Houston, William Travis, Stephen F. Austin, and other prominent figures from the revised standard version of Texas history, all standing guard in an empty marble corridor.
Almost another century has rolled past since this building was erected in 1936, and it’s probably no longer possible to think about Texas in the way this consecrated place intended us to, as the culmination of an imperial dream. Locked in our own time, we are more likely to look back on the history trumpeted at the exposition with the accumulated detachment of the generations. That particular vision of Texas belongs to another age.
But when you leave the Hall of State, with its heroic statues and its sprawling, muscular murals, when you exit its mighty bronze doors and walk past limestone buttresses engraved with the dreamily thematic words “Romance,” “Fortune,” “Adventure,” and “Honour”; when you drift toward the Cotton Bowl and find yourself staring up at the rebuilt Big Tex, his new white shirt brilliantly billowing against the searing blue sky of a Texas summer, you can’t help but feel just a little bit Texanized. The state has nation-sized measurements: 268,000 square miles in all, 827 road miles from its westernmost city, El Paso, to Beaumont, near the Louisiana border. But its insistent and imposing sense of itself has created a vast mythical mindscape as well. Because it looms large in the world’s imagination, and in fact is large, Texas has a history that is of consequence not just to itself, and not just to the nations it was once part of or the nation it briefly became. It sits at the core of the American experience, and its wars, its industries, its presidents, its catastrophes, its scientific discoveries have never stopped shaping the world.
“I salute the Empire of Texas!” President Franklin Roosevelt grandly declared when he visited the Centennial Exposition the week after it opened. His tongue may have been slightly in his cheek, and he may have been playing to the besotted native pride of his audience. But it was not much of a stretch to call the state an empire, and still isn’t. The scale of Texas has always been, to borrow a word invented to describe the exposition’s architecture, Texanic. In every dimension that matters, it is a very big place.
“I couldn’t believe Texas was real,” remembered Georgia O’Keeffe, who arrived in the Panhandle as a young artist and teacher in 1912. Her first impression was grander than even Roosevelt’s. Her new home was not a state, not an empire, but a world. Texas, she thought, was “the same big wonderful thing that oceans and the highest mountains are.”