My first sighting of the new world came from the back of the family station wagon, in the late afternoon as the slanting sun behind us lit up the city skyline with fierce and brilliant color. Now, of course, the vista of skyscrapers that awed me as a child is buried in the shadows of modern Dallas; the buildings that seemed so monumental then against the flat horizon were the pale blue Southland Center, the Mobil Building with the neon winged horse atop, the Republic Bank, largest bank in the Southwest. When I come upon these structures today they seem petite and almost historical. Foremost, as we approached the city, was an unpretentious cubical edifice with a large billboard on the roof advertising Hertz rental cars and blinking the time and the temperature. The building itself was anonymous, and afterward, when the world knew it as the Texas School Book Depository, people in Dallas identified it by the Hertz sign and said, “Oh, that one.”
We were moving from Abilene, Texas, where my father was vice president of the largest bank in town. My sisters and I had been in mourning for weeks, since Daddy returned from his mysterious trip to announce that he had gotten a new job—at last he would be president of his own bank. It was small, he warned us, but it was in Dallas, and Dallas was growing, and as the city grew so would his bank. Dallas was a place where dreamers like my father would be given a chance.
As in all boomtowns, tension in Dallas was high. Some people were zooming through society like race cars, giving the world an impression of Dallas as a city of affluent hicks—you could see them flaunting their greenbacks at the gaming tables from Las Vegas to Monte Carlo, or talking too loudly in restaurants that were really too good for them. They were moneyed, naive, too eager, democratic, yes, but socially pretentious. For an astounding number of people Dallas was just such a jackpot. They formed a rough society of nouveaux millionaires; they built gorgeous Gatsby-like mansions on the north side, enrolled their children in Hockaday or St. Mark’s, bought their minks and their Cadillacs, and joined the Republican party. The winners were easy to spot.
The losers made their own headlines. Dallas was the murder capital of Texas, and Texas itself led the United States in homicides. We were reminded that Dallas killed more people in a year than all of England—a statistic with little effect, for wasn’t England a sound-asleep society, and weren’t we exploding with new force, making millions by the minute, and did you expect a new world to be born without death and broken hearts?
It was not just Dallas, of course. New cities were forming, cities without traditions, with only the blind instinct to grow, to add wealth. Already in the fifties the urban centers of the Northeast had begun their long decline. A great migration was taking place, out of Boston, for instance, which lost 13 percent of its population in the fifties; and New York, which diminished by one hundred thousand people; and Cleveland and Providence; all of them great industrial centers, union towns, politically liberal. A million immigrants settled in the newly built suburban tracts surrounding Phoenix, San Diego, Albuquerque, Orlando, Los Angeles, Houston. Middling towns such as Tulsa, Amarillo, Mobile, Charlotte, doubled in population; Tucson grew five times its size, Anaheim nearly ten times. And yet this was only a prelude to the sixties, when the new world that was arising in the South and the West erupted like Atlantis, a civilization that seemed to pop up overnight.
What distinguished Dallas from the other cities of the new world (this was the legend we told ourselves) was that there was no reason for its existence. It did not float atop an ocean of oil; there was no seaport, no mighty river; there were no paper mills or stockyards or coal mines; it was essentially a low-water crossing on a muddy creek, no more than that. Dallas had pressed itself into existence through force of will and public relations. During the construction of the Texas & Pacific Railroad the city fathers had tricked the legislature into bending the tracks toward Dallas, and on that fragile concession they made the city the transportation and distribution depot of the Southwest—a city of warehouses and regional offices, and soon of banks and insurance companies, which piped the dollars out of the oil fields and ranchlands; a city then of magnificent stores, which fed the material aspirations of the newly moneyed; a city finally of commerce, information, and trade, self-created like no other city in the world.
And because there was finally no reason for Dallas, there was anxiety among its citizens. It might all disappear tomorrow: the customers would go elsewhere, the companies would relocate, the train wouldn’t stop here anymore. Dallas was a fire that might go out at any time. To keep it alive the citizens advertised it far and wide, and even to ourselves; it was “Big D, my oh yes!,” the city that works, et cetera. We were blowing on the coals.
My father, John Donald Wright, was typical of the men who made that new world. The youngest of five children, he went to a one-room schoolhouse in central Kansas, and saw his family farm blow away in the same wind that brought the Depression. He was sixteen when he left home, and with no resources other than fear and determination he put himself through Central State Teachers College in Edmond, Oklahoma, then through law school at the University of Oklahoma. When World War II broke out he dutifully joined the infantry. He met my mother, Dorothy Peacock, while he was in Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia, and proposed to her after a three-week courtship. She was a hostess at the Officer’s Club, and boldly at ease in society—warm, immediate, playful, his opposite in so many critical ways. For most of their first decade of marriage, my father was off fighting in Europe, the Pacific, and then Korea. He did not think of himself as a brave man or a natural warrior. Twice his hair turned completely white, but returned to its wavy black when he was discharged as a major in 1952 at the age of thirty-six. He was a civilian now with a wife and three children. He had not even begun to make a career. He hit the ground running.
Eight years later he had learned the frustration of small-town banks with sleepy family management, so when he was finally offered the presidency of the Lakewood State Bank in Dallas he accepted at once. In 1960 it was a small and troubled storefront bank on Gaston Avenue, between Doc Harrell’s drugstore and Kirk’s Beauty Salon. To see it now—three entire city blocks of land, a tower, a parking garage, fountains, expensive art on the walls, and a modern, amalgamated name, Allied Bank of Dallas—is to realize my father’s aspirations in their most tangible form. He built this bank, with the help of people like him, people who came out of nowhere with nothing, who came to Dallas because Dallas would give them a chance.
Wasn’t this the American dream? And wasn’t Dallas a new America for all those frustrated farmboys like Don Wright, who found life too small in their places of origin, and who came to Dallas to grow beyond themselves, to transform themselves—Dallas, a city chrysalis where the poor, backward, and ambitious were transmogrified into the rich, conservative, and satisfied.
By comparison with Abilene, Dallas seemed wide open, but it wasn’t, as we soon learned. Politically, it was shut up tight. Hungry newcomers like my father found the leadership of the city distant and mysterious. You had to prove yourself, endure probation. If you did, you’d be noticed; you’d be brought along slowly, like a colt being trained to a bridle. One day someone would approach you. You’d be asked to “do something for Dallas.” You’d get an assignment. For my father it was to head up a bond election to air-condition the public schools. People were surprised when the bond passed; the secret circle opened and admitted Don Wright.
The cabal he entered was the Dallas Citizens Council, which was once defined as “a collection of dollars represented by men.” There was not a doctor or a practicing lawyer on the council, and not a single woman. These were the board chairmen, men who could commit money without consulting anyone else, the “yes-or-no men,” as Mayor R. L. Thornton, Sr., who founded the council, called them. The men on the council chose the candidates for local office and made decisions for the good of the city, without consulting the voters or the elected representatives. When, for instance, Chance Vought Aircraft was considering relocating in Dallas, the head of the company announced that the runways at Dallas’s Love Field were two thousand feet too short for its purposes. Three hours and forty minutes later a council member called him and said that the city had approved an emergency bond and that work would start on the runways Monday morning. That’s the way Dallas operated. As a political model the city was ruled from the top down, by corporate junta, but by and large it was well ruled.
It was that same firm rule, however, that caused life in Dallas to go, subtly, quite wrong. If you had come to Dallas in 1960 from any other American town of comparable size, you would have found it much the same as your city. Its people dressed alike, talked alike, and thought alike, as did the preponderance of middle-class citizens everywhere; the country had after all a very homogeneous culture in 1960. What would have struck you, if you were keen enough to observe it, was that similarity had been carried too far in Dallas. America was a conformist society, perhaps, but conformity had been taken to extremes in Dallas. I don’t ever remember seeing a bearded man, other than Santa Claus, until Stanley Marcus decided to grow a beard two years after the Kennedy assassination. When the famously bearded Commander Whitehead came to Neiman-Marcus for a British Fortnight celebration, the president of our most famous department store decided to give a party for bearded men only. He found he didn’t know any; he wound up serving a roomful of strangers.
Dallas was a city of believers, a city of eight hundred churches, among them the largest Methodist, the largest Baptist, and one of the largest Presbyterian congregations in the world. While everyone was religious, some were superreligious, and they thought of themselves as a spiritual vanguard. They were contemptuous of the rest of us; we might as well have been agents of the devil. In the face of so much belief, honest doubt hid itself; skeptics and heretics were one and the same.
My family was conventionally religious—Methodists—although my father was devout. God had spared his life several times on the battlefield, and he repaid Him by living righteously and teaching Sunday school. But even my father was scared off by the fanaticism of the first church we joined. The preacher was a Holy Roller with a red face and sulfurous eyes, so that when he pounded the Bible and screamed about damnation, he truly had the aspect of a man roasting on the coals of hell. He also had a taste for Savile Row suits and alligator shoes, which was satisfied by the hypnotized widows in the front pews.
We later moved downtown to the First Methodist Church, and when we were brought into the congregation we knelt before the choir as they sang the final verse of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” They began in a melodic whisper—“In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea”—but the sound swelled and grew thunderous, and I felt my skin turn to gooseflesh as the refrain “Glory, glory hallelujah!” nearly levitated me above the organ pipes. I asked God to bless me and keep me, and save me from my evil nature.
Dallas was filled with suspicious Protestants. In 1960, when John Kennedy had not yet secured the Democratic presidential nomination, the Reverend W. A. Criswell of the First Baptist Church declared in a sermon that “the election of a Catholic as president would mean the end of religious freedom in America.” One of Criswell’s 18,500 parishioners was billionaire H. L. Hunt, who took the trouble to have 200,000 copies of Criswell’s sermon mailed to Protestant ministers all over the country. We never made the mistake of underestimating the power and influence of the First Baptist Church. In 1964 there was a brief flurry on the part of Hunt to get the Republican presidential nomination for another of Criswell’s parishioners, evangelist Billy Graham, and I wonder how far this scheme might have gone if a Texan had not been occupying the White House at the time.
Everybody knew informally that Criswell was growing wealthy off his investments, which were guided by some of the enormously powerful members of his congregation. All of our pastors were well-to-do. The biblical injunction that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God was not the subject of many sermons. In Dallas, success meant money, even in theology, and it would have been simply embarrassing to see a preacher struggle to send his children to private school, or have to drive a secondhand car.
The richest man in the world lived only a few blocks from us, in a reproduction of Mount Vernon on the shore of White Rock Lake. You could see H. L. Hunt in the morning raising the flag in his front yard, or sitting on the porch in the late afternoon, in a white shirt and a clip-on bow tie, playing checkers. It was part of Dallas lore that Hunt’s Mount Vernon was twice as large as George Washington’s—or even ten times as large (size always being important in Texas, a state with few other admirable physical qualities). Hunt actually went to the trouble to have his mansion measured, and found it merely 2 percent larger than the original.
In his front yard he posted a billboard advertising his superpatriotic radio show called “Life Line.” He hired a former FBI agent named Dan Smoot as his commentator, who later founded his own conservative newsletter and opened an account in my father’s bank. The Dallas extremist fringe found its voice and radio ambassador to the rest of the nation in Smoot. He talked about the enemies within, and their names were Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter Reuther, Edward R. Murrow, Earl Warren. He opposed mental health programs because they were a Communist form of mind control. He urged the repeal of the income tax, abandonment of disarmament plans and foreign aid, and eventually the election of a Congress that would “bring a bill of impeachment against John F. Kennedy.” On the very day of the assassination, “Life Line” editorialized that if Kennedy succeeded in his plan to communize America, we would find ourselves living in a country where “no firearms are permitted the people, because they would then have the weapons with which to rise up against their oppressors.”
My father used to dream about landing an account from Hunt, whose wealth was spread all over the globe but not in his neighborhood bank. He was famously tight with his money. He drove to work every day in an Oldsmobile 88 and carried a sack lunch. One of the legends I heard about Hunt is that his net worth increased $11,000 per minute, most of it from his oil wells but also from his diverse investments in real estate, broadcasting, agriculture, health food products (under the HLH label), and even a sandwich shop in downtown Dallas. At that rate, one week’s earnings would more than match the total assets of the Lakewood State Bank. My father finally cajoled Hunt into taking a tour of the facilities. He appeared one autumn day, a genial old gent with wispy white hair and chipmunk cheeks, in the company of several dark-suited young men. He spent his time flirting with secretaries. One of the girls was getting married, and her friends were celebrating the occasion with a coffee cake. “Here, Mr. Hunt, you can have a piece,” offered the bride-to-be. The cake was intercepted by one of the dark suits, who tasted it and passed it on to Hunt. He pronounced it delicious. “Now, honey, I’ve got a little sump’n for yew,” he said, and reached into his pocket. Two pecans.
Hunt never really fit into the city; he loathed charity and all civic functions—you would never see him at a symphony ball, mingling with the sophisticates, but you might catch him at the state fair, personally hawking his HLH Gastro-Majic indigestion pills. Despite his wealth and radically conservative politics, he was essentially bohemian and wildly out of place in a city where pretense mattered. He was not only a notorious philanderer, he was a bigamist with three sizable families. One of his girlfriends was the diva Lily Pons, who settled briefly in Dallas and tried to reform its cultural prejudices. Hunt never lost his appetite for women, even in his eighties when he was boasting of his potency and hoping, by eating healthy food, to live another eighty years. I can remember seeing him standing on his head on the television news, with a nubile instructor grinning beside him, advertising the benefits of yoga. He also liked to crawl, or creep, as he called it, and he invited the Dallas Morning News to photograph him on his hands and knees racing around his living room. “They call me the ‘Billionaire Health Crank,’ ” he joked. He was terribly afraid of death.
It’s a measure of how small my world was that I had no experience with any person of another race in Dallas, except for our weekly maid. I was an unconscious racist, a fact I discovered in Dr. Criswell’s church. I was invited there on a blind date by friends who introduced me to Linda, and we sat together and listened to Dr. Criswell deliver the evening sermon with his usual nineteenth-century theatrics. He wore a cream-colored suit and swayed in the pulpit, tears in his eyes, praising our material prosperity and condemning godless Communism. With his white hair parted down the middle, he reminded me of Our Gang’s Alfalfa grown old. Linda was not black, of course, or she would never have entered the sacred nave; Criswell had once called race mixing “a thing of idiocy and foolishness.” Linda’s mother was a Filipino, and she had inherited an Asian caste of skin. As I sat next to her, liking her, the racist inside me noticed that she was not entirely white. I never called her; her color frightened me.
We said that Fort Worth was “where the West begins,” and we might have said of Dallas that it was where the South ends. The slave culture had run aground in East Texas; past Houston and Dallas blacks were rarely seen. We fought school desegregation with the same cleverness as the rest of the South. In 1954 the Supreme Court had ruled in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that public schools should be desegregated “with all deliberate speed”; eleven years later I graduated from high school without ever having had a black classmate.
In 1965 the Davis Cup came to Dallas, in the form of a challenge round between the United States and Mexico. Tennis was my sport, and my hero then was Arthur Ashe, the NCAA champion from UCLA. He was the first black man in what was still a country-club sport. Ashe had the biggest serve since Pancho Gonzales and a backhand that no one had ever equaled; it was the strongest stroke in the game. But he was not a powerful-looking man. He was lithe and tall, and he whipped his shots with abandon. This was a new game to us, power tennis; there was nothing leisurely about it, nothing cunning. It was a raw and, I suppose, angry game, played by an intellectual with delicate manners. He was the most exciting player in the world, but when he made the Davis Cup team, the Dallas Country Club refused to host the match. Rather than be disgraced, the city quietly built a splendid municipal court in Samuell Park, near my neighborhood. The inadvertent effect of this decision was to democratize the sport in Dallas, and to make the city one of the great international centers of the game.
Understanding that integration of public facilities was inevitable, the Citizens Council arranged a coup. One day a black couple was seated for lunch at the Neiman-Marcus Zodiac Room. That was it—a signal to the entire city that desegregation had arrived. It was typical of Dallas that social change would be accomplished in the parlors of power, and not at the lunch counters of Walgreen’s.
The subject of sex was never unbuttoned in my house. My father was puritanical; he walked out of Dr. Zhivago because it was too racy, and after that we never took him to movies. Mother, on the other hand, had a taste for potboilers and French films, but it was a taste seldom satisfied, for Dallas was as publicly antisex as it was anti-Communist. In fact there seemed to be a subliminal link between the two, having to do with -verting, either per- or sub-. There was a high level of hypocrisy in sexual affairs, which was not surprising, given the go-go egos of the big winners in this sanctimonious city and the idle and pampered status of its women. The city fathers, publicly pious, were in private a rough and jaunty bunch, with thick knuckles and heavy appetites, men who were used to grabbing what they wanted. There was a tacit understanding, in those tall buildings, that the flesh was weak. Even our neighborhood pharmacist was known to trade out the cost of a prescription drug for a few hot moments behind the curtain that led to his “office”—a lonely daybed. My prudish father forgave this offense on the grounds that it was done in a charitable spirit (and because the druggist was on his board of directors).
The city never, in my memory, went to the trouble of formally banning a work of art or literature, as we heard had been done in Boston, although in the fifties the local art museum removed from display some of its collection of “Communist” art, including paintings by Picasso and Rivera. In 1962, after Henry Miller’s erotic novel Tropic of Cancer was published, the Dallas police swept through the city’s bookstores and the book simply disappeared. We were sexually sanitized. I can remember my furtive astonishment when I read James Michener’s Hawaii. I couldn’t believe a book as lusty as that had fallen into the hands of an unguarded teenager. I had sexual luaus in my dreams for weeks. Between readings I hid the book in a cigar box behind an air-conditioning vent, where it no doubt still reposes.
The prevailing ethic in the city was not hard work but high risk. The big money had been made by the wildcatters in the oil fields. All of my life I had heard stories about men who had been through several fortunes; the attitude of these men toward money, and themselves, was highly romantic. They courted great wealth, grasped it briefly, then lost it again, usually through some preposterous investment. Anyone who worked too hard to make money or who seemed to be too cautious in holding on to it was regarded as a drudge or a scrooge. Money was supposed to be inconsequential, and although our millionaires didn’t light their cigars with fifty-dollar bills like Daddy Warbucks, they enjoyed wasting money, buying up entire store window displays from Neiman-Marcus, or his-and-her submarines.
Dallas had been a wide-open town, filled with mobsters and prostitutes and numbers runners, until 1948 when Bill Decker became sheriff and turned back the mob. He was our Wyatt Earp, and as grateful as the city was for his service, one had a sympathetic feeling for the citizens of Tombstone once the shopkeepers and churchgoers got control. We had an overdose of righteousness. In Texas, juries set the sentences in criminal trials, and in Dallas they assessed such terrific penalties (especially for property crimes, not so much for murder) that you supposed they must believe in reincarnation. One habitual offender got a thousand years for possessing marijuana. In 1972 the Ransonette brothers, Woodrow and Franklin, kidnapped Amanda Dealey, the daughter-in-law of our newspaper publisher. Since the death penalty was not in effect, the jury sentenced them each to five thousand years.
Dallas was so straitlaced it got a national reputation as a lousy spot for conventions. Outsiders couldn’t get over the way pedestrians froze into place in front of a DON’T WALK sign on an empty street. Edna Ferber once went to jail for jaywalking in Dallas, and many people suspect she wrote Giant in revenge—a theory I endorse, having received two jaywalking tickets myself during a teenaged crime spree.
Despite its reputation for regimentation and hard justice, Dallas had an underground love of criminality. Belle Starr, the Bandit Queen, settled near Dallas in 1860. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, the romantic desperadoes of the Depression, were from Dallas, and are buried there—still, no doubt, the most famous dead people in town (Lee Harvey Oswald lies in Fort Worth). The hero of my own youth was the King of Diamonds, a jewel thief who operated in North Dallas for several years. He must have been an avid reader of society columns, because he usually struck when the homeowners were off at a charity ball. Reporters loved him; they even threw their own party in his honor and demanded costume jewelry at the door. During debutante season the cops staked out all of North Dallas, but he always slipped through them, leaving behind his distinctive waffle-soled shoe prints. I remember learning the word “impunity”—that’s what the King of Diamonds operated with.
We were orderly, if not always law-abiding, but all the clean living and upstanding behavior bred a secret taste for the low life. This was not simple perversity. I had the feeling, growing up in Dallas, that real life was being hidden from me. There was a curtain drawn over human travail and ugliness, which I longed to fling away. But for a schoolboy in Texas, about the only glimpse behind the curtain came each October during the Texas State Fair (the nation’s largest, of course), when the tattooed ladies rolled into town. Each year we were let out of school one day during the fair, a sanctioned excursion into the world of midgets and two-headed calves. For me, the smell of corruption was never the brimstone that the preachers hollered about but the vomity odor of corn dogs that wafted through the midway. I spent most of my summer’s allowance throwing softballs at Kewpie dolls, thrilled to know for certain that I was actually being cheated.
The political scale in Dallas began with Eisenhower conservatism and ran well past fascism into such utopian notions as H. L. Hunt’s belief that the power of a person’s vote should depend on the amount of taxes he paid. (He articulated this vision in a novel titled Alpaca.) Although Dallas was predominantly Republican, the Democrats were also intensely conservative—the local party leadership hadn’t supported the national ticket since 1932. Such were the politics of the new world. The motto of its citizens was “unlimited opportunity,” and anything that hindered the advance of the ambitious, the clever, and the talented was seen as an infringement of liberty. The choking liberalism of the East was not appropriate for this frontier society of ours. We had cities to build and roads and schools and businesses that no one had ever imagined. We wanted to be left alone to make our new world. Our enemies were bureaucracy, regulation, legalisms. We felt ourselves to be a colony of an older civilization, and we resented the weight of its laws and strictures.
Dallas never went as far in its antigovernment stance as the voters in Houston, who rejected zoning as a Communist plot. The archconservatives of Dallas were no more rabid than those in Los Angeles or Miami, nor was the political climate of Texas much different from that of Southern California, or Florida, or Arizona. Across the country, but particularly in this new world, there was a certain adolescent bitterness, a suspicious feeling of impending betrayal, a willingness to find conspiracy lurking in every corner. “The mood,” as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., described it, “was one of longing for a dreamworld of no communism, no overseas entanglements, no United Nations, no federal government, no labor unions, no Negroes or foreigners—a world in which Chief Justice Warren would be impeached, Cuba invaded, the graduated income tax repealed, the fluoridation of drinking water stopped and the import of Polish hams forbidden.”
No, it was not just Dallas, but my hometown was already gaining the reputation of being the capital of this new world. There was something scary brewing in my city. People were demanding certitudes no sane man could offer. Military solutions—invading Cuba, annihilating Russia—were crisp, definitive responses to problems that seemed too damn much trouble to understand. “Fuzzy” was the word for any response other than a straightforward invasion of a foreign country when American interests (there were always American interests) were threatened. Fuzzy responses were what you came to expect from the bow-tied intellectuals at the State Department. In that atmosphere strident attitudes, even crazy ones, were appealingly clear.
Our politicians were always on the run from the smears of the right. Our mayor, Earle Cabell, who later served in Congress, was a far-right Democrat who was present at the founding of the Dallas chapter of the John Birch Society (he actually did not join), and yet he was routinely described as “the socialist mayor of Dallas.” The leader of the American Nazi party, George Lincoln Rockwell, offered that Dallas had “the most patriotic, pro-American people of any city in the country.” The compliment may have embarrassed a few, considering its source, but we believed that about ourselves. To the radical conservatives, Dallas had become a kind of shrine, a Camelot of the right.
The superheated political climate in the city brought ordinary life to a rolling boil. It was hysterical, yes, but after a point there seems to be little difference between hysteria and festivity. One sensed the appeal of fanatical movements. They begin like this, in a city where anxiety is high, where the opposition is cowed, where there is only one public voice and it is filled with certainty and hate. The brakes were off in Dallas. We had the giddy feeling that we were careening toward some majestic crack-up, but it was a thrilling ride, and who had the nerve to say slow down?
Once again—it wasn’t just Dallas. But we who lived there began to feel that we were in the middle of a political caldera, a grumbling, reawakening fascist urge that was too hot to contain itself. I wonder what might have happened in Dallas if Kennedy hadn’t died there.