THE 1960s catapulted Texas into the forefront of the nation’s thinking. Political pundits conceded Lyndon B. Johnson a chance to be nominated as the Democratic candidate for president in case the party’s national convention should get past one or two ballots without nominating Senator John F. Kennedy. When Kennedy won, Johnson caused more than a little static on the Texas political scene by joining the ticket, and a number of former supporters treated him for a while as a leper for having accepted the vice-presidential nomination on a ticket with a man whom they abominated. Many liberal Democrats were equally displeased; but when Johnson helped to hold the South in the Democratic Party and possibly made the difference in Kennedy’s being elected, Johnson’s support drew praise.
Also, 1960 was the year when Johnson’s Senate term came up for renewal, and he somewhat naturally desired the best of both worlds—to be vice-president if the national electorate so decided, or to return as senator and presumably majority leader if Kennedy failed to get elected. So Johnson ran for both offices in Texas, which led to more intense opposition by anti-Johnson Democrats and by Republicans, who fielded a relatively unknown college political-science professor, John G. Tower of Wichita Falls, as their candidate. Tower turned out to be an unusually articulate candidate who can talk conservative sense without sputtering, a rare quality among Texas Republicans.
Johnson won both races, holding Texas in the Democratic camp for the national ticket and necessitating a special election for his vacated seat in the Senate. Since Tower received 900,000 votes in the senatorial election, he entered the special election with the bonus of having become known throughout the state through a respectable losing effort.
The special election brought out a field of seventy-one candidates, six of whom were serious and qualified, but the race evolved into a two-way fight between the interim senator, William Blakley, and Tower, both conservative.
If the cause had not been so serious, the race would have reached a new high in low comedy, for Tower and Blakley each made repeated claims that his opponent was Communist-tinged. Tower called Blakley a left-winger for the simple reason that he was a Democrat, and the Democrats were the party who had opposed Senator Joseph McCarthy and housed Walter Reuther and Hubert H. Humphrey. Blakley pointed out regularly that Tower had done graduate work at the London School of Economics and had undoubtedly been tainted by the leftist views of Professor Harold Laski.
Blakley, reputed to be worth some two hundred million dollars but a cowboy in his early adulthood, plastered the state with larger-than-life posters showing him in cowboy regalia—Dallas cowboy, not working cowboy. When Blakley’s advertising proclaimed that he stood for the Constitution, J. Frank Dobie took large ads in the state’s major newspapers to retort, “Who the hell ain’t for the Constitution!” Tower’s election made him the first Republican senator from Texas since Reconstruction. He is now serving his third term, in the upper half of Senate seniority and in the upper reaches of Republican councils.
The period saw the passing of Sam Rayburn, leaving a void in Texas and Democratic leadership which has since gone unfilled. Rayburn served from 1912 until his death in 1961, nearly a half-century. In 1937 he was named House majority leader, and three years later became Speaker of the House, in which position he served until his death except for two terms of Republican control. He was a decisive leader who knew how to compromise and how to control a meeting.
Lyndon Johnson had been a particular protégé of Rayburn’s, although the Speaker had originally opposed Johnson’s accepting the nomination for vice-president. But Texans would pick up the slack elsewhere, as with Congressman Wright Patman, chairman of Banking and Currency; George Mahon, chairman of Appropriations; Albert Thomas, who preceded Mahon as Appropriations chairman; Omar Burleson, chairman of House Administration; Olin E. Teague, chairman of Veterans Affairs; Robert Poage, chairman of Agriculture; and a team of younger comers like Jack Brooks, Jim Wright, Henry Gonzalez, and J. J. “Jake” Pickle.
Kennedy added to Texas prestige by naming a former Johnson administrative assistant, John Bowden Connally, as secretary of the navy. In 1962 Connally resigned this position to return to Texas to run successfully for governor, and Fred Korth, a banker-lawyer from Fort Worth, succeeded him as secretary of the navy. Meanwhile the liberal and moderate-conservative wing of the Texas Democrats personalized their fight in the persons of Senator Ralph Yarborough and Governor Connally.
With the election of 1964 on the horizon, President Kennedy decided to visit Texas to try to salve whatever wounds Yarborough and Connally had inflicted on each other. The trip was well advanced and was proceeding splendidly in Dallas when shots rang out, evidently from the Texas School Depository, killing President Kennedy and seriously wounding the governor. The fact that the assassination of a president took place in Lyndon Johnson’s Texas backyard and that it occurred in a town already derided as politically Neanderthal loosed such a national outpouring of hate against Texas in general and Dallas in particular that a lynch spirit against Texas seemed to pervade the nation and undoubtedly handicapped Johnson in his years as president.
The explosive rise and subsequent steady decline of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency are too well known to repeat here. Certainly Texans dotted the Johnson administration, because these were the people he knew best. Although many of the appointments were regularly denigrated, political scientists generally concede that Johnson ran the tightest administration in memory. Ramsey Clark (whose Texas father, Tom Clark, had been named to the Supreme Court by President Truman) became almost a cultish attorney general, despite his being from Texas. Bill Moyers was another Johnson appointee who was admitted spiritually into circles of national admiration, and his handicaps were even greater than Clark’s—he was not only a Texan but an ordained Baptist minister.
The victory of John Tower in 1961 had encouraged Republicans to put up local candidates in 1962, and the subsequent election sent eight Republican legislators to Austin and Ed Foreman of Odessa to Washington as a Republican congressman. Otherwise political life continued as always, with the Democrats in control and forever threatening to fall apart. Governor Connally joined Allan Shivers and Price Daniel in holding the governorship for three full elective terms. Connally worked diligently to push through educational reforms, maneuvered higher education so that the University of Texas would carry more political power, and raised salaries for schoolteachers through the age-old device of a sin tax, this time on cigarettes. By 1966 the complexion of representation began to change as a number of Negroes and Republicans were elected to Texas offices. In that year the legislature put out sixteen amendments to the Texas constitution, such a profusion that only the experts could grasp all of them. Obediently Texas voted for fifteen of the sixteen. Texas abolished the poll tax as a condition for voting and legalized annual registration of voters.
During the next legislature Texas redistricted congressional and legislative districts to comply with court orders, again raised salaries of teachers and state officials, and authorized a city sales tax. The federal government created Padre Island National Seashore, a lovely, lonely stretch of island beach outside Corpus Christi that runs for sixty miles almost without human interruption, and the Big Thicket National Biological Preserve, a unique region characterized by its fauna and flora, indicative of a biological and cultural crossroads.
Before President Kennedy was killed, he had designated Harris County southeast of Houston as the site for the United States Manned Spacecraft Center for space flights, particularly to the moon. The choosing of Texas for this NASA installation was credited or blamed on Vice-President Johnson, although probably Congressman Albert Thomas exerted even more influence on Kennedy than did his vice-president. The center is now known as the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center.
President Kennedy also began and Johnson completed a settlement over a disputed area on the edge of El Paso and Juárez caused by the change in channel of the Rio Grande. The argument reached back a century and had seemed to be settled during President Taft’s administration, but the United States had refused to accept the adjudication. Since the Rio Grande’s alteration had favored Texas, the United States had showed no eagerness to settle, but the unsettled Chamizal issue rankled with the Mexicans. Its final disposition pleased both nations and Texans accepted it as long overdue, even though they lost some land in the process. The Department of the Interior has co-operated with the government of Mexico in erecting a suitable park to commemorate the peaceful if drawn-out settlement of an international border problem.
Governor Connally unnecessarily called down opprobrium on his head from labor unions, chicanos, and liberals when he refused to treat with Rio Grande Valley workers marching on Austin seeking a minimum-wage law. He met them about sixty miles south of Austin at New Braunfels, where like a kindly but fatherly patrón he turned them back. He was, of course, only delaying the inevitable, and under his successor, Preston Smith, Texas passed its first minimum-wage law during the 1970–1971 biennium.
Texas also moved up to date with passage of a constitutional amendment authorizing the legislature to legalize sale of liquor by the drink. Even many drys agreed that the privilege, if that’s what it is, was overdue. For the first time in fifty-two years mixed drinks were sold legally in Texas bars. Loopholes had been found in previous laws permitting private clubs which could serve liquor, some of them so private that anyone could walk off the street, pay fifty cents, and become a member. Once the shock of buying a legal drink diminished, Texans noted little difference in drinking after the law had gone into effect, except for the disappearance of the brown paper sack in both posher and cheaper nightclubs.
Another scandal of historic proportions hit Texas in 1971 and 1972, this one centered on the distribution of bank stock among public officials. Speaker of the House Gus Mutscher, his aide, and a state representative were found guilty of conspiring to accept a bribe and given five-year probated sentences. Although Governor Preston Smith made a considerable profit on the sale of stock, his sin seems to have been more ethical than legal.
Texas worried a lot about the role of Lyndon Johnson when he returned to the state at the end of January 1969. Knowing his hyperactive metabolism, his opponents with near hysteria foresaw Johnson’s hand in every activity of which they disapproved. He was going to be chancellor of the university, president of the university, own all the banks in the state, control all the land, run the state government, and on and on and on. When his Lyndon B. Johnson Library was dedicated in Austin in 1971, Washington depopulated to attend the dedication ceremonies, including President Richard Nixon and Vice-President Spiro Agnew. But Texas fears were considerably overblown.
The political love affair with women which began with Ma Ferguson has continued. The state came close to electing a woman liberal, Frances (Sissy) Fahrenthold, as governor in 1972, admiring her courage as she went about the state blithely committing political suicide almost everywhere she turned up. Houston sent Barbara Jordan to the state Senate, unaccustomed either to women or blacks, much less a combination in one body. At first Texas senators observed Miss Jordan warily, but they soon learned that usually she was the best prepared among them. So they showed their recognition for quality by electing her president pro tempore of the Senate and giving her customary “Governor for a Day” honors.
When Houston elected Miss Jordan to Congress as the first black House member from the South, she not only received national attention but performed so capably that many Texans, liberal and conservative alike, are making tentative predictions that she will be not only the first woman president but also the first black president of the United States. After the Judiciary Committee hearings regarding impeachment of President Nixon in the summer of 1974, one advertising executive in Houston, no liberal, took space on a number of large signboards dotted over Houston with the simple message: “Thank you, Barbara Jordan, for teaching me about the Constitution.”
Despite his identification with the Democratic Party and Lyndon B. Johnson, John Connally returned to Washington as a regular adviser to President Richard M. Nixon and eventually as his secretary of the treasury. Many noted similarities between Connally and Johnson, both big men with restless energy and a ready recall and grasp of details. When in 1972 the Democrats chose George McGovern as their presidential standard bearer, Connally decided that his interest lay nearer the tenets of the Republican Party and moved over. Most Texans privately predicted that he would become another Wendell Willkie and stand in the line of succession when Nixon finished his administration. But events, both national and personal, got somewhat out of hand.
The polite resurgence of the Republican Party in Texas represents a heartening development in Texas politics. Democrats need their challenge. As indicated many chapters ago, Republicans in Texas suffered unfairly through identification with alleged carpetbag and black excesses following the Civil War, and whites fled the party. For a period Negroes provided the only glue.
In February 1868 Negroes voted in Texas for the first time, electing nine delegates to a constitutional convention. In 1869 two Negroes were elected to the state Senate and nine to the state House of Representatives. Gradually blacks moved into the power vacuum of the Republican Party. G. T. Ruby, a New York mulatto by way of Maine and Haiti, and Matthew Gaines, former slave and minister, influenced party policy in late Reconstruction days and provided most of the Republican votes. Although many black Republicans held local office, even counties with large Negro majorities never enjoyed a majority of black officials.
With Texas under the grip of the white establishment after 1874, five Negroes still were chosen as delegates to the constitutional convention of 1875 which wrote Texas’s present organic law. Norris Wright Cuney, a native Texas black, was a delegate to the Republican national conventions from 1872 through 1896, one of the longer attendance records white or black, and served on the Republican national executive committee in 1891 and 1892. In reward for his exceptional services he was appointed inspector of customs at Galveston in 1872, chief inspector in 1881, and collector of customs in 1889. He also served as alderman for Galveston and as a water commissioner for that port city from 1887 to 1889.
As remarkable as Cuney was William Madison (Gooseneck Bill) McDonald, a native Texan son of a slave and a free woman and college educated. In 1892 McDonald, then twenty-six, was elected to the Republican Party’s state executive committee. For thirty years he would remain a party power in company with Edward Howland Robinson Green, the somewhat bewitched son of Hetty Green, the “witch of Wall Street.” The pair ran the Republican Party in Texas and were a growing force on the national scene until 1912, when the Bull Moose schism split the party. McDonald’s star dimmed when he and Green supported General Leonard Wood for the G.O.P. nomination for president in 1920, only to see R. B. Creager of Brownsville move to the front by backing Warren G. Harding. Creager then ran the party for three decades, but under him it developed an exclusive club complexion that handicapped its growth in Texas.
Between 1890 and 1896 Republicans began to copy Democrats with their Lily-White Movement, an attempt to purge the party of its black majority. The conflict dated back to 1870, broke open in 1884 when Cuney seized control of the party’s state convention, and became truly serious when blacks refused to seat delegates from white Republican clubs in 1890. In retaliation the whites urged an all-white primary, only to have their fangs drawn when the blacks nominated only whites for their 1890 ticket. Two years later white Republicans sent a completely white rival delegation to the Republican national convention and nominated Andrew Jackson Houston, Old Sam’s son, for governor. Boycotted by the blacks, Houston received 0.3 percent of the vote.
Again in 1896 the party split, sending a “black and tan” as well as an all-white delegation to the national convention in St. Louis. The Lily-Whites were not seated. Later in the year the Lily-Whites adopted the strategy of joining what you can’t beat, moved in on the black Republicans, utilized the institution of the poll tax and white primary to dominate and eliminate, and the black voice in the Republican Party began to grow silent. Since he had nowhere else to go, the black remained a political nothing until 1944, when the Texas case of Smith v. Allwright opened primaries to blacks. On his return as a citizen the Negro turned to the once-hated Democrats as the party holding the best hope for his improvement. Gooseneck McDonald, for instance, supported Al Smith and Franklin Roosevelt before rejoining the Republican fold for Thomas E. Dewey in 1944 and 1948.
Since 1960 Republicans have returned as a loyal opposition. While they don’t dominate the state, they influence it—and once in a while they join with disaffected liberals to scare the daylights out of regular Democrats. Their threat represents a healthy political situation for the state, another signpost along its highway to maturity. In 1972 the Republicans nearly pulled an upset in the gubernatorial race, as their candidate Henry C. Grover, a personable former teacher of history, polled 1,534,000 votes to 1,633,000 for Democratic nominee Dolph Briscoe. Probably the only reason that Graver did not win is that old-line Republicans did not feel that he belonged to the club.
A separate force arising in Texas has been Raza Unida (United Race), an independent political party organized in 1970 to make the town of Crystal City a model for chicano self-determination. José Angel Gutiérrez and his wife, Luz, led the group from the start and by 1973 had organized in twenty-three states. The party endeavors to bring dignity and power to all disfranchised groups, whether chicano, black, women, the poor, or the voiceless Anglo.
Raza Unida hit the political ground at full stride when in April 1970 its slate swept school-board elections in Crystal City (population 8,104). It followed up with victories in city-council elections in Crystal City, Carrizo Springs, and Cotulla. In each instance reforms instituted included bilingual-bicultural education at elementary levels; hiring of teachers, principals, and counselors of Mexican descent; free breakfast programs for elementary schools; housing projects; street improvements; summer recreation programs; and elimination of rules prohibiting speaking of Spanish on school grounds. Since 1972 the party has entered statewide contests, won nothing, but looked good as Ramsey Muñiz polled 214,118 votes for governor in his first attempt. Crystal City, where the chicanos had first won in 1963 with another organization but had been unable to sustain themselves, has been studied in California, Colorado, Illinois, Wisconsin, Arizona—anywhere that a local majority of disfranchised people wonder how to exercise majority rights currently denied. Crystal City may well become a generic name for takeovers by the politically underprivileged.
Texas has avoided that entrapment that often appears in other states—emotional entrancement with a family name. No Kennedys, no Roosevelts that crop up in succeeding political generations. Governor Jester’s father was a lieutenant governor in the 1890s, while the incumbent lieutenant governor, William P. Hobby, is the son of the W. P. Hobby who succeeded Jim Ferguson as governor. But that was fifty years ago, and very few repeater voters are around to remember. Evidently Texans believe that public office should be passed around, or that political sagacity is not an inherited trait. Or perhaps the periodic fresh face loses too much of its bloom while in office, and no one wants to be reminded of it again.
Texas is in no way lacking cultural amenities and other aspects of the “good life”: it has nearly 300 registered museums, three major symphonies and a small horde of lesser ones, lakes, mostly dammed but representing enormous acreage in expanse, regattas, 130 or so institutions of higher learning, and pleasant tree-lined neighborhoods.
On the negative side, Texas has yet to turn out a novelist or poet of certified international reputation, but that is no sign that it is not a well-adjusted state. Texas has produced any number of good entertainers—Mary Martin for musical comedy; Harvey Schmidt as composer and Tom Jones as author and lyricist of The Fantasticks (which apparently will run till the Second Coming); producers like Joshua Logan; movie directors like King Vidor; classical performers like Van Cliburn; an endless spate of popular performers (black, Teddy Wilson; white, Jack Teagarden; brown, Trini Lopez and Johnny Rodriguez); historians, Walter Prescott Webb; sociologists, C. Wright Mills; folklorists, John A. Lomax and J. Frank Dobie; composers, Scott Joplin; dancers, Alvin Ailey; short story writers, O. Henry and Katherine Anne Porter (who has rejected yet drawn upon her East Texas heritage);—an endless list that runs on and on and on. Fred Gipson’s Old Yeller has all the appearance of a minor classic for adolescents, a latter-day Huckleberry Finn that rivals The Fantasticks in number of performances.
The University of Texas may be a cow-country college (albeit heavily financed by oil royalties), but its Humanities Research Collection provides a mecca for scholars all over the world, while Latin Americanists from Latin America find that they can work more satisfactorily in Texas’s Latin American Collection than they can in any other library in the world including their own countries’. The Margo Jones Theatre in Dallas, Paul Baker’s theaters in San Antonio and Dallas, and Nina Vance’s Alley Theater in Houston produce innovative shows that Broadway lacks the courage and support to produce and that rank alongside what Tyrone Guthrie is producing in Minnesota. A San Antonian, Robert Tobin, virtually underwrites the experimental Santa Fe opera season each year and for San Antonio’s HemisFair produced the only complete version of Verdi’s Don Carlo in the history of the United States. And a Texan would drive a hundred miles for such performances.
On the popular side Texans pioneered in country and western swing, producing their own sort of folk music apart from an extension of Appalachia with Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. Now musicians from throughout the nation are clustering around the hills of Austin and a raffish establishment called the Armadillo World Headquarters to found a counter-school to the country commercialism of Nashville. Naturally some local musicians are involved, and their lyrics point toward a harsh Texas sentiment that doesn’t fit the more careful Nashville version. Entertainment as culture? Certainly. But entertainment that has sprung up, rather than having been transplanted from another clime. Uncontrived.
Notably, when the Hermitage sent its art exhibit to the United States, the Leningrad group chose Fort Worth’s Kimball Museum as one of its three stops in the United States. The Amon Carter Museum of Western Art in the same city spent half of 1973–1974 displaying its Remingtons and Russells behind the Iron Curtain to a stampeding crowd. Some hold that western art should be denigrated, but how much more parochial is Remington than Winslow Homer; or Porfirio Salinas and his bluebonnets; or José Cisneros and his conquistadores; or Tom Lea, who can’t be categorized as a western artist any more than his The Brave Bulls can be called a Mexican book?
In the 1890s the little town of Waco had a fire-eating editor-publisher named William Cowper Brann, whose The Iconoclast de-hided all sorts of pseudo-religious cant and hypocrisy. At his peak he had an international subscription of 96,000 in a town of 15,000. In a later day the Texas Observer shows just as much courage as The Iconoclast and a lot more balance and liberality of spirit as it takes apart the Texas Establishment. Run now by two remarkable girls, Kaye Northcott and Molly Ivins, but nursed for years by Ronnie Dugger and cigar-smoking Frankie Randolph, a Houston banker’s wife, the Observer uncovers stories that more wealthy newspapers overlook, twits erring politicians, lambasts wrong-headed legislators, and generally turns the state topsy-turvy. Probably it is read most carefully by its detractors, who want to know what the opposition (whose paths they seldom cross) is thinking.
Taken in an absolute sense, Texas’s attitude toward race has not been a cause for Texas pride. On the other hand, Texas observed de jure integration with a reasonably good attitude, and followed the same deliberate de facto segregation path that practically everyone else trod. When the time came for Houston schools to integrate, the city fathers asked Governor Daniel to assist them with troops, not so much to open up white schools to blacks as to keep blacks away “to avoid trouble.” Governor Daniel wisely told Houston that the school board had its orders and that keeping blacks out of Houston white schools was not part of the governor’s prerogative. Houston integrated with relatively little incident. Seeing what had happened at Little Rock, Oxford, New Orleans, and Charlotte, for instance, where economic progress had stalled, the Dallas business establishment resolved that this slowdown of business activity would not happen to Dallas. For good business reasons, Dallas integrated schools without incident.
In the matter of union labor Texas can be faulted. Although the Screwman’s Benevolent Association became an effective union in Galveston more than a century ago and Texas became accustomed to unions on railroads and on docks, by and large union development in Texas proceeded slowly. The political and social climate was not propitious. In particular, Texas remains a battleground for organization of agricultural workers by the United Farm Workers, especially in the Rio Grande Valley. With the third largest farm-worker population in the United States, Texas nationally ranks third in priority in organizing drives among migrant and seasonal farm workers. But the long, generally unguarded border with Mexico gives growers immediate access to a pliant strikebreaking force, and UFW leaders have been reluctant to go all out in trying to organize. Success looks more likely for the farm workers than it did in 1966, when they lost the strike, only to prove in a suit against the Rangers that violence and repression were practiced. Since then, Rangers and other law-enforcement officers handle the pickets with more care.
Where does all of this leave Texas? Mainly, striving. Its people get up in the morning, try to endure their jobs and their bosses, go home in the evening, perhaps by way of a cantina, enjoy their families or kick their children, worry about inflation, try to pay some of their bills, and hope that somehow the Lord will provide. Washington is a long way off, but not so far as it once was, while to many the state capital seems almost as far away.
Texas has turned into an urban state with an outside image that is still rural. Yet Texas is more urban than most of the remainder of the nation. Only New York, California, and Illinois have more citizens living in urban areas than does Texas: 80 percent of all Texans, according to the census of 1970, compared with 73.5 percent of the nation. And the movement to town is accelerating. Only Houston oil men and Dallas bankers are turning rural, as they irrigate and plant grass on rocky hillsides.
This transformation has happened recently enough to be intoxicating and confusing, or even to go unnoticed, especially by state legislators who still view mass transit as something for Boston and Cincinnati. After all, fifty years ago two out of every three Texans lived outside the cities; you can’t breed out country attitudes that quickly. More than half the population lived in rural areas at the close of World War II and reveled in the western image portrayed in movies and fiction. But now Texas has five cities listed among the forty-five leading cities in the United States—Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, El Paso, and Fort Worth. And cities like Austin and Corpus Christi are knocking at the gate.
Texas is getting younger, and all age groups below fifty-five are increasing. The proportion of women is likewise increasing, and a state which sometimes has recognized women as people already has begun to see women grow in business and political clout. Austin’s legislative delegation, for example, consists of two women, one of them black; one chicano; and one white male—all of them reasonably liberal. By 1980 Texas will likely have 100 females for every 93.8 males. How does that square with the long-legged, be-Stetsoned, macho Texas stereotype?
In the middle of all this change, one more statistic should be considered for balance: despite its rapid and nearly complete urbanization, Texas retains a larger rural population than the total populations of twenty-five other states. If you’re looking for country ham with red-eye gravy, you can still find it.
Sometimes Texans try a little self-improvement, sometimes they get a little excited about public scandals, and sometimes they think they perceive opportunity. The impatient chafe because its public officials won’t live up to the possibility of Texas, don’t seem to realize they could fashion a state which could be a showpiece for the nation. But since most Texans are ordinary people, their leaders are about as ordinary, with the exception of a now-and-again Sam Houston or Lyndon Johnson who wants to drag them along faster and farther than they want to go.
To generalize about Texas is tantamount to asking foreign visitors what they think about the United States when the only places they have seen are New York and Washington. Which is the American university, Harvard or Sul Ross? Neither. Who is the typical Texan, Ramsey Clark or Bonnie and Clyde or Lee Trevino? None of them. Who represents Texas culture—Van Cliburn or Ornette Coleman, Bob Wills and his “New San Antonio Rose” or Leadbelly or that good ol’ Dallas boy, Terry Southern, who wrote the outrageously funny Candy, the screenplay for Dr. Strangelove, the novel The Magic Christian, and the collection known as Red-Dirt Marijuana? Or Janis Joplin, who used Southern Comfort and a microphone for her growing pains, and an exploitive public for her psychiatrist and confessional?
Texas is sliced neatly from Del Rio on the Rio Grande for several hundred miles northeastward through San Antonio on to Austin and eventually to the Red River by the Balcones Fault, an escarpment formed during the Tertiary time when a down-warping occurred near the Gulf Coast along with a moderate uplift inland. The Balcones forms more than a geological zone; it is also a cultural fault line. To the east of Balcones lies the farthest west extension of the Old South, the fertile well-watered agricultural valley that forms part of the broader Mississippi River trough and Gulf of Mexico plain. That portion of Texas is southern culturally—heavily black and evangelical, with a poor-white cotton mentality that barrels of oil won’t quite wash away. To the north and west of the Balcones Fault the land belongs to sheep, goats, and cattle and is the easternmost-southernmost extension of the Rocky Mountains and the semiarid desert. Here people talk louder, are more casual about religion, and learn to live with chicanos.
In East Texas lives the largest concentration of Negro millionaires in the world. Eighty percent of the state’s blacks live in East Texas. Most are not millionaires. Meanwhile the proportion of blacks to whites dwindles from 30 percent in 1870 to 11 percent nearly a century later, though the net population increases.
To the east rainfall is plentiful. To the west the citizens hold prayer meetings for rain, which God answers only when the wind is right. Not infrequently the western areas seem to get their yearly average in one weekend. Houston wallows in water; Lubbock thirsts and rations. When integration of whites and blacks was a problem, every town west of the Balcones line integrated automatically, while the eastern portion uttered a quavery “Never!” before backing down. East Texas is George Wallace country; West Texas belongs to Barry Goldwater. Two decades ago a rigid conservative and a mild liberal contended for speakership of the state house. The conservative, somewhere in another century economically and socially, came from the Rio Grande Valley, where it would have been political suicide to oppose integration, and he didn’t; the liberal came from Gober, near Bug Tussle, in northeast Texas, where it would have been political suicide to favor integration, and he didn’t. The division in Texas is that distinct, that inflexible.
Most Texas cities lie below the Balcones line. Only El Paso, Lubbock, and Amarillo among the larger cities reside behind. The latter three towns, as well as the remainder of West Texas, possess a strong booster drive. West Texas is alive; Central and East Texas are more sophisticated, which translates as somewhere between cynical and tired.
On the negative side Houston for years required special social-science textbooks which did not mention the verboten United Nations nor social security. Once Houston banned Plato from a local junior high school, which led its resident pundit, Hubert Mewhinney, to muse in print his surprise, not that the book was banned but that any school in Houston had a copy of Plato’s works in the first place. At one period recently the Houston school board meetings were so abusive that they were telecast locally, and people turned down dinner invitations to stay home to watch the school board. Locally it outranked “I Love Lucy.” On the other hand, the University of Houston established the first educational TV station in the nation. In that same community the Houston Post, Lieutenant Governor Hobby’s paper, for years endured Mewhinney, a most erratic character with probably as much raw brainpower as anyone in Texas, when any other newspaper would have fired him for absenteeism, stabbing sacred cows, and preferring to listen to a honky-tonk pianist in a Negro holy roller church over turning in this or last week’s copy.
And from that same “intellectual desert” have emerged Barbara Jordan and Denton Cooley and Michael DeBakey, the latter two among the foremost open-heart surgeons in the world. Impossible cases are flown in from all over the world to be renewed in Houston. In the 1930s and 1940s jazz musicians from all over the United States came to Houston to be renewed also—not by a surgeon’s skillful hands but by the firm fingers of Peck Kelley, who played the blues on the piano like no other white man. The visitors would play their gig at some country club or posh party and then take off for whatever club Kelley was playing in, to sit and blow and listen and jam the remainder of the night, and then go away to praise his taste and talent to other musicians.
Also out of Houston plays Lightnin’ Hopkins, a black man whose blues are real; while over in Navasota lives Mance Lipscomb, another black belter whose records are prized by Harvard undergraduates while generally ignored in Texas. Like Peck, neither has ever turned commercial; both remain as genuine as the soil which nurtured them. When Lightnin’ sings those “Long Gone Blues,” you know he’s been where he’s shouting about.
In Temple in Central Texas (a town a bit smaller than Mayo’s Rochester, Minnesota) Dr. Arthur C. Scott and Dr. R. R. White pooled their medical talents three-quarters of a century ago to found a hospital which grew into Scott and White Hospital, not only the most noted private hospital in the Southwest but internationally recognized for its diagnosis and treatment of malignant diseases. And in a recent poll the Southwestern Medical College of the University of Texas was named one of the ten best hospitals in the United States in the field of diagnosis.
Rivalry between Dallas and Houston has replaced the old-time contention between Dallas and Fort Worth. The two cities are unlike—Dallas is a white-collar town that faces east; Houston is a blue-collar, big-dealer town that faces—anywhere. Dallas feels like a city; Houston, like Los Angeles, is a country town with more than a million people in it. Dallas is contained, assured, a bit defensive; Houston is brash, aggressive, full of frontier exaggeration and excess. Houston may not be Texan at all but “standard American,” a buzz of continual motion. Hubert Mewhinney also capsuled the two cities by observing that Dallas is a piccolo and soufflé town, while Houston—“Houston is a steak and trombone town.”
The lesser cities and towns move on, too: Fort Worth gradually shucking its cowtown image as it becomes an art center; San Antonio and El Paso regularly building their special Latin ambience; Corpus Christi growing into a kind of Nice of Texas, not quite a Riviera but next door; and Austin, pleasantly civilized except when the legislature’s in town, an oasis and every Texan’s second city.
As you enter the state from the northeast, you are invariably impressed with the rawness, the unkempt quality. Farmers don’t button up their landscapes. You miss the white fences and mowed verdancy of Kentucky, the gardenlike greenery of Vermont, the hedgerows of Illinois, the gentility of Virginia. But travel from Austin to Corpus Christi in late June—the old brush country where the range-cattle industry originated, and watch the variegations of green fields with the topaz heads of milo maize; or drive from San Angelo to the eastward and see the unfolding light green of mesquites blending with the dark green of the hated ubiquitous cedars, the broad scapes dotted with Herefords and Angus and Brahmas; or visit the Big Bend at any season. It wasn’t so long ago that Pancho Villa’s Mexicans invaded the Big Bend at Glenn Springs, several hundred of them, to sack the town, kill a boy, set fire to the brush roof of a United States barracks, and shoot three of the garrison as they rushed from the burning building. Some sons of homesteaders still expect them to return. You can almost feel the tension.
Texas is a land of contradictions, capable of expanding the soul and equally capable of being mean and petty. Texas raises a breed of religious zealots whose piety masks a poverty of spirit akin to meanness. Unlike the eastern Kentucky fundamentalist who gets drunk on Saturday night, cuts up his best friend, maybe “sets a spell” in county jail, and then dominates the mourner’s bench the next time he is free to go to church, his Texan equivalent looks on all merriment as sternly as the old Puritan Congregationalist and then ruins his neighbor on Monday almost “for the good of his soul.” Thus Billy Sol Estes was a lay minister who neither drank nor smoked nor took the Lord’s name in vain, and did not permit even his children to indulge in mixed bathing in the swimming pool of his luxurious home, all the while milking the federal government of an estimated $40 million in one of the biggest swindles in history.
If the state were suddenly to withdraw from the world, the world would still carry its name along. With a growing world conscience that makes it forever more difficult to defame groups and promote stereotypes, Texans may well at times be the last whipping boy—the last minority group—safe to attack. If Texans should outgrow their usefulness as objects of detestation, they will continue as commercial objects. Texas Bucks, Texas-size jiggers, ten-gallon hats—most Texans don’t buy them—people from other states do. The largest order for Texas Bucks, according to George Fuermann, came out of Kansas City. And Chrysler puts out a Dodge that insults every Texan with its advertising—giving it a Texas name and throwing in every claim except that Santa Anna drove it at the Alamo. Seventy years ago Richard Sears hit Dallas the same way with a special Texas edition of the Sears Roebuck catalog. He buttered Texas pride on every page—no wonder the catalog was the buttress of every Texas privy.
Hubert Mewhinney probably summed it up as well as anyone. In 1955, before Alaska displaced Texas as the largest state, he wrote as follows:
Texas is the biggest state in area but the biggest and best of any single thing will be found somewhere else. … Texans ought to be content with the variety of loveliness, the picturesqueness of what they actually do have.1