Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
The parts of the Bible in which the children of Israel saw the sweetness in a harsh land, and piled up the foreskins of their enemies, to the Texan made more sense.
The movement to the cities failed to erode the old ethic quickly. For one reason, it came late; the Texas metropoli did not really grow until the fourth decade of the 20th century. The cities grew linearly, not upward; they grew statically, much as the Old South spread west. They were entirely creations of the auto age. In 1920, San Antonio, with 161,000, was the only large city in Texas, but in 1920 both Boston and St. Louis were larger than they would be in 1960. The Texas cities were planned for the automobile, thus avoiding certain enormous problems. In Dallas or Houston in the 1960s, three-quarters of all employed people rode in automobiles to work. This figure far exceeded the ratio in Detroit, the automobile center of the world.
The cities also grew in the age of the single-family dwelling, the outlying shopping center, the small plant with its parking lot, the drive-in theater, and drive-in bank. In the same era the downtown church waned, because the new city dwellers built their own on the periphery. Thus Texas did not build genuine cities, in the European sense, but atomistic accumulations of people. The metropolitan Texan lived in far greater comfort but socially not much changed from the way he had lived on his scattered ranches and farms. Nothing like the European or Northern city neighborhoods evolved. Strikingly, the Texan retained more loyalty to his region than to his city. He called himself Texan, not Dallasite or Houstonian. Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, Fort Worth, sucked millions of scattered Texans from surrounding areas, in a general pattern. North of the Brazos, in east Texas, most families moved toward Houston. South of the Colorado, they tended to move southwest, to San Antonio, or in unending fragmented streams, up from the Rio Grande. Dallas pulled its hundreds of thousands from the old corn and cotton fields of the post-oak belt and from along the ancient farming line. These people drove to the metropoli, often moving less than two hundred miles through country without much change. They kept their roots. They were at most second generation urbanites, not yet urbane, and they all had relatives or property back in the small towns or farms.
Since they were all of the same stock, and Texas had flexible annexation laws, they did not suburbanize as did people in other places. The cities kept spreading out, making continual new islands of commerce in the sprawling mass. Urban sprawl Texas had, but as yet not much real urban decay. By the 1960s, a pattern was emerging in several Texan metropoli: large numbers, even majorities, no longer went to the city center for any purpose, either to shop or work.
Thus the economic effect of cities was enormous, but they provided very little cultural force. The resident of Dallas could live, work, and think, suspended between streets and the surrounding land, almost exactly as he had lived, worked, and thought on his cotton fields or shady small-town lanes. The great Texas middle class merely moved from farm to town, and found conditions basically unchanged. They still lived off the land. In San Antonio, in fact, in 1960 more people lived in the city than worked there. Nowhere was there a flight of the business or professional class.
Texans, as on the frontier, had different social characteristics, and different problems, from other metropolitan Americans. One effect was that the Texas urbanite remained inherently conservative in politics, while the masses in Northern cities, composed of different kinds and classes of people, did not.
The great difference between Texas and every other American state in the 20th century was that Texas had a history. Other American regions merely had records of development. This made, and had to make, certain subtle differences between the Texan and the average Anglo-American soul.
Seventy percent of the people of Texas moved only a few miles, and did not change their culture, to become metropolitanites. By contrast, the urban majorities in the North came thousands of miles, most of them dropping, or trying to shed, their history on the cattleboat. Millions of Germans, Englishmen, Irish, Italians, or Poles started their American experience in Chicago, Omaha, Milwaukee, Baltimore, or New York, bringing with them certain traits and cultural patterns but no discernible past. When they became middle-class Americans, they twice severed their ancestral roots. The inhabitants of "Winesburg, Ohio" had no sense of the great American conquest, the battle between North and South, East and West, the mystic feeling that comes with having buried one's own dead in one's own soil. As a sensitive Jewish writer once remarked, he could never sing "Land where our fathers died" without feeling a stabbing qualm. Millions of modern Americans, who became definable Americans, bypassed the frontier experience altogether.
There was nothing bad in this, except some tried to deny the frontier experience.
The distance from Chicago to Dallas, or from Omaha to San Antonio, where the gloomy Alamo stood, was not measured merely in miles but in years and blood.
The Texan did not shed his history in the 20th century; he clung to it. Texas history was taught in Texas schools before the study of the United States began. The Anglo held to his history; the Mexican to his; only the Negro faced an immense psychosis in Texas, because the black man's history was not defined, and unbearable when it was. This Anglo history was shot through with the national myths all such histories have; it had its share of hypocrisy and arrogance. Parts of its mythology made both ethnic Mexicans and Negroes writhe. But in essence, it rang true.
We chose this land; we took it; we made it bear fruit,
the Texan child is taught. History, and the fact that he has never really left the land, made the 20th-century Texan the most "European" of all American stock.
They had had the longest frontier in America; they had battled in close combat with foreign races; they had subjugated other peoples, and had been conquered themselves. They had learned that all peoples were not the same; parochial inside America, they were yet less parochial than those Americans who thought all the world was essentially the same. The great majority knew where their grandparents lay buried. They were as provincial as Frenchmen, as patriotic as Russian peasants. They put not their trust in governments, but in holding to their soil. These were things all Texans felt or sensed, though few could articulate well.
Noticeably, while thousands of Texans sojourned around the world, and Texas millionaires found pleasanter havens in which to live, few completely broke their ties with home. A frequent phenomenon was the return of the Texan prodigal from Los Angeles or New York. Much more common, but less noted, was the refusal of the Texan to leave. Literally thousands of Texans surrendered better-paying jobs in order to remain where they were, something few other Americans could really understand. The average American's pride in his state of birth was more normally shown by his alacrity to leave it forever, given the chance.
In a number of ways, then, rising out of his past and present, the Texan was different from the mainstream American, even beyond the obvious Southern variation from the norm. He carried the ancient American ethic untrammeled and unchanged; he was apt to be as mercilessly middle-class as his ancestors on the long-erased Scots-English war frontier. Warrior values, rapidly diluting in America, also survived.
The cult of courage was obvious; cowards never sought out any dangerous frontier. But like all warrior-colored societies, the Texan despised cowardice in a way more secure societies could not understand. The physical coward, the man who rode away when the Comanches poured along the Brazos, leaving his womenfolk behind, was not tolerable for obvious reasons. But the cult of courage was mercilessly applied much further: the man who did not accept combat when it was offered, for any reason, was suspect.
Warrior values made Texans respectful of the rights of peers, much as all Indian braves were essentially equals when not on warpath. L. H. McNelly, in a recorded incident, shocked the officers of the U.S. Cavalry when he invited one to dine with him, because he ate, smoked, and squatted among his Ranger privates on terms of perfect equality when not on patrol. But McNelly would have shot dead on the spot any Ranger enlisted man who disobeyed a combat order. McNelly was a leader, like Hays and Ford, not because of any military hierarchy, or some governor's written commission, but because he was recognized as the best thinker under stress, the deadliest man around. The Ranger bands were almost perfect microcosms of the Texas frontier concept of democracy. Leaders were leaders, because they first proved they could act.
The reverse of the coin was that no warrior society was respectful of the rights of those outside the peer group. McNelly never told a Mexican twice to do something. Hays, either personally or in the name of his regiment, took no insult from any man, either disrespectful citizen of Mexico City or General Winfield Scott.
Samurai
could be touchy men.
Texans appeared to be courageous and self-reliant; the majority were.
They could also be contemptuous and brutal, if not cruel. Webb, perhaps better than anyone else, summed up the Western hero as he really was, and remained: "Gracious to ladies, reserved toward strangers, generous to friends, brutal to enemies." The Texas partisans could just as easily have wielded claymores or led men in armor on more ancient forays. They would apply the same values in other times, with weapons far more lethal than Jack Hays's Colt; values are slow to change.
The Texan was different also in his psychological conservatism. Every major social change that came in the 20th century was forced upon the State of Texas by outside pressures. Texas, from the Eastern, Southern influence, did not follow the Western pattern of granting female suffrage. This came by federal amendment. A host of restrictive laws applying to women remained. They were barred from jury duty, restricted in doing business in their own name, and could not transact property without their husband's consent. Some of this derived from Spanish law, but survived many referenda at large. Texans were indeed gracious to ladies, but preferred not to have the ladies dabbling in warriors' business. The Texan image, everywhere, was dryly and assertively masculine; this, too, shaped the native culture.
Votes for Negroes, desegregation, welfare, and various forms of the so-called civil rights for the non-peer group were forced down the Texan throat from outside. These trends, in a region where New England libertarianism did not dilute the essential puritanism, kept Texas in continual collision with the dominant forces in Washington. The Texan bitterly attributed all such agitation to politics, and was outraged when politics were used to alter the basic parameters of social life.
The mass migration to cities, because of its nature, did not alter the Texan concept of the inept, the foolish, the unlucky, or the weak. Nor was he enamored with these when they congregated and clamored for attention. The frontier ethic and experience laid no groundwork for such accommodation. The intelligent Texan realized that something had to be done; these people could not be "sent back where they came from," but most subconsciously wished they could run the new welfare reservations in their cities into Oklahoma.
Texas was relatively a rich state, although enormous differences in wealth and income continued between its citizens, white and white, black and brown. Such differences were bound to persist in a cause-and-effect society, based on action. But inevitably, the survival of its value system, and the strengthening of that system particularly in the west, led Texas to deal with its poor, its handicapped, its colored, and its blind, insane, and aged less compassionately than any comparatively wealthy state. Texans were decent, Protestant people, but the concept of public welfare beyond the starvation level violated every ancient Protestant ethic they possessed. God helped them who helped themselves. Those who could not cope deserved second class, or worse, status.
The entrance of the United States Supreme Court into such matters, and the slow, but massive assault on private property and tribal concepts of law that the modern Court took up, offended Texans not only in the pocketbook but in the soul. The Texan trend had always been to modify the law to fit conditions on the ground, and from this struggle Texas had evolved the stiffest concept of, and defense of, private property anywhere in the United States. Trespassing in Texas was no small offense. Fence-damaging was a felony; so being caught in someone's orchard with the
prima facie
evidence of holding a fruit bag was a crime. Stray stock could be impounded; pickets had permission to walk a public street, but not set foot on private ground; any hunter or fisherman who invaded another's property without express permission was subject to arrest. All this was a logical outgrowth of land-hunger and land-struggle, and as one splendid side effect it preserved Texas's last great herds of game; Texans invented the game ranch because they found it profitable, not because they loved the deer they hunted. But because under many circumstances a landowner could shoot a trespasser and be absolved, it showed that Texans instinctively put the defense of property above notions of humanistic law.
The pressures out of Washington to regulate and control the individual's use of private property, whether his acres or his factories, offended Texans. This conflict created interest politics, as with the tideland oil. Above all, the movement of the Supreme Court into the destruction of state boundaries by an overriding, expanding federal law, aroused anger and fear. This went far beyond the mere opposition to imposed civil rights.
The Court's decisions on criminal procedure and law enforcement convinced Texans that the Court was trying to change conditions to fit ideas, rather than making law to fit the dominant majority's needs and mood. The pressures for civil rights Texans could understand; there was a Negro vote. But other moves smacked of the triumph of ideology over the way things were. Successful Texan politicians, more often than not, ran on platforms pledging greater opposition to the ideologue reformers in the North, who were called much worse terms.