History Lesson 
Forget the Alamo
A new breed of scholars is rewriting Texas history to debunk the myths, explore the overlooked, and find heroism in the everyday lives of women and minorities—all while fending off charges of “flabby multiculturalism.”
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Campbell tried to remedy the situation by writing An Empire for Slavery, published by LSU Press in 1989. He points out that on the eve of the Civil War, more than a quarter of Texas families owned slaves, and human chattel composed 30 percent of the state’s population—figures that match antebellum Virginia’s. An Empire for Slavery is replete with footnotes, which, if you were to follow them to their source, would take you to the newspaper morgues and county courthouses of many a Texas town. There he unearthed the moldering skeletons of the slave economy: yellowed probate records in which farmers bequeath slaves to their sons and daughters, receipts that tally the rental of slaves to other farms, and records showing how the income from leased slaves paid white children’s tuition at fancy schools.
Calvert’s A&M colleague Walter Buenger addresses the problem of why, fifteen years after Texas voted overwhelmingly to join the Union, it voted overwhelmingly to secede. He looked at the secessionists and found many recent immigrants from the South. But there were also immigrants with no tradition of slavery who didn’t aspire to own slaves. And Anglo farmers near the Red River also had no stake in slavery because they couldn’t ship cotton to market; they raised crops like corn that did not require the help of slaves. By 1861 so many Texans were fighting over slavery and secession that portions of the state were close to their own civil war.
Buenger uses an unlikely metaphor to describe the misuse of Texas history: the Alamo. “Originally it had an absolutely flat roof,” he says. “Then, in the 1840’s, they added that characteristic limestone arch you see now. By the 1890’s the building was in ruins, but when preservation started, instead of going back to the original flat roof, they went back to the added roof. That, to me, is how Texas history works. You never go back to the real thing; you go back to what’s been added on after the fact.”
The Mild West School
TO MANY OF THE NEW HISTORIANS, the real frontier heroes were the unknown ones. In Austin, St. Edward’s University professor Paula Mitchell Marks has found that cloth reveals culture. “One scrap of homemade fabric can tell us much about the realities and nuances of a woman’s life, of a community’s life, in nineteenth-century Texas,” she writes in her introduction to Hands to the Spindle: Texas Women and Home Textile Production 1822—1880. Marks discovered that Stephen F. Austin favored homespun cloth over mass-produced fabric at his nascent colony so that everyone would appear to be on the same economic level. The newspaper of Austin’s colony warned that manufactured cloth would produce “damsels” who guarded their fingernails and sought “gaudy dress.”
In archives and libraries, Marks has ferreted out diaries and letters, as well as accounts of frontier Texas trade in everything from homespun cloth to hens’ eggs. The documents reveal that many frontier women were the economic mainstays of their families. They were endlessly busy with food production, spinning, weaving, and other tasks that helped support their families. This female labor, Marks says, made possible the war making, politicking, land speculating, and other male wheeling and dealing that occupy the traditional history books.
The Texas frontier historians are more than multiculturalists; they are also debunkers of the myths. Take the notion that frontier towns were hotbeds of gun-toting violence: Can any idea have been more central to Hollywood’s idea of the West? East Texas State University historian Ty Cashion has found that the violence has often been overstated. Fort Griffin, a settlement near Abilene that once served as a pit stop for Dodge City—bound trail drivers during the 1870’s and 1880’s, enjoys a reputation among frontier history buffs as a hell town of honky-tonks, gambling, prostitution, and random violence. The saloons and the prostitutes, with names like Polly Turnover and Slewfoot Jane, were an important part of life in Fort Griffin, but the police and court records Cashion examined show that wanton killing was relatively rare. When it did occur, it was generally carefully investigated, swiftly prosecuted, and strictly punished—unless the victim was a member of an ethnic minority.
The Urban School
THE TRADITIONAL HISTORIANS HAD little use for cities or for the post-frontier period of Texas history. Fehrenbach allots 45 pages of a 719-page book to a chapter called “The Twentieth Century.” The word “Spindletop” does not appear in his index. Cities hold no fascination for him. To the new historians, the glorification of the rural culture at the expense of the urban is a serious omission in Texas history. Char Miller, who moved from Miami to San Antonio in 1981 to teach history at Trinity University, notes that the most celebrated moment in Texas history, the Battle of the Alamo, was an urban event. As small as it was, San Antonio de Béxar was the biggest settlement west of the Mississippi in 1836, which, Miller says, is precisely why the Texans chose the mission as the best place from which to harass the enemy. Nevertheless, Miller notes, the Alamo became a symbol for rural virtue and valor.
Miller coedited a collection of historical essays called Urban Texas. He introduces it to his students by handing out copies of a short story written by Stephen Crane at the turn of the century, “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.” Crane describes the drunken gunslinger who arrives in a Wild West town near the Rio Grande as “[a] man in a maroon-coloured flannel shirt, which had been purchased for purposes of decoration, and made principally by some Jewish women on the East Side of New York.” To Miller, the passage’s deliberate connection between frontier and metropolis shows that the West was never isolated from the city. “Boots, clothing, barbed wire—they all came from manufacturers in cities,” he says. Portrayals of cattle drives as purely rustic are belied by their routes, which took them through cities; the Chisholm Trail ran along San Antonio, Austin, Waco, and Fort Worth because these cities were not only collection points for cattle but also outfitting centers for saddles, ropes, and groceries.
The new urban historians have made some surprising findings about the development of Texas cities. Texas Southern University’s Cary Wintz has used turn-of-the-century census data to outline the development of residential segregation in Houston. The same data, however, also showed that white and black families often lived on the same streets in those days and even roomed and boarded with each other. The rigid residential patterns of later years, Miller’s research has shown, were the result of the growth of suburbs, where property was expensive and deeds often had racial exclusions.
Miller thinks it is silly for any rural symbols to define Texas today. Since 1950, most Texans have lived in urban areas, and for most of the twentieth century, cities were gaining population at a faster rate than the country. But when traditional historians write about Houston or Dallas, they focus on entrepreneurial giants and their virtues of rugged individualism. “Dallas, San Antonio, Houston—they’ve all grown by intense government and business cooperation, drawing heavily on federal money,” Miller says. San Antonio was subsidized by military bases, Dallas by defense industries, Houston by a ship channel, federal investment for wartime petrochemical industries (arranged by Houston’s Jesse Jones, who was both Secretary of Commerce and head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation), and NASA. “I doubt,” says Miller, “that the Marlboro Man could have swung those deals.”
The Last Traditionalist
THE ONE AREA IN WHICH THE NEW HISTORIANS are no match for their mythic predecessors is the ability to bring history alive. Lone Star is, above all, a great read. “The Texans,” Fehrenbach writes, “came closest to creating, in America, not a society but a people. . . . The closest 20th-century counterpart is the State of Israel, born in blood in another primordial land.” Into this holy territory, Sam Houston leads the charge at San Jacinto, “his heart thudding in a tremendous passion, cooly, cooly with his soldier’s brain, knowing no power on earth was going to stop this headlong charge.” Melodramatic sometimes to a fault, Fehrenbach colors his language in the hues of an earlier time: The Indians are “Stone Age savages,” blacks after the Civil War “lacked motivation.”
But one can also find in Lone Star some of the very research of which the new social historians are so proud. To cite one such passage: “The entire existence of this glittering cotton empire was based on the subordination and labor of the Negro slaves. There were 182,000 blacks in bondage in Texas, approximately one-third the entire population. Slavery was not completely popular. It was disliked by most free farmers, on racial, social, and competitive grounds.” Nor was Fehrenbach hostile to the cultures that the Texans conquered; he has written admiring histories of both Mexico and the Comanche. His great difference with the social historians is that he does not approach nineteenth-century attitudes with a twentieth-century sensibility.
Today, at 73, Fehrenbach apologizes for the stale cigar smell of his office, but he makes no apology for his version of history: “Rangers, cattle drives, Injuns, and gunfights may be mythology. But it’s our mythology.” These romances, he says, are vital to Texans’ ability to see themselves as a people and to confront the future of the state. Nonsense, retort the revisionists. Let the old myths die so we can get on with the modern world, a world in which very soon the majority of Texans will be what are now called “minorities.” Now if only someone would write a revisionists’ version of the history of Texas.
“I’m optimistic that someone could do a book that would say to the public, ‘Hey, look how far history has come! Look how many different stories we have today,’” says Paula Mitchell Marks. But, she cautions, “It’s going to require tremendous care to include all the different groups who made the history and their various viewpoints. The danger is that in trying to address everything, the book could become clunky and pedantic.” To all this Fehrenbach shrugs. Common people will never accept the attempt to demythologize Texas—“Especially,” he says, “if the alternative is flabby multiculturalism.
“I have no real use for the present,” he allows. “I don’t believe in social science or all those tables and statistics. All the great historians have been great writers. But most of the new ones write small things. Hell, I read three pages of their work and my eyes dull.” Lone Star, he says, “represented the worldview of the native Texan of mid-century, of my generation. Now, whether it makes sense for the youth of the nineties, I couldn’t tell you. Every generation has to rewrite its history—that’s a normal, psychological reaction against the fathers. But the book has lasted almost thirty years. That’s longer than I ever dreamed.”
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