Michael Ennis
T.R. Fehrenbach Is History
His classic book Lone Star has reigned supreme for nearly forty years, but two new challengers are hoping to ascend the throne.
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Haley doesn’t devote significantly more words to the twentieth century than does the updated Lone Star, but the march to modernity represents a considerably greater fraction of his trimmed-down 560 pages—and his heart is clearly in it. Almost without precedent in a Texas history, Haley evocatively weaves culture into the tales of political shenanigans and oil booms, sketching out figures as disparate as expatriate author Katherine Anne Porter, actor “Fatty” Arbuckle, and counterculture icon Janis Joplin. He can be as unsparing of our collective failures as he is of individual foibles, as in this analysis of immediate post—World War II affairs: “The ferocity with which the Texas establishment fought to maintain mastery of the economy and the political landscape seemed continually tied, either directly or tenuously, to race. Even when not debated openly, it was the elephant in the parlor of every political discussion.” In the end, however, Haley is careful to distance himself from the “political correctness” of many revisionists, and the critical defect of Passionate Nation may turn out be its biggest selling point with its intended audience: It undermines the Texas myth more by subtle nudges than direct challenge.
That’s not the case with Campbell, the driest stylist of the bunch but without peer at lucidly presenting real history in the harsh light of inescapable facts. A professor at the University of North Texas, in Denton, and a heavyweight among academic historians, Campbell is distinguished by having personally done a lot of the groundbreaking scholarly spadework on which Gone to Texas is based.
Campbell hits the twentieth century less than three quarters of the way through his 471-page text, and his chronicle of the economic and political changes that dramatically transformed Texas into the place we live in today is the most thorough of the trio. But Campbell is also the preeminent authority on antebellum and Reconstruction-era Texas, and those epochs are the foundation of his reconstructed Texas narrative. While he flatly dismisses the notion that the Texas Revolution was a Southern conspiracy to expand slavery, Campbell convincingly establishes the centrality of the peculiar institution to a fledgling state that had made itself, by the eve of the Civil War, the “Empire State of the South.” By 1860 cotton dominated Texas’s economy and political life, and slaves composed 30 percent of the state’s population. But only Campbell offers a peek into the lives of human chattel who were worked, in the words of one, “from can see to can’t see.” Fehrenbach, who never quite comes to grips with why, in his words, “human slavery was firmly embedded across one of the most egalitarian areas of earth,” frequently complains that Northerners were no more morally scrupulous on the issue than Southern Anglo-Celts. However, as Campbell notes, at least one large group of antebellum Texans, despite being denied access to formal education, could see all too well that slavery diminished the moral capital of those who profited from it. “I reckon that old Tim,” said one slave whom Campbell cites, speaking of her master, “wasn’t no worse than other white folks that owned slaves.”
Campbell also takes on the long-held conviction that venal Northern carpetbaggers, intent on filling their pockets and settling scores, hijacked a benign rebuilding effort led by ex-Confederates after the Civil War. He argues that the federal crackdown in Texas was prompted by unrepentant, often violent Southern partisans (almost a thousand freedmen and white Union loyalists were reported to have been murdered in the three years after the war) and that the six-year period of radical Reconstruction that followed was implemented by state officials who were predominantly homegrown scalawags, far outnumbering freed blacks and Northern transplants. Yet the unprovoked victimization of Texas by Yankees became, in Campbell’s words, an “article of faith” far into the twentieth century. Fehrenbach himself echoes this venerable, popular mythology by blaming a relative handful of Northerners, who were here for only a few years, for generations of Jim Crow laws and lynchings: “What happened to the Negro was inevitable, once the North muddied the waters, then beat a strategic retreat.”
With our increasingly multiethnic demographics, Texas is, by both choice and necessity, steadily shedding its racist past. But the political legacy of Reconstruction continues almost unabated in our present state constitution, written in 1875 (and ratified in 1876) by a convention packed with ex-Confederate Redeemers who believed they were saving the state not only from “Sambo” and his Yankee sponsors but also from big business and, most important, government itself. This virulent antipathy toward government was registered with crippling restrictions of its powers: a legislature that still meets for four months every two years and a governor who remains less powerful than the lieutenant governor. “The constitution of 1876 was in spirit and letter an instrument of the older, agrarian South, not that of an emerging industrial state,” concedes Fehrenbach. “The emergence of Texas into the modern world was presided over by farmers, and not by businessmen.”
As our recent school finance spectacle illustrates, twenty-first-century Texas is hoping to educate its future scientists and entrepreneurs via a political apparatus intentionally designed to fail by a bunch of reactionary rubes who were already behind the times considerably more than a century ago. But that’s just one example of why Texas history really does matter—and why it matters that we get it right. The frontier mythology and Lost Cause romanticizing that remain at the heart of old-school Texas history will provide few answers to the problems of this century; as Haley observes, “Texas is an urban colossus facing significant challenges for which its history may not have prepared it.” We will be challenged to fill up our city centers, not spread people out across an endless horizon; to make heroes out of teachers and urban planners instead of trail drivers and Indian fighters; to tell a startling new story in which the chosen people will be Hispanics, again becoming the dominant population after a two-century hiatus. To move forward, we’ll have to accept that our history, however sacred and deeply embedded in our culture (most of us drink the Kool-Aid in seventh-grade Texas history), really isn’t inerrant scripture after all; our perspective on the past changes with time, cultural and political maturity, and new information. Gibbon, for all his brilliance, wasn’t the last word on the fall of Rome, and it’s a good sign of our continued ascendance that Fehrenbach’s literary classic is no longer the last word on the rise of Texas.
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