Adam Clulow, Author at Not Even Past

IHS Climate in Context: Environments and Borders: Where Do We Draw the Lines?

By Mary Huber

Natural environments seldom follow political borders. While sometimes arbitrary lines on a map separate states, natural environments shape the way people live.

In Texas, people raised in the Gulf Coast wetlands share a similar environment with their counterparts in Louisiana. East Texans who live in the piney woods experience ecological patterns closer to their neighbors in Arkansas. And in West Texas, the desert ties together inhabitants of Texas, New Mexico and Mexico to the south.

Mexican American and Latino/a Studies Assistant Professor C.J. Alvarez has spent the last three years studying this last group, which he calls “desert dwellers” — people who live in the vast 193,000-square-mile Chihuahuan desert that spans states and national borders. He’s interested in the unique characteristics that define them and that stretch beyond the political borders of nation states.

The Chihuahuan Desert is the biggest desert in North America — about the size of Germany. It encompasses southern New Mexico, West Texas, eastern Chihuahua, and western Coahuila. Despite its large size, Alvarez says many residents of the United States or Mexico would be hard pressed identify it on a map. Historians, too, have often written about deserts from the perspectives of outsiders who saw drylands as either spiritual and artistic places or as harsh wastelands that should be transformed into economically productive spaces through technology and engineering.

Chihuahuan desert and Chisos mountains in West Texas — *Chihuahuan desert and Chisos mountains in the Big Bend National Park, West Texas, with Kit Peak in the background. Photo credit: Harry Green*

“Both of those views — whether you see it as a wasteland or a source of aesthetic inspiration — assume that the desert is an exotic place,” Alvarez says. “I am more interested in the way desert people have understood, seen and experienced the desert in the day-to-day.”

“Most of my research focuses on the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. In those days almost everyone who lived in the desert had to directly confront desert conditions in their day-to-day lives. Limited water, extreme heat, difficulty caring for animals, and serious agricultural challenges were all part of the package. Some of the most important sources I use to re-create a sense of what life was like back then are oral histories alongside ranch and irrigation records. Very few desert dwellers directly reference the fact that they live in the desert. In fact, they almost never even use the word. Instead, they often talk about the environment in the context of the challenges they face making their lives there.”

Alvarez has been collecting these narratives about desert dwellers and their relationship to the earth as part of the UT grand challenge initiative, Planet Texas 2050, which seeks to mitigate some of the worst effects of climate change over the next decade. Researchers believe that having a better understanding of our state’s varied ecosystems will help us to protect it into the future.

Map of Chihuahuan Desert — *The Chihuahuan desert is the biggest desert in North America — about the size of Germany. Image credit: Josh Conrad*

And Texas is the perfect place to do this work.

“Because it’s so big and the political boundaries of the state have only a dim relationship to environmental boundaries, we are actually able to see both sides of the coin of intensified hydrological cycles produced by human-induced climate change,” Alvarez says. “We see extreme wet weather in the storms of the Gulf Coast and extreme drying and droughts in West Texas.”

Alvarez himself grew up in the Chihuahuan desert, in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He says when he was a child, struggled to grasp the nature of floods. “I couldn’t conceive of it,” he says. “I thought it was just for coastal people.”

It turns out that, historically, flooding has been a significant problem in the desert. Unlike the permanent rivers on the Gulf Coast that swell with water when hurricanes roll in, West Texas has what are called arroyos, ephemeral rivers, that flow maybe a few minutes every year during the rare thunderstorms. They cut small canyons and gullies in the landscape, though 99% of the time they are bone dry, Alvarez says.

“But, oh man, when it storms in the right place at the right time, you get flash floods.”

In the middle of the 20^th century, construction workers started building unique dams —not to store water for irrigation or interrupt a river system to produce electricity — but to slow down flood water in the rare case of a flash flood. You can see them carved into the landscape around El Paso as well as other desert cities. They have made urban and architectural development in those places possible. Without them, El Paso, for instance, would be destroyed — maybe not next year or the year after, but when the right storm came at the right time, Alvarez says.

Construction of Franklin Canal — *Reconstruction of settling basin and concrete lining at Franklin Canal near El Paso. Photo Credit: Library of Congress*

“We think about deserts as places whose biggest problem is the dryness, but there is a particular kind of wetness and excess water problem that deserts have that is incredibly dangerous and destructive,” Alvarez says. “This is a specific experience and phenomena for desert people — something outsiders wouldn’t notice.”

Just as desert people have adapted to live with flooding, they have also adapted to live with drought. In the future, they will face additional challenges as these conditions worsen, facing near-permanent damage from overgrazing, as well as drinking water shortages, increased erosion, and depleted irrigation reserves for crops.

“Despite the fact that drylands are often written off as vacant wastelands, they are in fact some of the most fragile environments on earth. Because of this, arid zones will suffer some of the most serious repercussions from climate change, many of which have already begun,” Alvarez says. “Looking back at the history of how people have confronted the extreme conditions of deserts will help us better respond to an uncertain future.”

Mexican American and Latino/a Studies Assistant Professor C.J. Alvarez will be presenting on these topics as part of the Institute for Historical Studies’ “Climate in Context” events, which look at how human interaction with the natural world has changed over time and what valuable information that can provide for addressing our current conditions. Alvarez will speak as part of a panel on April 12 that looks at the history of oil and water in Texas. Jackson School of Geosciences Professor Jay Banner, who is a Planet Texas 2050 researcher, as well, will also present.

For more details and to register, visit IHS Panel: “Oil, Water, and Climate: Environmental Histories of Texas”.

Mary Huber is Communications Coordinator for Bridging Barriers Grand Challenges

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

HPS Talk – “Vannevar Bush and Cold War Science Policy,” by Johnny Miri

This talk took place on Friday March 26, 2021

Vannevar Bush is best remembered for his leadership of American military research during World War II, overseeing the creation of such formidable technologies as the atomic fission bomb, radar, and the proximity fuse. In the closing stages of the war, Bush prepared the groundbreaking report Science: The Endless Frontier, outlining his vision for America’s postwar scientific organization. Yet in the years immediately following Allied victory, Bush experienced a rapid fall from power, leaving government service entirely in 1948. In this talk, I will examine the various factors that led to Bush’s decline, specifically his loss of powerful allies, political missteps, and feuds with the military. The story of Bush’s fall provides a backdrop for a careful consideration of the postwar trend of institutionalization of American science policy. I argue that this shift was more gradual than previously assumed, and that postwar institutions were shaped by the personal networks that preceded them. Finally, I discuss some of the broader implications of Bush’s fall, especially the rise of military patronage of American science.

Speaker

Johnny Miri is an independent scholar living in Austin, whose interest in the field began at the Lone Star History of Science Group. His research focuses on the history of American science in the mid-20th century, particularly the interim years between World War II and the Cold War. His first scholarly article is forthcoming in the September 2021 issue of Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences.

This event is part of the History and Philosophy of Science weekly talk series, which will be held virtually during Spring 2021.

Greedy Bastards – One City’s Texas-Size Struggle to Avoid a Financial Crisis, by Sheryl Sculley (2020)

"The State of the City: A Book Review Series" overlays a photo of the San Antonio Riverwalk

By Craig D. Pedersen

Joint editor’s note: Like so many cities, Austin is in a process of rapid transformation. To better understand this moment and its consequences for the city’s residents, we can draw on insights from other places and periods. This review is part of ongoing new series called The State of the City. The series, which is a collaboration between Urbānitūs and Not Even Past, aims to share insights from the latest research as well as classic books that explore the varied lives of cities and the connection between urban development and globalization.

Sheryl Sculley’s story of local governance is at the heart of many current public issues, with broader meaning beyond one city and one career. It is also a story that reflects on many of the key attributes and competencies of being a public official

Greedy Bastards – One City’s Texas-Size Struggle to Avoid a Financial Crisis, by Sheryl Sculley, 2020, 211 pp., Lioncrest Publications

Sheryl Sculley is one of the best city executives in America. Reading Greedy Bastards will convince you why. Before her arrival as city manager, San Antonio was not an impressively run municipality. After Ms. Sculley’s tenure, it has become one of the best managed cities in the state, perhaps in the nation.

One can learn much from Ms. Sculley whether a new or experienced public official. The purpose of this book is education in the general administration, financial management, policy challenges, and political realities of being a city official. It is not theory, but practice. It is especially relevant if one aspires to be in charge of the day-to-day operation of a substantive U.S. city. The lessons of this book, though, can serve any public official – and any citizen – well.

Ms. Scully presents her story of becoming San Antonio City Manager in clear and succinct language, very much in keeping with her no-nonsense and straight-forward personality. Her prose is as lean as her marathoner’s frame. Leadership/management competence and deep values radiate from her story in unassuming ways. She tells her story with the language and examples of professional wisdom.

San Antonio City Manager Sheryl Sculley sits behind a microphone — *San Antonio City Manager Sheryl Sculley. Source: Scott Ball, San Antonio Report*

Sculley’s narrative is one of short comings and shortfalls. It is a saga of challenges starting before her official first day and continuing beyond the last day of her 14 years of service. She describes the inherited administrative inadequacies of City of San Antonio operations. Greedy Bastards gives a high level overview of how to approach a dysfunctional government operation and turn it around. We experience a city manager making tough, but correct, decisions, and engaging effectively with staff, policy makers, and the community.

Ms. Sculley also highlights a critical success factor for all leaders: surround yourself with good people. She goes deeper into this insight by putting “the right people in the right seats on the bus,” to use author Jim Collins’ phrase from Good to Great. Time and again we see her skillfully doing this. She makes bold moves to find excellent employees and consultant contractors to address specific challenges.

Along the way the reader also sees sophistication in managing one’s career, transitioning effectively, exercising career choices wisely. These are valuable insights for anyone, especially those in the public sector, aspiring to advance their career.

The centerpiece of Ms. Sculley’s story is her battle over unsustainable police and fire employee contracts. It is a story that developed over decades and would have led to financial disaster if left unchecked. It is a great case study of municipal government realpolitik. It is also a study in personal values that drive one to do right, even at considerable personal cost. One comes away from this read with an appreciation of values so deep that, in spite of the cost, Ms. Sculley could not do otherwise.

An experienced lobbyist once said that anyone can say “yes,” but that the best in that trade know when and how to say “no.” So it is, too, with senior government officials. Saying “no” requires courage, resilience, values, and insight. Courage and values drive one to make the difficult but correct decisions. Resilience serves one to be willing and able to find new strategies and tactics over time and to outlast the opposition. Defending “no” requires the insight to frame the conversation of why it is the right answer, in spite of negative consequences. It requires the political and communication savvy to engage in a hard battle with sophisticated opponents. Sheryl Sculley describes an experience doing just that with public safety contracts and union leaders.

San Antonio Police Chief William McManus speaks as City Manager Sheryl Sculley looks on — San Antonio Police Chief William McManus and City Manager Sheryl Sculley meet with the Express-News editorial board regarding policing reform on Thursday, Mar. 3, 2016. Source: Kin Man Hui, Staff / San Antonio Express-News

It is a story about long term financial implications and fairness. Generous public safety benefits coupled with a lack of analysis and full consideration of impacts was a key contributor to the financial crisis. The failure to appreciate the financial ramifications of a specific policy decision (public safety benefits, in this case) is the first cautionary note. Such challenges are exacerbated in an era of COVID-induced budget shortfalls.

Sculley’s story is also one of public perception, political favor, and cynical manipulation of politics and policy by union leaders. We see public support of police and fire employees distorted by selfish motivation of union leaders. Excessive and undeserved privilege ignored financial realities and drove earlier city officials to abandon values in response to raw political power. Union leaders effectively declared war on Ms. Sculley and helped altered the city charter to encourage her departure and to prevent a future city manager from leading as effectively. The history behind a range of public policy mistakes is at once a deep dive into root causes and a cautionary tale about how to avoid such disasters with proactive and relatively simple analyses. It is also a warning of what to expect if one confronts public safety unions, even in spite of long-time support for the police and firefighters as employees.

The political favor of public safety unions beyond other public employees also contributed to the situation. Police and fire unions prevailed upon the Texas Legislature to exempt them from the constraints imposed on other public employees regarding active campaigning and fundraising. General public approval or acquiescence to this special situation allows these privileges to continue. One must ask how this privilege impacts other areas of public safety performance and oversight, such as the current issues of appropriate police use of force and responsiveness to community standards of behavior.

Sculley’s story is one at the heart of many current public issues, so it has broader meaning beyond one city and one career. It is also a story that reflects on many of the key attributes and competencies of being a public official.

San Antonio Riverwalk in the evening — *The San Antonio Riverwalk. Source: Stuart Seeger*

Ms. Sculley’s tenure as City Manager represents a dramatic inflection point in the operation of San Antonio city government. The change in the quality of management by the city as an organization has been obvious and meaningful. San Antonio has become a different city in the way it operates. This is a testament to both Ms. Sculley’s effectiveness and the political and community leadership that supported and partnered with her.

Greedy Bastards provides an education in public leadership in 200 pages. I recommend this book to all public leaders and those preparing themselves to lead. Any citizen can benefit, as well.

A lecturer at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, Craig Pedersen was the founding director of the school’s Executive Master in Public Leadership Program. He has been a member of the faculty since 2015.

Prior to joining LBJ, Mr. Pedersen successfully led large and complex organizations in both the public and private sectors. He has extensive executive and legislative experience and relationships with local, state and federal government organizations and with many nonprofits. He served as a legislative and executive aide, as the CEO of a state agency, as a regional business line leader and office manager of a 300-person profit center for a Fortune 500 engineering company, and as senior vice president of a technology startup company in the water industry, a position he continues to hold.

He had career in Texas state government from 1981-2002, which included both administrative and policy positions, culminating in 11 years as the Executive Administrator of the Texas Water Development Board, the state water infrastructure financing and planning agency. He was recognized for organizational innovation in both management and policy. He served in that position longer than anyone has and under both Democratic and Republican Administrations. He also has the experience of having developed policies and programs in the legislative process and, subsequently, implemented them as a state agency head. He has served with and for some of the most influential leaders in recent Texas state history, including Lt. Governor William P. Hobby and Comptroller Bob Bullock.

The Benson as Anti-Colonial Library and Archive: A Letter from the Incoming Director of the Institute for Historical Studies

I was recently elected as the incoming director of the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. One of the projects I have in mind for my first year, 2021-22, is a detailed examination of the Benson and its collections by creating two working groups formed of six graduate students and faculty each, one in the Fall another in the Spring. I am currently reaching out to the Vice Provost of Equity and Diversity, The Graduate School, CIMAS, LLILAS, and COLA for funding for this project. I believe such projects are essential in helping us investigate and understand the racial history of this campus of ours.

The Benson, to cite just one example, hosts the archives of the United League of Latin American Citizens (LULAC) from its very origins in the 1920s.

The United League of Latin Americans Citizens originated largely at UT Austin around figures like Carlos Castañeda. Castañeda was born in Ciudad Camargo, Tamaulipas. He lost both his parents by age 15 before becoming an apprentice at a young age and later the first “Benson” Librarian. LULAC goes to the core of the origins of Tejano-Chicano-Mexican American political mobilization in the state of Texas. It cannot be dissociated from the origins of both Latinx and Latin American Studies. This is the reason why we have the Gloria Anzaldua’s archives and many others.

To honor the centennial of the Benson I believe we need to link it to Latinx-Mexican American Studies and Latin American Studies. Castañeda and LULAC did not separate these two elements of a common “Hispanic” anti-colonial identity, anti-white supremacist identity. In this way, the Benson was born as both an anti-colonial library and an archive.

The Benson originated as an anticolonial initiative of discriminated UT Latinx employees. Castañeda left the “Benson” in protest as the lowest paid member of the staff.[1] He spent his life battling discrimination in schools and the oil fields of Houston. As librarian he put together the first collections of Tejano history not as a history of Latins but as a history of Latin America. His archives were in Coahuila, Saltillo, Nuevo Leon, and Mexico. Many of the original collections of Latinx and Latin American documentations originated with the efforts of Castañeda whose primary scholarship was the edition and translation of primary sources designed to weave the history of Tejanos back into the white supremacist narrative of the Alamo.

His sources were mostly from church archives and his politics were Catholic at time of the Cristero rebellion in Mexico and the expansion of Irish bishops in Tejano dioceses. Castaneda, in the meantime, fought anti-discrimination campaigns in education and the oil fields of Houston.

The origins of the Benson are also linked to the origins of LULAC, namely the Latinx organization that gave us in 1954 Hernandez v Texas, the first time ever Mexicanos born in Texas were considered legally Mexican Americans. LULAC, the United League of Latin American Citizens, drew on Latin American populist notions of citizenship (mestizaje, a citizenship not attached to racial rights) to make its case before the Supreme Court of the United States. Castañeda was one of the founders of LULAC and the main ideologue of Hernandez v Texas was George Sanchez in the School of Education.

Attorneys Gus Garcia (left) and Johnny Herrera (right) stand with client, Pete Hernandez — *Attorneys Gus Garcia (left) and Johnny Herrera (right) with client, Pete Hernandez, circa 1953. Source: Dr. Hector P. Garcia Papers, Bell Library, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi*

The University of Texas at Austin witnessed the creation of the Benson from the bottom up as a response to white supremacy. That is why the Benson has traditionally been underfunded in contrast with similar institutions on campus. The Benson was from its very inception both Latinx and Latin American. The Benson centennial is an invitation for us to rethink the politics of race in this country and on this campus in particular. The Benson has large collections from the Latinx community of Texas that need reevaluation. It is a library created largely from the bottom up and the generous gifts of Lozano Long to LLILAS Benson are part of a tradition of Latinx involvement. And yet, paradoxically, it is also a colonial library in that those collectors brought into Texas many private archives of Catholic Mexicans who had collected colonial and indigenous documents. It also houses dozens of nineteenth century private archives of leading Mexican political families.

This project seeks to balance the contradictions of Latinx and Latin American collecting in Texas but also in the nation as a whole. My proposal is to mobilize undergraduate, graduate students and faculty in an effort to reflect and reconstruct the history of this library, as part of a bottom up call for participation that will lead in turn to the publication of a volume and a wider national reflection. This activity would allow us to recast the Benson as a much more than simply a Latin American Center Library but as a jewel of the history of Latinx in this country that deserves increased autonomy and funding.

[1] Castañeda later returned to the university as an Associate Professor.

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at UT-Austin and the incoming Director of the Institute for Historical Studies.

Statements, Resources and Events Responding to the Mass Shootings in Atlanta

From the editors: Not Even Past joins the wider University of Texas community in our horror at the recent mass shootings in Atlanta. We express our solidarity with the messages and statements below and have included details of important events and workshops focused on confronting anti-Asian racism. The events in Atlanta cannot be separated from a long and painful history of anti-Asian racism in the United States that has been exacerbated over the past year. This page includes resources and books that shed light on this long history. It is an evolving resource that will be frequently updated.

Messages and Statements

To the Asian American students, staff, faculty of UT and beyond:

You are loved and cared for in this moment of heightened racist and misogynistic violence against our communities. The anguish, sadness, vulnerability, and rage you feel following the massacre in Atlanta demand full recognition. Contained in them is a truth not only about the pandemic era, but about the making of the United States. Asian Americans have long been enlisted as the scapegoats who bring to fruition reactionary nationalism, patriarchy, displaced economic resentment. These goals were achieved by rendering Asians in the United States perpetually “alien” and therefore unworthy of citizenship and entry to the country during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. During World War II they took the form of the unconstitutional imprisonment of Japanese Americans. As de-industrialization led to economic and urban decline during the 1980s, these goals were exercised against Asian immigrants who were said to be stealing American jobs. In the post-9/11 period the goal of creating a new and expanded homeland security state was achieved through the vilification of and violent attacks against those of South and Central Asian descent, particularly those who hail from Islamic-majority countries.

That Asian Americans are again being used as scapegoats during another watershed moment should not come as a surprise to anyone. This is especially true when we consider that the former president of the United States, with his proclamations of COVID-19 as the “China Virus,” played a key role in recruiting Asian Americans for this role. Some will try to argue that this was not an act of racism but of free speech or “individual resentment.”Similarly, there are those who will try to convince you that the killings in Atlanta were motivated by something other than white supremacy, racism and sexism— as if a discussion of mental instability should eclipse the discussion of intersectional, structural oppression. These disavowals point to another recurring aspect of the historical injuries inflicted on Asian Americans: our oppression is always doubted, if not outright denied. Our oppression is too often rendered invisible and unimportant. The point of this short message is to assert just the opposite. The Center for Asian American Studies recognizes that the violence we experience is real and unrelenting. As best we can we, and in the most appropriate ways possible, our goal is to provide support for our community, especially for those who feel alone and unrecognized in this moment. Here are some initial steps/resources are listed below.

Sincerely yours,

Center for Asian American Studies
Department of Asian Studies
Center for East Asian Studies
Asian/Asian American Faculty Staff Association
Center for Women’s & Gender Studies
South Asian Institute
LGBTQ Studies
Latina/o Studies Department
Black Studies Department
Native American & Indigenous Studies

This last year has been punctuated with incidents of hate directed against the Asian and Asian American community and ending in the terrible events in Atlanta on March 16, 2021. Our hearts ache today with our Asian and Asian American students, faculty, staff, and friends.

We in the Department of History join the Center for Asian American Studies in calling for recognition of this violence and the deep wounds inflicted by Anti-Asian racism and hate. As a department and as historians, we reaffirm our commitment to teaching the long and painful history of anti-Asian racism in the United States and to exposing the deep roots of prejudice.

We stand today and always with members of the Asian and Asian American community and we express our solidarity with the statements made by the Center for Asian American Studies and the American Historical Association. There is much that can be done and learned from this terrible moment.

Sincerely,

Department of History

Not Even Past will link to additional statements here:

Statement on Violence against Asians and Asian Americans, Immigration and Ethnic History Society

AHA Statement on Violence against Asians and Asian Americans (March 2021)

Statement from the Association for Asian American Studies

Statement from the Association for Asian Studies

Events and Community Resources

Confronting Anti-Asian Racism: A Bystander Intervention Workshop

When: Monday 3/29 @ 1:30PM or Tuesday 3/30 @ 2PM

Registration: https://utexas.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_1B5zaNuhacugGz4

Description: This digital workshop is open to all current UT students, staff and faculty with limited capacity via ZOOM. Confronting Anti-Asian Racism is a 1.5 hour interactive workshop that will lead participants through the history of anti-Asian xenophobia in the US as it relates to the present day Asian American experience. This historical context will provide a foundation for attendees to practice identifying and interrupting anti-Asian bias through the BeVocal bystander intervention model. The workshop requires active participation in small groups and working through real-world scenarios of microaggression and covert/overt anti-Asian racism.

Coordinated by Sahtiya Hammell, UT’s Bystander Intervention Program Coordinator, and Tony Vo, CAAS assistant director.

#StopAsianHate Rally & Vigil

When: April 17 from 4-6pm

Description: Join the rally to #StopAsianHate at Austin City Hall! We stand with Asians across the country in solidarity to condemn anti-Asian racism in all forms. Masks and social distancing required.

Asian Voices @ UT and Community Newsletter
A drop-in group called Asian Voices @ UT meets every Tuesday from 4:45-6:15 p.m. In tangent with the group, there is also a newsletter with mental health and community resources that is identity-affirming. Students can sign up for the newsletter, which includes information on how to sign up for the group’s Zoom.

Virtual Office Hours via The Center for Asian American Studies (CAAS)
Amy Tao-Foster of CMHC has traditionally held office hours at CAAS where students can drop in for support and community, or ask questions about mental health and other resources. She will hold office hours from 1-1:50 p.m. on Tuesdays. Students who are interested can email Amy to schedule a Zoom meeting for office hours.

Counseling Appointments for Asian, Pacific Islander, and Desi American (APIDA) Students
Staff and faculty can also refer students directly to Amy Tao-Foster as the Diversity Counseling and Outreach Specialist. If students are hesitant to call CMHC to request an appointment, they can be referred directly to Amy at 512-475-6943. If she is unable to answer, they can leave a message with their name, EID, and phone number, and Amy will be able to call them back to set up a phone or video counseling appointment.

Coping with Racial Trauma
Dr. Connesia Handford, also holds a workshop series for students of color on Mondays from noon to 1 p.m., where they can learn helpful tools and techniques for coping with racial trauma. Students can sign up here.

Resources

Readings on the history of anti-Asian racism and how to be an anti-racist ally, compiled by Jennifer Ho (University of Colorado Boulder)

Antiracist Toolkit, focused on the action areas of educating and assessing ourselves; examining and revising our work; and enacting change. Created by the Department of Asian Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

“Coronavirus and Racism: Asian-Americans in the Crossfire,” July 2020 episode of Asia Matters podcast featuring AAS President Christine R. Yano (University of Hawaii at Manoa) and Jennifer Pan (Stanford University)

Christine R. Yano, “Racing the Pandemic: Anti-Asian Racism amid COVID-19,” from The Pandemic: Perspectives on Asia, edited by Vinayak Chaturvedi and published by the AAS Asia Shorts book series

“Black and Asian American Feminist Solidarities: A Reading List,” created by Black Women Radicals

“Confronting Prejudice: How to Protect Yourself and Help Others,” from OnlinePsychology@Pepperdine, the Online Master of Psychology program from Pepperdine University

Documenting Anti-Asian racism

“In response to the alarming escalation in xenophobia and bigotry resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian Pacific Planning and Policy Council (A3PCON), Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA), and the Asian American Studies Department of San Francisco State University launched the Stop AAPI Hate reporting center on March 19, 2020. The center tracks and responds to incidents of hate, violence, harassment, discrimination, shunning, and child bullying against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders throughout the United State”

https://stopaapihate.org/

Podcasts and conversations

This is Democracy – Episode 140: Asian American History and Exclusion

A conversation with Dr Madeline Hsu

Books – The Long History of Anti-Asian Racism

Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans

Driven Out exposes a shocking story of ethnic cleansing in California and the Pacific Northwest when the first Chinese Americans were rounded up and purged from more than three hundred communities by lawless citizens and duplicitous politicians. From 1848 into the twentieth century, Chinatowns burned across the West as Chinese miners and merchants, lumberjacks and fieldworkers, prostitutes and merchants’ wives were violently loaded onto railroad cars or steamers, marched out of town, or killed.

But the Chinese fought back—with arms, strikes, and lawsuits and by flatly refusing to leave. When red posters appeared on barns and windows across the United States urging the Chinese to refuse to carry photo identity cards, more than one hundred thousand joined the largest mass civil disobedience to date in the United States. The first Chinese Americans were marched out and starved out. But even facing brutal pogroms, they stood up for their civil rights. This is a story that defines us as a nation and marks our humanity.

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520256941/driven-out

The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion

This classic study offers a history of anti-Japanese prejudice in California, extending from the late nineteenth century to 1924, when an immigration act excluded Japanese from entering the United States. The Politics of Prejudice details the political climate that helped to set the stage for the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and reveals the racism present among middle-class American progressives, labor leaders, and other presumably liberal groups.

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520219502/the-politics-of-prejudice

Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear

The “yellow peril” is one of the oldest and most pervasive racist ideas in Western culture—dating back to the birth of European colonialism during the Enlightenment. Yet while Fu Manchu looks almost quaint today, the prejudices that gave him life persist in modern culture. Yellow Peril! is the first comprehensive repository of anti-Asian images and writing, and it surveys the extent of this iniquitous form of paranoia.

Written by two dedicated scholars and replete with paintings, photographs, and images drawn from pulp novels, posters, comics, theatrical productions, movies, propagandistic and pseudo-scholarly literature, and a varied world of pop culture ephemera, this is both a unique and fascinating archive and a modern analysis of this crucial historical formation.

https://www.versobooks.com/books/1508-yellow-peril

Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War

Through intellectual vigor, Haunting the Korean Diaspora explores the repressed history of emotional and physical violence between the United States and Korea and the unexamined reverberations of sexual relationships between Korean women and American soldiers.

At once political and deeply personal, Cho’s analysis of U.S. neocolonialism and militarism under contemporary globalization brings forth a new way of understanding—and remembering—the impact of the Korean War.

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/haunting-the-korean-diaspora

Lost and Found: Reclaiming the Japanese American Incarceration

For decades, a fog of governmental cover-ups, euphemisms, and societal silence kept the victims the mass incarceration of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II from understanding their experiences. The Japanese American National Museum mounted a critically acclaimed exhibition with the twin goals of educating the general public and encouraging former inmates to come to grips with and tell their own history.

Combining heartfelt stories with first-rate scholarship, Lost and Found reveals the complexities of a people reclaiming the past. Author/curator Karen L. Ishizuka, a third-generation Japanese American, deftly blends official history with community memory to frame the historical moment of recovery within its cultural legacy. Detailing the interactive strategy that invited visitors to become part of the groundbreaking exhibition, Ishizuka narrates the processes of revelation and reclamation that unfolded as former internees and visitors alike confronted the experience of the camps. She also analyzes how the dual act of recovering—and recovering from—history necessitates private and public mediation between remembering and forgetting, speaking out and remaining silent.

Lost and Found: Reclaiming the Japanese American Incarceration (Asian American Experience

A Family Fight on the Bosporus: The Ashkenazi Jews of the Ottoman Empire

In 1884, a twelve-year old boy got into a fight with his parents. Pious Ashkenazi Jews from the manufacturing city of Lodz in Poland, they were traveling by ship to make a new home in the Holy Land. Once in Constantinople, unbeknownst to his parents, Wolf Finkelstein stepped off the ship and into a rowboat. He then delivered an ultimatum to his mother and father: either they would allow him to remain in the city or he would throw himself into the Bosporus. His (presumably reluctant) parents left the boy in Constantinople to fend for himself, which he did. Within a few days, he found a job as an apprentice to a tailor; within a few years, at the age of eighteen, he started his own tailoring business, then, over the next few years, went bankrupt, started more businesses, married, and had four daughters.

Who were the Jews of the Ottoman Empire? The prototypical Ottoman Jews were those Ladino-speaking residents of the Greek and Anatolian cities of Salonica, Smyrna, and Constantinople (now Thessaloniki, Izmir and Istanbul) bordering the Aegean, Black and Mediterranean Seas. They were the descendants of the Spanish and Portuguese refugees who had fled the Inquisition and the mass expulsions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Many of them carried Spanish surnames such as Cuenca, Perez and Tarragano.

Wolf Finkelstein's Business Card — *Wolf Finkelstein’s Business Card*

But the Ottoman Empire was also a cosmopolitan empire; and there were also Berber-speaking Jews in North Africa, a few tens of thousands in the Palestinian holy cities of Jerusalem and Safed, merchants in the port cities of Beirut and Benghazi, and the enormous, Arabic-speaking community that, at 53,000, constituted one-third of the population of Baghdad.

After almost a century of near-exclusive focus on the culturally and intellectually fertile world of Yiddish- (and French, German, Russian, and Polish-) speaking Ashkenazi Jews dwelling in the vast region between Eastern France and Western Russia, the last few decades have witnessed an explosion in the study of Jews from predominantly Muslim lands. Collapsed under the name of “Sephardi-Mizrahi” studies (Sephardi, meaning Spanish, Mizrahi, meaning “from the East”) this includes Jews from a 3500-mile expanse stretching from Morocco to Iran.

Indeed, the steady increase in numbers at the Sephardi-Mizrahi Caucus lunch at the annual conference of the Association for Jewish Studies testifies to the fact that Sephardi-Mizrahi studies has gone from being the neglected stepchild to the cool new kid of Jewish studies. And with good reason, as this exciting scholarship has opened not only new cultural understandings of Jews but has deep implications for theorizing the complex relationships between Jews and Islamic legal frameworks, European colonialisms, religious minorities’ belonging to the nation-state, and trade, family and educational networks.

But the construction of this field—which deserves all the attention it receives—has so far paid scant attention to the way that Ashkenazi and Sephardi fates overlapped and were intertwined. One group that is little-mentioned in the history of Ottoman Jews are the Ashkenazim who were drawn to and settled in the Ottoman Empire—drawn to it for economic opportunity but also to escape the pervasive discrimination and threat of violence that were particularly present in the late-nineteenth-century Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. In fact, these reasons were not so different from those for which their cousins migrated to New York City around the same time.

The presence of these Ashkenazi Jews is not new information, in fact the Galata neighborhood in Constantinople had at least three Ashkenazi synagogues. French Ashkenazi Jews from Alsace-Lorraine with names like Brasseur emigrated to Beirut; Russian Ashkenazim with names like Hochberg created new lives in settlements like Ness Ziona in Palestine.

And perhaps none of this should be surprising or even an issue. After all, to a Yiddish-speaking Jew from Ukraine or Hungary, Constantinople was no farther geographically, culturally and linguistically than it would have been to the Arabic-speaking Jew in Baghdad or Aleppo. The categories of Ashkenazi and Sephardi mattered in some ways, but almost certainly not in the way that the organization of luncheons at the AJS conference might indicate.

By the time Serafina Hirsch arrived in Constantinople in her early twenties, she had already crossed so many boundaries armed with her prodigious ability to learn languages (she knew fourteen) and adapt to new settings, that Constantinople was, in all likelihood, just one more strange and different place. Semi-orphaned at a young age, she moved around Central and Southern Europe, from the home of one older sibling to another. At a young age, she was working as an impresario for a small Jewish orchestra, traveling and booking venues around the Balkans. She spent three years in Budapest learning French and made her way to Constantinople sometime around 1900, where she worked for a time as the French teacher to the daughters of a wealthy Turkish general.

It was during this time that Serafina met Wolf. Precisely how, we don’t know, but perhaps it was through one of the Ashkenazi synagogue communities in Galata, or else through mutual friends. Perhaps they met in a café or in any number of one of the venues young people socialize in exciting, cosmopolitan cities, in the same way that their daughter would meet her future husband in late 1920s Berlin.

Either way, they married in 1901, and the following year, Serafina gave birth to their first child, Edith, in the garden of a house overlooking the sea in Salonica (in the garden, as she was carried out of the house during the birth in the middle of an earthquake). The couple’s linguistic flexibility was such that these two Ashkenazi Jews not only hired a Greek servant but spoke Greek to one another, and Greek was Edith’s first language. Their second daughter was named Renée. Wolf’s tailoring business foundered, and the family left their Constantinople neighborhood of Pera and moved to Smyrna. Perhaps Wolf’s lack of success with his small businesses presaged the final collapse of an empire that was, unbeknownst to him, in severe decline even when he arrived.

And then, twenty-two years after Wolf had fought with his parents, Serafina and he moved again, taking the two small girls to another capital of another empire—France. The girls, along with the two sisters who were born there, would attend French schools, absorb French culture, and hereafter identify themselves as French even though they never did obtain French citizenship. Edith, in particular, loved l’école and spent hours copying scenes from French history into notebooks. The girls spent summers living with French peasants in Normandy and Auvergne, or with their parents at the sea near Calais.

*Finkelstein family at Le Crotoy circa 1912-13.*

But the Ottoman Empire continued to mold their experiences. Edith’s dark hair and olive skin drew attention in the family’s Paris neighborhood of Montmartre, and she was called “Turquoise” (Turk) and “Youpine” (dirty Jew) as both racial and antisemitic slurs. The early twentieth-century French version of Mean Girls told her to go back to her country and eat macaroni. (“Why macaroni?” Edith wondered, “I’m not Italian.”) More ominously, as a Turkish citizen, Wolf was imprisoned in a concentration camp for several months at the beginning of World War One and after his release was forced to relocate to neutral Spain. He left Serafina to manage the family’s tailor shop amid unfriendly neighbors and to send the four terrified young girls to live in the French countryside away from the German shelling of Paris, supervised by a twelve-year-old Edith.

As soon as World War One ended, Serafina and the girls joined Wolf in the “capital” (New York) of yet another empire (the United States). From this point forward, the Finkelsteins’ lives were defined economically by America and culturally and linguistically by France and Europe. Just as it did for most of the Ashkenazi Jews who had at some point or another, had made lives and homes within the Ottoman Empire, the empire ceased to have not only political and legal, but cultural and economic meaning for them. Those Jews who stayed did not fare well, and tens of thousands within its former borders were subsequently murdered in the Holocaust. Many other former Ottoman Jews from communities in Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey emigrated, and in so doing, re-oriented themselves to new cultures and economies in the United States, Israel, France, and Latin America.

*Serafina and daughters at Ellis Island*

Wolf and Serafina were each drawn to the Ottoman Empire by its vitality and the opportunities that its cities seemed to promise. In this, they were like thousands of Ashkenazi, Yiddish-speaking Jews who were pulled into its orbit but who left when the actual opportunities could not support a growing young family. How their stay there would end was not something that could have been known to them when Serafina gave birth to Edith overlooking the sea in Salonica, or when two young Ashkenazi Jews met in the bustling and cosmopolitan capital of a declining but still-vital empire, or when a twelve-year-old boy made the decision to thwart the will of his parents and break from their destinies by stepping into a rowboat. Either way, the Ottoman Empire, by pulling them in and pushing them out, shaped their future, leaving the aspiring historian who is their great-granddaughter to attempt to imagine those crucial moments of choice and determined motivation.

Isabelle S. Headrick is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Texas at Austin. She works on the global modern education movement and its interaction with Iranian, Jewish, global French, and family histories. She wishes to thank Daniel Headrick and Kate Ezra for sharing their historical and photographic sources.

Introducing a New Collaboration between Not Even Past and LLILAS Benson

By Melissa Guy, Director, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection

LLILAS Benson is proud to feature our collections in Not Even Past during 2021, the centennial year of the Benson Latin American Collection. This is a fitting collaboration, because from its very beginnings, the Benson’s collection has been inextricably linked with history and historians, especially those in the Department of History at UT Austin.

The collaboration will feature a range of articles focused primarily on texts and objects within the collection. All publications will be collected together under the banner: Journey into the Archive: History from the Benson Latin American Collection.

The university’s Latin American library has its origin in an event that was at once historically significant and serendipitous. Charles Wilson Hackett, chair of Latin American History at the university, was visiting Mexico City to attend the December 1920 inauguration of Mexico’s 46th president, Álvaro Obregón. Accompanied by UT Regent H.J. Lutcher Stark, Hackett stepped into a bookstore on Madero Street and stumbled upon a first edition of True History of the Conquest of New Spain, an account written in 1576 by Spanish conquistador and colonist Bernal Díaz del Castillo and published in Madrid in 1632. “That is a book that should be in the library of the University of Texas,” said Hackett, to which Stark responded: “Let’s purchase it.”

This story, among many others, is told in an account written by historian and librarian Dr. Nettie Lee Benson, whose decades of leadership would transform the library into the foremost collection of its kind on the planet. The Mexico City book purchase would soon lead the university to acquire the extensive collection of the late Genaro García, a Mexican politician, historian, and bibliophile, in 1921, thus establishing a Latin American library on campus. The collection was stewarded by renowned Mexican historian Dr. Carlos E. Castañeda, who, like Benson, received his PhD at the University of Texas. Later, Benson would take over as head librarian, overseeing the expansion of the library’s influence and breadth, building a true library for the Americas. The collection was named for her after her retirement in 1975.

Entering its second century during a worldwide pandemic, and in partnership with the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS), the Benson continues to serve as both partner and resource for students and faculty in history at UT, and for historians around the world. LLILAS Benson’s expansion into the digital realm could not have been more timely. Through the practice of post-custodial archiving, in which LLILAS Benson is a pioneer, rare and vulnerable Latin American archives in Mexico, Central, and South America have been digitized through grant–funded partnerships. This practice preserves documents in their countries of origin while creating a digital copy that is safeguarded at UT, and allows broad access to researchers worldwide, including members of the communities where the archives originated. At the same time, more and more rare materials from the Benson have been digitized and made available online in the form of curricula, exhibitions, and other repositories.

Through all of these efforts, the Benson steps boldly into its second century. We hope you, the reader, enjoy this peek into our collections and we look forward to seeing you at the library, whether in person or online.

Support the Benson Centennial! Visit benson100.org to learn more.

Review of Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347-1600 (2017) by Nükhet Varlik

Banner image for Review of Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347-1600 (2017) by Nükhet Varlık

The historiography of the Black Death has tended to cast the Ottoman Empire as the “sick man of Europe.” Nükhet Varlık does admirable work in breaking down this Eurocentric view by tracing the Black Death’s history during the rise of the Ottoman Empire, a history she considers as a long process of recurrent outbreaks rather than an isolated event. Varlık frames her work within the historiography of diseases, creatively intertwining environmental history, the history of science, and imperial political history. Moreover, she models how historians can work with up-to-date scientific research, including recent studies in epidemiology, genomics, ecology, and bioarchaeology.

Varlık argues for a correlation between the plague’s epidemiological patterns and the empire’s consolidation, which is visible through the interaction among ecological zones as human and nonhuman mobility increased. These mobile nonhuman agents included fleas, lice, rodents, and the pathogenic bacteria Yersinia pestis, and they determined the plague’s expansion and waves of recurrence. While ‘global’ histories of disease tend to flatten social differences and take connections for granted, Varlık builds upon the idea of a ‘network’—a dynamic set of relationships that assemble the asymmetrical flow of ideas, humans, goods, animals, as well as pathogens.

Plague and empire focuses on what conventionally has been called the “second plague pandemic” (the Black Death) —the first being the Justinian plague and the third the East Asian plague. Nevertheless, the second pandemic was not a single discreet event that took place in 1348. It consisted of several waves of epidemics over 250 years. It is no coincidence, Varlık argues, that this period coincided with the transformation of the Ottoman semi-nomadic regime into an extensive empire in the eastern Mediterranean. Therefore, she situates the Ottoman epidemic cycles within the context of imperial expansion and the conquest of cities like Edirne and Istanbul as trade connections with Europe and Asia increased. Thus, she overcomes a variety of historiographic fallacies, including the “westward diffusion of the plague,” Turkish indifference to the Black Death (fatalism), and “epidemic boundaries” between the Christian and Muslim Mediterranean worlds.

*The Black Death: Map of the World with vignettes, watercolor by Monro S. Orr. Source: Wellcome Library*

Varlık synthesizes historical primary sources with current scientific research on the etiology of the plague, including new understandings about the interaction among hosts (such as rodents, humans, and other mammals), vectors (fleas and lice), and the pathogen (Yersinia Pestis). She also explains how the disease remained “inactive” in wild foci of animals––that is, groups of infected animals that became plague reservoirs. Moreover, she suggests that climate played a role in the migration of some of these hosting species.

The book employs a wide range of documents such as medical treatises, travel accounts, and official reports, not only from Turkish sources but also from Arabic, Byzantine, Italian, and Iberian sources. Although there is an apparent absence of the plague in early Ottoman sources, she explains that it does not mean a real absence of the disease. Instead, she argues that the plague gradually became significant enough to register in Ottoman culture as the empire urbanized and its officials moved between territories. Thus, environmental factors became entangled with perceptions and knowledge about the plague and governmental measures for controlling outbreaks.

Despite its broad regional scope, Plague and Empire centers on Istanbul. Methodologically, this choice makes sense, particularly after its conquest by the Ottomans in 1453, because this new capital became the primary node where imperial and epidemic networks converged. Varlık’s focus on connections helps us understand how Istanbul was not isolated, but the core of governmental processes and the catalyst of epidemic waves in the Western Mediterranean.

Varlık’s model of intertwining imperial history and the flow of disease could productively be applied and tested in other contexts, including different epidemics. For instance, thinking about smallpox epidemics in the Conquest of America––simultaneous in time with this long Black Death––could be a fruitful comparison. Another case to think about is our current context of dealing with COVID-19. Considering its zoonotic origins, environmental drivers, post-modern circulation networks, and the state’s crucial role and supranational institutions to control its spread, we have much to learn from Varlık’s approach.

Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World constitutes a bold and reliable approach to the history of diseases in imperial and globally-connected perspectives. It incorporates current scientific research in ways that make it relevant across disciplines. Varlık carefully links social, political, and environmental analysis. As a result, the book offers not only a crucial addition to the new historiography of diseases but also makes a contribution that is relevant to our present pandemic experience.

Check out Dr. Varlik’s talk at the IHS Climate in Context conference.

HPS Talk: “Thomas L. DeLorme and the Transformation of Rehabilitative Medicine”, Dr Jan Todd

HPS Talk: “Thomas L. DeLorme and the Transformation of Rehabilitative Medicine,” by Jan Todd, University of Texas at Austin (History and Philosophy of Science Talks)

Friday March 5, 2021 • Zoom

Dr. Jan Todd
Professor, Department of Kinesiology and Health Education
Professor, Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, College of Liberal Arts
Roy J. McLean Centennial Fellowship in Sports History
University of Texas at Austin
https://education.utexas.edu/faculty/janice_todd

IHS Climate in Context – Texas Deregulation and the 2021 Ice Storm

By Christopher Sellers

This article is part of the wider IHS Climate in Context Series.

The Texas ice storm of February 2021 did not just knock out the power for four million people, it resuscitated a dormant debate over the wisdom of the state’s deregulated market for electricity. Should such a vital service should be entrusted so entirely to the market? Of course, calling Texas’ electric market “free” is something of a misnomer, since it stemmed from carefully calibrated acts of government beginning with a 1999 law signed by then-governor George W. Bush. Passed with little or no consideration of climate change or extreme weather, this legislation set the stage for a wobbling polar vortex twenty years later to throw a crippling and near-catastrophic monkey wrench into the state’s chain of electric supply.

The questions now being raised about deregulation echo those percolating across late nineteenth America as laissez faire laws and court decisions helped usher in an era of rising economic inequality and conflicts. Transportation (railroad and streetcar) and utility (water, sewer, gas and electric) companies enjoyed little competition across many territories they served, what economists of the time termed “natural monopolies.” They were thus able to hike charges on trapped consumers with impunity. A Progressive economics then set about critiquing the private machinations behind their monopolies, as cries of foul play also turned political. Out of movements from the agriculturalist Grangers to the urban Progressives and “sewer socialists,” the first public regulatory commissions were born, and public ownership of utility companies also flourished. The Texas Railroad Commission was a product of this era, and by 1920 some 38 states had created public commissions to oversee electric rates.

Garbage can with icicles hanging from the lid — *Images from the storm from Not Even Past*

Texas’s electric companies remained a national exception, with only city-level oversight until 1975. That year, the state finally set up a Public Utilities Commission to regulate electric companies along with gas, communications, and cable television industries. By then, environmental oversight of these and other industries was peaking both in Texas and in Washington, D.C. But nationally and in other states leaders were also switching gears to explore the deregulation of industries including railroads long regulated on the public’s behalf. The rationales ranged from concerns about private oligarchies (airlines) to new inter-industry competitiveness (trucks versus trains) to a neoconservative revival of faith in market freedom. Beginning under a Democratic President, Jimmy Carter, the first deregulation measures came in ground transportation, airlines, and natural gas. The Republican administration of Ronald Reagan then attacked government regulation more broadly, sowing the seeds both nationally and in Texas for the return of full-blown laissez-faire ideology. As in the late nineteenth century, economic inequality grew in tandem with wealth- and business-favoring policies, the deregulation of Texas’s electricity industry among them.

Car parked on the side of an ice and snow covered road — *Images from the storm from Not Even Past*

A first step came in 1992, when the U.S. Congress passed an act enabling Texas’s Public Utilities Commission to deregulate wholesale electricity suppliers. The deregulation of the state’s retail electricity markets then first gained serious consideration under Governor George W. Bush, Texas’ second Republican governor of the twentieth century, after Republicans finally gained a majority in the Texas Senate for the first time since Reconstruction in 1996.

Among the advocates of electricity deregulation were companies seeking entry into this market, especially the outspoken and influential Enron. The arriviste Houston-based energy broker had grown explosively over the 1980s into the 1990s out of a niche created by the deregulation of natural gas, and now sought to move into the state’s market for electricity supply. Among the great advantages it and other newcomers anticipated over Texas’ established electricity providers, the latter faced the considerable “stranded costs” of two massive nuclear plants not yet paid off, which were also expensive to run. In a time when climate change was being framed as largely a global and future concern, consumer advocates as well as some environmental groups also embraced the idea of deregulation, to keep current electric monopolies from “getting bailed out by the consumer to the tune of billions of dollars,” as Texas Citizen Action staff director Julie Davis put it. With additional choices, they hoped, consumers stood a chance of paying less, as established utilities were forced by competitors to keep prices low and find other ways to cover their bad investments. But the incumbent electric utility industry, a powerful force in Texas politics, insisted on some provision to help it recover these stranded costs, as a condition for its support of any deregulatory measure.

The Enron Complex in Downtown Houston — *The Enron Complex in downtown Houston. Source: Telwink on Flickr*

All these interested groups hewed to certain assumptions about Texas’ weather that went unspoken: that its seasonal rhythms were stable and well-known, and that surely private suppliers would prepare for their anticipated extremes, so regulators didn’t have to.

After an initial Bush-backed effort that died in committee, a first deregulation bill, in 1998, allowed the incumbent producers to issue bonds to recover stranded costs, but failed to placate many other political players. A year later, deregulation had become a thoroughly bipartisan endeavor, with bills introduced by Dallas Democrat Steve Wolens in the House and Waco Republican David Sibley in the Senate, and with Governor Bush also actively supporting. The final bill, Senate Bill B 7, with 56 amendments, provided at least a little “something for [almost] everyone.” The big established utilities got the right to issue bonds to pay off their nuclear plants, then gradually repay with income from customers. Environmentalists celebrated requirements to clean up power plants by “groundbreaking” emissions cuts and to build out 2000 megawatts of renewable power within the decade. An Enron spokesperson, too, found it a “good bill,” even though deregulation would arrive in 2002 rather than the 2001 it had advocated. Consumer advocates, however, asserted that true market rates would likely exceed the modest six percent decline set by the bill itself, and found it asked “consumers…to take a pretty big leap of faith.” A Houston Chronicle reporter agreed, relaying his “strong impression that the monied interests came out on top.”

U.S. Air Force Airmen assist with coordinating and unloading more than 150,000 pounds of bottled water brought in via aircraft — In the wake of the winter storm, thousands of Texans lacked potable water. U.S. Air Force Airmen with the 502nd Logistics Readiness Squadron assist with coordinating and unloading more than 150,000 pounds of bottled water brought in via aircraft on Feb. 21, 2021, at Joint Base San Antonio-Kelly Field, Texas. Source: U.S. Air Force photo by Sarayuth Pinthong

Looking back from 2021, this bill effectively tied the hands of Texas’ regulatory agencies, preventing them from pressuring preparations for more extreme weather, even if they had been so inclined. More than that, the privatized, fragmented, and largely opaque market for electricity it set in motion may actually have disincentivized Texas’ electric industry from anticipating events like February’s devastating ice storm. Twenty years on, confronted with a winter freeze made more extreme by planetary trends stoked by fossil fuels, the disastrous travails of Texas’s thoroughly privatized electricity markets have revealed new truths about what SB 7 accomplished. The massive black-outs and large-scale disruption, the exorbitant power bills, the over seventy deaths and thousands of worsened ailments epitomize the market failure of Texas’s “freed” electricity industry. Aside from those few who finagled huge profits, Texans’ faith in the ultimate magnanimity of the market has been betrayed. To steer this and other markets toward actually serving the interest of the Texas public rather than a monied few, more government will be necessary. That need is all the greater given the volatile weather which climate change has already begun stirring up over Texas, which is just getting started.

For further reading, see:

Dyer, R.A. (“Jake”). “The History of Electric Deregulation in Texas.” Cities Aggregation Power Project, 2008. http://tcaptx.com/downloads/HISTORY-OF-DEREGULATION.pdf.

Hartley, Peter R., Kenneth B. Medlock, and Olivera Jankovska. “Electricity Reform and Retail Pricing in Texas.” Energy Economics 80 (May 2019): 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eneco.2018.12.024.

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