Stacy Vlasits, Author at Not Even Past

Advancing Democracy: African Americans and the Struggle for Access and Equity in Higher Education in Texas by Amilcar Shabazz

by Kyle Smith

Amilcar Shabazz has authored an intriguing account of the fight against Jim Crow segregation in higher education in Texas. First he reviews the struggle of the descendants of African slaves to obtain the right to higher education in Texas from the time of Reconstruction to the 1940s. Then he provides a compelling and detailed description of the battle waged by national and state civil rights organizations to end the accepted system of segregation that denied blacks admission to colleges and universities in the southern United States. He argues that it was not primarily the collective action of the organizations or the government that brought about integration:

“That triumph must be found in the self-determined struggle of blacks themselves… It was the brave example of black students, who, from 1949 to 1965, stepped onto white campuses in the face of white resistance that ranged from passive, to massive and legal, to illegal mob violence. These students played the decisive part in winning the hearts and minds of large numbers of blacks of all social classes and, eventually, of many white liberals to integration as the only way to ensure racial equality and justice.”

Shabazz does a masterful job compiling original sources, including the NAACP Papers now housed in the Library of Congress, state and federal government documents, personal correspondence, personal interviews, and decisions of the Courts that heard the desegregation cases of the 1950s. The author expertly weaves this data into a moving and enlightening narrative of the era and what he calls the “University Movement.” Shabazz chronicles this “Movement’s” early ideological and financial struggles, and its victories and losses in the struggle against racism and discrimination in higher education on Texas.

Shabazz provides his readers a compelling picture of the efforts of the ex-slaves and their descendants to achieve the benefits of the freedom granted by the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth through Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. With as much urgency as slave owners fought to keep their slaves uneducated and illiterate to maintain power over them, blacks sought to obtain the education they realized held the key to equality and independence. From the outset, the Reconstruction governments set up schools and provided for higher education of the freed blacks. But by the end of Reconstruction, new state legislatures throughout the south had reversed the legislation that had given rights to blacks, including funding for higher education. Supported by the 1896 Supreme Court Ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Texas Legislature established the separate and woefully unequal education system that existed for the next three-quarters of century. This provided blacks one institution of higher education, the Texas A&M branch called Prairie View. It was not until the Supreme Court’s ruling in Sweatt v. Painter that the state was forced to make an attempt to at least look like they were attempting to provide equal access to higher education for black Texans. Sweatt v. Painter made it illegal for the state to maintain separate and unequal institutions of higher education. Between 1949 and 1952 at major universities like the University of Texas and at private denominational colleges like Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, the walls of segregation were torn down as blacks gained a new era of opportunity and equality in higher education.

Members of the Texas NAACP Youth Department (Image courtesy of the UT Center for American History)

Attendees of the NAACP’s annual conference, Houston, Texas, June 24-28, 1941 (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Shabazz emphasizes the role played by the individual students who dared to lead the fight by followed. Heman Sweat is undoubtedly the most famous, as the first African American admitted to the UT School of Law, and because of the lawsuit bearing his name. Not so well known, but just as important to the fight to integrate Texas higher education was Herman Barnett, the first black student to integrate the University of Texas Medical School. John Chase has the distinction of being the first student admitted to graduate school for architecture at UT. Hattie Briscoe was the first black woman admitted to St. Mary’s University Law School in San Antonio. Shabazz conveys their amazing courage and the reasons their their contributions are well worth preserving. Any student of U.S. history and especially anyone interested in twentieth century African American history will enjoy this highly readable and enlightening volume.

All images used under Fair Use Guidelines

Could a Muslim – or a Catholic or a Jew – Be President? A 1788 Constitutional Debate

by Denise A. Spellberg

The Constitution’s ban on religious tests prompted the nation’s first debate in 1788 about whether a Muslim – or a Catholic or a Jew – might one day become president of the United States. William Lancaster, a delegate to the North Carolina convention to ratify the Constitution, worried: “But let us remember that we form a government for millions not yet in existence. I have not the art of divination. In the course of four or five hundred years, I do not know how it will work. This is most certain, that Papists may occupy that chair, and Mahometans may take it.”

Lancaster asserted these future fears of a “certain” Catholic or Muslim president on July 30, 1788 as part of a day-long debate on the Constitution’s Article VI, section 3: “… no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” His views are preserved as the final utterance in the most detailed attack on – and defense of – a uniquely American ideal of religious pluralism, one that included Muslims at the founding.

Thomas Jefferson’s 1764 copy of The Koran (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

The Constitution’s no religious test clause, intended to end strife among Protestants of varied denominations, also theoretically ended exclusive Protestant control over federal appointed and elected offices. An Anti-Federalist, Lancaster and the majority of delegates to the North Carolina convention, opposed not just all non-Protestant participation in the federal government but the Constitution itself. (Anti-Federalists would eventually defeat ratification by a landslide 184 to 84 vote.) Henry Abbot, an Anti-Federalist, worried at the beginning of the day’s debate that Protestant rights of conscience were not sufficiently protected: “They suppose that if there be no religious test required, pagans, deists, and Mahometans might obtain offices among us…”

For Federalists in North Carolina, support for the Constitution thus also included an inadvertent defense of the political equality of Muslims, Catholics, and Jews. James Iredell, later appointed to the Supreme Court by President George Washington in 1790, countered Abbot’s anxieties in the 1788 debate. He included Muslims in his country’s new blueprint: “But it is to be objected that the people of America may, perhaps, choose representatives who have no religion at all, and that pagans and Mahometans may be admitted into offices. But how is it possible to exclude any set of men, without taking away that principle of religious freedom which we ourselves so warmly contend for?”

James Iredell, a prominent Federalist and Supreme Court Justice who expressed support for the incorporation of Muslims into American society (Image courtesy of the U.S. Government)

Iredell’s universally inclusive stance shocked his listeners. At the time, there were 2,000 Jews in the United States and 25,000 Catholics; both were despised minorities. Catholics were perceived as dangerous because of their past persecution of Protestants in Europe and their allegiance to the Pope. All the delegates to the North Carolina ratification convention were, by law, Protestant, but seemingly none were aware of the thousands of enslaved West African adherents of Islam then in the United States.

The Muslim slave Omar ibn Said, for example, lived in Fayetteville, North Carolina from 1811 until his death in 1863, two years before the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution would have granted him his freedom. Omar is famous for writing his autobiography in Arabic, which is preserved still. A mosque in Fayetteville now bears his name. James Iredell, a slave owner, might argue for the rights of future Muslim citizens in theory, but even he assumed these “Mahometans” remained an exclusively foreign population. The majority of Americans associated Muslims with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ottoman Turkish military incursions in Europe. North African pirates remained a more immediate problem for Americans. In 1784, they began seizing American commercial shipping in the Mediterranean, left defenseless without British naval protection it the wake of Independence.

Omar ibn Said, a Muslim slave from Fayetteville, North Carolina (Image courtesy of UNC University Libraries)

At home, the fate of all non-Protestants, Muslims, Catholics, and Jews remained linked together in debate on the Constitution. The idea of Muslims and Jews as citizens with rights was not invented in the United States. John Locke, the English political theorist, first asserted the possibility in his 1689 tract on toleration. In 1776, Thomas Jefferson, who considered Locke his hero, copied this precedent: ““he sais ‘neither Pagan nor Mahomedan nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth because of his religion.’” What Jefferson noted in Locke as theory, James Iredell first asserted in actual political debate in support of a Constitution that legally protected the equality of male Muslim, Catholic, and Jewish believers.

If you’d like to learn more:

The complete transcript of the North Carolina debate may be found online in Elliot’s Debates, The Debate in the Several States Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, volume 4, pp. 191-215, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lwed.html. This brief discussion is based on the author’s article “Could a Muslim Be President? An Eighteenth-Century Constitutional Debate,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 39, no. 4 (2006), pp. 485-506 and her forthcoming book, Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders, which will be published by Knopf in October 2013.

Was Iraq War Worth It? 10 Years after Invasion, It’s Too Early to Know

By Celeste Ward Gventer

Last November marked the 30th anniversary of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Since it ranks as one of the most popular sites on the National Mall with over 4 million visitors every year, it is easy to forget the outcry that accompanied the monument’s initial unveiling in 1982. Critics called it a “black gash of shame and sorrow,” and “nihilistic.” Prominent supporters of a Vietnam memorial pulled out of the project when the design contest judges selected Maya Lin’s now-iconic black wall concept. But the two reflective granite slabs that bear the names of over 58,000 service personnel killed or missing in Vietnam now rate as one of the most beloved pieces of American architecture and serve as a kind of national shrine.

The battle over the Vietnam memorial was more than aesthetic; it reflected a disagreement about how to interpret the war and how to communicate its meaning to current and future generations. It was a fight about national memory. For some veterans and their supporters, the black wall bespoke disaster and disgrace; it failed to recognize the heroism of individual human beings who fought valiantly and served honorably, even if the nation considered the war a loss.

A U.S. marine stands before the Vietnam memorial, July 4th, 2002 (Image courtesy of Indrani/Wikimedia Commons)

What might a future national monument to the Iraq war look like? This month marks 10 years since that conflict began on March 20, 2003. From a decade on, we can only begin to see how future historians and future generations will interpret the war and what questions they will ask. For now, Americans seem inclined to put it behind them. The contentious politics surrounding it are perhaps still too fresh. But much unfinished business remains in understanding the war and its implications. It hangs awkwardly in the background in discussions of U.S. foreign policy and strategy. What is the role of the United States in the world? How should it use its military? Under what circumstances should it intervene abroad? Iraq casts a long shadow on these questions.

For the moment, few rank the war as a success, and many view it as little more than a disaster. Iraq remains beset by strife between its major ethnosectarian groups: majority Shiite Muslims, minority Sunni Muslims who ruled the country before the U.S. invasion, and ethnic Kurds. The Shiite-dominated Iraqi government appears more aligned with Iran’s interests than with America’s. U.S. hopes to build a strong ally in the Middle East remain, for now, unfulfilled. But history often plays out in unexpected ways. Despite the conflict in Southeast Asia, the U.S. still won the Cold War and, 40 years later, enjoys cordial political and economic relations with Vietnam. Future interpretations of Iraq will depend on what questions historians ask and when they ask them.

The hundreds of thousands of Americans who served in Iraq, as well as the families who lost loved ones, will inevitably take representations of the war and any collective conclusions about it somewhat personally. I spent nearly two years in Iraq as a civilian, attempting to make some small contribution to its future and to my own country’s prospects for success. My husband served three tours there with the Army and was wounded twice during some of the most difficult fighting in Baghdad’s Sadr City. To this day neither of us can bear to watch movies about the Iraq war and find some of the early histories of the conflict painful reading. We remain hypersensitive to what we perceive as inaccuracies and apparent agendas of filmmakers and authors. My father-in-law, a Vietnam vet, could not sit through any films about his war either. Those representations simply did not jibe with how he remembered it and what he thought the conflict was about.

An Iraqi man is detained in the village of Qarah Cham, 2007 (Image courtesy of Jim Gordon/Wikimedia Commons)

As with Vietnam, controversies over the Iraq war will not go quietly. Some questions may remain contentious for the foreseeable future. At least four issues stand out as subjects for ongoing dispute. Many discussions about the Iraq war tend to conflate these related, but nonetheless distinct questions:

First, why did policymakers in the Bush administration decide to invade Iraq? When we put aside conspiracy theories and judgments about the personal traits of the actors involved, we are left to grapple with the real questions of history: What were they thinking and why did they think it? In the 1990s, few people in the national security business doubted Saddam Hussein’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Critics often forget that many foreign policy experts were surprised by the lack of WMD found in Iraq. The country had possessed and even used them in the past and had been notoriously intransigent with U.N. weapons inspectors. But how did invasion become the administration’s preferred option? Did they believe that Saddam Hussein might really be in cahoots with al-Qaida? Were key figures influenced by the rapidity with which the U.S. had toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan just over a year before? How might their views have been colored by the overwhelming success of the U.S. operation against Iraq in Desert Storm in 1991 and their perception of American military prowess? Some members of the administration had wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein for years. To what extent does the war represent a bit of cynical opportunism in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks?

The second question concerns how the U.S. planned and conducted the invasion and its management — or lack thereof — of the post-war occupation. The small invasion force experienced little trouble in defeating Iraq’s military but was too modestly sized to occupy and stabilize the country. One possible explanation for the administration’s failure to plan for an occupation is that it never intended to establish one. Perhaps instead policymakers planned to remove Saddam and his cronies, quickly assemble a new Iraqi government, and withdraw U.S. military forces. This small, light, and fast approach had worked (seemingly, at the time) in Afghanistan just 18 months before. Whatever the merits of this theory of regime change, however, we are left to explain the change to an occupation when Ambassador L. Paul Bremer arrived in Baghdad in late April, 2003. Bremer and other members of the administration offer conflicting accounts of this apparent shift. Moreover, if the administration planned for a small American “shock and awe” force to quickly topple Saddam’s regime and depart, how did it intend to secure the WMDs they believed existed?

Other controversies surrounding the handling of the U.S. occupation abound and form a rich vein for future research and discussion. But at least one issue bears particular mention. Most observers presume that the dismissal of the Iraqi Army in the early days of the occupation ranks as a grave error. This move, the argument suggests, antagonized a group of people with military training, which then turned on the U.S. and formed an “insurgency.” But this conclusion, while plausible, lacks the weight of historical evidence. If many or most of the “insurgents” attacking the U.S. and its allied coalition were former Iraqi soldiers angry at their dismissal (versus, say, being driven from power, which is a different cause), data that would validate this proposition is not available or has not been made public. The truth is that the U.S. faced a farrago of different groups during the course of the war, with different agendas, support networks, ethnosectarian compositions and ideologies. We arguably never fully understood the composition, intentions, and purposes behind the multifarious organizations and individuals arrayed against us. Moreover, the Iraqi Army was a fractured institution. Many of the senior officers were Sunnis while Shiites and Kurds made up most of the conscripts. Would those latter two groups, newly liberated from Saddam’s yoke, have tolerated the maintenance of the dictator’s army?

A Stryker vehicle lies on its side after being hit by an IED just south of the Shiek Hamed village in Iraq, 2007 (Image courtesy of the U.S. Army)

The third issue that will occupy historians is gaining a true understanding of the effect of the so-called surge of U.S. troops, which began in early 2007. Many observers have claimed that the infusion of forces and their application of counterinsurgency techniques turned the tide and led to an eventual decline in violence in Iraq. But there exist troubling questions about the causal connection between the surge and the reduction of violence, and multiple explanations might account for why the situation changed. Some Sunni groups took the political decision to stop fighting. Sectarian violence may have largely burned itself out. The political signal of the surge — as opposed to its specific form and content — may have convinced Iraqi leaders to accept at least temporary accommodations with each other and with the U.S. At this point, it remains unclear which combination of factors fully explains what happened on the ground.

The fourth and final question concerns the timing and circumstances of the U.S. military’s departure from Iraq. In 2008, the Bush administration signed an agreement with the Iraqi government that U.S. forces would depart the country at the end of 2011. But throughout that year, analysts and former members of the Bush administration suggested that this agreement had been intended as a temporary expedient and urged the Obama administration to negotiate a new agreement to provide for U.S. forces in Iraq into the future. The Obama administration made some efforts in this direction, but the Iraqi government refused the offer. U.S. military forces departed the country in December of 2011, thus bringing an unambiguous end to the war. Advocates of remaining in Iraq now argue that if at least some U.S. troops had stayed, the U.S. would enjoy an influence that it now lacks.

Future historians will confront a welter of other questions that have yet to be explored. For example, much of the discussion about the war so far concerns actions that America and its allies took and the presumed effect of these actions. But we do not fully understand the other sides of the story. How did the various Iraqi factions view the situation over time, and what steps did they take to advance their own interests? How did they leverage their position with the U.S., and how did they view American actions and intentions? Just how extensively did regional states interfere in Iraq throughout the course of the war? Beyond these “high policy” questions, we have as yet little understanding of how ordinary Iraqis experienced the war and the ways our decisions affected those millions of people.

Iraqi Special Weapons and Tactics team members on patrol in western Ninewah, Iraq, 2008 (Image courtesy of the U.S. Navy)

These and other unresolved questions will prevent any real consensus from emerging over the meaning of the Iraq war anytime soon. Consensus, in fact, may be too much to hope for, since many of the chief controversies of the Vietnam War persist after more than 40 years. Like that conflict, Iraq may continue to lurk in the background of our thoughts about future military interventions and the uses of American power.

This raises the question why, despite ongoing disagreement about the meaning of Vietnam, Americans have come to so fully embrace the memorial. Perhaps the ultimate genius of its design is that it does not require everyone to agree about the war. A memorial may not provide closure or answer any questions, but it can offer us a way to honor those who suffered and sacrificed. That may be the most important thing we can do. A visitor seeing her own reflection mingled with the names on the black granite connects her to the human beings who bore the cost of the conflict, whatever she thinks of how and why it occurred, or the strategic payoff to the country.

In Iraq, hundreds of thousands of the country’s citizens were killed, wounded or displaced. Over 4,000 American souls were lost, and tens of thousands returned without limbs, sight or hearing, or with seared skin, splintered bones, and shattered psyches. They still walk among us and bear witness to the decisions political leaders made a decade ago. It is difficult to say today whether their sacrifice was worth the benefit to the country.

Judgments on this will shift with the passage of time and events. But their names and their lives provide a reflection of our nation and of its purpose in the world. May any future monument to the Iraq war allow us to see those who were lost and maimed, honor them, and in the process, better see ourselves.

This article originally appeared in the Austin American-Statesman.

Austin’s First Electric Streetcar Era

As Austin considers building a new electric light rail system—streetcars, really—it is worth looking back to the city’s first streetcar era. For fifty years, from 1891 until 1940, Austin had an extensive network of electric streetcar lines, running from Hyde Park in the north to Travis Heights in the south, and from Lake Austin in the west to the heart of East Austin. The trolley cars were central to the lives of many Austinites, carrying them between their homes, jobs, and schools, shaping their decisions about where to live and work, and providing a site for racial contact and conflict at the height of the Jim Crow era. Austin was far from unique in any of this. Electric streetcars were one of the defining technologies of cities and towns around the world from the 1890s until at least the 1930s, and a look at Austin’s experience with streetcars will help us to see how global patterns played out in a local setting.

Austin’s first streetcars were propelled by mules, not electricity. They began operating in January 1875 and ran mostly along Congress Avenue from the train stations up to the Capitol. Austin was the railhead in the mid-1870s, the farthest point reached by the railroads, and though it only had about 10,000 residents, it bustled with activity. As the railroads extended further west, however, Austin became something of a backwater, and by the 1880s city leaders were looking for new ways to spark growth and development. They hit on the idea of building a huge dam to supply industrial power, and though the project eventually proved disastrous, it set off a speculative boom in the city in the late 1880s and early 1890s.

Gated entrance to Hyde Park in Austin, Texas in the 1890s featuring a trolley car to the left of the entrance

One of those attracted to what Austin seemed to offer was Monroe Shipe, a developer from Kansas. After acquiring a plot of land north of town, which he rather grandly dubbed “Hyde Park,” he set about offering what he said would be the finest home sites in the region. But Hyde Park was too far from the center of town to be attractive to potential buyers; Shipe needed a way to bring it closer. In May 1889 he set out to do just that, securing a franchise from the city for the Austin Rapid Transit Railway Company and setting out to build an electric streetcar line running from downtown to Hyde Park.

Electric streetcars were the hot new technology in 1889. Thomas Edison and others had been trying for several years to devise a practical way to use electricity to drive streetcars, but it was Frank J. Sprague who in 1888 managed to pull together a working system. Working on a short deadline in Richmond, Virginia, Sprague designed and built a streetcar system that was rugged, efficient, and clearly superior to any of its competitors. One of his key steps was to power his cars from overhead wires tapped by the arm of a spring-loaded “trolley,” a name that was soon applied to the cars themselves. Sprague’s new system spread extremely rapidly, and within a few years hundreds of electric streetcar lines were up and running all over the United States. The new technology came along at just the right time for Monroe Shipe, and he jumped on it.

A map of Austin, Texas and its suburbs detailing the streetcar system of the city

Shipe’s franchise required him to have his line in operation under electrical power by the end of February 1891. He beat the deadline, he later said, by just one hour and forty-four minutes. The line was an immediate hit, no doubt initially in part for its novelty value. Over 2000 Austinites rode Shipe’s streetcars that first day, and the line continued to carry heavy traffic for months to come, many riders taking the loop all the way out to Hyde Park. Like many streetcar operators around the country, Shipe built attractions to draw riders at off-peak hours; though in other cities these often took the form of garish amusement parks (many with names like “Electra Park”), Shipe provided a more sedate pavilion and lake at the north end of his line (near 43rd and Guadalupe), perfectly placed to allow visitors to see how pleasant their lives could be if they bought a home site in Shipe’s development. With its tree-lined streets and carefully planned amenities, Hyde Park was a classic streetcar suburb, of a kind that began to appear all over the United States toward the end of 19th century. Rapid and convenient electric streetcars allowed city-dwellers to live much further from their jobs than had previously been possible, contributing to a shift in housing patterns and a greater separation between home and workplace. Shipe promoted Hyde Park as the “bon ton residence” of Austin, and especially in the early years sought to attract the upper stratum of Austin homebuyers.

The Austin City Railroad Company, the operators of the old mule car line, resented Shipe’s intrusion into the Austin transit business and fought back hard during the early months of Shipe’s operation. Then in May 1891 a fire struck the old company’s barn, destroying many of their cars and killing thirty mules. The owners, described as “a syndicate of Chicago and Boston capitalists,” leaned toward liquidating their remaining property, but decided first to see what they might salvage. According to the Austin Statesman, whose boosterism in those years knew few bounds, once they visited the city, the northern investors were so impressed by Austin’s “brilliant future” that instead of selling out they decided to invest in rebuilding and electrifying their system. By the end of 1891 the two companies had merged into a fully electrified system whose twenty cars ran on fifteen miles of track that reached through most of the city north of the river.

Soon after he had engineered the merger, Shipe withdrew from the streetcar business. He knew the real money lay not in collecting nickel fares, but in using the availability of streetcar service to boost the value of the land he was trying to sell. It was a wise move. After the early 1890s, Austin’s streetcar companies struggled financially; though they experienced occasional periods of profitability, generally after receiving an infusion of outside capital, these were inevitably followed by stagnation, losses, bankruptcy, and reorganization. In 1902 the Austin Rapid Transit Railway Company gave way to the Austin Electric Railway Company, followed in 1911 by the Austin Street Railway Company and in 1921 by Austin Transit.

Black and white image of a trolley car moving down Congress Avenue towards the Texas State Capital Building

Austin itself struggled, too. The dam, completed in 1893, never produced enough power to attract industrial customers, and the city was saddled with an enormous debt and little way to pay it off. Then in April 1900 the dam failed in a flood, leaving the streetcar system without power. Mules were pressed into service for several months until the streetcar company could erect its own steam powered generators at 4th and Pressler Street on the west side of town.

Shipe found that the market for high-end house lots in Hyde Park had declined as well, and he began to aim his pitch a little further down market, offering lots on favorable terms of just $2 per month. On one point, however, the pitch remained the same: as Shipe’s advertisements stated in bold letters, “Hyde Park is Strictly for White People.” Racial lines were hardening in the 1890s, and the advent of electric streetcars and streetcar suburbs made it easier to enforce a separation in housing patterns.

Black and white photograph of large groups of pedestrians crossing Congress Avenue in downtown Austin, Texas

The turn of the century also witnessed a wave of Jim Crow laws mandating segregation on public transportation. City councils across the South passed ordinances requiring separate seating on streetcars, with blacks forced to the back. The streetcar companies generally opposed such laws, saying they imposed new costs without providing any new revenues, made it more difficult to respond to shifts in demand, and forced drivers and conductors to enforce policies that were likely to arouse opposition. In many cities, black citizens boycotted the segregated streetcars in favor of informal “hack” lines of wagons and carriages operated by black drivers. The Houston Electric system was hit especially hard; after the city passed a Jim Crow law in November 1903, black ridership plummeted. A few months later, the white streetcar drivers went on strike, further crippling the system. When frustrated whites asked the black hack drivers for a ride, they were politely told that the city ordinance prohibited letting blacks and whites sit together, and that the hack wagons did not have the required separate compartments.

The Houston streetcar boycott fizzled out toward the end of 1904, but others followed. In March 1906, the Austin city council passed an ordinance requiring segregated seating on all streetcars. The law was not set to take effect until June, but blacks began their boycott immediately, and by April the Austin streetcars reportedly carried almost no black riders. Black drivers soon started up mule-drawn hack lines, and local black leaders even talked of acquiring a “large auto passenger bus” to carry black riders. But despite determined efforts, the boycott collapsed in June, and black riders seemingly resigned themselves to taking their places in the back of Austin’s streetcars. Public transportation remained a racial battleground in the South, however, as the story of Rosa Parks and the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott makes clear.

Black and white photograph of Congress Avenue in downtown Austin, Texas with a view of the State Capital Building in the background

Both Austin and its electric streetcar system continued to grow in the early 20th century. After the new concrete Congress Avenue Bridge was built across the Colorado River in 1910, streetcar lines were extended into South Austin and the new suburban development at Travis Heights. Lines were also extended further into East Austin, until by the mid–1920s the system reached its peak extent, with 23 miles of track to serve a population of about 40,000. By then, however, the streetcars were coming under increasing competition from automobiles, and farebox income was insufficient to keep the streetcar system in good repair. Many cities began to shrink their networks of streetcar lines, and in 1933 San Antonio became the first major city to junk its electric streetcars in favor of buses. Austin followed in 1940. In a ceremony presided over by Mayor Tom Miller, Austin’s electric streetcars made a last nostalgic run along the Main Line up Congress Avenue on 7 Feb. 1940 before giving way to shiny new buses. The remaining rails were pulled up in 1942 during a wartime scrap metal drive.

I first began delving into Austin’s streetcar history while teaching an undergraduate seminar on “Electrification.” I encourage my students to explore the rich local history of electrical technologies and their social impacts, and they have turned up some fascinating stories. In fact, much of what I said above about the 1906 black streetcar boycott was drawn from an excellent paper my student Kevin Stewart wrote a couple of years ago. I have also learned a lot just by talking with Austinites. I recently gave a talk about Austin’s streetcar history at the Neill-Cochran House Museum in West Campus, and struck up a conversation there with Virginia Wallace, a longtime Austin resident. Her stepfather was a streetcar driver, and she described how handsome he looked in his uniform. She also told how, sometime after the ceremonial “last run” in February 1940, he let her ride with him as he drove the last streetcar to the old car barn on Pressler Street to be retired. With that Austin’s streetcar era—or at least its first streetcar era—came to an end.

Check out more of Professor Bruce Hunt’s contributions to Not Even Past:

“City Lights: Austin’s Historic Moonlight Towers”

“The Rise and Fall of the Austin Dam”

“The Atomic Bombs and the End of World War II: Tracking an Elusive Decision”

Photo Credits:

Streetcar along the entrance to the Hyde Park neighborhood of Austin
Citation: [Gated Entrance to Hyde Park], Photograph, 1894; digital image, accessed March 18, 2013), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History; crediting Austin History Center, Austin Public Library, Austin, Texas.

A 1925 map of Austin with the streetcar lines highlighted (Image courtesy of Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection)

Streetcar on Congress Avenue, 1913
Citation: Congress Avenue with street rail, Photograph, 1913; digital image, accessed March 18, 2013, University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History; crediting Austin History Center, Austin Public Library, Austin, Texas.

Streetcars run along Congress Avenue on their “last run” in Austin, February 7, 1940
Citation: Ellison Photo Service. Street Railroad Downtown, Photograph, February 7, 1940; digital image, accessed March 18, 2013, University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History; crediting Austin History Center, Austin Public Library, Austin, Texas.

Congress Avenue after the streetcar lines were removed, 1943 (Image courtesy of the U.S Government)

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.

Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia by João José Reis (1993)

by Michael Hatch

Shortly after 1:00am on January 25, 1835, a contingent of African-born slaves and former slaves emerged from a house at number 2 Ladeira da Praça and overpowered the justice of the peace and a police lieutenant. Throughout the night approximately six hundred rebels ran through the streets fighting and vandalizing a number of municipal buildings. Because the leaders of the revolt were African-born Muslims, some historians have characterized the revolt as a jihad. Others downplay the religious elements engrained in the rebellion, emphasizing instead ethnic differences among Africans. Joao Jose Reis effectively establishes a middle ground between these two arguments by describing networks existing across African ethnic and religious lines. Africans from a myriad of ethnic groups and religious affiliations counted themselves among the ranks of the revolt. For Reis, classifying the rebellion as either a religious or an ethnic phenomenon misrepresents the various forces of social solidarity in the Bahian slave society.

Reis begins his investigation by carefully crafting the social and economic setting of early-nineteenth-century Bahia. That society was fraught with social inequity and an atmosphere often fractured by revolts. Both free and enslaved peoples throughout the opening decades of the 19th century took to the streets as a means to voice displeasure with some aspect of society. He goes on to show the roles played by the African Muslim population in that setting. and the daily lives of the accused rebels. He ends with an examination of the depth and breadth of the Brazilian response to the revolt and subsequent repressive measures meted out against the free and enslaved Afro-descended community.

Reis utilizes documentary evidence including eyewitness accounts from Brazilian, French, and English sources in order to craft as complete an account of the events of that night as possible. The author then moves from the revolt itself to the various affiliations (religious, ethnic, social) that tied together and drove apart Afro-descended peoples in and around Salvador. Despite the majority of the primary conspirators being Muslims, religious difference did not prove an insurmountable obstacle to coordination or affiliation with the revolt.

Afro-Brazilian slaves performing “Capoeira,” a Brazilian martial art, 1825 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The Muslim rebels (Malês) “never posed a threat” to ethnic and religious plurality in Bahia, and Reis emphasizes that there is no evidence to support the claim that religious conquest was the rebels’ goal as state officials at the time and some scholars would argue. However, Reis the documentary evidence of the revolt does show that “ethnic identity continued to be an organizing and sociopolitical cornerstone of African life in Bahia.” According to one document translated from Arabic by a Hausa slave, “They were to have come… taking the land and killing everyone in the white man’s land.” Other documents from African-born slaves describe a desire to kill all whites, mulattoes, and native-born blacks, while testimony from the trials indicate a desire to enslave mulattoes.

Public flagellation of a slave, Rio de Janeiro, 1834-1839 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Reis also uncovers the tensions within the Afro-descended communities of Bahia, most notably, the friction between African-born and Brazilian-born people of color. Brazilian-born (crioulo) free people of color made up a large fraction of the city police, regular army, and slave hunters. In a way, Reis characterizes the face of oppression as Afro-Brazilian because many crioulos were viewed by African-born slaves as the most apparent beneficiaries of the slave society and economy. The author takes pains to emphasize the role that ethnicity played in the revolt, while tempering it with religious undertones. The relationship between religion and ethnic plurality played a key role in the revolt, and although “Islam is not an ethnic religion… it may have been ethnic in the 1835 scenario.” Although the religious motivations for the revolt were secondary to ethnic ones, religion was an important element in the development of a specific ethnic and cultural affiliation, which manifested itself, in this case, as confrontation. Reis utilizes the trial documentation as a window through which to view everyday life under the auspices of urban slavery. The revolt then becomes the vehicle to understanding a wider social and cultural history; a reversal of the introductory chapters which supply a portrait of the society which nurtured a rebellious tradition.

Receipt of a Rio de Janeiro slave sale, 1851 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The concluding chapters of Slave Rebellion in Brazil describe the response from governmental and political authorities and repression of the Afro-descended population of Bahia. In the immediate aftermath floggings, deportations, and death sentences characterized a swift and violent response to the revolt. After appeal and deliberation, however, the courts commuted many executions. Tomás, a Nagô slave and one of the leaders of the rebellion initially sentenced to death on March 10, had his execution commuted to 800 lashes on June 20. Reis argues that 1835 was a watershed moment because the response to the rebellion represented a systematic and far-reaching effort “exorcize [sic] anything African” from Bahian society. Additionally, the author hints that the post-1835 repression symbolized an effort on the part of Brazilian officials to develop slavery as a firm foundation for the newly independent nation. Of all assertions in this work, this is the least substantiated by evidence, and appears more a conjecture regarding official efforts to “whiten” society.

Slave Rebellion in Brazil is a magnificent example of interpretative historical analysis based on rigorous archival research. Slave Rebellion represents a dramatic shift in the historiography of Latin American and Brazilian slavery, emphasizing both slave agency and the importance of a plurality of African ethnic identities in the development of Afro-Latino cultures rooted in the Atlantic slave trade.

The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet by Lawrence J. Friedman (2013)

by Christopher Duncan

Perhaps one day some whimsical people with money will get together and honor books for their subtitles. Lawrence Friedman’s new biography of Erich Fromm, subtitled “Love’s Prophet,” wins for getting the total picture; for, in just two words, capturing a whole life. But it couldn’t have been a difficult choice.

Erich Fromm was a German-American psychotherapist and ethicist, most noted within the academy for his groundbreaking synthesis of Marxism and Freudianism. After emigrating from Germany in 1934, Fromm became a robust public intellectual, a voice for love and freedom who spoke in words a schoolchild could read. Fromm’s message was brief: love — and don’t wait — or perish. Mike Wallace’s interview with Fromm perfectly captures his otherworldly charm, his preference for the elegance of plain truth over reasoned facts, his will to enjoy, his deep concern for humanity, his long view of history. This footage makes me nostalgic for the time when playful intellectuals visiting us from some mystical other world would come on TV.

Fromm’s ecstatic prophetic pose alienated many academics.and few young scholars today are familiar with or even interested in Fromm’s arguments about freedom, fascism, capitalism or love. And yet, there was something about Fromm’s style that seemed to catch; few thinkers achieved Fromm’s global popularity.

In Friedman’s telling, Fromm wasted no time becoming Fromm. The biography opens with an adolescent Fromm’s coming-to-terms with his neurotic, overbearing father.. Rather than moving far from his home in Frankfurt to become a rabbi, as he wished, Fromm remained close to his family by attending the nearby University of Heidelberg. There he studied economics under Alfred Weber, Max Weber’s brother. Fromm’s dissertation explored “the function of Jewish law in maintaining social cohesion and continuity in the three Diaspora communities – the Karaites, the Reform Jews, and the Hasidim.” Much of his ethics would follow from these roots in humanistic Judaism. Although Weber believed Fromm’s work qualified him for a promising career as a scholar, Fromm’s father wasn’t so sure. He showed up in Heidelberg on the day of his son’s defense to tell the faculty committee that, because Erich was not prepared and would fail, he was going to kill himself.

Fromm’s affair with Frieda Reichmann, a much older Frankfurt psychoanalyst who introduced him to the new discipline and thereafter become his first of three wives, offered the emotional exit he needed from his oppressive family. Fromm spent his twenties invigorated by psychoanalytic training, and even then, he showed signs of departing from Freudian orthodoxy. Around 1929, Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School for Social Research hired Fromm to bring in the new psychology that had been blossoming in Vienna and Berlin. For whatever reason, Fromm’s estrangement from the Frankfurt School casts a large shadow over the magnitude of his involvement, first in grounding the Institute’s particular “Freudo-Marxism,” and secondly in ensuring its future. Many scholars and activists today, historians included, have become so accustomed to thinking about culture in fluid social psychological terms similar to those Fromm pioneered that they forget the great chasm that once existed between Orthodox Marxism and Freudian analysis. Fromm worked to forge a dialectical link between “social structure” and “instinctual need,” where structures (e.g. forms of work organization, distributions of wealth, broad cultural practices) modified libidinous impulses that in turn cement or challenge (“explode”) those structures. Fromm proved that psychoanalysis could provide Marxism with a better understanding of subjectivity and he “postulated that the entire interaction between changing instincts and changing social forms took place most conspicuously within the family, the primary mediating agency between the individual psyche and broad social structures.” At Frankfurt, Fromm accomplished what was then a radical philosophical feat.

When Hitler came to power, Fromm was offered a position on Columbia’s sociology faculty. Fromm successfully lobbied Columbia for the Frankfort Institute’s use of University facilities in Morningside Heights, ensuring the future of an intellectual tradition he would not long remain part of. Fromm’s intellectual conflict with some of the Frankfurt School crew (notably Adorno and Marcuse), at least on the surface, revolved around his departure from the notion, popularized by Freud, that sexual libido, in its repression by the reality principle, was the material basis of the unconscious and of mental illness. In America, Fromm cultivated friendships with analysts who shared his rejection of Freud’s libido theory of mind. Through his friendships with Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan, and Margaret Mead, who all emphasized culture and intersubjectivity over the economic and the psychosexual, Fromm’s thought flourished. Rather than seeking to occupy a position of authority or submission vis-a-vis his contemporaries, Fromm wove his own ideas out of the “interpenetrative,” fraternal exchanges with his rather intelligent and pioneering friends. In other words, the generative mode of his life’s work corresponded gracefully to its content.

Fromm’s psychotherapeutic career occupies in my opinion too small a portion of Friedman’s book, though we can forgive the biographer this fault since access to that deeply private history is no doubt heavily restricted. What we do know is that Fromm was a lay analyst, which created problems for him in an increasingly institutionalized, medical and behavioralist psychological field. Fromm innovated his technique away from what believed were Freud’s alienating and paternalist approaches; hence his rejection of the couch. The way Friedman describes it, Fromm viewed therapy as a “dance” between friends, and his sessions recall a piece by the performance artist Marina Abramovic, “The Artist is Present,” in which two interlocutors stare at each other, taking the other in, silently and fully, affirming their shared experience and desires.

On the question of politics, Friedman argues that Fromm must be remembered as an enthusiastic Marxist. Fromm called himself a socialist humanist, but if his commitment to Freudianism was often contested, so were his Marxist credentials. The fuss was understandable: Fromm confounded ideologues, especially with such seemingly innocuous ideals – love, self-discovery, freedom. When Herbert Marcuse published Eros and Civilization, in 1955, with its rabid critique of Neo-Freudianism, Fromm’s split with Frankfurt returned to haunt him. Marcuse’s apparent victory in what became a highly publicized feud in the American magazine Dissent seemed to seal Fromm’s rejection by Marxist scholars and the New Left: by Marcuse’s rhetorical tricks, Fromm’s post-Freudianism came, oddly, to signify his post-Marxism. What Marcuse saw in Fromm’s good tidings – his evangelical message of love (formalized a year after Eros in The Art of Loving – in my opinion Fromm’s most beautiful book) – was the happy acceptance of bourgeois alienation, a “sunny-side up” accommodation to capitalism akin to the opium of religion and capitalist morality. Yet, despite his deep spiritualism,or because of it, Fromm vigorously criticized American religious life, which he believed combined the worst of authoritarian and consumerist moral delinquency. America’s God appeared to Fromm as, in his words, the “remote General Director of the Universe, Inc.” If wit is cunning simplicity, Fromm’s flew over Marcuse’s head. Friedman’s verdict of what Fromm actually believed should be definitive: “Society had to be changed, to be sure, but the reader [of Fromm] should not await the demise of capitalist structures and values before seeking to master the art of loving.” Fromm’s revolution was impatient, so impatient that it transformed into what we call ethics — an under-acknowledged aspect of Fromm’s Marxism, a bedfellow, perhaps, to Walter Benjamin’s cry that “the state of exception is now.”

In 1961, Fromm’s cousin Heinz Brandt, a radical social democrat who survived the Death March, was kidnapped in West Berlin by Stasi operatives. Just as Fromm had worked tirelessly to assist a large network of Jewish friends, relatives, and colleagues escape Germany before and after Kristallnacht, Fromm now entered into a game of international arm wrestling that involved Bertrand Russell and Khrushchev. His cousin was released by the GDR, no doubt in part due to Fromm’s skillful manipulation. On these occasions, Fromm personally displayed the courage in the face of state brutality he so cherished in his writings.

Friedman’s biography leaves little wanting. I highly recommend it, especially as a readable primer in Critical Theory. Excepting his mild tendency to repeat himself, Friedman has produced what will surely remain the best intellectual biography of Fromm . Sadly, however, if we happily accept Fromm’s ordainment as prophet, this designation must remain strictly a stylistic observation. One sociologist recently penned an article on Fromm called “How to Become a Forgotten Intellectual.” Although Fromm’s books sold extremely well throughout the postwar years and over the globe, he failed to develop a mass following appropriate for a prophet. Here’s to hoping Friedman’s book reignites at least some interest in a man who failed at every turn to be uninteresting.

Photo Credits:

Sigmund Freud, 1922 (Image courtesy of LIFE Photo Archive)

The central figures of the “Frankfurt” school: Max Horkheimer (front left), Theodor Adorno (front right), and Jürgen Habermas (in the background, right), 1964, Heidelberg (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

A plaque memorializing Fromm, Bayerischer Platz, Berlin (Image courtesy of Axel Mauruszat/Wikimedia Commons)

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines

“Her Program’s Progress”

This Associated Press photograph was taken in 1966 to accompany an article by Frances Lewine about Lady Bird Johnson’s beautification project, entitled, “Her Program’s Progress.”

“Mrs. Lyndon Johnson has begun a national movement to eradicate blighted and ugly scenery from America, feeling ‘ugliness is an eroding force on the people of the land.’ On visits to small towns, large cities, national parks and points of scenic and historic interest, she related such visits to the benefits of natural beauty. She has been instrumental in legislation and donations to improve, clean up or renovate national eyesores everywhere. Here, before a backdrop of Lake Powell, Mrs. Lyndon Johnson speaks at dedication ceremonies of the Glen Canyon Dam near Page, Arizona, in late September 1966.”

When Lady Bird took the podium, as one of a host of national and local politicians, she pointed out that the region surrounding the dam “consists of eons of time laid bare – on stone pages and in the treasure troves of Indian myths and artifacts” that would make the resulting Lake Powell “a magnet for tourists.” Evoking the genius of technology, the conservation of water, and the spirituality of nature, she remarked, “To me, the appealing genius of conservation is that it combines the energetic feats of technology – like this dam – with the gentle humility that leaves some corners of the earth untouched – alone – free of technology – to be a spiritual touchstone and a recreation asset.”

Only a decade earlier, the area that Lake Powell flooded had been a vast, arid desert, peppered with ancient American Indian cliff dwellings and majestic rock structures, like Rainbow Bridge. The resulting reservoir was impressive given that it filled up a network of side, slot, and crater canyons measuring more than 150 miles long and with a shoreline longer than the east coast of the United States. The dam — a barrier of five million cubic yards of reinforced concrete (more concrete than was used in Hoover Dam) — was hailed as one the “the engineering wonders of the world” by the Bureau of Reclamation as well as local newspapers, and state and local officials in both Arizona and Utah. It was honored as “the outstanding engineering project” by the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Yet, among environmentalists it was (and is) considered one of the nation’s most controversial projects. Flooding the canyon disrupted the free flow of the Colorado River, destroyed the original natural beauty of the site, and made dozens of plant and wildlife species extinct.

Clearly, beautification was in the eye of the beholder. For Lady Bird Johnson, as well as many other Americans, technology did not necessarily ruin nature. Later on this leg of her 1966 Beautification tour, she also paid a brief visit to San Ildefonso Indian Pueblo, dedicating a highway and a park and planting seedlings. All of this earned her the nickname: “Our First Lady of National Beautification” from the New York News on November 13, 1966.

Often when thinking about Lady Bird Johnson’s Beautification Program, we overlook the ways she celebrated technology as much as nature — especially if it aided people’s access to nature or natural resources.

For more, see Erika Bsumek’s book: The Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam: Infrastructures of Dispossession on the Colorado Plateau (University of Texas Press, 2023)

The text of the speech may be found: Lady Bird Johnson, “Glen Canyon Dam Dedication Ceremony,” item display 75982, Cline Library, Northern Arizona University.

Photograph: from the author’s private collection.

New Books in Women’s History

We are celebrating Women’s History Month this year with recommendations of new books in Women’s History from some of our faculty and graduate students. From third-century North Africa to sixteenth-century Mexico to the twentieth-century in Russia and the US, and more…

Judy Coffin:

Deborah Cohen, Family Secrets: Living with Shame from the Victorians to the Present Day, (2013).
A history of shame and changing social norms, of privacy and how a “right” to privacy was established, and of changes in what families will and will not confess — to themselves and to others. It’s bold, refreshing, and readable. (In fact it comes with Hilary Mantel’s endorsement.) Published in Great Britain in January, the book due out here at the beginning of April. You can read the introduction on the Amazon website, and pre-order. This is a book that everyone interested in gender, sexuality, and families will want to read.

Linda Greenhouse & Reva Seigel, Before Roe v. Wade: Voices that Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court’s Ruling, (2010).
Here’s another readable and important book. It reconstructs the everyday politics of contraception and abortion before Roe v. Wade, making it clear that the now landmark decision was one case among many, the justices’ reasoning was rather narrowly cast. This is not an all-roads-led-to-Roe story; it is much more interesting, unpredictable, and historical than that. Siegel is a professor at Yale Law School and Greenhouse covers the Supreme Court for the New York Times.

Lizeth Elizondo:

Catherine Ramirez, The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory, (2009).
Catherine Ramirez illuminates the ways in which Mexican-American women rebelled and chose to express their individuality by joining the popular zoot suit movement of the 1940s. By focusing on the women behind the suit, Ramirez offers a revisionist interpretation of the involvement of women in the infamous Los Angeles Zoot Suit riots and the Sleepy Lagoon case of 1943.

Alison Frazier:

Thomas J. Heffernan, The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, (2012).
In one volume, Heffernan presents the essential text and tools for readers to begin thinking through the unique and precious “prison diary” of Vibia Perpetua, the visionary young mother who led a mixed-gender group of Christians to martyrdom in early third-century North Africa.

Laurie Green:

Barbara Ransby, Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson, (2012).
In contrast to the enormous attention paid to the acclaimed African American singer, actor, radical and civil rights activist Paul Robeson, his extraordinary wife, Eslanda “Essie” Robeson has remained in the historical shadows. For the first time, in Ransby’s biography, we can grasp her amazing lifework, including her intellectual career as an anthropologist and journalist, and her passionate involvement in women’s rights, racial justice and anti-colonialist movements on an international scale.

Janine Jones:

Fatima Mernissi, Dreams Of Trespass: Tales Of a Harem Girlhood, (1995).
Scholar and activist Fatima Mernissi’s captivating memoir of her childhood in a Moroccan harem during the end of the French Protectorate is not to be missed.

Halidé Edib, House with Wisteria: Memoirs of Turkey Old and New, 2nd ed., (2009).
Turkish journalist, novelist, and early feminist activist Halide Edib’s lyrical memoir of growing to adulthood during the chaotic collapse of the Ottoman Empire is filled with stories of tragedy, love, and strength.

Anne Martinez:

Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, Love and Empire: Cybermarriage and Citizenship Across the Americas, (2012).
Schaeffer puts desire in the context of the global economy, class, and cultural citizenship in this book about transnational cyber-relationships since the 1990s.

Joan Neuberger:

Marina Goldovskaya, Woman with a Movie Camera: My Life as a Russian Filmmaker, (2006).
“I started school in 1948. In my class of more than forty children, I was the only one who had a father.” This memoir traces Marina Goldovskaya’s career in Soviet television and her emergence as Russia’s best known documentary film maker. Along the way, we get an inside look at the everyday politics of survival and success in two of late-twentieth-century Russia’s most interesting industries.

Megan Seaholm:

Michelle M. Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right, (2012).
The significant role that women played in the rise of conservatism from the 1950s through the 1964 presidential campaign. This careful study of conservative women in southern California explains how “populist housewives” became impassioned activists who influenced the conservative agenda for decades.

Stephanie Coontz, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, (2011).
Fifty years after Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, often credited with igniting the feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, Professor Coontz examines this book and the impact it had on readers.

Susan J. Douglas, The Rise of Enlightened Sexism: How Pop Culture Took Us From Girl Power to Girls Gone Wild, (2010).
Cultural historian Susan Douglas has written a perceptive and often humorous book about the way that icons of popular culture encouraged a generation of women (the “millennials”) to believe that feminism had accomplished its goals.

Ann Twinam and Susan Deans-Smith both recommend:

Camilla Townsend, Malintzin’s Choices, An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico, (2006).
The wonderfully readable and compelling book tells the story of Malintzin, the young Nahua woman who became Hernando Cortés’ translator and mistress during the conquest of Mexico. Townsend takes on the difficult task of giving voice to someone who, while typically vilified as a traitor and sexual siren, left no words of her own. The resulting portrait allows us to see Malintzin’s understanding of her situation and the difficult choices she made in a rapidly changing political landscape.

Lady Bird Johnson interviewed by Michael Gillette

By Michael Gillette

I had already conducted the first five oral history interviews with Lady Bird Johnson when she telephoned my LBJ Library office one day in the spring of 1978. Her first words were “Hello, Mike. How would you like to do something zany?” Before I could speculate what she could possibly mean by “zany,” she explained: “Would you like to accompany me to my fiftieth high school reunion in Marshall, Texas?” I eagerly accepted the invitation.

The trip was an extraordinary adventure in time travel that added rich context to her oral history narrative. The reunion with old Marshall High School friends brought out her youthful spirit and warmth. As she addressed the gathering, I thought of her graduation fifty years earlier when her shyness was so excruciating that she was relieved to learn that her class ranking—the third highest–spared her from having to give a speech. But now, as the former first lady delivered an eloquent, humorous, nostalgia-filled speech, she spoke effortlessly.

The East Texas trip took us to several landmarks of her youth. We walked around the stately antebellum Brick House, where she was born. We stopped at the beautiful, lonely country Scottsville cemetery where her mother was buried when Lady Bird was five years old. We climbed into jon boats and ventured onto Caddo Lake amid the haunting majestic Cypress trees, laden with Spanish moss. I could readily see how she had developed her love of nature in such a spectacular setting.

In August 1977, almost a year before our trip, I had begun the series of oral history interviews with Mrs. Johnson that would ultimately comprise forty-seven sessions. Our interviews usually took place on weekends at the LBJ Ranch, where interruptions were minimal. My oral history staff and I would prepare a chronological outline for each year, along with a thick file of back-up correspondence, appointment calendar entries, and press clippings. Mrs. Johnson would review the entire folder of material to refresh her memory and make notes before we began recording each interview. Over a span of fourteen years, I conducted the first thirty-seven interviews. After my transfer to the National Archives in Washington in 1991, Harry Middleton, the LBJ Library director, continued the interviews.

In 2011, two decades after my departure from the LBJ Library staff, I learned that the library was preparing to release Mrs. Johnson’s long-sealed interviews in May of that year. I immediately prepared a book proposal to Oxford University Press, which had recently published a new edition of my Launching the War on Poverty An: Oral History. Once Oxford approved the project, my task was to edit her 470,000 words into a manuscript of less than half that length in time to publish it before Mrs. Johnson’s centennial in December 2012.

Lady Bird Johnson: An Oral History consists of three concurrent tracks. The first track presents her perceptive observations of life in two capital cities during a span of four decades. As a witness-participant, she vividly describes the events and personalities that shaped our world. The second track is the phenomenal political rise of Lyndon Johnson through a combination of good fortune, consummate political skill and resourcefulness, and incredibly hard work. The third and most compelling track is the transformation of a shy Southern country girl into one of the most admired and respected first ladies in American history.

If the picturesque rural setting of her youth fostered a love of natural beauty, her isolation also imposed self-reliance and a love of reading. There simply wasn’t much else to do. Her education was pivotal to her transformation. Two years at St. Mary’s College in Dallas instilled an appreciation of the English language, a measure of independence, and an enduring religious faith. Next came her four years at the University of Texas, which brought not only academic rigor, but also an active social life that she had never enjoyed before. In Austin she became more confident, more aggressive, and more willing to extend herself.

But a glimpse of Claudia Taylor’s life in mid-1934 suggests that something is missing. She is smart, intellectually curious, and shy but popular with many friends in Austin. Although she is not beautiful, her charm and appealing presence make her attractive to a succession of college beaus. She has just graduated with her second degree, majoring in Journalism. She has also earned a secondary teaching certificate, but she seems to view teaching as an opportunity to travel to exotic places rather than a vocation. She has also taken typing and shorthand courses so that she can, if necessary, secure a job as a secretary.

And yet she has no real plans for her future. Instead of pursuing a career, she takes a graduation trip to New York and Washington and then moves back to Karnack to spend a year remodeling the Brick House for her father. Her plan is, in her words, just “to see where fate led me,” as if she were a mere spectator of her own life. What is missing here is ambition; ambition that gives drive, direction, and purpose to life.

But Lady Bird’s life dramatically changes on September 5, 1934, with a chance encounter while she is visiting her friend Gene Boehringer in the state capitol. Suddenly, a young man named Lyndon Johnson walks in. He asks her to have breakfast the next morning. After breakfast and a day-long drive around the hills of Austin, he asks her to marry him.

The introduction of this powerful, unexpected force creates a terrible dilemma for Claudia Taylor. She is pressured to make the most important decision of her life within a span of less than three months. She barely knows the young man, and the fact that he is 1,200 miles away during most of their brief courtship makes it difficult to become better acquainted. But she must agree to marry this young man and move to Washington, or he will drop out of her life forever as quickly as he entered it. Her fear of losing him ultimately prevails over her innate caution.

If opposites attract, one can easily imagine that there was, as she described, “something electric going on” when they first met. The two were strikingly different in many ways. She was conservative, cautious, and judicious; he was liberal, impulsive, and always in a hurry. Her calm, gracious, shy demeanor contrasted with his expansive, demanding, volatile temperament. If she was thrifty, he was given to acts of extravagant generosity. She was essentially private and self-reliant, while he desperately needed people around him. She was a studious reader of books; he was at heart a teacher whose text was experience.

But what did she see in Lyndon Johnson? It was his drive, his forcefulness, his raw, honest ambition to which she was attracted. As she wrote during their courtship, “I adore you for being so ambitious and dynamic.” He gave her what she was missing; he shared with her his ambition, his sense of purpose.

The man whom Mrs. Johnson characterized as “a regular Henry Higgins,” contributed to her transformation in two ways. First, he “stretched” her, as he did everyone around him, challenging her to do more than she thought possible. At his urging, she extended herself to speak in public, to run the congressional office in his absence, to manage a radio station, and to renovate the dilapidated LBJ Ranch. His increasing confidence in her day after day, year after year, spurred her on. He also facilitated her growth by placing her in the daily company of intelligent, sophisticated women and men in Washington during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, as she phrased it, “the society he thrust me into.” She attended and hosted countless teas and dinners for some of the nation’s most informed and interesting personalities, among them: George Marshall, Eleanor Roosevelt, Lady Astor, Tommy Corcoran, Marjorie Merriweather Post, Anna Rosenberg Hoffman, Paul Porter, Oveta Culp Hobby, and Josephine Forrestal. Through the Congressional Club for spouses, the Seventy-fifth and Eighty-first clubs, the Senate Ladies Club, and the Texas establishment in Washington, she participated in an extraordinary, continuing salon for almost thirty years before entering the White House.

The more Lady Bird Johnson changed and grew, the more she influenced LBJ’s life and his fortunes in a high-pressure profession. Her husband reaped the benefits of her warmth and grace as a hostess. Sam Rayburn, Dick Russell, and others who were instrumental in advancing LBJ’s career frequently enjoyed informal dinners in the Johnson home. And as Lady Bird Johnson’s political involvement and sophistication grew, her role in her husband’s rise to power expanded. Throughout his career, her good judgment and soothing comfort kept him on an even keel, while mending fences that he had damaged. Although she was virtually excluded from his first campaign for Congress in 1937, she became increasingly active in each of his successive races, and, by 1948, her role in the 87-vote cliff-hanger against Coke Stevenson was pivotal. When a kidney stone attack immobilized LBJ and he was on the verge of withdrawing from the race, she spirited him away to the Mayo Clinic, while keeping him from the press. She overcame her fear of public speaking to campaign for him throughout the state in the run-off. Finally, in the 1964 Presidential campaign, she rode the Lady Bird Special train through the South to become the first First Lady to campaign independently for her husband.

An apprenticeship as a congressional wife, a Senate wife, and as a frequent stand-in for Jacqueline Kennedy during the Vice Presidential years made Lady Bird Johnson one of the best prepared First Ladies ever to enter the White House. Her experience and skill served her well during the tumultuous 1960s. She assembled a professional staff in the East Wing of the White House and mobilized legions of influential, resourceful women and men to beautify and conserve the nation’s environment. With Washington, DC as their initial focus, they created a spectacular showcase for millions of American tourists could see what was possible in their own hometowns. Next she traveled through the country to draw attention to its scenic beauty and the threats to the nation’s environment. To her, beautification was just one thread in the larger tapestry of clean air and water, green spaces and urban parks, scenic highways and country side, cultural heritage tourism, and significant additions to our system of national parks.

Lady Bird Johnson’s environmental leadership was only one facet of her remarkable legacy as first lady. She also continued her predecessor’s quest for authentic furnishings and important American art for the White House. She recognized the achievements of women with her Women Doers Luncheons. Embracing the Head Start program, she gave it the prominence of a White House launch.

She participated gracefully in an endless succession of presidential trips, state dinners, congressional receptions, and other social events, including two White House weddings. At the same time, she provided LBJ with, in her words, “an island of peace” throughout his heady, turbulent presidency. Finally, she bequeathed to posterity an historical legacy: her White House diary of more than 1,750,000 words and forty-seven oral history interviews, comprising almost another half-million words.

Michael L. Gillette, Lady Bird Johnson: An Oral History

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The Republic of Nature by Mark Fiege (2012)

by Hannah Ballard

Flip through the pages of almost any American history textbook. Within the first few sections, you will find paragraphs dedicated to the American Revolution and the ideological groundwork that supported it; the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mythology that surrounds Abraham Lincoln; the rise of a cotton-based economy in the South and the enslaved manpower that sustained it; the westward expansion of the American population and the lines of communication andtransportation that they created in the wake of their migration. Fast forward to the twentieth century and that same textbook will likely devote space to the Manhattan Project, the Civil Rights Movement, and, perhaps less commonly, the country’s increasing reliance on foreign oil. In The Republic of Nature, Mark Fiege ambitiously attempts to reconceptualize this well-traversed historical terrain, first and foremost, as “a story of people struggling with the earthy, organic substances that are integral to the human predicament.” In each chapter, Fiege uses his riveting storytelling abilities to show that the nation’s history “in every way imaginable – from mountains to monuments – is the story of a nation and its nature.”

The Republic of Nature challenges the historiography that relegates environmental history to the margins of key episodes in the nation’s history. By locating “nature” in some of the more familiar narratives of the American past, he forces his reader to ask what role nature plays in history and how the answer to that question shifts our understanding of human actions, interactions, and reactions between groups and with their environment. For instance, Fiege’s argument about the nature of slavery – namely that the driving force behind the institution was the marriage of plants and people – forced this particular reader (who considers herself at least somewhat familiar with American slavery) to rethink my understanding of the peculiar institution. Instead of a capitalist society in which commodification of the enslaved human body constituted the prime motivations of the master, Fiege recasts this familiar story as a power struggle between human (master) and plant (cotton) in which masters often failed to control the plant and thus transferred that loss of power to their slaves by more tightly controlling their lives and the productive abilities of their bodies.

American loggers, 1908 (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Cotton farmers in the American south sometime between 1880 and 1897 (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Workers at the Central Park Zoo in New York City manicure an elephant, date unknown (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

As title clearly indicates, Fiege’s work is limited to the history of the United States. It is interesting to consider how his work could be expanded beyond national borders to include the transnational perspective that is beginning to permeate the historical discipline. Fiege’s decision to write from a national perspective, however, produced a book that locates “nature” in varied contexts in order to unmake the familiar and remake it with an environmental focus. Occasionally, in the sweeping scope of his scholarship, the notion of “nature” becomes fuzzy as he attempts to thread it through such disparate events over a substantial expanse of time. With those minor criticisms in mind, this reader will still take distinguished environmental historian William Cronon’s word for it: “No book before it has so compellingly demonstrated the value of applying environmental perspectives to historical events that at first glance may seem to have little to do with ‘nature’ or ‘the environment.’ No one who cares about American history can ignore what Fiege has to say.”

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