Texas Archives - Page 4 of 5

Student Showcase – The Texas City Disaster: The Worst Industrial Accident in U.S. History

Evan Knapp
Rockport-Fulton Middle School
Junior Division
Individual Exhibit

On April 16, 1947 a fertilizer and oil fire triggered a massive explosion in the Port of Texas City, killing 581 people. Later dubbed the Texas City Disaster, this event remains the worst industrial accident in American history. Rockport-Fulton Middle School student Evan Knapp’s Texas History Day exhibit looked at the devastation caused by this horrific accident–but also considered how this event impacted America’s legal system.

A section of Evan’s exhibit

When deciding on a topic, I wanted to find something that dealt with Texas History. Since the theme is rights and responsibilities in history, I immediately thought about the town where I was born. I grew up hearing stories about Texas City and the huge explosion that occurred there. My grandfather was at Lamar College in Beaumont, where the windows shook at the Chemistry building when he was having class. One of my parent’s colleagues, who was six years old at the time, was orphaned by the disaster and wandered the town, by himself, for three days after the explosion. Growing up with these stories around the house, I wanted to learn more about the disaster.

Another section of Evan’s exhibit

My topic fits the theme of rights and responsibilities in several ways. Although the Texas City Disaster is an all-but-forgotten event, the court case that came from it was the first failed class action law suit against the United States government. These citizens were exercising their new right, granted to them by the Federal Tort Claims Act of 1947, to sue the federal government. Other results of the disaster included governments and industries having to be more responsible in disaster prevention and response. Also refineries in the Texas City area formed the Industrial Mutual Aid System to help prevent future disasters. With all disasters come changes, both good and bad. The Texas City disaster forced people to rethink how we regulate import and export of dangerous materials, and although it’s still a problem today, changes have been made for the better.

More great work from Texas students:

A website on a medical experiment secretly carried out on 600 African-Americans

A documentary on one man’s attempt to fight injustice in World War II America

And a research paper on the balance between public health and personal liberty

Has Texas Seen its Last Liberal?

EDITOR’S NOTE: A new HBO documentary, “All About Ann: Governor Richards of the Lone Star State,” takes a look back at the life of the political icon.

By Zachary Montz

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Buenas noches, mis amigos! I am delighted to be here with you this evening, because after listening to George Bush all these years, I figured you needed to know what a real Texas accent sounds like.” This is how America first met Ann Richards, her trademark white hair lit by the spotlight as she delivered the keynote address at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in her distinctive Central Texas twang. Richards, then the state treasurer, poured it on that night, mixing a stalwart defense of activist government with swipes at the Republican nominee, fellow Texan George H.W. Bush, including her perfectly landed mocking line, “Poor George, he can’t help it – he was born with a silver foot in his mouth,” that brought the audience to its feet. Along with the jabs, Richards gave delegates the country wit and big personality they might have expected from a rising Texas politician. But here, too, was something new from a state famous for its macho self-image: a woman, and a proud, sharp-tongued liberal at that. The fiery speech won the hearts of delegates, prompting some to wonder if the Democrats had nominated the wrong person. Ann Richards had become a national star.

Texas Governor Ann Richards in 1992 (Kenneth C. Zirkel/Wikimedia Commons)

Richards’s keynote provides the opening for HBO’s recently-premiered documentary “All About Ann: Governor Richards of the Lone Star State,” which airs on the cable network throughout May, as well as on HBOGo. An opportunity for longer-settled Texans (and non-citizens too) to revisit the life and career of the woman who rose to the top of the state’s conservative and male-dominated political scene, this excellent documentary also serves to introduce Richards to a new generation, who know a Texas where the politics have gone from conservative to right-wing and are almost as single-gender as they were when Richards was elected governor in 1990.

Originally released in 2012, this product of first-time documentarians Jack Lofton and Keith Patterson, was subsequently acquired by HBO’s documentary division, which recut the film to tighten its focus on Richards’ career in statewide office, from her election as State Treasurer in 1982 to her gubernatorial loss to George W. Bush in 1994. While “All About Ann” features commentary from Bill Clinton, Michael Dukakis, Dan Rather and other national figures, some of the best insights come from interviews with Richards’ inner circle of advisors, namely long-time chief of staff Mary Beth Rogers and speechwriter Suzanne Coleman. Contributions from Richards’ former husband David and from her children, including daughter Cecile, now a Democratic political player and Planned Parenthood president, give viewers a look at Richards’ time both before and after her stint in big-league politics and provide a sense of how the many sides of her well-known personal life – as a mother, grandmother, teacher, divorcee, and recovering alcoholic – helped shape her political outlook and public persona.

Of course, there is no substitute for the woman herself, and the film is wise to let Richards, who died in 2006, tell much of her own story. The directors take advantage of archival newsreel, interviews, and televised debates and speeches to show the full depth of Richards’ character, her knack for language, and the prodigious communication skills (one thing we learn is that Richards’ mother enrolled her in “expression lessons” as a child) that took her to the Governor’s Mansion.

Ann Richards poses on a motorcycle (Texas State Library and Archives Commission)

Viewers get only a quick run through Richards’ life before elected office: her upbringing in Waco and high school debating triumphs, her marriage in college to David Richards, who would become a prominent labor and voting rights lawyer, and her time raising four children in Dallas and later Austin. As she explains it, a career in politics was not something she had initially considered. “I was exactly what the magazines said I ought to be,” Richards recalled, “I was a hostess, a fabulous cook, a chauffer, [and] I was very involved with my kids.” Richards had been involved on the outside of politics, doing the “women’s jobs” of social planner and campaign volunteer, but when David passed on a chance to run for a seat on the Travis County Commissioners court in 1976, Ann jumped into the game, winning election in her first race. Richard worried that the dramatic shift in her life and the new role she would play in her family would spell trouble for her marriage. She was right. Although they remained on generally good terms, the couple split in 1980 and divorced in 1984.

It was around the same time that Richards went through treatment for alcohol addiction. Richards’ personal life was the subject of many a dirty political attack during her career, the most common of which were that she had fallen off the wagon or that she was bisexual. In the 1990 Democratic gubernatorial primary Richards was dogged by Attorney General Jim Maddox’s frequent allegations of past cocaine use. Richards skillfully dodged the question, turning it into an opportunity to talk frankly with voters about overcoming her alcohol problem. Not that Richards couldn’t play rough too. In the same race she put away former Governor Mark White with ads that implied – with no real proof – that he had been paid to steer state business to a Houston bond firm.

Watching Richards counterpunch her way to victory in a good, old fashioned Texas melee like the ’90 primary is a delight for the political junkie, but it would be a mistake to let Richards’ campaigning talents distract from what was at the heart of Richard’s political story: her desire, as she put it, to create a “new Texas,” one where the “doors of government” would “swing open” to “let the people in.” As the documentary makes clear, this purpose was present from the beginning of Richards’ entry into public service, and the film gives considerable attention to her tenure as State Treasurer, where Richards earned acclaim for reforming an office that was a bastion of good-old-boy inefficiency when she took over in 1983. Richards modernized the Treasury, both by computerizing its workings and by emphasizing the hiring of minorities and women in an effort to make the government of Texas better reflect the state’s diverse population.

Ann Richards speaking at the 1988 Democratic Convention (Associated Press)

In the debates over hiring and affirmative action in the 1980s, many conservatives argued that measures to create diverse workforces would come at the expense of job performance. Excellence and diversity were counterpoised values. Richards had no need to play that game. “They told me that I was asking the impossible, that I simply could not find Hispanics and blacks and women who were capable… of really high-class financial management,” Richards recalled in 1991. But her success in the Treasury, she argued, “has been directly the result of opening the door and giving an opportunity to people who were dying to prove themselves.” In Ann Richards’ new Texas, diversity and excellence went hand in hand. And one only had to look at other areas of Texas government to know that the opposite was also true: a closed door, and the old boys network that thrived behind it, could be a recipe for incompetence and corruption.

Richards’ commitment to diversity and her vision of an open government, among other convictions, put her in the left-liberal wing of the Texas Democratic Party, an outsider compared to the so-called pragmatic or conservative Democrats who continued in the tradition of LBJ and John Connally. Texas liberals had rarely been in the driver’s seat of their own party, never mind in the Governor’s Mansion, and given the state’s current domination by Republicans, it is worth asking how Richards ever managed her upset victory in 1990. Certainly her opponent had something to do with it. That year, the Republicans nominated Clayton Williams, a man who seemed to be made in their own self-image: a wealthy businessman, a rancher, and a straight-shooter. What they got was a political fool who shot himself in the foot enough times to blow an early double digit lead. The documentary airs the full “Claytie” blooper reel. It would be pure comedy if Williams’s attitude towards women didn’t seem so out of our present political moment: a disgusting rape “joke,” a comment about Richards that he would “head her and hoof her and drag her through the dirt,” and a decision (a premeditated one, as the film reveals) to refuse to shake his opponent’s hand after a televised debate.

Ironically, it is the clownish version of Williams that conservatives like to remember, for it allows them to write off Richards as an accidental governor, one who won only by dint of her pitiful opponent. But as several of Richard’s former staffers point out in “All About Ann,” it wasn’t only the misogyny that undid Williams. The margin of victory came from working class voters, especially in East Texas – a generally-conservative group, but one with a populist streak. Richards could out-good-ole-boy the good-ole-boys and could poke fun at Texas’s bubbas while winning their vote, and her campaign coupled her personal touch with a concerted effort to portray Williams as a big businessman unconcerned with working Texans. Williams’ steadfast refusal to release his tax returns, and his out-of-the-blue admission in the campaign’s final week that he had paid no taxes during the crash year of 1986, helped Richards rack up votes in East Texas, sealing the election for her.

From left: Texas Governor Ann Richards, Nelson Mandela, Dominique de Menil, And Texas State Senator Rodney Ellis (Senator Rodney Ellis/Wikipedia)

From left: Texas Governor Ann Richards, Nelson Mandela, Dominique de Menil, and Texas State Senator Rodney Ellis, 1991 (Senator Rodney Ellis/Wikipedia)

Richards began her governorship ready to “make changes that should have been made a long time ago.” Continuing her record as treasurer, she appointed an even split of men and women in her first 100 days. The officials reflected the diverse state: 54% were white, 25% Hispanic, and 21% black. The film provides a laudatory overview of Richards’ term. She threw out rubber-stamp regulators in the insurance department, passed a new ethics law, put teeth into seldom-enforced environmental rules, and implemented an addiction treatment program in state prisons to reduce recidivism, all broadly popular moves that kept her personal approval ratings high and grew her national profile.

This approving account of Richards’ time in office provides little sense of her shortcomings, and notably excludes mention of struggles involving the budget and school finance. The oversight is compounded by the directors’ failure to include any interviews with either critics or opponents of the former Governor. As a result, “All About Ann” is hard pressed to explain just how Richards, despite her personal popularity, lost decisively to George W. Bush in 1994. The film provides two culprits: Karl Rove, a political consultant made uniquely powerful by a lack of scruples, and an election cycle unusually hostile to Democrats. The film puts Rove behind rumors that Richards’ supposed legions of gay supporters were poised to spread their “lifestyle” through the public schools, and a whisper campaign about gun confiscation, an effective, if unoriginal, charge that was bolstered by Richards’ veto of concealed carry legislation. Meanwhile, Bush – a likeable, attractive, and disciplined campaigner – could play it straight, avoiding the personal attacks and mistakes that destroyed his Republican predecessor. Although he criticized Richards for being soft on crime and presented his own ideas about education reform, Bush ran against Bill Clinton as much as the sitting Governor, attacking an unpopular president in a midterm year that would give Republicans control of Congress.

Just as the idea of Richards as an accidental governor denies her ground-breaking victory, the story presented by her allies that she was felled by forces beyond her control denies Richards’ role in her own defeat. As Jan Reid argues in his sympathetic, but by no means uncritical, 2012 biography of Richards, the Governor’s term can be seen as a parabola: real successes in the first two years were followed by a decline in the latter two. Richards divided her time and energy between governing in Austin and involvement in the national scene, leaving her without a clear program and on the defensive against a rising tide of Republican attacks. In 1990 Richards had been the brassy outsider. Four years later, lacking a bold policy agenda to match her personality, she was open to being defined by her enemies and vulnerable to the sorts of attacks – guns, God and gays – that Rove and Co. used to great effect. Her campaign centered on the complaint that Bush was a spoiled novice whose only qualification for the Governorship was that he thought he was entitled to it. She couldn’t convince enough Texas voters that he was not.

Image of Ann Richards firing a gun from the film, “Backwards and In High Heels” (Texas Democrats)

Richards would find plenty to do after leaving the Governor’s Mansion. She had no interest in running for another elected office, telling the public after her loss that “I’ve been doing this for 18 years – not as long as I was a housewife – and now I look forward to something new.” The documentary shows the many roles she played: as a lobbyist and strategist, lecturer, stump speaker for female Democratic candidates, and as a fantastic talk show guest. All throughout she continued her fight on behalf of the causes she had advanced during her political career, especially the rights of women to control their own bodies, right up until her death from esophageal cancer in 2006.

The release of “All About Ann” comes as another Texas woman, the first, in fact, since Richards, has received the Democratic gubernatorial nod, and comparisons between the two are inevitable. Like Ann Richards, Wendy Davis has captured national attention and built a dedicated base among Texas women at a time when reproductive rights are at the forefront of political conversation. Unlike Richards, however, Davis faces a Republican Party that is much more dug in, and her opponent, Greg Abbott, while perhaps not having the personal likability of George W. Bush or Rick Perry’s deep understanding of the right wing id, is no Clayton Williams. And outside of her core supporters, Davis has yet to show that she can connect with Texas voters in the way that Richards did in 1990.

But “All About Ann” reminds viewers that Richards too faced an uphill battle when she declared her candidacy for the governorship. It was against these long odds when she was at her fighting best. The documentary closes with a poignant clip of Richards speaking at a LGBT fundraiser in 2003, coughing her way through a powerful address, already suffering from failing health. Recalling the many barriers to women and minorities that had fallen in her lifetime, Richards encouraged her audience to continue the effort to create the sort of “pluralistic society where human dignity is cherished” that had been at the heart of her political life. “We have got to remember that we have the power… that dreams can come true if we are willing to work for them.” It has been the mantra of Texas liberals in the many fights they lost in Ann Richards’ lifetime, and in the few that were won.

Zachary Montz received his PhD in History from UT Austin in 2014

Sources:

Some background information on Richards’ term as Governor, as well as demographic information on her appointees, is drawn from Jan Reid’s excellent biography, Let the People In: The Life and Times of Ann Richards (University of Texas Press, 2012)

What Not to Wear to a Texas Barbecue, 1957

By Lynn Mally

When Coco Chanel received the Neiman Marcus Award for Distinguished Service in the Field of Fashion in 1957, she asked to visit a ranch during her trip to Dallas. Her host, Stanley Marcus, obliged her by throwing a barbecue at his brother’s spread in her honor. It included, among other things, a cow fashion show. And this is what she wore—a trim suit, a fur scarf, a Chanel handbag, and white gloves. I wonder what she thought when she saw how her hosts, Billie and Stanley Marcus, were dressed.

Black and white photograph of Coco Chanel attending a Western Party with Stanley Marcus and his wife in Dallas, Texas in 1957

But apparently she was not the only one who didn’t have the right clothes for a barbecue. According to Marcus’s memoir, Minding the Store , “It turned out that she didn’t like the taste of the barbecued meat and the highly seasoned beans, so she dumped her plate surreptitiously under the table. Unfortunately, the contents hit the satin slippers of Elizabeth Arden, who was seated next to her.”

Black and white photograph of Chanel, Stanley Marcus, Mary "Biliie" Marcus, Elizabeth Arden watching the "Bovine Fashion Show" at Stanley Marcus' Western Party — Chanel, Stanley Marcus, Mary “Biliie” Marcus, Elizabeth Arden watching the “Bovine Fashion Show” at Stanley Marcus’ Western Party. (DeGolyer Library: Photographs, Manuscripts, and Imprints)

Lynn Mally taught modern Russian history at the University of California at Irvine until she retired to become a seamstress and an historian of American fashion. She writes the blog, American Age Fashion, where this article was originally posted on January 31, 2014.

The Texas State Historical Association Launches the Tejano History Handbook Project

History Professors Emilio Zamora, University of Texas, and Andrés Tijerina, Austin Community College, are co-directing the one-year project to increase the number of entries on Mexican Americans in Texas history in the Texas Handbook Online, the well-known and respected encyclopedia of the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA). They are currently seeking academic and non-academic researchers to prepare essays on historically significant men and women, events, places, and themes in order to expand the breadth and depth of the Handbook.

The TSHA initiated the Handbook as a two-volume encyclopedia in 1952. By 1999, they digitalized its contents, making them available to a wider readership online. The Texas Handbook Online has become the nation’s preeminent state encyclopedia with well over 25,000 essays and more than 400,000 readers a month from more than 200 countries and territories from around the globe. Part of this growth involved a concerted effort in the 1980s by the TSHA to produce additional entries on Mexican Americans. More than twenty-five years have passed since Dr. Cynthia Orozco and Teresa Palomo Acosta led this project. Since then, researchers have made significant progress in Mexican American history and contributed to the expanded public and professional interest in the field.

Image of the Aims and Purposed of the League of Latin American Citizens document from c. 1927 — Aims and Purposes of the League of Latin American Citizens. [ca. 1927]. (Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. University of Houston Digital Library. Web. March 18, 2014. http://digital.lib.uh.edu/collection/perales/item/72.)

Existing essays include, for example, biographical pieces by Cynthia Orozco on such historical figures as Petra Vela de Vidal Kenedy, a rancher and philanthropist of the nineteenth century, and Alonso Perales, a co-founder of the League of United Latin American Citizens. Vela de Vidal Kenedy figured prominently in the development of the cattle industry in the Texas-Mexico region and in the story of international conflict and ethnic strife in south Texas. She was also generous with her wealth: her obituary notes that “the poor never appealed to her in vain and their wants were often anticipated.” Perales helped usher in an ethnic form of politics that made constitutional claims for equal rights during the middle of the twentieth century. According to Orozco, he was “one of the most influential Mexican Americans of his time, . . . a defender of la raza, especially battling charges that Mexicans were an inferior people and a social problem.”

The Tejano History Handbook Project intends to capitalize on the quality and growth of existing entries by identifying researchers to write new essays. The new entries will adhere to the high standards of scholarship evident in the Texas Handbook Online and they will be subjected to rigorous review. Thanks to these entries, the general public as well as public school students and university researchers can come to understand the importance of Mexican Americans in Texas history.

Inquiries on the Tejano History Handbook Project should be directed to Dr. Emilio Zamora, e.zamora@austin.utexas.edu.

And read about Dr. Zamora’s book, Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas; Mexican Workers and Job Politics during World War II

The Latest from Longhorn PhDs

In November we wrote to everyone who received a PhD in History at UT Austin since 2000 to find out what they were doing. We are curious about our former students’ careers and adventures and we want to celebrate their achievements in whatever line of work they pursued.

And we still do! We hope everyone who didn’t write back immediately will send us news of their work, travels, lives.

Photograph of the front facade of Garrison Hall on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin

Greg Cushman (2003 PhD) is an Associate Professor at the University of Kansas and he has just published a new book called Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History (2013). One of his UT professors, Bruce Hunt, said that the book got an absolute rave review in “Science” and added that “It’s the best book on bird crap you’ll ever read.”

Stuart Rockoff has become Executive Director of the Mississippi Humanities Council.

Matt Childs is an Associate Professor and Director of the History Center at the University of South Carolina where he started teaching in the fall of 2009. Matt is the author of The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery (2006), which was a finalist for the 2007 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, and he has co-edited with Toyin Falola The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World (2005) and The Changing Worlds of Atlantic Africa: Essays in Honor or Robin Law (2009). Most recently he co-edited with his former UT profs, James Sidbury and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, The Urban Black Atlantic during the Era of the Slave Trade (2013), which was featured in the New Books series this spring at the UT Institute for Historical Studies.

David Imhoof wrote to say that he is an Associate Professor and Chair of the History Department at Susquehanna University and he has just published his first book: Becoming a Nazi Town: Culture and Politics in Göttingen between the World Wars.

Roger Martinez, is Assistant Professor of history and Director of the Sephardic and Crypto-Jewish Studies Program at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.

Ken Aslakson let us know that he teaches at Union College in Schenectady, NY where he just got tenure. His book Making Race in the Courtroom: The Legal Construction of Three Races in Early New Orleans is just about to be published by NYU. He wrote to us from France where he was completing a month-long invited professorship at the University of Toulouse.

Lauren Apter Bairnsfather (PhD 2008) works in the Office of the Dean of the UT Austin College of Liberal Arts where she supervises Grants Services, conducts institutional research for the Dean, and serves as contact for Humanities Research Awards. She has written articles for the AHA newsletter Perspectives and for Not Even Past about careers for history PhDs outside the professorate.

Anju Reejhsinghani has been Assistant Professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point since Fall 2010. She recently saw fellow UT Latin American history PhDs Bonar Hernández (East Stroudsburg University) and Ben Narvaez (University of Minnesota-Morris) at the North Central Council of Latin Americanists conference she helped to organize on her campus in September 2013. In January 2013, she developed and led one of the University of Wisconsin System’s first for-credit, short-term study abroad programs to Cuba; she is repeating the program in January 2014.

Kristen Oertel was a professor at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, for ten years, where she won the Outstanding Young Faculty award in 2003. She left Millsaps in 2010 to accept the Mary F. Barnard Chair in 19^th-Century American History at the University of Tulsa. She published her first book, Bleeding Borders: Race, Gender, and Violence in Pre-Civil War Kansas with LSU Press in 2009. Her second book, Frontier Feminist: Clarina Howard Nichols and the Politics of Motherhood (Kansas, 2011) won the Armitage-Jameson Prize for the best book in women’s and gender history from the Council of Western Women’s Historians. She says that “It’s sometimes tough to wear my Texas Longhorns t-shirt while living in Oklahoma, but I never waste an opportunity to wax poetic about my time at UT.”

Matt Heaton (PhD 2008) has been an Assistant Professor in the History Department at Virginia Tech. He has published Black Skin, White Coats: Nigerian Psychiatrists, Decolonization, and the Globalization of Psychiatry. (2013) and edited with Toyin Falola, A History of Nigeria in 2008.

Miguel A. Levario is an Associate Professor at Texas Tech University. He published Militarizing the Border: When Mexicans Became the Enemy (2012). He has also recorded an episode for 15 Minute History on Mexican-American immigration.

Anna Taylor writes: “I am happy to share my news, since I had such an excellent experience in the PhD program. My advisors were Martha Newman and Alison Frazier, and they did a wonderful job of preparing me for the academic job market, as well as supervising the dissertation.” She recently published Epic Lives and Monasticism in the Middle Ages, 800-1100 (2013), and also received tenure in the Department of History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she teaches a variety of courses on western civilization, medieval history, religion, monsters, and animals.

Faik Gur teaches at Ozyegin University in Istanbul and has just published an article in Historical Research, the journal of the Institute for Historical Research in London: “Sculpting the nation in early republican Turkey” (vol. 86, no. 232 [May 2013]).

David M. Lauderback has taught history at Austin Community College since 1996. Dr. Lauderback has served as a Fellow for the ACC Center for Public Policy and Political Studies for many years and partnered on numerous events, such as Texas Independence Day Celebration, Constitution Debate Night, the Mock Hearing on Health Care, the Earth Fair, and numerous teach-ins and lectures for ACC students and the community. He earned the Rising Star and Guiding Star awards from ACCs Student Life for his work with the Center for Student Political Studies and the Silver Star Children’s Literacy project. And, just this spring, Dr. Lauderback received recognition as recipient of a John and Suanne Rouche Excellence Award from the League for Innovation in Community College instruction.

Frances (Franni) Ramos wrote to tell us that In June 2013, she was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure at the University of South Florida. In 2012, she published Identity, Ritual, and Power in Colonial Puebla, which was awarded the Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies Michael C. Meyer Award for Best Book in Mexican History published over the past five years (2008-2012). In the spring of 2013, she spent five months researching at the John Carter Brown Library with the support of an NEH, and she just received an Outstanding Research Achievement Award from USF. In August 2012, she also had a baby girl named Ellie! And she says, “I miss UT.”

Andrew Falk sent us a long newsy note that says in part: “it’s great to hear from Austin again, and I’m glad to give you an update. I keep up with the UT History Department regularly, including the impressive Not Even Past site.”

[We just had to include that!] “The short answer to your question is this: things are great and UT prepared me very well, indeed!” [We couldn’t resist that either.]

“After earning my PhD from UT Austin in 2003, I got a postdoc at the University of Georgia. Then I received an academic appointment at Christopher Newport University. It’s a mid-sized liberal arts college focused on undergraduate education. Located in Newport News, Virginia, CNU is situated in the beautiful Hampton Roads area between Colonial Williamsburg and Norfolk….At UT I worked most closely with Michael Stoff and Mark Lawrence and, therefore, teach classes in the same areas: modern US politics, culture, and foreign relations. Like Mike Stoff, I’ve led my students on several study abroad trips, including to China and throughout Europe. My first book, Upstaging the Cold War: American Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy, 1940-1960 was published as part of the “Culture, Politics, and the Cold War” series of the University of Massachusetts Press in 2010…. In Virginia I’ve managed to find Stubbs sauce, Shiner beer, and Bluebell ice cream, but the homesickness endures….Hook ’em.”

Julie Hughes writes: “I’ve been at Vassar College as an Assistant Professor of History since Spring 2010. My book Animal Kingdoms: Hunting, the Environment, and Power in the Indian Princely States first came out in 2012 in South Asia, where it was published by Permanent Black. In 2013, Harvard University Press published their edition of Animal Kingdoms. I just had an article on the idea of wilderness in the Indian princely states accepted for publication in the journal Modern Asian Studies, and will have a chapter on wild boar hunting in a forthcoming volume, Shifting Ground:People, Animals, and Mobility in India’s Environmental History,edited by K. Sivaramakrishnan and M. Rangarajan, from Oxford University Press. In November 2013, I was an invited speaker in the Yale Agrarian Studies Program’s Colloquium Series and, in March 2014, I will be giving a talk at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, as part of their public lecture series ‘Science, Society and Nature.’ I hope all is well down there in Austin – I must say I miss it, especially when the weather starts getting cold up here!”

Paul Rubinson wrote to say “Not sure how much detail you want about my career, but I got my PhD in 2008 (an ominous year to start the job search) and managed to luck out with a TT job.” He is an Assistant Professor of History at Bridgewater State University (Bridgewater, MA). He’s published 4 articles on international science:

“The Global Effects of Nuclear Winter: Science and Antinuclear Protest in the United States and the Soviet Union during the 1980s,” forthcoming in Cold War History (published online February 15, 2013.); “Internationalism in a National Security State: U.S. Scientists and the Cold War,” in Artemy Kalinovsky and Craig Daigle, eds., Routledge Handbook of the Cold War. Forthcoming from Routledge in Summer 2014; “‘For Our Soviet Colleagues’: Scientific Internationalism, Human Rights, and the Cold War,” in Petra Goedde, William Hitchcock, and Akira Iriye, eds., The Human Rights Revolution: An International History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 245–64; and “‘Crucified on a Cross of Atoms’: Scientists, Politics, and the Test Ban,” in Diplomatic History, Vol. 35, No. 2 (April 2011), 313–49.

Saheed Aderinto, (PhD 2010) is an Assistant Professor at Western Carolina University. His book, When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, will come out in Fall 2014. He has edited another book and published over a dozen articles, and is working on a book about guns and arms control in Nigeria.

Stefanie Wichhart is an Associate Professor at Niagara University, near Niagara Falls NY, where she teaches both Middle Eastern and European history. She has recently published two articles, one on the Iraqi Kurds in World War II in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History and the other on democracy debates in Iraq during World War II in the Journal of Contemporary History.

Eric Meeks (PhD 2001) writes to say that he is currently the department Chair and Associate Professor at Northern Arizona University. His book Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans and Anglos in Arizona was published in 2007. It won several book awards and one of his articles, entitled “The Tohono O’odham, Wage Labor, and Resistant Adaptation, 1900-1930,” earned the 2004 Bolton-Kinnaird Award as the best article in borderlands history that year from the Western History Association, and the Oscar O. Winther Award for the best article appearing in the Western Historical Quarterly in 2003. He added: “I must say, UT Austin gave me a superb education, which I am very thankful for!”

Photo: Garrison Hall, UT Austin (Wikimedia Commons/User Larry D. Moore)

“The Die is Cast”: Early Texans Face the Comanches

This article is part of an occasional series of articles highlighting the fascinating collection of historical documents in the Briscoe Center for American History at UT Austin.

by Nathan Jennings

The Telegraph and Texas Register was the most influential newspaper in the region between colonial settlement and the Civil War. Based in Houston and intended for popular consumption, the nationalistic editorials in this publication offer a window into how the newly formed Lone Star Republic viewed the challenges of rapid territorial expansion into contested territories along the lower Great Plains.

One editorial in the Telegraph, published on November 3, 1838, provides a particularly revealing view of the new republic’s reaction to increased conflict with the Penateka Comanche people. This specific time in Texas’s history represented a transitional stage between the Texas Revolution of 1836 and the Anglo-Indian Wars that exploded across the plains between 1839 and 1841. Though the Anglo-American colonies of Mexican Tejas had frequently grappled with smaller tribes east of the Colorado River, they had yet to decisively engage the massed cavalries of the Plains Indians. The Telegraph article by Francis Moore was written in response to a recent Comanche victory over a group of settlers, and focused on the confrontation emerging in the San Antonio region.

Page from the Telegraph and Texas Register newspaper from Nov. 3, 1828

Moore’s editorial sheds light on three ways Anglo-Texans perceived the Comanche and the threat of their power. First, the article emphatically stated that “war with this tribe has become inevitable” and called for mobilization by the Texas government. This enthusiasm for large-scale warfare represents a transition from the Texans’ historical reliance on localized militia to a society-wide engagement with national armies. Second, the editor admits the culpability of “rash men” who have “aided in plunging the whole country into a murderous conflict” in order to seize western property, but then fatalistically disregards this causality, shifting blame onto the Native population: “The die is cast — the tomahawk is uplifted, and the hundreds of helpless mothers and children call aloud for protection.”

The third point reveals a tactical shift in ideas about defeating the Native American warriors. Moore suggested that the republic launch the offense with an “expedition” of “mounted men” to “penetrate into the very heart of the Comanche country.” This shows that by 1838, Anglo-Texans had fully embraced the cavalry culture of the region. They also apparently understood that their own defensive strategies were insufficient against arguably the most lethal raiders in North America, who were defending their territory against European settlers who were seizing and occupying it.

The editorial’s prescriptions –to mobilize the army and population for a large-scale, cavalry war — would soon become tragic reality. Over the next three years the Texan and Comanche peoples clashed in an unprecedented scope of ethnic warfare to decide the fate of West Texas. While both peoples launched massive and destructive invasions into each other’s heartlands, the Anglo-American sustained use of expeditionary methodology suggested by the Telegraph proved decisive. By 1845 Texas broke the power of the southern Comanche for a generation and the Lone Star Republic solidified its control of the territories between the Red River and the Rio Grande.

The full text:

We trust this mournful event will serve to convince those who are entrusted with the reins of government, that a war with this tribe has become inevitable. Further apathy on the part of the Executive will be regarded, by the suffering citizens of the west, as criminal in the extreme. It is useless now to waste time in idle speculation, relative to the causes of the war, and to declaim against those rash men who have aided in plunging the whole country into a murderous conflict in order that they might secure a few square leagues of land. Whether they or their savage opponents are most to blame, is no longer of importance. The die is cast-the tomahawk is uplifted, and the hundreds of helpless mothers and children call aloud for protection. We trust they will not call in vain. We look to the executive with confidence for one last, prompt, decisive and energetic effort, that shall arouse the slumbering energies of a gallant people, and display to the is miserable, cowardly, unarmed tribe of cannibals, the true character of that nation the affect to despise, and so foolishly threaten to exterminate. The present is a most opportune season to carry on an expedition into the Comanche country-the Buffalo are returning from the north-the air is mild and bracing, and the mesquite grass offers an inexhaustible supply of pasturage. The Mexicans, who have undoubtedly instigated them to this measure, can afford no and, as they are compelled to concentrate all their disposable force on Vera Cruz and the sea coast, to prevent the expected attack of the French. A small figure of mounted men could, therefore, at this time, easily penetrate into the very heart of the Comanche country, and extort from them a peace that would be proof against Indian treachery.

More amazing finds at the Briscoe Center:

Standard Oil writes a “history” of the old south

And Stephen F. Austin visits a New Orleans bookstore

Stephen F. Austin’s bookstore receipt

This is the first in an occasional series of articles highlighting the fascinating collection of historical documents in the Briscoe Center for American History at UT Austin.

by Brenda Gunn

In July 1835, after two years in Mexico, part of that time confined to a jail cell, Stephen F. Austin received a passport issued by the Mexican government. Austin had gone to Mexico on a diplomatic mission, when Texas was still under Mexican rule, but set off to return home to Texas, where the political climate had shifted and tolerance for Mexican rule had deteriorated. On his way back, he spent time in New Orleans, purchasing several books that might provide clues to his state of mind.

Austin’s passport and the receipt for his book purchases are part of a collection held at The Briscoe Center for American History at UT Austin. The passport confirms that Austin boarded the Wanderer and set sail from Veracruz bound for the United States. The exact date of Austin’s landing in New Orleans is unclear, but the New Orleans Bee mentions Austin’s stay on Aug. 12, 1835.

Stephen F. Austin’s 1835 receipt for Hotchkiss & Co. Booksellers and Stationers in New Orleans (Image courtesy of the Briscoe Center for American History)

While in New Orleans, Austin visited Hotchkiss & Co. Booksellers and Stationers on Chartres Street, where he spent $27 on books. It is clear that Austin was interested in conflicts. Listed on the receipt were two recent publications: A History of the Fall of the Roman Empire by J-C-L Sismondi and History of the Revolution in England 1688 by Sir James Mackintosh (both published in 1834). Austin also purchased Washington Irving’s military history, Spanish Conquest of Granada.

These choices suggest a shift from Austin’s long-held moderate outlook regarding Texas’ relationship with Mexico toward resignation that conflict was inevitable.

Other purchases listed on the receipt, however, reflect very different preoccupations.

19th century depiction of Stephen F. Austin (Image courtesy of the Briscoe Center for American History)

An issue of the monthly literary magazine, Atkinson’s Casket: or Gems of Literature, Wit, and Sentiment and a copy of Penny Magazine, which focused on British culture, exhibit the cultural interests of the future revolutionary. Since Austin wrote often and at length, it also seems fitting that the receipt includes a copy of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language.

Austin also bought the Young Man’s Own Book: A Manual of Politeness, Intellectual Improvement, and Moral Deportment and Sacred Classics, or Cabinet Library of Divinity, featuring sermons on a variety of topics. Most of the books Austin bought that day are works of nonfiction and convey a serious frame of mind in August 1835.

He did leave room for a novel: Pelham: Or the Adventures of a Gentleman, a tale of a young man with political aspirations — a topic that may not have been far from Austin’s heart.

***

Check out more DISCOVER pieces:

Ann Twinam explains how a 19th century Peruvian “bought” his whiteness

And Danielle Sanchez discusses her family’s confusing, and often painful, history of immigration, race and prejudice.

Austin’s Municipal Abattoir

By Betsy Frederick-Rothwell

In late October 1939 a photographer from the Bureau of Identification spent the day among both warm and chilled beef carcasses, shrouded sides of pork, and racks of washed and dried offal, documenting the daily activities of the Austin Municipal Abattoir. The building’s foreign name (abattoir is French for slaughterhouse) and the photographer’s dramatic black and white images obscure the rather prosaic purpose of the documentation effort. The photographs illustrated not a volume of contemporary art, but rather an annual report written by the superintendent of the city-owned slaughterhouse for the City of Austin council members, informing the city managers of monthly revenues, recent building improvements, and new markets for slaughter by-products. A formal report such as this, with detailed operational descriptions and illustrations, was probably necessary because the city council members likely would not have visited the abattoir—then located at Pleasant Valley and East Fifth Street—in the regular course of business in the same way they may have toured the earlier-built public library or even the soon-to-be-completed Tom Miller Dam. Although the abattoir was a signal of Austin’s “modernity,” and its operation was critical to a hygienic life in Austin, most residents likely preferred that it be out of sight.

While a municipally funded and operated slaughterhouse may seem strange to Austin residents today, the city abattoir was a common feature of many urban centers in the early twentieth century. The French term for the facilities implies their origins in the large cities of Europe, but the widespread construction of city-owned slaughterhouses in American cities was a response to the exclusion of domestic slaughterhouse inspection in the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. The statue only required federal inspection of meat intended for interstate or foreign trade; for meat produced in slaughterhouses intended for sale within the city or the state, inspection was not required. The city abattoir, where inspection of meat for local markets could be assured, was proposed as a remedy.

Black and white image of Austin's Municipal Abattoir as it appeared in 1939

Austin’s Municipal Abattoir as it appeared in 1939 (Photo Credit: PICA 00609, Austin History Center, Austin Public Library)

A bond issue passed in 1929 funded the Austin Municipal Abattoir’s 1931 construction as a concrete-frame building with brick and hollow-tile infill. The building’s legislated purpose, easily sanitized construction materials, and highly controlled inspection, slaughter, and rendering processes conjure a narrative common to almost all cities in the United States that wished to be “modern” and hygienic. The plant’s highly standardized workflow as described in the 1939 report gives a sense of why many radical writers at the time presented the modern slaughterhouse (or more pointedly the slaughter “factory”) as another step in the march toward the technological control of nature. Area ranchers bringing their animals to the Austin Municipal Abattoir for slaughter surrendered their yield not to an individual butcher but rather to an Abattoir intake clerk, who issued the rancher a “slaughtering ticket” that would eventually be exchanged for the finished product, a processed carcass with the adequate number of inspection stamps to make it acceptable for delivery to markets in Austin and surrounding small towns. The work of the Austin Abattoir was executed in carefully defined steps to increase operational efficiency. According to the abattoir’s annual report, in 1938 alone, the seventeen employees of the Austin Abattoir responsible for inspection, killing, butchering, washing, and chilling processed 22,975 cattle, 6,825 hogs, and 1,239 sheep and goats, with similar numbers adding up for 1939.

Black and white photograph of the Austin Abattoir's slaughter room from the Bureau of Identification

Bureau of Identification image of the Austin Abattoir’s slaughter room, October 1939 (Photo Credit: University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, http://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Austin History Center, Austin Public Library, Austin, Texas)

The building’s relatively late construction date and location within the city evoke a story particular to Austin at the beginning of the twentieth century. The City of Austin considered sponsoring a municipal abattoir as early as 1913, and Paris, Texas, a town somewhat smaller than Austin, was the first city in the United States to build a city-owned slaughterhouse in 1909. However, heavy municipal debt resulting from the construction of the Austin Dam limited funds for other citywide improvements until the late 1920s, when an official city plan for beautification and improvement was passed by the city council. That plan, passed in 1928, also served the purpose of instituting racial segregation on a citywide scale. African Americans, who prior to 1928 lived in neighborhoods throughout Austin, were refused city services in all locations except those neighborhoods east of current-day Interstate Highway 35. Not surprisingly, the city located the Austin Municipal Abattoir at the city boundary on the far east side of this segregated neighborhood. Although proximity to the primary railroad lines was certainly a factor in locating the facility at the city’s eastern limit, the plant’s location in a segregated neighborhood and its distance from downtown embodies contemporary city leaders’ desire to keep this necessary public utility “invisible” to the city’s most prominent residents. However, the plant would not have been easy for its immediate neighbors to ignore; anecdotal accounts from other cities with similar abattoirs tell of terrible smells emanating from such buildings.

The Austin Abattoir’s closing in 1969 represented yet another shift in city dwellers’ relationship to the meat they consumed on an ever increasing scale. Changes in meat distribution networks and widespread availability of in-home refrigeration made city support of a local processing and preservation plant seem less critical.

Research for this article is based in part on:

Eldred Perry, “City of Austin Municipal Abattoir – Annual Report for the year 1939,” Austin History Center, Austin, TX.

Lady Bird Johnson, In Her Own Words

by Michael L. Gillette

Between 1977 and 1991, Michael L. Gillette, executive director of Humanities Texas and former director of the LBJ Library Oral History Program, sat down with Lady Bird Johnson to discuss her childhood, family life and experiences as First Lady. For the first time anywhere, Not Even Past is publishing audio segments from these incredible conversations.

Lady Bird, 1915 (Image courtesy of the LBJ Library)

What happened when a young Lady Bird and a friend traveled to New York City in June 1934? Hear her impressions of Chinatown, Depression era poverty and a “museum for fish” she visited.

How did Lady Bird and LBJ meet? In this segment, she describes their very, very brief courtship and Lyndon’s almost immediate proposal.

After LBJ’s proposal, Lady Bird went out to San Marcos to meet Lyndon’s parents. Here she talks about first meeting Mr. and Mrs. Johnson and her impressions of the old Texas family.

“You’ve brought a lot of boys home, and this time you’ve brought a man.” These were the words of Lady Bird’s father after meeting Lyndon for the first time. Hear more about that initial encounter and life at the “Brick House,” Lady Bird’s family home in Karnack, TX.

Credits:

Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson Oral History Interviews, by Michael L. Gillette, LBJ Library

The Many Histories of South Austin: The Old Sneed Mansion

By Dennis Fisher

You wouldn’t think much of the limestone walls hanging on for dear life as you walked along Bluff Springs to get to the grocery store or the bus stop. Not least because they are set back about thirty feet from the road and concealed by trees. I first heard something about the walls and the Sneed mansion they once supported while walking along the Onion Creek greenbelt in South Austin. “The mansion on the hill was built by slave labor,” a local told me.

I decided to explore for myself on a recent drizzly Sunday. The entire neighborhood, mostly apartment complexes, a few empty lots, and bus stops, has grown up around this small patch of land, which has been just barely “preserved” (given its dilapidated state) by city officials. Walking past the crumbling walls of the Sneed mansion, marked by graffiti and littered with plastic bottles, evokes not only Austin’s past but also a sense of loneliness.

A black and white 1936 photograph of the Sneed House still intact taken by the Historic American Buildings Survey

A 1936 photograph of the Sneed House still intact taken by the Historic American Buildings Survey (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Sebron Sneed Sr. was born in Kentucky in 1802. He spent his early years bouncing around—first in the Missouri militia in 1823 and later in Arkansas practicing law. He married Marinda Atkins of Tennessee in 1824 and they both ended up in Austin, Texas in 1848 after the conclusion of the War on Mexico, making a new home for themselves. They both joined the Pleasant Hill Baptist Church—which still stands today on William Cannon across IH-35. Sebron started the local Democratic Party chapter in 1857. It’s probably not too hard to discern what the Sneed family thought about Texas in the 1850s. Coming from the Appalachian borderlands into newly conquered territory they probably hoped to prosper in a land that would soon expell its Native inhabitants—Tonkawa, Apache, and Comanche peoples around here—and in a place where black slavery was firmly entrenched and outside of the reach of the troublesome former Mexican government as well as the current Federal one—up until 1861, that is, when Lincoln was elected to the presidency. Sebron Sneed Sr. owned 21 people as property in 1860. One of them, Nancy Jane, was purchased by Sneed as “the highest bidder . . . of a certain mulato girl” in Arkansas in 1848 just before he relocated to Texas. We have no idea what Nancy Jane, almost entirely lost to us in the historical record, must have thought, felt, and dreaded–torn from her relatives and brought to a strange land.

Daguerreotype of Marinda Atkins (1809-1878), wife of Sebron Sneed, ca. 1849-1850 in an ornate gold frame

Daguerreotype of Marinda Atkins (1809-1878), wife of Sebron Sneed, ca. 1849-1850 (Image courtesy of Southern Methodist University, Central University Libraries, DeGolyer Library)

The location chosen for Sneed’s mansion still makes good sense. It stands on a hill that lifts slightly to the west but then drops down to where IH-35 currently sits. The land gently slopes downward on all remaining sides. Close by on the north and east sides of the house wind small streams that gently make their way downhill. Limestone, soft and porous, is readily available in this area. All of south Texas (and extending down into Guatemala and Belize) was covered by a shallow sea some sixty million years ago, which left behind as its primary legacy a thick layer of limestone—great for building houses and pyramids as well as collecting and channeling water into natural wells, creeks, and aquifers.

Sneed made his money in the legal profession. His papers, located at the Briscoe Center for American History at The University of Texas, are full of promissory notes from clients. In 1860, he paid fifty dollars in “occupation taxes” as a lawyer. By looking at his tax receipts we find that he owned enslaved people, horses, cattle, and land in Del Valle (just east on Highway 290)—the numbers vary from year to year suggesting he sold people as well. In 1864, he paid his county taxes in kind with 545 bushels of corn. During the war he made money by selling two enslaved men—Peter and Isaac—to Confederate General Magruder for building fortifications at Galveston. If Sebron saw Texas as a promised land, his vision and future rested firmly on the foundation of white supremacy. Furthering that vision, Sneed opened his mansion in south Austin as a recruiting station at the outset of the Civil War and later as a convalescent home for returning wounded soldiers. Both he and his son fought in the war—he as a provost marshall and his son as a captain. Sebron Sr. would die in 1879, at the time engaged in “agricultural pursuits”—the records shed little light on this post-war aspect of his life. He would be buried in the adjoining family cemetery along with his wife, other family members, and “infant Sneed.” After the war, his son moved downtown to Colorado and 3rd and kept busy as a lawyer, acting Comptroller, and later as superintendent of Travis County schools.

Black and white photograph of the second floor fireplace of the Sneed House, 1936

Second floor fireplace of the Sneed House, 1936 (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Today echoes of that era linger in both small and not so subtle ways. Ranch owners along the Onion Creek greenbelt still regularly take their horses out along the trails and locals flock to McKinney Falls to play along the limestone and creeks that crisscross the area. Confederate flags still find a place at rallies at the capitol as well as on t-shirts and pickup trucks. But today south Austin at William Cannon and IH-35 looks very different. Anglo-Americans, African-Americans, Native-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and Mexicans all call this place home. Hispanic Texans constitute the majority of enrolled students in a state that could swing Democratic in a decade or less in a country that has twice elected an African-American to be president. Looking at what remains of the Sneed mansion serves to remind us of the very different histories that have inhabited these places.

If you’d like to learn more about the Sneed family:

A 1982 issue of the Austin Genealogical Society which includes an 1860 letter from Sebron Sneed jr. to his wife

The Sneed House’s city zoning information

A guide to the Briscoe Center’s Sneed family papers

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