by Al Roker
Some of the American settlers, harried by the Comanche, seemed bent on Indian eradication. Rekindling the old dreams of the filibusters, they imagined taking over Texas and extending their holdings all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
Other settlers, like Sam Houston, a former officer in the American Revolution, harbored a different hope. Sam Houston wanted the Texan settlements annexed by the United States. Texas might then become an exciting new U.S. territory—even a new state.
Especially problematic for Mexico: these Americans came with enslaved Africans. The settlers saw Texas as an ideal place to continue and develop the South’s “peculiar institution,” just as its persistence in the South was beginning to roil the whole United States. The Texans’ plans for big bonanzas depended on slave labor.
But Mexico objected to slaveholding. In 1823, the nation had banned slavery in its territories. Americans failed to comply, and the Mexican government soon decided it didn’t want any more of these immigrants pouring across its borders and flooding its countryside with objectionable practices. In 1830, Mexico banned all Americans from entering Texas.
So it was that in 1835 war broke out between the Texan settlers under Stephen Austin and the Mexican colonial government under President General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Famous scenes ensued. The best known is probably the Battle of the Alamo, in which all American fighters died. Among them were William Travis, James Bowie, and Davy Crockett.
The most consequential conflict in that war took place along the marshy western banks of Galveston Bay: the Battle of San Jacinto, where, in April of 1836, Texans serving under Sam Houston routed the Mexican army in less than twenty minutes. The independent Republic of Texas, founded by settlers from the United States, came into existence.
Thus the sovereignty of Texas—and of Galveston Island—switched yet again. Galveston was now subject to a freewheeling, self-created government like Jean Lafitte’s. But unlike Lafitte’s, this one was formed by ambitious Americans.
In April 1861, one week after federal ships fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina, Sam Houston crossed Galveston Bay to the island, disembarked at the wharves, and angrily made his way on foot to the Tremont Hotel, one of Galveston’s finer establishments. Houston’s visit caused much public excitement. He wasn’t merely the hero of the Battle of San Jacinto a quarter-century earlier. He’d been the founding governor of the Republic of Texas, and then a governor of the U.S. state of Texas. And he’d just been shoved out of office for refusing to swear loyalty to the Confederacy.
The old man had come to Galveston to give a speech. He wanted to warn the people of Texas against seceding from the Union.
By now, Galveston was a busy port with a working customs house. A consortium of settlers and speculators, led by the French-Canadian Michel Menard, had begun building homes and businesses under the independent Texas republic, and the city of Galveston had been for a time the capital of that republic.
Still, as late as the 1840s, a visitor had described the city this way: “The appearance of Galveston from the harbor is singularly dreary . . . a piece of prairie that had quarreled with the mainland and dissolved partnership.” The island had seemed nothing but a grim Texas frontier town located, strangely enough, in warm tropical waters.
But throughout the 1840s and 1850s, the city began booming. Immigrants seeking opportunity in the new republic came not only from the United States but also, crucially for Galveston, from abroad: Germans, Greeks, and Italians immigrated to Texas; Jews of all classes came from eastern Europe; and the city’s topographical position in the gulf made it the region’s major port. Galveston soon mingled Mexicans, Europeans, and American families, as well as African Americans both free and enslaved.
Catholic churches and convents were built. The formation of a multicultural port city in the Texas Gulf was well under way by the 1860s.
By the time Sam Houston went to the Tremont to give his speech, he knew had no chance of persuading the people of Galveston, much less all of Texas, to change their political course. But he was explosively irritated. From the earliest days of Texas immigration, Houston had favored not independent expansion into California but annexation by the United States. There, he knew, lay prosperity for Texas.
And his dream had been realized—if all too briefly. In December 1845, Texas was admitted into the Union. The former independent republic became the twenty-eighth American state.
But now the slavery issue had boiled over in the United States. And while the mixed nature of Galveston’s population did make the city more progressive than the rest of Texas—Germans, Jews, and other European immigrants generally opposed slavery—and while slave labor wasn’t playing an important role in the city’s economy anyway, after the shelling of Fort Sumter, anti-Union hysteria ran amok on the island.
A mob ransacked offices of a Galveston anti-slavery German newspaper. Federal supplies were now in the hands of amped-up local militias. And as Sam Houston, a founder of Texas, walked the city’s broad and busy streets, the people were actually shouting at him, catcalling and insulting him.
The old man needed the right place from which to make his speech. The city had developed markedly from Menard’s first days: there was a railroad bridge to the mainland now; fine homes and public buildings represented the beginnings of the city’s characteristic Victorian-tropical architecture. And, as in New Orleans, galleries covered many sidewalks to shade the passersby and provide upper balconies.
Finding himself locked out of the courthouse, Houston chose the Tremont’s gallery for his speech. He stepped out onto that balcony. He glowered down at the angry crowd.
What Sam Houston told Galvestonians that day—“Will you now,” he thundered, “ . . . squander your political patrimony in riotous adventure, which I now tell you, and with something of a prophetic ken, will land you in fire and rivers of blood?”—turned out to be somewhat exaggerated for those who remained on the island itself. It is true, however, that Galveston didn’t exactly benefit from its brief period as a Confederate city.
Confederate strategy largely ignored the island. Many citizens fled to the state’s capital at Houston, on the mainland. When the local Confederate command, too, finally evacuated the island, Galveston was left defenseless. Union troops sailed into the harbor and were greeted warmly by Galveston’s mayor. Most of the remaining citizens’ hearts really weren’t in resisting.
But Union forces, occupying Galveston during much of the war, also lacked support from their own high command. Local militias poked about the island at night, skirmishing with the occupiers.
Still, things on the island stayed more or less calm during the occupation. So peaceful, in fact, that the Union general didn’t even bother destroying the railroad bridge to the Confederate-held mainland.
That was a mistake. In 1862, Major General John B. Magruder, newly appointed Confederate commandant of Texas, took Union occupation of Galveston as a personal affront and decided to liberate the city. On New Year’s Day 1863, Magruder attacked the island by both sea and bridge. During the Battle of Galveston, he retook the city for the Confederacy.
Galvestonians might have treated this change in authority as yet another in the long series of upheavals that had made them who they were. But in taking the city, Magruder shattered the relative calm that had prevailed during the occupation. In the Battle of Galveston, hundreds of men on both sides were killed and maimed. The wounded filled the Ursuline Convent.
For the first time, Sam Houston’s prophetic words seemed to be coming true. Most Galvestonians found all the violence and killing pointless and disgusting. They developed a “pox on both your houses” attitude regarding the opposing armies—and regarding the Civil War itself. That attitude would become an asset to Galveston’s future growth.
Galveston got over the Civil War more quickly than did many other cities and regions of the former Confederacy. As the war wound down, Confederate troops mutinied against Magruder; at the bitter end, troops pillaged the qu
artermaster’s store. For a time, anarchy threatened to prevail on the island.
But it was in the city of Galveston, on June 19, 1865, that Union authority first arrived in Texas, raised the Stars and Stripes, and took command of the whole state. On that day, and in that city—forever celebrated as “Juneteenth”—the abolition of slavery in Texas was first announced.
And the city on the narrow gulf island now began a rise to dominance, in Texas and throughout the world. That ascent may be unique in its speed and intensity.
In 1900, thirty-five years after the Stars and Stripes first flew again in Galveston, about 37,000 people lived in the city. That was fewer than lived in Houston, but size had never been Galveston’s stock in trade. This was an island. There was no way to grow beyond certain obvious physical limits.
And yet by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Galveston had electric lights on its broad and graceful streets—the first electric lights in Texas. Gaslight had shed a discreet, cozy glow; these new carbon-arc street lamps, outputting a blinding 4,000 candlepower, lacking the stink and soot of gas, turned the night into a white-out version of daytime.
And because in the 1880s Thomas Edison had suspended carbon filaments in vacuum-sealed bulbs, incandescence had tamed electric light—both its glare and its cost—for smaller spaces like warehouses, banks, and side streets.
Electricity was also powering another set of strung cables: the telegraph. Developed by Samuel Morse, the system had linked East and West on the eve of the Civil War, but by 1900 cable-laying ships plowed the seas as well. Ten days had once been the quickest time for a ship to bring a message from the United States to Europe. That gap had been shortened to seconds. It was rumored by 1900 that the telegraph would be going wireless.
Meanwhile a new device fostered yet another communication miracle. Voice-to-voice talk via the telephone was changing everything yet again. By 1900, switchboard exchanges could patch multiple calls quickly through a single system.
At first such systems were operated by boys. But it turned out that the anonymity involved in telephony tempted the boys to mouth off at callers. Soon grown women—those with an especially mature and smoothly gracious manner—replaced the kids as operators.
So Galveston had telephones and telegraph. The city’s electricity, distributed by a turbine-driven central power system, flowed to public buildings and powered a reliable streetcar system. There were flush toilets. On Broadway the huge Gilded Age mansions of the city’s industrialists and traders and financiers vied with one another for ostentation.
As a center of international trade, Galveston now epitomized the heady pace of growth and development that marked the entire country. This was the age of the robber barons: the great financiers, the railroad entrepreneurs, the steel magnates. This was the era of “the millionaire”—and Galveston, Texas, boasted more of them per capita than any other city in the United States.
There was conflict in America too. In the summer and fall of 1900, the incumbent president William McKinley and the Democratic populist William Jennings Bryan were restaging their epic political contest of 1896. Bryan came to Galveston that summer to give one of his powerfully emotional speeches.
The debates of the campaign season included such things as the goals of America’s new ambitions abroad: President McKinley had sent U.S. troops to China, Cuba, and the Philippines. People were questioning the immense power of the high-finance elites. Some were championing the rights of labor.
Those themes would resonate, of course, in American political campaigns for decades to come. Amid all the frenetic activity at home and abroad, the nation was leading the world into new kinds of success, and new kinds of turmoil, which would come to mark the modern age. Galveston, Texas, had become one of the main centers of that turmoil, and that success.
So by 1900, some had begun to call Galveston “the New York of the Southwest.” At the very least, this was another New Orleans, another San Francisco. The city was laid out on a stately rational grid. Numbered streets, leading from the busy port on the bay down to the beautiful beach on the gulf, and lettered avenues, running across town, were jammed with horse-drawn carts hauling supplies, with elegant buggies driven by coachmen, and with electric streetcars.
Visitors crossing the bay by steam or sail or on a railroad causeway were struck at first by the deep-water wharves, bustling with the steady loading of bale after bale of cotton—along with bushels of corn, barrels of flour, and bundles of sawn lumber—and the equally steady unloading, warehousing, and trucking away of everything from beet sugar to cement to coffee.
Two new forts stood guard over the strategic island. They were U.S. forts, of course—but their names recalled the fight against Mexico for Texas independence and the establishment of the Texas Republic. Fort San Jacinto, named for the victorious nearby battle that wrested Texas from Mexico and established in 1898, stood at the east end of the island, commanding the bay. Fort Crockett, named for a hero of the loss at the Alamo, was even newer—just starting construction, in fact, in the summer of 1900. There, just west of the city, the U.S. Army Coastal Artillery was creating a modern facility on the gulf that could command the entire area with the biggest modern guns.
Beachgoing visitors, traveling southward across town on a special mule-drawn trolley, would arrive at the gaudy beach bathhouses on the gulf. For by now, Galveston’s beautiful gulf shore was attracting tourists. The Pavilion, built as a beach palace, and illuminated by electricity, had rivaled Brooklyn’s fabled Luna Park on Coney Island; it boasted a huge dance floor. When it burned to the ground in 1882, it was replaced by a grand beach hotel with a high dome, breezy porches, and a freshwater fountain gracing its driveway.
The city was one of the fanciest and most elegant tourist destinations in the country. Bathers especially loved Galveston’s tranquil, warm gulf waters.
Trade, of course, was the basis of this remarkable rise to national importance. Galveston’s harbor, where a pirate flagship had stood at anchor less than eighty years before, now shipped more than two million bales of cotton annually, worth more than $85 million. The Galveston Cotton Mill and the city’s Texas Star Flour Mill ran at full tilt.
A bell opened and closed business on the vast trading floor of the Cotton Exchange near the wharves. There, below high chandeliers dangling from a spectacularly soaring ceiling, the marble walls echoed with prices and bids for bales and futures shouted by bearded men in coats and derbies and top hats.
Galveston also boasted dockside warehouses full of goods from all over the world. Those goods moved to Houston, Dallas, the South, the West, and directly to New York by steam, by sailing ships, square-rigged to fly a multitude of sails, and by rail. In a city this physically intimate, the new opera house, built on a grand scale in 1894, stood not far from the bordellos: the city’s rugged frontier origins survived its rise to elegance and power.
Galveston may have been the New York of the Southwest. But it was also the first city of a state that fully captured the new American spirit of 1900. With the restoration of U.S. government after the Civil War, Texas was enjoying a huge boom as a national leader in cattle ranching and lumber production. Combining disdain for Northeastern-style niceties with eagerness for a Wild West form of cosmopolitanism, Texas style matched the feverish development, big money, and gigantic ambition that had gripped the nation as a whole. By 1900, Texas was leading the nation in cotton production. The oil boom to come was presaged in 1898, when the Corsicana oil field was opened by a former Standard Oil executive. The first modern oil refinery west of the Mississippi, Corsicana augured a new age for both Texas and the United States.
So in Galveston, the state’s greatest port, there were 500 saloons. And because the city’s trade was international, so were its people. Multiculturalism had only intensified since the Civil War: blacks, white Protestants, Jews, Germans, Irish Catholics, and Latinos mingled with relative ease. By 1900, Galveston was the favorite destination for European immigrants entering t
he western United States. Relative racial and ethnic tolerance were characteristic not only of Galveston but also of post–Civil War Texas as a whole. By 1883, the Negro Longshoreman’s Union, along with a black screwman’s union, were admitted to the Galveston Trades Assembly.
Yet the nature of those unions shows how thoroughly racial segregation prevailed in key areas of Galveston life in 1900. Black and white people lived on some of the same streets but rarely socialized as equals. Schools were segregated: Galveston’s Central High School was the first high school in Texas for black students. Yet early on, the city’s school board determined that teachers and principals in those schools should be hired without regard for race. Many of the city’s African Americans found avenues to middle-class life by serving as teachers and administrators in the “colored” schools. The quality of the education they provided was widely considered to be high (some thought higher than that provided white students). It contributed to the rise of the black community in Galveston.
Still, segregation would hamper that community’s success for more than sixty years. Black citizens were expected to ride in the backs of trolleys. Theaters had separate “colored” sections. Swimming—or “bathing,” as Daisy Thorne would have called it—was not racially integrated: a small section of beach was designated for Negro citizens.
And while the civic leadership and upper-crust society, based so entirely on success in trade, was unusually well mixed—Jews and Mexicans were included with the Anglo-Protestant elite—African Americans were not among them.
In 1900, those injustices, underlying Galveston’s evident racial calm, would be exposed by catastrophe. The calm would be broken by a storm.
All this dazzling success had come about thanks to the amazing capacity of Galveston’s people, and of its leadership, to solve problems. By the fall of 1900, as Galveston looked at its own situation, all of the biggest challenges seemed to have been met.