Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  They were populated from different human sources. Very few Texas urbanites ever arrived out of Europe, or even from the other American regions. They poured in from Texas's own heartland. Paris, Texas, was populated in the beginning exactly as was Paris, France. The great majority of Texas cities had no foreign enclaves, or any non-Anglo-American communities, except for Mexicans and Negroes, and these two groups formed distinct societies.

  The politics of Dallas, Houston, and Lubbock therefore could not be similar to those of Minneapolis or Chicago. The outlook of the larger Texas cities was predominantly conservative, in economics, ethic, and social attitudes. These cities had to be put in true perspective of time and place. The shining towers thrusting up from the plains, rising over miles of green fields and oceans of subterranean oil, were filled with old-stock, Anglo-American Protestant pioneers. This ethnic strain was not an elite, or an enclave; it was the majority, homogeneous throughout all classes except for the Mexican and black subordinate castes. This strain survived here. These people brought their attitudes and value systems across the wide Atlantic, through the Appalachian chain, onto the savage, sunlit plains. They held it intact, finally transmitting it to the cities, where, finally, they migrated as individuals. In the cities there was small erosion; they stayed hard-working, disciplined, wholly economically oriented as before. Because of the sprawling nature of the Texas metropoli, the pioneer stock was almost as atomistic and uncompressed as when it filtered through the Texas prairies. All this showed through, beneath some superficial veneers.

  People who criticized Dallas in the 1960s were really criticizing Anglo-America in 1900. The changes in America, for better or worse, were still taking place elsewhere, not in Texas. Education did not, and would not, change the basic ethic. Under stress, everywhere, human beings react according to their basic value systems, never according to acquired education. Anthropologists knew this, but it was a fact most educators and sociologists preferred to dismiss.

  Texas, with its gleaming, spreading cities and its leagues of primordial, slow-changing landscape, presented a pattern common to many parts of the 20th-century world. Texas began as a colony, with a colonial society and economy. It was still bound by unbreakable cords to the vaster world community the Anglo-Celt never quite escaped. Here the most modern enterprise and technology lived side by side with elements of crushing poverty, with age-old drives, and with unchanged ideas. Texas was rich, and poor, tributary to a distant civilization, paying its tribute for money and artifacts in cotton, beef, and oil. The Texan took everything from that distant world he thought he could shape or use: the German rifle, the Yankee six-shooter, the Pennsylvanian know-how in drilling for oil. The colonial, and the frontiersman, always needs the artifacts of civilization.

  But he always resists domination. Texans, again and again, now successfully, now hopelessly, rejected ideas and changes that seemed to have no relevance to their land or to their history, or which brought about social situations few Texans desired.

  Societies changed internally; they rarely could be changed by pressure from without. The white man exterminated some Indians, conquered the rest, but in three centuries he could never destroy the Amerind's own concept of man, society, and the world. On sullen, squalid reservations, thousands of Amerind remnants held to the old ways still; probably, they always would. The Indian knew the white man had won; this did not mean he himself had to become an imitation Caucasian or commit race treason by adopting European ways.

  The Texan society, brawling, vulgar, expansive and expansionist, with a simmer of violence beneath its surface, and a cool, empirical view of its own and other men's worlds, thus like certain other basically colonial communities remained static on one plane in the 20th century while it exploded dramatically on another.

  Chapter 36

  THE LIGHTS OF SAN ANTONIO

  Once you were master of all you surveyed, and your head of cattle were countless, in south Texas. As adventurous, carefree, and pleasure-loving Dons, you dealt with the friendly Tejas and the savage Apaches. A Nordic cloud appeared in the north, and slowly but unremorselessly, grew into monstrous proportions . . . Your pleasure-loving ways, your good nature, have been unable to cope with the energetic, wealth-seeking characteristics of the Nordics.

  FROM AN ARTICLE FOR TEXAS MEXICANS

  BY RODOLFO DE LA GARZA

  AT the core of the violence and warfare marking Texas history was a series of ethnic problems, the situation developing when two or more sharply differentiated peoples are brought under a single government. As the ethnic consciousness of all peoples increased enormously in the 20th century, ethnic troubles have come increasingly to the fore in America. Both in Texas and in the United States, these problems have been met with a combination of indifference, lack of perspective, and naïveté.

  In world terms, ethnic troubles were neither new nor unusual. Historically, they came about in only three general ways: conquest of one race or culture by another, the imposition of arbitrary boundaries combining different groups within one political entity, or the importation of foreign stock by a more highly organized society for labor. Canada's ethnic problem came through the British conquest of French Quebec; black Africa's, and Belgium's, through the arbitrary combination of different peoples within common boundaries by outside powers; while the Texas situation strongly resembled the chain of events in Algeria and South Africa.

  Like Algeria and the south African region, Texas was a large, almost unpopulated land when the first highly organized and determined European settlers arrived. The Texan experience with the Indians was similar to the French, and Boer, experience with certain savage, primitive tribes. These were fought, beaten, and pushed back into marginal lands the conquerors did not want. In the 1850s, American observers compared the state of the Great Plains, with its chain of protective forts ringing the Amerinds beyond the 98th meridian with the French policy in North Africa. There a similar chain of military posts guarded the agricultural regions, where Europeans settled, against the wild tribesmen of the desert, while no real effort was made to subdue or settle the less fertile regions.

  The nature of the Plains Indians, who could be conquered but not civilized in white terms, determined the nature of the North American contest. The Indians could not bend, so they were broken. They were useless to the Texans, and dangerous. They were killed or driven out. In 1900 there were only 1,000 Amerinds living in the entire state. The Indian wars in Texas obviated a later Indian ethnic problem.

  However, just as European settlers in North Africa and on the southern tip of the continent could not refrain from importing huge masses of cheap, unskilled, and exploitable labor—Muslims in the north, Bantus in the south—the dominant Anglo-Texans proceeded with a similar lack of vision. The Muslim population of North Africa, and the Negroid population of a South Africa that had been almost deserted when the first Dutch arrived, exploded under the opportunities and improvements the conquerors made. It was inevitable that, sooner or later, a contest for control of the land would begin.

  The Spanish-Mexicans had imported Anglo-Americans into Texas for their own reasons, and they suffered a logical result. When Anglos outnumbered Mexicans in Texas, they controlled the province; they frightened the government of Mexico long before the Texas Revolution began. These Texas settlers were the catalyst that provoked a Mexican-American war, though some such war was probably inevitable, since the Anglo civilization was dynamic and expansive, the Mexican nation static and even regressive, unable to exert power in the borderlands.

  The conquest of Texas, and even the extension of the American border to the Rio Grande, did not create a large ethnic conflict within Texas, because the Mexican population was too small. There were only about 12,000 ethnic Mexicans in Texas the year before the Civil War, and during the rest of the century the figure did not proportionally increase. There was no reason for Mexicans to enter Texas; in fact, there was ample reason for them to leave it; and even discounting heavy Anglo immigration, the
Anglo-Texan rate of population increase, at least until 1880, exceeded the ethnic Mexican. German immigrants, who Americanized rapidly, outnumbered Mexicans in San Antonio by 1850, and Anglos outnumbered both soon after the railroad arrived in 1877. The ratio in the border counties was about fifty-fifty at the end of the 19th century, and the total population figures were small. The ethnic Mexicans were being engulfed, and it was widely believed they were being absorbed. Although there were bitter troubles on the border, a happy solution, in the American tradition, seemed in sight.

  The first, and most serious, ethnic problem in Texas centered around the Negro. The Negro was never a prime mover, but always a dangerous catalyst in American life. The institution of black slavery—originally imported to solve the most vexing problem facing a developing North America, labor—determined the course, and the fate, of the South. The industrializing North solved its own labor problems through massive European immigration: Irish, then Germans, later Italians and Eastern Europeans. The majority of these immigrants were not noticeably differentiated from the original Anglo mass; many of them were already urbanized and arrived with important skills; and those who were accustomed to urbanization and possessed skills, such as the Germans who flooded the Midwest, integrated into American society within several generations with immense success. The Irish tended to freeze on lower social levels, but still, because of political skills and the fact they already spoke English, made the transition with minimal cultural pain. The latter-day, 20th-century immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe was too culturally different, and too massive, to be easily absorbed, but massive problems were eased with the choking off of unrestricted immigration after the First World War. After that, troubles in Europe enormously increased the quality of immigrants—refugees tended to be skilled, urbanized, and valuable additions—and the flow was still ample to provide New York, Chicago, and other cities with an indispensable supply of labor in certain fields.

  The nature of the European immigration into the United States, and the fact that most immigrants deliberately dropped most of their history and culture during their passage, arriving as individuals determined to Americanize, blinded American society as a whole to the normal nature of ethnic difficulties. The American process in the North was not average; it was almost unique. A growing, amorphous, rapidly expanding and industrializing society provided tremendous opportunities for any immigrant who could meet certain basic social parameters, whether he was Jew or Greek.

  The society of the American South was neither growing nor amorphous, though it was expanding in static form toward the West. Except for the one large wave of European agrarian migration to Texas in the 1840s, Europeans sensibly sought the urban centers of the North. White immigration could not compete with the horde of Negro slaves; even the old Anglo stock was not competing economically with the slaveholders of the planter class. Thus there were two enormous differences between the Northern laboring groups and the Southern depressed class. The slaves were black, and noticeably different; static social forces, among whites of both the upper and the middle and lower classes, gravitated strongly against social change. Planters faced economic loss; marginal whites feared competition.

  The blacks were brought into Texas for only one purpose: to provide essential labor. The myth that the slave system was economically unviable was about as valid as the myth that white men were unfit to labor in the coastal climate. Both grew from rationalized desires. The myth of white supremacy was also a normal, in fact, a required rationalization to prevent social change no Southerner wanted. In 1860 the slave economy was producing enormous profits, though at dangerous social cost, and it was guilty of the greatest social sin of all, military weakness. But when it was destroyed by war, the purpose of the Negroes' existence in Texas was destroyed with it.

  Tragically, in American history it was impossible to provide the millions of black human beings who labored, and whose backs built so much of the economy, with individual faces. Their situation was analogous to the faceless hordes who sweated out their lives in Sicilian wheatfields or Thracian mines under Roman overlords, or the millions of serfs upon whose labors the cathedrals of medieval culture were raised. History records that the brilliant culture of Renaissance Europe had to eat, and that someone provided menial work and food. It records the name of no serf, unless he entered history through rebellion.

  In Texas, the black man faced a combination of class disadvantage, differentiation, and imposed caste. After a logical Emancipation, American society as a whole faced all these problems with naïveté.

  The black could not be made an effective citizen overnight, because in voting democracies the one essential was that a majority of the citizens be at least theoretically equal. The Negro was unequal, in education, social conditioning, and in the white mind.

  Nor was he integratable, in the manner of the immigrant Rumanian or Jew. Miscegenation was rejected in theory and practice by the Nordic white, and rejected even more ferociously once the Negro was free. The Negro could not meet one essential parameter: a white skin. President Lincoln and a host of Americans of his generation, before they fell into dangerous experimentation for political purposes, recognized that some form of social polarization must result. A tiny, almost insignificant Negro minority was brought into white society in the North with reasonable success. In Texas, where one-quarter of the total population was black, this was impossible. Political democracy had to grow up from the basic social institutions of the people, to rest on a firm base of consensus. It could not be imposed. The Southerner could not willingly allow the former slave to vote, because he considered the freedmen's ballot dangerous to his own status and institutions.

  There was no historical precedent for a society's basic institutions being overturned by ballot; democracy possessed very real limits. Neither George III nor Jefferson Davis were deposed in America by elections or legal writ, but by war.

  The Negro in Texas had always lived in a separate country, with separate laws, from the dominant white. The change from slavery to elaborate caste was probably as inevitable as a similar situation inevitably created caste in India, Ethiopia, and Hispanic America generations earlier. The tragedy, and error, was that the new caste system provided no means for eventual social elevation and change; it did nothing to provide the Negro the means for eventual entrance into American life on an equal, if separate, basis with white society. But then few caste systems ever do. The faceless slave became the faceless sharecropper and handyman, whose name history continued to ignore.

  The existence and the function of the freedmen under tenantry was always anomalous. Most landowners always distrusted ex-slaves, preferring whites. For some years, the system was workable, if not very viable, because there was no other solution at hand. The Negroes were thinly scattered, and even more controllable than they had been as slaves but never so profitable. Then, with the agricultural revolution that began in the last quarter of the 19th century, even the meager security of the sharecropper began to disappear. Slowly but inevitably, the Negro farmer failed to serve any useful purpose, like the tenant white. But the white farmer had avenues of escape, which to the Negro were closed.

  Texas agriculture was more pragmatic and adaptable than that of the older South. The squalor of the sharecropper's shack provided his landlord with no measurable profit, and while there were reactionaries in the deep Brazos bottoms who took a sort of paternal pride in the Negroes on their lands, the majority of landowners, sooner than the rest of the South, began to let their Negroes go. Mechanization was not possible for the Negro, who lacked capital and credit; those tenants who survived financed themselves and emerged as respectable farm operators in their own right. The owner who farmed himself, or let his acres to efficient white tenants, made money. From his Negro sharecroppers, in many years, he collected only a few pounds of cotton or a bag of beans. Thus arose a Texas saying in the 1930s, to the effect that "the last one saw of niggers, the first one saw of money again." By 1930, the majority
of Texas Negroes were already living in the small cities and towns.

  The great boom caused by the exploitation of mineral resources passed the Negro by. Texas had instituted a public school system for blacks in 1870, but in a region where the white rural schools averaged in the bottom third in national ratings, the Negro schools were poor indeed. The black school was marked by untrained teachers, substandard buildings, short terms, and few funds for such things as books. There was no social pressure among the bottom caste for education; education did not fit into their world. They lacked motivation, and the white structure logically saw no reason to educate them beyond their expected station. The majority of Negroes were functionally illiterate at best. They could not compete with the more aggressive, American-ethic-stimulated white farmer in town in any case. In specific cases, both Negroes and whites took the caste system to town; the vast majority of Negroes found employment only in menial jobs.

  The black settlements formed almost separate towns beside the white communities. They were rigidly segregated and endured rigid poverty, not so much on the world scale but on the American. Again, in these "nigger towns" scattered throughout the old heartland, the Negro lived in a separate nation, under separate laws. The civil and criminal codes were not enforced rigidly within the black communities by the dominant white power structures, unless the Negro and white man impinged. Here, not earlier, a considerable trend toward Negro crime and violence emerged. The sharecropper was among the most peaceable of men; the compressed town dweller exploded more easily. Texas took an entirely empirical view toward this trend. Negro violence was not severely punished, nor did it much concern white society or politics, so long as it was directed at the Negro community. If a Negro crossed the invisible line—much like the old deadline drawn by the western frontier towns—by harming one of the upper castes, his punishment was usually swift, heavy, and sometimes horrible.