Michener, James A.

by Texas

  . . . TASK FORCE

  I tried to be polite when the governor intruded upon the planning session for our August meeting in Galveston. 1 explained that we had intended to invite a meteorologist from Wichita Falls to address us on Texas weather: 'You know, things like hurricanes and tornadoes.'

  He said: 'Those are the Texas storms aloft. What I'm worried about are the storms here on the ground.'

  When I explained that it would be difficult to disinvite Dr.

  Clay, he broke in: 'You mean Lewis Clay? He's one of the best.' A governor, it seemed, was supposed to know everyone in his state, and without consulting me he grabbed a phone, dialed his secretary, and said: 'Get me Lewis Clay, that man who supported me in Wichita Falls,' and within a minute he was speaking to our meteorologist: 'Lewis, your old pal, the governor. I hear you're heading for Galveston with these fine people on our Task Force. Now, Lewis, I'm going to have to preempt the morning session.' There was a long pause, after which I heard: 'Lewis, in running a great state, unexpected things sometimes become imperative. And believe me, this is one of those times.' Another pause: 'Lewis, they'll save you the entire afternoon.'

  When he hung up I was more irritated than before, because this really was an unwarranted intrusion, but as things worked out, the split meeting was one of the most instructive we would have, for the day dwelt first on those great tempests of the human soul and then on the tempests of the sky which mirror them, and when we were through, our Task Force understood the spiritual and physical settings of Texas much better.

  The impromptu morning session was monopolized by three worried Texans who had worked for the governor's election and who now warned him that unless they were given an opportunity to present their opinions about the spiritual base of Texas history, they were going to lead a statewide campaign against our work, against the members of the Task Force, and against the governor himself for his carelessness in selecting the committee members. When we convened that morning in a beautiful room overlooking the peaceful Gulf of Mexico, we were faced by three determined citizens with a tableful of charts, studies and typed recommendations.

  Up to that moment they had not known one another personally, although they had been in correspondence regarding the threatened destruction of their state. The first was a tall, cadaverous man from Corpus Christi, an Old Testament prophet accustomed to dire prediction; he was not an ordained clergyman, but was prepared to advise clergymen as to how they should behave and what thev should include in their sermons. He had a sharp, angular face, strong eyebrows and a "deep premonitory voice. When he spoke, we paid attention.

  The second was a stern housewife from Abilene who sat with sheaves of paper which she had trouble keeping organized. About fifty, she had educated her own three children rather rigorously and was now prepared to do the same with the state's. Her forte was to start talking and to keep going regardless of objections or obstructions thrown in her path. She was a verbal bulldozer, ex-

  tremely effective in leveling opposition with force if not reason

  The third member was a jovial man from San Angelo, conciliatory, nodding agreeably when introduced, and never offensive in what he said or how he said it. But he was often more effective than his companions because he started each presentation with some phrase like it would really be hurtful, wouldn't it, if we taught our children that . . .' And he would follow with some established fact which everyone accepted but him, such as the truth that Texas was composed of some twenty radically different ethnic groups. He and the woman objected to any such statement in our conclusions on the ground that 'it would be divisive, stressing differences in our population, when what we need is a constant reminder that Texas was settled primarily by one master group, the good people from states like Kentucky and Georgia with an Anglo-Saxon, Protestant background.'

  The rugged session covered four hours, nine to one, and we Task Force members tired of trying to digest the particularist ideas long before the three protesters tired of presenting them. Indeed, our visitors looked as if they could have continued throughout the evening, and next day too.

  The thrust of their argument was simple: 'The essential character of Texas was formed by 1844, and our schoolchildren should be taught only the virtues which dominated at that time.' They were much more interested in what should not be taught than what should, and they had a specific list of forbidden subjects that must be avoided. Each of the three had some personal bete noire in which he or she was interested, and I shall summarize the main points of their forceful presentations:

  The San Angelo man instructed us to downplay the supposed influence of the Spaniards, the Mexicans, the Germans, the Czechs and the Vietnamese: 'As for the colored, there is no real need to mention them at all. They played no significant role in Texas history, and to confuse young minds with the problems of slavery, which rarely existed in Texas and then in a most benevolent form, would be hurtful.' He also advised us to drop excessive coverage of Indians: 'The Texas Indians were cruel murderers, but we don't need to dwell on such unpleasantness. And the fact that we threw them all out of our state proves that they influenced Texas not at all. You needn't be unkind about it. Just ignore it, for they vanished a long time ago.' Most specifically, he warned against adverse comment on the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s: 'Some people are speaking of this as if it was a blot on our escutcheon, and this has to stop. It really shouldn't be mentioned at all, and if it is, it must be presented as a logical,

  God-fearing upiising of loyal citizens eager to protect Texas against the radical incursions of coloreds, Catholics, jews and freethinkers.'

  The Abilene woman was gentler in her admonitions: 'The job of the schools is to protect our children from the ugliness of life. We see no reason why you should even mention the Great Depression. It would be a reflection on the American Way. And we're appalled that some textbooks speak of little girls having babies out of wedlock. It's much better not to discuss such things.' She cautioned us against including prominent photographs of Texas women like Barbara Jordan and Oveta Culp Hobby because they made their names in political activity: 'Ma Ferguson is all right, because she was governor and she did stand for old-fashioned virtues, and I suppose you'll have to include Lady Bird Johnson, but feature her as the mother of two daughters. We don't want a lot of mannish-looking women in our books. They're not proper role models for our young girls.' She said she supposed we'd have to include Abraham Lincoln and F.D.R., but she hoped we would not praise them, 'for they were worse enemies to Texas than the boll weevil.'

  The Corpus Christi man fulminated against secular humanism and what he called the Four Ds: dancing, deviation, drugs and Democrats: 'And when I say deviation, I mean it in its broadest sense. There is a wonderful central tendency in Texas history, and when we deviate from it in any respect, we run into danger.' When I asked for an example, he snapped: 'Labor unions. All Texas will be deeply offended if you discuss labor unions. We've striven to keep such un-American operations out of our state and have campaigned to preserve our right-to-work laws. I have four textbooks here which speak of communists like Samuel Gompers and John L. Lewis as if they were respectable citizens, and this will not be tolerated. Organized labor played no part in Texas history and must not be presented as if it did.' Like the Abilene woman, he wanted the roles of the sexes clearly differentiated: 'Boys should play football and there should be no concession to movements blurring the lines between the sexes.' When he preached against dancing, I think all of us listened with condescending respect, but when he came to drugs, we supported him enthusiastically: 'I simply cannot imagine how this great nation has allowed this curse to threaten its young people. What has gone wrong? What dreadful mistakes have we made?' We nodded when he said in thundering, prophetic tones: 'This plague must be wiped out in Texas.'

  At this point Rusk interrupted: 'What positive values are you

  advocating?" and the man replied: 'Those which made Texas great Loyalty, religion, patriotism, justice, opp
ortunity, daring

  As he recited these virtues, most of which I endorsed, 1 saw these three earnest visitors in a different light. They were striving to hold back the tides of change which threatened to engulf them They really did long to recover the simpler life of 1844 and find refuge in its rural patterns, its heroic willingness to defend its principles, its dedication to a more disciplined society. I understood their feelings, for all men in all ages have such yearnings.

  When we broke for a belated lunch, Miss Cobb, a descendant of Democratic senators, asked the speakers: 'By what route did you become Republicans? Surely, your parents were Democrats.'

  The Abilene woman laughed uneasily: 'My father knew only one Republican family. A renegade who joined that party so that the Republican administration in Washington could nominate him postmaster. Father would cross the street to avoid speaking to the scoundrel.' The Corpus Christi man said: 'You mustn't get into that with children. Our families were all Democrats. Nobody thought of being anything else before the 1928 election, when they had to vote Republican to fight Al Smith and his boozing ways.'

  Smiling amiably, the San Angelo man said: 'If you do have to explain it, why not use the old joke? Man asked a rancher in the Fort Stockton area: "Caleb, your six boys are all good Democrats, I hope?" and Caleb said: "Yep, all but Elmer. He learned to read." But I agree with the others. Best to omit the whole question.'

  I said: 'You seem to be recommending that we omit a good deal of Texas history,' and the dour Corpus Christi man said: 'A good history is characterized by what's left out.'

  I said I'd appreciate an example, and he was more than equal to the occasion: 'In the decades after the great storm of 1900 that destroyed Galveston, loyal citizens rebuilt the city, pretty much as you see it here today. But with their enormous losses and few businesses to take up the slack, how could they earn money? They turned the city into a vast amusement area—houses of ill repute, gambling, gaudy saloons. Men from my city . . .'

  'And mine, too,' the San Angelo man chimed in. 'They came here to raise hell in Galveston. Wildest city in America, they boasted.'

  'Do we need to include that in a book for children 7 ' the Corpus Christi man asked, and I had to reply 'No,' and he smiled icily: 'There is much that can be profitably omitted.'

  At our lunch I wanted to make peace with our vigorous critics and said: 'I'm sure I speak for our entire Task Force when I say that while we must disagree with certain of your positions, we

  support many of them. Like you, we feel that modern children are pressured to grow up too fast. We deplore drugs. We champion private property. We agree that too often the negative aspects of our society are stressed. And we subscribe to Texas patriotism.'

  'What don't you agree with?' the Corpus Christi man challenged, and I answered him as forthrightly as I could: 'We think women have played an important role in all aspects of Texas life. We think Mexicans are here to stay. We think Texas should be proud of its multinational origins. And we are not monolithic. Rusk and Quimper are strong Republicans; Miss Cobb and Garza, equally strong Democrats.'

  'What about you?' the San Angelo man asked amiably, and I said: 'I'm like the old judge in Texarkana during a heated local election who was asked which candidate he supported: "They're both fine men. Eminently eligible for the big post, they think. Haven't made up my mind yet, but when I do I'm gonna be damned bitter about it." '

  Dr. Clay started his presentation on Texas weather with three astonishing slides: 'Here you see the Clay residence in Wichita Falls at seven-oh-nine in the evening of the tenth of April 1979. That's me looking up in the sky. This second slide, taken by a neighbor across the street, shows what we were staring at.'

  It was an awesome photograph, widely reproduced later, for it showed in perfect detail the structure of a great tornado just about to strike: 'Note three things. The enormous black cloud aloft, big enough to cover a county. The clearly defined circular tunnel dropping toward the ground. And the snout of the destroying cloud, trailing along behind like the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner.'

  When Clay started to move to the next slide, Rusk stopped him: 'Why does the snout trail?'

  'Aerodynamics. It lingers upon the ground it's destroying.'

  He then showed us the most remarkable slide of the three: 'This is the Clay residence one minute after the tornado struck.' No upright part of the former house was visible; it was a total destruction, with even the heavy bathtub ripped away and gone.

  'How could the man with the camera take such a picture?' Rusk asked, and Miss Cobb wanted to know: 'What happened to you?'

  'That's the mystery of a tornado. Its path of destruction is as neatly defined as a line drawn with a pencil. On our side of the street, total wipe-out. Where the photographer was standing . . . merely a big wind.'

  'Yes, but where were you?' Miss Cobb persisted.

  'just before it struck, the man with the camera shouted: "Lewis! Over here!" He could sec where the pencil line was heading.'

  'Remarkable,'Quimper said, but Clay corrected him:'No, the miracle was that the tornado lifted not only the bathtub from our wreckage but also my mother. Carried her right along with the tub and deposited them both as gently as you please a quarter of a mile away.'

  Then, with a series of beautifully drawn meteorological slides, he instructed us on the genesis of the tornadoes which each year struck Texas so violently: 'Four conditions are required before a tornado is spawned. A cold front sweeps in from the Rockies in the west. It hits low-level moist air from the Gulf. Now, this happens maybe ninety times a year and accounts for normal storms of no significance. But sometimes a third factor intrudes. Very dry air rushing north from Mexico. When it hits the front, which is already agitated, severe thunderstorms result, but rarely anything worse. However, if the fourth air mass moves in, a majestic jet stream at thirty thousand feet, it's as if a cap were clamped down over the entire system. Then tornadoes breed and tear loose and do the damage you saw at Wichita Falls.'

  'How bad was that damage?' Quimper asked, and Clay said: 'It smashed a path eight miles long, a mile and a half wide. Four hundred million dollars in destruction, forty-two dead, several hundred with major injuries.'

  In rapid fire he sped through a series of stunning photographs, throwing statistics at us as he went: 'Most Texas tornadoes strike in May. We get a steady average of a hundred and thirty-two per year, and they produce a yearly average of thirteen deaths. Most tornadoes we ever had in one day, a hundred and fifteen shockers on a September afternoon in 1967. The funnel rotates counterclockwise and can travel over the ground at thirty-five miles an hour, almost always in a southwest-to-northeast direction, and with a funnel wind velocity of up to three hundred miles an hour.'

  Numbed by the violent force of the pictures and words, we had no questions, but he added two interesting facts: 'Yes, what you've heard is true. A Texas tornado can have winds powerful enough to drive a straw flying through the air right through a one-inch plank. And there really is such a thing as Tornado Alley. It runs from Abilene northeast through Larkin and Wichita Falls.' Looking directly at Ransom Rusk, who lived in that middle town, he said: 'Statistics are overwhelming. Most dangerous place to be during a tornado is an automobile. The wind picks it up, finds it too heavy, dashes it to the ground. Best place?' He flashed his third slide, the one showing the destruction of his own house: 'Pick your spot. But if you have a tornado cellar, use it.'

  The next two hours were compelling, for he gave a similar analysis of the great hurricanes that spawned off the coast of Africa and came whipping across the Atlantic into the Gulf of Mexico, and we sat appalled as he showed us what had happened to Galveston on 8 September 1900: 'Worst natural disaster ever to strike America. Entire city smitten. Whole areas erased by a fearful storm surge that threw twelve feet of water inland. Up to eight thousand lives lost in one night.'

  One remarkable series of shots taken by four different photographers on a single March day in 1983 showed Amarillo in a snow-and-slee
t storm at 29° Fahrenheit, Abilene in the middle of a huge dust storm at 48°, Austin at the beginning of a blue norther at 91° and Brownsville in the midst of an intolerable heat wave at 103°. 'From northwest to southeast, a range of seventy-four degrees. 1 wonder how many mainland states can match that kind of wild variation?'

  He spoke also of the famous blue norther, which had amazed Texans since the days of Cabeza de Vaca: 'These phenomenal drops in temperature can occur during any month of the year, but of course they're most spectacular during the summer months, when the sudden drop is conspicuous, but the daddy of all blue northers hit the third of February in 1899. Temperature at noon in many parts of the state, a hundred and one. Temperature not long thereafter, minus three, a preposterous drop of a hundred and four degrees.'

  But what interested me even more were his statistics on 1 exas droughts: 'Every decade we get a major jolt, worst ever in those bad years 1953 to 1957. Much worse than the so-called Dust Bowl years. We really suffered, and the law of probability assures us that one of these days we'll suffer again.'

  Clay was a man of great common sense. After decades of studying Texas weather, he had come to see the state as a mammoth battleground over which and on which the elements waged incessant war, with powerful effect upon the people who occupied that ground: 'No human being would settle here, with our incredibly hot summers and our violent storms from the heavens and the sea, if he did not relish the struggle and feel that with courage he could survive. What other state has tornadoes and hurricanes that kill more than sixty people year after year? And blue northers^ and drought and hundred-degree days for two whole months?' He looked at me, and knowing one of my preoccupations, added: And a constant drop in its aquifers? This is heroic land and it demands heroic people.'