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Overview
There is the story the Lone Star State likes to tell about itself—and then there is the reality, a Texas past that bears little resemblance to the manly Anglo myth of Texas exceptionalism that maintains a firm grip on the state’s historical imagination. Lone Star Mind takes aim at this traditional narrative, holding both academic and lay historians accountable for the ways in which they craft the state’s story. A clear-sighted, far-reaching work of intellectual history, this book marshals a wide array of pertinent scholarship, analysis, and original ideas to point the way toward a new “usable past” that twenty-first-century Texans will find relevant.
Ty Cashion fixes T. R. Fehrenbach’s Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans in his crosshairs in particular, laying bare the conceptual deficiencies of the romantic and mythic narrative the book has served to codify since its first publication in 1968. At the same time, Cashion explores the reasons why the collective efforts of university-trained scholars have failed to diminish the appeal of the state’s iconic popular culture, despite the fuller and more accurate record these historians have produced.
Framing the search for a collective Texan identity in the context of a post-Christian age and the end of Anglo-male hegemony, Lone Star Mind illuminates the many historiographical issues besetting the study of American history that will resonate with scholars in other fields as well. Cashion proposes that a cultural history approach focusing on the self-interests of all Texans is capable of telling a more complete story—a story that captures present-day realities.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806161525 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2018 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 296 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Ty Cashion is Professor of History at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, and is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. He lives in The Woodlands, Texas, and Montréal, Canada.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE TRADITIONAL MIND
Texas Identity and the Conventional Narrative in Historical Perspective
John Connally was "the greatest Texas governor of the century" because he "saw the dark side of the Texas stereotype — a self-satisfaction, a narrowness, a confusion of size with greatness, and an obsession with myth that kept the state from realizing its full potential."
— Texas Monthly editor Paul Burka
True Texans do not spend much time agonizing over their self- identity. They know who they are, even if at heart it is only an essence, something part ideal and part caricature that casts them into a role they are capable of playing with uninhibited gusto. For most of them it begins with a sense of exceptionalism that John Steinbeck expressed so succinctly in his Travels with Charley when he wrote that "Texas is a state of mind." That simple but loaded quote has launched more studies by native scribes determined to fathom the Texas mystique than any other single reference. If these lesser wordsmiths had been bound to full disclosure regarding the way the Californian appraised what was going on inside that Texan mind, however, they might have been reluctant to acknowledge him at all.
Lost among Steinbeck's many ego-stroking compliments was the opinion that Texans removed from their immediate environment could be "a little frightened and very tender in their feelings," manifesting a childlike state of mind characterized by "boasting, arrogance, and noisy complacency." Or maybe they overlooked the fact that the third and then-current Mrs. Steinbeck was a Texan, which might have compelled her husband to tread lightly when recording his observations concerning the integrity of that Texas state of mind. Indeed, he couched his criticism in such elegant prose and surrounded it with so many expressions of affection that only by taking everything at face value do the implications become clear. His estimation of this "Texas-of-the-mind fable [as] often synthetic, sometimes untruthful, and frequently romantic" can be interpreted in only so many ways, and none of them is entirely flattering. Steinbeck's consolation that such lack of substance "in no way diminishes its strength as a symbol" might also appear at a distance to have been a polite way of saying that Texans are all hat and no cattle.
What others think about them matters a great deal to true Texans, but it seldom tempers their own expressions of the way they see themselves. More practical are Texans who filter their self-identity through regional affinities, especially in places where the local history is rooted in antebellum culture or lashed to a past where Anglo settlement did not begin until after Appomattox. Most true Texans, at least in practice, are chameleonic products of this dual regional heritage. They possess the ability to change shape, figuratively speaking, whenever occasion impels them. Being both southerners and westerners entitles them to wallow in the ennobling aura of the Lost Cause, free of its saturnine debilities on account of their triumphant role in the Winning of the West.
Discussing the ambiguity of identity as a concept, James Cobb, in Away Down South (2005), contended that it "typically refers to a perception of reality rather than to reality itself." Using the South and the North as examples, he insisted that this "matter of perception versus reality is compounded by the fact that, historically, identities have not existed in isolation but always in relation to other perceived oppositional identities against which they are defined." Texas identity in this regard is further complicated by perceptions of exceptionalism that must be factored into the equation even as others try to distinguish to what extent the state is influenced by its ties to the South and to the West. In his essay "Texas Identity," Walter Buenger made the perceptive observation that "more often than not, Texas was American and universal instead of exclusively southern, western, or exceptional." Then, of course, there are the Borderlands to consider, which adds another layer of complexity to this equation that will be explored further in chapter 3.
Even so, true Texans who consider themselves Americans first would be just as likely to insist they are at least a special breed of American. Such an attitude represents a pretention of exceptionalism consummated in the blood of heroes at the Alamo and birthed in the blood of the vanquished at San Jacinto, where Santa Anna, the self- described "Napoleon of the West," learned a big lesson: "Don't mess with Texas." As gratuitous as this whimsical notion of exceptionalism might sound, it peels away unevenly, leaving too little merit for most who claim it and exposing too much substance for those who would dismiss it out of hand.
Texans have earned a reputation for many things, and as a hard-and- fast but admittedly self-declared rule, they come in only one size: big. Unfortunately, being known as big thinkers has somehow eluded them. True Texans fancy themselves more as men of action and regard bullheadedness as an admirable character trait. Naturally, such qualities leave them little inclined to pause and reflect abstractly on the meaning of it all. Such an attitude raises the question, but only rhetorically: Why would a people largely blind to error and veritably hostile to voices of dissent have any use for self-edification?
The unapologetic view of history that true Texans embrace makes perfect sense, given the premise of a traditional metanarrative that fosters an attitude of unqualified exceptionalism. While polemical minds have found this concept a malleable accompaniment for a variety of arguments, they would surely agree that exceptionalism cannot be used interchangeably with mere distinctiveness. Those who would contend that Texas is indeed sui generis in the American experience should be prepared to make a convincing case that parallels their understanding of observations Alexis de Tocqueville made about the fledgling United States. To wit, Texas is qualitatively different from other American states and regions in much the same way that the United States is different from other countries of the world.
Looking at the big picture from the perspective of true Texans, the state's history represents the apex of America's westward movement, revolving mostly around glory and bragging rights. The past is not about self-awareness. It is about telling anybody within earshot that Texas is a special place, populated by rugged and persistent individualists. True Texans in fact are convinced that they stand a little taller than everybody else. In a country full of people who are full of themselves, there could probably be as many claimants to exceptionalism as there are states or regions, but only one could make the boast of being Texceptional in the American experience. While this neologism has not become part of the true Texans' lexicon, it is somehow appropriate, given the reputation of Texans as notorious braggarts. In fact, there are people all over the planet who somehow find this character trait endearing, and they accept Texas exceptionalism as an article of faith. Texans themselves will tell you their state is like a whole 'nother country. But can the concept hold up beyond the boundaries of the Texan mind and its infatuation with bigness?
A MAN'S LAND — AND HISTORY
Before proceeding, it becomes imperative to cover an important premise. These true Texans referred to thus far embody a closed society informed by the version of Texas history that T. R. Fehrenbach encapsulated in 1968. As previously discussed, his publication, Lone Star, established him as the popular authority on the subject. This reductive synthesis, the product of a tightly projected interpretive arc, assembled a quintessential cast and compressed the plots from a thousand and more Texas adventure tales. It then unpackaged them in serial fashion, each episode connected by a metanarrative that beat the steady drum of a destiny reserved exclusively for Anglo men. It is this epic version of the Texas past that frames the traditional history most immediately familiar to true Texans, such that every romantic account that found its way into Fehrenbach's opus could be essentially regarded as "the rest of the story" that complements his fundamental chronicle.
Fehrenbach never gained approbation in academic circles, however, because his undocumented saga represented a model of intellectual atavism, composed on assumptions and concepts that were being discredited by scholars even as he was regenerating them for mass consumption. None of that, however, stopped Fehrenbach from concluding that the product of Texas exceptionalism — his true Texans — represented the perfection of the "Old American stock" who "wrested the land from the wilderness, the Indians, and the Mexicans."
As suggested, there was nothing original about his estimation of the Texan identity. It was merely the bald summation of a metanarrative that bubbled up from the strangely carbonated canon on which his survey relied. Fehrenbach also became the de facto spokesman for true Texans everywhere largely because he did not "do nuance." That freed him from the kinds of distractions that normally consume the energy of scholars, such as weighing different points of view and broadening the story to include issues that the average reader might regard as parenthetical to the narrative, like, for example, the last fifty years of the twentieth century. For Fehrenbach, this was an insignificant span of time during which nothing really noteworthy happened, according to the foreword he composed for the second edition of Lone Star, published in 2000. He became the champion for true Texans by delivering an emotively styled narrative with the force of a frontal assault that resonated among those who grew up with the same romantic view of the past. It was a story justified by raw might and unburdened by any misgivings over messy details and contrary interpretations.
The true Texans in Fehrenbach's sweeping saga, besieged by enemies on every side and locked in a winner-take-all endurance contest, emerged on the other side of an experience so unusual in American history that they represented to him a genuine ethnicity. In the brief Seven Keys to Texas (1983), a kind of exegesis that followed Lone Star, Fehrenbach's ethnic Texan presented a stark contrast to Indians and "Mexicans" — and presumably by omission from his rationale, African Americans — who could never be true Texans. Still, the part that people of color played is no less important in the traditional history. After all, someone had to play the role of foil. Without a mudsill class and losers of the West to contrast notions of rugged individualism, most true Texans might feel compelled to inquire what kind of historical legacy has left them with nothing but swagger to show for all the swag their forebears squeezed out of the wilderness and the land's original inhabitants.
From another angle, the history embraced by true Texans, or the Texas myth, as Lou Rodenberger and Sylvia Grider preferred to call the traditional history in their introduction to Texas Women Writers (1997), is almost exclusively masculine in character and content. Fittingly, Lone Star provides the archetypal model. Never for more than a few lines, and always parenthetical to the exploits of men, the few women capable of emerging by name from the shadows of Fehrenbach's epic narrative are objectified as victims and ideals or sensationalized by distinguishing themselves through their manly exploits in a masculine environment.
Take Granny Parker, for instance. A month after the battle of San Jacinto, she was "stripped, pinned to the ground with a lance, and raped" by Comanches. Or thirteen-year-old Matilda Lockhart, ravaged by those same fiends almost a decade later, her face "full of bruises, and sores, and her nose actually burnt off to the bone." Never mind that the rape and disfigurement are the documented products of overactive imaginations. Then there are the models of feminine ideals, mothers and Madonnas, such as "heroic pioneer" Jane Long, left by her filibustering husband to fend for herself at a makeshift fort on Point Bolivar with "two tiny children, and a single Negro girl."
At the other end of the spectrum was The Flat's Lottie Deno, surrounded by trail drivers and buffalo hunters — "a rough, bearded, dirty, violent set of men." There, at the river-bottom village below Fort Griffin in the 1870s, the imperious red-haired poker queen ran her game, "her cold-eyed gunmen all around." Of course, there was also Miriam "Ma" Ferguson, the accidental governor, who in 1924 ran in her husband's stead after he was impeached and barred from holding office. Minimizing the significance of the state's first woman governor, Fehrenbach asserted that it was Pa who "entered his wife's name in the Democratic primary," and afterward it was he who became "the governor of Texas in everything but name." While acknowledging the forty-fifth governor of Texas, Ann Richards, who ascended to the state's highest office on her own merits, he dismissively contended that "she had no real political agenda," editorializing that "many of her appointments ... were disastrous."
Most often women in Fehrenbach's Lone Star appear at best ancillary to the context and are typically portrayed as somewhere between pitiable and contemptible. To illustrate, the author twice mentioned that among the prospective colonists under the command of seventeenth-century explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, were "some poor French girls who had come seeking husbands." Ultimately, he wrote, after all the healthy men set forth for the Illinois country to seek aid, "the whooping Karankawas carried off the children and many of the young Frenchwomen, who, to their horror, at last found husbands in the New World." Later, when Fehrenbach covered the "Runaway Scrape," his abstract description portraying "columns of women and children clogging the frightful roads ... behind the Texas army" served only to illuminate the motivations and feelings of the men: "Watching it, one of [Sam] Houston's captains, Moseley Baker, broke down and cried."
Scholarship focusing on these women in both circumstances underscores what Fehrenbach missed by casually dismissing their historical contributions. The filles du roi (King's Daughters), a program by which Louis XIV supported the emigration and settlement of young women elsewhere in New France, no doubt provided a feature that La Salle drew upon in planning his Texas venture. Otherwise, tracing the fate of colonist Marie-Madeleine Talon through sources that were available to Fehrenbach presents an adventure as remarkable as that of any man he recounted in Lone Star. Talon, among the survivors of La Salle's Fort Saint Louis recaptured by Spaniard Alonso de León, was removed to Mexico City, where she became part of the viceroy's court. Later, she made her way to Spain and eventually returned to New France, contributing to the settlement of Montréal.
Moreover, contributors to the essays in Women and the Texas Revolution (2012) treat such seemingly incidental women as those who brought Moseley Baker to tears as complex historical figures capable of acting in their own interests. Light T. Cummins completely recasts the Runaway Scrape, projecting the event from the perspective of women who evacuated their families in advance of the Mexican army. Collectively, the essays in this edited volume conclude that this larger watershed episode, which extended to Anglo men a host of open-ended benefits, effected little improvement for Anglo women. In regard to women of color, it rolled back rights and opportunities for Tejanas, confirmed the wholesale loss of freedom for African Americans, and cast those belonging to First Nations into mortal uncertainty.
Despite Fehrenbach's palpable want of appreciation for the historical role of women, to accuse him of misogyny would be inaccurate. More precisely, women in the traditional view of the past simply do not merit consideration. In the author's frontier society, men socialized, fought beside, lived with, needed, and admired other men, but they could easily live without women.
"The horse," Fehrenbach ventured "was not mere transportation, but the most valuable possession the border Texan had." As if to underscore this conviction, he added that "the Texan's second most treasured object was his wife. [Ranger captain] Jack Hays and his boys could live without women; their hours were numbered without a fleet horse." When discussing how Mexican dictator Santa Anna began passing restrictive laws prior to the rebellion he set into motion, Fehrenbach noted that "the attitudes, prejudices, and folkways of the Anglo-Texans" made it impossible for them to submit. "They thought of themselves as free men, only minimally subject to any government." Representative of many such instances where the author referred to collective populations, the idea of using language akin to "men and women" evidently never occurred to him. With the Civil War appearing imminent, the author commented: "The great American tragedy was that in both Texas and in Northern States otherwise decent men had come to believe in diabolism and depravity on the other side."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Lone Star Mind"
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Table of Contents
PREFACE,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION Promise and Peril beyond the Cultural Turn,
1. THE TRADITIONAL MIND Texas Identity and the Conventional Narrative in Historical Perspective,
2. THE END OF TEXAS EXCEPTIONALISM Exploded Myths, Selective Memories, and Notions of a Usable Past,
3. WHISTLING DIXIE AND CHANNELING TURNER Echoes from the Old South and Incipient Voices of the Texan West,
4. WHO OWNS THE TEXAS PAST? The Cultural Turn and the Politics of History,
5. TEXAS HISTORY ON THE HORIZON Parallax Views,
NOTES,
BIBLIOGRAPHY,
INDEX,