‘Mud & Money’ offers succinct, earthy Houston history
“Mud and Money” could easily be the perfect history book for its chosen subject, the city of Houston.
At 72 pages, it’s possible to ingest the book during a leisurely afternoon, maybe twice. Subtitled “A Timeline of Houston’s History,” the book serves up our local past in paragraph-size bites, from the comings and goings of eons-ago Native Americans all the way to 2017’s one-two punch of Hurricane Harvey and the Astros’ first World Series championship.
Houstonians with more than a flicker of interest in local history, however, might spend days poring over the wealth of images depicting bygone people and places — minor league baseballers the Houston Buffalos in action at West End Park (near present-day Fourth Ward), the ticker-tape parade honoring Howard Hughes, a streetcar on the Magnolia line, the old PanAmerican Ballroom on North Main.
“I really wanted to find pictures that even the hardcore Houston history buffs had not seen before, and hopefully I did that,” says author and local historian Mike Vance. “There are certainly some that have been used elsewhere, but I think there are some in there that have probably never been in print.”
If facts about Houston are all you’re after, you won’t be disappointed either. You’ll learn the year of the Houston Police Department’s founding (1841); the amount of acreage George Hermann gifted the city in 1914, which became his namesake park and hospital (285); and the number of vehicles that rolled in 1988’s original Art Car Parade (40).
Yet between the lines, the story “Mud and Money” tells is even more fascinating.
Because Houston has focused on business and development from its earliest days, the march of industry also helped enable civil rights expansion, albeit largely under the radar. In the 1910s and ’20s, for example, many recent Mexican immigrants found work at the ever-expanding Ship Channel — which, Vance notes, “they were calling it a Ship Channel from almost Day One, definitely from (Houston founders) the Allen brothers’ time.”
The city “kept having jobs and more and more people moved here, and they’re all coming here for money,” says Vance.
Likewise, the region’s oppressive climate encouraged all manner of wildcats and crusaders to seek their fortunes here. It didn’t deter them, at least.
The biggest theme, though, is how a multitude of ethnicities came to call the area home, a blending of cultures that happened steadily and, for the most part, peacefully.
Judging by the image modern Houston projects to the world, it seems almost as if one day it just dawned on the city that it had become the nation’s most diverse — and what a fantastic selling point that would be, by the way.
Far less attention has been paid to how it got that way. From its inception onward, this city has been known for looking forward, not back.
“I think most Houstonians could do with a little education about our own history,” offers Vance.
He says he’d like “Mud and Money” to act as a sort of primer for the recent arrivals who are “trying to get a grasp of where we came from.” But not just newcomers stand to benefit from a fresh look at Houston’s past.
By hopscotching between a half-dozen or so frequently overlapping topics — call them climate, commerce, education, transportation/infrastructure, politics and culture — the narrative structure of “Mud and Money” is nebulous at best. But perhaps that’s as it should be; anyone expecting things to line up neatly is living in the wrong town.
All the same, certain inflection points can’t help but stand out. In the census of 1850, almost 15 years after Houston’s incorporation, roughly 13 percent of Harris County’s population of just under 4,800 people was enslaved. A century and a half later, no one racial or ethnic minority was dominant among the millions swarming a metro area bigger than some Eastern states.
But for a long time, “we were a very Southern city, and that includes everything that came with that,” Vance says. “This was not a good place to be AfricanAmerican.”
“It didn’t see the violence, I don’t think, that other places saw, (but) there was a lynching as late as 1928,” he adds. “That happened right before the Democratic convention.”
The 1928 Democratic National Convention, spearheaded by Houston banking/real estate/ media tycoon Jesse H. Jones, would be a turning point for the city — and not just because, four years later, the same Sam Houston Hall (later Coliseum) built for the convention would host a cattleman’s convention that grew into the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.
“Just like today, (reporters) show up for a big event and they want to do little color feature pieces that they’re sending back to hometown newspapers all over the country,” Vance says. “I think that was something that moved us forward as far as people around the country maybe thinking that we’re an actual, viable city.”
At the onset of the 1920s, however, the Ku Klux Klan had enough influence and visibility in Houston to proudly hold a torchlight parade down Main Street. Business leaders like John Henry Kirby and Joseph Cullinan helped rally public opinion against them — as did newspaperman Marcellus Foster, whose anti-Klan editorials for the Chronicle got a cross burned on his lawn.
“He was just a good old-fashioned muckraking journalist,” says Vance. “He’s at the top of the list as far as people that turned public opinion from tolerating to not tolerating the Klan.”
“Mud and Money” includes less savory moments of local history alongside the origins of institutions like NASA or the Houston Zoo. In 1958, another cross was burned at the home of Hattie Mae White, the first African-American elected to the
HISD board of trustees (and to any public office in Texas since 1900).
Twenty years later came the Moody Park riot on the near Northside, after two HPD officers who had been convicted of killing Joe Campos Torres, a Mexican-American Vietnam veteran, were given a probated sentence.
The book also highlights less heralded moments that nevertheless helped lead to lasting change, such as an NAACP-filed lawsuit in the early ’50s that called for the desegregation of Houston’s golf courses.
At that point, Vance says, the people calling the shots here began to read the writing on the wall.
“To people here in Houston, money was more important than whatever racist ideas that they held, (at least) as far as the business leaders,” he says.
Ultimately, “they understood that any sort of rioting or violence was going to cost them money, and they wanted a peaceful transition.”
Another reason Houston has become such a melting pot is almost embarrassingly simple: everybody eats.
Vance was working on another book, he recalls, when he came across a trial transcript from around 1908. People discussing eating at a Japanese restaurant and one said, “The one that was here?”
The answer came back: “No, no, the other Japanese restaurant that’s over here.”
“That kind of surprised me,” says Vance. “I wasn’t expecting that Houston had two Japanese restaurants in 1908, just a few blocks apart and apparently both popular enough that everybody knew where they were.”
In the generations to come, other cultures began successfully introducing their home cooking to the city at large — first Mexicans and Italians in the 1920s, and much later on Vietnamese, Africans and South Asians.
“I think that’s been the introduction to immigrant culture to a lot of other Houstonians,” says Vance. “They love the food, and through that you get to know a little bit more about the people.”