TEXAS: A MYTH NO MORE?
The Lone Star State, annexed by the U.S. in 1845, has a strong sense of self
Everybody knows Texas. Everybody. From Saginaw to Singapore, people have an image as soon as the name is mentioned. Somemay go old school and think of solitary cowpokes and ruthless Indians, or brave frontier fighters, fierce Texas Rangers and cattle to the horizon on unfenced ranches. Movie stuff.
For others, mechanical wells tirelessly pumping out liquid gold leap to mind. Or great vistas of a vast, flat nothing, or perhaps just a strange land of pickup trucks and country music and rodeos everywhere.
Then there’s the A word. Who doesn’t remember the Alamo? They may know little of what took place there, or even why it took place. But they know it more or less translated into the birth of a singular chunk of geography where everything is supposed to be different — maybe in a good way, maybe not.
Texas, it’s been said, is an idea as much as a state of the union. A bit like a country unto itself, which of course it was for a decade or so. It onlymakes sense that the biggest, proudest Texan of them all stands a bazillion feet tall and offers that perfect Texas greeting — “Howdy!” — to visitors at the state fair, which of course is the biggest in the land.
Texaswas admitted to the Union on Dec. 29, 1845, becoming the 28th state — 175 years ago.
If nothing else, the Lone Star State has a very strong sense of self. It embraces the
mythology of heroism writ large, how knowing sacrifice led to improbable victory, endowing its creation with special significance. There’s a reason that every seventh-grader is given an official account of how Texas came to be.
Historian H.W. Brands argues that seventh-grade Texas history is nothing less than a “rite of passage” for the state’s youth. It gives impressionable minds a lengthy dose of their origin story and a sense of who they really are. Some of them anyway.
Does it work? Nobel laureate John Steinbeck, who chronicled the Oklahoma exodus in “The Grapes of Wrath,” later offered up his take on a place like no other:
“Texas is a mystique closely approximating a religion,” the novelist famously wrote following a cross-country journey late in his life. “For all its enormous range of space, climate, and physical appearance, and for all the internal squabbles ... Texas has a tight cohesiveness perhaps stronger than any other section of America. Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study, and the passionate possession of all Texans.”
Problem is, Steinbeck wrote those words more than a half-century ago. Texas is not what it used to be, and neither is its history. Today, America is being dragged to a belated reconsideration of its
past. It seems fair to ask whether the mythology of Texas is bound to follow suit.
Time takes a toll, on landscape and legend alike. No more is Texas just the province of folks descended from rugged individualists who cast a skeptical eye toward government and outsiders and everything not Texan. For one thing, it’s now mostly urban, and as diverse in its population as any place in the nation. Immigration, legal and otherwise, from other countries and other states, has changed its appearance, culture, character and to some extent its politics.
The notion of a “Texas exceptionalism” — that this place retains a sense of real difference, a culture apart — has faded, said Brands, a historian at the University of Texas whose work includes a history of the American West.
People may well recognize the economic opportunities that have become synonymous with the Lone Star State, Brands said, but that doesn’t equate with a particular identity.
“This is not a pressing issue today,” Brands said. “It’s a curiosity piece for younger people, not a big deal anymore.”
For those somewhat older, it’s not so cut and dried. The idea of being a “true” Texan instead of a mere Texas resident is not easily extinguished. Witness the increasingly nasty quarrel over the remodeling of Alamo Plaza, in which the lieutenant governor has clear ideas about how the
“The question is, does that story connect in any meaningful way?”
Stephen Harrigan, author of the recent Texas mega-history “Big Wonderful Thing”
“Cradle of Texas Liberty” and its surroundings, especially the monument celebrating the fallen, must appear. The Confederacy is one thing. The martyrdom of those yanked by destiny to this place beyond the American frontier is something else.
To some people, Texas remains more than an address.
“It’s not as defining as it was in the past, and the state has undergone profound changes with demographics,” said Stephen Harrigan, author of the recent Texas mega-history “Big Wonderful Thing.” “But I always tell people that if you want to know whether Texas identity is still alive, go to Bucees. It’s an emporium of Texas identity. There’s a vestigial longing to be part of that identity. Whether it’s screamingly relevant is another question.”
And what it even means is yet another one. Like it or not, history is a world forever at war with itself. Accepted truth may be written in stone, but even the sturdiest statues can be toppled. Long told tales are challenged by fresh eyes and more critical minds, not to mention those whose ancestors were ignored in the old stories.
Texas is not exempt. “Truth” is revised. Along the way, unseemly artifacts of a different era are kicked to the curb. No longer does the state fair have a special day acknowledging the Ku Klux Klan. Or Confederate heritage in general.
Some things, of course, are not in dispute. Noone can say Texas is not big. Or that a couple hundred men didn’t die at the Alamo at the hands of a determined enemy. Or that the Spindletop gusher didn’t change everything.
But facts are not stories. To the keepers of the flame, Texas has always been more than the sum of its parts — legendary in the most literal way. The founding narrative told of Anglo settlers willing to die to wrest this large Mexican state away from a government that abused its people and just basically didn’t deserve to keep it.
A lot was left out: the desire by some settlers to add another slave state to the U.S.; the longtime Tejano residents who didn’t like the new arrivals, many of dubious character, deciding that insurrection was the best path; the treatment of native inhabitants as anything more than savages.
Yet a flawed tale is a tale nonetheless. Earlier Texans believed in a special connection to their land that surpasses — they think — the natural loyalty of others to theirs. With ranches bigger than Rhode Island and a resource that changed the world and ingenuity that allowed baseball to be played indoors and men to frolic on the moon, Texas stood apart.
As the baby boomers pass, those nurtured on the old narrative become fewer. Harrigan believes that a “gravitational pull” toward traditional assumptions of a uniqueness won’t die outright.
“The question is, does that story connect in any meaningful way?” he said. “I resist the idea that everything has to be turned on its head. The important thing is not to subvert the traditional story but to make it credible, to add nuance and complexity to what has been a very simple and one-dimensional story.”
One Texas historian has written a book proposing exactly that. In “Lone Star Mind: Reimagining Texas History,” Ty Cashion takes on both T.R. Fehrenbach’s 1968 bestseller and the more progressive assertion that the story of Texas is part and parcel of the larger narrative of racist white American hegemony.
For the casual consumer of Texas history, Fehrenbach’s “Lone Star” was the final word, celebrating as it did “the Texan mystique … created by the chemistry of the frontier in the crucible of history and forged into an enduring state of heart and mind.”
Fehrenbach wasn’ t much interested in nuance, by his own admission, or what happened in Texas in the 20th century and beyond, viewing its exceptionalism as something stamped on it at birth by rough-hewn Anglo Celts. For Cashion and other scholars, that gave credence to the idea of a “true” Texan, someone convinced they instinctively know who they are, resulting in “part ideal and part caricature that casts them into a role they play with uninhibited gusto.”
Cashion, ensconced in the history department at Sam Houston State University, pleads for a new conception, abandoning “overpowering myths perpetuating hackneyed stereotypes.” He doesn’t promote a scorchedearth revisionism when telling the story of Texas. But he has no use for those believing in “exceptionalism,” however one chooses to define it. “A dubious fabrication,” he calls it. Even the most loyal of Davy Crockett’s admirers deserve better.
“Traditional history will continue to make sense only to those unwilling to concede that irresistible cultural forces are inexorably shifting the terrain beneath them,” he writes.
What to take its place? Something more inclusive, more complete. Something that forever puts the lie to the idea of a “true” Texan and all that comes with it.