San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Book tells howSan Antonio became the city it is today
How does one write a history of San Antonio’s economic and political development, from its founding in 1718 to as recently as 2017?
David R. Johnson, author of “In the Loop: A Political and Economic History of San Antonio,” found the task not easy at all. Apparently no one else had ever attempted to write a truly comprehensive history of the Alamo City as a living, breathing, dynamically growing and changing social organism.
He was well prepared to for the job, having delved deeply into urban studies and classical theories of urban development at the University of Illinois in the 1960s under the tutelage of the late Richard C. Wade, described in his obituary in The New York Times as “a pioneer in the study of urban history.”
It takes a certain kind of obsession to read all the available San Antonio City Council minutes from 1836 to the present day, exhaustively search online newspaper archives to follow the lives of local leaders across decades, and dig in the Bexar County database, year after year, for 19th and 20th century property records.
Johnson did all that as well as interviewing civic leaders over the course of three decades.
Year after year, he conducted exhaustive research while also teaching a steady stream of students about the politics and history of San Antonio, along with many other subjects, at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
The fascinating product of his labors was published last month by Trinity University Press.
Johnson’s 1984 book “The Politics of San Antonio: Community, Progress and Power,” cowritten with John A. Booth and Richard C. Harris, has long served many a San Antonio civic leader as a handbook to understanding issues unique to the city. “In the Loop” bodes to do the same for new generations of leaders and citizen activists for some time to come.
Now retired and living with his wife, Margaret, in North Carolina, Johnson took some time recently to talk about some of the key themes and stories in his book.
One theme that recurs throughout “In the Loop” is the longstanding conflict between advocates of “boosterism” — who advocated for city subsidies for development of infrastructure to boost growth and increased property taxes — and “frugalists,” who opposed such measures.
“It was the Germans who were largely in the frugalist camp, although I don’t like that term,” Johnson said. “We have to remember that they came from the liberal political tradition in Europe, which is a term that is very different from what people today know as ‘liberalism,’ for they believed in very limited government.”
Johnson chronicles several very strong 19th century mayors who pursued what might be called a “booster” agenda, backed by groups of businessmen who were advocating for the development of San Antonio as a tourist and convention destination,
facilitated by railroad ventures that did not always succeed.
Bryan Callaghan emerged as perhaps the most influential of such mayors, developing a culture of civic administration some have called “bossism.”
“Reformers have often mischaracterized the political system of ‘bossism’ as one that is fundamentally undemocratic, but in fact the boss system in its time was kind of the epitome of democracy,” Johnson said.
Strong mayors in San Antonio “worked with coalitions of influential politicians to win elections and adopt agendas that reflected
those coalitions,” he said.
In his book, Johnson recounts how frugalists and boosters competed and at times even cooperated — such as when Maury Maverick and Walter McAllister, men from opposite sides of the political spectrum — joined forces to endorse a frugalist agenda. McAllister in the late 1940s became a major advocate for the adoption of councilmanager government.
Such efforts in time lead to the voters’ adoption of a new charter in 1951 that institutionalized a professional city manager as chief executive officer of the city, and theoretically weakened the
powers of the mayor.
Shortly thereafter, according to Johnson, the Good Government League dominated council politics, making decisions behind closed doors, until its “meltdown” amid accusations of malfeasance and the voters’ adoption of a district-based City Council in 1977 after some pressure from the Department of Justice.
Johnson writes in his introduction that when he arrived in San Antonio in 1974, he marveled at its “small town” ambiance and sensed that “something else was going on here that was different from what I had learned in the big city models of urban development. What I found was that it was the ordinary citizens as much as the established leaders who were making a difference in the politics of the city.”
Johnson found plenty of evidence of such citizen involvement in the 1970s and 1980s, and he devotes considerable ink to recounting how Communities Organized for Public Service built upon early citizen activism in the 1960s to demand major changes for the Mexican-American community in boisterous City Council meetings during the administration of Mayor Charles Becker.
Perhaps the part of “In the Loop” that has the greatest relevance for contemporary readers is in the chapter titled “A Vulnerable Unity: 1974-1991.”
There, Johnson recounts how USAA executive Gen. Robert McDermott, Mayor Lila Cockrell and City Councilman Henry Cisneros would emerge as partners in an unprecedented effort to unite conflicting interest in a major effort to develop the city.”
“When McDermott founded the Economic Development Foundation in 1974 to promote local economic growth, he had no connection with city government,” Johnson said. “When he began to see how Lila Cockrell and Henry Cisneros were working together on City Council, though, he becomes attracted to working with her. She was politically conservative, as he was, and soon he was asking Lila for advice. She, in time, connected him with Henry Cisneros.”
Johnson’s account of how these three leaders collaborated extensively on projects affecting every aspect of San Antonio’s modern development, including Cisneros’ deep interest in reviving downtown San Antonio, plus the development of the South Texas Medical Center through the leadership of the San Antonio Medical Foundation, is a key part of the book.
Johnson’s penetrating profiles of former mayors Cockrell and Cisneros, together with his insights into McDermott’s thinking, reveal his valuable perspective on San Antonio’s development.
“While the frugalists were the dominant force until the 1970s,” Johnson said, “McDermott, Cockrell and Cisneros started working together in a hiatus in their influence and made it possible for them to succeed. If they hadn’t worked together, the growth San Antonio enjoyed in recent decades would not have happened.”