The Red State Blues

How Did Blacks Become Democrats and Republicans Racists? Part II

2012-01-27T18:35:00.001-08:00

The last time African Americans in significant numbers seriously considered voting for a Republican candidate was in the 1960 showdown between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. Both candidates largely overlooked the civil rights struggle in the 1960 election. Several signs pointed to a favorable year for the Democrats, out of power in the White House for the eight years of Dwight Eisenhower, but the party still relied heavily on its Southern segregationist wing.

Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, who waged an unsuccessful campaign to win the party’s vice presidential nomination in 1956, opened the race as a top contender because of family money, a highly publicized war record, his personal attractiveness, and the glamour of his wife, the former Jacquelyn Bouvier. Kennedy feared alienating key white Southern politicians as he fought an uphill primary battle with two-time presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson, the favorite of the liberal wing, and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson of Texas, who had the support of many key Democratic leaders in the South such as U.S. House Speaker Sam Rayburn, who also hailed from the Lone Star State.

Kennedy avoided discussing civil rights issues as much as he could during his primary battle, and he actively courted and won an early endorsement from arch-segregationist Alabama Gov. John Patterson. During debates on a 1957 Civil Rights Act, John Kennedy had sided with Southern segregationists on some issues. Noting that Eisenhower had pulled Southern whites into the Republican camp in his 1952 and 1956 campaigns against Stevenson, the eventual GOP nominee, Vice President Richard Nixon, also sought the backing of whites in Dixie who supported Jim Crow laws.

New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller attempted to frustrate Vice President Nixon’s campaign for the GOP nomination by appealing to liberals within the party on civil rights. Many African Americans grew disgusted with the continued dominance of Southern segregationists in the Democratic Party and had voted for Eisenhower in 1956. Some African Americans felt reassured by Eisenhower’s use of the National Guard to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. Nelson Rockefeller believed that the Republicans had a chance to win the black vote in 1960 and that this could give the party an edge in close races in major Northern and Midwestern states. Rockefeller demanded a stronger than planned civil rights plank in the 1960 Republican platform and Nixon, also hopeful of winning black support, acquiesced. The platform pledged “vigorous enforcement of civil rights laws,” support for “court orders for school desegregation” and creation of “a Commission on Equal Job Opportunity” and “Action to ensure that public transportation and other government authorized services shall be free from segregation.”

Nixon tripped over himself trying not to alienate black voters while at the same time hoping to carry white Southern voters as successfully as Eisenhower had in 1952 and 1956. Kennedy, meanwhile, described segregation as “irrational,” but was largely unaware of the conditions faced by African Americans in the South and seemed to have little emotional investment in the issue. Yet, he realized that the black vote could swing six of the eight most populous states his way in the November elections. Liberal advisors persuaded him to reach out to African Americans. Once, while driving his red convertible through Georgetown on his way to the Senate, Kennedy spotted Harris Wofford trying to get a cab. Wofford was an attorney advising Democratic campaign on civil rights. Kennedy pulled over, picked Wofford up and, as his left hand tapped on the car door, he said to Wofford, “Now in five minutes, tick off the ten things that a president ought to do to clear up this goddamned civil rights mess.” Kennedy soon promised that with a “stroke of the pen” he would end discrimination in federally funded housing. An incident in Georgia, however, provided an important, lucky opportunity for the Democrat to win over African American voters.

On October 19, less than a month before the election, police arrested civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., along with 53 other African American protestors at Rich’s Department Store in Atlanta, for refusing to leave tables at the segregated Magnolia Room Restaurant. Five days later, authorities released the other protestors from jail, but King was sentenced to four months’ hard labor for supposedly driving with a suspended license, and was transferred to Reidsville State Prison. Members of the King family feared that the minister would be murdered while in custody.

Nixon instructed aides to tell the press that the Vice President would offer no comment on the issue. The Kennedy campaign, however, saw an immediate opportunity to gain ground with African American voters. Wofford feared for King’s safety and sent an urgent message to Kennedy, who was campaigning in Chicago and in Michigan. Kennedy placed an immediate call to Mrs. King and told her he would see if he could assist the family.

Campaign manager Bobby Kennedy phoned the judge who had sentenced King. “It just burned me up . . . to think of that bastard sentencing a citizen to four months of hard labor for a minor traffic offense and screwing up my brother’s campaign and making our country look ridiculous in front of the world,” Bobby Kennedy later said. “. . . I made it clear that if he was a decent American he would let King out of jail by sundown.” It took a little longer, but within days authorities released the minister from jail. The incident got relatively little coverage in the white press, but word spread quickly in the African American community. The civil rights leader’s father, the influential minister Martin Luther King, Sr., had said that, “I had expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion. But now he can be my president, Catholic or whatever he is. It took courage to call my daughter-in-law at a time like this. He has the moral courage to stand up for what he knows is right. I’ve got all my votes and I’ve got a suitcase and I’m going to take them up there and dump them in his lap.”

A blue-bound election pamphlet distributed to African American church congregations quoted the elder King’s endorsement and spread among black congregations in the days leading to the presidential election. Kennedy himself later laughed at the mixed message contained in the African American minister’s words. “He was going to vote against me because I was a Catholic, but since I called his daughter-in-law, he voted for me. That’s a helluva bigoted statement, wasn’t it? Imagine Martin Luther King, Jr., having a bigot for a father.” Then, acknowledging the controversies surrounding Joseph P. Kennedy, Kennedy grinned as he observed, “Well, we all have fathers, don’t we?” Kennedy had won over black voters worried about his Catholic background.

The assassination of John Kennedy November 22, 1963 put Vice President Lyndon Johnson in the White House. Johnson might be the most complicated figure in American political life in the mid- and late-twentieth century. Often crude, he nevertheless proved to be perhaps the greatest political tactician of his era. The graduate of Southwest Texas State Teachers College, a small Central Texas campus, he often suffered from an inferiority complex in the company of the Ivy Leaguers peopling the Kennedy Administration, yet his ambitions bordered on the grandiose. A small-town Southerner, Johnson would use the word “nigger” in private conversation but still devoted much of his public life to promoting civil rights and fighting poverty. An inveterate compromiser, Johnson would also propose some of the boldest reform legislation in American history.

Johnson’s early career as a grade-school teacher would shape his political worldview. During the 1928-29 school year, he taught fifth-, sixth- and seventh-graders at a tiny, segregated Mexican American school in Cotulla, Texas, just south of San Antonio. Three-quarters of the Mexican population in the town, according to Johnson biographer Robert Dallek, lived in “hovels or dilapidated shanties without indoor plumbing or electricity.” The parents worked at area ranches and farms for “slave wages.” Johnson would later recall that his heart broke looking at students “mired in the slums . . . lashed by prejudice . . . buried half-alive in illiteracy.” He remembered looking at their eyes and seeing “a quizzical expression on their faces” as they wondered, “Why don’t people like me? Why do they hate me because I am brown?”

Johnson was often harsh and sometimes intolerant as a teacher, using corporal punishment if he caught students speaking Spanish, but he also felt empathy for his young charges’ poverty. Johnson would say, “I was determined [to help] those poor little kids. I saw hunger in their eyes and pain in their bodies. Those little brown bodies had so little and needed so much I was determined to spark something inside of them, to fill their souls with ambition and interest and belief in the world, to help them finish their education. Then the rest would take care of itself.” Johnson may have underestimated the power of racism to deter educated, ambitious people of color, but he devoted himself to his students, distributing toothpaste sent to him by his mother and starting extracurricular activities like debate, track, baseball, spelling bees, and band.

Johnson carried his conflicted personality, which was both bigoted and empathetic, to his job as director of the New Deal-created National Youth Administration in Texas from 1935 to 1937. Though he sometimes accommodated local anti-Mexican prejudice in his hiring of unemployed youths on projects such as constructing roadside parks, he was more assertive in recruiting and promoting African Americans. Under Johnson, the NYA created Freshman College Centers for students who had received a high school education but could not, with their small NYA salaries, afford tuition at local colleges. Under this program, students could take a pair of college courses tuition-free, improving their education and their resumes at the same time.

Early in his Senate career, Johnson intervened in the controversy surrounding Private Felix Longoria. Longoria was killed in the Philippines during a volunteer mission in the closing days of World War II, and his body was shipped to a cemetery in Three Rivers, Texas. But the funeral director refused to allow a wake to be held in the chapel, supposedly because there had been disorder at previous Mexican-American funerals and because “the whites would not like” sharing the funeral grounds with Mexicans. Dr. Hector Garcia, a Corpus Christi Mexican American civil rights activist, contacted Johnson, who arranged a funeral with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery on February 16, 1949. Johnson and a personal representative of President Harry Truman attended the service with the Longoria family.

In 1955, Johnson’s peers selected him as Senate majority leader. “No longer the deferential youngster, Lyndon Johnson was now a towering presence in the Senate anterooms where deals were cut, a wheeler-dealer who poked his face within inches of his fellow senators, gripping their forearms with one hand, persuading, intimidating, and calling in debts to secure the votes he needed for advancing his legislative and personal agenda,” as one observer noted. Franklin Roosevelt had predicted that Johnson might become the first Southern president since antebellum times. With a White House bid in mind, in the late 1950s Johnson positioned himself as a racial moderate.

He was pointedly not asked to sign the so-called “Southern Manifesto” circulated among and supported by 101 members of the House of Representatives and the United States Senate. The 1956 document condemned the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown school desegregation order and said in part, “This unwarranted exercise of power by the Court, contrary to the Constitution, is creating chaos and confusion in the States principally affected. It is destroying the amicable relations between the white and Negro races that have been created through 90 years of patient effort by the good people of both races. It has planted hatred and suspicion where there has been heretofore friendship and understanding." Johnson, the Senate majority leader who was distrusted by his Dixie colleagues as a racial liberal, joined Tennessee senators Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore, Sr., as the lone Southern standouts in the Senate who did not lend their names to the Manifesto.

Lyndon Johnson also gave his critical support to the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the first voting rights law passed by the Congress since Reconstruction. Under this law, Congress established the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. The law empowered this division to investigate claims of voter harassment and racial discrimination by election officials. The Justice Department now could prosecute individuals conspiring to deny voting rights. The law also established a six-member United States Civil Rights Commission, which examined cases where voters were denied the ballot because of race. Johnson also proposed in 1959 a federal civil rights mediation board where disputes over elections could be resolved.

Johnson entered the 1960 Democratic presidential primary race, losing to Kennedy. He was selected as running mate because the party faithful worried about their prospects in Texas, a state that had gone for Eisenhower twice in the previous two presidential elections. Kennedy and Johnson proved a mismatch. The president and his brother Bobby saw Johnson as unsophisticated, and they underestimated his political skills. Johnson bridled at serving as junior partner to the younger Kennedy; Johnson had previously held seniority in the Senate.

Nevertheless, when Johnson spoke up, it could be with force. Johnson later recounted an anecdote: He was vice president and he asked his African American cook and her husband to drive him from Washington, D.C., to Texas. Their route took them through Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, and the entourage could find no restaurants or restrooms open to two of the three passengers. “Two people who worked for the Vice President of the United States peeing in a ditch . . . That’s not right,” Johnson would later drawl. As historian Matusow notes, Johnson was passionate, if ineffective, as head of the president’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity and he “urged Kennedy to tour every Southern state to tell white people in person that segregation was morally wrong, utterly unjustifiable, and in violation of the tenets of Christianity.”

Johnson frequently invoked his martyred predecessor as he pushed, needled and cajoled the Congress toward passage of his top legislative priority, the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The law banned segregation at public facilities and racial discrimination in the work place, empowered the attorney general to initiate lawsuits against segregated school systems, and allowed the federal government to withhold funds from schools refusing to comply with desegregation orders. In the Senate, Richard Russell of Georgia launched a filibuster, relying on a team of 18 colleagues who attempted to talk the bill to death, claiming the proposed law would lead to “amalgamation and mongrelization of the races.” The bill ultimately passed by an overwhelming 290-130 vote.

The struggle to pass the bill sometimes took on physical dimensions. Arch-segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who had switched from the Democratic to the Republican Party because of “liberal” civil rights legislation, tried to prevent enforcement of the law by boycotting a key subcommittee meeting, provoking Texas’ last liberal Senator, Ralph Yarborough, to literally drag Thurmond into the hearing room. The two wrestled each other to the ground. Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, soon to become Johnson’s vice president, urged Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, not previously a supporter of civil rights legislation, to join the cause. On June 10, 1964, Dirksen announced his support for a cloture vote, which would end the filibuster and allow a vote on the bill. The cloture motion passed 71-29, with four votes more than needed to close debate. The front lines of the battle for social justice, however, would not be found in Washington, D.C., but in the backwoods of Mississippi.

FREEDOM SUMMER

A younger generation of black protestors was not content to wait upon the slow workings of the United States Senate. The NAACP, representing an older generation, fought segregation through a series of lawsuits. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) sought to defeat Jim Crow through political lobbying, negative publicity about Southern discrimination, and acts of non-violent resistance, such as sit-ins at segregated lunch counters. With a younger membership, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) favored direct action against injustice, led by local civil rights campaigners. SNCC’s membership resented King and other civil rights “celebrities” they accused of swooping in at the end of a campaign and claiming credit for the hard grassroots work of locals.

Seen as reckless by the older peers, SNCC members marched directly through the gates of fire, continuing their voter registration campaign in Mississippi in spite of past bloodshed. John F. Kennedy’s administration had been lukewarm about civil rights demonstrations, fearing that Southern segregationist Democrats would withhold support of the domestic and foreign policy agendas. To the Civil Rights Movement’s surprise, the president’s brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, signaled in late 1961 that he would help groups like SNCC receive financial support from liberal charities such as the Taconic Foundation if the civil rights organizations focused on voter registration in the South. Worried that its mild civil rights record guaranteed that Kennedy would lose Southern states to the Republicans in the 1964 re-election effort, the administration no doubt hoped that an increase in the number of friendly black voters in states like Mississippi would provide a counter to white segregationists. Many in SNCC feared the White House was using them, but the cash-strapped group found Bobby Kennedy’s offer one they couldn’t refuse. SNCC, the NAACP and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) launched the Voter Education Project in April 1962.

More than $870,000 (about $5.5 million in today’s dollars) poured into the Voter Education Project from the Taconic Foundation, the Stern Family Fund and the Field Foundations. Over the next two years, the project registered for the vote more than a half-million African Americans in the South, but the overwhelming majority of these voters lived in big cities. The large numbers of rural southern blacks remained largely unregistered, and in Mississippi, the project had added only 4,000 new voters. Just under 400,000 African Americans remained unregistered there. In rural Pike County, just 200 of 8,000 eligible African Americans were on the voter rolls. In Walthall County, not one of 2,500 blacks had registered, and Amitie County recorded just one registered black voter. By 1964, even though African Americans made up 42 percent of the total population they comprised only 6.7 percent of registered voters.

Mississippi became a focus of the registration drive. Having seen so many African Americans injured or killed over civil rights, and a victim of an attempted murder himself, Bob Moses in the fall of 1963 invited the participation of white students from colleges like Harvard, Yale and Stanford. His vision of a nation transformed into a “Beloved Community” included blacks and whites. Moses moved ahead with plans for a “Freedom Summer” in 1964, in which hundreds of white volunteers would join black activists to increase the number of African American voters across Mississippi. Most of the 900 student volunteers who arrived from out of state for the campaign were well-off white students from elite universities.

MISSISSIPPI BURNING

It was a long, hot, and bloody summer. During the “Freedom Summer” campaign in 1964, arsonists frequently burned down Freedom Schools and the homes of the volunteer staff. In total, police arrested more than 1,000 black and white volunteers, at least 80 civil rights workers suffered beatings at the hands of law enforcement officers or angry white mobs, and at least 37 black churches and 30 black homes and businesses were firebombed or torched during that Mississippi summer. Volunteers lived with high stress day and night, and would later report symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome. One volunteer recalled, “wondering whether someone was going to sneak in and dynamite you or fire-bomb your home. Always checking your car before you got in it, because you were worrying whether someone stuck a piece of dynamite under it. Always making sure your tires were in good condition, because you never know, you may have to race up the road at night.”

The murders of the three young men in Mississippi turned public sentiment strongly in favor of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. For many African Americans, however, the case also served as a reminder that the white establishment valued white life much more than black life. Soon, black activists in large numbers would part from their white allies and seek a separate black identity that rejected what they saw as the sick values of white society. “I am sick and tired of going to the funerals of black men who have been murdered by white men,” said CORE activist David Dennis, angry tears streaming down his cheeks, during the funeral for James Chaney. “I’ve got vengeance in my heart tonight . . . If you go back home and sit down and take what these white men in Mississippi are doing to us . . . if you take it and don’t do something about it . . . then God damn your souls.”

THE MISSISSIPPI FREEDOM DEMOCRATIC PARTY

Lyndon Johnson had long felt like an unwanted interloper, and rankled that some Democrats saw him as an illegitimate heir to the Kennedy throne. Thus, Johnson hoped that the 1964 Democratic National Convention that summer in Atlantic City would be his coronation, an untarnished celebration of that year’s many legislative accomplishments. Unfortunately, in spite of movement in the direction of expanded black civil rights, the signs loomed of a national white backlash against reform legislation, and the atmosphere threatened to spoil the Democratic celebrations. George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, entered the Democratic presidential primaries and carried 34 percent of the vote in Wisconsin, 30 percent in Indiana, and a shocking 43 percent in Maryland. When Wallace’s insurgent campaign failed to unseat Johnson, many of these voters began drifting to Republican nominee Barry Goldwater, who portrayed civil rights laws as the intrusion of a growing and increasingly tyrannical federal government into states’ rights. Rioting in Harlem and other American cities in the summer of 1964 provoked white anger and increased Johnson’s fear of a challenge on the right.

The president, however, perceived a more direct challenge from Southern African Americans seeking to put a stop to the all-white segregationist delegations from the South that had been a feature of Democratic Conventions since the 1830s. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) had been organized during Freedom Summer. Using a black panther as its symbol, the MFDP planned to challenge the credentials of Mississippi’s all-white delegation on the floor of the 1964 convention. The MFDP held its own primaries, with black representatives from cities and rural communities across the state, as well as four white delegates. The delegates would charge that the Mississippi regulars conducted primaries that ignored black voting rights and were thus in violation of federal law and could not be legally seated. One of the MFDP delegates, Fannie Lou Hamer, a former sharecropper who had suffered an involuntary sterilization under Mississippi’s eugenics laws, said, “When we went to Atlantic City, we didn’t go there for publicity, we went there because we believed that America was what it said it was, ‘the land of the free.’”

President Johnson didn’t want a credentials fight at his convention. Seeking to not embarrass the president, liberals proposed seating both the all-white Mississippi regulars and the Freedom delegation. Governor Paul Johnson of Mississippi told the president his delegation would walk out if forced to share a place with the dissenters, while Gov. John Connally of Texas warned that other Southern delegations could walk out as well. Johnson promised Hubert Humphrey a position as his running mate if he could persuade the Freedom delegation to drop its credentials challenge.

Hamer and the other delegates refused to play along and instead presented testimony to the credentials committee on the violent and corrupt oppression of black voting rights in Mississippi. With television networks broadcasting the testimony, Hamer related how she had been beaten in a Mississippi jail for her voter registration efforts. A state highway patrolman ordered black prisoners to beat her. “The first Negro began to beat, and I was beat until I was exhausted . . . After the first Negro was exhausted, the State Highway Patrolmen ordered the second Negro to use the blackjack. The second Negro began to beat . . . I began to scream, and one white man got up and began to beat me on my head and tell me to ‘hush.’ ”

Upset that the Freedom delegation was getting all the attention, President Johnson called a press conference while Hamer was still testifying. A compromise was offered that would allow two Freedom delegates to sit with the regulars while sixty-six other Freedom Party members could sit as non-voting observers with other delegations. Unwilling to accept even this watered-down proposal, and a demand that they pledge loyalty to the Democratic presidential ticket, the all-white regular delegation walked out of the convention along with the Alabama delegates. The walkout didn’t spread, however, which Lyndon Johnson declared as victory. The convention voted to insist that the 1968 Mississippi delegation had to be integrated. Hubert Humphrey was rewarded with this outcome by being named Johnson’s running mate.

The Democratic ticket overwhelmingly defeated GOP nominee Goldwater that November. The Arizona senator frightened off mainstream voters with a convention nomination speech in which he declared, “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” Later, Goldwater dismissed the hydrogen bomb as “merely another weapon.” The night before the general election, the Johnson campaign ran an ad in which a young girl pulled petals from a daisy and counted them, then a voiceover counted down to a missile launch and the screen filled with footage of a mushroom cloud. The ad was designed to remind voters of the dangers of nuclear weapons, and to imply that Goldwater’s attitude toward them was irresponsible.

The next day, Johnson carried 61 percent of the popular vote and beat Goldwater 486-52 in the Electoral College. Goldwater’s sweep of the Deep South states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, where he carried the votes of whites angered by Johnson’s support of civil rights legislation, represented the only cloud on the political horizon for the Democrats.

BLOODY SUNDAY

Lyndon Johnson might have gotten his way regarding the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic convention, but Martin Luther King would force the president’s hand regarding passage of a voting rights act in 1965. King had undergone a subtle transformation in his attitude toward non-violence. As historian Allen J. Matusow notes, “Once he employed it to persuade racial oppressors of their guilt and to change their hearts. Many broken heads later – in fact, by Birmingham, 1963 – he had come to direct his campaigns not at the heart of the South but at the conscience of the North, seeking primarily to enlist the coercive power of the federal government against racial injustice.” For his next voting rights campaign, King targeted Selma, Alabama, where only 383 of about 15,000 African Americans were registered. King chose Selma not only for the obvious suppression of black voting but because he could count on an overreaction by Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark. This man had acquired a reputation for out-of-control anger and violence.

The campaign started in January 1965. King announced that the campaign would climax with a 54-mile march on March 7 from Selma to the statehouse in Montgomery, the one-time capital of the Confederacy. That day, 600 marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge onto state Highway 80 before state troopers, who arrived in squad cars adorned with Confederate flags, halted the march. The state police charged into the crowd wielding billy clubs and firing tear gas canisters. State police chased the marchers back across the bridge with Sheriff Clark shouting, “Get those goddamned niggers.”

Deputies carried on what was essentially a police riot in Selma’s black neighborhoods that day, seizing a young black man from inside a church and throwing him through a stained-glass window decorated with an image of Jesus. Footage of the police violence interrupted ABC’s broadcast of the film Judgment at Nuremberg, and the ugly scenes played on televisions around the world. The event came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.”

King had been warned of an assassination plot by the Johnson administration and so was not present at the march but, after hearing of the injuries suffered by his friends and allies, he announced a second march. Johnson worked out a deal with Wallace, however. King could bring the marchers to the bridge, but they would halt when ordered to by the state troopers. The protestors would then bow in prayer and leave. Sadly, violence still broke out the night of the second march on March 9, when thugs beat to death James Reeb, a white minister from Massachusetts who had participated in earlier protests.

Historian Matusow argues that this event marked a key turning point in the relationship between King and the younger firebrands in SNCC. SNCC activists already chafed because Selma represented one more case in which local groups laid the foundations for the movement before a national figure like King swooped down with the national media in tow to get credit and publicity. King’s compromises with state and national officials caused some members of SNCC to charge King with cowardice and betrayal of local activists.

King’s tactics, however, had an impact on President Johnson. Johnson had wanted a “cooling off” period for civil rights legislation and hoped to focus on Medicare and other parts of his “Great Society” agenda, but the scenes on Bloody Sunday outraged him, and he made a voting rights bill a priority. Johnson would also step in to allow King and his fellow marchers to complete their symbolic trek from Selma to Montgomery. Johnson federalized the Alabama National Guard for the third march, which began on March 21. With 1,900 guardsmen shielding them from violence, by the fourth day the marchers numbered 25,000 protestors and included entertainers like the musical group Peter, Paul and Mary, United Nations Ambassador Ralph Bunche, and longtime activists like Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph, and Whitney Young. On March 25, King spoke from the steps of the Alabama State Capitol, where Jefferson Davis had been sworn in as president of the Confederacy in 1861.

The protestors happily sang freedom songs at the end of the long journey to Montgomery. This moment represented in many ways a final hurrah for King’s movement. A deep generational split over the tactics of non-violence and incremental reforms would cause the young members of SNCC to move in a more radical direction, to be followed by more confrontational groups such as the Black Panthers. Too many African Americans got tired of African American non-violence provoking white brutality. The night of March 25, Viola Liuzzo, a white woman from Detroit, had volunteered to help transport marchers. The mother of five was driving with a black passenger on Highway 80, the main route to Montgomery, when a car occupied by four Klansman pulled alongside her and fatally shot her in the head. Gary Thomas Rowe, an informant on the FBI payroll, testified against the other three Klansmen, who were never convicted of the murder but sent to prison for 10 years for violation of the 1971 Ku Klux Klan Act.

VOTING RIGHTS ACT

“Bloody Sunday,” followed by the Liuzzo murder, gave momentum to passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The act prohibited devices employed by Southern legislatures to keep African Americans from voting, such as literacy tests, which were supposedly equally enforced for black and white voters but were manipulated to systematically deny African Americans the ballot. The law also empowered the U.S. Justice Department to monitor elections in order to prevent intimidation and harassment of black voters in districts with a history of such behavior.

Resistance from Southern senators, who sensed a changing tide of public opinion, proved half-hearted. Sixty-six senators co-sponsored the bill, just one short of the number needed to end a filibuster. Southern efforts to filibuster collapsed quickly. Longtime civil rights leader Roy Wilkins afterward described Southern resistance to the bill as “lame.” “That year, they (Southern senators) had neither their old energy nor the sympathy of the country behind them.”

On August 3, the House passed the measure by a 4-1 margin, and the next day the Senate passed the legislation 79-18. Johnson signed the bill into law August 6 in the President’s Room, where in 1861 Abraham Lincoln signed a law declaring free any slaves forced into service with the Confederate Army. Johnson passed out 89 pens he used to sign the law, with Rosa Parks (who started the Montgomery bus boycott) and Vivian Malone (who had to be escorted into the University of Alabama by federal marshals when the university was integrated in 1963) two of the recipients.

A jubilant atmosphere attended the signing ceremony, but Johnson knew the political dangers of pushing for such revolutionary change. “I have signed away the South for a generation,” he is said to have commented after he signed the bill into law. Johnson had no way of knowing if African Americans would vote in significant numbers after the bill’s enactment. He could count, however, on an angry Southern white backlash. He would live long enough to see his sad prophecy come true, as former segregationist Democrats essentially became segregationist Republicans across Dixie.

As a result of this law and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, segregation began to slowly fade across the South. Decades later many students across the country would still attend overwhelmingly white or predominantly black and brown schools. But in terms of black voter registration, the impact of the 1965 Voting Right Act was dramatic. In the states of Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Alabama, black registration overall went from 31 percent to 57 percent by the late 1960s . In the Deep South, the results were more dramatic, with black registration climbing from 32 to 60 percent in Louisiana, 19 to 53 percent in Alabama, and from 6 percent to 44 percent in Mississippi. In Dallas County, Alabama, where the Selma campaign had just taken place, the number of registered voters rocketed from 320 to 6,789. The number of black elected officials in the South also sharply climbed. In the six states mentioned above, the number of black elected officials grew from 70 to about 400.

Although both Kennedy and Johnson had sometimes half-heartedly and inconsistently supported civil rights, the actions of both administrations regarding the black freedom struggle had two long term results. The so-called "Solid South" cracked. For decades Southern states had elected a delegation to the House and Senate consisting almost entirely of Democrats. Now segregationists, angered by Kennedy's intervention at Ol' Miss and Johnson's passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights laws in 1964 and 1965, reluctantly drifted from what had been the party of the Confederacy to the Republicans, the once-hated party of Abraham Lincoln. After a result of the Voting Rights Act, African Americans were now a factor in Southern elections and , like blacks nationally, became firmly attached to the Democratic Party. This dramatic racial realignment of the American political system would not be complete until the 1990s.

Michael Phillips is the author or co-author of the following books:

“White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, Texas, 1841-2001” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

“The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas Speaker Became a Power in State and National Politics.” Co-Written with Patrick Cox. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).

Walter Buenger and Arnoldo de León, eds., “Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away From Past Interpretations” (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2011).

Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz, eds., “The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western Experience” (New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011).

Richardson Dilworth, ed. “Cities in American Political History” (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011).

He will also be co-author of the forthcoming “The Radical Origins of the Texas Right” (edited by David Cullen and Kyle Wilkison) due to be published in 2012 by Texas A&M University Press; and “American Dreams and Reality: A Retelling of the American Story,” to be published the same year by Abigail Press.

He is currently collaborating, with longtime journalist Betsy Friauf, on a history of Bishop College, an African American institution originally established in Marshall, Texas, that relocated to Dallas by the 1960s before suffering bankruptcy in the 1980s. The two plan to create a website and author a book, “’God Carved in Night’: Afro-Texan Culture, Political Activism and the Rise and Fall Of Bishop College” based on this project.

Books You May Have Missed: Review of "Yeoman, Sharecroppers, and Socialists: Plain Folk Protest in Texas, 1870-1914

2012-01-27T16:49:00.000-08:00

Yeoman, Sharecroppers, andSocialists: Plain Folk Protest in Texas, 1870-1914. By Kyle G. Wilkison. (College Station: Texas A&M University,2008. x,297, pp. Paper, $40, ISBN-13:978—1-60344-065-3.)

Supplementing exhaustive archivalresearch with detailed statistical analysis and intriguing oral historyinterviews, Kyle Wilkison outlines the spread of plantation tenancy and theattendant destruction of “plain folk” culture in late 19^th and early20^th century East and Central Texas. While Socialism in Texas received thoughtful treatment byJames R. Green’s groundbreaking 1978 work Grassroots Socialism: RadicalMovements in the Southwest, 1895-1943 andNeil Foley’s equally innovative The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks,and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture(published in 1999), the left wing in Texas remains sorely understudied. Wilkison blazes a new path in thisstill emerging scholarly field by demonstrating how socialism overlapped withtraditional, Texas rural values emphasizing community, shared sacrifice, andfair play.

At the dawn of the 20th century,Wilkison writes, “Texas yeoman farmers exhibited both a high degree ofcommunity independence and individual family interdependence based on thewidespread ownership of land and the liberty such property afforded even thecommon lot.” [p.8.] Increased cotton production, however, promoted landlessnessand economic dependence across the Texas cotton belt. As speculation and absentee ownership drove up land priceseven as cotton prices dropped due to foreign competition and Americanoverproduction, fewer farmers could afford land. More rural Texans became renters, working for landlords whodemanded that even more acreage of their property be used for production of thecash crop. Renters, hoping toclimb up the mythical “agricultural ladder” to land ownership instead wanderedfrom property to property seeking in vain better financial arrangements. This migration, however, cut these poorfarming families off from the church, community celebrations and neighborlyconnections that sustained the agricultural community through hard times. The relative success of socialism inhighly religious East and Central Texas, Wilkison argues, derived largely fromthe desire not only to gain financial independence but also to re-forge lostcommunity ties. The mostsuccessful socialists adapted party ideology, appreciating and appealing to thelocal population’s strong religious faith, their tragically white supremacistracial attitudes, and the increasingly rootless peasantry’s desire for landownership.

Wilkison writes well andperceptively. The onlyshortcoming, and it is a minor one, is that the statistics-heavy openingchapters should have been leavened with illustrative quotes from the 51 oralhistories Wilkison collected that are cited in his bibliography. Wilkison interviewed former East andCentral Texas landowners, tenants and sharecroppers (and their children) whoseaccounts demonstrate that many Texas middling and poor farmers saw nocontradiction between conservative Christianity and support of socialism. Wilkison, furthermore, demonstratesthat even in very traditional East Texas communities, farming families elidedassigned gender roles, though anti-black racism formed an impenetrable barrierdividing the agricultural oppressed. Yeoman, Sharecroppers, and Socialists is a definitive work on the culture of cotton farming on East Texas andthe ephemeral impact of radical politics in the Lone Star state.

Michael Phillips is the author or co-author of the following books:

“White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, Texas, 1841-2001” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

“The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas Speaker Became a Power in State and National Politics.” Co-Written with Patrick Cox. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).

Walter Buenger and Arnoldo de León, eds., “Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away From Past Interpretations” (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2011).

Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz, eds., “The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western Experience” (New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011).

Richardson Dilworth, ed. “Cities in American Political History” (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011).

How Did African Americans Become Democrats and Republicans Become Racists?

2012-01-25T20:00:00.000-08:00

I have created a new blog called the "Internet Republican Racism Database." Below is the first post on that blog. I will continue to cross-post between The Red State Blues and the Database until the November election.

This site is devoted to one thesis: that in the age of Obama, the Republican Party has abandoned any attempt at subtlety and has openly embraced racism as an electoral tactic. From the local to the state to the national level GOP supporters, activists and elected officials have come out of their closets and into their sheets.

After a pair of introductory essays explaining the history of the relationship of blacks, Latinos and other marginalized groups to the Democratic and Republican parties, this blog will provide daily examples of the racism of prominent Republicans until Election Day 2012.

Southern racists began migrating to the Republican Party in the 1940s when the national Democratic Party recognized the changing demographics of Northern voters and started supporting, however tepidly, African American civil rights. A Democratic Party that had been devoted to slavery, segregation, and the defense of lynching, dramatically changed under the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt.

New Deal programs began to benefit African Americans. The First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, openly sympathized with the black freedom cause. FDR, reluctant to offend the segregationist Democrats he relied on for passage of his New Deal program, nevertheless regularly met with representatives of the black community who came to be dubbed "The Black Cabinet." When the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) refused to allow the African American contralto Marian Anderson to perform at Constitution Hall, Ms. Roosevelt publicly resigned her DAR membership and persuaded the Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, to arrange for Ms. Anderson to perform an outdoor concert at the Lincoln Memorial on April 9, 1939.

Even as FDR, a New York patrician, continued to consider himself an "honorary Southerner" and made regular trips to Warm Springs, Georgia to relieve symptoms of his polio, he received increasing pressure from the black Civil Rights Movement. As the United States geared up its weapons production in anticipation of American involvement in World War II, A. Philip Randolph, the leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, threatened to hold a massive "March on Washington" in 1941 to protest discriminatory hiring practices in the defense industry. Not wanting a show of disunity in the face of a war with the Axis Powers, FDR signed Executive Order 8802 which prohibited racial discrimination in hiring by defense industries with federal contracts.

This set a pattern for a new relationship between the two major parties and African Americans. The Republican Party was founded in the 1850s on the premise of stopping the spread of slavery beyond where it already existed. This opposition was based on the notion that unpaid slave labor represented unfair competition to paid white labor and that the association of blacks with certain jobs would compromise the dignity of those manual labor tasks -- and white workers would refuse to perform those duties.

By the 1850s, some Republicans came to see slavery as evil, but they were not necessarily ever a majority. During Reconstruction, so-called Radical Republicans hoped to establish a competitive party in the Democratic-dominated South. The Radicals pushed dramatic changes in the rules of America's racial politics during the post-Civil War Reconstruction era (1863-1877.) With the 13th Amendment, they abolished slavery. With the 14th Amendment, they established citizenship for all naturalized U.S. residents and all those born in the United States (including African Americans.) With the 15th Amendment, the Radical Republicans prohibited states from barring residents from voting based on "race, color, and previous condition of servitude." America had, after the Civil War, entered what sociologist James Loewen describes as a brief period of racial idealism in which Northern whites, who generally voted Republican, could imagine a peaceful, multi-racial democracy.

Several factors undermined this racial idealism, including persistent Ku Klux Klan terrorism, continued poverty among Freedmen, a depression from 1873-1878, and the corruption of the Republican administration of Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1877). White Southern racism and resistance to reform seemed intractable and stretched the patience of even Republican voters. There was wide support for GOP President Rutherford B. Hayes after the 1876 election when he withdrew Union troops from the South, thus abandoning blacks to the tender mercies of the white majority. Faced with an onslaught of immigration from newcomers like Chinese, Japanese, Jews, Italians and others seen as "not white," Republican-supporting Northerners began to think they had their own racial problems and started to empathize with Southern whites.

In addition, the history profession came to be dominated by Southern white men attending Columbia University in New York who were taught by the Confederate-sympathizing professor William Dunning. He believed that liberating black slaves had been a mistake forced on the country by "fanatical" Abolitionists, that African American freedmen were completely unqualified for citizenship, and that the experiments in racial equality during Reconstruction had been wrong-headed and ultimately destructive, ushering in a Southern era of unprecedented corruption and black criminality. Free blacks, Dunning believed, were destroying the South with criminality and incompetence until the region was "saved" by the Ku Klux Klan, which ended the foolish experiment in black citizenship.

The Dunning view of America’s troubled history of race relations became the accepted wisdom of the experts. Dunning students wrote the American history textbooks adopted across the country. Klansmen suddenly emerged as heroes alongside the Minutemen of the Revolution, “Deprived by force of any legal means of defense against this iniquitous kind of government, the South resorted to intimidation and persecution of the negro,” one Dunning student, David Saville Muzzey, wrote in an American history text widely adopted by high schools in the early twentieth century . “ . . . Inevitably there was violence done in this reign of terror inaugurated by the Ku-Klux. Negroes were beaten and scalawags shot. Of course these deeds of violence were greatly exaggerated by the carpetbag officials . . .”

Another pair of Dunningite historians. James Truslow Adams and Charles Garrett Vannest, argued in another early 20^th century high school text that violence can be justified if it preserves white power. “It was natural that the Southern whites, to prevent their complete ruin, should wish to gain control of their own states,” they claim in The Record of America. “The only way to combat congressional legislation was with violence when other methods failed.”

This understanding of history infected popular culture, North and South, and inspired the plot line of the first Hollywood movie epic, The Birth of a Nation, made by Southern-born director D.W. Griffith in 1915. Audiences lined up around the block all across the country to see Birth, which depicted black soldiers in the Union Army as rapists; and abolitionists who favored black rights as insane. It’s no wonder that the Republican Party moved in a more racist direction than even Abraham Lincoln (who always believed that blacks were intellectually inferior) would have contemplated. By the twentieth century, Republican leaders in Southern states like Texas sought to make their party “lilly white,” and President Herbert Hoover (who served from 1929-1933) implemented a Southern strategy in which he sought to distance the GOP from the Lincoln era and make the Republican Party competitive in Dixie by actively supporting segregation, the purging of black Republicans, and appealing directly to bigots in the old Confederacy. Little wonder that African Americans wondered what they had gained from unflagging support of “the party of Lincoln,” after seven decades, when FDR became president.

When Roosevelt died in 1945, subsequent Democratic presidents built on the outreach to African Americans begun by Roosevelt. FDR’s vice president, Harry S Truman, rose to the White House April 12, 1945, when FDR died of a stroke. Truman came from a regional border state (Missouri) and occasionally used anti-black slurs in private conversation. Writing to his daughter, Margaret Truman, when he was a senator from Missouri, the future president once complained about black waiters at a Washington, D.C. restaurant, whom he described as “an army of coons” who thought they were “evidently the top of the black social set in Washington.” Once in a 1939 letter to his wife, Bess, Truman derided an African American social occasion as “nigger picnic day.” As president, however, Truman worried about the impact of racial injustice in the United States on the Cold War. Pragmatic electoral concerns also shaped his newly found interest in civil rights. From the 1920s through World War II, millions of African Americans had moved north of the Mason-Dixon line and into the West to escape the harassment of Southern whites and to find better-paying jobs. Since Roosevelt’s second term, African American voters in the North and West largely supported Democrats, and in states like California and Michigan the black electorate could swing close elections. Black resentment over the influence of Southern white segregationists on the Democratic Party, however, caused a drop-off in black support for the Democrats in the 1946 congressional races. Truman wanted to win these voters back.Post-war racial violence, however, also moved the president. Black activists told Truman of an incident in Monroe, Georgia, in which whites fatally shot two African American men. The wife of one of the victims recognized one of the white shooters, so the killers assassinated both of the victims' spouses, as well. Violence against African American servicemen in particular shocked the president. More than 1 million African Americans served in the military during World War II. Black soldiers entering the war hoped to win what civil rights leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois called the “Double V” – victory against the Axis Powers and against racism at home. In the same way that many African American soldiers returning from World War I suffered persecution and lynching upon returning to the United States, several shocking attacks on black veterans made headlines across the nation just after World War II. Black veterans would be outraged by the poor treatment they received upon their return to the United States, prompting many to become active in the Civil Rights Movement.

In one incident, the police chief in Aiken, S.C., severely beat Sgt. Issac Woodard, an African American, with a nightstick and gouged an eye out. Woodard had received his separation papers from the United States Army a mere three hours earlier. Hearing of this attack, Truman reportedly said, “My God. I had no idea it was as terrible as that. We’ve got to do something!” Truman later said incidents such as the assault on Sgt. Woodard moved him to push for civil rights. Pressed by Southern members of Congress to abandon this stand, Truman said, “My forebears were Confederates.… Every factor and influence in my background—and in my wife’s for that matter—would foster the personal belief that you are right. But my very stomach turned over when I learned that Negro soldiers, just back from overseas, were being dumped out of Army trucks in Mississippi and beaten. Whatever my inclinations as a native of Missouri might have been, as President I know this is bad.”

On December 5, 1946, Truman established the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, to which he predominantly appointed racial liberals. The committee issued its report, “To Secure These Rights,” the following October. According to the report, the contrast between the nation’s stated ideas of human equality and the widespread practice of racial discrimination served as “a kind of moral dry rot which eats away at the emotional and rational bases of democratic beliefs.” With its eyes on America’s global competition with the Soviet Union, the report warned that “we cannot ignore what the world thinks of us or our record.”

The committee recommended a broad range of reforms including enacting a federal anti-lynching statute (designed to get around Southern courts which refused to prosecute violent crimes committed by whites against blacks); a ban on the poll tax (which reduced black voting); prohibiting by federal statute discrimination in private employment; establishing a permanent Commission on Civil Rights; increasing the size of the Justice Department’s civil rights division; and strictly enforcing voting rights laws. The Commission also urged the Justice Department to file lawsuits against housing developments and neighborhood associations that used secret covenants to deny housing to racial and religious minorities; said that federal money should be denied to any public or private agency that practiced segregation; and called for the Congress to integrate all facilities in Washington, D.C., including the public school system. President Truman embraced most of these recommendations in a civil rights message to Congress on February 2, 1948.

At the Democratic National Convention that summer, Southern delegates walked out when a far-reaching pro-Civil Rights plank was for the first time added to the Democratic Party platform. Nevertheless, Truman issued two executive orders on July 26, 1948: one that would eventually desegregate the armed forces and another that prohibited discrimination in the federal civil service. Truman first signed Executive Order 9981 ordering the desegregation of the Armed Forces on July 26, 1948, but by January 13, 1949, only one of the Marine Corps’ 8,200 officers was an African American. Only five of the Navy’s 45,000 officers were black. The Army, meanwhile, maintained a 10 percent recruiting quota for African Americans until the Korean War began in 1950. High casualties among white units in the war hastened the integration of black troops. Not until 1953 could the Army announce that 95 percent of African American troops served in integrated units.

During the late 1940s, Truman also used his executive powers to empanel a Commission on Higher Education that recommended an end to religious and racial quotas used at universities to limit admission of Jews and blacks. After his presidency, Truman continued to use words like “nigger” in private conversation, dismissed Martin Luther King, Jr., as a “troublemaker” and considered the civil rights movement at least partly inspired by communism. But his presidency nevertheless committed the national Democratic Party to greater support for black voting rights and opposition to segregation. For a long time, the Democratic Party suffered a split personality on civil rights, with the Northern wing and the presidential nominees generally supporting the black freedom struggle, at least verbally. Sen. Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, the party's failed nominee for the White House in 1952 and 1956, supported black voting rights in the South. This, in turn, led to greater African American allegiance to the Democratic Party, until by the 1990s 90 percent of black voters routinely support Democratic candidates for president.

Michael Phillips is the author or co-author of the following books:

“White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, Texas, 1841-2001” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

“The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas Speaker Became a Power in State and National Politics.” Co-Written with Patrick Cox. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).

Walter Buenger and Arnoldo de León, eds., “Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away From Past Interpretations” (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2011).

Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz, eds., “The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western Experience” (New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011).

Richardson Dilworth, ed. “Cities in American Political History” (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011).

Earl Rudder And Breaking The Color Barrier at Texas A&M

2012-01-24T22:32:00.001-08:00

Afterdecades in which it seemed nothing changed at Texas A&M, in the early 1960sconvulsion almost became routine. Afteropening up enrollment to women for the first time and changing the name ofTexas A&M, President Earl Rudder had two other missions. In September 1965, membership in theparamilitary Cadet Corps– once required of all students -- becamevoluntary. Rudder insisted thatthe Corps would survive. “ I willdo all in my power to see [the Corps] strengthened and preserved . . . I wantto see the Corps generate so much esprit de Corps that incoming fish are struggling to get in, insteadof to get out.” In spite of thisassurance, by the end of that year, Corps membership dropped 11 percent.Commanders consolidated or eliminated units without advance notice, much to theirritation of some Cadets. Tensions began to rise between Cadets and civilian students, culminatingin a fight between the two groups in May 1966 in which both sides hurled rotteneggs, fruit and buckets of water.

Inthe 1970s, uniformed Cadets formed less than a fourth of the total studentbody. Campus reforms affected theCorps in paradoxical ways. “TheCorps was down, but by no means out,” Dethloff wrote. “The discipline and exuberance of the Corps, which continuedto maintain its own ‘student life area’ on campus, was undiminished, perhapsstronger. The group had become an even more elite and selective organization byvirtue of its volunteer status, and by virtue, too, of the rising pay scalesand greater attractions of the professional military life in America, which hadbecome a more specialized, professional, volunteer organization itself.”

Perhapsbecause so much energy had been spent on admitting coeds, changing the school’sname, and changing the status of the Corps, racial desegregation at A&Moccurred with relative quiet. Asearly as the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which declared public school segregationunconstitutional, A&M’s student newspaper endorsed the decision. “In therush of statements howling about how the rights of whites have been foullyinvaded, very few have even considered the Negroes, whose rights have beentrampled in [a] legal hodge-podge of ‘equal facilities’ for scores of years,” aBattalion editorial declared onJune 18, 1954. “The pretense ofequal facilities has been used so long the people assume it so withoutbothering to check. Here in ourcommunity, one only has to drive past the A&M Consolidated High school,then by the Lincoln (Negro) High school. It would take a shallow-minded hypocrite to search his soul and say, ‘Yes,equal facilities.’” They areconsidered equal only if the other fellow has to use them.” On March 14, 1956,the Student Senate voted by a 23-7 margin for a resolution opposingsegregation. By no means did everystudent embrace desegregation. Onestudent senator, Doug De Cluitt, said it “would be more degrading to me to havea Negro boy chew me out than to wear lip stick all year round and walk in steamtunnels.” A student petitionobjected to the senate vote. Thesenate responded by holding a campus-wide referendum in order to accuratelygauge student views on segregation. Students favored segregation by a 1,066 to 620 vote margin.

Nevertheless,the Texas A&M board ruled in 1962 that qualified males students, regardlessof race, would be admitted to the school. A&M quietly admitted three African American students during thesummer session when fewer students were in attendance in June 1963. Two graduate students and oneundergraduate were admitted under special circumstances and were not seekingdegrees. “One college officialsaid the Negroes came into Sbisa Hall to register and practically no one gavethem a second glance,” the Dallas Morning News reported June 5 1963. Leroy Sterling, one of the students, told the newspaper thathe experienced no “incidents of any kind when I went to class.” A&Mofficials initially considered segregated housing for black students but optedinstead for complete integration of black students into the Corps. Years later Sammy Williams, anAfrican American who enrolled in 1964, told the Battalion that when he experienced rough treatment, it was hardto tell if “it was being done because of color or because I was a fish” althoughhe added he believed that he got “extra treatment” because of his color. Two years later, Williams and hisfriend J.T. Reynolds became walk-ons with the football team, the first blackathletes to break the school’s color barrier in that sport.

Williams,however, did not get to play a down in the Aggies’ 1967 run to the SouthwestConference Championship. It musthave been lonely for Williams, who could not have missed the racial slurs andlate hits white Aggies dished out to the Southwest Conference’s first greatAfrican American star, Jerry Levias, Southern Methodist University’s electricpass receiver. Levias shatteredthe Southwest Conference’ segregation barriers in the mid-1960s, but A&Mdid not recruit a black football player until Jerry Honore suited up for theAggies in the 1970s. A&M wasnot alone, as the Southwest Conference, which included schools such as A&M,the University of Texas, Baylor, SMU, Texas Christian University, Texas Tech,Rice University, and the University of Arkansas remained almost exclusivelywhite until the 1970s. The famousshowdown between number one-ranked Texas and number two-ranked Arkansas thelast game of the 1969 NCAA regular season featured two teams without a singleAfrican American player. It wasn’t until Emory Ballard’s recruitment drives inthe mid-1970s that African Americans represented a significant part of theAggie football team.

Bythe mid-1990s, African Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans and AsianAmericans made up 15 percent of A&M’s student body, but that figure stilllagged well behind UT’s 24.5 percent figure (the percentage of Texas’ totalpopulation belonging to those groups was 39.4 percent.) Less than 3 percent of the school’spopulation was African American. As late as 1992, a fraternity made pledgesdress up in grass skirts and wear blackface during a “jungle theme party.” An African American staterepresentative denounced the incident, which provoked the Battalion to depict the lawmaker as a black, barking dog. A&M may have been no worse thanother Texas colleges and universities edging towards integration, but as withco-education, the process began with tokenism and moved towards genuinedesegregation at a glacial pace.

Throughthese whirlwind years of reform, Rudder sought to stay in touch with studentsthree decades younger who grew up in a vastly different cultural context. If Rudder became a surprising agent ofchange in College Station, he remained at heart a deeply conservative man. In March 1966, President Lyndon Johnsondispatched Rudder and Oveta Culp Hobby, chair of the Houston Post, to tour South Vietnamese educational and economicinstitutions. Visiting SaigonUniversity as well as technical and normal schools in Long Xuyen, Ban Me Thuot,Can Tho, and Dar Loc, he returned with an upbeat assessment of the American warin Southeast Asia and claimed he had heard no criticism of Premier Nguyen CoaKey’s dictatorship by South Vietnamese citizens. “The United States is making great progress in winning thewar and the peace in Viet Nam,” he said on an episode of NBC’s Today Show after his return. But even at conservative A&M,not all students shared Rudder’s optimism about the war or still viewed theAmerican government and the military with the same confidence.

Towardsthe end of his life, Rudder began to uncharacteristically overreact when smalltraces of 1960s counterculture began to appear at the A&M campus. Two short-lived, mimeographed dissidentstudent publications, Evolution andParanoia, appeared at A&M in1968-1969. Both publications ridiculed the Cadet Corps and A&M militarismand took the administration to task for its less than convincing commitment toracial and gender equality.

Tothe writers of Evolution, racismlay at the heart of Aggie culture. “The Confederacy is not dead – it is verymuch alive and in good health at Texas A&M University,” a spring 1968edition declared. “Why else wouldthe flag most often seen on campus be the Confederate flag? . . . However, these are only the mosttangible manifestations [of racism.] The subtle, or not so subtle ideological displays are even moretelling. Any black athlete (abreed hardly known here) unfortunate enough to come to Kyle Field or G. RollieWhite Coliseum is taunted and harassed. There is derisive talk of ‘Yankees,’not to mention ‘hippies,’ and ‘weirdoes.’ Even the venerated female has notescaped . . . Can you deny that women are not encouraged to attend A&M?” Anissue of Paranoia deridedcoeducation at A&M as a hoax. “You may . . . question why we have so fewfemale students at Texas A&M. The person who can most readily answer this is General Rudder; hisinaction results from his desire to please financially, politically andtraditionally influential individuals.” After claiming that Rudder gave minimal notice to the state’s press ofA&M’s policy changes regarding women, thereby keeping most women in thedark about coeducation at the school, the paper said, ”This situation iscompounded by the administration’s refusal to provide housing for women.Congratulations, General Rudder, on your subtle, shrewd, manipulation of thesituation.”

Ifdesigned to tweak a retired general’s sense of discipline and hierarchy, thecriticisms in these countercultural newspapers were not entirely off-base andhardly represented a threat to campus stability. A&M, in fact stood in dramatic contrast to the studentactivism present at major universities across the country. At the University of Michigan in March1965, 3,000 anti-war students held an on-campus “teach-in” against the VietnamWar participated in by students, faculty and area youths. This modeled similar student actionsheld at dozens of universities in the coming years. In August of 1965, several hundred University of Californiaat Berkeley students stood on railroad tracks to stop oncoming troop trainsfrom reaching Oakland Army base. One of the most spectacular student actions came 19 days after MartinLuther King, Jr.’s assassination in April 1968 when student activists occupiedthe Columbia University campus in New York to protest the university’sparticipation in Defense Department research and the construction of gymnasiumin an African American neighborhood where a public park had been located. Students occupied five barricadedbuildings for eight days before police stormed in and arrested 600 students.

AtA&M, the tiny student left fell spectacularly short of revolution. In fact, as Rudder himself admitted,when one group tried to organize a chapter of the Students for a Democratic Societychapter at A&M, the meeting drew “less than five members.” (In a bizarre May 4, 1969 incident,police arrested an alleged SDS leader and two other A&M students aftercatching the three inside the school administration building after officehours.) When A&M students ignored a day of protests against the Vietnam Warstaged across the country in May 1969, the student body earned the admiringnotice of conservative radio commentator Paul Harvey, who declared on May 11, “whileother student bodies are rioting for peace -- Aggies are keeping the peace.”

Inspite of the tepid, almost invisible traces of the New Left on the A&Mcampus, Rudder still felt compelled in April 1969 to warn would-be studentdemonstrators to stay away from the school. “They will have a hell of a fight,” Rudder said in a speechbefore the A&M chapter of the Future Farmers of America, “and thispot-bellied president will be in the front ranks leading it . . . We must meettheir power with power if they threaten our society . . . I would use whateverforce I could command to keep the educational processes at A&M continuingin an orderly fashion.” Afterwarning away protestors, Rudder turned his anger on left-leaningprofessors. Asked by a member ofthe FFA audience about professors at A&M sporting beards, Rudder said, “Theonly thing I can say about that is, I think we hired the wrong professor.” He said that if he were in charge ofhiring he would hire no faculty members with beards, noting that, “A Prof whowears a beard in the classroom is trying to substitute a beard for knowledge.”

Rudderhad started his A&M career battling hidebound Aggie traditions in order tobring the campus into the modern world. In the process, he faced a barrage of criticism from reactionary alumniwho charged him with being politically ambitious or doing nothing to stop thesinister plots of leftist professors intent on undermining A&M’s militarymission. At the end of the 1960s,Rudder appeared as the defender of traditional Aggie values, standing betweenhis wholesome student majority and an imagined mob of anarchists set onsubverting campus life.

Inthe process, Rudder became to many in Texas and the country a white backlashhero, putting an arrogant and disrespectful youth culture back in itsplace. Rudder’s speech to the FFAinspired a note from A&M colleague, Engineering Chair Jack Doyle, whovolunteered to stand with him should leftists arise on campus. “As the pot-bellied President’ stridesinto battle . . . let him look over his left shoulder to find a pot-belliedprofessor moving right along with him,” Doyle wrote April 4, 1969. “Though only an Aggie by adoption thereis tradition here much like the one in which I was brought up. God willing it will prevail andflourish.”

Rudder’scomments provoked fulsome praise from the Dallas Morning News. “Didyou hear about the Aggie who promised the sandaled set ‘a hell of a fight’ ifthey tried to take over A&M?’” an April 4, 1969 editorial asked. “Well, it wasn’t any Aggie joke and, ifany would-be revolutionaries take him up on the promise, they’ll no doubt findit isn’t a joking matter, period . . .

There has been much complaint from the shaggy ones onother campuses that their elders do not engage in meaningful communicationswith them. Though the A&Mpresident’s comment is refreshingly lacking in the ornamental clichés of theNew Left, it is a remarkably meaningful communication and leaves little roomfor misunderstanding and confusion. Other administrators might well learn to communicate as clearly.

Suchmessages would fill the president’s in box the final two years of Rudder’slife. To many older, white middleclass Americans threatened by the violence and chaos of uprisings in Watts in1965, Detroit in 1967, and across the country after the King murder in 1968,and shocked by the spectacle of protest by privileged children at topuniversities, A&M now represented the anti-Berkeley, the anti-Columbia, aplace where respect for mother, God and country still reigned supreme. Its World War II hero president, EarlRudder, becaqme a comforting symbol of a mythic, civil, orderly past.

Perhapsthis explains the hysteria that accompanied Rudder’s reaction when confrontedby a group of African American students calling themselves the Afro-AmericanSociety on May 1, 1969. On thatsame day, a group of 34 black SMU students belonging to the Black League ofAfro-Americans and African College Students occupied President Willis Tate’soffice for five hours. Theypresented a list of demands, including the hiring of two black staff members toassist prospective African American students, expansion of black study courses,and provision of a building for use as a black social center.

Dr.Tate agreed to all the student demands except one calling for recruitment of500 additional African American students for the next fall semester. SMU atthat time had only 50 African American students, mostly in graduate school, outof a total of 9,500, but Tate insisted that school had the prerogative to setadmissions standards. SMU Vice President Thomas E. Broce praised the students,telling the press, “It was a very constructive and healthy discussion. We feel and the students feel we have abetter university for it.”

TheSMU meeting stood in stark contrast with the almost simultaneous confrontationthat took place at Texas A&M where 15 students identifying themselves asthe Afro-American Society presented a list of eight demands to Dick Bernard,special assistant to President Rudder. ‘We have been morally maimed and mentally tormented by the pretentiousatmosphere of racially tranquility set forth by racist proponents on thiscampus,” the student statement, in part, read.

Expressinganger at the tokenism still prevailing at A&M six years after its supposedintegration, the students sought recognition of the Afro-American Society as acampus organization; the immediate hiring of a black counselor to work asliaison between black students and the administration and the right of blackstudents to approve the counselor’s selection; investigation of recruitmentpolicies at the still almost all-white A&M athletic department and theexpansion of athletic scholarships to black athletes. “We want immediate recruitment of black athletes in allmajor sports or the firing of athletic director Gene Stallings,” the studentssaid in their mimeographed statement. “If the demands are not met by the third week of September, 1969, theAfro-American Society will take appropriate action. We will meet force with force, understanding withunderstanding, and restraint with restraint.” A&M officials, including Rudder, offered no commentimmediately after the confrontation.

Rudderlater rejected the notion of students presenting demands to the university andthe A&M board of directors rejected the complete list, includingrecognition of the Afro-American Society. “. . .[C]hange which would disrupt due academic process, change thrust upon this institution under the uglyveil of threat or demand will not be considered or tolerated,” the board said on May 5. In a May 27 letter, Rudderprovisionally rejected the idea of black studies course. “As to the idea of ‘special courses onAfrican history’ and the like, I am against them,” Rudder wrote. “Any course with academic merit whichis submitted to the Coordinating Board with evidence of sufficient demand andadequate financing has no problem of meeting with approval . . . I just don’tbelieve that ‘special’ courses in anything which lack either academic value,sufficient demand or a college able to offer them should be included in thecurriculum.”

Clearly,the tactics used by the Afro-American Society were clumsy and making “demands”of a former general running a conservative, hierarchy-driven institution wasunlikely to produce a positive response. Furthermore, the promise of these 15 students to meet “force with force”was a bit of macho bravado, meant to match, and perhaps parody, Rudder’searlier pledge that student protestors would meet a “hell of a fight.” The reasonable requests and questionsraised by the students was unfortunately lost, however, in their overheated,immature rhetoric. It wasreasonable, for instance, to ask why so little progress had been made in recruitingblack students or why the A&M athletic department was supposedly stillunable to find qualified African American athletes for its sports program. Today, it is also easy to see merit inestablishment of an Afro-Studies program. Rudder’s presumption that “African” studies would not carry sufficientacademic merit may indicate his lack of academic sophistication (he heldsimilar suspicions about art courses) but also suggest a belief that theAfrican American past and culture had little of value to offer the largerworld. Such racist assumptionswere commonplace in Western academia for the first half of the twentiethcentury and a serious re-appraisal of African history and culture and the blackpast in America was only just under way. As a product of early twentieth century Texas schools without anacademic background, Rudder can be forgiven his suspicions about such courses.

Hisreaction, however, does not compare favorably to the more understandingresponses of the still-conservative Willis Tate and the SMU administration tosimilar demands. If anything, theugly racism undergirding much of the public support for Rudder after thisincident underlies why Afro-American studies were sorely needed in Texasschools in the late 1960s. Somewriting to Rudder expressed general concern about anarchy on American campusesand disruption of the learning environment. “I have a young boy coming up who I hope to send there inthe future and I have made tentative provisions for it,” wrote Edward H.Gilchrist in a May 4 letter to the A&M administration. “But for heaven’s sake pleasetry and not let it go down the drain like some other schools have donealready. “. . . Gentlemen, pleasedon’t give into these people [the black protestors.] We want you and need you to help steer our young peopleright. Put your foot down, andyour best foot forward.”

DonB. Slocomb, a 1921 Aggie graduate, and in 1969 the superintendent of theGiddings Independent School District near Austin, expressed similarsentiments. “I am in favor ofgiving the Negro, within reason, those things that he requests in an orderlymanner,” Slocomb wrote on May 5. “But,violence and threats of violence have no place on our college campuses, and Ihope, Earl, that you won’t tolerate sit-ins and building takeovers! . . . Iwill wager that 99 percent of the present student body will back you inopposing militant blacks, militant whites, SDS’ers, and any other groups thatissues demands and threatens a takeover if their demands are not met.” Jack P.Goode of Seabrook, Texas, said that Rudder “should listen to their [theprotestors’] problems and take corrective actions where required . . . However,do not allow any radical group to take over and destroy A&M in the eyes ofthe world.”

Manyother correspondents, however, were more motivated to write letters of supportto Rudder because of their disgust at the sight of African Americans speakingout to white authorities. Severalletter writers used the incident to express their anger that any blacks wereattending A&M. “So the blackstudents want more black history taught,” began a letter dated May 3 from Rusk,Texas.

What history? Historians have been kind to the Negroes in not discussing their lack ofaccomplishment as a race when not led by the white race (Negro Africa). They want you to recruit more blackstudents, students who will not pay their own expenses and can’t learn ifaccepted (The average Negro can’t do satisfactory high school work.) They will do nothing but disrupt theorderly process of educating the real students.

RaymondOrr of Kerrville encouraged the use of violence to put black students back intheir place:

I deeply deplore the 1954 decision of the U.S. SupremeCourt that ended segregation. If Ihad my way, there would not be a negro in a white school or college in theUnited States. These negroes arenot in college to learn anything. They are there to create trouble and to destroy college functioning,nationwide . . . It is an old Southern saying that to give a negro an inch, hewill take a mile. This is so true. Permissiveness and ignorance of thebasic nature of the negro, on the part of so many softies who head up Northernand Eastern colleges, have brought about a state of anarchy everywhere. What must happen, if civilization is tosurvive, is to expel hundreds of these negroes, and send them to thepenitentiary for 25 or more years. It would be a good thing to shoot dead allnegroes caught toting guns on a campus.

Yearlater, one of the students participating in the Afro-American Society, KenLewallen, recalls the Afro-American Society receiving piles of hate mail fromfellow students and the surrounding community. In spite of the inability of thegroup to be recognized by the campus, the society continued as an undergroundgroup for years until it evolved into a formally recognized studentassociation. Life had been toughfor African American students before the society presented its demands, and itremained tough afterwards. “A&M resisted integration as long as it could,and it did so very quietly,” he said. Lewellen, who graduated from A&M in 1969 and then received adoctorate in American History from Kansas State university, learned quicklythat the best way to survive as an African American on campus was to keep a lowprofile. “You could be a blackstudent at A&M and pursue your educational aims unimpacted, if you werecareful. All of us were verycareful. We rocked the boat, butwe knew when to do it, and when not to.”

Rudder,who had personally contacted African American students, including athletes,urging them to attend A&M, probably felt equally bewildered by blackactivism and the subsequent white racist backlash. Having grown up in a part of Texas with a small blackpopulation, where the intense Negrophobia of some East and North Texas Aggieswas alien, and having served in an Army that though segregated included AfricanAmerican and Mexican American brothers-in-arms, and having been influenced byhis friend President Johnson’s gentle transformation into a civil rightssupporter during the 1960s, Rudder was probably revolted by the most intenselybigoted letters he received. Hequietly reminded many correspondents in return letters that every qualifiedstudent had the right to attend A&M regardless of race. Yet black identity politics wereprobably incomprehensible to him, or at least represented an issue he didn’tspend much time thinking about.

Rudderprobably accepted the lessons of the minimal history that he had been taught,that African Americans lacked a civilization before slavery and had undergone aslow tutelage for citizenship since. He no doubt was unaware of the racist biases in American and Africanhistoriography, or that new research was rediscovering rich African culturaltraditions. Living in a mostlywhite world, he probably little understood the need African Americans felt tocelebrate their culture and thirsted for a non-racist, thoughtful understandingof their past. Rudder’s approach to racial politics was mildly integrationist,however, not Afrocentric. In atour of student dorms in late 1969, Rudder told students that he wanted onestudent body, “not one divided black, white, or any other faction.” However, African-American students, bythe late 1960s, increasingly emphasized repairing the psychological damage causedby centuries of oppression and placed more emphasis on a positive identity thanin simply sharing public accommodations with whites. As a result, Rudder and A&M’s African American communitytalked past each other as they pursued markedly different political agendas.

Politicshad always been an up-and-down experience for Rudder and undoubtedly theculture wars at A&M had been tiring. The turmoil on campus had obscured what the president was undoubtedlyproud of, an ambitious building program that included a $10 million EngineeringCenter, a 15-floor, $7.6 million oceanography-meteorology center, and an $8.5million addition to the Memorial Student Center. In the last months of his life, work had already started ona $10 million complex that included an auditorium, a continuing educationcenter, and a conference tower along with other construction projects includinga chemistry annex and the campus’ first dormitory for women. The edifice of a great university wasarising in College Station as Rudder celebrated the start of 1970, even if itsintellectual foundations had only just been laid.

“EarlRudder was constantly in the middle of it,” Dethloff wrote. “He never sparedhimself. He was tough, but fair. Usually congenial, he could be abrasive if he thought it wouldhelp. He held an open mind, andwould act on advice contrary to his preconceived ideas when it appeared to himthat such advice was better informed.”

Rudderwouldn’t live to see his mission fully accomplished. That took almost another three decades. By the late 1990s, one state magazine, TexasMonthly, called A&M the best public university in Texas, while anational magazine, U.S. News and World Report, for the first time named the school one of the 50best in the United States. In1997, A&M had the largest fulltime undergraduate enrollment in the country,its annual research funding was sixth nationally and it had the best freshmenretention and graduation rates. The “Aggie” joke, in which the supposed rubeswho attended Texas A&M were mocked for their legendary slow-wittedness hadbeen a staple of humor in the state, particularly at the rival University ofTexas campus, for decades. Now, itwas the Aggies who were telling jokes. ‘What do you call an Aggie after graduation?” one quip went. “Boss” That punch line might be thegreatest achievement of Rudder’s academic career.

Michael Phillips is the author or co-author of thefollowing books:

“White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion inDallas, Texas, 1841-2001” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

“The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas SpeakerBecame a Power in State and National Politics.” Co-Written with Patrick Cox.(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).

Walter Buenger and Arnoldo de León, eds., “BeyondTexas Through Time: Breaking Away From Past Interpretations” (College Station:Texas A&M Press, 2011).

Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz, eds., “The HarlemRenaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western Experience” (New York:Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011).

Richardson Dilworth, ed. “Cities in AmericanPolitical History” (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011).

He will also be co-author of the forthcoming “TheRadical Origins of the Texas Right” (edited by David Cullen and Kyle Wilkison)due to be published in 2012 by Texas A&M University Press; and “AmericanDreams and Reality: A Retelling of the American Story,” to be published thesame year by Abigail Press.

He is currently collaborating, with longtimejournalist Betsy Friauf, on a history of Bishop College, an African Americaninstitution originally established in Marshall, Texas, that relocated to Dallasby the 1960s before suffering bankruptcy in the 1980s. The two plan to create awebsite and author a book, “’God Carved in Night’: Afro-Texan Culture,Political Activism And the Rise and Fall Of Bishop College” based on thisproject.

Re; Obama's State of the Union Speech

2012-01-24T20:01:00.001-08:00

I wish Obama had made this State ofthe Union address three years ago. He’d be in much better shape today if he had been this assertive. I likedthe call tonight to punish unfair trading practices by China, to reward companiesfor manufacturing stateside, to penalize companies that ship jobs overseas, toraise the tax rate for the wealthy to at least 30 percent, the call forinvestments in green technology, and the request to increase spending on andthe pace of infrastructure construction. I really did not like the energy partof the speech. The time to act on global warming is now and more oil andnatural gas drilling is not safe to the environment or our health. I am alsoskeptical of all the proposals for business tax cuts to change corporatebehavior. The business oligarchswho run this country are not smart. They are where they are by being ruthless. Mitch Daniel, by the way, isa crashing bore and an anti-labor goon.

Michael Phillips is the author or co-author of thefollowing books:

“White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion inDallas, Texas, 1841-2001” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

“The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas SpeakerBecame a Power in State and National Politics.” Co-Written with Patrick Cox.(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).

Walter Buenger and Arnoldo de León, eds., “BeyondTexas Through Time: Breaking Away From Past Interpretations” (College Station:Texas A&M Press, 2011).

Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz, eds., “The HarlemRenaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western Experience” (New York:Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011).

Richardson Dilworth, ed. “Cities in AmericanPolitical History” (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011).

He will also be co-author of the forthcoming “TheRadical Origins of the Texas Right” (edited by David Cullen and Kyle Wilkison)due to be published in 2012 by Texas A&M University Press; and “AmericanDreams and Reality: A Retelling of the American Story,” to be published thesame year by Abigail Press.

He is currently collaborating, with longtimejournalist Betsy Friauf, on a history of Bishop College, an African Americaninstitution originally established in Marshall, Texas, that relocated to Dallasby the 1960s before suffering bankruptcy in the 1980s. The two plan to create awebsite and author a book, “’God Carved in Night’: Afro-Texan Culture,Political Activism And the Rise and Fall Of Bishop College” based on this project.

Earl Rudder and the Era of "Radical Change" at Texas A&M

2012-01-24T06:28:00.001-08:00

Even asA&M made its rough transition to a coeducational future, however,Aggies found themselves contending with another controversy. Almostsimultaneously with a new admissions policy, the college Board of Directors andthe state legislature moved ahead with long-discussed plans to change the nameof the school, to replace the word “college” with “university” as part of thegeneral campaign to enhance A&M’s public image. A name change hadbeen suggested by the Century Council and in the faculty Aspirations report, but action on this still caught adisoriented A&M community by surprise.

Schoolofficials knew that one again they would be trouncing on the toes of sensitivealumni. The College Name Change Committee considered several argumentsagainst a name change, including the fact that the “College with its presentname has built up an identity in the public mind which would be lost,” that aname change might “necessitate a change in the institution’s songs, yells,ring, etc,” and, perhaps most importantly such a change would not only alienatethe “support and good will” of some alumni but would stoke already high fearsof further changes regarding the Corps, coeducation, and so on.

As early as1961, some faculty members, including the Chemistry Department’s A.F. Isbell,lobbied strongly for changing the name to Texas State University. Isbellbelieved that the new name not only advertised the school’s emerging status asa university, but as a top-notch state supported institution. To Isbell,acquiring this name represented a matter of urgency.

“It is nosecret that Texas Tech would like to have its name changed to Texas StateUniversity, North Texas State would also like to adopt this name, and when theUniversity of Houston becomes a state-supported school, it would be no surpriseif this school also asks for this name,” Isbell wrote in a letter toName-Change Committee Chair Lee Duewall. “If one of these schools is successfulin getting its name changed to Texas State University, its gain in prestige incomparison to the loss to A&M would be disastrous. Regardless ofour name, we would be regarded generally by those outside this immediatelocality as no higher than the third ranking school of this state.”

Isbell arguedthat he found it “impossible to think of a more concise or more descriptivename than the simple Texas State University.” Isbell argued that if“A&M” remained part of the school name, it would invite criticism sincethe initials would no longer stand for the limiting designation “Agriculturaland Mechanical.” Instead, it would be a mere symbolic reference to a past thatthe newly-designated university should try to escape. “The names that would becompletely unacceptable to me are such names as: Texas A&M Universityor simply A&M University,” he wrote. “Such names not only fail todescribe the school adequately, but more important, I believe they would makeus the laughing stock of the country. Finally, such a name would put usin company with the only other school to my knowledge which has such a name –Florida A&M University, which is a school for colored students only.”Actually, at the point Isbell’s letter was written, 10 institutions stillretained “Agricultural and Mechanical” as part of their name, includingLouisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College and PrairieView A&M, a segregated black institution that was part of the TexasA&M system. Even if an association with black colleges made some Texanslikes Isbell uncomfortable, however, his call for a completely new name gainedlittle traction among alumni.

To Bob Layton,A&M class of 1945, “A&M” held an important metaphorical, not aliteral meaning. “It does not mean Agricultural and Mechanical College ofTexas,” he wrote on January 13, 1961. “It means a way of life found noother place in the world. It is a factory which builds men to meettoday’s challenges. It is a heritage which has been paid for by years ofhard work, and by many lives who fought to defend that heritage.” Sentiments such as those expressed by Isbell represented nothing less than partof a communist conspiracy to Layton. “We want the best school we canpossibly have, but let’s not sell our heritage to get it,” he declared. “The communists have vowed to take this country by 1973 without firing a shot,by destroying freedom of thought, or individualism. Let’s not make iteasy for them. These are the real issues involved . . . Did you know thatTexas A&M is one of the few major schools which does not have known‘pink’ faculty members[?] This is commendable. Let’s keep it thatway.” On August 23, 1963, Layton got his wishes when the state Legislatureapproved changing the name of Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas toTexas A&M University. Reformers got the “university” designation theywanted while traditionalists like Layton could celebrate that the schoolremained “Texas A&M” and could retain most of its old fight songswithout rewrites, its traditional cheers, and the name ‘Aggies” for its sportsteams.

This was stilltoo much for Jack Gallagher of the Houston Post, who fumed in a column, “When they starttampering with the good name of Texas A&M, well they’ve oversteppedtheir bounds . . . They’ve ruined something sacred, our song, the song thatbelongs not just to the Aggies, but to everyone . . ‘We’re theAggies from AMC.’”

MichaelPhillips is the author or co-author of the following books:

“WhiteMetropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, Texas, 1841-2001” (Austin:University of Texas Press, 2006).

“The House WillCome to Order: How the Texas Speaker Became a Power in State and NationalPolitics.” Co-Written with Patrick Cox. (Austin: University of Texas Press,2010).

Walter Buengerand Arnoldo de León, eds., “Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away From PastInterpretations” (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2011).

Bruce A.Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz, eds., “The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The NewNegroes’ Western Experience” (New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group,2011).

RichardsonDilworth, ed. “Cities in American Political History” (Washington, D.C.: CQPress, 2011).

He will also beco-author of the forthcoming “The Radical Origins of the Texas Right” (editedby David Cullen and Kyle Wilkison) due to be published in 2012 by TexasA&M University Press; and “American Dreams and Reality: A Retelling ofthe American Story,” to be published the same year by Abigail Press.

He is currentlycollaborating, with longtime journalist Betsy Friauf, on a history of BishopCollege, an African American institution originally established in Marshall,Texas, that relocated to Dallas by the 1960s before suffering bankruptcy in the1980s. The two plan to create a website and author a book, “’God Carved inNight’: Afro-Texan Culture, Political Activism And the Rise and Fall Of BishopCollege” based on this project.

Keep up the pressure

2012-01-20T14:19:00.000-08:00

I think the pressure from Progressives who didn't vow their support for Obama in 2012, no mater what, has had an important effect in the last two weeks on the president's new order to close Guantanamo, his decision to halt (for now at least) the Keystone Pipeline, and his decision today to not allow insurers waivers allowing them to deny coverage for birth control. Keep the pressure up and don't embrace Obama unless it's a do-or-die choice and maybe we'll finally move this country forward.

Michael Phillips is the author or co-author of the following books:

“White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, Texas, 1841-2001” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

“The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas Speaker Became a Power in State and National Politics.” Co-Written with Patrick Cox. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).

Walter Buenger and Arnoldo de León, eds., “Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away From Past Interpretations” (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2011).

Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz, eds., “The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western Experience” (New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011).

Richardson Dilworth, ed. “Cities in American Political History” (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011).

He will also be co-author of the forthcoming “The Radical Origins of the Texas Right” (edited by David Cullen and Kyle Wilkison) due to be published in 2012 by Texas A&M University Press; and “American Dreams and Reality: A Retelling of the American Story,” to be published the same year by Abigail Press.

He is currently collaborating, with longtime journalist Betsy Friauf, on a history of Bishop College, an African American institution originally established in Marshall, Texas, that relocated to Dallas by the 1960s before suffering bankruptcy in the 1980s. The two plan to create a website and author a book, “’God Carved in Night’: Afro-Texan Culture, Political Activism And the Rise and Fall Of Bishop College” based on this project.

Completely Newt-ered

2012-01-20T10:04:00.001-08:00

So in India, to protest the often brutal custom of grooms' families demanding dowries from brides, a Mumbai dating service has created an app called "Angry Brides" based on the popular game 'Angry Birds." I'm designing a game based on Newt Gingrich called "Angry Ex-Wives."

Michael Phillips is the author or co-author of the following books:

“White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, Texas, 1841-2001” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

“The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas Speaker Became a Power in State and National Politics.” Co-Written with Patrick Cox. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).

Walter Buenger and Arnoldo de León, eds., “Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away From Past Interpretations” (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2011).

Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz, eds., “The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western Experience” (New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011).

Richardson Dilworth, ed. “Cities in American Political History” (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011).

He will also be co-author of the forthcoming “The Radical Origins of the Texas Right” (edited by David Cullen and Kyle Wilkison) due to be published in 2012 by Texas A&M University Press; and “American Dreams and Reality: A Retelling of the American Story,” to be published the same year by Abigail Press.

He is currently collaborating, with longtime journalist Betsy Friauf, on a history of Bishop College, an African American institution originally established in Marshall, Texas, that relocated to Dallas by the 1960s before suffering bankruptcy in the 1980s. The two plan to create a website and author a book, “’God Carved in Night’: Afro-Texan Culture, Political Activism And the Rise and Fall Of Bishop College” based on this project.

Gender Desegregation: Earl Rudder and When Texas A&M Became Co-Ed

2012-01-14T09:40:00.000-08:00

A Texas farm boy, James Earl Rudder became internationally famous as a D-Day hero. A deeply conservative man who lacked the proper academic credentials, he nevertheless ruled as president of Texas A&M when the tradition-bound school underwent sweeping reforms. Under Rudder, A&M changed its name, desegregated, admitted women for the first time, and ended the requirement that students serve in its paramilitary "Corps of Cadets." The passage describes the sometimes hysterical and angry reaction provoked when A&M began to admit women.

Only a person with solid footing as an Aggie, as a soldier, and as a patriot would be able to carry off the reforms necessary in order to save Texas A&M from stifling traditions that threatened the future of the college. Such a person came in the person of Earl Rudder, who was ready to leave politics after two years as state Land Commissioner. As journalist Paul Burka put it:

He was Old Aggie to the core, class of ’32, an industrial education major, an ex-football coach, a general, and a World War II hero. Years later, a number of Rudder’s contemporaries would try to take credit for persuading him to open A&M’s doors to women and end mandatory Corps membership once and for all, but the reality is that it did not take a great amount of insight to see what had to be done. What it took was courage and clout – the willingness and the stature to stand up to Old Aggies – and Earl Rudder had plenty of both.

His experiences at A&M and afterward also may have given Rudder a unique ability to empathize with the students while at the same time keeping an objective distance from some of its more hidebound customs. Two decades earlier, Rudder had arrived at A&M as a “frog,” the Aggie term for transfer student. He had never been a fish and therefore had lived outside the take and give of the school’s class system. Not hazed as an underclassmen, he may not have been as patient with the literally sophomoric desire to return the favor to subsequent freshmen. His experience as a real soldier at wartime, and of witnessing comrades bleed and die on the battlefield, probably made him a little cynical of the tin soldier aspects of the Cadets. Nevertheless, he was an Aggie and respected the conservative values the institution represented.

At the time of his appointment, Texas governor Price Daniel reportedly told him to “go over there and straighten things out.” A&M’s board of directors eased in Rudder, naming him vice president in charge of the College Station campus while M.T. Harrington received the title of President. It was clear, however, that Rudder was the man of the moment. As if to announce his inevitable ascendancy, officials placed Rudder and his family in what was known as “Prexy’s Home,” the official home of A&M presidents built originally for Sul Ross during his A&M tenure in 1891. As if to underscore the challenges Rudder faced in his new position, two Brazos County women filed suit in order to gain admittance to A&M just as the new vice president was settling into his official residence.

In 1957, A&M’s Academic Council voted 49-1 that military training at the school should be optional, which placed them in direct conflict with the school’s Board of Directors, which narrowly favored compulsory training by a 5-4 vote. The Battalion published editorials supporting both optional military training and coeducation, but this did not reflect majority opinion on campus. Reprisals for taking a dissenting view increased in severity. The Cadet Corps “busted’ the editor of the Battalion a rank for an editorial supporting coeducation, while one another student favoring the admission of women suffered injuries when an unknown assailant tossed an ammonia bomb in his dorm room.

Rudder rarely visited the A&M campus after his graduation, so he probably did not fully appreciate how explosive the issues surrounding the Cadet Corps and women students had become. When he arrived to take the office of vice president, author John A. Adams notes, “he was surprised to find an air of unrest among the cadets, as well as discontent among a scant number of non-regs (civilian students), faculty and staff. His concern quickly turned to to the Corps . . . [and] he was blunt about the dissension in the ranks.” In one of his first speeches to the Cadets, Rudder placed much of the blame for the campus discontent on the class system, by which upperclassmen asserted their authority over underclassmen. “Do you want a Corps or a class system?” he asked bluntly. “We have many units instead of a Corps in many respects.”

Rudder warned the Cadets that the survival of both the Corps and the school were at stake. “The primary objective of your lives on this campus is an education,” he said. “Or, are you looking forward to privileges, authority, to prolonging for awhile indulgence in immaturity and irresponsibility to indoctrination of the young men with a philosophy of ‘take it now so you can dish it out later?’” He then shared with the cadets the appalling dropout rate among freshmen. In Air Science, the dropout rate climbed from 19.9 percent in the 1954-1955 school year to 44.4 percent in 1957-1958. In military science there had been a similar 43.4 percent dropout rate over the previous year. In the Army ROTC program, the situation was even worse, with 57 percent leaving the school before their sophomore year. “At this rate,” Rudder concluded, “The Corps will eliminate itself.”

Rudder appealed to younger students to lead the charge in reforming Cadet culture. “Part of the trouble is that we know no way to handle freshmen except the way we were handled last year,” Rudder told a gathering of sophomores. “. . . I think that this is our problem because we failed to tell you the difference between good military discipline and so-called ‘good bull.’”

The issue of the Cadets’ role in campus life, of course, entwined with the issue of admitting coeds. The coed issue seemed to have been resolved when the Texas Supreme Court refused, for a second time, to order A&M to admit women and when the state Legislature again rejected a bill making A&M coeducational. “No Coeds for Aggieland: This Time It’s For Real – So A&M Remains An All-Male Citadel,” an April 1959 headline of the Battalion, the A&M student newspaper, prematurely declared. Rudder would soon resolve the twin issues of the Cadets and coeducation in the opposite direction, but that awaited his rise to the school presidency.

As campus historian Henry Dethloff notes, the on-campus battles over the school’s identity grabbed so much attention, that the press barely noticed the announcement on June 27, 1959 that the Board of Directors had named Rudder president of Texas A&M College and Dr. M.T. Harrington had become chancellor of the A&M system, which in addition to the College Station campus included Arlington State College, Prairie View A&M and John Tarleton College. Although the new titles involved no real change of duties or alteration of Rudder’s relationship with Harrington, “Rudder’s authority, the closeness of his relationship with the Board of Directors, and his general popularity with the students, former students, faculty, and staff perceptibly increased.”

After his official inauguration on March 26, 1960, he “faced the difficult task of binding the wounds and quieting the tumult raised over the past two years, while steering Texas A&M ahead in its academic development.” Some greeted his mission of reform with skepticism, accusing him of holding statewide political ambitions. Others doubted that an “Old Aggie” of his austere military manner could engineer the campus makeover needed to secure A&M’s future. But, as Dethloff observes, ”Rudder was a fighter who never quit anything until it was finished. As many have said since, he turned out to be the right man in the right place at the right time.”

Rudder and the rest of the Aggie administration moved cautiously. The Board of Directors launched four different studies evaluating the school’s programs and policies in preparation for its decennial report to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, the body that would approve or withdraw accreditation. In 1961, Rudder charged a Committee on Aspirations, composed of faculty and staff members to consider the following questions: 1) What kind of graduate and citizen should A&M College produce? 2) What should be the A&M mission for the next 15 years? 3) To what level of research, teaching and other services should A&M aspire? 4) What should be A&M’s size and scope by 1976?

The aspirations committee, in its 1962 report, recommended establishment of a tenure process in order to bring the college in line with national standards and to attract higher quality faculty. With tenure, the college should provide higher faculty and staff salaries, including yearly raises and merit pay. The college’s library must be improved, the report said, and a graduate school overseen by a dean should be established. Faculty also needed improved benefits such as better health insurance coverage, and a more generous retirement program. The administration should also seek alumni support to established endowed chairs in college departments. The committee also declared that, “the name of the institution should be changed to foster and maintain a university image.”

More controversial was the report’s support for the admission of women and a call for compulsory military training to be replaced by a voluntary program, charging that the activities and duties of the Corps formed a distraction from academic excellence for many students. “In housing, feeding, and recreation of students, the military emphasis has limited the true pursuit of scholarship and the development of an environment which will contribute to this scholarship,” the report said. In addition to making the Corps voluntary, the committee urged that the Corps no longer exist as a residential organization and that an adult supervisor reside in each residential unit. Knowing how deeply the Aggie community felt about the Corps, this report supposedly alarmed Rudder so much that upon reading it, he let out a “loud exclamation followed by tossing the report into the garbage can. He soon fished it out and re-read it.”

A furious reaction attended release of the Aspirations Committee Report, with some critics charging that a communist-inspired attack on the Cadet Corps had begun. “The next Legislature should investigate the “Abolish Military Training” advocates on the A&M Campus,” wrote 1957 graduate Robert W. “Bob” Rowland. “These cries closely parallel the same being uttered in such publications as ‘THE WORKER’ among others.” Rowland, charging that the A&M faculty “despises A&M past, present, and all traditions” urged that the annual Faculty Achievement Awards given annually by the Former Students Association be immediately discontinued.

The Report of the Century Council proved milder in its conclusions but reinforced the building momentum toward reform. The Century Council called for developing an institution of “university structure,” that included solid humanities, socials science and natural science programs. The Council hedged on the issue of a university name change, however, and, unlike the aspirations committee, strongly endorsed maintaining a two-year compulsory ROTC program. The 1963 self-study report submitted to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools focused on plans for an ambitious building program, that included construction of a meteorology and oceanography building, a particle accelerator, and a cyclotron accelerator. Such projects obviously assumed an improvement and expansion of the natural science course offerings at A&M.

A last report, the Board of Director’s Blueprint for Progress, called for the school to develop “strong interdisciplinary programs in the areas of engineering and the sciences, including the planetary sciences, molecular science, biomedical engineering, energy and raw material resources, electronic data applications, and the behavioral sciences.” The board also called on A&M to “take all feasible measures to strengthen and give greater depth to studies in the humanities and social sciences in all curricula. . . [and] place greater emphasis upon graduate offerings . . .”

Taken together, these four separate internal reviews focused on different issues but pointed in one direction. To survive, A&M had to grow beyond its traditional narrow focus on engineering, agriculture and military discipline and develop credibility as a full-fledged liberal arts school. Secondly, A&M had to recruit students beyond its narrow base of white, male “native Texan[s] of middle-to-upper-class socio –economic backgrounds” and begin reaching out to non-traditional students, such as women.

The numbers made clear that A&M’s growth had not kept up with most of the other 18 state supported colleges and universities in the decade between 1951 to 1961. Overall, enrollment in Texas public institutions of higher learning nearly doubled in that 10-year period from 52,568 to 100,982. At the University of Texas, enrollment had grown approximately 37.7 percent, from 12,707 to a total of 20,396 ten years later. Texas Technological College (now Texas Tech) had more than doubled from 4,901 to 10,212. Arlington State College (now the University of Texas at Arlington) grew almost eightfold, from 1,318 to 8,318. By contrast, A&M’s enrollment figures barely budged, growing a tepid 14.8 percent, from 6,582 to 7,724.

If the enrollment figures were stagnant, the College’s public image, outside of Aggie partisans, was depressing. On September 28, 1962, Time magazine ran a highly unflattering portrait of Texas A&M, which the writers suggested stood for “Texas Athletic and Military.” Described as “100 miles from anywhere,” the article noted that “A&M has no departments of arts, classics, music or philosophy. English, history, and psychology are undistinguished. To scoffers . . . Aggies are mere ‘onion packers.’” Noting a masculine atmosphere in which “[h]earty lads skin deer in the showers, carry Volkswagens up four floors of dormitory stairs and work round-the-clock piling timber 100 ft. high for the purgative bonfire before the Wagnerian game with the University of Texas”

"Time" magazine concluded that at A&M “the prime requirement may not be scholarship, but the prime blessing is belonging.” The article strongly displeased Rudder, but he recognized the implications of such condescension from an influential national magazine. Supposedly when he read the line about A&M’s lack of philosophers, he said, “I don’t know what they are, but get me some.”

Within a year after the four internal review reports were completed, Rudder and the Aggie Board of Directors made the first of several dramatic breaks with the Aggie past. Rudder at first expressed reluctance about co-education, but his friend Lyndon Johnson, then the Vice President, apparently persuaded him that such a change was necessary to the college’s survival. The Board of Directors on April 27, 1963 agreed to admit women to A&M on a limited basis starting that June 1. Women had to not only meet the requirements faced by all prospective students, but had to be the wife or daughter of an enrolled student, staff member or faculty member, or enroll in a course of study not available at another state-supported college or university. Women could enter A&M graduate or veterinary medicine programs without restriction.

Even this limited step toward co-education sent shockwaves across the Aggie community. Board of Directors member Sterling C. Evans explained the policy changes as a matter of convenience, noting that there were now 1,800 married students on campus and that the university had experienced difficulty in the past hiring married faculty when their wives and daughters could not enroll at the school.

Rudder tried to calm Old Aggies that assuring them that the impact of limited coeducation would be minimal. “”[T]here are 254 female students enrolled at Texas A&M for the current semester,” he wrote in a November 13, 1964 letter. “. . . Females comprise about three percent of the student body this semester. I see no basis for a significant departure from this level in the near future. To my knowledge, the policy change allowing limited coeducation was not intended by the Board of Directors to be a phase in . . . plan for unrestricted coeducation.”

Such explanations did little to calm the storm. When Rudder called a meeting of the entire Corps of Cadets at G. Rollie White Coliseum, students chanting, “We don’t want to integrate”, roundly booed him. Rudder warned that without limited coeducation, A&M could lose important academic programs and students to Texas Tech, but strong resistance to the admission of women still developed.

Some Aggies feared that the delicate social fabric of the campus would be ripped apart by this change. “We’d always been equal at A&M, no matter if Daddy was a big oil man or a sharecropper,” said one alumnus. “It didn’t matter. Aggies were all wore the same clothes, ate the same food, lived in the same quarters. I was afraid all these changes would upset the fellowship.” Not all opposition to female students was so well-intentioned however. Some Cadets, with the backing of angry alumni, formed the Committee for an All Male Military Texas A&M.”

Members of the committee derisively referred to Aggies supporting co-education as “Maggies.” An ugly, bitter misogyny filled the pages of the committee’s leaflets and circulars. “We men know to appreciate, love, and honor our women, but we know what a fix Eve got us in in the garden of EDEN,” wrote 1939 graduate Gordon Wisenbaker in an open May 8, 1963 letter to Governor John Connally. “Let’s not let that happen at A&M.” An issue of the November 21, 1963 Beaumont Aggie News was filled with sexist jokes such as “BACHELOR: A ROLLING STONE WHO GATHERS NO BOSS.” The jokes were followed by an editorial comment: “MAYBE IT’S A GOOD THING MEN DON’T UNDERSTAND WOMEN. WOMEN UNDERSTAND WOMEN AND DON’T LIKE THEM.”

In a protest letter to the Board of Directors and Rudder, Warren B. Johnson, Jr., class of 1957, continued in this vein. “Who can blame freshmen for leaving when they discover how emasculated the school has become and how uncertain its future?” The Senior Committee for the Preservation of A&M suspected selfish ulterior motives behind the policy change. “”It is the opinion of many, that President Rudder has something more than just A&M at heart and that something may well be his political goal to be an official in the state government,” a committee flier suggested

Support for coeducation often proved less than egalitarian, such as the case of the Abilene ex who suggested that the presence of co-eds might improve football recruitment. The local newspaper, the Bryan Eagle, however, fully embraced the admission of women. ”The board’s action yesterday proves that the college fathers are willing to act in an objective manner not motivated by tradition for tradition’s sake . . . Texas A&M is well on it way to the excellence sought by school officials and the people of Bryan-College Station.”

The results of the A&M policy change were not as revolutionary or as apocalyptic as many expected. Gender “desegregation” turned out to be a slow and difficult process. An Aggie alumnus serving in the state Legislature, Rep. Will Smith, introduced legislation on May 7, 1963 that would have returned A&M to its all-male status. Unable to get the necessary four-fifths vote required for the bill to be considered by the full House, Smith did engineer passage of a House resolution calling for the state to provide one major all-female and one all-male university.

The week of the vote 500 Aggie students and alumni lobbied the legislators, including a delegation of young women bearing signs that read “We want Aggies, not Maggies.” Smith told the House that the Board of Directors had overstepped their authority by approving the admission policy changes without approval of the Legislature. “Thousands of former Aggies are withdrawing their support of the school because of the board’s action,” Smith said. “The only people who favor putting girls in A&M are the merchants of Bryan. They want more business.” The motion passed 99-22, with shouts of “Gig ‘em Aggies” (a traditional A&M cheer) echoing in the House chamber as green lights indicating “yes” votes flashed on the electronic voting board.

One supporter of the resolution was future House Speaker Bill Clayton, then the state representative from Springlake, “I am a former student, Class of 1950, and I want you to know that the majority of A&M men in my area are certainly opposed to your views and the views of the Board of Directors,’ Clayton wrote in a November 25, 1964 letter to John Lindsey, president of the Association of Former Students, who supported the Board’s move. Senator William T. Moore, long an advocate of co-education, responded to Will Smith’s actions in the House by introducing a resolution in the state Senate supporting the A&M Board of Directors, but it failed to pass.

In any case, co-education went at a snail’s pace. Twelve women applied for admission to A&M within two days of the policy change. The college accepted two women, both wives of faculty members, for regular admission in May 1963, the first female day students accepted at the college since the height of the Depression, in 1933, when 11 women had been accepted under the school’s “hardship” provisions. By September, 150 women attended day classes. A&M did little, however, to make the women feel welcome. Few buildings on the campus had women’s restrooms and the first dorm rooms for women did not open until 1972.

By 1965, however, most students already expressed their support for coeducation and other proposed reforms on campus. On February 25 of that year, an on-campus poll of about 25 percent of the entire student body indicated that about 47 percent of students favored unlimited coeducation, and another 11 percent favored limited coeducation. As expected, the bulk of opposition came from the Cadet Corps. About 55 percent of Cadets opposed any degree of coeducation. Fifty-four percent of students participating in the poll said they supported making Corps membership non –compulsory.

Nevertheless, women had a hard time feeling secure about their status at A&M. Anna Bell Harvey, one of the original 11 day students, recalled that the school required her to sign an agreement that she would withdraw from A&M if the Board of Directors reversed its decision on co-education. Sallie Sheppard, later to become A&M’s associate provost for undergraduate programs was also one of the pioneers. “I never encountered any animosity,” she said in a 1989 newspaper interview. “I heard at night there were rallies against women at A&M, But I . . . never really saw any of that.” Shepperd graduated with a degree in mathematics in 1965, the same year that the Board of Directors authorized Rudder to use his “discretion” in admitting women to the university. The number of women attending the university slowly increased and by 1969, the year before Rudder died, women who met the same admissions criteria as men were being admitted. In September 1971, the Board of Directors declared that, “Texas A&M University is a coeducational university admitting all qualified men and women to all academic studies on the same basis . . .”

It still took years for women to enter the campus’ remaining all-male citadels, however, such as the Corps of Cadets or the band. The Corps opened to women in 1974, but the band, and select Cadet companies such as Rudd’s Rangers, remained male-only. A group of women filed a class action suit against the university in 1979, alleging gender discrimination. Between 1978 and 1980, the Aggie band would change tempo when a company of women marched onto the football field, causing the women to be out of step. In this period, a cross was burned on the lawn of the women’s cadet dormitory; sandwiches and tobacco juice were thrown at women Cadets; dead armadillos and opossums were left in women’s rooms; gunshots were fired through a woman’s dorm window; and a bottle of flammable liquid was thrown into Cadet Anita Bowden’s residence, causing damage.

“I left A&M very bitter,” said Bowden. “I was left with a lot of hate.” Melanie Zentgraf, the lead plaintiff in the discrimination case, suffered severe harassment. A&M President Jarvis Miller publicly humiliated Zentgraf during 1980 graduation ceremonies by refusing to shake hands with her even as she was booed and hissed by other students. “I wasn’t proud of her,” Miller later said.

As of the early 1990s, only 10 percent of the A&M faculty were women, less than half the state average. Not until 1994 did a women, Brooke Leslie, become an Aggie student body president. The 1996-1997 school year marked the first time women constituted a majority of the freshmen class. Women made up 48 percent of the total student body that year. Yet sexism persisted. At A&M, policy changed faster than attitudes about gender.

Michael Phillips is the author or co-author of the following books:

“White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, Texas, 1841-2001” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

“The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas Speaker Became a Power in State and National Politics.” Co-Written with Patrick Cox. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).

Walter Buenger and Arnoldo de León, eds., “Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away From Past Interpretations” (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2011).

Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz, eds., “The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western Experience” (New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011).

Richardson Dilworth, ed. “Cities in American Political History” (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011).

He will also be co-author of the forthcoming “The Radical Origins of the Texas Right” (edited by David Cullen and Kyle Wilkison) due to be published in 2012 by Texas A&M University Press; and “American Dreams and Reality: A Retelling of the American Story,” to be published the same year by Abigail Press.

He is currently collaborating, with longtime journalist Betsy Friauf, on a history of Bishop College, an African American institution originally established in Marshall, Texas, that relocated to Dallas by the 1960s before suffering bankruptcy in the 1980s. The two plan to create a website and author a book, “’God Carved in Night’: Afro-Texan Culture, Political Activism And the Rise and Fall Of Bishop College” based on this project.

Earl Rudder, Hypermasculinity, and the Culture of Texas A&M University

2012-01-13T12:15:00.000-08:00

A Texas farm boy, James Earl Rudder became internationally famous as a D-Day hero. A deeply conservative man who lacked the proper academic credentials, he nevertheless ruled as president of Texas A&M when the tradition-bound school underwent sweeping reforms. Under Rudder, A&M changed its name, desegregated, admitted women for the first time, and ended the requirement that students serve in its paramilitary "Corps of Cadets." The passage describes the anti-intellectual and often crude atmosphere that prevailed at the campus when Rudder assumed the office of college president in 1959.

When President Earl Rudder opened discussion on admitting women to Texas A&M University in 1963, he confronted a macho subculture that had prevailed over the school for its century-long history. Similar efforts had destroyed previous A&M administrations. As Rudder undoubtedly knew, Aggie traditions are often not only durable, but intractable. Yet, Rudder brought to the job military credentials Aggies respected and a flexible enough mind to sense changes in the larger culture and respond accordingly. No president wrought so many changes on the Aggie campus, yet Rudder remains one of the most revered figures in the campus’ crowded pantheon.

Much of A&M’s masculine identity derives from its origins as a land grant college and the unique role played by the paramilitary Corps of Cadets, who from the beginning formed the heart of the student body. Even in its earliest days, A&M was unique in the sense of identity it created among students and their parents. “One of the things which makes Texas A&M College so great is the keen interest taken in it by its students and ex-students,” Rudder would note on Aggie “Muster Day” in 1956. “Aggies, in school and out, love A&M enough to defend it in every way possible. I have never known any Aggie to show any apathy or lethargy in any matter connected with Texas A&M College.”

When Rudder won appointment as president of Texas A&M College in 1959, however, the school’s future was in question. A&M’s Board of Directors gave Rudder a mandate to enhance the school’s influence, visibility, and academic image. In one of the many ironies of his college presidency, this military man would achieve his mission at A&M by reversing the policies of his predecessor and fellow soldier, Lawrence Sullivan ”Sul” Ross, through a reduction of the Corps’ influence on campus life.

Rudder embarked on a reform crusade because the College Station mentality had become a threat to the school’s future, depressing enrollment, increasing dropouts and tarnishing the school’s image as a serious institution of higher education. A conservative, Rudder would be the man who would institute the most radical reforms in campus history, changing the school’s name, dropping the requirement that students belong to the Cadet Corps, admitting coeds, and racially integrating the campus. Not only did Rudder survive these reform efforts, he thrived, and after his death he would join Sul Ross as one of two A&M presidents immortalized in sculpture on the campus grounds.

The oldest public institution of higher learning in Texas, A&M was established in 1862 under the terms of Morrill Land-Grant College Act, which mandated that schools established under the program "teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts." The Agricultural and Military College of Texas opened on October 4, 1876. The Legislature directed that the school be built near the isolated, rural South Central Texas hamlet of Bryan, where the new town of College Station would rise to accommodate the school.

With 106 students and a faculty of six, A&M began as an all-male military institution requiring all students to participate in the Corps of Cadets. A&M was not a service academy like West Point, though many cadets went on to heroic and distinguished military careers. A&M’s creators believed that the drill and regimentation required by the Corps also provided the discipline needed for a successful civilian career.

The resulting intense sense of community may have been enhanced when, the year of its opening in 1876, the new state constitution specified that the Agricultural and Mechanical College was to be a branch of a proposed University of Texas, even though the University of Texas would not open for six years. This secondary status firmly placed a chip on the collective shoulders of Aggies for much of the twentieth century, an attitude captured in the way Aggies still refer to Texas as “tu,” emphatically in lower case, to stand for “the university.”

A&M’s origins as a land grant college placed the school in a curricular straitjacket. The Legislature intended the school to train the industrial class and to provide knowledge of modern agricultural techniques for the upcoming generation of farmers. A&M was seen as a seat of practical knowledge, while the esoteric arts of philosophy, literature, history, and mastery of dead classical languages were best left to the private schools attended by elite children. A shortage of textbooks on agriculture and engineering, however, persuaded the school’s first faculty to teach a traditional liberal arts program. This drew the anger of the Grange, the first of a series of agricultural movements to rock Texas politics in the late 19th century. The Grange, which embraced land grant colleges as a means of improving the lives of farmers through exposure to modern technology and cultivation techniques, protested that A&M College was not living up to its charter.

Oran M. Roberts, a reactionary Democrat who had staved off a challenge from the agrarian Greenback Party to win the 1878 gubernatorial race, declared that A&M’s top mission should be to teach students how “to produce two ears of wheat and corn and two bales of cotton by the same labor and capital that have been heretofore producing but one.” A&M students didn’t need literature and science, Roberts proclaimed because effetes interested in such abstractions “are seldom found to spend their lives between the plow handles or in the workshops.” The Board of Directors, the administration body of the college, fired A&M’s first president, Thomas Sanford Gathright, and the entire nine-person faculty and informed students that they could major in agriculture or engineering, the two options implied in the school’s name.

Such a curriculum guaranteed the campus’ male-dominated atmosphere for the next century. “Few women attended college, fewer still pursued instruction in the then ‘unfeminine’ fields of farming and engineering.” campus historian Henry C. Dethloff noted. Regardless, the heavy emphasis on agronomy and practical science narrowed the college’s horizons from the beginning.

As longtime Texas political journalist Paul Burka notes, the next year, Governor Roberts proclaimed his support for building of “a university of the first class,” by which he meant the University of Texas. For the next seven decades UT would become the center of law, science and the liberal arts, while A&M remained a backwards, forgotten little sibling, relying on tradition and the spirit created by the Corps rather than academic excellence.

Already in the 1880s, politicians in Austin spoke of closing A&M and converting it into an insane asylum. A&M escaped this fate, though, through the appointment of former Confederate Army hero Lawrence Sullivan Ross, appointed A&M’s president 1890 while he still occupied the governor’s mansion. Ross’ war record and previous service as governor proved effective lobbying assets. Legislators for a time stopped talking about closing the university or consolidating it with the University of Texas. Ross had a vision for the college, where he believed military training should be of “transcendental importance.” As Paul Burka writes, “A&M had found its calling. Education, even agricultural education, was relegated to secondary status.” At A&M, “’College spirit’ and indoctrination surpassed and even began to smother academic interests,” Dethloff observed.

This created an unflattering stereotype of A&M students in the form of Aggie jokes. Largely the students and alumni of the University of Texas instigated this onslaught of ridicule. “Why did the Aggie tip-toe past the medicine chest?” “So he wouldn’t wake up the sleeping pills.” “What is an Aggie doing when he holds his hands tightly over his ears?” He’s trying to hold on to a thought.” “How did the Aggie try to kill the bird?” “He threw it off the cliff.” Not just the students, but A&M College itself became the butt of jokes. “Did you hear the one about the Aggie library? They had to close it when someone checked out the book. But he returned it, so they reopened the library. Then they had to close it down again when they found out he had already colored it in.”

Aggies, however, took the jokes as a sign of distinction. In the popular stereotype, of the Aggie, “[h]e was loyal, dedicated and determined, so much so that at times, he appeared bull-headed, immature, and irrational . . .” Dethloff explains. Such barbs, Dethloff argues, became a form of “ethnic humor” which gave students and alumni an even stronger sense of common identity, even as it made the campus community more resistant to outside influence.

Aggies’ sense of being a tribe apart only mounted as the outside world witnessed the rise of women in politics, culminating in the ratification of the women's suffrage amendment over strenuous objections from Texas males in 1920. Men already emasculated by the rise of capitalist market forces in the early twentieth century. Increasingly in Texas from 1900 to the 1920s, men left the farms to an uncertain urban environment where, instead of living off of the produce of their own labor they depended on the wages granted by richer and more powerful bosses. Such an employee-employer relationship contradicted the very definition of independent manhood that dominated rural culture in the 19th century.

In this cultural and political landscape, A&M represented a manly safe haven, a place where “Cadets lived together, drilled together, went classes together, even danced together. (At campus sponsored stag dances, ‘girls’ were identified by a handkerchief tied around a cadet’s arm.) The Corps was an all-inclusive fraternity, its rituals became traditions, its traditions sacrosanct.” This herd of sacred cow traditions, combined with military regimentation, shaped many heroic military careers. Aggie culture also created a hothouse environment that made aggression and violence an almost inevitable part of campus life.

A&M quickly acquired a “Wild West” reputation. The Galveston News, consistently unfriendly to the campus in the 1880s, reported that A&M represented a den of iniquity where faculty “drank liquor and played cards.” Faculty members complained about students burning outhouses, frequenting local whorehouses, drinking in student housing and practicing brutal hazing rituals. A former state senator wrote that he would sooner give his son “a pony, six shooter, bottle of whiskey and deck of cards . . . as to send him to the A&MC.”

Hazing of freshman, or “fish” as they are known in A&M parlance, had already been institutionalized. The persecution of fish by upperclassmen included forcing freshmen to buy passes to non-existent campus buildings, making them to stand guard over the campus flagpole all night, and sending them on pointless missions such as entering the Corps Commandant’s Office to get a “bucket of reveille” (Reveille was the college’s canine mascot.) A freshmen eating at the campus dining hall might be stopped by an upperclassman, who would insist that the younger student answer some trivia question on Texas history or concerning A&M lore. Someone failing to answer correctly would be denied the privilege of desert. If stopped elsewhere on campus, fish might be made to polish an upperclassman’s boots or some other act of abasement.

Because of a shortage of student housing, more than 100 students lived in 36 tents during the fall and spring terms of 1907 and 1908. Other students lived in primitive dormitories still heated by wooden stoves. The college’s physician, among others, called attention to the unsanitary, unhealthy, and inadequate bathing facilities on campus centered at the unheated aging natatorium. These conditions, coupling with hazing, contributed to the Cadet campus strike in 1908.

A&M life was dominated by class struggle, but rather than a face-off between capitalists and labor, this contest featured upper and lower classmen locked in hazing rituals that established comforting, predictable hierarchies. The common experience of moving from harassed fish to hazing sophomore produced a sense of belonging, and A&M students took this coming-of-age ritual very seriously. The Corps promoted an intense sense of belonging that made the Cadets hard to divide and conquer when they felt threatened by change. Thus in 1908, students tightly united against they saw as the high-handed and authoritarian actions of President Henry Hill Harrington.

The son-in-law of revered late A&M President Sul Ross, Harrington clashed with the cadets when one severe rash of hazing provoked the president to dress down the entire sophomore class. In an assembly, he called the students “cowards” and “sneaks” for their acts of physical abuse. “Harrington . . . thoroughly offended the class, who, from their point of view, believed they were only doing what others had done unto them, and were carrying on a custom of the school.”

In February 1908, the cadets signed a petition requesting the A&M board of directors to fire Harrington. The board not only ignored the petition, but also passed a resolution exonerating Harrington of any wrongdoing and pledging the board’s continued support. Angrily the Cadet Corps boycotted classes and refused to line up for formation. A tiny fraction of the 580 enrolled students remained on campus by late February. Harrington proved unable to resolve his differences with students, and with the faculty, which objected to his authoritarian administrative style. Isolated, Harrington resigned, effective September 1, 1908.

The 1908 strike confirmed for A&M critics their image of the school as out of control and renewed cries for the campus to be closed or made part of the University of Texas. None of these controversies enhanced A&M’s academic reputation. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching inspected the school not long after the Harrington era and snidely comment in a report that ”It is a display of great leniency to term the Agricultural and Mechanical of Texas an institution of higher education at all.”

A&M again faced possible extinction at the hands of an angry Legislature after an upsurge in hazing, which intensified between 1910 and 1913. One freshman in 1910 awoke next to burning sulphur left by upperclassman and suffered serious burns. A&M parent wrote furious letters regarding the practice of “strapping,” which involved the use by upperclassmen of a belt or a wooden paddle on the backside of unfortunate fish. The practice, which dated back to the school’s earliest days, provoked an angry response from Texas Governor Oscar B. Colquitt in 1912, who had received numerous letters from concerned parents.

We do not object to boys having small pranks played on them, but when it comes to the boys being stripped of their clothing, and thrown across a bed and whipped on their bear rump and thighs with a leather strap, we think it is time to call a halt.

A still-pathetic housing situation, which placed 500 cadets in 241 canvas tents on campus, probably stoked tensions at A&M, where the incoming fish turned out to be particularly rebellious. Freshmen refused orders to take down their painting of the “Class of 1916” from the campus water tank or to get a Christmas tree for the upperclassmen as they had always been required. In response, upperclassmen strapped every freshman just before or after the Christmas break. This happened in the same year that a hazed University of Texas student had responded to harassment by fatally shooting his tormentor.

The Texas Legislature passed a resolution condemning hazing and held a hearing on the A&M strapping incident. To prevent more sanctions from Austin, the full A&M faculty approved the immediate expulsion of 27 students. As in 1908, students went on strike, but this time the administration stood firm and expelled another 466 students for insubordination. In response, the Legislature passed a bill that made hazing a misdemeanor punishable by fines and/or imprisonment. Campus President Robert T. Milner, like Harrington, was forced to quit the presidency.

Such turmoil did little to improve the image of the college and may have contributed to its relative neglect by the Texas Legislature. In 1923, when oil was discovered on the University of Texas’ public lands, A&M received only one-third of the revenues, while UT received the other two-thirds. A&M no longer had to scramble for funds for mere survival, but it lacked the resources to compete as a top-tier or even second tier institution.

In the mid-1940s, Gibb Gilchrist became the latest campus president to tangle with Cadet culture by attempting reforms. Gilchrist achieved a statewide reputation as Texas Highway Engineer, a post from which he oversaw the state's highway development program in the late 1920s through the late 1930s. In 1937, the A&M Board of Directors appointed Gilchrist dean of engineering, where in his first year he established a Department of Aeronautical Engineering. Gilchrist rose to the A&M presidency May 25, 1944.

One of Gilchrist’s most enduring achievements came with the establishment of the Texas A&M Research Foundation, established in November 1944. Headed by 50 prominent and influential men, many of whom were A&M alumni, the foundation funneled corporate and individual donations into scientific and technical research eventually encompassing oceanography, medicine, meteorology, space travel, and nuclear power. In September 1944 Gilchrist had announced his vision for A&M. The school, he said, should focus its engineering and agricultural research and teaching programs on the development of Texas’ natural resources.

Secondly, Gilchrist wanted to establish community technical training centers across the state. These recommendations aimed at increasing the university’s visibility through providing more direct service to Texas farmers and through outreach to distant communities. “While Gilchrist offered a ‘New Vision at A&M,’ the vision was distinctly framed by the old agricultural and engineering precepts,” Dethloff wrote. “There would be no revolution, but there would be greater efficiency.”

Neither objectives addressed the main difficulties undermining A&M’s credibility: its narrow curriculum and the low quality of its faculty. In 1924, a school of arts and sciences had been established, but the vestigial program provided students only two broad classes, one in “liberal arts” and another in “sciences.” School officials in 1937 had failed to earn accreditation for the chemical engineering department. Only 17 percent of the faculty held Ph.D.’s by 1946, and the college did not require that its professors conduct research.

The end of World War II, however, forced dramatic changes on the A&M campus. The end of the war brought a flood of military veterans enrolling at the college in a bid to improve their economic futures. A&M experienced a common phenomenon of the late 1940s. College doors flung open for veterans in large part because of the so-called GI Bill, which passed in 1944 to assistant veterans’ readjustment to civilian life. Under the act, veterans enjoyed increased access to business loans, were given preference in hiring and, most important for A&M, were also provided educational benefits. Under Title 2 of the original GI Bill, veterans under age 25 at the time they signed up for the military who served 90 days or more received a year of college or vocational training at government expense. Veterans who served a two-year stint earned credit for three years of college. The government paid tuition to the college of the veteran’s choice and gave former servicemen who were single $50 for monthly subsistence and married veterans $75.

Colleges previously had drawn their student bodies from the ranks of mostly male, unmarried 18- to 22-year-olds fresh out of high school, but these new post-war collegiates were unmistakably adult. Older, more likely to be married, and often having experienced the life-and-death exigencies of combat, returning veterans sought different experiences from their younger peers. “For the returning soldier, classroom offerings were often inappropriate; worse still, in loco parentis rules designating dating customs, hours outside dormitories, or dress codes seemed onerous or silly,” wrote histories James Gilbert. “As a result, many schools offered revised curriculum offerings and eliminated some of the more restrictive social codes.”

This task proved more delicate at A&M, which had to decide whether returning war veterans would have to be submitted to the discipline of younger upperclassmen in the Cadet Corps. Wartime A&M enrollment hit bottom at about 2,000 between 1943-45, but in September 1946, 8,200 students registered for classes. This created a desperate housing shortage, especially for married students, an almost non-existent demographic before the war. Trailers and temporary family homes were purchased to handle the overflow. The school in 1946 obtained use of nearby Bryan Airfield and used the facilities for dormitories and classrooms. The Bryan annex became housing for incoming freshman by 1947. Freshmen continued to live at the air base until 1950 when a drop in enrollment and expansion of housing on campus allowed the entire student body again to reside on A&M’s grounds.

This complex series of events forced several adaptations of Aggie traditions. The placement of freshmen off campus severely limited opportunities to haze fish. With a large percentage of the student body having already served as professional soldiers, the school’s Board of Directors exempted these students from the requirement of belonging to the Corps. Many veterans were trying to get away from all things military, anyway, and refused to wear the Cadet uniform, something previously required of non-military students. Cadet seniors also found themselves unable to issue orders to older underclassmen veterans more experienced than their supposed superiors.

”The veterans simply would not hear of a young kid in uniform telling them what to do,” Dethloff wrote. New campus regulations meant that all students who were veterans in active duty for at least 12 months were exempt from having to wear the cadet uniform. A new position, the Dean of Men, was created to serve and supervise civilian students, while the campus’ professor of military science and tactics supervised the Cadets only.

Incoming freshmen under the age of 21, however, who had not served in the military still faced a requirement of years of military science and membership in the Corps of Cadets, where rituals of harassment still stood as sacred. With most forms of hazing banned by state law, Gilchrist now sought to reorganize discipline policies and wipe out this troublesome tradition, which was blamed for a 48 percent dropout rate after one semester among freshmen.

Billy Clayton of Spring Lake, later to be speaker of the Texas House, remembered how tough life as a fish was in the late 1940s. “. . .[I]n those days, nobody ever forgot their freshman year, because hazing was pretty rampant,” Clayton recalled in a 2004 interview. Like many cadets of this generation, Clayton defended the hazing tradition, but also revealed deeply mixed feelings about the practice. “ . . . [In] your freshman year . . . you really learn the discipline of how to present yourself to people and how to accept them,” he said. “You felt humbled. You walked in the street, the upper classmen walked on the sidewalk. You rushed up to meet everybody that you didn’t know and you were expected to remember them . . . It was the great camaraderie, but your freshman year really gave you that grounding.”

Nevertheless, Clayton vividly recalls his brutal year as a fish. “I remember having to go to the shower and soap my shorts off a bit . . . . they just bust you so much it’ll make you bleed,” he said. “But, you know, I wouldn’t take anything for it . . . It was a experience I probably wouldn’t want anybody else to go through but I wouldn’t take anything for mine.”

The college’s Board of Directors instituted new rules that forbade upperclassmen from ordering fish to provide room service or to run personal errands. Corporal punishment through paddles or other instruments was also banned, as were extra drills unless approved by college administrators. The new rules, The Articles of the Corps, were read to cadets in a meeting held on January 11, 1947. This was the third time the campus officially banned hazing, yet Cadets reacted with surprising anger, tearing up the regulations or pointedly leaving the manuals in their seats.

The next night the entire 2,100-member Cadet Corps staged a march on the president’s house. “[T]he upper classmen organized all of us and we marched and hung him [Gilchrist] in effigy .. .,” Clayton said. Reportedly 200 commissioned and non-commissioned officers turned in their resignations to Gilchrist, who greeted the protestors in a bathrobe and pajamas. The Cadets told the president that they would not rejoin the Corps unless the new regulations were repealed. Gilchrist stunned the crowd when he simply replied, “I accept [your resignations] with regret.”

Public support for the most part rallied behind Gilchrist. “Schoolboy soldiers who cannot grasp the first principle of soldiering have no right to run anything – least of all the right to run A&M College,” a 1947 Dallas Morning News editorial declared. The student protests resulted in a legislative investigation of Gilchrist's administration during the spring of 1947. A coalition of unhappy faculty members, students, alumni and parents kept the heat on Gilchrist by raising charges of financial improprieties against him. Opponents asked why $200,000 had been appropriated for a laboratory equipped with classrooms that had never been built, questioned the price paid by the university for land along the Brazos River, critiqued profits made at the Exchange store, complained about the $100,000 spent on a wind tunnel that they said had never been used, asked why the administration had rented Bryan Air Field for freshmen housing rather than accepted an offer of the base as a gift, and wondered why A&M still lacked a tenure system for faculty.

Legislative hearings, involving hundreds of witnesses and 2,000 pages of testimony, aired the campus’ dirty laundry in April and May of 1947. The investigating committee concluded that charges of incompetence against Gilchrist were unfounded and that no university funds had been misappropriated or misspent by the administration. The committee determined that Gilchrist’s attempts to comply with state laws regarding hazing lay at the heart of the controversy and that campus outsiders and disgruntled employees had seized on the issue to topple the school administration.

A minority report essentially agreed with the majority report but chided Gilchrist for his failure to command respect from the students. If the investigating committee officially exonerated Gilchrist, the president nevertheless had suffered a mortal political wound. The Board of Directors kicked Gilchrist upstairs in May 1948 by establishing the Texas A&M College System (now the Texas A&M University System) and September 1, 1948 naming Gilchrist as its first chancellor. The Corps’ hazing traditions had toppled another administration.

Aggie conservatism had triumphed once again. To the college’s apologists, A&M’s deep resistance to change represented its most attractive feature. In the 1950s, as the United States lost its monopoly on the hydrogen bomb, as McCarthyism stirred fear of fifth column insurrection, and as the African American Civil Rights Movement challenged the South’s racial status quo, A&M represented to some a stable, safe refuge where change always took place somewhere beyond the campus gate. As one alumni, Colonel Joe E. Davis, put it:

We feel that we have something unique at Texas A&M – a program which is badly needed in these changing times in an unsettled world. Today’s children are not being reared as you and I were reared. Their entire environment is totally different. Television, atomic war stories, third dimensional movies, and comic books help to pattern their lives . . . Gone from many of our homes are the opportunities to assume the responsibility for doing small chores. Gone with those responsibilities are many of the opportunities to teach and instill obedience and honesty and a feeling of closeness and dependence within the family . . . It’s these evident gaps which we are trying to bridge in the training of our cadets; its these things which must be regained if we are to maintain our strength as the greatest of all nations.

Where some saw stability, however, others saw stagnation. Reporter Leon Hale, in a series of 1959 Houston Post articles entitled ‘Aggieland’s Ordeal” quoted faculty members who questioned whether the campus’ “strict regimen of military life is compatible with high academic achievement.” A&M had become a castle of traditional values and the drawbridge over the moat had been drawn. Legendary football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant got this sense of A&M’s distance from the rest of the world when he first traveled with his wife to take up his job as Aggie football coach. Mary Harmon, Bryant’s wife, turned pale when she first saw the school grounds. “At first glance, Texas A&M looked like a penitentiary. No girls. No glamour. A lifeless community. I nearly died when I saw what I was getting into,” said Bryant, who would dub A&M “Sing-Sing on the Brazos.”

Already a well-respected coach, he found selling A&M to blue-chip athletes an enormous handicap. Bryant felt only frustration in his attempts to recruit hot-shot high school senior quarterback Don Meredith of Mount Pleasant, who later achieved stardom at Southern Methodist University and with the Dallas Cowboys. “Coach if you were anywhere in the world except A&M – anywhere in the world . . . ,“ Meredith told him when he turned down a scholarship offer at A&M.

It wasn’t just athletes who were no finding it hard to commit four years of their lives to the customs and traditions of Aggieland. Enrollment at the college steadily declined from 8,536 in the 1948-1949 school year to a low of 6,257 in 1954-1955. It bounced back slightly, to 7,474 in 1957-1958, but remained well below its late 1940s high. By contrast, at the other 19 state-supported colleges and universities enrollment almost doubled, growing by 92 percent between 1951 and 1961. The state enrollment growh was just over five times the rate at A&M. A subcommittee of The Texas A&M Century Council, made up of 100 leading citizens of Texas to determine the best course for A&M’s future, concluded that the school was rapidly losing it claim to be the second school in the state, after the University of Texas, to faster growing campuses such as Arlington State College (then a branch of Texas A&M but now the University of Texas at Arlington).

A&M’s decline rested on several factors: the school’s loss of monopoly on its course offerings, with an increasing number of quality vocational, agricultural and mechanical training programs being offered at other state schools; the small scope of the school’s curriculum and its designation as a “college” rather than as a university; the school’s gender segregation, which it shared only with the also-declining Texas Women’s University; A&M’s compulsory military training and Cadet Corps membership; and the poor quality of many academic programs offered. These observations were suppressed before release of the final Report of the Century Council, but they reflected widely held anxieties in the A&M community.

A sure sign that change would not bypass even A&M forever came on March 3, 1953, when state Senator William T. Moore, a 1940 Aggie graduate, introduced a resolution calling for the school to admit women. A&M had languished since World War II, Moore argued, and witnessed a decline in enrollment because of it’s male-only policies. The Senate adopted the resolution by voice vote, but a vociferous backlash, led by another Aggie, state Senator Searcy Bracewell of Houston (class of 1938), flooded the Senate with angry telegrams, letters and phone calls. Shocked, the Senate reversed the resolution two days later, by a recorded vote of 28-1. Unbowed, Moore predicted that A&M would be coeducational within a decade.

Michael Phillips is the author or co-author of the following books:

“White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, Texas, 1841-2001” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

“The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas Speaker Became a Power in State and National Politics.” Co-Written with Patrick Cox. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).

Walter Buenger and Arnoldo de León, eds., “Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away From Past Interpretations” (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2011).

Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz, eds., “The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western Experience” (New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011).

Richardson Dilworth, ed. “Cities in American Political History” (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011).

He will also be co-author of the forthcoming “The Radical Origins of the Texas Right” (edited by David Cullen and Kyle Wilkison) due to be published in 2012 by Texas A&M University Press; and “American Dreams and Reality: A Retelling of the American Story,” to be published the same year by Abigail Press.

He is currently collaborating, with longtime journalist Betsy Friauf, on a history of Bishop College, an African American institution originally established in Marshall, Texas, that relocated to Dallas by the 1960s before suffering bankruptcy in the 1980s. The two plan to create a website and author a book, “’God Carved in Night’: Afro-Texan Culture, Political Activism And the Rise and Fall Of Bishop College” based on this project.

New Hampshire Mittwits

2012-01-09T15:24:00.000-08:00

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney was rushed to a New Hampshire hospital today after experiencing what doctors later described as a "brief but potentially dangerous moment of sincerity." Campaign insiders said this was likely brought on by a brutal schedule that left Romney little time to sleep. A campaign spokesman called the incident "minor" and "highly unlikely to happen again."

Michael Phillips is the author or co-author of the following books:

“White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, Texas, 1841-2001” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

“The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas Speaker Became a Power in State and National Politics.” Co-Written with Patrick Cox. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).

Walter Buenger and Arnoldo de León, eds., “Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away From Past Interpretations” (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2011).

Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz, eds., “The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western Experience” (New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011).

Richardson Dilworth, ed. “Cities in American Political History” (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011).

He will also be co-author of the forthcoming “The Radical Origins of the Texas Right” (edited by David Cullen and Kyle Wilkison) due to be published in 2012 by Texas A&M University Press; and “American Dreams and Reality: A Retelling of the American Story,” to be published the same year by Abigail Press.

He is currently collaborating, with longtime journalist Betsy Friauf, on a history of Bishop College, an African American institution originally established in Marshall, Texas, that relocated to Dallas by the 1960s before suffering bankruptcy in the 1980s. The two plan to create a website and author a book, “’God Carved in Night’: Afro-Texan Culture, Political Activism And the Rise and Fall Of Bishop College” based on this project.

Scandal, 1950s Texas Style: Allan Shivers, Earl Rudder and the Veterans Land Swindle, Part III

2012-01-09T09:02:00.000-08:00

A Texas farm boy, James Earl Rudder became internationally famous as a D-Day hero. A political outsider, he cleaned house as Commissioner of the Texas General Land Office after one of the messiest scandals in the state's often corrupt political history. A deeply conservative man who lacked the proper academic credentials, he nevertheless ruled as president of Texas A&M when the tradition-bound school underwent sweeping reforms. Under Rudder, A&M changed its name, desegregated, admitted women for the first time, and ended the requirement that students serve in its paramilitary "Corps of Cadets." The passage describes how a bomb planted in a car owned by a witness involved in the Texas Veterans Land Scandal cast an ominous shadow over statewide elections in Texas in 1956

By increasing the openness of the Land Office and frankly addressing the agency's shortcomings, the newly appointed Commissioner James Earl Rudder significantly increased confidence in the Veteran's Land Program both among legislators and the public. The office stopped providing land loans in July 1954. With Rudder's reforms, the office resumed the veterans' land program on October 31, 1955, just 11 months after the new commissioner took office. The Legislature placed a constitutional amendment before voters in November 1956 to authorize a $100 million bond sale. Voter approved that measure, which was coupled with a change in the makeup of the governing board. The board, henceforth, consisted of the Land Commissioner, and two citizens appointed by the governor. Another legislative change was designed to prevent the "block sales" that became the center of the Giles-era scandals.

By the time Rudder compiled his 1954-1956 report to Governor Allan Shivers, he could announce progress on five major goals he set when he first took office: converting the Veterans' Land Program "from a state of chaos and confusion to an honest, orderly, and well-regulated business-like program"; providing closer supervision of mineral exploration, development, and leasing; improving working conditions for the Land Office staff; placing the office on a self-sustaining basis as required by the Texas Constitution; and better preserving records and more efficiently using office space.

In spite of his many accomplishments as Land Commissioner, Rudders faced surprisingly strong opposition in the Democratic Primary in 1956 as he sought a full term in his own right. On April 24, 1956, Rudder announced his intention to enter the commissioner's race. The incumbent trumpeted his role in cleaning up the land program, closing loopholes "which enabled promoters and sharp dealers to use this fine program for their own selfish motives." Rudder claimed that he had accomplished much, but his mission was not complete. "Much remains to be done and it is my desire to help complete the job," he announced. "To refuse to offer my services for two more years, in my opinion, would be to shirk an important public duty."

Election cards printed for the July 28 primary touted Rudder as "[t]he veteran who cleaned up the Veterans Land Program." Rudder asked his campaign staff to come up with an easy-to-remember campaign slogan and his Harris County chair, John Lindsey, came up with "None udder than Rudder." Reportedly, Rudder hated the suggestion, but it became the campaign's unofficial slogan.

Rudder sought election in an unusually crowded political season in which getting press attention proved a problem. Even the Austin American-Statesman, one of the state’s most politically-oriented newspapers in terms of coverage, devoted little ink to the land commissioner’s race.

Shivers had never recovered from the damage to his reputation caused by the insurance and the Veterans Land Board Scandals. His political approval rating collapsed to 22 percent by the fall of 1955. This created a fierce race within the Democratic Party to succeed governor, even as Shivers entered into bitter battle with Senator Lyndon Johnson for control of the state party convention. Six candidates vied to be Shivers’ successor, including popular Senator Price Daniel, who famously said he would rather be governor of Texas than president of the United States; the colorful and folksy Ralph Yarborough, the Austin lawyer who led the Texas Democrats’ liberal faction; retiring House Speaker Reuben Senterfitt; former governor “Pappy” O’Daniel; and J. Evetts Haley, a former leader of the extreme right-wing Jeffersonian Democrats of Texas who sought to prevent the re-election of Franklin Roosevelt as president in 1936.

In addition to the Shivers-Johnson feud, the crowded governor’s race, and a heated Democratic presidential primary contest between Adlai Stevenson and Estes Kefauver, Shivers successfully placed three inflammatory referenda concerning segregation on the Democratic primary ballot. Democratic voters were asked to whether they favored repeal of compulsory school attendance laws “when white and Negro children are mixed in public schools”; whether they supported strengthening the state law barring intermarriage between whites and blacks; and whether they backed the use of “interposition” to “halt illegal federal encroachment” on states’ rights.

Shivers first conceived of the referenda, seeing segregation as an issue he could exploit to win a fourth term. Shivers hoped that having the race-charged measures on the ballots would draw right-wingers to the polls in large numbers and, as one of the governor’s advisors put it, “weld together conservative forces.” The hoped-for fourth-term boom never materialized, however, and the governor withdrew from the race. He did, however, hope that the referenda would draw supporters for the candidacy of Marion Price Daniel, a conservative Shivers hoped would prevail. Whether Daniel benefited from a heavy segregationist turnout is less clear, but the three segregation referenda certainly shaped the rhetoric of the most extremist gubernatorial candidates. Haley warned that the Brown decision was but one part of a wide communist conspiracy to destroy Texas while “Pappy” O’Daniel darkly prophesied there would be “blood in the streets” if the federal government tried to force integration on Texas schools.

In such an over-heated atmosphere, Rudder and his opponent Ned Price of Smith County had trouble getting press coverage. And although Rudder enjoyed considerable advantages -– incumbency, a sterling war record, and the support of the Democratic establishment -– he suffered from one major liability: Allan Shivers. A sure indication of the governor’s declining popularity came when Ralph Yarborough began mocking Price Daniel as a “political buddy of Allan Shivers.” Such associations were no longer seen as something to brag about, but Rudder could not deny his friendship with the governor.

His opponent, a three-time state representative who was serving his fourth term as Smith County Judge, Price preferred to run against Shivers than Rudder. In a large campaign advertisement that Price ran in Rudder’s hometown newspaper, "The Brady Standard" and "Heart O’Texas News" just before the primary, Price contemptuously dismissed Rudder’s military service. “Yes, we, too, like a hero,” the ad read. “But we have heard so much about the ‘big hero’ – it has been rehearsed and rehashed, morning, noon, and night, for years, until we are sick and tired of it – fed up on it. We have heard this story so often we can close our eyes and recite it from memory, forward, backward, up and down – and sideways. It has been worked overtime. So, we hope to disperse with this ‘hero’ stuff for awhile – and let some of the weary ‘GIs’ have their inning.”

Price presented the real issue of the campaign as Shivers’ corruption. Rudder disappears from the attack ad, except as a Shivers’ stooge, as the challenger directly blasts the governor in the last nine of the advertisement’s 14 paragraphs. “Did you [Shivers] come up to Brady and select your ‘appointee’ to pay a Political Debt? . . . Was the ‘smoke’ boiling over in the Land Office, you rushed up to Brady to ‘select’ a good friend to hurry down to Austin to help you . . . plug up . . . the holes in the Land Office and keep all the ‘smoke’ inside the office until your term of office expires next January?” Price then attacked Rudder’s salary increase from $6,000 to $17,500 and accused Shivers of grooming Rudder to be a future governor. “We want our Land Commissioner to be one that was ‘appointed’ and ‘chosen’ by us -- not by Allan Shivers – never.”

During the campaign Price labeled the former army officer an appointed hack and a Shivers clone. Rudder, however, ran a quiet campaign of retail politics, emphasizing his successful record as commissioner. For the most part unable to get attention from major newspapers, he made appearances at smaller cities and small towns, running the circuit of civic clubs. His campaign kicked off on a high note with a Distinguished Service Award presented by the Brady Chamber of Commerce. “And even before '[Brady Standard' Publisher L.B.] Smith had finished the introduction the audience was standing and clapping, and like Rudder, some of them had tears in their eyes, too,” the hometown newspaper reported on it front page. “A ‘favorite son’ of the town, who had been honored many times elsewhere, had finally been honored at home.” The Standard gave extensive coverage to the Chamber of Commerce award, detailing his D-Day heroism in a sidebar, and a month later generously reported Rudder’s dedication speech at the opening of a Girl Scouts camp at nearby Lake Brownwood.

As Rudder urged voter support for the constitutional amendment on the November ballot, which would strengthen and extend the veterans’ land program, he reassured voters that the scandals that plagued the commission in the past could not happen again. “[W]e have already closed the loopholes which enabled promoters and sharp dealers to use this fine program for their own selfish motives,” Rudder declared in opening his campaign. ”With the cooperation of the legislature, along with the help of the veterans organizations . . . we have made a tremendous amount of progress. Much remains to be done, and it is my desire to complete the job.” It could not have hurt Rudder’s cause when Ken Towery, the reporter who broke the veterans’ land fraud story, told the Brady newspaper that he had a favorable impression of Rudder. “Talking to men he trusts in Austin, Towery said he has already been told that Rudder is doing a good job,” the newspaper reported.

Yet, in spite of the reforms he initiated in Giles’ wake, Rudder’s association with the scandal-saturated Shivers regime became the ghost at the banquet. To Rudder’s embarrassment, the land scandal literally burst onto the first pages of not only Texas but national newspapers once again in June 1956 amidst Rudder’s reelection bid. This time the story veered from the merely venal to the sinister.

As the "Dallas Morning News" related events, on 8 a.m. June 8 1956, Sam McCollum, a 37-year-old Brady attorney who had provided key testimony against Bascom Giles during the former land commissioner’s trial, “snatched a glass of chocolate milk from the hands of his pretty wife La Nelle, drank it, and hurried to his 1953 Mercury station wagon parked in front of the small white cottage [that was McCollum’s home.] When Sam pressed on the starter, the car exploded – nearly blowing the young attorney into oblivion and certainly catapulting him into national headlines.”

McCollum, a friend of Rudder’s also served as friend and lawyer for L.V. Ruffin, a Brady insurance and real state salesman under indictment for charges related to the land board scandals. McCollum and Ruffin not only provided key testimony against Giles in his criminal trial, but also implicated another key figure in the case, B.R. Sheffield, who still faced a trial for fraud and other alleged improprieties. The dynamite from the blast shattered the window in McCollum’s home and could be heard 16 blocks away, according to the "Morning News." “The roaring explosion deafened me, beat me, hurled viciously against the back of my seat,” McCollum later recalled. “Black smoke swelled up in a choking, nauseating cloud that burned my eyes and throat . . . I looked down at my legs. I couldn’t see them. I thought, ‘My God, my legs are gone!”

Newspapers prominently featured photos of a scarred McCollum recovering in his Brady hospital bed, bearing chest wounds from glass, metal and pieces of the car’s floor mat that blew through his clothing during the explosion. In the photos, McCollum grins broadly in the embrace of a grinning LaNell, but in subsequent days few in the state house or the Land Office found anything to smile at. The photo of the McCollums appeared on front pages across the nation and the story for a time even eclipsed the media attention afforded President Dwight Eisenhower’s hospitalization for heart disease. Investigators later said they believed a “hired killer” had wired a bomb into the car’s ignition system. McCulloch County Sheriff Luke Zogel proclaimed that “We know that this thing is tied up with the land scandals.” Police questioned Sheffield about the attempted murder. He denied involvement. By the time a court of inquiry convened in mid-October, McCollum was still in the hospital and no one had been charged with the attempted murder.

Even though Rudder had nothing to do with the attempted murder of his friend and could make a convincing case that he had turned around a once-criminal land board, the attempted murder undoubtedly made some Texas voters again link the name of Allan Shivers with a scandal that now resembled a gangland war. Men like Rudder who were close to the lame duck administration began to suffer badly from their friendship with Shivers. Rudder continued to insist that land board scandals were safely in the past. This placed him in an awkward position, however, when questions arose about a proposed block land deal the commissioner ultimately backed out of in 1953.

Three year earlier, Rudder had made plans involving four other former soldiers purchasing, under the Veterans Land Program, a 240-acre tract just east of Brady near the site of a decommissioned World War II prisoner of war camp. The deal fell apart before details could be sealed. Rudder, however, still faced embarrassing questions when the Houston Post published the murky details of the transaction a little more than a month before the July primary. Rudder apparently bought the land from Enoch Shuffield of Brady. Enoch was the brother of B.R. Sheffield, deeply implicated not only with the land board scandal but also suspected in the Brady bombing case. (The younger Sheffield had changed the spelling of his last name.)

Rudder apparently made a $1,500 down payment on the land. The entire contract price came to $30,000. State veterans refund checks totaling $1,500 sent in June 1953 to four veterans originally involved in the deal (Valentine Garza, Jr., Romulo Cervantes, Jr., John V. Espinoza, and Fidel G. Guttirez) had been countersigned and cashed by Rudder. Rudder said he met the men in the Brady area and that some of them had had worked at Brady Aviation where Rudder was vice president until his appointment at the Land Office. He claimed he cashed the land board checks to make back the original deposit and then bought the property by himself for $30,000. “The only way I could have made money on the deal was to wait and buy it from the veterans and use the low interest rate,” Rudder told the Austin American Statesman. “But once I saw the complications and saw it wasn’t right, I backed out.” Rudder never explained what made him uncomfortable about the transaction.

Although the "Post" and other Texas newspapers never charged that anything illegal happened during the aborted Brady land deal, Rudder’s opponent Ned Price quickly made that implication. “The people of Texas are entitled to know the full facts about the veterans land fraud scandal, including any part which the current land commissioner had in a block deal, involving himself and certain Latin-American veterans at Brady,” Price told the Post. “It is obvious that the full story of the land scandals has not been told.” Rudder reminded reporters that the land deal had never been finalized. “It was so involved I didn’t see any way for me to get the land I wanted,” he told the Statesman. “It just didn’t look right.” Rudder insisted that there was “no mystery or scandal” about the transaction and then complained that “politics” lay behind the publication of the story so close to the election. Rudder also claimed in a written statement that he had previously informed reporters about the deal.

When I was appointed land commissioner, I reported the full circumstances of this transaction to other members of the veterans’ land board, to the state auditor, to District Attorney Bill Allcorn of my home district, and to members of both the Senate and House investigating committees. I also told members of the Capitol press Corps about it. All agreed that I had acted correctly in refusing to go through with the proposal as it was originally offered.”

Reporters, however, contradicted part of the commissioner’s story. “None of the seven who questioned [Rudder] today could recall having been informed of the transaction,” the Statesman reported. No story related to the Land Commissioner race got more coverage, but Rudder tried to ignore the possible fallout. He returned to his theme that the scandals of the past could not happen again. “[T]here is no possibility of slick land deals such as those that shocked the state not so long ago,” he told the Marshall Luncheon Club nine days before the July 28 election. As he toured East Texas, he took credit for a $48 million increase in the state school fund. “The increase was due to the restoration of a sound, business-like administration at the land office, which was plagued with irregularities, including the veterans land scandals, when I took office,” Rudder said in a Kilgore address in the campaign’s waning days.

It is hard to tell how much the Post’s “block deal” story and the McCollum attempted murder case hurt Rudder in the final days of the race. Rudder won the primary, beating Price 647,443 votes (about 51.2 percent) to 616,459 (approximately 48.7 percent.) In a state completely dominated by the Democratic Party, Rudder's win in the primary meant that he had already guaranteed his election to the office that November. Rudder, however, assumed he had won the public's trust, and was stung by the closeness of the vote. Advisors and friends told Rudder the margin did not indicate any personal disapproval but stemmed from an anti-Shivers backlash. "I had the scare of my life when the returns starting coming in at Lufkin and South East Texas," wrote Harvey Bayne, Houston County Service Officer, in an August 1 letter. "Judge Price must certainly have spread the discord about Allen [sic.] Shivers and you being an appointee of his."

A concerned Rudder asked Joe Buford, owner of the Buford Investment Company in Mount Pleasant, Texas, for his analysis and the business executive gave a similar answer. "Earl, You [sic.] have asked me to give you any reason for Ned Price's large vote," Buford replied in an August 12 letter. "I will try to give you several reasons that I know had some bearing on your race. Unfortunately there is nothing that you could have done or can do about any of them. First some people that are anti Shivers [sic.] thought you were an associate of Governor Shivers because he appointed you to the Land Office job . . . [Also] In a race for an office such as yours the general public does not try to inform themselves as to the best man for the job. They merely pick out the name which might appeal to them. Your opponent had a very common name and I think this got him a number of votes. Now in this county a number of people voted for Mr. Price because he was from East Texas and you were from West Texas."

It's impossible to know for certain how Rudder reacted to his one race for statewide office. He may have thought he had accomplished all he set out to do in public office, but the campaign had to have been in many ways a bitter, disillusioning experience. It is almost certain that the competitive, hard-driven general found the results disappointingly close and the accusations of corruption against him by Price disheartening. If Price was right when he charged that a Shivers cabal was grooming Rudder as a future governor, it was clear that land commissioner’s heart was no longer in politics by November 27, 1957, when the "Fort Worth Star-Telegram" announced in a headline, "Rudder to Resign, Take A&M Duties." Rudder, the story reported, had been offered either the job of president or vice president of the A&M system and head of the main college.

Many Aggie exes jumped for joy at the rumors. "I read some very interesting news in the paper yesterday morning regarding Earl Rudder and A&M College," teasingly wrote another friend, architect George L. Ingram of Beaumont. "If you will remember, I made some mention of the possibility of your becoming governor and certainly, if you desire the job of A&M College, I think all the 'exes' and student body will be most pleased to see you in this office."

Many friends, however, expressed deep concern about the future of the Veteran Land Program specifically and the General Land Office in general. Rudder himself had warned that the Veterans Land Program might be on its last legs unless the struggling bond market of 1957 improved and voters approved a constitutional amendment that raised the interest rate on bonds from three to four percent. At such a time, attorney Burr S. Cameron of Linden argued, it would be irresponsible for Rudder to leave. "It is submitted that your service in your present position could hardly be replaced," Cameron wrote to Rudder. "The people of Texas, particularly the veterans have great confidence in you. In a short time you have brought the Veterans Land Board from chaos and great distrust to orderliness and trust."

Despite such widespread pleading, Rudder submitted to Governor Price Daniel on December 21,1957 his letter of resignation, effective February 1, 1958. Rudder had been appointed vice president by the Texas A&M Board of Directors. "I can report to you in all sincerity that with the help of many dedicated Texas citizens and faithful state employees this mission [to clean up the Veterans Land Program] has been accomplished."

Disenchanted with politics, Rudder found in A&M another difficult challenge he found almost impossible to resist. The school was segregated and still not coeducational when he assumed his duties as vice president in 1958. A visiting committee of professional librarians from other colleges deemed the library “seriously inadequate”. The elderly and unproductive faculty led Rudder shortly after he rose to the presidency to unkindly remark that, "What A&M needs is a lot of funerals." Rudder had no experience as an educator, and lacked any academic credentials other than a college diploma as he moved to College Station to assume the vice presidency of his alma mater. He seemed a completely unlikely candidate to resurrect a school suffering a declining reputation and sagging enrollment. But he had established, first as a soldier, and then as General Land Commissioner, a unique knack for the role of fixer, a man who could salvage impossible situations and impose order on chaos. The Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas would provide him a perfect stage to display those talents.

Michael Phillips is the author or co-author of the following books:

“White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, Texas, 1841-2001” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

“The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas Speaker Became a Power in State and National Politics.” Co-Written with Patrick Cox. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).

Walter Buenger and Arnoldo de León, eds., “Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away From Past Interpretations” (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2011).

Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz, eds., “The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western Experience” (New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011).

Richardson Dilworth, ed. “Cities in American Political History” (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011).

He will also be co-author of the forthcoming “The Radical Origins of the Texas Right” (edited by David Cullen and Kyle Wilkison) due to be published in 2012 by Texas A&M University Press; and “American Dreams and Reality: A Retelling of the American Story,” to be published the same year by Abigail Press.

He is currently collaborating, with longtime journalist Betsy Friauf, on a history of Bishop College, an African American institution originally established in Marshall, Texas, that relocated to Dallas by the 1960s before suffering bankruptcy in the 1980s. The two plan to create a website and author a book, “’God Carved in Night’: Afro-Texan Culture, Political Activism And the Rise and Fall Of Bishop College” based on this project.

A website I've created with Betsy Friauf and Lee Mosier

2012-01-09T08:56:00.001-08:00

The past few months we have been working on a website documenting the history of an historically black institution, Bishop College, founded by former slaves in the 1880s in Marshall, Texas, and which folded in Dallas in the 1980s. We now have a finished prototype for the website. Here it is:

http://bishop.banyondesign.com/

Thanks to Lee for his great web design and to Betsy for her help in the writing and the research.

Michael Phillips is the author or co-author of the following books:

“White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, Texas, 1841-2001” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

“The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas Speaker Became a Power in State and National Politics.” Co-Written with Patrick Cox. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).

Walter Buenger and Arnoldo de León, eds., “Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away From Past Interpretations” (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2011).

Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz, eds., “The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western Experience” (New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011).

Richardson Dilworth, ed. “Cities in American Political History” (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011).

He will also be co-author of the forthcoming “The Radical Origins of the Texas Right” (edited by David Cullen and Kyle Wilkison) due to be published in 2012 by Texas A&M University Press; and “American Dreams and Reality: A Retelling of the American Story,” to be published the same year by Abigail Press.

He is currently collaborating, with longtime journalist Betsy Friauf, on a history of Bishop College, an African American institution originally established in Marshall, Texas, that relocated to Dallas by the 1960s before suffering bankruptcy in the 1980s. The two plan to create a website and author a book, “’God Carved in Night’: Afro-Texan Culture, Political Activism And the Rise and Fall Of Bishop College” based on this project.

Scandal, 1950s Texas Style: Allan Shivers, Earl Rudder and the Veterans Land Swindle, Part II

2012-01-06T06:05:00.000-08:00

A Texas farm boy, James Earl Rudder became internationally famous as a D-Day hero. A political outsider, he cleaned house as Commissioner of the Texas General Land Office after one of the messiest scandals in the state's often corrupt political history. A deeply conservative man who lacked the proper academic credentials, he nevertheless ruled as president of Texas A&M when the tradition-bound school underwent sweeping reforms. Under Rudder, A&M changed its name, desegregated, admitted women for the first time, and ended the requirement that students serve in its paramilitary "Corps of Cadets." This passage describes what Rudder discovered when he took over the Land Office following the suicide of a figure connected with the Veteran’s Land Scandal.

The only state with complete control over its public lands and over the revenues produced from its administration over and sale of these tracts, the First Congress of the Texas Republic created the General Land Office in December 1836, just nine months after the Battle of the Alamo. The new republic was eager to establish who held legal title to lands within its borders. The Republic’s constitution recognized all grants made by the Empire of Spain and the Republic of Mexico in Texas as valid, so the first land commissioner John P. Borden, collected from the Spanish and Mexican governments a record of valid land grants and translated them into English. The archives, originally stored in Houston but now housed in the state capitol of Austin, currently holds 4,200 such land grants pertaining to 26.2 million acres of land within the present-day Texas boundaries. Leases, trades and sales of public lands and mineral rights properties administered by the General Land Office have generated more than $6 billion for the state’s Permanent School Fund, netting Texas public schools about $700 million a year.

Upon the recommendation of Giles, land commissioner since 1939, the state established the Veterans' Land Board after voters’ approval of a state constitutional amendment in November 1946. Aid programs for veterans sprang up across the United States after the Japanese surrender in August 1945. Worries over the impact of "reconversion," the effect on the American economy as the country transitioned from a war to a peacetime footing, marked the months immediately following World War II. Before the war, the United States had suffered a decade of Depression, and it was uncertain whether peace signaled a return of economic hard times.

A deep recession, after all, had followed World War I. Defense industries faced a production slowdown. No one was sure about the influence of lifting wartime production quotas. Workers, meanwhile, impatient after nearly four years of wartime wage controls, launched strikes across the country in 1946 even as the government signaled concerns about inflation. Many economists made gloomy predictions regarding the fate of millions of now unemployed soldiers returning to uncertain prospects stateside.

To cushion the impact of reconversion, many states paid direct, one-time cash bonuses to returning veterans. At the start of 1946, however, Texas had no program in place to aid the thousands of veterans making the transition to civilian life. In November 1946, voters approved the constitutional amendment implementing the Veterans' Land Act. This law authorized the state to issue $25 million in bonds. Using proceeds from the bond sale, the state purchased land, intended to be re-sold to participating veterans who took out special 40-year loans at three percent interest. The law creating the program, written by Giles, specified that no loan be made for more than $7,500 and that loans could not be used to purchase less than 20 acres. Veterans had to provide a five percent down payment and hold the land for at least three years before selling it. Because it would be difficult for many veterans to buy land even under these terms, the Legislature allowed the property to be purchased in "block sales" to two or more veterans. In 1951, voters approved another constitutional amendment that set aside an extra $75 million for the program.

In seven Texas counties, land promoters induced veterans to sign paperwork for what the veterans believed would be wartime bonuses paid in the form of free land or cash payments. Instead, these veterans later discovered they had signed Veterans Land Board loan applications. Anglos
participating in the swindle bought tracts at prevailing market rates, divided them into smaller parcels and then, after getting the veterans’ signatures, completed the paper work. An artificially high demand for these tracts drove up land prices. Bribed officials at the General Land Office, including Giles, drove prices of these tracts even higher by assessing highly inflated values to the parcels. The conspirators then sold their land to the Veterans Land Board and cashed in, leaving the veterans with a debt for land they had usually never seen and some cases didn’t want. Giles and his co-conspirators would then expedite approval of the loan application paperwork submitted by these land syndicates.

"Certain 'promoters' acquired or assembled varying-sized tracts of land . . .," a 1955 Senate investigating committee report noted. "In many such instances, it appeared that the consideration to be paid by the 'promoters' . . . was not paid until the money was advanced by the Veterans Land Board. By this practice, the only money involved was that of the State . . . The plan . . . constituted a highly reprehensible practice, especially in view of the 'spread' between the original purchase price paid by the 'promoters' and the appraised price paid by the Veterans Land Board, resulting in unconscionable and shocking profits . . . without risk and with only token expense to them and the 'rooking' of the veteran-purchaser."

Veterans who had signed loan paperwork often received checks ranging in value from $10 to $300, perhaps in hope of buying their continued cooperation. In some cases, however, land office employees sent bills for the land to these veterans, who were surprised to find they were responsible for purchasing tracts they thought they had received as a war bonus. "[T]hese veterans started trickling in, complaining that they hadn't bought any land, wanting to know what the blue slips [they had been mailed by the land office] were, were there payments to be made," recalled Dewitt County prosecutor Wiley Cheatham. "Some of them had pink slips where delinquent payments had not been made, and delinquent notices." The complaints made by these veterans added to the mounting evidence against Bascom Giles and the other conspirators.

Public awareness of the scandal grew after publication of a series of articles by managing editor Ken Towery at the Cuero Record in 1954 and 1955 forced a complacent statewide press to pay attention. After investigations by Wiley Cheatham and the Texas Department of Public Safety, a state audit of the General Land Office, and an inquiry by the state Senate's General Investigating Committee, nine counties issued indictments against 21 people. Charges centered on improper use of state money and fraud committed against the veterans. A Travis County grand jury indicted Giles on March 5, 1955 for conspiracy to steal $83,500 in state money (nearly $590,000 in 2005 dollars). Upon conviction, Giles became the first elected official in Texas history convicted of a crime committed while he was in office. Having won election to a ninth term as General Land Office Commissioner, Giles declined to be sworn in and later was sentenced to six years at the state penitentiary in Huntsville. He served his sentence from January 1956 to December 1958 before release for good behavior. Giles also paid $80,000 to settle civil suits. Only one other defendant, B.R. Sheffield of Brady, spent substantial time in prison as a result of the scandal. Convicted of forgery, Sheffield, served five years in prison before winning parole in 1966. A state auditor's report issued in December 1955 concluded that land transactions totaling more than $3.5 million (about $25 million in today's dollars) involving 591 veterans buying land from 39 sellers should be "classified as fraudulent in whole or in part." Meanwhile, land promoters involved in the scheme were forced to buy land back from the swindled veterans and return money to the state.

Regardless of the causes of the land scandal, Shivers now faced an image problem. As dictated by the legislation creating the program, a board that consisted of Land Commissioner Giles, Governor Shivers and state Attorney General John Ben Shepperd supervised the veterans land program. The enabling legislation requiring the consent of board members before the state could buy land for the program. Shivers and Shepperd, however, rarely attended meetings of the board, at times leaving Giles alone to make decisions. Shivers often sent a representative, Maurice Acers, to attend in his stead, and Acers suspected problems with the program as early as March 1954, but Shivers never acted on Acers’ suspicions.

Both Shepperd and Shivers vigorously denied any role in illegal transactions, even though in March 1955 Giles implicated the two in the scandal. Although no evidence surfaced of Shivers and Shepperd's direct guilt, much of the voting public assumed they were responsible for the crisis, either as active participants in the corruption or due to neglect. “The news eventually came out and no one saved face . . .,” Shivers biographer Ricky Dobbs wrote. “Legislative investigators ruled that the scandal stopped with Giles, his staff, and the land developers involved. However [these investigators] also criticized Shivers and Shepperd for their lax attention to duty.” Shivers, entertaining thoughts of a fourth gubernatorial term, needed to salvage something positive from the land scandal. Specifically, he sought a replacement for Giles with impressive credentials and a heroic reputation. He turned to his old friend Earl Rudder.

Shivers appointed Rudder Commissioner of the Land Board on January 1, 1955 and he and Shepperd named him the chair of the Veteran's Land Board on January 5. The first paragraph of the press release announcing Rudder's appointment to the board described the aviation executive as an "outstanding hero of the Normandy invasion in World War II." The state press followed the governor's lead, emphasizing Rudder's war record. A typical newspaper story on Rudder's appointment, in the January 9, 1955 issue of the Dallas Morning News, details in several paragraphs his role on D-Day. The reporter, Dawson Duncan, describes Rudder as "blunt, jovial, unequivocal, the opposite of egotistical, whose innermost desire is to serve his fellow man without ostentation . . ." The story then covers Rudder's management of the Brady Aviation Company. Dawson notes that Rudder had not even been inside an industrial plant when he was hired to run Brady Aviation. In spite of this inexperience, Duncan notes approvingly that during Rudder's brief tenure, the company "has not lost a single day in labor stoppage or strike." Asked how he managed such congenial labor relations, Rudder replied, "I just saw to it that they (employees) were treated like they ought to be treated as people. It's just that simple."

After a string of public relations disasters, the appointment of Rudder represented a coup. The Texas media presented the new land commissioner as heroic, honest, and an excellent manager, in stark contrast to corrupt Giles. Rudder knew his mission as land commissioner, in part, depended on improving the tarnished image of the land program. In a lengthy feature story in the Houston Post by Marie Moore, Rudder related the story of a young former employee of the land office who applied for a job in another city and expected to be hired until he was asked about his duties at the General Land Office. The man's job had been to check the surveys of land bought under the veterans' program. "As the boy explained it to me, his interview was over as soon as the veterans' land question came up," Rudder said. "Of course, he didn't get the job. I think one of my greatest tasks in this job is overcoming suspicion as that. Whether this attitude was justified by what happened in this past is not a matter for me to consider."

The scandal caused many people to reconsider the value of the land program. “Well, a lot of people [thought], ‘Well, we don’t need a veterans program, we shouldn’t do that,’” recalled Jim Lindsey who served as speaker of the House at the time of the legislative investigations of the land office. Rudder, however, was adamant that the veterans' land program should continue and that it provided a valuable service to a deserving population. ". . . I've thought ever since I took over this job that a system of state loans for veterans to buy farms should be continued," Rudder told the Post. He pointed out that 15,682 veterans had used the program at that point. He added that, in spite of well-publicized problems, only 1,291 loans were delinquent in the veterans' program. " . . .[S]how me a bank that has a better average," he said.

Rudder acted aggressively to restore the credibility of the Land Office and to distance himself and his subordinates from the Giles era. At a January 13, 1955 meeting, Rudder recommended and won approval of the resignation of three Giles-era land program employees: Executive Secretary Laurence C. Jackson; Assistant Executive Secretary U.S. McCutcheon; and Appraiser Lee Richey. The board halted consideration of any loans in which there were any suspicions. The board asked for more information from the principals before such loans could be further considered. Finally, Rudder appointed Dennis Wallace, the chief clerk for the General Land Office, as the Acting Executive of the Land Program.

In addition to purging the office of employees with clouded reputations, Rudder grappled with missing Land Office documents and with a chaotic filing system. On the job just over a month, Rudder was called before the Senate's General Investigating Committee, which had subpoenaed records from Giles administration that had not yet been turned over. "I know that there have been accusations that the files have been stripped in the past, and I certainly don't want that to happen while I'm here," Rudder testified on February 15, 1955. " . . I do want you to know that the opportunity for people to strip our records and get information out of them is kept to a minimum."

Many gaps existed in the Land Office records, including correspondence concerning questionable land deals previously published by the Cuero Record. It was not just the possibility that potential criminal defendants had destroyed important evidence that concerned members of the Senate committee. Such records provided key information that might be important in future state land transactions or private business deals. Sloppy records management, however, still plagued the office six weeks after Giles' sudden departure. Senator Jimmy Phillips of Angleton fumed over a visit he paid to the Land Office the previous day, February 14, when he requested a set of records that were still in the possession of the agency. The file, Phillips complained, "wasn't misplaced, it was somewhere in the department. Went to the mimeograph machine and it was going 90 miles an hour. We went to the desks, went to the lawyers' desks, on top of files, in and out, around and around for an hour and a half and the general conversation was to this effect, anything could have happed to that file, it might be in the lawyer's title opinion office; it might be here; it might be in the photostat machine, it might be anywhere."

Rudder seemed chastened by this description of his office's record keeping. Apologizing to Senator Phillips Rudder, even though he had just started as commissioner, refused to take the easy way out and blame Giles. The failure of his staff to find the file, he said, "is a matter of internal management on my part." Regarding the office's record keeping, Rudder said, " . . . I'm not happy with it because [we're] . . . not giving you the kind of service we want . . . and I repeat that our files are not in good shape over there." Rudder then made a vow. "But we are working to get them that way and you give me a little time and I think we'll have the files where you can walk in and in a matter of two or three minutes should be able to get any file over there."

Not only were records missing from the General Land Office, Rudder and his two fellow board members, Shivers and Shepperd, discovered that the records that remained could not be trusted. Reading through minutes of meetings in which controversial land deals had been approved, Shivers and Shepperd insisted that several transactions had been inserted into the record that had not been discussed while they or their designees had been in attendance. The board delved into "correcting" the altered minutes while a House investigating committee concluded that Shivers and Shepperd could not have known what was going on in the Land Office due to the widespread forgery of records.

Just a month later, Rudder announced to the press that he had sent a letter requesting the Legislature, the governor, and the state attorney general to conduct a "thorough investigation" of all General Land Office actions. He noted to the press that he opposed ending the land program, "which was not all bad despite reports of fraud and excess profits from some fast-dealing land promoters." Rather than cancel the program, Rudder called on the Legislature to place before the voters constitutional amendment that would double the program’s size. Rudder then cited letters from veterans who had participated in the program. "It has been good for some," he said. ". . . [It] can be made good for all by proper supervision and management."

Rudder also acted to improve working conditions in the Land office, which he found to be impossibly crowded. The state had neglected this agency, underpaying employees and providing inadequate resources for a “$50,000,000 a year business” to do its job. Even Giles had previously complained in a report that due “to the necessity of satisfying public demand in the operation of the Veteran’s Land Program, it has become necessary to assign several of the Land office employees to perform work of the Veteran’s Land Board. This, of course has curtailed many of the operations of the General land Office.”

Rudder not only agreed that the Land Office was inadequately staffed and that employees were underpaid and stretched too thin, but he expressed his astonishment at the cramped quarters staff occupied. “Within 30 minutes after I assumed the duties of Land Commissioner a meeting of the Veterans Land Board was held in my office,” he later wrote. “I was amazed to find such inadequate facilities for holding a meeting. A large contingent from the press was present and the available space was so crowded and confused that it was extremely difficult to conduct the meeting properly. I also became aware of the deplorable working conditions of the employees. They were badly handicapped in the performance of their duties by the heat and the crowded working conditions.” Rudder spent his tenure lobbying for better funding and facilities and more personnel for the agency.

Rudder didn't leave the rehabilitation of the Land Office's reputation to the Legislature, but sold the value of the program to civic groups, promising a new era of responsible management. In such public appearances, Rudder pursued several overlapping goals. He placed the veterans' land scandal in a larger historical context in order to reduce the threat to the program's survival. He strengthened the public's sense of kinship with veterans who might be harmed if the program were to be scrapped. He cast the program as not representing a handout, but a conservative investment in the state's future. Finally, he assured all that the program had entered a new era of openness and honesty.

Rudder pursued all four objectives in a speech to the Austin Lion's Club on August 11, 1955. " . . . [W]e find in the records of the land office, even in the early days of our Republic, that fraudulent land schemes were widespread," Rudder told the gathering. In short, if Texas luminaries like Sam Houston or Mirabeau B. Lamar couldn't completely prevent fraud, modern Texans should not be surprised by its occasional outbreak today. Rudder, however, walked a rhetorical tightrope, knowing that he could not dismiss the crimes of the Giles era as business as usual.

After providing details on a pair of corrupt land deals from the 1830s, he shifted tone and declared that, "Fraud in government is a detestable thing and, with your help and the help of all Texans, I hope to keep the Land Office operations free of it, so that the Veterans Land Program will be administered for the benefit of the veteran . . ." In contrast to Giles, who had provided only evasive answers as various investigations of the land office proceeded, Rudder invited the public to scrutinize his every move. "I invite you to keep a close surveillance on my conduct as Land Commissioner, and I strongly urge you to do the same toward the conduct of all other public officials," he said. " . . . I do not wish to operate in an official vacuum — separated from the desires and the will of the people who it is my duty to serve."

In the racist climate of 1950s Texas, Rudder urged his Lion's Club audience to see African American veterans and Mexican American veterans as the unwilling dupes of a criminal plot hatched by powerful, scheming white men.

The veteran . . . has been victimized . . . Some of our veterans, not wise in the ways of the world, and I might say underworld, were an easy prey to those shady-dealing promoters who would capitalize upon veterans' benefits to the prejudice of the veterans themselves . . . Veterans as a whole cannot, by a long shot, be classified as a shiftless lot . . . Why, you and I are veterans . . . I do not mean to convey the idea that the veterans deserve a reward simply because they were serviceman. Quite the contrary — It is my belief that it is a man's duty to serve his country even to the point of giving up his life in that service . . .[but] our people decided to restore to the veteran some of the things lost by [his time in service] . . . to enable him to more easily readjust and more quickly become integrated into a peace-time civilian society. The Veterans' Land Program was an excellent way to accomplish this purpose.

Rudder's public relations campaign proved enough to save the program from the budget axe and his improvements in accounting practices helped the Veterans' Land Board resume operations in October 1955. He aggressively pursued collection of money from those involved in the scandal. In addition to the nearly $80,000 returned to the Veterans Land Program from Giles, Rudder secured the return of nearly $400,000 from B.R. Sheffield. Three-men committees were established in each county to review each veteran's land loan application. All veteran applicants were required to meet with appraisers on the tract to be acquired and the appraiser was required to inform the applicants of the loan terms and the features of the property. Under Rudder, the General Land Office more professionally collected oil royalties from leased state lands. He persuaded the Legislature to hire additional field inspectors to confirm that oil and gas producers strictly obeyed the state's drilling laws. He also increased the seismic exploration staff, enabling the land office to locate more oil wells on state land and thus increase royalty payments to state universities.

Rudder also discovered to his chagrin that the Land Office's archives, filled with documents more than a century old, were in daily use, a result of increasing litigation concerning land titles in a rapidly growing state. Constant handling caused deterioration of the fragile papers, but no single policy had been settled upon to prevent the destruction of these historical treasures. "There is nothing so exasperating and frustrating as to open a book of old letters where you expect to find a vital piece of correspondence dated some 50 to 60 years ago, and to discover, to your great dismay, that the letters and the writing have been reduced to nothing more than a mass of crumbled confetti and dust," Rudder noted in his 1956 report, "or to open up a set of original field notes and to find two or three calls eaten away by the acid from the ink." He commissioned a study on records preservation, settling on lamination of documents, and thereby slowed the decay.

Michael Phillips is the author or co-author of the following books:

“White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, Texas, 1841-2001” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

“The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas Speaker Became a Power in State and National Politics.” Co-Written with Patrick Cox. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).

Walter Buenger and Arnoldo de León, eds., “Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away From Past Interpretations” (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2011).

Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz, eds., “The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western Experience” (New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011).

Richardson Dilworth, ed. “Cities in American Political History” (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011).

He will also be co-author of the forthcoming “The Radical Origins of the Texas Right” (edited by David Cullen and Kyle Wilkison) due to be published in 2012 by Texas A&M University Press; and “American Dreams and Reality: A Retelling of the American Story,” to be published the same year by Abigail Press.

He is currently collaborating, with longtime journalist Betsy Friauf, on a history of Bishop College, an African American institution originally established in Marshall, Texas, that relocated to Dallas by the 1960s before suffering bankruptcy in the 1980s. The two plan to create a website and author a book, “’God Carved in Night’: Afro-Texan Culture, Political Activism And the Rise and Fall Of Bishop College” based on this project.

Perry-sitical

2012-01-05T17:28:00.000-08:00

When Rick Perry was told by his advisors that he won only 10 percent of the Iowa voters, the Texas governor said, "So who did the other 100 percent vote for?" He's off to New Hampshire and is excited to visit New England. "I always wanted to see Buckingham Palace," he said. Perry was asked why he didn't drop out of the race after proving to be less popular than rubella. ""Napoleon didn't surrender at Waterloo, did he?" the governor said.

Michael Phillips is the author or co-author of the following books:

“White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, Texas, 1841-2001” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

“The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas Speaker Became a Power in State and National Politics.” Co-Written with Patrick Cox. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).

Walter Buenger and Arnoldo de León, eds., “Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away From Past Interpretations” (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2011).

Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz, eds., “The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western Experience” (New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011).

Richardson Dilworth, ed. “Cities in American Political History” (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011).

He will also be co-author of the forthcoming “The Radical Origins of the Texas Right” (edited by David Cullen and Kyle Wilkison) due to be published in 2012 by Texas A&M University Press; and “American Dreams and Reality: A Retelling of the American Story,” to be published the same year by Abigail Press.

He is currently collaborating, with longtime journalist Betsy Friauf, on a history of Bishop College, an African American institution originally established in Marshall, Texas, that relocated to Dallas by the 1960s before suffering bankruptcy in the 1980s. The two plan to create a website and author a book, “’God Carved in Night’: Afro-Texan Culture, Political Activism And the Rise and Fall Of Bishop College” based on this project.

Scandal, 1950s Texas Style: Allan Shivers, Earl Rudder and the Veterans Land Swindle

2012-01-05T08:43:00.000-08:00

This post marks the start of a series on the unpredictable career of James Earl Rudder. A Texas farm boy, Rudder became internationally famous as a D-Day hero. A political outsider, he cleaned house as Commissioner of the Texas General Land Office after one of the messiest scandals in the state's often corrupt political history. A deeply conservative man who lacked the proper academic credentials, he nevertheless ruled as president of Texas A&M when the tradition-bound school underwent sweeping reforms. Under Rudder, the school changed its name, desegregated, admitted women for the first time, changing and ended the requirement that students serve in its paramilitary "Corps of Cadets." This passage describes how Rudder came to be be named to head the General Land office by besieged Gov. Allan Shivers.

A cliché holds that politics is all about timing. No figure in mid-twentieth century Texas politics possessed a more uncanny sense of the moment than Robert Allan Shivers. A relative moderate during his early career in the state Senate, Shivers balanced his own personal conservatism with the pragmatic need to win votes among his relatively liberal, union-friendly, blue collar Port Arthur constituency. When anti-New Deal sentiments brewed among elite Texas voters in the late 1930s, Shivers transformed into an outspoken conservative without missing a beat. Throughout his career, he maintained an instinct for shifts in public mood and as governor he proved a master at manipulating racial and class resentments.

Born in 1907 in the tiny hamlet of Woodville, Shivers grew up in solidly middle-class surroundings. His father, Robert Andrew Shivers, taught until he earned a law license and won an election as County Judge in largely poor Tyler County. The family experienced more prosperity after moving to Port Arthur, a center of the state’s oil and chemical industry. First elected to the Senate’s Fourth District in 1934, Shivers mostly supported the liberal programs of Governor James Allred, a New Deal ally. Shivers voted for Allred’s proposal to tax chain stores, and also backed pensions for the elderly, poverty-stricken blind people, and impoverished children. If the younger Shivers initially seemed influenced by his father’s progressive-style politics, the future governor slowly shifted right after he married Marialice Shary, the daughter of millionaire citrus planter and land mogul John Shary of Mission, Texas in 1937.

As state senator, Shivers would marvel at country music radio performer and Hillbilly Flour impresario W.O. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel’s success in implementing regressive social and economic policies as Texas governor from 1939 to 1941. As governor, O’Daniel savagely cut Texas’ already feeble programs for the sick, the poor and the elderly while retaining the support of poor pro-FDR voters. O’Daniel’s faux populism further emboldened Shivers’ move to the right. As governor, O’Daniel “cut hospital beds, moneys for state wards, and slashed the highway budget by half. Still, public enthusiasm for O’Daniel did not wane.” Shivers learned much about Texas politics from O’Daniel. The governor’s “ability to appeal to ‘personal desires and personal emotions’ demonstrated to Shivers the power of ‘the psychological approach to almost everyone’s desire for love of mother, home, and country.’ O’Daniel’s rhetoric repeatedly convinced ordinary Texans that he understood them, even as he gutted public services.”

Sensing an anti-New Deal backlash centering on Roosevelt’s perceived friendliness with unions and African Americans, by the late 1930s the Port Arthur senator consistently supported O’Daniel’s anti-New Dealer appointments to state office. Shivers also endorsed an O’Daniel bill that banned violence or the threat of violence by strikers (while not sanctioning similar acts by employers) and voted as often against his labor constituency as he did with them.

As he grew more reactionary, Shivers drew a favorable response from Herman Brown, a deep-pockets conservative owner of a Texas construction empire who also sponsored Lyndon Johnson’s political career. Shivers would earn as well the patronage of right-wing oilmen like Arch Rowan and Hugh Roy Culllen. This provided the brash politician the capital to wage a serious race for lieutenant governor after he returned from service as an Army major in World War II. Facing journalist and legendary storyteller Boyce House and state representative and Houston lawyer Jo Ed Winfree in the Democratic primary, Shivers and his opponents managed a quiet, respectful race for lieutenant governor compared to the bitter-six man gubernatorial campaign eventually won by Beauford Jester. If Shivers specialized in racist demagoguery during the 1950s, his only foray into racial politics during the lieutenant governor’s race came when he declared unconvincingly that “I am the kind of Texan who believes that colored people do not want to attend school with the whites.” He still managed to get some support from organized labor and won enough votes to finish first in the primary and then win handily in the runoff, thus assuring his victory in the one-party state in the November 1946 general election.

“In politics there is really more to timing than in a track meet,” Shivers later observed. “ There generally is a time when the best man who offers for a position couldn’t be elected – either because of the lack of interest, or apathy of the voters, or because he really doesn’t have the opportunity to present his views. On the other hand, for exactly the same reasons with a few variations, there’s a time when almost anyone can defeat an incumbent.”

The moment definitely belonged to Shivers. Constitutionally, the lieutenant governor represents the most powerful public figure in Texas. Shivers skillfully expanded the reach of the office, playing a key role in passage of Texas’ right-to-work law, which banned unions from holding an election among workers and upon obtaining a majority vote declaring a work site a “closed shop” where all employees must join the union local. Unions needed the closed shop in order to prevent employers from undermining organizing efforts. The state’s right-to-work law greatly diminished the political influence of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations and strengthened already dominant conservatives within the Democratic Party. With his party faction reaching unprecedented dominance, Shivers used his stint as lieutenant governor to pursue an aggressive legislative agenda. He could claim credit for steering a revolutionary modernization of the public school system, the Gilmer-Aikin Laws, through the senate. Shivers also expanded funding for higher education, including the Texas State University for Negroes (now Texas Southern University), a move designed to bolster segregation as well as the university.

Shivers assumed the state's highest office on July 11, 1949 when Governor Beauford Jester died of a heart attack. As governor, Shivers cultivated establishment support for increased expenditures on education, old age pensions, and other progressive programs, but he avoided taxes on energy companies enjoying exploding profits in the 1950s and shifted the tax burden to consumers, particularly cigarette taxes which were particularly burdensome to lower-income voters. The governor enthusiastically embraced union bashing and McCarthyism, calling a special session of the Legislature in 1954 where he made a top priority of a bill that would Communist Party membership a crime punishable by death. Furthermore, Shivers undercut the Good Neighbor Commission that had been designed to monitor labor conditions endured by Mexican migrant farm workers in South Texas.

At a time of racial violence across the South, Shivers urged resistance to the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling ordering desegregation of public schools. The governor encouraged white mobs violently resisting a federal court order mandating desegregation of Mansfield schools in North Central Texas. There, enraged white mobs, ranging in size between 300 to 400 whites, surrounded the city’s high school on August 30 and 31, 1956 to block the enrollment of three African American students. Whites hanged three blacks in effigy, the black-faced dummies hanging in front of the Mansfield High campus for days. Other whites roughed up reporters and physically threatened the sheriff. Downtown stores shut down to support demonstrators while bands of thugs inspected cars entering town in order to prevent entry by civil rights supporters. Rather than maintain order and respect for the law, Shivers praised the Mansfield mobs and violated the court mandate by dispatching Texas Rangers to prevent desegregation.

Immensely popular through most of his two full terms, Shivers’ demagoguery won some votes, but he began to face strong opposition during a surprisingly close re-election bid in 1954 against liberal candidate Ralph Yarborough, an Austin lawyer. Shivers, a Democrat, alienated many in his party by publicly campaigning for Republican Presidential nominee Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. Other Democrats worried about Shivers' violation of the gubernatorial two-term tradition in Texas. Earl Rudder, a friend of Shivers’, campaigned for the governor around Brady, He warned Shivers, however, of his declining popularity.

"Two things that are hurting me more in this area, is the third term proposition and leading us into supporting Eisenhower," Rudder advised in a letter. "Most of the type of persons who like to believe this still hold [President] Franklin Roosevelt as the greatest Democrats that ever lived. And it might be well to point out that he [Roosevelt] served more than two terms. Also I believe that he pointed out in his memoirs he voted Republican once during his political career."

A well-known World War II hero, James Earl Rudder was a good friend to have around for a political campaign. Born in 1910 in the tiny town of Eden in West Texas. Rudder graduated from Texas A&M in 1932 with a degree in industrial education and earned a commission as a second lieutenant in the United States Army Reserves. After working as a football coach and teacher at a small, rural high school, Rudder taught and coached at Tarleton Agricultural College in Stephenville, before being the Army activated him in 1941. He experienced a rapid rise in an authentically heroic career, rising quickly to the rank of lieutenant colonel and commanding the Second Ranger Battalion, a group that would become famous after D-Day in June 1944 as “Rudder’s Rangers.”

Hitting Normandy Beach on June 6 the French coast at Pointe du Hoc under blistering, lethal German fire, Rudder’s Rangers suffered a more than 50 percent casualty rate, grinding their way up 100-foot cliffs before reaching a nd destroying key Wehrmacht batteries. Within a year, Rudder commanded the 109th Infantry Brigade which endured the brutal Germnan counteroffensive in arctic temperatures in December and January of 1945. Rudder ended the war as a full colonel and had a chest full of medals, including the Silver Star, the Distinguished Service Cross, and the French Legion of Honor with croix de guerre and palm. While in the Army Reserves in the 1950s, Rudder received promotion to Brigadier General.

Many returning World War II veterans found their combat records to be a distinct advantage in politics. Back in West Texas, Rudder won election as mayor of Brady from 1946 to 1952 before temporarily retiring from politics to run an aviation company. Rudder campaigned vigorously across the state for Alan Shivers during the 1954 race. “I think I’ve been around long enough to know a man when I see one,” Rudder told a Lufkin audience on June 21 as he introduced Shivers. Rudder briefly described his exploits in World War II and rhetorically made fellow veteran Shivers part of his band of brothers. “And Allan Shivers is a man – a man of integrity – a man of warm heart and raw courage . . . a dynamic leader, a man who won’t run away –- a man you can follow with complete confidence that he will do what is best for Texas.”

In spite of Rudder’s enthusiasm, Shivers faced a tough race. Forcing the incumbent governor into a runoff in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, Yarborough suffered a sound defeat in the second round only after Shivers painted him as an extreme integrationist and a communist dupe.
The governor may have won a third term, but events quickly swamped him in scandal. In 1955, Allan Shivers suffered the worst year of his political life.

The high number of failing insurance companies in Texas became a campaign issue in the 1954 gubernatorial race. The next year, US Trust and Guaranty, one of the major insurance carriers in the state collapsed in spite of inspection by state officials. This incident amply demonstrated the weakness of Texas insurance industry regulation. Texas chartered more insurance companies than any other state in the union, and many filed for bankruptcy in the mid-1950s. A subsequent investigation found that members of the state's insurance board accepted gifts from one bankrupt firm, ICT Insurance Company. ICT founder BenJack Cage was later indicted for embezzlement and bribery before he fled to Brazil. A.B. Shoemake once headed a $7 million bank and insurance empire as president of the bankrupt U.S. Trust and Guaranty Company of Waco. Facing investigation of his firm, he shot himself in the temple on January 7, 1956. Shoemake, however, survived the suicide attempt but spent the rest of his life as “a mind-less, helpless person being cared for by the Veterans Administration.” Many voters blamed Shivers for the state’s insurance mess. In yet another bout of negative press, questions arose over how Shivers' $25,000 option on a 13,500-acre land parcel in the Rio Grande Valley resulted in a $450,000 sale by the governor.

One of the largest scandals of the Shivers era broke in 1954-1955. Land speculators conspiring with officials from the General Land Office offered what seemed like no-lose propositions to mostly African American and Mexican American World War II veterans. Targeting illiterate former soldiers, some of whom spoke English as a second language, these speculators conned veterans into signing applications for state-backed loans to buy land the speculators owned. Such deals carried fat profits for the conspirators but left the veterans poverty-stricken, holding the loan notes.

Swindlers targeted about 600 veterans, telling the veterans that the land they were supposed to receive represented a reward they earned through military service during World War II and that the property would become theirs in three years’ time. Although a land program existed, no state agency provided land as a bonus. In 1954-1955, a series of newspaper articles published by the Cuero Record and an investigation by Dewitt County District Attorney Wiley Cheatham revealed that the signatures provided by these veterans enabled a massive land sale fraud launched by Texas General Land Office Commissioner Bascom Giles and his co-conspirators.

By 1955 what became known as the Texas Veterans Land Board Scandal thoroughly entangled Giles and other state officials, including members of the Texas Legislature, who now faced criminal charges. Giles, head of the General Land Office for more than 16 years, landed in jail. Ken Towery, the managing editor of the Cuero Record who first brought the biggest story of the year to public attention, won the Pulitzer Prize. And Allan Shivers, in an attempt to salvage his rapidly sagging reputation, named Earl Rudder as the new land commissioner. Rudder's impeccable image as a war hero provided Shivers some political breathing room as the controversy unfolded. For not the first time in his life, Rudder embarked on a rescue mission with risky prospects.

Michael Phillips is the author or co-author of the following books:

“White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, Texas, 1841-2001” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

“The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas Speaker Became a Power in State and National Politics.” Co-Written with Patrick Cox. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).

Walter Buenger and Arnoldo de León, eds., “Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away From Past Interpretations” (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2011).

Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz, eds., “The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western Experience” (New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011).

Richardson Dilworth, ed. “Cities in American Political History” (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011).

He will also be co-author of the forthcoming “The Radical Origins of the Texas Right” (edited by David Cullen and Kyle Wilkison) due to be published in 2012 by Texas A&M University Press; and “American Dreams and Reality: A Retelling of the American Story,” to be published the same year by Abigail Press.

He is currently collaborating, with longtime journalist Betsy Friauf, on a history of Bishop College, an African American institution originally established in Marshall, Texas, that relocated to Dallas by the 1960s before suffering bankruptcy in the 1980s. The two plan to create a website and author a book, “’God Carved in Night’: Afro-Texan Culture, Political Activism And the Rise and Fall Of Bishop College” based on this project.

Random Thoughts: Iowa Caucuses Division

2012-01-04T15:22:00.000-08:00

My friend Tommy Cummings says that the plural of caucus should be cauci.

A panel of political scientists, historians, and journalists gathered at Columbia University concluded in a report issued today that, "no matter who wins the Republican caucuses in Iowa today, the eventual GOP nominee will redefine the phrase 'batshit crazy.'" In its strongly-worded conclusion, the panel noted that there has not been such evidence of mass mental illness in modern times since the last time millions tuned in to watch “Celebrity Apprentice.”

Though I thought he would be a really weak GOP candidate, which would be good news, I can't help but enjoy Rick Perry's name being barely mentioned tonight. Such an ignorant, smug, selfish, arrogant incompetent jerk deserves a very long comeuppance. And that goes for the morons in his Texas political operation too.

Earlier today, Andy Borowitz predicted there would be a 100 percent chance that the winner in Iowa tonight would be white.

Both Perry and Bachman claimed that God told them to run for president and both are in the back of the pack tonight in the hugely evangelical Iowa Republican caucuses. They are only ahead of John Huntsman and a chia pet that entered the race late. Guess this means that an endorsement from God is as worthless as one from a newspaper.

So the Republicans in Iowa can't chose between a candidate who wants to outlaw birth control, one that thinks the Civil Rights Movement was a bad idea, and one who is so fond of taking strong positions that he has more than one on every important issue. The only Stooge left out is Curly.

Mitt Romney laid on the cornball lyrics from "America The Beautiful" and sensed he was losing the crowd and tried to fire them up by quoting "Smoke on the Water."

It's amazing how watching Mitt Romney speak makes me feel less sincere. Chris Matthews had the funniest line of the night when he compared Romney to one of the animatronic dummies from Disneyland's "Hall of the Presidents."

Ron Paul will be having breakfast with his strategists this morning. It turns out that he likes his coffee and his cream separate but equal.

I love this stat: Rick Perry spent $3 million in Iowa and won a grand total of two delegates. The ongoing budget disaster that has been Texas under Perry now makes perfect sense.

By the way, the economic recession is easing up just enough that the GOP freak show and circular firing squad has just about guaranteed an Obama reelection.

We're having a late middle-aged New Year's eating at home, watching TV for the countdown and having a few symbolic sips for champagne before nodding off. We're going to party like we're 99.

Michael Phillips is the author or co-author of the following books:

“White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, Texas, 1841-2001” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

“The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas Speaker Became a Power in State and National Politics.” Co-Written with Patrick Cox. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).

Walter Buenger and Arnoldo de León, eds., “Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away From Past Interpretations” (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2011).

Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz, eds., “The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western Experience” (New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011).

Richardson Dilworth, ed. “Cities in American Political History” (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011).

He will also be co-author of the forthcoming “The Radical Origins of the Texas Right” (edited by David Cullen and Kyle Wilkison) due to be published in 2012 by Texas A&M University Press; and “American Dreams and Reality: A Retelling of the American Story,” to be published the same year by Abigail Press.

He is currently collaborating, with longtime journalist Betsy Friauf, on a history of Bishop College, an African American institution originally established in Marshall, Texas, that relocated to Dallas by the 1960s before suffering bankruptcy in the 1980s. The two plan to create a website and author a book, “’God Carved in Night’: Afro-Texan Culture, Political Activism And the Rise and Fall Of Bishop College” based on this project.

A Year's Worth of Facebook Updates: Random Thoughts Edition, Part III

2011-12-28T11:59:00.000-08:00

I view teaching at a community college as performing in the borscht belt of academia and have long considered my job to be “standup historian.” I post most of my jokes on Facebook. I like doing comedy online because it’s harder for the audience to throw things at you. Since it’s the end of the year, I’m going to be posing a year’s worth of my Facebook updates by theme. Today I take a last look back on the dark corners my addled brain ambled towards.

I was going to start a sentence with the phrase, "In my humble opinion," but then I realized I have no humble opinions.

Will drinking too much fake wine make you a fake wino?

Today, I am completely flappable.

I had an existential crisis earlier today but I decided that it was pretty meaningless.

I am so tired, I may only be able to work up sidewalk rage today.

Note to all: If you hack my computer you'll not find anything of interest unless you really love history. I'm too modest. I shower fully clothed.

Ah, a double-dip recession. I'll take mine with sprinkles.

Enjoyed attending the ribbon-cutting at Arlington's just-opened bottleneck factory.

I really wish I had a better sense of direction. I got completely lost at the Mobius strip mall the other day.

If I were Jesus right now, I would so have a full liquor cabinet.

So apparently on Twitter you are limited to 140 characters, not 140 chapters. Now I know.

I'm trying to overcome my pessimism, but I doubt that I can do that.

Yet another new amazing iPhone is on the market. I can't keep up. I'm keeping my old iPhone until they come up with one that can shave me, make my coffee and add just enough cream, and take over my classroom duties.

I think it was Abraham Lincoln who once said that the Lord must have loved stupid people because he made so many of them. However, it is not clear why so many of them ended up in broadcasting.

Because of the insane multiple deadline pressures I have been under the past few I was telling my son the other day about my days as the captain of a gravy boat.

For months, the entire semester I have felt like I'm living that nightmare where you show up for work or class and only then realize that you're naked. No. Wait a minute. That actually happened to me last Wednesday.

I have graduated from senior moments to senior hours.

I took a great new product today called, "I Can't Believe It's Not Percodan."

Dominic is soaked in sweat after playing Wii. That only happened to me at his age when I talked to girls.

I am celebrating my 51st year as a difficult person. Why am I difficult? That's none of your damned business.

An observation regarding the debt deal between President Obama and the Congress: even with a high-priced advertising campaign, a shit sandwich is still a shit sandwich. And whether it's made by a world renown chef or some schmuck at a greasy diner, it's still a shit sandwich.

So I take it as a sign of age but I no longer have anxiety dreams where I show up somewhere naked. Now I dream that I show up overdressed.

Now I'm dealing with the dilemma of being too simple for a Messiah Complex and too complicated for herpes simplex.

My brilliant wife Betsy Friauf asks how it is possible for intellectuals to be both "pointy-headed" and "eggheads" at the same time. Pointy eggs? It's a conundrum.

This morning I'm filled with nostalgia for the long gone things of my youth: vinyl records, polyester suits, rain . . .

Another day of being obtuse but accessible.

Giving in to unreasonable people does not make you reasonable. It makes you crazy.

Don't mean to be a cheese snob, but I really like Gouda. I consider myself a
practicing Goudist.

It's the holiday season and time to remember all those people who overlook you. I've got my Christmas grievance list. I hope you do too.

Remember, kids, you have nothing to fear but fear itself. Well that and unemployment. And bankruptcy. And poor health. And that party guest who won't go away. And flesh eating bacteria. And photographs of you from high school. But other than that, and some other personal items I dreaded mentioning on Facebook, you've got nothing to fear but fear itself.

It's that time of year when my thoughts turn to the Christmas gifts I plan to return.

Beginning to be a lot like Christmas. Got some nog for the egg nog and cute dyslexic kids in the neighborhood came by to sing, "The First Leon."

At Christmas I remember the family getting together, with the fire roaring in the fire place, the music playing in the background, the food piled on the table, and everyone sharing guilt and recriminations.

I consider myself a man of principle. Unless someone has a better offer.

So I've worked out my list of people I'm going to rail against on Facebook today: trombonists, doctors who perform rhinoplasty, Mennonites, people from Monaco and sufferers from gingivitis.

We're having a late middle-aged New Year's eating at home, watching TV for the countdown and having a few symbolic sips for champagne before nodding off. We're going to party like we're 99.

Michael Phillips is the author or co-author of the following books:

“White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, Texas, 1841-2001” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

“The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas Speaker Became a Power in State and National Politics.” Co-Written with Patrick Cox. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).

Walter Buenger and Arnoldo de León, eds., “Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away From Past Interpretations” (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2011).

Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz, eds., “The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western Experience” (New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011).

Richardson Dilworth, ed. “Cities in American Political History” (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011).

He will also be co-author of the forthcoming “The Radical Origins of the Texas Right” (edited by David Cullen and Kyle Wilkison) due to be published in 2012 by Texas A&M University Press; and “American Dreams and Reality: A Retelling of the American Story,” to be published the same year by Abigail Press.

He is currently collaborating, with longtime journalist Betsy Friauf, on a history of Bishop College, an African American institution originally established in Marshall, Texas, that relocated to Dallas by the 1960s before suffering bankruptcy in the 1980s. The two plan to create a website and author a book, “’God Carved in Night’: Afro-Texan Culture, Political Activism And the Rise and Fall Of Bishop College” based on this project.

A Year's Worth of Facebook Updates: Random Thoughts Edition, Part II

2011-12-24T16:20:00.000-08:00

I view teaching at a community college as performing in the borscht belt of academia and have long considered my job to be “standup historian.” I post most of my jokes on Facebook. I like doing comedy online because it’s harder for the audience to throw things at you. Since it’s the end of the year, I’m going to be posing a year’s worth of my Facebook updates by theme. Today l look back on the dark corners my addled brain ambled towards.

I want to publicly declare that absolutely nothing is beneath me.

My vow of silence did not work out. I'll have a statement on that later today.

The other day I was told to "take a powder," but I was not informed of the proper dosage.

‎"Whup ass" is now available not just in can form, but also in vacuum-sealed reusable packages.

I am feeling completely snarkless today.

I officially believe that even disillusionment is not worth the energy.

Remember kids, if you are a fool or a bigot or a religious zealot, I will respect your right to free speech but I am nor morally obligated to be your friend or to pretend you have a brain.

What should one do if one has kicked ass but forgot to take attendance?

According to a doctor's report I just received I am precisely jiggy like that.

Remember kids, there's no "I" in "team" unless you are a poor speller.

Remember kids, there's always a third option: being a tiny fish in a universe-sized ocean. Or evolving legs. But not in Texas. Evolving is illegal here.

‎Betsy Friauf got me a Kindle for my birthday. That's awesome. Now I'm trying to figure our how you fit books in this tiny thing.

Tomorrow, I plan to celebrate Labor Day 2011-style by being laid off and replaced by prison labor in China.

Excited to hear that production has begun for "Harry Potter Crosses a Street."

Very few people know this about me, but I was once part of a Milli Vanilli cover band.

I have discovered that Post-Its don't work very well on Kindles.

I have an opinion about everything. If you lack an opinion on an issue, I will be happy to give you one of mine.

One lyric says, "To sing the blues/you've got to pay the dues." What if you've paid the dues but you sing off-key?

As a famous person once said, "I don't want to be quoted."

Suffering from insomnia. I'm going to try to sleep it off.

I'm going to a sleep therapist ASAP. Apparently I am a sleep neurotic.

This semester, I vow to be ruthless and to eliminate one ruth at a time.

The Sicilian part of me wants to get all Joe Pesci on a large part of the world.

My 7-year-old son has early release today. In a text exchange I told him I would pick him up at 2:30 p.m. He replied, "That sounds reasonable."

I've got my bait and tackle box ready and tomorrow morning I'll set off to fish for compliments.

I'd write a memoir, but I've never been that good at fiction. If I do, I’ll call it “Dope-Slapped by Destiny.”

Given the people I often have to deal with, I should have just gone ahead and become a mental health professional.

Today's question: if a nanobot gets a computer virus, does it suffer from nanobotulism?

The other day I had a revelation. The reason so many people won't remove their heads from their asses is that their insurance won't cover the procedure.

Michael Phillips is the author or co-author of the following books:

“White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, Texas, 1841-2001” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

“The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas Speaker Became a Power in State and National Politics.” Co-Written with Patrick Cox. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).

Walter Buenger and Arnoldo de León, eds., “Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away From Past Interpretations” (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2011).

Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz, eds., “The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western Experience” (New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011).

Richardson Dilworth, ed. “Cities in American Political History” (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011).

He will also be co-author of the forthcoming “The Radical Origins of the Texas Right” (edited by David Cullen and Kyle Wilkison) due to be published in 2012 by Texas A&M University Press; and “American Dreams and Reality: A Retelling of the American Story,” to be published the same year by Abigail Press.

He is currently collaborating, with longtime journalist Betsy Friauf, on a history of Bishop College, an African American institution originally established in Marshall, Texas, that relocated to Dallas by the 1960s before suffering bankruptcy in the 1980s. The two plan to create a website and author a book, “’God Carved in Night’: Afro-Texan Culture, Political Activism And the Rise and Fall Of Bishop College” based on this project.

A Year's Worth of Facebook Updates: Rangers-Cardinals World Series Edition

2011-12-21T06:58:00.000-08:00

I view teaching at a community college as performing in the borscht belt of academia and have long considered my job to be “standup historian.” I post most of my jokes on Facebook. I like doing comedy online because it’s harder for the audience to throw things at you. Since it’s the end of the year, I’m going to be posing a year’s worth of my Facebook updates by theme. Today l look back on the agonies of being a sports fan, particularly if you cheer for the Texas Rangers.

Even if the NFL season is cancelled, I think the Giants will find a way to finish below .500.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day not only honors a great man but also marks the date when, traditionally, the New York Mets are eliminated from World Series contention.

Far be it from me to defend the Dallas Cowboys, but Tony Romo is playing with a punctured lung and broken ribs. I'm out for the day if I get a paper cut.

The World Series is almost over, the air is cooler, there's dew on the grass and now is the time that young men's thoughts turn to free agency.

This game is as scoreless as I was as a teenager.

The Cardinals are going through pitchers like Larry King goes through wives.

Bases loaded. And from what I read, so were the Red Sox most of the season.

Until that play, I hadn't seen so much choking since the Boston Strangler.

I haven't seen so many errors since the last time I graded a blue book,

Let's face it, this game has more Es than eleemosynary.

The ball apparently is more slippery than Bernie Madoff's accounting.

Scientists are still trying to detect this umpire's strike zone. It appears to be as small as Rick Perry's heart. And mind.

I think Sally Struthers is about to do a tear-jerking ad asking for someone to sponsor the abandoned base runners in this game. Sarah McLachlan will sing the background song.

If Michael Jackson were still alive, I could repeat a joke about the Cardinals they used to make about the Texas Rangers: What do Michael Jackson and the St. Louis Cardinals have in common? They both wear one glove for no apparent reason.

Tony LaRussa is going to do a double-switch. I think that's what Larry Craig did in that restroom.

Oh well. The Rangers are like my first marriage. I expect to be let down.

Rangers, you are the Anna Karenina of baseball.

Rangers, you're like Ike and Tina Turner. You never do nothin' nice and easy.

Feldman is on the mound for the Rangers. Haven't his people suffered enough?

Well Scott Feldman blew his chance to be the most beloved Texas Jew since Jack Ruby.

I get it. This game will never end. We're in a play by Samuel Beckett.

Alabama is No. 2 and LSU is No. 1. Perhaps next week’s featured game will involve teams that can spell SAT.

This Alabama-LSU game is the only reason I'm glad I'm grading blue books. This game is like the "Is it safe?" dentist scene in "The Marathon Man"

What would make this LSU-Alabama game more interesting would be if one of the players came out as a Wiccan and thanked Satan after the game.

Well, the game of the century of the week is about as electrifying as C-SPAN's "Booknotes" show. Maybe ESPN 12 is running chess.

There is no truth to the rumor that the Texas Rangers are trying to trade C.J. Wilson to Argentine kidnappers.

[Referring to the Penn State scandal]. Way back in my journalism career, which I spent part of as a sports writer, the sports section was called "the toy shop" of journalism. It has become the Stephen King novel of news.

I did not realize until this morning that ESPN had started broadcasting "America's Most Wanted."

Michael Phillips is the author or co-author of the following books:

“White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, Texas, 1841-2001” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

“The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas Speaker Became a Power in State and National Politics.” Co-Written with Patrick Cox. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).

Walter Buenger and Arnoldo de León, eds., “Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away From Past Interpretations” (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2011).

Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz, eds., “The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western Experience” (New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011).

Richardson Dilworth, ed. “Cities in American Political History” (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011).

He will also be co-author of the forthcoming “The Radical Origins of the Texas Right” (edited by David Cullen and Kyle Wilkison) due to be published in 2012 by Texas A&M University Press; and “American Dreams and Reality: A Retelling of the American Story,” to be published the same year by Abigail Press.

He is currently collaborating, with longtime journalist Betsy Friauf, on a history of Bishop College, an African American institution originally established in Marshall, Texas, that relocated to Dallas by the 1960s before suffering bankruptcy in the 1980s. The two plan to create a website and author a book, “’God Carved in Night’: Afro-Texan Culture, Political Activism And the Rise and Fall Of Bishop College” based on this project.

A Year's Worth of Facebook Updates: Random Thoughts Edition, Part I

2011-12-19T05:05:00.000-08:00

A Year’s Worth of Facebook Updates: “Heartbreak Hotel” Edition

2011-12-17T19:15:00.000-08:00

A Year’s Worth of Facebook Updates: “That’s Entertainment” Edition

2011-12-17T12:16:00.000-08:00

A Year’s Worth of Facebook Updates: The "Working In A Coal Mine" Edition

2011-12-15T20:12:00.000-08:00

A Year’s Worth of Facebook Updates: The “It’s All Politics” Edition

2011-12-15T08:42:00.000-08:00

I view teaching at a community college as performing in the borscht belt of academia and have long considered my job to be “standup historian.” I post most of my jokes on Facebook. I like doing comedy online because it’s harder for the audience to throw things at you. Since it’s the end of the year, I’m going to be posing a year’s worth of my Facebook updates by theme. Today l look back on what I said about our political leadership, in other words "America's Least Wanted."

The Founding Fathers had their share of bad ideas: slavery, the Second Amendment, Georgia statehood . . .

Completing a high school biology class no more qualifies you to pass judgement on the theory of evolution than writing a grocery list makes you an author.

The good news is that the United States government just received a promising email from a Nigerian businessman proposing a deal that could net trillions.

Mike's Big Book of Politics, Rule 1: A stupid idea is not any smarter because it's bipartisan.

Today in Texas is "Confederate Heroes Day." "Heroes" is a much nicer word than "traitors." Or "losers."

Dominic and I are watching the children's programming being offered nonstop on C-SPAN.

Remember, kids, the rich really aren't a persecuted minority and they really don't need your help. They do want the best for you, but unfortunately they think that's turning you into Chinese prison labor.

Anti-gay, anti-feminist rightwing loon Phyllis Schlafly is 87 years old. She is proof that only the good die young.

Glenn Beck has the easiest job in America. He just has to be smarter and better informed than his audience.

You can really feel the excitement drain from the Presidential race now that Tim Pawlenty has dropped out.

Headline of the future: "New York Times' Announces 'Town Crier' Format: Reporters to Visit Subscribers' Homes."

I'm off to teach a class, Mr. and Mrs. America. Please remember, the word is "whore," not "ho." I want you to properly address your member of Congress.

Mississippians are voting tonight on whether life begins when a man in a bar buys a woman a second drink.

I noticed that MSNBC has a countdown to the government shutdown in the lower left corner. Will an electric ball go down the Washington Monument at midnight? Where's Dick Clark?

Glenn Beck, who earns at least $32 million a year for making stupid shit up for one hour a day five days a week, says he wants to figure out what is a "realistic" salary for school teachers.

New rule: hosting a cable television or a radio show makes you an expert on broadcasting. Not an expert on science, on the economy, on geopolitics, on history, on energy, on relationships, or anything useful. Behave accordingly.

Well, I am officially an atheist now. On his show today, Rush Limbaugh mentioned the name of Jesus Christ to ridicule those who suggest Jesus' heart was with the poor and Rush did not burst into flames. Rush mentioning Jesus is like a pedophile discussing your child's school picture.

Christ, these Republicans make Montgomery Burns on "The Simpsons" look like Mother Teresa.

By the way, after a very close vote I doubled my debt ceiling.

Headline of the Future: Bank of America Forecloses Itself, Receives Giant Government Bailout

In a press conference, the police officer who used pepper spray pointblank in the faces of sitting, peaceful protestors at UC Davis explained that he was a performance artist and his actions were an "ironic statement" on the abuse of state power. He announced that his next installation would be titled, "Parent Slapping Child at Walmart."Getting ready for Thanksgiving. I'm going to beat and pepper spray the turkey later this morning.

We're getting read for Thanksgiving. I've already beat and pepper sprayed the turkey.

The Macy's Parade float with the pepper spraying cop was so loveable.

I feel bad for Ann Coulter. The sex reassignment surgery she underwent obviously did not go well.

Ann Coulter called John McCain a "douchebag" on MSNBC. What a distinction for McCain. That's like being called a great musician by Duke Ellington.

Fourteen percent approve of the job Congress is doing. Who belongs to that group and where are they hospitalized?

Please let lightening hit the wingnuts in Austin. I promise I'll become a believer.

Pat Robertson put the “mental” in “fundamentalist.”

Handing microphones to conservatives is like handing out box cutters to terrorists.

I think that John Ensign will look very presidential in an orange jumpsuit.

Payoffs to college athletes in Texas will be conducted in silence in honor of late former Gov. Bill Clements.

Michael Phillips is the author or co-author of the following books:

“White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, Texas, 1841-2001” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

“The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas Speaker Became a Power in State and National Politics.” Co-Written with Patrick Cox. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).

Walter Buenger and Arnoldo de León, eds., “Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away From Past Interpretations” (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2011).

Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz, eds., “The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western Experience” (New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011).

Richardson Dilworth, ed. “Cities in American Political History” (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011).

He will also be co-author of the forthcoming “The Radical Origins of the Texas Right” (edited by David Cullen and Kyle Wilkison) due to be published in 2012 by Texas A&M University Press; and “American Dreams and Reality: A Retelling of the American Story,” to be published the same year by Abigail Press.

He is currently collaborating, with longtime journalist Betsy Friauf, on a history of Bishop College, an African American institution originally established in Marshall, Texas, that relocated to Dallas by the 1960s before suffering bankruptcy in the 1980s. The two plan to create a website and author a book, “’God Carved in Night’: Afro-Texan Culture, Political Activism And the Rise and Fall Of Bishop College” based on this project.

A Year’s Worth of Facebook Updates; “Blessed Are The Meek” Edition

2011-12-14T15:52:00.000-08:00

A Year's Worth of Facebook Updates: International Diplomacy Edition

2011-12-13T06:11:00.000-08:00

A Year's Worth of Facebook Updates: Rabid Elephants Edition

2011-12-12T19:19:00.000-08:00

I view teaching at a community college as performing in the borscht belt of academia and have long considered my job to be “standup historian.” I post most of my jokes on Facebook. I like doing comedy online because it’s harder for the audience to throw things at you. Since it’s the end of the year, I’m going to be posing a year’s worth of my Facebook updates by theme. Today l look back on what I said about a Republican Party that is increasingly resembling the cast of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

Another day in a country whose leaders think that Dickens novels are an economic blueprint.

House Republicans are considering a bill declaring women's uteruses national parkland so they can be controlled by the Department of Interior.

Breaking News: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker admits his recent actions are part of a 12-Goosestep Program.

Interesting how many Texas conservatives are Social Darwinists even though they don't believe in evolution.

John Kyle got pregnant after a sexual romp with an illegal alien on his Senate staff and had an abortion at Walgreen's. This was not intended to be a factual statement.

People in Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin are waking up to the fact that crazies have taken over their state government. The crazies took over the government here in Texas too, but that was in 1836.

People get on Mitt Romney's case, but give him his due: he is the first candidate made of 100 percent recycled plastic.

According to the AP, when Mitt Romney travels the AC in his hotel rooms have to be set on high because plastic melts.

Mitt Romney is backtracking from the one major policy initiative of his tenure as Massachusetts governor - health care reform. Today he is assuring Republican voters that, if elected, he will apologize for every action he takes as president.

I propose a Constitutional amendment that the President and the Congress in the future will be prohibited from sending troops to any country that Tea Party members can't find on a map.

When Tim Pawlenty entered the GOP presidential race last week, we finally heard the sound of one hand clapping.

Earlier today God said at a press conference that, contrary to earlier reports, he has not asked anyone to run for president. He noted that he was not even registered to vote because he lacked a photo ID, and Republican election officials will not accept oil paintings or statuary as alternatives.

Before I donated blood today, I was asked the following questions: 1. Had I ever had sex with a man? 2. Had I ever had sex with a prostitute? 3. Had I ever been a GOP member of Congress?

Pat Buchanan has written a new anti-immigrant, anti-multiculturalism screed, "Suicide of a Superpower." It sounds like he wrote it when he was three white sheets to the wind.

I hear that in Washington on September 11, a bell will solemnly toll for every time that Rudy Giuliani has mentioned 9/11 in the last 10 years.

Sorry, Birthers, but if the sheet fits, wear it.

I was watching the news footage from Libya, with everyone heavily armed and firing weapons into the air, and absolutely no sign of a government anywhere, and I thought, "There it is - Tea Party Heaven." Well, maybe not. The locals are too dark-skinned for the Tea Party types.

Members of the Tea Party are facing an investigation from the EPA because they've moved from burning books to burning Kindles.

In the interest of balance and fairness, I am opening a clinic to cure straightness. I am not sure about the total course of treatment, but it will probably require men to spend time with Michele Bachman. For the women, any normal guy will probably do.

Sen. John Kyle of Arizona is the real identity of Lady Gaga. Not intended to be a factual statement.

Triumph the Insult Dog is entering the GOP primaries.

Remember kids, if God's telling you to run for president, that's why they invented thorazine.

How did House Speaker John Boehner go "mano-a-mano" with the president when both his hands are always in somebody else's pockets?

Republicans have finally found a tiny, persecuted minority they want to protect: hedge fund managers. It costs so little to help. Won't you give a hand?

Sen. John Kyle of Arizona paints his toenails a J. Crew shade of hot pink. Not intended to be a factual statement.
After the GOP presidential debate, I was just whistling that song from "West Side Story": "Sharia - I just passed a law called Sharia."

I've seen trailers for this new sci-fi film "In Time," which is sort of a twist on "Logan's Run." It depicts a future society where you don't get to live past 25 unless you pay a lot of money. It's based on the GOP health care plan. I don't find the plot feasible. If everyone died at 25, how would adult children move back in with their parents?

After a couple of bruising Presidential debates, the Republican Party this weekend will host a team-building exercise for the candidates. The leading candidates will beat hemophiliacs and deny them healthcare coverage.

I'm going out to see a movie - "The Republican First Wives Club."

Sen. John Kyle of Arizona double dips at parties. Not intended to be a factual statement.

Michael Phillips is the author or co-author of the following books:

“White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, Texas, 1841-2001” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

“The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas Speaker Became a Power in State and National Politics.” Co-Written with Patrick Cox. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).

Walter Buenger and Arnoldo de León, eds., “Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away From Past Interpretations” (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2011).

Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz, eds., “The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western Experience” (New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011).

Richardson Dilworth, ed. “Cities in American Political History” (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011).

He will also be co-author of the forthcoming “The Radical Origins of the Texas Right” (edited by David Cullen and Kyle Wilkison) due to be published in 2012 by Texas A&M University Press; and “American Dreams and Reality: A Retelling of the American Story,” to be published the same year by Abigail Press.

He is currently collaborating, with longtime journalist Betsy Friauf, on a history of Bishop College, an African American institution originally established in Marshall, Texas, that relocated to Dallas by the 1960s before suffering bankruptcy in the 1980s. The two plan to create a website and author a book, “’God Carved in Night’: Afro-Texan Culture, Political Activism And the Rise and Fall Of Bishop College” based on this project.

A Year's Worth of Facebook Updates: Ayn Rand Edition

2011-12-12T06:54:00.000-08:00

A Year's Worth of Facebook Updates: Donald Trump, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachman Edition

2011-12-11T06:50:00.000-08:00

A Year's Worth of Facebook Updates: Barack Obama and the Democrats Edition

2011-12-09T12:27:00.000-08:00

A Year's Worth of Facebook Updates: Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain Edition

2011-12-08T07:29:00.000-08:00

I view teaching at a community college as performing in the borscht belt of academia and have long considered my job to be “standup historian.” I post most of my jokes on Facebook. I like doing comedy online because it’s harder for the audience to throw things at you. Since it’s the end of the year, I’m going to be posing a year’s worth of my Facebook updates by theme. Today, l look back on what I said about the zipper-challenged Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain.

Mitt Romney said that he would put a bust of Winston Churchill in the Oval Office. Newt Gingrich said he would put in a bust of himself.

Because he believes that too much power in a single person's hands is dangerous to democracy, Newt Gingrich advocates making the office of First Lady one that rotates each year.

Newt's right face doesn't know what his farther right face is saying.

Newt Gingrich will be kicking off his presidential campaign with a major speech before a large audience of his former wives.

Let's give Newt Gingrich credit. He really took the "adult" out of adultery.

I had a nightmare last night where I was on a road trip with Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich and we kept getting pulled over by the vice squad.

According to the United States Census Bureau, Latinos/Latinas the most rapidly expanding population group in the United States. The second fastest category is women claiming to have been sexually harassed by Herman Cain.

I don't think that Herman Cain has any chance of being President of the United States. However, he’s got a shot of being the next Prime Minister of Italy.

The AP is reporting that Newt Gingrich is being treated for severe back strain. He apparently tried to move his divorce decrees to the garage.

With Cain and Gingrich ranking among the top three Republican presidential candidates, we know that the GOP is again the party of family values. Unfortunately, it's Caligula's family.

Apparently Newt Gingrich spent a half-million dollars at Tiffany's trying to buy some integrity, but the check bounced.

Newt Gingrich blamed his past history of adultery on his intense patriotism. In Newts defense, before a date night with Betsy I always play the National Anthem.

Newt Gingrich was expressing such intense love for his country tonight that I was afraid he was going to commit adultery with Hannity on camera.

The AP is reporting that Newt Gingrich has already been caught cheating with another country.

Apparently the only people Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain haven't fondled are each other. I apologize for planting that image in your head

According to doctors at Cedar Sinai Hospital, biopsies taken from various points on Newt Gingrich's body reveal that he is 95 percent colon.

‎"Entertainment Tonight" is reporting that Clarence Thomas, Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain are planning a reunion with the rest of the cast of "Porky's."

The AP is reporting that in 1997, Herman Cain sexually harassed Sarah Lawrence College.

During the debate, Newt Gingrich called for instilling pride in children by giving them paying jobs in coal mines. "They're so small," he said. "More of them can fit in those tiny little shafts." He will provide details for his "Minors as Miners" program Thursday.

There was a singing duo back in the 1980s known as "Two Tons of Fun." Watching Gingrich and Trump together today I thought they should tour as "500 Pounds of Stupid."

Herman Cain, in announcing his departure from the presidential race, quoted a Pokemon move. Michele Bachman responded by quoting a Charlie Chaplain film.

Michael Phillips is the author or co-author of the following books:

“White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, Texas, 1841-2001” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

“The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas Speaker Became a Power in State and National Politics.” Co-Written with Patrick Cox. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).

Walter Buenger and Arnoldo de León, eds., “Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away From Past Interpretations” (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2011).

Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz, eds., “The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western Experience” (New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011).

Richardson Dilworth, ed. “Cities in American Political History” (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011).

He will also be co-author of the forthcoming “The Radical Origins of the Texas Right” (edited by David Cullen and Kyle Wilkison) due to be published in 2012 by Texas A&M University Press; and “American Dreams and Reality: A Retelling of the American Story,” to be published the same year by Abigail Press.

He is currently collaborating, with longtime journalist Betsy Friauf, on a history of Bishop College, an African American institution originally established in Marshall, Texas, that relocated to Dallas by the 1960s before suffering bankruptcy in the 1980s. The two plan to create a website and author a book, “’God Carved in Night’: Afro-Texan Culture, Political Activism And the Rise and Fall Of Bishop College” based on this project.

A Year's Worth of Facebook Updates: Rick Perry Edition

2011-12-07T19:13:00.001-08:00

I view teaching at a community college as performing in the borscht belt of academia and have long considered my job to be “standup historian.” I post most of my jokes on Facebook. I like doing comedy online because it’s harder for the audience to throw things at you. Since it’s the end of the year, I’m going to be posing a year’s worth of my Facebook updates by theme. Tonight, l look back on what I said about failed Texas governor and even more failed presidential candidate Rick Perry.

Gov. Perry thinks Occam’s Razor is something you shave with.

I thought this violated the laws of physics, but Rick Perry is both an empty suit and a stuffed shirt.

In one of those cute gubernatorial sports sidebets, Rick Perry told Jan Brewer he'd close UT for a year if the Longhorns lose. He said that was in his budget plans anyway.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Florida Gov. Rick Scott have a bet on the NBA Finals between Miami and Dallas. The winner gets to close a orphanage in the other governor's state.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is also lobbying for not just for a law allowing concealed handguns at colleges, but also a concealed hair spray law.

Remember, half of all global warming is caused by Rick Perry's hairspray.

There is buzz that Rick Perry might run for president. Human evolution has shifted gears and is heading in reverse.

Rick Perry relaxed this weekend by tracking down a school teacher and laying her off. He also said that he finds turning off the ventilators of the elderly "calming."

The sad thing is that four million years of primate evolution produced Rick Perry. Nature is a crapshoot, isn't it?

Rick Perry believes that the federal income tax should be as flat as the earth.

Rick Perry to educators: "If I want your opinion, I'll misstate it for you."

So Rick Perry wants us all to fast on August 6 to battle "moral relativism." I hope if he is really concerned about this country, he'll put his money where his mouth is and fast until the presidential election.

I have been unfair to Gov. Goodhair in Texas. He is a job creator. The number of political hand jobs in Austin has gone up dramatically since he's taken office.

Experts wonder what's next for the oil-rich feudal state, divided by tribal loyalties, ruled endlessly by a corrupt, autocratic oligarchy and dominated by medieval religious thinking. But some think Texas can make a transition to democracy."

Gov. Perry, you don't get more with less. You only get less.

Headline from the future: "In Speech at D.C. Beach, President Perry Calls Global Warming a 'Myth.'"

Rick Perry clarified that he is not endorsing Galileo's theories and still wants to understand why he was mentioned in that Queen song.

Rick Perry was "thoughtful" in the way he cut the state's education budget in the same way that John Wayne Gacy was a thoughtful neighbor.

Arguing about whether a contribution from Merck prompted Perry's attempt to require HPV vaccine for schoolgirls, Rick Perry said, ""I raised about $30 million [in campaign contributions]. And if you're saying that I can be bought for $5,000, I'm offended." Mr. Perry, we've aready established what profession you are in. Now we're arguing about the price.

Research from behavioral scientists demonstrates that Rick Perry cannot, in fact, be bought for $5,000. Throw in a Chuck E. Cheese coupon, though, and a linty Lifesaver, and he's your's.

Rick Perry isn't sure what country Obama was born in. I'm not sure what century Rick Perry was born in. Or what century.

During the presidential debate, Rick Perry said, "I want schools to emphasize the A, B . . er . . . ah . . . I can't think of that third letter."

Perry just made a speech where he said we should live by the Declaration of Independence's support of "life, liberty and pursuit of whatever it is we're supposed to be pursuing."

Lots of Penn State students last night proved that Rick Perry is not necessarily the dumbest human alive. He's still in the running, though, unlike the presidential race.

Headline of the future: "After Palin, Perry Debacle, God Promises to Be More Careful Who He Talks To"

Michael Phillips is the author or co-author of the following books:

“White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, Texas, 1841-2001” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

“The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas Speaker Became a Power in State and National Politics.” Co-Written with Patrick Cox. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).

Walter Buenger and Arnoldo de León, eds., “Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away From Past Interpretations” (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2011).

Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz, eds., “The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western Experience” (New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011).

Richardson Dilworth, ed. “Cities in American Political History” (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011).

He will also be co-author of the forthcoming “The Radical Origins of the Texas Right” (edited by David Cullen and Kyle Wilkison) due to be published in 2012 by Texas A&M University Press; and “American Dreams and Reality: A Retelling of the American Story,” to be published the same year by Abigail Press.

He is currently collaborating, with longtime journalist Betsy Friauf, on a history of Bishop College, an African American institution originally established in Marshall, Texas, that relocated to Dallas by the 1960s before suffering bankruptcy in the 1980s. The two plan to create a website and author a book, “’God Carved in Night’: Afro-Texan Culture, Political Activism And the Rise and Fall Of Bishop College” based on this project.

Two Journeys To Truth: The Promise And The Heartbreak Of American Culture, 1960-1980

2011-12-06T04:32:00.000-08:00

I am coauthor of an updated version of the college American history textbook, currently titled “American Dreams and Reality: A Retelling of the American Story.” Here, I describe the disappointed utopian dreams of 1960s American culture.

Both the liberal political establishment, represented by the Kennedy administration, and the youth counterculture that arose in its wake started the period from 1960 to 1980 with a broader sense of purpose than the narcissistic pursuit of self-fulfillment. The administrators of Kennedy’s New Frontier, filled with hubris, saw their mission as saving the world from communism. The more idealistic members of the Kennedy administration hoped to usher in an America freed from segregation and poverty.

Meanwhile, counterculture youths saw a world poisoned with militarism and corrupted by the undemocratic dominance of wealthy, straight, Protestant, English-speaking Anglo men. They fought to create a world in which African Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, women, gays and the poor would have a voice. Both sets of idealists looked outward to make the world a better place rather then inward for self-justification.

Two overlapping journeys in the summer of 1969 illustrate these separate, Homeric quests for a better world: the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969 and the staging of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in upstate New York, August 15-18. For millions of Americans the manned moon landing marked the emotional highlight of a difficult, often depressing decade, a rare moment of unity in a divisive time. A party atmosphere surrounded Cape Kennedy in Brevard County on Florida’s east coast on the morning of July 16. About 1 million visitors flocked to the launch site. Counterculture youths had dubbed as “happenings” their large gatherings to share emotional experiences stimulated by mood-altering chemicals. The Apollo launch was a “happening” for the older generation.

“From Titusville to Melbourne, thousands of cars converged on huge regions stretching as far west as Orlando,” author Dan Parry wrote. “With the freeways blocked by the worst jams in Florida’s history, some drivers used the wrong side of the road since no-one was headed in the opposite direction. Only the wealthy, or well-connected, managed to avoid the crowds by arriving in private aircraft, and then boarding one of the hundreds of boats choking the Banana River.

Thousands of people, who were settled among their barbecues, beer coolers and bottles of pop, were either lounging around or else trying out their cameras, telescopes and binoculars.” Elsewhere, space tourists set up tents and camper vans or cooled off at the local bars where a “‘lift-off martini’ would set you back $1.25, while for those who really wanted to live it up there was the ‘moonlander’ consisting of crème de menthe, crème de cacao, vodka, soda, and a squeeze of lime, topped with an American flag.”

Inside the space center, officials set up bleachers for establishment celebrities and important officials including former President Johnson, the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic, Charles Lindbergh, and “Tonight Show” host Johnny Carson. NASA set up a “press enclosure” for 3,500 reporters from around the world.

Many African Americans were offended that all the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts had been white, but even more by the fact that black school children lived in crumbling urban neighborhoods with deteriorating schools while the federal government wasted money on what they saw as space tourism and the terrible misadventure in Vietnam. The Rev. Ralph Abernathy, who became president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., led 100 protestors to the gates of the Kennedy Space Center, to protest what he saw as badly misplaced priorities. The money spent on Moon landings, he said, should instead be used to feed the poor. NASA officials invited Abernathy into the VIP section to watch the liftoff. But even Abernathy, there to protest, found himself overwhelmed by the drama.

He considered himself “one of the proudest Americans as I stood on this soil.” Later, after a moment of reflection, his ambivalence returned. “There’s a great deal of joy and pride,” he said, “For that particular moment and second I really forgot the fact that we have so many hungry people in the United States of America . . . This is really holy ground. And it will be more holy once we feed the hungry, care for the sick, and provide for those who do not have houses.”

About 600 million people around the world, 20 percent of the Earth’s population, watched on television or listened on the radio when Armstrong announced at 4:18 p.m. EST on July 20 that “The Eagle has landed.” When an announcer at Yankee Stadium in New York informed the crowd of the Eagle’s touchdown, the crowd of 16,0000 let out a whoop of celebration, belting out “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In Britain, television networks provided their first all-night broadcast, allowing audiences there to see the landing live.

Apollo lunar modules would land on the Moon five more times between November 14, 1969 and December 19, 1972 (because of dangerous mechanical problems, the Apollo 13 mission had to be cut short before it reached the moon). By this point television audiences had grown bored with the moonwalks and few paid attention to the last lunar voyage, Apollo 17. The last mission in the series, Apollo 18, was scrubbed due to objections to the Moon program’s continuing high costs.

Always controversial, when the Apollo program ended in 1972, it had cost the taxpayers $25.4 billion, or about $129 billion in 2011 dollars. That amounted to, when adjusted for inflation, $11.7 billion a mission at a cost of about $630 per person in the U.S. Many scientists believe that more information could have been obtained at less expense with unmanned craft. Nevertheless, lunar rocks and soil brought back to Earth by the astronauts have provided solid evidence supporting the “giant impact theory” concerning the Moon’s origins. According a Mars-sized object collided with the Earth early in its history and that scattered debris from this impact, through gravity, coalesced to create the Moon.

Technology developed for Apollo greatly accelerated the development of, as Sharon Guadin for “Computerworld” magazine wrote, robotics, the integrated circuit, laptop computers, nanotechnology, and technological advances in aeronautics, transportation and the health care industries. Micro-electromechanical systems, supercomputers and microcomputers, software and microprocessors are also technological spin-offs resulting from NASA’s lunar quests.

“Without the research and development that went into those space missions, top companies like Intel Corps may not have been founded,” reported Guadin, “and the population likely wouldn't be spending a big chunk of work and free time using laptops and Blackberries to post information on Facebook or Twitter.” Freeze-dried food, the credit card swiping devices used by retailers, and liquid-cooled clothing used by firefighters also trace their origins to the Apollo program.

To older Americans, the moon mission provided supposedly objective evidence that American capitalism was superior to Russian communism because the United States got to the moon first. It confirmed the power of rational thought, and that with determination and unity Americans could do anything. For some, like the poet Archibald MacLeish, the photos of the Earth taken by Apollo astronauts served as an eloquent warning to humanity of the loneliness and fragility of the planet and the consequent need for peace and understanding. “To see the earth as it truly is,” MacLeish wrote, “small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold – brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”

Many counterculture figures, by contrast, saw the space mission with its segregated all-male crew leaving garbage and planting an American flag on the surface meant that humans were just transporting racism, sexism, pollution and imperialism elsewhere in the cosmos. Apollo was an expensive diversion, a typical example of establishment excess. The truth lay in inner, not outer space. About 400,000 gathered in upstate New York for a journey of a different sort.

Promoters organizing the Woodstock Music and Art Fair had rented 600 acres of farm land from Max Yasgur to see one of the most storied music lineups in history, including longtime folk music legend Joan Baez, the English rock band The Who, blues-inspired, scorching Texas vocalist Janis Joplin, the band most associated with extended musical LSD raves (The Grateful Dead), and emerging guitar legends Carlos Santana and Jimi Hendrix.

On the surface, Woodstock was about the counterculture – the alternative values embraced by young people by the late 1960s that questioned aspects of mainstream society like capitalism, but at this festival, appearances were often deceiving and not just because of the mind-altering drugs gobbled there.

As historian David P. Szatmary documents, “Woodstock represented a well-calculated business venture. The planning and promotion of the festival has been masterminded by two astute businessmen – John Roberts, a young millionaire who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, and Joel Rosenman, a Yale Law School graduate . . .” The festival organizers were out to make a buck and hoped to charge those in attendance $18 a head, but “the state police closed the New York Thruway [and] . . . long hairs from throughout the country parked their cars and walked miles to the site,” as historian John C. McWilliams observed. “As the crowd grew . . . promoters realized the futility of trying to collect a fee . . .” Many newspapers and television stations predicted a disaster and, as McWilliams argued, “it should have been.

With very little security and almost no police protection, severe food shortages, a limited medical staff, inadequate toilet facilities, drugs everywhere, and a fierce thunderstorm that turned the field into a swamp, a disaster did seem inevitable. Some people suffered from dehydration, and several experienced bad drug trips, but remarkably there was no rioting. At Woodstock, the hippies gave peace a chance . . . After three days of continuous music, three deaths were reported – two drug related and a third when a tractor accidentally ran over a person in a sleeping bag. A sense of community among the crowd fostered cooperation and civility . . . The police chief in nearby Monticello called the festival throng “the most courteous, considerate, and well-behaved group of kids that I have ever been in contact with in my twenty-four years of police work.” Despite the drugs, unsanitary conditions, a three-hour wait to use a pay telephone, and shortages of almost everything, no violence – not even a fistfight – occurred.

During the Apollo mission on the moon, astronauts were sealed in airtight suits to protect them from the cold, the lack or oxygen and the absence of air pressure in space. Their helmets and suits came between them and a new world. The Woodstock festival immersed its audience in tastes and smells, with flesh pressed against flesh and oozing mud squishing between everyone’s toes and fingers. The audience felt inducted into a new, psychically bound “Woodstock Nation,” as one participant Glenn Weiser remembered.

“That was the first the first revelation of Woodstock. – the sheer size the counterculture had grown to. Every town had its hippies, but now enormous numbers of us had massed in one area. Friday afternoon brought home to everyone how broad-based the movement had become . . . [T]he second revelation of Woodstock [was] the brotherhood that developed as an entire crowd of young people high on psychedelics got acquainted with those sitting next to them . . . There was a feeling of immediate friendship, and the sense of a group mind at work.” Some hoped magic would result, a world transformed not through space age technology but through good will. “And I dreamed I saw the bombers/riding shotgun in the sky,” Joni Mitchell later sang of the concert, “And they were turning into butterflies/above our nation.”

The vision of a better world that fueled both quests proved to be an illusion. Moon landings ended much sooner than anyone expected and by 2011 the future of the American space program was in question. The space shuttle program ended that year, and NASA had no new manned journeys to space planned by the end of the year. If Archibald MacLeish hoped that the image of the world from space would inspire brotherhood, that dream had completely crumbled by the time of a civil war in Bosnia in the 1990s that produced the worst genocide in Europe since the Holocaust and other heartless slaughters Rwanda in the 1990s and in the Sudan in the opening years of the twenty-first century.

The dreams Woodstock inspired also quickly shattered. Just four months after the concert, the English rock band the Rolling Stones staged a show at the Altamont Raceway in northern California. A cancellation of an earlier show meant that the concert’s producers had a single day to prepare for the arrival of an audience of about 300,000. “Sanitary facilities were inadequate, the sound system, terrible; the setting cheerless,” Matusow wrote. “Lots of bad dope, including inferior acid spiked with speed, circulated through the crowd. Harried medics had to fly in an emergency supply of Thorazine to treat the epidemic of bad trips and were busy administering first aid to the victims of the random violence.”

Much of the trouble came because the Rolling Stones had decided, upon the recommendation of the Grateful Dead, to hire the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang to guard the stage in return for $500 worth of beer. Drunk and strung out on drugs, the Angels “indiscriminately clubbed people for offenses real and imagined.” The clubbing continued when the Stones got on stage. Lead singer Mick Jagger stopped singing at one point to beg the Hell’s Angels to stop the violence, but to no avail. Jagger resumed the concert, and darkly sang the band’s recent hit “Sympathy for the Devil”:

I watched with glee
While your kings and queens
Fought for ten decades
For the gods they made
I shouted out
“Who killed the Kennedys?”
When after all
It was you and me.

“Midway though [the song],” Matusow said, “only a few feet from the stage, an Angel knifed a black man named Meredith Hunter to death.” In retrospect, the event seemed like the death of the 1960s and the start of a more desperate decade of diminished expectations in which bombers didn’t turn into butterflies but the nation would instead, by 1980, elect as President Ronald Reagan, a man who saw military hardware as a sign of American pre-eminence in the world.

The counterculture to a large degree was a byproduct of the prosperity produced in the post-World War II American economy. The middle-class and affluent whites who dominated the counterculture enjoyed the luxury to dream of alternatives to the status quo. “By solving the problem of want, industrial capitalism undermined the very virtues that made this triumph possible, virtues like hard work, self-denial, postponement of gratification, submission to social discipline, strong ego-mechanisms to control the instincts,” Matusow argued. “. . . Unprecedented affluence after World War II created a generation of teenagers who could forgo work to stay in school. Inhabiting a gilded limbo between childhood and adult responsibility, these kids had money, leisure, and unprecedented opportunity to test taboos.”

Yet, a revolution was needed in a culture in which rape was treated as a male privilege in marriage and in which millions of African Americans, Chicanos, and Native Americans were disenfranchised and treated as subhumans. Regardless, among affluent whites both the baby boomers and their parents were deceived by the unusual economic comfort of the 1950s and the 1960s and suffered from unrealistic expectations of what was possible, financially, morally and spiritually. Like Tantalus in the Greek myth, these generations thought themselves surrounded by limitless opportunity, and endless pleasure – whether in the form of material comfort, a freer society, a more just world, or a life unshackled by punishing Puritanism – that lay within easy reach. The crushing economic contraction of the 1970s, however, cruelly pulled away these treasures, feeding a resentment that would give rise to a different, conservative age of indulgence.”

One of the central political figures of the 1980s would not be a hippie but a straight-laced Baptist minister in Virginia, Jerry Falwell, who made a career of bashing unions. Falwell had supported segregation and not baptized African American members in his church until 1971. He would blame the 2001 terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on feminists and the legalization of abortion, and would describe AIDS as “the wrath of God against homosexuals.”

Men like Falwell hated everything about the 1960s and 1970s counterculture and would the Virginia minister become the most visible leader of evangelical Christians who would sweep Ronald Reagan into power in the 1980- presidential race. The view of the Woodstock audience had been inclusive. The creators of Apollo imagined an expansive future. Falwell wanted a narrower, more restrictive America. He wanted gays back in the closet, and women back at home. While he condemned the sexual excess and drug abuse of the 1960s counterculture, however, Falwell would in the years after the 1980s show blindness towards another type of excess.

When Ronald Reagan was sworn into office January 20, 1981, “The inaugural festivities had been in full swing since the weekend . . . In 1976 [at Jimmy Carter’s inaugural], all the events had been open to the public, and most had been free. Now a simple ball ticket cost $100 ($274 in 2011 dollars) . . . the tarmac at Washington National Airport so crowded with private jets that some had to be turned away,“ as Dominic Sandbrook said. At a time of high inflation and skyrocketing unemployment, Nancy Reagan wore a dress “that cost enough to keep fifty people in food stamps for a year.” The inaugural festivities cost taxpayers $16 million [almost $44 million in today’s dollars.]

At one banquet at Union Station, Sandbrook wrote, “tables were piled high with gourmet food prepared by the finest French chefs; stuffed clams and raw oysters, lobsters and scallops, éclairs and brioches, carpaccio and chardonnay.” In spite of expensive decorations, however, Union Station was decaying after years of neglect and one failed attempt at renovation during the 1976 bicentennial celebrations. “Even as Reagan’s guests circulated around the gourmet tables, some noticed mold in the ceiling and cigarette burns in the carpet.”

As the wealthy inaugural attendees “swallowed their expensive cakes and pastries, they tried to ignore the shabby drunks and derelicts, a small army of the capital’s homeless, gathering outside the doors, drawn by the aroma of the food,” according to Sandbrook. “First one, then another slipped past security and made for the tables, and for a few glorious moments the forgotten Americans found themselves shoulder to shoulder with the rich and the famous. But it was only for a minute or two, then the guards were on them, and the illusion was broken, and they were outside, shivering with cold as Washington toasted a new era.”

The inaugural foreshadowed the next thirty years of American history. Reagan would slash spending on public housing, and federal aid to cities would be cut by 60 percent during his eight-year presidency. A consequence was a massive increase in the number of homeless, which in America by the late 1980s had swollen to “600,000 on any given night – and 1.2 million over the course of a year. Many were Vietnam veterans, children, and laid-off workers.”

Meanwhile, Reagan tripled the federal debt from $900 billion to $2.7 trillion ($5.1 trillion as of 2011), spent to a large degree on military hardware. From Reagan’s first year in office to 2011, the United States federal government would run deficits 27 out of 31 years and would decline to raise taxes for expensive wars and other military adventures in Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, the Persian Gulf, Somalia, Bosnia, Serbia, Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya and elsewhere. As of 2011, the total federal debt reached $14 trillion. Many questioned whether America adequately funded schools, much less moon missions. By 1981, America did not find a Woodstock Nation of peace and love, or a New Frontier in outer space, but a Darwinian world of rich and poor drowning in red ink.

Michael Phillips is the author or co-author of the following books:

“White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, Texas, 1841-2001” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

“The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas Speaker Became a Power in State and National Politics.” Co-Written with Patrick Cox. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).

Walter Buenger and Arnoldo de León, eds., “Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away From Past Interpretations” (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2011).

Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz, eds., “The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western Experience” (New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011).

Richardson Dilworth, ed. “Cities in American Political History” (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011).

He will also be co-author of the forthcoming “The Radical Origins of the Texas Right” (edited by David Cullen and Kyle Wilkison) due to be published in 2012 by Texas A&M University Press; and “American Dreams and Reality: A Retelling of the American Story,” to be published the same year by Abigail Press.

He is currently collaborating, with longtime journalist Betsy Friauf, on a history of Bishop College, an African American institution originally established in Marshall, Texas, that relocated to Dallas by the 1960s before suffering bankruptcy in the 1980s. The two plan to create a website and author a book, “’God Carved in Night’: Afro-Texan Culture, Political Activism And the Rise and Fall Of Bishop College” based on this project.

“A Civilization Without Insanity”: Religious Experimentation In The 1960s

2011-12-05T07:36:00.000-08:00

I am coauthor of an updated version of the college American history textbook, currently titled “American Dreams and Reality: A Retelling of the American Story.” Here, I describe the flirtation with Eastern religions pursued by many young people turned off by Western violence and materialism in the 1960s and the 1970s, the rise of encounter groups and new religious sects like Scientology, and the spread of the "new narcissism."

Drug use, particularly consuming LSD, had been widely seen as a spiritual exercise that allowed one to escaped doomed Western civilization. Now young people in the Sixties and Seventies sought more natural means to expand their minds and looked to ancient wisdom available in India, China and Japan. In America, young people turned to Tibetan and Zen Buddhism. Others experimented with the mysticism of Sufi Islam. The Hare Krishna sect, in which devotees surrendered personal property, shaved their heads, wore orange or yellow robes, took a Sanskrit name, and danced and chanted the name of the Hindu deity Krishna, as they begged for donations became a common sight at American airports by the 1970s. Other young people, including feminists offended by the exclusion of women from the clergy in many mainstream churches, embraced nature-worshiping “Wiccan” beliefs.

New religions also arose, such as the Church of Scientology founded by one-time science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard. “A civilization without insanity, without criminals and without war, where the able can prosper and honest beings can have rights, and where man is free to rise to greater heights, are the aims of Scientology,” Hubbard once wrote to his followers.

Hubbard served in the United States Navy during World War II, and later claimed that he received serious injuries that left him “[b]linded with injured optic nerves and lame with physical injuries to hip and back . . . a supposedly hopeless cripple.” Hubbard would tell his followers that he miraculously healed himself while lying in a military hospital bed, using the methods that later became Church of Scientology practice. Hubbard said he discovered that the mental exercises he used to repair his body could cure depression, alcoholism and other mental maladies.

He codified these techniques in a 1950 book "Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health," which charted 28 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. “Written in a bluff, quirky style and overrun with footnotes that do little to substantiate its findings,” journalist Lawrence Wright noted, “’Dianetics’ purports to identify the source of self-destructive behavior—the ‘reactive mind,’ a kind of data bank that is filled with traumatic memories called ‘engrams,’ and that is the source of nightmares, insecurities, irrational fears, and psychosomatic illnesses. The object of Dianetics is to drain the engrams of their painful, damaging qualities and eliminate the reactive mind, leaving a person ‘Clear.’”

Scientologists had their personalities tested, received treatments that were supposed to address past pains and current anxieties, and paid for ever more expensive courses that progressively revealed the cosmic truth as understood by Hubbard, that humans are occupied by the souls of aliens tormented in a disastrous war that unfolded millions of years ago and that these alien presences cause the mental illnesses Scientology claims to cure.

Many young people in the Sixties and the Seventies moved quickly from one belief system to the next, sometimes blending wildly divergent beliefs like a theological smoothie. Wade Clark Roof, a sociologist, came across one upper-class Jewish woman, “Mollie” from New York who told him she tried out “holistic health, macrobiotics, Zen Buddhism, [and] . . . Native American rituals.” She told Roof she joined a “commune,” read about reincarnation and started attending Quaker meetings. Mollie was not typical. “Of course, such spiritual alternatives never attracted more than a small fraction of Americans who adhered to one variety or another of Judaism and Christianity,” wrote Isserman and Kazin. “Even in the San Francisco Bay Area, mecca for unorthodox faiths, fewer than 10 percent of the population seems to have taken part in any manifestation of the new religions.”

"Revolutionary Suicide"

Nevertheless, the search for truth and happiness for some young people turned desperate, leaving them vulnerable to ruthless con artists. Jim Jones, a preacher and faith healer, founded the Peoples Temple Christian Church Full Gospel in Indianapolis. A crusader against racism who embraced Marxism, Jones launched programs to aid the poor and the hungry. He presided over an integrated congregation that often met hostility from white residents in a city that had been dominated by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Appointed to the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission, Jones used his position and the support of local civil rights groups like the NAACP to advance desegregation of the city police department, local businesses and other institutions. Jones received numerous threats as he began adopting Korean, Native American and African American children.

Jones’s inner demons soon overwhelmed his idealism. He staged fake miracle cures to bring in more congregants and to fill church coffers. Dependent on drugs and alcohol, and sexually exploiting members of his church, Jones became obsessed with what he saw as the pending end of the world and paranoid about an establishment he believed was plotting his demise. Jones relocated his church and his congregation to Northern California, which he believed would be spared a coming nuclear war. He eventually established a headquarters in San Francisco where his charitable work and anti-racism activism earned him enough credibility that Mayor George Mascone appointed him to lead the city’s Housing Authority Commission. By this point, still telling his followers that a nuclea war would soon happen and now insisting that the United States government wanted to kill him and destroy the People’s Temple, Jones in 1973 rented a remote plot of land surrounded by jungle in Northern Guyana for a communal farm that he dubbed “Jonestown.”

More than 900 members emigrated there where they found a life of relentless labor, clearing the jungle, building housing, cultivating crops and listening to Jones increasingly doomsday-oriented sermons. Preaching that U.S. government forces would soon come to destroy the Temple, Jones led his followers in suicide drills in which members drank what they were told was Flavor-Aid filled with the poison cyanide. Reports from relatives of Temple members that their loved ones had become disaffected with Jones but were being held against their will in South America led the San Francisco-area Congressmen Leo Ryan to travel to Jonestown on November 14, 1978. With him were 17 concerned relatives of People’s Temple members and a NBC News crew.

After difficult wrangling, the group was allowed to inspect Jonestown on November 17. When Ryan left the next day, 14 Temple defectors joined him. Jones ordered the assassination of Ryan and his group. Temple hitmen murdered the Congressmen and four others at a nearby airstrip. Jones’ long awaited apocalypse had arrived and the heavily sweating and stern minister called on members to engaged in an act of “revolutionary suicide.” Eventually 909 in Jonestown, including more than 300 children, were found dead. Most drank cups of poisoned Flavor-Aid under the watchful gaze of Jones’ private army. Jones shot himself in the head.

"A God IN Your Universe"

California served as home base not just for Scientology, the Manson Family and The People's Temple, but also a number of so-called consciousness-raising groups like Erhard Sensitivity Training or EST. Born Jack Rosenberg, Erhard had already experimented with Scientology and Zen Buddhism and had failed at selling cars and encyclopedias before launching est, according to Schulman.

Erhard vaguely claimed to have had some profound spiritual insight while driving on a California freeway. He told perspective students that est would make them “throw away” their belief systems, break down their old personalities and let them recreate a healthier version of themselves. Students who attended the group training seminars, which cost $250 a pop, were given infrequent food, little sleep and and few bathroom breaks and were sometimes stuck in a conference room for eight hours with trainers who shouted verbal abuse in order to break down their defense mechanisms.

Trainers taught students that failure, illness, romantic frustration, etc., were always a product of the individual’s unhealthy thinking and not of random chance or normal human frailty. Once beaten down, the students took “responsibility” for their failures and were told they could now achieve virtually anything they wanted as long as they didn’t defeat themselves. “You are omnipotent,” Erhard would tell his devotees. “You are a god in your universe.” As historian Dominic Sandbrook wrote, “ . . . Not all customers emerged satisfied, and psychiatric journals reported that several people, some already vulnerable, had been driven to near madness.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, transactional analysis, primal scream therapy, Esalen, Rolfing and other pop psychology therapies, as well as the endless list of bestselling self-help books like "I’m O.k., You’re O.k." and "Looking Out For Number One" shared what journalist Peter Marin labeled “the new narcissism.” Perhaps Sixties youth grew tired of battling intractable problems like poverty and racism, but these fads all reflected a withdrawal from the wider world and what Marin called “selfishness and moral blindness.”

Marin described how he heard two speakers at the Esalen Institute claim that “the Jews must have wanted to be burned by the Germans.” Marin asked the women what they would say to a child trapped in a famine and one said, “What can I do if a child is determined to starve?” Tom Wolfe called the Seventies the “Me Decade,” a time Marin said, of “a retreat from the worlds of morality and history, an unembarrassed denial of human reciprocity and community.”

Michael Phillips is the author or co-author of the following books:

“White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, Texas, 1841-2001” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

“The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas Speaker Became a Power in State and National Politics.” Co-Written with Patrick Cox. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).

Walter Buenger and Arnoldo de León, eds., “Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away From Past Interpretations” (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2011).

Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz, eds., “The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western Experience” (New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011).

Richardson Dilworth, ed. “Cities in American Political History” (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011).

He will also be co-author of the forthcoming “The Radical Origins of the Texas Right” (edited by David Cullen and Kyle Wilkison) due to be published in 2012 by Texas A&M University Press; and “American Dreams and Reality: A Retelling of the American Story,” to be published the same year by Abigail Press.

He is currently collaborating, with longtime journalist Betsy Friauf, on a history of Bishop College, an African American institution originally established in Marshall, Texas, that relocated to Dallas by the 1960s before suffering bankruptcy in the 1980s. The two plan to create a website and author a book, “’God Carved in Night’: Afro-Texan Culture, Political Activism And the Rise and Fall Of Bishop College” based on this project.