Tag: Texas Books

Q & A with Judy Alter About “The Most Land, the Best Cattle: The Waggoners of Texas”

Through the rest of 2022, look for a post on Texas Books (apropos of my own book-in-progress on Far West Texas) on the first Monday of every other month.  On the fourth Monday of every other month I post a Q & A with a fellow writer. This Monday, August 1st, it’s a two-fer: a Q & A with Judy Alter about her superb contribution to Texas history and, of particular interest to me, ranching history. The Most Land, the Best Cattle also happens to be a wild story, and a fun read.

“I think there are two kinds of readers for this book: those who know Texas history and the cattle industry and will appreciate it on one level, while there’s a host of people who will read on another level for sort of vicarious experience, wishing they were cattle barons, had that money and power and what seemed a glamorous life. The first kind of reader is also more likely to appreciate the very real contributions W. D. Waggoner made to Fort Worth and North Texas generally. I think his work sometimes get lost in the glitz.”
— Judy Alter

From the catalog copy:

“In the 19th century, Daniel Waggoner and his son, W.T. (Tom), put together an empire in North Texas that became the largest ranch under one fence in the nation. The 520,000-plus acres or 800 square miles covers six counties and sits on a large oil field in the Red River Valley of North Texas. Over the years, the estate also owned five banks, three cottonseed oil mills, and a coal company.

“While the Waggoner men built the empire, their wives and daughters enjoyed the fruits of their labor. This dynasty’s love of the land was rivaled only by their love of money and celebrity, and the different family factions eventually clashed.

“Although Dan seems to have led a fairly low-profile life, W. T. moved to Fort Worth, became a bank director, built two office buildings, ran his cattle on the Big Pasture in Indian Territory (Oklahoma), hosted Teddy Roosevelt at a wolf hunt in the Big Pasture, and sent Quanah Parker to Washington, D.C., for Roosevelt’s inauguration. W. T. had three children including his daughter, Electra, the light of his life. W. T. built a mansion in Fort Worth for her—today the house, the last surviving cattle baron mansion on Fort Worth’s Silk Stocking Row, is open to the public for tours and events. Electra, an international celebrity and extravagant shopper (she once spent $10,000 in one day at Neiman Marcus), died at the age of forty-three.

“W.T.’s brother Guy had nine wives; his brother E. Paul, partier and horse breeder, was married to the same woman for fifty years and had one daughter, Electra II. Electra II was a both a celebrity and a talented sculptor, best known for a heroic-size statue of Will Rogers on his horse, Soapsuds, as well as busts of two presidents and various movie stars. She is said to once have been involved with Cary Grant. After marriage to an executive she settled in a mansion at the ranch and raised two daughters.

“This colorful history of one of Texas’s most influential ranching families demonstrates that it took strength and determination to survive in the ranching world… and the society it spawned.”

Judy Alter, author of
The Most Land, the Best Cattle

C.M. MAYO: What inspired you to write The Most Land, the Best Cattle?

JUDY ALTER: I’d studied this family for years, drawn by the career of Electra II who with wealth, beauty, and sophistication, could have spent her days reading Silver Screen and eating bonbons but she developed her talent and carved out a career. Of course when you scratch beneath the surface there’s a much bigger story. But that’s where is started some thirty-plus years ago.

C.M. MAYO: Of course your book was published in 2021, the midst of the pandemic, but apart from that, what has most surprised you about its reception?

JUDY ALTER: I guess the people who read it. I was so pleased with Red Steagall’s endorsement and with the sales—my books are not generally bestsellers, but this one did better than usual. I think Texans are always interested in the ranch families and their stories. I have not heard from the one descendant still living who had a prominent part in the book and that’s a disappointment—he wrote a nice note saying he had it and he and his family looked forward to reading it, but then I heard no more.

C.M. MAYO: Which writers have been the most important influences for you in general— and also, specifically, when you were writing The Most Land, the Best Cattle? 

JUDY ALTER: The late Texas novelist Elmer Kelton, who captured Texas history from before the Alamo through the early twenty-first century had more influence on me than anyone else. He was a good friend and mentor. Erin Turner who edited my first book with TwoDot taught me a great deal about crafting creative nonfiction. I suppose McMurtry’s early novels—Horseman, Pass By and Leaving Cheyenne—also were influential.

C.M. MAYO: I am genuinely surprised not to have come across much about the Waggoners and their stupendous ranch, and the celebrity Electras, before I read your book. Surely the Waggoner’s story, or rather stories about them, and the Electras, Electra I and Electra II, have been an influence on such novels as Giant (later made into the movie starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean), and TV shows such as Dallas. Might you say more in this wise?

JUDY ALTER: It is surprising that more wasn’t known about the Waggoners, because their twentieth century history is full of divorce and scandal and lawsuits. Yet in their own way, they were private. None of them left any memoirs, glimpses into their thoughts and feelings (except two impersonal, disorganized scrapbooks of Electra II—I was fortunate enough to study them years ago; now they are in the Red River Valley Museum with public access forbidden). There were occasionally features in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas Monthly, and other places. 

I’m not sure what family Edna Ferber had in mind—in many ways, it could have been the Waggoners, or the King/Kleberg owners of the King Ranch (they generally kept a much lower profile than the Waggoners). I’ve never seen a reference to much research by Ferber. In the same way, parts of Dallas may have been inspired. W. T. Waggoner (second generation) was the patriarch for many years, and while crusty and taciturn and interesting, he was not flamboyant. That came with his daughter and his grandchildren.

C.M. MAYO: Electra II, Electra Waggoner Biggs has to be one of the most unusual artists in Texas history, which certainly has no shortage of characters! Do you think, or do you know of any evidence that she might have been inspired by the example of the sculptor Elisabeth Ney?

JUDY ALTER: No such luck. She took a sculpting class in NYC on a whim, discovered she had a talent for it, and began to work at it. In the afternoons. Evenings, she dined, danced, and partied; mornings, she slept. But she really did put a lot of hard work into the Will Rogers piece.

C.M. MAYO: What’s next for you as a writer?

JUDY ALTER: I’m working on a book about the life and work of Helen Corbitt, doyenne of food at Neiman Marcus in the fifties and sixties, cookbook author, etc. I want to place her against the background of what was happening with food in America. Tentative title: Tastemaker: Helen Corbitt, Neiman Marcus, and America’s Changing Foodways. But, like Electra’s sculpture, it’s slow going and hard work.

PROCESS-RELATED QUESTIONS 

C.M. MAYO: As you were writing The Most Land, the Best Cattle, did you have in mind an ideal reader? If so, how might you describe that ideal reader?

JUDY ALTER: I think there are two kinds of readers for this book: those who know Texas history and the cattle industry and will appreciate it on one level, while there’s a host of people who will read on another level for sort of vicarious experience, wishing they were cattle barons, had that money and power and what seemed a glamorous life. The first kind of reader is also more likely to appreciate the very real contributions W. D. Waggoner made to Fort Worth and North Texas generally. I think his work sometimes gets lost in the glitz.

C.M. MAYO: What was the most challenging aspect of researching and writing this book?

JUDY ALTER: Fleshing out the story, because they left so little in the way of personal records. The editor encouraged me to use my storytelling skills and create scenes—I know purist historians frown on such. In fact, I cannot do that with the Corbitt book, and as a result it’s harder to catch her distinctive personality, red-haired Irish temper and all.

C.M. MAYO:  Researching a book like this requires extraordinary organizational skills. Can you talk about your working library and how you keep track of the books you read / consulted for The Most Land, the Best Cattle? 

JUDY ALTER: In recent years I’ve written more fiction than not, so the research skills I gathered in graduate school have grown rusty. I kept a pile of Waggoner-related books on one corner of a bookcase where they were handy, and I tried to keep a running bibliography as I went on my computer. Beyond that my notes are handwritten on legal pads, which is most inefficient but comes naturally to me. To find a specific note I sometimes had to page through an entire pad. 

C.M. MAYO:  And how do you keep track of articles, both on-line and on paper?

JUDY ALTER: I keep that running bibliography on my computer and labeled each legal pad page with the source—in my own handwriting which is increasing illegible, even to me, as I age.

C.M. MAYO:  Any other tips to share / hard-earned lessons in organizing one’s research?

JUDY ALTER: I’ve often though of going back to the 3×5 note cards of grad school. It was a much more efficient way to organize. But after one or two tries, I found myself reaching for a legal pad. I just bought a new supply of twelve of them.

C.M. MAYO: On research files: What happens to them when you are finished with the book? How do you store them? Do you give them to an archive? (Do you have any related advice for other writers with books that required significant original research?) 

JUDY ALTER: To my surprise, the Southwest Writers Collection, The Witliff Collecton, Texas State University-San Marcos, has kept my manuscripts, research materials, etc. for years. You can find my archive at Judy Alter : The Wittliff Collections (txst.edu) Since I now live in  600-square foot cottage, saving rought drafts, etc., would be impossible, and I’m grateful to the folks at San Marcos. As for advice, that’s a hard one: who knows whether or not your work will be of any worth. They tell me my efforts will help young writers see process. I hope. We are also increasingly losing a literary heritage because with computers, we simply rewrite rather than writing a complexly new manuscript each time as we did almost up into the eighties.

C.M. MAYO: How has the Digital Revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share? 

JUDY ALTER: Social media has definitely made it harder to focus. My technique is to read emails and Facebook first thing in the morning. Since I am a daily blogger (http://judys-stew.blogspot.com and http://gourmetonahotplate.blogspot.com ) and am also vocal about social and political issues, such early morning review can take the better part of a morning, and since I am addicted to an afternoon nap (that’s what retirement and age do for you), there is sometimes precious little writing done on some days, especially Mondays.

C.M. MAYO: For those looking to publish, what would be your most hard-earned piece of advice?

JUDY ALTER: That old word: persevere. And don’t be impatient. For most of us, success, if any, comes in slow drops and dribbles. But I would also advise joining writers’ groups. For many years I was active in Western Writers of America, inc. (editing the newsletter, chairing committees, serving on the board, and finally serving as president). Now, in my mystery-writing days, I find great support in the Guppies online chapter of Sisters in Crime.

*

Excerpt from Judy Alter’s The Most Land, the Best Cattle
(the conclusion of the section on Electra II),
reprinted by permission of the author:

[Electra Waggoner Biggs] was a woman of complexity. The wealth of her family—from the empire built largely by her great-grandfather and grandfather—enabled her to live and party on equal terms with East Coast celebrities, always surrounded by a cadre of admiring men. But, unlike her aunt, she did not content herself with that life; she spent time and effort developing her artistic skills and thereby bringing a certain stability to a family reputation that had been marked by flamboyance. In a family known for an astounding record of divorces, after one brief failed marriage she married for life in what was apparently a happy union. And she returned to make her life at the family ranch, as a wife and mother, the source of all good that had been given her. She once disparagingly claimed that there was no water on the land and the oil was played out, but she stayed there. She did not abandon society, traveling often to see friends and bringing celebrities to party at Santa Rosa. But the ranch seems to have been her anchor, and she was destined to be the one to preserve and continue the family heritage.

Yet when she tangled with Bucky Wharton over the future of the land, Electra was the one who wanted to sell and distribute the assets, although there is no record of the influences upon her by the early 1990s. Speculation is always dangerous, but without Johnny to guide her, she may have been influenced by those managing the ranch, including Gene Willingham. And during that period, there were no trustees of the estate, from whom she might have sought advice. It may be too that her health declined either mentally or physically, in her last years, coloring her judgment. If so, that is a well-kept family secret. 

When Electra Waggoner Biggs died at the age of eighty-nine, Bucky Wharton, W.T.’s great-grandson, was the sole Waggoner descendent left on the ranch—except for Helen Willingham, who continued to live there. And Bucky’s story is an entirely different chapter.

*

Learn more Judy Alter and The Most Land, the Best Cattle at her website.

I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.

From the Archives: 
A Review of Pekka Hämäläinen’s The Comanche Empire

The Marfa Mondays Podcast is Back! No. 21: 
“Great Power in One: Miss Charles Emily Wilson”

Q & A: Carolina Castillo Crimm on De León: A Tejano Family History 

Texas Books: From the Archives: A Review of Sarah Cortez and Sergio Troncoso’s “Our Lost Border”

This blog posts on Mondays. In 2022 first Mondays of the month are for Texas Books, posts in which I share with you some of the more unusual and interesting books in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my working library. 
> For the archive of all Texas-related posts click here.
P.S. Listen in any time to the related Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project.

The end of March 2022 marks the 16th anniversary of this blog, after which point, until further notice, I will be posting approximately two Mondays a month. The posts on Texas Books, the writing workshop, my own work, and a Q & A with another writer, will continue, each posting every other month and, as ever, when there is a fifth Monday in a given month, a newsletter.

OUR LOST BORDER
Edited by Sarah Cortez and Sergio Troncoso
Arte Público Press, Houston, Texas
Trade paperback $19.95, March 30, 2013 
ISBN: 978-1-55885-752-0

Review by C.M. Mayo originally published in Literal, 2013

Lurid television, newspaper stories, and cliché-ridden movies about Mexico abound in English; rare is any writing that plumbs to meaningful depths or attempts to explore its complexities. And so, out of a concatenation of ignorance, presumption and prejudice, those North Americans who read only English have been deprived of the stories that would help them see the Spanish-speaking peoples and cultures right next door, and even within the United States itself, and the tragedies daily unfolding because of or, at the very least kindled by, the voracious North American appetite for drugs. For this reason, Our Lost Border: Essays on Life Amid the Narco-Violence, a treasure trove of one dozen personal essays, deserves to be celebrated, read, and discussed in every community in North America. 

Not a book about Mexico or narcotrafficking per se, Our Lost Border is meant, in the words of its editors, Chicano writers Sarah Cortez and Sergio Troncoso, “to bear witness,” to share what it has been like to live and travel in this region of Mexico’s many regions, and what has been lost.

Snaking from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, the 2,000 mile-long U.S,-Mexico border is more than a fence or river or line on a map of arid wastelands; it is the home of a third culture or, rather, conglomeration of unique and hybrid cultures that are, in the words of the editors, “a living experience, at once both vital and energizing, sometimes full of thorny contradictions, sometimes replete with grace-filled opportunities.” 

In “A World Between Two Worlds,” Troncoso asks, “what if in your lifetime you witness a culture and a way of life that has been lost?” And with finesse of the accomplished novelist that he is, Troncoso shows us how it was in his childhood, crossing easily from El Paso to Ciudad Juárez: family suppers at Ciros Taquería near the cathedral; visits to his godmother, Doña Romita, who had a stall in the mercado and who gave him an onyx chess set; getting his hair cut by “Nati” at Los Hermanos Mesa… Then, suddenly, came the carjackings, kidnappings, shootings, extorsions. For Troncoso, as for so many others fronterizos, the loss can be measured not only in numbers— homicides, restaurants closed, houses abandoned— but also in the painful pinching off of opportunities to segue from one culture and language with such ease, as when he was a child, for that had opened up his sense of possibility, creativity, and clear-sightedness, allowed him develop a practical fluidity, what he calls a “border mentality”— not to judge people, not to accept the presumptions of the hinterlands, whether of the U.S. or Mexico, but “to find out for yourself what would work and what would not.” 

For many years along the border, and in some parts of the interior, drug violence was a long-festering problem. It began to veer out of control in the mid-1990s; by the mid-2000s it had become acute, metastasising beyond the drug trade itself into kidnapping, extorsion and other crimes. Short on money and training— in part a result of a series of fiscal crises beginning in the early 1970s— the Mexican police had proven ineffective, easily outgunned or bribed. Shortly after he took office in late 2006, President Felipe Calderón unleashed the armed forces in an all-out war against the cartels and that was when the violence along the border erupted as the narco gangs fought pitched battles not only against the army, marines, and federal and local police, but also and especially, and in grotesquely gory incidents, each other. Some of the worst fighting concentrated in the border state of Tamaulipas in its major city, Tampico, which is a several hours’ drive south of the border with Texas, but a major port for cocaine transhipments. 

In the opening essay, “The Widest of Borders,” Mexican writer Liliana V. Blum provides a Who’s Who of the narco-gangs, from the Gulf Cartel, which got its start with liquor smuggling during Prohibition, to its off-shoot, the Zetas, which formed around a nucleus of Mexican Army special forces deserters in 1999, then joined the Beltrán Leyva Brothers, blood enemies of the Sinaloa Cartel. Fine a writer as she is, Blum’s experiences, which included having to drive her car through the sticky blood of a mass murder scene on the way home from her daughter’s school, make discouraging reading. 

In “Selling Tita’s House,” Texas writer Mari Cristina Cigarroa recounts her family’s visits and Christmases to her grandparents’ elegant and beloved mansion in Nuevo Laredo. But then, with soldiers in fatigues patrolling the streets, Nuevo Laredo seemed “more like an occupied city during a war.” Chillingly, she writes, “I awoke to the reality that cartels controlled Nuevo Laredo the day I could no longer visit the family’s ranch on the outskirts of the city.”

The strongest and most shocking essay is journalist Diego Osorno’s “The Battle for Ciudad Mier,” about a town shattered in the war between the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel for Tampaulipas. 

I have hope for Mexico for, as as an American citizen who has lived in Mexico’s capital and traveled and written about its astonishingly varied history, literature, and varied regions for over two decades, I know its greatness, its achievements, its resilience, and creativity. But in his foreword, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith rightly chides, “The United States needs to wake up.”

I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.

Great Power in One: Miss Charles Emily Wilson

Edna Ferber’s Giant 
& A Selection of Related Books, 
Plus Two Related Videos On (Yes) the Nuremberg Trials

Why Translate? The Case of the President of Mexico’s Secret Book

Texas Books: “The End of Night,” “West Texas Time Machine,” “How We See the Sky” and More Books About the Sky & Stars

This blog posts on Mondays. In 2022 first Mondays of the month are for Texas Books, posts in which I share with you some of the more unusual and interesting books in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my working library. 
> For the archive of all Texas-related posts click here.
P.S. Listen in any time to the related Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project.

The end of March 2022 marks the 16th anniversary of this blog, after which point, until further notice, I will be posting approximately two Mondays a month. The posts on Texas Books, the writing workshop, my own work, and a Q & A with another writer, will continue, each posting every other month and, as ever, when there is a fifth Monday in a given month, a newsletter.

Long before smartphone apps, before television, before electricity, yea verily, before mechanical clocks, our ancestors looked to the ever-present, ever-changing vault of the heavens. Because of light pollution however, in most towns and cities the night sky does not look the way it once did.

It so happens that the subject of my book in-progress, Far West Texas, is one of the darkest places in North America. In part this is simply because of its lack of water, and therefore low population, but it’s also thanks to “dark skies” policies and state legislation to protect it from light pollution (read more about the the whys, wherefores and history of these policies at at the website of the International Dark Skies Association). Not by happenstance, Far West Texas is also the home of one of the world’s most important astronomical observatories: the McDonald Observatory in Fort Davis. In the most remote places in Far West Texas, if you find yourself outside on a clear night, you can not only see the Milky Way; it can seem the whole sky is a blanket of stars close enough to touch.

As one born in the second half of the 20th century, it took me a long while to appreciate how shockingly much of my culture’s relationship to the sky has atrophied. I’ll have a lot to say about this in my book; but for now, in this blog post, here are some of my go-to “stars and sky” books in my working library:

Paul Bogard’s The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light I would recommend to anyone and everyone. Bogard doesn’t say much about Far West Texas per se, but never mind, it’s a brilliant, joyous book, entertaining, informative, and thought-provoking throughout.

Telescopes gather light— and the technology behind some of them is astounding. An astronomical telescope is, in fact, a time machine, for it allows us to see light originating thousands, millions, and more years ago. West Texas Texas Machine is but one of an ongoing river of books on this subject, but it’s a good one, and the one I happened to have bought on my first visit to the MacDonald Observatory back in 1998.

Here is a batch of sky & stars books from my working library:

If you would like read more on the subject of our relationship with sky, and on seeing it not with gee-whiz technology, but with your own eyes, I would especially recommend astronomer Thomas Hockey’s How We See the Sky: A Naked-Eye Tour of Day and Night. After reading it, I had a whole new awareness of the sun and the moon and the planets and the stars.

I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.

Edna Ferber’s Giant & A Selection of Related Books,
Plus Two Related Videos On (Yes) the Nuremberg Trials

Q & A with Christina Thompson on Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

The Book As Thoughtform, the Book As Object:
A Book Rescued, 
a Book Attacked, and Katherine Dunn’s
Beautiful Book White Dog Arrives

From the Archives: A Review of “Desert America: Boom and Bust in the New Old West”  by Rubén Martínez 

This blog posts on Mondays. In 2022 first Mondays of the month are for Texas Books, posts in which share with you some of the more unusual and interesting books in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my working library. 
> For the archive of all Texas-related posts click here.
P.S. Listen in any time to the related Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project.

The end of March 2022 marks the 16th anniversary of this blog, after which point, until further notice, I will be posting approximately two Mondays a month. The posts on Texas Books, the writing workshop, my own work, and a Q & A with another writer, will continue, each posting every other month and, as ever, when there is a fifth Monday in a given month, that’s for the newsletter.

DESERT AMERICA:
Boom and Bust in the New Old West 
by Rubén Martínez 
Metropolitan Books, 2012
Review by C.M. Mayo originally published in The Washington Independent Review of Books, February 18, 2013

What is the West? That cross-borderly mashup of music, footwear and haberdashery known as “cowboy cool”? Or is it indigenous? The Big Empty, healing refuge, Hispano, Chicano, Mexicano? Or is it now found in the scrim of “underwater” water-sucking tract houses? What is this landscape, if not seen through millions of different eyes each with its own needs, lusts, filters and projections? And how is it changing? (Radically.) In Desert America Rubén Martínez tackles these immense and thorny questions in a narrative of multiple strands masterfully braided into a lyrical whole.

A memoir of living and traveling through both iconic and off-the-path places from Joshua Tree to Sedona, the Arizona borderlands to the heroin-infested farming communities of New Mexico and, briefly, the artist colony of Marfa, Texas, Desert America is also the story of a son and grandson of Salvadoran and Mexican immigrants trying on and struggling with various identities —guitar-toting “brown cowboy”; Roque Dalton-quoting poet-activist; addict, farmer, husband, father. But more: Desert America is a work of literary journalism in the finest tradition, a novelesque interweaving of vivid and telling detail with interviews and original research.

In the chapter “Water in the Desert,” Martínez profiles Mike Wilson, a member of the Tohono O’odham reservation, who makes a spiritual practice of leaving gallon jugs of water in the Baboquivari Valley, a deathtrap of thirst for uncounted hundreds of migrants. Not far from Wilson’s house are tract houses for a different kind of migrant — many of whom take a dim view of Wilson’s endeavor. Wilson named his various depots after the Gospels. After an exhausting day of following him around, writes Martínez:

“John Station is in the sun-dappled shade of a mesquite thicket, and with all the splashing from the ten-gallons containers and the hoses, soon there are diamonds of light glinting on every surface, drops of water whose brilliance disappears within seconds as the blazing air sucks the moisture away.”

Later, Martínez joins Wilson and a party of Guatemalans in a search for the body of a teenager named Sergio, whose cousin Lucas, residing in San Diego, learned had died two days into his journey from the border. In the car on the way to where they will start the search, Martínez learns that Sergio was 19. He was overweight; he carried a fake Mexican birth certificate. In Guatemala he’d driven a bus and gone into debt for the privilege. A husband and father already, he’d come north for fast cash. His body, Lucas had been told, “was left at the foot of a tree in a wash next to the highway to Arizona City, near a cemetery.” But after a brutal day of searching micro patches of immensity, Wilson, who knew the desert, said, at last, and in good Spanish, “Do you know how many places that could be?”

On the flip side of the coin, with “a postcard view of Baboquivari Peak,” on “640 acres of stunning Sonoran desert” is “a handsome house, 1920s vintage with Moroccan arches, tall ceilings and an exquisitely tiled kitchen,” where Martínez interviews its owner, who holds a Ph.D. in anthropology and carries a shotgun. Apart from the menace of rattlesnakes, migrants cross her land. At night, from the house, she can hear the rumbling of the Border Patrol SUVs.

“She visualizes them coming down the saddle between the two hills behind the ranch house. Walking up to the house, up to the bedroom window, peering in at her.

‘You must understand, Rubén. These are not Juan and María.’ They are, she says, like feral dogs.

I tense. There is a great contradiction between us, in the way we imagine who is on the land. Who is the figure crossing the desert?”

In “Where the River Bends,” Martínez arrives in Texas’ Big Bend country, to the tiny town of Marfa as a Lannan Fellow, assigned one of their several beautifully refurbished writers’ residences. He covers the basics of the art colony’s history as well if not better than anyone: the filming of the iconic Elizabeth Taylor-Rock Hudson-James Dean vehicle, “Giant”; the arrival of visionary artist Donald Judd, “mad emperor of the rectangles filled with the soul-stirring vistas of the Chihuhuan Desert,” and then, on Judd’s heels, the jet-in multimillionaires in search of space and creatives displacing the old ranching families. But more than a personal memoir or press release-fed bit of travel section fluff, Martínez delves in, hiking with Jeff Fort, ex-Tyco CEO who bought Judd’s fabled Chinati Hot Springs, among other and vast properties; and, recounted with often painful detail, Martínez attends a party at a sleek mansion surrounded by an ocean of plains and mountain views. And more: he looks into Marfa’s Blackwell School, which was the Mexican school — for Marfa’s public schools were not integrated until 1965. That famous scene in “Giant,” where Rock Hudson gets punched out by the waiter who had refused to serve Mexicans, was, alas, based on an ugly reality.

There are myriad ugly realities in the new West — migrants perishing in the deserts, unsustainable sprawl, conflicts, poverty, an epidemic of addiction — and while Martínez explores these, yielding powerful insight into the changing mosaic of peoples, he also shows us the magnet that is the West’s breathtaking beauty. And it all makes a symphony of sense. As Martínez writes in his introduction, “the only way to tell my story, it seemed, was to tell theirs.”

I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.

Journal of Big Bend Studies: “The Secret Book by Francisco I. Madero”

Edna Ferber’s Giant & A Selection of Related Books,
Plus Two Related Videos On (Yes) the Nuremberg Trials

From the Archives: 
A Review of Pekka Hämäläinen’s The Comanche Empire

From the Archives: My Review of Heribert von Feilitzsch’s “In Plain Sight: Felix A. Sommerfeld, Spymaster in Mexico, 1908-1914”

This blog posts on Mondays.
In 2022 first Mondays of the month are for Texas Books, posts in which share with you some of the more unusual and interesting books in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my working library.
> For the archive of all Texas-related posts click here.
P.S. Listen in any time to the related Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project.

Texas shares its southern border with the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas, so of course “Texas Books” must include those about the US-Mexico border. Soldiers, spies, civilians, weapons, and supplies going back and forth across that border played a crucial role in many conflicts, most especially the Mexican Revolution. This Monday’s post is a review of Heribert von Feilitzsch’s In Plain Sight: Felix A Sommerfeld, Spymaster in Mexico, a work I consider one of the most astonishing, original, and important contributions in recent years to the history of that Revolution— which first battle, the Battle of Juárez, was watched from the rooftops of El Paso, Texas.

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IN PLAIN SIGHT:
FELIX A. SOMMERFELD, SPYMASTER IN MEXICO, 1908-1914
by Heribert von Feilitzsch
Henselstone Verlag, 2012
Review by C.M. Mayo originally published in Literal Magazine, October 2016

It was Mahatma Gandhi who said, “A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.” Like Gandhi, Francisco I. Madero was deeply influenced by the Hindu scripture known as the Bhagavad-Gita and its concern with the metaphysics of faith and duty. And like Gandhi, Madero altered the course of history of his nation. From 1908, with his call for effective suffrage and no reelection, until his assasination in 1913, Madero received the support of not all, certainly, but many millions of Mexicans from all classes of society and all regions of the republic. But the fact is, during the 1910 Revolution, during Madero’s successful campaign for the presidency, and during Madero’s presidency, one of the members of that “small body of determined spirits,” who worked most closely with him was not Mexican. His name was Felix A. Sommerfeld and he was a German spy.

We must thank the distinguished historian of Mexico, Friedrich Katz, author of The Secret War in Mexico, among other works, for shining a bright if tenuous light on Felix Sommerfeld. Other historians of the Mexican Revolution have mentioned the mysterious Sommerfeld, notably Charles H. Harris III and Louis R. Sadler in their 2009 The Secret War in El Paso. But it is Heribert von Feilitzsch, by his extensive archival detective work in Germany, Mexico, and Washington DC, who has contributed our most complete—albeit still incomplete—understanding of who Sommerfeld was; Sommerfeld’s relationship with Madero; and his role, a vital one, in the Mexican Revolution.

Writes von Feilitzsch:

“No other foreigner wielded more influence and amassed more power in the Mexican Revolution. From head of security, Sommerfeld took on the development and leadership of Mexico’s Secret Service. Under his auspices, the largest foreign secret service organization ever to operate on U.S. soil evolved into a weapon that terrorized and decimated Madero’s enemies…”

While Sommerfeld was unable to prevent General Victoriano Huerta’s coup d’etat, and his warning to Madero escape arrest came too late, he himself escaped the capital. Continues von Feilitzsch:

“Sommerfeld became the lynchpin in the revolutionary supply chain. His organization along the border smuggled arms and ammunition to the troops in amounts never before thought possible, while his contacts at the highest eschelons of the American and German governments shut off credit and supplies for Huerta.”

Von Feilitzsch reveals that Sommerfeld was reporting not only to the German ambassador in Mexico City, Paul von Hintze, but from 1911 to 1914 to Sherburne G. Hopkins, lawyer and lobbyist par excellence in Washington. Hopkins had initially been brought on board for the cause by Madero’s brother and right-hand man, Gustavo Madero. To quote von Feilitzsch again:

“As a lawyer and lobbyist for industrialist Charles Ranlett Flint and oil tycoon Henry Clay Pierce, Hopkins enabled Sommerfeld to hold the entire keys for American businessmen trying to gain access to the Madero, Carranza, and Villa administrations.”

Sommerfeld was operating at the highest level of sophistication. And perhaps most telling of that sophistication is something surprisingly simple. It is a photograph of him taken in El Paso, Texas during the Revolution, the one that appears on the cover of von Feilitzsch’s book.

In a light-colored suit and dark tie, Sommerfeld stands at Madero’s elbow, protecting his back. On Madero’s opposite side journalists Allie Martin and Chris Haggerty crowd close, seemingly mesmerized by the glamorous revolutionary. Haggerty holds the brim of his hat, pale circle, as if he had only just swept it from his head. But on the other side, just slightly behind Madero, Sommerfeld, bareheaded, craggy-faced, with eyes that belong to an eagle, looks out— a secret service man’s gaze. It is an iconic photograph; those who study the Mexican Revolution will have seen it.

The telling thing, though, is this: that in the archive which has the original, the Aultman Collection in the El Paso Public Library, Sommerfeld, the man with the eagle-gaze, that man who so often appears right by Madero’s side, and here and there in other iconic photographs of the time, including one of the guests at the dinner with Madero and family to celebrate the Battle of Juárez, is unidentified. Or at least he was unidentified there at the time von Feilitzsch wrote his book. In short, during the Revolution, and for over a century to follow, Felix Sommerfeld had been hiding in plain sight. In Plain Sight: the title of von Feilitzsch’s book.

AN ESOTERIC CONNECTION?

I am more grateful than I can say to have encountered In Plain Sight when I did, and I believe that anyone who studies the Mexican Revolution, after reading this book, will say the same. The Mexican Revolution has thousands of facets, of course, but for my own work, the key questions were, Who was Francisco I. Madero? How, in the nitty-gritty, did he pull it off, to lead a Revolution and win the presidency? And, in the face of inevitable and ferocious counter-revolution, how did Madero manage to hold the presidency for as long as he did?

My work, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution, was prompted by my encounter with Madero’s secret book, Manual espírita (Spiritist Manual). A blend of Kardecian Spiritism, Hindu and other esoteric philosophies, Manual espírita was published in 1911 under the pseudonym “Bhima.”

Never mind what was in Manual espírita, this slender volume with now yellowed pages: the fact that Francisco I. Madero, leader of the 1910 Revolution, had written it and moreoever, published it when he was president-elect in 1911— I could not but conclude that its contents must been exceedingly important to him, and hence, offer profound understanding into who he was and what he stood for.

But my intention here is not to talk about my book about Madero. I suffice to mention that, apart from benefitting so much from the information and insights in von Feilitzsch’s book, I took the liberty of emailing von Feilitzsch a question: What kind of person was this Sommerfeld—might he have been a Spiritist? For there was another German spy working closely with Madero, a Spiritist who turns out to have become a major figure in esoteric circles in the first half of the 20th century: Dr. Arnoldo Krumm-Heller.

Von Feilitzsch was kind enough to permit me to include his answer in my book. He writes:

“With respect to Madero’s Spiritism, Sommerfeld not only knew all about it. I am convinced that he was a kindred soul. I have scoured the earth for a book Sommerfeld wrote around 1918, likely under a pen name. I cannot find it. This might be the only possible source for a glimpse into this man’s deepest convictions and emotional structure. Sommerfeld became so close to Madero at the exact time, when Madero must have been under the most emotional pressure. Madero hated bloodshed and violence and exactly that he set off when the revolution started. In his innermost circle were Sommerfeld, [Arnoldo] Krumm-Heller, his wife Sara, and Gustavo, which is documented. … (Sommerfeld was [Sara’s] bodyguard in Mexico City and the last address I have for Sommerfeld reads: c/o Sara Madero, Mexico City. This was in 1930). Just like…Madero, Sommerfeld did not drink, gamble or smoke. In that time and considering the background of Sommerfeld as a mining engineer in the “Wild West,” this is a very unlikely coincidence. In his interviews with the American authorities, he said that Madero was “the purest man I ever met in my life. When I spoke to him, he took my breath away—the child’s faith of this man in humanity.” (Justice 9-16-12) In his appearance before the Fall Committee [of the US Senate] in 1912 he testified: “President Madero is the best friend I have in this world…” Senator Smith “…you became interested in him?” Sommerfeld: “Yes, we became very close friends.” And so on. I definitely hear undertones of esoteric connection. Sommerfeld was very private, rarely allowed a picture taken, and certainly never talked about his faith or personal life to anyone. As someone very rational he kept his distance to others and never described any other relationship in these highly emotional terms. Until I can put my hands on his personal papers or his book, these are only indications but still worth thinking about.”

MORE THAN WE MIGHT HAVE DARED HOPE FOR

In many ways Felix Sommerfeld remains a mystery. Von Feilitzsch however, has given us much more than we might have dared hope for: That Felix Sommerfeld was born on May 28, 1879 near Schniedemühl, then in Prussia. As owners of a grain mill, his family was relatively wealthy. Like many Germans in the late 19th century, he had relatives, including brothers, who emmigrated to the United States. As a teenager Felix lived with his brothers for a time in New York. He joined the US Army and received training in Kentucky—then went AWOL, back to Germany. In the first years of the 20th century von Feilitzsch finds Felix Sommerfeld serving in the Prussian cavalry in China during the Boxer Rebellion. Then, he pops up as a mining engineer in Arizona and then northern Mexico—perhaps by then already reporting to the German consul in Chihuahua. Then he’s back to Germany, then, back again in Mexico as a journalist—and all of a sudden, in charge of revolutionary leader Francisco I. Madero’s secret service.

One more of so many things von Feilitzsch brings to us about Felix Sommerfeld: He was Jewish. We do not know his fate, but if he lived into his sixties he may have perished in the Holocaust—or perhaps he disappeared, as secret agents know how to do.

In the Bhagavad Gita, which we know that Francisco Madero read and reread, penciling copious notes in the margins, Lord Kirshna, incarnation of cosmic power, advises the warrior Arjuna to have heart, to do his duty. For Madero, that meant putting aside material concerns and gathering around himself that “small body of determined spirits,” who would help him to alter the course of Mexico’s history. As Madero understood it, those “spirits” would have been both disincarnate and incarnate. Whether and to what degree his chief of secret service shared Madero’s esoteric inclinations remains an open question. But in revealing that, both during and beyond Madero’s lifetime, Felix Sommerfeld was an indispensible member of that “small body,” von Feilitzsch has made a contribution to the history of the Mexican Revolution that is at once disquieting and sensational.

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I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.

From the Archives: My Review of Edward H. Miller’s 
Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy

Synge’s The Aran Islands and Kapuscinski’s Travels with Herodotus 

Notes on Stephen L. Talbott’s The Future Does Not Compute

“What Is a Film Outside the Audience’s Mind?” Notes on “George Stevens: Interviews”

This blog posts on Mondays.
In 2022 first Mondays of the month are for Texas Books, posts in which share with you some of the more unusual and interesting books in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my working library.
> For the archive of all Texas-related posts click here.
P.S. Listen in any time to the related Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project.

“I believe that if you make a film properly today, it’ll be watched by people in fifty years time”—George Stevens

Last month I devoted the first-Monday-of-the-month “Texas Books” post to several works related to the iconic movie Giant, which was based on Edna Ferber’s best-selling and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. It’s nigh impossible to exaggerate the influence of that 1956 movie on shaping popular concepts and imagery of Far West Texas—although, strange to say, neither the author of the novel it was based on, nor the starring actors, nor the director of Giant were Texan. George Stevens (1904-1975), who won an Academy Award for Best Director for Giant, was a liberal Californian through-and-through. But unlike most of his fellow Hollywood directors, Stevens volunteered to serve in World War II, in which for a mobile film unit he documented, among other events and places, the liberation of Dachau. Two of the films he directed, The Nazi Plan (1945) and Nazi Concentration Camps (1945) were screened as evidence in the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.

Stevens, who got his start filming Laurel and Hardy comedies, and later directed such stars as Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, was to become one of Hollywood’s first major producer/ directors. However, his directing career was cleaved by World War II. Prior to the war, he made myriad light comedies and entertainments; afterwards, the serious and meticulously researched dramas, including Shane, the epic Giant, and The Diary of Anne Frank. As Stevens told one interviewer, “After seeing the camps I was an entirely different person.”

So who was this person, this Hollywood Californian, who had become another person whose vision of Texas in the mid-1950s has had such a powerfully lasting influence?

After last month’s “Texas Books” post on Giant I realized I needed to learn more about its director; specifically, to better see Giant in the context of his oeuvre. So— abebooks.com to the rescue—I put in an order for the now out-of-print collection of interviews edited by filmmaker and film historian Paul Cronin, George Stevens Interviews (University Press of Mississippi Press, 2004).

I devoured the editor’s excellent introduction, chronology and filmography, and all the interviews from 1935 to 1974— spanning nearly four decades.

A few quotes that stood out for me:

From the interview given to William Kirschner, Jewish War Veterans Review, August 1963:

[On the liberation of Dachau] “It was unbelievable. What is there to say about such enormities and abuse. A fellow in my unit who was something of a linguist wrote letters for the dying to their relatives without interruption for days and nights at a time. It was like wandering around in one of Dante’s infernal visions. (pp.18-19)

“Nothing has disturbed me in my life as much as the Hitler outrages. It’s the reason I got into the war, and I finally wound up in a concentration camp on the day it was liberated. I hated the German army. What they stood for was the worst possible thing that’s happened in centuries.” (p.21)

[On the wartime experience] “It was an elaborate change in my life… Professionally, I knew I wanted to do very different things to what I’d done before. In this respect, the film that was very important to me was The Diary of Anne Frank.” (p.21)

[On films in general] “The business of people gathered together in great numbers to look at a screen and agree or disagree upon ideas as acted out in front of them, I think it’s one of the great adventures of our time.” (p.23)

From the interview given to James Silke, Cinema, December-January 1964-65:

[On films in general] “I think all people are very curious about experiences, experiences that in this little life span they may not experience for themselves. A film is a remarkable way for people to experience things they would not have had the opportunity to experience in any other way. And I think the best in films occurs when they bring the response, ‘That’s it!'” (p.48)

From the interview given to Robert Hughes, 1967:

“This is what the theater does so well. People gathered in a large group, finding a little something about themselves. When the audience was truly moved, it was absolutely quiet. They were in communion because they were learning the truth about themselves. They were there for discivery, not entertainment. They say film is a narcotic, an escape. But when film was done right, it asked real questions: Who am I? Why am I? Why do I do this? Real theater and film is therapy for the audience.” (p.60)

[On Dachau] “After seeing the camps I was an entirely different person. I know there is brutality in war, and the SS were lousy bastards, but the destruction of people like this was beyond comprehension. This is where I really learned about life… We went to the woodpile outside the crematorium, and the woodpile was people. I remember there was a whole area for Yugoslavs. The only reason I knew they were Yugoslavs was because they had a tag on their coats or a broad purple crayon mark on their chests. There was a dissecting thing in the crematorium where they cut people apart before they put them in there.”(p.65)

From the interview given to Bruce Petri, 1973
(reprinted from A Theory of American Film: The Films and Techniques of George Stevens, Garland Publishing, 1987)

“So I keep the camera back in a position that is not going to help the audience too much…We’re curious creatures, and we like to discover for ourselves. In the world that we’re living in, in the film, the film is exposing life to you for your convenience. It must, to a degree, and it can under many situations without resentment; but I think it’s an enormous waste not to give the audience its priority of discovery, as much as you can.” (p.90)

From the interview for the American Film Institute, 1973:

[On Giant] “The structural development of the picture, I believe, is what saves it. It has an excellent structure design, which has to do with the audience anticipating and looking some distance ahead all the way to the finish, which is a reversal on how this kind of story would normally end— the hero is heroic. Here the hero is beaten, but his gal likes him. It’s the first time she’s ever really respected him because he’s developed a kind of humility— not instinctive, but beaten into him.” (p.102)

[On film in general] “It’s all about making sure the film bounces off that sheet and comes to life in the mind of the audience. What is a film outside the audience’s mind?” (p.104)

I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.

Into the Guadalupe Mountains: 
Some Favorites from the Texas Bibliothek 
(Plus a Couple of Extra-Crunchy Videos)

The Marfa Mondays Podcast is Back! No. 21: 
“Great Power in One: Miss Charles Emily Wilson”

Lord Kingsborough’s Antiquities of Mexico

Edna Ferber’s “Giant” & A Selection of Related Books, Plus Two Related Videos On (Yes) the Nuremberg Trials

This blog posts on Mondays. This year, 2021, I am dedicating the first Monday of the month to Texas Books, in which I share with you some of the more unusual and interesting books in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my working library. Listen in any time to the related podcast series.

Without question the iconic image of Far West Texas in the 20th century and into our day in the 21st is that of James Dean in character as Jett Rink, sprawled in the back of an open automobile. Unless you were born yesterday, or grew up in, oh say, the highlands of Papua New Guinea, surely you will recognize it:

It is a still from Giant which was filmed on a stage-set, no longer extant, on a ranch just outside of Marfa, Texas. Here’s one of the many movie posters which incorporate the image:

And here’s a more recent DVD package cover:

And don’t think you can get away from James Dean-Jett Rink if you go to Marfa! Last time I was there, Giant was playing nonstop in the lobby of the Paisano Hotel, and there were postcards galore for sale featuring the James Dean-Jett Rink image. In Alpine, the town next-door (in Far West Texas next-door would be a half hour’s drive), the bookstore incorporates James Dean / Jett Rink into its logo:

The movie Giant, based on Edna Ferber’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, and starring James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson, and directed by George Stevens, was a smash hit in 1956, and to this day it remains, in the words of film historian Don Graham, “probably the archetypal Texas movie; it contains every significant element in the stereotype: cowboys, wildcatters, cattle empire, wealth, crassness of manners, garish taste, and barbecue.”

Here’s my copy of Ferber’s novel:

The movie Giant now seems integral to the very weave of Texan cultural identity, yet when it was being filmed, many Texans who were familiar with the novel and its vociferous condemnation of prejudice and segregation, made threatening noises. One Texan told a Hollywood columnist, “If you make and show that damn picture, we’ll shoot the screen full of holes.”

For her saga of the family of cattle barons (Bick and Leslie Benedict, in the movie played by Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor) versus the upstart oilman (Jett Rink, played by James Dean), Ferber did her research—that would be another post. However, Ferber was no Texan, she was a liberal Jew originally from the Midwest, resident in Manhattan, member by the way of the Algonquin Roundtable, and she had made a career writing blockbuster ready-for-Hollywood novels. Texans generally came to embrace the movie Giant, but at the time the novel came out in 1952, the Texan attitude was more, Who was this highfalutin’ person to judge, never mind attempt to write about, Texas? Quoted in J.E. Smyth’s Edna Ferber’s Hollywood, one reader’s letter-to-the-editor of the Ladies Home Journal, which had serialized the novel, sputtered: “I thought I had heard very misconception of Texas and its people and every form of ridicule possible to small minds, but you have left me speechless with astonishment— such colossal ignorance I have never encountered.” Another reader claimed there was no racism in Texas, however, if any Texan “made the mistake of marrying a Mexican, she certainly would not be entertained in the living room”— and so on.

Apart from the James Dean scenes— all of them— the scene from the movie Giant that has echoed over the decades is the diner scene, also known as The Fight at Sarge’s Place. In Ferber’s novel, Mrs. Benedict (the cattle baron’s wife, played by Elizabeth Taylor), with her Mexican daughter-in-law and grandchildren, is refused service in a roadside café. From the novel:

“You can’t be talking to me!” Leslie said.

“I sure can. I’m talking to all of you. Our rule here is no Mexicans served and I don’t want no ruckus. So— out!”

In the movie, however, Bick Benedict (Rock Hudson) is with his wife Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor), the Mexican daughter-in-law, and the grandchildren. They have been seated, but when the owner, Sarge (played by Mickey Simpson) rudely refuses service to a Mexican family that came in after them, Bick protests. A slugfest with Sarge ensues, and the now elderly Bick ends up sprawled on the floor, unconscious. Sarge grabs his sign from the wall behind the cash register and throws it on top of Bick:

WE RESERVE
THE RIGHT
TO REFUSE SERVICE
TO ANYONE.

So it was in certain parts of the United States in the days before the Civil Rights Act— and that sign, in the words of Don Graham, “was the most famous emblem of racial discrimination in that era.” (Graham, Giant, p. 198)

Side note: Here’s my copy of Scene from the Movie GIANT by Tino Villanueva (Curbstone Press, 1993), an exquisite book-length poem about a 14 year old Mexican American boy watching that very scene in a movie theater.

From Tino Villanueva’s Scene from the Movie GIANT:

That a victory is not over until you turn it into words;

That a victor of his kind must legitimize his fists
Always, so he rips from the wall a sign, like a writ
Revealed tossed down to the strained chest of Rock Hudson.
And what he said unto him, he said like a pulpit preacher
Who knows only the unfriendly parts of the Bible.

After all, Sarge is not a Christian name. The camera
Zooms in:

WE RESERVE
THE RIGHT
TO REFUSE SERVICE
TO ANYONE

Here’s my copy of Giant: Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Edna Ferber, and the Making of a Legendary American Film by Don Graham:

Writes Don Graham in his history, Giant:

“[Director George] Stevens held a strong belief in racial equality, and he meant Giant to tell a story that would compel viewers of the film to consider their own prejudices instead of blaming them on other people. In Stevens’ mind, Giant would prompt people to examine their own hearts.” (p. 198)

George Stevens’s own heart had been opened as by a chainsaw.

In the decade before World War II he had been turning out feature films starring such legends as Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, Betty Grable, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers, James Stewart and Cary Grant. Then, to do his part in World War II, he set his career aside. For the US Army Signal Corps’ motion pictures unit, he filmed the Normandy Invasion, the liberation of Paris, and the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. Writes Graham:

[W]hat Stevens saw in Germany was almost too much to absorb. He shot footage at Nordhausen, where the ravaged bodies of slave workers bore the grim evidence of starvation, torture, and murder. But Dachau was worse. There was nothing worse than Dachau. He shot boxcars packed with skeletal Jews; he shot ditches filled with the dead. He was in a world of indescribable horror. ‘We went to the woodpile outside the crematorium, and the woodpile was people.’ He filmed the extinct and the living. He filmed German officers and forced them to look at their handiwork, and he filmed German citizens, deniers all, in nearby villages, pretending they didn’t know what had been happening just down the road. He smelled the unbearable stench of the sick and the dying, and he saw signs of cannibalism among the heaped-up bodies.

“After seeing the camps,” he said, “I was an entirely different person.”

Stevens’ documentary films, including Nazi Concentration Camps, were entered as evidence in the 1945-46 Nuremberg Trials. When Stevens returned to Hollywood to make feature films, they were of a different order of seriousness. And these included the hard-hitting film based on Edna Ferber’s novel Giant.

From J.M. Smith’s Edna Ferber’s Hollywood: American Fictions of Gender, Race and History:

“Stevens appreciated Ferber’s attack on Texas racism. He also shared Ferber’s commitment to creating unusual perspectives on the American past… His independent film company bought the rights in the summer of 1952, and then convinced Warmer Bros. to put up the money for the production and distribution… [Stevens’] desire to condemn racism and enshrine the old-style toughness of the western hero would result in a deeply conflicted western.” (pp.201-202)

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The back cover of J.E. Smth’s Edna Ferber’s Hollywood shows Jett Rink’s creators, writer and actor:

It was on location in Marfa that Ferber, who was old enough to be his grandmother, became friends with the brilliant young actor from Indiana. It must have seemed that Jimmy Dean had a long stretch of life before him, but in fact he was living out his last days. He would die in a car crash in California while Giant was still in production. In Ferber: Edna Ferber and Her Circle, Julie Gilbert quotes Edna, saying that, once home, she had received from Jimmy a photograph of him in character as Jett Rink:

It was not characteristic of him to send his photograph unasked. I was happy to have it and I wrote to thank him: “… when it arrived I was interested to notice for the first time how much your profile resembles that of John Barrymore. You’re too young ever to have seen him, I suppose. It really is startlingly similar. But then, your automobile racing will probably soon take care of that.”

I was told that the letter came the day of his death. He never saw it. (p.148)

In a uncanny way, Giant has become James Dean’s film, and the image of him sprawled in the back of the automobile, wearing his crown of a Stetson, gloves loosely, as if royally, grasped, cowboy boots up, that monstrosity of a Potemkin construction in the distance, the whole of it a talisman of the pump-jack power of American cool. Wrongly so perhaps, but Ferber and Stevens are no longer household names, but relegated to mentions in scholarly works and footnotes.

What is that magic eros that James Dean had, that for all these many decades he has managed to spark and hold the passionate interest of not only so many movie viewers, but other actors, and writers and poets? One could explore that question from a variety of disciplines for 500 years and forever, but here’s one illuminating and entertaining work, co-edited by my amigo, Richard Peabody: Mondo James Dean: A Collection of Stories and Poems About James Dean.

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PS: TWO VIDEOS ON THE NUREMBERG TRIALS

The Nuremberg Trials were very present for me when I was a teenager, in part because World War II was then relatively recent— the older people in my life, including my parents, had all lived through that war, and I knew many people who had come to the US as refugees—or their parents had come as refugees. Moreover, my high school French and German teacher (she taught both languages) had served as a translator at the Nuremberg Trials.

So when I learned that George Stevens’ filming had played such an important role in the Nuremberg Trials, I went a ways into looking for videos around that issue. Here are two that I would warmly recommend watching.

Ashton Gleckman’s “I Am the Last Surviving Prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials” The Story of Benjamin Ferencz:

Dr. Lee Merritt’s talk on Dr. Karl Brandt, who was condemned to death in the Nuremberg Trials. The story is complicated and important.

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Look for my next Texas Books post on the first Monday of next month. You can find the archive of the Texas Books posts here. 

You can also listen in any time to the 21 podcasts posted so far in my 24 podcast “Marfa Mondays” series exploring Far West Texas here.

I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.

Francisco I. Madero’s Commentary on the Baghavad-Gita (or Bhaghavad-Gita)

13 Trailers for Movies with Extra-Astral Texiness 

Remembering Ann L. McLaughlin

They Beat Their Horses with Rocks (And Other Means of Energizing Transport in the Permian Basin of 1858)

This blog posts on Mondays. This year, 2021, I am dedicating the first Monday of the month to Texas Books, in which I share with you some of the more unusual and interesting books in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my working library. Listen in any time to the related podcast series.

The edge of the Permian Basin at the Guadalupe Mountains, as seen from the window of a jet.
Photo: C.M. Mayo.
The Butterfield Overland Mail by Waterman L. Ormsby (Only Through Passenger on the First Westbound Stage) Edited by Lyle H. Wright and Josephne M. Bynum. Shown: My copy of the seventh printing (1972) of the handsome edition published by the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery in 1942.

With time and patience and, presumably, approved government-issued identification and a credit card, you can easily drive or fly across Far West Texas. But just look out the window at this rough, bone-dry country and you’ll know, your path across it would be nigh impossible without fossil fuels.

For many thousands of years, as archaeological evidence attests, people came into its spring-laced mountains, and also camped in its ciénegas (oases), such as Hueco Tanks, for seasonal hunting and fishing, and processing that meat, and seeds, berries, and roots. When out hunting or moving on, they would follow the big river we call the Rio Grande or a creek, such as Toyah or Alamito— or if not, they would would have known, whether by direct knowledge or tradition, how far they would have had to walk until the next source of water, and how to find it. To extend their range, they wore sandals woven of lechugilla, and used gourds and baskets to carry food and water. In hot weather they would have walked by moonlight. But no one in their right mind would have set out walking for hundreds of miles over the open desert, on so straight and water-scarce a path as our asphalted highways.

The transportation technologies that harnessed the horse, mule, burro and donkey arrived in the Americas with the European colonists in the 16th century. For this form of transportation, fuel is forage. And you need water. You either have enough forage and water, and at regular intervals, or the animals collapse and die. You also need to give them a chance to rest.

Flash forward to 1858. The American Southwest, including gold-rich California, is the prize of the US-Mexican War, which had concluded a decade earlier. Texas, having revolted and won its independence from Mexico in 1836, had become the 28th state of the Union in 1845. The unfathomably vast deposits of petroleum and natural gas lie deep within in its Permian Basin, a complex of geologic structures and sub-basins named after the Permian Period of 299 to 251 million years ago. Part of the Permian Basin extends into Far West Texas, that is, Texas west of the Pecos River, the subject of my book in-progress. But in 1858 no one imagined that fabulous abundance of “black gold,” nor could they have dreamed of the material and, consequently, political power it would allow the United States to command over the world over so much of the twentieth century. The Permian Basin wasn’t even a concept in 1858. No one then saw anything much of value in Far West Texas, except some salt. As for the Pecos, as one old-timer told historian Patrick Dearen, it was so brackish “a snake wouldn’t drink it.”

Texas west of the Pecos was a brutal inconvenience to be crossed, as quickly and cheaply as possible, either on the way to, or the way back from California. In addition to the lack of water, there was the ever-present danger of attacks by bandits, and by Apaches, Comanches, and Kiowa. Fossil-fuel-powered transport—the railroad— was coming to Far West Texas, but the track would not be hammered into place until many years after the US Civil War, which outbreak lay three more years over the horizon. In 1858, for these parts, the cutting-edge transportation technology was the stagecoach: a wheeled box for mail and passengers, hauled over dirt roads by a team of mules or horses. The idea was, at the scheduled stops on its route, passengers could get on and off, have a rest and a bite to eat, the mailbags could be unloaded and loaded, and the animals refreshed.

In 1857, an act of Congress had authorized a mail and passenger stage line to connect St Louis / Memphis and San Francisco. The Postmaster General selected the route that swi=ung down into Far West Texas (among the many considered), and awarded the contract for the semi-weekly service to John Butterfield and associates. At 2,700 miles long, Butterfield’s Overland Mail would be not only the longest stagecoach line in the world, but a chapter, albeit brief—it ended with the outbreak of the Civil War— of signal importance in the economic development and cohesion of the United States.

The first through-passenger on the west-bound stage was Waterman L. Ormsby, a 23 year-old New Yorker, whose eight reports appeared in the New York Herald.

My pencil points to the Pinery, the stagecoach stop at the foot of the Guadalupe Mountains in Far West Texas.

The map from the book (above), shows the stagecoach stops for the Butterfield Overland Mail Route, from St. Louis (at the far top right, east) to San Francisco (far top left, west). That map is difficult to make out, I’ll grant. The map below is a close-up of Trans-Pecos Texas, from the same map. The Butterfield Overland arrived at the Pecos River at Horsehead Crossing, then traveled up alongside its the steep banks to Emigrant Crossing, and then on up the Pecos to Pope’s Camp. Then, heading west, the stage stopped at Delaware Springs; the Pinery, in the shadow of Guadalupe Peak (now the Guadalupe Mountains National Park); Cornudas by the salt beds; the oasis of Hueco Tanks; and finally, the tiny settlement of Franklin, now known as the city of El Paso—before heading to parts further west.

Overland Mail Company schedule, as of Spetmber 16, 1858, reprinted in The Butterfield Overland Mail by Waterman L. Ormsby.

The schedule shows that the stagecoach departed the Pecos River (Emigrant’s Crossing) on Thursdays and Sundays at 3:45 AM, averaging 4 1/2 miles an hour, to arrive at El Paso Saturdays and Tuesdays. The footnote reads, in part: “If they are behind this time, it will be necessary to urge the animals on to the highest speed that they can be driven without injury.”

The pressure to profit in the capitalist race against the clock comes through vividly in Ormsby’s reports. From his report near El Paso, Texas, September 28, 1858:

“We travel night and day, and only stop long enough to change teams and eat. The stations are not all yet finished, and there are some very long drives—varying from thirty-five to seventy-five miles—without an opportunity of procuring fresh teams.”

Ormsby’s report for the New York Herald of October 10, 1858, from San Francisco, is the one that details the crossing of Far West Texas. He begins:

“Safe and sound from all the threatened dangers of Indians, tropic suns, rattlesnakes, mustang horses, jerked beef, terrific mountain passes, fording rivers, and all the concomitants which envy, pedantry, and ignorance had predicted for all passengers by the overland mail route over which I have just passed, here I am in San Francisco, having made the passage from the St. Louis post office to the San Francisco post office in twenty-three days, twenty-three hours and a half, just one day and a half an hour less than the time required by the Overland Mail Company’s contract with the Post Office Department.”

(It is only the fact that he was a 23 year old New Yorker that inclines me to believe him, a little, when he claims, “I feel almost fresh enough to undertake it again.”)

Arriving at the Pecos River, which had “no trees or any unusual luxuriance of foliage on the banks,” the driver who takes charge of the stagecoach is:

“Captain Skillman, an old frontier man who was the first to run the San Antonio and Santa Fé mail at a time when a fight with the Indians, every trip, was considered in the contract. He is a man about forty-five years of age, in appearance much resembling the portraits of the Wandering Jew, with the exception that he carries several revolvers and bowie knives, dresses in buckskin, and has a sandy head of hair and beard. He loved hard work and adventures, and hates ‘injuns,’ and knows the country here pretty well.” (p.68)

But it wasn’t all Kumbaya and PETA for the mules:

“We started with four mules to the wagon and eighteen in the cavellado; but the latter dwindled down in number as one by one the animals gave out.” (p.69)

The stagecoach jolted up alongside the north shore of the Pecos for sixteen miles, then:

“met a train of wagons belonging to Mr. McHenry, who was going from San Francisco to San Antonio, carrying a load of grain for the company on the way. By his invitation, we stopped and breakfasted with him, giving our mules a chance to eat, drink and rest—all of which they much needed.”

Miles later, after Emigrant Crossing, and another slogging day:

“We continued our weary and dusty road up the Pecos…inhaling constant clouds of dust and jolting along almost at snail’s pace. Our animals kept giving out so that we had to leave them on the road; and by the time we reached Pope’s Camp at least half a dozen had been disposed of in this way. ” (p.71)

But, O, Nature!

“As we neared Pope’s Camp, in the bright moonlight, we could see the Guadalupe Mountains, sixty miles distant on the other side of the river, stranding out in bold relief against the clear sky, like the walls of some ancient fortress covered with towers and embattlements. I am told that on a clear day this peak has been seen across the plains for the distance of over one hundred miles, so tall is it and so low the country about it.” (p.71)

At Pope’s Camp, they got their fresh team—and “some supper of shortcake, coffee, dried beef and raw onions” (p.72) that beef being cooked over a fire of buffalo chips (yes, that is what you think it is).

Ormsby continues:

“The Guadalupe Peak loomed up before us all day in the most aggravating manner. It fairly seemed to be further off the more we traveled, so that I almost gave up in despair all hopes of reaching it. Our last eight or ten miles were among the foothills of the range, and I now confidently believed we were within a mile or two, at the outside. But the road wound and crooked over the interminable hills for miles yet and we seemed to be no nearer than before. I could see the outlines of the mountain plainly, and as I eagerly asked how far it was, the captain laughingly told me it was just five miles yet, and we had better stop to give the animals a little rest or they could never finish it. ” (p.73)

So stop they did, by the cool, bubbling water of Independence Spring. Then:

“We were obliged to actually beat our mules with rocks to make them go the remaining five miles to the station” (p.73)

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For a complete and splendidly illustrated history of the Overland Mail, nothing to date beats Glen Sample Ely’s The Texas Frontier and the Butterfield Overland Mail 1858-1861 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016). I am fortunate to have a copy of this magnificent tome in my working library.

About those stagecoaches and their teams, writes Ely:

“The stagecoaches used by the Overland Mail Company in West Texas were not the heavy wooden Concord coaches seen in such popular Western movies as Stagecoach. Along the arid frontier, it was too taxing on livestock to pull a cumbersome Concord through deep sand roads in dry weather or through boggy stretches after heavy rains and flooding. In Texas, the typical passenger vehicle was the lighter, canvas-topped Celerity wagon, also known as a mud wagon.” (p.15)

As for the mules:

“Much of the time, four-mule teams were hitched to Butterfield’s mud wagons, although horses were used on some sections of the route. The livestock varied in cost: the lead mules at the front of the team ran $35 to $40 each, whereas higher-grade mules (known as “wheelers”) costing $70 to $80 each were used at the back of the team, closer to the coach. The Overland Mail Company kept ten to twenty mules on hand at each station. Butterfield’s larger regional depots kept fifty to sixty animals in reserve for needed adjustments along the line.” (pp.15-16)

To keep them in feed was a challenge:

The Overland Mail Company kept a large supply of corn and hay on hand for the livestock, as the local terrain was usually too sparse to support a station’s requirements year-round. Local grasses were most prevalent from spring to early fall, during the so-called rainy season. Leaving the stage stop to go out and cut hay was often a deadly task. Raiding Comanches and Apaches targeted employees out on forage detail.” (p.17)

It was reported that, even for 50 dollars an hour—a stupendous sum at the time—there were occasions when no man would cut hay. Speaking of which, on next month’s first Monday I’ll be showcasing some of the captivity memoirs in my working library.

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Look for my next Texas Books post on the first Monday of next month. You can find the archive of the Texas Books posts here.

You can also listen in any time to the 21 podcasts posted so far in my 24 podcast “Marfa Mondays” series exploring Far West Texas here.

I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.

From the Texas Bibliothek: The Sanderson Flood of 1965;
Faded Rimrock Memories; Terrell County, Texas: Its Past, Its People

A Review of Patrick Dearen’s Bitter Waters

The Power of Literary Travel Memoir: Further Notes on 
David M. Wrobel’s Global West, American Frontier

Into the Guadalupe Mountains: Some Favorites from the Texas Bibliothek (Plus a Couple of Extra-Crunchy Videos)

This blog posts on Mondays. This year, 2021, I am dedicating the first Monday of the month to Texas Books, in which I share with you some of the more unusual and interesting books in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my working library. Listen in any time to the related podcast series.

Texas is giant in so many ways, including its literature. However, the literature on its Guadalupe Mountains is relatively sparse. This isn’t surprising when you consider how remote these mountains are—by car from El Paso, only after an hour and half do they rise up to their full splendor from the floor of the Texas desert. They make for a “sky island,” watered woodlands surrounded by the salty desert of what used to be a vast sea. There were never any towns in the Guadalupes’ wooded valleys; into the 19th century these valleys were inhabited by the Mescalero Apaches for seasonal hunting camps, until they were driven out by the U.S. Army, and the railroad tracks laid down across the desert, alongside the telegraph lines. Suffice to say, without the aid of fossil fuels, first coal, then oil, it was brutally difficult to travel over this region. Even today most travelers blow on by the Guadalupes at 80 miles an hour towards points west or east. As one who has served as an artist-in-residence in the Guadalupe Mountains National Park, I well know what glories (and not a few rattlesnakes) these mountains hold. I am at work on my memoir / portrait of Far West Texas but of course, others have written about the Guadalupes, and their works inform mine. Herewith, a few favorites from my working library:

Jeffrey P. Shepherd’s Guadalupe Mountains National Park: An Environmental History of the Southwest Borderlands (University of Massachusetts Press, 2019) is the book I wish I’d had when I started my research some years ago. From the catalog copy:

“The Guadalupe Mountains stand nearly 9,000 feet tall, spanning the far western fringe of Texas, the border of New Mexico, and the meeting point of the Southern Plains and Chihuahuan Desert. Long an iconic landmark of the Trans-Pecos region, the Guadalupe Mountains have played a critical role for the people in this beautiful corner of the Southwest borderlands. In the late 1960s, the area was finally designated a national park.

“Drawing upon published sources, oral histories, and previously unused archival documents, Jeffrey P. Shepherd situates the Guadalupe Mountains and the national park in the context of epic tales of Spanish exploration, westward expansion, Native survival, immigrant settlement, the conservation movement, early tourism, and regional economic development. As Americans cope with climate change, polarized political rhetoric, and suburban sprawl, public spaces such as Guadalupe Mountains National Park remind us about our ties to nature and our historical relationships with the environment.”

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W.C. Jameson’s Legend and Lore of the Guadalupe Mountains (University of New Mexico Press, 2007) and The Guadalupe Mountains: Island in the Desert (Texas Western Press, 1994), with tales of Indians, wildest nature, secret gold mines and ghosts, are essential reading for any would-be Hollywood screenwriter.

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A Brush with Passion: The Work of Clark Cox, edited by Wendy Parish and Jeannie Sillis (Carlsbad Caverns-Guadalupe Mountains Association, 2003) is my personal favorite. Clark Cox (1861-1936) was a professional scene painter for opera and theater. For some time he worked out of New Orleans, then moved to Dallas, at which point he began to make annual pilgrimages to paint landscapes in the Guadalupe Mountains. His strike me as the kind of watercolors Beatrix Potter would have painted, had she ventured so far afield. And having hiked these landscapes myself, these many decades later, I so admire how Cox captured their subtle beauty.

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Paul Cool’s Salt Warriors: Insurgency on the Rio Grande (Texas A & M University Press, 2008) is a major scholarly history of the El Paso Salt War of 1877, a bloody conflict between newly-arrived Anglo businessmen and local Mexican salt harvesters. I had the honor of interviewing the author for this blog back in 2016.

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Mark Santiago’s A Bad Peace and a Good War: Spain and the Mescalero Apache Uprising of 1795-1799 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018) is a superbly researched history of a war that had been, essentially, entirely forgotten. From the catalog copy:

“This book challenges long-accepted historical orthodoxy about relations between the Spanish and the Indians in the borderlands separating what are now Mexico and the United States. While most scholars describe the decades after 1790 as a period of relative peace between the occupying Spaniards and the Apaches, Mark Santiago sees in the Mescalero Apache attacks on the Spanish beginning in 1795 a sustained, widespread, and bloody conflict. He argues that Commandant General Pedro de Nava’s coordinated campaigns against the Mescaleros were the culmination of the Spanish military’s efforts to contain Apache aggression, constituting one of its largest and most sustained operations in northern New Spain. A Bad Peace and a Good War examines the antecedents, tactics, and consequences of the fighting.

“This conflict occurred immediately after the Spanish military had succeeded in making an uneasy peace with portions of all Apache groups. The Mescaleros were the first to break the peace, annihilating two Spanish patrols in August 1795. Galvanized by the loss, Commandant General Nava struggled to determine the extent to which Mescaleros residing in “peace establishments” outside Spanish settlements near El Paso, San Elizario, and Presidio del Norte were involved. Santiago looks at the impact of conflicting Spanish military strategies and increasing demands for fiscal efficiency as a result of Spain’s imperial entanglements. He examines Nava’s yearly invasions of Mescalero territory, his divide-and-rule policy using other Apaches to attack the Mescaleros, and his deportation of prisoners from the frontier, preventing the Mescaleros from redeeming their kin.

“Santiago concludes that the consequences of this war were overwhelmingly negative for Mescaleros and ambiguous for Spaniards. The war’s legacy of bitterness lasted far beyond the end of Spanish rule, and the continued independence of so many Mescaleros and other Apaches in their homeland proved the limits of Spanish military authority. In the words of Viceroy Bernardo de Gálvez, the Spaniards had technically won a ‘good war’ against the Mescaleros and went on to manage a ‘bad peace.'”

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Last but not least of the favorites to mention, is Donald P. McGookey’s Geologic Wonders of West Texas (self-published, second printing, 2007). This is uber-nerdy geology, but essential reading for anything to do with the Guadalupe Mountains, for these are geologic wonders indeed. To quote McGookey, page 70:

“The Guadalupe Mountain rocks are of a very large and long barrier reef, the Capitan Reef. This type of barrier reef is very similar to the present day Great Australian and Belize Barrier Reefs. The continuity of sediments down the slope into the basin facies are the best found anywhere in the world. In places like McKitrick Canyon it is an easy hike from rocks of the top part of the reef to those deposited in the basin. Total relief between the reef and deeper parts of the basin is over 5,000 feet.”

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Finally, two extra-crunchy videos:

Eleanor King’s video “Conflict Archaeology: The Untold History of the Buffalo Soldiers and the Apache in Texas”

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This recent Zoom by archeologist Dr Bryon Schroder is not about the Guadalupe Mountains per se, but about cutting-edge research on paleolithic hunters in the larger Big Bend Region of Far West Texas. I include it here because it gives an overview of peoples who would have also hunted in the Guadalupe Mountains.

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I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.

Selected Cabeza de Vaca Books, Part II: 
Notes on Narrative Histories and Biographies

Journal of Big Bend Studies: “The Secret Book by Francisco I. Madero”

Notes on Artist Xavier González (1898-1993), 
“Moonlight Over the Chisos,” and a Visit to
Mexico City’s Antigua Academia de San Carlos

From the Archives: My Review of Edward H. Miller’s “Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy”

This blog posts on Mondays. This year, 2021, I am dedicating the first Monday of the month to Texas Books, in which I share with you some of the more unusual and interesting books in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my working library. Listen in any time to the related podcast series.

Here we are in the Present Rhinocerosness otherwise known as 2021, in which in the United States we are beginning to see some political realignments of epic proportion; thus, already, Edward H. Miller’s 2015 tome about the Republicans’ Southern Strategy of yore seems like it might have been penned on papyrus. All the same, some knowledge of history, with all its repetitions, rhymes and echos, can be most instructive for those who would speculate about what is to come. Although I object to the title (as I explain in the review), Nut Country is a worthy book I continue to recommend.

This review was originally published in the Washington Review of Books, October 1, 2015

NUT COUNTRY:
RIGHT-WING DALLAS AND THE BIRTH OF THE SOUTHERN STRATEGY
by Edward H. Miller
University of Chicago Press
2015
256 pp.

Reviewed by C.M. Mayo

Whither Texas in the Republican Party’s rise?

In the early 1950s, for most Texas voters, the party of Abraham Lincoln had about as much appeal as Rhode Island barbecue. In the Civil War, Texas, a slave state, had fought for the Confederacy. Reconstruction brought Republican Party-rule, with its emphasis on establishing and protecting rights for freedmen. The backlash from largely ex-Confederate “redeemers” took only a few years to flush the Republicans from power.

Attacking them as “the black man’s party,” these Democrats called for racial solidarity among whites and for rolling back the rights of African-Americans. For decades to come, Jim Crow Texas, like the rest of the South, was controlled by the so-called “yellow dog Democrats,” Democrats who would vote for their party’s candidate, even if he were a yellow dog. Yet by the 1960s, the Republican Party, now espousing conservatism, came roaring back in the Lone Star State.

What happened?

In the South of the 1960s, so the story goes, fiscal conservatives and segregationists were ill-at-ease and even outraged by the policies of liberal Democrats such as President John F. Kennedy and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. The Republican Party’s “Southern Strategy” was to coax those demoralized voters into its fold with an appeal to “states’ rights, lower taxes and less government regulation.”

In Nut Country, Edward H. Miller argues that this process began sooner, in the mid-1950s; not in the South, but the Southwest; that “it was in fact explicitly racial in motivation and application”; that the role of Dallas, a wealthy and growing city at the crossroads between South, West, and North, with “a powerful local conservative movement,” was particularly significant; and that Dallas’ ultraconservatives played a more essential role in the Republican Party’s rise than has been previously recognized.

The book’s title is taken from President Kennedy’s remark to his wife on the morning of his assassination in Dallas: “We’re heading into nut country today.” It is a tactless choice of title, as is its grab-‘em-by-the-collar opening line:

“President Kennedy’s exploded head was a mark of the beast, some said, even during Kennedy’s televised state funeral throughout the long, gray weekend of November 23 to 25, 1963.”

That some Americans entertain ideas bizarre and horrible to others— shall we say, to those of us who would write or read a book of political history published by the University of Chicago Press— is hardly news.

For the record, I was at the University of Chicago, in the cafeteria in Reynold’s Club, on the day President Ronald Reagan was shot, and several of the workers there, otherwise unremarkable denizens of the South Side, were watching the TV with glee, openly wishing he would die. What I mean to say is, however repugnant others’ ideas may seem, to so flippantly label them “nuts” makes their power and origins more, rather than less, opaque. This is my one quibble with this solidly researched, well-argued, and illuminating work.

Among a parade of others, Miller introduces H.L. Hunt, the richest man in the world, whose Facts Forum conflated liberalism with Communism and relished ferreting out Communist conspiracies; Ted Dealey, owner of the Dallas Morning News; John Bircher Gen. Edwin Walker; W.A. Criswell, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas; and Bruce Alger, who was in 1954 elected the first Republican congressman from Dallas since Reconstruction, and who famously protested in the Adolphus Hotel against Lyndon Johnson — then JFK’s running mate — by pumping a placard that read, “LBJ SOLD OUT TO YANKEE SOCIALISTS.”

Despite its title, Nut Country is not only about Dallas’ ultraconservatives: Miller also considers the moderate conservatives in the Republican Party and delineates, episode by episode, how their positions on various issues were molded by their reactions against or alliances with ultraconservatives, on the whole, tilting further right.

By the 1950s, Dallas had a white-collar economy based on oil, aerospace, and financial industries. Its moderate conservatives, already members of (or ripe for the picking by) the Republican Party, included bankers, doctors, lawyers, and businessmen, and, as elsewhere in the United States, a vocal activist contingent influenced by philosopher Ayn Rand and economists such as Friedrich Hayek, championing small government, personal freedom (though not necessarily civil rights), and laissez-faire economics.

The city’s Southern traditionalist conservatism and Protestant evangelical heritage combined — sometimes easily, other times awkwardly — with the more pragmatic conservatism of immigrants from the Midwest. Many of the latter had “grand expectations for the future and good reason for optimism.”

Ultraconservatives, however, braced for cataclysm. Like their Maecenas, H.L. Hunt, many were premillennial dispensationalists; that is, they believed in the literal interpretation of the Bible’s Book of Revelation. They felt they were living in the end times, that the Antichrist would soon appear, or had already (some said he was Kennedy, others the Soviet Union or United Nations; certainly, there was no dearth of candidates), and this would signal the return of Jesus and the rapture, when He would raise the faithful to Heaven, leaving the rest of humanity to suffer the tribulation and the Apocalypse — the complete, final destruction of the world.

For the premillennial dispensationalists, you either believed or you didn’t; you were either saved or lost; you were either with Jesus or with Satan. This binary thinking, coupled with the thrilling conviction that, as Miller puts it, “Satan’s war against Christianity was history’s biggest and most long-standing conspiracy,” translated directly into secular matters — and a preoccupation with conspiracy theories about everything from Communist agents in the White House to the nefarious purposes behind adding fluoride to the water supply.

Whether in disgust or with a chuckle, it would be easy for most academics and the reasonably well-educated to dismiss the ultraconservatives’ ideas. In recent times, these include the Birthers’ claim that President Barack Obama was born in Africa. For scholars, the difficult but fascinating task is to dig down to the roots of such ideas and movements, evaluate their size and form, and identify what, precisely, nourishes them. Toward this end, Nut Country is a Texas-sized achievement.

I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.

Carolyn E. Boyd’s The White Shaman Mural

Q & A: Joseph Hutchison, Poet Laureate of Colorado, on The World As Is

Cal Newport’s Deep Work; Study Hacks Blog, and on Quitting Social Media