Apparently there was little question that Texas was a southern state up until about 100 years ago when business leaders wanted to distance the state from groups like the KKK.
Re branding the state as being full of freedom loving cowboys was more attractive than being seen as being full of racists who missed slavery and the plantation system.
Two related stories:
- Is Texas Southern, Western, or Truly a Lone Star?
Re branding the state as being full of freedom loving cowboys was more attractive than being seen as being full of racists who missed slavery and the plantation system.
Two related stories:
- Is Texas Southern, Western, or Truly a Lone Star?
“I don’t think anyone much questioned Texas’s essential Southernness until the twentieth century,” says Dr. Gregg Cantrell, Texas history chair at TCU, past president of the Texas State Historical Association, and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. “And they started doing so as a way of distancing themselves from the late unpleasantness of the 1860’s and 1870’s. Defeat, military occupation, Jim Crow and lynching, and all of those unpleasant things that are very much a part of Texas history as a Southern state, were things that a lot of Texans would probably just as soon not talk about a lot.”
Nationally, Dixie was stigmatized as a backward, ignorant, and violent hotbed of the Ku Klux Klan and religious hypocrisy. Why remain linked to all that baggage? Why not, forward-looking Texans began to think, align with the West instead? Back then, and to a certain degree today, the West was seen as optimistic, the place of second chances, the land of the golden tomorrow, a stark contrast when compared to Dixie’s melancholy and tragic yesterdays. So Texas’s politicians, educators, and ad-men went to work, Cantrell says, and have since all but totally recast the very ideal of what it means to be a Texan.
“And so what do you do? You play up the frontier, you play up the Texas Revolution and the Alamo, you play up the (in reality not-very-glorious) ten years of the Texas Republic, and then you talk about the Indian Wars and the cattle drives, all culminating in Spindletop and the discovery of oil,” he says. “All of these things made Texas seem like anything but a Southern state.”
- How Fort Worth and Texas seceded from the South, or did we?
. . . take the slogan that remains on our front page: “Where the West Begins.”
That slogan was first added to founder Amon G. Carter’sStar-Telegram on Aug. 15, 1923.
That summer, the 1920s rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan had staged two robed and hooded parades in Fort Worth, one described as 25 blocks long.
Business leaders across Texas wanted desperately to promote the state to investors and customers from the North. But tens of thousands of white Texans wanted to revert to a racist, nativist “Invisible Empire” that used vigilante attacks to intimidate black Texans, immigrants and everyone except white Protestant prohibitionists.
