Dallas, Texas: Silhouette of A City

Dallas residents proudly call theirs "a man-made town." Few cities can match Dallas for the amount of self-conscious effort that her citizens have invested in making a good image for their town. Consequently the grotesque events of this November in Dallas have a special meaning for Dallas's denizens. More than a sense of national tragedy, they have a sense of civic ire; for Dallas' carefully constructed image has been soiled.

Dallas is a city of promoters--were it otherwise, "Big D" would not have survived the frontier. Dallas began as a log cabin in 1841. Hundreds of miles from the nearest rail transportation and plagued by lack of water, Dallas never deserved to grow into a city. But in the 1870's a group of early Dallas boosters (mostly ex-Confederate colonels from Tennessee bribed the Houston and Texas Central Railroad to come to Dallas. The Texas and Pacific building West, though, wouldn't be bought or persuaded. A crafty state legislator from Dallas tacked a rider onto the railroad's authorization bill that specified Browder Springs as a watering spot. Not knowing that Browder Springs was adjacent to Dallas, the Legislature made the bill law and, unwittingly, the Texas and Pacific came to Dallas.

Nineteenth Century Dallas prospered as both a western and a southern city. On the western edge of the cotton-rich East Texas "Black Belt", Dallas became the largest inland cotton market in the world. And while West Texas cattlemen transacted business in the stockyards of Ft. Worth, their wives travelled thirty miles East to the shops and culture of Dallas. By the first decades of the Twentieth Century, Dallas was undisputed mercantile and cultural capital of the Southwest. To Texans it was "where the East begins."

Oil Capital

The growth of the oil and gas industry continued the trend. Numerous "struck-it-rich" oilmen moved their families to Dallas, far from the refineries of Houston and the oil derrick forests of East and West Texas. As the oilmen sought to stabilize their money, they invested in Dallas real estate, banks, and insurance companies. After Los Angeles and Houston, Dallas was the nation's fastest growing major metropolis between 1950 and 1960. As a result of their experience in promoting Dallas as the site of the 1936 Texas Centennial Celebration, the city's merchants and bankers organized the Dallas Citizens Council (DCC). San Antonio, with the Alamo, and Houston, with nearby San Jacinto Battlefield offered more historic settings for the Centennial, but unhistoric Dallas promised $3,500,000 and well laid-out fair grounds, and won the contract. Through his experience in the venture, banker Robert Lee Thornton felt a need for a permanent group of Dallas businessmen dedicated to the progress of Dallas--"a yes and no committee," he called it.

Sporting the chief executives of all firms employing more than 50 people, the Citizens Council now has over 250 members. Together, these "civic super dads" employ 92 per cent of the city's work force. The most recent--and perhaps, most typical--undertaking of the Council has been the desegregation of Dallas. The DCC realized that the city could be materially damaged by failure to accept federal law peacefully. They attributed the disasters of Little Rock and New Orleans to the abdication of responsibility, by community leadership. If a similar vacuum were created in Dallas, the least respectable elements could destroy the city's good name. A pamphlet warned that "racial violence, and situations which might provide the setting for such violence, must be avoided at all costs in Dallas." Just as they had promoted the railroads and the Centennial in past years, the business men set out to sell law and order in 1961.

Dallas Desegregates

In fine entrepreneurial fashion, the Council hired an advertising agency to aid in the development of the "selling" campaign. It decided to avoid all moral aspects of the problem. "The program confines itself," pamphlets declared "to Federal law, which insists that Dallas schools desegregate. All good citizens must obey the law." Distributed throughout the city were brochures with this message in various forms, and posters of children playing, with the caption "Keep Dallas Safe for Them, Avoid Violence." The agency prepared a film, "Dallas at the Crossroads," every propaganda angle possible--from the birth of a baby to a Boy Scout flag parade. Dallas facilities were desegregated without incident that fall.

MARK L. WINER '64, is a Dallas resident. A social relations concentrator, he is writing an honor thesis on patterns of desegration in southern cities.

In many respects, Dallas is a progressive city--so long as progress coincides with the business interests. But Dallas is best known for its conservatism. Three times Dallasites have returned Republican Congressman Bruce Alger, who votes against everything including the appropriation for the Dallas Federal Building. In 1960, 60 percent of Dallas voted for Nixon, 40 for Kennedy. More significantly a large volume of anti-Catholic literature was circulated. A week before the campaign's close, a sermon by Baptist Minister W. A. Criswell appeared on the front-page of the News; it attacked Catholicism. A number of rightists (including General Edwin Walker and H.L. Hunt) live in Dallas. Oilman Hunt publishes the hate-filled American Mercury, the one-time mouthpiece of H. L. Mencken. In addition, he sponsors the nationally broadcast radio show, Lifeline.

Attacks on Visitors

Perhaps Dallas right-wingers made their biggest splashes with their demonstrations against the Vice-Presidential nominee, Lyndon Johnson, in 1960, and U. N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson a month before President Kennedy's assassination. Led by Congressman Alger, a crowd of 50 pickets met candidate Johnson in the lobby of a Dallas hotel. Several demonstraters jostled both him and Lady Bird, but the nominee declined police aid declaring, "the day hasn't come when me and my Lady can't walk through a Dallas hotel." More recently Ambassador Stevenson confronted Dallas' wild wooly right after a U. N. Day speech to the local United Nations Association. Leaving a standing ovation inside, he found several hundred pickets outside fresh from a "U. S. Day Rally", addressed by General Walker. Before reaching his car, Stevenson was struck by two pickets and spat upon by a third.

In the current issue of the Nation, University of Texas sociologist Reece McGee argues that assassination's occurrence in Texas--particularly in Dallas--was not coincidental. He cites as five reason for his contention:

* The absolute nature of local thought

* The institutionalization of personalized violence

* The proliferation of firearms and the habit of carrying them

* The political respectability of the radical right

* The nonexistence, publically, of a radical left

He concludes, "If there were a climate anywhere in America that permitted assassination to become conceivable, to be defined as something that might in fact be culturally legitimate, that climate existed in Dallas."

Dallas Reacts

Certainly the President's assassination jolted the overwhelming majority of Dallas citizens just as it did the rest of the nation. But the reactions of a few belied the deep strain of callous self interest that resides not far below the city's civic league surface. An audience of 1800 packed the Dallas City Opera the evening after the assassination to to applaud Verdi's Masked Ball. Citizens held indignant meetings to decide what to do about ministers who issued malicious statements about the city. The school board fired--later rehired--the teacher who reported her student's applause at the news of the assassination. And a taxi driver admonished the Boston Herald's George Frazier for leaving Dallas on the morning of Sunday, November 24th. "You might miss some excitement around here. After all, Dallas folks don't take kindly to having their city made to look bad by somebody from Ft. Worth." He wasn't mistaken.

From all reports, the FBI and the Dallas police were well prepared for the President's visit. For the past several years Dallas has been the center of the "Hate Kennedy Cult of Texas." A Republican pamphlet calling for a fund to retire all the Kennedys to rocking chairs in '64 was widely distributed. A couple of days before Kennedy's visit, fliers appeared in down-town Dallas with the President's picture and the caption "wanted for treason." On the morning of November 22nd, a full page advertisement in the News called Kennedy a traitor and a communist.