Six on History: Texas
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GEN. SHERIDAN does not have a very exalted opinion of Texas as a place of resident. Said he lately, “If I owned hell and Texas, I would rent Texas and live at the other place.” In former times, before Texas was “re-annexed,” Texas and the other place were made to stand as opposites. Thus, when Col. Crockett was beaten in his Congressional district, he said to those who defeated him, “You may go to hell, and I’ll go to Tex!” which he did, and found a grave.”
"When Jim Crow was originally established, it spread from state to state like a contagion, each subsequent state taking lessons from the ones before it.
Mississippi was one of the states at the vanguard of the first Jim Crow; Texas may well be at the vanguard of the next. And the oppressive crusade is broader than race. It includes gender and identity.
As The 19th reported last month:
“Texas has introduced the most bills targeting transgender youth in the country, triple the number of any other state. Though none of Texas’ over 40 proposed anti-trans bills have been passed, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has made restricting trans youth’s sports participation a priority for the state’s third special legislative session.”
Texas may not yet be at the vanguard of passing anti-trans bills, but it is at the vanguard of enacting anti-abortion laws.
Last month, the Supreme Court refused to block a Texas law banning most abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy. Many women don’t even know that they are pregnant at six weeks. Furthermore, the law allows for individuals, with no personal stake in the pregnancy, to sue medical personnel and even drivers who help a woman obtain an abortion in violation of the law and, if successful, win $10,000. It creates abortion bounty hunters.
Abbott has also signed a bill barring medical personnel from providing abortion-inducing drugs to women who are more than seven weeks pregnant.
Then there is another major issue: voting rights and voter power.
The state didn’t stop there. Texas stands to gain two new congressional seats because its population grew, according to the latest census. And although 95 percent of that growth was due to people of color, the Republican-led Legislature is working on new maps that would increase the power of white Republicans in the state and reduce the power of people of color.
According to an analysis by The Texas Tribune published last week, although white Texans are only about 40 percent of the state’s population, “In the initial map for the Texas House, the majority of eligible voters (known in the redistricting and census data as the Citizen Voting Age Population) in 59.3 percent of the districts are white.”
Furthermore, according to The Tribune, “In the proposed Senate map, 64.5 percent of the districts have white majorities,” and “white Texans make up the majority of eligible voters in 60.5 percent of the proposed congressional districts.”
How else to describe this other than racist gerrymandering? This is an attempt to lock in white dominance and control even after white people no longer have a numerical advantage.
"On Thursday evening, two Texas writers, Chris Tomlinson and Bryan Burrough, were supposed to give a talk at the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin about Forget the Alamo, a new book they co-authored with Jason Stanford. The book, which sets out to dispel the myths of the Republic of Texas’ founding, has already made waves—it makes a persuasive case, for instance, that the state’s much-hyped acquisition of Alamo-related artifacts from the musician Phil Collins was actually just a bill of goods.
Hosting an event with the authors of a buzzy new book about the state’s famous but fraught symbol is what you’d expect a museum such as the Bullock to do. But a few hours before the talk was to begin, Tomlinson announced that the event had been cancelled—in the fullest sense of the word.
As Tomlinson explained it, the museum had been instructed by its board—which includes Texas’ Republican governor, lieutenant governor, and speaker of the house—to pull the plug. “I think we’re being censored,” he told the San Antonio Express-News. On Friday, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, confirmed in a tweet that yes, that was exactly what happened.
The authors of “Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth,” had planned...
This kind of censorship would be infuriating anywhere, but it’s particularly grating to see it happen the way it did, at a place like the Bullock, which in recent years has hosted significant work challenging the state’s core myths. When the museum first opened, as University of Texas historian Monica Muñoz Martinez recounted in her book, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas, it was criticized by historians for the way it repackaged the sanitized pseudo-history of Anglo Texas.
But by 2016, the institution had improved enough that it played host to a fairly remarkable exhibit—“Life and Death on the Border, 1910–1920.” The installation, which Martinez helped plan as part of a group of historians and activists called “Refusing to Forget,” told the story of state violence inflicted on people of Mexican descent in Texas in the early 20th century—a contrast to the hagiography with which state organs have talked about the Texas Rangers in the past.
Under the pretext of combating “wokeness,” American politicians are embarking on campaigns of state-sanctioned censorship.One of the items displayed at the exhibit was an original copy of the 1919 investigation into the Rangers’ abuses by the Texas Legislature’s only Mexian-American lawmaker—the transcripts of which had gone unpublished for nearly a century. A few years later, the Bullock hosted a conference on the hearings themselves, at which high school students performed scenes from the proceedings. The Bullock has shown, in other words, the power of public history in elevating stories and facts that in some cases were deliberately suppressed by the state."
The authors of “Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth,” had planned...
This kind of censorship would be infuriating anywhere, but it’s particularly grating to see it happen the way it did, at a place like the Bullock, which in recent years has hosted significant work challenging the state’s core myths. When the museum first opened, as University of Texas historian Monica Muñoz Martinez recounted in her book, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas, it was criticized by historians for the way it repackaged the sanitized pseudo-history of Anglo Texas.
But by 2016, the institution had improved enough that it played host to a fairly remarkable exhibit—“Life and Death on the Border, 1910–1920.” The installation, which Martinez helped plan as part of a group of historians and activists called “Refusing to Forget,” told the story of state violence inflicted on people of Mexican descent in Texas in the early 20th century—a contrast to the hagiography with which state organs have talked about the Texas Rangers in the past.
Under the pretext of combating “wokeness,” American politicians are embarking on campaigns of state-sanctioned censorship.One of the items displayed at the exhibit was an original copy of the 1919 investigation into the Rangers’ abuses by the Texas Legislature’s only Mexian-American lawmaker—the transcripts of which had gone unpublished for nearly a century. A few years later, the Bullock hosted a conference on the hearings themselves, at which high school students performed scenes from the proceedings. The Bullock has shown, in other words, the power of public history in elevating stories and facts that in some cases were deliberately suppressed by the state.
But Texas conservatives—like conservatives across the country—are in the midst of a moral panic about the teaching of “critical race theory.” Patrick has praised efforts to ban CRT (whatever it actually means) from public schools. And in this world, a book that challenges long-held myths about the state’s origins—and points out how the state government itself got bamboozled—simply cannot be allowed.
This is the reality of the recent CRT “debate.” Under the pretext of combating “wokeness,” American politicians are embarking on a campaign of state-sanctioned censorship. It doesn’t get any more deliberate than this: a lieutenant governor ordering a state museum to block the authors of a book he doesn’t like from appearing, not because there is anything really wrong about the book, but because he’s threatened by what’s right about it. As with many debates over free speech, the urgency state actors feel in suppressing an idea is the greatest testament to the importance and power of that idea.
It is tempting to discuss these things in terms of hypocrisy—because it sure does seem hypocritical to complain about liberal censorship and cancel culture while literally cancelling a book you don’t like. But what Patrick is doing, and what plenty of others have done or aspire to during this fight and the many many incarnations of it that came before, is not really that. The vast gulf between what Patrick wants for his side and what he wants for others is the essence of the politics. It’s not supposed to be fair. The point of the CRT backlash—much like the point of the Alamo myth, a fable about why the white men who fought Mexicans in order to enslave Black people were Actually Good—is about preserving a longstanding belief in who the country belongs to.
Anyway, you can buy the Alamo book here."
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Jason Stanford is the Austin-based writer of the Substack newsletter the Experiment and the co-author, with Bryan Burrough and Chris Tomlinson, of “Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth.”
"With more than 300 RSVPs, the event hosted by the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin was shaping up to be the highlight of our virtual book tour for “Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth.” But about four hours before showtime last Thursday, my co-authors, Bryan Burrough and Chris Tomlinson, and I received an email from our publisher. The Bullock had backed out, citing “increased pressure on social media.” Apparently, the state history museum was no place to discuss state history.
“As a member of the Preservation Board, I told staff to cancel this event as soon as I found out about it,” tweeted Patrick, adding, “This fact-free rewriting of TX history has no place @BullockMuseum.”
Minor umbrage compels me to defend the book as well as the museum, which currently is hosting a Jim Crow exhibition. As The Post noted in its review of our book, we “challenge the traditional view” of the Alamo saga, one popularized by Disney and John Wayne and cemented by politicians in the Texas school curriculum.
The Heroic Anglo Narrative is that in 1836, about 200 Texians (as White settlers were known, to distinguish them from Tejanos) fought a doomed battle at a Spanish mission in San Antonio against thousands of Mexican troops, buying Gen. Sam Houston enough time to defeat tyranny in the form of Mexican ruler Santa Anna and win freedom for Texas. The myth leaves much out, most notably that Texians opposed Mexican laws that would free the enslaved workers they needed to farm cotton.
Politicians barricading the figurative doors of the Alamo in defense of the myth are nothing new. In 2018, a panel reviewing the state history curriculum suggested not requiring seventh-graders to learn that those who died at the Alamo were “heroic.” Republican state political leaders, including Sen. Ted Cruz and Land Commissioner George P. Bush — the nephew and grandson of presidents and the state officeholder with oversight of the historic site — reacted as if the Alamo were once again besieged.
“Stop political correctness in our schools,” tweeted the state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott. “Of course Texas schoolchildren should be taught that Alamo defenders were ‘Heroic’!”
In the past few years, the boogeyman for these self-appointed defenders of ersatz history has evolved from a generalized “political correctness” to the New York Times’s 1619 Project and other efforts to center slavery and the role of racism in the American story. More than 20 states have introduced or passed legislation that attempts to prescribe how racial matters can be taught. In Texas last month, Abbott signed into law an act establishing a committee called the 1836 Project (get it?) to “promote patriotic education.”
Texas conservatives continue to appear quite exercised about the possibility of public-school students learning more about slavery and racism. So much so that Abbott has added further discussion about a ban on the teaching of critical race theory to the agenda for an upcoming special legislative session.
This is the political flotsam in which our virtual book event was snagged. A couple of days before the scheduled talk, the head of a right-wing think tank in Austin took to Twitter to attack the Bullock Museum for using public resources to provide a platform for our “trashy non-history book,” taking care to tag the governor, lieutenant governor and house speaker. They sit on the State Preservation Board, which oversees the museum.
I’ll leave it to First Amendment scholars to say whether forbidding a state facility to host a conversation because of the contents of a book constitutes censorship. As a Texan, I’m just embarrassed to be governed by politicians who quaver at the prospect of a single uncomfortable conversation. If Texans were tough enough to fight at the Alamo, they should be tough enough to talk about why."
