Sunbelt Texas, 1945-1965 (Dallas, Fort Worth, and San Antonio)

As in all posts of this series, I am grappling with a set of interconnected questions, all aimed at analyzing why three Sunbelt states (Arizona, Texas, and Florida) have become so important in American life, from the mid-20th century to today. I have already covered Phoenix’s spectacular growth within Arizona, and I have now turned my attention to the cities of Texas, currently the fastest growing state. Why have so many people been moving to these cities (now some of the largest in the nation)? Secondly, what has been the consequences (economic, social, political, and environmental) of the growth, both at the state level and for each individual city? Thirdly- who has benefited, and who has not?

Each of Texas’s four largest cities has a distinctive past, economy, and identity. Last time I talked about the state as a whole, from World War II to the mid-Sixties, and about Houston (traditionally the “oil town” on the flat Gulf coast). In this post, I will talk about Ft. Worth (“Cowtown”), San Antonio (“Military City”), and Dallas (which has stood out as a city without such a slogan or single economic focus).

Dallas and Fort Worth sit close together (roughly 30 miles apart) in the far north of Texas, about 70 miles south of the Oklahoma border. Ecologically, they each sit on boundaries. Fort Worth straddles the border between the Cross Timbers (a long narrow band of forest) and the southern edge of the Great Plains, originally one of the world’s largest grasslands, which extends from Texas north all the way to the Prairie Provinces of Canada (Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta), the original core range of what was once the continent’s most numerous large mammal, the American bison. Dallas sits astride the border between the Cross Timbers and the East Texas forests, originally longleaf pine (part of an ecosystem that originally extended clear across the Southeast and as far north as southern Virginia). Both are in the same watershed, on headwater forks of the Trinity River (the longest river within Texas), which flows from their sites for 250 miles down to the Gulf of Mexico. Both are between 500 to 800 feet above sea level, and have a climate of hot summers and mild winters; the chief natural hazard has been tornadoes.

Historically, both cities were founded by the “Anglo” (Americans of Western European origin) settlers who came (many with slaves), at first by invitation, to what was by then a Mexican province, from the 1820s on. Those settlers, in alliance with local Hispanics (Tejanos), rebelled successfully against Mexico in 1835, creating the independent Republic of Texas (annexed by the U.S. in 1845). Dallas was founded first, as a small trading post, in 1841, and incorporated first, in 1856. Its founders hoped that it would grow at the head of ship traffic from the sea up and down the Trinity River- a dream that lasted all the way to the 1970s. In practice, only small steamers could make it up and down the river (railroads would be much more practical). Instead the town developed as a hub for trade in a wide variety of resources, including cotton, such that it was the largest city in the state up to 1930 (when it was surpassed by Houston).

Map of Trinity River Basin, Texas (from Wikipedia)

Though only a short distance away, Fort Worth has always had a different trajectory. It was initially an Army post (1849-53), one of a set created to protect Anglo settlers in Texas from constant bloody raids by the Comanche people of the Southern Plains. Though the Army soon left, a small group of civilians did not. The town got its real start just after the Civil War, in the late 1860s, from its location on a branch of the Chisholm Trail (a major route for ranchers to drive their longhorn cattle from Texas up to the national railroad network in Kansas, where they were shipped to Chicago as the nation’s beef supply). The cowboys who did that arduous trip, up to the early 1880’s, stopped in Fort Worth for supplies and recreation (creating the notorious vice neighborhood known as “Hell’s Half Acre”).

Both cities were greatly influenced by the arrival of the railroad- in Dallas in 1872, and in Fort Worth in 1876. Dallas got an important early advantage in becoming a rail crossroads (north-south and east-west) in 1873, growing to 10,000 by 1880. Soon it had access to the latest national technologies, such as electricity and telephones. It got another big boost when it became the site of the massive annual State Fair in 1886 (still going strong today). As in all features of the Jim Crow South of the time, the Fair was segregated (allowing just one day as “Colored People’s Day” for Black visitors, up to the 1960s!).

As Dallas, now the wholesale market for the whole Southwest, was building its first upscale neighborhood (Oak Cliff), Fort Worth was taking its next big step in its cattle industry, opening in 1887 the third largest stockyards in the nation (behind only Chicago and Kansas City) for gathering the cattle for shipment by rail. The town did try to build a showcase to rival Dallas’s State Fair, in the form of a grand oriental-style building containing many kinds of agricultural displays (the Spring Palace, 1889-90), but, sadly, it burned down and was never replaced. Instead, Fort Worth created in 1896 the annual Stock Show, which, besides its cattle competition, would help to introduce to the nation the (risky and very popular) Western sport of the rodeo (calf-roping, bull riding, etc., also still held annually). Fifty million people tuned into the first TV broadcast of the Stock Show in 1958! Fort Worth's last brush with the mythology of the Wild West came with a brief visit by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1900 (the gang posed for a famous photo, before going on to their spectacular end, as shown in the movie, in a shootout in Bolivia). But, to grow, Fort Worth still needed, not just spectacles, but a business that would bring in jobs by the thousands.

That business arrived thanks to a historic deal in 1901. Two of the nation’s largest meatpackers, Chicago-based Armour and Swift, were lured to Fort Worth by a $50,000 bonus for each company from the townspeople, plus land and infrastructure. As a result, by 1903, the companies created the region’s first large industry (initially in its own separate company town, Niles City), which earned $6 million in its first month alone! Thousands of immigrants poured in (initially European, such as Greeks, and later Black) for the abundant jobs. Fort Worth soon had its first millionaires. Dallas, being downstream of the meatpackers, was not pleased, as the Trinity River was soon carrying loathsome waste in its direction!

Fort Worth’s boom also drew in, by 1905, its most important 20th century personality: Amon Carter, Sr. Carter quickly came to own the town’s major newspaper (the Star-Telegram, with its enduring masthead slogan, “Where the West Begins”), which he made into one of the biggest into the state; he would go on to found the city’s first radio and TV stations. Carter, good friends with Franklin Roosevelt and Will Rogers, the top comedian of the day, would spend the rest of his life seeking to expand the city’s wealth as well as his own, especially at the expense of Dallas. His one-man rivalry bordered on the obsessive (he refused to eat Dallas food- if he went there for business, he brought a bag lunch!). Meantime, Dallas suffered one of the biggest crises in its history, when in 1908 the Trinity River overflowed, knocking out power, telephones, and rail service for three days, while thousands of drowned and rotting cattle were caught in treetops. The city invested belatedly in a major engineering project (moving the river three miles to the west!) to ensure that downtown was never underwater again. Both cities, from 1910 on, saw their Mexican populations growing for the first time (from refugees from the long and bloody Mexican Revolution). Dallas chose to hire a master city planner, George Kessler, who in 1911 proposed a central train station, a central plaza (Dealey, where Kennedy would be killed in 1963), parks, and other grand features, many of which would not be built due to cost. Dallas got another big boost when it was chosen, in 1914, as the site of one of the Federal Reserve Bank’s branches.

Fort Worth Star-Telegram Collection, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries. Amon G. Carter, Sr. dressed in Western wear. n.d. UTA Libraries Digital Gallery, https://library.uta.edu/digitalgallery/img/20085483. Accessed

31 Jan 2024

Both cities boomed throughout the 1910s and through the Roaring Twenties; Fort Worth also benefited from an oil strike nearby, and both gained by the massive East Texas oil strike in 1930. Dallas had a street of lavish “movie palaces”, second only to Broadway, while Fort Worth added other livestock to its main business, including supplying countless horses and mules to the Allied nations in World War I. Each city developed its own famous department store: Leonard’s in Fort Worth (which took up 6 blocks, and made its own ice cream), and Neiman Marcus in Dallas. Fort Worth gave birth to “7-Eleven” stores, while Dallas produced the classic “Stetson”-style Resistol hats. Both cities steadily absorbed their growing suburbs, becoming much larger, decade by decade, in land areas. Dallas developed its own large city-owned airport (Love Field), and first large-scale shopping centers (Highland Park Village). Very little of this wealth, though, found its way to the growing Black populations, especially in Dallas, where most lived in overcrowded shantytowns. As still continues today, polluting industries (such as a lead smelter that contaminated part of Dallas for decades) were placed in nonwhite neighborhoods. They were also the ones to be bulldozed for major highway construction.

As I described for Phoenix, rapid growth also meant political upheaval. In Dallas, as in Phoenix, a group of the wealthiest businessmen organized (in this case as the “Citizens Charter Association” or “CCA”) in the 1930s, and gained long-term control of the city’s politics. The city shifted to being run by a professional manager, but the council seats were all chosen on an “at-large” system (meaning that city areas, including nonwhite, did not have their own local representation). Candidates had to have the money to wage city-wide campaigns, and that cost only grew as the city did (hence the CCA’s dominance). 

Dallas, thanks to its wealthy rulers (who raised $3.5 million for the effort), was able to beat out other Texas cities for one of the biggest financial prizes of the state’s history, the Centennial Exposition in 1936. It marked 100 years since Texas’s independence, and required massive construction (Fair Park, more than 50 buildings, for $25 million), in the midst of the Depression. Its wide range of attractions and exhibits included a “Hall of Negro Life”, visited by 400,000 (but also the first building demolished after the Exposition!). The Exposition as a whole drew in 10 million visitors, giving Dallas (nicknamed “Big “D”) a permanent reputation boost. Not surprisingly, Amon Carter in Fort Worth was filled with jealousy, and he put on a rival show (the Frontier Centennial), with the slogan “Dallas for education. Fort Worth for fun.”!

During World War II, both cities boomed, like most in the country, from war production, though they did not have large bases nearby (Fort Worth did have an Army airfield). The Fort Worth Stockyards had their best year ever in 1944, but then declines swiftly (as animals were raised on smaller feedlots and were moved by trucks instead of railcars). The end of the war in 1945 would mean new types of economies for each city.

That postwar shift got started in spectacular fashion, when a major military aircraft manufacturer, Chance Vought, decided in 1948 to move its entire plant, piece by piece (27 million pounds!), with all of its 1,300 workers, over 1600 miles from Connecticut to Grand Prairie (halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth). It was the largest such industrial move in U.S. history to that time, and marked a move into aviation and related technology that continues to today. As mentioned in the previous Texas post, though, further growth was held back by a severe state-wide drought (1949-57), that hit Dallas particularly hard (much like the hotter and drier conditions it has had since 2011). Paradoxically, this is when Fort Worth had its worst flood, in May 1949 (with a tenth under water). In 1950, Dallas ranked #22 nationally in population (434,000); Fort Worth had 361,000.

The next big economic leap for Dallas had global impact. The growing aviation industry (including the arrival of Bell Helicopter production from Buffalo), as well as oil technology, had led to the arrival of the first major electronics companies, especially Texas Instruments, in 1951. TI developed the world’s first mass production of transistors (making radios portable for the first time!). But its big breakthrough came in 1958, when a young engineer, Jack Kilby, was given the task of designing the next level of computer technology. He told his boss his idea of embedding the circuits in tiny wafers of silicon, which he called the Integrated Circuit (IC)- the basis of all computers today (it was independently invented by Philip Noyce in California, in what would be called “Silicon Valley”- they would share a Nobel Prize!). Overnight Texas Instruments was at the cutting edge of world electronics (Kilby would go on to make the first successful hand-held calculator in 1967). That electronics would find immediate use in guided missiles and in the new space program (I’ve told the story of Houston’s Space Center in the last post).

Late in his life, Jack Kilby holds his first integrated circuit, which is encased in plastic. Photo via Texas Instruments (https://earthsky.org/human-world/this-date-in-science-microchip-patent/)

At the same time, Dallas was getting a national political reputation as the hub for far-right Christian conservatism (I recommend the book “Nut Country”!). Its politicians and leading Protestant minister strongly opposed the civil rights movement and saw the new young Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, as weak on Communism (the state supported him very narrowly over the Republican, Nixon, in the 1960 election). Texas was still controlled by the Democratic Party, but that party was split by now, with a conservative and moderate majority (represented by Vice President Lyndon Johnson and Gov. John Connally), and a liberal minority (represented by Sen. Ralph Yarborough). It was to heal that split (before running for reelection) that led Kennedy to visit the state in Nov. 1963, stopping briefly in each of the major cities before coming to Dallas, with all of these politicians, by the afternoon of the 22nd. His assassination, as his motorcade passed through downtown, horrified the nation and the world, and caused a widespread revulsion toward Dallas (which got named “the City of Hate”!). 

The city responded by electing the founder of Texas Instruments, J. Erik Jonsson, as its moderate Republican mayor. Jonsson aimed to refocus attention on economic growth- renovating Fair Park and building a new City Hall. Dallas also opened the largest and most lavish shopping mall in the nation, NorthPark, in 1965. Further boosts came from the big success of the city’s NFL team, the Dallas Cowboys, and from a visit by the Beatles in 1964! Meantime, Fort Worth was reinventing itself too, as its meatpacking mainstay disappeared, as a cultural capital. Amon Carter died in 1955, leaving his Western art collection to become the city’s first landmark art museum, which would be followed by another, created by oilman Kay Kimbell’s Old Masters collection (opened in 1972). By 1965, Dallas and Fort Worth had effectively become one metropolitan area, with 1.7 million people!

Now- on to San Antonio. It has a relatively simple story for this time period. First- some basics. It’s the southernmost of Texas’s (currently) largest cities (about 150 miles from Mexico). As with the other cities, it has a river (with the same name- due to the Spanish habit of naming places for the saint’s day they first visited!)- a relatively small one. It sits at the edge of the Balcones Escarpment, relatively high (660 feet) above the flat coastal plain (where Houston sits, just under 200 miles to its east).  Austin, its closest major Texas neighbor, is 75 miles to the north. That geological Escarpment boundary produced the set of large limestone springs that has drawn people to the area for many thousands of years, all the way back to the first humans (the “Paleo-Indians”). San Antonio is the only one of the four major cities with a colonial history (first visited by the Spanish in 1691, when they were seeking to head off a rival French colonization attempt). It started as a single mission (San Antonio de Valero- now far better known as “the Alamo”!) in 1718 (the same year that the French were founding their colonial city far to the northeast, New Orleans). During the 1700s, four other missions were relocated (due to Native American attacks) to the area; a fort (presidio) was founded; a governor (for the vast frontier province of “Tejas”) took up residence; and a network of 7 irrigation canals (“acequias”) were built (much like the far more ancient canals on the site of Phoenix). For generations, San Antonio stood out as the only settlement of any real size in the whole region (if about 2,000 counts!). 

The town was famously at the center of the Texas Revolution of 1835-36, when the Alamo compound was fortified (quite foolishly!)by a small group of American settlers, including legends like William Travis, Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett, to hold off a Mexican army of thousands, led by dictator Jose Lopez de Santa Anna. Those Anglo Texans, with some Hispanic allies, exacted a high price in Mexican lives over 13 days, only to be overwhelmed and wiped out. Santa Anna ordered the execution of the male survivors. When the main Texan army won its decisive victory at San Jacinto soon after (over by present Houston), Gen. Houston captured Santa Anna, Texas became independent, and the Alamo story became Texas’s cherished myth. The town began to grow rapidly (to over 8,000 by 1850), as more American settlers came, and the Anglos systematically displaced the Hispanic elite, seizing their land and wealth. The American military used the town to store essential supplies (first in the Alamo, and then in a U.S. Arsenal). But the town grew far more slowly than Dallas or Houston, mainly because it was the last to be connected by railroad (not until 1877). That happened just in time, as the Army, looking for a more sensible location for transportation, was preparing to leave town!

Fast forward to 1910. By then, the Army has not just stayed, but has built Fort Sam Houston on the outskirts (today part of a set of large bases called “Joint Base San Antonio”). In turn that fort has become, in a set of impressive buildings, the headquarters of the Southern Department, and the largest Army base in the U.S.! That military link, socially, politically and economically, has shaped San Antonio ever since. When the Army has grown, during border tensions and wars, the city has grown too. As with other Texas cities, it developed a strict racial power structure and residential segregation in the 20th century: Anglos in charge, dominating downtown and moving northward; Mexicans in barrio neighborhoods on the West Side (of the small San Pedro Creek) and to the south; Blacks in their own area on the east side (see the map in Krochmal 146). Tourism soon became a significant draw, as the Alamo was taken over by the state and its story became a staple for its schoolchildren. A second major tourist draw has been the Riverwalk, a uniquely attractive landscaped park along the San Antonio River (completed by 1941, as part of a response to a disastrous 1921 flood). Thanks to the military, the city for a long time had the largest gambling and prostitution area in the state (with its own 1912 guidebook!). In terms of an annual draw, San Antonio’s answer to Dallas’s State Fair has, since 1891, been the grand, and now very diverse, “Battle of Flowers” parade (watched by 350,000 at last count!).

Today's Riverwalk (the umbrellas mark Casa Rio, a restaurant founded in 1946)- by Daniel J. Simanek, from Wikipedia

Modern San Antonio emerged in the aftermath of World War II, when the brothels were shut down (1941). At that point the old political machine, which had gained Black votes by providing city jobs and basic services (while neglecting the Mexican area, which had the highest mortality in the state), came to an end. In a familiar pattern, a small set of wealthy Anglo businessmen got a major change in the town charter in 1955, and for the next 16 years, as the “Good Government League,” ran the city with no serious opposition. The only major exception to Anglo rule in this period was the rise of San Antonio’s own Henry Gonzalez, one of the first Mexicans on the City Council, and then elected as a Democrat in 1962 (until 1991!), to the U.S. House, where he would become revered for his decades of fighting for better housing in the city.

Since then, the military presence has kept expanding (Randolph, Brooks, Kelly, and Lackland Air Force Bases; nowadays the overall Joint Base houses over 250,000!). Meantime older employers (the Stock Yards and the railroads) were replaced by freeways, high-rises, and a limited set of non-military employers (Joske’s, the main department store; USAA, the nation’s top insurer for military people; etc.). The city’s main claim to fame up to the mid-‘60s was the Brooks Army Medical Center, the nation’s chief research site for investigation of what is now called PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), and, through its school of aviation medicine, of the health effects of air combat and of space travel on humans. Thanks in part to the GGL’s policy of annexing suburbs almost as fast as they were built, by 1965 San Antonio had expanded to 110 square miles, with over 700,000 people (17th in national size, but falling well behind Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston in growth). Its long-standing residential segregation remained mostly intact. As with all the Sunbelt cities, it would, from the late ‘60s, have to face a declining downtown and demands for greater diversity and equity in its politics.

That’s it for this installment! By 1965, thanks to aviation, electronics, and the military, the Texas cities were primed for even greater growth and national prominence. Next time, I will cover Florida’s rapid growth, with tourism replacing agriculture, from the end of World War II to the opening of Disney World in 1971 (including the disastrous damage to one of the world’s great wetland ecosystems, the Everglades). After that, I’ll be concluding this series, by looking at what has happened, economically and politically, in Arizona, Texas, and Florida, in recent decades, and today’s environmental challenges for all three.

Resources:

Behnken, Bruce. “Fighting Their Own Battles: Mexican Americans, African Americans, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Texas.” (2014)

Campbell, Randolph B. “Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State.” (2003)

Cunningham, Sean. “Cowboy Conservatism: Texas and the Rise of the Modern Right.” (2010)

Gibson, Carrie. “El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America.” (2019)

“Handbook of Texas” (multiple authors and entries- tshaonline.org)

"hometown". Various blog posts (hometownbyhandlebar.com). Very helpful series on Fort Worth history.

J.S. “A Bombing Victim Recalls the Nightmare,” dmagazine.com (Mar. 1, 1987)

Krochmal, Max. “Blue Texas: The Making of a Multiracial Democratic Coalition in the Civil Rights Era.” (2016)

McCarthy, Meghan. "Article 2: A History of Urban Renewal in San Antonio." (https://sites.utexas.edu/planningforum/article-2-a-history-of-urban-renewal-in-san-antonio/)

McCullar, Emily. “Juanita Craft Helped Integrate the Texas State Fair—And Inspired the Next Generation of Civil Rights Activists,” texasmonthly.com, Apr. 19, 2021.

Miller, Edward H. “Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy.” (2015)

Minutaglio, Bill. “A Single Star and Bloody Knuckles: A History of Politics and Race in Texas.” (2021)

Peeler, Tom. "50 Events That Shaped Dallas and Fort Worth," drmagazine.com, July 1, 1998.

Reid, T.R. "The Texas Edison," texasmonthly.com, July 1982 (Jack Kilby)

Selcer, Richard. "Fort Worth, Texas, Where the West and the South Meet: A Brief History of the City's African American Community, 1849-2012," blackpast.org, Aug. 1, 2012.

Simek, Peter. "The Long, Troubled, and Often Bizarre History of the State Fair of Texas," drmagazine.com, Sept. 26, 2019.

Wikipedia.org. Multiple authors and entries.