Texas Almanac, 1990-1991 Page: 459
611 p. : col. ill., maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this book.
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CULTURE 459
subjects. At the same time, Dobie began teaching a
popular course at the University of Texas at Austin
called "Life and Literature of the Southwest." One sto-
ry holds that Dobie first suggested a course on the liter-
ature of the Southwest, only to be told that there was no
such thing, that there was no Southwest literature.
"Then call it 'Life and Literature of the Southwest,'"
Dobie argued. "I know there is plenty of life here."
Webb, a historian at the University of Texas, also in
1931 published The Great Plains, which became a stan-
dard history text and which won national awards. Lat-
er, Webb wrote The Texas Rangers, a history of the
legendary organization. Dobie and Webb became lively
public figures in Texas, championing intellectual en-
deavors. Both were respected and considered natural
resources.
In the early 1950s, they were joined by a close
friend, Roy Bedichek, who wrote Adventures with a Tex-
as Naturalist, to become known as triumvirate of Texas
letters.
While today the quality of the work of the three is
debated, the value of it is not. Through their writings
and through the force of their personalities, they legiti-
matized intellectual life in Texas.
Dobie particularly, though he wrote no fiction,
showed young writers that there were indeed things in
Texas that could and should be written about. Dobie
made it seem possible, Pilkington asserts, to turn the
Texas experience into literature, as did Webb and Be-
dichek.
Dobie also was instrumental in establishing the
Texas Institute of Letters in 1936 to promote and honor
literary works on the state or by Texas writers.
Although the TIL has been embroiled in controversies
over the years, it has been successful. No other state
has such a literary institution.
All three of the men were dead by 1963, ending an
era in the development of Texas literature. They left
many young Texas writers with broader horizons and
higher ambitions. But they, along with the Western, also
left a large misconception about the state's literature
that endures until this day.
The Southern Tradition
While Dobie, Webb and Bedichek provided inspira-
tion for young writers and brought attention to Texas,
their work, in addition to the Westerns, also obscured
one aspect of Texas literature: Despite the romance of
the cattle industry and the cowboy, Texas' literature
until World War II was firmly fixed in the Southern tra-
dition, not Western.
The Southern tradition, while it is preoccupied with
history, place and family, did not develop a romantic
folk hero. Texas' economy from the days of the Repub-
lic until the 1920s was firmly based on the toil and sweat
of the cotton farmer, not the cowboy or the oil-field
worker. Indeed, until well into the 20th century, annual
cotton income exceeded even that of oil, and it was not
until the middle of the century that livestock values sur-
passed cotton. Hoeing and picking cotton hardly com-
pared with stirring cattle drives and Indian fights as
literary fare, however.
The Southern literary tradition was ingrained in
Texans from the beginning. Texas was settled by South-
erners, particularly after the Civil War when thousands
migrated from the ravaged heartland of the Old South.
Two different cultures that shared common features
were represented: the Upper and the Lower South.
Upper Southerners tended to migrate from the Bor-
der States of Kentucky and Tennessee. They basically
were non-slave holding yeoman farmers. Following es-
tablished tradition, they settled land, cleared and
farmed it, and within a few years moved on. Most
farmed the land for their own food and sold any surplus.
With the advent of commercial agriculture, their lot de-
teriorated, and most were poor, suffering from the
whims of weather and man alike.
From the Lower South th came the more aristocratic
plantation owners before the Civil War. This slave hold-
ing class was more affluent and wielded considerable
more political power than its numbers. According to
one study, for example, in 1860, slave holders consti-
tuted 27.3 percent of Texas' population but provided
68.3 percent of the political leaders.
After the Civil War, the South had to develop a new
labor system acceptable to blacks and whites to replace
the slavery. What evolved in Texas and elsewhere was
the sharecrop and crop-lien systems. Former land-own-
ing farmers or slaves either worked land owned by an-
other for a portion of the harvest, or they borrowed
money from local merchants for supplies and neces-J. FRANK DOBIE
sities and repaid the loans, if harvests and the markets
were good.
Cotton was the leading cash crop in the state even
before the Civil War, and afterward Texas became one
of the leading cotton-producing areas in the world. The
result was an economy as highly dependent on good
cotton crops as it later became tied to oil. Lenders
insisted that farmers grow cotton because even with
bad weather, some crop could be made. When a small
farmer became mired in debt, as many did, the option
of diversifying crops was lost. This dependence on
cotton worked against the best interest of the small
farmer, for when crops were good, the market became
glutted with cotton and prices dropped. When crops
were poor, the farmer's investment of labor was not
well rewarded.
In areas where the farmland was poor, some small
farmers became politically radical during the agrarian
revolt at the close of the 19th century. Populism was
strong in regions like the Piney Woods, parts of Central
Texas and the Cross Timbers.
Race relations also were strained, particularly in
East Texas with its high proportions of blacks.
In 1941, William A. Owens, an East Texas native,
had an opportunity to compare the cultures of the
Southern tradition with those of the Western while
working as a folklorist at UT-Austin. On one tour of
West Texas, he observed:
"Mile after mile I drove over land open, flat, well-
nigh treeless, with here and there the horizon broken by
ranch buildings or a water tower. Ranches are far
enough apart for people to say, 'Distance is decency.' In
broad-streeted towns I saw none of the huddling com-
mon in East Texas towns. The people were overwhelm-
ingly white, their beliefs and customs remarkably
unified. They were bound together in the mystique of
ranches, cattle, cowboys. Some were settlers from the
Deep South, but the myths and legends I heard were not
of the Civil War but of almost forgotten Indian depreci-
ations and fading memories of cattle drives to Kansas.
As in East Texas, some of West Texans's legends were
garnered from pulp novels and retold until they were
accepted as fact."
Dr. James W. Lee, chair of the English Department
at the University of North Texas in Denton, has cited
Owens, William Humphrey, William Goyen, George Ses-
sions Perry, J. Mason Brewer and Katherine Anne Por-
ter as authors producing the best of the Southern
tradition writing in Texas literature. The list could be
expanded to include Dorothy Scarborough, Edward
Anderson, Ruth Cross, Barry Benefield, Laura Krey,
Dillon Anderson, John W. Thomason, Karie Wilson Bak-
er, Jewel Gibson, John W. Wilson, Madison Cooper, Leon
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Kingston, Mike. Texas Almanac, 1990-1991, book, 1989; Dallas, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth162512/m1/461/: accessed April 26, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.