Dallas 1963: Context and Questions

Dallas 1963 (Twelve, 2013), by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis, takes the reader back to the city of Dallas and to the years before that fateful day on November 22, 1963. In this 50^th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, this important book raises several fascinating questions.

To what extent was Dallas already the “City of Hate” before the assassination? What role did conservative figures play in creating this paranoid milieu? How does this environment in part mirror current conservative attacks against President Barack Obama? Did the hateful environment in Dallas contribute to, or encourage, or explain Kennedy’s assassination?

The Dallas of 1960 is a city where the Ku Klux Klan once had its national headquarters, the current mayor had once been an unabashed KKK member, and important statues celebrate Confederate heroes. The Dallas Morning News is led by publisher Ted Dealey, who refers to Washington, D.C. as “nigger town” and joins oilman H. L. Hunt in supporting the belief that the United Nations is creating a world socialist system. For them, JFK’s support of Medicare is tantamount to “sweeping dictatorial power over medicine” and will create government death panels. This is Obamacare’s déjà vu.

Joining these powerful citizens is Rev. W. A. Criswell of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, who sermonizes that JFK’s Roman Catholicism is a “political tyranny” that threatens the very fabric of the U. S. of A. Meanwhile, General Edwin A. Walker resigns from the military, finds Dallas politically hospitable, and gives speeches to adoring local crowds where he exhorts unleashing nuclear holocaust on the Soviet Union, even at the price of millions of casualties stateside. Super-patriot Walker wants to overthrow the “totalitarian regime” of Kennedy, and files to run for Texas governor in February of 1962.

Stirring this toxic stew, and exploiting it, is Representative Bruce Alger from Dallas, the lone Republican in the Texas delegation, and an arch conservative. During a visit from Lyndon B. Johnson on the eve of the 1960 election, Alger leads a “mink coat mob” that attacks LBJ and Lady Bird Johnson. A sign in Alger’s hands reads “LBJ Sold Out to Yankee Socialists.”

Later when U. N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson visits Dallas in October of 1963, Frank McGehee, the Dallas founder of the National Indignation Convention, adopts the tactics of conservative intimidation by leading a mob to disrupt Stevenson’s speech. One protester, a Dallas insurance executive, slams a placard on Stevenson’s forehead.

Oddly, Lee Harvey Oswald is a relatively minor figure in this book, a Socialist sympathizer who nearly assassinates General Walker in April of 1963 and later kills Kennedy. This is odd because Dallas 1963 repeatedly hints that the hateful conservative milieu in Dallas somehow portended JFK’s assassination. But how exactly? Was Oswald drawn to Dallas because of its conservative fanaticism, and so he decided to combat it there? Why did he turn the rifle instead on JFK? These questions and any others explicitly linking the right-wing hate in Dallas to what happened on November 22, 1963 (at least the official and most likely version of events) are not answered in this book. We are left to make these links somehow on faith.

Dallas 1963 is a meticulously researched book that brings you back to a place and time beset by a mass or even class psychosis, where innuendo and wild accusations gain currency, where zealots sound reasonable, and wild and murderous ideas are taken seriously, and acted upon. The dark side of democratic rule, too often, is the rule of the mob. When that mob has power, money, news media, and well-spoken leaders, then the most inhumane acts can be perpetuated by societies in the name of what is ‘right.’ Dallas 1963 will help readers gain a perspective that resonates with the caustic politics that have unfortunately become the norm today.

(This book review originally appeared in The El Paso Times on November 3, 2013.)

The Texas Board of Ignorance

I left Texas to educate myself.  At Harvard College, one of my greatest shocks was how little I knew about my heritage and Mexican history.  I was born and lived in Ysleta, less than half a mile from the Zaragoza International Bridge, yet I knew nothing about where I was from.  So I spent four years at Harvard College studying Latin America with visionary teachers like Peter Smith and Terry Karl; I learned Mexican history from John Womack.


I imagined one day life would be different for a young and eager high school student from Ysleta, one who was proud to be an American citizen yet who also wanted to know more about his roots.  But the recent vote on textbook standards from the Texas Board of Education shows that Texas is going backward, not forward.  Close-mindedness is winning.  Ignorance is trumpeted.  Isolation and indoctrination are the new watchwords for those afraid of a changing world.

To recap: last week, the Texas Board of Education, led by a conservative majority, voted to call into question concepts like the separation of church and state and the American Revolution as a secular revolt.  The majority voted to emphasize the political contributions of Phyllis Schlafly, while minimizing Thomas Jefferson, apparently too democratic for their tastes.  In fact, the United States, according to these conservative activists, should not be studied as a ‘democracy’ anymore, but as a ‘constitutionally-based republic.’  Guess who decides what’s in the Constitution?  Previously this conservative majority had attacked the historical contributions of César Chávez and Thurgood Marshall.

This is what happens when people hunker down.  When your state is becoming too Mexican-American and African-American, when you feel you are being left behind, when perhaps you see the day when you will not be the majority anymore, then you retrench and attempt to rewrite history.  But what happened to thinking?  What happened to understanding that many Latinos, including my mother, hold deeply conservative values, yet simply do not want to be mistreated or disrespected?  What happened to studying the fact that the Constitution counted a slave as two-thirds of a person, while also being a unique founding document that created checks and balances between branches of government to control their powers?  Why can’t we study the failures of our history as well as our triumphs, and still appreciate that we live in a great country?

One conservative board member, in an interview, said the majority’s vote was “the return of American exceptionalism.”  But sadly, the conservative vote of the Texas Board of Education shows exactly the opposite.  The United States was an exceptional, historically unique country because it was pluralistic, because you had freedom of speech and freedom from a state-imposed religion, because unlike hierarchical Europe you could achieve whatever you wanted to achieve regardless of class, religion, and then later, race.  We have always been a work-in-progress; that's the root of our greatness.

The United States remains exceptional as long as we correct our mistakes, as long as we keep confronting our problems head on.  That’s what a democracy does, at least when it functions well.  The problems get aired out, confronted, and eventually fixed more or less.

But when you trumpet some weirdly nostalgic ‘America’ that never existed, without the messy conflicts, without the democratic debates, without the will of the people manifesting itself through blood and protest, what you are holding high is an ‘American absolutism.’  You are saying, in effect, stop thinking.  Stop including the newcomers, like Latinos, and stop turning them into Americans.  You are saying stop the potpourri of religions now in America; let’s all be Christians.

You are saying, without saying it, that we are not confident anymore.  We are not pluralistic anymore.  We must close shop.  We must bar the doors.  This scary new world is too much.  Let’s teach our children to hide.

The only saving grace is that I learned about the vote of the Texas Board of Education in El Paso.  At least El Paso is barely part of Texas.  I don’t have to explain myself in El Paso, and I don’t have to endure suspicious stares or seemingly polite comments about my accent in Ysleta.  As Texas becomes more like El Paso, maybe one of these days, before I die, I will feel at home in the rest of Texas too.

Pandemic Flu and Xenophobia: A History Lesson

The year 1918 was an exciting and terrible time for El Paso and the border: the Mexican Revolution was nearing its bloody end and an outbreak of Spanish influenza incited one of the most shameful and neglected episodes in American history: the decades-long delousing of Mexicans, with insecticides, gasoline, kerosene, and cyanide-based pesticides to make them ‘clean.’ David Romo’s Ringside Seat to a Revolution recounts this remarkable story.

Today when we are facing another pandemic flu, it is useful to review the irrational decisions made back in 1918, by demagogues who already hated Mexicans and who used the fear in the populace to advance an agenda that didn’t in fact help to stop the spread of Spanish influenza. Delousing physically harmed and psychologically scarred thousands of Mexicans, including my grandfather Santiago Troncoso. Let’s not repeat this kind of American history, but learn from it.

First, facts. The ‘Spanish influenza’ began in Kansas. Why it was given this misnomer is probably another legacy of how easily it is to blame the poor and those not media savvy. Also, of course, gasoline and kerosene and pesticides did not kill the Spanish flu, but it did harm and shame many people who were forced to strip naked at the border as they were sprayed with ‘the solution.’ Finally, and most remarkably, Zyklon B was used in El Paso in 1929, the same chemical agent that in more concentrated form was subsequently employed by the Nazis in their death camps to exterminate the Jews. Romo even uncovers evidence to suggest that the use of Zyklon B in El Paso directly inspired German scientists to start looking into its properties for cleansing a country of its ‘pests.’

Today the possible pandemic is swine flu, and we should redouble our efforts to act on facts, rather than on fears or prejudices that end up hurting innocents, or worse. I am waiting for a weak politician, or media loudmouth, to exploit the swine flu fears to further a xenophobic agenda. I am waiting to see whether stereotypes of Mexicans are privately reinforced and maybe even publicly acted upon, with the same bloody results. I hope I will have to wait forever, but I am still wary.

I don’t know if we as a country have a mature-enough political discourse to resist such temptations. The glib media rule the airwaves, including Twitter, and passing along short bursts of fear, instead of thoughtful analysis, is our modern forte. Moreover, the groundwork for xenophobia against Mexicans has already been reinforced by the many years of attacks demonizing undocumented workers in the United States. Perhaps the saving grace of the current situation is that we have a new administration that I believe will be more sensitive to the abuse of public hysteria to further a xenophobic agenda.

Early reports, in the Wall Street Journal, for example, indicate that this swine flu outbreak did start in Mexico. But even here the picture is more complicated than we might think. One of the first swine-flu cases was that of a five-year-old boy from Veracruz who lived near a pig farm operated by Smithfield Foods Inc., an American company based in Virginia. The company denies any involvement in the swine flu outbreak.

All this tells me is that we are interconnected, whether we like it or not. We get our food from all over the world. We get our people from all over the world. This has been our world for a long time, and I don’t attempt to imagine some false pure state where I am island and if I return to this island I will somehow be safer, or better, or truer in some metaphysical sense. Reaching back, or forward, to false utopias, especially during crises in our communities, has always prevented us from solving the problems in the first place, and too often spawned horrific ‘solutions’ that expose our greatest human frailties and moral failures. Work the problem, people. Not the fear.