The Triumphalist White Supremacy of Fair Park -- Rev. 2021

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THE TRIUMPHALIST WHITE SUPREMACY OF FAIR PARK – Ed Sebesta 7/30/2019

Introduction

Figure 1 - Ticket to the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition The 1936 Texas Centennial was understood at the time as a tool to teach Texas students across the state Texas history and what a Texas identity should be and also to teach future generations of Texans the same lessons. This would be a white nationalist history of Texas and white nationalist identity.

DMN 1936 article, “Inspiration to Future Ages,” explains that, “the newly completed Hall of State stands at the Centennial as a magnificent Texas shrine at which this and future generations may find inspiration towards mighty deeds.”1

1

Griffing, Aaron Birdwell, “Inspiration to Future Ages Seen in Showy Texas Shrine,” DMNF, 9/26/1936, page 4.

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Wylie A. Parker, Principal of Forest (Forrest)2 Avenue High School had a lengthy DMN article, “Educational Opportunities of the Texas Centennial.” One of the educational opportunities he sees is learning Texas history stating: Since this is a Texas Centennial, large emphasis on history and kindred studies would naturally be expected. No one need be disappointed in this regard, either, for there is history everywhere in the exposition, but Texas history is emphasized in the Hall of State, the spacious $1,000,000 building with its $200,000 worth of equipment.

Parker also recommends the Humble Hall of Texas History.3 A considerable effort was done to make sure this lesson of Texas history would be taught to as many students as possible.

DMN 1936 article, “1,500,000 Pupils May Be Sent to Fair,” reports that the Governor and the State Superintendent of Schools are working on a plan, “to make it possible for most of the 1,500,000 school children of the State to see the great fair.”4 The bringing of students to the 1936 Centennial exposition receives considerable attention in the press.

There is the DMN article, “Reduced Fare Brings Pupils to Centennial,” is about bringing as the subheading states, “1,000 Panhandle School Children at Fair.” Another subheading announces the expectation, “Whole Scholastic Population of State Expected to Attend Exhibit.” The article explains with how reduced train fares had brought students of the Texas Panhandle from such a distance. The article mentions that there will be a series of days for groups of students from different parts of Texas to visit.5 Another article is titled, “Pupils Arrive For Inspection of Centennial: Vanguard of Hosts From All Over Texas Put in Appearance for Educational Visits to Fair.”6

2

There seems to have been some contest over the name of the street and as late as 1981 Dresser Industries in a DMN employment ad was spelling their location as “1000 Forrest Avenue.” (March 10, 1981). The DMN seemed to carefully take a neutral position on this, for example, one article refers to the “New Forest Avenue High School” and it is on “Forrest Avenue.” (Dec. 25, 1915, Page 6). A 1932 article, “Music Group Gives Awards,” uses the term “Forrest Avenue High School,” (May 8, 1932, page 6) as well as a DMN obituary, “Bogie, Thomas Martin,” (6/18/2009). The DMN article, “Time’s March Changes Names of Streets, Dims Memory of Persons They Were to Honor,” (August 7, 1939, page 1) states that the street was named for Nathan Bedford Forrest, but had changed for some reason over time. It also discusses how some of the names of individuals are misspelled or have more than one spelling in the records. It does seem that both names were in use and the street was named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, but the full explanation will be in another paper by the author.

3 Parker, Wylie A., “Educational Opportunities of the Texas Centennial,” DMN, 9/13/1936, page 11.

4 No author, “1,500,000 Pupils May Be Sent to Fair,” 8/14/1936, pp. 1, 16.

5 No author, “Reduced Fairs Brings Pupils to Centennial,” DMN, 10/2/1936, pp. 1, 16.

6 No author, “Pupils Arrive for Inspection of Centennial,” DMN, 10/1/1936, pp. 1, 14.

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Fair Park is visited by over two million people each year for the Texas State Fair 7 and over 7 million for the State Fair and other events at Fair Park.8 In ten years that is over 20 million attendees for the Fair and over 70 million for all attendance at Fair Park.

That is a lot of people who are receiving the lessons about Texas history and Texas identity taught by the art and architecture of Fair Park that the original 1936 Texas Centennial intended to teach during a period which white supremacy was supremely dominate in the culture and politics of Texas.

We need to understand the white supremacist lessons the art and architecture of Fair Park teaches the public about race and Texas history. Understanding these lessons we need to act accordingly to see that these lessons are no longer taught.

Attention has been drawn to Fair Park for its Confederate images, figures and statues.

What has gone unnoticed is how the art and architecture of the 1936 Texas Centennial is used to portray a triumphalist white nationalist historical progression. Unrecognized or ignored is that the 1936 Texas Centennial explicitly defined itself as an empire exhibition in the period of late world imperialism of the 1930s with its multiple empire exhibitions and colonial expositions.

In the Hall of State in the State of Texas Building in a mural of Confederate military officers in the mural over their head flies the Confederate battle flag. Above this seen are figures of three women, in an allegory of the three Fates of Greek mythology, but labeled South, Columbia, and the North, thus representing one of the Fates as the Confederacy and the Union government not being American, which instead represented by another figure labeled Columbia.

At the Hall of State also there is a huge gold medallion with an allegorical figure representing the Confederacy with a seal of the Confederacy. The walls on either side of the entry way have places for three flags to be flown, and on the right side of the entry is the 1st National Confederate Flag.

For the Hall of Transportation, also known as the Automobile building, there is a twenty foot tall draped female figure as the statue of the Confederacy on a twelve foot pedestal. 9 It is at the center entry to the building along the Esplanade. Inside the portico behind the statue on the outside wall is a painted medallion with the First National Confederate flag and a stalk with a cotton ball. Under the seal is the text, “Confederate States of America, 1861 1865, Texas the Seventh State Admitted to the Confederacy.”10

7

State Fair of Texas website, “Daily Attendance,” https://bigtex.com/about-us/daily-attendance/, printed out 7/17/2019.

8 “About Fair Park,” https://fairpark.org/index.php/en/about-fair-park, printed out 7/17/2019.

9 Measurements from, Parsons, Jim, Bush, David, “Fair Park Deco: Art and Architecture of the Texas Centennial Exposition,” TCU (Texas Christian Univ.) Press, Fort Worth, 2012, pp. 35. This is a book entirely unconscious about any issue regarding race which is fairly amazing given the year it was published.

10 Photo documented by author.

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Additionally the four bronze lanterns in front of the State of Texas Building. Each have six figures representing the nations as defined in the six nations of Texas concept one of which is a figure representing the Confederacy.

A frieze on the Federal building is a representation of the progression of Texas history with what appears to be three Confederate soldiers.

Though these Confederate elements might be what an observer first notices as racially problematic elements in the built environment of Fair Park and raise concerns, there is the risk that only these elements will be seen as being problematic. A casual observation might conclude that these Confederate elements are the unacceptable elements from a racist past in an otherwise acceptable Fair Park. There is a risk that inquiry and examination starts and stops with the Confederate elements and misses the larger framework of a historical progression of a triumphal white supremacy. Also, these Confederate elements operate within this larger framework and they can’t be understood without understanding this framework in which they exist.

The entire set of art deco buildings with their art, and the Texas building and the Hall of State make up a superstructure supporting white supremacy and without recognizing this, the city of Dallas might just put a few inane plaques purporting to be contextualizations and which won’t acknowledge the triumphalist white supremacy of Fair Par and the 1936 Texas Centennial as one of a set of empire exhibitions and colonial expositions of the period of late imperialism. Unrecognized will be how Art Deco and modernist architecture was used in the Texas Centennial the same way as in other 1930s colonial expositions and empire exhibitions given elsewhere to assert racial hierarchy.

This essay will have four sections following this introduction. One section will discuss the individual Confederate elements. It will be followed by the second section which will discuss Fair Park as whole, how the art and architecture of the centennial was used to portray a triumphalist white nationalist history. The third section will describe empire exhibitions and colonial expositions of the 1930s and show the similarities of the 1936 Texas Centennial to them and how all of them used similar or the same methods, in particular Art Deco and modernist architecture, to justify white supremacist political systems. The forth section will discussed motivations to tear down the Hall of Negro Life since it challenged the white triumphalist narrative by its very existence.

A special note about the Six Flags, Six Nations theme.

This six-flags six-nation theme is the idea that there was six nations with sovereignty over Texas in a rough historical progression and the representation of the this idea with six flags, with each nation represented by one flag.

The six flags, six nations theme has multiple aspects which needs to be considered. First, there is its origin as a defined six flags set and its historical validity and the six-flag design on the obverse of the state seal which will be discussed in an Appendix. Second,

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there is the issue of how the six-flags six-nation idea is used to legitimize and present the Confederacy at the Texas Centennial. Third, there is how the six-nation theme as a progression is used to structure the comprehension of history. Fourth, there is how the six-nation theme is used to arrange the layout of the buildings at Fair Park. Fifth, there is the origin of the six-nation six-flag idea. All of them are not going to be discussed in one section, but in different parts of this essay as they are relevant.

Confederate Fair Park Sydney Smith Memorial Fountain

Figure 2- Gulf Cloud Memorial Fountain at Fair Park.

At Fair Park there is a huge Sydney Smith Memorial fountain with a plaque mentioning that it is named after “Capt.� Sydney Smith.

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The plaque gives Sydney Smith a Confederate identity since the title “Captain,” comes from his service in the Confederate army and the monument remembers him as a Confederate.

Figure 3- Plaque by Gulf Cloud Fountain.

He had moved to Dallas in 1878 and became the secretary of the Fair in 1886 until his death in 1912.

Sydney Smith was a slave owning plantation owner in Mississippi in 1860, and then enlisted in the Confederate army under Nathan Bedford Forrest, then was a staff member of Gen. W.H. Jackson and was a Captain. In Dallas, Texas he was the member of the racist neo-Confederate organization the Sterling Price Camp of the United Confederate Veterans (UCV).

This was a vicious racist organization which passed unanimously a resolution in 1909 asking the President Taft to pardon Sheriff Shipp of Hamilton Country who had been found guilty by the Supreme Court of the United States of America, in the only criminal trial ever conducted by that court, of aiding and abetting a lynching of an African American prisoner in his jail.11 When Smith died the Dallas Morning News (DMN) credited him for the entirety of its

Figure 4- Book Contempt of Court.

11

No author, “Camp Sterling Price Asks Pardon for Shipp,” Dallas Morning News, 11/22/1909, page 12. The text of the resolution was published in the DMN, “Wants Petitions to President,” by William Lewis Cabell, 11/21/1909, page 29. The details of the case are online and can be read at this URLs. “United States of America v. John F. Shipp et al.” provided online by Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/203/563. A more detailed account is provided by the American Bar Association online at this address.

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operation. From the statement of J.J. Eckford, president of the State Fair at the time of Smith’s death: This mammoth enterprise, grand in its whole effect, is the result of his master hand. So perfectly has he worked out all, even its petty details, so through in its organization, that it moves as by its own impulsion.12 In the 19th and early 20 Century expositions and other cultural institutions put nonwhite people in exhibitions, which have been denounced as human zoos. An example was Ota Benga who was exhibited in 1906 at the Bronx Zoo where he, “spent time with the chimpanzees in the Monkey House.”13 Figure 5 Advertisement for Texas State Fair Dallas always striving to keep up with world trends had its own human zoo.

1898 Dallas Morning News.

This project with which Smith was involved with including its petty details was the State Fair’s Antebellum Negro Village which was an exhibit of African Americans portraying slaves on an antebellum plantation and which was

http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/a_supreme_case_of_contempt. There is also a book on the case, “Contempt of Court: The Turn-of-the-Century Lynching,” by Mark Curriden and Leroy Phillips, Jr. Anchor Books, 1991.

12 “Capt. Sydney Smith is Claimed by Death,” Dallas Morning News, March 14, 1912, page 6. I am not going to correct and pepper quotations with [sic] for spellings that were in usage then and are not considered correct now.

13 Zielinski, Sarah, “The Tragic Tale of the Pygmy in the Zoo,” Smithsonian Magazine, online Dec. 2, 2008, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-tragic-tale-of-the-pygmy-in-the-zoo-2787905/ printed out 4/9/2018.

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announced in a series of advertisements for the upcoming 1898 State Fair.14 In the advertisements Sydney Smith was listed as the Secretary and W.H. Gaston as the President of the State Fair. There is also a W.H. Gaston Middle School in the Dallas Independent School District.

The DMN did run the ads but did not describe it in any way.15 However the Dallas Time Herald (DTH) did have an article describing it and recommending the exhibit. I am going to quote it in its entirety so that the appalling nature of the Antebellum Negro Village is fully perceived.

“Sat’day Eve Befor de Wah,” is one attraction on amusement row which is receiving the attention of nearly all the visitors to the Fair, especially the ladies.

And it is pronounced by them to be one of the most attractive features of the Fair.

The scene represents the old time negro quarters on a big Southern plantation on Saturday evening, after the day’s work is done. All the old uncles and aunties and the little pickaninnes on the plantation are assembled in front of the cabins, and then the evening’s frolic begins. There’s an old plantation break-down ending with a cake walk as cake walks were in ante-bellum days. There’s buck and wing dancing by young negroes and negresses, banjo solos, songs, etc., and as an old uncle draws his bow across the strings of a fiddle that may have seen better days but has lost none of its sweetness of tone, the young negroes seem magically touched and such dancing and cutting of the pigeon wing has never been seen since the days of ’61. The negro village is just as true to nature as anything can be, there’s not an objectionable feature to the entertainment, and if any person, especially ladies, wish to enjoy a half hour and at the same time get a glimpse of negro life in the South before the war this is the place to go. [Bold face added.]16 Not much is yet known about this exhibit besides this one article.17 In an 1899 article we are informed about some stuffed birds Smith is adding to the Antebellum Negro Village, the article states that, “A group of crows and blackbirds Capt. Smith will place in the negro village.” One advertisement in 1899 refers to “Negro quarters” at the State Fair.18 However, when and why the “Negro village” was discontinued is not known. It might have continued but not been featured in Fair advertisements or it might have been continued with a different name. So far images for the “amusement” haven’t been located or any other information besides what the author has discovered.

14

Advertisement, “The Texas State Fair and Dallas Exposition,” Dallas Morning News, Oct. 5, 1898, page 3. Also, advertised Sept. 30, 1898, page 3; Oct. 1, 1898, page 3; Oct. 3, 1898 page 3; Oct. 4, 1898, page 3.

15 The author looked using the search database through DMN articles using different terms but could not find anything nor going through the microfilm.

16 No author, “Another Great Big Crowd,” Dallas Daily Times Herald, Friday Oct. 7, 1898, page 4.

17 More might be in the Dallas Time Herald, but we don’t have it word searchable.

18 Advertisement, Dallas Morning News, Sept. 29, 1899, page 5.

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Figure 6 - W.H. Gaston Middle School DISD The effort to erect a memorial to Smith was supported by the Sterling Price Camp who passed the following resolution.

“That Camp Sterling Price heartily approves of the move of the Fair and leading associations in the city and the citizens of Texas to erect a monument to the gallant Confederate and good business man, Capt. Sydney Smith, and that Col. J.A. Orr of Columbus, Miss., the only living member of the Confederate Congress, be selected to participate at the unveiling of the monument at the next State Fair, in October.”19 The Dallas Sterling Price chapter of the United Confederate Veterans understood this memorial to be a Confederate monument. Orr Street in Dallas is named after J.A. Orr. The Dallas Daily Time Herald obituary sought to represent him as a noble example of the Antebellum South of plantations and slavery and service of the Confederacy in the terminology of the Lost Cause interpretation of history. From the obituary. … All through his long and useful life he lived up to those ideals of the old-time Southerner and was as courteous as any cavalier of old. When the tocsin of war sounded in 1861, Captain Smith responded to the call of his native Southland and 19

No author, “Confederate Veterans Meet, Dallas Morning News, 5/6/1912, page 16.

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fought gallantly on the Confederate side until the surrender of Lee at Appomattox. He entered the army as a member of Company D, First Mississippi regiment, and served throughout the entire four years’ strife. When the war ended he was an aide-de-camp with the rank of captain and on the staff of General Jackson. After the war he returned to his Mississippi plantation and followed the life of a planter …20 The Capt. Sydney Smith monument glorifies a Confederate identified vile racist.

Figure 7- 20th century 20s to 30s. Gallas East Africans exhibited with zebras.

Garden Zoological of Acclimation in Paris.

20

No author, “Captain Sydney Smith Died This Morning,” Dallas Daily Times Herald, 3/13/1912, page 1, last page of section.

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Figure 8-- Garden of Acclimation exhibiting African women.

Figure 9- French tourist observes African drinking a beer at the Garden of Acclimation.

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Texas Under Six Flags and Six Flags Over Texas The Six-Flags Texas idea is used extensively by the 1936 Centennial on artifacts, its printed material, artwork, the in art work, and in the layout of the architecture along the Esplanade.

The meaning of this Six-Flags Texas idea needs to be discussed since the 1936 Centennial sought to be its physical manifestation. The issue of what six flag designs were selected to make up the Six-Flags Texas idea in the appendix.

The Bullock Museum states that origin of the Six-Flag theme is not known but became popular with the 1936 Centennial.21

Figure 10- The Story of Texas Under Six Flags by M.E.M. Davis 1897.

It seems though that the concept of Texas being under at different times the sovereignty of six nations appears to originate or was first popularized with the book, “The Story of Texas Under Six Flags,” by Mollie Evelyn Moore Davis, who was often listed as M.E.M. Davis, a school textbook published by Ginn & Co. in 1897. She was born in 1844 and died in 1909.

She was the author of twelve books, the first one, “In War Times at La Rose

Blanche,” in 1888.22 Her school history is a white and Texan nationalist history whose many failings won’t be discussed here, however a section which represents the perspective of the book would be a section titled, “Dying Races,” where she wistfully discusses the extinction of the buffalo and Native Americas as equivalent, “With the Red Man, another race, as wild, as noble, and as free as his, was as slowing drifting to its end.”23 21

“The Six Flags of Texas: We weren’t always under the Lone Star,” website of the Bullock Museum, https://www.thestoryoftexas.com/education/texas-six-flags, printed out 4/18/2018.

22 Wilkinson, C.W. “Davis, Mollie Evelyn Moore,” Texas State Historical Association Handbook, online, https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fda44, 7/19/2019.

23 Davis, Mollie Evelyn Moore, “The Story of Texas Under Six Flags,” Ginn & Co., Boston, 1897. The section, “Dying Races,” is pp. 142-43.

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She was a “negro dialect” writer who depicted African Americans in a derogatory way. Her first book, “In War Times at La Rose Blanche,” set during the Civil War has loyal slaves supporting the Confederacy. In this dialog from the book a slave Dandy is asked by the plantation owner what he would want, and what Dandy wants is to accompany the owner’s son Tom who is leaving to join Confederate army and be Tom’s servant.

“Well, Dandy,” he said as he dropped it, “what do you want most of everything in the world?”

And Dandy replied: “Please, Marse, I wants to go to de war ‘long o’ Marse Tom.” Father broke into a queer little laugh, “All right, Dandy, you can go,” he said.

Figure 11- In War Times at La Rose Blanche by M.E.M. Davis.

Brother Tom gave a wild whoop. Dandy made a respectful “curchy” and backed down the steps, his dark eyes shining. He darted around the end of the gallery where Mandy and I looking over the railing saw him throw himself on his hands and lift his heels in the air cracking them jubilantly together.24

The United Daughters of the Confederacy has a chapter named after her.25 The primary symbol of Texas, that is the Six-Flags symbol, and the primary historical idea of Texas, the Six-Nation historical theme originates from a racist ex-Confederate author.

Six-Flags and Six-Nations and the Confederacy The whole Six-Flags, Six-Nations idea is a historical fabrication. The flags weren’t officially determined until the 1990s so that flag manufacturers would have a known set to manufacture to enable a supply of six-flags sets. Which six flags were used for the sixflag theme has varied greatly in the past and during the Texas Centennial of 1936.

However, dwelling on the historical fabrications obscures the use of this theme in the 24

Davis, Mollie Evelyn Moore, “In War Times at La Rose Blanche,” D. Lothrop Co., Boston 1888, pp. 22-23.

25

https://www.molliemooredavis.org/, printed out 7/19/2019.

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support of white supremacy. So the review of the Six-Flags is given in an appendix to this paper.

The theme of Six-Flags for the Six-Nations has a two-fold agenda. One is to define the history of Texas in terms of the agency of white people which will be discussed in another section of this essay. The other is to legitimize the Confederacy as a nation and not as an insurrection which will be discussed here.

The official Federal name for the Civil War was “The War of the Rebellion” which was used by the Congressional Record and by the U.S. War Departments 127-volume collection, which is titled, “The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies,” published from 1881 to 1901. The term “Rebellion” defines the Confederate effort as an insurrection. A rebellion is subject to criminal prosecution and hence implies that the Confederacy was a criminal effort.

Congress didn’t adopt the term “Civil War” until 1907.26 Likely this was a concession to neo-Confederates who would no longer be criminal insurrectionists in this new name for the War of the Rebellion.27 No nation recognized the Confederacy as a nation during the Civil War. There has been neo-Confederate claims that an obscure tiny German state, Duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, which you can find on a very large map of 19th century Germany, but whether this is true is contested and not historically clear. Even if this was true, it is only, to use the cliché, the exception that proves the rule, that overwhelmingly no nation of significance and many of no significance recognized the Confederacy as a nation.

Figure 12- Six-flags symbol with gold seal in Foreword of Official Souvenir Guide 26

Spillman, Scott, “War, Civil War, or Revolution?” The New Republic, Aug. 30, 2017. Book review of “Civil Wars: A History in Ideas,” by David Armitage, Knopf, 2017.

27 The author of this essay doesn’t know what the politics were behind this name change as a documented fact.

This is a topic that needs to be pursued.

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The six-Nation and six-Flag theme is expressed in multiple ways at Fair Park in different forms. There are six-flags hanging in the Hall of State in the Texas Building. Also, in the Hall of State is a giant gold medallion with six figures one for each nation, including a figure for the Confederacy with the Seal of the Confederacy.

Figure 13- Hall of state flags from left to right, France, 1st National Flag of the Confederacy, United States of America. On your right when entering Hall.

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On the way to the Hall of State the art deco lanterns have six figures and one of them is a Confederate soldier with the Confederate seal.

Further the six porticos along the Esplanade are individually assigned the identity of one of the six nations with both title and art work. One of the porticos is designed for the Confederate States.

Figure 14- Lanterns with a military figure for each of the six-nations. The figure on the left is a Confederate soldier standing on the Seal of the Confederacy.

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Artifacts of the Centennial frequently used a six-flags theme, such as postcards and Centennial dishes.

Figure 15- Dish sold at Centennial with six-flag theme.

Figure 16- Postcard Texas Centennial.

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By adopting this this six-flags and the associated six-nations, the Confederacy is elevated as a nation equal to other great nations, Spain, France, Mexico, and United States of America.

The Centennial Fair adopted this six-flags, six-nations theme and in 1936 there would be many still alive remembering the term “War of the Rebellion,” and this six-flag, sixnation would be a rejection of the idea that the Confederacy was a criminal insurrection, but instead was a legitimate nation.

Figure 17Cover and publication page of State of Texas Building.

But the six-flag, six-nation theme was used also to demote the United States of America to the level of the Confederacy or below. This is reveals in the text for the book “State of Texas Building.” It is a leather volume with the title and the giant medallion embossed on the cover. It uses a curious mix of scripts, some to be ancient, some modern, and others artistic inventions. Paragraphs are started with an artistic illuminated initial letters. It is meant to be a precious sacred volume like a Bible. The title page announces that the book is “Presented by Commission of Control for Texas Centennial Celebration and The State Board of Control,” in an archaic script. It is “Vol. 1” in the series “Shrines of Texas,” also in archaic script. There is also on another page a dedication by the “State Board of Control” that also determines that this book is an expression of official opinion.

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The book repeatedly demotes the United States of America. In a front page with a color illustration of six-flags is an explanation of the six-flags with the following reference to the Confederate flag: In 1861 the Lone Star became the seventh in the banner of the United States of the Confederacy until the Stars and Bars of the Lost Cause bowed to the Flag of the Union.

Note that it is the “United States of the Confederacy,” instead of the “Confederacy,” and instead of referring to the United States of America,” there is the term, “Flag of the Union.”

Figure 18- A front page in the book State of Texas Building.

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Figure 19- Hall of State Medallion description in State of Texas Building pages 2021 In the description of the gold medallion in the Hall of State, the text in the book states: At the top left, the ‘Union,’ an energetic figure holds the seal of the United States of America. At the upper right, ‘Texas,’ wearing the traditional frontier costume, gazes proudly at the seal of the Republic of Texas.

At the center left, the ‘Confederacy,’ in a stately and dignified pose, hold a garland of flowers, as by her side we see the seal of the states united in purpose at an important period in our history…

The figure with the seal of the United States of America is called the “Union figure” instead of the American figure. The Confederacy is made to be a heroic figure equal to the “Union figure.” 28 This demotion of the United States of America also occurs in one of the murals in the hall of state as previously mentioned by having three fates representing the South, North, and Columbia. The Confederacy is made to be a nation while the United States of America is demoted to being a faction.

28

Adams, Frank Carter, Editor, “State Building of Texas: Central Exposition, Texas Centennial Celebrations, 1836 Dallas 1936,” for Commission of Control for Texas Centennial Celebrations and The State Board of Control, The Steck Company, 1937, Austin, Texas.

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Confederate Mural in the Hall of State

Figure 20Detail of Mural at Hall of State The first thing that is noticed is the Confederate battle flag and it is a part of what is held to be the heroic epic of Texas.

What may not be noticed is that the three Confederate soldiers on horseback facing in profile to the right are not generic Confederate soldiers but are portraits of specific individuals who have been considered Texas Confederate heroes by Texas neoConfederates.

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On the mural are the texts, “Dowling, Johnston, and Hood.” The portraits are of Confederates Major Dick Dowling, Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston and John Bell Hood.

Dick Dowling rented slaves for his business prior to the Civil War. He is considered a Figure 21 - Enlargement of photo taken from other side of the pillar. hero for winning the Battle of Sabine Pass which prevented emancipation from reaching Texas much earlier in the Civil War. Some of the African American soldiers were sold into slavery. Others were forced to labor at the Texas State Penitentiary. Both of these acts are crimes against the laws of war.29

29

The Fondren Library of Rice University has an excellent online website titled, “Slavery and the Battle of Sabine Pass,” which details what happened to captured African American troops and Dowling’s involvement with slavery.

https://exhibits.library.rice.edu/exhibits/show/dick-dowling/slavery-and-sabine-pass 7/26/2019.

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Albert Sidney Johnston’s son William Preston Johnston wrote a biography of him published in 1878, and in the biography W.P. Johnston wanted the reader to know that Johnston was pro-slavery and a white supremacist.

Quoting W.P. Preston: General Johnston’s views in regard to slavery were those generally held in the South …

With no great respect for political abstractions, and perceiving clearly the differences that mark race and condition, he rejected with scorn the generalizations which overlook all existing facts, and confound all the relations of life… But he could not ignore that the manifest inferiority of the negro fitted him for the place he held, and that time alone could fit him for any other.30 In another section of the book W.P. Johnston quotes antebellum letters from his father to show that his father was pro-slavery as W.P. Johnston states:

Figure 22-Title Page The Life of Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston During the summer and fall of 1856 all other interests were subordinate to the political struggle which resulted in the election of Mr. Buchanan, the Democratic candidate, over Fremont, the nominee of the Antislavery party. The following letters are inserted, because they clearly define General Johnston’s views on the subject of abolition and his apprehensions at that time.

Indeed they do. An extract of a Sept. 12, 1856 letter from San Antonio is as follows: I notice with sorrow the progress of fanaticism in the North. What do they want?

We want the Union with the Constitution. We want to share in its glorious, 30

Johnston, William Preston, “Life of Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston,” D. Appleton and Co., New York, 1878, p. 258.

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benevolent, civilizing mission, and its high and magnificent destiny. Our whole hearts are devoted to its support and perpetuity. We want the rights and independence of the States and the security to individuals guaranteed by the Constitution; we claim immunity from intervention and intervention. Do they want these things? Let them then cease to agitate a question which produces a feeling of insecurity which is intolerable. With whatever sorrow, however heartfelt and agonizing, we will not hesitate to encounter separation with all its attendant horrors rather than bear the evils and degradation relentlessly heaped upon us by the heartless folly of fanaticism.

Hypochondriac persons, without a single cause of unhappiness, by cherishing insane ideas, contrive to make themselves truly miserable. So with our people of the North. A merciful and beneficent God has placed within our grasp every source of human happiness. He has given us the finest country on earth, embracing every variety of climate, soil, and production, affording the means of a perfect independence of the rest of the world; a government more free than any other, and laws whose extreme benevolence hardly restrains individual action sufficiently for public safety; and the right to worship even according to our fancy. Yet with all these gifts — surely divine — they cannot be happy unless their Southern brothers will consent to lie upon the Procrustean bed they have constructed for them. They must adopt some other basis for the settlement of the question in agitation than passion. Why not let reason again resume its sway?

W.P. Johnston follows with this letter from his father.

Writing on the 23d of November, he says, in allusion to the same topic, and the election of Mr. Buchanan as president: My Dear Will: We are all well, and contented with the results of the election. If our Northern brethren will give up their fanatical, idolatrous negro-worship, we can go on harmoniously, happily, and prosperously, and also gloriously as a nation. We hope this, although we fear it is making too much of poor human nature. It is more in accordance with human experience to believe that they will cherish their unhappy delusion. Wat a people? what a destiny! Great, almost without limit we would be, if they would employ all the energy, all the talents, all the genius, and all the resolution, to build up, beautify, adorn and strengthen our Government, which they have used from the beginning to cripple and destroy it.31 This is an extract from an irate letter by Confederate John Bell Hood to U.S. General William Tecumseh Sherman.

31

Johnston, William Preston, “Life of Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston,” D. Appleton and Co., New York, 1878, p. 189190.

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You came into our country with your army avowedly for the purpose of subjugating free white men, women, and children, and not only intend to rule over them, but you make negroes your allies and desire to place over us an inferior race, which we have raised from barbarism to its present position, which is the highest ever attained by that race in any country in all time. I must, therefore, decline to accept your statements in reference to your kindness toward the people of Atlanta, and your willingness to sacrifice everything for the peace and honor of the South, and refuse to be governed by your decision in regard to matters between myself, my country, and my God. You say, "let us fight it out like men." To this my reply is, for myself, and, I believe, for all the true men, aye, and women and children, in my country, we will fight you to the death. Better die a thousand deaths than submit to live under you or your Government and your negro allies.32 Albert Sidney Johnston died in battle during the Civil War. Dick Dowling and John Bell Hood died of yellow fever after the Civil War. Dowling died Sept. 23, 1867 and Hood died Aug. 30, 1879.

More subtle in this section of the mural are the three goddess that are the fates and they are labeled “South,” “Columbia,” and the “North.” This is a “War between the States,” concept of the Civil War in which the United States government is made equal to the Confederacy and reduced to a faction within the United States of America as being just the “North” with the United States of America being represented by Columbia. The Union during the Civil War is made to be something different and just a faction in the United States of America.

Figure 23- South, Columbia, North figures in Confederate section of mural in the Hall of State 32

Hood, John Bell Gen., extract from letter to Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, Sept. 12, 1864; O.R. Ser. 1 V. 39 Bk. 2, page 419-422.

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The Giant Golden Medallion The giant gold medallion in the hall of state opposite the entry way has an allegorical female figure draped in robes to represent the Confederacy. The seal of the Confederacy is on a shield which she is holding.

She rests upon clouds which makes her a Figure 24- Medallion in the Hall of State divine figure in the heavens. As stated earlier the medallion elevates the Confederacy to be a nation rather than a rebellion and demotes the United States of America to be the Confederacy’s peer.

Making a Sacred and Beautiful Confederacy

Figure 25 - View of the Confederate Portico and the Confederacy statue

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Figure 26 Two views of the Confederacy Statue The portrayal of the Confederacy in front of the Confederate States portico as a statue of a beautiful figure, like a goddess, or a high priestess, in front of the Confederate portico, and the beautiful figure on heavenly clouds on the great medallion, and art work on advent garde buildings works to make the Confederacy beautiful, sacred and timeless.

Set in an idyllic setting it entices the viewer to love the Confederacy. It erases the suffering of slaves and the massacre of African American troops by the Confederate army during the Civil War. The figure of the Confederacy on the gold medallion in the Hall of State, along with the Confederacy statue seeks to make the Confederacy divine.

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Figure 27-- Confederacy statue Seventh State and Seven Stars

Figure 29 Medallion inside Confederate States Portico

Inside on the portico is a painted medallion for the Confederacy.

It shows a Confederate flag with seven stars and balls of cotton. The first national flag of the Confederacy, known as the Stars and Bars, has

Figure 28- Crown of the Confederacy statue

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thirteen stars. A seven star flag would be a flag briefly used in 1861 until another state seceded. As mentioned earlier, under the medallion is the text, “Confederate States of America, 1861 1865, Texas the Seventh State Admitted to the Confederacy.” The statue, Confederacy, in front of the portico has seven stars in her crown to indicate that Texas was the seventh state to join the Confederacy. An attempt is made to give Texas joining the Confederacy some special numerological and mystical connection by emphasizing this fact.

It isn’t some prosaic fact or a recounting of the chronicles of history, it is symbolized in the statue’s crown who is a either a goddess or high priestess. None of the three national flags of the Confederacy were selected, but a flag that was only in brief use.

Texas Women in the Civil War Plaque

Figure 30- Location of the Texas Women in the Civil War plaque Near the entry way for the Grand Place building is a plaque “Texas Women of the Civil War.” The plaque, erected in 1964 states in all capital letters: Civilian Duties of 90,000 Texas Men Fighting for the Confederacy fell to wives back home in land of few factories and an enemy blockade that cut down on imports. Women had to run businesses and farms for their absent men who committed to the uncertain mails their letters of instructions. Yet with the help of children, old men and loyal slaves, furnished army and the Confederacy with grain, meat and cotton for home consumption and foreign exchange for guns, gunpowder, factory goods, drugs and other supplies.

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Ran newspapers. Loaded Shells. Made Gun Caps. Did “Man’s work” of many kinds, in addition to homemaking, sewing, nursing, teaching and child care.

Made medicines from herbs and plants.

Grew poppies and squeezed the seed pods to supply opiates to the hospitals.

Carded cotton and wool, spun and wove, then dyed the homemade cloth with bark or roots. Plaited palmetto or corn shucks to make hats. Made coffee of acorns or vegetables, tea of sage or orange leaves.

Figure 31- Texas Women in the Civil War plaque

On 2,000 miles of coastline and frontier, faced personal hazards from invasion or Indian raids. Elsewhere were in peril from marauders. Through the four years won admiration for their pluck, and maintained faith enough to help rebuild the defeated South. (1964)

This plaque misrepresents history, erases history, and falsifies history. First this plaque is about white women supporting the Confederacy and African Americans are made to be outside of history. Second, Texas had a significant opposition to secession and the Confederacy, particularly in some communities and areas, such as among German immigrants and in North Texas, and so not all white women supported the Confederacy.

The plaque serves to erase the resistance by Texans against the Confederacy by having an underlying assumption that all Texas women in the Civil War were supporters of the Confederacy. The title should be “Pro-Confederate White Texas Women in the Civil War.” However, there is another falsification that deserves special notice. This narrative pushes the idea of women in an unsafe environment with challenging circumstances straining to maintain their livelihoods and eke out production to support the Confederate war effort. The reality was quite different.

John H. Cochran in his history, “Dallas County,” a history published in 1928 and widely accepted by Dallas residents, in his chapter on the Civil War describes how Dallas flourished and enriched itself from selling supplies to the Confederacy during the Civil War. He states that the prosperity of the Civil War era is what gave Dallas its boost and subsequent success. These are key extracts from the book.

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But Dallas County, from 1859 to 1861, had made such rapid and successful progress in the production of wheat, corn, forage meat and other necessary supplies of food, she was recognized as the center of the food-producing counties of Texas, so much that the Confederate Government established and maintained a general quartermasters and commissary headquarters at Dallas for the collection of food and supplies for the army of the Trans-Mississippi Department. Also, established a transportation and recruiting department there and a manufacturing department at Lancaster, where arms were repaired and pistols manufactured. Dallas was general headquarters for all these departments, so the officers and their families and all necessary details made Dallas their temporary home during the war, thus supplying the places of the enlisted soldiers.

Dallas was hardly reduced to marginal economic circumstances and with the Confederate military stationed there, there wouldn’t be a security problem. As to how Dallas County was able to produce so much food and support the supply of war materials to the Confederate army Cochrane explains: Besides, large numbers of negroes were brought into Dallas County for food and for protection during the war, and were gladly hired to the citizens for their food and clothes. Nearly every family, which had no negroes of their own, hired one or more of these negroes and were thus enabled to cultivate all of their land in wheat, corn and oats, so Dallas County continued to be the great food producing center of Texas. Its reputation in this respect became so great that many desirable citizens were attracted by its prosperity and permanently settled in the county and contributed much to its future development.33 During the Civil War slaveholders sent their slaves to Texas to prevent their emancipation by the American army and their slaves fleeing to the American army lines.

Dallas had an abundance of cheap slave labor to exploit.

The success of Dallas starts with war profiteering supplying the Confederate armies with food, supplies and war materials in their fight to preserve slavery by exploiting cheap slave labor. For those who marvel at the wealth of Dallas looking at the great buildings of downtown Dallas and northward, should also go visit the Greens, Pinks, Whites, and Browns, on Highland Village Dr. to see where some of the descendants of the exploited slaves live.

33

The extracts are from a special double edition published by The Aldrege Book Store in Dallas in 1966. This volume has, “History of Dallas County, Texas,” by John Henry Brown, and “Dallas County: A Record of its Pioneers and Progress,” by John H. Cochran. As the front page states, “The Two Major Chronicles of Early Dallas County Now Republished Together,” with a foreword by Sam Acheson. Cochrane’s book was originally published in 1928 and printed by Direct Advertising and Printing Co., Dallas, Texas. The volume has the original pages and the quotes are on pages 87-88.

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AN EMPIRE EXHIBITION: The White Triumphalism of Fair Park The Confederate elements are only elements, among other elements, in a larger scheme of art and architecture of triumphal white supremacy.

Empire Exposition In the 1930s and earlier imperial powers had empire exhibitions and colonial expositions.

The 1936 Texas Centennial defined itself as an empire exhibition. These multiple references to “Empire” is in a time, 1936, of world domination by the American and European empires in a nearly world-wide system of white supremacy.34 The “Official Figure 33- Foreword to Official Souvenir Guide,” Souvenir Guide. announces on its very first page that the exposition has been designed to communicate a message of triumph.

The guide’s Foreword introduction announces:

Figure 32- Cover of Official Souvenir Guide.

This is the official guidebook of the Texas Centennial Exposition. It has been designed to tell you the complete story of An Empire On Parade, the location of the buildings, attractions and exhibits. Something of the glamorous history of Texas has been included although no book, no exposition, can do justice to that thrilling story. [Boldface added.]

34

The Japanese Empire also had expositions. The Japanese imperial expansion can perhaps be seen as another part of their program of Westernization and copying the West.

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“An Empire On Parade,” capitalized in the text of the foreword, announces the triumphalist intention of the Centennial Exposition and that the guide will do so, and is “designed” to do so, by telling the reader of the “location of the buildings, attractions, and exhibits.” The art and architecture is explained as being the vehicle to express this triumphalist empire theme. Above this Foreword is a six-flags design with a gold seal for the Dallas Centennial stamped over the flags poles would intersect thus making the six-flag element integral to the 1936 Texas Centennial.

Under the Foreword were the signatures: Nathan Adams, Chairman of the Board; Fred F. Florence, President; and the Management Committee, R.L. Thornton, Chairman; Harry A. Olmsted and Arthur L. Kramer.

This Foreword is followed by a letter to “TEXAS CENTENNIAL VISTORS,” by Texas governor James V. Allred which concludes with the sentence: I say, “Welcome to AN EMPIRE ON PARADE.” Capitalization and quotes are in the original. 35

Figure 34- Texas Gov. Allred letter of welcome in Souvenir Guide Book

35

“Official Souvenir Guide: Texas Centennial Exposition * Dallas, June 6 to November 29,” cover title, front piece gives the title as the “The Official Guide Book: Texas Centennial Exposition, June 6 1936 Nov. 29,” published by the Texas Centennial Central Exposition, copyright 1936 by John Sirigo. Pagination on the Souvenir Guide doesn’t start until page 9. Both quotes are prior to pagination. This reference will hence be OSG, for Official Souvenir Guide.

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In the Souvenir Guide book there is a section titled, “An Empire On Parade.” It explains how the Texas Centennial Exposition is a medium to explain how great and heroic Texas history is in its achievement of empire. The essay concludes with the following: Against a background of history made brilliant by the story of mission priest and Spanish Don, pioneer and frontiersman, the sharp imprint of Texas will be revealed, Art and Science, Commerce and industry have been merged in the Texas Centennial Exposition to tell, in graphic reality, of the thrilling climb up the steep heights of empire.

Figure 35- "Empire on Parade" section in Official Souvenir Guide.

Thus the Texas Centennial Exposition becomes more than a World’s Fair, more than the joyous celebration of a land honoring a noble past. It is a drama that was born in mountains and on the plains of Texas. In its oil fields and on the broad ranges the scenes were rehearsed. Workers in cotton fields, farmers on the fringe of the wilderness and all the gallant host of men and women who have made Texas are the authors of this fast-moving spectacle, Texas, through the medium of the Texas Centennial Exposition, presents an Empire On Parade.36 37[Boldface added.]

The essay, “Touring the Exposition,” opens as follows: As you enter the grounds of the Texas Centennial Exposition through the main gate, facing Parry Avenue, there stretches away from you one of the most beautiful and imposing vistas of An Empire on Parade. It is the Esplanade of State, 300 feet wide and 1,000 feet long, leading from the main entrance to the stately Texas Hall of State, the centerpiece which dominates the entire scene. 38 [Boldface added.]

The guide defines the architecture and layout as a progression and an empire exhibition.

In a following section titled, “The Esplanade of State,” this idea is repeated stating:

36

OSG, “Early History of Dallas,” pp. 15-16.

The capitalization of the phrase, “An empire on Parade,” varied, with usually, but not always “An” capitalized but “on” roughly was capitalized half the time and not capitalized half the time. Not reason for this can be discerned by the author.

38 OSG, “Touring the Exposition,” pp. 17-18.

37

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As you stand at the western end of this promenade and look toward the $1,200,000 Texas Hall of State, the full power and scope of An Empire on Parade is impressed upon you.39 [Boldface added.]

Then follows a description of the Esplanade of State with focus on its impressive size and its illumination. The “Empire on Parade” was to be understood as being very grand.

Along the Esplanade on each side are buildings about the length of the reflecting pool. On the right side viewing from the entrance was the Varied Industries, Electricity, and Communication, and on the left side was the Hall of Travel and Transportation.

In the section, “Story of Texas” we are told that Stephen F. Austin had a “dream of empire.” 40 In the section “The Electrical Hall,” again a reference to the empire is made. The guide states: The Hall of Communication presents the extensive display of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. You will find this one of the outstanding attractions of the commercial exhibits of An Empire on Parade. [Boldface added.]

The “empire” theme is repeated in describing the exhibit of the Western Union, a telegraph firm: You will find this one of the most intriguing and of the most unique in your tour of An Empire on Parade.41 [Boldface added.]

Further in the section, “The Varied Industries Building,” it is stated: The wide variety of the exhibits in the Varied Industries Building gives you a splendid idea of the scope of An Empire On Parade.42 [Boldface added.]

During the Texas Centennial Exposition a theatrical performance, “Texas Cavalcade,” was performed twice a day. The “Guide Book” has a section devoted for it. The opening sentence is:

39

OSG, “The Esplanade of State,” pp. 19-20.

OSG, “The Story of Texas,” pp. 9-12.

41 OSG, “The Electrical Hall,” pp. 21-27, “Empire” on pp. 23, 24.

42 OSG, “The Electrical Hall,” pp. 75-79, “Empire” on pp. 75.

40

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The spectacle of an empire marching to its destiny through four hundred years is to be a feature of the Texas Centennial Exposition at Dallas, June 6 to November 29. 43 [Boldface added.]

Repeatedly the Guide Book defines the Texas Centennial as an Empire Exposition and the art, architecture and Texas Cavalcade are to celebrate a Texas empire.

The guide book clearly and repeatedly wants to instruct the reader that the assemblage of architecture and the displays within the buildings making up the assemblage are an empire exposition.

Texas White Nationalism The introductory essays in the guide book reveal a neo-Confederate and white nationalist viewpoint and a white Texas identity. The essay “The Story of Texas” uses the phrase, “War Between the States,” to refer to the Civil War and Texans are held to be supporters of the Confederacy with the statement, “The War Between the States fell like a clap of doom, and again the tall men with long guns shouldered their rifles and fell in step with the Confederacy.”

The essay repeatedly refers to “the tall men,” which are clearly identified to be white American immigrants, with a imagined distinguishing racial characteristic, as those who successfully make Texas a triumph. The essay positions the current Texas as a triumph of white, primarily Anglo-Saxon, men.

The introduction states: The first men to range the plains and peaks of Texas were Red men with bows and arrows, but the debt of the free citizens of Texas today, is a debt to tall men with long rifles, American frontiersmen.

After describing what they hold to be the failure of the Spanish and French to effectively colonize Texas, the essay states, “they drove the wedge of civilization into a land of such expanse that it was destined to greatness beyond imagination. It was the tall men with long guns who carried on.” As mentioned earlier the essay further explains that these men realized Stephen F. Austin earlier “dream” of “empire.”

After the struggle the essay explains, “Sam Houston, leader of the tall men with long guns, was the popular hero of the young free land.”

The term “young” shows that the narrative has as its year zero the triumph of these white men. In terms of human settlement, Texas was over ten millennia old prior to Europeans reaching the Western hemisphere, additionally it had been settled by 43

OSG, “Cavalcade,” pp. 63-64, “Empire” on pp. 63, 64.

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Spanish and was part of the Republic of Mexico. This narrative exists in an Anglo-Saxon white space-time universe. This freedom is defined as that for white people and not relevant to African Americans who were enslaved.

The term “free” also reveals the narratives whiteness. Mexico abolished slavery shortly after independence and it was the attempt to assert over the territory of Texas the abolition of slavery was one, if not the one issue, that drove the secession of Texas from Mexico. In this definition of being “free” it is American whites being free, but not slaves or Latinos in Texas, and it also is being “free” from the multi-racial Mexicans.

The reader is told, “Surviving the Reconstruction era, the Texans began in the early ‘70s the real development of the Lone Star State.” The multiracial democracy of Reconstruction is posed as something that Texans survived.

However, the essay primarily concerns itself with independence from Mexico as a heroic effort of the “tall men,” white Anglo-Saxon men, against what was understood by Texans in 1936 as the multi-racial Mexicans.44 The subsequent essay, “Early History of Dallas,” starts with eliminating Native Americans, the essay explains: When the Republic of Texas won its spurs on the battlefield of San Jacinto in 1836, it turned its attention almost at once to the opening of the rich interior still dominated by the red men.

Victory over the Mexican government is a prelude to the consolidation of white supremacy by genocidal wars against Native Americans as the essay further explains: Beginning in 1837 the Congress of Texas laid the basis for this development by a series of laws. These were designed to improve communication with the United States to the northeast, to eliminate the Indians in the area and to populate the prairies with white families.

The essay uses the term “War Between the States” in reference to the Civil War. The essay states that “Dallas and surrounding territory were overwhelming pro-Southern in sentiment and turned their major energies to aiding the Confederacy.” The actual historical record was that the surrounding territories didn’t support secession. Support for secession in Dallas was due to inflammatory editorials in the Dallas Herald.

Randolph B. Campbell in “Grass-Roots Reconstruction in Texas,” notes: Eight north-central Texas counties that, like Dallas, grew relatively little cotton and had small numbers of slaveholders and slaves opposed secession in 1860 and 1862. For example, voters in Collin County, located immediately north of Dallas, 44

OSG, “The Story of Texas,” pp. 9-12.

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cast 70 percent of their ballots in favor of the Union. Dallas County residents, however, being influenced by the pro-secession stance of local leaders such as John J. Good, the ultrasouthern editorials of Charles R. Pryor’s Dallas Herald, and a supposedly abolitionist-inspired plot that resulted in the burning of the town square of Dallas in July, 1860, supported disunion by a vote of 741 to 237.45 Even before the Civil War Dallas was a reactionary outlier. Dallas has a Pryor Street and a Good-Latimore Expressway.

The importance of Dallas to the Confederate war effort is explained as if that was a laudatory accomplishment. The essay describes Reconstruction as a time of oppression and states “but its citizenship regained political control in 1874.” However, African Americans lost their rights to vote then, and so how Dallas conceives of itself, as a body of white people, who make up this “citizenship,” is revealed.46 All these essays have an erasure of the genocidal wars against Native Americans, the brutality of slavery, and the atrocities of the violent white terrorism during Reconstruction and the oppression and the lynchings of racial oppression, and the brutalities against Latinos.

Violent White Masculinities

Figure 36- Mural in West Texas Room Texas Building with enlarged detail.

45

Campbell, Randolph B., “Grass-Roots Reconstruction in Texas, 1865-1880,” Louisiana State Univ. Press, Baton Rouge, 1997, pp. 62, 65.

46 OSG, “Early History of Dallas,” pp. 12-14.

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In the West Texas Room there are at opposite ends of the room, two murals. One is of a pioneer family traveling in a covered wagon sitting in the front. You notice that it isn’t the stereotypical family of one father, one mother, one son, and one daughter. There is no daughter portrayed. It is instead a patriarchal unit with a patriarch and the patriarch’s wife and his son. Their faces are grim and they do not look very friendly. The other mural has a cowboy and his face is not friendly and he seems angry.

Figure 37- Mural in West Texas Room of Texas Building with enlarged detail.

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Another mural in the Texas Building in the North Texas Room of a popular character, “Old Man Texas,” also emphasizes the idea of patriarchy as being the core of Texas identity.

Figure 38- Mural in North Texas Room of Texas Building. Old Man Texas.

At Old Man Texas was created by Dallas Morning News Cartoonist John Knott in 1906.47 Here three generations of men are shown with the middle generation man having a wife as a responsible patriarch to produce the next patriarch to succeed him.

The industrial machinery, skyscrapers, trains, farms, electrical power and the rest represents the wealth and achievements of the Texas patriarchs represented by the archetypal Old Man Texas. In this mural also patriarchy is continued into the modern world of 1936.

At Fair Park Texas identity is represented by “Big Tex” a white cowboy wearing cowboy boots. The Texas identity is that of a cowboy. These murals also represent Texas identity.

47

Parsons, Jim & Bush, David, “Fair Park Deco: Art and Architecture of the Texas Centennial Exposition,” TCU Press, Fort Worth, Texas, 2012, pp. 86.

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The book, “Description of Texas,” Oran M. Roberts, governor of Texas 1878 to 1883,48 was published in 1881 and has a short history of Texas. The book has a section titled, “Delay In Settling: Inhabited by Indians, then by Mexicans,” in which Native Americans and Mexicans are denigrated.

In the introductory paragraph Robert’s explains the elimination of Native Americas as part of a larger global pattern white domination and extermination of non-whites from the planet. Referring to the continuing resistance of Native Americans to the loss of Texas, Roberts writes: They are careful, however, to keep us reminded of their existence, by their savage depredations upon our frontier people. This, however, cannot last long; for this very savage nature, which causes them to strike back as they recede before a superior race, draws upon them their gradual, though ultimate, Figure 39-- A Description of extermination. This is simply one of the processes at Texas by O.M. Roberts work, by which the higher order of man is, and will continue to be, forced in self-defence, willing or not, to take possession of, and use the earth everywhere, carrying out the inexorable and perpetually operating law of races, and of nations, — to elevate or die.

Roberts stating the racial identity of Mexicans argues that they are failures in both settling Texas and having an inferior “manhood” in failing to carry out a successful campaign of genocide against Native Americans. Roberts states: The Mexicans during a hundred years, under the Spanish monarchy, and afterwards under the Mexican Republic, made some progress in settling a small part of Texas, and in disputing its dominion with the Comanches and other tribes. They were, for the most part, a race of native Indians of copper color, slightly intermixed with Spanish blood. They were partial, in their industrial pursuits, to hunting for game, and to the care of herds of cattle, sheep and horses; and their arts were, in the main, confined to a level with their occupations. Their cultivation of the earth was very limited in quantity, and rude in manner. …

With their standard of manhood, and arts of war, the struggle with the wild savages was long, and often doubtful in maintaining their position in the country.

That difficulty, perhaps, contributed largely to their invitation of the Anglo48

Dixon, Ford, “Roberts, Oran Milo,” Texas State Historical Association Handbook online,

https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fro18, 7/18/2019.

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Americans to share with them their lands and dangers; which, commencing formally in 182, resulted in establishing numerous colonies for the settlement of white men.

The Texas insurrection is understood as an inevitable racial conflict.

The antagonism of races soon commenced, and was kept up from various grounds, until the Anglo-Americans, by the aid of some noble Mexicans, remained masters of the field and established in Texas an independent Republic in 1836. …

Roberts explains that white Texans, in contrast to Mexicans, are ready to violently seize Texas with a campaign of genocide against Native Americans.

The Anglo-Americans, when permitted to come to Texas, as colonists, and otherwise, adopted a very different mode of settling a new country. They went out boldly, spreading themselves over the country, irrespective of military posts, or priests, or towns, and with guns in hand, confronted the dangers of the Indian scalping knife and tomahawk; formed settlements, built cabins, opened and tilled farms, and gathered around them their stocks of hogs, sheep, cattle and horses.49 The Dallas Independent School District has an Oran M. Roberts Elementary School. In 2017, in a 3,000 plus word essay, it was one of the schools that Dr. Michael Phillips and Ed Sebesta said needed to have its name change.50

Figure 40 - Oran M. Roberts Elementary School Dallas ISD The Official Souvenir Guide wasn’t so direct, but communicated the same message. In the section “The Story of Texas,” the phrases “the tall men with the long rifles” and “the tall men with the long guns” is used repeatedly in the following sections:

49

Roberts, Milo Oran, “A Description of Texas: Its Advantages and Resources,” Gilbert Book Col., St. Louis 1881 , pp. 17-21.

50 Phillips, Michael, Sebesta, Edward, Dallas Morning News, Aug. 4, 2017, online at:

https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2017/08/04/dallas-confederate-memorials-screamwhite-supremacy

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The first men to range the plains and peaks of Texas were Red men with bows and arrows, but the debt of the free citizen of Texas today is a debt to tall me with long rifles, American frontiersmen. [Boldface added.]

After explaining the attempts by the Spanish and French to colonize Texas and their failures, the Guide explains.

These men, however, blazed the trail. Under the Cross and the colors of their kings, they drove the wedge of civilization into a land of such vast expanse that it was destined to greatness beyond imagination. It was the tall men with long guns who carried on. [Boldface added.]

As part of relating a narrative of the Texas insurrection: Sam Houston, leader of the tall men with long guns, was the popular hero of the young free land. [Boldface added.]

In mentioning the Civil War: The War Between the States fell like a clap of doom and again the tall men with long guns shouldered their rifles and fell in step with the Confederacy.

[Boldface added.]

After describing how Texas is a triumph after a hundred years since independence from Mexico, the section concludes with this sentence.

The tall men with long rifles wrought well in the wilderness.51 [Boldface added.]

“Tall men” is a way of saying white men from America or “Anglo-Americans.” “Long guns” and “long rifles” are instruments of violence by which “the tall men” were able to conquer and settle Texas. The history of Texas is the triumph of violent white men. The failure of Mexico to extensively occupy Texas is not discussed, and the failures of Spain and France are asserted to be due to having the wrong objectives. Given that a Pan American Exposition was planned for 1937 it would be bad policy to assert that Mexicans were racially inferior because they were racially mixed, an argument of white supremacy that would apply to almost all of Latin America.

The racial nature of this “parade” is made clear in official Centennial materials.

In the “Official Souvenir Guide,” there is a section, “Cavalcade of Texas.” This was a theatrical performance on a huge stage, 170 X 300 feet, of Texas history at the State

51

OSG, “The Story of Texas,” pp. 9-12.

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Fair. The section repeats the empire theme, and also makes it clear that history begins and is all about what white people do. It also has a less direct expression of Robert’s ideas of racial violence.

From the introduction: The spectacle of an empire marching to its destiny through four hundred years is to be a feature of the Texas Centennial Exposition at Dallas, June 6 to November 29.

This panoramic extravaganza is “Cavalcade of Texas,” written and produced as a living saga of the inexorable advance of civilization, by blood and iron and the enduring will of the white man, in what was only the wild land of the naked savage.

The Guide wishes to inform the reader that by “blood and iron” the “white man” violently takes possession of the land from the “naked savage.”

The section explains that the “Cavalcade” starts with “… Pineda, the Spanish explorer of 1519,” to U.S. President Tyler admitting Texas as a state. The essay explains why it starts with Pineda: Moving across a great stage … will march the men who shaped the destiny of Texas: Pineda, the first White Man to set foot on the soil of Tejas (Indian for “friendly) of the Indians.

Note the capitalization of “White Man” in the text. The authors wish to impress upon the reader that this beginning was when “the first White Man,” appeared in Texas.

Again making reference to “empire” the drama also involves gender roles in its portrayal of Texas history as explained.

The story is episodic in that it is told in scenes and eras through “cut backs” taken from two central and modern young characters, the inevitable boy and a girl.

Their wills clash; the girl abominated Texas, the boy, a cowhand, defends it – and the march of an empire springs there before the eyes of the spectators, visitors to the $25,000,000 World’s Fair of 1936.52 The triumph of Texas is also a triumph of men over women.

52

OSG, “Cavalcade,” pp. 63-64, “Empire” on pp. 63, 64.

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Figure 41- Dallas did not tolerate racially mixed casts for theater productions so "Native Americans" were created for the Cavalcade by air brushing with pigment.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy Shuts Down the Oak Cliff Little Theater Though it is not stated, the cast for “Cavalcade” would be all white. In 1936 in Dallas a mixed race cast for a theatrical production would be angrily opposed. In 1935 the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) led a successful campaign against the Oak Cliff Little Theater for attempting to produce a play with a racially mixed cast which “horrified” the Texas Division president. The UDC’s campaign not only prevented the production of the play, but the Oak Cliff Little Theater shut down. The president of the Texas Division of the UDC, Mrs. C.C. Cameron, exulted in this triumph in the annual minutes of their 1935 convention.

In the Dallas Time Herald, May 28, 1935 is an article, “Death of a Theater,” which gives details into the harassment which drove out of existence the Little Oak Cliff Theater. The article reprints the official notice of theater announcing its closure.

Whereas public co-operation of the Oak Cliff Little Theater has diminished to such a point that further operations are both impractical and inadvisable, and whereas, the present management of the Oak Cliff Little Theater recognized this sentiment and believes it desirable no longer to operate contrary to the manifest sentiment of the community.

Therefore, be it resolved by the directors of the Oak Cliff Little Theater assembled, That effective at once, it is the sense of the this body that such organization should cease to exist …

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The article explains that “Tuesday morning a fuller statement on the passing of the theater was released by the group’s board of directors.” The statement issued by the Little Oak Cliff Theater was that they had earlier ran an article in the paper in the first week in May announcing that they were going to perform the play “Jute” with a racially mixed cast and had only received positive responses. Then it states: On or about May 20 we received a letter from the United Daughters of the Confederacy, protesting and stating the show must not go on, as it would disgrace the city and the state. The following day we received a letter from one of the local camps of the United Confederate Veterans, an affiliated organization also protesting the show. The following day letters from several other organizations and individuals were also received.

All told, the opposition was such minority, we refused at first to take it seriously.

On Friday morning we received a telephone call from the secretary of the commercial association, stating he was besieged with telephone calls and that something must be done.

The Oak Cliff Little Theater in response told the commercial association that they would have a board meeting and get back to them, but on the following day of this first call they received another call refusing to allow the Oak Cliff Little Theater the use of the building. The Oak Cliff Little Theater shut down shortly thereafter.53 One notable thing about the shutdown of the Oak Cliff Little Theater you will not find this reason for the shutdown in local histories, which are obscure or just wrong regarding its closure.54 As stated, the Texas Division UDC President C.C. Cameron gloated over defeating the Oak Cliff Little in her address to the Texas Division UDC 39th Annual Convention in San Antonio Oct. 29 – Nov. 1, 1935.

In her address she takes care describing the many different colors of the flowers blooming in Texas on her travels calling out each type of flower and its color. The purpose of this become clear when she starts discussing their triumph over the Oak Cliff Little Theater. Describing returning to Dallas after visiting Elgin, Texas she states: On my returning to Dallas our Daughters were horrified that a Dallas Little Theatre had announced the production of a play using a mixed cast of whites and blacks. Joining other patriotic bodies, after some little controversy we finally 53

Lovell, Jimmy, “Death of a Theater,” Dallas Time Herald, 5/28/1935, page 12.

I plan on writing up a complete history of the shutdown of the Little Oak Cliff Theater and also how the history has been omitted from local histories. I have also purchased a copy of the play “Jute.” It is a racist play and was performed by an all-white cast and an all-African American cast in Dallas previous. It was the proposed performance of an interracial cast where white people would play the white characters and African Americans would play the African American parts that infuriated the neo-Confederates.

54

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convinced the Little Theatre that this must be stopped and the production of the play was withdrawn. We would encourage in every way a Negro Little Theatre as we would a white, but we believe God was wise and had a purpose in mind when he gave us colors in people as well as colors in flowers, and as a group of Southern people we wish to return to Him His colors as He intended them to be.55 In this Cameron is asserting that white supremacy is like making a floral bouquet.56 So to portray Native Americans the “Cavalcade of Texas Souvenir Program” shows a naked man getting his buttock air brushed with pigments to darken him.57

Figure 42- Airbrushed white people pretending to be Native Americans. Pg. 11 Cavalcade of Texas.

D.W. Griffith, Birth of a Nation, and the Cavalcade of Texas 55

Cameron, C.C., “Address of Mrs. C.C. Cameron President of Texas Division United Daughters of the Confederacy,” in “Thirty-Ninth Annual Convention Texas Division United Daughters of the Confederacy, San Antonio, October 29, November 1, 1935,” pp. 56-61, mention of Oak Cliff Little Theater, pp. 59-60.

56 Cameron, C.C., “Address of Mrs. C.C. Cameron, President of Texas Division United Daughters of the Confederacy,” Thirty-Ninth Annual Convention Texas Division United Daughters of the Confederacy, San Antonio, Oct.29-Nov.1, 1935, pp. 56-62, mention of “Jute” play on pages 59-60. Officers of the UDC until the 1990s did not go by their names and would instead use their husband’s names. The campaign against the Oak Cliff Little Theatre is reported in the DMN: “Confederate Daughters Oppose Playing Whites And Negroes in Drama,” 5/18/1935, pp. 6; “Another Confederacy Chapter Opposes Two Races in Theatricals,” 5/23/1935, pp. 6; “Guarantee No ‘Social Upheaval,’ Quince Asks Protests to Cease on Mixed Cast for Play ‘Jute’”; “Quince Drops ‘Jute’ In Face of Protests,” 5/27/1935, pp. 7; “Oak Cliff Merges Membership with Dallas Little Theater’s,” 5/28/1935, pp. 14.

57 “Cavalcade of Texas Souvenir Program,” presumably published by the Texas Centennial but lists no publisher or date. Cover says “Dallas * 1936.”

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Figure 43- Souvenir Program Cavalcade of Texas and Movie Poster for The Birth of a Nation.

The producers of the “Cavalcade” and the Dallas Morning News worked to give to it the prestige of another white supremacist work by pairing the production with the pro-Klan movie “Birth of a Nation.”

D.W. Griffith was the director and producer of one of Americans most notorious, if not the most notorious racist film “Birth of a Nation” which portrayed African American men as rapists. Griffith visited Dallas during the Centennial. As a famous Hollywood director he was a local news item and also was used to promote the Exposition.

The DMN on 6/8/1936, the day before the Exposition opening reported that D.W. Griffith is advising the producers of the “Texas Cavalcade”: Rumor that D.W. Griffith, great movie producer and creator of “The Birth of a Nation” and other cinema epics, was called to Dallas to advise on “The Cavalcade of Texas,” Centennial pageant, was give credibility by the fact that Mr. Griffith and his wife were guests Sunday of high Centennial officials.58

58

No author, “Griffith Entertained by Centennial Staff,” DMN, June 8, 1936, page 8.

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The article goes on to explain that Griffith was present at a rehearsal of the performance.

On the same page was a photo with of D.W. Griffith being meet by Centennial officials as he disembarked from the train stating that he was in Dallas to see the “Cavalcade.” 59 The DMN, on 6/9/1936, the day of the opening of the Exposition, wishes readers to know that Griffith has had input into the production and has praised the “Cavalcade of Texas,” and reports David Wark Griffith, the first of the great movie directors and responsible for the immortal “Birth of a Nation,” Monday was furnishing the impetus which is expected to make the opening of the Cavalcade of Texas Saturday night among the more impressive events of the exposition. ….

The cast and their performance were pronounced excellent by the noted director but he advised the additional expenditure on details to make the show outstanding in every particular.60 In the DMN on 6/11/1936 is an article, “Griffith Praises Lighting” in reference to the “Cavalcade.”61 On 6/17/1936 the DMN reports that the “Cavalcade” is almost ready and will open Saturday the article concludes with an explanation that D.W. Griffith praised the production as follows: D.W. Griffith, the motion picture producer and director, whose “Birth of a Nation” as made him immortal in film annals, left Dallas Monday with an explanation that he had no official connection with “Cavalcade” but made several suggestions when invited to do so. He warmly praised the magnitude of effects.”62 The DMN repeated hammers that D.W. Griffith, who they identify as the producer of “Birth of a Nation,” the 20th century’s most notorious American racist film, a film which is, according to the DMN, “immortal” and which according to the DMN, makes Griffith “immortal,” approves the theatrical presentation and has helped make it even more than excellent. In short, the DMN is instructing its readers that most famous white nationalist movie director praises this theatrical production.

The understanding of Texas history being a racial triumph isn’t confined to the “Official Souvenir Guide.”

59

No author, “Movie Master and Bride Arrive,” DMN, June 8, 1936, page 8.

“75,000 Expected to Attend Centennial during Week,” DMN, June 9, 1936, page 1, 9.

61 “Griffith Praises Lighting,” DMN, June 11, 1936, page 16.

62 “Cavalcade Almost Completed and Ready to Open Saturday,” DMN, Jun 17, 1936, page 4.

60

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Figure 44- Cover of booklet Commemorating a Hundred Years of Texas History and its Preface The booklet, “Commemorating A Hundred Years of Texas History,” published by the Texas Centennial Commission, makes it clear that the centennial is about explaining not only a white triumph, but an Anglo-Saxon racial triumph. In the opening Preface to the book, Cullen F. Thomas, President of the Texas Centennial Commission explains: It will be more than a mammoth modern exposition, whose buildings are models of architecture, in brick and stone, housing triumphs of invention and miracles of science and the riches of Texas soil and sun.

It will testify that Texans are not unworthy of the incomparable heritage left to them by martyrs and patriots, dying and ready to die, that Texas might become an Anglo-Saxon commonwealth.

It will commemorate the sacrifices of the plain pioneer men and women who first trekked the unpeopled wilds, with ax and plow and rifle and spelling book and Bible, to lay the mudsills of civilization.

It will life our eyes to the hilltops of our history, where cometh our help above the bog and fog, to taller thinking and nobler living. [Boldface added.] 63

63

Thomas, Cullen, F., “Preface,” Commemorating a Hundred Years of Texas History, pub. Texas Centennial Commission, 1936, pp. 1. Cullen F. Thomas is the President of the Texas Centennial Commission.

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Also, note the phrase, “unpeople wilds.” Native Americans don’t even count as people and are relegated to the non-human status of wild life in the “wilds.” History for Thomas starts with white people, since prior to the arrival of white people, there are no people and hence no history.

Six-Flags and Six-Nations and the Organization of Space and Time

Figure 45- 1936 Postcard of the Esplanade with the six porticos identified.

The Esplanade is the central focus of Fair Park today and was the central focus of the Texas Centennial. The layout of the Esplanade is based on the six-nations historical narrative of Texas history.

After passing through the main entrance of the Texas Centennial you come across a wide pool which is as long as the Esplanade. On either side are three porticos, each one devoted to one of the six nations in the six-nation theme.

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Figure 46-- The six medallions in the porticos of the Esplanade They are laid out in a roughly historical progression. First, on the left is the Spanish portico, and on the right is the French portico. Next, on the left is the Confederate states portico, and on the right the Mexico portico. Finally, on the left is the Texas portico and on the right is the United States of America portico.

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The Texas building with its Hall of State is conceived as a shrine to Texas. The Esplanade along with the Texas building constructs a historical progression cumulating with a triumphal Texas. Persons entering the park, walking along the Esplanade, and then visiting the Texas building re-enact this historical progression. The built landscape gives this historical idea a physical and a monumentally imposing presence.

The Six-Flags idea defines the history exclusively in terms of a succession of European style nation states. This would be white identified nations, Spain, France, Confederacy, United States of America, and the Republic of Texas, and a nation derived from a European nation, but not white, Mexico. These are nations conceived in the model of modern states of the 19th and 20th century as Western states with national flags as symbols of nation-states as opposed to the older dynastic states with their banners and dynastic flags.

This defines the beginning and the end and the progression of Texas history as starting and ending and being done by white people. The story of Mexico, a nation seen as nonwhite is part of this narrative as a nation overthrown by white people in a triumphal march of white supremacy. The Six-Flags idea is a white nationalist conception of Texas history.

The Six-Flags idea also does erasure. There were Native Americans in non-European polities (Organized but not European nation-states). Conflict with Native Americans, and genocidal war waged against them by American immigrants to Texas and later during the Republic of Texas, the Confederacy, and before and after the Civil War as the state of Texas in the United States is a central feature of Texas history. This set of SixFlags excludes all these Native American polities.

Many Native American polities now have adopted flags, but a review of the literature shows that this occurred in many, if not all cases, after 1936 and many cases from the 1960s to the 90s and some as recently in the 21st century.64 However, there might have been some Native American polities that did have a flag before 1936, the author hasn’t exhaustively searched the literature. However, it appears that by having the requirement of a flag and a development of European ideology of nationalism, Native Americans not having flags would be excluded which would be most if not all Native Americans in Texas.

Similarly by defining the requirement that a historically important group in Texas have been in existence in Texas as a nation state, large groups of Texas are excluded. Without being nation-states they are without flags. So the Six-Flags doesn’t included African Americans nor Latinos after 1836 and erases them as part of Texas history and drivers of Texas history. These minorities become objects acted upon white the triumphal whites.

64

Healy, Donald T., “Native American Flags,” Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2003.

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The text under the Mexican medallion shows the purpose of Mexico being assigned a portico, even though they are not white. Under the medallion for Mexico is the text, “THIS REPUBLIC FOSTERED THE ENTRY OF THE FIRST AMERICAN COLONISTS A PEOPLE DESTINED TO MOULD A GREAT EMPIRE.� (Original all capitals.) That is the historical meaning of Mexico is that they allowed white people to enter and establish the triumphal white state of Texas.

Figure 47- Text under the medallion in the Mexico Portico Art along the Esplanade In the porticos on the inner wall there were murals, two for each portico. There are figures of white men and women, semi-nude neo-classically draped in scenes of the leading modern technologies of 1936. They are going into the heavens on rockets, welding, using X-Rays, broadcasting, working with the atom, making movies, working on modern equipment, sailing and navigating the oceans, using trains and automobiles, and other technologies. There are no non-white people. Non-white people are nothing, non-existent, in these buildings of the future.

The following are some pictures of some of the murals.

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The Esplanade isn’t the only location at the Centennial in which white people are represented as being the agents for all important activity.

In the iron work for the doors to the former Dallas Museum of Fine Arts you see that the artists are all white.

Figure 48- Iron work for doors at the former Dallas Museum of Fine Arts.

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What is disturbing is that Dallas cultural institutions have been restoring the murals along the Esplanade. Some were damaged by fire or painted over and Dallas cultural organizations have seen fit to bring them back.65 Texas Hall of State

Figure 49- Postcard Night view of the State of Texas Building.

As you complete walking down the Esplanade you reach the pavilion before the Texas Hall of State. Whereas the buildings along the Esplanade represent the progress of Texas history, the Texas Hall of State represented the triumphant present day state of Texas.

65

I have seen the following information on plaques at Fair Park. At the Confederate Portico the “Future Methods of Transportation” mural, Carlo Ciampaglia, received conservation treatment in 1997 was paid for by Katherine B. Scrimshire, Fidelity Investments through the Fidelity Foundation, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and John Raeber. At the United States portico, “Photographic Process” mural, Pierre Bourdelle, was paid for by the City of Dallas Bond Program, Friends of Fair Park, and State Fair of Texas. Another mural at this portico was also restored but the author failed to get photos of the plaque for the restoration. At the Portico of France the murals are also restored. No information on who paid for the restoration. This remains a project to be completed.

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Figure 50- Series of views approaching the Texas Building

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Figure 51- Views of Texas Building and detail

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Figure 52- Texas Building looking up In a line all around the exterior of the building towards the top are chiseled letters of all the Texas governors, making quite a rogues gallery of racists.

Figure 53- Names of Texas Governors front right wing.

It was considered a shrine to Texas, a holy place.

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In a front page DMN article, “Gorgeous Shrine Westminister for Texas, Says, Neft,” Pat Morris Neff, then president of Baylor University and previously governor of Texas, says that there should be no commercialism in the Hall and it should be the “Westminister Abbey of the New World.” He refers to it as a “sacred spot,” and that “In the dedication of this building we pay tribute to a glorious and romantic past and look forward to a greater future,” and most importantly, “it will always be held as a sacred source of inspiration for our youth.” That it will teach a certain white nationalist understanding of Texas to “our” youth, the white youth.66 In another front page DMN article, “Majesty of State Hall Makes Visitors Instinctively Remove Their Hates and Lower Voices,” compares this to religious space. The article states: The dignity of the structure is inescapable and so overpowering that men walking through its portals, standing face to face with the heroes of the past, instinctively remove their hates. Visitors lower their voices as if they were within the walls of some great cathedral.

The Hall with its murals are, “… almost oriental in its splendor, its richness and in its color.”67

Figure 54- Left to right statues are James W. Fannin, Mirabeau B.Lamar, Stephen F. Austin Upon entering is a curved room with large statues of the leading figures in the Texas revolution against Mexico, who created a slave Republic out of a nation that had

66

No author, “Gorgeous Shrine Westminister for Texas, Says Neff,” DMN, 9/6/1936, pp. 1.

Wallis, Eugene C., “Majesty of State Hall Makes Visitors Instinctively Remove Their Hats and Lower Voices,” DMN, 9/20/1936, page 1.

67

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abolished slavery and was threatening to bring the abolition of slavery to Texas. It also represents the white revolution against a multiracial Mexico.

Figure 55- Statues are left to right, Sam Houston, Thomas J. Rusk, William, B. Travis

Figure 56- Someone thinks that the birth of a slave republic and Jesus go together.

Pictures taken 12-18-2018.

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John Morán González in his book, “Border Renaissance: The Texas Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican American Literature,” explains how the Texas Centennial celebration’s negative depictions of Mexicans resulted in a counterresponse and the development of Mexican American culture and Tejano identity. His first chapter, “‘Texanizing Texans’: Texas Centennial Discourses of Racial Pedagogy,” explains how the Texas Centennial state-wide discourse was about teaching white supremacy and white triumph over multi-racial Mexicans. 68

Figure 57 - Left side view, center view, and right side views from the entrance to the Hall of State

68

González, John Morán, “Border Renaissance: The Texas Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican American Literature,” Univ. of Texas Press, 2009.

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From the rotunda with the leaders of the Texas Independence movement you pass into the giant Hall of State with its gigantic murals on either side. Illuminated by chandeliers and an ornate ceiling held up by massive pillars. The steps into the hall, the floors, and the walls below the murals are made of polished stone. Opposite the entry way is a great golden medallion with a giant five pointed star in the center and six figures arrayed around the star on the medallion representing an allegorical figure for each nation on a cloud.

It is like entering a great temple and it is a great temple, a temple to the triumph of the white nationalist state of Texas.

Figure 58 - Depictions of African Americans in the Texas of 1936

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Figure 59- Mural Hall of State Right side as entering taken from medallion side facing entrance.

On these murals the Native Americans are subordinated, white Spaniards first colonize the land, Mexicans are defeated, and white Texans fight battles, settle the land, found states and educational systems and are the agents of history and build the future.

African Americans are depicted once, four shirtless adult men toting bales of cotton and loading them onto a ship. African Americans are just objects that are present in Texas.

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Figure 60-- Mural in Hall of State on side facing in from the entrance.

Over the many of the historical scenes are figures, often three classically draped women, as if they were the three sister goddesses of Fate in Greek mythology, directing or reigning over the scene below. In one scene they are three angles with golden halos. Sometimes it is a single female figure in classical drapes. These gods, angels, allegories, themselves, the arbitrators of fate in Texas, these divine agencies, are all white. The heavens themselves in the murals are run by whites.

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Figure 61- Allagorical figures in the Hall of State Murals – The heavens and earth are run by white people.

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These murals also fashion a history of Texas that is an erasure. Slavery isn’t depicted nor is Reconstruction and its white violent terror. The Ku Klux Klan is erased.

Figure 62- Slave stabs himself to death rather than be recaptured - Dallas Daily Herald 11/28/1858.

The strivings of Native Americans, African Americans and Latinos to a better future and accomplishments they have made is ignored. African Americans are clearly depicted as having only a future of manual labor and being happy to do it.

In the other halls at the Texas Building, with their murals, only possibly once is an African American depicted as a tiny figure helping to saw down a tree. Again white people are making Texas.

Figure 63 - Left figure is possibly an African American assisting with the manual labor of cutting down a tree.

As GonzĂĄlez explains in his book, this idea of racial triumph in the celebration of Texas had its precedents. He explains that the first proposal for a Texas centennial made in 1923 by Theodore H. Price, publisher of the business journal Commerce and Finance, argued for a centennial celebrating the first identifiable Anglo-Saxon settlement by

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Stephen F. Austin in 1824 and in which Texas history would be central and that it was about Anglo-Saxons defeating “Mexican oppression.”69 Even earlier, the official guide to the Texas exhibit at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904

by Moye Wick’s in a section, “Texas: A Glance at Its History,” emphasized white supremacy. The introduction to this section is: The Progress of Texas is an object lesson of survival of the fittest, as shown by the final domination of the Anglo-Saxon over other racial elements. The luminous page of history records no achievement surpassing the victory at San Jacinto, by which the Republic of Texas accomplished independence in 1836. … Not only was Texas, during all this time, menaced by Mexico, but it was also in conflict with the Indians. … It also shows that Providence favored the possession of this great domain by the Anglo-Saxon, “the heir of all the ages, in the foremost ranks of time” – the only race worthy to cope with its vast possibilities. … This pride is well founded, for, from the inception of the Anglo-Saxon history of Texas, its pages have been gilded with glory.70 The triumphalist white supremacy of the 1936 Texas Centennial has deep historical roots.

The architecture of the Centennial is undeniably intended to be a triumphalist architecture which it is. Though the specific architectural styles used to signify modernity and the future is different than the triumphalist architecture of fascist states in Europe in the 1930s, the Texas State Centennial Fair, is essentially the same in its goals.

Figure 64- Title page Texas Imperial State of America.

Again Texas is imagined as an empire.

69

González, John Morán, “Border Renaissance: The Texas Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican American Literature,” Univ. of Texas Press, 2009, pp. 34-36.

70 Dexter, W.W., “Texas: Imperial State of America with her Diadem of Cities,” The Texas World’s Fair Commission 1904, Samuel F. Meyerson Printing Co., St. Louis, n.d., “Texas: A Glance At Its History” by Moye Wicks, n.p.

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Figure 65- Picture of the Esplanade in 1936 from State of Texas Building.

Fair Park ought to be considered Texas’s very own “Triumph of the Will” and the artists involved should be considered Leni Riefenstahls. Instead art books entirely ignore the racial elements in Fair Park and just see a lot of pretty buildings.

Dallas cultural institutions are busy restoring or recreating these murals are restoring the message of white supremacy of the 1936 Centennial. There doesn’t seem to be any recognition by Dallas cultural groups that these restorations are restoring the message of white supremacy. These activities should instruct the reader that Dallas cultural institutions are white institutions.

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Empire Exhibitions and Colonial Expositions

Figure 66- Empire Exhibition Glasgow Scotland 1938 Dominions and Colonial Avenues.

The 1936 Texas Centennial was not the only empire exposition in the late imperial world system of white supremacy of the 1930s. There was the 1931 Coloniale Exposition of Paris, the Bruxelles (Brussels) 1935 Exposition, the Johannesburg Empire Exhibition of 1936-37, Glasgow Empire Exhibition of 1938 and others, but only these named four will be discussed in this essay.

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Figure 67- Postcard Paris 1931 Colonial Exposition - Cite des Informations

Figure 68- Picture Cite des Informations Paris 1931 A common feature of these exhibitions and expositions is that they employed modernist architecture, including Art Deco to make a white supremacist regime seem modern and of the future and communicate ideologies in support of white supremacy.

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Figure 69- Brussels Exposition 1935 Grand Promenade

Figure 70- Grand Palace Brussels Exposition 1935

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Figure 71- Cover booklet for Johannesburg Empire Exhibit 1936-1937 As Mark Crinson, in his book, “Modern Architecture and the End of Empire,� (2003) points out, the historians of architecture have largely ignored the relation of modernist

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architecture to imperialism and have made assumptions that it was inherently not nationalistic or imperialistic, but instead assumed that it was anti-imperialistic. Crinson in his book points out that these assumptions are not true. Instead Crinson suggests that modernist architecture is a part of imperialism. Crinson makes these statements in his introduction: Imperialism figures hazily if at all in most surveys of modern architecture, even those specifically devoted to British modernism.

Architecture as an arm of imperialism is seen, and seen episodically at best, as an embarrassment to modernism and part of what it … contests.

But modernism arose at the peak of European colonial empires, even if its own histories barely acknowledge this and even if empire seems like one of those things it consigns to history.

One [assumption] is that the values of modernist architecture are understood to transcend issues of national power and sovereignty over other peoples; modernist architecture … was … silent, so it can remain for its historians in relation to imperialism.

One [assumption] is that modernism’s advocates were anti-imperialist … Yet, if this opposition to imperialism was there it was subconscious at best: there are few anti-imperialist statements by modernist architects, and where we do find them they tend to be voiced by only a few non-wester clients. Perhaps it might be better to speculate that modernism was not a disavowal of imperialism, it was actively employed as a way of improving the function of the colonial city …

But it [modernist architecture; was also a form for the veiling and naturalizing the violence …71 As explained by Patricia A. Morton in her book, “Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris,” this exposition used modernist architecture to establish a racial hierarchy with France, the Metropole, represented by modernist architecture, as being the advanced and the subject peoples of the French empire represented by their architecture which was to represent their less evolved state.

As Morton states: “The Exposition classified and organized colonial objects and peoples it displayed according to principles of hierarchy and evolution, with Europe at the pinnacle and ‘less evolved’ civilizations ranked below it. The architecture of the pavilions was the medium for bearing the ‘good news’ of colonialization and, at the same time, was the physical manifestation of this invented colonial ‘reality.’”

71

Crinson, Mark, “Modern Architecture and the End of Empire,” Ashgate Publishing Co., Hants, England, 2003, pp.

1-3

Supposedly less advanced architectures: Algerian mosque, Vietnamese Pavilion, Angkor Wat, and Dutch Indies (Indonesia)

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Supposedly less advanced architectures: West African design restaurant, West African Mosque, Equatorial Africa, Togo & Cameroun.

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Morton also explains that some of the actual culture present in Paris and in the colonies had to be ignored to maintain a narrative supporting racial hierarchy.

“Cross-breeding between colonizer and colonized, so prevalent in both Paris and the colonies, had to be edited out to preserve the bipolar equation that justified colonialism. The heterotopias of both the Métropole and the colonies – mixtures of native and metropolitan culture and blood – had to be deleted to the greatest extent possible or the collection would not be read in the desired manner.”72 This type of editing needs to be considered in understanding the tear down of the Hall of Negro Life and the destruction of two of the four murals of Aaron Douglas.

Dipti Bhagat in his essay “Art Deco in South Africa,” explains how it is used in the 1936-37 Empire Exhibition in Johannesburg to support a white supremacist state. He makes these statements: The spectacular Art Deco styling of the exhibition’s built form and decorative program was an exemplary expression of an Empire Dominion that asserted during the 1920s and 1930s a young white nationhood …

In this young nation’s eclectic Deco-inspired form, style and motifs framed Africa’s white Dominion as culturally sophisticated and racially distinct.

Figure 72- United Kingdom building is white and radiant with rays contrasted with Africans.

The duality of South Africa’s celebratory Modernism – an impetus at once national and cosmopolitan – was

72

Morton, Patricia A., “Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the Colonial Exposition, Paris,” MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000, pp. 88-89.

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seen at its most complex in the exhibition’s representation of South Africa’s black populations as primitive and exotic.

This posture conveyed the idea of modernity to rival that of Europe and America, but was also conceived, in a local context, as a means of asserting white South Africa’s cultural difference from ‘the native’ and its supremacy over him. 73 As Morton pointed out in “Hybrid Modernities,” the need to edit out items that didn’t support racial hierarchies at the Paris 1931 Coloniale Exposition.

The Johannesburg exhibition also found a need to edit out African accomplishment. In the brochure for the exhibition is a page for the Zimbabwe Ruins.

There are pictures of the ruins, Cecile Rhodes’ tomb, and a picture of the Rhodesian pavilion, (Colonial name for Zimbabwe) which the caption for the picture explains “The pavilion is based on the temple in the Zimbabwe Ruins.” The page discusses the Zimbabwe ruins:

Figure 73- Zimbabwe Ruins page from Johannesburg Empire Exhibition booklet.

73

Bhagat, Dipti, “Art Deco in South Africa,” Chapter 39, pp. 419-425, in “Art Deco 1910-1930,” Editors, Charlotte Benton, Tim Benton, and Ghislaine Wood, Bulfinch Press, New York 2003. USA printing of Victoria and Albert Museum printing in 2003.

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The mysterious ruins of Zimbabwe, a source of argument to archeologists of five continents, will be reproduced in replica as the Rhodesian Pavilion. The silent mystery of these ruins, standing in the heart of Africa are a challenge to science the world over.

It is believed in some quarters that Zimbabwe was built by the slaves of the Queen of Sheba, and that it was from mines in the vicinity that she got her supplies of gold. Miners are to-day still recovering gold from ancient mines in the region of the ruins.

The idea that a ruin in the heart of Africa built long before the arrival of Europeans might be built by Africans is simply unacceptable since it would undermine the ideology of white supremacy. So speculation is given forth that it is a “silent mystery” or possibly the construction was directed by the Queen of Sheba a figure from the Bible, a religious book of Christians. So in this case it is edited out by making it a mystery and eliminating the ruins as an African achievement. Again this editing gives insight to the tearing down of the Hall of Negro Life in Dallas.

The Johannesburg Empire Exhibition and the 1936 Texas “Empire on Parade” both used a covered wagon as part of self-identification.

Figure 74- On pillars at entry of front entrance of Texas State Fair.

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Figure 75- Johannesburg Empire Exhibition postcard with enlarged detail below.

Figure 76- Johannesburg Empire Exhibition medal.

Figure 77- Johannesburg modernist buildings representing Europeans vs. official exhibition postcards of Africans

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At the Brussels 1935 Exposition racial hierarchy appears in that the Congo building where the Belgians promoted their colonial enterprise as uplifting and beneficial to the Congolese has a modernist architecture but with a few African elements.74 Next to the building were buildings which looked like grass huts which to represent the Congo itself.

75 Central to the exposition is a large promenade with a large modernist building at the end. The exposition did have a human zoo. 76 Unfortunately there hasn’t been an examination of the architecture of the Brussels Exposition published in the English language.

Figure 78- Pavilion for Colonial Enterprises which would be the Congo

74

Stanard, Mark G., “Selling the Congo: A History of European Pro-Empire Propaganda and the Making of Belgian Imperialism,” Univ. of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE 2011, pp. 61-66 regarding Belgian propaganda and the Palais du Congo; Morton, 75 The author of this paper has secured images of the Palais du Congo and its associated buildings.

76 Stanard, Mark G., “Selling the Congo: A History of European Pro-Empire Propaganda and the Making of Belgian Imperialism,” Univ. of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE 2011, pp. 61-66 regarding Belgian propaganda and the Palais du Congo; Morton,

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At the 1938 Glasgow Empire Exhibition there was an Empire Tower as a central element done in an unmistakably Art Deco style. As Crinson states in his book, “The conjunction of modernism and empire was intended to be unavoidable in Glasgow. Tait [Who laid out the exhibition grounds.] saw it as the best way to ‘combine dignity and gaiety … to be impressive without being heavy, gay without being cheap.’”77

Figure 79-Left Empire Tower Glasgow Expo, Right Tower Johannesburg drawing from guide booklet.

77

Crinson, Mark, “Modern Architecture and the End of Empire,” Ashgate Publishing Co., Hants, England, 2003, pp. 92-99, quote pp.

95.

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Figure 80- Left to right, Palace Metropolitan Paris 1931, Federal Bldg. Dallas 1936, Palace of the City of Brussels 1935 At the Brussels Exposition 1935 many pavilions had towers.

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The layouts of these empire and colonial exhibitions and expositions are strikingly similar to each other as well as the Texas Centennial. There is usually a big Art Deco tower. There is in several cases a very long giant promenade with water and fountains, sometimes a pond along the entire length or a series of ponds in the promenade. The promenade often leads up to a large modernist building. Africans or persons of African ancestry are represented as being backward.

The striking irony of these pretentions of rationality and progress is that these Western powers who had devoured the world with imperial conquest and then turned on each other in World War I and would in a few years be engaged in another World War with a combined death toll of both these world wars would be in excess of a 100 million. They had defined non-whites as “savage” yet they would slaughter each other by the tens of millions.

As Art Deco and other modernist architectures were used in the other empire exhibition and colonial expositions Art Deco in the Texas Centennial serves the same purpose in the 1936 Centennial to make a racist regime seem modern and part of the future.

The use of modernist styles of architecture to make a racist regime seem modern isn’t confined to 1930s expositions and imperial regimes. Also, More than one type of modernist architecture can be used to attempt to make reactionary racism seem modern. Walter Peters, in his 2004 article, “Apartheid politics and architecture in South Africa,” explains how the apartheid government of South Africa in the 1950s drew its inspiration from Brazilian modernism. Architects travelled to Brazil to study its modernistic buildings to get ideas for its designs of segregated facilities in Namibia78 and South Africa. Brazilian modernism shows that different styles of art and architecture, thought as modern, can be used to make reactionary regimes seem modern.

At the conclusion of the article he discusses the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and how it would grant amnesty to those who had committed human rights abuses. Peters points out, “Despite the gross application of apartheid ideology to architecture, the profession has obviously not understood its role in the ignoble past, let alone that collusion may have distorted its moral and ethical basis.”79 It might be equally said that Dallas cultural institutions, as manifested in its activities and attitudes related to Fair Park, seeing it without comprehending its meaning, have also not understood their roles in relation to Dallas’ ignoble past or demonstrated much understanding at all.

78

Then under South African control.

Peters, Walter, “Apartheid politics and architecture in South Africa,” Social Identities Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture,” Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, Vol. 10 No. 4, 2004, pp. 537-547, DOI: 10.1080/1350463042000258953, link to article, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1350463042000258953.

79

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African Americans at the Empire Exhibition Dallas Morning News Mocks African Americans African Americans during the 1936 Centennial are not just ignored or demeaned by the Fair Grounds. The DMN has a constant rhetoric demeaning them. One front page article is “Negroes Swarm To Centennial For Their Day,” as if they were locusts.80 Another headline about the Negro Hall of Life proclaims that “History of Negro From Jungles to Now to be Shown,” with the subtitle, “Centennial to Be Turned Over to Darkies Juneteenth.” This article opens with the sentence: The economic and cultural development of the Negro, from the days of the weird chants sung by native tribes in Africa to modern times in America…81 Yet another headline is, “Folk Festival Negroid For Emancipation Day.”82 In a front page article, “Negroes Stage Big Juneteenth At Centennial: Dallas Eats Cold Supper and Cotton Patches Emptied as Thousands Inspect Magic City: Hall Is Dedicated: Dusky Beauties Prance,” about African Americans having a Juneteenth celebration.

“Magic City” implies that African Americans will not comprehend the Exposition except as magic.

The article insistently regards African Americans attending the triumphalist white Exposition in comical terms.

Mandy wasn’t there when Dallas sat down to cold supper Friday night for with Rastus, and thousands of carefree members of her race she was busy putting in a glorious Juneteenth at the magic Texas Centennial Exposition. …

Joining in with the city negroes were other thousands of dusky country merrymakers who had deserted catfish streams and left fiddle-faced mules to munch contentedly in idleness, farm work forgotten, to celebrate Emancipation Day …

Rolling eyes and flashing white teeth dominated exhibit halls, the Midway and various places where special negro programs …

80

“Negroes Swarm to Centennial for Their Day,” DMN, 10/20/1936, page 1.

“History of Negro from Jungles to Now to be Shown,” DMN, 5/14/1936, page 15.

82 “Folk Festival Negroid for Emancipation Day,” DMN, 6/19/1936, page 5.

81

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Laughter and carefree happiness comes easy to the sons and daughters of Ham and with the many wonders and attractions of the magic city at their disposal they made this Juneteenth a Christmas, July Fourth and Thanksgiving all rolled into one.83 The article continues with similar remarks.

Another DMN article has the subtitle, “Seven Bewildered Blacks from Cuba Bring Voodooism as Fair Feature,”84 and another article headline is, “Third Million At Fair Is Due On Wednesday: If 3,000,000th Visitor Is Negro Will Get Date With Yanyego Voodoo Dancer or Her Partner.”85 The DMN, using popular ideas of what Voodoo is, is portraying African Americans as primitive and pagan.86 With these articles the DMN hoped to do what the exhibitions and representations of non-whites at the Paris, Brussels, and Johannesburg exhibitions and expositions sought to do, represent persons of African ancestry as primitive. The Hall of Negro Life dashed those hopes. The Hall in turn could be dashed to pieces.

Figure 82- Aaron Douglas' mural Negro's Gift to America. Was destroyed.

83

Figure 81-- Estevancio. Was destroyed.

Not sure if any image remains.

“Negroes State Big Juneteenth at Centennial,” DMN, 6/20/1936, pp. 1, 12.

Rosenfield, John, Jr., “The Passing Show,” DMN, 8/4/1936, page 10.

85 No author, “Third Million at Fair is due on Wednesday,” 8/19/1936, page 1.

86 The DMN would be using what the popular ideas of Voodoo were. I do not make any comment about what Voodoo might actually be. Popular ideas what voodoo was would be from movies like “Black Moon,” Columbia Pictures, 1934, or “I Walked With a Zombie,” RKO Radio Pictures, 1943.

84

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Hall of Negro Life

Figure 83- Postcard Hall of Negro Life The Negro Hall of Life was erected at the 1936 Centennial over the opposition of the Dallas establishment. There were problems with the building’s racist contractor. It was located off in a corner away from the rest of the Centennial and cordoned off by numerous shrubs. It was shuttered during the 1937 Greater Texas and Pan American Exposition. It was demolished over the objections of the local African American community.87

87

González, John Morán, “Border Renaissance: The Texas Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican American Literature,” Univ. of Texas Press, 2009, pp. 42.The Texas State Historical Association Handbook offers up an excuse for why the building taken down to try to dismiss the idea that it was due to racism which should warn the reader about this handbook.

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Figure 84- A red circle is drawn around the Hall of Negro Life on the map.

At the Hall there were four panels by Aaron Douglas of which two survive. Examining the surviving art work it becomes apparent why the Hall was torn down, why it was an imperative for white racist Dallas to have it torn down. The Douglas’ art was a pointed and direct rejection of the entire art and architecture of the 1936 Centennial.

The first feature that would have been objectionable was that the art of Aaron Douglas was immediately and easily perceived as superior artistically and intellectually to the art of the porticos and other buildings and the murals in the Hall of State.

The art of Aaron Douglas was sophisticated and modern and show his understanding of Orphic-Cubism. Even today the two surviving murals, “Aspirations” and “Into Bondage” are compelling. In contrast the Art of the white nationalist narrative of the 1936 Centennial seems kitschy and banal. The interest in Art Deco would be coming to an end shortly and was somewhat dated.

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Figure 85--Aaron Douglas Aspirations and Detail from Hall of State

CREDITS - THANKS Aaron Douglas, American, 1899–1979 Aspiration, 1936 Oil on canvas 60 x 60 in. (152.4 x 152.4 cm) The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, museum purchase, the estate of Thurlow E. Tibbs Jr., the Museum Society Auxiliary, American Art Trust Fund, Unrestricted Art Trust Fund, partial gift of Dr. Ernest A. Bates, Sharon Bell, Jo-Ann Beverly, Barbara Carleton, Dr. And Mrs. Arthur H. Coleman, Dr. and Mrs. Coyness Ennix, Jr., Nicole Y. Ennix, Mr. and Mrs. Gary Francois, Dennis L. Franklin, Mr. and Mrs. Maxwell C. Gillette, Mr. and Mrs. Richard Goodyear, Zuretti L. Goosby, Marion E. Greene, Mrs. Vivian S. W. Hambrick, Laurie Gibbs Harris, Arlene Hollis, Louis A. and Letha Jeanpierre, Daniel and Jackie Johnson, Jr., Stephen L. Johnson, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Lathan, Lewis & Ribbs Mortuary Garden Chapel, Mr. and Mrs. Gary Love, Glenn R. Nance, Mr. and Mrs. Harry S. Parker III, Mr. and Mrs. Carr T. Preston, Fannie Preston, Pamela R. Ransom, Dr. and Mrs. Benjamin F. Reed, San Francisco Black Chamber of Commerce, San Francisco Chapter of Links, Inc., San Francisco Chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity, Dr. Ella Mae Simmons, Mr. Calvin R. Swinson, Joseph B. Williams, Mr. and Mrs. Alfred S. Wilsey, and the people of the Bay Area, 1997.84 Art © Heirs of Aaron Douglas/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

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The 1936 Centennial had taken care to hire white artists from outside the state who were supposedly the best and brightest in painting murals. Several were from Europe. Yet here was an African American artist clearly surpassing them all and not by an increment, or margin, but was way beyond them. Aaron Douglas art made a mockery of the whole white triumphalist narrative of the 1936 Centennial.

The mural, “Into Bondage,” made visible what the 1936 Centennial artwork and the Confederate artwork strove to make invisible, the crime of African American slavery.

The mural, “Aspirations,” is a direct rejection of the depiction of African Americans in the Hall of State. The African American men in this picture are wearing suits. They are not toting bales of cotton, one holds architectural tools, a compass and a square ruler, the other holds a chemical flash. The third figure, an African American woman, is reading a book. To the side is a globe of the world.

All three are looking off into the distance where on top of a hill are skyscrapers and a modern factory. They have serious expressions and postures in looking towards the buildings on top of the hill. There is a solemnity in the picture. There is hope. They stand on a ledge above many hands stretched upward and wearing chains.

“Aspirations” directly rejects the depiction of the African Americans toting cotton bales.

It directly rejects how the DMN wanted its readers to think about African Americans.

The African Americans in “Aspirations” are not “carefree” or “rolling their eyes.”

It would give aspirations to African Americans in Dallas in a city whose white establishment could only but be alarmed by African Americans with aspirations, in a city whose white establishments would worry that African Americans with aspirations might mean “cold suppers.”

As long as the Negro Hall of Life stood it would demonstrate that the art of the 1936 Centennial was ridiculous and racist. It would mock the pretensions of white supremacy made by the 1936 Centennial.

Morton in her discussion of the Paris 1931 Coloniale Exposition pointed out that that the reality of hybridity in the actual architecture of France and the colonies was excluded in the exhibition’s construction to insure that the exhibition would only speak a certain narrative of racial hierarchy of white over non-white. Those who constructed the Paris 1931 Coloniale Exposition had control over the space and were able to prevent any contradiction to their intended narrative. In the Johannesburg exhibition there was the denial that the Zimbabwe ruins could have been construction by Africans again preserving racial hierarchy.

The Afrofuturism of Douglas inverted the intended racial hierarchy of art at the Centennial and thus subverted the Centennial. This upset white people. Jesse Thomas in

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the book, “Negro Participation in the Texas Centennial,” a report on the Hall of Negro Life in the Centennial, describes the reaction of white people at the Centennial.

“Many white people insisted that these murals were not painted by a Negro. In the early days of the Centennial, several of them remonstrated with the intelligence personnel. Some became so rude that the administration decided to have a sign painter paint on the wall the following statement: ‘These murals were painted by Aaron Douglass, [sic] a Negro artist of New York City.’”88 Dallas had previously demonstrated opposition to African Americans upstaging white people. In 1925 the Bonnie Blue Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy of Dallas reported in their annual statement to the 29th annual Texas Division UDC convention minutes the activities of their legislative committee: In a Book Review contest a negro child won the first prize. Our committee called upon the School Board protesting such a contest and offered to furnish a separate prize for a contest between negro children. The School Board advised that a mixture contest would not be held in the future.89 Even something as minor as a book review contest by school children would be seen as a threat by the ever vigilant guardians of white supremacy, imagine how Douglas’ murals eleven years later would alarm them.90 Renée Ater, in her essay on Douglas’ murals in the book, “Aaron Douglas: African American Modernity,” published by the Spence Museum of Art at the Univ. of Kansas, recognizes that Douglas’ murals upset racial hierarchy. Ater states: The visual history of the past and future as depicted by Douglas stood in stark contrast to the murals in the Hall of State.

Ater proceeds to give a summary how the Texas Building and Hall of State presented history and then comments: 88

Thomas, Jesse O., “Negro Participation in the Texas Centennial Exposition,” Christopher Pub. House, Boston 1938, Pp. 27. Douglas was spelled with a single “s.” See also, The British Association for American Studies has an excellent web page on Aaron Douglas and his murals at the Negro Hall of Life. http://www.baas.ac.uk/usso/fromharlem-to-texas-african-american-art-and-the-murals-of-aaron-douglas/, 4/19/2018. Aaron Douglas is spelled with a single “s”. Frederick Douglass is spelled with “ss” and not “s,” an interesting spelling error.

89 “Minutes of the Twenty-Ninth Annual Convention of the Texas Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Held in First Methodist Church, Marshall, Texas, October 13-16, 1925,” “Report of the Bonnie Blue Flag Chapter, No. 1852, Dallas,” pp. 145-148, quote from pp. 146. United Methodist Churches still lend their facilities to United Daughters of the Confederacy meetings as recently as 2016. The author has been unable to track down who was the child who won the contest in 1925 or what the title of the essay was. It doesn’t seem to have been reported in the Dallas Morning News. The Dallas Independent School District needs to track this down and some type of reparations needs to be given to all the students who after 1925 were shunted into a separate contest.

90 The author of this paper is going to write the Dallas Independent School District and try to find out who this African American student was and also ask for reparations.

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Unacknowledged in the Hall of State was the way in which slavery had been vigorously sanctioned in the state from its beginnings as a republic in 1836; except for the stevedores, no African Americans were visible. (Native Americans and Mexicans fared no better; they were shown either as noble savages or as savage brutes to be defeated.) The history that Douglas relayed was diametrically opposed to the history that the white organizers projected, that of a progressive and modern new Texas. If the Texas Centennial effectively erased blackness from public display, Douglas intervened in this exclusive story and emphatically reinstated the black presence. Douglas’s murals for the Hall of Negro Life and the murals as exemplified by the north Texas room for the Hall of State shared a conviction in the utility of the past, emphasized the role of humans in shaping that past, and celebrated the heroes of their respective communities. However, the gulf between these two versions of history and the way in which they were represented was wide and deep, and was never bridged at the Texas Centennial Exposition.91 Unlike the Zimbabwe ruins it would be relatively easy to just tear down the Hall of Negro life and they did.

The infamous behavior of the contractor for the Hall in painting its interior bright green and red would have acted to make the hall less sophisticated in the eyes of the public and less of a disruption of racial hierarchy. Thomas in his book reports: The contractor painted the building without instruction or consultation with the General Manager or members of the Advisory Committee with reference to the color scheme to be followed. He used two colors for the interior —deep green and red. When he was called into question as to the reason for painting the building without official advice or authority, he stated that in the first place he knew that Negroes could not assemble enough exhibits to fill the building; the second place, he understood that Negroes like loud colors and he thought when visitors came they ought to have something pretty to look at.

Thomas relates that it was a struggle to get the contractor to correct this and paint it the correct colors and he had refused to follow the safety code and resisted correcting it and only did so under the federal government’s threat of forfeiture of payment.92 This white visitors to the Hall of Negro Life had probably walked up the Esplanade and toured the Texas building and were in awe of the Hall of State, and felt like they were the

91

Ater, Renée, “Creating a ‘Usable Past’ and a “Future Perfect Society: Aaron Dogulas’s Murals for the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition,” a chapter in “Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist,” edited by Susan Earle, published by the Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Manhatten, 2007, pp.

92 Thomas, Jesse O., “Negro Participation in the Texas Centennial Exposition,” Christopher Pub. House, Boston 1938, pp 21-22.

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master race of the universe and then when they viewed the murals of Douglass their pretensions would have popped like a bubble, a cheap rubber balloon.

There had been resistance to having a Hall of Negro Life but African Americans through lobbying the federal government were able to get the Hall of Negro Life included. In just existing it was an affront to the white establishment of Dallas and Texas in that they were not masters of the Centennial space and that African Americans were able to challenge successfully their control of this space. Empires control their space and dominate it, with the Hall of Negro Life being constructed, the Centennial had not, it was not an Empire on Parade as they asserted. The message of the Esplanade and the Texas Building was absolute white triumph over the geographic space of Texas and yet in this microcosm of the Centennial into which Texas and Texas history was mapped there was an intruder representing a failure to control space and the successful contesting of white control of this space. Just by existing there was a message that resistance could be successful and the Texas Empire was fragile.93 For the Texas Building and its Hall of State and for the Art Deco murals and architecture to teach their lessons the Hall of Negro Life would have to be taken down. It was torn down and two amazing national treasures of art were destroyed when it was torn down.

Conclusion The Art Deco of Fair Park, the architecture, the Texas Building and the Hall of State within needs to be recognized as an empire exhibit and as the triumphalist white supremacist project that was intended to teach a lesson of white supremacy. It needs to be recognized that Fair Park teaches this white supremacist lesson today.

We need to put an end to Fair Park teaching white supremacy.

93

Thomas, Jesse O., “Negro Participation in the Texas Centennial Exposition,� Christopher Pub. House, Boston 1938, describes the lack of support the Hall received from the state of Texas and the decision to seek funds from the federal government.

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APPENDIX: Six-Flags Over Texas: A Historical Fabrication The idea of six flags over Texas is a historical concoction since for France and Spain the idea of nations and national flags are projections back into the historical periods when Texas is imagined to be under two national states France and Spain. To understand this we need to understand the ideology of nationalism.

As Michael Billig ably explains in his landmark work, Banal Nationalism, national identity and nations are thought to be the natural order of things resulting from a rational understanding of objective criteria which define nations, however, the ideology of nationalism, that the idea that the world and its people are naturally divided by nationality with clear geographic boundaries is a modern European ideology which has universally triumphed so such so that we have trouble comprehending that the idea of nations is a modern invention, are ideological constructs and are not inherent in human existence. Billig’s explains that when there are regions of the globe which are stateless we regard the situation as an anomaly where something has gone wrong because we believe nations are natural and hence this geographic area without a nation is unnatural.

The study of nations and nationalism in the field of cultural geography in the late 20th century has come to realize that nations are constructs and are ideological projects.

The ideology of nationalism is creation of the modern world starting perhaps as early as the late 18th century, nations are mostly are efforts starting in Europe in the 19th century and in the 20th century nationalism has swept the globe making nationalism a universally triumphant ideology.

Nationality and the resulting nations have no consistent objective reason. In detailing how there is no common logical geographical principle or language or religion that defines nationality and nations, cultural geographer Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism, in describing the national divisions of the earth concludes: Historical forces may have combined to produce the nation-state as modernity’s logical form of governance. Yet, a willful anarchy seems to have accompanied the way that logical principle has been established in practice. 94 A common strategy for groups that feel oppressed by the metropolitan centers of a nation is to seek to define a separate nationality and claim some need for some degree of separation whether secession to create a separate state, or some degree of autonomy from the national government, or some other separatist strategy. The core argument is

94

Billig, Michael, “Banal Nationalism,” Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA, 1991, pp. 23-24. It has been through ten printings by 2010 and is considered a landmark book in the field.

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that this separate nationality is not fairly treated within the larger state, in terms of developing its national identity, in the treatment of its nationals, and the treatment of the region for which it claims for its nationals. In short there must be a sense of grievance and difference that needs a solution in separation or separatism.

With the rise of modern nation states there are often invented national traditions.

A national identity exists if you can convince people that they are a nationality.

There can be appeals to common language, religion or not, or historical events, ethnic origins or not, or different customs and culture or not, or what you can find people accepting as defining a national identity. There can be claimed differences in ethnic origins. These rationalizations can often be capricious. Nationality is an ideological creation of moon beams and smoke. 95 This explanation of nationalism is related to the theme “Six Flags Over Texas” so that it can be understood that this theme relies on ignoring some flags and historical periods to pick flags which might reasonably be attributed to nations.

Whereas Mexico, Texas, the United States and the Confederacy were Republics and creations of the late 18th and 19th century with defined flags, France and Spain were monarchies defined by dynastic inheritance and feudal antecedents. A definitive selection of which flags composed the Six Flags over Texas wasn’t decided until June 20, 1997 by the Texas Historical Commission which reported on their reasons for their decision and adopted by law that year. The report is available online, see footnote.96 The Commission reported that most of the displays of the “Six flags’ were incorrect since they were made from flags that manufacturers were already producing for the markets, to avoid the cost of custom manufacture of specific flags and that without a codification of what the “Six flags” were, manufacturers would not have a design specification or an assured market.

In deciding which flag would represent the Kingdom of Spain the Commission decided on the flag of Bourbon Charles III over that of the Habsburgs monarchs of Spain. The Habsburg flag was a red saltire of the House of Burgundy from 1516 to 1785, whereas the flag of Bourbon Charles III was three horizontal strips of red, yellow, and red in that order from 1793 to 1931. The current flag of Spain is very similar in color and design to the Bourbon flag.

95

This is a common understanding of nations and nationalism by scholars. I recommend Chapter 2, “Nations and Language” and Chapter 4, “National Identity in the World of Nations,” in “Banal Nationalism,” by Michael Billig, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA,, 1991. It has been through ten printings by 2010 and is considered a landmark book in the field.

96 “Six Flags Over Texas,” A Report by the Texas Historical Commission, reprinted from the June 20, 1997 Texas Register, Vol. 22, pages 5959 to 5967. This is available online as a PDF at http://www.thc.texas.gov/public/upload/forms/six-flags-over-texas.pdf.

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As the Commission report states, “Although displaying the Burgundian saltire as a ‘Six Flag,’ would be historically correct, few people would recognize the flag.” So the flag of Charles III was adopted, though it was only a flag “over” Texas for a short period of time compared to a much longer period of Spanish (or Habsburg) claims to the territory of Texas. Another reason for this choice given in the report is that the flag appears in the Texas state seal.

The Texas Secretary of State has online the 1993 pamphlet explaining the Texas State Seal. Unlike most state seals Texas’ seal has a design on the reverse of the seal using a six flag design. The original design adopted in 1961 by the Daughters of the Republic had a Confederate Battle flag which was changed in 199197 However, the Texas State Library and Archives Commission webpage on “Six Flags of Texas,” pointed out that the 1936 Texas Centennial in Dallas used yet another Habsburg flag, with was divided into four squares with a castle or lion in each square. It was chosen since it was the flag used when Cortez conquered Mexico. This report is online see footnote.98 Reading both these reports of the Texas Historical Commission and the Texas State Library and Archives Commission you learn that the purpose of the six flags of Texas is other than historical instruction but rather communicate a white nationalist idea of Texas.

In deciding for the flag to represent the Kingdom of France the Commission states, “The flag of France that was allegedly carried by René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle in 1865, was probably a plain white flag strewn with fleurs-de-lys. This flag (circa 1643 to October 31, 1790) was a simplified version of the French state flag …)

So this flag that was “allegedly carried” “was probably” the flag used is the one the Commission selected. It has the advantage that the Commission report explains is that it matches the Texas state seal. The selected flag is just pulled out of the air to cover up another bad historical decision.

The Texas State Library and Archives Commission “Six Flags of Texas” has this to say.

In the 1680s, there was not one official French flag; a number of different designs were in use, and it is not clear which La Salle's expedition might have carried.

Some patterns which have been used in Texas include a white banner with three gold fleur-de-lis, a blue banner with three gold or white fleur-de-lis and a white banner liberally sprinkled with gold fleur-de-lis. For the Centennial Exposition, 97

“The Texas State Seal,” online version of pamphlet of same title, first printed 1993, https://www.sos.state.tx.us/statdoc/seal-additional.shtml.

98 No author, Six Flags Over Texas, Texas State Library and Archives Commission, https://www.tsl.texas.gov/ref/abouttx/sixflags.html. The reference in the online page for the reasons this flag was selected is given as “Why the Six Flags of Texas?” Texas Centennial Review, Feb. 19, 1936, page 3.

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the white flag sprinkled with gold fleur-de-lis was adopted as the most likely design, and this pattern is most commonly seen today.

The Historical Commission points out that the flag design they choose matches the Texas State seal. Why a French flag was included at all probably was to have six flags and hence a symmetrical Texas seal and maybe more identify Texas with Europe.

Though how this imagined flag flew “over” Texas is questionable. The failed tiny French colony was a disaster with half of its inhabitants dying in the six-months. La Salle started out with 180 colonists, but when he left them, abandoned them, there were 23 left. The colony ended with a supposed massacre by Native Americans.99 However, they might have had a flag, and it might have been the one that is easy to get manufactured commercially for flag displays.

The Confederate states adopted three different national flags. The first one, the Stars and Bars was later rejected since it was considered too similar to the American flag. The second flag was a complete redesign and had the Confederate battle flag as the canton in the upper left. The third was only modified with a red vertical bar at the end so that without wind, it would not be confused with a flag of surrender. The second and third flags are what the Confederate decided upon as their flag for the foreseeable future, and the first Confederate flag was decisively rejected.

However, a variant of the first flag is adopted by the Historical Commission because, “The Texas State Seal Advisory Committee choose to use the seven-star Stars and Bars when the committee updated the design of the reverse of the Texas State seal in 1992 because the Star and Bars is the least recognizable and least inflammatory of the three Confederate flags.” This seven star flag was the first version of the 1st National Confederate flag, but was only in existence until more states seceded and was transient in its existence. Supposedly authoritative online sources discuss the 1st Confederate National Flag but don’t point out that it had thirteen stars during most of its existence.

It has a prior history in Texas memory as representing not the first version of the 1st National Confederate flag, but as the flag representing Texas as the seventh state to secede, yet it was chosen.

For example, the Texas State Historical Association in their article “Flags of Texas,” list this seven-star flag for the years of 1861 to 1865. It was in use only from March 4, to May 21, 1861. The thirteen star flag was in use from Dec. 10, 1861 to May 1, 1863. It omits how short this flag was in existence or its association with Texas secession. 100

99

Weddle, Robert S., “La Salle’s Texas Settlement,” Texas State Historical Association Handbook online, https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/uel07. As always read the TSHA handbook with caution.

100 Spain, Charles A., Jr., “Flags of Texas,” Texas State Historical Association Handbook online,

https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/msf01 (7/29/2019). The use of the Texas State Historical Association Handbook should always be done with caution. The omissions can be startling. For the dates of the duration of the individual flags see, “What you should know about the Confederate

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The selection of this seven star flag celebrates the secession of Texas and does not represent the period of time Texas was a Confederate state, whereas other Confederate flags wouldn’t specifically call out the secession of Texas.

It is doubtful that you would find many people able to recognize the Stars and Bars, however, most everyone would recognize the second and third Confederate national flags. It is without anyone’s doubt that the first flag is the least inflammatory of the three designs.

The six-flag codification shows how it is constructed by non-historical considerations.

The Texas State Library and Archives Commission web page states, “The flags of six nations have flown over Texas.” The Historical Commission on the six flags is much more careful in their wording stating, “THC has reviewed these designs and determined that they represent the appropriate flags of the six nations at the time of each claim to this soil,” excepting the U.S. Flag. The critical word is “claim.”

How, much sovereignty each nation state actually had authority over the geographical area of Texas is avoided. The reason for Texas’ existence is that the Spanish and Mexican states had very little authority or presence in this peripheral edge of their claimed territory.101 The Texas State Seal is unusual because it has art work for its obverse which includes six flags. The obverse itself has been changes. The 1961 version had the Confederate Battle flag which wasn’t any of the national flags of the Confederacy. This was the seal obverse adopted during the mid-20th century Civil Rights Era. It was changed in 1991 to be the First national Confederate flag.102 Though there has been some care by some, like the Historical Commission of the “six flags,” to not make a definitive historical claim, the seal has become accepted as representing the six nations representing stages in Texas’ development. This the opening sentence by Charles A. Spain, Jr., for the Texas State Historical Association handbook entry, “Flags of Texas,” is as follows: FLAGS OF TEXAS. The strong Texas interest in flags is shown in public and private displays of the “Six Flags Over Texas,” i.e. the flags of six countries that flag’s evolution,” Kyle Kim and Priya Krishnaakumar, Los Angeles Times, July 9, 2015, at archive.org http://www.latimes.com/visuals/graphics/la-na-g-confederate-flag-history-20150623-htmlstory.html.

101

No author, “Six Flags of Texas,” Texas State Library and Archives Commission, https://www.tsl.texas.gov/ref/abouttx/sixflags.html, printed out 2/11/2018. Texas Historical Commission Report, “Six Flags Over Texas,” reprinted from June 20, 1997, Texas Register, Vol. 22, pp. 5959-5967. http://www.thc.texas.gov/public/upload/forms/six-flags-over-texas.pdf. Downloaded 2/11/2018.

102 “The Texas State Seal,” from the web page of the Texas Secretary of State, Rolando Pablos, https://www.sos.state.tx.us/statdoc/seal-additional.shtml, printed out 2/11/2018. This page is an online version of a pamphlet, “The Texas State Seal,” printed October 1993 under the Office of the Secretary of State of Texas.

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have ruled over Texas: the Kingdom of France, the Kingdom of Spain, the Mexican Federal Republic, the Republic of Texas, the Confederate States of America, and the United States of America.103 Charles A. Spain, Jr. was a co-chair of the Texas State Seal Advisory Committee which adopted the obverse design in 1961 with the Confederate Battle flag.104 When you use the phrase, “Six Flags over Texas,” the “over” tends to indicate national sovereignty in terms understood in the 20th and 21st century understandings of nations and national territory. As indicated before the French presence in Texas was marginal and the authority of Spain was also minimal and largely a claim on maps to preclude other European claims.

At the time of the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas which Confederate flag was to be used wasn’t fixed. In some cases it is the First National Confederate flag, but on postcards you can see a flag that is either the Second or Third National Confederate flag and on the tickets the Confederate Battle flag.105 The cover of “Commemorating a Hundred Years of Texas History,” has six flags also, but it is the white fleurs-de-lys on blue for France, a white flag with the Hapsburg coat of arms for Spain, and the First National Flag for the Confederacy.

The various selections of six flags to make up the “Six Flags Over Texas” theme have largely been mix and match. That is because it isn’t about historical instruction concerning flags, it is about defining Texas history as being about a specific set of six nations and defining Texas history as white history.

103

Spain, Charles, Jr., “Flags of Texas,” Texas State Historical Association Handbook, online, at https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/msf01, printed out 2/11/2018.

104 Spain, Charles A. Jr., “Seals of Texas,” Texas State Historical Association handbook, online, https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/mss01, printed out 2/11/2018.

105 Items in the author’s collection.