Michener, James A. (49 page)

Quimper, a heavy drinker, interrupted: 'But, Reverend Harrison, didn't you recently lead the fight against alcohol? In those three western counties which held a referendum on saloons?'

'I did, and I'm proud to say we kept those counties dry. I consider alcohol an abiding evil.'

'Thank you,' Quimper said, bowing as if to a debating adversary.

Then Harrison said: 'I share these things with you to remind you that in Texas, we take religion seriously. It can even be, as I shall demonstrate in a moment, a matter of life and death.' He then launched into his formal paper, which I shall summarize in his words:

'Except during the republic, when secularism ran rampant, religion has always been a major force in Texas life, and often the major force. No state in the Union pays greater deference to religion or supports it more vigorously. The founding fathers were unequivocal. Stephen F. Austin sought for his colony only devout Christians. Even a somewhat suspect hero like William Travis of

Alamo fame, who dealt in slaves and deserted his family, could in 1835 write to the leaders of his church:

We are very destitute of religious instruction in this extensive fine country . . . About five educated and talented young preachers would find employment in Texas, and no doubt would produce much good in this benighted land. Texas is composed of the shrewdest and most intelligent population of any new country on earth, therefore a preacher to do good must be respectable and talented. Remember Texas.

Texas became a state partly because loyal Protestants from the North and the South refused to accept Catholicism or any established church as the state religion, and much of the animosity anglos in the new nation of Texas felt toward their Mexican citizens along the border stemmed from the fact that those loyal Catholics adhered to customs which were morally offensive to the puritanic Protestant majority in the northern parts of the state. Even today you less traditionally devout members of this Task Force cannot comprehend how embittered we Protestants can become when we hear that churches along the border permit the drinking of alcohol and the gambling of Bingo on church property. We cannot understand such profanation.

The religious impulse influences Texas life at every level and in the most unexpected ways. To this day it keeps most stores closed on Sunday. It determined that Texas would lead the nation in the fight for Prohibition. It dominates school boards. It accounts for great universities like Southern Methodist, which Joel Job III helped found, and Texas Christian and Abilene Christian, which J.J. V was so instrumental in financing. In today's world it explains why so many radio and television stations allocate much of their time to media ministers, who collect more funds from Texas listeners than from any other state.

'Indeed, if one studied only the outward manifestations of religion, one would be justified in concluding that Texas is now and always has been the most Christian of nations, and it is understandable that many Texans, and perhaps most, believe this to be the case. We love our churches and defend them vociferously.

'But if one steps back dispassionately and assesses with cold eye the actual conditions in Texas, one must wonder how deep this religious conviction runs. You are more likely to be murdered in Odessa than in any other city in the nation. It and Grand Forks, North Dakota, are of comparable size, but Odessa produces twenty-nine point eight murders per thousand; Grand Forks, one. Dallas gunmen shoot more police officers in a year than do the

citizens of Philadelphia, Detroit, San Diego, Phoenix, Baltimore, St. Louis, San Francisco and Boston combined. Such amazing figures can be explained only by some inherent Texas differential. Our state officials go regularly to jail for blatant offenses which do not occur with such frequency in states like Iowa and South Dakota. Each autumn three or four Texas high schools watch their football teams forfeit all their games because they broke the rules, knowingly. Deaths on Texas highways from drunk driving are shattering in their regularity.

'And one has to be amused at the famous bass-fishing contest held at the Lake O' The Pines near Jefferson. Total prize money, one hundred and five thousand dollars. Created an open scandal because Texas sportsmen were caught fastening onto their hooks twelve-pound frozen bass flown down from Minnesota, allowing them to thaw in the warm water, then reeling them in with delighted cries: "Hey! Look what I caught!" When this was detected, other contestants hired scuba divers to swim to the bottom with live bass from Wisconsin to fix to their lines. Solution? Give every fisherman a lie-detector test. When sixty percent of the winners failed, loyal Texans cried: "Understandable. They were all from Oklahoma."

'Historically, Texas Christians, good church members all, have been loath to face up to the moral problems of their time. Joel Job I was a stout defender of slavery, and both Harrison II and III leaped into Confederate uniform during the War Between the States to serve as chaplains, for they believed that slavery was ordained by God and must be prolonged. Harrison IV, who led the fight against drink and Al Smith, also led the fight for the revival of the Ku Klux Klan and preached two notable sermons explaining why it was doing God's work in Texas.'

At this point he coughed, rather nervously I thought, and fumbled among his papers for a small document, whose nature I could not determine from where I sat, before continuing: 'Nothing exemplifies better the complexities of the moral order in Texas than this well-edited little publication: The Blue Book for Visitors, Tourists and Those Seeking a Good Time While in San Antonio, Texas, 1911-1912. It defines the red-light district, Via Dolorosa to Matamoras, and lists the more luxurious houses of prostitution therein. Lillian Revere seems to have run an attractive place at 514 Matamoras Street—Old Phone: 1357, New Phone: 1888, Private Phone: 2056. To get there, her advertisement said, you took the San Fernando streetcar, got off at South Pecos and Matamoras, and there you were. The book divides the women into three classes —twenty-two A's, twenty B's, sixty-two C's—and gives addresses

and phone numbers. It also lists thirty-three cabdrivers who can be trusted. Among the names, several attract attention. Beatrice Benedict, Class A, apparently ran three houses, but how she did this is not explained. One of the Class B girls was named El Toro, one of the Class C's was Japanese. One of the cabdrivers was John Ashton (English Jack). And on page seventeen is something I rather liked, the complete baseball schedule for San Antonio's games in the Texas League.'

Reverend Harrison told us that he had often pondered these apparent contradictions and had decided that they did not really represent moral confusion: 'The Texan who guns down his neighbor does not visualize himself as committing a crime. He is merely settling an argument within the accepted Texas tradition. The Texas billionaire who has three wives, three households and three families of children at the same time cannot conceive of himself as doing anything wrong. He is merely perpetuating the free life of the frontier, and he sees himself as being a better Texan for so doing. With no apologies he supports his church, helping to finance its attack on immorality and loose living.

'Every example of social disorganization which the Northern critic might cite in an attack upon Texas can be explained away by the Texan apologist with the statement: "But that's the way we've always done it in Texas." If any item of behavior is accepted by the majority, then it becomes part of the Texas theology, serving as its own justification. The good people who published The Blue Book were satisfied that they were providing a constructive service.

in no instance is this more clearly demonstrated than in the case of wetbacks along the Rio Grande. For generations, Texas planters, first in cotton then in citrus, utilized those people under living conditions which were appalling at best and tragic at worst. Good church members who sent their sons and daughters to SMU or TCU saw nothing wrong in treating their Mexican workers worse than they did their animals, and their justification was: "They're better off here than they would be back in Saltillo."

in the early 1900s the fiery Baptist minister John Franklyn Norris led a noisy crusade against horse racing, gambling and alcohol. Distressed by the perfidy of women, he launched fevered sermons against short skirts, bobbed hair and dancing. But his fiercest ire was reserved for any professors at Baylor, the Baptist university, who veered even one inch from what he felt was the literal truth of the Bible, and he succeeded in getting several fired. Idolized by Texans as their revealed prophet, he startled some of his weak-kneed supporters in 1926 by winning an argument with

a gentleman and winning it by the simple expedient of whipping out a revolver and shooting the man dead with three well-placed bullets. The jury found him innocent on the grounds, I suppose, that he was a member of the cloth, and therefore incapable of doing wrong.

'How tragic these Texas religious debates could become was illustrated in the case of W. C. Brann, the Voltaire of Waco, who in the 1890s published a famous muckraking journal, The Iconoclast which delighted in castigating Baptists for their spiritual and moral deficiencies. Unable to bear his gibes, which circulated about the world, religious fanatics took stern measures: once they thrashed him in public; then they kidnapped him; they came close to lynching him; and finally they killed him with a shot in the back, "right where the suspenders crossed," and later they desecrated his grave.

'The contradictions have survived into our time, for recently Brother Lester Roloff, another powerful evangelist, ran children's homes in the Corpus Christi area which broke every rule in the book, yet the state excused him on the grounds that he was a God-fearing clergyman and therefore exempt from normal restraints.'

'What should we, in fairness, say in our report?' Miss Cobb asked, and Joel Job VI was prompt in his response: 'That Texas really is a state which honors religion far more than most. Basic to everything we do is a reverence for religion, but we insist upon constructing our own theology.'

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F THE VARIOUS NATIONAL GROUPS THAT SETTLED IN TEXAS,

and there were more than twenty—Germans, Czechs, Poles, Wends—the one which gave the area its basic character came from Ireland. They arrived in great numbers, filtering down the famed Natchez Trace from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee.

They were a resolute, courageous, self-driven, arrogant lot. Often surprisingly well educated, the vast majority had been raised as Presbyterians, although many in recent years had become Methodists or Baptists. To appreciate their unique qualities, it will be instructive to follow one stubborn fellow as he makes his way slowly, accidentally toward Texas.

To do this it will be necessary to jump backward in time to the blustery winter of 1802 and to a long, beautiful glen that ran west to east at the center of Scotland. At its far end, Glen Lyon was marked by a small mountain-girt loch, from which tumbled a sparkling river that bred trout and provided water for the sturdy Highland cattle grazing along its banks.

On the shore of the loch, so positioned that a man could survey the protecting mountains and also see any enemies who might be climbing the glen, stood a dwelling, low and dark, of but three rooms. Its foundation was of solid boulders; its sides were of heavy half-worked stone; and its thatch-and-turf roof was held down by a network of thick heather ropes from whose ends dangled large rocks to offset the lifting power of the winds which often howled down the mountains.

This dwelling, Dunessan by name, was occupied by the family of a redoubtable man in his seventies whose forebears generations earlier had fled into the remote fastnesses of Glen Lyon after being harried and driven from their ancestral lands. A stubborn clan, they had persistently backed the wrong side in wars and had paid the penalty.

The old man was Macnab of Dunessan, patriarchal head of the local branch of the Macnabs, one of the most contentious clans in Scotland. He was a big man, veteran of a dozen Highland battles, and he looked especially formidable when clad in the

crimson-green-red tartan of the Macnabs, with dirk and claymore at the ready. He wore white mutton-chop whiskers and a Highland bonnet, and seemed always ready to take up arms for some new battlefield, but recently an old bullet wound in his left leg had begun to impede him, forcing him to stay close to his house, from which he still roared orders to his kinsmen.

On this morning he was in a gentler mood, for he rested with his grandson Finlay on a wooden bench outside the door, trying to catch whatever heat the wintry sun provided. 'Have you ever wondered,' he asked the boy, 'why we Macnabs always cling to the IVlacdonalds and guard against the treacherous Campbells?'

'Glencoe,' the lad said promptly.

'But why Glencoe?'

When the boy, only ten years old, displayed an imperfect understanding of that tragic name, the old man drew him closer: 'In the long run of human history no event surpasses the villainy of the Campbells at Glencoe.' And he proceeded to summarize that Highland horror in which the Campbells, seeking to curry favor with an English king, insinuated themselves into the good graces of the rebellious Macdonalds. Appearing suddenly in the remote and gloomy fastness of Glencoe, they passed themselves off as friendly travelers, but after more than a week of feasting and singing and wooing the Macdonald lassies, the Campbells, in dead of night, fell upon their hosts and slaughtered them.