Dallas

HOTEL ADOLPHUS
DALLAS, TEXAS
DEAR ELISAVETA ANDRIEVNA: —
Trains were sliding into and out of the railroad station the other morning when I got off the Memphis sleeper at Dallas. Big black trains, old style, and silvery streamlined trains, new style. There was an immense clanging of bells on the bright air, and the sound of deepthroated locomotive’s whistles, which, more than any other sound, stirs the soul of the American who hears it because it is forever part of him, with the promise to a restless people of far places on a huge continent.
Inside the station, as I waited for my friends to fetch me, a trainman in a high-pitched voice which seemed half exhortation to the reluctant traveler to be on his way, and half moan as though he lamented the going of those whom he would never see again, called the roll of America: Abilene, Amarillo, San Angelo, Oklahoma City, Pawnee, Albuquerque, New Orleans, San Francisco, Denver, St. Louis, Chicago, ‘aa-n-d po-ints we-e-est.’ Bells clanged again, feet shuffled, ticket punchers bit into cardboard, drive wheels pounded the rails, and the California limited was gone. Gates opened, and incoming travelers, wiping the morning from their eyes, walked chatting with friends out into the wide plaza of the station.
Sitting there amid the sound and the movement, enveloped by the warm friendliness of the people, listening to the accents of Southwest and Far West, I was strangely moved. It seemed to me that I was at the heart of an empire ruled by a youthful, energetic people who were unafraid and had never tasted the bitterness of disillusion. I felt as I used to feel in the ancient days of ten years ago when I landed at New York from a tired Europe and was lifted up by the surging exuberance of the city, the certitudes of a young country, and the powerful thrust of a people who had known many reverses but no defeats.
These feelings were magnified in me because I had come fresh to Dallas from the Old South. My homeland is overgrown with tangled and clinging memories of another day in which ivy and Cape jessamine, inextricably intermingled, partially shut out the light. Here there is release from the spiritual burden of the historical past, and a voluptuous reveling — as of swimming at night amid great waters — in the heady present. The Old South, tied to a losing plantation culture and hostile to alien immigration, saw many of its best men go North after the Civil War, while in recent years it has been unable to attract much more than a dribble of domestic or foreign immigration. Here the plantation has never dominated, and the immigrant has long been welcome whether he brought new ideas, new blood, new capital, or all three.
In representative cities of the Old South — Richmond, New Orleans, Louisville — the patterns of living have long been defined and set; an indispensable element of success is often whiskers, mental or facial. In Dallas there are no patterns. Nothing is set or defined except the people’s political conservatism, their allegiance to the Democratic Party, their passionate devotion to the open shop, their inbred (and mistaken) belief that near-by Fort Worth is a crude cow town and the other fortyseven states of the Union were founded so that they might become in time a suitable framework for the State of Texas. Within the range of these tribal and political taboos, a man may rove high, wide, and handsome; whiskers, mental or facial, are not essential to success in business or politics; and the patterns of today may form the scrap heap of tomorrow. A phenomenal city in a phenomenal state, Dallas daily faces the sun rising over an ever-expanding world of its own creating. Against this background, and blown along by the sheer exuberance and joyous animal energy of the people, the visitor from the slower-paced, memory-burdened Old South finds it hard to keep in step.
Situated upon a vast plain with boundless vistas on every side and endless horizons unbroken by the thrust of hills, drenched with light, clean of skies, and set down in a state which could shelter the land areas of old Germany and France, Dallas gives one the impression of being in a world detached from the continental land mass of the United States. Nor is the impression dissipated because the town exhibits so many characteristics common to other American cities. It has, for example, its quota of large, comfortable, sprawling Victorian houses. These were built by the earlier cattle barons who moved to the city at the behest of wives tired of living on lonely ranches, or for the sake of the children’s schooling. In the business section, skyscrapers testify that the plague of elephantiasis of the ego which afflicted other cities of the country also afflicted Dallas. On its continuously expanding outskirts there are rows and rows of jerry-built, monotonously similar houses — glued together by speculative contractors, and with a useful life shorter than that of a good watch — which shelter in anonymity newcomers to the city. In the suburbs, and along tree-bowered Turtle Creek in the centre of the town, are the lavish homes, the gardens, the cool green lawns of the rich. And, to complete the count of similarities to other American cities, scattered here and there over the length and breadth of Dallas are the mean streets and tumbledown shacks of the Negro and Mexican poor. Yet such is the impact of this city upon the mind of the visitor that, despite these likenesses to other communities, he has the feeling of being in a new town of a new world.
It is hard to say why. Perhaps it is because there still lurks in the American’s soul an atavistic urge for elbowroom: a survival of the days when a man sometimes moved farther west because his nearest neighbor, now but fifty miles away, was beginning to cramp him. Here, although one is in a city, the boundless horizons and the imperial vastness of Texas produce the illusion of endless space. Perhaps it is because the older states and cities of the country, long settled, formalized, and a little weary, are, for all their apparent strength, weak at the core, bowed beneath the weight of unemployment and baffled by problems too difficult to solve. Here nearly everything is still fluid; there is little unemployment; the pains of the community are growing pains. Or perhaps it is because this is America’s last frontier, inexhaustible of promise and only in the initial stages of exploitation. But, whatever the reasons, I assure you that one has the exciting feeling here of being in a new, energetic, and somehow strangely innocent world.
It is characteristic of the engaging naivete of Texans — a naïveté which often conceals a Yankee shrewdness and deludes the outland slicker — that the founders of Dallas, back in the days when Texas was a republic, chose to name it for a man who was Vice President of the United States in the administration of Polk. Any community which deliberately takes its name from a man who, barring accident, is almost inevitably doomed to historical oblivion manifests either a sublime ignorance or an unshatterable confidence. What manner of men were the founders? One gets a glimpse of them from a roll call of privates who went to the Mexican War in 1847, as reported forty years later by a Texas Thucydides, John H. Brown: —

. . . Thomas Dykes, who died in New Orleans, en route home; — Hatfield, who deserted on the Rio Grande to avoid prosecution for a row (had too much of the good old Methodists’ hell cat in him); — Hunter, killed by his own pistol at Jalapa; Wm. Hicklin, afterwards killed in an impromptu duel; Anderson Pruitt (his ‘society’ title in camp life being ‘Piney Woods’); George R. Paschal, eighty years old, lives at Terrell, and has a youthful desire to emigrate to the land of gold and grow up with the country, because his elder kindred oppose his using tobacco; Hiram Shirley, died and was buried at sea en route home; Wm. Wilhite, died in Mexico, as did his brother, McKinsey Wilhite. . . .

This is obviously a hard-bitten tribe in the old American ‘half hoss and half alligator’ tradition, whose members kept moving and doing until they were cut down by a bullet, a knife, or disease. These men ‘fit,’ dueled, drank, cussed, and died only fifty to a hundred years ago. Their Dallas descendants, victims of the vulgar modern doctrine that the same gross court which presides over a suit by a farmer against a railroad for the death of a cow can settle with equal facility delicate issues of personal honor, have long given up dueling. But when challenged they can still drink with superb facility, and, despite the enervating influence of college education, many of them cuss with much of the old effectiveness and picturesqueness. Texas was won by fighting men, and Texans mean to keep it free by fighting if necessary. Only the other day fifteen thousand persons turned out for a mass meeting in Dallas to express their contempt for Hitler and to urge aid for the Allies (France was still fighting) in language which not even a lawyer-politician could misinterpret. And you may be sure that if these people lay their hands on any fifth-columnists near-by oaks will bear fruits more exotic than the acorn.

Wars, as you know, work strange wonders whether or not they are comprehended at the time, and environment produces its mutations and transformations upon men at war or at peace. Thus the Mexican War was by no means fought only by tough frontiersmen. At their side were numerous aristocrats and slaveholders of Mississippi, Kentucky, Louisiana, and the Old South who went to help the Texans win a vast territory from Mexico, and so increase the area of their political dominance by increasing the area of slavery. Many of these soldiers remained to merge their fortunes with those of the newborn state and to become its leaders. Others, having exhausted the fertility of their lands back home in the older cotton states, went out to Texas in search of new, cheap lands, and their numbers were sharply increased after the devastations of the Civil War.
In the ‘70s and ‘80s, when inquiries as to the whereabouts of a man were made in the Old South, the answer commonly given was ‘Gone to Texas’; and as the migrations increased, the phrase became abbreviated to ‘GTT.’ These immigrants from an older and more complex civilization brought with them their manners, their political and social traditions, and, so far as they could be realized in a pioneer community, their ways of life. If they tended to transform their environment, they were inevitably and subtly transformed by it. The result is that today one finds among their descendants in Dallas a curious amalgam of manners and a point of view which derive from the complex, formalized Old South and the relatively simple, breezy Southwest. These men, for example, foster a hospitality which William Howard Taft, amiably exhausted by it, described as ‘ferocious’; they tend to be intelligent rather than intellectual; they are far more money-minded than their Mississippi or Kentucky kinsmen, much more energetic and aggressive, and yet in general they respond to the same codes of manners and behavior. The marriage of the tall beaver topper and the tengallon hat has turned out well.
Dallas, however, contains elements other than ex-Southeners and native Southwesterners. Here are to be found the offices and warehouses of three thousand out-of-state corporations that distribute goods and services to an enormous territory. Here is located a great financial centre which revolves around the Federal Reserve Bank snatched by aggressive Dallas from somnolent New Orleans. Here is the fourth largest insurance group in the United States. Here, in short, is a city grown large and rich not by manufacturing or exploiting natural resources, but by distributing goods and dispensing services. Great numbers of executives have come to Dallas from the Middle West, New England, and the Eastern seaboard states. They are generically lumped together under the heading of ‘Yankees,’ but they quickly go native and find time, while distributing ploughs, chill tonic, and typewriters, to boost Dallas with fervent ardor in the accents of Connecticut and Nebraska. Their wives, released from the gray skies of New England or the chill atmosphere of Iowa sewing circles, revel in the sun and breezincss of Southwestern life; their children, put through the machine of public schools, emerge as Texans; and the family that may have come to town with the notion of remaining a few years on the raw frontier stays on to become permanent residents. The consequence is that., except for the absence of considerable numbers of the more exotic European stocks, Dallas is a thoroughly cosmopolitan American city with an unmistakably Southwestern flavor.
The visitor to Dallas, coming from a state where the average family income is about $200 a year, is astonished by what seems to him the plutocratic richness of the city. The average Dallas family has an annual income of about $3600, which means that it can spend more in a single month than an average Mississippi family in a whole year. Only two other American cities — New York and Washington — have a greater family purchasing power, and when it is remembered that three fourths of all our non-farm families have annual incomes ranging downward from $2500, it is clear that Dallasites enjoy a standard of living unapproached by most of the country.
Where does the money come from? Dallas is not made up of oil millionaires; it is not a manufacturing centre; men of dazzling wealth are few. It earns its keep as a wholesaler, retailer, middleman, banker, and insurer for a vast area. Thousands of Dallas executives earn $5000 to $25,000 a year, or more; wages tend to be higher than those paid elsewhere in industry; and the town has in addition a considerable number of men who, having made fortunes in oil, cotton, or cattle, moved to the city to spend their lives and incomes. Here, then, is a community with a population approaching four hundred thousand which is not dominated by one industry, or by one group of overwhelmingly wealthy men, and yet enjoys a wide distribution of more than ordinary incomes.
It would be pleasant, therefore, to tell you that Dallas is one American city which has abolished poverty. I regret that this isn’t true. A short distance from the centre of the business section, within sight of its towers and the winged metal Pegasus that bestrides the air high above a skyscraper, lies the Mexican quarter, containing about five thousand persons. They are the meek who shall some day inherit the earth, but who up to this point have achieved merely hovels that lie along rutted roads filled with the dust storms of summer and the mud of winter. The pneumonia rate among this group is appalling: disease ends what poverty began. Scattered throughout the quarter, starring its mean streets with mercy, are the missions of the churches that must first save the temporal bodies of their parishioners before theycan begin to assure the salvation of their immortal souls. Here the descendants of the great Montezuma who once held nearly all the Texas territory, and who erected an astounding culture while Europe still groped in barbarism, run little grocery stores, go out to work as laborers and domestics, or sit on stoops in the sun dreaming who knows what strange dreams behind the facade of impassive faces.
But, whatever the poverty and hardships of these folk, the ancient instinct of their ancestors for beauty burns in them undimmed. They are passionate lovers of flowers, upon which they lavish unstinted tenderness and devotion. In their tiny, rocky, thin-soiled front yards, one sees young brown girls and toil-bent old women lovingly and painfully coaxing flowers and plants from the earth, cultivating them in tomato and oil tins, guiding their slow flights on poles and trellises, watering them from homemade spouts, and so giving forth through petal, frond, and color a joyous affirmation of living in what would otherwise be a dark and shabby sterility.
Out of the needs of the poor, the obscure, and the inarticulate of Dallas has grown one of its most distinguished institutions — Civic Federation. Its founder and motivating force is Elmer Scott, who (despite the spectacular yowlings of Maury Maverick) is perhaps the most effective and notable liberal in Texas. He is, however, no snarling, humorless, suspicion-encrusted, dialectic wordsplitter like many Eastern liberals whose intolerance is matched only by that of their opponents. In common with Oscar Ameringer, of near-by Oklahoma, he is a warm-hearted, mirthful, plain-speaking, courageous man of wide sympathies. Scott understands those who oppose him as well as those who concur with him. He sees, better than they, how they are enmeshed in the coils of society. He knows that a man’s point of view — as James Madison stated in a memorable passage of The Federalist — is deeply affected by the ownership of property and his place in the community. By virtue of his insight and tolerance he has secured the approbation of the majority of his townsmen and the support of nearly all the powerful except a few who regard any aid to the downtrodden as tinctured with red unless it is in the form of a handout of sowbelly and cowpeas.
In the prime of his life, Elmer Scott renounced a lucrative business career to become chief of the department of public welfare in the municipal administration of Dallas, but so innocent was he of the world that he was amazed when soon kicked out of office. He then nourished the quixotic belief that the place for the man who sought public service was in the public service, but, although wounded in his societal impulses, he was not discouraged. Twenty-three years ago, with almost no money and few supporters, he established Civic Federation, and through two decades of untiring, selfless effort has brought it to its present high estate in the life of the city.
This organization follows no rigid pattern. It trains social workers, holds open forums on economic and political questions, interests itself in the preservation of civil liberties, presents foreign and unusual domestic films to audiences who otherwise would see only the run-of-mill variety, and has built up a large library of books and phonograph records. Federation frequently examines the ledgers of democracy through institutes on taxation and other governmental problems, conducted by local and foreign experts. This it does not in an effort to turn up double-dealing entries but out of an oldfashioned belief that the people who theoretically own the government are entitled to know how their managers are running the business. Sometimes the managers resent these inquiries, just as some heads of private corporations are angered by the small stockholder who not only dares to attend the annual meeting of his company, but has the gall to ask questions about the management. Federation, however, is little disturbed by the grumblings of politicians. It goes on quietly teaching, conducts a radio forum known as ‘You Might Be Right,’ and, in the quite outmoded belief that man is more than a politico-economic animal, encourages the playing of chamber music by local amateurs. Federation’s president is an enlightened and humane movie magnate — Karl Hoblitzelle— who has gathered around him a board of directors made up of leading business and professional men of Dallas. This may seem a small accomplishment to you, but you must remember that it has been brought about in a community where social thinking moves slowly, in an area where buffoonery in politics and a sometimes antique conservatism exist side by side. cow was loud in the land, NeimanMarcus has taught Southwestern women to dress well and without self-consciousness; contrived to sell more fine clothes than any similar store in Chicago and almost as much as the largest in New York; and in so doing has earned the lush gratitude that women reserve for those who show them how to improve upon nature.
In derrick-cluttered oil towns where cooking is still in the frying stage and drinking is whiskey followed by a beer chaser, Germaine Monteil and Elsa Schiaparelli are names not unknown to many women. On lonely ranches where angora goats dream in sparse shade of the Turkish hills from which their ancestors came to Texas, ladies go attired in Bianchini silks subtly scented with the perfumes of Paris. In the office buildings of Dallas sit girl typists and clerks simply and smartly clad. From St. Louis and Chicago, from states as distant as North Dakota and as near as Oklahoma, women come to Dallas to buy their clothes. Once a week Neiman-Marcus stages a style show at luncheon in a local hotel, where capacity audiences watch beautiful models display evening gowns, furs, or sports clothes; twice a year it gives huge style shows within its premises which are attended by crowds so large that the performance must be repeated for several evenings.
This, it seems to me, is all to the good. I can think of no great civilization, ancient or modern, in which there was not at least some attempt toward elegance. Generally speaking, where the arts flourish there flourishes also the minor art of woman’s dress. Even Elizabeth of England, master of statecraft and one of the architects of her country’s greatness, was enormously concerned with her clothes and wore silk stockings at a time when they were one of the rarest and costliest of all luxuries. I need say nothing to you of the beauty of women’s clothing in the ancient days of India, China, and Japan, of Renaissance Italy and France. One might, coming to modern times, draw interesting deductions from the fact that Germany alone of the great western countries has made so few contributions and has been so little given to elegance. But to return to Dallas. While women gain in attractiveness by being well dressed, they must inevitably in the process learn something also of form and line and color which they carry over into the appointments of their homes and into the influence they exert upon the appearance of their communities, until the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
You may think me fanciful if I suggest that beneath all this there may be the stirrings of something even more significant. At first glance there is no apparent relationship between the wellgroomed hens of the Dallas County Fair and the well-dressed ladies of NeimanMarcus. And to the mind coarsened by pragmatic thinking there is none. You know, however, that fashion has long proceeded from France: a country given to a superb agriculture, not in the gross sense of tonnage, but in the refined sense of quality. The geese of Toulouse, the asparagus of Argenteuil, the truffles of Perigord, the cheeses of Normandy: do not these derive from the same soil which produces the world’s greatest dressmakers? Have not the vegetable venders of the French markets always created symphonies of form and color as they instinctively arranged the yellow of carrots, the pale green of cabbages, the blood-red of beets, the ivory-white of cauliflower, into an ordered whole which enchanted the eye even as it beguiled the palate? None of this is needful to the demands of commerce. What is it but part of the French instinct for form, and therefore the essence of the feeling which made France the world’s centre of fashion and elegance?
A superb rooster crowing lustily on the farm of a peasant in the Nievre and a beautiful evening gown worn by a Parisienne at dinner: are these not related fragments of the same instinct — of the harmonious eighteenth-century order so beloved of Voltaire surviving into the disordered twentieth century? And if the origins of the instinct are mysterious, while its strength is such that it cannot be destroyed by wars or revolutions, is it impossible then to believe that some particle of it — however pale and attenuated — may now be taking root in Texas and shyly putting forth its first fruits in the form of queenly hens and well-dressed ladies? Who shall say where the broidered Twelve driven from Parnassus by war’s alarms may not take up their new abode in exile?
In this huge, rich, roaring state where oil gushes out of the ground like blood off the hide of a behemoth, where ranches are as large as Rhode Island, cowboys ride herd in airplanes, and a prodigious Browning collection has been assembled at Baylor University in the near-by cotton town of Waco, one is prepared for miracles. But it was with a shock of surprise that I came upon the Cokesbury Book Store in Dallas. Fitted with simple and dignified fixtures, its stock of books large and diverse, and air-conditioned throughout its five floors, Cokesbury is perhaps the handsomest bookstore in the United States. But this is not its most surprising aspect.
The Texas atmosphere is filled day and night with the howlings of primitive preachers who make sinners jump through hoops of fire as they sit before their radios. More perhaps than Georgia or Mississippi — no mean competitors in this sphere — Texas is given to religious orgiasticism, hydrophobic fervor, Sodomand-Gomorrah sermons. Hosts of holy men working frenetically in around-theclock shifts beat off the hosts of Satan. And the Cokesbury Book Store is owned and operated by the Methodist Church, some of whose ministers fight the devil’s flames with flames. Yet the church imposes not the slightest censorship on books or readers. Here one may buy any volume that is offered for sale elsewhere; adjacent shelves are labeled ‘Sex’ and ‘Religion.’ It is something of a feat for any church to run a bookstore and refrain from the temptation of trying to run the minds of its customers. The feat is the greater when it is accomplished in a largely fundamentalist area where the prevailing doctrine concerning the Bible — and much else besides — is ‘I’d believe it even if it ain’t true.’
This is my last day in Dallas, and I’m sorry to leave. I regret especially leaving the coffee-shop waitress who has shared with me ever since my arrival my morning grumpiness and morning newspaper’s headlines. This morning I asked her; ‘What kind of a town is this?’ She looked at me with the swift, appraising eyes of one who has spent years bringing eggs and bacon to armies of men away from home. ‘I can tell you right now,’ she said, ‘that more traveling salesmen lose their jobs here than anywhere else in the country.’ ‘Why?' I asked. ‘Because,’ she answered with a gleam of patriotic pride in her brown eyes, ‘Dallas is famous for its strong whiskey and wild women.’
It is just as well, then, that my bags are already packed; just as well that I shall be leaving in an hour with newfound friends for Fort Worth — a city, I hope, of fewer temptations than Dallas.
Affectionately,
DAVID

Dallas, a modern city which some of its citizens unfortunately think of as a Southwestern New York, still carries on an old rural tradition and does it with a magnificence unapproached elsewhere in the United States. Although no Stravinsky has composed a Petrouchka for the Dallas County Fair, and it necessarily lacks the Asiatic splendor of the fairs once held at Nizhni-Novgorod, nonetheless its prize hens cackle in gilded seraglios, giant bulls stamp the ground inside imposing enclosures, and mountainous boars grunt in an agricultural Petit Trianon. The Fair’s structures are valued at $15,000,000. Many of the buildings erected for the Texas Centennial Exposition in 1936 have been preserved by Dallas for its fair, and a hopeful woman bringing a layer cake or a patchwork quilt to enter for a prize winds her way through man-made lagoons and fountains into the prescribed room of a building where the product of her homely skill is shown with something of the eclat with which rare pearls are exhibited to lordly customers in the private chambers of metropolitan jewelers. Enormous cash prizes — quite staggering to those who know the modest sums offered at fairs in New England and the South — are given for the best cattle, horses, poultry, grains, and fruits. Even gargantuan Texas, fully aware of its riches in timber, oil, and other resources, is wisely conscious of the eternal strength that resides in the ancient farm trinity: cow, sow, hen. It is therefore fitting that bulls richly garlanded, horses sleekly curried, sows cleansed and shining, and roosters knightly caparisoned in the glory of comb and spur, should be exhibited against a tapestried background. No great American of the past, if he could arise from the grave, would be more pleased with this than Thomas Jefferson, who thought that the United States would remain strong and its citizens virtuous only so long as they retained touch with the earth from which come all things.
At the other end of the scale, Dallas is famous for its well-dressed women and for the store which leads the way in dressing them well. The most widely publicized institution of this city located in a state where men are men is not a saloon, hung with bar nudes and adorned with time-mellowed whiskey aromas, but — shades of Crockett and Houston — a store for women. Mention NeimanMarcus anywhere in Dallas or the Southwest, and the eyes of ladies glow with the soft, rapt light usually evoked only by memories of a favorite obstetrician or a superlative dressmaker. For this shop has achieved a minor miracle. Beginning thirty years ago when Dallas was a small town in an area where the voice of the