The Path to a Modern South: Northeast Texas between Reconstruction and the Great Depression

Abstract

In this work, Walter L. Buenger has produced an excellent local history of northeast Texas ut unfortunately fails to ask questions that are large enough to capture the interest of non-Texans. Buenger defines northeast Texas as the state's first congressional district, the counties south and west of the Red River. Labeling these counties more “southern” than other parts of Texas, Buenger traces the region's political, social, and economic development from the 1880s through the 1920s. During those years, farmers in the region diversified and modernized; class increasingly divided prosperous farmers and sharecroppers; lynching increased and then (in the 1920s) declined; small towns emerged as market centers; town folk worked for progressive reforms; and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) rose to political prominence. By the late 1920s, Buenger argues, the first district had gone through a transformation that made it less “southern” and more “western.” This freed the region's politicians, led by Rep. Wright Patman, to court New Deal aid. Concurrently, local historians within the region began downplaying the district's southern heritage, preferring to highlight the Alamo rather than the Confederacy.