Circuit Riders for Mental Health: The Hogg Foundation in Twentieth-Century Texas by William Bush (review)

Circuit Riders for Mental Health: The Hogg Foundation in Twentieth-Century Texas offers a thoroughly documented narrative along with a full set of references and stories about the heroic efforts of numerous dedicated individuals working within the Hogg Foundation to bring to the people of Texas a meaningful, useful, and compassionate understanding of mental hygiene, mental health, and mental illness.

Reading Circuit Riders also brought back memories and reflections, both cultural and personal. Its first-hand stories and experiences evoked memories of my own early years working in the Bexar County Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation (TDMHMR) and the San Antonio State Hospital (SASH). Some of the persons mentioned I had worked with and knew professionally. Over time, TDMHMR became another agency. The old wards and bar-covered doors and windows at SASH are now gone, as are all the persons mentioned.

Appropriately enough, I read it during several long road trips with my wife from San Antonio back and forth to Houston, Austin, Goliad, Dallas, Big Springs, Fort Davis, and El Paso. Our routes consisted mainly of Interstates 10 and 35 at 75 to 80 miles per hour, with the help of cell phone and GPS technology. As we sped across the Texas landscape, I learned how, during the early years of World War II, Robert Lee Sutherland, the first director of The Hogg Foundation, and others were able to address 2,000 audiences in 152 communities, reaching 400,000 Texans with pamphlets and other important information about mental hygiene, mental health, and mental illness. Their travels to all parts of the state were on single lane roads, often gravel, at 30 to 40 miles per hour with rationed gasoline and, with luck, a car radio that worked. In an age before mass media and in ways similar to early church circuit riders, Hogg Foundation staff members drove countless miles around the state distributing pamphlets, speaking to school audiences, holding public meetings, and working directly with mental health professionals, community organizations, and the state hospital system. Remember, this was a time before Southwest Airlines.

Having dug deeply back through the archives of the Hogg Foundation, William Bush uncovers and carefully reassembles in detail now-forgotten memos, notes, letters, publications, public pamphlets, academic lectures, community addresses, and organizational reports. He provides thirty-two pages of notes and a seven-page bibliography. These archival records not only detail private and public work, along with the contributions of the Hogg Foundation, but also for the first time reveal the key roles, first-hand experiences, and front-row descriptions written in field reports that vividly reflect the extreme poverty, political struggles, and racial conditions around the state during the sixty decades that comprised the middle and late twentieth century.

This is important Texas history because it tells the story of Texans at their best, Texans who worked tirelessly to circulate mental health information, to reform public health policies and mental health codes, and to promote mental health education and training. Circuit Riders for Mental Health documents deep core values within the wider cultural context of our humanity and reveals the flexibility of and sensitivity for the people, communities, organizations, and public institutions of Texas.

Every one of the 254 Texas county judges and their commissioners, every Texas mayor and city and town council member, every Texas state representative and senator, and especially the governor, commissioners, and directors of state agencies need to read this important book.