Bulwark Against the Bay: The People of Corpus Christi and Their Seawall by Mary Jo O'Rear (review)

In this short volume, Mary Jo O'Rear tackles community resilience, business boosterism, Texas political factionalism, naked self-interest, and engineering failures and successes as she unwinds the story of the construction of the Corpus Christi, Texas, seawall in the two decades following the disastrous hurricane of October 1919 that left several hundred dead and much of the city a flooded wreck. The material makes for a good tale that illustrates the nature of municipal and regional political economies along the Texas Gulf Coast and the difficulties in financing and completing large public works projects in 1920s and 1930s America. Among the complex cast of characters O'Rear introduces are Walter Elmer Pope, a real estate developer and longtime state representative who pioneered port development and the seawall concept for Corpus Christi; Perry Gray Lovenskiold, the resolute mayor during the 1920s who oversaw the rebuilding of the city after the 1919 storm; Margaret Lorine Jones Spoonts, hotel manager, clubwoman, and head of the chamber of commerce in the late 1920s; sculptor and dogmatic civic visionary Gutzon Borglum (of Ku Klux Klan notoriety and Mount Rushmore fame); and King Ranch heir and U.S. congressman Richard Mifflin Kleberg Sr. (who brought a young aide named Lyndon Baines Johnson with him to Washington, D.C.). The book is illustrated with many photographs, technical diagrams, and maps that help the reader visualize the Corpus Christi area and the efforts that transformed it in these years.

O'Rear has trod over similar ground in a previous work, Storm Over the Bay: The People of Corpus Christi and Their Port (College Station, Tex., 2009), which focuses on the development of the city's shipping and port facilities in the years immediately after the 1919 catastrophe. She is intimately familiar with the subject matter and the leading players, and she once again has mined the relevant sources for her new history, drawing very heavily on newspapers, city council minutes, other official documents, a handful of privately held memoirs, papers from Corpus Christi, and a few archival collections. By far, O'Rear is most dependent on local and regional newspapers, one of which, the Corpus Christi Times, was owned for a decade by perhaps the most enthusiastic supporter of both the port and the storm-surge security of a seawall, the influential state legislator and civic booster Walter Pope. The author's reliance on newspapers gives the book a journalistic pace, marked at times by O'Rear's insider interest in sideline characters and stories—such as Lovenskiold's dam and reservoir project on the Nueces River and some brief civil rights digressions that feel out of place—all stitched together with an air of heady determinism as the people of Corpus Christi sought their seawall.

In reality, the picture that emerges is one of a murky and contested consensus, as the movers and shakers within Corpus Christi fought battles with local residents and each other over land rights, public access, financing, and the direction of development. Indeed, it appears that there was never a clear, unified vision of the end product until another devastating storm flooded the area in 1933 and provided additional motivation (a common theme in Gulf Coast environmental history). Ultimately, interest at the national level in the expansion of a secure shipping lane through the intracoastal canal and the protection of a budding petrochemical industrial base along the Gulf Coast led to the completion of the project with federal dollars in the years before World War II. Work proceeded apace, and the people of Corpus Christi gained at least a small measure of protection against storms of the future.