The South at Work: Observations from 1904

Educational Endowments in Texas

Educational Endowments in Texas The Public Schools Are Most Richly Supported, but the University Has Been Crippled by Rural Prejudices—The Latter Is, However, a Most Creditable Institution—San Jacinto Day at Austin— A Glimpse of Texas Politicians [Special Correspondence of the Transcript]. Austin,Texas, April 19. San Jacinto Day in Texas comes but three days later than Patriots’ Day in Massachusetts. In San Antonio yesterday gilded booths and other preparations for Thursday’s celebration of the anniversary of Houston’s victory over Santa Anna gave the curious little city a holiday look.1 Yesterday was Sunday, but in San Antonio, as in New Orleans, the bars and beer gardens are open Sundays. A professional baseball game was in progress, and an excellent band was playing all the afternoon in San Pedro Park.These local customs, though of long standing, helped to make the place seem, to a stranger, completely en fete already. This year there seems to be unusual interest in the celebration. The Daughters of the Republic are trying to raise money enough to buy the Published in the Boston Evening Transcript, May 18, 1904. Educational Endowments in Texas 111 land around the Alamo for a park.One patriotic woman has in fact purchased the property already and is holding it for the association.2 As feats of arms, the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord cannot vie with the fights at the Alamo and San Jacinto, yet at first an American from the Eastern States is a little surprised at the pride that Texans take in their own history. Looked at another way, the revolution of 1836 was by no means so trifling in its consequences that it cannot be compared with the rising in Massachusetts in 1775, even though we regard the latter as the beginning of the American Revolution. Was not the territory invaded nearly as great, particularly if we add what was afterwards gained by the war with Mexico? The recent war with Spain was scarcely a more notable episode in the long conflict between the English and the Spanish civilizations than the achievement of twenty thousand English-speaking settlers in wresting from Mexico so vast a region, surely destined to be the home of so many millions of human beings. The peculiar history of Texas, and particularly its existence for nearly ten years as an independent republic,still has effects which differentiate the State, in quite practically important ways, from every other in the South and in the country. It is not merely that Texans cherish a whole set of reverences and traditions which the rest of us cannot claim; it is that they are living today a somewhat different life, because as a community they are still vitally governed by their past. In their courts the civil law, as derived through Mexico from Spain, is still administered along with the common law and the laws on the statute books.3 Titles to millions of acres of land still rest on Spanish and Mexican and Republican grants.4 The whole system of education, from the country schools to the State University here at Austin, is based on grants of public land which no other State ever had the power to make. The railroads , unlike those of other regions west of the Mississippi, owe none of the bounties they have received to the National Government, but all to the State. These things cannot be ignored by a stranger, much less by people who come into the State to live or to buy land or to engage in any sort of business. The uncertainty of land titles in parts of the State is a serious matter. I understand that the question of ownership has quite recently been raised concerning both the great ranches which I visited last week. Both are held by titles based on grants which were made long before Texas became a State in the Union. In order to remove all doubt of their rights, the present holders themselves,it is said,stirred up the attorney general to bring suit against them for the State.Their titles are now judicially affirmed,but the proceedings were by no means inexpensive.5 There can scarcely be another state in the Union with so many inducements to adopt the Torrens system of registering titles. But as yet, I believe, the Legislature has never seriously considered it. 112 Educational Endowments in Texas That is in keeping...