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  • The Dallas Myth: The Making and Unmaking of an American City
  • Roger Lane
The Dallas Myth: The Making and Unmaking of an American City. By Harvey J. Graff (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2008) 388 pp. $34.95

This is an ambitious but uneven book, drawing on "urban social and cultural history, historical geography . . . political economy," and "cultural studies" both to deconstruct myths about Dallas' past and to sketch a vision of Dallas future (xvii).

In Graff's words, his project "outlines principles" that will "set an agenda" for future collaborative work (xxvii). But much of that agenda has already been set, or indeed met. Graff himself published a guide to the relevant sources back in 1979, and he served as adviser to Patricia E. Hill, author of another fine study, Dallas: The Making of a Modern City (Austin, 1996). Several recent "revisionist" studies, in fact, cover such previously neglected subjects as minorities, women, and social and spatial segregation. The myths discussed in Graff's book—notably that Dallas is a self-made city without limits or history—have, in short, already been deconstructed. Moreover, whatever the version once offered by the chamber of commerce, it is scarcely "a long-neglected truth" that "views of history shift depending on who is included and excluded, and where the viewer stands" (96).

Graff's major points are that (1) despite claims to uniqueness, the city should be fit into comparative models of development, such as Monkkonen's, and (2) rather than aspiring to compete with "the Parises, the Rios, and the Tokyos" Dallas should think in terms of, say, Kansas City (249).1 The city differs from its peers only in the degree to which "The Dallas Way" was successful, through much of the twentieth century, in realizing a program championed by any number of local elites—that is, identifying the city with its business class, promoting private profit at public expense, and stifling minority dissent.

These are all sound points, made again and again. A onetime resident of the city, with a sharp eye for urban design and architecture, Graff is surely qualified to assess "A City at the Crossroads." The final chapter offers an insightful look at how choices made in Dallas in the twentieth-century limited those available in the globalized twenty-first. But the journey to that point meanders repetitively, reading like a series of loosely linked magazine or journal articles, too much of it as fragmented as the city that it describes. [End Page 124]

Roger Lane
Haverford College

Footnotes

1. Erik H. Monkkonen, America Becomes Urban: The Development of U.S. Cities and Towns, 1780–1980 (Berkeley, 1988).

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