The City in Texas: A History by David G. McComb (review)

Despite the well-known frontier iconography that defines Texas in the popular imagination, the state is an amazing 88 percent urban. Wide-open spaces may have attracted the state’s first residents, but as historian David G. McComb reminds us, cities are central to Texas politics and economic growth. That cities hold such an important place in Lone Star culture should not surprise anyone. But in Texas, the shift from rural to urban is relatively recent. One consequence, McComb argues, is that urban centers in Texas are more modern, more open, and more diverse than their nineteenth-century cousins. Recounting the decline of the state’s embrace of rural distinctiveness and acceptance of an “urban imperative” sits at the heart of The City in Texas: A History (p. 2).

In four parts and thirty-nine chapters, McComb follows the transition of Texas from natural environment to urbanized landscape. In an overview of early state history, the expected cast of Native Americans, Spanish missionaries, and American explorer-settlers fills the book’s opening chapters. The second section moves from Texas independence and the Civil War to 1900, when the arrival of the railroads transformed the state’s nascent urban centers. Unlike in other states, where rural outposts were linked to small cities, which in turn connected to larger regional cities, in Texas a top-heavy hierarchy of large cities dominated. McComb details how settlers in these urban locales—San Antonio, Galveston, Corpus Christi, Houston, and Austin—worked to convert their booster dreams into commercial reality.

In Part 3, covering 1900–1950, McComb explains the solidification of urban power. A timely oil boom transformed once forlorn locations like Midland and Odessa into major industrial centers. The oil boom meant even more to places like Dallas and Houston. As these metropolitan regions grew in size and power, however, they also became increasingly segregated and marked by poor public services. In 1930, for example, no American city lost more citizens to tuberculosis than San Antonio. Finding solutions to the consequences of urban growth while at the same time developing new city amenities became a priority for twentieth-century developers.

The book’s final section moves from the post–World War II era to the present, chronicling the rise of the Texas megacity. Sprawling supercities engulfed their surrounding suburbs at an alarming rate, often straining the limits of city services in the process. Issues of racial integration, heightened by the arrival of African Americans and Hispanics into the urban core, impacted the political foundations of Texas cities. Thus urban tensions pulled at the social cohesiveness of these metro areas. But at the same time, the explosion of the high-tech sector in places like Austin offered a counter-narrative of productive growth.

Military towns, railroad outposts, lumbering centers, river communities, and port cities all get coverage in The City in Texas. In what is an otherwise solid introduction to Texas urban history, however, the costs of urban expansion remain an undeveloped theme. As McComb notes in a short final chapter, Texas produces one-third of the nation’s greenhouse gases, and meeting current Environmental Protection Agency pollution standards seems like a distant dream. State cuts to education contribute to standardized test scores that are far below national levels. Texas does not have a state income tax—a source of some pride—but instead relies on a regressive sales tax that forces a high percentage of low-income Texans to use state relief services. Each of these issues stems from urban growth. McComb reminds us that “modern urban greatness” in Texas was the product of “talented individuals” working “to create something better” (p. 305). That is no doubt true, but the challenge facing the state is how to manage urban growth for a cooperative future.