- "Don't Sell Texas Short!":Amon Carter's Cultivation and Marketing of West Texas Nature
It was time for Fort Worth "to get busy with West Texas, by playing to the people of these sections," wrote Amon G. Carter to a local dry goods company president in 1921. The city had "come to the relief of West Texas cattlemen and farmers when they needed relief worst," driving "the wedge . . . into Dallas' hold on West Texas." Fort Worth's "merchants, manufacturers and newspapers," wrote the newspaperman and civic booster, should "get together in a campaign to pull the business of West Texas and the Panhandle to Fort Worth and divert it from Dallas." His Star-Telegram had begun, and would continue "to fight for this section of trade territory, which rightfully belongs to Fort Worth." Carter hoped "to impress upon" his correspondent "the fact that tying these people up to a Fort Worth paper will naturally bring many customers to the Fort Worth merchants, jobbers and manufacturers, as well as wholesalers, if they will only take advantage . . . and go after this business vigorously. . . . Let's strike while the iron is hot," Carter signed off.1
Within a few years Carter was claiming West Texas as Fort Worth's undisputed trade territory and selling the whole package—even all of Texas—to his social network: members of the American Petroleum Institute; mayors of New York and San Francisco; prominent journalists like William Randolph Hearst, H. L. Mencken, and Barron Collier; people [End Page 389] with names like Rockefeller, Armour, Chrysler, Mellon, and Lehman; and eventually presidents Hoover and Roosevelt. Examining Carter's claims to West Texas illustrates how development and modernization, begun in Texas before the New Deal or World War II, depended on the creativity of individual Texans, Amon Carter chief among them, in cultivating the landscape, in readying the soil for an expanding national government, mobile citizens, and infusions of capital. Further, Texas's economic acceleration emerged in lockstep with, and was dependent upon, an intentional cultural shift that reimagined Fort Worth and the rest of the state a western place.
Carter should be remembered in the creation of modern Texas among contemporary public figures like John Nance Garner, Sam Rayburn, Jesse Jones, and others. By the early 1920s his Star-Telegram had the widest circulation of any newspaper in Texas and the Southwest. Observant pedestrians on Main Street in downtown Fort Worth learn from a commemorative plaque that at his death in 1955 Carter was credited with attracting employment for perhaps half the city's residents with companies like American Airlines, Lockheed Martin, and Bell Helicopter. He brought radio to Fort Worth (1922) and television to Texas (1948). He was "the city's most vigorous booster and champion."2 National outlets like Time and the Saturday Evening Post noted Carter's wide influence as "Mr. Fort Worth" and "Colonel Carter of Cartersville."3
Historian Brian Cervantez has traced Amon Carter's boosting knack from his hardscrabble frontier childhood, early career as an advertiser, and entrepreneurial spirit to paint him a "typical New South booster." Indeed, Carter's "business progressive" stance and courtship of federal largess fit the type. Depending partly on Texas's congressional clout and the Solid South's control of the legislative branch, Carter goaded the New Deal federal government to run, in Garner's words as vice president, "for the exclusive benefit of Fort Worth."4 But a moniker coined in late-nineteenth-century Atlanta is an odd fit for someone whose career peaked from 1920 to 1955 and who shouted so loudly about the West. Texas's historical complexity transcends the black and white past the New South hoped to escape. A question about utility is more important than analyzing whether Texas (or Amon Carter) was southern, western, or uniquely [End Page 390] Texan. What did Carter, Fort Worth, or Texas at large gain by his purposeful westward turn? His cowboy hollers orient Carter in the early twentieth-century project by Texans to reframe the state's history for contemporary purposes. This reimaging traded the state's history of secession and reconstruction for the Texas Revolution and...