Lone Star Mind: Reimagining Texas History by Ty Cashion (review)

Neurological studies suggest that among the basic properties of the human mind is self-awareness, one of the most important human traits. Investigating the “mind” of a region, a nation, or a state necessarily includes explaining group self–awareness or collective memory. Thus, when W. J. Cash wrote The Mind of the South in 1941, he was among the first to address the subject of collective memory based on social conditions, culture, intellect, and history.

Ty Cashion’s Lone Star Mind explores the nature and origins of a Texas collective memory, using it also to help explain the state’s historiography. He prominently features T. R. Fehrenbach’s Lone Star: A History of Texas and Texans (Macmillan), the 1968 publication that identified Texas as unique in its evolution from a northern province of Mexico into an independent republic in 1836 and annexation to the United States in 1845. According to Fehrenbach, Texans maintained their distinctive history—or mind—by perpetuating a concept of exceptionalism embodied by true Texans, who were (and are) almost entirely represented by Anglo men. Fehrenbach’s exclusionary view of the state’s history has found a receptive audience, but it has also served to justify Texas’s deeply ingrained racism and sexism. Cashion discusses both exceptionalism and true Texan-hood, but with a significantly different viewpoint from Fehrenbach’s. In one notable phrase Cashion states, “Figuratively, the white hats that true Texans wore in the nineteenth century too often come into focus as white hoods in the twentieth” (79).

Cashion refutes the notion that Texas’s exceptionalism stems from its brief years as a republic and sites examples of other states’ origins, such as California, as independent republics. There was confusion, to be sure, over whether Texas belonged to the American West or to the South. That slavery flourished in its eastern counties suggests that Texans had reason to join the Confederacy, yet a seemingly wide-open West Texas beckoned settlers to appropriate land bordering on or intruding upon Native Americans, leading to frontier wars. Texas exceptionalism, it seems, was a state of mind formed by Anglos as they came to dominate not only the land but also the history of heroism in the state. Violence, Cashion reflects, is part of that history, especially when recalling the Alamo, the Regulator-Moderator War in the republic’s infancy, or the Fort Griffin vigilante episode in the 1870s.

Cashion finds that fiction also elucidates the mind of Texas as writers Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCarthy, and Edna Ferber describe the “Texan West” (121). Films such as Giant, which characterized Texas as a rugged proving ground, shaped American impressions throughout the 1950s. Film producer Daryl F. Zanuck noted that “If you go to Texas, go on a horse with a gun” (121). The western experience, Cashion opines, is also informed by Tejano and Mexican cultures, while African Texans and ethnic Europeans such as German Texans provided a counterpoint to the usual white stereotype. Finally, Cashion lays claim to the influence of social and cultural history in making the state’s mind in the late twentieth century “less western and more American” (127).

In discussing who owns the “Texas Past” (128) and what Texas history will look like “On the Horizon” (154), Cashion is optimistic. He concludes that a new, progressive generation of historians will write new metanarratives that evaluate the work of twentieth-century historians while incorporating the work of “cultural constructionists and revisionists” (158). One hopes the subjects will include women, gender, sexuality, ethnic, cultural, economic, political, and urban studies. This is an erudite book that calls on students of history to reevaluate the state’s larger-than-life narratives. It draws on a surprising multiplicity of sources and invites writers who wish to create a usable past not only to scrutinize elite individuals but also to elucidate the histories of the many Texans who share in the state’s collective memory.