Wild Rose: The Life and Times of Victor Marion Rose, Poet and Historian of Early Texas by Louise O’Connor (review)

Victor Marion Rose (1842–93) was a Texas newspaper editor, poet, and writer. His father, John Washington Rose, was a state senator, planter, and one of the wealthiest men in Victoria County. Victor was endowed seemingly from birth with the soul of a poet but was thrust from college into the Civil War. Following that trauma, he became a newspaper editor, a published author, and a rolling stone.

John H. Jenkins mentions Rose three times in Basic Texas Books, but never as an author in his own right. In Texas literature and history Rose has always been, as the author notes in her preface, “something of a shadowy figure” (xvii). Wild Rose is O’Connor’s effort to bring him out of the shadows, to illuminate the reasons for his having been there, and to rehabilitate his reputation as a journalist, writer, and scholar whose legacy is “an amazing assessment of the Old South and its way of life” (1).

The front matter of this book provides an unusually thorough introduction to its subject. Included is a foreword containing genealogy of the Rose and O’Connor families by Gary Dunham, resident of Victoria, Texas, a foreword by Margaret Stoner McLean, Rose’s great-niece, and a preface by the author, Louise Stoner O’Connor, in addition to her formal introduction.

O’Connor divides the book between biography and analysis of Rose’s work. This organization is logical, but it results in some confusion as to how Rose’s many troubles affected his writing. The author’s affinity for her subject may contribute to occasional lapses in attention to detail. For example, O’Connor asserts that Rose emphasized commitment to truth. She writes that Rose’s purpose in writing Ross’ Texas Brigade (1881) was not to justify the Confederate cause. “He says simply” that the South had no alternative because the administration in Washington interpreted secession as a declaration of war and attacked Fort Sumter, enraging Southerners who then felt compelled “to answer the call of duty and defend their honor” (80). It is unclear whether she is repeating what Rose said or describing her own understanding about how the Civil War started, but the account is misleading and inconsistent with Rose’s alleged commitment to truth. It is illustrative, however, of the difficulty even well-intentioned Southerners have had dealing objectively with their history. O’Connor emphasizes Rose’s many struggles with this conflict between head and heart. While Rose appeared steeped in mythology about the Southern cause in his early life and writings, O’Connor argues that he was able to break away from these attitudes when forced to confront the reality of loss after the Civil War. She claims he made a “monumental change in order to survive,” throwing off the “mantle of martyrdom, rejecting the role of propagandist for the Old South” (10). For support she draws from Rose’s personal papers, the papers of several of his associates, contemporary newspapers, Rose’s published works, and numerous secondary sources.

Much of the second half of the book draws on clippings from Rose’s The Old Capitol, his most successful newspaper endeavor. While respected in the journalistic world, Rose’s lack of recognition as a historian is understandable considering his propensity for mixing fiction with fact. Another reason could be his lack of stability. The timeline O’Connor provides of Rose’s newspaper career is particularly helpful in understanding this aspect of his professional life. The average length of his tenure at the newspapers he edited was two years, although he contributed to more than a dozen news publications in his career.

O’Connor does a service by bringing to light valuable information in Rose’s work such as the biographical sketches in his History of Victoria County, which might never have been noticed otherwise. Appendices...