The Dallas Rejoinder
(Editorial from The Nation, 25 May 1964, page 519)
On April 27, Congressman Bruce Alger of Dallas, Tex., spent almost 19
pages of the Congressional Record (pp. 8916–8935) in “Setting the
Record Straight on Dallas.” By so doing, he joined the stream of “don’t
blame it on Texas” stories and demands that have been welling out of the Lone
Star State for the past several months. That this chorus should be coming from
an area as “image-conscious” as Texas is hardly surprising; that Texans
should seek to assuage their apparently deep-seated feelings of guilt about the
awful event of last November is entirely understandable (and, surely, the state is
protesting too much for the rest of us to take seriously its remonstrances that
“it could have happened anywhere”). It would be tragic, however, if the
near-unanimous assurances of Texas newspapers and public figures should come to
be believed by the proud citizens of that great commonwealth. For there is
something rotten in the state of Texas.
It is, of course, entirely true that
President Kennedy could have been assassinated anywhere; but he wasn’t.
The terror was not loosed upon us all from Tulsa or Albuquerque or Shreveport;
it happened in Dallas. A brave and superlative personality was killed there.
When his plans for the trip to Texas were announced, President Kennedy had
been warned by friends in Washington (and, allegedly, in Texas itself) that it
would be dangerous for him to visit Dallas. For pressing reasons of his own he
chose to ignore those warnings, went to Dallas, and was shot down in the streets
of that city. It happened there, not “anywhere.”
And the lash-back also happened there: the
President’s alleged assassin himself was shot down in the very basement
of the Dallas police station, while surrounded by policemen. A minister
reporting of his own knowledge that children cheered the news of the
President’s death was hounded from his home; a schoolteacher who wrote
a letter to the editor of Time criticizing Dallas was fired from
her job; an advertisement written by a theological faculty and calling for a
moral reassessment was refused by every Dallas newspaper; the vice
president of a Dallas oil firm did suddenly resign his job after writing
an article in Look which suggested that maybe the citizens of Dallas, and
Texas, bore some responsibility for the political atmosphere there; another vice
president, this time of the towering Dallas institution, Neiman-Marcus, did
resign his job in order to write a fair and balanced treatment of the city; a
university professor who wrote of the cultural predispositions to violence in
the state was abused by a former governor and a score of newspapers.
These things, too, did not occur “anywhere,” but in Texas.
We do not, of course, hold Texans or
Dallas responsible personally or collectively for instigating the assassination.
With Jean-Paul Sartre we “do not believe in the degradation of a people,”
but also with him, we “do believe in stagnation and stupor.” We think it
characterizes the politics and, to some extent, the culture of Texas.
There are some signs of reassessment and
reawakening. The renaissance in Dallas of the normal politics of the Democratic
Party in a grass-roots organization free of extreme Right influence can only be
applauded; we hope the ripples of that act broaden. For while November 22 was a
day of black tragedy for the national life, it will have been doubly tragic, in
futility, if out of that terrible event Texans learn nothing of Texas; if they
succumb to the multitudinous voices now wooing them and do not perceive what the
rest of the nation has long known: that they are not what they think—that
their image of themselves does them little credit—and that they are citizens
of a greater commonwealth than Texas, the United States of America.
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