‘In a nightmare of violence, agonised and conscience-torn, the US approaches a crucial election. Where today are the ideals that inspired the making of the American Dream? Who will personify them as the next American president?’ No, that wasn’t written last month but on 21 July 1968.
The Observer Magazine started a major series on ‘Understanding the American Dream’ with Texas, aka ‘Peacemaker country’, referring to the ‘most famous handgun ever toted – and, in legend, the number one tool used in carving out the State of Texas’.
Cyril Dunne felt Texas to be the ‘ideal starting point for understanding America’ with its ‘flamboyance and eccentricity, its poverty and riches, its conscience and its bigotry’.
‘In this vast territory you may still sense,’ he continued, ‘as you no longer can among the mundane commuters of New York, the hell and the glory of the Great American Epic.’
Dunne considered that ‘in their essence the founders of Texas were romantic adventurers’ – David Crockett, James Fannin, Sam Houston – ‘driven forward into new and undeveloped lands in the unquenchable belief that fame and/or fortune was their American birthright’. Hmm…
Then there was the jaw-dropping argument that the Comanches and the Apaches ‘possessed the land only as gulls possess the surface of the sea. They were horsemen and hunters, footloose and savage, not settlers to be dislodged from the soil.’ Uh-huh.
It wasn’t only about land grabbing, but livestock herding, too: ‘From the remnants of the Texas army emerged the American cowboy, copying clothes, style and techniques from the vaqueros of Mexico.’ But it was the discovery of oil in the 1930s that really gave ‘full rein to the flamboyance of its inhabitants’.
And the man who was to personify the American Dream later that year? Richard Nixon.
