T.R. Fehrenbach, Historian, Dies at 88; Chronicler of Larger-Than-Life Texas
San Antonio Express-News
T.R. Fehrenbach, third from left, when he was honored at a 2004 gala for the Former Texas Rangers Foundation.
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: December 3, 2013
T. R. Fehrenbach, a historian and journalist whose sweeping treatment of Texas history portrayed the state as an almost mythic land, powerfully pleasing many Texans while mightily rankling others, died Sunday in San Antonio. He was 88.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said Stephen Spadaro, a friend.
John Steinbeck once wrote, “Texas has its own private history based on, but not limited by, facts.” Mr. Fehrenbach got the thought.
He said he had never claimed to be a historian; he once characterized his writing as “political science fiction.” A member of the Sons of Texas — he participated in the group’s rituals at the Alamo — he both defended and fed, unapologetically, Texas’ appetite for larger-than-life self-portraits.
“Rangers, cattle drives, Injuns, and gunfights may be mythology, but it’s our mythology,” he declared in an interview with Texas Monthly in 1998.
He would occasionally range beyond the Lone Star State in his 18 historical books, many magazine articles and a weekly column in The San Antonio Express-News. Senator John McCain of Arizona wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2007 that Mr. Fehrenbach’s book “This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness,” published in 1963, was “perhaps the best book ever written on the Korean War.”
But Mr. Fehrenbach’s abiding focus was Texas. His now classic book “Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans” (1968), a sprawling work of more than 700 pages, was “stupendously popular” for many years, the journalist Saul Elbein wrote in The Texas Observer last year. He described Mr. Fehrenbach as “probably the greatest living Texas historian.”
For Mr. Fehrenbach, Texas was “not a society but a people,” he wrote in “Lone Star.” “The closest 20th-century counterpart is the State of Israel,” he added, “born in blood in a primordial land.”
“Lone Star” begins 32,000 years ago, before humans arrive, and ends with the description of an empty landscape. In between, Mr. Fehrenbach chronicles Texas as a Spanish and Mexican colony, as an independent country, as part of the Confederacy, and as the oil and cattle kingdom that begot today’s astounding wealth and aspirations.
Light Townsend Cummins, who was the Texas state historian until last year, said in an interview on Monday that “Lone Star” had “reawakened a zeal in the state for the study of Texas history” and, in fact, had persuaded him to take up the subject, too.
But Professor Cummins, who teaches at Austin College in Sherman, Tex., acknowledged that “Lone Star” had come to be seen as a period piece written in “the context of his times.” He said, for instance, that Mr. Fehrenbach placed far greater emphasis on white frontiersmen than do today’s historians, who give considerable weight to the roles and contributions of women, Mexicans, American Indians and blacks.
In 2006, Texas Monthly numbered Mr. Fehrenbach among the last of a “long lineage of historians” who saw the Texan pioneers as “the pluckiest, manliest, most devilishly clever bunch of European white males God ever placed on this earth.”
But that historical view has changed, said Paula Mitchell Marks, a historian at St. Edward’s University in Austin. A new generation of historians is marshaling modern analytical methods to move the study of Texas history “out of the 19th century into the 21st,” she said.
“We are certainly much more aware of race, class and gender issues and how they affected people in history,” she added, noting that most historians now contend that Texas was shaped as much by urbanization as by the frontier.
David Montejano, a professor of ethnic studies and history at the University of California, Berkeley, said in an email: “There are numerous references to the ‘Negro in Texas’ that make one cringe. One has to remember that ‘Lone Star’ was basically composed while the civil rights movement was underway in Texas.”
T.R. Fehrenbach, Historian, Dies at 88; Chronicler of Larger-Than-Life Texas
Published: December 3, 2013
Professor Montejano mentioned “the great irony” that he had received Fehrenbach Awards from the Texas Historical Commission for two of his books, both of which he said “would clearly be considered as oppositional” to “Lone Star.” He said he respected Mr. Fehrenbach for allowing his name to be used “to honor diverse views.”
Mr. Fehrenbach’s answer to such criticism was that he saw it as his duty to portray events as they had actually happened and as they were understood and discussed at the time. He honored the old myths, he said, because people believed them, maybe needed them. But he eschewed grand theories like manifest destiny, and paid scant attention to governmental doings and treaties.
His concern was real people, and he pulled few punches. He wrote: “The moral, upstanding Comanche who lived by the laws and gods of his tribe enjoyed heaping live coals on a staked-out white man’s genitals; a moral Mexican, for a fancied insult, would slip his knife into an Anglo back. The moral Texan, who lived in peace and amity with his fellows, would bash an Indian infant’s head against a tree or gut-shoot a ‘greaser’ if he blinked.”
Theodore Reed Fehrenbach was born on Jan. 12, 1925, in San Benito, Tex. His family moved to Brownsville when he was 5. As a boy he began selling cartoons he drew for a penny apiece, then moved on to writing fiction.
He skipped two grades of school and entered Princeton at 16. He completed three years of college in two before joining the Army as a private during World War II. He rose to lieutenant in the infantry. After his discharge he returned to Princeton and graduated magna cum laude in 1947.
Mr. Fehrenbach worked as a farmer, returned to the Army to serve in Korea, rising to lieutenant colonel, and later sold insurance. He also found time to map out what he hoped would be the “great Texas novel.” It turned out to be his big history book.
Among his other books were well-received histories of the Comanche tribe and of Mexico. From 1987 to 1991 he was chairman of the Texas Historical Commission.
He is survived by his wife, the former Lillian Breetz.
His last column for The Express-News was published on Aug. 23. His failing health was forcing him to sign off, he explained.
But he did so on a note of pride, saying, “Readers who do not like what I write read me anyway.” And on a note of humility. He said he had received his greatest accolades when he wrote about his cat.
No comments:
Post a Comment