Readings

Fifty Years of the Texas Observer

Trinity University Press, 429 pp., $19.95 (paper)

The Observer, for the unfamiliar, is the journalistic oasis of sanity in a maddeningly conservative state. Even in the days of Democratic domination, the welfare of workers, the poor, racial minorities, and other put-upon folks in Texas always suffered back-burner treatment – or outright hostility. It was up to a few hardy liberals to be the conscience of this state. A handful got elected to the Legislature; a few others, working for about the same pathetic pay, wrote for The Texas Observer and have somehow kept it operating long enough for this 50th anniversary celebration.

The reading fascinates even more than one might expect, precisely because it is not a history book: The stories told here do not recount dead issues from our shameful past; instead, we see them with here-and-now vitality, the eyes of the time. When founding editor Ronnie Dugger writes about Henry B. Gonzales' anti-segregation filibuster on the floor of the Lege in 1957, he does so not knowing what the future would bring – Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King were merely activists in another state at press time, not yet heroes and martyrs. Even more recent reporting already has a time-capsule quality, such as Jake Bernstein's heroic recounting of last year's Democratic flight to Ardmore ... told without the foreknowledge that the lawmakers' working vacation would simply be a minor speed bump in Tom DeLay's journey to remake Congress in his own image.

And sadly, however much Texas may have improved over the decades, the Observer's work is not done, and the times aren't as different as we might think. In a 1964 profile of George Bush (the Elder), then a U.S. Senate candidate, we learn of a man who "unleash[ed] on the country the campaign of fear, hate, and character assassination that has now sickened this land," a man who "says his conservatism is 'compassionate.'" Sound familiar? The conventional wisdom might be that yesterday's news belongs in the recycle bin, but for those who love and yearn for a better Texas, this book proves otherwise.

There simply isn't enough space here to list all the important Texas literary and political figures who have graced the pages of the Observer – Roy Bedichek, J. Frank Dobie, Molly Ivins, Larry L. King, Willie Morris, Maury Maverick Jr., Larry McMurtry, and even The Austin Chronicle's Michael King, Robert Bryce, and Lou DuBose, just for a short list.

Molly Ivins, who wrote the foreword for Fifty Years of the Texas Observer, will be at BookPeople on Wednesday, Sept. 8, 7pm.