175 Years of Heat - An Interview with Texas Monthly Deputy Editor Brian Sweany (Part One)

Image from Texas Monthly

Texas Monthly is celebrating our state’s one-hundred and seventy-fifth anniversary - or terquasquicentennial, in unpopular parlance - with an issue highlighting the same number of historic events that helped define what Texas means today. And by historic, we mean historic. Starting at dinosaurs and ending with Rick Perry, the staff at Texas Monthly labored to find the most emblematic moments in Texas history, some which took place way before there was even a Texas. Deputy Editor Brian Sweany shifted through myths, legends, cowboys and corn chips to get to the heart of the matter, and in this two-part interview he was kind enough to take us through some of the magazine’s selections and the stories behind them.

By the way, the magazine is hosting a contest for whichever intrepid readers are the first to visit each of the landmarks singled out in the issue. Read more about the contest, road trip, and the terquasquicentennial here.

At 175 years are we any closer to understanding Texas history, or is it the sort of thing that's always in flux and we're never gonna go, "Yep, we've got an idea. We're there"?

I was fortunate to write my first ever “Behind the Lines” column, and essentially that was the question at hand - where are we right now in telling the true story of Texas? For so many years we had these sort of overblown myths which in many ways were supported by some of our premier writers. Walter Prescott Webb had written about the Texas Rangers, and there’s what J. Frank Dobie had written about in terms of our myth.

In many ways, we allow folklore and story and myth-making to override facts, so I reached out to two gentlemen whom I really admire (for the column). One is a professor up at the University of North Texas, Randolph Mike Campbell, and one is down your way, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, who actually teaches Dobie's class Literature of the Southwest now at UT. I think that their sense is we're getting much closer to being able to do so, because over the last several decades - thanks to the work of lots of writers and historians and academics - people have been approaching Texas history now from angles it had not generally been approached by. Mike had told me (Professor Campbell, he likes to go by Mike) that we all know for better or worse that, at least up until the '50s, the story of Texas was told as sort of Anglo-dominance over inferior cultures, and nobody believes that anymore. I think everybody realizes that's just a simplistic way of looking at things, and is, at worse, a terrible marginalization of the contributions that lots of different groups have made. Hopefully this list addresses it in some degree, because I think not only are we ethnically diverse and geographically diverse, we're also telling the story of Texas from very high, high moments - talking about the Kennedy assassination, for example, in my neck of the woods - all the way down to a fellow in San Antonio perfecting the Frito and what that meant for Texas and Texas's identity. But that continues to be the question. What is Texas and how do we best tell its story, and can we ever really wrap our arms around a place that - as ethnically and geographically diverse as it is - has such complicated history?

What were the guidelines for deciding what to include? How did you decide between things like Fritos and historical events?

I think the guidelines were that we wanted to tell a good history, but of course, what does that mean? I think at the end of the day we wanted something that was interesting to our readers and something that spoke to a large degree of the authority that we feel we have of the state. But that authority is earned, it's not taken, and I think that we believe that we have it because even if we all have different points of view, we love this place and we choose to work in this place and raise our families here. I know that I feel very strongly about it.

Image of Bonnie and Clyde

Campbell had told me that he doesn't think of himself as a revisionist. He's done a lot of writing, for example, about slavery in Texas. When he arrived in Texas forty-some years ago there had been no serious work done about how important slavery was to Texas, not only after the revolution, but certainly all the way up to the Civil War. He said he wasn't looking to stand history on its head, just trying to explore an area that had been overlooked. So when we were looking at putting the list together we obviously had to go after things that people know and are familiar. San Jacinto occupies a huge place in this issue and there's a beautiful gatefold photograph that Dan Winters took of it (editor's note: top of the page). The Alamo is not in there as a battle, but there for two other reasons. We chose to make that distinction where we don't want to continue to retread the tire. At the same time, Texas Monthly has been around since 1973 and we're still trying to tell and retell some of the very same stories that we've all grown up with.

That was a real challenge. You want to be able to surprise the reader with certain items. For example, there’s the invention of the first frozen margarita machine, which may seem like a trifle that happened in May of 1971 in Dallas, but that thing is now in the Smithsonian. Last year the Smithsonian released a list of the top ten American inventions, not just in the restaurant business, not just of the past twenty years, but of all time. I believe topping that list was Thomas Edison and the light bulb and coming in at number ten was Mariano Martinez's frozen margarita machine.

That's a great item - it's funny and yet at the same time it does have real significance. I think beyond that what we're trying to do is just to tell these stories and to say: “This happened here,” or “this law was important,” or “this battle was important.” I think hopefully the value we're providing this time around is allowing readers to participate by telling them exactly where to go and find out these things. For example, if you're gonna go see where the frozen margarita machine was first invented, that restaurant no longer exists anymore, but the location is there and it's a PetSmart. And not only do we know that it's a PetSmart, we know the exact spot inside the store where that machine would've been. Hopefully that's of value to our readers who are as crazy about Texas as we are.

Note: see Part 2 of our interview here.