“Un-Southern”: Buffalo Bill, the Texas State Centennial, and Texas’s Western Turn

Abstract

“Un-Southern”: Buffalo Bill, the Texas State Centennial, and Texas’s Western Turn Jacob W. Olmstead (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photograph of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney with her sculpture of William F. Cody, The Scout. Photograph taken in 1924. Courtesy Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, Wyoming, USA: P. 69.0517. [End Page 370] In the early months of 1936, Texans began preparations for the celebration of the Texas Centennial. Many communities sponsored local monuments, fairs, pageants, and rodeos. With a mandate and funding from the Texas state legislature, the state also planned to host a World’s Fair-type exposition to promote the history and progress of the Lone Star State. After a rigorous competition, the state’s Centennial Commission selected Dallas to host the main exposition. The palatial fairgrounds, dubbed the “Magic City,” featured voluminous pavilions in the Art Deco architectural style of the 1930s, broad walks and midways, and monumental works of art highlighting salient themes and individuals in Texas history.1 Three months before the gates opened in Dallas, a controversy erupted and cast a long shadow over much of the year’s festivities. On February 22, 1936, Centennial officials announced that a bronze replica of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s The Scout, a sculpture of Colonel William F. Cody, also known as Buffalo Bill, would greet visitors at the entrance of the new Hall of Fine Arts on the Centennial grounds.2 The life-size statue depicts a mounted Cody with a rifle in one hand and pulling the reins tight as he [End Page 371] inspects the ground for Indian tracks.3 Several Dallas-based Confederate commemorative groups, believing that Buffalo Bill served during the Civil War as a Union spy, swiftly denounced the decision. Such sectional outcries stood in stark contrast to the progressive and exceptional state that Texas Centennial planners hoped to introduce to Americans during the celebration.4 Indeed, most Texans no longer collectively identified themselves as primarily southern. In the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction, Texans had become more aware of the value of their state’s exceptional past. The legacy of throwing off the rule of an oppressive dictator and the heroes of the Alamo was much more palatable and useful by the early twentieth century than the defeatism of the Lost Cause ideology championed in the South. The embrace of the revolutionary past signified Texans’ growing identification with the history and symbols of the American West rather than those of the South.5 This reorientation eventually exhibited itself in the consumption of western art, architecture, music, and film.6 Not surprisingly, themes and images promoted by the state during the Centennial also skewed western.7 A stylized cowboy, complete with six-shooter, chaps, spurs, and waving a ten-gallon hat, became the principal icon for the celebration.8 To be sure, many Texans had not fully let go of their southern roots—a point illustrated by the objections to the Buffalo Bill sculpture. Though not as prominent, the Confederate flag and statues to the Confederacy’s leaders were exhibited during the Centennial year around the state and on the Centennial grounds.9 But like the physical landscape of the Magic City, the cognitive landscape of most Texans now made more room for Stephen F. Austin, Jim Bowie, cattle drives and cowboys, and Spanish missions. By the 1930s the “conscious and unconscious distancing of a people from the South of defeat and poor expectations” could not be turned back.10 [End Page 372] Identification with the South stood in sharp contrast to the western symbols and ideals many Texans were now embracing. These symbols and ideals were not only emblematic of the West, but the United States in general. Simply put, Texans had become western and quintessentially American, while southerners remained sectional and un-American.11 Historians have well documented the reshaping of Texas’s civic memory and identity from southern to western and the role the Texas Centennial played in that process.12 These, as well as other memory studies, have also demonstrated the power of celebrations and monuments to shape public memory.13 Still, the row over the prominent placement...