Historian Nancy Baker Jones was a child when her father, who was serving in the U.S. Army in Europe, was called home in 1953 to testify at U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s hearings on an alleged communist spy ring at an army laboratory in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey.
During McCarthy’s four-year reactionary crusade to root out “card carrying Communists,” hundreds of government, Hollywood, and university employees were imprisoned, and thousands more lost their jobs and were blacklisted despite a lack of evidence they were subverting the government. After what came to be known as the Army-McCarthy hearings, the senator’s meteoric popularity just as quickly plummeted, and in December 1954 he was censured by the U.S. Senate for behavior that worked to “obstruct the constitutional processes of the Senate.”
Reading from an excerpt of her autobiography at the Alliance for Texas History’s first annual conference, which 400 people attended at Texas State University May 15-17, Jones recounted her lifelong career helping to build African-American and women’s history programs in Texas universities during the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and expanding the state’s historical encyclopedia, called the Handbook of Texas, to reflect diverse narratives starting in the 1980s. Jones warned the audience of a new McCarthyism arising and reminded them of the role historians can play to combat it.
“The Alliance for Texas History was created from our own messy reality of history at a time when war appears to have been declared on our profession. We have already faced a difficult truth and started something new in the world, so that we will not repeat the past.”
This alliance was formed last year after Jones, who was serving as board president of the 128-year-old Texas State Historical Association (TSHA), was sued and ousted by TSHA’s executive director and oil tycoon J.P. Bryan. Bryan sought to stack the board with conservative, non-academic historians over professional historians who he told the Galveston Daily News want to “demean the Anglo efforts in settling the western part of the United States for the purpose of spreading freedoms for all.”
The struggle to chronicle our state and national past, to determine whose history is told or not told, continues to play out across Texas from the state Capitol to libraries, museums, and the classroom. Concerns about state action that could restrict the work of academic historians arose in conversations and presentations during the historical conference.
Ben Johnson, co-editor of the Alliance’s Journal for Texas History, opened the conference with a speech describing the current climate for historians: “Until the last few years, never in my lifetime did state officeholders cancel book signings, did legislatures create laws banning the teaching of particular historical texts or concepts, or crowds gather to protest and sometimes remove statues of historical figures. Nationally and in many states, particularly Texas, history has become a venue for political and social combat.”
Two weeks after the May conference, state lawmakers passed Senate Bill 37, a new law that will strip from university faculty members their control over curricula and faculty hiring and hand this decision-making power to an institutional governing board. A statewide “curriculum advisory committee” chosen by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board will also have the power to decide required curricula for all higher education institutions from community colleges to medical schools. Under the new law, governor appointees will also be empowered to investigate and recommend the withholding of funding for universities found to be noncompliant with SB 37 or Senate Bill 17, a 2023 law that banned diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in Texas’ public colleges and universities. In the final version of SB 37, lawmakers removed a provision mandating faculty “not advocate or promote the idea that any race, sex, or ethnicity or any religious belief is inherently superior,” language that professors testified could have been used to censor conversations in government and history courses, especially.
During one of the conference’s panels, “Teaching LGBTQ History in Texas,” academic historians grappled with how to include the topic in their classrooms during a time of increasing state surveillance of universities. Lauren Gutterman, a University of Texas at Austin American Studies professor shared how SB 17 has already had a “chilling effect” among UT students and faculty, even though the law did not impact curricula or research. Guest lectures on LGBTQ topics were canceled by UT administrators due to “preemptive over-compliance with SB 17,” and faculty were “self censoring out of fear,” Gutterman told attendees.
“SB 37 is going much further in increasing government oversight of what happens in our classes. So I can only imagine the kind of self-censorship, and then the actual censorship that we experience from the government, is just going to be heightened,” Gutterman told the Texas Observer.
Over the past year, it’s been more difficult for her department to recruit graduate students, and the UT faculty regularly ask each other. “‘Are you in the market?’ ‘Are you leaving?’ It’s just a kind of ubiquitous concern,” Gutterman said.
She and other historians at the conference encouraged their colleagues not to self-censor. Gutterman told the Observer that faculty members need to “push back against the kind of anticipatory compliance or over-compliance … beyond what the law required.”
While the state is narrowing what students can learn in the classroom, the Alliance for Texas History has opened up their call for diverse histories to be presented at their conference and in their publication. During the conference, historians, faculty members, and graduate students shared their research and concerns and received feedback from their colleagues without fear of reprisal.
The Alliance for Texas History is “taking the broadest possible approach to the Texas past,” Gutterman said. “It’s particularly important at a moment when our state leaders have demonstrated that they don’t want students to have a really full, inclusive accounting of our state or national past.”
Alliance for Texas History conference (Courtesy/Adam Clark)
Johnson said in his speech, “The irony of all of these restrictions on history is that they come at a time when the study of the Texas past in public is robust, more inclusive, more expansive, and more nationally prominent than ever before.”
Over the three days of the conference, academic historians, museum curators, public school students, and other individuals selected from a program of 45 panels to attend on topics as diverse as “New Deal Texas,” “Trailblazers in Twentieth-Century Texas Sports,” “Racial Ideology, Eugenics, and the State Fair of Texas,” and “The Revitalization of the Karankawa.”
In closing the conference, Jones assured attendees the Alliance for Texas History would continue to embrace the histories of all Texans: “Facing difficult truths about the past, moving forward with new understanding and assuring that we do not repeat what should not be repeated. This is what [historian and philosopher] Hannah Arendt called the messy reality of history. There is no finality. She said that it is a story with many beginnings but no ends. We are free to change the world and to start something new in it, and when we do that, that is a healing act.”
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