Anthony M. Orum

I get the feeling that a lot of city-specific history books are really only interesting to people who actually live in the city in question. There's only so many city council members from the 1940s that people can be expected to remember or care about, and that number pretty much drops to zero if they're not from where you live. The exceptional works of history succeed by broadening their scope and showing why a city matters to people beyond its borders, whether because they're large or because they're innovative or because really important things happened there. Books like Robert Caro's The Power Broker or William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis showed how events in New York and Chicago changed the way that America traded goods and thought about city-building, respectively, and even if you've never been to those cities after reading those books you can get a sense of why they matter to people all over the world. Orum's work doesn't quite rise to the level of those two, but will still be of interest, primarily to Austinites, for a few reasons.

Austin is a much smaller and younger city than either New York or Chicago and hence has had less happen in it and fewer lives touched by it. Austin didn't have 100,000 people until the middle of the 1940s and still doesn't have a million, so even if Austin had a lot of important things happen in it (which it did), there's still fewer of them. As you can tell by the ubiquitous Keep Austin Weird advertising campaign, it's a city that's insecure about its identity, without the self-confidence that comes from a few centuries as a household name. Over the course of the book there's a lot of analysis of how national events like the civil rights movement or environmentalism played out in the city, but with a few important exceptions Austin was a follower, not a leader. Austin may have been Lyndon Johnson's congressional district and an important nexus for local politics in its capacity as state capital, but until very recently it hasn't been a nationally prominent city except in the areas of music and semiconductors. Now, of course, it has been extremely successful in those fields, and you can't fault Orum for not following the music scene as closely as he could have.

Another reason this isn't quite a masterpiece is because the narrative is a little disjointed - characters like Ben White or Roy Bedichek or J.J. Mansfield jump onstage, play their roles, and disappear while someone like Emma Long gets a whole chapter devoted to them. One of the cool things about reading history books is that sense of "wow, I never realized how that dam was built/why that street is laid out the way it is/who really ran things in town", and I found myself wanting to know more about these familiar names, plus figures like Tom Miller and Walter Long who did get some space. Although perhaps Orum did the research and simply made a sound editorial judgment not to waste precious space on someone who was only important enough to get a middle school named after them. There's a fine balance between detail and narcissism, and I understand that not every founding father's life story is vital to the overall narrative, so it's probably better to treat this book as a springboard for your independent research, if you're interested, than as an artificially perfunctory and limited overview.

A third reason this falls short is because Orum is determined to fit many disparate events in the city's history into a good guys vs. bad guys narrative, to the detriment of a deeper understanding of the city. He's a liberal Democrat, as am I, but he sees the world from the perspective that all established interests are evils to be tolerated at best, and therefore their opponents, the self-designated representatives of "the people", whether they're student radicals, poor minorities, or anti-growth environmentalists, are probably in the right in any given conflict. Now, there is much truth in this view, and as Orum ably shows, much of what makes Austin such a pleasant place to live comes from its firm support for the university (as in the McCarthyite free speech struggles of the 1950s), its efforts to reduce racial disparities (Brown v. Board of Education relied heavily on Austin's struggle to integrate UT Law School in Sweatt v. Painter), and its preservation of its abundant natural beauty (Barton Springs is only one of the many excellent parks around the city). But any city is a mixture of coalitions and interests, and trying to lump the various factions together not only muddies their history but is a recipe for future misunderstandings. I'm pretty sure that part of the reason the City Council of the 70s that Orum likes so much had so much trouble getting things done is that they didn't have a very consistent vision for the city other than opposing the status quo. Their efforts individually are noble and laudable, but you can't do what Orum does and assume that just because they opposed the Chamber of Commerce that they had good plans themselves.

A fourth, related reason is Orum's crusades against developers and entrepreneurs are part of a long-standing anti-growth tradition that I feel has harmed the city. He makes some excellent points when he notes that at some point in the late 60s the city irrevocably made the transition from state-led growth as exemplified by the New Deal and the Lower Colorado River Authority to private growth like all the semiconductor firms speckled throughout the city. The fading of the New Deal and Great Society vision of America was momentous for the entire country, and Orum is absolutely right to point out that in many cases private developers in Austin were less than interested, and even flatly opposed to development that took everyone's interests into account. But frequently you will be reading about some long-ago minor dispute over developing a parcel of land and you'll think "hey wait a minute - I shop at some business there all the time and would be pissed if they never existed just because someone wanted to preserve some empty field instead". See Ed Glaeser's Triumph of the City for more on this phenomenon. One specific example he uses is Barton Creek Square Mall, which I went to a lot as a kid. The mall might have a hideous amount of unnecessary parking, which causes problems with runoff and pollution, but I have happy childhood memories of watching Fourth of July fireworks exploding gloriously over the city skyline from the edge of that parking lot, and I'm glad that it was built even aside from the shopping opportunities. The solution to hasty development is not no development.

This leads into the final observation that this is an excellent book aside from its minor flaws because it makes you confront your own ideas about where you fit into the place where you live. There are an infinite number of modern examples like the Walmart at Northcross Mall or the Triangle or the Domain where people who think they have a right to keep Austin preserved under glass butt heads with people who have a variety of motives for wanting to build, from crass money-making to the desire to live in Austin to the simple desire make their own contribution to the city's history, and to group them together is really misleading and perpetuates the kind of head-in-the-sands approach to growth that makes getting around in Austin such a nightmare these days and pushes them to the suburbs. It's a truism in Austin that "things were always better just before you got here", and so nostalgia for the good old days plays a powerful role in the city's perennial anxious tension between preserving whatever its own sense of itself is and its recognition that staying modern and desirable is the key to prosperity. I know I would have reservations about a gigantic new office tower right next door to me, and so I do understand the concerns of both sides.

On that subject, the book was originally published in 1987, a few years after I was born, and so it's quite fascinating to see what 24 years has done to his final chapter, where he reviews many of the developments then occurring along Mopac and Loop 360, both fairly recently built. Northwest Hills, Lakeline, West Lake Hills, Circle C have all gone from blueprints to normal and accepted parts of Austin life, much as every part of the city must have. While I wish the book was longer and covered every neighborhood in as much detail as it covered Clarksville and old East Austin, it did give me a lot to think about and additional layers of appreciation for the city. There's tons of additional reading to be done after this.… (more)