Dallas, Texas

Dallas, Texas developed initially as a crossroads settlement in the 1840s and established itself successively as an agricultural service center, market town, and regional metropolis with the arrival of two major railroads in the 1870s. A commercial city of 92,104 by 1910, Dallas attracted the 11th District Federal Reserve Bank in 1914 and led the region in financial and insurance services in the decades before the Great Depression. At the same time, the city developed both a light industrial base represented by manufacturers of agricultural implements and clothing and heavier industries including cotton mills and a major Ford Motor Company assembly plant.

Between 1880 and 1920, Dallas often imitated Chicago, Kansas City, St. Louis, or its rivals of similar size and age on the developing prairies. Few residents of early Dallas or other “new” 19th-century towns preferred stasis or advocated returning to a simpler time. A broad, general consensus favored growth—virtually all of the citizens of Dallas were convinced that their city was destined for greatness. Still, competing interests articulated different visions of urban growth. The commercialcivic elite, club women, populists, socialists, trade unionists, and municipal reformers competed and compromised by forming shortlived coalitions that endured only as long as their respective ambitions overlapped. Significantly, the racism of the city's white majority curtailed efforts to unite Dallas workers.

Conflicts in the 1920s and 1930s convinced a new generation of businessmen—most of them Texas natives and less cosmopolitan than their predecessors—that divisions among the elite threatened the city's regional hegemony. Businessmen led by banker R. L. Thornton matured in the 1920s and consolidated their power with the formation of the Dallas Citizens Council in 1937. Unlike the early commercialcivic elite of Dallas, this new generation excluded all voices except its own from civic affairs, aired intra-class disputes behind closed doors, and presented the public with a single option that ostensibly benefitted the city as a whole.

Political scientist Stephen Elkin considers Dallas after World War II an extreme example of the entrepreneurial political economies characteristic of Sunbelt cities in which strong alliances developed between businessmen and public officials. What distinguished Dallas was not that business leaders dominated the city but the extent and duration of their dominance in the postwar decades.

John Neely Bryan established Dallas in 1841. Most probably, he named the town after Alexander James Dallas, a U.S. naval hero. Dallas County was named for the commodore's brother, George Mifflin Dallas, who was vice president under James K. Polk. By the time Bryan built his cabin and began enticing other settlers to Dallas, the Republic of Texas had already provided funds for a military highway from Austin to the Red River to cross the Trinity River near the convergence of its three forks.

From its origins as a strategically located river crossing, Dallas benefitted from the rapid settlement of much of its hinterland. In 1841, Texas granted William S. Peters and his associates from Louisville, Kentucky [Page 205]approximately 16,000 square miles in the region of the upper Trinity. From Stephen F. Austin's original contract with Mexico, empresarios were barred from luring migrants already in Texas to new settlements. As a result, Peters Colony settlers came primarily from areas to the north and east. Most grew wheat instead of cotton, and few owned slaves. Unlike most migrants to Texas who had to purchase land from speculators, many Peters Colony farmers near Dallas received 640 acres of free land and, because they possessed cash reserves, developed a lively interest in trade.

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