EDITOR’S PAGE

HOW ODD that I should be writing about power in Dallas, having been so near to it and yet so far away for much of my life. I’ve been close enough to see it clearly, but distant from the inner circle, which has never, to my knowledge, admitted a woman, though that may be changing. (The Dallas Citizens Council now has a woman member: Mary Crowley.) I think I learned instinctively to keep pace with my male peers in the city -many of them friends and sometimes family – by analyzing Dallas. “Analyze” is hardly the word for me. I tend to be intuitive. It’s also true that I’m drawing my material from my own life’s blood, which might very well cloud my objectivity as much as it informs my observations.

For me, the modern era in Dallas dates back to 1939, when Woodall Rodgers, a lawyer, became the first mayor elected under the council-manager form of government. He and Amon Carter, suzerain of Fort Worth, tried to agree on a joint airport for the two cities, but negotiations fell apart over where the entrance would be: on the Dallas or Fort Worth side. Another dream of Rodgers was to build Central Expressway.

Rodgers dominated Dallas in the Forties, and R.L. (Bob) Thornton, chairman of Mercantile National Bank, took over at City Hall during the Fifties. This was the growth-minded mayor who said “keep the dirt flying.” He also was famous for firing off telegrams summoning important businessmen in town to a meeting, all but locking the door, then strong-arming them to give to this or that cause. He had many causes: Some were heartfelt; others were pragmatic commitments. One was the Dallas Symphony. “Dallas has to have a symphony,” he would say, “as long as I don’t have to go to it.”

It was Thornton who had helped start the Dallas Citizens Council back in the Thirties. These were the “yes and no men” who ran the city’s top companies. He wanted to make fund-raising easier and to formalize a system of leadership. This was where the oligarchy, as it came to be known by critics, all began, riding high through the Forties and Fifties but falling into rough and controversial waters in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. Fortune magazine featured Thornton’s “dydamic men” (by now Earle Cabell was mayor, but Thornton’s legacy was still in the ascendancy), and asked if business leadership had failed Dallas.

In fact, it was business leadership that pulled the city back from this tragedy. Since 1960, many in Dallas had been enthralled by the radical right. It was urgently necessary to lead these people and the prevailing ethos of Dallas back to the middle ground. It was further imperative to restore confidence to a town whose successful booster psychology had been shattered beyond recognition.



THREE STRONG MENOF THE SIXTIES



Three leaders emerged from the business community. They persuaded Earle Cabell to resign as mayor and challenge far-right Bruce Alger for Congress in 1964. He won. They further persuaded the City Council to replace Cabell as mayor with Erik Jonsson, a founder of Texas Instruments. He won three subsequent elections. Jonsson, in fact, was one of the trio of leaders who put the city back together again after the assassination. The others were John Stemmons and my uncle, Bob Cullum.

They made a grand slam in the Sixties, but there were setbacks in the Seventies. City Hall was lost for a while to populist mayor Wes Wise. A plan to canalize the Trinity River was defeated at the polls. At-large elections for City Council and the Legislature gave way to single-member districts and neighborhood politics.

But for all the agitation, exhilaration and anguish of those years, Stemmons, Cullum and Jonsson have become our foremost mythological figures. More than Thornton, more than Rodgers, more than John Neely Bryan with his make-do cabin, these three have come to symbolize who and what we are.

And what we are (I’m indebted quite directly to Don Cowan of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture for this) is all tied up with the trader, with people of commerce, with those canny negotiators who must be instinctive peacemakers. Not for Dallas the puritanical lawmaker; leave that to Boston, where God’s own rules are divined from the tides, if not the tea. Not for us, either, the warrior; Chicago’s immigrant settlers learned the tough justice of ethnic machine politics and underworld coercion, both a martial means of maintaining order. For Dallas, there are always more goods to be sold and more deals to be made. For our politicians, there is always another vote. Keep the bridges in place.



OLD PATTERNS, NEW LEADERS



It’s precisely because of what we are that our traditional style of leadership is reasserting its strength and gearing up for the long haul. Dallas is a business town that wants business leadership. We strayed from the familiar pattern during the Seventies. Women and minorities were clamoring to get in the action, and they (we) upset the old equilibrium. But our system is much more inclusive today, and we’re regaining our balance as a city.

In the story that follows on new power in Dallas, we’ll be looking primarily at business leadership, plus the infrastructure of interested people who support that leadership and make it possible. We won’t deal with politicians except in a few instances, though, of course, they’re essential to making things happen.

We find that the new guard isn’t functioning exactly like the old, any more thanErik Jonsson operated like Bob Thornton.(Jonsson actually liked the symphony.)The new generation of Dallas leadership ismore broadly based and far less autonomous than before. But the animating principles remain much the same. They have todo with the rough yet elegant arts of diplomacy and trade.