Culture and Capital in Dallas, Texas

I am on a plane to Dallas. I lived in Texas for nearly 20 years. I am always interested in Texas, and I am also irritated by it, like I am almost any place I have ever lived. 

There is a big media event happening in Dallas, and one that fits the nature of the place well. Jake Paul, a streaming celebrity, will fight Mike Tyson, a once-dangerous-but-now-over-the-hill boxer, at the end of a full card broadcast live from AT&T Stadium in Arlington. A former mayor once called Arlington the dash between Dallas and Fort Worth. There’s an entire world in that dash.

No one respects Dallas. Civic pride is low there, and people East of the Mississippi hardly know it exists. Those who do tend to be unimpressed. Houston, a humid and polluted city, is far more beloved by both its residents and the world at large. Michelin, those dining reviewers, recently traveled through Texas and only awarded one star in Dallas, as opposed to Austin (7) and Houston (6).

My friend Philip is picking me up from the airport and he asked me if there was anything I’d like to do in the afternoon. I struggle to think of anything other than just to drive. When I think of Dallas, I don’t think of many places – maybe a few concert venues like the Granada Theater, the restaurant Cafe Brazil and a little store called We Are 1976. But, mostly I think of State Highway 75 and the overpasses and how fun it can be when traffic is light to zip down those urban rapids. 

I did come up with one activity, but I won’t ask Philip to do it: To go to NorthPark Center. It’s the only true landmark I can think of in Dallas, and one of the only malls that, last I saw, was still going strong. It was the purest view of luxury any striving Texan I knew, myself included, had. Texas money buys you stuff from the mall. 

I have no sense of any Dallas history before Nov. 22, 1963, the day Kennedy was assassinated there. I don’t know the power players or what makes the city truly go, other than that it does, fast, every day. If traffic in Los Angeles is a crawl, in Dallas it is all about speed. You’ll drive faster while crossing five lanes of traffic than anywhere else you’ve ever been. I know the Hunt Family ruled here for decades, but they don’t seem as powerful as they once were. 

I know a little bit more about Fort Worth’s history: That it was a military outpost that became a booming city thanks to the robust Texas cattle industry. That oil barons Sid Richardson and the Bass family took a special interest in shaping the city, as did the Fort Worth Star-Telegram publisher, Amon Carter. I know none of these details about Dallas. I assume there were once ranches and cattle there, but I couldn’t tell you where other than South Fork Ranch, which was featured in the TV show Dallas. 

I know that Will Rogers once said Fort Worth was where the West begins and that Dallas was where the East peters out, a statement I’ve generally found to be true. There is very little West in Dallas and next to no East in Fort Worth. The divide is a mindset. Drive east of Dallas and you’ll find the pine forests that cover most of the American South. Drive west of Fort Worth and you’ll see the type of ranchland vistas that make you think of cattle drives and stagecoaches. 

I can think of two miscarriages of justice, one for each city, and perhaps they reveal something about the nature of the two places: The first is the Cullen Davis trial. The second is the woeful tale of Randall Dale Adams.

Davis was a wealthy, if somewhat odd, figure who was well-known in those hoity-toity ’70s Fort Worth social circles. He was the son of a man who made and sold parts to the oilfield, and he married a brassy, party-loving woman, Priscilla, who eventually left him. One night while she entertained friends at the opulent Stonegate Mansion he tried to shoot her to death. He failed, instead killing her boyfriend, Stan Farr, and Priscilla’s 12-year-old daughter, Andrea Wilborn. The crime, his arrest and trial would linger in the collective memory of older Fort Worthians for many years. 

Long story short, the rich guy was not convicted. Priscilla’s character was called into question and the lawyer that put it altogether, Richard “Racehorse” Haynes, became a legend. 

Davis would get himself in trouble at least one more time, in a murder-for-hire scheme against a judge and Prscilla, who he was still locked in a divorce battle with. Against all odds he escaped prison for that one, too. Years later he would say he found Jesus and renounced his old ways. Davis, 91 years old, still lives in Fort Worth. Priscilla died in 2001. 

I’d love to say this says something about the dark heart of money in Texas, and maybe it does, but I would imagine a multi-millionaire would get similar treatment pretty much anywhere. It’s not what Texans do, but how they do it that is so distasteful to the wealthy and privileged classes everywhere else. Quite frankly, Texans often treat wealth and power with a certain vulgarity that is hard for others to stomach.

Another case, this one in Dallas County, is of Randall Dale Adams. Adams was a nobody, a laborer staying in a motel off of I-30. The last time I drove by, the motel was still there, not far from Westmoreland Road. In 1976, Adams was wrongly accused of murdering a Dallas police officer in cold blood, a crime that the other passenger in the car, David Ray Harris, (who Adams did not know well), would eventually confess to. Harris said Adams wasn’t even in the car. All evidence pointed to Harris from the get-go, but since he was a minor at the time, they chose to charge Adams instead because he could be charged with the death penalty. 

The Adams case would become the subject of one of the more famous documentaries of all time, The Thin Blue Line. The director, Errol Morris, did Adams a solid and helped him get out of prison. He lived a quiet life, helping the wrongfully convicted, until he died. He got the Hell out of Dallas County as fast as he possibly could and died in Ohio in 2010. He never received any restitution for being wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for 12 years. 

I’d love to say this says something about the dark heart of justice in Texas, and so I will. Adams himself said, “if there ever was a Hell on Earth, it’s Dallas County.” Prosecutors in Dallas used to famously say it took a good prosecutor to convict a guilty man, and a great prosecutor to convict an innocent man. 

I can’t help but see a metaphor in the oil wells pumping cash into the machine that is Dallas and modern Texas – the only thing you can do is get out of the way or get a job maintaining the machine. Anywhere in between and you can expect to be crushed. It is not a place for a drifter or a dreamer. In Dallas, everything – justice, relationships, art, food – is just business. 

Houston I know very little about and most of my trips there have been for weddings or high school soccer tournaments. It always seemed like a fun city – half New Orleans and half Los Angeles. Austin and San Antonio I have little to say or write about. Austin is deep into its own myth making, and I am no longer interested in that type of writing. It is the capital of Texas, and that deserves its own examination. San Antonio is exactly what it looks like for good and ill and will probably outlast Texas itself. El Paso and its sister city Juárez are a great mystery to a great many Texans and I hope one day the city that gave us At The Drive-In will get a closer look. 

But Dallas is Texas as we know it in a nutshell and there is no place more worthy of a little critical ink than Dallas. How can one of the biggest media markets in the nation produce such ineffectual, booster-happy journalism? How can a city with limitless financial resources fail to build anything beautiful in brick-and-mortar? How can a place that hosts concerts daily fail to capture the national imagination with any consistency? 

Most of the things we think of as Dallas are outsourced. The steers, or what’s left of them, are in Fort Worth. The cookie cutter homes are mostly in the suburbs north and west of the city. Even the Dallas Cowboys themselves do business in Arlington now. My friends tell me that for the first time in decades Dallas is struggling to keep up. It has long been a place that young Texans move to to meet a spouse, make some money, and move back home. But now even that dream is becoming unaffordable. 

There is, ultimately, one cultural export from Dallas, and that is the Cowboys. They are the first thing you see in the airport shops when you step off the plane and on the hats, shirts and tattoos of the people who live and work there. They are, in their brutality, the closest thing Dallas has to elegance. The silver field and the blue star. The cheerleaders. The history and legacy. 

I have a real distaste for the Cowboys. I grew up a Dolphins fan and just liked them better. And so much of life in Dallas revolves around the Cowboys. The radio talks about them. Your neighbors talk about them. The pastor talks about them. They are the most important thing in Dallas, and they are what all the business exists to glorify. The Dallas Cowboys aren’t just religion, they are a Texan’s concept of God. 

But, and here is where I’m torn. It’s easy to hate Texas. It’s easy to spotlight its gauche cruelty. It’s easy to condemn its brazen quest for power and riches at all cost. It’s easy to dismiss its cultural output (which is to dismiss its film, music and literature, some of which is sublime). But in doing so I think one reveals more about America’s blind spots than anything about Texas. Does one of America’s final frontiers, Florida, not yearn for wealth? Does country-music capital Tennessee not search for political power? Does cultural king New York not run on greed? Does utopian California not shamelessly sell a dream financed by the military’s bombs and fighter jets? 

Texas and the powerful Texans that run it see American contradictions and exploit them. Is this shameful? Certainly. Is it understandable in a country that speaks of justice, but does not deliver it? I think so. 

Years ago some justice was rendered on Texans when the Southern Methodist University football team, embroiled in a pay-for-play scandal, was given the “death penalty.” They didn’t play for a season, and it took decades for them to rebuild their program. The story goes that SMU was far from the only Texas school bending the rules, but they were the ones that got caught and that most of the dirty boosterism started between powerful men in boardrooms bragging about their alma maters. Sounds right to me. This year SMU is first in the ACC and college football players can officially earn money from their likenesses. In the documentary Pony Excess, one of the interviewees points out other teams were spending the same amount of money, if not more, and still losing. Video of my alma mater, Texas Christian University, flashes across the screen as he says it. America isn’t about how you play the game. America is about winning. And Texas knows this. And that is what you need to know about Texas to survive there. 

So, I suppose it is time to wrap this long-winding rambling up for the week. Texas isn’t going anywhere, and if you think a state full of engineers is going to take climate change as anything more than a technical challenge, or that its politicians won’t command billions in Federal aid to do so, I have bad news for you. Texas, for all of its antique drapery, is all about the future. 

And yet Dallas still yearns for a respect, for recognition as a global city, that it seems it will never get, no matter how big it is, no matter how much money it spends or how impressive its skyline becomes. The Cowboys have been stuck in the middle of the pack my entire adult life. Its greatest artists always leave. But everything is for sale. And Texas powers the world. Ignore it at your own risk.