Tag: Blogging

The Annual Meeting of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History: A Graduate Student Perspective.

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Andrew Klumpp is a Ph.D. Student in American religious history in the Graduate Department of Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University.

One of the underappreciated advantages of attending graduate school in a sprawling urban area like DFW has to be that every once and awhile national conferences take place right in your backyard. This past weekend the Society for US Intellectual History (#USIH2017) rolled into town, and when the call for graduate student volunteers went out, I eagerly signed up. On Thursday afternoon, I trekked up to the conference hotel in Plano and immersed myself in the four-day event. By helping at the registration desk, I managed to introduce myself to many of the scholars at the conference, learn about some of the logistics involved in pulling off an event like this, and connect (finally) with people I’ve been chatting with through Twitter’s #twitterstorians for months.

Heading into a busy season of conferencing—the Southern Historical Society is in town in a few weeks and AHA is just around the corner—I did what many academics may be prone to do. A few weeks ago, I headed to the Dallas Public Library and checked out books on how to network effectively. (Keith Ferrazzi’s Never Eat Alone proved particularly useful.) Armed with a fount of new knowledge, I dove into the conference. And, to be honest, it kind of worked. Of course, this was due in part to the size of the conference (around 200 attendees) and the graciousness of many of those in attendance. I managed to hear about fascinating research, get a few leads on archival sources, build relationships with people working on similar projects to my own, and even get one of my books signed by the author (shout out to Andrea Turpin).

Of course, I also attended a spate of engaging panels. The topics ranged from Christian nationalisms in the Early Republic—which included an excellent paper by SMU’s Kate Carté Engel—to grassroots birth control advocates and explorations of resonances between social and fiscal conservatism in the late twentieth century. One of the most thought-provoking questions that undergirded many sessions queried what counts as intellectual history and what kinds of sources might inform it. Are the ideas of self-proclaimed intellectuals necessarily more systematic and consistent than those of everyday folks? If we think so, what might that say about our views of everyday people and their role in intellectual history? If not, what might that mean for the need to reevaluate complex intellectual figures, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson? At times, these questions bubbled up in lively question and answer sessions, but more often, they simmered in enriching ways beneath the surface of the conversation.

This conference also piloted a new “Guided Discussion” session format. More interactive than a traditional roundtable, in this model the four panelists each briefly posed a question to the group around a common theme—in this case, how historians use words with contested or complex meanings. After each panelist posed his or her particular question, the audience broke into groups based on which question each person wanted to ponder and then discussed it with their small group. My group consisted of a historian of religion (me), a historian of science, a historian of disability and two philosophers. This proved to be a remarkably fruitful discussion of terminology. It shone light on the assumptions that particular subfields bring to certain terms and parsed the tensions involved in using terminology that reflects our sources while also attempting to be precise and avoid terms now deemed offensive. Did we solve the underlying problem? Certainly not! Yet, these varying voices did push me to consider my own use of language and to sharpen my own practices when using contested concepts.

On Saturday evening, Annette Gordon-Reed delivered an outstanding keynote address to a packed crowd. She focused her remarks on how memories kept alive the stories of Thomas Jefferson’s relationship Sally Hemmings—an enslaved woman owned by Jefferson. Gordon-Reed recounted her own work to uncover this relationship and how it relied on taking seriously the memories of Hemmings’ children. What is more, she explored how the memories of Hemmings’ children and their descendants shed light onto the relationship between Hemmings, Jefferson and their children. In a spirited question and answer session, Gordon-Reed deftly engaged questions that ranged from how Jefferson ought to be commemorated to how to label relationships between white men and enslaved women.

As the weekend drew to a close, I came to appreciate the privilege of having such an excellent conference take place right here in Dallas. As a native of a hamlet in Northwest Iowa, I’m admittedly rather unfamiliar with national organizations showing up in town—aside from glad-handing presidential candidates, of course. I can, however, now tell you from experience that I’d rather shake hands with a crowd of intellectual historians than road-weary politicians any day.

Book Review: Tejano Tiger

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Kyle B. Carpenter is a PhD Student in SMU’s William P. Clements Department of History

Thompson, Jerry D. Tejano Tiger: José de los Santos Benavides and the Texas-Mexico Borderlands, 1823-1891. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2017. Pp. 414. $29.95.

Texas A&M University Press and the Texas Book Consortium

Jerry Thompson’s Tejano Tiger chronicles the life of Santos Benavides of Laredo, Texas.  With a narrative that spans the man’s entire lifetime, the book offers a window into how the U.S.-Mexico War, U.S. Civil War, French intervention in Mexico, Reconstruction politics, and industrialization all impacted the people living on the Rio Grande.  Santos Benavides had a hand in all of these significant events.  As a politician, he adapted quite quickly to the U.S. political system, becoming mayor of Laredo in 1856 and a Texas state house representative in the 1870s.  He also fought Indians, Union soldiers, and Mexican revolutionaries as a combatant in the various conflicts on the border.  Further, he took advantage of the border conflicts and contestations to make savvy real estate and business decisions to build a prominent mercantile house with the Benavides name.  Through boosterism, politicking, smuggling, violence, and bribery, Santos navigated crisis after crisis to do what he thought best for Laredo and himself.  Thompson does a masterful job weaving an engrossing and intriguing narrative of a truly transnational border figure from a wide variety of sources.

Thompson’s source base is astounding.  Santos Benavides did not leave a memoir or extant journal, so the author had to piece together his biography from an assortment of manuscript and archival sources.  From the national archives of the United States and Mexico, regional archives in Texas and Nuevo Leon, down to local archives in Laredo and Nuevo Guerrero, he cites over fifty different manuscript collections, not to mention a wealth of newspaper and secondary source research.  The painstaking hours of research into the lives of people who surrounded Benavides during his life allows Thompson to paint a beautiful and nuanced picture of the man and the borderland in which he lived.

Thompson’s narrative style blends the disparate source base together in a clear, complete whole.  He skillfully keeps Santos at the center of story even though most of his sources engage Benavides peripherally.  Thompson also navigates convoluted border crises with aplomb.  For example, the complex intersections of the U.S. Civil War and French intervention created an atmosphere of chaos along the border.  Thompson, however, finds a narrative balance through the relationship between Santos Benavides and Nuevo Leon governor Santiago Vidaurri.  Benavides fought as an officer for the Confederacy in South Texas while Vidaurri tepidly supported the French imperial push into Mexico.  Through their relationship, Thompson demonstrates the many ways the conflicts in the United States and Mexico overlapped along the border.

The Benavides-Vidaurri relationship is just one of the ways Thompson maintains a transnational scope in the book.  Though the border remains a constant and important concept in the book, the author has no delusions that it was a firm division between two nation-states.  In fact, Thompson constantly shows the international movement of people and goods across a porous, open border.  The central themes for entire chapters center on border crossing.  Chapter four explores how essential the Mexican cotton trade was for the Confederacy, chapter six investigates the complex process of peacemaking after civil war, and the concluding chapter, nine, tracks Santos’s abilities as an international diplomat facilitating peaceful relations between Mexico and the United States.  For Thompson, border crossing was a central theme of Santos Benavides’s life.

Thompson’s masterful biography elicits further questions and offers new paths for historical exploration.  For example, according to Thompson, the Benavides matriarch and her daughters played very important roles in the family’s ranching and mercantile businesses.  Following his sources down that path could reveal a significant analysis of women’s role and their power in the borderland.  Additionally, straying farther from Thompson’s central figure would allow historians to draw out and uncover important research projects.  For instance, when the Confederacy dissolved, angry soldiers roamed around the borderlands wreaking havoc around Brownsville.  A militia made up of Mexican Juaristas helped restore law and order in the city, protecting the lives and property of Anglo-Americans (p. 205).  Why were Juaristas flexing power in and around Brownsville?  What dynamics drove them there?  How did the people of Brownsville react?  Why was Santos Benavides not demanding order from his former charges?  The author cannot cover everything and the book already comes in at 414 pages including notes, bibliography, and index, but it provides a spark for exciting research avenues in nineteenth century borderlands history.

Overall, Tejano Tiger remains a remarkable biography of an important transnational border leader.  The life of Santos Benavides supplies great insight into how an elite conservative Tejano navigated the border in a most tumultuous time.

Terry: SMU’s Once Great White Hope

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Roberto Andrade is a PhD Candidate in SMU’s William P. Clements Department of History

My dissertation examines boxing’s influence on identity, specifically focused on Mexican and Mexican Americans. Concerns over machismo, class, and assimilation inform many of the arguments that use boxing—as well as other sports—as a claim towards authentic “Mexicanness.” In the United States, an equivalent to boxing’s impact on identity is the Great White Hope; a common trope deeply rooted in race that seemingly never fall out of use. In 1972, for one boxing bout, the Great White Hope came from SMU when a student, Terry Daniels, fought for the boxing heavyweight championship. While I was conducting research, Joan Gosnell, an archivist at SMU, mentioned Terry Daniels. As boxers rarely come from affluence, his story immediately intrigued me. After further research, I found a remarkable story that, unfortunately, has an ending that is common for boxing. This is that story.

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The first time Joe Frazier knocked down Terry Daniels, it appeared he would not get back up. Daniels laid there, face down and motionless, for about five seconds. It was the type of knockdown that forces spectators to wonder if they witnessed a man’s death. After eight seconds, Daniels struggled to his feet, just as the first round ended. And as the bell rang, signaling a minute’s rest between rounds, Daniels stood there, confused, staring at the referee. Daniels’s trainer walked across the ring and placing his arm on his fighter’s shoulder, guided him back to their corner to prepare for the second round.

Terry Daniel son knocked down while Joe Frazier waits in the background. (Branson Wright, The Plain Dealer).

That Frazier knocked down Daniels was unsurprising. Ten months earlier, Frazier became the first boxer to defeat Muhammad Ali. Frazier is among the all-time great boxers; Daniels is not. But on a Saturday night in 1972 New Orleans, a day before the city hosted the sixth Super Bowl, Daniels, the latest version of the Great White Hope, challenged for boxing’s heavyweight championship.

Daniels’s manager, Doug Lord, was largely responsible for the fight. “I told the fight promoters I’ve got a white kid from Dallas,” Lord said. “He’s friends with the Dallas Cowboys, and everyone knows the Cowboys are going to the Super Bowl in New Orleans…They loved it. They bought it.”[1]

Technically, Daniels was not from Dallas; he only lived there, moving from Ohio to attend Southern Methodist University. The son of a successful, possibly millionaire, businessman, Daniels was intelligent, young, handsome, and—since it is a prerequisite of any Great White Hope—white. Leading up to the fight, promoters emphasized the many differences between Daniels and his opponent. Stories of him being part of his high school choir, or mentioning that Daniels was treasurer of his junior class became part of the narrative. In the hype, even noting Daniels enjoyed reading was worth mention as was his initial plans to study engineering upon first enrolling at SMU.[2] All these things distinguished Daniels from Frazier, who though lived in Philadelphia was originally from South Carolina. Frazier was a sharecropper’s son—far removed from Daniels’s life of privilege. But as it pertained to boxing, these differences mattered little once promoters sold the fight. And those who bought tickets to see a Great White Hope, were on the verge of watching him lose minutes into the fight.

As the second round began the television commentators wondered aloud if Daniels had recuperated from Frazier’s punches. They noted the obvious—that Frazier had won the first round—when seemingly out of nowhere, Daniels connected with a right uppercut that stunned Frazier. “Oh! He landed a beautiful uppercut,” one commentator incredulously screamed. Maybe Daniels was more than just hype. Maybe he was something almost as romanticized as a Great White Hope; maybe Daniels was a natural.

Daniels was certainly athletic, having played football and baseball for SMU before an injury shifted his focus to boxing.[3] As an amateur, Daniels found success even winning local Golden Glove tournaments. When he fought professionally not only did he postpone his graduating from SMU but also angered his father who, understandably, had not sent his oldest son to Dallas to prizefight. By 1972, three years into his career, Daniels had become a local celebrity, accumulating a record of 28 wins, 4 losses, and 1 draw; an impressive accomplishment even if against subpar competition. But as his punch connected and forced Frazier to step back, no one cared about past opposition—not when, for one punch, it appeared Daniels may have been on the verge of orchestrating an incredible upset.

In boxing, hopes die fast. Within a three-minute round, hopes of a championship, of wealth and fame, and even, of any future quality of life can disappear. In the third round, Frazier brought Daniels back to reality—again dominating as he had in the first round. Frazier’s signature punch, the left hook, kept connecting and Daniels could do nothing to stop it. Had he raised his right hand slightly to better protect his face, it would have altered, even minimized, his right cross—his most effective punch.[4] And had he used a right hook, a punch he was not prone to using, to counter Frazier, he would have risked everything; as one of boxing’s old adages warned: you don’t hook with a hooker. Frazier was a hooker—the left-handed, boxing type—Daniels was not. So again, Frazier’s left hook dropped Daniels toward the end of round three. He stood up long enough to fall by the same punch not even ten seconds later. As he gasped for air, a look of bemusement on Daniels’s face, the bell rang and once again saved him.

On the final knockdown, Frazier nearly knocked Daniels out of the ring. (Branson Wright, The Plain Dealer).

There was nothing remarkable about the fourth round besides Frazier knocking down Daniels a fourth and fifth time. The latter resulted in Daniels falling back through the ropes, appearing as if he would fall all the way to the floor. Ringside judges braced to break Daniels’s fall but he remained inside the ring and at least, save some dignity. The referee stopped the fight, leaving Daniels visibly upset. “Don’t stop, damn it,” Daniels screamed, before turning to his manager and saying, “Doug, don’t let them stop it. There’s nothing wrong.”[5] Daniels was likely the last person in the world to realize he never stood a chance.

After the fight, Daniels’s manager implored, even begged him, to not fight again.[6] For a time, Daniels took the advice, returned to SMU and earned a political science degree in December of the same year he fought for boxing’s heavyweight title—one of sport’s most prestigious titles. But the title of boxing heavyweight champion can have a seductive appeal on men practicing a sport so inherently tied into ideas of masculinity. “The closer a heavyweight comes to the championship,” Norman Mailer noted, “the more natural it is for him to be a little bit insane. [S]ecretly insane, for the heavyweight champion of the world is either the toughest man in the world or he is not.”[7]

Whether he deserved it or not, the fight gave Daniels a chance to show he was the toughest man in the world. He failed. And whether he was a Great White Hope or not, the loss hurt the same. Six years after fighting Frazier and claiming he had retired, Daniels fought on, partly because dreams of his title fight haunted him. “I daydream a lot about that fight,” Daniels explained. “I fantasize about what might have been if I had blasted Frazier in the third round, when he was so confident, with a right hook.”[8]

Daniels fought until 1981. Counting his loss to Frazier, Daniels’s final 32 fights resulted in only 7 victories against 26 losses. Terry Daniels left Dallas and returned to Ohio in 2004. He now lives in a retirement home, suffering from what some call pugilist Parkinson’s.[9]

 

[1] Peter Finney, “Former heavyweight champion Joe Frazier etched in N.O. boxing history,” The Times-Picayune, November 16, 2011.

[2] Jeff Miller, “The Fight of His Life,” Texas Monthly, February 2015.

[3] Ron Fimrite, “Back-To-School time for Terry Daniels,” Sports Illustrated, January 24, 1972.

[4] Les Thomas, “Student Boxer Believes Punching is his Bag,” The Campus Chat (Denton, Tex.), February 14, 1969.

[5] Don Gardner, “Re-evaluating the Situation,” The Daily Campus, January 25, 1972.

[6] Kevin Sherrington, “Fight of his life amounted to Super letdown,” Dallas Morning News, January 26, 2004.

[7] Allen Barra, “Norman Mailer, Sportswriter,” The Atlantic, December 26, 2013.

[8] Mike Kiley, “Daniels is boxing to keep wolves from his doorstep,” Chicago Tribune, October 26, 1978.

[9] Mark Podolski, “In “My Brother The Boxer,” brother and author Jeff Daniels chronicles pinnacle of Willoughby South grad Terry Daniels’ pro career, a bout with Joe Frazier,” The News-Herald, November 9, 2015.