New books include 'Cold War Texas', WT history professor's work on politics

Brewer’s new book completes Cold War trilogy

Southwestern Oklahoma State University History professor Landry Brewer’s new book, "ColdWar Texas," will hit the shelves Aug. 1, according to a news release.

In the book, Brewer argues that the Lone Star State played a significant role within American Cold War national security policy, when civilization’s survival hung in the balance. Abilene’s Dyess Air Force Base operated 12 Atlas F intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launch sites in the early 1960s that were identical to those operated near Oklahoma’s Altus Air Force Base at the same time. In fact, one of those Altus-area missile sites was located just south of the Red River near Fargo, Texas.

“Had these 13 ICBMs been fired, they would have reached their Soviet targets in less than 45 minutes, each delivering a nuclear bomb more than 250 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, at the end of World War II,” Brewer said.

Those missile launch sites cost millions of dollars to build, and five lives were lost in the process.

Nuclear-capable Nike Hercules surface-to-air antiaircraft missiles protected Austin and the Metroplex from a Soviet bomber attack. An American pilot stationed at Laughlin Air Force Base near Del Rio was the only fatality of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Amarillo’s Pantex plant, where three employees died in a 1977 explosion, maintains the security and reliability of the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal.

Abilene Christian University History professor Amanda Biles offered this praise in the book’s foreword: “Professor Brewer’s research takes his readers through the entire Texas Cold War experience, from origins to early nuclear build up, then through civil defense and even espionage. He tells of universities, schools, and civic organizations banding together to provide shelter from possible fallout … . He provides needed insight on the relationship between cities and their nuclear neighbors. ... These efforts left a lasting impact on Texas communities. Her citizens knew they would likely be caught in the crosshairs of any Soviet attack, and they responded to this danger with Texassized resolve. Their stories are all chronicled here, in another excellent installment of our nation’s Cold War history.”

Brewer is also the author of "Cold War Oklahoma" and "Cold War Kansas". He said this book completes the trilogy. "Cold War Texas" is available from Arcadia Publishing/The History Press and may be preordered from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and several other booksellers.

Brewer is Bernhardt Assistant Professor of History for SWOSU and teaches at the Sayre campus. He also co-hosts “The Early Morning Show” on KECO Radio with his twin brother Nathan.

WT’s Bowman explores local roots of national political battles in new book

CANYON — A new book by West Texas A&M University’s history department head will shed light on a 1970s political battle in the Texas Panhandle that presaged ongoing culture wars. “You Will Never Be One of Us: A Teacher, a Texas Town and the Rural Roots of Radical Conservatism” by Dr. Timothy Bowman was published July 28 by the University of Oklahoma Press, a news release said.

In the book, Bowman profiles Wayne Woodward, a 1968 graduate of then-West Texas State University, who began teaching English at La Plata Junior High School in Hereford in 1969. “Wayne was a product of the ’60s,” Bowman said. “He wasn’t super political, but he had an awakening in college. He taught in Death Valley, California, then came back to the Panhandle, and the school administration put up with his mostly harmless liberal activities for a time.”

But in 1975, Woodward tried to start a Hereford chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, thinking it could help protect the rights of his students and their parents, mostly Mexican and Mexican American workers at the feedlots and other agricultural businesses around Hereford. When school administrators caught wind of Woodward’s actions, he was abruptly fired. “Wayne was naïve about conservatives’ hatred of the ACLU, especially in the context of political battles that took place in the 1960s and ’70s,” Bowman said. “They thought he was wanting to help unionize local ag workers.”

He filed suit against the school district, claiming it had violated his constitutional rights to free speech and due process, prevailing at the district court level. But after Hereford Independent School District appealed the verdict, Woodward decided to settle his lawsuit rather than continue with a protracted legal battle. Eventually, he became a nurse practitioner and now lives at Lake Tanglewood; he never taught again.

Bowman became acquainted with Woodward after publishing his first book, “Blood Oranges: Colonialism and Agriculture in the South Texas Borderlands” in 2016. “What really drove my interest was trying to understand the people who did this to Wayne,” Bowman said. “These were generally good, upstanding people who believed they were taking the right course of action against someone who was a threat to their town. They deserve to be taken seriously and understood on their own terms.”

Bowman said his balanced examination of the conflagration is sympathetic to both sides, which he hopes will help provide context for continuing political wars around the country. “It looks at conservatism in the Panhandle in the 1970s and why conservatives and liberals started speaking different languages and not getting along,” Bowman said. “Ultimately, it’s an attempt to understand the origins of our divisive political culture from a rural perspective.”

The book “expands and often upends existing histories by locating the early culture wars not in coastal campuses and think tanks but in Hereford,” said Jason Mellard, author of “Progressive Country: How the 1970s Transformed the Texan in Popular Culture." “The themes of controversy and speech, patriotism and protest, outrage and offense, that are the political oxygen of the early twenty-first century all appear here, near fully formed, in the High Plains of 1974.”

Bowman joined WT in fall 2012. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Texas Christian University in 2002, a master’s degree from the University of Texas–Arlington in 2005 and a Ph.D. from Southern Methodist University in 2011. In addition to serving as department head, Bowman teaches a variety of courses related to the North American Southwest and modern United States history.

This article originally appeared on Amarillo Globe-News: New books include 'Cold War Texas', WT professor's work on politics