The Texan Podcast - Interview: Justice Ken Wise on American Thanksgiving and Texas History

Episode Date: November 28, 2024

Happy Thanksgiving!Justice Ken Wise joins Assistant Editor Rob Laucius to talk all things historical leading up to the start and widespread celebration of Thanksgiving as we know it today. Plus, learn a little about politics in the early Texas Republic.

Well, howdy folks, and I hope everybody's having a happy Thanksgiving. My name is Rob Lausches, and I serve as the Assistant Editor at The Texan. I'm very pleased to welcome back Justice Ken Wise for another history-themed, Thanksgiving-themed podcast. Thank you for joining us, Justice. It's great to meet you. Thanks for having me. Always great to be with The Texan.

Well, meet you. Thanks for having me. Always great to be with the Texan. Well, thank you. We appreciate you making the time to come down here and help, you know, spread more of the amazing story that is Texas history. And if you all don't know him already, Justice Wise has served on the 14th Court of Appeals in Houston since 2013, having previously served as a judge of the 334th and 152nd District Courts in Harris County. He's a member of the Texas Judicial Council, director of the judicial section at the State Bar, an adjunct professor at Houston Baptist University, and a former adjunct professor at the University of Houston Law Center. He's also the creator of Wise About Texas, the best

Texas history-themed podcast you'll hear, and has published numerous journal articles and speaks about Texas history across the state. In 2021, Justice Wise was honored by the State House of Representatives for his contributions in preserving Texas history, and he can even trace his own ancestry back to the Republic of Texas in 1836. Justice, thank you again for joining us. Did I get that all right, or is there anything that needs to be updated or corrected? No, you got it all right. I am currently serving as the president of the Texas State Historical Association, as if I don't have enough irons in the fire, but excited about that. I was going to say,

it's a very impressive resume. Well, thanks. I also understand that you're an Aggie. Are you looking forward to the 30th? Well, I am for a couple of reasons. It's great to play that game again, but my daughter is currently a freshman at the University of Texas, so we're going to get a chance to go together and see what happens. You're in the opposite situation with my family. My dad is a Longhorn. My sister's an Aggie.

So they already have a bet going. The loser has to sing the winner's fight song. Oh, I love it. I think I'm going to work on that with my daughter, although that even though nowadays it seems like a holiday that's as American as apple pie, one that's celebrated by everybody, back in the day, back before the Civil War, it was actually seen as more of a northern holiday, and it wasn't really as common in the South. So can you speak a little bit on that and how maybe the Plymouth landing wasn't really seen as something representative of the country as a whole until after the Civil War? Well, there are several parts to that. You know, Abraham Lincoln declared during the Civil War, declared that a day of Thanksgiving should be held. And I think, I don't have the quote in front of me, but it was in reference to the war dead and Lincoln's continued disgust with the Civil War

and his focus on reuniting the Union when the war would end. And so he declared that day of Thanksgiving and that no doubt caused a reaction in the South. The whole Plymouth thing is interesting because, you know, Plymouth, they landed in 1620, but in Jamestown was formed earlier than that. I want to say 1619. And traditional, organized, specific day proclaimed by the president or anything like that. It was just, you know, even George Washington said we should set aside a day to give thanks. And that's certainly true in a general moral sense. We should do that more often than we all do, probably. So it really wasn't very organized early on. And I think that's

probably what you're thinking about. Interesting. Yeah. I remember seeing that even Thomas Jefferson in his first term as president, you know, some of the some of his opponents, you know, he wasn't the most the most religiously observant man in the world. He even received some flack from people for for not being more attentive to these Thanksgiving proclamations. Was it more haphazard back in the day that political officials would announce these? Well, I think that's true. And I think one thing you got to remember, and this is sort of a general comment on the study of history, when you're studying history and looking back at things that actually happened in the past, you have to see them through the eyes of the people that were there.

And my point in saying that is in our current media environment, everybody knows everything immediately and or thinks they do. And so, you know, you didn't have that back then. If the president could say something, it would be weeks before somebody in Texas heard it. So I think that's probably why. Plus, the government was not in our lives as much back then. And I probably shouldn't say much more about that. But, you know, we didn't have to wait on the government to tell us to give thanks. We should give. But the other thing, when you mentioned Jefferson, those early presidents in Lincoln, too, you know, a reminder from the president that we should all be grateful to live where we live is, I think, a good thing. We probably could use a little bit more of that, the things that bring us together. No, definitely. With the state of

the country right now, you know, we're certainly in one of those divisive periods that seem to pop up over and over again in American history. So it's good to take, I think, stock of Thanksgiving for that reason and really see it not just as a celebration of food and football, which it is. It is, for sure. But to view it as more than just that, right, is giving thanks for the bounty, you know, that you're supposed to enjoy the food with a lot of gratitude, you know, enjoy the nice things you have and really be appreciative of it. Yeah, and it's just an opportunity for all of us to come together around something that we can all agree on, such as cheering for Texas A&M. I don't know if we can all absolutely agree on that.

I'm going to get some emails on that one, I think. But we all want a good game, right? I think in rankings it's UT and then a and M or like one and two right now so I'm expecting it to be a good one yeah we'll have some fun to us absolutely I did have one other question actually which is that one of my friends from Virginia makes the claim that earlier in the American, like before the Civil War period, a lot of Americans didn't really, a lot of people in the colony, something that was more, as of course the South was less, I think, outwardly religious in its form of government, like earlier in American history. Do you think that that's true, that perspective that they would have traced, for example, their ancestry back to Jamestown, rather than seeing there as being like one big founding for the United States? Yeah, I think that probably is correct, because, you know, in early American history, the focus was much more on your place in the state or the colony,

much more so than, you know, kind of we're all the same. America is a mature nation now, and so we talk more in broader terms. But early on, if you, and, you know, I don't know how deep you want to go into this, but if you read the Constitution, we are a group of sovereign states united for limited purposes. That's basically what the Constitution says. And they didn't like a big federal government early on. And many would argue we should go a little more back that direction. And that tension has always existed in our system of government. And often it's healthy because you don't necessarily need or want the same policy in Texas that you have in California. So people viewed themselves

as residents of their state first. That's a pretty general statement. And all of us listening to this that live in Texas are surely familiar with that feeling. I mean, you go travel around the world, somebody asks where you're from, I always say Texas first. And so I think that feeling was a little more widespread. So I would certainly expect someone from Virginia to talk more about Jamestown than Massachusetts. Absolutely. Yeah, I know. Texas, I think, has, I think we have the right to say that we're from Texas, not the U.S. in the sense we're just such a culturally distinct state, you know, as opposed to the rest of the country. You tell someone from France, you know, I'm from Connecticut.

I'm not sure if it'll quite register with them. That's right. Even though it does have an interesting history of its own. Well, every state, you know, we've all got our histories, and I think everyone should take some pride in the place they live. And a good natured rivalry is fun to talk about. But I certainly am a Texas chauvinist when it comes to history because our history is so unique and so exciting. Well, something else interesting that I found while I was reading about Thanksgiving history in the United States is that as if the

1930s didn't have enough problems of its own, there was a brief time period where there was a big debate over when Thanksgiving should even be held. President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to change the date of Thanksgiving to be one week earlier. This is in 1939. He wanted to move the date one week earlier in order to boost the Christmas shopping season and try and get the American economy more roaring up. This led to a lot of criticism from people such as Alf Landon, who was the 1936 Republican presidential nominee, who even said that Roosevelt had acted with the omnipotence of a Hitler in trying to move the date of Thanksgiving around, something that by this point had become much more fixed,

I think, and become much more, you know, spread across the whole country to the point where people were much more willing to defend it. They're willing to defend Thanksgiving from federal overreach. So I was wondering if you could speak a little bit onto that. Well, it's a funny story. It was 1939 and Roosevelt decided there were five Thursdays in November and Roosevelt decided to move it up to the fourth Thursday. And I don't know. I don't know, I guess people were looking for something to react to because like you said, that one, Alf Landon compared him to Hitler because he moved the day of Thanksgiving. And of course was eventually moved it back. And so one funny story

out of Texas around that time was there was a calendar company in Amarillo that had already printed their calendars for the year and had made a mistake and actually put Thanksgiving Day on the fourth Thursday. So they certainly didn't. That calendar company in Amarillo didn't complain because all of a sudden their calendars were correct. But yeah, Roosevelt was forced to move it back. The retailers definitely wanted an extra day of Christmas shopping, and that did not go over very well. That is fascinating about that calendar company in Amarillo, to think that you make that kind of mistake and it ends up working out for you.

That's right. Hope they didn't use up all their luck on that one, but that's good. No, it's true. Well, you know, things were, we weren't quite out of the woods yet. We had another several years before things could start to get, you know, feel it seems normal in the U.S. around the time. 1939 certainly wasn't a very lucky year, but no, that is interesting. Yeah, Frank's giving kind of makes some of our current political scale. You know, that's the nice thing, I think, about studying history and seeing these these things people argued about and and political factions that no longer exist. And even the scandals at the time, because it reminds you just how transitory I think a lot of our current political divides are and how all these scandals that seem

so big to us right now one day will be you know not remembered by the majority of people just like Frank's giving no that's good to learn about them no I think so I mean it teaches you that you shouldn't invest so much emotion in the things that are gonna be history pretty soon it's true I think it's better to just invest straight up in the history. So that's the nice thing. The battle's already won and lost. You know, you can just, you can be happy about it or be sad about it forever, but at least they're not, it's not going to go back and change. Right.

So that is one nice thing. But speaking about, um, older political factions though, that existed in Texas, I really enjoyed your recent wise About Texas podcast about the election of 1841, not in the United States, but in the Republic of Texas for the president of, at the time, an independent sovereign Texas. You mentioned in that podcast that politics at the time tended to revolve around being pro Sam Houston or anti Sam Houston. And what made Houston such a divisive figure that people would arrange themselves against him or in favor of him? Well, Houston was such an outsized personality at the time. And he, you know, he came to Texas. He ends up commanding the Texas Army, winning the Battle of San Jacinto and, you know, achieving Texas independence. He was hailed as a hero, justifiably so, as the commander. But along the way, he made as many enemies as he did friends. And he was an extremely divisive figure.

You know, you sit around occasionally and talk about who you would like to meet from history. And I would like to be around Sam Houston just so I could take his measure of his personality and what it was about him that caused such division. But so as such, when he was elected president the first time in 1836, he split the politics in Texas, and you were either pro-Houston or anti-Houston. There weren't really political parties in Texas then, but there was the Houston faction and the anti-Houston faction, and he remained a dominant force, even when losing political battles. He hated Barambu Lamar, and the feeling was mutual, and of course, Lamar was elected the second president,

so these wild swings between different candidates are not unusual, And then he was elected again. It's 1841, as you mentioned, and that podcast I did was talking about he was running against David Burnett, who had been the provisional president during the fight for independence, and they hated each other. So Burnett wrote him a famous letter as Houston took the army east and stretched out Santa Ana supply lines. He was accused by his detractors of a cowardly retreat. And Burnett wrote him a very famous letter, hectoring him about that and insisting that he fight and all of that. And so Burnett runs against him. And it was just a bitter, they were calling each other names and all that. I sort of wish we'd had Twitter or X or social media back then to see what they would have said. But, you know, some things never change.

No, it's true. I mean, what was the—I'm trying to remember. There was one specific insult, I think, that they were saying. It was that Sam Houston was a drunk, wasn't it? That was what he was accused of being. Well, yeah, and he was. I mean, he had an alcohol problem. It was the 19th century.

That's right. It was a stressful time. And Houston had famously lived with Cherokee Indians for a time, and they had nicknamed him Big Drunk. You know, the newspapers back then were blatantly biased. They admitted their bias. And they would champion one candidate or another and they would write, you know, they would publish pieces that their preferred candidate would write under a pen name or something like that. And one newspaper that was pro-Burnett and anti-Houston published an article that said, you know, Sam Houston is known as, I'm making up the text, but Sam Houston is known as Big Drunk,

but we don't think it's appropriate to call Sam Houston Big Drunk, even though that's his nickname. So we're not going to use Big Drunk, which is Sam Houston's nickname in any stories, because we don't think calling him by his nickname Big Drunk, which is Sam Houston's nickname, in any stories because we don't think calling him by his nickname Big Drunk would be appropriate. You know, they wrote an article like that. And it's really pretty funny. Yeah, some of the political satire, I think, back then, you know, they weren't outwardly as, they seemed to be less interested in outright insulting, but in these very slippery kind of barbs that they would slip in. I remember reading some great Federalist satire about the Louisiana Purchase, where they just made relentless fun of the Louisiana Purchase. Because at the time, there were all these people who thought, oh, there's going to be all this great stuff in there.

We found prairie dogs. But some of the stuff they were exaggerating. Like they said they saw 10-foot-tall Indians or a mountain made of rock salt. And there's this great Federalist satire where they just write, oh, the economies of Livingston and Monroe. What a wise administration. A mountain made of salt. We'll have enough money to pay off our debt twice over, Great Britain's national debt, France's national debt. You know, just they were, they really committed to the bit, I think, as we would say nowadays.

That's right. Always be selling, they say. Absolutely. But so you mentioned that Lamar and Houston didn't really like each other. And I was curious, like, what kind of political disagreements were there at the time that would have caused such division? Like did it, was it that they have different visions for what they wanted Texas to be, or was it over more specific policy? Well, the big one, I think, well, first of all, you got to understand, I mean,

none of us, or I wouldn't imagine many people listening, have experience starting a new country. I mean, Texas won their independence, but we were in massive debt trying to finance the revolution. We won the Battle of San Jacinto, but you're only independent if you can keep it. And so Mexico was still an issue. The instinct was to join the United States immediately. Everybody, say everybody, 97% of the population who voted in September 1836 desired to join the United States because France had been sniffing around. England was sniffing around. And we were very vulnerable. You had the Indian frontier

to the west also. And so we were in a, we, Texas was in a precarious position. So everything was an issue back then. And, but one of the biggest differences between Lamar and Houston was the policy toward the Indians, because Lamar because Lamar was an expansionist. He envisioned Texas being an empire going all the way to the Pacific Ocean, stuff like that. And Houston was more of a pragmatist in my view that he wanted to get the country established and get it secure, which I would argue we probably never really were as a republic. And so I think they just basically disagreed on everything. One incident that I'm curious that might have had an effect, or I wonder if it had an effect, Lamar was from Georgia and he engaged the day before the Battle of San Jacinto.

A portion of the army went out and they wanted to capture a Mexican cannon. And Houston allowed them to go on what he described as a reconnaissance mission. Well, the Mexican cavalry surrounded him immediately. And one young soldier was knocked off his horse and Lamar heroically rode in and rescued the young man and was hailed as a hero by all the people who had essentially disobeyed Sam Houston's orders and were itching to fight. And so they immediately elected Lamar commander of the cavalry. And there's really nothing that Houston could have done about that. And I'm very interested to wonder if that was a rift that sort of a challenge to Sam Houston's command that he might never have gotten over. I don't view Houston as a very forgiving person in incidents like that. And so anyway, but it made sense. But they certainly didn't

like each other. And I think a lot of it was just their view of what needed to be done immediately. You know, Lamar moved the Capitol out of Houston. The first Capitol of the Republic was Houston and the city of Houston. And Lamar immediately, upon being elected president, moved it way out on the frontier to the settlement of Waterloo, which he renamed Austin. And that infuriated Houston, who spent his second term trying to move it back. Well, I can only imagine, you know, it's his city, right? You don't want to, you wouldn't want to lose your own city. It was, so you said Austin was called Waterloo at the time. Was Houston was just called Houston.

Houston was named by the Allen brothers for saying Houston. They were trying to get the capital, which they eventually did get it. You know, if you're starting a city, you want it to be the capital because it's going to be prosperous. And so they named it for Houston. Pretty good PR move, if you ask me. No, it makes a lot of sense. Was Lamar's desire for expansion connected to his moving the capital at all, like trying to get it away from the more sort of eastern side, more urbanized side, trying to push the population? Well, that was certainly his argument. You know, I'll invite the readers to research and come to their own

conclusion about whether he really wanted it further to the west or he just wanted it out of the town that was named for his enemy. Probably a little bit of both. Well, I'm curious. You mentioned he wanted to go all the way to the Pacific. So at the time, that land was still controlled by Mexico, right, because the Mexican-American War hadn't been fought yet. So did Lamar want to go on the offensive against Mexico in order to try and take as much of that land? Well, that issue never really came to a head.

He never really had an opportunity. Would he have? Probably. You know, the Republic of Texas, as the Texans claimed it, went all the way into Wyoming and included Santa Fe and, you know, much of Colorado and all of that. And I go to Colorado every year and always claim it as part of Texas. But there you go. So he sent, Lamar, during his administration, sent an expedition to Santa Fe. Now you got to remember, I mean, think about it. I mean, that was a big deal. You didn't just jet over to Santa Fe in those days. And the expedition was a miserable failure. But his idea was, I'm going to send this expedition with a bunch of trade goods to Santa Fe and inform the citizens how lucky they are to now be citizens of the Republic of Texas. And they went up through, they went north and then they turned and crossed the

Llano Estacado. So a bunch of them were starving to death. They didn't know where they were going. They ended up, you know, straggling into Santa Fe, starving to death and et cetera, where they were promptly shot at and imprisoned by the grateful citizens of Santa Fe. So didn't quite work out. That's crazy. Was it because they were viewed as too aggressive by, you know, they're trying to take over this town as that wire was? Because that was still part of, obviously, Mexican territory at the time. Well, according to Mexico it was. According to us, it was ours.

And so you've got to remember back then you only got the land if you could keep it. And so it was a much more violent time. You didn't just annex things. You had to actually enforce it. And of course, the people in Santa Fe wouldn't necessarily know of the events that were occurring at San Jacinto or in the more populated part of Texas. That's a fair point. I guess it wouldn't have even, would it have been common knowledge like throughout, I'm just curious, in the West about something like the Texas Revolution or would that still have seemed much further away?

Well, both. I think both are true. Yeah, they might have known about it. Someone would certainly know about it, but it was hundreds of thousands of miles away. It's not going to affect their life. So they didn't really care what Texas thought in Santa Fe, obviously, because they shot at them. That's fair. And then I was also curious, because I know that Sam Houston was in favor of Texas being annexed to the U.S., but was Lamar, you mentioned Lamar wanted to build an empire all the way to the Pacific. Was his long-term goal to still join the United States with all of that land, or did he want Texas to be an independent power in North America? Well, you know, I haven't studied too much of Lamar's politics in that regard, but he was focused on, I think, if you think about, he wanted to build this empire. Whether it would join the United States or not was probably not foremost in his mind. In Houston, always the pragmatist knew that Texas really needed to

join the United States for protection. And the people generally agreed with that. But of course, Texas was in such debt. I mean, we were not an attractive target for the U.S. right away. It's a wonder Santa Fe didn't want to join. Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah. Santa Fe was much more prosperous. Interesting. Well, here I add one more quick question, if you don't mind, about this relationship at the time between Texas and the United States. I know that the big political factions were the Democrats, you know, following in the tradition of Andrew Jackson, and the Whigs, who are following in the tradition of not being Andrew Jackson, kind of like, I was curious if there was any, you know, overlap, seeing as the Democrats would come to be the big political

faction in Texas, once it became a state, was there any parallel between these two factions? Or was there between the Democratic democratic wig split and the houston anti-houston split well houston's mentor uh was andrew jackson um so he was very pro jackson you know but houston again houston the state uh the state of or excuse me uh texas the state of, or excuse me, Texas, the state, one of the unique things about Texas is how diverse we've always been. And so when you're trying to form a country, settle land, create an economy, all of that, the political parties were much less important. The idea of joining the United States was more for survival and that sort of thing than necessarily a political party. Now, that would rear its head when the issue of Texas joining the United States came to fruition in the 1840s because Texas had slavery. And that was a huge issue in the United States. So are you going to

take this state into the Union as a slave state was a big problem and delayed Texas entering the Union for a time. But my own feeling from everything I've read is that it was very up in the air. I mean, the instinct to join the United States certainly spring from the fact that most of the Anglo settlers in Texas at that time were Americans and they were definitely fighting for American constitutional principles because Texas as part of Mexico was a province that was caught up like the entire country of Mexico in a bitter dispute between centralism and federalism. And of course, Texans being from America were federalists, and they were not going to tolerate

a dictator like Santa Ana, who at one point was a federalist, but embraced dictatorship since he was the dictator. So that dispute was a very smaller battlefield back then, at least in my historical opinion. Okay. No, that's interesting. In other words, I'm sorry to interrupt. In other words, there was much more agreement. And when there's smaller, when the disagreements are fewer, they tend to become outsized.

And, uh, so I think that was probably a lot of that going on. It's funny to think how many of these Texas founders, you know, of course did not actually, none of, you know, none of them were really born in Texas. You know, they were all came, what's the, um, what's the old quote, right? We, we, uh, Virginia is the mother of Texas and we don't know who the father is, but we strongly suspect Tennessee. It's probably Tennessee, yeah. Georgia would have something to say about that. No, it's true. And Kentucky, right? Because I think wasn't, Houston was born in Kentucky, I thought, and then- He was born in Virginia. Born in Virginia, right. But then he, was it Tennessee that he had his started his political career.

Yeah, he was governor of Tennessee and probably would have been president of the United States. But for a failed marriage. Oh, interesting. Yeah, no. Back in the day, they had. So he followed Andrew Jackson to being divisive, being a strong figure and having scandals around his marriage. Really interesting. Well, that's really that is actually really cool.

Well, it looks like I don't want to take up too much of your time today. Thank you very much for joining us, Justice. I highly recommend to everyone out there, if you enjoyed this podcast, please give Wise About Texas a listen, because the Justice is a wealth of historical knowledge. And if you can, can you let us know if you have any big topics that are going to be coming out soon on the next Wise About Texas? I'm actually, we're recording this on a Friday. an important third prong of a three incident situation that changed the relationship between Texas and the Comanches forever. So I'm very excited about that. So I'm going to start working on that. And I've got a list of probably 250 or 300 topics that I need to get to. So I am going to spend a little time over the weekend organizing that. Well, I'm very much interested in listening to them, and I'm sure everybody else is as well. Well, thanks very much for having me.

It's great to be with everybody at the Texan. I listen to you every week and read you every day, so thanks for having me. Thank you very much. All righty. And to everybody listening, have a happy Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving. God bless, Texas.