Scotty Henderson wrote: >There may have been a struggle as these groups tried to sort out prejudice >against them but America, even Texas is a big place, and I'm not sure we >know how much of this Howard heard or absorbed. The earlier struggles you >mentioned in the Houston and Brownsville area were a 2 day journey from >Cross Plains, and an area that Howard never visited as far as I know. Even >in 1930, I would surmise that most news was locally reported, and only the >exceptional stuff drifted into the bigger cities, or got distributed >nationally. In order to make your case, you would have to prove that the >papers available to Howard in CP carried news of these events.
Jeez, Scotty, you make it sound like poor ol' Bob, stuck there in Cross Plains, was probably ignorant of happenin's more than a few miles down the road. Actually, when you read his letters you find him mentioning all kinds of stuff from national and international news. And the news actually travelled pretty fast. There was radio, of which Bob was an avid listener -- he mentions listening to the national political conventions, for instance, and to a speech by Mussolini, and a number of other news events. He sent numerous clippings from the newspapers to HPL, and mentions all kinds of news events in his letters. He wasn't confined to just the Cross Plains Review, or even the Brownwood Banner -- it seems pretty likely that the Howards subscribed to either a Dallas or Fort Worth paper (I still haven't gone to the microfilm archives to check the few clippings sent to HPL which still remain, for source). And before you go thinking the paper was old news before it got all the w! ay from Fort Worth to Cross Plains, it happens that newspapers went by train, so Cross Plains got its Dallas/Ft Worth papers in the morning, just like folks in the big city. From all I can see, Howard was keenly aware of what was going on statewide, nationally, and internationally. Rusty
