DALLAS, TX., CIRCA 1964

Warren Lewis lived in Dallas for 17 years and worked as a reporter for a local paper and later as an executive of one of the largest companies in Dallas.  In 1964, he published DALLAS: Public and Private, a summation of his observations about the city.

I was struck by how much some of the  conservative residents of Dallas resembled today's conservatives.  From pages 89-90:

Every city seems to have a built-in supply of fanatics, and Dallas probably has more than its share. But what it also has, which is of interest to the sociologist and the psychologist, is a seemingly inexhaustible supply of young and middle-aged people, many of them college-educated, who see black or white and literally nothing else. These are nice looking, pleasant, attractive people. Their children are handsome. They are open and friendly in business, they are hospitable, they attend church, and they keep a clean house. They live in Establishment and non-Establishment areas throughout the whole city. They are really a very attractive group until you discover that the human mind is for them an instrument for the projection rather than the reception of ideas.

Almost without exception, these are people who feel that their greatest enemy is not the Soviet Union or Communist China, but the government of the United States. Their wives feel it even more fiercely. They feel that their worst enemies are other Americans who disagree with them. They are not equipped to deal with contradictory evidence; when it appears, they boo it and hiss it to make it go away. Their statements are positive and final; if one does not agree with them, one is in the enemy camp, at least temporarily. In other words, these people do not recognize any middle ground. To give in to the pressure of a new idea is weakness.