The Year America Discovered Texas

"They came, they saw, they liked it," Stanley Marcus recalls of 1936--the year "the rest of America discovered Texas." That year, in the midst of the nation's depression, the Lone Star State extravagantly celebrated the centennial of its independence from Mexico with fervor, fanfare, and hoopla. Spawned by pride, patriotism, and a large measure of economic self-interest, the 1936 centennial observances marked a high tide of ethnocentrism in Texas and etched a new image of the state.