Journal of Southern History

Amon G. Carter is the sort of Texan whom most of us would likely encounter only in the pages of detailed biographies of someone like President Lyndon B. Johnson, unless one lived in Fort Worth, where Carter's footprints remain visible more than half a century after his death. In Brian A. Cervantez's new and very readable biography, Carter's impact on both Fort Worth and West Texas is rescued from the footnotes and indexes. The book is also a refresher course in how newspaper publishers were once the movers and shakers of the cities that they served.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, for decades the largest circulation paper in the Lone Star State, was the megaphone through which Carter promoted politicians, public works, tourism, and the oil business—to name just a few of his pet projects. From publishing, he expanded into broadcasting (first radio, [End Page 355] then television), while plowing his profits into real estate and oil exploration. His political ties and personal connections extended to the likes of Will Rogers, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Carter's support of Eisenhower's presidential bid foreshadowed the Lone State State's subsequent evolution into a bedrock of the Republican Party.

Fort Worth stood at the heart of everything Carter did. He saw his adopted city as the place where the West began. He wooed automobile and airplane companies to settle there. He did most anything he could to one-up his greatest nemesis—neighboring Dallas. By turns, Carter could be prophetic (seeing the space between the two cities as the ideal site for an airport), quixotic (clinging to the notion that Fort Worth could be linked to the sea via a canal along the Trinity River), and pragmatic (securing federal funds for Fort Worth's own Texas centennial celebration, in competition with the one in Dallas, of course).

This biography is much more than a catalog of dates and milestones. Cervantez mines the sources to uncover Carter's inner motives. Born into meager circumstances in 1879, he set out to be a salesman, becoming a very effective one at a young age. That brought him to Fort Worth to sell advertisement space for the newspaper he soon came to own. As Cervantez relates, Carter found his muse in P. T. Barnum—another showman who never forgot his background and never hid his roots. Throughout his career, Carter reveled in being the Texan with a capital "T"—a hard-driving, gun-toting, Stetson-wearing, cowboy-boot-shod son of the Plains. Carter's flair for promotion (handing out signature Shady Oak Stetsons to his ranch house visitors) and generosity (lavishly donating to Texas Christian University and endowing a museum to house his art collection) could be self-serving. But he genuinely hoped his largesse would make Fort Worth a better place to live. Cervantez gleans these insights from Carter's papers, contemporary newspapers, and a vast array of secondary sources. The author's eye for detail can be seen on almost every page.

Amon G. Carter's name still graces Fort Worth buildings and West Texas college campuses. Big Bend National Park and Texas Tech University stand as two more monuments to his life. He never tired of reminding folks that his first earnings came from selling chicken (or was it rabbit?) sandwiches to railroad passengers. As Cervantez's biography so ably shows, Carter's ego and largesse transformed Fort Worth from a modest market town into a national destination.