Southwestern Historical Quarterly

Fort Worth history has been enjoying a renaissance of late, and those interested in the topic no longer need to rely on Oliver Knight's 1953 Fort Worth: Outpost on the Trinity (University of Oklahoma Press) as their principal source. Although Knight's book certainly had its strengths, it overlooked the experiences and contributions of African Americans and [End Page 111] Latinos, failed to discuss the implementation and maintenance of Jim Crow, and generally provided a sunny, boosterish evaluation of the city's development. Over the last decade, Fort Worth has been front and center in scholarly works such as J'Nell Pate's Arsenal of Defense: Fort Worth's Military Legacy (Texas State Historical Association, 2013), Harold Rich's Fort Worth: Outpost, Cowtown, Boomtown (University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), and Richard Selcer's A History of Fort Worth in Black and White: 165 Years of African-American Life (University of North Texas Press, 2016). All of these contributions to the city's growing historiography have done much to place Fort Worth's development in larger national and urban contexts, and Rich's new book is no exception.

As its title suggests, this book is a broad survey of the city's political, social, economic, and cultural development between the world wars. In that sense it is a broader look at the city's past than the author's previous work, which focused on economics and business developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rich's Fort Worth is a city struggling with its status as an urban center, one where modernity and traditionalism collide in a southwestern context. The racial and cultural clashes of the 1920s, exhibited by the rise and fall of the Ku Klux Klan, prohibition, and firebrand preachers such as J. Frank Norris, unfold against a backdrop of a stagnating local economy.

That last point gets at one of the strengths of Rich's work, for it reveals that, instead of relying on traditional narratives of the 1920s as a decade of population growth and economic development, he conducts his own analysis. He notes that the Fort Worth economy during the 1920s actually declined after having experienced rapid growth the previous decade, and that the population growth that occurred was primarily the result of aggressive annexation of outlying communities. Tarrant County, anchored by Fort Worth, entered the 1920s as the largest manufacturing economy in Texas and the center of the state's oil industry, but by 1940 it had fallen behind Harris County and Dallas in manufacturing and the Midland-Odessa area in the oil industry. As Rich argues, the decline of Fort Worth's petroleum and defense industries and "Houston's rise were the major economic issues for Fort Worth in the years separating the two world wars (229)." And as he points out, the decline of these two major industries in Fort Worth was out of the city's control because they were attributed to the decline in defense spending in peacetime and the discovery of oil in other parts of Texas.

Throughout the narrative, Rich humanizes the story of a city's journey through the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression, providing more than a cursory glance at how various groups fared in these two decades. Chapters on the experiences of women and African Americans as well as on crime, vice, and entertainment are given attention equal to the city's economic and political affairs. All of this is enriched by his attentiveness [End Page 112] to detail and ability to mine sources such as newspapers, oral histories, censuses, police department reports, Chamber of Commerce data, and city council minutes. The result is a rich narrative that enhances both our understanding of Fort Worth's past and of urban development in the Southwest.