In the Texas State Historical Association’s (TSHA) March 2023 annual meeting program book, J.P. Bryan, the organization’s executive director—and former CEO of a multi-million-dollar energy company—included a poem:
When a land forget its legends,
Sees but falsehoods in the past,
When a nation views its sires
In the light of fools and liars-
Tis a sign of its delcine
And its glories cannot last
Branches that but blight their roots
Yield no sap for lasting fruit
The poem, by English writer J. Fairfax-Blakeborough and pulled from Walter Prescott Webb’s book glorifying the Texas Rangers, reads as a declaration of war to many Texas historians. The TSHA, the 125-year-old nonprofit that puts out widely used publications such as the Handbook of Texas, plus well-regarded periodicals and other materials, has become the latest front in conservatives’ quest to control the teaching of Texas history.
Bryan stated as much in the same program, vowing to ensure that the horror he sees as being depicted in Fairfax-Blakeborough’s poem “does not become reality in the teaching of Texas history.”
Bryan tried unsuccessfully at the TSHA’s annual conference in March to get his own candidate elected to the organization’s board. In April, in a bizarrely worded filing, he sued the TSHA president to keep the board from holding a meeting at which he expected to be fired. He won a temporary restraining order from a Galveston County judge to delay the meeting based on the allegation that the board’s current makeup is too heavily weighted toward academics, in violation of its bylaws. How this fight plays out, he told the Galveston County Daily News, “will determine the future of the way the history of Texas is written.”
Texas historians agree. Several TSHA members who spoke to the Texas Observer said they feel they are being bullied and that their jobs are in danger if they speak up. They fear Bryan’s actions will unravel the TSHA and muzzle historians, especially those of color.
Bryan told the Galveston newspaper that professional historians on the board want to “demean the Anglo efforts in settling the western part of the United States for the purpose of spreading freedoms for all.”
“That is a fairy tale,” said Ben Johnson, former TSHA board member and professor of history at Loyola University. “The idea that you’re going to make a historical organization tell only stories that are consistent with that kind of thinking—that is the death knell for any serious history.”