The Carpetbagger Who Saw Texas’s Future

When Edna Ferber’s Giant was published in 1952, Texans were not pleased. Ferber’s sweeping novel about cattle, oil, and the winds of change brought a reform-minded Virginia woman, Leslie Benedict, to a Texas ranch, where she has the temerity to suggest that the denizens might treat their nonwhite, non-male neighbors a little better. Show some kindness to the Mexican immigrants—or “wetbacks,” as they’re routinely called in Giant—living in poverty down the road. Acknowledge that women might be capable of and interested in thinking about politics.

Ferber, a waggish, literary New Yorker born and raised in the Midwest, known for novels including Show Boat and So Big, had done the unpardonable—she had messed with Texas—and Texas let her know how it felt. Julie Gilbert recalls some of the vitriol in her new book. Giant Love: Edna Ferber, Her Best-Selling Novel of Texas, and the Making of a Classic American Film. “Carl Victor Little in his Houston Press review suggested that she be lynched,” Gilbert writes. Little dismissed Ferber’s “‘brand of fiction’ as steeped in backstairs gossip and what girl-novelists call local color.” Later, a man in Beaumont, after hearing that Ferber’s novel would be made into a movie directed by George Stevens, made his feelings known to a Hollywood columnist: “If you make and show that damn picture, we’ll shoot the screen full of holes.”

Ferber was attacked not only for being a carpetbagger, but also for having a progressive agenda. Through her heroine, who comes to the Reata ranch when she marries the longtime cattleman Jordan “Bick” Benedict, the author imagined a transformation that Texans of a certain stripe dream of to this day, and she knew that it would be an uphill battle. Though the state has changed in many ways over the past 70 years—it is more diverse, more urban, and more ideologically varied—political realignment seems just as elusive today. Ask Beto O’Rourke, who generated a sea of lawn signs in 2018 … and then lost his Senate race to incumbent Ted Cruz and the deeply entrenched state Republican machine. Or Colin Allred, who went up against the same candidate in November, with an even worse result. A Democrat hasn’t won a statewide race in Texas since 1994, when Bob Bullock was reelected lieutenant governor.

The state’s current Republican power players, led by Governor Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, have Texas politics in a headlock. The state’s abortion restrictions are among the stiffest in the country; the Texas state school board recently approved Bible-based lessons for public elementary schools. The Texas General Land Office recently offered President-Elect Donald Trump a 1,400-acre ranch to build “deportation facilities.”

Although Ferber didn’t turn Texas into a progressive haven, she did offer a fictional heroine trying to chip away at the traditions she abhorred. Gilbert brings to her book about that struggle a built-in rooting interest: Ferber, who died in 1968, is the author’s great-aunt, and Gilbert has fond memories of her. To Gilbert’s credit, however, this is not a “My Aunt Edna” project. The author uses personal correspondence when it helps make a point, along with reams of her own research and observations. Giant Love makes a fine companion to Don Graham’s 2018 history of the film Giant. These are books about the power of art to change perceptions, as well as its limits in changing reality. Years before the native son Lyndon Baines Johnson started talking about a Great Society, Ferber’s book—and especially the 1956 movie—expanded the national idea of what felt possible in the heart of Texas.

Ferber first set eyes on the state many years before she began writing Giant. She undertook what she would call “a superficial tour” of Texas, from dusty border towns to ritzy city shops: “Talking to scores of Texas people. Amazed by their viewpoint, their braggadocio, their seeming unawareness of the world outside their vast commonwealth.” At first, she concluded that the state’s muchness was too much for her: “It was larger than life. Too big. Too massively male. Too ruthless and galvanic and overpaced. Too blatant. Too undiluted. Too rich. Too poor … This novel of Texas is not a book for a woman to write. It would kill you.” But the state had already cast its spell, and she changed her mind. “My rejection of Texas on that initial visit had not been on the grounds of pre-formed opinion or inexplicable emotion,” Ferber later wrote. “On the contrary, I had been vastly interested, astounded; confused and startled; repelled and attracted.”

[Read: Elizabeth Taylor’s feisty, feminist turn in Giant]

I know the feelings. I moved to Dallas from my native Berkeley for a newspaper internship after college in 1996, planning to stay in Texas for a summer. Almost 30 years later, I’m still here—albeit in Houston. During that time, I have seen all manner of cultural development in both cities: independent bookstores, thriving film scenes, culinary delights. Houston, the fourth-largest city in the United States, is very much a place for immigrants and first-generation Americans, and when I go to the grocery store, I feel like I’m seeing a cross section of the country. In the urban centers, at least, it’s pretty easy for people of all political persuasions to feel at home. Leslie Benedict would be pleased.

The state’s four major cities—Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio—are all blue, but this is a state of more than 29 million people, and there’s a whole lot of in-between country. One of the funniest scenes in the film finds Leslie (played by Elizabeth Taylor) coming to Texas for the first time with her new husband, Bick (Rock Hudson). She looks out the train window and wonders when they’ll get to Texas. Bick informs her that they’ve been there for hours already. It’s still like that.

Because of this sprawl, there are many different Texases. In Bernie, the 2011 movie from Richard Linklater, an old wag provides a helpful breakdown: “You got your West Texas out there, with a bunch of flat ranches. Up north, you’ve got them Dallas snobs, with their Mercedes. You got Houston, the carcinogenic coast … Then down south, San Antonio. That’s where the Tex meets the Mex, like the food. And then in Central Texas, you got the People’s Republic of Austin, with a bunch of hairy-legged women and liberal fruitcakes.” Every Texan I know who has seen the movie loves this scene. It suggests that they contain multitudes, and that they can laugh at themselves.

But when Ferber laughed at Texas, and, via Leslie, suggested improvements, she was doing so as an outsider, or a tourist. In the movie, Leslie is eager to tip some sacred cows. After reading up on Texas history, she confronts her soon-to-be-husband: “We really stole Texas, didn’t we, Mr. Benedict? I mean, away from Mexico.” Bick, speaking for his people, is aghast: “I’ve never heard anything as ignorant as some eastern people.” Leslie’s father jumps in: “Leslie, you mustn’t talk that way to a Texan. They feel very strongly about their state.” Yes, they do. They can talk trash among themselves. But don’t you go butting in.

Yet Leslie doesn’t just talk. Once she arrives at Reata, she demands that the local (white) doctor tend to the nearby Mexican village. Over Bick’s objections, she encourages their son, Jordy, to follow his dreams of becoming a doctor instead of working the ranch. Jordy ends up marrying Juana, the daughter of the local Mexican American doctor, and fights segregation and racism by working to provide health care for all. As Gilbert writes, the theme of racial disharmony and progress was actually more central to the movie than the novel, much to the chagrin of one preview audience member, who complained: “Not enough ridicule of Texas as in the book—wetback problem became the dominant one.”

Bick, the prideful Texan, is also granted a more redemptive character arc by Stevens and his screenwriters, Fred Guiol and Ivan Moffat, than the one Ferber provided. In the novel, when the Benedict family is kicked out of a roadside diner that doesn’t serve Mexicans, Bick isn’t even present. In the movie, he uses the occasion to make a stand, and gets pummeled by the diner’s burly owner after sticking up for another Mexican American family. “This was a ‘lesson’ scene for Bick,’ Gilbert writes, “and perhaps for some audience members as well … As never before in the whole story, we see Leslie holding her Bick’s head adoringly, amid broken crockery all around them. We see her being deeply in love with her fallen husband.”

The Bick of the film seems to be pointing to a new, more tolerant future. Texans, sufficiently flattered, warmed up to the movie in a way they never did to the book. Here was an actual native, not a mouthy carpetbagging woman, showing some Texas backbone. Bick’s redemption wasn’t the only reason for this about-face. The movie softens Ferber’s acidic satirical voice; it also provides the glamor of Taylor, Hudson, and James Dean (who died in a car crash before production was completed). But making Hudson’s Bick both tough and tolerant was a bold stroke of the state’s ego. “Four years earlier the book had quite literally been an enemy of the state, and now this former pariah had become the high priestess of the Lone Star,” Gilbert writes. “There were plaudits such as ‘the national movie of Texas,’ ‘the archetypal Texas movie,’ and even ‘the state religion.’” And there were no reports of anyone shooting a screen full of holes.