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Oral History Transcript - Richard B Henderson - October 17, 1985

Interview with Dr. Richard B. Henderson

Interviewer: Stephany S. Goodbread

Transcriber: Stephany S. Goodbread

Date of Interview: October 17, 1985

Location: Dr. Henderson’s Home, 1401 Brown Street, San Marcos, TX

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Begin Tape 1, Side 1

Stephany S. Goodbread: This is Stephany Goodbread. Today is October 17, 1985, and I’m conducting an oral interview with Dr. Richard Henderson, retired Professor of Political Science at Southwest Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas.

Richard B. Henderson: You want me to tell you about how I came here. After World War II, after I got out of the Army Air Corps in World War II, I was going to go to the University of Texas, but I couldn’t find any place to live. I had married my wife in Seguin, and we had one child, and so I learned from my brother-in-law about San Marcos, Southwest Texas. He said, “Why don’t you try over there?” I said, “Well, okay, sounds like a good idea. I’ll maybe go for a year or so, and then I’ll go to UT.” And I guess I found a home here. I was interested in journalism and began work in that right away, and then when the time came to run for editor of the Star along in about 1947, I think it was, I ran for editor of the Star, was elected and had some good experiences out of that. And then I decided to major in government, we didn’t call it political science, through Dr. James Taylor, who was chairman of the social science division, “James Taylor Lecture” was named for him. He was able to get me a graduate assistantship at the University of Maryland and that way I started out on my graduate work and went on and eventually got my PhD at the University of Maryland. We sort of had a deal that, when I did this or when I got my advanced degrees, I’d be coming back here, which I did, and stayed here, been here ever since. Although, I was at Maryland twice. I came back for a couple of years and then went back to finish the PhD and then came back again. But after I came back the second time, which was somewhere along 1955, I’ve been here ever since, or I was here ever since down to when I retired in May of 1984. So, that’s about it in a nutshell.

Goodbread: Well, what was it like on the university at that time? Was there a building program going on then, like now?

Henderson: Very little. It was a small campus. The student body, even though it had been increased somewhat by the returning veterans, the student body was, I would say somewhere around 2,300 or 2,400. The faculty was about 100 or 115, some such thing as that. You knew every faculty member and most of the students, if you had been here a couple of years. It was that kind of environment. It was a real nice place. There was that phenomenon that they boasted about here, but it was truer then than it is now, that it was a very friendly campus, because everyone knew everyone and you greeted people on the campus. People spoke to one another very readily and that kind of a thing. It was really great. And it was a better academic environment than some people tend to think, and we had some good people here. And of course, Dr. Taylor, I mentioned a while ago, was one of the outstanding ones, and so was Retta Murphy, Dr. Murphy, for whom the building is named, the Taylor-Murphy Building. He was a fine professor, and there were some excellent people in journalism, and I was majoring in it, and then I switched over. I felt more strongly oriented toward public affairs and the academic discipline for it, which is government or eventually political science. But the journalism professors, or one of them was head of the department and advised on the paper and all was Senator Walter Richter that everybody knows is almost Mr. Alumnus of Southwest Texas, probably one of the most outstanding distinguished alumnus. Senator Walter Richter, and the other professor was Joe Vogel from Lockhart, who later went on and got a degree in, I think it was in communications, a PhD in communications, and was with the United States Information Agency for many years and is now a visiting, not visiting, he was visiting, but he is now a professor in communications at the University of Texas. He retired from the United States Information Agency, which operates, really, under the State Department. He retired from that and became a professor at UT.

Goodbread: At this time, you say there were returning veterans from—?

Henderson: Right. That’s the thing that I wanted to get back to. That was the way the campus, the student body was oriented. It was dominated by older students, students in their twenties and even thirties. I remember one of the top linemen on the football team was a thirty-some-year-old major in the, who had been a major in the Air Force as a bomber pilot, you know, because these were the people you had, guys that went off, you know, and came back, and came back to school. Some of them had had a year or two, but they were still eligible, and so you had them when they, most of them were veterans. And that colored the whole social life. We married veterans. We lived in what they called “Dogpatch” sometimes, or “Splinterville,” or various names. They were those little, they weren’t really pre-fab buildings, but not very substantial buildings that were there in the area where you have some campus housing now, you know those apartments, the little two-story buildings—?

Goodbread: By Strahan?

Henderson: No, by the Jowers Center. That was the area that was called “Dogpatch” and there were a lot of little houses with, it was, what it was was off-base housing that was built in World War II for personnel at what was then an Air Force base. See this Gary, what is Gary out there now, excuse me, Job Corps Center, was an Air Force base. Originally, it was a navigation training base for the Army Air Corps. And so they built that housing there. Well, the housing was converted to sort of just general public housing, but especially for students up here, returning veterans and what not. And eventually, it was, I think, sold for virtually nothing to Southwest Texas and became strictly university housing for a number of years. But the buildings lived way beyond their expected life, but eventually they were torn down. And we lived in those, and we had kind of a community there of married students and—which made for a, really, quite different sort of atmosphere. And there was some political activism, but it was essentially of the conventional sort, not radical politics. In fact, this, of course, was part of the political base that Lyndon Johnson had, you know, and in fact, the veterans club worked very hard. In fact, I was personally involved in it, in his successful campaign for the Senate. In fact, we even set up a speaker’s bureau, and we had guys, older fellows—veterans who’d go out and make speeches at other campuses, some of them as far as down in the Valley, down in Edinburg, making speeches to students. And, see, all of them were voters because they were in their twenties and they made up, you know, they made up anywhere from 30–50% of the student population at that time because this was right after the war. We’re talking about from ’46, I started to school here in February—no, I got here in February—but I started in June of ’46, so we are talking about ’46’49 is the stamp of that. And so, it was really interesting, the effect of the influx of veterans on the GI Bill, because it changed the nature of the student body. You didn’t have a bunch of kids. They were mature people.

Goodbread: —and probably more serious-minded about their studies.

Henderson: Alright, that’s good, that’s a good point. That was another thing. In classes, I mean you had people who were really motivated, I mean they were doing this because an opportunity had been given to them to get a college education and they maybe never would have gotten a college education. Well, you know, there have been books written on this, the impact that this had on the United States, when you swell the number of people with college educations now through this thing. We’re talking about what, I don’t know how many it was, but there were probably a million and one-half or a couple of million people, I don’t know, you could look it up, who took advantage of the GI Bill and who had high school educations, who instead had college educations, and many of them did what I did, and that is they got hooked on it, and they went on to graduate degrees. And you get another effect that many out of that generation became the professors of the next generation, you know, in the colleges and universities, they stayed in the academic sphere, and so it was, the GI Bill was a really important phenomenon in this country.

Goodbread: You know, we look back at the fifties with this rosy glow now, you know. Everybody kind of thinks the fifties was like “Happy Days” on TV. What was it like around here in the fifties and—?

Henderson: Yeah, because what I’m talking about was in the forties and just getting into the fifties. Okay. Things turned out pretty bad in the McCarthy—time, or in the general complex from, or of, the suppression of ideas and—because it wasn’t just McCarthyism, it was the race thing, too. And I’ll tell you a couple of things that might serve to illustrate that that I’ve used in classes to tell students what it was like, showed them what it was like. Dr. James Taylor, the late James Taylor, who was, well, that’s all kinds of information about him, so I don’t need to say any more about him, he was chairman of the social sciences division on to 1962—I replaced him in 1962 as chairman of the social sciences division. Well, anyway, in—sometime in the fifties, I forget exactly what year it was, he went to some sort of institute up at Howard Payne, he and Walter Prescott Webb, the famous historian, and they made speeches. And in these speeches they talked of the coming of desegregation, that the South was going to have to face up to it, so we are probably talking about 1952, I’d say, because the desegregation ruling came in ’54, so we are probably talking about ’52 or somewhere along in there, that people in the South were going to have to face up to it. It was inevitable; it was coming and so forth. Well, as a result of a report of his remarks in one of the Houston papers, Houston newspapers, Dr. Taylor was called up before the Board of Regents. They had the quotation that this young woman journalist had written, and they were thinking in terms of dismissing him, firing him. Well, he was able to show that the young woman, in her zeal, had misquoted him and made his remarks sound stronger than they actually were. When he was able to do that, they decided it was okay. But as he left the hearing room, one of the members of the Regents said, “I would still fire you,” just like that. What they were getting after him about, as I said, was for saying simply, things like, well, “These people are entitled to their constitutional rights, and it’s going to happen, and we might as well prepare ourselves for it, that they are going to get their constitutional rights, that under the Fourteenth Amendment that these people are entitled to equal protection under the law and you’re not going to be able to carry on these institutions of segregation and whatnot any longer.” And he was trying to tell them what the portents of the future were; I mean that’s how bad the climate was. A little later on, after the ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education, which was in the summer of 1954, officials at this school were still ordered to turn black people away, even though rulings had been made in public education and then subsequently in higher education, there were several rulings that followed the Brown vs. Board of Education, it became clear that from the standpoint of the law that no educational institution in this country could, certainly no public education institution, could turn somebody away because of their color. Nevertheless, the officials up here were told by the Board of Regents, “Turn them away until one of those students actually goes to the United States District Court and seeks a writ of mandamus;” in other words, they held on to the last bit. And finally, one—a young black girl did. She went to the United States District Court and got a writ of mandamus, and it was served on the Regents and on the Registrar of Southwest Texas, and she was admitted. But they, I mean, after all the law was cut and dried and settled for a couple of years, somebody finally got in. Dr. Taylor used to joke about that. He said, “We have been discriminated against, they haven’t been interested enough in getting in here to go get a writ.”

Goodbread: Was she the lone black for that particular semester, or did they then let other—?

Henderson: No, I think she was. I think she was the only one. And for a number of years we didn’t have more than, you know, like a handful, a half a dozen, even then. And gradually, it picked—or even now the percentage is quite small, even today. I mean, you know, when you think of the percentage of Anglos and Mexican-Americans, the percentage of blacks is really quite small, and that can be attributed to such simple things as population variations and densities and so forth. There are not very many black people within the main service area of this institution, just not that many.

Goodbread: No, this is not a heavy black area around here. During this McCarthy period, when you’re teaching political science and theories about communism and Marxism, was that a problem?

Henderson: Yes. It was, I would be stretching things if I said that anybody ever came and told me what to teach or came to your classroom or anything like that. But things happened, which made you extremely wary and cautious. And I can tell you a little story to illustrate that, which I’ve also used to teach my students about what things were like in those days. We had set up a summer institute in international affairs, that may not have the exact title, but a summer institution in international affairs. As I recall, Dr. Hahn, you know, he’s still here—he retired from history a number of years ago—Cecil Hahn, Dr. Cecil Hahn—Dr. Hahn, I believe, was in charge of it, and I was on the committee, and I was a young instructor or assistant professor or whatever, and I was pretty green, and they invited a number of speakers, and we never had any money for things like this or very little, so we would—a lot of times we would get speakers who were available for free or for their expenses or some such thing as that. So we had some speakers from the American Friends Service Committee, and that’s the Quakers, right? And they had some extremely competent people from—who had served in various capacities in other countries and had a lot of—had a lot to contribute in matters of international problems and international understanding and so on. So there were several of them among the people who were going to be involved in this, outside speakers and whatnot. And they also—they maintained a speaker’s bureau, and I think they also had some people available who were, maybe not necessarily Quakers and not on the Friends Service Committee. But at any rate, there was a slate of speakers who were going to come here. About a week before this was to take place—it was to be a thing that lasted for several days—I was attending a function in Austin, and I was sitting next to a man from Houston who was an ex-student of here from many years ago, and he asked me about this program, and then he said, “Are you going to have it?” And I said, “Well, sure, as a matter of fact,” I said, “I’m on the committee.” And he said, “Well, I’ll tell you what,” he said, “You’re going to have it over my dead body.” And I don’t know, I just kind of shied away from the guy. I wasn’t real clear about what was going on.

Well, the next day, the President, Flowers, called us in the office, and he said that the Regents were putting the heat on him, and—President Flowers died a number of years ago—but anyway, he said the Regents were putting the heat on him to drop these speakers. These speakers, several of them, had appeared in Houston, and I think they had an appearance scheduled in San Antonio as well. Well, there was a kind of a McCarthy-type mob scene in Houston when they had appeared there, and so these people said, the Regents had told Dr. Flowers, You’ve got a hot potato down there and you’d better be careful how you handle it. See, they didn’t tell him what to do, they just said you’d better be careful how you handle it. Well, anyway, he called these people and asked them if they would come to a meeting in his office, so they were all there. One of them was a woman in the U.S. Foreign Service, mind you, who had a top secret clearance. She ran over and grabbed the phone on Flowers’s desk, and she said, “Let me—I’ll call J. Edgar Hoover himself about this.” And they calmed her down, saying, “No, no, that won’t be necessary.” And then a man who was a Quaker and one of the American Friends Service Committee was—said—these people sent along a mimeograph sheet to show us how bad these people were, what kind of “commies” they were—and it said on there that this guy had made a speech somewhere in the North in which he said that he would take the American flag and throw it down and stomp and spit on it. Well—and this was a rather common thing in those days—what they had done was quote him out of context from a speech in which he said—he was discussing the argument for world government and what was called One World, you know, with Wendell Willkie, who was a presidential candidate, Republican presidential candidate of all things—anyway, what he said in the speech was, he said, “I am not one of those ‘One Worlders’ who would pull down the flag and stomp—” But they said that he said that in a positive way, that he would pull—and it was so preposterous, the whole thing. But, the heat was on, so what happened? I sat there, and I said, “Boy, we can’t throw these people to the wolves.” And so the President finally said, “But listen,” he said, “I have to think of it this way,” he said, “I don’t want them coming to get you people.” And he says, “That’s my role.” He said, “If I were just plain old John Flowers and not president of this institution,” he said, “Yes, I’d do the same thing. I’d say, ‘Well, we’re going to have them.’” But he said, “I gotta worry about you people because that’s what is going to happen next, they’re going to come after you.” So then these people agreed to sit down, and that’s the terrible thing about McCarthyism, these people agreed to sit down—I sat there while they did it—one of them sat down at the typewriter, the guy from the American Friends Service Committee—I think his name was Sanders, if I remember correctly—he sat down at the typewriter, and he typed up a statement that we all agreed to, which said something to the effect that due to some of the terrible circumstances that had developed at a function in Houston involving these speakers that they had decided that it was best if they withdrew from their appearance at Southwest Texas, as if they were doing it and we were not telling them that we didn’t want them. But they were persuaded to do this, and that’s how the incident ended.

But that’s the kind of thing that went on. I remember people writing articles in those days saying, you know that famous book title, It Can’t Happen Here, but it was happening here, happening right here, as the old song goes from  Music Man, right here in River City, and this is River City, right here in River City it was going on, that’s the kind of thing. Well, now, you start thinking about things like that when you’re teaching your classes. How could you help but think about it. You say, “Well, there may be some character in the class here who is reporting me and what I say.” And indeed, that happened.

Goodbread: Tell me about that.

Henderson: Well, it’s something about Joe Vogel—He told me one time, he said, “You know, there was a guy in one of your classes.” I was doubling in brass a little bit at the beginning, and I taught a little history—American history. He said, “There is a guy in class who said that he was kind of watching out for professors who indi—” You know, had inclinations like that. And he said, “Oh, who are your professors?” The guy said he was taking history from me, and he said, “Well, what do you think about—?” He said, “Oh, he’s all right,”—talking about me, you see. I don’t believe the boy was paying any attention to what I was saying. (Laughs heartily)

Goodbread: He was so busy watching for negative things. I—can see—where that could stifle—

Henderson: But that’s the way, I mean I was reading about things like that, you know, in Harper’s Magazine and Atlantic Monthly, the so-called “think” magazines, I read about things like happening in other places in the United States, and you think, Well, we’re not going to have that kind of stuff here. But, we have. And there may be some other things that I don’t know about. But I was personally involved in those things. It was bad.

Goodbread: Well, once he was kind of publically unveiled for what he really was, then did the climate quickly kind of shift the other way, when it was  Shsss—Kings X, you know where—?

Henderson: I don’t know if it was quickly, but it did begin to change, yes. In other words, given the way he finished, you know, that is that when he—when censure, which is a formal action of the United States Senate, when censure was voted against him by the United States Senate, it was on the basis of a motion, a resolution, that had introduced by some of the most conservative senators who had said, you know: Thus far and no farther. This has gone to absurd extremes and it’s ruining us. Something’s going to have to be done about this guy. It was an old senator, Republican senator from Vermont, I think, who introduced the motion. And once, you know, that had happened—oh, anything to—you know what they say, to give a guy enough rope and he will hang himself. Well, that’s what—I mean after all, in the final stages, who did McCarthy take on—the Army! The United States Army. [He] said that the United States Army was a bunch of commies. Well, you can’t—you know, that won’t wash. And then, of course, there’s many, many commentators who knew more about things like that than I do, commented that this was televised, and people sat there and watched this guy and after a while, they thought—well, I mean, that’s a slimy guy. I mean, you could tell, you can’t fool people that long. And they watched him on television, and they saw the way he performed. They saw the way he treated the Secretary of the Army and people like that. And, you know, they heard about him saying that they thought maybe Eisenhower was a little suspect, too.

Goodbread: —a little pink. Bizarre—

Henderson: They did, oh, yes—that pretty soon people didn’t find that kind of thing acceptable any more. And so the climate did change. I don’t know whether I’d say rapidly, but it began to change rather obviously. And then there were some rulings of the Supreme Court a couple of years later, probably as a result of that, because whatever anybody tells you, the Supreme Court follows public opinion too, or the election returns, or however anybody wants to put it. And in the 1957 session of the Supreme Court, they rendered a number of decisions that sort of put the seal of approval on the changeover that had taken place, that is to say that McCarthyism just wasn’t going to go anymore, that this absurd hysteria about radical ideas and even the Communist Party itself, it just wouldn’t go. It’s gone, man, it’s really gone. I don’t mean to say that the so-called Cold War and differences between the United States and the Soviet Union are gone, because it’s obviously still with us. But I mean this thing of domestic witch hunt—

Goodbread: —the obsession with it.

Henderson: Yes, that’s the right word—the obsession with domestic witch hunting and that kind of thing. I think that is pretty much gone. You get little flare-ups here and there, but it’s pretty much gone, I think. Now, some of my colleagues may not think so, and they’ll see it cropping up here and there, and maybe it does, certain little aspects. But, I mean the—this thing was heavy. It was a pall over the country in that period there where that incident took place. You could feel it.

Goodbread: Well, you didn’t know who was watching who.

Henderson: Right. And you didn’t know when neighbors would inform on neighbors. They sounded more like the other side of the “Iron Curtain” than this side of it—people informing on other people. There was an incident, I remember, it doesn’t have anything to do with Southwest Texas, but there was an incident of a man in the civil service in Maryland who got involved in some of these things. The guy was totally innocent. He was 150% American, you know, Boy Scouts, community service, the whole thing. But some informant who didn’t like him, see, started telling stories about him and about how he was having these secret meetings at his house with the shades drawn and all of that. The guy was suspended without pay. But then the chilling thing, he started going to neighbors and acquaintances and asking them to make affidavits to his good character and the like, and they said, “I don’t know, Bob, I can’t get involved in this kind of stuff, or I’ll be next.” And, you see, a thing like that becomes corrosive to the whole society. So, I feel like we put it behind us, and I think it’s a mighty good thing we did.

Goodbread: Well, then, out of that—then you come with the radical—you know the Radical Sixties and the love movement and the flowers in the ends of guns and—“Ban the Bomb.”

Henderson: Well, there was a substantial amount of it here, but it was largely with a minority of students. I mean, after all, we didn’t have anybody taking over the dean’s office and mounting the barricades on the campus and things like that, like they did at Columbia or out at Berkley and whatnot. But, in fact, a lot of it was sort of faddish, I think, with some of the kids—the long hair and the crummy clothes and whatnot. But there were a number of them, and they—I think the administration thought that there was a lot of them, and they were paying attention to what was happening and, true enough, that some of these places with the SDS and some of those groups. There was kind of an underground newspaper sort of thing here, The Weather Report, and John Pfeffer, who is now a local character, edited it, and he was kind of a perennial student; he was, I guess, in his thirties. I guess he is in his forties now. But he was in his thirties and he, I think, aspired to be a kind of a radical leader type, and he attacked the things in the administration—and the kids did get up means where they agitated for a more democratic university and students having more to say about policies, and all of that was healthy as long as it didn’t involve these violent types of things of taking over, like they did at Columbia. They actually vandalized the offices, threw the people in administration out, and took over the offices and things like that—and some of the worst aspects of the movements out at Berkley and things like that. But, it really—my impression was that it didn’t amount to a lot because I was teaching those students in classes and I’d heard talk. And I was teaching a graduate seminar; in fact, I used the radicalism of the sixties as a theme in a theory seminar. And people did papers on the Black Panther movement and so, and what they began to learn as they studied these things was the relative small percentage of people who adhered to these groups. Like the overwhelming majority of the black people supported working within the system, they didn’t go for that. They admired these people, they admired a lot, but that’s not where they gave their support, Martin Luther King got their support, not Bobby Seale or the others, but they did admire them, they admired the—

Goodbread: —courage or—

Henderson: —the Panthers and—for asserting their blackness and being proud of their heritage and all, they liked that. Sure, the way some of them do now with this, what’s this character’s name—he’s gotten so controversial here in the last—

Goodbread: —Farrakhan, Louis Farrakhan?

Henderson: —the black guy who is making these anti-Semitic speeches.

Goodbread: I’m probably not saying his name right, but he was connected to the Rainbow Coalition, and then he was cut loose because of—and he just came out and said some more anti-Semitic things, just recently.

Henderson: Yes, that’s the one I’m talking about, and a lot of them also admire him, though they don’t agree with him. They admire him because of his bluntness and his willingness to take on the white majority or whatever and so on. And I think there was a lot of that then and the same way with the SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, that was the main organization. And, again, the students here, as such movements go, the students here were relatively moderate. There were a few, and we did have some incidents that were bad involving the few. There was a famous cause of the San Marcos Ten, they were referred to as, that was taken—I think, it didn’t get to the United State Supreme Court, but got to the U.S. Court of Appeals—but they attempted to hold a demonstration out there on the campus by those stallions. Well, they had held a demonstration once against the war in Vietnam, and they subsequently attempted to hold a second one, and the administration refused to permit them to, and they did anyway, and they told anybody—that Dean told them that they had to leave, and ten refused to leave and said that they were entitled under the First Amendment to hold the meeting and so on, and they were expelled. And they fought it in the court and the United States District Court, and then the Court of Appeals ruled that they had received their First Amendment protection because the administration didn’t say they couldn’t have the demonstration; in fact, they told them, You can have it up there on that end of the campus, up by the Old Main Building, but you can’t have it here, it disrupts classes. Well, that was really, I think, a kind of subterfuge-type of thing. I mean, I think that the students had the case. They didn’t win, but I think they had the better case that their First Amendment guarantees were being denied to them, but they lost. But it was a difficult thing to decide, I’m sure. But I don’t know—I really did—I mean I was there. I was in the building and teaching classes at the time. I wasn’t teaching one at that exact time—

Goodbread: This was when Evans was—

Henderson: Right. It was right outside the windows of the Evans Building. And it did not appear to me to be disrupting the classes. And the fact of the matter is if they had held the demonstration, and that was their argument, back on the grassy knoll down behind Old Main, nobody would have ever seen them. (Laughs) How could you demonstrate if nobody sees you. It’s not much of a demonstration. Well, that was my thinking about that, but it was not the view of the court. The court’s view was that they weren’t really denied because the administration said, “Yes, you can have a demonstration, but you can’t have it at noon there. You can have it at four o’clock over there.” They said, That’s not the same thing. But anyway.

Goodbread: Were they expelled forever from the university or just for a semester or—

Henderson: They had a preliminary court order by which they got back in school, and I think what happened was that several of them finished pending the outcome of the court ruling—and they finished school, I mean those that were in it. And I think some of them just never came back. But no, I don’t think they suspended them forever, probably for a year or something like that. They didn’t do anything, as I say, to the ones who finished. I remember one for sure who finished, and I think there were probably a couple of others.

End of Side A, beginning of Side B

Goodbread: So we’ll discuss Maury Maverick.

Henderson: When I was a young instructor here, and it was about, really, it was about the time—no, I was an assistant professor, I’d come back, and so it would have been along about 1952, maybe, or something like that—I graduated in ’49, went off for two years, came back—so it was around ’52 or along in there—I had come back, and I think I was maybe an assistant professor, I’m not sure, what’s the difference? The important thing is I was teaching here, and Dr. Flowers, President Flowers called me in one day, and he said, “I have an invitation to an International Relations Institute in San Antonio, which is being put on by the famous research institution in Washington, Brookings, so—” And what they had done, they had invited college presidents and some distinguished faculty and some leaders from all walks of life. There were several generals there, as a matter of fact, and an admiral, I think, and a commodore, as I remember. Anyway, they were invited to really carry on discussions, break up into panels, you know, and discuss major questions that were going on at the time. For example, certain aspects of the Korean War were under discussion at that time, things like that. Well, anyway, there were a number of businessmen. Among them was Maury Maverick, who had been mayor of San Antonio and a two-term New Deal congressman, and so on. And I got on a panel with him, and, you know, I met him and talked with him. Then, after I went back up to Maryland—this was in—would have been—this occurred in the summer of 1954. I was working in Washington and doing graduate work at the University of Maryland, and word came that Maury Maverick had died. Well, I was working on a subject for a doctoral dissertation that had taken me to some research at Yale University—it was a figure not so well-known from colonial history, and he had made some modest contributions to early American political thought, and so I was going to do a dissertation on him, and I’d gone to Yale and spent about a week in the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale, and so I was working on that—well, then we got back down here, and I found that it was difficult for me to get away or to get fellowships and the like of that to continue the research on this particular guy.

Goodbread: Who was it?

Henderson: I was trying to say, but it’s been so many years ago, I forget, but I’ll probably think of it in a little while. [The man’s name is James Hillhouse] Anyway, as I said, he was really an obscure figure, you can find him if you look in the right kinds of books, but in general American history you’d never see his name. Anyway, he—it was going to be a real difficult thing for me to do. So anyway, Dr. Taylor’s good friend, Walter Prescott Webb, was, at that time, courting Mrs.—the widow—Mrs. Maury Maverick in San Antonio. I mentioned an interest in this and of doing something on Maury Maverick, especially his work in the field of civil liberties, First Amendment kinds of things. Well, anyway, Dr. Taylor talked to Dr. Webb, Dr. Webb introduced me to Mrs. Maverick, whom he later married. And I went down and talked to her, and she agreed to let me—I was in his whole papers, in fact, I catalogued his papers because it was a massive and they were—parts of them were well-organized, but they weren’t completely integrated, so I had to do that before I could do the research. Well, anyway, I did that, I wrote my dissertation on his contributions to the ideas of civil liberties, ideas in the area of civil liberties, his philosophy with respect to civil liberties is what I called it. And from there it didn’t require, seemingly, a great deal, although I spent a lot of time in further digging to go from that to a political biography of Maury Maverick, so I talked to a couple of presses. In fact, there were some publishers who indicated an interest in it unsolicited. One of them was Little, Brown [and Company], as a matter of fact. But I found that I could get a better relationship and obviously a much more accessible situation with the University of Texas Press, so I went up and talked—I already had an entrée because all of these people knew him. I mean, Mrs. Maverick knew the—Frank Wardlaw, who was the head of the University of Texas Press and he later went to A&M—they knew him, and I knew other people who knew Wardlaw also, so I had a sort of entrée, so I went up and talked to them: Oh, yeah, great, let’s go—get it to us. So, I just started working, and it took me—it was years because, you know, and I was doing it on the weekends and holidays and nights and that kind of thing. And all the time I was doing that I was chairman of the social science division, and then when we got reorganized somewhere in the mid-sixties, I became chairman of the government department, which later became the political science department. So, I was doing all of this at the same time. That’s when I got an ulcer, I guess.

Goodbread: I’d say you were a little busy.

Henderson: But, anyway, it turned out to be a pretty good book. I won a prize from the Texas Institute of Letters for $500, and, I don’t know, some other things. And, by the way, would you believe—that’s fourteen years ago—I got a little royalty check yesterday for $25.14. I mean, to me, that’s uncommon to make money off of a book. But, Maury Maverick was such a colorful character. And there are people, you know, who collect Texana, and they must have everything that comes out on anything Texan. In fact, I had a member of the Board of Regents send me his copy of Maury Maverick so I could endorse it for him, you know, or whatever. He had the Secretary of the Board of Regents bring it down to me. He was a guy who had been in school with me. But anyway, I made a little money off of that. Of course, it was—I don’t know—it was—in a way, maybe I made a mistake. It was a book which, if I had done it the popular way, probably would have sold a lot. But I tried to drive right down the middle of the road of in-between a popular book and a scholarly book, and so it—I don’t know—I guess some people would say it wasn’t successful either way because I did that. I remember one reviewer in one of the Houston newspapers—he said something about he didn’t think that anybody could write a dull book about Maury Maverick, but somehow I managed to do it. That was one of my unkind reviews, but I got some good ones, and, like I said, I won the prize from the Texas Institute of Letters—they have an annual meeting, and they give prizes for non-fiction and fiction. And what it amounted to was the number two prize. The number one prize is the Carr P. Collins Award. That’s the best non-fiction award, and the second one is the five-hundred—I think it has gone up since then, the dollar amount. But it’s called the Friends of the Dallas Public Library Award, and it’s awarded for the best contribution to general knowledge in Texas for that year, the best contribution to general knowledge. And that was the award that I got. And then I got an award from the Women’s Journalism Honorary—I just can’t remember, anymore, what the name of that is, but they give an annual award.

Goodbread: Well, I was delighted to discover it. I had a friend who, when she was a senior in the political department, won the Prof. Green Award, and we, neither one being older than average students, had no idea who Prof. Green was. And in the last couple of years, I’ve heard a little bit about Prof. Green, though I never had him as a professor; but did you work with him?

Henderson: Well, I had him as a professor, I mean he was one of my professors in one class, anyway, and I remember Dr. Taylor saying that people used to talk about Prof. being, well, you know, not having the best academic credentials because he never finished his doctorate and this kind of thing. But Dr. Taylor said that everybody ought to have a least one course with Prof. Green. So, I had a course with Prof. Green. As I remember, I was in International Organizations, and it was true, he had barely caught up with the UN. He was still teaching the League of Nations, you know, that kind of thing. But he was colorful and provocative and made students think. He’d make statements that would send students to the library to refute him. They’d go—one of my stories I tell, a favorite with me was at the time when old Prof.’s office was right next to my office. Our offices were in Lueders Hall, and he was right next door. And he was teaching a class over there, and after class one day, this boy, Lanny Something—he was a spastic boy, but he was bright and a good student, but he had a kind of strained voice and you could hear him all over the building—and he said, “But Prof., you mean all Republicans are crooks?” And you get some idea of what Prof. Green was like from that.

But he—I remember when some of us younger professors would criticize Prof. Green and his lack of the best academic credentials, and Dr. Taylor would fire back at us and say, “How many of you hand-trained the Vice President of the United States?” because he had become—he was Vice President—Dr. Taylor died before he became President. He said, “How many of you hand-trained the Majority Leader of the United States Senate and the Vice President of the United States?” or whatever—it might have been just Majority Leader, I’m not positive about that now. Let’s see, no, he would have been Vice President of the United States because he became Vice President in 1960, and Dr. Taylor died in, I think, about 1962, so yes, “How many of you hand-trained the Vice President of the United States?” You know, he felt sort of protective of old Prof., although he could be just as critical of him at times, but Prof. was a real institution and people—the people who were here in his younger days and knew his whole family and everything can tell a lot better stories about him. I liked Dr. Murphy, Retta Murphy. She was tough in every sense; I mean she was tough academically. She was demanding, and she was tough as far as discipline was concerned and the like of that. In fact, some people, I think, maybe thought she was too tough. I remember one time her really tearing into a young guy—in that period of veteran young guys, you know, as his excuse for not being there or something was that his baby was sick or something like that. She said, “Well, you’ve got to figure out what you’re going to do, go to school or have babies,” or, you know, that kind of thing. She was pretty harsh about things like that. In other words, academics was what was important.

Goodbread: Family came second.

Henderson: But I can tell you just one good story on her. We had had the law laid down to us about smoking in the classroom—those old buildings were rickety, and we were in the Main Building, that was one of our prime classroom buildings, Old Main—and she gave an exam that day, and we were sitting writing on an exam, and I saw a guy over here light up a cigarette and another one over there lit up a cigarette, and she said, “I’m not aware of any lifting of the regulations concerning smoking in the classes.” And this one guy said, “But Dr. Murphy, Dr. Hahn let us smoke in his class this morning.” She said, “Well,” you know, she smoked like hell herself, smoked a pipe. She said, “Well, light up, everybody light up.”

Goodbread: And she smoked a pipe?

Henderson: Yes.

Goodbread: She must have been a tough lady.

Henderson: Well, she smoked a pipe, you know, in her office or at home or down around town. I saw her a time or two in her car with a pipe, smoking her pipe.

Goodbread: You look at the picture, and you sure can’t quite see her smoking a pipe.

Henderson: Well, she did, believe me. I saw her.

Goodbread: Did you know Evans, C.E. Evans?

Henderson: No. I’ve heard all kinds of stories about him, but he was—I’m not sure whether he’s still living or not—but he was—Dr. Flowers was President when I came. I think Flowers came in in the middle of World War II, and I came here, to San Marcos, I think it was in February of ’46 and started school in the beginning of summer school in June of ’46. So, no, I can’t tell you a thing about C.E. Evans.

Goodbread: Did you know Leonard Wright, they called him Deacon Wright?

Henderson: Sure do. I had—I don’t— no, I never had class with him, but I knew him. I knew him both as a student and then later, when I was teaching, he was still teaching. And of course, the whole incident by which he was booted out and all, that occurred during one of the times I was at the University of Maryland so, you know, all I know about that is hearsay.

Goodbread: —and then Bert Hunt? —Dr. Burgum, I’m not familiar with him, but I was told he had some rather strange teaching methods. Leland Burgum?

Henderson: That’s what I hear, and you probably hear the same stories from everybody because I judge, from what you’ve said, that some of the antics he had of—I remember—this was told to me by, let’s see, my brother-in-law’s sister-in-law, almost kin, my brother-in-law’s—that’s right—my wife’s brother’s sister-in-law, that’s who she is. She was a student here; in fact, she was a student assistant for a while, and she told me the story about something that he apparently did almost routinely, and that is that once in a while during a semester—he was teaching psychology, and I think he taught, didn’t he teach special education too—well, anyway, he would hide under the desk, and the students would all come in, you know, and after a while the professor hadn’t come in, so they would start shuffling around and whatnot, and then he’d pop out and say boo or something like that. And another time, he is said to have leaped out of the window, you know. But, you know, it was one of these things where we were on a terrace-like and go out the window, and it wasn’t that far to the ground. But it looks like he’s bailing out on them or something, you know. That’s the sort of stuff that I heard about Burgum. He was a kind of an oddball type.

Goodbread: What was it like to have to move from Evans over to West Campus in these last few years? Have you enjoyed that move and being isolated over there from the rest of the Liberal Arts Department?

Henderson: In some ways it’s like everything in life. I try to be balanced and circumspect and whatnot. There were a lot of good things and some bad. It was a beautiful sight—the view out of those offices—you look at it, and you could look at it, and you could look half-way to Seguin. It’s beautiful up there—and those big old pecan trees, and there was a good crop that winter, the first—the fall and winter we were there, and I tell you, I brought home bags of pecans, beautiful pecans. There are a couple of trees up there that are fantastic. It’s a beautiful environment and quiet and no classrooms in that buildings. I have never been in that experience before, of a building that was nothing but offices so you didn’t have the constant up and down the halls and din, you know, and it was rather quiet, and even though that was an old building, they did just enough of refurbishing to where the quarters were comfortable, that is nice. But what was bad was where we had to teach, and I think that I’m the one that coined the expression the “Burma Road” or the “Ho Chi Minh Trail” was what—the “Ho Chi Minh Trail.” We had to go down there, and I’ll tell you, it was all torn up, and you had to climb over pipes and through heaped-up piles of gravel and dirt and whatnot to get to your classes. And the classrooms were not in good condition. There were all kinds of problems with air-conditioning going or just not being there and things like that, and it was a very difficult classroom situation. But the office thing, I thought, was really great. And I imagine that they’re going to be back over there to Evans in the new building. I don’t know, did anybody say anything about it? Probably, they say, I think, mid-year, but it’ll probably be June—that’s always the way it is because they said it would be this fall, and now they say it’ll be mid-year, so that means that it’ll be June [1986].

Goodbread: Well, maybe June or over the summer months. Then they are going to move the History Department supposedly over there.

Henderson: And re-do Taylor-Murphy, but you’ll come back?

Goodbread: Hopefully. I hope we’ll recognize it when we come back, though.

Henderson: That’s a nice building. I’ve always liked that building.

Goodbread: I wish they’d just clean it up and leave it alone.

Henderson: I remember when that building was built.

Goodbread: Really? You know, the architecture on the campus is what you might call “eclectic” at best—

Henderson: Well, yes, there was a time when, I think—

Goodbread: The Spanish Colonial was—so appealing.

Henderson: —Flowers was trying to hew to that, but it became eclectic. Let me, just for fun, tell you what was there, because I can just go around and just tick it off. Okay, starting—okay, the stallions weren’t there. That was a gift that came in later years. All right, we go to—that was a—that building that is now, what, Psychology and Philosophy is it, that’s right there on the corner as you start up the mall—

Goodbread: I think that’s Math, Derrick Hall?

Henderson: No, no, no, we’re across the street—go down and across the street—

Goodbread: —from Taylor-Murphy?

Henderson: Yes.

Goodbread: Yes, that’s the refurbished Psych Building, across from Flowers.

Henderson: Right, that was the Education Building, before that that was the San Marcos High School. That building was the same—

Goodbread: Across from Flowers?

Henderson: Right.

Goodbread: Oh, I thought it was further down.

Henderson: That was the San Marcos High School. Evans was the elementary school, or shall I say delicately, the white elementary school. That’s right, Evans was the elementary school.

Goodbread: So they are kind of caddy-corner from one another?

Henderson: Right. Then, okay, you go on up to the Science Building—the front part of it was there, and that’s all, just the front part, the part that’s right on the mall. Now, all the rest has been added to it. Next, you get—that’s Lueders—that was the old ALS Building, it was called then, and later, when Alma Lueders died, it was named for her. Okay, then you go to the Main Building, then you come around—

Goodbread: That’s the Art Building now.

Henderson: That was the Home Economics Building, and at one time, it was the Student Center. There was a period in there when it was the Student Center. You come down here, and you’re at Flowers Hall. That was the library. It was converted into a larger thing of a combination of classrooms and library, and that’s when we moved down there. We were up there in that Lueders Hall, and we moved down there to Flowers Hall. Then we moved from there across the street to Evans.

Goodbread: —when was it built?

Henderson: No, no, when the school district was run out of it—it was built in the thirties. There is a PWA cornerstone out there—it was built under—as one of the New Deal programs. Okay, but see, that was a cooperative arrangement between a state teacher’s college, which is what this was, see, Southwest Texas State Teacher’s College, where you had your student teachers teaching in high school and elementary schools right here. It was a mutually advantageous thing to the school district and to the college—

Goodbread: —and student teaching and—

Henderson: —but it was especially advantageous to the school district. It was a big shock when the Board of Regents finally, they’d been trying to push Flowers on it for some years—they told Flowers, You’re going to have to get them out of there, because they weren’t paying much and they were getting a beautiful situation. They had their high school and a major part of the elementary school taken care of in buildings that belonged to Southwest Texas, belonged to the state, they weren’t the school districts—so anyway, that eventually went out, and that’s when this school district really had to start spending money and building schools and then desegregation, of course contributed to it too, because they had a school for the Mexicans, which was down there on—

Goodbread: You mean they segregated out the Mexicans?

Henderson: Yes, that was the South Side, that was—well, for all practical purposes they did. There may have been a few of them up here, but they were nearly all down there in that little South Side school—it’s around there where the tax office for the school district is now, right around there. That was the—and then there was a little black school down here and a little black high school—there was a black elementary and a black high school. So, they had to deal with all of that, and then of course they built that big high school out there. Then they built the middle school down here, you know, it’s just a few blocks down that way.

Goodbread: But when Flowers started doing the building program, he wanted this Spanish tile look, what, because it was a Southwestern effect, or do you know why he chose that?

Henderson: Oh, no, I don’t. I really never inquired into that. There might be some people who could answer that better about what—

Goodbread: It’s very appealing, and now they’re getting totally away from it.

Henderson: Yes, I sort of liked it too. It could be that maybe a lot of people criticized him learning too heavily, maybe, on Harvey P. Smith, who was the architect. And maybe it was Harvey P. Smith’s liking of it, I don’t know. But, yes, he did start—but when you asked me much earlier about the building program—there wasn’t much building back in those days. It was pretty limited compared to what’s been going on now; my goodness, the campus is burgeoning with building going on everywhere. Then it was a building here and a building there over the years. Dorms—when I started teaching here, do you know that there were two dorms? There was a little women’s dorm; now, wait a minute, I have to take that back. There were two major permanent building dorms, I mean like brick dorms. There was Sayers Hall, which was right down below the Main Building—it’s gone now, razed—and Harris Hall for men up on this side. There were no other men’s and women’s dormitories. All of that has been built since. There were two dorms. There were old white frame houses, two and three-story old frame houses—there was a “Bobcat Hall” where the football boys lived, and there were other big, old, white original residences, which had been converted into sort of dorms like and housing for students. All of that has come in relatively recent times because that’s about the shape of the campus when I was a student here and the first couple of years I was teaching here. One of the first things they built, maybe, was that Taylor-Murphy thing, which was originally Fine Arts.

Goodbread: I’m just concerned that they are going to change it to the point we don’t recognize it anymore.

Henderson: The addition to Flowers Hall and then that, I think, those came along near the same time, and then they started stuff like the Student Center over there across from Evans and then moving out with that and expanding it a little bit. And then the dorms came along and then more big dorms on down the bottom of the hill there. Those were all just little residential areas, little houses and cottages and whatnot.

Goodbread: After Johnson was president, was there a resurgence, then, of growth in the university building program? Did his being an alumnus seem to have a direct relationship to the growth of the university in any way?

Henderson: I’m not conscious of it if it was, really. One thing some of the faculty members used to talk about was the way that—because Lady Bird Johnson went to UT and she was then on the Board of Regents—that everything seemed to be focused toward the University of Texas and it really didn’t have the—in fact, there were people who complained and were somewhat disgruntled that there wasn’t more benefit to this institution from the fact that he was President. Of course, in his last years and days, he seemed to be trying to do something about that, and he came down here, you know, made a lot of visits here and talked to students and classes and came down once—I saw him down here at one homecoming. And he was visiting around up on the quad—In fact, it was maybe a few months before he died, it seemed like, that he was down here.

Goodbread: Well, his son is one of Dr. Jager’s—no, grandson—Lucy’s boy is a grandson in one of our classes. [Freshman History]

Henderson: Is that right? Well, I’ll be darned.

Goodbread: He comes to class as Lyndon Nugent, and I thought, He has got to have some relationship to the Johnson family with a name like that, and as it turns out, it’s Lucy’s oldest, that oldest grandchild of LBJ, a really nice young man and a good student.

Henderson: Well, but that’s an interesting question that you raised there. It bears on the bigger, broader question that a lot of people have wrestled with in recent years about why this school has bloomed in enrollment. And I— it could be that that is a factor but I don’t think so. I think it can be found in other things—the location, the access by the big expressways. You can’t really exaggerate the importance of these big expressways. Well, you can be in Austin at some business from San Marcos quicker than you can get there from Austin. Zoom, you’re there. Well, and then the students like it around the Hill Country environment and they all want to get away from home. If they live in the big cities, they don’t want to go to the University of Houston, they want to come to Southwest Texas.

Goodbread: Yes, we have a lot of Houston students, and it’s easy access by way of a good freeway system.

Henderson: Yes, they come up and hook off at Seguin, and they’re here. Yes, I remember in seeing some of the early statistics when we started to increase in enrollment while sister institutions were declining, you’d see all these names such as Pasadena, Houston, Bay City, you know, all around there. And a surprising number from San Antonio. Look at all of those institutions in San Antonio and all of the students who come over here.

Goodbread: Well, they even run shuttles. The university runs a shuttle bus that goes all the way to San Antonio to pick up students that live there. And, of course, you can get on at Universal City and New Braunfels, and there are an awful lot of people, a heavy population, between San Marcos, San Antonio and Austin with New Braunfels, Luling, Lockhart—and this is a very convenient and very friendly university. I think people feel secure about sending their children [here], too. When you’ve raised a child in a small community, they are rather naïve, and you are a little—that first year, you’re a little edgy about sending them to the big, bad city of Houston or the big, big city of Dallas or off out-of-state or something, but San Marcos, being a small community, you feel more comfortable sending your child here, I think.

Henderson: And when you compare it to the University of Texas, they can still say it’s a small institution—talking about maybe nineteen thousand now ,isn’t it, compared to forty-some thousand.

Goodbread: Well, and I’ve talked to students who’ve transferred here from Texas and their freshman classes here are a hundred—say, they went one semester and became disillusioned or not doing well or for other reasons—their freshman classes were six hundred in history, six hundred in English. They come here and a big class, I mean a really big—the biggest history class you can have is 120. And that—there are only a few of those. And I think one of the largest lecture rooms in the Art Building for that humanities course holds two hundred, and that’s just as large as it’s going to get. And then the minute you’re out of some of those necessary freshman-level courses, then you’re in with thirty-five students, back to what you’re used to at [the] high school setting, and then when you get into your upper-level courses, you’re in with ten or fifteen, and it’s wonderful because you have so much more access to your professor and to learning.

Henderson: As you said, students from UT have told me that. I remember over the years—they told me that, they said, Well, even though you have some large classes here, you don’t have anything like what we had up there and where we’d never see a professor. And then what’s even worse is when you talk to graduate students who say they never see the professor. Now that’s bad.

Goodbread: Yes, that’s bad because that’s the joy of graduate work is the size of the classes and you get to know the professors.

Henderson: They say that they occasionally see their graduate professors or whatever.

Goodbread: That’s a shame—well, I have really enjoyed this afternoon.

Henderson: Well, I have too.

Goodbread: It’s been a delight and I will stop this [the tape machine] now.

End of interview