*** After many hours of searching, I could not find mention of Dowling in the Houston Post, September 8, 1958. I decided then to use instead the Houston Chronicle issue from that day, an issue we had discussed in class but agreed needed some more context. The article is called Birds-Eye View “An interview with the hero who saved us from invasion,” by Sigman Byrd***
The first article I scanned was a Birds-Eye View editorial piece by Sigman Byrd entitled: “An interview with the hero who saved us from invasion.” In this article, Byrd holds a somewhat humorous and biting pseudo interview with the posthumous spirit of Dick Dowling. In the interview, Dowling complains about the poor placement of his statue, the continual theft of his “shillelagh” and the annoying pigeons that perch near his statue. Beyond the silliness of the article, Byrd exhibits a very biting and cynical view of modern Southern society, including the way that most Southerners celebrate history. First of all, the title of the article does not state that Dowling was “the hero who saved the Confederacy” or “the hero that saved the South from the Union army,” but the headline describes Dowling as the “hero who saved us.” Byrd believes that Dowling has the same right, if not more of a right, to be a Texas hero than Sam Houston. He even criticizes Houston as being disloyal to the South and betraying Christian values. Overall, it is clear that Byrd recognizes the declining prominence of Confederate heroes; therefore, he tries to sell Dowling as more of a Texas hero, by calling him our hero. Additionally, Byrd is very critical of the shifts in Southern society that have led the legacy of Dowling into obscurity. In the interview, he tells Dowling that “times are changing, the South is being robbed of her rights again, like the Confederacy was.” Describing the conditions of the South as those that sparked the Civil War is a very bold attack on progressivism. Byrd definitely shows that he is one of the many conservative Southern voices that were active during the radical social changes of the 1950’s and 60’s. In this article, Byrd uses historical remembrance as base line to preach the importance of maintaining conservative and religious values in the South.
Similar to Byrd’s Dowling article, Byrd also wrote an editorial two days later about another unsung, Texas, Irish-Catholic hero named John Green Hanning. Although the details of the article aren’t very important to Dowling’s legacy, Byrd’s tendency to write about strong religiously oriented Texan figures is integral to understanding the context of the Dowling article. In this second editorial, Byrd also calls upon Texans to learn more about local figures with deep ceded religious values like Hanning. In all, it is clear that Byrd tends to use historical characters–with clear Christian values–to further his conservative agenda.
The second article I found, the one from list B, is a short article from The Confederate Veteran. This article, entitled “Heroes of Sabine Pass,” outlines one attempt of a UCV historian to create a “revised roster” of the heroes from the Battle of Sabine Pass. As has been discussed in many of the documents from the Houston Public Library Digital Archive, the acknowledgment of the exact heroes of the Battle of Sabine Pass has been a point of contention for many different memorial groups. Without providing any methods or modes of evidence for how this historian came up with this “revised roster,” it is difficult to know where this source of information came from. Although it claims to use the accounts of two survivors of the Battle (Drummond and O’Hara), the question of who is a hero and who is not, is an extremely subjective topic. As such, this simple article serves to raise more questions than it answers about who the real heroes of Sabine Pass were.