To the constant disregard of thought, Americans of the
mid-twentieth century have added positive opposition. Critical
ideas are apt to make any critic suspected of being
subversive. The Southwest, Texas especially, is more articulately
aware of its land spaces than of any other feature pertaining
to itself. Yet in the realm of government, the Southwest has
not produced a single spacious thinker. So far as the cultural
ancestry of the region goes, the South has been arid of
thought since the time of Thomas Jefferson, the much talked-
of mind of John C. Calhoun being principally casuistic; on
another side, derivatives from the Spanish Inquisition could
contribute to thought little more than tribal medicine men
have contributed.
Among historians of the Southwest the general rule has
been to be careful with facts and equally careful in avoiding
thought-provoking interpretations. In the multitudinous
studies on Spanish-American history all padres are "good"
and all conquistadores are "intrepid," and that is about as
far as interpretation goes. The one state book of the
Southwest that does not chloroform ideas is Erna Fergusson's _New
Mexico: A Pageant of Three Peoples_ (Knopf, New York,
1952).
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