Texas Almanac, 1947-1948 Page: 37
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FIRST CITIZEN OF TEXAS 37
fully and with charm, whether speaking
or writing.
No radical or sudden changes occurred
in The News as Dealey's influence began
to be felt in the over-all direction of pol-
icy. At first it was more negative than
positive. During the years of political
turmoil in which the last century expired,
the newspaper had plunged deeply into
these bitter controversies. It had taken
its part in the agitation over free silver
and prohibition. It had been concerned
over the rise of Populism, and the news-
paper viewed the dramatic seizure of the
state government by such an innovator as
James Stephen Hogg as a cause of great
alarm. But Dealey was not one to place
much reliance on political partisanship as
a means of either reforming or stabiliz-
ing society. His voice in the council of
The News was for a modulation of such
strident concerns.
On the positive side Dealey urged in-
stead that The News assume leadership
in solving definite, tangible and imme-
diate evils in the economic and social life
of Texas. The plight of the cotton farmer,
the woes of the rancher or the difficulties
confronting the timber industry were
not to be solved at either Austin or
Washington, in his estimation. Hlie suc-
ceeded in having The News turn its
attention, therefore, to the encourage-
ment of sounder farming and ranching
methods and to the improvement of the
physical conditions in which farmers and
ranchers and their wives and their chil-
dren were to live and make their living.
He was a pioneer in the good roads move-
ment even before the advent of the
horseless carriage, since he was con-
vinced that the producer on the soil must
first of all have satisfactory means to
market his produce.
City Plan Origin.
The day would come, Dealey early saw,
when the greater part of the people of
Texas would live in cities and towns. To
his mind Dallas might well become a
model city, not only for the benefit of its
own predestined large population, but
also as an example to its neighbors
throughout the entire Southwest. His
thoughts were sharply aroused over the
need for urban improvements because
Dallas at the time was a frightful exam-
ple of what a city should not be. Unpaved
and ill-kept streets, few sidewalks, uncol-
lected trash and other surface indications
of a poorly organized community life
were perhaps the penalty that must be
paid for mushroom expansion of a small
town into a young city. But it was time,
he felt, for the citizenry to make Dallas
more sightly.
Under the impetus of Dealey the Clean-
er Dallas League was organized in 1899.
The News of course backed and promotedthe movenient which had the immediate
goal of making the town more present-
able. Employees of The New s pitched in
and bought public trash cans for the
business area. Soon organized collection
and disposal of garbage as well as trash
was instituted by the city.
Typical of Dealey's method, when first
things had been attended to first, he
moved forward according to a well-laid
plan to more ambitious objectives. The
Cleaner Dallas League was transformed
into the Dallas Civic Improvement Asso-
ciation in 1902. To cleanliness was added
the call for more attractiveness in the
external aspects of Dallas life The need
for parks and playgrounds, for trees to
line and shade the streets, for more
attractive public and private buildings to
match the growing taste in new homes
springing up over the city-these and
other goals were added. He was ever a
great believer in the power of example,
and for a number of years The News
almost daily reproduced pictures of nota-
ble progress along these lines in other
American cities under the headline of
Examples of Civic Attractiveness.
Dealey and those caught up in his quiet
but dogged enthusiasm soon encountered
a harsh fact, though. This was that an
antiquated and inefficient city govern-
ment can be a most powerful stumbling
block to civic progress. He decided,
therefore, that the existing aldermanic
governmental system with its entrenched
wardheelism must go, rather than that
the new movement for civic improvement
should be halted. The commission form of
government, first introduced in the na-
tional capital and used successfully to
bring order out of chaos in Galveston
after its great flood of 1900, was chosen.
Soon the Citizens Association came into
being with the full backing of The News,
the issue of a change was submitted to
the voters and in 1906 Dallas had its first
City Commission.
These were but preliminaries, however,
to a grander scheme crystallizing in his
mind: a city plan for Dallas. In the first
decade of the century city planning was a
novel and virtually untried idea in the
United States. Burnham in Chicago had
set a notable example, but few would
have expected a community of less than
100,000 in Texas to become a pioneer with
the Great Lakes metropolis in this move-
ment. That Dallas did bring in George E.
Kessler, one of the nation's greatest city
planners, and that it did adopt a city plan
as early as 1910 were advances due almost
entirely to Dealey. It was his vision which
he sold tirelessly to his associates in The
News, to fellow civic leaders in the Critic
Club and to the people generally through
the columns of the paper. Although the
Kessler Plan of 1910 was but the start of
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Texas Almanac, 1947-1948, book, 1947; Dallas, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth117136/m1/39/: accessed April 26, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.