The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 72, July 1968 - April, 1969 Page: 514

Southwestern Historical Quarterly

to challenge the status quo. The migration of blacks to the North
during the period of the First World War helped to nationalize and
reanimate the race problem.
Demagogues and agents of prejudice appealed to racists, and victims
of the urban boom and agricultural depression. The Ku Klux Klan
became influential politically, but lacking a political program and
dynamic leadership, its influence receded rapidly in the late 1920's.
A relatively poorly developed economy, inferior schools, libraries,
and roads, and the haggling of church leaders over modernism and
segregation and of politicians over prohibition and suffrage for women
were more peculiarly southern. H. L. Menken and the "muckrakers"
flayed the "benighted" south, while Donald Davidson and others em-
phasized its deeper virtues. These Tindall stresses without glossing
over the seamier features of southern life.
Lambuth College OTTIS CLARK SKIPPER
Bluebonnets and Cactus: An Album of Southwestern Painting. Edited
and designed by John H. Jenkins. Austin (The Pemberton Press),
1967. Pp. 151. Paintings by Porfirio Salinas. $14.50.
That which is soft and lovely contrasts with that which is harsh
and painful in this album of southwestern paintings by the Mexican-
American painter, Porfirio Salinas. Not only is this true in the forty-
eight paintings, which are beautifully reproduced in full color, but
in the selection of the five short stories by editor Jenkins.
The book was prepared for the Fine Arts Corporation and is bound
on the short dimension. This allows the paintings, which are mostly
horizontal, to be reproduced at maximum size.
The love of the land which is Texas could have prompted this col-
lection and it all seems to end in a strong nostalgic appeal. There is
no substitute for that which one loves except in oil paint. Salinas
paints it all lovingly, the bluebonnets and the fall coloring, but also
the prickly pear and the harsh and wild distance.
In the introduction by Joe B. Frantz, we find an honest appraisal
of the paintings and the painter. He makes no apalogy that Salinas is
a literalist, but points out his appeal to many a southwesterner, in-
cluding governors and the president himself, Lyndon B. Johnson.
Frantz quotes an artist as saying, ". . . I suspect that Salinas has done
more in the past quarter-century to make the ordinary intelligent

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