Reading Eagle (April 28, 1941)
DOROTHY THOMPSON SAYS –
Report from Texas
El Paso, TX, April 28 –
Out on the Mexican border people are worrying less about Greece, the Balkans, North Africa, and even the Atlantic, and more what is going on just over – and sometimes across – the Rio Grande. It’s all part of Hitler’s machinations, however.
Local and federal authorities are looking for some Germans who have been shopping in Texas for queer things that innocent or unpatriotic Americans might be willing to sell them. Parachute silk, for instance.
Apart from such little incidents, there is continual evidence that the Nazis are working overtime in Mexico and from Mexico as a base are establishing contacts with residents of Texas. Through them, a great deal of Nazi propaganda has penetrated Texas itself, and among a small minority, Hitler is a popular international character. Texans will regale you with story after story about the nice little German governess for instance, who was such a jewel, who spent all her vacations in Mexico and traveled for a brief visit to Germany on a luxury liner in a cabin that would have cost half a year’s salary. When she came home, she was pinched by the FBI.
It would be an exaggeration to say that Texas residents are hysterically nervous, but they are soberly concerned, and the most intelligent of them have no illusions whatsoever that this is a “European struggle,” or that the Western Hemisphere is in no way involved.
On the other hand, they take comfort in the presence of the numerous Texas army camps, where a remarkably husky and personable mass of selective servicemen are being trained for whatever might happen. Fort Bliss, at El Paso, is a city with 21,000 recruits. Barracks, tent cities, mess halls are already built, and a hostess house and recreation center are going up. Everything is very handsome, spotless, solid and imposing. The papers this morning carry pictures of the new light tanks recently arrived.
By universal agreement, the morale of the men in the Fort Bliss encampment is extraordinarily high. Most of them come from the Southwest area, and they are as handsome and healthy a crowd of men as I have ever seen. It seemed to me that the average height was six feet, and remembering the Poilus and Tommies I had seen in France last year, whose bodies, bones and teeth contrasted disadvantageously with the Nazi soldiers, all of them looked in the pink, it was a comfort to see some soldiers for democracy that look as though they could lick anything alive.
When I asked one of the officers about morale, he said you could always judge that by the number of men in the guard house. It turned out that, out of 21,000 men, exactly 80 were in the guard house yesterday, and for minor misdemeanors.
General Swift allowed me to participate in a “problem” which involved the capture of a well – the source of water for a battalion. The well was, theoretically, guarded by a few men with machine guns, and we – who were the enemy – were to capture them. It was desert warfare with a vengeance involving a lightly armored scout war that ploughed across the desert over and around hummocks – they call them bond boxes out here – of mesquite and grasswood, and before it was over, I was full of sympathy for Anzacs fighting in Libya, and considerably black and blue.
I discovered that the horse is not outlawed by modern mechanized warfare. Armed horsemen tore across the desert at 30 miles an hour, while our car shook the daylights out of us at four or five miles.
Soldiers, eating a meal in the desert, cooked over folding stoves and food fires, were faring excellently – corned beef hash, stewed tomatoes, beans, bread and jam, coffee and canned apricots, all transported on horseback. The men seemed to me to be enjoying a rather serious picnic.
And the camp has furnished a lot of activity for the women of El Paso, who are busy planning dances and other entertainment for the bys while on leave.
What a country to defend! The Southwest seems an almost foreign empire to my Eastern eyes, with its magical mountains, its sweeping deserts, its rich towns, its beautiful ranches. At a girls’ school that I visited, every child learns Spanish from the first grade, and the children at table sang Spanish songs as easily as English. A far cry from the tight green and white villages of New England, the 18th century elegance of Virginia, the tense clanginess of Chicago and Detroit, the cosmopolitanism of New York. But all America – one Reich, one Volk – but one common belief in certain principles, one common passion for freedom.
I’ve talked with a lot of Army men, officers and privates, here and in other camps in the Southwest about Lindbergh. Funny, I find many industrialists and a great many women who are Lindbergh enthusiasts. Not yet an Army man. Their viewpoint was about summed up in the words of one officer:
Even if he thinks that way, he shouldn’t give expression to his thoughts. Not now. Maybe we misunderstand him, but it’s no time for people not to be very clear. No time for defeatism.
Out here pioneering days are not yet ancient history. Sam Houston’s son was just appointed the other day to fill out a term in the Senate. He’s very old, but his name in the papers was a reminder of how new this country is.
Yet, in Dallas, I stopped between planes to shop for a couple of hours in the finest store for women’s clothes off Fifth Avenue. The Southwest stimulates a wholly artificial sense of youth and daring. I bought a hat I would have rejected in New York as much too bright, and shipped the dull one I was wearing home. When I looked at the label, it said, “John Fredericks.” That master hat-maker always seemed a little too frivolous for me, in New York, but not at all so in Texas.
I shall now put it on and move to Abilene.