For generations, Texas has been sold to the country — and to itself — as the ultimate red state: a place where conservatism, capitalism and rugged individualism are simply part of the state’s DNA.
But writer David Griscom says that story is incomplete.
In his new book, The Myth of Red Texas: Cowboys, Populism, and Class War in the Radical South, Griscom argues that Texas has a much deeper and more contested political history than its modern reputation suggests.
Beneath the familiar imagery of oil wealth, frontier toughness and Republican dominance, he says, lies another tradition. It's one shaped by labor unrest, farmer organizing and movements that challenged concentrated economic power.
The book revisits a Texas often left out of the popular imagination, one where cowboys went on strike, farmers built populist coalitions, and socialist candidates found support among working people frustrated by inequality and corporate control.
Griscom’s argument is not that Texas was ever a uniformly left-wing state, or that conservative power was absent. Rather, he says the state’s political history has always been a struggle between wealth and labor, hierarchy and democracy, exclusion and solidarity.
That runs against the common assumption that Texas was always naturally conservative, and that today’s political map simply reflects an unbroken tradition. Griscom suggests instead that what many Texans now think of as the state’s fixed political identity was built over time, and often at the expense of other traditions that were pushed aside or forgotten.
The book arrives as Texas remains firmly Republican in statewide politics, even as its population grows more diverse and its urban centers become more politically competitive.
