Complicating The Myth of Red Texas

Texas is a land that revels in its idiosyncratic history and associated iconography. On bar signs, brand logos, T-shirts, and tattoo sleeves, the Western-outfitted cowboy and land-roping barbed wire feature heavily. These tangled symbols aren’t easily sorted politically, but when it comes to talking about the Texan past, more often than not, that past is associated with conservative, right-leaning political values. 

The resilient trail of leftist ideologies that David Griscom traces through the state’s history in The Myth of Red Texas: Cowboys, Populism, and Class War in the Radical South aim to trouble that assumption. The author’s debut work doesn’t craft an idealized ancestral politic that left-leaning Texans can saunter on home to, but instead lassos the many worker-led movements that’ve impacted Texas history into a traceable path, complicating simple assumptions about the Lone Star State and its people and crafting a loosely tethered intergenerational community of Texas radicals. 

In his pages, Griscom attempts to reassociate cowboy individualism with cowboy solidarity in the strikes of late 1800s, and the rural, tough-living pride of said barbed wire with property-hungry landowners that strangled the open range, despite resistance from fence-cutting cowpokes, farmers, and neighbors. 

Following these fence-cutters through the populist movement, labor unions, and socialists, Griscom drops in on different casts of characters each cut in the rugged shape of Texas who face variations of the same struggle. Though they differ in ideology and approach, these charismatic speakers and movement leaders grapple with the same temptations of political power and infighting. Griscom does not shy away from interrogating the pitfalls of these movements – particularly the racism and misogyny that manage to transcend solidarity more often than not – and the backstabbing dance of courting imagined moderates in a plea for reelection. The Brotherhood of Timber Workers and some German socialists prove to be exceptions to these common drawbacks, Griscom reveals. 

As staunchly as conservatives want to turn the wagon around, liberals can fix their eyes on the horizon too closely. In an introductory analysis of recent Democratic defeats in Texas, the writer argues that colloquial assumptions about history deeply impact contemporary campaigns and grassroots organizing. No modern movement is reinventing the wheel, and moving forward with a knowledge of the successes and missteps that came before could embolden today’s organizers. As Texas once led the country in socialist party sign-ups, the Houston chapter remains the organization’s largest branch and, as Griscom notes, the Texas AFL-CIO was the first statewide labor association to advocate for a ceasefire in Gaza. The legacy of collective movements and outspoken groups persists in Texas, even when the overarching narrative doesn’t celebrate them.

Unique though it may be, Texas is also something of a microcosm, a laboratory, and a weather beacon for the politics and culture that ripple throughout the United States – a fact that Griscom, a writer and podcaster for Jacobin and host of Left Reckoning, knows well. A return to the past has been the great call of the political right in America for the past decade, and its leaders have revised and reshaped that past to suit their current intentions. As Griscom writes, recalling Texas’ rich and undertaught liberalist history makes it “difficult for the GOP to remake the state in its own image completely.” As Texas leads the country in enacting conservative policies in education, reproductive rights, and voting legislation, it stands to reason that muddying its narrative can remind other states to look backward for ideas in imagining a radical future. 

Griscom is clear-eyed in his introduction about this 177-page primer being a cursory introduction to the history of leftist movements in Texas, much less the history of Texas politics as a whole. But for those who have felt excluded by the mythologizing of Texas’ past, it serves as a galvanizing read for further education and collective action. 

This article appears in April 10 • 2026.