My two articles reflect major changes in the way that Dick Dowling has been honored and remembered in Houston. I chose March 22, 1997 from list A, largely because I believed that I would easily find an article about Dowling given that his statue was rededicated in March of 1997. As I went through page after page of the Houston Chronicle however, I realized that the Dowling monument was far less newsworthy in 1997 than it was when it was first dedicated in 1905. I found my document in a local section at the very end of the paper that was presumably only sent to the region of Houston that it was geared towards—South and Southwest Houston. The article, if you can call it that, consisted of two pictures of the monument rededication ceremony and a short paragraph explaining the pictures. I did learn from the blurb that the monument was rededicated on March 16, and further inspection of the Chronicle’s archives showed that there was an article about the Dowling rededication in the first section of the paper on March 17, but even that article was not published until page 15 of the paper. My short blurb did not mention the Civil War or anything that made Dowling famous; instead, it mentioned that the monument was important because it was Houston’s first public monument.
In sharp contrast, on November 3, 1935, the Chronicle devoted both front-page space and a large chunk of space on page 6 to the dedication of a monument to Dowling at St. Vincent’s Cemetery, his final resting place. This was not a newspaper edition that was devoted only to frivolity. Other headlines of the day chronicled an ongoing war in Italy and parts of the New Deal that were being challenged in the Supreme Court. This highlights the importance of the Dowling monument dedication—it was given a huge amount of space in the paper, and not because it was a slow day for news. However, further exploration of that particular edition of the Chronicle revealed nearly seven full pages of a “Society” section, which shows that Houston’s elite, many of whom were instrumental in efforts to honor Dowling and other Civil War veterans, were given a lot of respect and coverage in the pages of the Chronicle.
What then, can we take away from the differences between my two articles? For many reasons, Dick Dowling was far more newsworthy in 1935 than he was in 1997, but this is unsurprising. When the marker was placed at St. Vincent’s Cemetery in 1935, there were still living Civil War veterans, and their children were certainly still alive and actively trying to preserve the memory of their parents’ sacrifices. Additionally, the South in 1935 remained dedicated to the “Lost Cause” in a way that it was not in 1997, and thus it is not surprising that the Dowling marker made major news in 1935. Overall, the 1935 article seemed natural, except that it placed a huge emphasis on Dowling’s Catholicism, leading to the question that many of us have asked up until this point—what was the place of Catholics, particularly Catholic immigrants, in Houston during Dowling’s life and in the first part of the 20th century? Initially I thought that Catholic immigrants would have faced the discrimination that they faced in the North during the late 19th century and early 20th, but this does not seem to be the case in Houston, and we should continue to explore this question.