When the President Comes to Town
CULTURE CLASH (#TBMG)
By Blake Earle
In 1937, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt finished off an eleven-day fishing voyage in the Gulf with a stop to the island. Galveston Mayor Adrian Levy gifted the president “the very finest rod and reel,” to mark the occasion. Roosevelt graciously accepted the token and regaled the adoring crowd with a fishing story, “Yesterday one of our party caught a twenty-four pound amberjack, and this morning that same fish weighed thirty-five pounds!”
Roosevelt C U LTU R EC L A S H G A LV E STO N . C O M • S E P T/O CT 2 0 2 0
Before heading north to Houston and then on to College Station and Fort Worth, FDR had a chance meeting with a future president. Waiting dockside to receive the presidential
yacht Potomac was a gangling, first-term congressman from the Hill Country, Lyndon Baines Johnson. This visit though, would prove to be the outlier in the twentieth century - no other sitting president came to Galveston. The city’s fading prestige and falling importance, especially relative to the phenomenal growth of Houston, explain why presidents during the twentieth century stopped in the Bayou City and not the Oleander City. During the 1800’s however, the opposite was true. Every president from Ulysses S. Grant to Grover Cleveland spent time on the island. Naturally, these years coincided with Galveston’s golden age. During the last few decades of the 1800’s Galveston was among the largest cities in Texas and by far the most sophisticated. In the years before the construction of the Houston Ship Channel, Galveston was still the state’s largest port. Money and people flowed in, transforming the city in the process. Galveston was the first Texas city with electricity, gas street lights, and telephones. It had the best newspaper and theaters. More than a dozen steamship lines from Europe, Asia, and Latin 21
Photos courtesy of Houston Chronicle and Rosenberg Library
IT’S BEEN A WHILE SINCE THE PRESIDENT HAS COME TO TOWN. Sure, George W. Bush surveyed the damage inflicted by Hurricane Ike in 2008, buzzing around the island in Marine One to get a firsthand look at the destruction left in the wake Bush of the category 4 storm. But for the last time a sitting president actually, set foot on the island, we have to go all the way back to the 1930s. And even then it was a brief, fifty-minute-long visit before speeding away to our neighbor to the north.
