‘Go Out and Sue a Polluter’

Shortly before Christmas in 1969 a dense fog rolled in across the bayous of the Texas Gulf Coast. For more than four days it blanketed a vast region, as far west as San Antonio and as far east as Port Arthur. Flights were grounded, cars crashed, and all traffic halted in the Houston Ship Channel, one of the busiest ports in the world. The murk posed a real threat to Texans with emphysema or asthma, to the elderly or the infirm. “These people are going to suffer more acutely,” a local physician told the Houston Post. Indeed, one Houston hospital reported a 240 percent surge in patients with breathing issues; a health officer noted a “tremendous increase” in upper respiratory symptoms.

To many Texans the source of the haze was, ironically, clear. It was “pollution-fed fog,” as the Post put it in a front-page headline, a glaring manifestation of a problem that plagued the industrialized parts of the region. So contaminated was the air that water droplets could cling to pollutants, slowing evaporation; the resulting scrim of moisture inhibited vertical air movement, trapping more pollution in turn.

At the moment the fog descended, Texans were rising up against environmental degradation like never before. Just days earlier State Representative Rex Braun, an intense, ruddy-faced man, warned an Arlington audience about the long-term effects of living with pollution. If the state couldn’t reduce it, he told the crowd, “you will drown in your own sewage, be buried in your own garbage or choked to death on your own bad air.”

Braun and a coalition of environmentally minded supporters pressed their case at a city council hearing soon after the haze cleared. A mother carrying an eleven-month-old baby in a yellow dress followed Braun at the podium; the child’s name was Tracy Lynn, a spokesman told the councilmembers, and her asthma was so severe that during the days of fog the doctors weren’t sure if she would make it. They advised the family to leave Houston; the air was too bad. Two days after the hearing a class of junior high school students unrolled a fifty-foot-long petition down the middle aisle of the city council chamber in nearby Baytown. “We, the undersigned, deserve the right to breathe clean air,” it declared, above some two thousand signatures. Under pressure, the Houston city council agreed to stop rubber-stamping grace periods for local industries to comply with air pollution regulations, a move that several councilmen described as “drastic.”

By March 1970 environmental furor had reached such a peak that Braun could mock “the Johnny-come-latelies to the anti-pollution battle” in a letter to a friend, recalling how, just a few years earlier, “we could only muster a handful of votes for my tough bills to curb air and water pollution.” Back then, he wrote, “rich Republican oil men didn’t even know what pollution was, much less how to spell it.” A month later, at an Earth Day rally in Texas, the progressive legislator and labor lawyer Bob Eckhardt similarly marveled at how quickly times had changed. “Now,” he told the crowd, “you are in the environmental upheaval.”

More than fifty years later, the story of Texas’s environmental upheaval remains little-known. Yet for a brief period in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Lone Star State was the site of a homegrown, populist environmental movement. Its partisans were not, principally, elite conservationists or representatives from national green groups but working-class activists with material concerns and unusually motivated allies in local government. “Our trees are dying, our metal is rusting, our house paint is falling off and we cannot breathe,” one official in the shipping and refining hub of Galena Park told the press.

Their movement was especially strong in Houston and its heavily industrialized, polluted environs—the adopted home of Rex Braun. Today Braun is an obscure figure, but for a brief period, from his first legislative campaign in 1966 until his electoral defeat in 1972 and his early death in 1975, he was perhaps Texas’s leading environmental crusader. Over three terms in the state house, representing the most polluted district in Texas, he fought to win a “right” to a clean environment and then translate it into better conditions on the ground. To Braun and his constituents, as well as a largely forgotten cohort of environmental populist politicians, the battle against pollution was inseparable from the fight for industrial safety regulations, a minimum wage, and public health.

For more than six years I’ve been searching for records related to Braun and the fight he helped lead. Because he left behind no personal papers, I’ve compiled documents from far-flung archival collections across Texas. These papers help reconstruct the story of courageous campaigners battling what Braun called “a few greedy and callous men who think they have the right to dump their industrial garbage into the air.” But they also return us to a Texas in which populist environmentalism was imaginable, with a strong social base in labor unions and community organizations. As union density fell, the organs of civil society failed, and the environmental movement professionalized, the promise of this kind of environmental populism faded—which is not to say it can never return.

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By the middle of the twentieth century, Houston stank. The discovery of black gold at Spindletop in 1901 had precipitated an unprecedented oil boom in the region, and the dredging of the Houston Ship Channel, a fifty-mile passage from the city to the ocean completed in 1914, gave the wildcatters an efficient way to trade petroleum for cash. The region’s population exploded, with hundreds of thousands of migrants flocking in to work at the port and in the refineries and factories springing up along the Ship Channel.

With this swift industrial growth came pollution. The booming new factories were dumping mysterious effluent into the water. Fat smokestacks discharged dark plumes of smoke. The air turned wet and heavy. Acrid odors became commonplace, especially on the east side of town, closer to the Ship Channel. Vegetation grew black. A blue haze was pervasive.

In 1952 the residents of a number of communities adjacent to the Ship Channel—Baytown, Cloverleaf, Galena Park, and most prominently Greens Bayou—started complaining that the stench was unbearable. From their petitions, their mass meetings, and their lobbying emerged Harris County’s first pollution control agency. As its head, the county commissioners appointed Walter Quebedeaux, a chemist and engineer from central Texas’s hill country who believed that freedom from pollution was a human right.

Quebedeaux threw himself into his work, taking on industrial polluters with a zeal that led one newspaper columnist to compare him to St. George slaying “corporate dragons.” He was uncompromising. He developed a particular fondness for suing the factories and their owners; a decade into the job, he even found time to earn a law degree himself, having grown frustrated with lawyers who couldn’t grasp technical concepts.

As the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, however, Quebedeaux found his ability to bring suit constrained. In 1961 the Texas court of appeals held that private corporations were effectively immune from criminal prosecution, a precedent that set Texas apart from all other states. Four years later the same court added a precedent making it virtually impossible to prosecute the executives running the corporations. The court then held that Quebedeaux’s investigators couldn’t enter a plant without an invitation. Nor could Quebedeaux pursue civil suits: he would build cases against polluters, but the county attorney’s office refused to act on his complaints.

Private litigants hardly had more luck. In 1964, in an important but routinely overlooked early environmental lawsuit, a group of Texas oystermen and fishermen partnered with conservationists to sue companies that were dredging the floors of Galveston and Trinity Bays in search of shells that could be used in cement, roads, and poultry feed. Asserting violations of the US and Texas constitutions’ guarantees of due process, the plaintiffs claimed that the dredging was destroying delicate reefs, important habitat and feeding grounds, a storm barrier, and the state’s entire oyster industry. “Thousands on thousands of Texans,” they argued, were losing their livelihoods.

The dredgers fought back, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in lobbying, public relations, and legal fees, ultimately convincing the Texas courts to throw out the case on the grounds that the plaintiffs had no vested property rights at stake and thus no standing to sue. Still the oystermen pressed their case in the court of public opinion, forming an advocacy organization called “Save Our Shell” and packing public hearings. By mid-1965 their attorney—Bob Eckhardt—could write that dredging “continues to be the most controversial issue on the Gulf Coast.” Yet the dredging carried on. Indeed, pollution continued to accumulate, without meaningful impediments, across Texas.

Also rising across the state, however, was a cross-class, multiracial social justice movement known as the Democratic Coalition. As the historian Max Krochmal narrates in his magisterial book Blue Texas, Black civil rights activists, Mexican American organizers, white liberals, and union members—including workers in Houston’s oil and steel industries—came together to integrate schools, win higher wages, break the whites-only Democratic primary with voter registration drives and legal challenges, and elect progressive candidates from San Antonio to Fort Worth.¹ Following a series of setbacks in 1964, however, the Democratic Coalition began to lose strength amid internal divisions and a brewing backlash; its last statewide push came in 1966, when Black civil rights activists in east Texas, Chicano farmworkers in south Texas, and white labor leaders across the state united to fight for a $1.25 minimum hourly wage. Their efforts included a push for local office, and that year progressive, multiracial slates of candidates seized power in many cities, including Houston.

Among the state representatives who won office amid this push was Rex Braun. From the very start of his legislative campaign, and to an extent unmatched within his cohort, Braun linked the struggle against pollution to the broader movement for justice.

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Meyer Gus Braun came of age in a hotbed of radicalism. Born in 1921 to Jewish parents in the small, swampland farming community of Kenner, Louisiana, he was six years old when Huey Long first won election as the state’s governor. Long, a populist who aggressively prosecuted Standard Oil, fought forcefully—and, his many enemies claimed, illegally—for the redistribution of wealth, famously seeking to fund generous social programs by taxing oil companies. Like Long, a political giant who acquired the nickname “Kingfish,” Braun loved being in charge, and soon he came to be called “Rex” by friends who teasingly compared him to a king. Years later, when a journalist asked Braun how he got interested in politics, he responded simply, “I grew up in Louisiana under Huey Long.”

Following college and a stint in the Pacific during World War II, Braun moved to Houston and opened a menswear store “with $40 and a pregnant wife,” as he later put it. A nattily dressed dynamo who stood just five foot four, Braun excelled in the clothing business and soon owned five stores. In 1964 he was named Harris County campaign manager for Don Yarborough, a member of the Democratic Coalition running for governor (and a friend of Braun’s from their shared time in the Marines). Yarborough lost, but the campaign whetted Braun’s interest in politics. No doubt Braun, an avid fisherman who liked taking a boat out in Galveston Bay—then the epicenter of the dredging controversy—was also struck by campaign materials promising that “public rights,” rather than “industries, such as the shell dredgers,” should be prioritized in “publicly owned natural resources.”

In January 1966 Braun announced he was running for the state house. Because the previous year’s redistricting had put his home in the tony Memorial Villages neighborhood into a conservative district, Braun moved his family first to the working-class, industrial area of Galena Park and then to North Shore, so named for its location just north of the Houston Ship Channel. Suddenly air pollution ceased to be an abstract concept. “I live in it,” he told the Houston Post. “I smell it every night and choke in it. In our neighborhood we have paint peeling off houses and shrubbery dying from the fumes.”

His campaign became as much a crusade against pollution as a fight to represent House District 23 (an election he would win unopposed). He spoke out against the dredging, promising the Baytown Sun that he would arrive in Austin ready to fight. He invited the do-nothing state air pollution agency to the Ship Channel, offering to hire a tour bus to show the regulators areas where people “continually endure health and property damage from air pollution.” When the chamber of commerce tried to convince Houston’s government to fire Quebedeaux, Braun rallied to the local pollution control director’s defense, charging the chamber with doing the dirty work of “the renegade fertilizer plants, refineries, papermills, chemical plants and rendering plants.”

Before he was even sworn in, Braun announced that he would soon introduce four bills to the legislature to empower officials like Quebedeaux to prosecute air polluters. The idea was to change the criminal code to specify that corporations could be criminally liable, as well as enable government inspectors to enter plants they suspected were polluting. The state’s present focus on establishing emissions standards for factories was insufficient, Braun claimed: “Pollution must be stopped at its source, at the smokestack, if it is to be stopped at all,” he wrote in a letter to the state air pollution agency.

Upon arriving in Austin in 1967, Braun immediately stood out from his fellow freshmen legislators due to his short stature, his stylish shirts and sport coats, and his status as the state house’s only Jew. He began writing a newsletter to his constituents, which survives in an Arlington archive as evidence of Braun’s broad-based pursuit of justice.² In the first issue he highlighted his four anti-pollution bills (cosponsored by the other progressive Harris County freshmen), his fight to force the state’s oil and gas industry to pay “their fair share” in taxes, and his efforts to pass legislation securing the $1.25 minimum wage, industrial safety measures, and a pay raise for the state’s teachers.³

Within a month the house began holding hearings on Braun’s bills. At one, a parade of witnesses testified in favor, including the mayor of Baytown and the president of Pipefitters Local 211. Only an industrial lobbyist testified against. By mid-May the house had passed the bills overwhelmingly, and they moved to the senate, where they were sponsored by fellow Houston freshman Barbara Jordan, the first Black woman to serve in the Texas legislature.

Just days later, however, the senate killed the Braun bills within an hour. Furious, Braun wrote in a press release that the “dollar sign flag of the Texas Manufacturers Association and the skull and cross bones of the Texas Chemical Council flew over the Capitol of Texas today.” To add insult to injury, the house then approved a constitutional amendment creating a tax exemption for companies purchasing pollution control equipment, an approach that Braun argued had been shown to be ineffective but that “will subsidize industrial polluters to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.” He had tried proposing his own amendment giving “victims of pollution”—those whose homes were damaged by it—an equivalent tax break, but it was voted down.

In his next newsletter Braun lamented not only the defeat of his bills but also the legislature’s refusal to enact the $1.25 minimum wage, which he called a “moral failure.” The special interests, the lobbyists, the polluter friends of conservative governor John Connally (whom Braun referred to privately as “His Majesty”)—they “run things in Austin,” he claimed, before concluding: “WHY AREN’T THE BIG CORPORATIONS AND THE OIL AND GAS COMPANIES PAYING THEIR FAIR SHARE OF THE COST OF OUR STATE GOVERNMENT?”

Braun pledged not to give up. “The battle against air and water pollution is a continuing fight,” he wrote to a friend that fall, comparing his struggle against industrial polluters to a previous generation’s fights against the robber barons. The special interests may have prevailed this time, he wrote elsewhere, “but let me warn them that the people will eventually have their days too.”

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And then, remarkably, the people did—or at least they tried. As the 1960s came to a close, communities all across Texas began defying the daily indignities of unchecked pollution. From the woman writing to Governor Connally about the “miasma” emanating from a Friendswood chemical plant—and complaining that the chamber of commerce had misled her about its source—to the physician alerting a regulator about a polluting steel mill east of San Antonio and demanding action by “the proper authorities” rather than “the poor people in the neighborhood who are financially unable to do so,” ever greater numbers of Texans were connecting the impunity of the state’s corporate and political bosses with their own health and welfare. “As recently as a year ago, concern about pollution was confined to a small, intense group,” wrote one commentator in the Houston Chronicle in 1970. “But in this past year the issue has billowed like smoke from an industrial chimney.”

Yet if the billowing was often spontaneous, considerable tinder had been laid, not just by leaders like Braun and Quebedeaux but by community organizations and labor unions, such as the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers (OCAW), which was in the midst of a nationwide “health and safety” campaign to protect its workers and their communities from dangerous pollutants. In early 1970 OCAW brought together more than five hundred Houstonians for an environmental forum dedicated to addressing “the increasing insult to their senses and their health by air pollution,” as one union publication put it. Speaking at the event, Braun decried weak regulations that allowed factories, like the ones where OCAW members worked, to emit more than a thousand pounds of particulate matter every hour.

The calls for enforcement kept coming. In 1968 an assistant county attorney in Houston encouraged his fellow prosecutors to “go out and sue a polluter, either air or water, or if you feel ambitious, go out and sue one of each. Nothing will clean up a polluter like being the Defendant in a good old fashioned American lawsuit.” With Braun still unable to pass legislation unfettering officials like Quebedeaux and enabling the prosecution of polluters, a diverse array of civilian activists threw caution to the wind and started bringing suit themselves. In 1970 thirteen residents of Baytown sued a packing and canning plant for polluting a stream, seeking $250,000 in damages and an injunction to halt the dumping. Four months later a group of Houston and Baytown conservationists brought suit against many of the area’s biggest corporations—including Shell, Dow, and DuPont—seeking a far broader, and permanent, ban on dumping refuse. A year after that, a Houston man named George Tanner (who, contrary to the image of environmentalists as out-of-touch elites, relied on food stamps and disability) sought damages from Armco Steel for violating his family’s “right to a clean environment and their right to breathe clean air.”

Suit after suit, the plaintiffs failed. Judges generally found that individuals suffering due to pollution did not have a clear legal basis, a “cause of action,” to bring suit, or that they lacked “legal standing,” the ability to obtain judicial relief. As a general matter the laws at the time prioritized the protection of property over individual health, and especially over so-called “aesthetic” interests such as the desire to see water, land, or air unpolluted or wildlife flourishing. Moreover, courts found it difficult to link a particular harm to a discreet action by a specific polluter, and there were exceedingly few lawyers with any experience convincing them to do so. This was a problem for plaintiffs opposing pollution not just in Texas but across the country.

In 1969 a group of activists in Michigan, another state dominated by powerful polluters—the auto industry—came up with a solution: change the law. They recruited a law professor named Joseph Sax to write a bill clarifying that anyone could sue to prevent any environmental degradation, and that judges hearing their suits were not confined by existing environmental standards but were instead empowered to scrutinize the “validity, applicability, and reasonableness of the standard.” If a standard were found to be “deficient,” the judge could throw it out and create a new, more protective standard themselves. The owners of a factory couldn’t, in other words, defend themselves against charges of pollution simply by proving that they were in compliance with a permit or even the law on the books. With the avid backing of the United Auto Workers and a broad array of activist groups, the bill’s promoters secured its enactment into law in June 1970. Then they turned to other states.⁴

That summer, fresh from the fervor of Earth Day, Braun began corresponding with Sax and other Michigan reformers. When, weeks later, a judge refused to issue an injunction prohibiting Armco Steel from further polluting the air, Braun blasted the decision in a press release, claiming that it “illustrates quite sharply the need for a new standard” for environmental cases. By February 1971 Braun’s bill was ready; he wrote to his constituents that it “gives the people legal standing to seek court orders protecting [the] public trust…. Michigan already has it, and it works! I’m already engaged in a battle royal behind the scenes with the industrial polluters who are out gutting the bill—before it’s even received a committee hearing.” The bill won swift endorsements from newspapers in Houston, San Antonio, Tyler, Waco, and beyond.

For a frenzied few months in 1971, the Braun bill became a rallying cry across the state. To many Texans it held the almost unthinkable promise of a “right,” an enforceable right, to clean air and water. In March six hundred people turned up to pack a public hearing on the bill. (“Please make whatever sacrifice is necessary to be in Austin,” Braun had urged his constituents.) They transformed the legislative chamber into a sea of green and white buttons. Over the next four hours, under bright klieg lights, attendees old and young, in ties and tie-dye, listened as environmental advocates did battle with what the Houston Post called “a hornet’s nest of opposition from House conservatives and industrial lobbyists.” Braun testified to the stakes: “people are having their lungs impaired, are being gradually asphyxiated, are having irreparable damage done to their health, and are dying—yes, are dying—in the industrial areas of this state.”

There followed an intense letter-writing campaign. After the show of force at the hearing, Governor Preston Smith unexpectedly endorsed the bill. “Of course Texas is a difficult state,” Sax wrote to a friend in Minnesota, “but I am hopeful.”

In the end these hopes were dashed. Braun wrote to Sax that the chairman of the committee considering the bill was “apparently committed to the industrial interests” and refused to let the legislation advance. When a desperate Braun moved to have the bill released, the house voted him down seventy-six to fifty-eight. Nearly two thirds of the legislators, one observer wrote, “represented oil and manufacturing interests.” Indeed, the very night of the big hearing, the oil and gas lobby had hosted a reception for lawmakers.

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In retrospect, environmental populism began to fade in Texas following the campaign for a right to a clean environment. The activists’ ambitions grew less grand; the labor-environmental alliance started to fray. “While the petrochemical industry’s wealth continued to mushroom in the seventies,” recounted The Texas Observer a few years later, “the air grew dirtier in Houston.”

One cause of the movement’s decline was Braun’s defeat in his 1972 run for state senate, challenging an incumbent liberal from the left. Most civil rights and labor groups threw their support behind Braun, but it was not enough to overcome all the money that industry spent against him. Braun regrouped and was considering a bid for mayor of Houston when he died suddenly of pneumonia in 1975, his lungs having been weakened by cancer. He was just fifty-four. His funeral was enormous.

Another factor was the increasing professionalization of the state’s environmental organizations, a consequence of the movement’s growth and success that also distanced the greens from onetime allies and moderated their demands. Just months after the defeat of the Braun bill, the head of one statewide environmental coalition claimed that the legislation had failed because its champions had used overly confrontational tactics; a better approach would have been “quietly and persistently making your views known to legislators.” Shortly thereafter, a coalition leader recommended attempting to enlist the support of the Texas Chemical Council and the Texas Manufacturers Association, once Braun’s sworn enemies. When, in 1973, the OCAW sought the coalition’s backing for a strike they were holding against Shell Oil, the group instead decided “to extend to the OCAW and Shell Oil an invitation for a ‘public forum’ to which both parties would be invited.”

No doubt the OCAW members took the brush-off hard; by then the union needed all the help it could get. Deindustrialization and automation were beginning to decimate labor’s bargaining power, as was the statewide rise of conservative, anti-union politicians. OCAW held on longer than most; the union’s innovative workplace safety campaigns bought it time, as did the relative delay in the outsourcing of jobs in the nuclear and chemical industries. Still, over the course of the 1970s the strength and size of organized labor fell across Texas and the country, and many unions lost their capacity for pursuing environmental activism.

The companies, meanwhile, saw an opening. When, in the early 1970s, the federal government sued Armco Steel for polluting the Houston Ship Channel—a different suit than the civil one brought by Tanner—the company sent a flyer to its workers claiming that the “purpose of each of these suits has been to shut down Houston Works operations and/or collect substantial fines.” It came with a warning: “YOUR JOB SECURITY IS INVOLVED!!!!”

This sort of implied threat was once known as “environmental blackmail.” Some unions had sought legislation to make it far more difficult for companies to fight pollution control by threatening layoffs or closure, but soon enough it was an essentially uncontested practice. As early as 1980, once-muscular communal organizations had already atrophied—and that was before the Reaganite surge.

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It is hard to imagine a broad-based anti-pollution mass movement returning to Texas now that so many of the conditions that once allowed environmental populism to flourish in the state have withered away. But there are no iron laws of history. Consider Houston in the late 1970s. Years after the push for environmental rights appeared to have failed, Black residents of the Northwood Manor neighborhood recruited a labor lawyer named Linda McKeever Bullard to bring a class action lawsuit challenging an attempt by Browning-Ferris Industries to locate a landfill near their homes and elementary school. The pollution from this landfill threatened their health, their property values, and “the physical safety of plaintiffs’ children,” Bullard wrote. This “will violate the constitutional rights of Plaintiffs.”

Black Houstonians had been objecting to landfills, dumps, and incinerators in their neighborhoods for over a decade, but this case was different. Bullard recruited her husband, Robert Bullard, a sociologist, to study the siting of waste disposal facilities in the city, and his report, soon introduced into evidence, revealed that the vast, disproportionate majority were located in Black neighborhoods. Though the Northwood Manor plaintiffs received few allies from the Texas environmental community and ultimately lost in court, their case gave rise to a new analytical concept, “environmental racism,” and a new rallying cry, “environmental justice.” The idea—along with protests and lawsuits and new organizations—spread across the country in the 1980s, and by the early 1990s it was a genuine movement.

In the following years, activists mobilizing under the banner of environmental justice repeatedly stopped industrial firms and local governments from siting pollution-generating facilities near marginalized communities, especially in the urban south; they formed alliances with civil rights groups and community organizations and, eventually, national green groups and unions; they won important concessions from the federal government, including the creation of an Office of Environmental Justice within the EPA. The Trump administration recently eviscerated the office, but the concept remains influential in environmental and policymaking circles. Today, thanks in no small part to environmental justice activists, residents of Houston and its outlying communities are forced to breathe far fewer pollutants than they did in Braun’s day, although theirs remains some of the nation’s dirtiest air.

Environmental justice, an ecological inheritance of Texas, is at its core about solidarity. The alliances that its advocates built over the last few decades did not always resemble those of the earlier environmental populists—they rely, for instance, far more explicitly on the church—but one throughline is surely their coalitional approach. The fight for the earth is, or should be, inseparable from other struggles for justice. In this respect many of the foremost advocates of environmental justice sound, at times, much like Braun. “What this movement is saying,” Robert Bullard told the Los Angeles Times in 1991, “is that the right to breathe clean air, drink clean water and live in a community that is not contaminated should be a right all of us enjoy.”