In 1947, Texas City’s youthful war-hero mayor and a firebrand priest were collaborating on unheard-of social changes, levying taxes on Monsanto, Union Carbide, Amoco, and other corporations, improving conditions for the African-American and Hispanic laborers crowded into “The Bottom” near the putrid waterfront and chemical plants. With ominous verisimilitude, he portrays a deeply segregated boomtown beholden to the companies whose factories created high employment, in return for which they received much municipal largesse.
Texas-based journalist and Bush family biographer Minutaglio ( First Son, 1999, etc.) grimly describes a horrifying disaster that revealed grave negligence in the post-WWII manufacturing sector.īased on 200 interviews with survivors, shrewdly focused on a group of key figures, Minutaglio’s account provides a highly personalized portrait of the tragedy that struck Texas City, Texas, in 1947.
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