As founding editor of The Texas Observer, he fought bigotry and exposed corporate greed, political chicanery and government corruption.
Ronnie Dugger, the crusading editor of a small but influential Texas journal who challenged presidents, corporations and America’s privileged classes to face their responsibility for racism, poverty and the perils of nuclear war, died on Tuesday at an assisted living facility in Austin, Texas. He was 95.
His daughter, Celia Dugger, the health and science editor of The New York Times, said the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
Inspired by Thomas Paine’s treatises on independence and human rights, Mr. Dugger was the founding editor, the publisher and an owner of The Texas Observer, a widely respected publication, based in Austin, that with few resources and a tiny staff took on powerful interests, exposed injustices with investigative reports and offered an urbane mix of political dissent, narrative storytelling and cultural criticism.
In an anthology, “Fifty Years of The Texas Observer” (2004), Mr. Dugger recalled that in 1954, when his weekly began, a gentlemen’s agreement of silence on sensitive matters pervaded public discourse in the deeply conservative Lone Star State.
“We were as racist, segregated and anti-union as the Deep South from which most of our Anglo pioneers had emerged,” Mr. Dugger wrote, adding:
“Mexican Americans were a hopeless underclass concentrated in South Texas. Women could vote and did the dog work in the political campaigns, but they were also ladies to be protected, above all from power. Gays and lesbians were as objectionable as Communists. And the daily newspapers were as reactionary and dishonest a cynical gang as the First Amendment ever took the rap for.”