As Texas Goes...: How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda Read online

Then there’s W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel (1939–41), a flour salesman turned politician who won the hearts of the voters with renditions of songs of his own composition, such as “The Boy Who Never Gets Too Big to Comb His Mother’s Hair.” And, of course, there are late arrivals like Ann Richards (1991–95), the second woman and last Democrat to serve as governor, and her successor, George W. Bush.

  “There are only seven spaces left,” says the guide, looking down at the portraits. “So there’s going to be a crisis boiling point.”

  For some reason, this reminded me of the legend of St. Malachy and the 112 popes. Back in the Dark Ages, Malachy allegedly wrote a list of all the future popes, each of them described by a phrase that captured his special identity. If you believe that he actually did this, and that the list was not the work of a forger from a later era, you would also believe that we are down to the last pope before “Peter the Roman,” during whose reign the world will come to an end. (Believing this also requires that you believe Malachy had some good reason for tagging the current pope, Benedict XVI, with the phrase “glory of the olive.”)

  Despite our guide’s pessimism, authorities at the state capitol seem confident they can make room for a lot more governors. But sooner or later the last slot in the dome will be filled—and will that mean the end is near for Texas? That it’ll break into five average-sized states? That the Last Governor will take the oath, then cackle wildly and announce he doesn’t really believe in God, thus undermining the state constitution, which contains a clause prohibiting atheists from holding elective office? There are a lot of ways for the world as we know it to come to an end, but in Texas’s case whatever happened would undoubtedly be action-packed.

  “Shaping the history of North America

  and the world”

  Even if Texas were not powerful enough to set the country’s course on everything from energy to education, and to create the terms of our public debate on everything from jobs to prayers before football games, the rest of the country would still give it way more attention than one-fiftieth of the union deserves. American movies and television shows are set in locales all over the nation, but the ones about Texas clearly had to be there and only there—Red River and Giant and The Last Picture Show, and on TV everything from the beloved and recently departed Friday Night Lights to that thing about people from Texas who bid on abandoned storage lockers. (In the penultimate scene of Friday Night Lights, some of the main characters sit drinking beer under the sky and toasting “Texas forever.” It’s been quite a while, but I do not remember Mary Tyler Moore going off the air with a salute to Minnesota.) In the 1980s we obsessed over the first series of Dallas, when 350 million people around the world tuned in to see who shot J. R. and everyone had very specific images of what it would be like to go to the Oil Barons Ball. Going even further back to the early days of television, the networks had a ton of adventure series featuring Texas heroes, including Tales of the Texas Rangers, The Adventures of Jim Bowie, and a show about Judge Roy Bean, “the law west of the Pecos.” It’s been more than fifty years since Judge Roy Bean was a television feature, but people still come to Pecos, Texas, looking for his courthouse, which in reality was a long distance away in Langtry. Pecos, which has fallen on hard times since the wells dried up, accommodates them anyway, with a replica.

  Above all there was David Crockett—who I am going to call Davy, since that’s the way all non-historians have known him since Walt Disney rechristened him for his miniseries. Davy was born on a mountaintop in Tennessee, but died in Texas at the battle of the Alamo. (Or as a prisoner of war after the battle of the Alamo; let’s not take sides in that fight.) The Alamo sits right at the center of the Texas imagination, as well as in the center of the city of San Antonio, where it attracts more than 2.5 million visitors a year. It’s hard to find a Texan who didn’t make the pilgrimage before puberty. Even on the hottest days, the place is packed with families examining Sam Houston’s shaving mug or sitting in the courtyard listening to a short talk on the creation of the Republic of Texas. (“It’s important to understand these events,” a young lecturer urged the small but attentive audience on the day I visited. “They’re not only important in shaping the history of Texas, but in shaping the history of North America and the world.”)

  The turnout is particularly impressive because, to be brutally honest, there isn’t all that much to see at the Alamo. Part of the old mission church and a small segment of the barracks have been preserved, but the only fully realized section is the gift shop. Those seeking more information are invited to a little room where a History Channel version of the story is constantly replayed on a large and elderly TV set, flanked by a painting of the Death of Travis on one side and Clara Driscoll, a leader of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas preservation movement, on the other.

  “We had a terrible black sheep”

  “The Alamo is not a museum. It is a shrine to the 189 men who died here. The Alamo is a shrine,” says Karen Thompson, the president general of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. She has large, wide eyes, grey hair, and a forceful voice. We are sitting in a small collection of offices where the DRT engages in the business of preserving the shrine for the edification of the world. The Daughters have been running the Alamo since the beginning of the twentieth century, but lately there have been several dustups over their performance, and proposals that the state should take control of the shrine-keeping duties. Which drives Thompson completely crazy, given all the trouble her organization has gone to over the years. “In 1910 there was no money. You didn’t have a lot of tourists,” she says, recounting the way the original DRT guardians of the Alamo made hand-drawn postcards and sold them to help support the place. “They had their gardeners come to tend the grounds.”

  To become a member of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, you have to prove conclusively that one of your ancestors lived in Texas before statehood, in 1846. Being able to trace your family back that far is the equivalent of having a relative who came over on the Mayflower—or possibly better, since the Texas settlers were far more colorful. A number of them, in fact, appear to have been flat-out deranged. “We had a terrible black sheep involved in the war of 1836. We don’t talk about him,” said Frank Cahoon, a Midland realtor and former Republican state representative. He is a thin, chipper man with wispy grey hair, sitting in a downtown office that’s decorated with African artifacts and the skull of a Texas woman who lived about 2,000 years ago, and whose bones were blown back onto the surface of the shifting west Texas sand.

  “He was from North Carolina,” Cahoon says, getting back to his ancestor, of whom he actually seems to be rather proud. “He was impeached by the North Carolina legislature. Gone to Texas.”

  “Gone to Texas” or “GTT” was what you were supposed to write on your fence or front door when you left your old, unsuccessful life in the States and took off for a new start in what was then a section of Mexico being colonized under the leadership of Stephen Austin. Frequently, people were GTT for reasons more exciting than crop failure or debt. Cahoon delicately skipped over the fact that the ancestor in question, Robert Potter, also represented North Carolina in Congress until he was forced to resign for castrating two men he believed were being overly familiar with his wife. Later, he was expelled from the state legislature for cheating at cards. All of which suggests that perhaps we should pay more attention to the history of North Carolina. However, GTT gave Potter a new start, and he made his name as the founder of the Texas navy.

  “VICTORY OR DEATH”

  The center of the legend of the Alamo is the moment when the commander, William B. Travis, tells the defenders that the choice is death, flight, or surrender, then draws a line in the sand and asks everyone who is prepared to stay with him and die to step across. All but one man, the legend says, stoutly walked over the line and joined Travis in his heroic stand. (Louis “Moses” Rose, a French soldier of fortune, was the one who decided that he’d prefer to live to fight another
day. Rose had served under Napoleon during the invasion of Russia and probably had had enough of doomed enterprises.)

  Historians now doubt the line incident ever happened, but nothing about the Alamo is for sure. Generations of scholars have pored over every scrap of evidence as if they were the Dead Sea Scrolls. Did Sam Houston want the Alamo abandoned as a hopeless and actually pretty useless cause? (Yeah, probably.) Could the men have gotten out if they wanted to? (Ditto.) Did they really believe they were going to die, or were they still hoping for a rescue? What the hell happened to Davy Crockett? All that’s for sure is that your reaction to the Alamo story says quite a bit about your general worldview.

  “The Alamo is a great monument to heroism. It’s not a great monument to intelligence,” opined James Haley, a biographer of Houston.

  “They had a reason to be there. They just ran out of luck,” said Stephen Harrigan, the author of The Gates of the Alamo. He added, “I don’t think they made a decision to die there. Who does that?”

  “The Alamo is a blank slate,” said Jan Jarboe Russell, a San Antonio writer and biographer of Lyndon Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird. If Russell could fill in that slate herself, the Alamo would be remembered as an old Spanish mission that was “a place of community and life” rather than its later incarnation as “a symbol of Anglo males who wanted to die to be heroes.”

  The Alamo’s ability to stand for different things to different people is particularly true when it comes to the story of William Travis, who became the sole commander when Jim Bowie got too sick to get out of bed. Travis was an émigré from Alabama, where he had abandoned a pregnant wife and baby son. “Most of the colonists thought he was a stuffed shirt and really full of himself,” said Haley. Whether or not Travis drew that line in the sand, he did definitely send out a letter at the beginning of the siege that became central to Texas’s sense of how one goes about standing up for one’s principles. “I have sustained a continual Bombardment & cannonade for 24 hours & have not lost a man,” he wrote in an appeal for aid. “The enemy has demanded a surrender at discretion, otherwise, the garrison are to be put to the sword, if the fort is taken –I have answered the demand with a cannon shot, & our flag still waves proudly from the walls – I shall never surrender or retreat.” He signed his missive VICTORY OR DEATH.”

  “I cannot read Travis’s letter and not cry,” says Karen Thompson of the DRT. “And I’ve read it a thousand times.”

  So the Mexican army came, all the Americans died, and today William Travis lives on in legend. In Texas, schools are named after him, and office buildings, at least one lake, a historic fort, and the entire county where the state capital is located. His portrait is on a huge oil storage tank in Houston. George W. Bush, when he was running for president, sent a copy of Travis’s letter to the American Ryder Cup team, which was in danger of losing the biannual golf tournament between the United States and Europe. The Americans rallied and Justin Leonard, a team member from Texas, sank a 45-foot putt that saved the day.

  Victory or death on the putting green.

  Travis strikes me as an excellent example of everything you wouldn’t want in a commander, particularly if you were one of the guys being commanded. Davy Crockett should have whacked him over the head and gotten the men out of the fort. If they wanted to be heroes, there was still Houston and his army, desperate for reinforcements. I asked Thompson to put herself in the place of one of the defenders’ wives, sitting at home waiting for some help with the crops while Travis was maximizing the chances of having her husband die for the cause. “Oh, I’d have been pissed! I’d be—what are you doing? I’d be a very angry wife,” she admitted.

  But Thompson always goes back to Travis’s side. “If you take it from the military standpoint, when Houston says ‘I don’t think that’s the spot,’ I can certainly understand that,” she said. “Except Travis wasn’t that kind of person. He’s not your ordinary person. Some people are different. They’re the leaders—the Mandelas of the world.”

  William Travis and Nelson Mandela are not two people that I would personally put on the same page, but then I’m from Ohio.

  The idea of the defiant Texan, standing up for principles so deeply felt that they must be defended at all costs, regardless of how sensible the battle, lives on today. In 2011, the Houston Chronicle referred to a state senator as “donning the patriotic trappings of a Patrick Henry—or maybe a William Barret Travis” while making a dramatic speech about the death of his pet piece of legislation. That was Dan Patrick, who in his non-legislative life is a radio talk show host once known for painting his face blue in honor of the Houston Oilers. The bill for which he was endorsing Alamo-levels of defiance was known as the “anti-groping bill.” It would have given Texas authorities the power to arrest any federal airport personnel who touched a passenger’s “private” areas during airplane security checks.

  Victory or death at the x-ray machine.

  In late December of 2011, after the US Senate came to a bipartisan agreement to extend a payroll tax cut for two months, the House Republicans unexpectedly rebelled, demanding that Speaker John Boehner fight to the (political) death on behalf of either their plan for a longer-term cut balanced by stringent spending reductions or nothing at all. The political fallout was disastrous. Everyone from Senator John McCain to the Wall Street Journal demanded that the Republicans in the lower chamber get with the program. In a few days, Boehner caved.

  “House Republicans felt like they were reenacting the Alamo, with no reinforcements and our friends shooting at us,” said Texas Republican Kevin Brady, one of the House deputy whips. The issue of how many months to extend a tax cut isn’t less earthshaking than winning a golf tournament, but it was a little peculiar that Brady seemed to be comparing the Senate Republicans to the Mexican army. Brady’s office did not respond to my queries, except to send me his full statement, in which he insisted that he wanted to “fight on.”

  “To the devil with your glorious history!”

  Texas politics currently boasts a number of women given to that same overheated, self-dramatizing style. There is, for one, Debbie Riddle, a Republican state representative from a district outside Houston, who worried publicly about female terrorists sneaking across the border to give birth to what opponents quickly dubbed “terror babies” who would use their citizenship as a tool in the war against America. During a committee hearing Riddle once demanded: “Where did this idea come from that everybody deserves free education, free medical care, free whatever? It comes from Moscow, from Russia. It comes straight out of the pit of hell.”

  So it’s not as if the hyperventilating is only coming from the male side of things. However, looking back over Texas history, the female sector does seem, overall, to have exhibited more practical sense. Perhaps that was because they had more to put up with—there was a famous saying that Texas was “heaven for men and dogs but hell for women and oxen.” Robert Potter, the ancestor we met earlier, broke up with his first wife after the unfortunate series of castrations. He married again in Texas, and when he died his second wife discovered that in his will he had left their home to another woman. Her memoirs were turned into a novel, Love is a Wild Assault.

  One of the first women to play a notable role in the war for independence was Pamela Mann, whose oxen Sam Houston had commandeered to drag artillery in the lead-up to the Battle of San Jacinto. “She had . . . a very large knife on her saddle. She turned around to the oxen and jumpt down with the knife & cut the raw hide tug that the chane was tied with . . . nobody said a word,” reported a witness. “She jumped on her horse with whip in hand & away she went in a lope with her oxen.”

  Even without Pamela’s livestock, the Texans ultimately won a decisive victory at San Jacinto, on the farm of Peggy McCormick, who demanded that the rotting corpses of the more than 600 slain Mexicans be taken away and buried.

  “Madam, your land will be famed in history,” Houston declaimed proudly.

  “To the devil with your g
lorious history! Take off your stinking Mexicans!” she snarled.

  This isn’t a whole lot of evidence, but I’m working under the theory that if a woman had been in charge of the defense of the Alamo, she’d have figured out how to evacuate. This is perhaps why you see so few women with their portraits painted on the side of oil refinery tanks.

  “She’s got an airport terminal”

  So what we have here is a state that celebrates excess, particularly excess in the pursuit of personal independence or a personal code of justice. This can sometimes be a marvelous thing. Think of Lyndon Johnson battering through Congress with the Civil Rights Act, all the while knowing that he was destroying the power of the Democratic Party in the South. Or Sam Houston. Houston might not have wanted to waste Texan lives defending the Alamo, but he committed political suicide himself when, as a senator during the lead-up to the Civil War, he fought to keep Texas in the Union. Turned out of office, Houston paraded through Washington in a leopardskin waistcoat, telling the world that come what may, he would not change his spots.

  The Texas capitol is full of his pictures and busts. “They called him the Raven,” says our guide, pointing to a portrait of Houston in the state senate chamber. “That was his warrior’s name. So. Pretty cool.”

  Houston did indeed live for a long time with the Indians, taking an Indian wife and attempting to defend Indian rights throughout his career. On the other hand, he abandoned the wife. And the Indians also called him the Drunkard. A man of many parts, Sam Houston.

  Pointing to another portrait and leaping ahead a century or so, the guide says, “That’s Barbara Jordan. Not only are schools named after her, she’s got an airport terminal.”

  Jordan, who died in 1996, was only the third black woman to become a lawyer in all of Texas history. She was the first black state senator since the Reconstruction era, and she became nationally famous during the Watergate hearings, when, as a member of the House Judiciary Committee, she declared that despite the fact that the Founding Fathers had not included her people when they wrote “We the people” at the start of the Constitution, her faith in that document “is whole, it is complete, it is total. I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.”