Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  AS Texas in the 1960s emerged from the prospect of an empire into one of the nation's dozen "imperial states"—and with a Texan, Lyndon B. Johnson, as president—the focus of Northern and national attention was on "change." By "change," most observers meant: When will Texans become more like the rest of the nation?

  Because Texas experienced little history but posted a stunning record of economic development—which are not the same thing—during the second half of the century, the state did grow more like the nation in many ways. It suffered most of the same maladies, from economic downturns, to urban woes, to revenue shortfalls, to inadequate public education replete with falsehoods about American history. It displayed the same flaccid commercial cosmopolitanism that pervaded America from coast to coast. And it had a few problems all its own, due to rapid changes in economic life and landscape.

  The most striking change was the growth of Texas's cities. This, of course, was only a continuation of early-20th-century trends, but the pace was faster. Texas's metropolitan areas spread hugely, creating suburban tracts and decaying city cores. Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio now ranked among the ten largest cities in the nation.

  Urban growth was part and parcel of population growth and movement.

  Texas, 80 percent rural in 1940, reversed that ratio in the 1980s, while the state's population rose from 9,579,677 in 1960 to 16,986,510 in 1990. Growing to more than 18,000,000 during that decade, the population of Texas surpassed that of New York State. The 1970s, when Texas was as much a beneficiary of the oil boom as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), was the first decade since the 1870s when most of the state's population increase came from immigration, both from other states and abroad. And though Texas briefly lost people during the ensuing oil bust of the mid-1980s, the curve of population growth was not affected.

  Texas's population, like the nation's, became more diversified. The great cities drew immigrants from many places—Nigerians driving cabs in Dallas, Vietnamese fishing on the coast. Mexican immigrants again flooded across the Rio Grande, now joined by other Hispanics from farther south. This raised some concern among Anglos, including the public and politicians alike. But a booming Texan economy by the 1990s demanded the labor of some 600,000 "illegals." The effects of the expanding economy actually succeeded in dampening ethnic tensions, since immigrants, legal or otherwise, displaced no natives on the job. At this point, it was the friction caused by cultural and language differences that remained the ever present and unresolved source of tension between Anglos and Mexican Americans.

  In the arena of politics, Mexican Americans (90 percent or more in many south Texas and border communities) asserted control beginning in the last 1960s. Cities and counties directed by minority officeholders were, with few exceptions, no more poorly managed than before. Local politics were in fact less corrupt given the demise of the old Anglo bosses. As cooler heads always noted, state and federal rule of law prevailed. Society was no more disrupted than in Boston when the Irish took over local government.

  The Hispanic population increased from 18 percent to 24 percent and growing. By 1980 Texas ranked behind only California in its number of Spanish-speaking residents, second in its concentration of Vietnamese, third in African-Americans, and ninth in American Indians. At least one-third of all Texans belonged to minority groups as these were now defined.

  Yet much of the immigration actually reinforced the culture. Ninety percent of white immigrants came from adjacent, Southern, or Middle Western states. They tended to be young, well-educated, ambitious (most came seeking opportunity), and business-conservative. Although the historically low state and local taxation rose to the national median by the 1990s, Texas remained one of the few states that lacked both a personal and corporate income tax. Partnerships, a major factor with the high-tech industries, were not taxed by the state at all.

  The vast swings of boom-and-bust that characterized the 1970s and 1980s were only a continuation of what had gone before. When the cotton kingdom crashed, Texas had depended upon cattle; when the cattle kingdom faded into the past, there was the wonderful discovery of gas and oil. When the three pillars of the historic economy—agriculture, petroleum, and land—collapsed beginning in the 1980s from freeze, drouth, and falling commodity prices, entrepreneurial Texas quickly recovered through rapid diversification. By the 1990s the computer and electronic industries created as much employment and wealth as the petroleum industry. Austin, for example, the second largest high-tech cluster in the United States after Silicon Valley in California, provided more than 100,000 well-paying jobs. The major casualties of the 1980s bust were Texas banks. While they did not go out of business, every large bank but one became victims of their own euphoria and were acquired by national banking groups. Similarly, while more farmers and ranchers were put out of business by drouth or markets, little land actually went out of production. Texas still ranked first in cattle, cotton, and other crops.

  The borderlands, however, presented special problems for the state. In certain ways the Rio Grande Valley resembled third-world areas: overpopulated, undereducated, and plagued with numerous threats to public health. While border bloodshed ceased and relations with Mexico improved throughout the century, the border was the beneficiary of not-so-benign neglect. Primarily agrarian, the region developed few industries. Those who came seeking cheaper labor soon found it elsewhere. The jobs created by the North American Free Trade Agreement, which demanded English literacy, were often filled by workers from out-of-state. While the borderlands were doubtlessly shortchanged by state government (politicians put their money where the power is), they also failed to adapt to the demands of changing economics. Texas would have to invest more resources in the borderlands, but money itself offered no permanent solution to endemic social maladies.

  Meanwhile, the border areas suffered from increasing violence, both from the vast narcotics-smuggling trade and a lively business in crossing illegal aliens, not merely from Mexico but from around the world. In 1998 the federal government tardily responded with increased border and immigration patrols, but these measures offered no elegant solution to what had become not merely a problem for Texas but for the entire nation.

  The effects of all these changes were, however, magnified for Texas. Just as religion is said to be invigorated in soldiers' foxholes, the bad times seemed to strengthen, not weaken, the Texas mystique. The 150th anniversary year of Texan independence, 1986, was celebrated statewide with ceremonies and special events. In contrast, the sesquicentennial of Texas's statehood in 1995 was barely noted. Texans, it seemed, were most adamant about celebrating the fact that they had declared their independence from arbitrary government, won the issue on the battlefield, and maintained a lonely sovereignty symbolized by the banner with a single star. They defeated a foreign power, sent their flag on the high seas, and voluntarily joined the United States under special terms. No other American state could make that boast.

  The fact that in this same year ranchers, oilmen, banks, and builders were going bankrupt in droves only made many Texans vow that when things improved, they would handle booms better the next time around.

  As Texas became truly "imperial," producing presidents (Lyndon Baines Johnson and George W. Bush), surpassing New York State in electoral votes, and its representatives acquiring renewed power in Washington, national attention naturally turned increasingly toward Texas politics. Here the changes, on the surface, were profound.

  Democrats ruled the political process for more than one hundred years because of the War Between the States. While there had long been intramural battles between local (conservative) and national (liberal) Democrats, with few exceptions the conservatives prevailed within the state. Democrats fought bitterly in primaries but coalesced on election day, since "Republican" had been a bad word from the days of Governor Edmund Davis. In 1964 Democrats held all 31 seats in the Texas Senate, and 149 of 150 in the House of Representatives.

  When President Lyndon Joh
nson signed federal civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s, he remarked somberly that he was "signing away the South for the next fifty years." Whether or not this was accurate, a generation of election returns presents a dramatic political story.

  In 1968 Republicans elected two state senators and eight members of the House. The Democratic vote for governor slipped from an average of 72 percent to 57 percent. In 1972 the Democratic candidate, Dolph Briscoe, eked out a 47.9 percent plurality; the Republican, Hank Grover, received 45 percent, and the La Raza candidate, Ramsey Muñiz, 5.6 percent. However, as Democrats coopted the La Raza vote, Briscoe received 61.4 percent at the next balloting in 1974.

  In 1978 Republican William P. Clements took the brass ring with exactly 50 percent, to John Hill's 49.2 percent.

  A blip in the Texas economy (over which no Texas governor, then or later, had any control) caused Clements to be thrown out in favor of Mark White, a conservative Democrat who some characterized as being to the right of Attila the Hun. But in 1986, when Texas experienced a much larger crash in its economy, Clements beat White handily.

  In 1990 Ann W. Richards defeated an inept Republican, Clayton Williams (who friends in the petroleum industry said was "too dumb" to be governor), saving Texas from embarrassment and becoming the state's second woman governor. Richards, however, proved to be a better candidate than governor; she had no real political agenda except to usher in the "New Texas" and many of her appointments, purely political in nature, were disastrous. She was defeated easily in 1994 by Republican George W. Bush, son of the president, who proved to be both focused and immensely popular in all parts of the state.

  In 1998 Bush won reelection overwhelmingly, running on "compassionate conservatism" and carrying more than 40 percent of the usually Democratic Mexican-American vote. This gained national attention and vaulted Bush into the ranks of prospective Republican presidential candidates.

  The races for the United States Senate followed much the same pattern. The Republican John G. Tower retained the seat he had won, almost as a fluke, in 1961. Meanwhile, the courtly and conservative Lloyd Bentsen easily kept the other seat for Democrats until 1993, when he opted to become Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration.

  Tower and Bentsen were replaced by Republicans Phil Gramm (a Democrat-turned-Republican) and Kay Bailey Hutchison, both of whom won succeeding elections with more than 60 percent of the vote.

  The slaughter of Democrats in most major state offices followed the same long curve. In 1996 Republicans elected a majority to the State Senate and were only eight seats short in the House. They marginally held the Senate in 1998 and gained two more House members (78 Democrats, 72 Republicans), but made a clean sweep of all other statewide offices, including the Texas Supreme Court.

  The process, of course, involved far more complex considerations than mere numbers; it involved both personalities and events. However, there was a pattern not always seen outside the state: For many years after 1960 most Texans were Democrats, but most were also conservative in their political instincts. They did not desert the Democratic Party so much as they felt the party had deserted them. Bolstered both by business-oriented immigrants and a robust economy, Republicans acquired some 40 percent of the voting public.

  The Democratic base, more and more dependent upon minorities and liberals, held about the same percentage. Meanwhile, two-thirds of all Texans, partisan or independent, remained generally conservative, which made, as it always will, for interesting politics.

  Of the 14,299,000 Texans of voting age in 1998, white/Anglo citizens totaled 12,143,000, self-identified Hispanics 3,799,000, and blacks, 1,685,000. Republicans did poorly among black and Mexican-American voters, but this often mattered little, since neither minority group registered or voted in high percentiles. The sleeping giant of the "Mexican" vote had not yet reached maturity. Therefore, a white Republican with strong Anglo support who could swing just a quarter of the Hispanic vote was virtually assured victory. It was the Anglo vote that the Democrats needed and could not always secure. Though Democrats Hubert Humphrey and Jimmy Carter both carried Texas (Humphrey by only 45,000 votes, or 41.4 percent, and Carter with 51.1 percent), Lyndon Johnson was the last Democratic presidential candidate to win a majority of the white Anglo vote.

  This was very much the course of partisan affairs across the entire South, which Republicans dominated by 1994. Meanwhile, politics had become more a "spectator sport" than a burning activity. In 1998 the Texas primaries pulled a smaller percentile of registered voters than had cast ballots in the bad old poll-tax days.

  Democrats did much better in holding on to Congressional seats—as in Virginia, where they still retained a majority of the delegation. Part of this was due to gerrymandering. Through 1991 the dominant Democrats had always created as many "safe" seats as possible for their partisans; Republicans were often "packed" into their own safe districts to avoid contaminating the vote in others. However, there was also the factor of Texas's historic moderate-conservative Democratic political establishment, in which many incumbents were more closely identified with their local constituencies than national party issues. And, quite differently from the case in other states, Texan members of Congress almost always voted together on matters affecting state economic interests—such as military bases—whether they were liberal or conservative.

  On the surface, the challenge and triumph of the Republican Party in Texas might suggest enormous change. However, as Republicans took control of the U.S. Congress in 1994, and long-term Texan GOP congressmen assumed key positions such as party whip and majority leader, it was, in a real sense, a throw-back to earlier days in the capital when powerful Democrats from Texas held sway.

  And in Austin, where in 1960 coteries of Democrats had above all else served business interests in the legislature, the Republican onslaught wreaked little real change. The Texas GOP, now more suburban than rural, held to most of the same values as had dominant Democratic politicians thirty years earlier. Many of them, in fact, were products of that milieu.

  The parties had changed, but the people were very much the same.

  Chapter 38

  THE AMERICANS

  After all these things do the Gentiles seek;

  After all these things do the Gentiles seek.

  FROM THE CHORUS OF

  THE CANTERBURY WOMEN IN

  "MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL,"

  T. S. ELIOT

  WHILE the wagons were moving westward, and the sun rose on endless vistas of unconquered, almost empty land across their continent, Americans were fortunate. The American nation did not have to seek its mission or rationalize its conduct. It possessed two instinctive goals: to expand across its chosen continent and to become predominant upon it. Any dynamic human society would have attempted to do the same. Americans succeeded, almost too easily, because the cultures they met were static and unable to adapt. Unlike the reconquest of medieval Spain, the conquest of North America did not involve the minds, bodies, and souls of all those who came to inhabit America; therefore, the hearts of those Americans who took part in the great movement would be different, in the world that followed, from those who did not.

  The history of Texas was unique in North America, but never unique or even unusual in the world of man. It was an old, old story: new peoples, new civilizations impinging upon the old. The reactions of these peoples—Caucasian, Amerind, and Hispanic-Mexican—were in no sense aberrations. The treatment of one culture or one race by another was always determined by relative strengths and weaknesses, and by the nature of the cultures themselves, dynamic or regressive. It was never, and probably never will be, so long as men stay men, determined by internal ethical or moral ideas and institutions. More Texans understood this, out of their history, than their compatriots who never physically or spiritually left the safety of the sheltering Appalachians.

  The open frontier was a great, unifying, imperial experience, and one that was continued for generations with only minor pa
in. But when the words of the song "Across the Wide Missouri" were no longer a call to action or a spur to dreams but touched a profound nostalgia in the American mind, and the image of the Rio Grande recalled faded moonlight rather than hot blood, a certain sense of purpose departed from the American soul. At the very hour Americans stood at last predominant upon their continent and emerged as a power into the world, they showed the first signs of incoherency, ultrarationalism, and frustration. Their world policies grew confused. Europeans who called America an immature power had it wrong: American society was showing the signs of immense success and age. Only new societies had a deep and simple sense of mission or could move after predominance and power without having to rethink their uses.

  The search for new missions and new myths was certain to be prolonged and painful. The first fatuous hope that the world was made collapsed in the recurrent assaults by other powers upon the political structures erected during the previous century. The United States oscillated between self-satisfaction and disillusionment, with others and itself, between powerful thrusts out into the world and abrupt retreats. Like Rome, during and following the Carthaginian wars, America had to hammer out a new form of advance, and a new world view. It had made itself an island, or more accurately, a continental power, but no nation could remain an island in a reclosing ecumene.

  The great power possessed by Americans would be used, wisely or disastrously. No people possessing power ever completely eschewed its employment. The American idealists who felt a sense of mission to protect or improve the earth, and the American cynics who weighed every use of power in self-defense, essentially followed the same course. Both found frustration, and nowhere was this frustration more apparent than in the frontier-conditioned regions, because never again was the United States apt to achieve such decisive results as it won on its own shores, against the kind of obstacles it met.