by Gail Collins
Molly Ivins watched the state legislators who had served in Austin with Jordan—a few of whom had privately referred to her as “that nigger bitch”—sitting mesmerized in front of the TV set. “As she lit into Richard Nixon, they cheered and hoo-rahed and pounded their beer bottles on the tables as though they were watching U. T. pound hell out of Notre Dame in the Cotton Bowl,” Ivins wrote.
By the time she became famous, Jordan was used to being the only black woman in one venue after another, so if she’s looking down on the Texas capitol, she’s probably not surprised to be the only black woman hanging on the walls. Like most state capitols, Texas’s is not replete with portraits of females of any ethnicity, although there are “Ma” Fergusons all around the place, and of course the one of Ann Richards, the second and last woman to be elected governor of Texas. Outside the building, there is a generic tribute to the women pioneers, and a little way toward downtown, on Congress Avenue, you have Angelina Eberly, the heroine of the Texas Archives War of 1842. Eberly’s moment in history occurred after Houston, still smarting over his enemies’ victory in getting the capital moved out of the city named for him, hatched a plot to reverse things. In the dark of the night, workers arrived in Austin with a wagon and began removing the state’s papers. They had not counted on Mrs. Eberly, a boardinghouse owner, who saw what was going on and ran to the town square, where she fired the cannon that was standing there. A mob gathered, retrieved the papers, and put them in the Eberly boardinghouse for safekeeping. Her statue, by the cartoonist Pat Oliphant, is seven feet tall and has the heroine of the Archives War standing by her cannon looking fierce and formidable, and actually a little bit naked around the top, ready for battle.
And that’s the traditional Texas spirit, at its best when there’s an enemy to rise up against. Outsized and brave. And frequently somewhat lunatic.
2
Empty Places
“But it’s an urban state!”
To understand Texas’s role in our current national politics, you have to start with the great, historic American division between the people who live in crowded places and the people who live in empty places.
Think about it: if your home turf is crowded, you will need rules to protect you from all sorts of intrusive behavior—noisy neighbors, factories that spew out pollution, dogs that poop on the sidewalk. Basically, you want a buffer between your family and the rest of the world. That buffer would be government. Go regulation!
But if you live in an empty place, government may look a lot different. What’s the point? It’s just going to tax you or get in your way. If a robber breaks into your house, it could take hours for law enforcement to arrive; carrying a gun is more practical. Government can’t help you and it has no business telling you what you can do with your property. Who could you hurt? There’s nobody else in sight. You’re on your own and you like it that way.
There are a few problems with the empty-world vision. Environmentalists are going to want to know whether you’re expressing your right to private property by dumping pesticides into the aquifer or killing off the last pair of blue-pelted ferrets on the planet. And there are actually quite a few things the empty-place residents expect to get from government as their rightful due. Finally, even though you’d never know it by looking at the composition of the US Senate, the number of people who are actually living in empty places is pretty small. They don’t call them empty for nothing.
The current Tea Party strain in the Republican party is all about the empty-place ethos. And Texas is the natural leader, because it’s managed to hold tight to its historic alone-on-the-prairie worldview while growing by leaps and bounds.
“Ask my students,” says Tom Dunlap, a professor at Texas A & M. “They all associate themselves with the country. They’re living a myth. They think of Texas as open wide—but 80 percent of the people in Texas live in one of the major metropolitan areas.”
“People still think of this as the frontier,” says Martin Melosi, the director of the Institute of Public History at the University of Houston. “But it’s an urban state!”
Describing their state, Texans don’t generally say “empty,” although there are exceptions. (Rick Perry, who grew up in the very small west Texas town of Paint Creek, said his dad called their neighborhood “the big empty.”) It’s more likely you’ll hear them call their state “open”—whether they are liberals stressing multicultural hospitality or conservatives talking about the anti-union right-to-work laws. But however you slice it, Texas believes people deserve plenty of elbow room. Its politics has always been based on an empty-place ideology. And the more crowded it gets, the more intense the feeling becomes.
“If you’ve got a car, you can carry a gun”
Texas is so big that the entire population of the planet would fit in it if everybody in Texas lived as close together as New Yorkers. Which they don’t intend to do. But you get the idea—very large place. Texans seem to think very little of jumping in the car and driving 300 miles to see a football game, or taking a job four or five hours away with the understanding that they’ll commute back home for weekends. This tends to confirm the feeling of empty-placeness, even if the trip is between San Antonio and Fort Worth.
No matter where they live, Texans believe they only need to get behind the wheel to leave civilization behind. “We just like to pour concrete and get in our pickup trucks and drive. That’s what we do,” laughed Lois Kolkhorst, a Republican state representative who successfully sponsored a law to raise the maximum speed limit to 85 mph.
Nobody can tell me what to do in my own car. Empty-place politics does tend to lap over into motor vehicle laws. For instance, in 2011 Governor Perry vetoed a bill that would have outlawed texting while driving. The practice of sending text messages while theoretically steering a car was “reckless and irresponsible,” Perry said, but he was opposed to “a government effort to micromanage the behavior of adults.”
Rather than wasting time discussing the possible feelings of non-texting drivers about this position, we will take this opportunity to mention that Perry once named his boots Freedom and Liberty.
In the same spirit, the governor in 2007 signed a “traveling rule” making it clear that Texans have a right to carry concealed weapons in their cars whether they have a permit or not. It is also legal to carry a concealed weapon without a permit if you’re on the way to your car. The bottom line, a Dallas police officer told the Dallas Observer, is “If you’ve got a car, you can carry a gun.”
Guns laws are a close-to-perfect reflection of the empty-versus-crowded mind-set. If you’re on your own, you might feel more secure if you have a weapon to protect yourself against the bad guys. But if you live in a place where police are easy to summon, and where a lot of strangers may be bumping up against you in the course of a day, you would probably feel safer if only the cops are packing heat. (Before we go any further, let me say that this discussion does not have anything to do with hunting. Or keeping a gun in the house in case of intruders. Most Americans, be they empty-place or crowded-place dwellers, think it is fine for people to have rifles for hunting if that’s what they like to do. And they also approve of the gun-in-the-home thing although honestly, it’s not all that great an idea.)
The Texas creed is that the more people carrying concealed weapons the better, even in what would seem to be the most wildly inappropriate situations. The legendary former lieutenant governor Bob Bullock, who was intensely attached to both alcohol and firearms, once drunkenly pulled a gun on a waiter, pressing the barrel to the man’s head and cocking the hammer. Nobody appeared to hold it against him.
Real-world experience suggests that a passel of law-abiding citizens carrying concealed weapons at their local shopping center will not react fast enough to stop one armed and crazy person from shooting a child, several senior citizens, a judge, and the local member of Congress. But arguing about this is pretty fruitless. While there are a number of dedicated people who are spending their lives tryin
g to talk empty-place states into more prudent gun laws, I have personally given up that battle. If you’re a Texan who feels disturbed by the fact that it’s legal for virtually anyone with a car to keep a loaded Uzi with a fifty-round ammunition magazine under the front seat, I sympathize. But you’ll probably have to adapt or move someplace else.
Our primary question, though, is what Texas does to the rest of us. And the gun thing doesn’t stop at the border. Consider sales. California has the most stringent gun laws in the country, and it makes a huge effort to restrict sales in ways that keep weapons from getting into the hands of criminals. Texas doesn’t, and in 2010 law enforcement officials tracked 368 weapons used to commit crimes in California back to gun dealers in Texas. In the same year, ninety-three Texas guns were used in crimes far away in New York. And nearly 15,000 guns sold in Texas wound up being used in crimes in Mexico, which is not part of the United States but certainly doesn’t need the extra firepower.
When it comes to guns, Texas loses its obsession with states’ rights. Most of its congressional delegation supports a “national concealed carry” law that would force states to honor concealed weapons permits granted anywhere in the country. That would pose a terrible problem for a place like New York, which has been very successful in controlling crime by controlling guns. It’s very hard to get a concealed weapon permit in New York, and New Yorkers like it that way. Allowing people from states that hand out permits like bingo cards to walk around with pistols under their coats “would be a disaster,” said police commissioner Ray Kelly. But advocates of the bill are indifferent to the issue of local control. “Studies show that carrying concealed weapons reduces violent crime rates by deterring would-be assailants and by allowing law-abiding citizens to defend themselves,” claimed House Judiciary chairman Lamar Smith of Texas, when his committee approved the bill in 2011.
“States’ Rights! States’ Rights! States’ Rights!”
Guns aside, Texas has been obsessed with states’ rights forever. It began, at least in mythology, with that pre-independence period when Mexico ran the land, and sometimes ran it very badly. (On the other hand, Mexico did allow American settlers to come into its territory, granted them large tracts of free land, and showed a certain amount of patience when the newcomers engaged in smuggling and ignored all the immigration laws. But we’re looking at things from the Texas side now.) Then after the Civil War, outsiders representing the federal government rigged elections, restricted freedom of the press, and deprived former Confederate soldiers of the right to vote. So, like the other former rebels, Texas returned to the Union with a near-paranoia about the dangers of Washington overreach. (On the other hand, once the outsiders were gone, the white Texans rigged elections, imposed vicious segregation laws, and deprived African Americans of their vote with a vengeance, just as an earlier generation of newly independent Texans had thumped down on the peaceful Mexican American settlers in their midst.)
To this day, the state is organized so that no one in government will have much power and no one in private business will be under much control. The state house and senate meet once every two years, for 140 days, unless the governor decides to call an emergency session. Given the specificity of the constitution, it’s impossible to do much of anything without the cumbersome process of amending it. (The Texas constitution is now the second longest in the country. At last count it had been amended 467 times.) The legislators receive $7,200 a year for their service. This, too, is in the constitution, along with the proper method of purchasing stationery and the rule that atheists cannot hold elective office.
The legislators’ salary is not the lowest rate in the nation—Alabama only pays its representatives $10 a day, which is certainly a model to look toward if your goal is turning your state into another Alabama. But no other large state has such a low salary. And given the amount of travel involved, and the fact that state legislators really do spend a great deal of time working on constituents’ problems, responding to calls for emergency special sessions, and running for reelection, it hardly seems like a job for an average middle-class citizen. “The Lege,” says Professor Christopher King of the University of Texas at Austin, using the familiar Texas nickname. “We pay these guys the princely sum of $7,200 a year. The lobbyists write the bills. It really is driven by ‘bidness,’ as we say.” (The lobbyists far outnumber the legislators, and at way better salaries. Texans for Public Justice, a nonprofit that tracks campaign finance and lobbying expenditures, said that in the legislative year of 2009, special interests spent $344 million on lobbying contracts. Given that the legislature has thirty-one senators and 150 representatives, that averages out to nearly $2 million per lawmaker.)
The Texas governor has historically been weak as well. Many people give Rick Perry—who has been governor since 2000—credit for creating a new model of a powerful chief executive, which seems to be built around the principle of never going away. Yet Perry does not appear to be feeling empowered, because he is so overwhelmed by the oppressive forces of Washington. “Texans know how to run Texas,” he told the crowd at that Tea Party rally. “States’ rights! States’ rights! States’ rights!” (Perry has a habit of saying the same thing over and over in a loud voice. Perhaps it comes from his days as a yell leader at Texas A & M.)
All the top Texas politicians, including Perry, are stupendously proud of Texas’s population boom and job growth, but it’s important to note—although almost nobody ever does so—that the state would probably still be a mainly poor, rural economy if it weren’t for massive federal aid. No one who has read Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson can forget the description of the farmers in the Texas hill country during the New Deal setting out the best food their families could afford for the workers who were going to “bring the lights”—and the sense of amazement and euphoria when the lights actually went on. For Texas to become something more than an underdeveloped supplier of raw materials to the rest of the country, it needed a network of highways and power grids. Electrifying remote rural areas was not something that private enterprise was going to find profitable. It took the federal government to make it happen, and taxpayers from other states to provide the money.
Now that Texas is sort-of booming, it’s no longer a big winner in the transfer of payments which the federal government makes between wealthy states and poor ones. It tends to break about even, although it still leads the country in farm subsidies, raking in $24.4 billion from 1995 to 2010. One of the beneficiaries used to be Rick Perry, cotton farmer. But that was then.
“Smoker and dog OK”
The law of the empty places is that neighbors help neighbors. A barn needs raising, the community rallies around. A disaster strikes, they’re there. “Remember Jessica McClure?” offered a Texan with whom I was discussing the state’s culture. That was “Baby Jessica,” the eighteen-month-old who tumbled into a well in the family backyard in Midland and got stuck 22 feet underground. It was back in 1987, and volunteers rushed to the scene, working heroically around the clock for two and a half days to rescue her. There was a happy ending and a TV movie. Texans had every right to be proud of the story, although truly, I would trust Americans to rise to a child-trapped-in-a-well crisis anywhere.
A more remarkable example was the way Houston responded in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina decimated Louisiana. Mayor Bill White promised the city would open its arms, and it did—to an estimated 200,000 refugees. The Astrodome “radiated security and services,” reported the New York Times, thanks to an estimated 60,000 local volunteers who did everything from mop floors to hand out drinks and snacks. Thousands of doctors and nurses from the area’s vast array of medical institutions lent their services. Houston residents took refugees into their homes—the Times reported a sign at the Astrodome posted by a local lawyer, offering to take “1 wheelchair + 1 attendant, smoker and dog OK.”
However, once the barn is raised or the child is rescued, the empty-state presumption is that the family will get back to busines
s and take care of itself. (A year after Katrina, when about 150,000 displaced Louisianans remained in Houston, a local congressman, John Culberson, announced that “The time has long since passed for these folks to go home.”) Texas has always shown a stupendous lack of enthusiasm for ongoing social services. It ranks second from the bottom in the percent of low-income people covered by Medicaid, dead last in state spending on mental health, fifth from the bottom in the maximum grant for temporary assistance to a family of three with no income ($250 a month) and last in the average monthly benefit for poor mothers on the Women, Infants, and Children Program. But all that is Texas’s business—unless you look at low-income Texans as low-income Americans. Or maybe as neighbors.
“It’s a developer’s dream”
More than 60 percent of Texans live in a central triangle that takes in Austin, Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, and San Antonio, all of which are among the twenty largest cities in America. But many of them still feel that they’re perched at the far edge of civilization. “They talk about that triangle all the time,” says Representative Kolkhorst, of 85 mph speed limit fame. “But that triangle’s large.”