Lone Star (138 page)

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 pain. 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.

As always, the end of the expanding frontier and the refinement of civilization behind it forced the nation to feed upon itself. Increased internal organization, compulsion, and control were inevitable; the relatively tribal frontier society would coalesce into classes and then bureaucracies, with increasing social distinctions, whatever they were called. The outcome of the War Between the States prepared inevitabilities, but it did not end all resistance. Texas conducted a long, and losing, series of delaying actions and last-ditch campaigns. But as the planter economy was destroyed, so was the cattle kingdom, and finally the bedrock social institution, the family farm. As the better-organized Texas society exterminated Indians and cowed Mexicans, Texas itself was made subject by greater organization and power. Nothing could prevent this, not even Wilson's and the second Roosevelt's nostalgic reforms. The pressures on frontier society were as pervasive as the pressures on the Norman-conquered Saxons. For all the Populists' complaints about the immorality of their millions of individual crucifixions, better organization always won, not only by brute power but by conversion.

Texas was always torn by the historic East–West tension in Anglo-America, the tension that existed from the time Anglo-Celtic frontiersmen found their policies dictated in Pennsylvania by men with incomprehensible Quaker ideas. The tension was based more on regional outlooks and interests than status or class. The Westerners always seemed more "democratic" because they were relatively classless in the social sense; the Anglo-Celt was more tribal than hierarchical. This enabled the Westerner to build a society with immense inequities, but which appeared egalitarian. Andrew Jackson lived in a great mansion, surrounded by thousands of acres and hundreds of slaves, yet appeared a "common" man, because the Westerner clung to his tribal vulgarity through many stations in life. He even rejected the notion that there were stations in life. The planter society did infuse incipient aristocracy, but it was abortive.

Because neither Kentucky nor Texas could have survived without assistance and artifacts from the Atlantic slopes, no matter how vigorous or violent the West became, it had to be subordinate. The West invariably held less people, and numbers determined dominant law. Because poor people settled the West, the frontier was always in debt. Even the capitalistic farmer, the cotton planter, and the wheat or citrus man in later years depended on money that had its wellsprings in the East. A certain form of colonialism always colored American history during the winning of the West. The West fought back, at times successfully, through politics. Alliances, however, like the New York–Virginia axis or the Boston-Austin deal, were generally fragile.

The East was structured, the West consciously if falsely classless; the West was imperialistic; the East was Atlantic-looking; the East was moneyholding; the West held the cheap-money beliefs of the land-poor. All these conditions were enough to preserve lasting differences between the regions. But all these were the basis of interest politics, for which the federal apparatus had been invented. There were certain other differences between the Texan and most other Americans that were harder to define and even more difficult to obviate.

The people who moved remorselessly into the frontier, who destroyed the great Amerind hunting preserve with a glacial advance developed certain weaknesses and strengths. Their first great strength was the sense of moral superiority, which gave them a crushing advantage over the Amerind, the Mexican, and the Negro race they dragged along. Austin, Houston, Hays, and McNelly struck the Hispanic-Mexican culture with a force like that of the
conquistadores
who struck the Aztecs. They, and the hordes behind them, rarely doubted the essential rightness of their kind and ways.

The feeling at times led to a high nobility, and frequently to a valor, like that of the
conquistadores
, almost beyond belief. When the Texians decided "to hold these ditches or die in them," this was not fatalism or courage born of desperation. It was the sort of combative will that more often than not carries all before it. Cortés wanted at the Amerinds. Travis wanted at the Mexicans, and so did Ford, McNelly, and Hays. The men who beat the Comanches were the ones who sought them out.

This same sense of superiority also produced self-satisfaction, chauvinism, and brutal prejudice, traits for which Texans and Spaniards became equally famed. The feelings were guileless and therefore guiltless. The Texan never doubted he was superior to the Indian, the Mexican, and Negro slave; all the other races excelled in something, but the Texan could count his superiority in obvious ways. He was able to exterminate the Indian, conquer the Mexican, and the black man was already his slave. To have expected people with an empirical cast of mind to adopt an ideology of equality was in itself beyond belief.

Another great strength of the Texan was his very empiricism. He carried few ideologies to the West. The Spanish conquest broke on the bitterly husbanded belief that the Texas Indians could be civilized, the trampling of reality under old ideas. The mission and presidio served on the Mexican plateaus; both were useless on the Comanche frontier. The Texan brought some equally useless experience with him when he entered onto the seas of grass. But he possessed a remarkable ability to see the real world, shed old baggage quickly, and change. Any useful tool, any new technique, exploded across the whole frontier. He seized the horse like any Spanish caballero, saw the superiority of repeating firearms before any tradition-bound army in the world, and, in the west of Texas, even restructured his dirt-farming society and law. The horse, the pistol, and the unwritten code of the West were not laughable in their day. They left an impress that lingers still.