The backward state of Texas

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Thu Sep 14 09:01:48 PDT 2000


Le Monde diplomatique

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September 2000

GEORGE W. BUSH DOWN HOME

The backward state of Texas

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Texas breaks all the records. It rates first for capital punishment,

second for size and population, last for public spending, and it is

nearly always behind in health care, racial equality and protection of

the environment. Two former presidents, Lyndon Johnson and George H.

Bush, come from Texas. Now it is George W. Bush's turn to run for the

White House.

by DANIEL LAZARE *

_________________________________________________________________

Most Americans, including most Texans, assume that Texas, home to

George W. Bush, gets its distinct political character from its cowboy

heritage, its wide open spaces, and its long history of violent

struggle with everyone from Mexico and the Comanche Indians to the

Civil War armies of the American North. When the Indians are on the

warpath and the nearest neighbour is miles away, a man has nothing to

fall back on except his trusty six-gun - which explains why Texans

have long prized individualism and self-reliance above all other

virtues.

Thanks to Bush, the United States presidential election is fast

turning into a referendum on Texas and all it stands for. But while

guns and geography have certainly played a part, explanations like

these tend to understate the degree to which Texas was consciously put

together during a brief period in 1875 by a group of 90 or so

lawmakers, all of them white and many of them ex-Confederate

(Southern) army officers. Over the previous half-dozen years, a

Northern-sponsored radical state government had struggled to bring

Texas into the modern world by building public schools, encouraging

industry and putting an end to some of the worst abuses of Mexicans

and blacks (1).

The results were so traumatic for Texas's large-scale landowners that,

when the North abandoned reconstruction and the state's brief

experiment with democratic reform was allowed to collapse, they seized

the first opportunity to restore the ancien régime. They decreed

racial segregation in state schools, slashed education, banned the use

of general revenues to fund black colleges, and all but dismantled the

governing apparatus that the former governor, Edmund J. Davis, had

worked so hard to create. The upshot was the deliberate reinvention of

a state whose name would become synonymous with hostility to

government, opposition to political change, and violence towards

racial minorities, workers and the poor.

This side of Texas is apparent in virtually everything the state says

and does - in its abysmal urban conditions, its class structure, its

boom-or-bust economy, and its love affair with capital punishment.

Texas, as the tourist brochures say, is a land of contrasts. What they

don't say is that many of those contrasts are the result of

deep-rooted contradictions in its political structure. Texans are

contemptuous of politics, yet they have produced some of the canniest

politicians in the country. They abound in oil and gas millionaires

who preach the gospel of free-market capitalism while milking

Washington for tax breaks and subsidies.

Texans are imbued with a can-do spirit, an irrepressible frontier

optimism, yet, thanks to chronic political disorganisation, their

history is a record of one failure after another. The battle of the

Alamo, the famous Spanish fortress in San Antonio in which 187 Texas

independistas were killed by Mexican forces in 1836, was a wholly

preventable military disaster. With unerring accuracy, the state's

white population chose the losing side in the US Civil War of 1861-65.

Then, in subsequent decades, local politicians did everything in their

power to make sure the state stayed an economic backwater by cutting

schools and all but outlawing trade unions.

Despite the discovery of oil in 1901, the state remained undeveloped

well into the 1950s. Although Texas's fortunes took flight in the

1970s when Opec forced up energy prices, it lost much of its wealth in

the savings-and-loan financial disaster of the 1980s when, relative to

the nation as a whole, its per-capita personal income fell nearly 10%.

It has a loser as governor. George W. Bush managed to go through

$4.7m, put up by family friends and wealthy Republicans, in the oil

business in the 1980s. He nearly ran two energy companies into the

ground and only turned a profit in 1990 when, on the eve of the Gulf

war, a third company in which he was involved won a lucrative

oil-exploration contract from Bahrain - helped by the fact that his

his father was president at the time. George W. Bush did well as the

owner of a professional baseball team, but only after persuading the

town of Arlington, a Houston suburb, to pick up much of the tab for a

new $191m stadium - another example of the Texas bourgeoisie's

reliance on public largesse (2).

George W. Bush did better in his bid to become governor, winning the

election in 1996 and again in 1998, and, of course, he may also do

well in his bid to become president. If he does, however, he will

merely succeed in imposing Texas's losing policies on the nation as a

whole. It's hard to think of anything the world needs less than a

right-wing Texas oil man at the helm of the sole remaining superpower,

but that may be where America's political system is now heading.

Oligarchy and frontier republic

The Texas that rose from the ashes in 1875 was very much an American

creation. In other circumstances, a land-owning class intent on

putting down ex-slaves and impoverished tenant farmers might have been

expected to monopolise political power and wield it with ruthless

force. But Texas's neo-Confederate elite did something more

complicated. Because the previous regime had tried to create a

centralised governing apparatus that would be a force for change, it

instinctively set about dismantling it.

In a special convention called to draft a new state constitution, a

group of hand-picked delegates voted to cripple the executive branch

by dividing it up into five different posts, each one separately

elected. They further fragmented executive power by dividing it up

among what are, by now, some 200 administrative boards, whose members

are chosen by the governor with the advice and consent of the Senate

and are largely unaccountable to either. The delegates also crippled

the local legislature by restricting its members to two-year terms,

and limiting their salaries and the times they could meet, so as to

ensure a high turnover of members.

On the assumption that a judge immediately dependent on the voters

would be less likely to challenge the other two branches, they then

hamstrung the judiciary by requiring that every last member be

popularly elected. As a final measure, they decided to hamstring the

electorate as well, by disenfranchising blacks en masse, and by

requiring even white voters to pay a poll tax and register in person

nearly a year prior to each election. A $1.50 poll tax may not sound

like much, but in the days when subsistence farmers rarely saw money

from one season to the next, it was enough to keep thousands of people

away from the polls.

Although often described as a return to loose forms of government that

had existed prior to the Civil War, the new system was actually worse

- more fragmented, more decentralised, less responsible to the voters

at large. Rather than a dictatorship, it was a kind of oligarchic

frontier republic that large-scale landowners had no trouble

manipulating behind the scenes.

In creating their pseudo-democracy, members of the 1875 Texas

convention were able to draw on a sizeable body of US constitutional

beliefs and structures. Although Americans like to think of themselves

as the most modern people on earth, the US constitution of 1787 was

(and is) curiously pre-modern in its elevation of what medieval

jurists described as jurisdictio (law) over gubernaculum (government).

Because law is the closest thing to a sovereign power, the law is

always right. Because it is strong, government can afford to be weak.

Indeed, since Americans have traditionally regarded their constitution

as a charter of liberties, the weaker the government, the stronger and

more undiluted those liberties will be.

Constraint on constraint

This is what Richard Coke, Texas's first governor after the Civil War,

meant when he told the state convention in 1875: "The accepted theory

of American constitutional government is that State Constitutions are

limitations upon, rather than grants of power...." (3). Even though

the US constitution already put permanent limits on the people's

ability to govern themselves, the purpose of a state constitution was

to limit it even more. Constraint was piled on constraint.

Texas's unshakeable state constitution - the state legislature

attempted to create a new one in 1975 but failed - has distorted state

politics ever since. Texas has a brand of folk conservatism that has

become the law nearly as much as driving on the right or stopping at

red lights. If the political culture of the Texas land-owning class

helped shape the Texas state constitution in the 1870s, the

constitution has, in return, served to ensure its hegemony over the

ensuing 125 years.

A rigid constitution has led to rigid politics, morality and much else

besides. In the 1890s Texas saw a brief populist revolt by

impoverished farmers, which was all too easily crushed and co-opted by

the state's Jeffersonian elite (4). Thereafter it saw a collection of

colourful politicians go trooping through the governor's mansion, each

one promising change while doing his best to preserve the status quo.

When one governor found himself impeached by the state legislature, he

arranged for his wife to run in his place so he could continue

governing from behind the throne. Another governor travelled the state

in the 1930s with his own country-and-western band, campaigning on a

platform consisting of the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, and a

promise to provide each retired citizen with a pension. (The pension,

needless to say, never came to pass.) Others made names for themselves

by railing against communism, the federal government, or literature

professors who assigned "obscene" books at the University of Texas.

While politics degenerated into little more than empty theatrics,

morality remained almost tribal. If a Comanche "enjoyed heaping live

coals on a staked-out white man's genitals," wrote T. R. Fehrenbach,

then a white Texan would, just a blithely, "bash an Indian infant's

head against a tree, or gut-shoot a 'greaser' [a Mexican-American] if

he blinked" (5). Texas probably saw more lynchings of blacks between

1900 and 1930 than other states in the deep south. Meanwhile the state

militia known as the Texas Rangers - also the name of the baseball

team that George W. Bush owned before becoming governor - conducted a

reign of terror against the state's Mexican-American population,

executing, without trial, an estimated 300 in the years 1915-19 alone.

Political impoverishment has also led to intellectual impoverishment.

According to Fehrenbach, "The Texan's ... distrust for theories [was]

profound. ... The practical outweighed the conceptual; things were

more important than ideas; education was to fit children to society,

not change them or produce inherent confusion by educating too many

students beyond their station" (6). If, traditionally, Texans "were

not antisocial but asocial", this perhaps explains the deep sexual

unease that Texas's most famous novelist, Larry McMurtry - author of

The Last Picture Show (1966), Terms of Endearment (1975), and

Lonesome Dove (1985) - argues underlies much of West Texas cowboy

culture.

Locked in the past

The Texan economy is also anchored in the past. Thanks to massive

federal investment in military installations and aerospace, Texas has

been successful since the 1980s in its efforts to diversity into

computers and other forms of high tech. Yet it remains an essentially

land-based economy. Regardless of how they make their money, wealthy

Texans consider it de rigueur to buy a few thousand acres out in the

hinterlands, put on jeans and cowboy boots, and set themselves up as

ranchers - as George W. Bush has done with 1,500 of desolate scrubland

that he recently purchased near the remote West Texas town of Crawford

(7). Wealth is not really wealth apparently, unless it takes the form

of property.

Texas's economy is also rooted in the past in terms of its social

policies. Although it ranks dead centre among the 50 states in terms

of personal income, its distribution of wealth is so lopsided that by

1998 it was among the 10 worst in terms of the portion of the

population living below the poverty level. Proportional to its

population, Texas is also in the bottom fourth in terms of such social

indicators as the number of physicians, full-time college enrolment

and infant mortality (8). Thanks to relentless budget cutting under

George W. Bush, it now ranks last in terms of state spending per

capita, an indication that the distribution of income is continuing to

worsen (9).

Because landed wealth is intrinsically anti-urban, Texas has little by

way of mass transit, multi-family housing, neighbourhood playgrounds

or other urban amenities. Because government is so undeveloped, the

people have no means with which to create effective environmental

policies. As a result, Texas is responsible for more water and air

pollution than any other American state or Canadian province. Hundreds

of ageing utilities, chemical plants and oil refineries are exempt

from pollution regulations while, thanks to rising traffic levels,

Houston, the state's petro-chemical capital, beat Los Angeles in 1998

as the city with the worst ozone levels in the US. Not that George W.

Bush seems to mind, though; one of his top environmental appointees

once testified in Washington that ozone is actually a benign substance

(10).

Texas has emerged in the late 1990s as the nation's leader in

"sprawl," a term that Americans use to describe a cancerous blight of

shopping malls, fast-food outlets, and discount stores that now covers

much of the landscape (11). Imagine a smog-shrouded, stiflingly hot

(36 degrees centigrade) city with about 20% fewer people than Paris

but spread out over an area more than 13 times greater, where there

are virtually no pedestrians or cyclists but an abundance of

traffic-clogged eight-lane highways going every which way like strands

of spaghetti - that is pretty much what Houston is like today.

Texas incarcerates more people per capita than any other state in the

nation: indeed, it has a system of law enforcement that is now the

most punitive in the industrial world. Though it only has one-tenth of

the population, it hosts a prison population that is now greater than

that of France, Germany and Italy combined. Its criminal justice

system is an uncontrolled Gulag consisting of some 250 county

sheriffs, 500-plus municipal police departments, more judges than in

the whole of Great Britain, and some two dozen state boards and

agencies, all more or less autonomous. The state legislature lacks the

constitutional authority to reorganise this hideous mess even if it

wanted to. Given the thousands of defence attorneys who also have a

stake in the status quo, serious change is unlikely.

Texas's criminal justice system is drawing international attention

because of the more than 200 prisoners executed since the 1970s.

Predictably, state officials have responded to the protests with

resentment and hurt. "I happen to think we live in a rather fine

place, and I think that Texas is being showcased by some for political

reasons as not such a fine place," declared Bush right-hand man

Lieutenant-Governor Rick Perry on the eve of the execution of Gary

Graham on 22 June. Graham, a black, protested his innocence to the

end, and the press failed to mention that he was under the age of 18.

The US is one of only six countries still to carry out the death

penalty on minors and the mentally ill - along with Iran, Nigeria,

Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

Incompetent state government not only invites criticism, it fairly

thrives on it. Rather than protecting state autonomy, the Texas state

constitution consistently undermines it by leaving the federal courts

and other US agencies (12) no choice but to step in and clean up state

abuses. Texas's consequent reliance on the federal government serves

to thrust it deep into federal politics, which is why the state has

turned into such a prolific breeding ground for national politicians

since the turn of the century - not only ex-President Lyndon Johnson

and the Bushes, father and son, but also long-time Speaker of the

House Sam Rayburn, Clinton Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen Jr., Bush

Secretary of State James Baker and numerous other Washington power

brokers.

Texas's backward political structure manifests itself in an unusually

unified ruling class. As an oligarchic republic, Texas not only allows

its wealthy residents and corporations to manipulate politics behind

the scenes, it fairly mandates that they do so to ensure their class

interests are protected. The upshot is an intense level of political

involvement on the part of the state's super-rich, most of them

reactionaries to one degree or another, who have moulded themselves

into "a formidable force that wins more often than it loses in

confrontations with ... the largely depoliticised masses" (13).

Texas's energy sector is America's very own Opec, a corporate clique

that believes that global warming is a myth, that the health risks

from smog are much exaggerated, and that it is the duty of every US

citizen to burn all the fuel he can. It is a sector that has never

seen a car, highway, or 10,000-square-foot suburban home that it

didn't like as long as it was filled with oversized refrigerators,

72-inch television sets, costly exercise machines and other

energy-consuming gadgets.

The Texan energy sector is America's own Opec, a corporate clique

believing that global warming is a myth, that the health risks from

smog are much exaggerated, and that it is the duty of every US citizen

to burn all the fuel he or she can: the clique never saw a car or a

highway it didn't like. This sector has backed George W. to the hilt -

to quote The New York Times, oil has been the essential lubricant for

his unsuccessful run for Congress, his two gubernatorial campaigns,

and his bid to become president. Bush's most important patron is the

Enron Oil Company, and at least 25 of his top donors are connected to

the oil business (14). The reasons for this support are obvious. The

son of an oil driller and a former oilman himself, George W. Bush is a

local patriot whose years at boarding school in New England, Yale

University and the Harvard Business School only served to strengthen

his loyalty to his home state. He is an enthusiastic glad-hander - as

a college student, he reportedly memorised the names of a thousand

fellow undergraduates to ensure his popularity - and he is thoroughly

at home in the deal-making world of Texas politics (15). He is also a

resolute conservative, well to the right of his father, and he exudes

a jovial, anti-intellectual manner. In Texas, ignorance rules.

Since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 the US has grown ever more

like Texas. The process has continued in the last eight years under

Clinton, with the prison population up 50%, the growing use of capital

punishment (Clinton and Gore are both supporters of the death

penalty), and an increasingly punitive war on drugs. If Bush gains the

presidency, the process will simply change pace.

_________________________________________________________________

* Journalist, author of The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is

Paralyzing Democracy (New York, Harcourt Brace, 1996).

(1) Robert A. Calvert and Arnold De Leon, The History of Texas ,

Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1990, p. 153. One historian

estimates that one black male in 100 between the ages of 15 and 49 was

killed by marauding whites between 1865 and the advent of a radical

state government in 1868.

(2) Molly Ivins & Lou Dubose, Shrub: The Short but Happy Political

Life of George W. Bush, Random House, New York, 2000, pp. 19-42. In

1998 Bush sold his share in the Texas Rangers baseball team for $15m,

acquired for $600,000 in 1989.

(3) Gary M. Halter, Government and Politics of Texas: A Comparative

View, 2nd edition, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1999, p. 21.

(4) Chandler Davidson, Race and Class in Texas Politics, Princeton

University Press, Princeton, 1990, p. 20.

(5) T.R. Fehrenbach, Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans,

Macmillan, New York, 1968.

(6) Ibid.

(7) Frank Bruni, "Bush Finds Comfort Zone In a Remote Texas Ranch,"

The New York Times, 22 July 2000.

(8) 1997-98 figure. For further information see:

http://www.census.gov/statab/www/ranks.html

(9) Louis Dubose, "The Gospels of the Rich and Poor," The Texas

Observer, 12 November 1999. The Observer's extensive coverage of the

Bush presidential campaign can be found at

http://www.texasobserver.org

(10) Molly Ivins et Louis Dubose, "Bush and the Texas Environment",

The Texas Observer, 14 April 2000.

(11) See John W. Gonzalez, "Urban sprawl in Texas fastest in the

country," The Houston Chronicle, 26 December 1999. See also Danièle

Stewart, "Do you know the way to San Jose?", Le Monde diplomatique,

English edition, July 2000.

(12) The federal government often intervenes in the States of the

Union to ensure that fundamental rules, which apply to all Americans,

are respected.

(13) Davidson, op. cit.

(14) John M. Broder, "Oil and Gas Aid Bush Bid For President," The New

York Times, 23 June 2000. Bush broke all records by accepting nearly

$100m in gifts four months before the general election.

(15) Nicholas D. Kristof, "Ally of an Older Generation Amid the Tumult

of the 60's", The New York Times, 19 June 2000.

Original text in English

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