God Save Texas

by Lawrence Wright

  Nick Fowler, the younger brother of Mack Fowler, the oilman I met in Houston, operates a petrochemical plant in Odessa. Nick is a ruddy man whose strikingly white hair and moustache look like a disguise. He is what is known as a “downstream” oilman. Upstream are the people who find the oil and the money to drill. Midstream are the pipeline operators and people who move the product to refineries and to market. At the end of the stream, Nick makes a kind of plastic that is a by-product of the refining of gasoline. “We take a hydrocarbon and turn it into a polymer,” he explained, as he showed me around the plant, with its inscrutable towers and a maze of pipes and gangplanks. I remembered as a child seeing plants like this lit up at night on the flat horizon like some kind of Mad Max skyscrapers.

  Nick handed me a sample of his end product, a malleable glob, which in the trade is called a “potato,” although it more closely resembles a pregnant ravioli. “It’s a form of polypropylene used for hot-melt adhesives,” he told me. I recognized it then as the same substance I use in a hot-glue gun. When melted, the potato becomes spreadable. “The biggest use is in the assembly of non-woven materials, like in feminine hygiene products, disposable diapers, panty liners, adult incontinence,” Nick said. “Our adhesives hold the layers together. Diapers are a very complicated structure.”

  Unfortunately, on the day I visited, the plant was on the blink. As he drove me through the facility, Nick rolled down the window and stopped to talk to his three engineers. A train car was waiting to take the next shipment of polymer to market, and who knows how many fortunes were being lost, but the engineers were unfazed. Actually, they all seemed a little amused and excited. They had an interesting problem to work on. The lead engineer, J. J. DeCair, speculated about what might be wrong, possibly a water leak in a condenser. Nick drove on, praising his crew. J.J. was self-taught, “an American genius of the same ilk as Wilbur and Orville Wright.” It takes a lot of ingenuity to run a petrochemical plant. Here they were, in one of the most desolate parts of Texas, on a hundred-degree day, having a pretty great time.

  Later that afternoon, Nick drove me to the Odessa Country Club for dinner. On the highway next to a strip club there was a large lot where unused oil rigs were stored. Every Friday at noon, Baker Hughes, a giant oil-field-services company in Houston, releases a “rig count”: a measure of how many new wells are being drilled in the U.S. It is the most closely watched barometer of the drilling industry’s health. On that Friday evening in June 2016, when Nick and I went to dinner, only 421 rigs were being put to use in the U.S., less than a tenth of the 4,500 rigs that were at work in December 1981, the highest count since records began to be kept. In the lot that Fowler and I passed, there were 47 unused rigs lined up in parallel ranks. “They cost fifteen to eighteen million dollars apiece,” Nick observed. He estimated the total investment of the idle rigs to be as much as $850 million.

  We sat in the empty dining room watching a storm blow in across the flayed landscape. Golfers raced into the clubhouse as lightning lit up the giant black sky like war. The rain itself was paltry, typical of the noisy, uncharitable storms of this part of Texas.

  Through the picture window, the idle rigs on the horizon, illuminated by the blinding flashes, looked like ideal lightning attractors. There have long been dreams of harvesting the electrical power of Texas’s many lightning strikes. In 2006, a company called Alternative Energy Holdings announced its intent to create lightning farms, and it actually set up an experimental lightning-capture tower in Houston, where there are lots of electrical storms and a huge demand for power. Nothing came of it, but I was reminded of the scene in Back to the Future where Marty McFly has to capture energy from a lightning bolt on the clock tower in order to power his DeLorean back to present time.

  I asked Nick if he ever thought of leaving Odessa. “Only on mornings when the sun rises in the east,” he admitted. “When the weather’s nice, it’s delightful, although it’s still not very attractive.” On the other hand, he liked being in a place where “the people at the laundry know your name.” Mainly, he was comforted by the 210 good jobs he provided.

  Fracking saved the economy of the Permian Basin, Nick observed, but it wasn’t going to last forever. When he and Mack were boys, their parents took them on vacation to Colorado, and they stopped in Leadville, headquarters of the great silver boom in the 1880s. Leadville then sported a dozen theaters, including the grand Tabor Opera House, where Oscar Wilde and Harry Houdini performed. The lobby floor of a hotel was paved with silver dollars. After Denver, it was the largest city in the state. Only a few thousand people live there now. It’s a meager tourist stop, gateway to the gold-mining ghost towns in the mountains. At best, Nick said, the Permian Basin has another twenty-five years before it follows the same path. “Fortunes change. People move on. How can it be any different in Odessa?”

  * * *

  I REMEMBER after the great bust in the 1980s there were bumper stickers reading “Please, God, Send Me One More Oil Boom. This Time, I Promise Not to Piss It Away.” That bust lasted for nearly twenty years.

  Societies that depend on natural resources tend to have certain inherent problems. The centralization of wealth—whether from oil, coal, diamonds, or any extractable commodity—often leads to corruption and authoritarianism. Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Louisiana are primary examples. In such a society the economy rises and falls by a single measure. Where money comes out of the ground, luck and a willingness to take risks are the main factors that determine one’s future, not talent or education or hard work. Money so easily acquired comes to seem well deserved, because those who have it must be either uniquely perspicacious or divinely favored.

  In good times, a kind of forgetfulness falls over the land. It’s easy to make money when the price of oil skyrockets and building cranes loom over the cities like praying mantises and the malls are jammed and you can’t get a dinner reservation. Then the reckoning arrives.

  The central fact about boom societies is that they inevitably go bust. The collapse of oil prices, beginning in the early 1980s, then falling into an abyss in 1986, put an end to one of the most expansive periods in Texas history, bringing down the savings-and-loan industry and puncturing the real-estate bubble that had created so much illusory wealth.

  In the Age of Money, Roberta and I watched many of our friends sending their children to private schools named Saint This or Saint That. They spent their evenings going over architectural plans, and generally lived life as it is glimpsed in magazine ads. Occasionally, we made the mistake of going out to dinner with them. We spent more on the tip than Roberta and I would ordinarily spend on a meal.

  A few years into the decline, I was serving on a jury in Travis County, which includes Austin. During a recess, I walked out of the courthouse to get some air, and there was a mob of people on the steps, pushing themselves forward to grab a paper that was being handed out. I had gotten used to signs of economic distress by then. Department stores were shuttered. Vacant skyscrapers were called “see-throughs.” Out-of-state interests bought up our newspapers and banks, so that we lost control of our sources of information and finance. Now Serving Breakfast banners foretold the next restaurant about to close. One of my neighbors, an engineer who worked for the city, lost his house and moved into his Volkswagen van. But I had never seen foreclosed properties for sale on the courthouse steps.

  My father, who was a retired banker by this time, watched many of his friends and colleagues in Dallas go through bankruptcy. They had been some of the most respected people in the city, the money men who had raised Dallas fifty stories into the air. One of Daddy’s friends, Jim Toler, a jovial former college football star, was the mayor of Garland, near Dallas. At Christmas, we always got a burlap bag of pecans, inscribed Nuts to You from Jim Toler. He had made a fortune on a crazily speculative suburban condominium development along the I-30 corridor. Some of the properties were sold as many as eight times in a day, st
arting at $100,000 in the morning and winding up at a million bucks by nightfall. There was a lot of fraud involved. Savings-and-loan associations, once known as “thrifts” because they were supposed to be more cautious financial institutions, had been deregulated in the Carter administration, and they became the piggy banks for the speculators. They were making loans on properties at 110 percent of the grossly inflated values, meaning that buyers, instead of putting money down, got a cash bonus when they signed the loan. You’d walk away with thousands of dollars in your pocket. The concept spread like a virus, infecting S&Ls all over the Southwest. When the scheme collapsed, more than seven hundred financial institutions in the country were shuttered. Toler was eventually convicted on forty-one counts of conspiracy, racketeering, and bank fraud. Daddy used to visit him in prison.

  Our former governor John Connally, who had been secretary of the Treasury under President Nixon, suffered a humiliating bankruptcy auction. He sat gallantly with his wife, Nellie, over the four days it took to dispose of their luxurious possessions, including his ceremonial saddles, extensive gun collection, Persian rugs, and even a Santa Claus cookie jar. At the end, Nellie salvaged a cardboard box so that Big John could have a bedside table for his alarm clock.

  Texas was riveted by the Connallys’ plight, but they were merely the grand marshals of the bankruptcy parade, which included Denton Cooley, the great heart surgeon in Houston, who owed $100 million on his unprofitable real-estate holdings; the Hunt brothers—William Herbert, Nelson Bunker, and Lamar—who were $1.5 billion in debt, after two of them tried to corner the market in silver; and the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, Clint Murchison Jr., who died broke. Even Willie Nelson was wiped out, owing nearly $32 million in back taxes, one of the largest individual tax liabilities ever generated by the IRS. The government seized almost everything he owned, except his guitar, which he hid at his daughter’s house. That still didn’t pay the tax collector, so he made a record to pay off what he could. It was called The IRS Tapes: Who’ll Buy My Memories?

  One day in 1989, while our children were in Saturday-morning music classes in Austin, Roberta was talking to some of the other parents about real estate. We had invested in a little rent house with a friend, paying $62,500 for it only four years before. Now it was worth half that. Roberta asked one of the mothers about the house she had had for sale for months. “Well, we deeded it back to the bank,” the woman said. “It cost us a hundred thousand dollars, but at least it’s off our backs.” Then another mother asked, “Oh, how do you do that?” It turned out that every single parent in the group was thinking the same thing. They were all looking for some relief from their crushing financial burdens.

  I knew about the fall of financial titans. I had read about the sleazy dealings of some of our most prominent political figures, and the corruption and mismanagement of our financial institutions. But when the bill for these misdeeds came due, it was paid mainly through the suffering of ordinary people. For some, the downturn passed by unnoticed. That same mother who told Roberta about deeding her house back to the bank recalled that the very next day her son was picked up for a concert by a friend in a Rolls-Royce with mink-covered seats.

  I looked around at the legacy of the great oil-fueled boom of the 1970s and early 1980s that had come to such a crashing end. Where were the cultural institutions, the schools, the public art? What I saw instead were cruddy strip shopping centers, garish beach communities, the ugly sprawl of car lots and franchise chicken joints and prefab warehouses that issued out of the heart of every city and crawled along our highways like poison vines. Texas in the wake of the boom was revealed to be a civilization built on greed and impermanence, a civilization that was here to take, not to give. It was odd, because Texans were always talking about how much they loved the state, but I wondered where was the evidence of that love.

  I thought about what had brought us to this point. What was the source of the greed, the blunders, the bullheaded arrogance that had led to this monumental crack-up? It was clearly a culture that confused wealth with value, where every notable personality had to be a millionaire. Even during the downturn in the eighties, Texas Monthly published an annual review, called “The Texas 100,” of the wealthiest Texans. To strike it rich is still the Texas dream, although the state has never been rich in the way that Maryland and Connecticut and other old money Eastern states are. Even Nebraska has more millionaires per capita than Texas. And yet, when people all over the world think of Texas, they still think of big money. You can tell the oil is gushing when they start selling those oversized dollars in the airport souvenir shops.

  I considered leaving Texas then. I don’t know why I didn’t. But something important happened in the wake of that mighty crash. There was a stronger sense of community as people hunkered down. The national schadenfreude that greeted the downfall of the Texas economy was sobering. Our political and business leaders began to realize that the state couldn’t compete without strong institutions and educated people. We had to diversify. Tolerance and openness were not notable Texas qualities, but they were vital for creating a resilient society in the modern world.

  Maybe God, in His mercy, will spare Texas another oil boom.

  THREE

  Houston, We Have a Problem

  On Thanksgiving morning my friend Steve and I hopped on our bikes again to go see the new African American history monument at the Texas capitol grounds in Austin. There are two bronze wings on the monument, with a frieze depicting the evolution and struggle of black Texans. On the far left stands Esteban the Moor, a slave who had been a part of Cabeza de Vaca’s expedition. Esteban was the first black person in Texas and, according to Steve, likely the first Muslim in America. On top, there is a pair of freed slaves, one holding the torch of liberty and the other with a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation. On the day that the monument was unveiled, a small group calling themselves White Lives Matter protested the event, reminding everyone that the sentiments that led to civil war still resonate in some minds.

  Nearby, in the gateway to the capitol grounds, stands a massive Confederate shrine, topped by a statue of Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president. There is also a monument to John Bell Hood’s Texas Brigade, one of the most valiant units in Robert E. Lee’s army. Out of 4,400 men in the brigade, only 600 were still standing at the end of the war. A Confederate flag is inscribed in the shaft. Closer to the capitol building is a monument to Terry’s Texas Rangers, who were the shock troops for the Battle of Shiloh and other significant engagements. On the building itself is a plaque, which was placed there in 1959, titled the Children of the Confederacy Creed. It pledges to honor the veterans and the ideals of the Confederacy, as well as “to study and teach the truths of history (one of the most important of which is that the war between the states was not a rebellion, nor was its underlying cause to sustain slavery).” That the state would dignify such lies by placing them on the capitol is shameful.

  You can find Confederate monuments all over the state. In 2015, the University of Texas at Austin, bowing to student demands, removed a statue of Jefferson Davis from the campus, together with one of Woodrow Wilson. Then, in the middle of the night, on August 20, 2017, workers removed the remaining Confederate statues: Robert E. Lee, General Albert Sidney Johnston, and John Reagan, who served as the postmaster general for the Confederacy. James Hogg, a progressive governor, who was the son of a Confederate general, was also taken down. The empty pedestals remain.

  Steve and I both have ancestors who fought for the Confederacy. Steve’s great-grandfather was a cavalry officer in Bradford’s Regiment, assigned to guard Galveston against a federal invasion. He is thought to have been in the Second Battle of Sabine Pass, when the Yankees attempted to invade Texas in 1863. It was the most lopsided victory the Confederates enjoyed during that war. My great-grandfather on my mother’s side, Robert L. Peacock, was injured at the Battle of Chancellorsville. I have the cane a fellow invalid
carved for Sergeant Peacock while he was recovering, as well as his pardon, granted at Appomattox Court House. I keep his powder flask on my desk. On my bedroom wall, as a child, I had a portrait of General Lee on his revered gray mount, Traveller. The historical memory of the Confederacy, and the lingering legacy of racism and separatism, have always been a part of my consciousness. I went through my entire education in Texas public schools without a single black classmate. I still feel ashamed of the prejudices that I struggled to shed. As a young reporter, I covered the civil rights movement, which was, after the writing of the United States Constitution, the greatest triumph of democracy in our country’s history. I had hoped that my generation would be the last to deal with racial discrimination, but hatred is a potent addiction.