by Gail Collins
And with really big gaps between the settlements. “I can go ten minutes from now and be out on the open plain,” said Chris Steinbach, who works in Austin as Kolkhorst’s chief of staff.
Houston is so huge that the regional planners cannot find anyplace to meet that doesn’t require some of the members to drive more than 75 miles. It goes on forever. But its size feeds into the empty-place mentality because it’s not an urban bigness with everything mashed together. There’s something here, something there, but you’ll still see a large open tract of land between this shopping area and that neighborhood, between that block of houses and the apartment building . . . over there. It creates the impression that you’re just a stone’s throw from the open plains, even if you’re actually five minutes from downtown.
Houston has no zoning because—well, zoning smacks of telling people what to do with their property. In some neighborhoods, the no-zoning ethos has created a patchwork of homes and stores, backyard car repair businesses and only minimally disguised bordellos, all flung in a mash that creates a throbbing energy, particularly for passersby who do not actually have to live next to a tire recapping shop or palm reader. (A Houston planner who looked askance at Austin suburban sprawl because “they’re raping and pillaging those hills” added that his city had no sins to be forgiven because in Houston “see, over here we don’t have anything to rape and pillage.”) Of course none of the anything-goes ethos applies if people have enough money. There are deed covenants, historic preservation laws, and even tiny “gallstone cities” with their own government and rules scattered around the Houston map. In River Oaks, the swankiest of the swanky residential areas, there does not seem to be any danger of a gas station plopping itself down in the middle of the block. “I knew a guy in River Oaks who was going to attach a basketball hoop to his garage for his kids, and his neighbors sued him,” said John Mixon, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center.
“IT’S A DEVELOPER’S dream—flat, treeless prairie,” says Stephen Klineberg, a professor of sociology at Rice University. He and David Crossley, the president of Houston Tomorrow, are tooling down the city’s endless highways, past the city’s endless strip malls, heading toward the endless suburbs.
“It all starts with land speculation. Then they try to get elected officials to promise to build a road. They never want to see transit,” says Crossley, who is an ardent champion of the city’s light rail service, an extremely pleasant but still very limited 7.5-mile line of small trains connecting the city’s medical center and Reliant Stadium to downtown. It has a surprising number of city advocates, but it is far from universally popular. “Light rail is not mass transit,” sniffs former mayor Bob Lanier, a champion of the developers. “It’s little bitty transit.”
People like Crossley hate unchecked exurban growth, particularly government-enabled unchecked exurban growth. He’d like to see less investment in highways built to fulfill developers’ dreams. He figures the lack of new roads would force development inward, to fill all the many gaping holes in Houston’s central city. Klineberg, who regularly surveys the attitudes of city residents, says a substantial minority of Houstonites would like to live in a place where they could walk to the store, or even to work. But as desirable as this might seem, it’s totally contrary to the empty-place ethos. And discouraging suburban sprawl is, if not unAmerican, definitely unTexan. “Let people live where they want to live!” growls Bill Hobby, the former lieutenant governor and one of the few remaining beloved Texas Democrats.
Most people who live in other parts of the country wouldn’t love the idea of do-what-you-will development, at least not if it meant the possibility that a massage parlor would suddenly pop up next door. But Texas does have one lesson the rest of us can’t ignore. Housing there is easy to build, and therefore very cheap. “Houston’s the only place in the world that if the demand were there they could put 60,000 lots on the ground next year, mainly because there’s no red tape,” said Ronald Welch of the University of Houston.
You are probably waiting to hear the downside, and there are several. For all its energy, Houston proper is a stupendously ugly city, and many of the suburbs have a mind-numbing sameness. “If you paint your door a different color, they’ll take away your house,” claims Crossley.
But again, those are issues for Texans to deal with. If it works for them, God bless. For the rest of us, the big concern would be things like air pollution and global warming. Guess which state is the largest emitter of carbon dioxide?
“Family capital of the free world”
Texas’s empty-place ethos has deep roots, but it also very definitely has its limits in the real world. For an example, let’s take a little trip to Midland. There are few places in Texas that embrace the anti-government concept more enthusiastically than Midland, the oil patch city where George W. Bush grew up and where you can still take a tour of his childhood home and marvel that there was a time really not all that long ago when middle-class families with a handful of children got by with one very small bathroom.
Midland had fewer than 30,000 citizens then. Now it has more than 110,000, and a history of painful booms and busts. During the big oil boom of the 1970s, the entrepreneurs of the moment celebrated their hopes for the future by throwing up a ton of big, square glass office buildings that obliterated whatever there was of actual life signs in the downtown. The crash of the 1980s left those buildings vacant, and even though Midland has come back, big time, in recent years, oil industry captains have discovered that they don’t actually need to live there to run their local operations. As a result, nests for short-term occupancy—hotel rooms and apartments—are almost impossible to come by, while the big glass blocks continue to be half empty and the downtown resembles a set in one of those zombie movies where the kids emerge from a night in the basement to discover that there’s no other warm-blooded entity in sight. There is only one coffee shop in the entire Midland downtown and mayor Wes Perry is worried about its financial prospects.
“We’re struggling,” he says, unable to avoid beaming even while delivering not-great news. “We’re having meetings to say we want Midland downtown to be more vibrant. That’s the word we use. We have a lot of young people moving back. They want to have fun places to go downtown.”
Where do young Midlanders go now when they want a night of entertainment? Perry looked hopefully at a young aide, who looked back, startled.
“Church?” the aide proposed. (The churches do indeed abound. However, I’ve run into a few jaded expatriates who offered different answers, which ran along the line of “doing drugs in the basement rec room.”)
Midland may not have achieved vibrant, but it has definitely embraced the Texas vision of limited government. “I always describe Midland as an independent, family capital of the free world. We don’t look to the government for help,” said the mayor. Perry himself is a conservationist who turns off the water when he’s brushing his teeth or soaping his hair in the shower. But he’s the last person who would attempt to impose his environmental lifestyle on other Texans. When it became necessary to restrict water use during Texas’s 2011 killer drought, the mayor announced that the limits on lawn-watering and car-washing were requests, not laws or ticketing mandates. “We don’t respond really well to, ‘Okay, the government says you’ve got to do this, and by God you’re going to do it or we’re going to string you up,’ ” he told Kate Galbraith of the Texas Tribune in April of 2011.
By that summer, there were laws and tickets. The people of Midland might not have liked being told what to do, but they really hated watching their neighbors break the rationing rules and get away with it. They demanded a crackdown.
“It was really interesting,” said Perry. “That’s the way it went.”
The next time you hear a politician extolling the idea of life without rules, remember Midland. Libertarianism looks a little different when your lawn is turning brown.
“Don’t tell me what to do
wi
th my land or my cattle”
Despite the fact that it doesn’t necessarily work in the real world, the sense that every man (or, presumably, woman) should simply be let alone permeates Texas culture. “It’s the whole ‘Don’t tell me what to do with my land or my cattle’ phenomenon,” says Tom Smith, the executive director of Public Citizen Texas, who has spent over twenty years trying to convince his fellow state residents that global warming is real.
About the cattle: Texas thinks of itself as the land of the cowboy, and it is the top producer of beef in America. But even in Marfa, a small west Texas town surrounded by high desert and ranchland, the appearance of an actual spur-wearing cowboy on the streets is cause for note. “We see them in town buying feed or sometimes meeting for breakfast at Alice’s Café,” reported Tom Michael of Marfa Public Radio as he listed recent sightings. In very few parts of Texas do you experience a significant portion of cowboys per capita. Nevertheless, when Houston has its annual livestock show and rodeo, you would think that the entire metropolis was made up of cowhands—cowhands with a real affinity for fringe.
For a theoretically hard-bitten state, Texas does love the imaginary. Drive down Highway 67 in west Texas, in the high desert country between little Marfa and the border city of Presidio, and you will pass an official road sign announcing “Shafter Ghost Town.” It’s near the road sign that announces a rock shaped like an elephant and the one pointing out a ridge that looks like Abraham Lincoln’s profile. (Ridges that resemble Lincoln’s profile are pretty much like star clusters that resemble the Big Dipper. Almost anything works if you stare at it long enough.) The ghost town does indeed have an abandoned look, if you discount the big TV reception dish and a handwritten sign pointing out where to make deliveries to the Rio Grande Mining Company. Actually, Shafter is the home of a few dozen exurbanites reveling in the scenery and a functioning silver mine. But it’s the thought that counts.
You are what you will in Texas. Millions of hopeful emigrants have Gone To Texas, fantasizing about what they would make of themselves there, and some of them found it as wonderful as they had hoped. “I am rejoiced at my fate,” wrote Davy Crockett, who thought he might be able to reestablish his foundering political career in exchange for service in the settlers’ fight with Mexico. Whoops.
SO THAT’S THE first key to Texas’s outsized influence on the rest of the country: it’s the keeper of the empty-places flame. There are kindred souls all over America, who also want to be free spirits of the open range, some of them living in rather crowded places, like Miami or Las Vegas. And God bless. Really, live and let live. The problem comes when the folks yelling “States’ rights!” start to infringe on the rights of people outside their territory, or threaten the future well-being of the nation as a whole.
The empty-places worldview is part of the philosophy of the Tea Party, which makes it part of the crazy-ticked-off nature of the nation’s political debate. But it could also be a key to cooling the madness down. The great thing about seeing politics in terms of empty versus crowded is that you can appreciate the way differences arise from reasonable responses to perceived reality. You may feel the other side is wrong/living in the past/getting carried away. But it’s not necessary to think of politics as a battle between good and evil. Between the heavenly hosts and the demon spawn of Beelzebub. Between the defenders of the Founding Fathers’ dream and the tribunes of European socialism who huddle in dank basements plotting to make Americans pathetic dependents on government largesse.
You get the idea.
3
It’s My Party
“Never underestimate the situation”
Ever since the Civil War, Texas has been a passionately one-party state. Different parties, but it’s the passion that counts.
Looking at the story in the least flattering way possible, you could say that the Texas voting majority has very consistently gone wherever the African Americans are not. After Reconstruction, when the Republicans were identified as the champion of the ex-slaves, Texas became completely Democratic. After the Democrats passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the state began galloping toward the GOP. This is a familiar story in the American South, but most of modern Texas thinks of itself as part of the West. Really, it’s western. Just ask. Being a western state is part of the Texas identity, along with the Alamo and the conviction that the weather will cool off as soon as the sun goes down.
These days, Texas Republicans have both US Senate seats and twenty-three of the thirty-two seats in the House. Democrats haven’t won a statewide race since 1994, and there are many, many statewide races to be not won. If you count statewide judicial contests, Democrats have gone zero for ninety-one since 1996. The Republicans also totally control the state legislature. In the 2011 session they had a 101–49 edge in the House. Since 101 members constitute a quorum, the Texas Observer noted, “that meant the House could still function even if all the Democrats never showed up.” Which was probably what the Democrats felt like doing on many a day.
As you might expect, these switches in power did not happen calmly. In 1874, E. J. Davis, the final Reconstruction-era Republican governor, refused to leave the capitol when he lost reelection to Democrat Richard Coke. Davis holed up at his desk while his militia tried to hold off Coke’s men, who were allegedly singing “The Yellow Rose of Texas” while they stormed the building. (Let us stop here to note that the original “Yellow Rose of Texas” was a mixed-race indentured servant named Emily West, who supposedly helped the Texans win the Battle of San Jacinto by seducing the Mexican general at a crucial moment. This part of her story is somewhat iffy. However, if true, it would reinforce my theory that the practical part of the Texas colonial experience was mainly female.)
Anyhow, former governor Davis held out until it became apparent that President Grant was not going to intervene and declare the election invalid. He then gave up the armed resistance, but he still refused to hand over the office keys.
Much, much later, in 2003, when the Texas Republicans were nailing down their permanent majority by remapping the congressional districts for the second time in two years, Democratic state legislators escaped across the Oklahoma border to camp out in a Holiday Inn and deny their opponents a quorum. “We got on a bus. We didn’t know where we were going,” recalled Joaquín Castro of San Antonio, who was a freshman state representative at the time. Castro asked one of his more veteran colleagues what clothes he should take. “Oh, just some shorts and tennis shoes,” the older man shrugged. It was not, in the end, the outfit Castro would have chosen to be wearing when the bus was greeted by a mob of media on the Oklahoma end of the trip. “I learned a lesson—never underestimate the situation,” Castro said.
As a drama, the Oklahoma holdout wasn’t exactly the Yellow Rose of Texas, but the Republicans’ leader, Representative Tom DeLay, did turn some heads when he asked the Department of Homeland Security to help him search for the plane of one of the missing members.
“I woke to find I was going to be the only one”
In between the Democrats’ storming of the state capitol and their last-ditch flight to Oklahoma, Texans spent more than a century making all their real political choices in the Democratic primaries. (For most of that period, we are talking only about white voters. A 1923 Texas law, getting right to the point, said “in no event shall a Negro be eligible to participate in a Democratic primary in the State of Texas.”) The Democratic populists fought the Democratic plutocrats, the Democratic New Deal loyalists fought the Democratic Roosevelt-haters, and the Democratic liberals fought the Democratic conservatives. Mainly, the conservatives won. Meanwhile, the Republicans donated money to the national party and got invited to dinners at the White House.
Frank Cahoon, the descendant of that interesting Robert Potter—the Texas navy founder who castrated his wife’s admirers—had the bad luck to be chairman of the committee tasked with finding a Republican candidate for state representative in the oil-pumping city of Midland in 1964, the year Lynd
on Johnson was preparing to sweep to victory in the presidential race. Cahoon wound up being stuck with the job himself when his last hope dropped out on the day the nomination papers had to be filed. He won the election and became the entire Republican caucus in the 150-member house. “That was the Goldwater year,” he recalled. “I woke to find I was going to be the only one.”
Serving as the lone Republican was not as bad as you might imagine. “John Connally was the governor and he was very conservative,” Cahoon said. “A big part of the Democrats were very conservative.” The liberal Democrats treated him well, too: “They thought my uniqueness was fun.” The liberals, in fact, were pretty much in the same boat as Cahoon was, power-wise. “The conservatives were in control and the liberals had difficulty passing anything. They knew they were going to be outvoted so they thought they might as well have a good time.” This was the era of Charlie Wilson, a hard-partying lawmaker so colorful that legend has it he once tried to drive his car up a flagpole while on a toot. Wilson later went on to Congress, where the rest of us will remember him as the guy who helped get the United States involved in Afghanistan.
By Cahoon’s era, the Texas legislature had developed a tradition of bipartisanship, in which Democrats actually went so far as to appoint Republicans—when there were Republicans—to chair committees. It was nice, but not actually all that surprising. When one party is pretty confident it’s going to be running things for the foreseeable future, it tends to become rather benevolent about the hapless minority. “We made lifetime friends,” Cahoon said.
Nobody joining the Texas legislature now seems to be expecting to make lifetime friends in the opposition party. “People ask if I miss it,” said Bill Ratliff, a much-respected retired Republican state senator who once served as acting lieutenant governor. “I miss the way it was when I served. I guess I could be in the legislature now, but it wouldn’t be any fun.”
