Quote of the Day (John Steinbeck, on Texas as a Mystique)

“I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion. And this is true to the extent that people either passionately love Texas or passionately hate it and, as in other religions, few people dare to inspect it for fear of losing their bearings in mystery or paradox. But I think there will be little quarrel with my feeling that Texas is one thing. For all its enormous range of space, climate, and physical appearance, and for all the internal squabbles, contentions, and strivings, Texas has a tight cohesiveness perhaps stronger than any other section of America. Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study, and the passionate possession of all Texans.” — American novelist and Nobel Literature laureate John Steinbeck (1902-1968), Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962)

Something to keep in mind, as the nation focuses on Lone Star State debates on abortion, COVID-19 policy, and—perhaps most basic—the meaning of its history.

Song Lyric of the Day (George Strait, Anticipating the Current Texas State of Mind)

“Amarillo by morning
Up from San Antone
Everything that I've got
Is just what I've got on.” —Country music singer George Strait, “Amarillo By Morning,” written by Terry Stafford and Paul Fraser, covered by Strait and released on his LP Strait from the Heart (1982)

Just before I wrote this, I googled current weather conditions in Texas and found it was 32 degrees in San Antonio and 10 degrees in San Antonio. And that’s Fahrenheit, not Celsius.

Over the last few weeks, my neck of the woods, in northern New Jersey, has been pelted with one snowstorm after another. (Come to think of it, that’s exactly what’s happening right now.) But Texas is another matter. Nobody expected what they’re getting now, so nobody prepared for it.

So yesterday, we had front-page headlines from both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal about the deep freeze that has massively disrupted the state’s electricity grid, forcing many out of their homes in search of a warm place to stay. The mayor of Colorado City in the Lone Star State has even felt the need to resign, after constituents took serious offense to his Facebook post disclaiming the local government’s responsibility to help in the emergency, climaxing with the Darwinian suggestion that “Only the strong will survive and the weak will parish (sic)."

In the 1970s, many state drivers, disdaining speed limits as a means of energy conservation, sported the bumper sticker, “Drive 80 and freeze a Yankee.” How many ever dreamed that they themselves might freeze?

So, I guess Strait, singing the above lyric by Terry Stafford and Paul Fraser, anticipated the privation and even desperation produced by the current crisis. There’s one thing he didn’t expect, however: in this auto-centric state, the man in his song might not even be able to get on the road with all the traffic accidents. Who would ever expect the Texas Department of Transportation to issue a winter storm advisory to stay off the roads?

It is hard not to read all the news articles and social media chatter without seriously worrying about what is going on down there. So pray for Texans—very much including those on the road from “San Antone” to Amarillo.

Quote of the Day (Larry McMurtry, on Herding Words and Books)

“I grew up in a herding tradition and that's determined everything I've done. I was never good at herding cattle, but writing is a way of herding words and rare books a way of herding books, and I suspect by my constant driving around the country I'm practicing a form of trail-driving, driving whatever happens to be ahead of me, the cars and the trucks, rather than cattle.”—Texas novelist (Lonesome Dove) and rare-book seller Larry McMurtry, quoted in Joseph Berger, “Herding Words,” The New York Times, June 9, 1985

Quote of the Day (Davy Crockett, on Hell and Texas)

“Since you have chosen to elect a man with a timber toe to succeed me, you may all go to hell and I will go to Texas.”—Defeated Tennessee Congressman David Crockett, in his farewell to constituents at the Union Hotel Bar in Memphis, quoted in J. R. Edmondson, The Alamo Story: From Early History to Current Conflicts (2000)

It galled David Crockett ("Davy" to posterity) that he lost to Adam Huntsman, a one-legged lawyer supported by President Andrew Jackson and Gov. William Carroll, by less than three hundred votes. But typical of his talent for raw but effective storytelling, he turned it into a crowd-pleasing anecdote, which he duly recited to an appreciative audience upon arriving in Nacogdoches, Texas, on or about this date in 1836.

Savagely disillusioned with politics (the Whigs had hoped to run him for President), Crockett had come to Texas in the hope of turning around his life, much as another Tennessean (who unlike him, remained on good terms with Jackson), Sam Houston, had done—though he wanted instead to make his fortune as a land agent.

The ex-Congressman and frontiersman was right about a revolution being in the offing in this Mexican-held land, but he was wrong about his long-term prospects. Two months later, he fell at the Alamo and, like everyone else in that garrison, passed into legend.

I used the phrase “passed into legend” in that last sentence, but it might have been just as correct to write “became part of an endless controversy,” for the arguments involving Crockett after that became even more contentious than what had already happened back in his home state, when he became the only member of Tennessee’s Congressional delegation to vote against Jackson’s Indian Removal Act.

Did he go down fighting the overwhelming forces of Mexican dictator Santa Ana? Or was he executed after having surrendered? The latter interpretation has endured, based on the alleged eyewitness account of a Mexican officer who was there.(For an examination, pro and con, see this piece by Michael Lind in the Winter 1998 issue of The Wilson Quarterly.)

Crockett—and Alamo—partisans fiercely disclaim that any such thing occurred. Who knows when, if ever, the dispute will be resolved?

Quote of the Day (Edwin Way Teale, on Summer in Texas, 50 Years Ago)

“Many times, as we rode across the open prairies, we saw birds perching on wire fences at the exact spots where the shadows of posts cut across them. Later, in northern Texas, a government naturalist told us of coming across a line of fenceposts with a jack rabbit stretched out in the shade of each post. They all pointed outward with their backs against the upright wood, ready for an instant getaway if danger appeared. As the position of the sun slowly altered in the sky, swinging the post shadows over the ground, the animals kept shifting their places so they remained extended exactly within the narrow band of the outstretched shade.” —Naturalist Edwin Way Teale (1899-1980), Journey into Summer: A Naturalist's Record of a 19,000 Mile Journey through the North American Summer (1960)

Quote of the Day (Molly Ivins, on a Texas Congressman)

"If his IQ slips any lower, we'll have to water him twice a day."—Columnist Molly Ivins (1944-2007), in 1983, after ultraconservative Congressman Jim Collins was quoted as saying the energy crisis could be solved "if we didn't use all that gas on school busing," quoted in Michelle Green, “The Mouth of Texas,” People, December 09, 1991

Let’s see if this next Congress turns out to be the same kind of greenhouse that the last one was!

This Day in Texas History (Independence Won at San Jacinto)

April 21, 1836--For a fight whose great rallying cry was “Remember the Alamo!”, the Battle of San Jacinto did not gain anywhere near the same amount of ink--not to mention screen time, or encrusted myths--as the desperate struggle that took the lives of William Barret Travis, Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett and their small band of Texans.

But Sam Houston’s victory over the Mexican dictator Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna—an almost exact reversal reversal of the results in San Antonio six weeks earlier--was arguably more momentous than the earlier battle. It lifted Houston--who had suddenly resigned in 1829 as governor of Tennessee, in a mystery that reeked of scandal and sent him into an alcoholic tailspin and exile among Indians--higher than he had ever risen previously. Over the next two and a half decades, he would not only occupy the most important posts of the republic and state of Texas, but even be discussed plausibly as a potential Presidential candidate.

More important, the win by the norteamericanos marked the opening salvo in the trans-Mississippi region of manifest destiny--the belief that it was the mission of the United States to become, in the Jeffersonian phrase, an “empire of liberty” from sea to sea. In the deepest of ironies, the anglos who settled in Texas and claimed to be fighting for freedom introduced slavery into a region where it had been banned by the young nation of Mexico. The United States, once (mostly) content to expand by treaty or annexation, would now do so increasingly through conquest--first of Mexicans, then of Native-Americans.

In certain ways, Houston’s victory over Santa Anna can be likened to British general James Wolfe’s over France’s Louis Montcalm at the Battle of Quebec in 1759 (discussed in this prior post of mine):

* Both losing armies were surprised--the French, discovering at dawn that the British had managed to scale the seemingly impregnable cliff in the way of Quebec; the Mexicans, by an assault during their mid-afternoon siesta.

* Both losing generals committed grave mistakes bred by overconfidence: Montcalm, in believing that “We need not believe the enemy has wings!”; Santa Anna, by dividing, in the days before battle, his force, contemptuously dismissing Texans that not only had been retreating for the past month, but whose compatriots he had already defeated at the Alamo and Goliad.

* Both battles were decided within a half hour.

* Both victorious generals were wounded: Houston, in his ankle; Wolfe, three times, the last fatally in the chest.

* Both battles sharply reduced the territories under the sway of the non-Anglo losers. France lost Canada to Great Britain and would never get it back, even after it helped America win its independence. Similarly, Mexico not only lost Texas but, in a war fought a decade later over unresolved tensions from the Texas War of Independence, it would also lose what is now the American Southwest.

* Both Anglo victorious forces might, in hindsight, have wondered if the results of the battle really justified what happened. Having expended blood and fortune to secure an overseas empire, the British were astonished when their American colonists rebelled at shouldering the fiscal costs. What followed was a fratricidal conflict. Six decades later, many Southerners, emboldened by the win at San Jacinto, began to push for the expansion of slavery elsewhere--not just in Texas or even in the American Southwest, but also in Cuba, even as far south as Costa Rica and Nicaragua, both of which fought off attempts by the American filibuster William Walker to seize them by force in the hope of turning them into slave states. That insatiable desire to spread slavery proved to be the last straw for the great mass of Northerners who might not have been sympathetic to the horrifying plight of African-American slaves, but who very much feared the undermining of their own free labor by the “peculiar institution.” The result--the Civil War--was an even bloodier, more fratricidal conflict than the American Revolution.

After all this, you might regard me as a revisionist when it comes to American history--someone like historian-novelist Jeff Long, who, in his account of the Alamo, Duel of Eagles, saw San Jacinto as an atrocity story. (The Texans continued to kill the Mexicans even after the battle was over. )

But I reject the term “revisionist” for myself, and not simply because I resist labeling. History might not be entirely black and white, but neither is it a matter of moral relativism.

Texans might not have been the simple freedom fighters of legend, but their cause and methods were still better than the man who sought to crush them. Santa Anna, who liked to see himself as the “Napoleon of the West,” was in fact a pioneering caudillo, the kind of strongman who has seized and held power throughout much of Latin America for decades. He could have been the George Washington of his country, setting it on a path of stability and continuing improvement. Instead, his greed and lust for power sent Mexico hurtling back and forth, across the decades, between anarchy and dictatorship.

In contrast, Santa Anna’s opponent grew in stature and greatness over time. Houston could have had his foe put to death, the way the cruel Santa Anna had done at the Goliad Massacre and after the last few defenders of the Alamo had surrendered. He did not.

Moreover, Houston not only learned to conquer his own temptation toward alcohol, but voiced dismay to his fellow Texans about the dangers of yielding to their own temptation: expansion that inflamed relations with Native-Americans and Northerners. The history of his state and his country would have been altogether different if his advice had been heeded.

This Day in Texas History (Sam Houston in Last Campaign for Office—and the Union)

June 3, 1859—Just three months to the day after he left the Senate, rejected by the voters of the state he had helped bring into being, Sam Houston announced his intention to run for governor—throwing the entire political applecart of Texas out of whack by taking on the secessionist who’d defeated him for the office two years before.

In a sprawling state filled, then as now, with characters that yearn to fill every inch of their vast space, nobody has ever loomed larger, I would argue, than Houston—certainly not Bush I and II, and not even Lyndon B. Johnson. Houston trumped them all—in military service, charisma, faults, and, finally, passion for his state and country alike.

The odds facing Houston as he strove to re-enter public life were enormous in June 1859, and it was barely a consolation that he’d faced equally stiff challenges throughout his life: life-threatening (and unhealed) battle wounds, divorce and scandal, fall from public office, naysayers in the Texas independence movement, and alcoholism.

This time, the 66-year-old Houston—a longtime Jacksonian Democrat who, at least for a decade, had been prominently and credibly mentioned as a Presidential candidate—found himself without the backing of any political party, any newspaper, or even any organization. What he did have in his favor was the man who beat him previously, Hardin Runnels, whose lackluster record as governor included unsuccessful attempts at reopening the African slave trade and quelling Native-American unrest.

Six days after announcing his intentions, Houston made his only speech of the campaign. Hating longwinded oratory, he liked to whittle toys for his own and other children while listening to preachers or Capitol Hill politicians. But when he spoke, he made every word count—and sting, if necessary. Senator Louis Wigfall became better known as “Wigtail.” As for one unfortunate soul who he felt had betrayed him, Houston held off an angry crowd with these words: “Don’t be too hard on him. I was always fond of dogs, and he has all the virtues of a dog except his fidelity.”

Two months after throwing his hat into the ring, Houston reversed the results of his prior loss by beating Runnels by 10,000 votes. He now proceeded to take on the state political power brokers by pulling a Jacksonian move: holding his inauguration on the steps of the Capitol, where the people could see him directly, rather than at a joint session of the legislature.

Houston would tangle with secessionists throughout the next two years. As recklessly as he had once charged into the line of fire, despite an already gaping wound in the thigh, at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend (an action that quickly caught the eye of General Andrew Jackson), Houston now attempted to quell rising Confederate sentiment (albeit balancing heated attacks on secessionists with equally annoyed urgings of abolitionists to stop stirring things up with their agitation).

The nomination of Abraham Lincoln at the Republican Convention, along with scattered unsolicited votes for Houston on that occasion, gave the secessionist “fire-eaters” a field day and increasingly isolated the governor. Immediately after one of his anti-secessionist denunciations, a powderkeg blew up behind the hotel where he stayed. After an ordinance of secession was adopted, he criss-crossed the state in an unsuccessful attempt to bring the voters to their senses, warning correctly of the North’s determination to keep the Union intact and the bloodshed that would follow.

When the secessionist movement proved too strong, the aging hero of San Jacinto refused to take the oath of allegiance to the new Confederate government, but also refused to order military action against the citizens he had served for nearly 30 years. He withdrew from his office—the first official ever to be forced out of the governor’s office in two different states (he’d resigned as governor of Tennessee in 1829 when, for unexplained reasons, his marriage to a 19-year-old woman collapsed almost immediately after the marriage).

Why hasn’t some movie actor put a script into development on Houston’s life? Think of all the stage business involved with this hugely colorful politico: a man who wore a huge sombrero and Mexican blanket, even into the most formal settings of our nation’s government; whose six-foot-plus height, lean frame, helmet of white hair, and sometimes crude manners made him an unlikely amalgam of ancient Roman senator, Cherokee Indian (which, of course, he was, in adolescence and in his post-first-marriage, middle-age-crazy period) and what one observer called "a magnificent barbarian"; and a figure who contained all the promise and contradictions of a Hamlet.

Well, someone did realize his dramatic possibilities: then-Senator John F. Kennedy, who made him one of the half-dozen figures from his chamber on Capitol Hill that he profiled in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage.

But, aside from Houston’s relatively tangential part in the Alamo drama (he actually ordered the doomed fort abandoned), this amazing figure has seldom, if ever, been depicted on the big screen. When he has dramatized, it’s been on TV, in the following now-almost-forgotten fare:

* Profiles in Courage, a TV series that ran in the 1964-65 season, based on Kennedy’s bestseller, included an episode on Houston, starring J.D. Cannon as the Texan;

* The Honorable Sam Houston (1975), a TV movie starring Robert Stack ;
* Houston: The Legend of Texas (1986), starring Sam Elliott.

When is a major studio going to give Houston’s life the treatment it deserves? Or, if Hollywood won’t go that route, why doesn’t a cable TV network offer a mini-series on his life instead of a relatively short TV film? This colorful but endlessly complicated Texan deserves at least this much.