As Texas Goes... (2 page)

“He was from North Carolina,” Cahoon says, getting back to his ancestor, of whom he actually seems to be rather proud. “He was impeached by the North Carolina legislature. Gone to Texas.”

“Gone to Texas” or “GTT” was what you were supposed to write on your fence or front door when you left your old, unsuccessful life in the States and took off for a new start in what was then a section of Mexico being colonized under the leadership of Stephen Austin. Frequently, people were GTT for reasons more exciting than crop failure or debt. Cahoon delicately skipped over the fact that the ancestor in question, Robert Potter, also represented North Carolina in Congress until he was forced to resign for castrating two men he believed were being overly familiar with his wife. Later, he was expelled from the state legislature for cheating at cards. All of which suggests that perhaps we should pay more attention to the history of North Carolina. However, GTT gave Potter a new start, and he made his name as the founder of the Texas navy.

“VICTORY OR DEATH”

The center of the legend of the Alamo is the moment when the commander, William B. Travis, tells the defenders that the choice is death, flight, or surrender, then draws a line in the sand and asks everyone who is prepared to stay with him and die to step across. All but one man, the legend says, stoutly walked over the line and joined Travis in his heroic stand. (Louis “Moses” Rose, a French soldier of fortune, was the one who decided that he’d prefer to live to fight another day. Rose had served under Napoleon during the invasion of Russia and probably had had enough of doomed enterprises.)

Historians now doubt the line incident ever happened, but nothing about the Alamo is for sure. Generations of scholars have pored over every scrap of evidence as if they were the Dead Sea Scrolls. Did Sam Houston want the Alamo abandoned as a hopeless and actually pretty useless cause? (Yeah, probably.) Could the men have gotten out if they wanted to? (Ditto.) Did they really believe they were going to die, or were they still hoping for a rescue? What the hell happened to Davy Crockett? All that’s for sure is that your reaction to the Alamo story says quite a bit about your general worldview.

“The Alamo is a great monument to heroism. It’s not a great monument to intelligence,” opined James Haley, a biographer of Houston.

“They had a reason to be there. They just ran out of luck,” said Stephen Harrigan, the author of
The
Gates of the Alamo
. He added, “I don’t think they made a decision to die there. Who does that?”

“The Alamo is a blank slate,” said Jan Jarboe Russell, a San Antonio writer and biographer of Lyndon Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird. If Russell could fill in that slate herself, the Alamo would be remembered as an old Spanish mission that was “a place of community and life” rather than its later incarnation as “a symbol of Anglo males who wanted to die to be heroes.”

The Alamo’s ability to stand for different things to different people is particularly true when it comes to the story of William Travis, who became the sole commander when Jim Bowie got too sick to get out of bed. Travis was an émigré from Alabama, where he had abandoned a pregnant wife and baby son. “Most of the colonists thought he was a stuffed shirt and really full of himself,” said Haley. Whether or not Travis drew that line in the sand, he did definitely send out a letter at the beginning of the siege that became central to Texas’s sense of how one goes about standing up for one’s principles. “I have sustained a continual Bombardment & cannonade for 24 hours & have not lost a man,” he wrote in an appeal for aid. “The enemy has demanded a surrender at discretion, otherwise, the garrison are to be put to the sword, if the fort is taken –I have answered the demand with a cannon shot, & our flag still waves proudly from the walls –
I
shall never surrender or retreat.”
He signed his missive VICTORY OR DEATH.”

“I cannot read Travis’s letter and not cry,” says Karen Thompson of the DRT. “And I’ve read it a thousand times.”

So the Mexican army came, all the Americans died, and today William Travis lives on in legend. In Texas, schools are named after him, and office buildings, at least one lake, a historic fort, and the entire county where the state capital is located. His portrait is on a huge oil storage tank in Houston. George W. Bush, when he was running for president,
sent a copy of Travis’s letter
to the American Ryder Cup team, which was in danger of losing the biannual golf tournament between the United States and Europe. The Americans rallied and Justin Leonard, a team member from Texas, sank a 45-foot putt that saved the day.

Victory or death on the putting green.

Travis strikes me as an excellent example of everything you wouldn’t want in a commander, particularly if you were one of the guys being commanded. Davy Crockett should have whacked him over the head and gotten the men out of the fort. If they wanted to be heroes, there was still Houston and his army, desperate for reinforcements. I asked Thompson to put herself in the place of one of the defenders’ wives, sitting at home waiting for some help with the crops while Travis was maximizing the chances of having her husband die for the cause. “Oh, I’d have been pissed! I’d be—what are you
doing
? I’d be a very angry wife,” she admitted.

But Thompson always goes back to Travis’s side. “If you take it from the military standpoint, when Houston says ‘I don’t think that’s the spot,’ I can certainly understand that,” she said. “Except Travis wasn’t that kind of person. He’s not your ordinary person. Some people are different. They’re the leaders—the Mandelas of the world.”

William Travis and Nelson Mandela are not two people that I would personally put on the same page, but then I’m from Ohio.

The idea of the defiant Texan, standing up for principles so deeply felt that they must be defended at all costs, regardless of how sensible the battle, lives on today. In 2011, the
Houston Chronicle
referred to a state senator as “
donning the patriotic trappings
of a Patrick Henry—or maybe a William Barret Travis” while making a dramatic speech about the death of his pet piece of legislation. That was Dan Patrick, who in his non-legislative life is a radio talk show host once known for painting his face blue in honor of the Houston Oilers. The bill for which he was endorsing Alamo-levels of defiance was known as the “anti-groping bill.” It would have given Texas authorities the power to arrest any federal airport personnel who touched a passenger’s “private” areas during airplane security checks.

Victory or death at the x-ray machine.

In late December of 2011, after the US Senate came to a bipartisan agreement to extend a payroll tax cut for two months, the House Republicans unexpectedly rebelled, demanding that Speaker John Boehner fight to the (political) death on behalf of either their plan for a longer-term cut balanced by stringent spending reductions or nothing at all. The political fallout was disastrous. Everyone from Senator John McCain to the
Wall Street Journal
demanded that the Republicans in the lower chamber get with the program. In a few days, Boehner caved.

“
House Republicans felt
like they were reenacting the Alamo, with no reinforcements and our friends shooting at us,” said Texas Republican Kevin Brady, one of the House deputy whips. The issue of how many months to extend a tax cut isn’t less earthshaking than winning a golf tournament, but it was a little peculiar that Brady seemed to be comparing the Senate Republicans to the Mexican army. Brady’s office did not respond to my queries, except to send me his full statement, in which he insisted that he wanted to “fight on.”

“To the devil with your glorious history!”

Texas politics currently boasts a number of women given to that same overheated, self-dramatizing style. There is, for one, Debbie Riddle, a Republican state representative from a district outside Houston, who worried publicly about female terrorists sneaking across the border to give birth to what opponents quickly dubbed “terror babies” who would use their citizenship as a tool in the war against America. During a committee hearing Riddle once demanded: “
Where did this idea
come from that everybody deserves free education, free medical care, free whatever? It comes from Moscow, from Russia. It comes straight out of the pit of hell.”

So it’s not as if the hyperventilating is only coming from the male side of things. However, looking back over Texas history, the female sector does seem, overall, to have exhibited more practical sense. Perhaps that was because they had more to put up with—there was a famous saying that Texas was “heaven for men and dogs but hell for women and oxen.” Robert Potter, the ancestor we met earlier, broke up with his first wife after the unfortunate series of castrations. He married again in Texas, and when he died his second wife discovered that in his will he had left their home to another woman. Her memoirs were turned into a novel,
Love is a Wild Assault
.

One of the first women to play a notable role in the war for independence was
Pamela Mann
, whose oxen Sam Houston had commandeered to drag artillery in the lead-up to the Battle of San Jacinto. “She had . . . a very large knife on her saddle. She turned around to the oxen and jumpt down with the knife & cut the raw hide tug that the chane was tied with . . . nobody said a word,” reported a witness. “She jumped on her horse with whip in hand & away she went in a lope with her oxen.”

Even without Pamela’s livestock, the Texans ultimately won a decisive victory at San Jacinto, on the farm of Peggy McCormick, who demanded that the rotting corpses of the more than 600 slain Mexicans be taken away and buried.

“Madam, your land will be famed in history,” Houston declaimed proudly.

“To the devil with your glorious history! Take off your stinking Mexicans!” she snarled.

This isn’t a whole lot of evidence, but I’m working under the theory that if a woman had been in charge of the defense of the Alamo, she’d have figured out how to evacuate. This is perhaps why you see so few women with their portraits painted on the side of oil refinery tanks.

“She’s got an airport terminal”

So what we have here is a state that celebrates excess, particularly excess in the pursuit of personal independence or a personal code of justice. This can sometimes be a marvelous thing. Think of Lyndon Johnson battering through Congress with the Civil Rights Act, all the while knowing that he was destroying the power of the Democratic Party in the South. Or Sam Houston. Houston might not have wanted to waste Texan lives defending the Alamo, but he committed political suicide himself when, as a senator during the lead-up to the Civil War, he fought to keep Texas in the Union. Turned out of office, Houston paraded through Washington in a leopardskin waistcoat, telling the world that come what may, he would not change his spots.

The Texas capitol is full of his pictures and busts. “They called him the Raven,” says our guide, pointing to a portrait of Houston in the state senate chamber. “That was his warrior’s name. So. Pretty cool.”

Houston did indeed live for a long time with the Indians, taking an Indian wife and attempting to defend Indian rights throughout his career. On the other hand, he abandoned the wife. And the Indians also called him the Drunkard. A man of many parts, Sam Houston.

Pointing to another portrait and leaping ahead a century or so, the guide says, “That’s Barbara Jordan. Not only are schools named after her, she’s got an airport terminal.”

Jordan, who died in 1996, was only the third black woman to become a lawyer in all of Texas history. She was the first black state senator since the Reconstruction era, and she became nationally famous during the Watergate hearings, when, as a member of the House Judiciary Committee, she declared that despite the fact that the Founding Fathers had not included
her
people when they wrote “We the people” at the start of the Constitution, her faith in that document “is whole, it is complete, it is total. I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.”

Molly Ivins watched
the state legislators who had served in Austin with Jordan—a few of whom had privately referred to her as “that nigger bitch”—sitting mesmerized in front of the TV set. “As she lit into Richard Nixon, they cheered and hoo-rahed and pounded their beer bottles on the tables as though they were watching U. T. pound hell out of Notre Dame in the Cotton Bowl,” Ivins wrote.

By the time she became famous, Jordan was used to being the only black woman in one venue after another, so if she’s looking down on the Texas capitol, she’s probably not surprised to be the only black woman hanging on the walls. Like most state capitols, Texas’s is not replete with portraits of females of any ethnicity, although there are “Ma” Fergusons all around the place, and of course the one of Ann Richards, the second and last woman to be elected governor of Texas. Outside the building, there is a generic tribute to the women pioneers, and a little way toward downtown, on Congress Avenue, you have Angelina Eberly, the heroine of the Texas Archives War of 1842. Eberly’s moment in history occurred after Houston, still smarting over his enemies’ victory in getting the capital moved out of the city named for him, hatched a plot to reverse things. In the dark of the night, workers arrived in Austin with a wagon and began removing the state’s papers. They had not counted on Mrs. Eberly, a boardinghouse owner, who saw what was going on and ran to the town square, where she fired the cannon that was standing there. A mob gathered, retrieved the papers, and put them in the Eberly boardinghouse for safekeeping. Her statue, by the cartoonist Pat Oliphant, is seven feet tall and has the heroine of the Archives War standing by her cannon looking fierce and formidable, and actually a little bit naked around the top, ready for battle.

And that’s the traditional Texas spirit, at its best when there’s an enemy to rise up against. Outsized and brave. And frequently somewhat lunatic.