Who really runs texas? | job training for Farmworkers | sarah weddington on ann richards

Oct05 |o 20ber | 2011 | 2012

Why Texans Don’t Vote Behind the no shows at the polls. by SAUL ELBEIN IN THIS ISSUE ON THE COVER illustration by Brian Stauffer

LEFT: Barbara Amador trains for electrical linework at Amarillo Community College. The training is part of MET, Inc.’s program to help farmworkers find more sustainable jobs. Photo by Jen Reel

20New Fields by Jen Reel Photographer Jen Reel documents a job training program in the Panhandle that gives farmworkers the skills to succeed.

No Shows Who Really Runs Texas? by Saul Elbein by Dave Mann, Patrick Michels Why so few Texans bother to vote. and Forrest Wilder Observer 08 16 The seven major donors who spend the most on, and get the most from, Texas politics. ONLINE Election Day is coming up. REGULARS 27 Big Beat 37 Novel Approach 40 the picture show Don’t forget to 01 Dialogue Why Democrats Get Faith in a In Moonrise Kingdom, vote! And follow 02 Political Latinos Right Dead-End Town Anderson Taps His our coverage Intelligence by Cindy Casares by Robert Leleux Inner-Child of the General 06 Tyrant’s Foe by Josh Rosenblatt Election at 07 Editorial 28 postcards 38 book Review www.texasobserver.org 07 Ben Sargent’s Corsicana’s ‘Killer A Populist and a 43 state of the media loon Star State Elephant’ Feminist Icon The Dallas Morning 26 state of Texas by Robyn Ross by Bill Sanderson Advertorial? by Bill Minutaglio 32 direct Quote 39 essay In Search of a Home Ann Richards’ Legacy 44 Forrest for the Trees As Told to Emily Mathis by Sarah Weddington Rivers Run Through It … For Now 34 culture by Forrest Wilder Fehrenbach’s Texas by Saul Elbein 45 Eye on Texas by Evan Prince A Journal of Free Voices since 1954

OBSERVER dialogue Volume 104, No. 10 A Winning Short Story Founding Editor Ronnie Dugger Editor Dave Mann A wonderfully evocative story (“Graduation Day,” Aug. 17, texasobserver.org) reveal- Managing Editor ing surprising attributes that would never have been suspected by most writers, and Susan Smith Richardson Publisher Piper Stege Nelson filled with telling details that make us see and feel the scene. Multimedia Editor Jen Reel Jimmie D. Davis Web Editor Jonathan McNamara p o s t e d at texasobserver . o r g staff writer Melissa del Bosque Staff Writer Forrest Wilder Staff Writer Emily DePrang The Real Radicals Abbott] not understand? How much tax money are he epublican arty is today the most radical Staff Writer Patrick Michels T r p these Republicans wasting to try to get their way? political party with its messages of violence and Jose Cazares Circulation Manager Candace Carpenter racism (“Is Julian Castro the Answer to Democrats’ p o s t e d o n fa c e b o o k . c o m CONTROLLEr Krissi Trumeter Prayers? Sept. 4, texasobserver.org). What I know about the Raza Unida Party is that it pales in com- Art Direction EmDash parison. … It was labeled radical at the time because The Best Education Copy Editor Brad Tyer never before had any people of Mexican heritage Thanks for the article concerning online educa- Poetry Editor Naomi Shihab Nye formed a political party at such a young age. … Even tion (“Randy Best Is Going to Save Texas’ Public FICTION Editor David Duhr the name they took, Chicanos, was an unknown and Universities, or Get Rich Trying,” September issue). Contributing Writers so threatening to those who had gotten used to call- It answered a number of questions I had concern- Lou Dubose, Saul Elbein, ing Mexican Americans anything they wished. ing [the University of Texas’] role—for example, Alex Hannaford, Steven G. Kellman, Robert Leleux, Bill Lily Rodulfo the politics concerning the $10,000 degree. I’m Minutaglio, Josh Rosenblatt, p o s t e d at texasobserver . o r g a retired UT professor and was one of the first Ellen Sweets, Brad Tyer, Andrew Wheat to teach online at UT circa the early 1990s. You might be interested to know that I was able to do so Contributing Photographers Supporting Sarah Lim, Alan Pogue, because I did not ask permission. I got caught when Matt Wright-Steel Women’s Rights the UT course catalog demanded that I have a time Contributing Artists Nothing affects a woman and her family more and room number listed for where folk would sit on Michael Krone, Alex Eben than her health and her money (“One Year Later, their butt for 15 weeks. DeLayne Hudspeth Meyer, Ben Sargent Cuts to Women’s Health Have Hurt More Than A u s t i n Texas Democracy Just Planned Parenthood,” Aug. 15, texasobserver. Foundation Board Lisa Blue Baron, Carlton Carl, org). We must provide ways for women to take Jen Cooper, Melissa Jones, responsibility for these areas of their lives. We must Abbott’s Jobs Susan Longley, Jim Marston, elect lawmakers who will support basic healthcare Mary Nell Mathis, Gilberto Ocañas, Ronald Rapoport, and employment rights for women. Right now Program Peter Ravella, Geoffrey Rips, you can google “Resendez petition” and support Well, the bright side is that the money isn’t going Geronimo Rodriguez, [Rene Resendez’s] request for the state to hold a to support crony capitalism and it’s increasing the Sharron Rush, Ronnie Dugger (emeritus) public hearing on its proposal to exclude Planned demand for attorneys (“If You Want to Sue Till Your Parenthood from Texas Women’s Health Program. Heart’s Content, Run for Texas Attorney General,” Our mission We will serve no group or Laury Adams Sept. 10, texasobserver.org). Heh, [Attorney party but will hew hard to p o s t e d at texasobserver . o r g General Greg Abbott] is a “jobs creator” and doing the truth as we find it and the right as we see it. We his bit to help stop the shrinking of the American are dedicated to the whole The men who caused this tragedy to a quarter of middle class. Mark Hayward truth, to human values above a million women need to pay dearly on Election Day. p o s t e d o n fa c e b o o k . c o m all interests, to the rights of humankind as the foundation Patricia Budak of democracy. We will take p o s t e d at texasobserver . o r g orders from none but our own conscience, and never will we overlook or misrepresent the truth to serve the interests of A Discriminatory Law the powerful or cater to the This voter id law discriminates period (“Twice ignoble in the human spirit. Sound Off This Week, D.C. Court Finds that Texas Law contact us 307 W. 7th St., Austin, Texas Discriminates,” Aug. 30, texasobserver.org)! What [email protected] 78701, (512) 477-0746 part of that does [Texas Attorney General Greg or comment on facebook.com/texasobserver and texasobserver.org october 2012 the te xas observer | 1 Political Intelligence

Dept. of Running for Higher Office Ag Dept. Gets Tough on Crime Texas is an urban state, and commissioner of the to do with agriculture, well, Staples claims that drug Texas Department of Agriculture has become one cartels are threatening Texas farmers and, in turn, of the more obscure statewide offices. Most Texans our food supply. don’t regularly think about boll weevil eradication In late August, the ag commissioner was the key- READ more about Staples and Treviño at or irrigation issues, especially when they’re sitting in note speaker at a narco-terrorism conference at txlo.com/stap traffic on I-10. Ag commissioner just isn’t the political Angelo State University, where he plugged the debut stepping-stone it once was. So what’s an ambitious of his 16-part video series titled “Texas Traffic—True politician who wants to run for higher office to do? Stories of Drug and Human Smuggling.” The depart- For Todd Staples, the answer is to run the ment is posting these videos on the ag department’s Department of Agriculture like he’s Chuck Norris. ProtectYourTexasBorder.com site. Each week, the Staples, a Republican who’s openly running for website features a new interview with a border resi- lieutenant governor in 2014, has made the threat of dent or law-enforcement official.

Todd Staples narco-terrorism on the Mexico border his central At the narco-terrorism conference, Staples argued Photo by Patrick michels issue. If you’re wondering what narco-terrorism has that the federal government hasn’t done enough to

2 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org Political Intelligence secure the border. Among his solutions: triple the and probably winning. TRIVIATEXAS number of “boots on the ground,” send surplus mili- The ultra-conservative think tank has become one of Texas has rarely tary equipment from Iraq and Afghanistan to the the most influential groups in Texas politics, and enjoys been a swing state border, and categorize cartel violence as “terroristic a close relationship with Gov. Rick Perry and many in presidential activity by violent transnational organizations.” Republican state leaders. The TPPF portrays itself as elections. Since “It’s time for the federal government to answer the a “non-partisan research institute” and boasts that it 1972, every call of duty and provide sufficient protection for our “does not accept government funds or contributions to Republican citizens and resources,” Staples said in written state- influence the outcomes of its research.” nominee has ment to the Observer about why he created the video Funny thing, though: TPPF’s research just so hap- captured Texas, series and the website. “Bullet holes don’t lie. The pens to line up exactly with the profit motives of its except Gerald ProtectYourTexasBorder website provides firsthand major donors. In August, the Observer obtained a list Ford, who lost accounts of the dangers along our border. Farmers and of the foundation’s funders, providing rare insight the Great State ranchers along the Rio Grande are caught in the mid- into the individuals, organizations and companies to Jimmy Carter dle of a conflict that affects every citizen of our nation. that supply the foundation’s money. (As a nonprofit, in 1976. In A threat to our food supply is a threat to our homeland TPPF, like the Observer, isn’t required to disclose its the preceding security. Texas stands ready to fight these terrorists donors.) The donors include a medley of right-wing and protect our residents, but we must have increased billionaires, conservative foundations and major cor- 100 years, the federal support to secure our borders, defeat our ene- porations. Believers in the cause of liberty, freedom Democrats mies and safeguard our national food supply.” and permanent corporate tax loopholes include: the were dominant. Lambasting the federal government for not secur- Koch brothers ($230,000), AT&T ($76,500), tobacco Between 1870— ing the border has become a tried-and-true talking companies Altria Group ($20,000) and R.J. Reynolds when Texas was point for any Republican candidate with aspirations ($5,000), private prison operator GEO Group readmitted to the for higher office. Last year, Staples commissioned an ($15,000), and State Farm Insurance ($25,000), just Union following $80,000 study by two retired U.S. Army generals that to name a few. the Civil War— called for turning Texas border counties into “sani- It’s not clear whether the foundation aligns its and 1948, only tary tactical zones” where military operations can research with its donors’ desires or the donors one Republican push back the narco-terrorists. support the TPPF because they like the research presidential Some border residents aren’t pleased with Staples’ it produces. Either way, the outcome is the same. candidate won zeal to militarize their hometowns. One of his biggest “Most think tanks work for their funders, and TPPF’s Texas. Who was it? critics, it turns out, is Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe donors are a who’s-who of Texas polluters, giant Treviño, who told The Monitor newspaper in McAllen utilities and big insurance companies,” said Craig a. Thomas Dewey that his border county last year had its second-lowest McDonald, director of the watchdog group Texans crime rate in 15 years. “To say the farmers and ranch- for Public Justice. “TPPF is thinking the way its b. Alf Landon ers have been victimized personally—other than donors want it to think.” c. Rutherford the trespassing—have been assaulted, threatened?” A TPPF spokesman declined to comment on the Hayes Treviño said. “I don’t have the statistics to support donor list, but the foundation has denied in the past d. Herbert Hoover those allegations.” that it tailors policy research to donors’ wishes. e. William McKinley “People who run into border-related trouble should In total, 129 donors poured $4.7 million into the f. Scrooge McDuck report the problem to law enforcement,” Treviño told foundation’s coffers in 2010. What did they get in The Monitor, “instead of telling Staples, who isn’t a return? For starters, TPPF explicitly advertises law-enforcement official and can’t directly tackle the access to its board members and executive director problem. And that’s why I find [it] so frustrating. And on its donation page. So-called Liberty Leaders— I don’t know, maybe Commissioner Staples is looking those who give $100,000 to $249,999—are invited to beef up his political résumé. Why else would you do to “join President or Executive Director at personal something like that?” —Melissa del Bosque one-on-one meeting to discuss Foundation’s focus and strategy.” Freedom Stewards ($250,000 or more)

are allowed to attend board meetings to “give feed-

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Donors also benefit from an endless churn of white of In the Tank papers, legislative testimony, op-eds, events and dis- percent 90 nearly Depression,

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school vouchers, toll roads, letting insurance com- Big utility companies, including Luminant, TXU to returned Democrats 1928.

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Texas Public Policy Foundation is fighting for it … in 2010. Near the top of the agenda for many Texas

october 2012 the te xas observer | 3 utilities has been convincing state regulators to lift talk oF Texas the cap on wholesale power prices, which would boost profits for the utilities. In a July op-ed, Bill Peacock, Only Mostly Dead Voter Edition who heads TPPF’s Center for Economic Freedom, even advocated that the price cap, already one of the most generous in the world, be eliminated. He railed, too, against the state’s Public Utility Commission for “Texas Demo- “spurious claims of market power abuse” and called for the agency to be handcuffed in its ability to pun- ish wrongdoers. TPPF has also rallied to the cause of the coal indus- crats blasted the try, singling out new EPA regulations that crack down on pollution from coal-fired power plants. Kathleen SEE a full list of TPPF’s Hartnett White, a TPPF energy analyst and former secretary of state donors at txlo.com/tppflist chair of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, has gone so far as to claim that “There is no environmental crisis. In fact there’s almost no major Wednesday for environmental problems [sic].” Big insurance companies, including State Farm, Farmers Insurance Group, USAA and the astroturf group Texas Coalition for Affordable Insurance generating a list of Solutions, collectively donated $105,000. For years, TPPF has pushed the Texas Legislature to strip the Texas Department of Insurance of its last vestige presumably dead of rate-regulating power, even though the depart- ment uses an insurer-friendly “file-and-use” system that allows companies to increase rates at will. In voters that con- September, State Farm jacked its rates by 20 percent, even as prosecutors are looking into allegations that the company pocketed $1 million that was supposed to go to insured victims of Hurricane Ike. tained the names of Money can’t buy everything, but if you’re in the market to support a regional think tank that unfail- ingly supports corporate profit-taking no matter the many living voters.” cost, TPPF is just the thing. —Forrest Wilder —San Antonio Express-News, Sept. 13.

Dept. of Outsourcing “Friday of last week, I got Pro-Choice a letter saying that my and Proud voting registration would be In late August, state Sen. Dan Patrick, a Houston revoked because I’m Republican, rounded up a few of the nation’s best and brightest school-choice advocates to testify before deceased, I’m dead. I was the state Senate Committee on Education. Former like, ‘Oh, no I’m not!’” Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the country’s biggest advocate —Houston high school nurse Terry Collins, as quoted by for carving off public-school money for online, pri- NPR on Sept. 16. vate and charter schools, couldn’t make it, so the job of selling the committee on expanded school choice fell to folks like Matthew Ladner, who works at “We don’t have a problem Bush’s foundation and is a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and another speaker from with zombies and dead the conservative Heartland Institute in Chicago. people voting, but we do It’s a heady time for advocates of school vouchers. In almost every session of the Texas Legislature for have a big problem with the past 20 years, someone has introduced a voucher voter participation.” bill with little success. Texas remains voucher-less, —Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins to CBS in but Patrick is vowing to change that in 2013. Dallas-Fort Worth. Ladner spent 45 minutes at the hearing talking up Florida’s McKay Scholarship Program, which provides private-school vouchers to special-needs students. He credited the program with improving test scores even among special-needs students who remained in public schools, and said it’s spurred the growth of new private schools to shoulder

4 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org new demand. After Ladner deflected a few tough James Leininger for years waged a pro-voucher cam- questions about the program, Sen. Kel Seliger of paign, bankrolling candidates for the Texas House Amarillo asked him to describe what kind of criti- and even the State Board of Education before realiz- cisms had been leveled at Florida’s voucher scheme. ing the board has no say in the matter. But Leininger Ladner paused for what felt like an excruciatingly has been less politically involved lately. His most long time. recent direct contribution was $25,000 in May to “I would invite you to Google ‘McKay Scholarship help re-elect state Rep. Sid Miller, who carried last problems’ and you could probably find people like session’s only voucher bill. that,” Ladner finally said. (Invitation accepted—the Vouchers have other salesmen now—like the first hit is a June 2011 Miami New Times feature Leininger-backed Texas Public Policy Foundation— headlined “McKay scholarship program sparks a and, crucially, a more extreme political climate to cottage industry of fraud and chaos.”) In the eight- work within. Five years ago Patrick danced on the hour hearing, none of Patrick’s invited guests offered Senate’s far-right fringe hoping for some attention; a critical take on vouchers. Some said vouchers are now he anchors a hefty tea-party contingent. But even great because they save the state money, others said tea party enthusiasm can’t change one thing: The they let special-needs kids get into the right schools. critical votes in past voucher fights have been cast by No two kids are the same, so why should the schools rural Republicans, who don’t much care for vouchers be? By the time the public had a chance to speak, the because their districts don’t have private schools. day’s message was clear: If you’ve got a problem with Seliger is an old-guard Senate Republican, and education, the answer is public money for private- like Patrick, is a top contender to chair the Senate school vouchers. Committee on Education next session. He says At the Republican National Convention the following Patrick’s maneuvering for vouchers has ensured that week, Patrick told reporters that education—specifi- the issue will get attention next session. cally, his pet notion of state funding to opt out of public “Legislatively, it’s very shrewd. Start early, and schools—is the “civil rights issue of our time,” which treat it as a priority,” Seliger told the Observer. But gives you a sense of where his head is. You could be for- the fight is going to depend on the voucher scheme’s given for thinking that civil rights are the civil rights details—how much the state will spend on how issue of our time. Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst has said that many students, and what strings are attached to the he’ll back a voucher bill next session too. money—not pure ideology. “It is going to be a longer In some ways, voucher advocates have come a long discussion than some people think.” way in the past 15 years. San Antonio mega-donor —Patrick Michels

The Texas Observer and AFF are proud to present

directed/produced by: KEITH PATTERSON Featured at the ANN RICHARDS’ TEXAS JACK LOFTON 19th Annual Austin Film Festival

OCT. October 24th, 7 p.m. 18-25 Paramount Theatre 713 Congress Avenue

ANN RICHARDS’ TEXAS chronicles the life of one of the most well-known governors of Texas. With her sharp wit, strong personality and liberal politics, Richards left her mark on the state.

photo by ave bonar ©

Festival passes are $65 and available at www.austinfilmfestival.com, 512.478.4795, or at Waterloo Records (600 North Lamar Blvd., Austin). Individual tickets to the screening of ANN RICHARDS’ TEXAS are $11 and will be available at the Paramount Theatre Box Office 20 minutes prior to screening time. october 2012 the te xas observer | 5 Tyrant’sFOE Taking on Industry In an Industry Town

hree months ago, Melanie Oldham moved from Angleton to a tiny old home in downtown Freeport, a southeast Texas town that lies in the shadows of petrochemical plants. She began filling a spare room with posters, photos, newspaper clippings, reports and books about one of the town’s most notorious polluters, Gulf Chemical & Metallurgical Corporation—a reading room for the community. Her home’s proximity to the company, and to other plants like Dow Chemical’s massive campus, also allows her to claim legal status in challenging the plant’s permits.

Not that many years ago, Oldham enjoyed a life pollution employ much of the population, Oldham Tof relative luxury. She was married to a Dow chemi- says, many residents are afraid of losing their jobs or Melanie cal engineer and lived in a spacious home. Now she being viewed as anti-industry. Although one Citizens works as a physical therapist, making enough money for Clean Air meeting about Gulf Chemical drew 200 Oldham to support her real passion: trying to force Freeport’s people, Oldham says the organization has only about Advocates for chemical companies and refineries to clean up. 20 consistently active members. big polluters to “They’ve sacrificed Freeport, Texas, for the sake A native of Missouri, Oldham moved to Texas with reduce emissions. of making money,” she says. “They’ve sacrificed the her then-husband 30 years ago. She lived in Angleton, people’s health, their lives.” about 20 miles from Freeport, until recently, when she In 2006 she created Citizens for Clean Air & Clean decided she wanted to better understand what the peo- Water in Brazoria County, and has spent the years ple of Freeport were experiencing, and solidify her role since educating the community on the links between in the fight against the companies polluting the area. industrial pollution and public health. She travels to Austin to testify before legislators Working with a handful of locals, she has made Gulf about public-health and environmental issues that Chemical her main target, a company so brazen in its affect citizens beyond the borders of Brazoria County. disregard for environmental laws and the surround- In Freeport, she often talks to the city manager, with ing community that even the Texas Commission on whom she has discussed the idea of creating a com- Environmental Quality has cracked down on it. In munity enhancement fund the city and industry could 2010, Gulf pleaded guilty to 11 felony counts of ille- both contribute to. Oldham says the fund could help gally discharging toxic wastewater into the Brazos establish a health clinic in Freeport, or an alert pro- River. The plant’s pollution-control devices, inspec- gram similar to Houston’s ozone alert system, which tors found, were literally held together with duct would inform residents when high concentrations of “They’re tape (see “Heavy Metal,” August 2012). certain chemicals are released into the air. Oldham and others in the community have pressured Oldham says she’d also like to open discussions with sacrificing local and state officials to take action, and the company leaders of Freeport’s petrochemical companies to has promised to install scrubbers and real-time pollu- lessen pollution. Dow Chemical has proven especially Freeport, Texas, tion monitors on its stacks by the end of the year. elusive, she says. In 2010, the company had the highest But sustaining a campaign against the industry has on-site releases of dioxin and dioxin-like compounds for the sake of proven difficult. Freeport is poor, and the companies are in Texas, and the fourth highest in the nation. powerful and sophisticated. “One of the biggest issues But the key to change in an industry town lies in making money.” is how to educate the community and the public on the education, Oldham says. She and her small group issues; we can’t get things in the newspaper that much,” of activists will continue to inform the community Oldham says. “The companies have great PR people and about the dangers posed by pollutants, and do what they pretty much control the media down here, so it’s they can to stop local industries from emitting them. very hard to educate people about both sides of the issue “Until people understand what’s going on, there’s and let people know that there can be a balance between going to be a relatively small amount of people speak- having jobs, but also having a quality of life.” ing up and trying to change things.” In a town where the companies causing the —Priscila Mosqueda and Forrest Wilder

6 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org editorial Texas’ Lethargic Democracy

month from election day, and of those few competitive districts, their votes will somewhere the campaign sea- have little impact on state and federal government Somewhere son is heating up. Just not in this year. Texas. While we don’t miss the The reasons for the lack of competitive races are the campaign cacophony of political advertising, complex. Heightened partisanship makes it rare the relative quiet evidences the for voters to cross party lines, no matter the quality season is state’s lack of competitive races. of the candidates. Gerrymandering has made most The presidential election will be decided elsewhere. legislative and congressional districts easy wins for heating up. TheA race to replace Kay Bailey Hutchison in the U.S. one party or the other. The ineptness of the Texas Senate is—barring a monumental upset—all but Democratic Party helps ensure GOP dominance, Just not decided. If Ted Cruz beats Democrat Paul Sadler as meaning most big races are decided in the Republican expected, he will have secured a Senate seat largely primary. There is no one cure-all for these issues, but in Texas. by winning a low-turnout primary for the Republican there is one thing we all can do to address them: vote. nomination. That would mean the 631,812 people Low voter turnout—Texas has one of the worst rates who backed Cruz in the July runoff—4.8 percent of in the nation—helps guarantee the status quo. Increased Texas’ 13 million registered voters—got to decide turnout, especially from the state’s emerging Latino who will represent the state in the U.S. Senate for the majority, would not only make statewide, and perhaps next six years. How’s that for democracy? presidential, elections competitive in Texas, but would Texans have precious little to vote for on the state also enliven legislative and congressional races now con- level, either. A handful of Texas House races are com- sidered unwinnable by one party or the other. petitive. There is one important race in the Texas The outcome of most Texas campaigns may be a Senate: Democrat Wendy Davis’ reelection bid in foregone conclusion this year, but our votes still mat- Fort Worth. In San Antonio, the congressional race ter, because voting in increased numbers is our only between Democrat Pete Gallego and Republican way out of this malaise. Otherwise, Texas’ leaders incumbent Francisco Canseco will be closely watched. will continue to be chosen by a tiny slice of the popu- But for the millions of Texans who don’t live in one lace. That’s lethargic democracy. loon star state Ben Sargent

october 2012 the te xas observer | 7 Rosa Bryant votes at the Sisterdale School House in Sisterdale in November 2008. Photo by Lisa Krantz, San Antonio Express-News/ZUMA Press 8 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org Why so few Texans bother to vote. No By Saul Elbein Shows

october 2012 the te xas observer | 9 I was sitting in a community resource center in the Houston suburb of Alief try- ing to get a glimpse of the state’s future. Alief is a mostly working-class neighborhood on the Democratic candidates. (George W. Bush was a notable western rim of the city. Twenty years ago, Alief was a exception, taking almost half of the Texas Latino vote in rural rice-farming community touted as the next big 2004.) So it’s not hard to see how Democrats can crunch suburb; today it has grown into one of the most racially these numbers and come up with some very exciting diverse areas in the state, if not the country. More than ideas. If the Latino population keeps increasing, and 70 percent of Alief’s residents are minorities. The if they keep voting Democratic, it would remake the area has a huge Latino population as well as a large national electoral map. If Texas were even competitive, Vietnamese community. Alief’s strip malls are dotted Republicans would face the prospect of trying to win with businesses advertising in Spanish, Vietnamese, the White House without the three largest states in the Thai and even Arabic. Yet Alief is represented in gov- Electoral College: California, New York and Texas. ernment, almost entirely, by white Republicans. You hear this from the top: On July 17, President This isn’t any sort of mystery. It’s simply a matter of Obama told a roomful of San Antonio Democrats, who votes and who doesn’t. Alief is situated in a state, “You’re not considered one of the battleground states, county and legislative district in which the major- although that’s going to be changing soon.” ity of people are non-Anglos. Yet at the state, county If so, Harris County should be the face of that tran- and district level, white voters, who tend to favor sition. In the last 20 years, Houston has experienced Republicans, are much more likely to vote. a rapid demographic change. In 1990, Harris County A Texans Together community worker had just had twice as many white people as Latinos. Now those handed me a chart with voting records for the area. numbers have shifted remarkably—the county is just Alief has been gerrymandered into a legislative district 33 percent Anglo and 41 percent Hispanic. Harris with a largely Anglo, mostly Republican neighborhood County today is approximately 70-percent minority. to its north. Seventy percent of the Anglos vote; just 30 But because of low minority voter turnout, Harris percent of the minorities do. County—where 7 out of 10 people are non-Anglo—is “See?” he said. “This is why we don’t get shit in Alief.” governed mostly by white Republicans, including Alief represents a paradox that lies at the heart of the county judge, county prosecutor and the entire progressive politics in Texas. If current demographic county commission. Alief is represented in the Texas trends hold, Texas in 2020 will look something like Legislature by Republican Jim Murphy. Harris County does today, and Harris County in 2020 The day I was at the community center, a non- will look something like Alief. The state’s Latino pop- profit group was giving free immunizations. Priscilla ulation is increasing dramatically. Because Latinos Swafford, or “Miss P,” a local resident and ad-hoc field tend to vote Democratic, the conventional wisdom coordinator, was running around grabbing kids and is that as the Latino population of Texas grows into a asking if they were current on their shots. I started majority, Texas will turn Democratic. asking her questions about voting, and after a couple If this were to happen, it would utterly re-shape of seconds she stopped me and said, “Just hold on national politics, so it makes sense that the national a minute.” Within three minutes, there were four media has been watching for it. Every election cycle, 30-something black women sitting around a table the media engages in a round of speculation over in one of the conference rooms, explaining how they when Texas will turn blue. For instance, in 2009, in its felt about the political system. While all of them said special issue “Lone Star Rising,” The Economist noted they planned to vote, none seemed terribly optimistic that “In 2004, Texas became one of only four states about voting’s potential effects. in America where whites are no longer in the major- “Whether you vote or not,” Miss P said, “the people ity. On recent trends, Hispanics will be the largest on top, if they don’t like how you voted, they gonna ethnic group in the state by 2015. Since they tend to give it to the other person. Our voice really doesn’t vote Democratic, this has big implications for Texas’s mean anything at the bottom. Only the people with big political make-up and for national politics.” bucks have a voice.” These stories typically rely on the same statistics: The I asked how they felt about the Democratic Party. Latino population, as a share of the total Texas popula- Did they feel like the party understood, or was address- tion, is increasing rapidly. Latinos were 31 percent of the ing, their needs? At this, there was utter derision. state’s population in 2000. By 2010, that number was up A woman named Shannon said, “When is the only to 38 percent. Texas is already majority non-Anglo, and time you see them in your community? When’s the only by 2016, according to political scientist Richard Murray time you see them out in the streets? Election time.” at the University of Houston, Latinos should pass Anglos “When they want something from you,” Miss P said. as the state’s largest ethnic group. And not long after that, “The only time you see them is when ...” Laurie Texas will be a majority-Latino state. chimed in. Latinos, historically, break about 70 percent for “Is when they want your vote.“

10 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org In August, Texans Together, a nonprofit organiz- of Latinos went to the polls. ing group that works in Alief, convened two focus In 2008, Latinos accounted for almost 40 percent groups of Alief residents unlikely to vote and grilled of the eligible voters in Texas, but cast only 12 percent them for a couple of hours about their voting habits, of the votes. In Harris County, fewer than a quarter their perceptions of the political system and their of eligible Latinos—citizens over 18 whether they’re knowledge of policy issues. registered to vote or not—decided to vote. Among Few of them planned to vote. Most felt there was working-class Latinos, turnout was in the low teens. no point. One man told the moderator that there’s no That was for a presidential election. The numbers sense in voting because “if you vote and try to push, to are even lower for statewide elections. This is the flaw put your pen out there, they’re going to put some junk in the Texas-turning-Democratic argument. In 2010, out there and change it back to what they want.” the Houston Chronicle, considering the Bill White In the focus-group transcripts, I saw a strange para- gubernatorial campaign in light of Latino population dox: the respondents were involved in politics, in that growth, asked: “Is this the year? The year that the they had issues they cared about, which they wanted state’s soon-to-be-majority minority group begins to to discuss. They were all involved in their community, exert the power and political influence reflective of its at least to the point of participating in a focus group. formidable numbers? The year that long-beleaguered But they had no faith, at all, in the integrity of the Texas Democrats climb aboard the demographic process. They talked about voting like some people express and ride out of the political wilderness?” might talk about church attendance—a noble thing to It was not the year. White and the rest of the do, certainly, but unlikely to do much practical good. Democratic slate got smashed. No Democrat has won This is the problem: We’ve been talking about voting as a statewide race in Texas since 1994, a losing streak though it’s like the weather, something that just sort of that encompasses 91 races. If Latino voters had turned Harris happens. But it’s not. And nowhere is that more evident out at anywhere near California’s rates, or even the than in Texas, which has one of the lowest voter-turn- national average, White might have had a chance. County— out rates in the nation, especially among Latinos. There In fact, if Texas Latinos participated in poli- are many reasons people don’t vote, and Republican tics at the same rates they do in other Latino-rich where 7 out leaders in Texas have enacted policies to dissuade states—California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, of 10 people people from voting and drawn district maps intended Arizona—then Texas would already be a swing state. to dilute the power of minority voters. But the central Texas has about the same percentage of Latinos as are non- problem is still apathy. California. If they had turned out at the same rates Demographics in Texas are such that, as many a as Anglos in 2008, 1.2 million more Latinos would Anglo—is media story has observed, Democratic and progressive have voted, according to Census figures. McCain beat governed candidates could be competitive right now—except Obama in Texas by 951,000 votes. that so many voters are disengaged. And they’re likely There is an unfortunate habit in a lot of politi- mostly to remain disengaged and apathetic as long as no one cal writing on this subject to treat demographic by white is talking to them about why voting matters. projections as deterministic. We talk about voting as though it’s an inevitable part of people’s lives, and Republicans. they only have to be persuaded to vote the way we They don’t pay my bills. At the end of want. But there’s nothing inherent to Latinos about the day, I’m the one who has to get up and voting Democrat, or about voting at all. In the real work and pay everything and take care of world, “voting” isn’t a thing that just happens. It isn’t my kids and stuff. They don’t know me a “demographic express” you can hop on. Real people personally, and I don’t know them. So at either decide to take off work, find their way to the the end of the day I’m not going to pay polls, stand in line and vote, or they don’t. That’s a attention to it. At the end of the day, they decision with costs and consequences—costs that fall are going to do what they want. I don’t most heavily on those in the lowest strata of society. think our vote actually counts. Latino voters in Texas are in many ways a natural —Female Latino respondent in target for progressives. In Harris County, 55 percent Texans Together focus group of Latino adults between 18 and 64 years old have no health insurance, compared to 11 percent of Anglos. Texas remains a conservative-run state with low Nearly half of adult Hispanics in Texas don’t have a taxes and beleaguered social service and education sys- high school degree, compared to 8 percent of Anglos. tems—a place that favors the wealthy even as poor and Only 11 percent of Hispanics have a college or gradu- minority populations are growing. To understand why ate degree, compared to 33 percent of Anglos. Texas is the way it is, you have to understand that we A funny thing happens when the Texans Together vote at rates dramatically below the rest of the country. focus group is asked how they feel about Obama’s Texas is consistently in the bottom five states for healthcare law. When told, “Some people say that the voter turnout. In the 2010 election, about 41 percent next election will determine whether or not we get of eligible voters turned out nationwide, according to to keep the new healthcare law or whether it will be the U.S. Census Bureau. In Texas, 32 percent did. That repealed,” they’re indifferent. Only two people say it means Rick Perry was elected to his third full term by would motivate them to vote. “I’d have to know what just 17 percent of the state’s eligible voters. was in it,” one says. Among Hispanics, these rates are even lower. The Then the moderator explains it, albeit in a slightly national Latino voting rate was close to 50 percent leading way: “One third of Harris County residents lack in 2008. But in Texas that year, just 38 percent of healthcare coverage and they won’t get it. Under the new Latinos turned out to vote. In California, 57 percent healthcare law, over 400,000 working people without october 2012 the te xas observer | 11 coverage in Harris County would be covered in 2014, For progressive organizers, this is a worrying but Texas’ refusal to participate in the program would development. ensure that citizens and hospitals in Harris County “Latinos tend to be socially conservative and eco- didn’t get their fair share of these healthcare dollars.” nomically progressive,” one Alief organizer told me. Suddenly, the response is overwhelming: 9 out of “If the Democrats aren’t offering them the policies 10 people in the room are for it. that will make their lives better, and the Republicans “The way I see it,” one woman says, “one out of are at least offering them the social issues, it makes three, that would mean three to four of us in this sense that they would vote Republican. At least they room wouldn’t get it and would die because we would get something.” couldn’t afford the medical bill, and without cover- In the future, the GOP doesn’t have to win a major- age, you basically go broke, lose everything, be in the ity of the Latino vote; it just has to win enough to keep streets and you could die.” Democratic vote totals down. As it is, Republicans It’s a graphic example of the information discon- tend to get about a third of Hispanic votes. Recent nect. It’s not that they are apathetic or opposed to anti-immigration rhetoric has pushed that down progressive policies. They just didn’t know. to around a quarter, but there’s no reason this can’t change. In 2004, George W. Bush—who speaks some Spanish, and pushed for immigration reform—took 40 “If you don’t have a job, if you don’t percent of the Hispanic vote. The Latino community have income, if you don’t have a car— isn’t monolithic. It comprises a huge range of cul- how can you get to the place to vote? tural and national identities, and for wealthier, more But at the Because some of those places to vote are established Texas Hispanics, it isn’t crazy to see the moment, so far off. It’s not in a district where you Republican appeal. can walk. So if you don’t have money to But at the moment, when unlikely voters do vote, when unlikely pay nobody to take you ... you can’t vote. they are far more likely to vote Democratic. That’s If you don’t have money to get on the bus where the short-term strategy comes in. In the short voters do ... you can’t vote.” —Shannon, Alief resident term, it is essential to Republicans that low-propen- vote, they sity Latinos not vote in serious numbers anytime Republicans are aware of what demographic shifts in soon. This, according to Mark Jones, a demographer are far more Texas could mean for them: permanent minority status. at Rice University, leaves pragmatic Republicans with But that only happens if Latinos continue voting for a delicate balance to strike. likely to vote Democrats, and if many more Latinos start voting soon. “They’re walking a tightrope between appeasing the Democratic. As it stands, Republicans have responded to demo- Anglo base without giving the Dems anything to organize graphic trends with short- and long-term strategies. around,” Jones said. “They have to make the base believe In the long-term, Republicans need to start winning they’re doing everything possible about immigration over enough Latinos to keep pace with the population without doing anything to alienate Hispanics or prag- increase. Despite their recent nativist outcry, the party matic business people. And they have to avoidgiving the has already started working on this. Steve Munisteri, Democratic population—and the Hispanic population in the state’s GOP chair, has stressed that Latino outreach general—an issue that inspires them to vote.” is central to his party’s continued success, holding You can see this Republican thread-the-needle summits and making sure Republicans have a pres- strategy in the Voter ID law, which would have ence at Hispanic conventions and conferences. Under required that every voter show a photo identification Munisteri, the GOP has been recruiting and support- to vote. Republicans said the law was necessary to ing Latino candidates with the help of the Hispanic combat voter fraud. Because most voters without IDs Republicans of Texas, a group funded and supported by are poor, and therefore more likely to vote Democratic, prominent Hispanic Republicans like George P. Bush. it was also an easy way to gain points in an election. “We’re very aware that we need a much larger major- The hard-right and nativist wings of the Republican ity of the Hispanic vote in the future if we’re going to Party—who have been pushing Voter ID for a decade— remain the majority,” Munisteri told the Observer in like it, and it doesn’t sound so overtly anti-Hispanic 2011. “We’re operating on borrowed time.” that it animates Hispanic Texans to vote. The Hispanic Republicans of Texas were big sup- “You have to fight the perception that a lot of people porters of Ted Cruz in his recent, successful U.S. [have]—including a majority of Hispanics—of ‘they Senate primary campaign against Lt. Gov. David don’t have an ID? Why not?’” Jones said. “It’s hard to Dewhurst. The press release endorsing Cruz lays out motivate regular people around Voter ID, because it’s the game plan: “As it stands today, Hispanic leaders hard to see the immediate connection between that are disproportionately under-represented as elected and civil rights. You have to go a couple steps. You have officeholders especially as Republicans. Hispanic to say, ‘Voter ID impacts those with least resources Republicans of Texas has been established to close and wealth, who will then have a hard time getting the the gap, build leadership within the Hispanic com- resources they need, and they’re disproportionately munity and support those who are ready to serve as likely to be Latino.’ … It’s a complicated argument, and elected leaders of this state.” it takes a few minutes. It’s not a ‘show us your papers’ Cruz handily beat Dewhurst. In the 2010 cycle, HRT law, where it’s easy to get people emotional.” managed to elect five new Hispanic Republicans to the In September, a federal appeals court in Texas Legislature and two more to Congress. In the Washington, D.C., ruled that Voter ID would impinge last year, two Hispanic state reps from the Democratic minority voting rights and struck down the law. The stronghold of South Texas—state Reps. Aaron Peña state can appeal the ruling, but it’s too late for Voter and J.M. Lozano—have defected to the GOP. ID to take effect before the 2012 election. Had the law

12 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org survived, Jones thinks, it might have shaved 2 to 3 per- We know what it would take to increase voter cent off the Democratic vote, which could have been turnout: daily, on-the-ground action. That’s what enough to flip some elections. progressives in other Latino-rich states—particularly Meanwhile, in redistricting the state’s legislative Colorado—did to help flip them from Republican map, Republicans factored in disengagement, and drew to Democratic. In 2000, Latinos in Colorado and districts around low-propensity Latino voters to dilute the Mountain West voted at about the same lev- minority voting strength. In the 2010 census, Texas els as Texas Latinos—around 40 percent. But since gained enough population for four new congressional 2002, wealthy Colorado progressives have been seats. Most of that growth was among Latino and black pouring money into creating a nonprofit network. residents. If Texas had relied solely on Anglo growth, One aspect of this strategy was turning out low- it wouldn’t have gained a single seat. But the map propensity voters, which they did by old-fashioned approved by state legislators generated not a single new community organizing. They set up field offices in Latino-majority district in Congress. Latino-majority neighborhoods. They paid for orga- The D.C. appeals court also struck down that redistrict- nizers to talk to local leaders, and tried to establish a “ProgressNow ing map—a week before rejecting V oter ID—after finding daily, on-the-ground presence. that it had been drawn with “discriminatory purpose” to Michael Huttner, a political strategist and the worked to prevent increasing Latino representation. The court’s founder of ProgressNow, which helped develop the build daily statement was acidic: “The only explanation Texas offers Colorado model, which has now been replicated for this pattern is ‘coincidence.’ But if this was coinci- in 23 states, told me, “The idea is that it has to be contact with dence, it was a striking one indeed. It is difficult to believe organic to the state. It has to be people from the com- people on that pure chance would lead to such results.” munity, who know the community. Every other year, As an example, the court found that state House just before the election, you get all this late money issues they District 117, just west of San Antonio, had been coming in. All these organizers from D.C. who say, redrawn so it would “elect the Anglo-preferred can- ‘Hey, I organized Iowa, I can organize Texas.’ That really cared didate yet would look like a Hispanic [opportunity] doesn’t work.” about.” district on paper.” The mapmakers did this by swap- ProgressNow worked to build daily contact with ping high-propensity voters for low-propensity voters, people on issues they really cared about. “You build a pattern they repeated across the state. a relationship during the year on mainstream, sub- Taking the testimony of the lead mapmaker, the stantive issues. Pocketbook issues. A utility provider federal appeals court ruled, “this testimony is con- hiking up home electricity bills,” Huttner said. “You cerning because it shows a deliberate, race-conscious develop a relationship based on fighting their home method to manipulate not simply the Democratic vote heating bill. Then, in the election, you’ve already seg- but, more specifically, the Hispanic vote.” mented those folks. They know what they’re in.” The state is operating under a temporary map for Colorado’s Latino turnout began to rise (it reached the November elections; a new map will have to be 50 percent by 2008, nearly double Harris County’s). drawn in the next two years. Alief, meanwhile, is in a With more Latinos voting, Democrats started winning. House district with a minority of white Republicans In 2004, an otherwise banner year for Republicans, who tend to win because of Alief’s low turnout. Colorado Democrats took both the state House Alief, though, shows a potential flaw in the and Senate for the first time since 1960. Right-wing Republican strategy: A lot of these “safe Republican Republicans took notice. Fred Barnes at the conser- seats” are majority-minority. vative The Weekly Standard did a 2008 cover story on “It’s a double-edged sword,” says Michael Li, who the “Colorado Model.” He warned Republicans that runs the Texas Redistricting blog. “If those non-voting “there’s something unique going on in Colorado that, African-Americans and Hispanics start voting, they’d if copied in other states, has the potential to produce start winning safe Republican seats. sweeping Democratic gains nationwide.” “It’s a bet they felt safe making because of low-voter Because Texas is so large, and so non-competi- turnout ratings, but if we ever get off our duff and start tive, said Mike Lux, a Democratic consultant based organizing higher voting, those seats would be emi- in D.C., national Democrats have been reluctant nently winnable.” to invest money in the state. What happened with Texas, likely, is that very early in the 2010 election- cycle—probably 2009—a bunch of DNC decision Male Respondent: If somebody over makers looked at Texas’ demographics and dismal the phone asked me to go vote, I probably voter turnout, shook their heads, and said, ‘Well, no wouldn’t have shown up. I wouldn’t have shot here.’ shown up. You’ve got to have somebody “When states are more competitive, they get more that got their hand in the community … resources,” Lux said. “They decided it wasn’t worth the investment. Female Respondent: …who has more of “Someday, a campaign will look at Texas and see your interest, who’s making a difference. that the numbers have changed enough to justify a big voter-turnout push. But right now, Texas is so big, and Male Respondent: Somebody who is has such a huge population, that that would cost too really physically out here 24/7. Wakes much money to be worth it.” up and goes to sleep in this community. This means that Texans are on their own. There [The organizer who brought us] does this are people in Houston who are working to close the and he’s serious about it. You always see gap. Texans Together, for instance. Another group him doing something in our community. trying to organize is Mi Familia Vota, a voting-rights october 2012 the te xas observer | 13 nonprofit that has been moving east from California. connection. They have noticed the change, but they Texas In Texas, the organization works mostly in haven’t connected it to their vote.” Democrats Sharpstown and the near north side of Houston, between downtown and the 610 Loop. They have 15 have canvassers trying to register and turn out about 9 I think the voting … you can vote, but percent of the city’s roughly 160,000 unregistered you need to take action. Like if you feel traditionally but eligible Latino voters. These canvassers work at that this is not happening, you should spent most community events and sit outside El Ahorro super- go out there and actually do something markets, trying to sign people up to vote. and have it happen. Because of voting? of their Carlos Duarte, an activist with Mi Familia Vota, You’re just going to vote. It’s just going money on finds that what works best is not assuming that to be another paper being pounded. people understand the issues. “You have to attach it —Female Latino respondent advertising. to something. You have to take the issues and make them concrete. Latino families tend to have a lot of Duarte’s efforts are the exception. Most people kids. So they worry about education. So we would be in Alief have never seen a progressive activist. out at community events. We would say to people, Texas Democrats have traditionally spent most ‘the Texas Legislature has cut $5 billion from pub- of their money on advertising—mailers and media— lic schools. Have you noticed a difference in your which studies have shown does not increase voter child’s school?’ turnout. When Dems tried to sweep Harris County in “And they would say, ‘Yes, I notice there are more 2008, they poured hundreds of thousands of dollars kids in classes, there are fewer programs.’ into the campaign. Most of it was spent on advertising, “And we’d say, ‘Okay, well, you can do something according to campaign filings. The Texas Democratic about this. You can register to vote.’ And they gen- Trust also funneled money to affiliated organiza- erally say, ‘Sign me up.’ Someone has to make the tions such as the First Tuesday PAC, a Democratic outfit formed in 2008 to win Harris County. As the Observer reported at the time, the First Tuesday PAC spent nearly $1 million on Democratic campaigns in 2008 in Harris County, according to state records. Only about $51,000 of that went toward field opera- Advertise now in The Texas Observer tions and voter outreach. Meanwhile, the PAC spent $775,000 on media buys. Newly elected Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Reach the perfect audience Hinojosa has promised to increase the party’s grass- for your business. roots operations. And a new nonprofit group formed after the 2010 elections, the Texas Organizing Project, has been harnessing private donations for Support The Texas Observer. community organizing and voter-turnout efforts. But the work is slow. What’s not to like? If Mike Lux is right, some day in the next decade a bunch of Democratic consultants in Washington will look at Texas’ demographics, nod at each other, and say, “Okay, it’s time.” Lux estimates that it would Contact [email protected] or 800-639-6620 take “tens of millions” of dollars to pay for the sort of Colorado-style effort that could flip the state. But at some point, he thinks, the national Democrats will decide the reward is worth the money. The question is, what will Texas look like by then? Republicans, too, are courting the Latino vote, and they’re moving fast. The Republicans don’t need to win over all—or even most—Latinos. They just have to strip off a few percentage points every election cycle. That would be enough to make it very hard for Democrats to win. If the Democrats wait too long, it may be too late. So for now, it’s essentially up to Texas progressives and their nascent organizing operations to find ways to boost turnout. They will have to send organizers to places like Alief, where few people have ever seen one. Fred Lewis, the head of Texans Together, puts it like this: “If you want people to be engaged, you have to develop social capital. You can’t just show up for an election and knock on a door of some people who think the process is broken and who have never seen anyone in their neighborhoods. Who have no idea what activism is, who have no idea what the issues are. If I’m on the couch, I’m not going to jump up and become an eager activist and voter overnight.”

14 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org T EDT ED LYLONYON TheT therial t treamial team to tu torn tu torn to

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october 2012 the te xas observer | 15 16 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org The seven major donors who spend the most on, and get the most from, Texas politics

t’s hard to overstate the power of money in Texas politics. If you’re wealthy, the state offers numerous ways to buy influence and implement policy. Texas has no limits on campaign contributions. Unrestrained spend- ing—in a state with extremely low voter turnout—means very rich people can Idonate a lot of money to influence a few voters and swing a state election. But that’s just the beginning. Rich individuals and corporations can spend unlimited cash on lobbyists, too, and use the legislative session to fete state lawmak- ers—who earn a measly $7,200 a year—with food, drinks and gifts. They can contribute to the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), a conservative think tank with close ties to Gov. Rick Perry, that’s largely funded by the corporate interests that benefit from the free- market policies it advocates. And thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, wealthy individuals and corporations can now fund third-party groups that influence elec- tions without ever disclosing their donors. Behind the scenes of many Texas political debates, there’s a wealthy individual or company feeding huge amounts of money into the system. When they get their way, as they often do, the policy they’ve purchased impacts people’s lives. Who are these donors? We’ve compiled a list of the seven individuals and companies that spend the most by Dave Mann, and get the most in Texas poli- Patrick Michels tics. During the first 18 months and of the 2012 election cycle— from January 1, 2011, to June Forrest Wilder 30, 2012—these seven donors illustration by have contributed a combined Greg Houston $10.3 million to state candi- dates, according to an analysis by the watchdog group Texans for Public Justice. There are many other powerful people in Texas, including elected officials, lobbyists and advocates. But these seven mega-donors essentially run the state. In Texas politics, money rules. october 2012 the te xas observer | 17 with$ and the power attorney who wrote the law that created the Texas Residential Construction Commission. The agency was nominally supposed to regulate the building indus- try and protect homeowners, but it did Bob nothing of the sort. Instead, it favored builders in arbitration disputes with consumers. Eventually the Legislature heard enough consumer complaints and did away with it. Though he lost his friendly state Perry agency, Bob Perry kept on writing It’s been a quiet few years for Bob checks, continuing to support the pow- Perry, relatively speaking. erful Texans for Lawsuit Reform, a ma- 7 The reclusive owner of Houston-based jor backer of tort reform. It’s become Tim Dunn Tim Dunn is out to billion Rainy Day Fund was Perry Homes has been the most prolific increasingly difficult for consumers purify the Republican left mostly unspent. and controversial GOP donor in Texas, if with faulty homes to sue or win claims Party, and he’s bankroll- The unprecedented not the nation, donating millions every against homebuilders. ing the tea party group education cuts didn’t campaign cycle. He famously helped Perry has largely avoided political Empower Texans to do it. bother Empower Texans. fund the Swift Boat attacks on John controversies in recent years, but Fronted by provocative Dunn is no fan of public Kerry in 2004. He prodded Rick Perry that doesn’t mean he’s any less activist Michael Quinn ed. A devout Christian, (no relation) and the Legislature to cre- influential. In the first 18 months of Sullivan, the group pushes he founded Midland Clas- ate a state agency in 2003 just for him. the 2012 election cycle, Bob Perry for extremely limited gov- sical Academy, which, OK, not just for him. Other homebuilders contributed more than $4.8 million to ernment and has tried to according to the school’s benefited, too. But it was Bob Perry’s Texas candidates. defeat any Republican who website, offers students strays from its orthodoxy. an “academic foundation Sullivan may be the from a Biblical worldview.” face of Empower Texans, If Dunn has his way, many The pertinent question isn’t who AT&T gives money but it’s Dunn’s money that Texas kids will soon use to, but rather who doesn’t AT&T give money to? makes the operation go. publicly funded vouchers The Dallas-based telecom giant is ubiquitous in Texas The 67-year-old Midland to attend private schools. politics. Campaign contributions? Check. More than oilman is chair of the To make that happen, AT&T $1.1 million donated to state candidates for the 2012 organization’s board and Empower Texans and Dunn election through June 30. High-powered lobbyists? For sure. The company spends provided nearly $400,000 took aim in 2012 at House nearly $10 million a year to employ more than 80 registered lobbyists, including to the Empower Texans PAC Republicans who support annual contracts ranging from $50,000 to $150,000 for high-powered lobby- since 2007—more than 40 public schools or who sup- ists and former lawmakers like Mike Toomey, Buddy Jones, Dianne Delisi, Eddie percent of its total contribu- port House Speaker Joe Cavazos and Tracy King. Corporate sponsorships? Of course. The AT&T logo, and tions, according to Texans Straus. Dunn contributed the corporate money that comes with it, backs numerous policy conferences and for Public Justice. After tea $40,000 toward defeating banquets, both parties’ state conventions, and the recent Texas Tribune Festival. party victories in 2010, Em- Straus in the May Repub- The company also donates money to lawmakers’ favorite charities. As The Dallas power Texans gained new lican primary. The speaker Morning News reported, AT&T even bought 700 copies of Rick Perry’s book Fed prominence. Pressure from retained his seat, but five Up! to give to attendees at a 2010 Washington luncheon. Sullivan (and the threat House committee chairs Still, we don’t know exactly how much money AT&T spends to influence public of Dunn’s money) helped lost their primaries, thanks policy in Texas, since the company also donates corporate money to nonprofits, push the Texas Legislature largely to Dunn’s efforts. think tanks and third-party groups that don’t have to disclose their donors. For in- significantly rightward in Dunn’s crusade against stance, the Observer has learned that AT&T donated $76,500 to the TPPF in 2010. 2011, contributing to deep the speaker—and against What we do know is that in the tangled world of telecom policy, AT&T nearly budget cuts, especially for public schools—will always gets its way. Think about that next time you look at your phone bill. public schools, while the $9 surely continue.

18 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org quarter billion dollars in Pitcock is the sole share- Pitcock keeps a low 2012. The company built holder in Texas’ biggest profile, but he has good Williams Brothers Baytown’s Fred Hartman road-building enterprise, friends in Austin, too. Bridge, the overpass- and he rewards his allies. In 2007, he loaned his rich U.S. 59 Gateway in Harris County Judge private jet to Gov. Perry Construction Houston, and big pieces Ed Emmett is a particu- for a trip to Israel that Thousands of years sibly straight causeways of the President George larly close friend, and the prompted the forma- with and from now, what will across the swamps—may Bush Turnpike around Fort recipient of more than tion of the Texas-Israel endure of Rick Perry’s be our most enduring Worth. $100,000 in campaign Chamber of Commerce. reign as governor? When achievement. So who are the Wil- money from Pitcock. As of 2010, he’d given the remnants of refineries When that day comes, liams Brothers? Look past In 2010, the Houston $400,000 to Perry’s have rusted to dust, and we can thank Williams brothers J.K. and C.K. Chronicle reported that campaigns, and Pitcock the radiation from West Brothers Construction Williams, each of whom Williams Brothers had was the second-biggest Texas’s buried waste be- for the monuments. The has sold his share of the been awarded more than benefactor of the Super the power gins to subside, our mon- Houston-based firm is company they founded $182 million in toll-road PAC Americans for Rick strous highway network— Texas’ biggest recipient in 1955 to third partner contracts from Harris Perry during the beguiling shamrocks high of highway contracts, James Douglass Pitcock. County during Emmett’s governor’s doomed above the plains, impos- earning just under a Today, 84-year-old Doug three years in office. presidential run.

said, is “the most dangerous American alive … because he would eliminate free enterprise in this country.” That’s a hilarious thing to say for a guy who spent State a fortune on lobbyists and campaign contributions to Harold get the Texas Legislature to privatize radioactive waste disposal in Texas. Then he talked Andrews County, where the dump is located, into financing construction Farm of the dump for him. He employs the former executive Like a good neigh- Simmons director of Texas’ environmental agency, which ap- bor who can raise your D Magazine once dubbed him “Dallas’ Most Evil proved the dump, as a lobbyist. One of the dump’s top insurance bill whenever it Genius,” but that might be selling Harold Simmons short. customers is the federal government, which is paying wants—according to ab- Not content with funding the swiftboating of John Kerry for the cleanup of a Fernald, Ohio, uranium-enrichment struse financial models you’ll in 2004, Simmons was the No. 2 donor to secretive anti- plant owned by one of Simmons’ companies. Ulti- never get to see, with little Obama Super PACs. On advice from Karl Rove, no less, mately, Simmons could reap billions in revenue from accountability from regula- the 81-year-old pumped more than $15 million into con- the project. With all that loot, perhaps he can afford to tors—State Farm is there, servative PACs. Simmons told The Wall Street Journal that add to the collection of 17,000 tulips that surround the more or less running the his goal was to defeat “that socialist, Obama.” Obama, he lake at his Dallas home. show. It’s not the only player in the Texas insurance mar- ket, but it is the biggest. campaign accounts each “This is not your typical election cycle—especially $840,000 in Texas political action com- market. You can’t easily to favored candidates mittees and politicians. compare, and you have no like Republican (and Energy Future That kind of largesse can come in option to opt out,” says Alex State Farm agent) Wayne handy. When the EPA proposed rules Winslow of the consumer- Faircloth, who’s trying to to crack down on pollution from coal- advocacy group Texas unseat Galveston Demo- Holdings/TXU fired power plants, the state’s political Watch. So you’d expect cratic state Rep. Craig Energy Future Holdings, the par- establishment took up EFH’s cause. The the regulators at the Texas Eiland this year. It’s no ent company that contains TXU Energy, company claimed that it would have to Department of Insurance to accident that in their day Luminant and Oncor, may be stumbling shut down two of its coal plants if it were keep State Farm and other jobs, more than one-tenth under a mountain of debt acquired in an required to reduce pollution blowing into big players on a pretty short of Texas’ legislators are ill-fated private equity buyout in 2007, other states. The EPA rule was struck leash. You’d be wrong. The insurance agents. but the utility is still the King Kong of the down in court but—guess what?—the department has little power Just how comfortable is state’s power companies. utility will idle the plants anyway. to reduce rates. State Farm in Texas? On In Texas, private electricity utilities EFH has also been a prominent cheer- At the Legislature, the the same day the Travis occupy a strange space: They function leader for lifting a cap on wholesale power misleadingly named Texas County District Attorney’s within an almost fully deregulated prices and creating a secondary market Coalition for Affordable office announced a major market, but still have to play politics in which the state would essentially pay Insurance Solutions investigation into State with regulators and politicians who companies to build new power plants. represents the combined Farm for systematically worry about rates and keeping the If EFH does file for bankruptcy, which interests of industry mam- avoiding payouts for roof lights on. Dallas-based EFH throws its many analysts consider inevitable, we can moths like State Farm, damage from Hurricane Ike, weight around quite effectively. Since thank our legislators. In 2007, TXU and its Farmers and Allstate. the company announced a the beginning of 2011, EFH and its Wall buyout partners spent $6 million on an State Farm’s PAC spreads statewide home insurance Street owners have invested more than army of 86 lobbyists to help seal the deal. tens of thousands around rate hike of 20 percent.

october 2012 the te xas observer | 19 New Fields

20 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org A job training program prepares farmworkers for the modern economy New Fields photos by Jen Reel

hen bill clinton spoke a more sustainable industry than farming in Texas. at the 2012 Democratic Most of the estimated 300,000 farmworkers National Convention, he along the Texas-Mexico border live in desperate quoted a statistic that most poverty. They earn little money, and lack benefits people were probably sur- and affordable housing. The work can be danger- prised to hear—in a climate ous; they use heavy machinery and toil in fields ofW high unemployment, more than three million jobs sprayed with pesticides. Drought makes jobs remain unfilled in America. The reason? Most appli- unstable. The lifestyle of a migrant family often cants don’t have the required skills to fill these jobs. conflicts with school and creates high dropout In an election year, we hear a lot of political rhetoric rates for the children, who often end up working about job creation, but how do we create a pool of along side their family to help make ends meet. It’s skilled workers to fill the jobs that currently exist? a lifestyle few people can endure. Irene Favila understands this problem. Favila Favila has since partnered with Amarillo works for the nonprofit Motivation Education & Community College where I spent two days Training, Inc. (MET, Inc.). The organization has observing former farmworkers learning how to received funding from the U.S. Department of Labor work with electrical lines. Since this issue’s pub- to help farmworkers find better jobs in the modern lication, all nine of Favila’s clients have received economy. After reading about expanding wind farms certification and are currently employed con- in West Texas, Favila thought the growing green structing electrical steel towers that will transport Irene Favila of MET, Inc. economy could supply jobs for her clients if they had energy into the grid. The former farmworkers are hands out business cards to farmworkers in a sorghum the proper tools. To Favila, wind energy seemed like earning $22-$25 per hour plus benefits. field outside Plainview.

october 2012 the te xas observer | 21 Counterclockwise from left: Barbara Amador, the first female to attend the program, feeds her 1-year-old in the early morning hours before class. Barbara and her husband Jorge will spend 12 weeks living in America’s Best Value Inn, a hotel that has provided a discount for MET’s clients.; Barbara heads to class after dropping her son off at day care; Terry Tucker, second from right, leads instruction at Amarillo Community College while students wait their turn at the controls of the bucket truck; Barbara begins her ascent of a utility pole.

22 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org october 2012 the te xas observer | 23 24 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org Clockwise from left: A wind farm near Amarillo Community College; Instructor Terry Tucker administers a SEE a slideshow of more test on electrical theory; Barbara draws the proper wire images from the Electric Power connections on a utility pole; The end of a long day. Workers class at txlo.com/MET

october 2012 the te xas observer | 25 State of texaS: the Cuts to Public education By Dave Mann Texas kids recenTly reTurned To school to find even fewer state dollars being spent on their education. Texas isn’t alone in this regard, and it’s not the most miserly on education spending. A new report from the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows the huge drop in Kindergarten-through-12 education spending across the country. Thirty-five states reduced per-student spending between fiscal year 2008 and 2013. Arizona had the deepest cuts. Texas’ reductions ranked 14th. Texas’ education system already wasn’t performing well, at least judged by average SAT scores.

decrease in per-sTudenT spending as percenTage of budgeT 2008-2013

1. Arizona: 21.8% 2. Alabama: 21.7%

3. Oklahoma: 20.3% 4. Idaho: 19% 15. Texas: 11.2%

Top average saT scores 2011 (combined math, writing and reading; max 2,400) q Illinois: 1,807 w Iowa: 1,777 e Wisconsin: 1,767 r Missouri: 1,764 t Michigan: 1,761

lowesT average saT scores 2011 4^ Florida: 1,447 4& Texas: 1,446 4* Georgia: 1,445 4( South Carolina: 1,436 5) Maine: 1,391

26 | the= teapproximatelyxas obser 50ver source: center on Budget andwww Policy.te Priorities;xasobser collegever Board.org ILLusTrATIoN BY JoANNA WoJTKoWIAK cindycasares big beat Why Democrats Get Latinos Right hen san antonio mayor Julian castro spoke at the Democratic National Convention in September, he received varying amounts of criticism from the right. After all, by his own admission, he “doesn’t really speak Spanish.” Republicans snickered and bragged that their If the Latino, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, speaks perfect English and Spanish. Sadly, they have Republican no idea how much that typifies their lack of rel- Party wants to evance to the vast majority of Latino voters. attract Latino WOf course, beneath the superficial fluency of a few is the perception among Mexican-Americans that carefully chosen candidates, the Republican Party is Cubans, as a group, have not suffered in the United voters, it has woefully out of step with the Hispanic community. States the way other Latinos have. Arizona Republicans’ ban on Latino studies classes From the Cuban Refugee Adjustment Act of 1966, no choice screams that message loud and clear. In the long run, which allowed all Cuban exiles to apply for U.S. citi- the language issue is more indicative of a lack of mar- zenship, to the ridiculous “wet feet, dry feet” rule of but to stop keting savvy that will bite them in the collective ass. 1995 that says, “If we don’t catch you in the water, It’s no secret that voters tend to vote for the can- you’re in,” Cubans have been set up to succeed in scapegoating didate they believe represents them most closely. A this country while other Latinos, and Mexicans in cursory look at the 2010 U.S. Census will tell you that particular, have been scapegoated and set up to fail. Mexicans. Mexican-Americans far outnumber Hispanics of any This perception—whether factually accurate or other origin in this country. In fact, Mexicans are not—combined with the image of an overtly bigoted the largest Hispanic group nationwide, and the larg- Republican Party, is a political recipe for disaster. est Hispanic group in all but 10 states. Additionally, Ask average Hispanic voters whether they want to according to the Pew Hispanic Center, 51 percent of vote for a Mexican-American who doesn’t speak much all Latinos born in the U.S. are now English-dominant, Spanish, or a Cuban-American who speaks perfect and native-born Hispanics outnumber their foreign- Spanish but belongs to the party that criminalized born counterparts roughly 32 million to 19 million. Chicano studies and passed the “show us your papers” Those two facts are already translating (no pun) into an law and built a wall between the U.S. and Mexico and impact on Hispanic media. Spanish-language networks wants to make English the official language of the Univision and Telemundo are, for the first time, plan- United States. You’ll quickly see how superficial the ning bilingual content for the fall 2012 season, including fluency issue is. Univision’s “Meet the Candidate” presidential forum, “The Cubans have never been one of us,” retired which will air in English and Spanish on television and Albuquerque educator and community activist online. Univision is also launching an English-language Moises Venegas told the Associated Press in a recent cable network targeted at Latinos and an English- article comparing Julian Castro with Marco Rubio. language website. In short, speaking so-so Spanish is Venegas is Mexican-American. “They came from no obstacle to reaching the country’s fastest-growing affluent backgrounds and have a different perspec- group of Latinos. Those who are less tied to their ances- tive,” he said of Cuban-Americans. “The Republican tral homelands and more comfortable in English, like Party also has opened doors just for them.” Castro, are the rule instead of the anomaly. That Rubio didn’t come from a privileged back- One could argue that Rubio, a second-generation ground, and that his parents arrived in the United States Cuban-American, falls into the same category, and in 1956, well before the Cuban Refugee Adjustment Act, he does, but here’s the Latino marketing problem doesn’t matter. In marketing, perception is reality. If the with Marco Rubio that trumps his Spanish fluency: Republican Party wants to attract Latino voters, it has He’s Cuban-American. Since the 1960s, Cubans have no choice but to stop scapegoating Mexicans. Because, been the beneficiaries of a huge immigration double like it or not, a little enclave of Cubans in Florida is not standard in this country and, for that reason, there going to win over 40 other states. october 2012 the te xas observer | 27 corsicana postcards

Corsicana’s ‘Killer Elephant’ by Robyn Ross

hen the al g. barnes capable,” the Corsicana Daily Sun explained on Oct. 10. Circus came to town on Oct. The circus parade went right through down- 12, 1929, Corsicana was in town, where thousands of people lined the streets. the last days of an oil boom H.D. “Curley” Prickett was leading one of the larg- that had started at the turn est elephants, Black Diamond, though he wasn’t the of the century. Railroads elephant’s regular trainer. Prickett had handled Black and an electric light-rail Diamond for seven years before leaving the circus to service from Dallas had connected the town with the work for Eva Speed Donohoo, a prominent landowner restW of the world, and the population had peaked at in nearby Kerens and a former society editor for The more than today’s 25,000 residents. Houston Post. For old times’ sake, he’d secured per- The circus was also waning as a central institution mission to walk Black Diamond through Corsicana. in American life. Radio and film had begun to usurp The elephant, also called Tusko and Congo, had its role in popular culture. But on this day in 1929, already killed three people, a fact not everyone knew. cotton farmers, merchants and oilfield workers from To prevent a fourth attack, circus trainers had sawed miles around still wanted to see the circus—and the his tusks short and fastened an iron bar across them Black Diamond, a circus elephant, was elephant herd in particular. to restrict his trunk’s range. Chains and shackles fur- executed after killing a “Elephants, the most sagacious of all animals, are ther curtailed his movements, and female elephants woman in Corsicana. Photo COURTESY regular life savers with the circus, where they are chained on either side were intended to prevent him thecircusblog.com called upon to do all kinds of odd jobs of which they are from bolting.

28 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org When Prickett and Black Diamond reached the after Donohoo’s death in his 1955 mem- spot where Donohoo stood between two parked cars, oir Elephant Tramp. Lewis was part of they stopped for a moment. Some say Donohoo asked the Barnes circus crew in Corsicana. While the show to pet the elephant. A moment later, Black Diamond went on, with two scheduled performances drawing The headstone for Eva Speed Donohoo tossed Prickett over a car, breaking his wrist. Using record crowds, some spectators were disappointed who was killed by what remained of his tusks, he knocked Donohoo they didn’t get to see the “killer elephant.” Black Diamond. Photo courtesy to the ground and dragged her from between the Black Diamond was confined in his boxcar, guarded city of corsicana cars, smashing them with his weight. Bystanders by two showmen. Lewis writes that an angry throng attempted to wrestle the woman away from the ele- had followed the elephant back to the car, “threat- phant, but Black Diamond continued his attack until ening that Diamond would never leave Corsicana circus hands tightened the chains that connected him alive.” Late in the afternoon, a “self-appointed exe- “Prickett went to the other elephants. Donohoo was rushed to a local cutioner” with a .45-caliber pistol tried to get into clinic, where she was pronounced dead. the car but was fought off by the trainers. A group of in the air, and About half a block away, 5-year-old Carmack residents followed the circus to the next cities on its Watkins was perched on his father’s shoulders to tour, demanding the elephant’s execution. [the elephant] get a good view of the parade. “People were holler- Popular lore holds that Donohoo had hired ing and cranking their Model T’s [to escape]. Some Prickett away from the circus in the presence of went up to of them had come in horses and wagons, and horses Black Diamond, and the sight of the woman who’d were rearing up and havoc was everywhere,” he stolen his beloved trainer provoked a jealous rage. that woman, recalls in a recent interview. “The last thing I saw Prickett himself, interviewed in the hospital, sug- was Prickett went in the air, and [the elephant] went gested that Black Diamond had been jealous. and we up to that woman, and we moved out.” But Lewis writes that Prickett hadn’t been with the circus for a year or two at the time of the attack, moved out.” Black Diamond was likely in a state of “must,” and that his authority over Black Diamond was gone. an annual period of hormone-induced irritability “Reporters said Diamond had been overjoyed and aggression in male elephants. But the Daily Sun to see his old trainer, and became jealous of Mrs. explained things in more dramatic language. The Donohoe [sic] when she talked to Curley [Prickett]. sagacity of elephants, celebrated in an article just two That was pure fiction,” he writes. days earlier, had been replaced with bloodlust: “‘Black In his assessment, the elephant’s intended victim Diamond,’ the killer elephant, lay trussed in his death was his headstrong former trainer, Prickett, who asked cell today, his little eyes aglow with a jungle lust to kill to lead the elephant through downtown Corsicana and his heavy chains a clanking badge of shame…” simply to show off. Donohoo just got in the way. Other headlines described Black Diamond as a “mad elephant” or “enraged brute.” Some Corsicanans Within a day of Donohoo’s death, John Ringling, demanded his death. who owned the Barnes circus, had sent his verdict: The rhetoric of lynching was often applied to “Kill Diamond in some humane way.” But how? rogue elephants, says Janet Davis, an associate The circus could take its cue from other elephant professor of American studies and history at the executions, most famously those of Topsy, in 1903, University of Texas at Austin who studies circuses and Mary, in 1916. Topsy, a Coney Island elephant and the animal-welfare movement. In her 2002 who killed an abusive handler, was electrocuted as book The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the part of a stunt by Thomas Edison. Mary, who had American Big Top, Davis suggests that elephant exe- killed a circus hand in rural Tennessee, was hanged cutions reveal a conflation between black men and from a railroad crane. Davis has found evidence of elephants in the minds of onlookers. additional executions in Ohio, New Hampshire, Phrases like the Daily Sun’s “jungle lust” are “weird Pennsylvania, New York, Maine and Rhode Island. but very specific references to anxieties in this racially Black Diamond’s handlers entertained several volatile society, in this period of Jim Crow America,” solutions, including poison. They rejected Corpus Davis says. “The ways people write about elephants, Christi’s offer to drown the elephant by tying 30 tons males especially, with ‘unbridled must,’ unbridled of lead to his feet and dragging him into the turn- sexuality, is a kind of mythology that accompanied ing basin with tugboats. They considered enlisting the justification for lynching one reads about. fellow circus elephants as his executioners: a chain “It’s very much a testament to the ways in which would be wrapped around his neck, and three ani- racism in America is so deeply embedded in daily mals would walk in different directions, strangling life and popular entertainment.” him. Ultimately, they decided to use a firing squad. The lynching metaphor corresponds to elephant On Oct. 16, spectators lined the route of Black trainer George “Slim” Lewis’ description of events Diamond’s last march to a pasture a couple of miles october 2012 the te xas observer | 29 outside Kenedy, southeast of San Antonio. While to his collection. Watkins assigned one of his employees circus performers wept, the executioners chained to find out where the elephant was buried, and perhaps the elephant to a block and fired between 50 and 170 buy the land and dig up the bones. The man came back rounds—accounts vary—until he fell. with better news: Black Diamond’s taxidermy-pre- Onlookers rushed to collect relics from the mas- served head and his skull were stored in the basement While circus sive body. A taxidermist and the Houston zookeeper of the Houston Museum of Natural Science. With help arranged for the head to be transferred to the Houston from Navarro College faculty, Watkins negotiated to performers Museum of Natural Science. The local undertaker, a have the pieces “assigned” to his personal museum, and member of the firing squad, made a foot into a stool had the head restored. Now school groups, tourists and wept, the that’s now displayed in the Karnes County Museum even former circus performers come to see it. near Kenedy. A butcher sold strips of the hide for a The Trophy Room, a quarter of the length of a foot- executioners dime apiece. A local who watched the execution ended ball field, is a cross between a natural history museum up with some of the elephant’s bones. and a man cave. A printed guide lists 240 specimens, chained the Less than two weeks later, the stock market crashed, but the room holds more than that. The heads of deer, marking the beginning of the Great Depression. moose, cape buffalo and a rhinoceros adorn the walls. elephant to Ringling, who had gone into debt buying several shows, A lion, tiger and cougar–each wearing a saddle–are including Barnes’, was forced to give up his circuses. frozen midstride. A polar bear and brown bear, both a block and In a 1975 article for The National Humane Review, standing upright, look across the room at an ostrich former trainer Lewis wrote that the deaths of and a longhorn. Watkins estimates he’s responsible fired between Donohoo and Black Diamond were a turning point for about half the trophies himself; the rest were pro- for male, or bull, elephants, whose must was often cured by family and friends. 50 and 170 misunderstood as a permanent temperamental flaw. Black Diamond’s head is mounted at the back of the Circuses began disposing of their male elephants, room, against a mural of Mount Kilimanjaro (he was rounds. sending them to zoos or killing them outright. an Asian elephant, but Watkins has hunted in East Africa). The elephant’s glass eyes, fringed by feathery They say elephants never forget. Neither lashes, watch over a collection of gifts from visitors: did Carmack Watkins. A lifelong Corsicana resident, an elephant-hair bracelet, an ice bucket made of a Watkins founded an eponymous oil and gas pipeline hollowed-out elephant trunk, a Model T truck axle construction company in 1954. His success supported that was used to stake Black Diamond to the ground, his avocation as a big-game hunter, and the Trophy brought by a visitor whose father worked for the cir- Room, his personal museum, at company headquar- cus. The offerings from so many pilgrims turn this ters in Corsicana is filled with his taxidermic zoo. corner of the room into something like a shrine. In the mid-’90s he decided that Black Diamond, or In contrast to the solemn presence of the head, the whatever remained, would be an appropriate addition skull nearby on the ground has the empty sockets

30 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org and prehistoric appearance of a paleontology exhibit. prints a walking tour of the historic downtown, sub- Watkins gives a forensic analysis of the skull’s sawed- titled “Roughnecks and wild elephants.” The site of Circuses off tusks: The groove made by the iron bar that held Black Diamond’s rampage, near the intersection of 1st down his trunk is clearly visible. The worn spot on Avenue and 13th Street, warrants a paragraph: began the right tusk came from the elephant sleeping on his “… imagine a sunny October 1929 autumn day with side in the boxcar. the excitement and activity of the Al G. Barnes Circus disposing of Watkins thinks the elephant’s behavior in coming to town. This was the date and the setting Corsicana was the inevitable result of his captivity. for the tragic death of spectator Eva Speed Donohoo, their male “He was not in his right environment. In a boxcar attacked by an enraged circus elephant as he bolted day and night, cold and hot, with no water, chained— from the parade.” elephants, that’s not any way to treat an elephant.” It’s hard to imagine the parade filling these streets, now It’s hard for him to explain exactly why he is drawn dominated by the beige, windowless Navarro County sending them to the animal he calls “Ol’ Black Diamond.” Jail. The scene of Donohoo’s death today is occupied by “I saw it happen when I was little, and it impressed my a school administration building. On the opposite side to zoos or mind so much,” Watkins says. “Sometimes I’d see a write- of the road are A-1 Auto Rental and Budget Bail Bonds, up in the Dallas paper about it, and I’d read it twice. whose sign reads: “You want out? Just give us a shout.” killing them “A lot of people ask about Black Diamond and want Downtown Corsicana has a dusty charm, though to know the history, especially from somebody that it has suffered as business migrates to the highways outright. was there that day. I’m about the only one left, I guess.” at the edge of town. Two-story buildings, some deco- He gestures for me to sit on an elephant-foot stool rated with murals or vintage signs, line the brick while he plays a CD someone sent him. streets. Law offices and furniture sellers are -inter spersed with storefront churches and empty windows. My name is Black Diamond; the circus can’t tame me A coffee shop and longtime diner have recently closed. And three men who tried to are dead Just outside downtown is the rambling Oakwood Now they’ve cut my tusks short, and put a metal bar on Cemetery, where Donohoo is buried. Her simple So I can’t reach my trunk to my head… headstone includes this statement: “Killed by Al G. Barnes circus elephant.” It’s “Black Diamond’s Song,” by Austin songwriter No grave exists for Black Diamond, though he Al Evans. has a permanent resting place in circus history and In addition to Evans’ ballad, Curtis Eller sings “The Corsicana lore. Execution of Black Diamond,” though he’s changed Freelance writer Robyn Ross lives in Austin. some of the names. Mary the elephant’s hanging is the subject of three different plays, including Elephant’s Graveyard, by George Brant, a Michener Fellow at UT. Topsy’s electrocution has been incorporated into poems, plays, indie rock songs and movies. THE NEW MOVEMENT &

In August 1931, the Corsicana Daily Sun ran an OBS ERVER opinion piece in response to a national magazine story about the elephant’s death. The editorial, titled “The present ‘Murder’ of Black Diamond,” defends locals from accu- sations that their mob mentality killed the animal: A spirited night “The question arises: Who ‘murdered’ Black of comedy and, Diamond? It is no mystery. well, spırits. Black Diamond was the victim of the great god Free Publicity…” Join us on October 25th at 5p .m.! New Movement Theater 616 Lavaca St. 78701 The circus cashed in to the tune of at least a mil- lion dollars worth of free publicity—space that could not be bought with money—by the execution of the big elephant.” The writer may have had a point, Davis says. The circus delayed killing Black Diamond for four days, citing danger from the elephant’s continued “jun- gle madness.” In that time, the show—sans Black Diamond—performed to crowds in Bay City, Corpus Christi and Kenedy. “The execution of an elephant is a way to show that the circus cares about community order,” Davis says. “More cynically, of course, [circus] shows also cared about maintaining spectacle at any cost, so killing an elephant was a way to retain that.” Today, the tragedy is an official part of the city’s tour- ist literature. The Corsicana Chamber of Commerce october 2012 the te xas observer | 31 32 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org direct quote In Search of a Home As Told to Emily Mathis

itty Parish lost her job at a medical billing company in early 2011. A few months later she became homeless. She stayed with friends and family for six months before resorting to the streets. This spring, she moved into the Salvation Army shelter in Austin. Parish, 60, now considers the shelter her home.

K“Most women that are homeless are know, I don’t want to go live with them … not here because they choose to be. They don’t like it that I’m homeless, but Every woman has a different circum- just like I told them, they’re trying to get stance … physical abuse, mental abuse, their lives together, and you don’t want financial situations—I mean, there’s Mom living with you. I don’t want to be a whole realm of reasons that women a burden to my kids. are homeless. “I’m actively looking for work. I’m “Where you stay and the people that trying to get a job so I can get my own you meet—you have to be extremely place and move on. But the problem is careful. I mean, you can’t just go sit my age. I’ll be 61 in December. under a bush all night. You’ve got to find “I just look at it like, I’m here for a someplace safe. And if you’re not of the reason. God put me in this situation homeless community, or you don’t know for a reason. I don’t know what it is yet, about the homeless community—like I but I’m here because He wants me to didn’t know anything about the homeless be here right now, here at this particu- community—and you come down here, lar time. And I’m going to trust Him to where are you going to stay, what are you get me out of it. going to do? So you just walk around all “I don’t even contact friends any- night and look for a safe bench to sit on more because I am embarrassed. They until daylight comes. It’s really scary. I don’t know the scope of the situation. always tried to stay at the mall as late as I That was another life—they were very could, or at the bus station, or anywhere affluent people. They live in that world that was lit, you know, a public place. where ‘it just can’t happen to me’. And “You can only extend your visit with it can happen, it did happen. But I family and friends so long. It’s different don’t want them to know where I am. when you have no job, you have no car. “[When you’re on the street] you You can’t do anything and you’re living don’t eat right, you can’t sleep—you with someone, but you’re in their way. No know, when you do sleep it’s just naps matter how much you try to help or work here and there. I can’t tell anyone how with them, you’re in their way. Basically grateful I am that the Salvation Army you’re invading their private home. So is here, because I honestly don’t know you can stay there for a little while but what would have happened to me had you can’t stay there forever … My kids I not gotten a bed in this shelter. That’s are here, but they’re on their own and just the long and short of it. Because I’m photo by Patrick Michels they have families of their own and, you not cut out to be out on the street.” october 2012 the te xas observer | 33 culture

Fehrenbach’s Texas by Saul Elbein

hen i met t.R. Fehrenbach, the fam- ous Texas historian, I found an old man given to gloomy pro- nouncements about mortality wearing a camel hair sport coat that seemed almost to swal- lowW him. His eyes were clear, and as I set up my camera, he assessed me with the bemused calm of a man who is talking to you because he has nothing better to do. At 87, Fehrenbach is probably the greatest liv- ing Texas historian, a former head of the state Historical Commission and one of a select group of cultural figures with a reserved plot in the Texas State Cemetery. (The cemetery is typically desig- nated for legislators.) His 1968 book Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans was the first general history of Texas since J. Frank Dobie’s time in the 1920s. It’s stupendously popular among a certain generation of Texans; my grandmother had a copy. Photo by JenniferCaption Whitney tk Photo by TK

34 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org I first read the book at age 15. For me, a transplant with his fellows, would bash an Indian infant’s head to Texas, it laid out the state’s past in all its brilliance against a tree, or gut-shoot a ‘greaser’ if he blinked.” Before and brutality. I finished the book and felt a sudden understanding: ‘Ah. This is where I am now.’ The only thing that unites these peoples is their Fehrenbach, “I find that in our culture,” Fehrenbach said in our most primal instincts. Of the conquest of the West by interview, explaining his approach to history, “people a vast, unguided migration of Scots-Irish farm fami- most histories are unwilling to look at the unpalatable facts of what lies into Native American land, Fehrenbach writes happened. They want to whitewash things. They in Lone Star: “The Anglo-American historical expe- of Texas took don’t understand that just because you say a thing is, rience was to be this: the people moved outward, on doesn’t mean you’re saying it should have been.” their own, and they sucked their government along for granted behind, whether it wanted to go or not.” Before Fehrenbach, most histories of Texas took This should not, he explains later in the book, be the manifest for granted the manifest destiny framework: History viewed with surprise: started with Stephen F. Austin and the Old Three “More and more anthropologists believe that the destiny Hundred. Anglo immigrants were presented as mor- desire to expand, to seize territory and hold it, is a ally superior to the Mexicans and Indians they fought. human instinct easily aroused, and one that requires framework. Fehrenbach didn’t do that. Lone Star is, unabashedly, no rationalization. It is only when the rationaliza- a history of Texas’ Anglos, but Fehrenbach begins his tion is attempted that hypocrisy enters in ... In fact, if book 32,000 years ago, long before there are Anglos— many of the ideas and arguments expressed in Anglo- with the first Ice Age hunters crossing into North America concerning peace and human rights had America. “In the beginning, before any people, was the been dominant, it is not inconceivable to contemplate land ... ” he writes. “No human beings were native to the a United States still cramped behind the Alleghenies, New World; every race of men entered as invaders.” complaining to world opinion about Amerind raids.” Invasion sets the tone for everything that follows, and underlines much of Fehrenbach’s view of history. Fehrenbach told me he sometimes looks at history In Lone Star, Fehrenbach retells the old myths, as tragedy. “In the Greek sense. You understand? In but, as he puts it, with “all the unpalatable parts left which the nature of the characters, their flaws, forces in.” Reading it is a jarring experience. Fehrenbach a terrible ending.” titled a chapter on the war between the Anglos and the Comanches “Red Niggers, Red Vermin.” The Lone Star was incredibly popular in Texas; phrase is drawn from a contemporary newspaper its gritty blood-and-soil take on history resonated in account. Fehrenbach likes to unearth unappealing a state that was much more rural and Anglo than the parts of the past and rub them in the reader’s face. one we live in today. Texas and the Texans, Fehrenbach argues, were “The book came out to great accolades. Everybody forged into a unique nation by the bitter, violent expe- read it,” said Light Cummins, a history professor at rience of more than 100 years of war on the frontier: Austin College in Sherman, adding that the book had a profound influence on him. “I understood for the first “The Mexican-Indian warfare taken together spawned time how complex our history was, the richness of our an almost incredible amount of violence across west and history. He folded in black Texans, Native American southwest Texas. Almost every ranch, every water hole, experience, Hispanic experience. Texas is a place that and every family had its record of gunshots in the night has very different, and sometimes competing, histo- and blood under the sun ... Because of this history, the ries. He was able to blend that into one cohesive story. dominant Texan viewpoint was not that Texans settled “I would argue that the book has had a greater Texas, but they conquered it. Many other Americans have impact on popularizing Texas history than anything never been able to rationalize this in terms of a mythical else that has been written about this state.” North American mission in the world. Texas was never Lone Star is now an element of history itself, its a refuge for the lowly, or oppressed, or a beacon pro- worldview challenged and debated among historians. claiming human rights. It was a primordial land with a “It’s a point of view that makes white, Southern- Pleistocene climate, inhabited by species inherently hos- born males the whole story of Texas history,” said tile to the Anglo-Celtic breed.” Randolph Campbell, chief historian at the Texas Historical Commission. “In the years since then a Fehrenbach is much less interested in what people great deal has been written about African-Americans said—their stated ideals—than in what they actu- and Mexican-Americans and women. Younger histo- ally did. He is skeptical about the importance of rians have modernized the story considerably.” countries, treaties, government. In Lone Star, Texas But Cummins says Fehrenbach’s book marked a history is told as a series of encounters between radical departure in how Anglos were presented in different tribes—Spanish, Mexican, Comanche, Texas history. Anglo—each so alien to the other that they might as “The book is written from an Anglo viewpoint, well have come from different planets. but it isn’t Anglo-centric,” Cummins said. “Past his- He writes: torians would have argued—did argue—that Anglos were historically superior to natives, black Texans, “The moral, upstanding Comanche who lived by the Hispanics. Fehrenbach absolutely did not do that.” laws and gods of his tribe enjoyed heaping live coals on To Cummins’ view, the book should be read as a a staked-out white man’s genitals; a moral Mexican, historical artifact. “A 1968 Ford Fairlane is very dif- for a fancied insult, would slip his knife into an Anglo ferent than a 2010 Ford Fusion,” he said, “but that back. The moral Texan, who lived in peace and amity doesn’t mean they weren’t both great automobiles.” october 2012 the te xas observer | 35 Lone Star is a history of conquest told by a man back to my background. I felt that in many ways the who’s descended from the conquerors. In fact, history of Texas was just as important as the his- Fehrenbach uses Anglo and Texan interchangeably. tory of some of these odd places in Europe we study. Toward the end of the book, he writes: I thought that Texans were just as important as a “This Anglo history was shot through the national people. I had the thought—maybe a little vainglori- myths all such histories have; it had its share of hypoc- ous—that I could raise Texas history to that level.” risy and arrogance. Parts of its mythology made both I can see Fehrenbach sitting at his desk all those years A copy of Lone Star on Fehrenbach’s bookshelf. ethnic Mexicans and Negroes writhe. But in essence, ago, looking at his family history and saying, ‘Wait, but to Photo by Jennifer Whitney it rang true. We chose this land; we took it; we made it understand this, you have to understand that thing that bear fruit, the Texan child is taught.” happened before...’ Suddenly we’re following his family Fehrenbach tells Lone Star from an Anglo perspec- back across the Appalachians, back across the ocean into tive, yes—but if he’s writing to Anglos, he’s giving them Ireland and Scotland. To understand the place they came an unflattering and brutal picture of their ancestors. For to, we need to go further back, to see the Spanish failure example, to Fehrenbach, there is no greater point to the to civilize or conquer the Texas tribes. We need to under- extermination of the Comanches; it’s just another exam- stand the Comanche dominance of the Plains. We need ple of the way human cultures have treated each other for to understand how they came to be here. We find our- millennia. Before their own destruction, the Comanches selves, near the beginning of Lone Star, tens of thousands nearly destroyed the Apaches, pushing them out of the of years ago, watching the first Americans following the buffalo grounds and into Mexican and Anglo lands. herds across a new land bridge into the virgin world. Before that, the Apaches had nearly depopulated the vil- Throughout our conversation, I would ask “It’s a point lages of the Pueblo Indians and other tribes throughout Fehrenbach a question about history, and he’d start the Southwest. to explain and then get sidetracked trying to explain of view that the context behind his answer, and the context After Fehrenbach wrote a popular 1963 book behind that context. makes white, about the Korean War, his editors asked him what he I’d come to interview him to try and understand what wanted to do next. He didn’t have much. “I said I had a made him tick, where his ideas had come from and why Southern-born couple of unpublished novels, and they’re pretty bad, but he had written about the things he had. He tolerated maybe...” They pitched him on a novel about his family. these sorts of questions for a while, but finally seemed males the “It’s true,” he said, “you could do a fiction out of a to tire of them. He was explaining his idea that people great many families. And I could—my grandfather occupy themselves with “fiddling things”—not work, whole story of was a great man, went on to considerable success... basically—to avoid having to gaze into the abyss. He “So I’m going to write the Great Texas Novel ... A lot of looked at me and said, “I think you may have a problem Texas history.” the people I’m going to talk about are still alive … This is with that.” very difficult. And then is it all that important anyway? “What do you mean?” I asked, caught off guard. So what this morphed into was a history of Texas, which “By your questions,” he said, “you seem like you’re no one had asked for, and nobody wanted.” preoccupied with trivial things; that you have trou- I tried to get him to explain how he had gone from ble gazing into the deep well.” Great Texas Novel to sweeping state history. The “All right,” I said. I put down my notebook. “If our question clearly made him uncomfortable. situations were reversed, if you were sitting here, “It just came that way,” he said. “I wrote it, and it interviewing T.R. Fehrenbach, famous historian, turned out there was a market for it. But I thought what would you ask?” we needed a general history of Texas, because it goes He smiled. “You know,” he said, “you want to know who T.R. Fehrenbach is, and the truth is I don’t really know. That’s not a question I’ve ever much wanted to ask myself. I don’t know what that says about me, and maybe I’d be better off, or I’d be a stronger person, if I wanted to know that. I have not, in my life, wanted to ask the why. “But you were asking me why things turned out the way they did, and the truth is, I don’t know. I could offer you a story of where these things came from, but it would be a rationalization. I’d be making something up. If you ask, ‘Why did he write about the Comanches? Why the Texans? Why the Mexicans?’ I think, at some point, you end up asking, ‘Why Fehrenbach? Why the earth? Why everything?’ And I haven’t wanted to do that.” In his account of his own life, and of Texas history, Fehrenbach isn’t searching for a larger purpose or glory. Lone Star doesn’t end with the usual platitudes about the future, or the greatness of the state, but with a sort of apocalypse: a description of the land- scape of Texas at the end of history, empty again, as it was at the beginning of the book. There is no ultimate mission; no holy purpose. All there is, in the end, is a good story that fades away. Contributing writer Saul Elbein lives in Austin.

36 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org robertleleux Novel Approach Faith in a Dead-End Town ichael morris’ sweet, sad-eyed new novel, Man in the Blue Moon, recalls great Southern literature: beloved works such as Olive Ann Burns’ Cold Sassy Tree and Fannie Flagg’s Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man. Set in a Spanish moss-draped, dead-end Florida town fit- tingly called Dead Lakes in the midst of World War I, the novel is the story of Ella Wallace, a middle-aged wife and mother who may be forgiven for wishing herself a widow. In every practical sense, she is one. Her no- Beneath account husband, Harlan, a charlatan and an opium addict, has abandoned her with Mthree sons to raise, a general store to run and a crippling mortgage. In addition to these the artful weighty woes, there’s also the irksome issue of a certain grandfather clock. intricacies of As is so often the case with put-upon people, Ella’s her beloved daddy’s that she hasn’t yet been forced to thoughts are occupied by her most manageable dilemma, sell—Ella enrolls Lanier in a plan to help clear and sell Morris’ tale is the pending delivery of that cursed clock. Just prior to his her timber before Clive has the chance to foreclose. It’s disappearance, Harlan invested Ella’s last dime in a pricy backbreaking labor unfit for a lady, but Ella shows the the lingering timepiece scheduled to arrive on the docks of nearby same steely spirit that kept Scarlett O’Hara’s dainty feet Apalachicola, according to a notice Ella receives in the planted on the red earth of Tara. And though Lanier, her question mail. Retrieving this package, Ella’s biggest concern is new mail-order handyman, is certainly no Rhett Butler, whether its postage has been paid. Little does she know he does reveal some unexpected strengths. With a full- of spiritual that the coffin-shaped crate from theB lue Moon Clock lipped kiss, he cures Ella’s youngest son’s thrush. With Company amounts to a Trojan horse containing the his contagious good cheer, he stiffens her spine. And authenticity. makings of her undoing, and her deliverance. with his broad, rippling shoulders, he clears pine and Rather than a clock, the shipment contains a real, cypress like nobody’s business. By the time Ella pays live man—and a good-looking man, at that. The blond- her mortgage, romance brews between them. haired beauty, Lanier Stillis, has a mysterious past, Unfortunately, there’s more brewing in Dead Lakes befitting the kind of fellow who would have himself than a love affair. The finale ofMan in the Blue Moon hammered into a box and mailed across the rural is a collision of the past and the present, and of faith South. In Georgia, he may have murdered his wife. He and reason. The particulars of Lanier’s late wife’s might even be Harlan’s long-lost cousin, and possess death are called—explosively—into question. When the gift of healing. One thing is for sure: He’s definitely his ex-brothers-in-law finally track him to Florida, the missing part of an ear as the result of a knife fight. resulting showdown forever alters the town’s fate. Assessing Lanier’s character is a bit of a gamble. It’s Beneath the artful intricacies of Morris’ tale is a gamble that Ella, a woman “on the verge of financial the lingering question of spiritual authenticity. and emotional collapse,” is forced to make. Especially On the surface, Lanier’s gifts appear as preposter- with crooked Clive Gillespie, the pockmarked fiend ous as Brother Mabry’s misguided schemes—or, for who holds her mortgage, breathing down her neck. A that matter, Ella’s gumption. At some point, each of scorned former lover from her finishing-school past, the novel’s characters is blindly driven by illogical Clive is after Ella and her property. He’s also deter- belief, held aloft by something as hopeful and crazy mined to earn a hefty profit off the delusions ofB rother as Lanier’s plot to mail himself to fairer weather. Mabry, a cockamamy revivalist who firmly believes that Emerging from the characters’ stories is a poignant the Garden of Eden was once located in Ella’s backyard. insight about the necessity of faith in the dreary, Brother Mabry, with money to burn, intends to estab- sometimes painful slog of life. When pressed, one lish Eden Everlasting, the ultimate religious retreat, on of Morris’ most eloquent characters claims: “Do I her land, and Clive intends to finagle it away from Ella understand miracles? Have I ever seen one? I don’t in time to sell it to Mabry. Ella has other ideas. know. … But I do have faith enough to believe … with Committed to keeping her acreage—the only thing of or without understanding.” october 2012 the te xas observer | 37 book review A Populist and a Feminist Icon by Bill Sanderson Richards was the first woman elected to statewide office in 50 years.

Ann Richards was the state’s first female gover- nor since Ma Ferguson. who left office in 1935. Photo courtesy ut press

n the epilogue of this fascinating biogra- party of Austin liberals. phy, a 70-year-old Ann Richards recalls in an Reid captures how Richards’ self-deprecating interview with University of Texas political humor—she called herself a WASP: “Waco And Sure scientist Jim Henson how her grandmother Poor”—matter-of-fact manner and affinity for hunt- couldn’t vote at one time. “The law in Texas ing, canning food and other down-home pastimes was that idiots, imbeciles, the insane and endeared her to voters who might otherwise have women could not vote. And, less than one dismissed her progressive sensibilities. generation later, I was the governor of Texas. Now There are also memorable scenes of Richards as an Ithat’ll tell you that we have progressed.” underdog in the brawl for governor in the 1990 Texas In Let the People In: The Life and Times of Ann Democratic primary, as well as gaffes by cowboy oil- Richards, Jan Reid paints a nuanced picture of a man Clayton Williams, her Republican opponent in pretty girl and champion debater from Waco who the general election. Joking around a smoldering married her high-school sweetheart and later campfire with members of the press on a wet night became a populist champion and national feminist at his ranch, he compared the weather to a woman icon. His chronicle of Richards, who died in 2006, is enduring rape: “If it’s inevitable, just relax and enjoy an absorbing tale set in a tumultuous time in Texas, it.” The remarks outraged voters and helped propel and in national politics, as women and minorities Richards into the Governor’s Mansion. pushed for greater inclusion. The elective politics part of the book ends as Reid, an author and longtime writer for Texas Richards—who opened state government to women Monthly, traces Richards’ 22 years in electoral poli- and minorities and championed gun control, envi- tics—from Travis County commissioner to governor. ronmental protection, school finance and prison The book details her experience managing Sarah reform—is unseated by George W. Bush in 1994. Reid Weddington’s successful legislative bid in 1972; her suggests that the Bush dynasty painted a bull’s-eye own candidacy for commissioner in 1976; and later for on Richards’ big hair after the 1988 Democratic state treasurer in 1982 and governor in 1990. Richards National Convention, where she emerged a super- was the first woman elected to statewide office in 50 star for delivering a red-meat speech on primetime years and the first female governor since Ma Ferguson. TV. Of George H.W. Bush she famously drawled: Richards hit the Austin political scene in 1972, a “Poor George, he can’t help it. He was born with a sil- sharp-tongued mom with striking good looks and ver foot in his mouth.” a piercing wit. “She was sexy as all get out,” Reid Supporting his grudge thesis, Reid includes an remembers of the night he met her at a gonzo Bridge excerpt of an interview with the elder Bush by The

38 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org Washington Post’s Hugh Sidey, writing for Time maga- alcohol-addiction intervention in 1980, which eventu- zine in 2004: “When George beat her in his first run ally led to a rehab program that successfully ended her for governor, I must say I felt a certain sense of joy well-known drinking problem that year. that he finally had kind of taken her down. I could go Likewise, Richards’ self-described “steady” boy- around saying, ‘We showed her what she could do with friend after her 1983 divorce, the celebrated Texas that silver foot, where she could stick that now!’” writer Bud Shrake, overcame his alcohol addiction Reid’s familiarity with Richards’ family adds to the with encouragement from Richards and a 12-step book’s insightfulness. Interviews with her ex-hus- program a few years later. Shrake died in 2009. band, Dave, to whom she was married for 31 years, Previously unpublished correspondence, included in and their children, mine often-painful memories. the book, between Richards and Shrake reflects the Clark Richards confesses, perhaps for the first time poignancy of their long relationship, and reveals an publicly: “When I was young, mom would sometimes affectionate and private side of Richards. have these rage attacks, and boy, they scared the hell That correspondence is also filled with droll out of me.” descriptions of public life, on-the-road campaign Any fault with this book, which draws on more stories and Richards’ growing political cachet. Six Let the People In: than 200 interviews conducted over three years, years after her death, Richards’ story still resonates. The Life and Times of may lay with the absence of input from Jane Hickie, Reid’s detailed account of her times and her legacy is Ann Richards Richards’ close friend. The brusque Hickie was a feast of vignettes and vivid characters that captures By Jan Reid Richards’ administrative assistant at the Travis the politics that, for a time, changed the countenance University of Texas Press County Commissioner’s Office and chief of staff in the of state government. 460 pages, $27 Governor’s Office. In the book’s notes, Reid writes that Bill Sanderson is a freelance writer and an adult she “politely declined” to be interviewed. We learn education specialist for Dallas ISD teaching ESL for little that is new of Hickie, the instigator of Richards’ adult immigrants.

Ann Richards’ Legacy by Sarah Weddington

ix years have passed since cancer election rally was overlooked because of the sea of claimed Ann Richards. I miss her, candidates competing for attention. My Republican and so do many others. opponent’s children were dressed as clowns as they I first met Ann in 1972. A group handed out emery boards and other knick-knacks. of Texas women were strategizing Ann came up with the idea of putting my campaign about how to change laws and cus- sticker on cheap white paper sacks for people to hold toms that limited us from making the handouts from the other candidates. Thanks to our own decisions. It was a time when women were Ann’s brilliance, everyone was walking around with Sonly allowed to run half-court in basketball. Women a “Weddington sack.” couldn’t get credit unless they had a man—typically a She and her family volunteered countless hours husband or a father—co-sign the application. Women during my campaign and were with me on election were generally not allowed to continue to teach in public schools if they became pregnant. It was a time when women who were raped faced suspicion in police stations and in court. Women often had a difficult time getting contraception; the health center at the University of Texas at Austin wouldn’t allow a woman to receive birth control unless she certified that she was within six weeks of marriage. Abortion was illegal “except to save the life of the woman.” It was a time when we needed someone with expe- rience who was willing to guide us in the fight for change. Patty Rochelle, whose mother-in-law Betty was one of Ann’s best friends, and Caryl Yontz sug- gested that we plead with Ann to help my campaign for the Texas House. She had worked a number of elections, organized efforts in Dallas, and had been active in the Young Democrats. We had lunch at the modest Alamo Hotel at West 6th and Guadalupe streets. Maybe Ann was swept away by our idealism, our enthusiasm, or our obvious need for guidance, but we didn’t leave until she agreed to help us. Ann had invaluable ideas. For example, during my 1972 campaign for the Texas House, our table at the october 2012 the te xas observer | 39 night when I became the first woman to represent to handle good ol’ boys, and she did it with laughter.” “She Austin-Travis County in the Texas Legislature. I was Perhaps Ann and her ex-husband David’s best one of five women elected to the House that year— legacy to Texas is their daughter Cecile Richards, represented a record number. She was in my office at the Capitol who is now President of the Planned Parenthood for another historic moment: when the call came on Federation of America and the Planned Parenthood all of us who Jan. 22, 1973, telling me I had won Roe v. Wade. Action Fund. Cecile is leading a new generation in Ann was essential as we formed the Texas the fight for women’s rights, and my generation is have lived with Foundation for Women’s Resources (now the counting on this new movement to continue the Foundation for Women’s Resources) and set about legacy that Ann, myself, and the many women sup- and learned to empowering women to be leaders and to open lead- porting our cause, began many years ago. ership positions to women. By 1977 we had made the Ann now rests at the Texas State Cemetery in Austin. handle good original changes we had set out to make, and Ann Her grave marker reads, “Today we have a vision of a was the central figure around whom we revolved. Texas where opportunity knows no race, no gender, no ol’ boys.” Someone once asked her if it was true that I had color—a glimpse of what can happen in government no sense of humor. Her reply was, “No. It’s just that if we simply open the doors and let the people in.” you have to say to Sarah, ‘Now this is a joke,’ and then My gravesite is about 50 feet away from hers. she’ll laugh.” Ann taught me you can’t be timid with Hopefully, when I call the Texas State Cemetery humor; you have to “punch” it. home, we will have great late-night conversations, Her Republican opponent in the 1990 gubernato- remembering our battles of the past and celebrating rial race, Clayton Williams, was the epitome of the the victories that live after us. Texas businessman. Molly Ivins wrote, “Ann was the Sarah Weddington won the U.S. Supreme Court case Roe candidate of everybody else, especially women. She v. Wade and was the first woman elected to the Texas represented all of us who have lived with and learned House from Austin/Travis County.

In Moonrise Kingdom, Anderson Taps His Inner-Child by Josh Rosenblatt

ot to sound too much like the Rushmore, was a revelation in blue blazers and khaki man’s mother, but for the last pants: innovative and virtuosic, with an offbeat decade I’ve been disappointed in sense of humor set against pervasive melancholy. Wes Anderson. Anderson reached back to French films of the 1950s It’s his fault, really. By setting and American films of the 1960s for his influences, the bar so high early in his career, but maintained his own modern voice. He crammed Watching Anderson convinced me that he human emotion into a rigid visual framework. Ncould be a truly great filmmaker. His second movie, By the time The Royal Tenenbaums was released Moonrise Kingdom, it finally became clear to me what Wes Anderson is: He’s Peter Pan with a movie camera.

Edward Norton (at center) stars as Scoutmaster Ward in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom. Photo courtesy Focus features

40 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org

two-and-a-half years after Rushmore, however, you and muscle memory, showing up in every movie with could already sense that the visual side of Anderson’s the consistency of a postal carrier at your mailbox. It cinematic personality was overtaking the side soon became clear to me that Anderson was a visual interested in human emotion. Finely wrought but savant with a tin heart who used emotion as little dramatically sputtering, Tenenbaums set the tem- more than an excuse to capture a great image or a plate for all the movies Anderson would make over the clever bit of dialogue. next 10 years: meticulous set design, just-so camera Well, I’m happy to say that 14 years after placement and fussy dialogue drowning out story- Rushmore was released, Anderson has finally made telling and character development. Once-energizing good on some of the promise that movie foretold. directorial flourishes—the slow-motion walks set to Moonrise Kingdom (available on DVD Oct. 16) is old Kinks songs, the long, lateral camera movements, no Rushmore, but it’s so far beyond the clever self- the absurdist conversations that alternated between congratulation and petrified ritualism of movies deadpan silence and quick wit—hardened into habit like 2004’s The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and 2007’s The Darjeeling Limited that it constitutes a great leap forward for a filmmaker who’s made a career out of staying put. It turns out all Anderson had to do to become great was give in to himself. With Moonrise Kingdom, free Anderson resigns himself to his playhouse instincts the rapoport t-shirt and creates a fairy tale about children and adventure. At heart, Anderson has a child’s aesthetic, a world- view based on nostalgia and sentimentality where sights and sounds are tied intimately to memory. Anderson has gone the route of the children’s tele- vision auteur: Like Mr. Rogers, he brings the pretend grant world of a child’s train set to life. By creating from scratch the world of New Penzance Island—with its Technicolor houses, its gently used and meticulously designed pup tents, its delicately detailed map— Anderson frees himself from the confines of real challenge life and gives his childlike tendencies permission with your to romp in an idealized, imaginary universe. (That for Anderson’s “perfect” world is entirely free of people donation! of color is an issue all its own.) the texas observer In Wes Anderson World, two 12-year-olds (a boy www.texasobserver.org and a girl) can wander off into the woods and survive on little more than the skills he learned as a pseudo Boy Scout, the French records she loves, and their poetic disillusionment with the adult world, which is filled with betrayal and despair. Bill Murray is back as the character he’s been playing in every Anderson WE KNOW movie since Rushmore: the world-weary cynic with WHAT YOU WANT the acid tongue and the near-cosmic resignation. But thankfully, this time he and his fellow adults are rel- egated to the sidelines of the action, living evidence of what will happen to our heroes, Sam Shakusky and Suzy Bishop, if they give up and grow up. In Andersonland, terrible things happen when kids stop believing: mainly adulthood. Watching Moonrise Kingdom, it finally became 1401 B ROSEWOOD AVE. 78702 clear to me what Wes Anderson is: He’s Peter Pan with a movie camera, a creator of realities far prettier and more manageable than the one he sees around him. Anderson’s religion is nostalgia and the cleanli- 5312 AIRPORT BLVD. STE G 78751 ness of imagination, the uncorrupted belief, as Sam M E N U and Suzy demonstrate, that a coonskin cap cocked at 467 8900 just the right angle, or a letter written on just the right 1809-1 W. ANDERSON LN. 78757 paper with just the right penmanship, can redeem a messy world. Or make us forget it entirely.

The Texas Observer (ISSN 0040-4519/USPS 541300), entire contents copyrighted © 2012, is published monthly (12 issues per year) by the Texas Democracy Foundation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit foundation, 307 W. 7th St., Austin TX, 78701. Telephone (512)477-0746, fax (512)474-1175, toll free (800)939-6620. Email observer@­texasobserver. org. Periodicals Postage paid in Austin, TX, and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER Send address changes to: The Texas Observer, 307 W. 7th St., Austin TX 78701. Subscriptions: 1 yr $35, 2 yr $60, 3 yr $85. Students $20. Foreign, add $13 to domestic­ price. Back issues $5. Airmail, foreign, group, and bulk rates on request. Microfilm available from University Microfilms Intl., 300 N Zeeb Rd, Ann Arbor MI 48106. Indexes The Texas Observer is indexed in Access: The Supplementary Index to Periodicals; Texas Index; and, for the years 1954 through 1981, The Texas Observer Index. Investigative reporting is supported in part by a grant from the Open Society Institute. Books & the Culture is funded in part by the City of Austin through the Cultural Arts Division and by a grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts.

42 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org billminutaglio state of the media The Dallas Morning Advertorial? he Dallas Morning News, still the bellwether mainstream journalism entity in Texas, has decided to align its editorial muscle with the online-oriented, Dallas-based advertising firm Slingshot. ¶ The newspaper and the ad firm are creating and co- managing what has been described as a “social media agency.” Known as Speakeasy, it will create digital ad campaigns for local and national businesses, in part by using newspaper sto- The ries that it distributes via Facebook and Twitter, or features on arrangement websites managed by the ad firm for clients. Jim Moroney, publisher of the newspaper, will serve the ubiquitous “advertorials” that sometimes con- is basically asT chairman of Speakeasy. The founder of Slingshot sume whole chunks of magazines like Texas Monthly. will be the CEO. And though the partnership has Now, instead of clients paying publications for an a sign of been described as a joint operation, it’s clear that The advertorial that’s clearly marked as an advertorial, Dallas Morning News will be the principal owner—and companies can re-publish works of bylined journal- the national the one continually scrambling to find new ways to ism on their sites. One Speakeasy executive described monetize its content. I used to work there, and I now it as a “softer” sell than an advertorial. times come teach inside The Belo Center for New Media at The Some people in North Texas are raising red flags. University of Texas at Austin, supported by the news- Tim Rogers, editor of D Magazine (over the last to Texas. paper’s parent company, A.H. Belo Corporation. several years he has done the best, most consistent The arrangement is basically a sign of the national coverage of the media in Dallas), wonders whether times come to Texas: publishers, from the heavy- newspaper editors will be tempted to start assigning weights on down, are racing to connect with social stories that advertisers would consider appropriate media experts. Sometimes, as in Dallas, they are for marketing purposes. simply siphoning money from print budgets to form Morning News executives insist there’s no poten- their own social media companies that unabashedly tial conflict, that the newspaper’s creation of a social view content as a mash-up of news and advertising. media ad agency is, in effect, just a continuation of And they’re not just trying to figure out how to what the paper has always done. For example, the disseminate the news in faster-moving bursts on newspaper may allow stories from its business sec- Twitter. The partnership in Dallas is predicated on tion to be used in corporate newsletters. The social exploring better ways to allow journalism, presum- media agency, the execs say, simply provides a digi- ably in any multimedia form, to be used as an integral tally groomed way to do the same thing. And, without part of digital ad campaigns. question, it’s a way to make up for the dwindling rev- The newspaper’s mid-September story on the enues from print advertising. strategy says its social media agency “will also have In its own story announcing the move, Moroney access to the complete archives of The News, allow- said the Morning News is a “tremendous reposi- ing clients to post stories related to their products tory of great content,” and that the social media/ and services on their own sites.” In other words, the advertising/journalism initiative will increase the ad agency will offer the journalistic content of the newspaper’s reputation as “an innovator in the newspaper to its clients. The clients, in turn, can use newspaper industry.” the newspaper’s stories on their own websites and in The Morning News promises to retain editorial their own social media channels. independence, and that its stories will not be selec- It’s one of the buzzy new mass-communications tively edited by businesses. mantras sweeping the 2.0 media landscape, whereby But does having works of journalism on a compa- the old journalism boundaries between editorial ny’s website—and coursing through its social media and advertising are increasingly blurred, and some streams—imply a tacit endorsement from the news- publishers talk unapologetically about “content paper? Is the result a “softer sell” because it seems to marketing.” Defenders of the new strategy say the come with the independent vetting that news outlets approach puts a smoother, more believable face on should always provide? Time will tell. october 2012 the te xas observer | 43 forrestwilder Forrest for the trees Rivers Run Through It … For Now n May, eight friends and I paddled for six days and 82 miles down a remote stretch of the Rio Grande known as the Lower Canyons. Refreshed by the Rio Conchos and generous springs, the river in this section gains momen- tum and can almost make you forget that for 200 miles between El Paso and Presidio the mighty Rio Bravo is a dry ravine, or that it no longer reaches the Gulf of Mexico at Brownsville. The scenery is harsh and humbling— ancient canyon walls sculpted by unimaginably powerful geological forces rising hundreds of feet above a muddy river strewn with massive boulders that create, in places, not so much whitewater as brownwater.

One soggy night, we camped in Mexico on a rocky allu- and suppliers bought in at the outset because both Ivial plain above the river while gray bulkheads of clouds sides wanted some “certainty” about the future, Ken throttled the nearby mountains. It poured. We huddled Kramer of the Sierra Club told me. in our tents and waited for the flood.B ut in the morning For each basin, teams of scientists and stakehold- the river had come up just a few inches. We paddled on. ers work to come up with so-called environmental After six days, we’d seen just two other groups on flow standards—basically a water budget that roughly the water. It was about as pure a wilderness river trip reflects the natural cycles that species have adapted to as one can expect anywhere, much less in Texas. over millennia. It’s a tough task. Almost all of our riv- Few have the time, resources, or even the desire ers have been dramatically altered from their natural The chance to to run the Lower Canyons. I feel privileged to have states through pumping, damming and engineering. experienced it. The goal is to figure out how much water is required protect Texas I relate this tale because the chance to protect Texas for a sound ecological environment, and take that into rivers, and the coastal bays and estuaries that they nur- account when considering future water permits. rivers, and ture, is slipping away. Most rivers in Texas can’t rely After five years, we have a fairly good handle on on their remoteness to insulate them from exploding how it all worked out. The good news is that every the coastal population pressures, worsening droughts, and the river/estuary/bay system in the state except one (the small-mindedness of certain commercial interests. Nueces) is currently considered healthy. bays and Increasingly, our rivers are called upon to provide The bad news is that the Texas Commission on drinking water, receive wastewater, cool power plants, Environmental Quality has taken reasonable rec- estuaries they support recreation, and breed wildlife, among many ommendations, delicately crafted compromises, other uses. and mountains of research, and basically flushed it nurture, is In some river basins there are more water rights all down the toilet. In the case of the Trinity River, allocated than there is water during drought times. which flows through Dallas-Fort Worth to Galveston slipping away. By damming and diverting rivers, we’ve altered the Bay, the agency adopted standards that the National natural patterns of freshwater inflow into estuaries. That Wildlife Federation calculated would reduce the can lead to dangerous increases in salinity and reduced Trinity to a trickle, jeopardizing the seafood har- productivity of shrimp, crabs, oysters and game fish. vest in Galveston Bay. Ditto for the Guadalupe, San Spring freshets, those blessed rainfall events that Antonio and Brazos rivers. The TCEQ commission- lead to runoff, not only flush out streams but pump ers bowed to the insatiable demands of the river freshwater into estuaries at a critical time in the life- authorities, most of which operate as insular fief- cycle of the species that grow there. They also help doms hell-bent on hoarding and selling water to salinity-sensitive critters make it through summer. the last drop. To arrive at its woefully inadequate Ironically, in 2007 the Texas Legislature created standards, the state agency appears to have ignored one of the nation’s most innovative and promising the stakeholder recommendations so its reckless processes for determining how much water is neces- growth-at-any-cost paradigm can continue. sary to preserve the ecological health of Texas’ rivers, The agency says it has to balance economic need estuaries and bays. Space doesn’t allow me to explain with environmental protection. But that’s precisely the details of the process, but it’s a complex blend what the teams of stakeholders were charged with of science, policy and politics. Environmentalists doing. In reality, Rick Perry and his apparatchiks as well as development-oriented water authorities prove once again that they have regard for neither.

44 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org eye on texas Evan Prince

Burlesque Dancing Austin Rivers Run Through It … For Now Burlesque dancing is more than 100 years old and has gone through many changes. In Austin, a handful of dedicated troupes are keep- ing the tradition alive. Burlesque is infused with comedy, musical theater and sexuality, allowing each performer self-expression in a unique three-to-four minute routine. The dancing has become so popular in Austin that the city hosts the Texas Burlesque Festival every spring (http://www.texas- burlesquefestival.com). In this photo, dancer Goldie Candela poses for a portrait with a traditional Burlesque prop, the feather fan.

See more of Evan Prince's work at www.texasobserver.org/eyeontexas. CALL FOR ENTRIES: Seeking Texas-based documentary photog- raphy that captures the strangest state. Please send inquiries to [email protected].

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