“Not only is labor not dishonorable among such a people,
but it is held in honor; the prejudice is not against it, but
in its favor.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America, Volume 2, 1840
De Tocqueville could easily have been talking about
modern-day Texas when he wrote those words
about America in 1840. That’s because Texans aren’t
interested in who your daddy was or where you
went to school. We don’t care what you did in
Tennessee or California or New York or Illinois or
wherever you came from before you landed in the
Lone Star State. If you’re ready to work hard, we’ll
give you the benefit of the doubt. Blood and bacca-
laureate don’t matter to us. We care more about
what you do than where you’re from.
This doesn’t mean Texans are blind to the past.
After all, we’re part of the South, a place where, as
Faulkner said, “the past is never dead. It’s not even
past.” We’re mindful of our bygone triumphs and
defeats. “Remember the Alamo” is just the beginning.
We also remember Sam Houston’s victory at San
Jacinto, where my great-great-uncle, Alfred Wyly, led a
company of Tennesseans. And we remember Goliad,
where an early Texas Declaration of Independence was
Sam Wyly is the quintessential Texas entrepreneur—a
migrant from Louisiana by way of Michigan who has been
successfully starting companies and busting up monopolies in
Texas since the 1960s.
TEXAS GOT IT RIGHT!
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signed by, among others, another great-great-uncle of
mine, Christopher A. Parker, before he became one of
the 187 heroes of the Alamo in 1836. We remember
the grit of Texas’s first settlers—dirt farmers who
scratched a living out of the hard earth and laid the
foundation for the Lone Star Nation. We remember
the great cotton and lumber barons who helped turn
our towns into cities, and we remember when that
first oil well at Spindletop blew in East Texas in 1901,
ushering the age of cars and planes and launching a
thousand fortunes. We remember the crash of the
1980s, too, when so many of those Texas oil fortunes
went belly-up and new fifty-story skyscrapers in Dallas
and Houston remained “see-through” empty buildings
for ten years.
Those were tough times for Texans, but we’re
optimists by nature—probably the most stubbornly
optimistic people on earth. We see opportunity
where others see disaster. In 1987, when real estate
here collapsed after oil dropped from $40 per barrel
to $9, I moved my company, Sterling Software, across
the street to a half-vacant building rent-free for two
years. Our three companies came out of those hard
times just fine. Texas did, too.
That’s because Texans aren’t afraid to fail. And
when we do, we don’t beg for taxpayer bailouts. Just
ask Richard Fisher, the head of the Dallas Fed. He’s
been preaching against “too big to fail” for years now,
a voice of Main Street common sense in a room full
of East Coast policy wonks. He looks back on the
1980s S&L crisis in Texas and sees survivors that
came out stronger and leaner and ready to grow.
Today Texas banks outperform the rest of the nation’s
banks fivefold, and our pioneers’ homestead laws,
which protect citizens from predatory creditors,
helped Texans avoid the subprime mess. Fisher—who
is trying to instill Lone Star fiscal responsibility in
The Spanish, French, and British Empires of North America,
1776. Texas was instrumental in successively pushing the great
European empires off the continent.
TEXAS GOT IT RIGHT!
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Washington and wants to bust up the banking
giants—is walking in the footsteps of great populist
Texans who came before him: fellows like Governor
Jim Hogg, who made it his life’s mission to break the
railroad monopoly that was strangling Texan farmers
and merchants at the end of the 19th century.
My
