The Lone Star State is Soaring: America’s Future Will Be Made in Texas
The United States is a misnomer. Despite its title, our republic has rarely been united, instead hosting an endless gladiatorial contest between different states and regions. In the early 19th century, New York and New England struggled for supremacy against the Virginians and their empire of cotton. Gotham then took the field against the Chicago stockyards, before losing out to those upstarts in California. And now, the West Coasters are themselves under attack: from the Lone Star State.
Texas today is irrepressible. If the numbers are right, it could soon pass California and become America’s most populous state. Texas is also the nation’s second youngest state, even as it enjoys higher net migration than any of its peers. Tellingly, many new arrivals are exiles from the Golden State. This buoyancy isn’t hard to understand. Shaking off its reactionary heritage, Texans now wallow in progress, building more and making more than anyone else, with some boozing and dancing as they go. At its best, in fact, this blend of high-tech growth and gentle multiculturalism could yet rebuild America — if, that is, its worst conservative instincts can be repressed.
In a sense, Texan success within the United States is ironic. After declaring independence from Mexico, in 1836, it enjoyed a reputation as a place to “flee” the tyranny of Washington. By the time it joined the union, nine years later, the 28th state was dominated by planters and ranchers, groups that eagerly embraced both slavery and the Confederacy. After losing the Civil War, Texans were left bitter and impoverished, their natural bounty in hock to far-off Northern bankers. To quote Wilbert “Pappy” O’Daniel, governor and then senator in the Forties, Texas had become “New York’s most valuable foreign possession”.
For all its bloody-minded independence — Steinbeck was surely right when he called Texas “a nation in every sense of the word” — it would ultimately be the federal government that dragged the state’s marshes and prairies into the 20th century. The New Deal brought electricity to remote rural areas, and massively expanded the all-important Houston Ship Channel. The boom in a quintessentially Texan product surely helped too. “Oil is money,” the historian Robert Bryce has written. “Money is power.”
Dovetailed with a degree of racial pragmatism, with Houston desegregating far more easily than Atlanta, Texas also began to move beyond its dependence on oil and gas. Prodded along by LBJ and other native sons, for instance, Houston emerged as the centre of a gigantic new space centre. And if that banished memories of the city’s parochial past — as recently as 1946, the writer John Gunther grumbled about hotels filled with cockroaches — other towns rose too. Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio and Austin, together known as the Texas Triangle, are now home to two-thirds of the state’s population and 70% of its GDP.
Not, of course, that this is simply a historical tale. For if 20th-century Texas flourished on a mix of social peace, low taxes and light-touch regulation, their successors are sipping much the same brew. The numbers here are clear. Texas’s overall tax burden, according to one recent study, ranked 37th out of 50: hardly the best, but much better than California (5th) or New York (1st).
Read the rest of this piece at Unherd.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Circa 1938 postcard, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.
