Читать книгу Texas Got It Right! - Sam Wyly - Страница 13

“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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