Читать книгу Texas Got It Right! - Sam Wyly - Страница 15

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 Scots-Irish ancestors knew something about

the struggles of the common man as they made their

way to Texas. Combative and cussedly independent,

those Borderer clans left the British Isles, where only

nobility could own land, in search of soil they could

call their own. They were suspicious of authority and

were a literate bunch, schooled by Presbyterian

preachers. My great-great-great-granddad Hezekiah

Balch (born in 1741) was a Princeton grad and went

on to found the first college in Tennessee. My great-

granddad Sam Y. Wyly (born in 1815) was a Princeton

man, too, and he set up some of the first schools west

of the Cumberland Gap.

The Scots-Irish first settled along the Eastern Sea-

board and in Appalachia, but slowly and doggedly they

moved south and west, to places like Louisiana, where

I was born, and on into the vast rangelands, piney

woods, and bottomlands of Texas, where they saw the

promise of being the masters of their own destiny.

The Scots-Irish took naturally to the cause of

Texan independence from Mexico, and their contrar-

ian, populist spirit still burns in Texan hearts today.

That spirit and fight are what made Manifest Destiny

possible and gave shape to the USA as we know it.

Those frontier folks had to whip the French Empire

(1763) to open the way for the Louisiana Purchase.

Then they whipped the English Empire, twice. Then,

with the Texas Revolution and the Mexican-

American War, they whipped the Spanish Empire.

Other waves of newcomers came to the Lone

Star State in those early years, too: the Germans

after 1848, then the Czechs, Poles, and Italians,

paving the way for today’s immigrants from the

Middle East, Southeast Asia, and beyond. Their

stories got woven in with those of the Spanish mis-

Signage for a 2012 production of Giant at the Wyly Theater in

Dallas. When the movie version of Giant came out in 1956, its

iconic story and imagery played a big part in making Sam

Wyly want to move to Texas.

sionaries who’d come to Texas in the 1700s, shaping

the land with their religious missions and vaquero

traditions. Those Tejanos left their native Mexico

behind and gave Texas the strong Hispanic imprint

that is such a big part of our state’s identity today.

About that “Texas identity”—well, it’s something

special. No other state in the union has anything like

it. You’re never going to hear people say, “Don’t mess

with Delaware!” or “Don’t mess with Illinois!” When

you put down roots in Texas, something in you

changes, no matter where you’re from or what reli-

gion or politics you practice. You’re a Texan first,

then a Mexican-American or Asian-American or

Christian or Jew or liberal or conservative.

TEXAS GOT IT RIGHT!

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