Texas Got It Right!. Sam Wyly

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!

      14

      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!

      15

      It started happening to me in 1956, when I came

      here for a summer job helping CPAs do audits in a

      hot tin warehouse, where I spent the day counting

      knives and forks before being “promoted” to an air-

      conditioned warehouse to count ladies’ underwear.

      That was the year the movie Giant came out, and the

      images of Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean in the

      West Texas high desert made a big impression on me.

      So did the on-screen conflict between East Coast pre-

      tentiousness and the Texas wildcatter spirit. I knew I

      wanted to be a part of this place. So I finished my

      MBA in Ann Arbor, Michigan; got toughened up at a

      ninety-day boot camp at Lackland Air Force Base in

      San Antonio; and, while all my business-school bud-

      dies were snagging their first jobs at GM (the

      Facebook of the day), I got a job working for IBM in

      Fort