COMMENTS: REGIONAL REPORTS-Lone-Star Liberals Regroup
Sears, Timothy
"There's no point in being a moderate in Texas," State Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower has remarked, "'cause the only things in the middle of the road are yellow stripes and dead...
...It has all been futile...
...IN THE WAKE of the 1984 defeat, Texas liberals are again regrouping...
...Although Clements received a quarter of a million more votes than he had four years earlier, he lost by more than a quarter of a million votes...
...In the years that followed, the Texas Democratic party was the arena for a no-holds-barred faction fight between the Dixiecrat establishment, led by John Connally and Houston oilman Jesse Jones, and the liberal insurgency organized by the Steelworkers' leader Eddie Ball, labor lawyer Chris Dixie, and Houston housewife Billie Carr...
...SO WHY DID MONDALE AND FERRARO LOSE by a margin of nearly 1.5 million two years later...
...Thus, in 1978, the well-heeled Texas GOP elected its first governor since Reconstruction— right-wing oil tycoon Bill Clements...
...From "Lives of a Hero," by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Vuelta, December 1984 Translated by RAFAEL PIROMAN 166...
...Texas is a place of enormous economic disparities, of poverty in the midst of plenty...
...A former Texas A&M economics professor, Gramm presented himself as a man of deep conviction who had endured persecution at the hands of big-spending Yankee liberals because of his supply-side ideology...
...Beaumont, for instance, is said to be the most heavily unionized city in the nation...
...Despite the slump in the area's basic industry, the AFL–CIO's Houston Organizing Project has made some gains among clerical and publicsector workers...
...The Democrats spent the next four years getting their house in order, rebuilding their grass-roots organization and strengthening their ties with the labor movement...
...They were intercepted by the Cuban coastguard and arrested...
...Similarly, the state's labor movement is already gearing up for the next round...
...In desperation, he and his brother tried to flee in a homemade boat...
...After the triumph of the revolution he was made ambassador to Belgium...
...The Republicans swept the state, gaining four congressional seats and innumerable judges, sheriffs, and other local and county officials...
...This led to accusations of treason...
...One who was elected district judge had thought she had so little chance of winning that she was on a two-week vacation on Election Day...
...I don't believe he understood...
...One partial answer is: money...
...They kill workers, peasants, underground leaders, Jehovah's Witnesses, whites and blacks...
...How could Doggett, a Lincolnesque young state senator and former consumer leader, be beaten so badly by a reactionary ideologue like Gramm...
...THE GREATEST CHALLENGE facing the liberal-labor alliance in Texas is not so much organizational as ideological...
...the 1984 elections showed that the Reaganites are more astute at persuading prospective voters...
...The roots of the present political situation can be traced to the 1950s, when the conservative Democratic leaders who dominated state politics publicly endorsed Dwight Eisenhower for president, sparking an open revolt by the loyal Democrats...
...These factors, bolstered by Clements's arrogance and abrasiveness, generated an unprecedented Democratic turnout...
...We got whipped and we know it," Texas AFL–CIO SecretaryTreasurer Joe Gunn acknowledges, "but now we're ready to pick ourselves up and get back into the fight...
...They kill their heroes...
...White workers and farmers can be persuaded that liberal policies are in their own selfinterest...
...GUILLERMO CABRERA INFANTE also participated in the Cuban revolution and was the editor of Lunes de RevoluciOn ("Monday of Revolution...
...The Service Employees' International Union is successfully organizing workers at nursing homes and health-care facilities in East Texas...
...While most observers agree that they will avoid open confrontations with the moderate and conservative Democrats for the next few years—so that it now appears unlikely that any liberal will challenge Hobby or White in the 1986 primaries—liberal activists are definitely not demoralized...
...The long and bitter battle for control of the Democratic party often took harsh and ugly forms, as when conservative challenger Lloyd Bentsen won the 1970 Senate primary with TV commercials implying that incumbent Yarborough was personally responsible for the riots at the '68 Chicago convention...
...Over the last decade, however, the power of the Dixiecrats has steadily declined...
...In 1982 the Arcos brothers were sentenced to 14 years in jail...
...I told him the only thing I could say: Gustavo Arcos is a human being...
...uniting all factions of the party, the statewide Democratic campaign was better coordinated than any in recent history...
...I have written to and spoken with Amnesty International...
...I have now renewed those efforts...
...Even Republican candidates were stunned by the magnitude of their victory...
...There's no point in being a moderate in Texas," State Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower has remarked, "'cause the only things in the middle of the road are yellow stripes and dead armadillos...
...Everyone...
...I also, not long ago, spoke with Jeane Kirkpatrick, then the U.S...
...Over the years, the Lone Star state has produced some of the nation's leading reactionaries, such as John Tower and Phil Gramm, as well as some outstanding liberals, such as Ralph Yarborough and Mickey Leland...
...I told them that the title wasn't true, that in totalitarian countries like Cuba the last people they kill are writers...
...In Cuba, They Kill Their Heroes...
...Culturally deeply conserva163 tive, Texans have supported both right-wing ideologues and militant populists...
...Hightower may be oversimplifying when he declares boldly that "the issue is that too few people have all the money and power...
...A lifelong Catholic, he never accepted the growing Communist influence over the revolution...
...The liberals were also reinforced by the growing political activism of the state's blacks and Chicanos, who together make up a third of the population...
...The 1982 election showed that the Democratic coalition has mastered the techniques of registering and turning out prospective voters...
...He refused and was jailed for five years, and was under house arrest for five more years...
...I mean is he a writer or a painter or an intellectual...
...They're more determined than ever...
...It showed him fishing with his two sons and his wife waving to them, as his voice-over told of how close the family is...
...While his campaign against Doggett included heavy doses of gaybaiting and blasts at Ted Kennedy and the "labor bosses," much of Gramm's appeal lay in the fact that he was seen as a man of uncompromising principle...
...In 1982, all this hard work paid off...
...He was refused permission to leave...
...Working closely with the unions and minority organizations, the Democrats launched a massive voter-registration drive in minority and working-class neighborhoods...
...Yet the camera never caught a clear glimpse of the faces of Wendy Gramm and the children...
...Organizers must contend not only with the aggressively anti-union attitudes of the business community but also with the exaggerated individualism of many workers in the Lone Star state, whose nostalgia for cowboylike self-sufficiency is reinforced by everything from beer commercials to country music...
...I told them, No thank you...
...And why, in the Steelworkers' Political Director Sam Dawson's phrase, did "Reagan's coattails drag all the way to the ground...
...most Anglo voters thought they had a more convincing message...
...Left populist leaders such as Hightower and Richards have made a good start on this project, with their anticorporate rhetoric and emphasis on economic justice...
...They invited me to speak...
...Like the land itself, ranging from dense pine forests and bayous to barren deserts, Texas politics is a study in contrasts...
...After decades of Texas leading the Sunbelt's economic growth, the state's average citizens are barely making ends meet...
...We'll never know 164 how much money was poured into that Senate race," Dawson comments...
...Gramm may well have thought it impolitic to remind his conservative 165 white constituents that his wife is Korean-American— a rather pathetic commentary on a candidate who blatantly appealed to antigay and anti-immigrant prejudices...
...Even more futile was a discussion I had with a very powerful editor of an American magazine...
...He then was asked to recant publicly for crimes he never committed...
...I didn't understand...
...The Republican professional from Hempstead moving up the corporate ladder in Dallas and the blue-collar liberal Democrat from Detroit finding work in Houston's booming construction industry both maintained their political affiliations, the one strengthening the GOP and the other pulling the Democratic party to the left...
...The old Southernstyle one-party system has broken down, leaving a stronger Republican party and a more liberal Democratic party...
...Meanwhile, the so-called Tory Democrats, with big business and rural white voters solidly behind them, continued to dominate Texas politics throughout the '60s and '70s...
...The Republicans not only had more money to get their message across...
...Noting that the national Republican party targeted the Texas and North Carolina Senate races, and that these were the only two states where Reagan's coattails had a dramatic effect, he contends that the massive spending on the GOP Senate campaigns had a decisive impact on the whole ticket...
...At the same time, Connally and many other Texas conservatives, and much of the big-business money, switched alle. giance to the Republican party...
...Most Texans of all races are profoundly conservative in their social and cultural attitudes and remain deeply divided along racial lines...
...They also don't understand in England...
...They don't kill the writers...
...In part, this has been a by-product of the influx of Northerners, in the '60s and '70s, drawn by the state's growing economy...
...It helps to keep that observation in mind when considering the meaning of the 1984 Republican landslide in Texas...
...In such towns as Port Arthur, Texas City, and Galveston, and in industrial suburbs east of Houston such as Galena Park and Jacinto City, labor has the only substantial grass-roots political organization...
...I have met with Belgian politicians of the Socialist party, influential Spanish Socialists, British Members of Parliament, and with a member of the House of Lords...
...Billie Carr, leader of the liberal-left caucus on the Democratic National Committee, notes that unlike in previous years, there was no break in organizing efforts in the weeks immediately following the election: "Our folks got angry about those election results...
...He is the author of Infante's Inferno...
...When I had to choose between supporting Tip O'Neill and supporting my constituents," he told Texans, "I stood for you...
...But by speaking directly to the real needs of ordinary Texans, he and his colleagues could build a multiracial movement that may forever change the face of Texas politics...
...He asked me: "What is Arcos...
...Perhaps worst of all for Texas liberals, Lloyd Doggett was buried in the GOP landslide by Phil Gramm, the former boll weevil Democrat who, as a member of the House budget committee, had coauthored Reagan's first budget...
...He now lives in London...
...But organizing in an environment as conservative as Texas is no easy task...
...Although Texas labor has suffered heavy membership losses in the last few years, total AFL–CIO membership in the state has probably stabilized...
...ambassador to the United Nations...
...Or they leave their country as exiles...
...After giving liberals Jim Hightower and Ann Richards, the state's treasurer, an overwhelming victory in 1982, Texans supported the reelection of Ronald Reagan by a margin of nearly 30 percentage points...
...Perhaps more than any other place in the nation, it exemplifies Michael Harrington's thesis that Americans have been moving simultaneously to the left, the right, and the center...
...And while the most politically active union, the Steelworkers, has been hit hard by plant closings, labor's money and organization remain essential to any successful Democratic campaign...
...Building a grassroots network of blacks, Mexican-Americans, and blue-collar whites, the liberals helped elect Ralph Yarborough to the Senate in 1958 and carry the state for John Kennedy two years later...
...Not too long ago there was a conference of writers in London under the facetious title of "They Shoot Writers Don't They...
...While Mondale and Doggett sought to downplay their liberalism in order to appeal to moderates, Gramm emphasized the right-wing purity of his opinions...
...After losing nearly a quarter of a million members, primarily in the oil, steel, and construction industries, labor is beginning to make gains in other sectors...
...While unions are virtually nonexistent in some parts of Texas—the largest right-to-work state—labor plays a critical role in state politics because of its strength in the oil-refining, steelmanufacturing, and shipping industries of the upper Gulf Coast...
...Since the first jailing of Gustavo Arcos I have been trying to help him...
...So while many moderates are talking now about the need to cut the party's ties to "the special interest groups," Gunn sees that as a passing fad: "These candidates may want to sneak around and come in the backdoor of the union hall, as they did 20 years ago, but they're still going to come...
...After these ten years he asked permission to leave the country and move to Miami where his ex-wife was suffering from cancer and where his eldest son was in a coma after an accident...
...Texas was hard hit by the Reagan recession, particularly as the drop in world oil prices led to massive lay-offs of refinery workers, steelworkers, sailors, and longshoremen along the Gulf Coast...
...But the last people they kill are the writers...
...I've never had to go to so many meetings in December, or seen people so anxious to get to work...
...If all of the independent spending by corporations, trade associations, the National Rifle Association, and various ideological PACs is included, Dawson estimates that Doggett may have been outspent by 3:1 or even 4:1...
...It is precisely those men without imagination, like Gustavo Arcos, whom they kill...
...Texas Democrats must articulate a version of liberalism that means more to Anglo workers and farmers than just higher taxes and bureaucratism...
...One of the sad ironies of the 1984 campaign was a strange commercial about "family values" aired by Gramm...
...Gusmvo ARCOS participated alongside Fidel Castro in the Cuban revolution...
...The Democratic ticket included such dynamic left-wing populists as Hightower and Richards, and such conservatives as Senator Lloyd Bentsen and Lieutenant Governor Bill Hobby, and moderate Mark White for governor...
...These either remain silent, or they become frightened and their silence is bought with a house and a car and numerous trips out of the country...
Vol. 32 • April 1985 • No. 2
