Texas Got It Right!. Sam Wyly

      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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