God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State(17)
There’s another story that Texans tell about the capture of Santa Anna, which has long been regarded as mere legend. Recent scholarship, however, makes it more likely that Houston’s victory at San Jacinto came about in part because of the sly distraction on the part of a serving girl, Emily Morgan. “Why, historians ask, did Santa Anna choose an untenable encampment on the plains of San Jacinto, with the Texan Army in front of him and a bayou prohibiting his retreat?” Steve once wrote in Texas Monthly. “Why, on the afternoon of April 21, when he knew that Houston’s forces were only half a mile away, was his army taking a siesta? The answer resounds through the ages: Santa Anna was in a hurry to get into the sack with Emily Morgan.” Whether the legend is true or not—and even Steve has doubts—she is memorialized by the Emily Morgan Hotel, next to the Alamo.
There is a lesson to be drawn from Houston’s career as a populist leader. He would twice be elected president of the Republic of Texas, which his decisive victory had secured. After Texas entered the Union, on December 29, 1845, Houston became one of the first two U.S. senators from the state of Texas. He clearly envisioned the disaster that the proposed Southern Confederacy would inflict on the nation and on Texas: “I see my beloved South go down in the unequal contest, in a sea of blood and smoking ruin.” In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, he was elected governor as a Unionist, but the secessionists were more powerful. Houston’s faith in populism as a force for progress was shattered. “Are we ready to sell reality for a phantom?” Houston vainly asked, as propagandists and demagogues fanned the clamor for secession with deluded visions of victory. To those who demanded that he join the Confederacy, Houston responded, “I refuse to take this oath…I love Texas too well to bring civil strife and bloodshed upon her.” Houston was evicted as governor, and the bloodshed came.
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HOUSTON’S NAMESAKE CITY was founded in 1836, months after his victory at San Jacinto. Two New York real-estate-developer brothers, Augustus and John K. Allen, commissioned Gale Borden Jr., a publisher and surveyor who would later invent condensed milk, to lay out a grand metropolis in the lowlands around Buffalo Bayou. They named the swampy new town after the hero of San Jacinto, but the brand was about the only thing to commend the place for settlement. “Houston (pronounced Hewston) has a reputation of being an unhealthy residence,” Frederick Law Olmsted, a New Yorker, disdainfully remarked on his trip through the state in 1854. He took note of the slave markets and the numerous venomous snakes. “Alligator holes are an additional excitement, the unsuspicious traveler suddenly sinking through the treacherous surface, and sometimes falling victim, horse and all, to the hideous jaws of the reptile.”
After Spindletop hit, Houston discovered itself as the capital of an oil empire. By 1913, there were a dozen oil companies located in the city, including Humble Oil, the predecessor of ExxonMobil. “Houston was a one-industry town,” Stephen Klineberg, the founding director of Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, said over coffee at a French bakery. “We did oil the way Detroit did cars.”
Klineberg has been conducting an annual survey of the city for the last thirty-five years. When the study began, oil and gas accounted for more than 80 percent of the city’s economy; now, it’s half that. The medical center alone—the largest medical complex in the world—has more than 100,000 workers, in fifty-nine institutions, occupying an area larger than Chicago’s Loop. Houston’s port is the second-busiest in the country. The city added more than 700,000 jobs between 2000 and 2014, almost twice the number of jobs created in New York City. “People complain about the weather and the flying cockroaches, but the latest survey shows that eighty-one percent say life in Houston is excellent or good, even with the downturn,” Klineberg told me. “They say that Houston is a crappy place to visit but a wonderful place to live.”
When I was growing up in Dallas, we looked upon Houston as a blue-collar cousin, a fine place to go if you liked country music and barbecue. That’s still true, but Houston is now rated (by The Washington Post) as one of the five best restaurant cities in the United States. It has an excellent opera, and claims to have more theater space than any city except New York—achievements that mark Houston’s aspiration to be an international cultural center. “There was this ad in Texas Monthly,” Lynn Wyatt, the long-reigning queen of the Houston social scene, told me. “It said, ‘Houston is’—what’s that awful word? Funky. It said, ‘Houston is funky.’ I called them up at once! I told them, Houston’s not funky! You make it sound like Austin or some such place. Houston is a world-class city.”
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I SPENT SOME TIME in the early 1980s writing about the space program, so I hung around the Johnson Space Center, which is in the Clear Lake area of Houston. A massive Saturn V rocket—the kind that took the astronauts to the moon—reclines on its side at the entryway, like some fallen colossus of an ancient world.
After the glamour days of the race to the moon, the space program had become more prosaic, more workaday, more lunchboxy. I remember seeing the Columbia—the first of the shuttle fleet to fly into space—as it passed over our house, in 1981, piggybacked atop a 747, on its way to Cape Canaveral. It was exciting and pitiable at the same instant. That’s a rocket ship?