Early on the morning of July 31, 1981, state representative Mike Martin arrived at the apartment complex in East Austin where he was staying during the session of the Texas Legislature. He got out of his car and was struck by a blast from a 12-gauge shotgun. Shortly afterward, one of his aides found him bleeding. Martin told him to call his press agent. The police were baffled, but Martin eventually solved the case himself. According to him, the perpetrators were members of a satanic cult called the Guardian Angels of the Underworld. It sounded unlikely, and more and more observers began linking the shooting to Martin's plans to run for a vacant seat in the state senate. As the list of unanswered questions grew, the police began looking for him and found him hiding in a stereo cabinet at his mother's house in Longview. Soon afterward, his cousin confessed: he was the one who had pulled the trigger, and the whole thing had been staged to help Martin climb to higher office.
In some less significant state, in one of those corners of the union that God loves a little less, the story of a legislator who staged his own ambush and blamed it on Satanists would be taught in history classes. His face would hang on the wall of every newsroom. The shooting would be commemorated by a plaque, perhaps even a statue in his hometown. The fact that almost no one in Texas remembers Martin's name, that his story has been lost among thousands of other tales of eccentricity, derangement, ambition, and chronic incompetence, speaks to a political culture of extraordinary caliber.
Texas politicians are different from politicians elsewhere, and along with wind and sunshine, they rank among the state's most important renewable resources. Politicians in Sacramento, Albany, or Baton Rouge are, of course, no less deranged or corrupt, but the way these qualities manifest themselves varies from place to place, and the men who have governed or misgoverned Texas (they were mostly men) possess a distinctive piquancy. The reasons are the subject of much debate. I have always secretly suspected that there must be something in the water. But it is not difficult to identify factors that make matters worse.
Texans generally have a weakness for loudmouth orators, braggarts, charlatans, and schemers. Voters here reward men and women who know how to put on a show and have forceful personalities, and the state capital has hosted a seemingly endless succession of lunatics and frauds. Perhaps the worst thing that can be said about a politician here is that they are boring.
It is also worth noting that Texas has had a proper two-party system for only about fifteen of the past hundred and fifty years, and that most matters are decided within the parties, which rewards ideological intransigence. Nor are there any real ethics laws worth mentioning. Some are merely for show and barely worth the paper they are written on. Checks could once be handed out directly on the floor of the Texas Senate, and brothels and hotels where lobbyists could pick up the tab stretched for several blocks just off Congress Avenue in Austin. Our creaky nineteenth-century constitution practically commands lawmakers to enrich themselves while in office, and they often succeed. This dovetails nicely with the enormous amount of money available in the state, much of it held by millionaires and billionaires who are every bit as eccentric as the politicians they buy.
This cauldron has produced several great leaders and many lesser ones. The first half of the twentieth century gave rise to remarkable figures such as “Ma” and “Pa” Ferguson, a husband-and-wife pair of governors who combined extraordinary corruption with populist economics, or “Pappy” O'Daniel, a businessman who became governor thanks to his noontime radio show and his western swing band, the Hillbilly Boys. Lyndon Baines Johnson, one of the strangest men ever to walk the earth, also fought his way up through these ranks; along a path that began inauspiciously at Southwest Texas State Teachers College, he ultimately remade the United States in his own image.
While the upper reaches of Texas politics have produced three presidents over the past sixty years and a host of others who aspired to the presidency, the lower reaches ensconced in the legislature are inhabited by people who inspire a different kind of awe. Over the decades, the Texas Capitol has been as much a venue for excessive drinking, drugs, and sexual escapades as for politics. So many fistfights and scuffles have broken out in the Texas House over the past century that they can scarcely be counted. In 1961, one brawl dragged on so long that four lawmakers at the speaker's microphone formed an impromptu barbershop quartet and provided musical accompaniment for the participants. In 1969, Land Commissioner Jerry Sadler throttled a lawmaker in front of a radio reporter who captured the entire episode on tape. And Bob Bullock, a leading state official for a quarter of a century, once threatened to shoot a reporter over the weekend and get away with it.
