Skip to main content

Can we really have five Texases?

Image
By
Image result for cactus jack garner
Senator John Nance "Cactus Jack" Garner (D-TX) suggested splitting Texas into five states.


It’s unusual to carve a new state out of an existing one, or even to redraw state boundaries.  The United States’ Constitution makes it very difficult to do.  Not only would the residents of the existing and potential new states have to agree, Congress has to agree, too.  In 1820, the new state of Maine was carved out of Massachusetts, and the new state of West Virginia was (sort of) carved out of Virginia.  Besides that, there have been occasions where state boundaries were nudged a little bit, but for the past century, things have been pretty calm on the new-borders front.

That’s not to say there are no efforts to break new states out of the old ones.  Most of these efforts don’t go anywhere—a handful of counties in rural Colorado tried to form the state of North Colorado in 2013, complaining that they didn’t get the attention they deserved from the government in Denver.  The residents of southeastern Arizona made a similar complaint in 2011, calling for the creation of the state of Baja Arizona.  A 1972 proposal to carve the state of Forgottonia out of western Illinois was clearly more of a protest than a proposal.  In fact, most such proposals are intended to express dissatisfaction with the status quo than they are to create legitimate, functioning states.  Some say there is one exception to this rule.  Others say that exception does not exist.  The case in question: Texas.

Texans enjoy thinking of themselves as a little different from the rest of the country.  It’s one of the three states that joined the United States not as a founding colony or as a territory, but as an actual, established republic.  When the Republic of Texas became an actual state in 1845, it claimed that the aforementioned law that Congress must approve any new states carved out of it didn’t apply, and that Texas, if it wanted to, could divide itself into as many as five different states.  This was controversial at the time; Congress never actually agreed with Texas’s claim.  Congress still doesn’t, and whether Texas has this right or not is still disputed.  It’s also still academic, since the government of Texas has never actually tried to split the state up.

The first proposal to do this came in 1860, right before the Civil War, when it was suggested that part of eastern Texas be cut off and made into the state of Jacinto.  Later, in 1869, it was proposed that the southern third of the state be cut off and established as the state of Lincoln, but Congress voted it down.  (This can’t be considered a test of Texas’s claim that it can subdivide, since Texas had not yet been readmitted to the Union following its exit before the Civil War.  Texas was readmitted as a state in 1870.)  In the early 1900s, there was an active movement to merge the Texas Panhandle with the Oklahoma Territory to form the state of Texlahoma, and in 1915, there was another movement to break the Panhandle off and form the new state of Jefferson.  (Jefferson is the most popular state name that never got used.  Originally a state of Jefferson was proposed to include Colorado and some of the surrounding territory; in the 1940s, a state of Jefferson to be carved out of northern California and southwest Oregon was also proposed.)

Perhaps the most ambitious plan to divide Texas was put forth by Senator John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner (D-TX), who penned an editorial in the New York Times in 1921 that not only can Texas unquestionably subdivide into five new states, it should.  In Garner’s editorial, he expressed concern for the growing population of the state and its disproportionately small representation in the Senate.  Among other concerns, he asserted that it’s not fair to the residents of very large states that they should get just two senators to represent them, while very small states get the same two.  This is an argument that’s been going on in America since the Constitution was written.

But old Cactus Jack had an ace up his sleeve.  He was a proud Texan, and couldn’t see how any Texan would want to part with their Texan identity any more than he would.  So, Garner reasoned, the name of each new state should retain the name of the mother state.  His proposal was to form the states of North Texas, South Texas, East Texas, West Texas and, in the middle, Old Texas.  These five new states could hold on to their Texas heritage while breaking into five more manageable states.  It would also just happen that there would be a bloc of ten senators hailing from one Texas or another, giving Texas a much greater voice in the Senate than it would otherwise have.  Senator Garner couldn’t have minded that!

Of course, it never came to pass.  In the 90-plus years following Garner’s proposal, numerous other divisions of Texas have been suggested, and nothing has come of them, either.  In 2009, political prognosticator Nate Silver wrote about a hypothetical five-way division of Texas, and how that might have played out in the 2008 election.  His conclusion: the new states wouldn’t have been as solidly Republican as they were in that election (and in nearly every election since 1980).  Considering the variety of the cultural landscape of Texas, maybe the ten senators from those hypothetical new states wouldn’t be such a predictable bloc, after all!
Related image
The Houston Press made some suggestions for division in 2014. 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How the Lemon was Invented

By
Lemons How do you make a lemon?  Silly question, isn’t it?  You just take the seeds out of one and plant them, and wait for the tree to come up, right?  That’s true, but it hasn’t always been that easy.  Lemons today are a widely cultivated citrus fruit, with a flavor used in cuisines of countries where no lemon tree would ever grow.  You might think that it was just a matter of ancient peoples finding the trees, enjoying their fruit and growing more of them, but that’s not true.  The lemon is a human invention that’s maybe only a few thousand years old. The first lemons came from East Asia, possibly southern China or Burma.  (These days, some prefer to refer to Burma as Myanmar .  I’ll try to stay out of that controversy here and stick to fruit.)  The exact date of the lemon’s first cultivation is not known, but scientists figure it’s been around for more than 4,000 years.  The lemon is a cross breed of several fruits.  One f...
6 comments
Read more

Origins of the Word Hoser, eh?

By
Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as cultural icons Bob and Doug McKenzie These days we often hear Canadians referred to as “Hosers”.  It’s a strange word, and it sounds a little insulting, but it’s sometimes used more with affection than malice.  Any such word is difficult to use correctly, especially if you don’t belong to the group the word describes.   I can’t say I feel comfortable throwing the word around, myself, but I can offer a little information about it that might shed some light on what it means. First off: is it an insult?  Yes… and no.   The word hoser can be used as an insult or as a term of endearment; the variation hosehead , is certainly an insult.  It’s a mild insult, meaning something like jerk or idiot or loser .  Its origin is unclear, and there are several debatable etymologies of the word.  One claims that it comes from the days before the zamboni was invented, when the losing team of an outdoor ice hockey game...
1 comment
Read more

The Whoopie Cap

By
What can you do with your father’s old hats?  If you were born after, say, 1955, the answer is probably “Not much.”  Men were still wearing fedoras in the 1970s and 1980s, but by 1990, fashion had turned to the point where unless you were Indiana Jones, the hat didn’t look right.  Some blame Jack Kennedy for starting it all, strutting around perfectly coiffed and bare-headed in the early 1960s.  In 1953, Harry Truman, a haberdasher by trade, stepped out of office, and just eight years later we had a president who didn’t care for hats?  The times, they were a-changin’. If you set the WABAC machine to the 1920s or 1930s (when Indiana Jones was supposed to have lived), you would see the fedora was still very much in style.  Men just didn’t leave the house without a hat of some kind, and for what remained of the middle class, the fedora was the topper of choice.  But like any other piece of clothing, hats wear out, too.  When that happened, you’d ju...
Post a Comment
Read more