From the Hill: Ted Cruz aims to win the West

After starting his campaign with a speech to evangelicals Senator Cruz is making a pitch to residents of the west - especially Nevada - who would like access to the national government's land holding in western states.

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Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is making a play for the West in the 2016 race by touting his opposition to the federal government’s expansive land holdings.

Cruz’s disdain for federal land control is resonating with Westerners whose lives are impacted by land managers, and could help him win over conservatives in Nevada, one of the early nominating states in the presidential contest.

“This is an issue he’s been focused on for quite some time, and it’s one that plays extremely well with the conservative base in the western part of the United States,” said Ford O’Connell, a GOP strategist who advised the 2008 presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)

Nationwide, the government owns nearly 630 million acres, a landmass bigger than Alaska and California combined. Most of that land, managed by agencies like the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service, is located in states west of the Mississippi River.

Federal control is particularly heavy in Nevada, where the government owns 81 percent of all land, the most of any state.

“This is something that has been a perennial issue in the West since it became part of the United States,” said James McCarthy, a geography professor at Clark University who studies the history of western land. “It’s a staple of western politics to complain about that.”

How Texas became a western state

Apparently there was little question that Texas was a southern state up until about 100 years ago when business leaders wanted to distance the state from groups like the KKK.

Re branding the state as being full of freedom loving cowboys was more attractive than being seen as being full of racists who missed slavery and the plantation system.

Two related stories:

- Is Texas Southern, Western, or Truly a Lone Star?

“I don’t think anyone much questioned Texas’s essential Southernness until the twentieth century,” says Dr. Gregg Cantrell, Texas history chair at TCU, past president of the Texas State Historical Association, and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. “And they started doing so as a way of distancing themselves from the late unpleasantness of the 1860’s and 1870’s. Defeat, military occupation, Jim Crow and lynching, and all of those unpleasant things that are very much a part of Texas history as a Southern state, were things that a lot of Texans would probably just as soon not talk about a lot.”

Nationally, Dixie was stigmatized as a backward, ignorant, and violent hotbed of the Ku Klux Klan and religious hypocrisy. Why remain linked to all that baggage? Why not, forward-looking Texans began to think, align with the West instead? Back then, and to a certain degree today, the West was seen as optimistic, the place of second chances, the land of the golden tomorrow, a stark contrast when compared to Dixie’s melancholy and tragic yesterdays. So Texas’s politicians, educators, and ad-men went to work, Cantrell says, and have since all but totally recast the very ideal of what it means to be a Texan.

“And so what do you do? You play up the frontier, you play up the Texas Revolution and the Alamo, you play up the (in reality not-very-glorious) ten years of the Texas Republic, and then you talk about the Indian Wars and the cattle drives, all culminating in Spindletop and the discovery of oil,” he says. “All of these things made Texas seem like anything but a Southern state.”

- How Fort Worth and Texas seceded from the South, or did we?

Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/bud-kennedy/article12946790.html#storylink=cpy

. . . take the slogan that remains on our front page: “Where the West Begins.”
That slogan was first added to founder Amon G. Carter’sStar-Telegram on Aug. 15, 1923.

That summer, the 1920s rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan had staged two robed and hooded parades in Fort Worth, one described as 25 blocks long.

Business leaders across Texas wanted desperately to promote the state to investors and customers from the North. But tens of thousands of white Texans wanted to revert to a racist, nativist “Invisible Empire” that used vigilante attacks to intimidate black Texans, immigrants and everyone except white Protestant prohibitionists.

Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/bud-kennedy/article12946790.html#storylink=cpy

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