Texas Threat

As other States were last week gloating over population increases which, by reapportionment next year, would give them greater political strength in the House of Representatives, Texas, biggest of them all, pointed with huge pride to Pampa as a sample of its own spectacular growth. In 1920 Pampa, high in the Panhandle, had 987 inhabitants. This year, thanks to oil and energy, it was found to be a full-fledged city of 10,453, a population increase of 959% in a decade. The disclosure of Pampa's spurty growth came just 24 hours after Texas' Congressman John Nance Garner, Demo cratic Leader of the House, had made a proposal which, if ever executed, would be far more subversive of U. S. political divisions than any readjustment of House representation consequent to the Census. Leader Garner declared that the time had come to carve five States out of Texas. Purpose: "To transfer the balance of political power from New England to the South and secure for the Southern States . . . prestige and recognition." What moved Representative Garner, as a Texan, as Minority leader of the House and as a member of the House Ways & Means Committee, to advocate this major change was the apparent victory of the industrial Northeast over the South & West in the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Bill. If the Lone Star State were changed into a constellation of five, Mr. Garner foresaw eight additional Democratic Senators from the four new States -- enough to over whelm Grundy-Republican-Tariffism. And incidently, under the Garner plan, what is now Texas would cast 28 electoral votes for President instead of 20. The mule-like kick in Mr. Garner's threat-proposal lay in the fact that Texas can turn itself into five States whether or not the rest of the U. S. approves. When Texas was admitted into the Union 84 years ago, Congress authorized it to form "new States of convenient size, not exceeding four in number and in addition to the said State of Texas." So immense is Texas (265,896 sq. mi.) that few persons can conceive of its size. It takes as long by train to travel from the Panhandle on the north to Brownsville on the south as it does to go from New York to Key West. Leader Garner gave his own figures: "Texas would make 220 States the size of Rhode Island, 54 the size of Connecticut, six the size of New York. Texas is four times bigger than the combined New England States. . . . With an estimated population of 5,600,000 Texas ranks fifth among the States, being exceeded only by New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Ohio. ..." Such a split-up of Texas into five States the size of Arkansas fired Mr. Garner's political imagination. He foresaw an East Texas, West Texas, North Texas, South Texas and just plain Texas in the middle. New State capitals would blossom on the mesa. Political jobs would increase fourfold. Every U. S. flag would be rendered instantly obsolete. But as clearly as anyone else Leader Garner saw that Texas itself will object to five Texases. The bigness of Texas is the supreme boast of every Texan. To hack the State up into five Arkansases would, to most of its citizens, be dismembering an empire. No longer could Texas brag of the fact that it grew more cotton (five million bales), produced more oil, than any other State. In such a split-up, North Texas would lose the historic glory of The Alamo (Roman Catholic mission at San Antonio cruelly besieged by Santa Anna). Bunker's Monthly, unique journal of and for Big Texas, would become just an ordinary interstate publication. Proud columns of Texas figures would wilt away. Vainly did Mr. Garner argue: "To divide the State would in no wise detract from the glory of the past but would add to the glory of the future by reason of additional political power and the enhancement of sectional initiative. . . ." This sentimental opposition to any partition of the State the New York World described thus: "A Texan is so proud of Texas as it is he can hardly sleep at night. He boasts that if all the steers in Texas were one big steer the critter would stand with his forefeet in the Gulf of Mexico and his hindfeet in Hudson's Bay and would drink water out of the Panama Canal while brushing the flies off the North Pole with his tail."*

* Famed toast to the U. S. as reported by Poet Carl Sandburg: "Bounded on the north by the Arctic Ocean and on the south by the Antarctic Ocean and on the east by the winds of the Equinox and on the west by the Day of Judgment."

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