Republicans head for Texas

'Dallas, that Texas town where they never seen ice or snow' – I hasten to assure any school teachers present that that is not my line or my grammar. It's that of the immortal Thomas 'Fats' Waller's version of the 'Dallas Blues', written by the less than immortal Lloyd Garrett and Hart Wand and its line no more to be amended by pedants than that other immortal American lament, 'He was her man, but she done him wrong'.

Which reminds me of a funny time just before the Second World War when the poet, the late W. H. Auden, first came to the United States and was overcome, as European intellectuals tended to be, by the poetic appeal of the black man and the blues. Auden was putting together an anthology of British and American folk poetry and he wished to include the saga of that stricken lady, but he changed the last line to, 'He was her man but she did him wrong'. The publishers, very literate men, registered horror at this blasphemy and assured Auden it could not be did, done. He was very gingerly from then on with American idiom.

Well, having endured the balloons and the baloney and the extraordinary eloquence of Governor Mario Cuomo at San Francisco and then the super colossal production of Los Angeles with its thrilling competitiveness and its sometimes remarkable episodes of non-sportsmanship, it is time now to steel yourselves for the Republican circus, or coronation, at Dallas.

You know the business of choosing a convention city is a very tense and, in itself, a very competitive business. It begins at least a year before the conventions are to be held. The mayors of many big cities put in their bids to the national committees of both parties and beg to be the host city. These appeals have nothing much to do with politics or party loyalty, not in the first place anyway.

The prospect of having your city invaded for a week or more by something like 5,000 politicians and 15,000 lobbyists, media people, not to mention the fashionable and the bad and the beautiful from every big city in the land, is synonymous with the prospect of many millions of dollars pouring into the coffers of the city's landlords, hotel and restaurant and taxi-cab owners, nightclubs, bars – most of all, shops and department stores.

When the national committees meet, that's when political considerations come into play. Four years ago, the Republican national committee debated long and hard whether to choose a city in a state that had a dependable Republican record or whether to choose a city in enemy country. They took the risk of doing just that, to go to Michigan to the city of Detroit, which was to walk into something like a Depression town.

Detroit for so long had been the capital of the automobile industry, the braggart symbol of American know-how, that the Republicans were practically choosing to hold their meeting on a breadline. The automobile industry was sick and shamed then by the enormous invasion of the Japanese, but the Republicans figured that the sickness of Detroit was none of their doing but of Jimmy Carter's. They took the risk and after Ronald Reagan's nomination and his passionate promise to do something for the jobless auto workers, it soon became plain that the promise had paid off. The Democrats had settled into the complacency of reminding themselves that Detroit was the headquarters of the UAW, the United Automobile Workers and the UAW stood firm, always had done, with the Democrats. Well, they didn't. The auto workers broke with their leaders and, for once, the UAW leaders failed to deliver.

The choice of Dallas by the Republicans was, I understand, not a matter of quite such infighting. Neither party is claiming Texas in November but they both know that this year Texas could be the swing state. Fifty years ago, it was, to all ideological intents and purposes, a Southern state and, therefore, in those days, when all the South was Democrat, the Democrats' preserve. It revolted, however, against Roosevelt's having a fourth term and since then it has never been taken for granted. It plumped twice for Eisenhower and for the next 20 years alternated between Democrat and Republican, but alternated with the national preference.

I mean that only once since 1932 has Texas done for the wrong man, for the defeated candidate. So Texans have learned to appropriate a maxim that for a long time belonged to the state of Maine – as Texas goes, so goes the nation. The Republicans decided to help fate by holding their convention there this year.

Now why should Texas, that mythical kingdom, so well known for its wealth and its optimism and its brazen patriotism, why should Texas provoke even a wince of anxiety among Reagan Republicans? Texas, with its forests of oil wells, its 800 million feet of timber, its ranches the size of Wales, its 13 million cattle, its thriving citrus farms, its unbelievable number of lavish, private collections of every modern painter from Renoir to Jackson Pollack, its average salary of $21,000.

Well, that's all true enough. It is the state scenery the world recognises, against which those characters with the wide-brimmed hats and the string ties and the cigars strut their hour with their gleaming ladies. All that Texas needed to fix itself like a wedding photo in the world's imagination was the famous soap opera and its cast of rich, handsome, sleek and trashy people.

Such people certainly exist and the soap-opera picture is true enough but only as a soap opera called 'London' would be true if the cast consisted entirely of Mayfair debs, young guardees, a City banker or two, a clutch of Sloane Ranger divorcees and a chorus of Hooray Henrys, but it wouldn't begin to be a miniature of London, any more than television's 'Dallas' is a miniature of Texas. Or, for that matter, of Dallas.

Texas has not been well served by that glittering drama any more than San Francisco has been served by its police drama. First of all, oil is certainly there in abundance, but only in a comparatively small part in the north and the east of a state that stretches 800 miles from the Louisiana border to where New Mexico begins, across a great central plain and on west to the Edwards Plateau and up it to the Davis Mountains, the foothills of the Rockies. On millions of acres whose ranches conform to the Texas average – which is no more than 120 acres – and where millions of people have rarely, if ever, seen an oil man.

In some other state, Lyndon Johnson might have never gone into politics but as a raw and gutty and impassioned poor man, he was the ideal champion of thousands of poor farmers who, this year as always, keep up a constant fight against first drought and then floods and who can always be recruited to fight the oil lobby.

Texas has more laws on behalf of cheap electricity and the conservation of land and public morality than a stranger would ever dream because, in the state legislature, there are many more Methodists than there are oil men. It's the main reason for an oddity I mentioned a few weeks ago, the fact that Texas, until fairly recently, prohibited the serving of alcohol in public years – 40 years or so – after Prohibition was repealed by the Congress of the United States.

So, as you might expect today, Texas has added to its large population of Methodists and Baptists, more than its share of the new evangelicals, the far-right populist religious groups who enthusiastically back Mr Reagan for his patriotism, his efforts on behalf of prayer in the public schools, most of all for his opposition to abortion.

Now this mix of oil barons, insurance tycoons, small farmers and religious non-conformists, both sober and fanatical, is a Texas mix of long standing and, even 40 years ago, at the beginning of the Second World War, the Texas border control was having trouble with what were then known as wetbacks, poor Mexicans who ducked into the Rio Grande by night and ducked out on the Texas side and got lost in the border towns all the way across the 800 miles from Brownsville to El Paso on the New Mexico border.

The wetbacks then were a peculiar Texas problem but shortly became a Texas resource in the sense that ranchers in the lemon and grapefruit and cotton country soon saw that they had a swelling pool of cheap labour. Well, in the past ten years or so, this stealthy source of supply has swollen to a flood that swamps the border towns and the unemployment exchanges beyond.

Today, Texas has – nobody can accurately say, but certainly well over – a million illegal Mexicans, maybe another million, legal, naturalised Mexicans who have finally outnumbered the ethnic majority – there since the turn of the century – of Germans. Mr Mondale, at one point, thought seriously of picking the very attractive and able young Mexican-American mayor of San Antonio as his vice presidential candidate.

What makes Texas in some ways a huge compound of American social problems of the 1980s is this new mix imposed on the old one – illegal Mexicans and a new wave of Hispanics, refugees from Central America, competing for jobs with the older strains, most of all the Scotch, Irish and the Germans.

Unemployment in Texas is below the national average, but this is an almost meaningless statement since every possible job in the cotton and the citrus fields, what they call stoop labour, is filled by the Hispanics and the Mexicans. In the towns, black unemployment is twice that of the whites. The unemployment rate among white workers is well up to the national average and that average salary, that remarkable $21,000, is a paper figure. Add the income of a score of multi-millionaires to a thousand middle-class incomes, divide by 1,020 and you get a very handsome average.

There are more registered Democrats than Republicans in Texas, but this is no longer a consoling thought to the Democrats, for nobody knows just how this new, bubbling stew of old English, Irish, Scotch, Germans, blacks, Mexicans, Hispanics is going to melt down into a recognisable political stock.

All the Democrats know, as they anxiously watch the Dallas doings, is that in November, they win Texas or they go down to defeat.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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