Texit

"Like most passionate nations, Texas has its own history based on, but not limited by, facts.” - John Steinbeck, Travels With Charlie, 1962

Two gunmen walked a ridge line several hundred feet above where we sat. I saw them on either side of the canyon as we connected our TV camera gear. The rifles they cradled had high-powered scopes and a few times they raised them in our direction as if they were sighting a target in the cross hairs. Maintaining my concentration was not going to be a simple task.

The man sitting atop a small, flat boulder in front of me appeared both haggard and unkempt. His head was bald down the middle but long strands of stringy hair sprung out from his temples and suggested he had just unplugged a finger from an electrical outlet. His eyes never seemed to settle on the interviewer and moved back and forth across the horizon and up the hills, constantly searching for something he did not bother to name or identify.

This was my third and final trip to the Davis Mountains to interview Rick McLaren, founder of the Republic of Texas movement. Slender and bedraggled, the revolutionary was living in a rundown camper trailer up next to a canyon wall. Inside, he wrote lawsuits and court filings and essays proclaiming Texas was still an independent country and he was leading its citizens in a resurgence of national pride that would reinstate our previously surrendered nationhood.

“It’s going to come out of this valley,” McLaren told me. “Right here in the Davis Mountains Resort, and we’ll move across this state like a wildfire and the population will support us with words and guns, if they have to. You can’t deny the law, and you can’t deny history. I’ve already proved it. You’ve read my documents. You know what the facts are.”

I only knew what McLaren had been proselytizing. The facts were a bit less clear, and as the Republic of Texas (RoT) campaign gained a bit of momentum, I began to feel slightly guilty. I had given McLaren and his followers some oxygen with my news coverage, though I did not see how I could have avoided reporting on their endeavors. When we took our cameras into the abandoned cotton gin outside New Braunfels for what McLaren described as their constitutional convention, I originally thought I was only doing a feature story about historical hobbyists.

I was as wrong as it was possible to be.

Secession is a deadly idea, and when people like U.S. Senator Ted Cruz crack jokes about the concept, he is not just pandering to right wing political ideology, he is laying the planks for a platform that might cost people their lives. Legitimizing the notion that Texas is not part of the United States, or can remove itself from the union, has already led to death, and misleading Texans into thinking they might put up a border along the Red River and the Sabine and operate their state as an independent nation for the second time, ought to be considered treasonous and criminal. Instead, there is a resurgent Texas Nationalist Movement (TNM) following the bloody trail marked out in the late 1990s by McLaren and now being trod by hundreds of thousands of separatist believers.

The current effort to separate Texas from the Union has a snappy marketing brand called, “Texit.” The group, which claims about 425,000 registered members, says it intends to achieve its goals with legislation, legal constructs, pleadings, and by avoiding violence. Rick McLaren had voiced similar intentions but as his notoriety grew and cash donations increased, the separatist leader moved to the mountains of West Texas to plan his takeover of the state, violently or otherwise. No guarantee exists that the current TNM effort will be pacific, and when people talk about independence and freedom and carry guns, the odds are always disproportionately in favor of violence.

Leaders of the Texas National Movement have made references to Rick McLaren and the Republic of Texas by claiming, “We’re not those people.” TNM may have no plans to foment a violent separatist movement, but its goal of secession is based largely on the same false premises as the fatal effort launched by McLaren and his acolytes, who left the New Braunfels cotton gin and took to the streets of Austin for political effect. There were not a lot of believers who followed McLaren up into his Davis Mountains “embassy,” but they were as fervent as their leader in their conviction that Texas was not a part of the United States.

McLaren’s argument, which he made endlessly to any listener, was that Texas had been illegally annexed by the U.S. government when it was made a state under a joint resolution by Congress in 1845. He believed, and undoubtedly still does, that Texas remains an independent republic and, therefore, not subject to the laws of the United States of America. Further, he has argued that after Texas joined the Confederacy, the U.S. had no authority to readmit the state to the Union since it had never become a state, in his analysis. Although the congressional resolution legalizing Texas statehood made clear that secession was not legal, it did authorize Texans to break up into four smaller states, not to exceed an additional four in number.  

The issue, technically, was settled by the Civil War. Secession was not legal, and the losers were not allowed to leave the Union, a choice they had made which was a central catalyst of the war. A Supreme Court Justice put the matter to final rest in an opinion issued in 1869 in Texas v. White. The state’s confederate legislature had sold bonds during the war and there was some question of their legality because of the status of the Confederacy. Justice Salmon Chase insisted Texas had no authority to separate from the Union, prior to or after the war. There is not now, nor has there ever been, a right to secede.

“The union between Texas and the other states,” he wrote. “Was as complete, as perpetual, and as indissoluble as the union between the original states. There was no place for reconsideration or revocation, except through revolution or through the consent of the [other] states.”

“Even if approved by voters and legislatures of states, secession is absolutely null under the constitution.”

McLaren, an inveterate researcher of legal documents, judiciously avoided materials that discounted his claims of Texas independence. As we videotaped a lengthy interview next to his “embassy” and out behind the general store in the Davis Mountains Resort, he ignored my lists of legal precedents about the illegality of secession. His hands were in constant motion, and he leaned across the gap between us to make his point. McLaren became sufficiently animated that I kept looking to the ridges and the riflemen to make certain they were not getting the mistaken impression I was threatening their leader.

“You are still missing my point,” he said, his voice slightly elevated. “How can you secede when you were never legally a part of the Union? The government of this Republic did not accede to the congressional resolution and legally accept statehood. We were always an independent republic, and we still are. The language to bring us back into the Union was wrong because it speaks to a statehood that did not exist.”

I never saw Rick McLaren again because he had decided to declare his kind of war against Texas. Initially, he had tried filing a string of motions and lawsuits challenging various jurisdictional authorities. The number of spurious liens he had put in local court records was not recorded but he gave people bad advice that convinced them to not pay their mortgages until their homes were repossessed. An outlander from Missouri, McLaren probably did not contemplate the lack of attention he received after he took to the remote mountains of Jeff Davis County.

Rick McLaren, reduced to custody

Eventually, he committed a crime by kidnapping two of his neighbors, a husband and wife he was convinced were spies for the state. As the Texas Rangers and Department of Public Safety began closing in on his outpost, McLaren took to his shortwave radio seeking a plea for help from sympathetic international governments. Intrepid cameraman and technician Austin Anderson slipped through the backroads in the darkness and got close enough to find the correct frequency and record the desperate broadcasts.

“May day. May day,” McLaren said. “This is an emergency broadcast to all nations of the world. We are the Republic of Texas. We are being overrun by forces illegally occupying our sovereign territory. We call upon all nations of the world to come to our assistance and rescue us from this hostile takeover. May day. May day. Please respond. This is Rick McLaren of the Republic of Texas asking for help from a friendly nation.”

Nobody responded, but Rick and his boys stood off the law for a week after holding his hostages for twelve hours. His legal issues were never addressed because instead of a being acknowledged as a constitutional or intellectual ideologist, he had suddenly become a thug with a gun. National publicity of the standoff focused on a mostly lone separatist who had barricaded himself in a house in the mountains of far West Texas. He was another kook making headlines. Two of his soldiers ran off to nearby bunkers in the woods until DPS bloodhounds ran them to ground. One of the men died in a shootout with law enforcement. Eventually, investigators discovered large caches of arms and six gas tanks.  

McLaren still proselytizing from behind prison walls

None of this, of course, put an end to the mythological dream of modern Texas independence. A derivative and successor of the Republic of Texas is the Texas Nationalist Movement (TNM), which claims to be more benign and not dangerous. The group is, however, considerably more polished in its efforts, maintains a professional website, and conducts constant outreach and marketing. Nonetheless, they say in their mission statement they are interested in restoring the “nation” of Texas.

“Our mission is to secure and protect the political, cultural and economic independence of the nation of Texas and to restore and protect a constitutional Republic and the inherent rights of the people of Texas.”  

There is no nation of Texas.

TNM seems to have found a social and cultural approach that evaded Mr. McLaren. Instead of standing on a street corner and preaching about the Republic of Texas, TNM’s leadership meets with conservatives and gives talks to various organizations in the state and internationally. They appear to be making effective use of social media and conduct petition signings and late-night talk sessions to attract more followers to their idea of a “Texit” from the U.S. There is also a monthly march at the Alamo to honor those who served independence in the past and to make a statement about TNM’s vision for the future. The president of the group, Daniel Miller, is running for Lieutenant Governor, a campaign that seems a bit counterintuitive. Why seek office in a government you do not consider legitimate?

TNM is not simply a gaggle of Texas eccentrics, however. The group is increasingly organized in fund raising and communications. Names are added to their petition daily. Who they are petitioning and what they might ask is not exactly clear. They can hardly present a list of millions of signatures to the state asking the government to dissolve itself and reform as a nation. The state does not offer initiative and referendum votes so a list of millions of signatures will not drive a ballot item, which seems as absurd as running for an office in a government you think is illegitimate. A constitutional amendment requires two thirds vote of both chambers of the state legislature to be placed on a ballot but why bother amending a document you plan to throw out as not relevant to your new nation?

Racism has also played a role in the historic separatist movement. An estimated two thirds of the Texas population was slaves when the state entered the Union, a move that was inevitable given the fact that Mexico had outlawed slavery decades earlier and was pressuring the new republic to end the atrocity. President Sam Houston believed in slavery, though, but when the time came, he spoke against secession from the Union and did not like the idea of joining the Confederacy. The modern separatist movement is not completely White, and there are even Blacks in leadership roles of TNM, but there is no way to completely disconnect Texas nationalism from its racist history any more than it is possible to argue the Civil War was simply about economics and states’ rights.

Freedom of speech and thought, of course, are central to our culture and government. The question must be asked, though, when does a Texas nationalist movement become a treasonous act of sedition? Are the members of such an organization, simply by the nature of their mission, not calling for the overthrow of the U.S. government, which has primacy over the state? They cannot be considered supportive of Texas state government since they want it abolished to be replaced by a Republic of Texas organizational construct.

Texit is also gaining notoriety at the national political level because of capricious and ill-considered comments by Texas’ U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, who said secession should be considered if “Democrats fundamentally destroy the country.” Cruz’ definition of destruction is probably a sustaining Democratic majority, but it is irresponsible of a U.S. senator to even joke about secession. The senator, who is alleged to be intelligent but rarely exhibits the characteristic in public, even described a series of actions to be performed by Texas after Democrats pushed the country “off a cliff.”

“If they pack the Supreme Court, if they make D.C. a state, if they federalize elections and massively expand voter fraud, there may come a point where it's hopeless," Cruz said. "We're not there yet. And if there comes a point where it’s hopeless, then I think we take NASA, we take the military, we take the oil.”

Cruz, of course, won’t be carrying a weapon or wearing a military uniform. He will be back in his office trading oil futures to get even richer. He will send others to die for Texas independence. If he makes any moves to actualize his vision, however, he needs to be sent up to the Texas Panhandle to share a cell with Rick McLaren in the Clements Unit of TDC. The leader of the Republic of Texas revolt was given 99 years in prison without parole, and my guess is that he continues to bore his fellow inmates with his argument of why Texas is still a nation and never was a state.

What a crazy damned idea on which to waste one’s life. I reported on McLaren’s trial from the Brewster County Court House in Alpine, and I remember standing outside to catch a conversation with one of the Texas Rangers who had testified. He was reluctant to speak but finally gave me a quote I have carried with me through the years as a kind of talisman. After peppering him with questions he carefully evaded, he pushed his hat back in frustration and said, “Mr. Moore, right is still right, even if nobody is doin’ it. And wrong is still wrong, even if everybody is doin’ it.”

I reckon.