It is sometimes said people either fear spiders or snakes, but not both. Not especially fearing either, we are neutral about the truth of that; but just as there are two kinds of people, those who divide all people into two groups and those who do not, throughout the West, in every part except California and Texas, there seem to be people who worry either about acquiring too many Texans or getting too many Californians.
That division seems to conform also to the people who drive Subarus with Namasté and Darwin-fish bumper stickers and who fear the Texans’ big trucks and bumptiousness, on the one hand, and the local drivers of pickups, who cannot see around the ends of them when they’re backing out of parking spaces and suspect that one foolish California idea or another, like zoning or excessive tolerance, will sneak in through the water supply.
Why these two states? Probably because in the West, California is the biggest state by population and Texas — cover your eyes, Lone Star people — is the second-biggest by size (and by population), if it were truly in the West. The biggest state by square miles in the West by far is Alaska, although many people in the West — and especially in Texas — don’t know it because they don’t think Alaska is in the West; they think it’s in that box on the lower left of the map. We heard a National Public Radio anchor the other day refer to “the continental 48.”
Please trust us when we tell you that Alaska is on this continent. In any case, we would argue for a slightly different definition of the West, one that includes Hawai’i and Alaska and excludes California as well as Texas.
California is an outlier. It sits behind the wall of the Sierra Nevada and evolved, in its white habitation, separately from the rest of the U.S. until mostly Chinese immigrants, working for the Central Pacific railroad, blasted through its mountains, emerged in the Utah Territory and helped give birth to American big business and finance, all for $3 a day. California has been invading the Intermountain West ever since.
Today’s Texas began as a Trojan Horse in Mexico after Mexico’s War of Independence, although Thomas Jefferson believed he bought it from Napoleon as part of the Louisiana Purchase. Eventually, the white Texans, being, essentially, Americans, as well as slaveholders, declared their independence from Mexico, which, knowing something about it, frowned on slavery.
Texas was admitted to the U.S. in 1845. From 1850 to 1860, its slave population was expanded from about 58,000 persons to 183,000 — whereupon it seceded from the Union along with other Confederate states in the Civil War, considering its ghastly property more important than its loyalty.
It is tempting to say that whatever the lessons of its history are, Texas doesn’t seem to learn them. Alternately, we might infer that Texas is forever going its own way and, despite the cattle and fences in its DNA and the fancy boot stores in Austin, doesn’t really want to be part of the West. Forced, as it sees it, to choose, it chooses the South. Today, its values still seem to revolve around oil and gas depletion allowances, large food portions, and, like California, the latent threat to secede.
Meanwhile, the actual Western states have the spiders-or-snakes mindset. In Denver, where everyone seems to have arrived yesterday and old-timers came last week, they worry about being joined by too many Texans, which they define as more than one or two added for flavor.
On Feb. 10, Gov. Spencer Cox was at the White House in his other capacity as the vice chair of the National Governors Association, meeting with President Joe Biden and talking about immigration. In remarks to reporters afterward while standing in the White House driveway, Cox differentiated Utah from the home state of NGA chair Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey, who was standing beside him, saying that Utah’s “biggest problems are more growth-related. We would love for people to stay in California rather than coming as refugees to Utah. … We’re not looking to attract more people.”
It was like putting out an unwelcome mat that says, “Californians, THIS MEANS YOU.” Cox’s gloves-off remarks were better covered in California than in Utah. “If you’re thinking of fleeing California’s traffic and high prices for Utah, well, you might not exactly be welcomed there with open arms,” observed Los Angeles’s ABC7.
California has accounted for the largest number of people among the other 49 states who move to Utah, according to a 2021 study by the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute at the University of Utah, although Utah was not even in the top 10 recipient states of California’s migrants — which shows California’s outsized influence on other states, like Gulliver accidentally crushing Lilliputians. And, from the same study, the preferred destination of the largest number of Utahns who left for another state was … California.
Like it or not, we’re joined. It can sometimes even seem as though the Golden Staters think they created Park City, while some Parkites who are proud of having no California roots think Californians should be glad we took them in. If there’s a truth to be had there, it must lie somewhere between.
Aristotle observed that water seeks its own level (one of those “duh” moments in Classical history). The people of the U.S. — who are highly mobile, vote with their feet and often will pick up and go where they think opportunity or pleasure awaits — are in a macro flow state. Americans are pragmatic that way. Then they will tell you about how they did things back where they came from, but that’s more of a tic, like runners talking about running or vegans talking about veganism. They don’t have much truck with generalizations, which is sound.
Inevitably, Americans change the places they go. To fault them for it is to fault them for being Americans. That’s something you can only get away with in restaurants in Paris, which have heavy sauces and are often overrated. Give us light California cuisine any day.