Ann Richards: A Wisecracking Liberal Governor From Texas
ANN RICHARDS, the white-haired, wise-cracking former Governor of Texas, was born in 1933 outside of Waco as Dorothy Ann Willis. In 1990, she became the 45th governor of Texas, and only its second female governor. And the first one, 60 years before, had been “Ma” Ferguson, who was something of a stand-in for her husband, “Pa” Ferguson. Ann Richards climbed the political mountain by herself.
Humor is very useful to politicians; they can use it to ridicule positions they dislike, or to deflect attention from their liabilities. Funny comments earn the respect of apolitical people, of which there are always many. So politicians often hire speechwriters to write funny speeches for them, and try to learn how to be funny at the podium.
Ann Richards was BORN funny, and it came out naturally, all the time.
When people asked her if she felt tempted to dye her hair, she said, “I get a lot of cracks about my hair, mostly from men who don’t have any.”
She went on a canoe trip with her friend Molly Ivins. Molly thought canoeing was a great idea; Ann not so much. As the canoes approached some rapids, quite audible but out of sight, Molly was excited. Ann called out, “It sounds like every whore in El Paso just flushed her john.”
She was an only child. Her father, Robert Cecil Willis, was a drug salesman and delivery man from Bugtussle, Texas. He delighted in profanity and used it with creative delight.
Her mother, Mildred Iona Willis, was a homemaker from Hogjaw, Texas. A few hours after Ann was born, Mrs. Willis rose from the birthing bed, wrung the neck of a chicken and began making dinner. Both of her parents would have liked to have more children, but in those Depression years, they weren’t sure they could afford any more. Ann often went without shoes.
They lavished their love on Ann, though, and made her part of their world. On summer nights during the war, 1942, ’43, ’44, her parents would have a few people over, and Ann took it all in: the sound of dominoes clicking on the tabletop; the laughter of men at off-color jokes; talk of the war, the progress of our armies; and family stories — ‘How the cow ate the cabbage’ and ‘How Mama put Clorox in the well when a frog fell in.’
Some of her first political memories were of listening with her parents to the Fireside Chats of FDR, that comforting voice from the White House, privileged but caring, working very hard to help ordinary folks. In later decades, she often thought back to those years when politicians seemed able to talk to us with a sense of national purpose, to bring people together across partisan divides, to convince us to sacrifice for the common good.
Another thing she got from her childhood was an impatience with self-important people, and a focus on results. In the 8th grade, she thought she looked cute in her basketball uniform, and was unnerved when a man in the stands called out, “Make that basket, bird legs!” Angry at first, she later decided the man had a point. Dribbling the ball and looking good in your uniform is not the point; the point is: ‘Make that basket.’
Politics was a man’s world which she fell in love with at any early age. She met David Richards at Waco High, did Girls State and Girls Nation, went to Baylor University on a debate scholarship, and was a debate star.
In 1953, at age 19, she married David, who was by now a staunch liberal, and would soon be a labor lawyer. They lived in Dallas, and spent their days and evenings near the center of the tiny liberal political scene in Dallas. They picketed racially segregated restaurants and staged political parodies, where Ann sang original songs.
In 1955 and 1956, she taught history and social studies in a junior high school and would always remember children there, hugging her around her knees. She worried they didn’t get enough hugging at home.
In time, she gave birth to four children of her own: Cecile, Daniel, Clark and Ellen. She loved them all, and gave them a great deal of herself but didn’t intend to be a homemaker. She often said, “I don’t want my tombstone to read: ‘She kept a clean house.’
She was both proud and a little worried when her daughter Cecile became an outspoken rebel. In the sixth grade in public school, Cecile was told to recite the Lord’s Prayer, and refused. Ann told her children that if they wanted to devote their lives to social justice work, they should prepare for a lot of defeats and few satisfying victories. But she also told her kids, ‘You’ll meet great people; they’ll be working right alongside you.’
By 1959, sick of the conservatism of Dallas, Ann and David Richards moved to Austin.
In these years, she later said, “I smoked like a chimney and drank like a fish.”
In 1976, Ann took her first step in elective politics, running for and winning a seat on the Travis County Commissioners’ Court. She remarked in those early years of politicking, “In politics, your enemies can’t hurt you — but your friends will kill you.”
Her marriage broke up, under stress from her drinking, though her husband admitted that he, too,shared some of the blame.
In 1982, Ann Richards was elected Texas state treasurer, the first woman elected to statewide office in Texas in 50 years. She began the statewide campaign by thinking she was running around all over Texas so the voters would know HER. She finished the campaign with the sense that this was a useful exercise for the politician, too. She told friends, ‘You have no idea how big Texas is until you campaign it.’
She realized very early in life that a big reason many “good old boys” didn’t want women in politics was they assumed they’d have to stop swearing with a woman around. Ann was an honorary good old boy. She told the male politicians she worked with, “Don’t be embarrassed about your language. I’m the only child of a very rough-talking father.”
She thrived as State Treasurer and became a rising star in the national Democratic Party. At the 1984 Democratic National Convention, she made a nominating speech for Walter Mondale. In her 1986 reelection campaign for State Treasurer, she ran unopposed by either party.
She felt that Republicans had a special blindness to the privilege conferred by wealth and white skin. She also felt a Republican is someone who hates “government giveaways’ but begs for a government bailout when his oil company’s broke. But her dislike of Republican George Bush the elder was odd, in one sense, because Bush was more than a little like her childhood idol, Franklin Roosevelt: patrician background, prep school accent, hyperactive mind, and sweeping ambition.
It griped Ann Richards that George Bush had received so much privilege and didn’t seem to see it. It griped her that he pretended to be a Texan, listening to country music and eating pork rinds — things which FDR would never have done. Something about that pose as a Texan set off Ann Richards, who’d learned in childhood to ridicule those who don’t play it straight.
So it was fitting, in a way, that in 1988 she became a national figure by mocking George Bush at the 1988 Democratic National Convention: “Poor George — he can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” The Democratic faithful loved it; here was a real Texan calling out a “fake Texan.”
George Bush managed to get elected President of the United States and though he was basically forgiving of criticism from political rivals, especially when delivered on the stump, what Ann had done was to taunt him, on national television, in a scripted take down. He couldn’t forgive the taunt, nor could his son, George Bush, Jr.
Two years later, in 1990, Richards was talked into running for Governor of Texas, and won the office, defeating Jim Mattox of Dallas in the Democratic primary and Republican Clayton Williams in the election. Both of her opponents made dumb mistakes. Mattox went after her drinking in a nasty way, implying falsely that it was out of control.
Clayton Williams made a horrendous joke about rape, saying it’s like the weather and “If it’s inevitable, relax and enjoy it.” That joke cost him a lot of votes from conservative women, who either voted for Richards or stayed home on election day.
Governor Richards never forgot the children growing up in poverty, old people trapped in dirty nursing homes. She was a proud feminist (“Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did — only backwards, in high heels.”) She supported health care reform, moderate gun control and abortion rights.
She did some “conservative” things, too: tried to streamline the government; audit some bureaucrats; and simplify state regulations on business. She made sure to get photographed shooting a gun. She didn’t try to hide her liberalism, though, and advised other Democratic candidates ‘Be smart, truthful, honest — and show a modicum of good sense, and the voters will support you.
She also had that vein of humor when she needed it.
As Governor, she put alcohol detox programs in prisons and told the prisoners, “My name is Ann, and I am an alcoholic.” Progressives noted, though, that the prison population kept growing during her time in office. She could have done more with policing and sentencing reform to reduce the role of racism in incarceration.
She did a great deal for the state’s film industry, promoting Texas films and promoting Texas as a great place to shoot a film, with costs low, permitting easy and all kinds of scenery from gleaming office buildings to old towns and bleached plains.
Governor Richards was sensible; when the ACLU objected to a creche scene on the Capitol grounds, she said, “You know that’s probably as close as three wise men will ever get to the Texas legislature, so why don’t we just let them be.”
In 1994, the Republican Party and the Bush family got its revenge when George Bush, Jr. ran a well-organized, well-funded campaign and beat Richards.
Bush had lost a winnable Congressional race back in 1978 and since then had been largely a surrogate for his much more famous father. Ann underestimated the junior Bush, calling him “Shrub” and “that young Bush boy.” She and her staff had waited for the younger Bush to make a blunder, as Clayton Williams had with his rape joke.
George Bush, Jr. made no such mistake. He supported the right of Texans to carry concealed weapons, something many Texans were itching to do, and that Ann Richards had opposed. Bush, Jr. won the election rather easily, 53%-46%.
Ann Richards smarted from that defeat but moved on. It was one of her core principles that you learn more from defeat than from victory. She taught Politics at Brandeis University, in Massachusetts, and later became a Brandeis trustee. In 2005, she taught at course at the University of Texas called “Women and Leadership.”
She died in 2006, of cancer of the esophagus, at the age of 73. In the years since her death, Richards has been an icon for political women in Texas and for progressives generally. The actress Holland Taylor mounted a one-woman show called “Ann” which conveyed both how tough and how funny Ann could be.
Ann’s daughter Cecile became a labor organizer and from 2006–2018 was president of Planned Parenthood. Austin has named a bridge after Ann Richards, and has two schools named for her, one of which Ann helped to create.
She liked to say, “Life isn’t fair, but government must be.”