John McCain claims to be a maverick. Not so fast, pardner!
He traveled from America’s civilized East Coast as a child to the deserts of the West. He was born into the family of high-ranking military office, and he received the best college education available. He married a tall, wealthy, educated Southern beauty more than 15 years his junior, and accumulated great wealth during his lifetime, including numerous properties. They raised six children in their Episcopal household, and he served in public office for decades while his wife was prominent in social circles.
But their lives were not always easy. He was held as a valuable prisoner of war by a foreign power, and the rest of his life bore the scars of prison. While imprisoned, he was offered his release if he would make a statement against his country, but he refused. After his eventual release the war hero played a significant role as a Republican in his nation’s government, including the Senate.
You may think I’m just talking about John McCain, the Republican nominee for President. McCain has made much ado about his reputation as a maverick — a nonconformist or a rebel. But the moniker itself appears to come from one Samuel Augustus Maverick, a Texas patriot with interesting parallels to the senator from Arizona.
Gus Maverick was born in South Carolina in 1802, studied at Yale, became a lawyer and moved to Texas in 1835. The defenders of the Alamo elected him to be their delegate to the convention that declared Texas independence from Mexico in 1836; because he was attending the convention, he wound up avoiding the Battle of the Alamo. He later served as mayor of San Antonio and as their Republican senator to the Republic of Texas.
During Texas’ battle for independence from Mexico, he was imprisoned on several occasions. The shackles he wore are now on display at the University of Texas.
This wasn’t the James Garner or Mel Gibson character of Hollywood fame. Gus Maverick wasn’t a professional gambler or con artist. Most contemporary accounts indicate that Gus was honest and unpretentious. A fellow signatory of the Texas Declaration of Independence, Col. Stephen W. Blount, said Maverick was "a man of determined will, unyielding when advocating what he believed to be right, and uncompromising in favor of a definite programme of separation from Mexico."
Another signer, William Menefee, said Maverick was "one of the most polished members of the Washington Convention. He had been educated in the best schools of the country and his manners and general deportment indicated a refined nature. Mr. Maverick made no effort to display his polite learning, but it so dominated his nature that one could not help feeling it in his presence. Not only was he a man of superior mental training, but he was a man of tact and ability. His course at old Washington was that of a diplomat and statesman. ... He was a cautious man and counseled prudence in speech and act."
Legend has it he once anonymously slipped a thousand dollars to another mayor of San Antonio in the dark of night to benefit the homeless.
But history has not been kind to Gus Maverick, if that was his reputation when he died in September of 1870. In his book, "The New Language of American Politics," William Safire wrote, "Old man Maverick, Texas cattleman of the 1840s, refused to brand his cattle, because it was cruelty to animals. His neighbors said he was a hypocrite, liar and thief because Maverick’s policy allowed him to claim all unbranded cattle on the range. Lawsuits were followed by bloody battles and brought a new word to our language."
Had he been an ordinary citizen, other ranchers would have taken his unbranded cattle grazing on the open range and marked them with their own brands. But because Maverick was so influential, and owned 385,000 acres, he claimed any unbranded calf as his own, and got away with it. Soon the name "maverick" was derisively applied by cowboys to all unbranded cattle.
John McCain and Sarah Palin may claim to be modern-day mavericks with the hope it lands them in the White House, but the label fits the legend in other respects. In their personal and public lives, they do what they want to do regardless of how it may impact others, just because they can get away with it. That’s nothing different than what we’ve had in the White House for the past eight years.
Old Gus Maverick might not have appreciated how his name has wound up being used through history. He probably knew how many homes he had on his 385,000 acres. But I don’t think he’d care much for McCain or Palin laying claim to his name if he’d been around today.