Rough Country: How Texas Became America's Most Powerful Bible-Belt State

by Robert Wuthnow,
The Huffington Post, August 4, 2014

After Governor Dan Moody proclaimed in 1930 that a few of his Texas Rangers could rid the city of Chicago of its gangsters, the Chicago Daily Tribune shot back that the Lone Star State would be better served by minding its own business - and ridding itself of bootleggers and lynch mobs. A "fundamentalist belt of primitives," the editors added, Texas' greatest contribution to science was paralysis and to public morality "the hypocrisy of the bottle nosed saint in the garb of the Ku Klux Klan."