With all the attention the Koch brothers, Harlan Crow, and oil magnates like Tim Dunn receive for their political spending, families like the McIngvales tend to slip through the cracks, but local fiefs like theirs have a long history of tipping the scales in the South. While not as large as their nationally focused counterparts’, the firewall that they preserve comes down hard on workers’ rights and other local reforms, maintaining the unequal system they’ve benefited from the most. Mattress Mack once compared his political work to that of our country’s Founding Fathers: “Those were not just citizens, those were people who were landholders, who were all very prominent and had so much to lose,” he said. He’s fighting to keep it that way.
Mack was never the everyman he claims to be. His father was, Mack says, an “entrepreneur/finance wizard” and philanthropist who owned and managed an insurance company. His mother came from the Alabama Shoals, where her father ran a cotton ginning company. He was born in Starkville, Mississippi, but raised in a wealthy suburb of Dallas. Shortly after Mack abandoned his studies at the University of North Texas, he expressed interest in starting a health club. In 1974, his father then purchased the rights to market Nautilus exercise machines in the Southwest for around $210,000 (more than $1 million today) and gave him and his five siblings a stake. With the help of his father’s contacts, Mack quickly accumulated 100,000 members in Dallas by promising steep group discounts. The only problem: Many of the discounts never materialized. Texas sued Mack for deceptive trade practices in 1978. As part of the settlement, he had to post $40,000 in escrow to pay off former members. He declared bankruptcy and left Dallas with his wife, Linda, a former health club employee.
Deception, bankruptcy, a lawsuit—none of it mattered. During Houston’s oil boom in the 1980s, he sold “aspirational furniture,” to borrow from Texas Monthly’s Mimi Swartz, “furniture for all the blue-collar workers who made Houston what it was.” Mack regularly inflated his sales figures by 10 percent or so to the trade press; he insists he took $5,000 and produced $1 million in the first year. In less than a decade, he created and ran two large companies with his family’s help, bouncing from bankruptcy to unimaginable wealth in a matter of years. But it’s exceedingly unremarkable for a child of a wealthy magnate to become one. Mack’s story was hardly inspirational on its own, so he started spending big to gain the public’s attention—and sympathy.