ustxtxb_obs_1957_08_23_50_00002-00000_000.pdf

Bartlett Appears Exclusively in the Texas Observer WHAT A LEGACY Let those flatter who fear, it is not an American art. JEFFERSON BenJack ‘Caged’? 5he R01 0/ The state Democratic executive committee asks, through its roving agent Jake Pickle and in its newsletters, what need there is for another Democratic organization, especially with all those repellent liberals and common working people in it. The need for “Democrats of Texas” is based on the fact that Price Daniel & Co. are not trustworthy Democrats. First, most of them bolted to Eisenhower in 1952, castigating Adlai Stevenson, Harry Truman, and the party they supposedly belonged to Second, they are personally conservative and therefore out of joint with the Democratic Party’s historically liberal nature. Third, they have used and -sanctioned procedures which are not democratic within the party. On this latter point, Texas Democrats cannot allow themselves to forget the Fort Worth convention of 1956. Shivers and Daniel, the Republicrats, the Dixiecrats, thus including most of the people who now control the executive committee, were on the one side. Yarborough, Mrs. Randolph, brass collar Democrats, union labor, liberals, the people who now make up Democrats of Texas, were on the other. To steal control of the convention they had not democratically won, the conservative group told the El Paso loyalists, whom their own credentials committee had already cer While we would not wish our readers to conclude that our editorial spleen has been dried out by the heat of the season, we cannot but follow last week’s accolade for our senators’ votes for the civil rights bill ixith a conscious pause this week to acknowledge Price Daniel’s present public service. The Governor h a s insisted, against the most frantic but veiled importunations, on a special session of the legislature for the increasingly focal purpose of registering and regulating the lobbyists. While Allen Duckworth is currently doing his imaginative best, in a Dallas News series which purports to be discussing lobbyists, to create the impression that the liberals are trying to persecute school girls who write postcards to their congressmen, the truth is that the lobbyists for the powerful economic groups have been doing as they pleased bribing, bestowing, beleaguering, and belaboring. It’s been nice, you know. Now the Governor insists the people are entitled to watch. They still can’t take that in. AUGUST 23, 1957 Published by Texas Observer Co., Ltd. Ronnie Dugger Editor and General Manager Lyman Jones, Associate Editor Sarah Payne, Office Manager Dean Johnston, Circulation Advertising ‘Published cnce a week from Austin, Texas. Delivered postage prepaid $4 per manum. Advertising rates available on request. Extra copies 10c each. Quantity orders available. Entered as second-class matter April 26, 1937, at the Post Office at Austin, Texas, under the act of March 3, 1879. tified as a legal delegation, they would have to vote to seat the rightwing delegation from Houston if they wanted to get into the convention themselves. When the El Paso loyalists rejected this raw offer, Daniel reconvened the credentials committee and had them reverse their own votes and replace them with the competing delegation from El Paso. Then, since they still hadn’t enough votes, Daniel & Co. permitted the Houston Dixiecrats to cast the county’s 270 votes on their own seating contest ! This is all established, and is not disputed. Now Jake and the other Daniel advance `men are going all over the state telling the people what good Democrats they are. We are glad they’re back and hope they stay back. But remember that in explaining his war on Adlai Stevenson, Price Daniel said in 1952 : “More than a year ago I stated that I would never vote again for Mr. Truman or any other presidential candidate who refused to recognize and uphold the Annexation Agreement between the United States and Texas. I will admit that I never dreamed that the Democratic Party would ever have another presidential candidate who would think like Mr. Truman.” This was Daniel’s 1952 justification; but in 1956, he found it expedient to support the man he had so roundly damned in 1952. One is not sure that time and circumstances a r e as impotent against the Governor’s resolutions as he would have us believe. Daniel & ‘o. cannot live down with words their deeds against the Democratic Party. They cannot live down with Jake Pickle their foul plays of so-recent Fort Worth. The formal reason for DOT is reform of party rules and regulations so such political breakingand-entering as Fort -Worth can never again be pulled offby Daniel, Lyndon Johnson, or anybody else. DOT is working, too, for a party registration bill to prevent the conservative cynics from dominating the party they loathe. It is our view that DOT must also come to stand for the liberal values of the Democratic Party nationally ; at present, it is a spokesman for some of these values. But the informal reason for DOT is that fair minded Democrats can’t trust their party in Texas to a Jake Pickle who could do the Port Arthur Story or a Price Daniel who so little loved his party and its abiding ideals he could bolt to Eisenhower in 1952 and then could accept the state party leadership at Fort Worth on pretenses of authority which cannot be called other than false. 6 We will serve no group or party but will hew hard to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it. We are dedicated to the whole truth, to human values above all interests, to the rights of man as the foundation of democracy; we will take orders from none but our own conscience, and never will we overlook or misrepresent the truth to serve the interests of the powerful or cater to the ignoble in the human spirit. Editorial and business office: 504 West 24th St., Austin, Texas. Phone GReenwood 7-0746. Houston office: 1501 Crawford, Mrs. R. D. Randolph, Dean Johnston. LUBBOCK Those men Shivers and Daniel put on the Texas Tech board of directors think they’re running a research branch of Pioneer Natural Gas Co. They haven’t the foggiest notion what a university is, much less what it’s for. They have brought their institution to academic ruin simply by failing to know or care about the differences between educational and corporate realms, and now they are like schoolboys kept in during recess, trying to understand what they’ve done wrong. A few of them, three, perhaps, Haley, Hinn, and Lineberry, . knew what they were doing. They probably knew what a university ought to be and ought to be for, but they were more interested in what they wanted people “under” them to say and do. The rest of them are light-stepping from one side of the line to the other. Jim Lindsey, the managing editor of the Midland newspaper whose own editor condemned the board’s action, did his best to get back on the good side of the reporters by making a big play of giving them various irrelevant documents at Saturday’s board hearing. When it came to giving three men accused and fired a public hearing before the same press, he voted no. M. D. Watkins, the board chairman, said the day before the hearing that he would present “evidence” to “justify the firings. Came the day and he didn’t. He’d been “misquoted” the day before, he said. Curious : three reporters must have had cotton in their ears. Another board member was brimming with remorse, not about the scalped reputations, but about the way they had been scalped. With most of the evidence in, it is almost beyond quibble that the directors acted from political motivations. But they wouldn’t admit that. They wouldn’t admit they’d fired them for any reason. “Ask the board,” said the board chairman. “Ask the board chairman,” said the board. “Don’t ask me,” said Lindsey. “No comment,” said Haley. Like a pack of bullies confronted with their bruised victims, they just didn’t know what to say. The shadowiest figure in the Tech administration now is Dr. Jones, the president. At first he defended the fired men. He warned that ‘censure. of Tech by the AAUP or the Southern Association would have grave effects on the faculty and the values of Tech degrees. He said it in the papers. But now he has to try to hold the faculty together, to placate, to mollify, and to be able to do this, he has given up the cause. He is silently grieving. Dr. Greenberg and his wife are feeling they don’t want to waste any leaving the state, and one gets the time doing it. He’s been publishinc , original psychological research in the official journals, he has a book on the psychological problems of the blind almost finished, he’s delivered papers to the highest forum of psychology in the U.S. for two years in a rowbut he’s getting out. Texas has no use for him. He’s too controversial. Dr. Abernethy and his wife and children probably won’t stay long either. \(Nobody knows, but anybody facts, the intimate details of the case, but the daily press somehow cannot protect a man and his family from an official act abusing him : the facts are so specific, one at a time, and the truth is so abstract. Per Stensland was born in Sweden and came here in 1941 on a scholarship. Now he’s told, you can finish the work you’ve been doing in four months, but after that, we don’t know. He and his wife and their daughter were in the yard at their nice middleclass house when the reporters arrived. They served us coffee and asked our advice. What would you do stay or get out ? You wish he weren’t from Sweden. That makes the board’s guilt too general, uncomfortably ours. Nine men, not a one of them educators, trying to run Texas Technological College like the Bell Laboratories of American Tel and Tel. Some of them flew out to the West Coast Sunday as guests of a commercial company to study how to relate Tech’s research programs more closely to the needs of industry. They put off acting on a Student Assembly idea for a group health program for students so it could be worked out more closely with “local insurance company representatives.” They really seem to think lirt Trxas Mharrurr