ustxtxb_obs_1959_03_07_50_00004-00000_000.pdf

Let those flatter who fear, it is not an American art.JEFFERSON 5he creg iJ fature PURIFY OUR PAST OF SKEPTIC STAIN THE HUGHES BILL for industrial safety has reduced industrial death and injuries in other states. The Governor’s study commission said 997 Texans die every year and 402,000 are injured on the job. This is carnage less publicized but more serious than the much ballyhooed highway accident toll, yet the Texas Manufacturers’ Association and its assorted spokesmen had the face to oppose the Hughes bill in committee last week. As long as the legislators fail to enact this law they have murder and maiming on their hands. EFFICIENCY I N GOVERN-MENT is neither a liberal nor a conservative goal. In Congress liberal Paul Douglas is its most insistent advocate. In Austin the man who has stepped forward for a Hoover Commission type study of the state government is a moderate, Rep. Dick Cory. That most right-wingers in the House block-opposed the bill was amazing. The potency of the moderate-liberal coalition was demonstrated by the two-to-one margin for Cory’s bill. PUNISH! PUNISH! cry many legislators and crime commission experts. They want to lower the age when you can send a boy or a girl to the pen, they want to raise penalties all along the line. Don’t they know that crime is social ?that you clean out slums, you finance probation of f i cers, you give people decent minimum he Appalling, the appearance of gags around the mouths of state employees and teachers ! Jan. 31 we reported the gag with which the state hospitals board tried to choke off its employees from talking to their own legislators; the board has reluctantly rescinded this order. This week on the House floor Rep. Gladden \(to the applause eous “plan of action recommended by your State Teachers’ Assn.” for Texas school teachers which says : “These legislators THAT Y O U WANT THE PROGRAM N 0 W, AND YOU WANT THE FUNDS PRO-VIDED TO PAY FOR IT. \(Do not Do not mention the fact that you are a teacher.” Hypocrisy, poor citizenship, and an attempt to regiment teachers’ thinkingfrom the official state teachers’ association! And this issue the Observer discovers another disgusting instance of the use of official government power to deny citizens who happen to work for the government their rights of free speech and dissent. Insurance Cmsr. Harrison memo’d all his employees to report to him all requests for information from legislators \(to avoid “comPublished by Texas Observer Co., Ltd. Entered as second-class matter, April 26, 1937, at the Post Office at Austin, Texas. under the Act of March 3, 1879. MARCH 7, 1959 Ronnie Dagger Editor and General Manager Larry Goodwyn, Associate Editor Sarah Payne, Office Manager Published once a week from Austin, Texas. Delivered postage prepaid $4 per annum. Advertising rates available on request. Extra copies 10c each. Quantity prices available on orders. wages, and thereby you reduce crime not by clubbing, clubbing, the growing giant. IS A PERSON WORTH $3? Apparently not, says the Legislative Budget Board, slashing to zero the $40,000 request of the Migrant Labor Council, which is devising plans for the. welfare of 110,000 otherwise ignored much abused Texas migrant workers be restored. A CLOSED PROFESSIONnot a closed shopis the issue behind Sen. Lane’s effort to abolish the requirement every lawyer join the State Bar Assn., a private organization. To be a lawyer you have to be a member of that private organization. None of the unions seek to close entire professions to non-union workers. If some law firm wants to require all its boys to join up, okay, but closing professions to those who object to joining a private organization violates their rights as individuals. A NATIONAL PARK on Padre Island can be achieved if the legislature will enact the Daily bill to authorize the parks board to buy the necessary land and give it to the federal government. The Interior Department, we are advised, is receptive to preserving and maintaining the area for the enjoyment of all the people into perpetuity. Can the legislators for once transcend the shallow slogan of Mates’ rights?If they don’t, nothing Will be done and they know it. ommendations on insurance legislation to any legislator “except as authorized by the board.” Do people who take public jobs lose their free speech? Orders from headquarters to keep your mouth shut because you get your paycheck from a public source are vicious in result, whether vicious in intent or not, and ought to be curbed by law. As for the teachersare they so gutless they take orders from a gutless headquarters? 5he We recommend that the Federal Bureau of Investigation intervene in the Harrison County scandal \(Obs. workers and friends acquitted a man who, as chief deputy sheriff, admitted tying a white and a Negro to trees and beating the white \(the Negro said civil rights case we never heard of one. The Federal Civil Rights commission should inquire, too. When local areas deprive Americans of their rights and the state remains in different there is no option to federal intervention. HOUSTON OFFICE: 1012 Dennis, Mrs. R. D. Randolph. EDITORIAL and BUSINESS OFFICE: 504 West 24th St., Austin, Texas. Phone GReenwood 7-0746. 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 AUSTIN Although the four legislators’ bill to require professOrs at state colleges to swear they believe in a “Supreme Being” other than the Legislature has not yet been set for public hearing in the House state affairs committee, and may not be, we venture a few suggestions on how it may be extended to accomplish the purging of our Texas heritage. No student of our history can deny that atheists, agnostics, and Jef fersonian deists dominated the revolution from which proceeded our state. Our forebearsSam Houston, Thomas J. Rusk, George Childress, the rest of themagreed in the Declaration of Independence at Washington-on-theBrazos March 2, 1836, that Mexico had inflicted on Texians … a consolidated central military despotism, in which every interest is disregarded but that of the army and the priesthood, both the eternal enemies of civil liberty, the ever ready minions of power, and the usual instruments of tyrants. The constitution of the Republic of Texas promulgated mostly by these same men just 15 day after the signing of the Declaration of Independence went further: In Article V, Section I, the fathers of the sons and daughters of the Republic decreed: Ministers of the gospel being, by their profession, dedicated to Gold and the care of souls, ought not to be diverted from the great duties of their functions; therefore, no minister of the gospel or priest of any denomination whatever shall be eligible to the office of the executive of the republic, nor to a seat in a branch of the congress of the same. And there was yet another atheistic clause in the Declaration of Rights of the Republic’s constitution : … every person shall be permitted to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience. The atheists also worked their way into the legislature later on. In 1881, establishing the University of Texas, they provided, as the Daily Texan has pointed out, that no religious qualifications should be required for admission to any office or privilege connected with the University. The anti-atheists therefore may wish to purify our past of these skeptic stains. Perhaps a legislative delegation, properly authorized by law, can visit Heaven while their colleagues are voting on new tax bills and seek permission to apply the new oath to our revered but free-thinking forebears. This junket might not pay off, though, since most of them are likely in hell. Alternately the Texas Education Agency can be instructed to clean up the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution a bit. It would be dif fiCult, however, to deface the originals without causing some comment. All in all it might be simpler to stamp the tainted schoolbooks, “Warning : This Book Contains Atheist Ideas. Signed, The Faithful Four.” It is difficult to evade the harsh truth that not the four new legislative assistants to St. Peter, but one Eliud Martinez, a 24-year-old Austin art student, most faithfully bears along the Texas heritage. One night at Stereo Stop, a hi-fi beer-and-hogskins place wallpapered with egg crating cardboards, Eliud was sporting about with members of the Austin Flea Circus and suddenly realized that, mind foaming, he had agreed to mount the campus at noon the next day swathed in strips of white cloth, a mesquite thorn crown on his brow and a sixfoot cross on his back. The Flea Circus prompters were to accompany him dressed as Roman soldiers. ‘They chickened out, but not Eliud. When he arrived at the campus Student Dean Arno Nowotny tried to keep him from taking the cross out of a car ; Nowotny asked him if he was a student, and told him he wouldn’t be a student tomorrow if he tried this, to which he replied, “I have to.” An Austin cop, butting into other people’s business as usual, prevented him from breaching the campus, so he marched along in the gutter a block, disconsolate, except when he. waved cheerfully at four girls he knew, and then took off in the accomplice’s car, cross and all. Elind is a serious fellow ; not beat, in spite of his black beard. “I’m doing this in protest against legislative control of values,” he said; “I am not an atheist or an agnoStic. I believe in God but I also believe something must be done about that oath.” When the Faithful Four introduced their bill they made some unfortunate statements. “I have a suspicion a great number of atheists are communists,” said white supremist Joe Chapman ; and most of them hide out, he said, at the University of Texas. Reps. Lewis and Dungan hinted about atheists at SMU, the Methodist church school. Rep. Hollowell was candid enough to admit all they had was hearsay, and then the returns started pouring inlusty, almost exhilirated opposition. Examples : Dr. Harry Ransom, vice president, U.T.: Atheism is not taught at U.T. You come back, anyway, to “the brass tack of Whether a person is teaching effectively or not teaching effectively.” Dr. Lanier Cox, vice president, U.T.: Sincere campus interest in religion is higher than ever before. Dr. Willis Tate, president, SMU : the charges are ridiculous. Melvin Straus; assistant professor of government, U.T.: “The ‘ supreme power of the state would become greater if the government were allowed to fine a person for being an atheist.” University of Texas Women’s Council: “Genuine education includes the right of the student to hear an objective presentation of all systems of thought.” Lynn Landrum, Dallas News : if an atheist professor is tops in his field, he should be hired; if he becomes a missionary for atheism, he should be fired. Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: it … an oath would not mean much to an atheist …. Besides, it would be skirting uncomfortably close to mixing church and state.” San Antonio Express : “Teachers’ Faith Rooted in More Than a Legislator.” The Daily Texan, U.T.: “What the hell are we afraid of ? Bring on the iconoclasts … Turn on the generators.” Corpus Christi Caller : “It is ‘terrifying to contemplate the logical conclusion … Just who, for instance, is to define the term, ‘Supreme Being,’ when the range of religious belief in the United States, and even in Texas, is so great ?” The Austin Statesman : “The McCarthy technique has no place in Texas.” Rev. Das Kelly Barnett, an Episcopal professor of ethics, Austin : “I see him shake his hand for me.” Dr. Blake Smith, University of Texas Baptist Church : “It might be healthy if a good Baptist would study under an atheist once.” Rev. Jack Carter, U.T. Canterbury Assn.: “I would hate to see the day when an atheist could not speak his piece.” Rev. Brandoch Lovely, Unitarian Church of Austin: “No self respecting professor would sign such an oath. I’m not sure God really needs it.” Dr. Lawrence Bash, U.T. Christian Church : “The American tradition has always held to freedom of religion, which inevitably means freedom from religion.” Dr. Robert Ledbetter, director, U.T. Wesley Foundation and Bible Chair : Agnostics have the right to their beliefs. “Religion, too, is interested in this search for truth.” E. H. Saurson, di THE TEXAS OBSERVER efolo