ustxtxb_obs_1956_11_07_50_00001-00000_000.pdf

The one great rule of composition is t speak the truti -T. \(Continued have been language practice in The trial reduced to a common is a rather common South Texas. last week followed an AUSTIN Fascinating details of an historic 1951 meeting between Governor Allan Shivers and leaders of the Texas Dixiecrats can now be published. The meeting is mentioned in D. B. Hardeman’s piece in the current Harper’s, “Shivers of Texas, a tragedy in three acts.” Hardeman recounted how “new right-wing forces” three times formed “shrill, well-financed third partiesthe Jeffersonian Democrats in 1936, the Texas Regulars in 1944, and the Dixiecrats in 1948” and had decided to “try to capture the Texas Democratic Party from within.” Hardeman goes on: “In December, 1951, a group of conservative leaders met with the Governor in his office. “It’s vitally important to us that Texas remain in conservative hands in both state and national politics. We want you to lead the fight, and we are here to tell you that the money you will need is now available,’ Clint Small, veteran oil and gas lobbyist, and spokesman for the group, told the Governor. “Shivers tacitly agreed. He became increasingly critical of the Truman Administration ..” There then followed the Governor’s bolt f o r Eisenhower in 1952 after, Hardeman says, he told Speaker Sam Rayburn at the national convention’ that “he intended to support the ticket and planned to issue a statement to that effect.” Clint Small, an Austin attorney, still very much around, and the Observer called him to ask him about this meeting. He said:: “We had a meeting with Shivers sometime in December, yes, it was 1951 …. We told him w e didn’t care governor or whether he ran for U.S. Senator. We told him we supposed either he or hoped they wouldn’t run against each other. We were interested in someone who was conservative and all that. “At that time they were thinking of continuing the Texas Regulars, you know? I didn’t want to do that, and Shivers had come out for all the things the Texas Regulars stood for. “Shivers said he was going to run for governor and Dan iel was going’ to run for the U.S. Senate. “We never so far as furnishing any money, there was not a dine. The question of money wasn’t raised at all. “After all, Shivers had come out for the things we stood for. “I didn’t know that I was an oil lobbyist. I’m not a lobbyist at all.” Small is an Austin attorney. Would it be correct to state that some of his clients are in oil and gas? “Oh yes.” But he does not represent them in connection with legislation? “No,” he replied. Who els e was present? Small was asked. of said. He thought a minute and added:’ “There was someone else there, but we were the ones who did the talking.” He did not recall the others present. Among the many interesting aspects’ of the meeting is the fact that Shivers was able to say seven months before the Democratic primary that he would rim for governor and Daniel would run for the Senate. Daniel was at that time Texas attorney general. A Fascinating Footnote r Orxaz strurr An Independent Liberal Weekly Newspaper We will serve 710 Troup or party bi’ will hew hard to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it. Vol. 48 TEXAS, NOVEMBER 7, 1956 10c per copy No. 28 Study of Texas Taxes I GALVESTON The old man, a rope from his ankle to the door imprisoning him between his filthy cover and a urine-soaked mattress, peered up at his visitors and hopefully asked : “Did you bring some good food?” City Health Inspector Joseph A. Pinachio, nauseated at the stench in the small basement cubicle, glanced down at the figure on the pallet on the floor and replied, “No, we just came to take your picture.” On a nearby bed, unchanged in weeks, another old man, one leg gone and the rest of his aging body paralyzed, lay motionless in even worse squalor, as flies busily hummed about himlanded briefly on his facethen hummed again. This was the scene that greeted a State Health Inspector on a routine check of a Galveston “nursing home” for the ageda home licensed by the state to care for 27 elderly Texans no longer able to help themselves. It brought immediate reaction. The woman operator of the home was ordered to correct the condition at once. The state held up her application for license renewal. Public condemnation of Jim Kemp large, yielded $253 million and the severance taxes yielded $185 million. Together these areas brought in seven-tenths of the state’s total income from taxes, licenses, and fees. Texas politicians are eloquently opposed to a “general sales tax,” but the fact remains that the sales taxes on specific consumer items are the state’s greatest revenue source. The goods so taxed are gasoline and other motor fuels, motor vehicle sales, cigarettes, radios and television sets, cosmetics, Ronnie Dugger playing cards, and the alcoholic beveragesliquor, w i n e, beer, and ale. The legislators have often felt that consumer items toward which some of the citizens feel moral hostility are fair Severance taxes are charged corrective action had already been taken when the ministers made their findings public. City Health Officer Dr. Paul B. Demesquita readily admitted he had been unaware of the conditions, but pledged to cooperate with the ministers. Inspector Pinachio, charged with making regular inspections of the homes, was more adamant. “The ministers are wrong,” said Pinachio. “Most of the homes in Galveston are very goodsome as good as my own home.” CORPUS CHRISTI Dispute over the remnants of segregation of L a t i n American students in South Texas schools has flared up here in testimony in a discrimination suit in the federal court. At the conclusion of testimony Judge James V. Allred said he thought the Driscoll C o n s o lidated Independent School District had “discriminated u n r e a s o nably” against Latin Americans. The suit was brought against the school district, primarily a farming area southwest of Corpus Christi, by five parents in behalf of their 13 children. The plaintiffs contended the school district discriminates against children. of Latin-American descent by putting them into separate classrooms in the first and sec Pinachio said he had told the operator of the home cited that she “shouldn’t keep the old man tied up. But she told me he had attacked the other man and she had to tie him up. She said he refused to sleep on a bed, and showed me a bed he had torn to pieces and a mattress he ripped up. I thought he should be sent to Rusk, but she says he isn’t crazyjust mean.” The inspector said there were 17 other patients at the home, ond . grades and requiring them to spend three years in the first grade, because of their background. The school district maintained that the segregation was purely on the basis of the children’s inability to speak English. It filed a counter-suit for an injunction requiring the plaintiffs to speak only English in the presence of their children. LEGALLY, the separation of Latin American children from Anglos has been outlawed since 1948. In that year the U. S. District Court, Western District of Texas, ruled that segregation of Latin American pupils “is arbitrary and discriminatory and in violation of plaintiff’s constitutional rights as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and is illegal.” Although desegregation may have solved economies in the school district and soothed those claiming equal educational rights, the problem of how to teach in English to pupils who don’t speak English has increased Within the past few years. Since 1949 it has been to the Anne Chambers advantage of school districts to enforce compulsory school attendance, since the appropriation of state funds is based on the average daily attendance. Before the Gilmer-Aikin school law, many school districts made little effort to force !attendance, as their income from the state was assured. Another factor important particularly in South Texas is the 1950 amendment to the child labor law, forbidding agricultural employers to hire children under 16 during school hours. According to wage and hour investigators here, these two factors “are crowding” the schools in South Texas. Separation until both groups `Pressure’ Charged To Barber Board LUBBOCK and AUSTIN A bitter fight between union and non union barbers over whether the price of haircuts should be $1 or $1.50 apparently led to the smashing of a plate glass window in a Lubbock barber shop and charges that the State Board of Barber Examiners help force up prices. Dana Powell of Austin, a member of the examiners’ board, declared to the Observer that his group makes no effort to help raise prices on haircuts. H. A. Day, owner of Day’s Bar ber Shop in Lubbock, complained \(Continued on Page of the state, but we were unaware of local conditions. “But it is not a problem confined to Galveston,” he said. “Things are just as bad in Houston and the rest of Texas, and it must be laid to the indifference of state officials. If you really want to know the conditions to which our old people are being subjected, I suggest you contact Mr. Bray.” CITY HEALTH OFFICIALS quickly came to their own defense, however, pointing out that lax health law enforcement was aimed at local and state officials. The Galveston Ministerial Association, shocked by what it termed the “indifference” of state and local authorities to “concentration camp” conditions “akin to savagery,” hurriedly met and named a committee, headed by Rev. George Scotchmer, to investigate. The group set up a schedule for weekly visits to all such nursing homes. Pointing to a series in the Observer by Bob Bray, Rev. Scotchmer said: “We had been reading of such conditions in other parts! An Old Man Tied to a Door IN SOUTH TEXAS Latins Protest Discrimination AUSTIN The Texas tax system is anything but systematic. Instead of having loopholes, it is itself loops around holes. It is as though legislature after legislature met, felt its empty pocketbook, and grabbed for the nearest victim. No one seems to know anything about “the e qui_ votingbut nowhere are there ties.” The legislators asked specific taxes on such substantial the Texas Legislative Coun areas of the state’s economy as ci.1 to tell them what’s unfair steel, magnesium, uranium, fabriabout the system, and the cated metals, machinery, printing Council replied, at the end of and publishing, and stone, clay, a massive five-tome report, and glass products. Nor is there that nobody knows, and even any perceptible logic about the if anybody does, nobody can ratios among the taxes that are say “without value judg in force. ments.” IT IS, NATURALLY, contro But a plain citizen can give the versial to ask: who pays what? mess a little study and see that But that’s only the first question. the state taxes oil production By the traditional classificabut not chemical plants, retail tion, the state levies selective stores but noti aluminum producsales taxes, severance taxes, gross tion, sulphur but not lumber. receipts taxes, and occupation Scattered through 219 provitaxes, as well as property, poll, sions of law are taxes and fees and inheritance taxes. on carnivals, cannon cracker The sales and severance taxes dealers, bowling alleys, auctionproduce most of the state’s in eers, concerts, rodeos, clock pedcome. In fiscal 1956, the sales dlers, boxing and wrestling, and taxes, paid by the people at