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Bartlett Appears Exclusively in the Texas Observer A FAILURE SHARED Let those flatter who fear, it is not an American art. JEFFERSON You Can Lead a Horse to Water .. . Ral p h and 4. don Without qualification we wish to congratulate Senators Yarborough and Johnson for voting for the civil rights bill. Seventeen die hard Southern senators voted against the Negroes’ right to vote, but neither Texans nor Tennesseans were among them, and that will be a footnote in history. We have heard some niggling .about motivations that Johnson had to find a position politically mid-way between the South and the anti-jury trial liberals to nurture his anemic 1960 presidential prospects, and then that Johnson’s position took the pressure off Yarborough. In politics there is seldom an unmixed blessing, but we firmly believe that those two votes, the first ones cast for civil rights by Texans in the Senate since 1875, were admirable in themselves and further denoted the growing strength of liberal values in Texas. Yarborough has also demonstrated in Washington that his devotion to the average citizenry is much more thorough-going than many of his close friends believed. He has fearlessly joined with the long-time stalwarts of liberal de, mocracy on behalf of 200,000 new starts in public housing, an extra $100 million to support the mortgage market and force down Republican interest rates, opposition to distasteful Eisenhower appointtees, support for the public power dam at Hell’s Canyon. By these stands he has earned the confidence and trust of his supporters as campaign promises could never have earned it. \(He also posed with Jayne Mansfield, which is someThe lukewarm aspect of Lyndon Johnson’s social philosophy the aspect that makes him put liberal inside quotation marks, as though it were some contaminated notion needful of insulation from cleaner Anglo-Saxon wordshas been better illuminated by Yarborough’s example. Johnson voted not to support the mortgage market and reduce interest rates, although he supported less stringent steps to loosen the m o n e y market. Johnson voted against 200,000 new public housing starts. Before Yarborough’s arrival Johnson voted against the excellent Fulbright plan to reduce corporation taxes on small businesses and raise them on the larger companies. But Johnson also voted in favor of the Hell’s Canyon darn, in favor of an anti-trust program under the banking regulation act, against reduction of the rate of federal participation in slum clearance financing. And he supported Eisenhow-. er’s budget more often than Yarborough, voted against the $90 million cut in the foreign aid bill while Yarborough voted for it. Yarbor AUGUST 16, 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 once a week from Austin, Texas. Delivered postage prepaid $4 per annum. 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. ough has been more liberal in economics, while . Johnson has been more liberal about existing government programs. In closing we would return to an unqualified enthusiasm for the two senators’ vote on the civil rights bill. We hope that they and their junior colleagues in the House of Representatives duly note that Texans everywhere have responded sensibly to sensible votes. We do not see why Texans continue to tolerate the kind of delegation they have in the House of Representatives. They behaved on the original civil rights bill as though nothing has changed in Texas since 1920. Every man in the delegation voted against federal aid for school construction, and their solid front, as TMA crowed this week in its “secret” newsletter, provided the necessary margin to deprive American school children of rooms they need to study in. But little by little the strengthening forces of liberal democracy are being felt in the counsels of politics. Ben Ramsey, the mastercraftsman reactionary of the withering Shivers heirarchy, is going to feel them next summer as he has never felt them before. We hope such Herbert Hoover Democrats as Congressman Clark Fisher of San Angelo and John Dowdy of Athens will feel them then, too. And if Speaker Waggoner Carr doesn’t stop acting like an errand boy for Humble Oil and the Citizens’ Counciltrying to block Governor Daniel’s special session Carr must know will pass the desperately-needed lobby control bill, appointing East Texas racist Reagan Huffman chairman of the interim investigating committee he, too, will find at least half of the electorate hostile to him when he makes the move he is so obviously contemplating. We, like many citizens, are growing extremely impatient with the fiddling about of the Travis County DA, Les Procter, on the naturopath and insurance scandal investigations. The hot potatoes are passed from grand jury to grand jury with monotonously similar excuses. N o w Procter says that “nothing is more important than local law enforcement” as a further excuse. Nonsense : enforcement of laws against thievery from the state is more important than local law enforcement, and they are Les Procter’s responsibility. 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. AUSTIN Sugar on the table, or fruit. The political and social attitudes of the medical profession. The “practical” concerns of legislators, those who meet on the Colorado’s banks and the Potomac’s. The limbo that begins where states’ rights leave off and federal ones begin. The price of farm products. The costs of farm labor. Unmarked graves of children along the highways leading north out of Texas. It was said this week at a meeting of deeply troubled and frustrated peoplethe people who run the State Health Departmentthat all of these things, the sugar’s ready availability and the anonymous child in the roadside grave, are connected. Because they are linked, apparently irrevocably, it was said, the power and majesty of the governments of the State of Texas and the United States of America can do nothing \(at least, the child’s death from being part of the sugar’s price. The meeting was called to hear a departmental expert speak on migratory laborthe migrant who is a citizen of the aforementioned government s’ jurisdictions. He spoke with passionand compassion. He was listened to with indignation. He was questioned, in tones that verged, now and then, on horrified disbelief. He was asked to say what might be done. BECAUSE, he said, the factory farmer in Colorado and the manager of the co-operative orchard in Washington State \(or in sugar beets and his apples harvested at the lowest possible wage per hour, more than 60,000 Texans, accidentally of Latin blood, must are doomed tolead lives so miserable and degraded that the inhabitant of a Neapolitan slum lives, by comparison, a heavenly and luxurious existence. The dead child by the road may have been lucky, it was said, since he had. in a sense, escaped earlier than his brothers from a life of filth, vermin, disease, illiteracy, backbreaking labor at wages on starvation’s outer edge. Dead, it was noted, he was quit of tubercu losis, syphilis, typhoid, dysentery, leprosy, bloated-belly hunger, and Z-class citizenship. Something could be done, it was said, if there were money, if the problem could be clearly defined \(and it is suspected it is far worse than the readily-available evidence islature “would listen for a minute,” if a state-federal program of responsibilities could be worked out, if Texas’s Constitution could be amended and a tagged health tax levied, if AMA could be induced not to fight a federal-employer-migrant-shared health insurance program as “socialized medicine,” if farm employers could be induced to live tip to a minimal set of housing and working condition regulations, if … Could not these things, and more, be done? it was asked. Who shall do them, came the answer, since “all of useach in his own way exploits” these people? Could not a nation capable of dusting the heads and the bodies of millions of displaced Europeans with DDT, one able to produce a Salk vaccine, a many billion-dollar highway network, an intercontinental guided missile, an atom and a hydrogen bomb, a TVA, even, say, a rigged farm price support program tackle this problem ? Well, yes, it was said, it could. Could not a task force be assembled for the specific purpose of eliminating this problem as a surgeon would excise a flowering malignancy ? Well, it was said, would that be practical ? We must have the cooperation of the doctors, and the federal government, and the local authorities and the employers and …. And would it be democratic ? Can we say to these people : Your home is filthy, your body is vermin-ridden, your blood stream is acrawl with spirochetes, or your lungs drip with tubercule, and, like it or not, we are going to clean you up and shoot you with drugs? T WAS. a meeting of deeply troubled people who talked earnestly and helplessly. It was also a meeting called to admit, publicly, a failure in which we share, equally. LYMAN JONES Mir Toms Mitorrurr