ustxtxb_obs_1958_07_25_50_00001-00000_000.pdf

The one great r 0.7. composition is to speak the truth.. Thoreau &xas 011grrurr 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. An Independentl_iberal Weekly A ezvspa per Vol. 50 HEARNE, PALESTINE, TYLER, MINEOLA Well-dressed, civic clubtype people turned out in moderate but respectable numbers along Gov. Price Daniel’s campaign shot into East Texas last week. Interested, concerned, but not excited, more like community chest planners than political supporters, they listened and agreed as he talked a little religion, a little states’ rights, a little Texas pride, and a 52-out-of-52 target score with the legislature. Traveling in segregation coun Ronnie Dugger try, he made clearer than usual his belief in separate schools. In one speech, at Palestine, he mentioned Mexico three times. He said he still bears the lash-marks from the days when Gov. W. Lee O’Daniel tried to pass a general sales tax. He backed off a little from the DOT issue, saying that if a majority in a precinct favor DOT and oppose him, that’s fine, they should rule; that he does not want to control the party. A lady who had been asked to make a pitch for conservative precinct control rose and instead made an earnest plea for Bill Blakley, whose campaign she had joined as a local manager. Daniel, not needing anyone else’s burdens, made it clear he is leaving the Senate election alone. His outward concern is that his friends may assume his re-election is “in the bag.” He told them he can win July 26 only if they get out his vote. Privately he said one of the bought-up Belden Polls earlier this month showed that his lead over Sen. Henry Gonzalez and O’Daniel had been narrowed to 55 percent. AUSTIN With each side predicting it will squash the other, Texas Democrats meet, argue and vote at the precinct conventions Saturday evening to decide who will control the state party for the next two years. “If our folks turn out we’re gonna slaughter ’em,” says Creekmore Fath, secretary-treasurer of the Democrats of Texas organization. A “10-to-1” victory is in the offing for the Daniel forces, says state Democratic executive committee spokesman J. Ed Connally. Fath, for DOT, has mailed out three resolutions recommended for precinct convention approval. They call for the honoring of nominees of the senatorial district caucuses for SDEC membership; passage of a party registration bill; and retaining precinct conventions as the nominating bodies for county convention delegates. Clamping down on his unlit cigar, Daniel was dressed in a black suit, black shoes, and a black tie with a white star in the center. His sons, Price, 17, and Houston, 13, and Dick Morrison, a young man from Daingerfield, traveled along in his re-election car. Hearne Early one morning about sixty people gathered in the clubhouse at the Hearne Country Club. Six pretty high school girls in party dresses were serving cokes, coffee, and donuts from the Shipley Cream Glazed Do-Nut Co. In the hall, waiting for the governor, were a judge, a lawyer, a contractor, a lumberyard owner, a filling station operator, a prosperous Brazos bottom farmer, a doctor, an insurance man, a pharmacist. Said the filling station man, “Shoulda got out some handbills or some way a’ scatterin’ the news around. I thought it was yesterday mornin’. But it clear slipped my mind, I went out and watched the Little League workout …” Daniel arrived from a prayer meeting at Bryan, half an hour late. After he had shaken hands around the walls, W. L. McCarver, Hearne city manager, explaining he was “pinch-hitting for the mayor, who’s a little bit indis AUSTIN The literature of the summer campaigns has been a story unto itself. Charges of “smear sheets” have been flying; tons of biographies, pamphlets, and car stickers have been rushing from the presses. Daniel’s official resolutions denounce DOT for using that name and endorse SDEC’s code of ethics. Connally mailed out to area Daniel leaders the Huntsville Item version of the Sam Wood story on DOT, leaving out the Yarborough references and picture in the original Wood story. Daniel first advocated abolishing precinct conventions. He modified this to selecting county convention delegates by regular vote and leaving the precinct conventions in existence for debating purposes. Now, in a letter to precinct committeemen, Daniel says the subject ought not to be taken up at the precinct conventions and that he will call a meeting later this year to talk about recommending his plan to the legislature. The SDEC resolution on its code of ethics is to include a guarded endorsement of some plan to keep members of one party out of the affairs of another. TEXAS, JULY 25, 1958 SATURDAY AUSTIN Estimates of the total vote Saturday range from 1,100,000 to 1,300,000. Although Blakley is predicting a decisive victory in the Senate race, most predictions favor Yarborough. The last private Belden Poll reportedly gave Yarborough 49 percent, Blakley 36 percent, but the spread is expected to be much smaller than this. A concensus of the predictions in the governor’s race is that it is a close question whether there will be a runoff, and then it is a close question whether Gonzalez or O’Daniel will make it, with Gonzalez the likelier. George Nokes’s challenge to Lt. Gov. Ramsey is a strong one, but the betting was still on Ramsey at mid-week. One major imponderable is the effect of “Stevenson Republican” Grover Cantrell’s congressional candidacy, not only on the Dallas congressional election, but on the Dallas turnout in the Democratic primary for the statewide conservative candidates. Dallas Republicans have urged conservatives to go to the GOP primary and vote for Alger; Dallas conservative Democrats scoff at the Cantrell challenge to Alger as unlikely to attract liberals into the GOP primary and say Blakley, Daniel, and Ramsey need the conservative votes in the Democratic primary. Control of the state Democratic Party for the next two years will be disputed at precinct conventions Saturday evening after the voting. Wednesday’s mail brought to the Observer office, from Houston, but in an envelope bearing Bill Blakley’s picture and his Dallas headquarters address, a reprint of the Sam Wood story on DOT as it appeared in the Waco Tribune-Herald. This story includes Sen. Ralph Yarborough’s The county leaders’ kits sent out by SDEC oppose a “strong” party registration law, which it is argued has not worked in other states. A state-wide broadcast of the “Freedom in Action” precinct convention film was scheduled Thursday night. FIA meetings have been held in various cities and towns to prepare FIA supporters for the precinct fights. Followers of ex-Gov. Allan Shivers have played prominent parts in these meetings. In most of the precinct meetings the decisive test vote will occur on the election of a convention chairman. In a statement, Jerry Holleman, Texas AFL-CIO president and a member of DOT’s board, said “the question of one-man rule or democratic control of the party” is the issue in the precincts. Holleman condemned what he called Daniel’s “fear-and-smear campaign against organized labor” and “anti-labor attacks on other minority groups.” HOUSTON It was in the parking lot of one of Houston’s community shopping centers. There, like all the rest, was the jungle of supermarkets and drug stores, the washaterias and the cafeterias, laid out with hurried precision, lowcut, neoned, new. This one was King’s Center, but only the name made it special. Atop a truck decorated with campaign posters and banners a hillbilly band ambled and rhythmed. Curley Fox, wearing sun glasses and a white suit, played the violin, and Texas Ruby, her voice powerful and masculine, sang: I’m back down in good or Texas Where the water tastes so fine You can have that Eastern water Just take it any time … A small early-morning crowd gathered. In the road beyond a Negro man sat on a horse, a campaign sticker taped across the horse’s snout. People looked curiously out of moving cars; there was a U.S. senator somewhere near. Sen. Ralph Yarborough was in the crowd shaking hands. He took the cue when Curley Fox started “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and climbed up the steps onto the truck. He spoke for 15 minutes, ripped into his opponent with all picture and arguments connecting Yarborough with “minority groups” and DOT. For this reason, Gov. Daniel, who has felt he cannot afford to become involved openly in. the Senate election, has been loath to use the Wood story. The Huntsville Item published a version of it with references to Yarborough and Yarborough’s picture omitted. This version the Daniel-controlled state Democratic executive committee has been mailing out to precinct and county Daniel people. At a Daniel luncheon rally in Palestine last week, the Huntsville Item version had been placed beside each plate. Daniel, holding it in his hand, remarked: “I did not put it out and did not know it would be put out. But I have read it, and it gives you some of the information about the DOT.” Thus Sam Wood’s DOT story and the Huntsville variation are being used as campaign documents by Blakley, Daniel, and the SDEC. Illustrative of the local mailings preparatory to the elections and precinct conventions July 26 is a letter from three laundry operatorsFred Page, Imperial Laundry & Cleaners; Frank Smith, Perfecto Cleaners; and Herman L. Pope, Nu-System Laundry & Cleaners to “Dear Industry Member” in Houston. The letter appealed for funds to support the conservative legislative slate in Houston and attacked “radical elements” trying to pass a state income tax or “pos the fire and fury of the political professional, then commended his own record with an opposite zeal. Finished, he waved and grinned to the accompaniment of “The Eyes of Texas,” stepped off the truck to shake more hands, then left for another stop. It was Saturday, a good time to catch attention, and with an impressive motorcade comprising his “Friendship Caravan” to drum up enthusiasm, the senator put in a 13-hour day. He made eight stops in Harris County and two in Galveston County, finishing up late in the evening at Texas City Willie Morris before a crowd of almost 600. It was a good day for gauging Yarborough’s campaign pitch. His chief themes: Ohis opponent opposes work ing people, is a Republican, takes federal subsidies for himself while denouncing them for others, had an. absentee record when he served in the Senate. Ohe, Yarborough, made an ex cellent record during his 15 months in Washington, pushed the highway construction bill, the increase in salary for civil servants and postal workers, housing legislation, veterans’ and old age assistance, deepening of the Houston ship channel. he shies away from the racial issue. He is a tireless campaigner. The grin is a physiological wonder: only in rare moments do you catch him without it. A plump, wellgroomed man who looks closer to 40 than 55, he walks from the heels with a boyish bounce; he gives to his speeches a folksy touch, more than a Daniel, less than an O’Daniel. He is not a ‘spectacular speaker, but he is a good one; he attacks the opposition with a vengeance. He leaves a vague impression that a man running for office has to pump an opponent, and that the more entertaining he can make the pumping, the better. He seems proud of his life and record and calls attention to it without blush or hesitation. He often recalls the harsher facts of past campaigns, neither with bitterness nor forgiveness. Occasionally he lapses into phrases of real eloquence \(“Tonight the flickering campfires of our Marines light the green and rolling hills of Lebanon, the same hills that sent the cedars that built King Solomon’s he uses rarely, and when he does it sounds a shade rehearsed. He looks happy and he is not shy. It is easy to see he has done all this before, many times. \(Continued on Page RAYBURN FOR YARBOROUGH AUSTIN Sarah McClendon writing in the Sherman Democrat reported that Speaker Sam Rayburn voted for Senator Ralph Yarborough by absentee ballot last Saturday. Yarborough and Rayburn conferred in Washington Tuesday. Thursday Rayburn confirmed he voted for Yarborough. 10c per copy Number 17 And With Yarborough A Day With Daniel . Party Control To Be Decided The Campaign ‘Literature’