ustxtxb_obs_1958_09_19_50_00003-00000_000.pdf

WERE IT NOT THAT 1 HAVE BAD DREAMS 0 God, I could be bounded in a nut-shell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams. HAMLET AUSTIN Price Daniel has always been a hesitantly earnest sort of man. As a boy he was a working Young Democrat, swept along by Roosevelt and the Cause; as a representative he was one of those who joined arms against the sales tax; as an attorney general he began to yield to the temper of the new times, speaking for the racists in the Sweatt case, and for the oilmen in the tidelands case ; as senator he said one time we ought to abide by the law on integration, and then he let the tidelands get away through a surfeit of compromise with liberals ; as Governor he yielded to the East Texans simply because they frightened him the most. Now and then one could sight through the effluvium of caution which he exuded a firm gesture, but never a firm act ; girded under by committees and studies and recommendations and briefs, he used each buttressing scrap of history, histrionics, and hysterics for confirmation of his slightest decision. Somewhere within the scarved and overcoated shape with which he braves the fall-time showers he takes for February blasts persists the tortured fragment of his ideal-enswathed youth, the heart but not the spine. of a liberal. His identity is lashed against two racks, each turning opposite : the one his youth, the memory of a radiant social hope that once suffused his blinking mind, the other his fear, his very terror before the powers he must outwit to persist in the palace, his cowering before their vigil over his known deeds and his unknown conversations with the shadows of his earlier time. And thus the native hue of ‘resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pitch and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action. “Stupid !” “So stupidtoo stupid even to be called outrageous !” Thus joyously was he judged at San Antonio. But wait a while. As Hamlet in his father’s love detested his father’s usurper Daniel in his hero’s shadow detests his ego’s failure. How often have we who have listened heard him enjoin to kneel beside him in his daily prayers the ghost of Jim Hogg, the empresario of his day-dreams, the historic muse whispering sibilantly to his frustrate self, at Huntsville, at Mineola, and then at San , Antonio, when he hoped with Hogg that Democrats could “go forth to battle with all our energy and to work for the prosperity of our state.” Shadowing across him from beyond the beyond is still another ghost, Sam Houston’s, ever descendant beside him, too, and the hauntinger for that ; a ghost fastfloating and coarse talking, contemptuous and potent through the firm-flowing folds of its menacing habit. “List, list, 0 list ! If thou didst ever thy dear father love” 0, that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew! The drawing of his reason’s humane memories, and hopes for the humble persisted in, cast our Governor’s private contemplations into a nearly philosophic mold. If he dissembles it is not from fraud but from nicety of spirit : from too much vulnerability to the presence of the moment, the suasions the skillful advocate can clothe his purpose in. He cannot but hear of the contempt such a one as Shivers has for him because he seems to say one thing to a Shivers and another thing to those who run yet with causes kin to the enthusiasms of his younger days. He cannot but fear that some day will come along a Marquis Childs of the Texas scene to say of him as Childs says of Eisen hower, “Here was a weak governor ; a vacillating man.” What then from Hogg and Houston in his late-life dreams ? How then to be a Governor, and arbitrary? At San Antonio the morning after he had purged from the state party’s committee two people he thought his enemies, the morning after he had thus for nothing made harmony bedlam and bungled a victory from which he could have mounted a heady charger into his second term, a man who has watched him some little time reflected : “I don’t know, of course, but I think that he may have committed the first truly arbitrary act of his life ; and most certainly it was his first truly arbitrary act as Governor.” He had given in on the party loyalty oath, though he likely doesn’t believe in it. He had seated almost all the legal delegations, and the one in doubt was not a clear issue. He had refused to join in the outcry from the ragged edge of his supporters to replace Mrs. Randolph as national committeeman. He accepted for his temporary chairman one of Lyndon Johnson’s and Sam Rayburn’s congressmen, and when it came to the chairman of “his” his own J. Ed Connally and tossed to the ravenous rightists of Fear In Action the Shivercrat, Jim Lindsey. Somewhere toward midmorning of the convention day he must have said to himself, Why did I trouble to be Governor ? What pallid jest on myself was that, to be Governor more than to be President ? What would they say, seeing me now, cats’-paw to Shivers and Johnson and Rayburn, yielding even to Yarborough and the DOT I’ve peeled with words so many times, but never with a single deed ? I’ve got to oppose somebody; go along with everybody they’ll think you’re nothing; Yet I, A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak, Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause, Arid say nothing; … Why, what an ass am I ! This is most brave, That atl.. Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words, And fall a-cursing, like a very drab., A scullion! Fie upon’t! foh! What ghostly thought came upon his reeling pride one cannot say : to turn with Houston on the usurper lieutenant governor and ask “And what was your name?” or with Hogg upon the hounds of Wall Street \(now or with his own youth recalled and I’ll damn their reproaches yet ; but some ghost came ; “Do not forget : this visitation/Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose” ; and even as he knew the risk he ran, the fellow conspirators he double-dealt, the senselessness of the issue drawn, he knew he could not leave silently the hellhall of his humiliated yielding. How all occasions do inform against me, And spur my dull revenge! What is a man, If his chief good and market of his time Be but toand feed? a beast, no more. .. .0, from this time forth, My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth! Though in his rising torment he ran through a hand-count of Poloniuses, repenting too late, after the blades were through them ; though his own Ophelias sank in shame “where a willow grows aslant a brook”; though after events had flowed far beyond the dikes Lyndon’s Laertes yet tried to wile him from his purpose, Let Hercules himself do what he may, The cat will mew, and dog will have his day. R.D., per W.S. Closed Schools But Minds Still Open “Rednecks of the South, arise ; you have nothing to lose but your red necks.”Old Folk Saying. TEXARKANA, L’il Orvie Foe-bus, announcing the official Arkansas policy of closed schools to accommodate an already established pattern of closed minds, may get fooled, but he is no fool. He knows that there is a sizable residue of hillbillyism and redneckism in Arkansas, and if there is some public figure who will back them, they will support him as far as he can steer them. A number of people outside of Arkansas have become as highly emotional about Faubus as those he calls “my people.” This is apparent here in Texarkana, on the border. It has always been hard to separate Texarkana, Arkansas, from Texarkana, Texas, in the business world, and now there is a great deal of common political interest among the peoples of both sides of State Line Avenue. They do not all support Faubus, but segregationist feeling. here has solidified around him as a symbol. The segregationists are highly vocal, and you get the impression that they feel their cause is righteous. In this way they have won over some of the previously uncommitted middle group ; they have alienated others. ON SEPTEMBER 10, 1957, I walked into a Texarkana, Texas, newsstand, and while I was browsing, a pleasant-faced man in his seventies, with pinkish skin and silver hair, entered the room and started talking with the woman behind the counter. He was leaning on a cane, but except for the slowness in his step he appeared healthy and happy with his lot in life. He would have passed for a retired lawyer or doctor. It was not long before they spoke of Faubus and the segregation question. “I’ll tell you who started all this the communists !” she said. “No, this began before this communist agitation. This began in the 1840’s when people from New Englang like Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner began to make speeches. They didn’t believe in slavery, and …” he began ; but she interrupted. “That hasn’t got anything to do with it. Don’t you know ? The Communist Manifesto was wrote in 1850 !” She glared exultingly at him. He was still smiling graciously. “This was long before that,” he responded quietly. The woman’s husband, a thin knot of a man, stuck his head up from the back of the newsstand. “That’s right, the Communist Manifesto was wrote in 1850 !” he said loudly. The old rnian chuckled in his quiet manner. “Well, I’m afraid you’re wrong there. The communists have very little to do with this,” the old man said, patiently and not harshly, seeming to know his age prevented him from taking a very active role anyway. By this time the woman was hysterically furious that the old man did not agree. As he took his leave, with his white hair, pink and genial face, and cane, she raced nervously from her counter stool and joined her husband at the back “What’s wrong with him ? He can’t even see that !” she said. T ODAY, with Faubus’ landslide re-election behind him, his supporters are loud and proud, on both sides of the state line. Just as members of the Dallas delegation at the Democratic state convention handed out “Faubus for President” banners. some Texas citizens here sport “Faubus for Governor” bumper stickers on their cars. They have found their boy. I even heard one old gentleman say recently, “We oughta run Faubus for President. He’d make a good one he’s a Democrat and a Baptist !” The man is a native arid lifelong Texan and a loyal-to-the-core Democrat. A few days ago I was chatting with a friend. It was the day of the Supreme Court decision on Little Rock’s Central High. “Whatta you think of the Supreme Court ruling?” he asked, in a matterof-fact tone. “I like it,” I said. “I think they’ve gone too far,” he said. “The nigger’s got _all the opportunity he needs now, he don’t have to go to school with us. He oughta be trying to help himself.” “How can he do that unless he has equal opportunity with the rest of us? SAN ANTONIO The resolutions committee at San Antonio, which, like all the other state convention committees, was dominated by adherents of Gov. Price Daniel, rejected, 29 to 6, the following resolution criticizing the Republicans : Whereas, the Republican crusade of 1958 has resulted in the ‘Vicuna Coat Era’ epitomized by the friendship of Sherman Adams and Bernard Goldfine, And whereas, five years of Republicanism is enough and any republican in office is one too many, And whereas, the Republican Party in Texas has seen fit to nominate many candidates who seem willing to stand up and defend `Brinkmanship’ Government by White House Group’ Bensonism’ and all of the stumble and falter, too little and too late policies of the Republican administration, You know yourself that a highly trained Negro can’t get a decent job here,” I said. “Niggers don’t pay taxes, why should they go to our schools ? You waste money sending ’em to school, they’re just monkeys anyway,” he said. I could see his jaw muscles flexing. “Sure they pay taxesa lot of ’em more than I do,” I said, surprised at what I considered my self-restraint. Just then two Negroes turned a corner and headed down the sidewalk in our direction. “If you had a little kid going to school, you wouldn’t look at it that way,” he told me. When we parted we promised to talk about women next time. JIM PRESLEY And whereas, the good people of Dallas County have a double dose of disaster in that they presently suffer from a lack of Democratic representation in the United States House of Representatives as well as the national Republican blight, And whereas, the unprecedented victory of Democrat Governor Edmund Muskie of Maine, in winning a seat in the U. S. Senate, points the way to complete Democratic victory throughout the United States, Be it therefore resolved that all Democrats and all Democratic Party officers and all nominees of the party now dedicate themselves to restoring the national and all other governments to the party of the people, the Democratic Party. !V Page 3 September 19, 1958 THE TEXAS OBSERVER `Moderates’ in Control