ustxtxb_obs_1959_04_11_50_00008-00000_000.pdf

Ralph Recalls `Hall of Infamy’ PLANS FOR CHANGE SAN ANTONIO Senator Ralph Yarborough made one of the most stirring speeches of his long career as far as the 225 Young Democrats attending the convention banquet in the St. Anthony were concerned. Byron Skelton, the national committeeman for Texas, who has supported Gov. Price Daniel in convention fights against Yarborough and the Democrats of Texas group, was seated at the head table and, in brief remarks, said of Yarborough, “We love him and appreciate him for his long service to the Democratic Party. Ralph has never wavered, not in the slightest.” He recalled he has been supporting Yarborough for election since 1939. His last words as he sat down alluded to the 1960 national convention, “where I sincerely believe that Texas will name the next president of the United States.” Skelton’s reception was restrained. Yarborough recalled that the liberal Young Democrats held their first convention in 1953 without any recognition and that all speakers except himself were scared off by telephone calls warning that the convention was going to be “controlled by cornmunists I didn’t scareI didn’t figure they could ruin me any more than they already had,” Yarborough said. Though Skelton was a supporter of Gov. Daniel’s and Sen. Johnson’s 1956 state party campaign for the Democratic nominees, Yarborough charged that “in 1956 out of the so-called Democratic state !headquarters they took funds contributed by Democrats to mail out anti-Democratic, anti-Adlai Stevenson literature.” This alluded to a Holmes Alexander column mailed out by that office praising Johnson to the explicit disadvantage of Stevenson. Yarborough said that there is a “barrage” that the government is “a welfare state” but that “We should be proud that our government is interested in people and the welfare of people.” He said that although the Senate labor and welfare committee is consid ered politically dangerous, “I asked to be on it. I figured we Young Democrats had taken ‘so many chances in Texas, I might as well take one in Washington.” He condemned “the spirit of conformityyou can’t do that, can’t vote for anybody, it ain’t the thing to do.” They called Jefferson and Torn Paine “radicals,” he said: “Most of your good solid businessmen weren’t for the revolution, during the revolution.” Turning then deliberately to the 1956 state conventions in Dallas and Fort Worth and the 1958 convention in San Antonio, in which Skelton was siding with the prevailing Johnson-DanielShivers coalitions, Yarborough exploded the meeting by declaring: “Those conventions were handled in such a way they were a disgrace to the Democratic Party and the processes of democracy.” Skelton sat still during the prolonged applause. When Travis led his group into the Alamo nearby in San Antonio, Yarborough said, it was the greatest charge in Texas history. “And I believe the second greatest one was when the honest Democrats of Texas stomped their standards on the floor and marched out of that hall of infamy over there!” Again the applause, and again Skelton sat motionless. “The same people who controlled the committee … Jake Pickle and the others … are still in control,” Yarborough said. “If we don’t have some new leadership we’ll have the same situation in 1960.” He closed: “You’ll feel better fighting with what you know is right than if you win in a go-along-get-along deal …. Remember your revolutionary days in 1953 and 1954 and fight for what’s right.” There is little doubt that Yarborough’s speech fired up many of the delegates for the resolutions disputes and the liberal caucus which followed. SAN ANTONIO A state personal and corporate income tax ; an end to the death penalty ; state rehabilitation for mental cases ; immediate integration ; equal justice for the accusedsuch were the ideas advanced by the Young Democrats in state convention here in addition to the publicized antiJohnson movement. The tax resolutions, adopted enthusiastically by the convention, carried out a theme of unremitting opposition to sales taxes of any kindgeneral, selective, or disguised. Excerpts from the resolutions: “A tax based on one’s ability to pay is the only fair and equitable answer to the state’s fiscal situation.” “A state graduated personal and corporate income tax is the only fair solution” and is endorsed. Regressive taxes, which tax all individuals “essentially the same amount,” are not based on ability to pay and curtail consumer purchasing power. The corporate profits tax introduced by Rep. Dean Johnston, Houston, is specifically endorsed, and Sen. Ralph Yarborough is commended for introducing a personal income tax exemption increase of from $600 to $800 per dependent. “A state sales tax of any description” opposes the “ability to pay” principle, and “selective sales taxes impose an undue burden on the people of Texas.” “Any type of indirect gross or selective sales taxes” is condemned. The young liberals endorsed the 18-year-old vote \(introduced in the legislature by a Young Democrat present, Rep. Roger Daily, points that 18-year-olds marry, work, pay taxes, and risk their lives in the service. However, another resolution, saying liquor laws “discriminate against” youths 18 to 21 and “are widely disregarded and impossible of enforcement,” met floor opposition. “They’ll think we’re a bunch of drunkards up here,” one delegate objected. To t h e tinkling of glasses the delegates rose for a standing vote on the resolution and placed it under the table. Party registration for primary elections, ruled unconstitutional by Atty. Gen. Will Wilson, was endorsed anyway in a resolution which advanced the argument that when Republicans vote in Democratic primaries, nominating conservatives for the general election, this “disfranchises many liberals in the subsequent election.” The state right-to-work law was condemned as a violation of “majority rule” in union affairs, was called “the right to destroy unions law” and “hypocritical,” and should be repealed, another resolution said. Justice & Wealth The Young Democrats for the first time took up the problem of equal justice for the accused. “It is a gross violation of the most sacred principles of civilized government for the quality of justice to depend upon the wealth of the parties litigant,” said a resolution: yet many men do not have the means to hire a lawyer. A system of adequate compensation for appointed attorneys or a public defender system was advocated for all cases involving the possibility of the defendant’s loss of liberty. The state’s responsibilities to mental patients were broached. Eelymosynary institutions should have enough money, a resolution said, “to supply not only custodial care but also any rehabilitative, instructional, and medical care that may be necessary to the total functioning of the individual.” Penal institutions should be “truly rehabilitative rather than merely punitive.” A traditional liberal hostility to abuse of the police authority, a strain, however, which has been tenuous in the liberal outcrop; ping in Texas, came suddenly into view in a resolution declaring that “there are currently many unfortunate victims of police officers who are overzealous in their duties.” A state law was advocated “making all municipalities responsible for the tort offenses of their law enforcing agents.” On the race issue the Young Democrats qualified again as militant liberals. Various resolutions said the 1954 school desegregation should be “immediately complied with throughout the state,” condemned Gov. Orval Faubus, Ar kansas, for behavior which was “an offense against all ‘humanity,” condemned opponents of the court ruling as “subversive,” and again advocated integration “as rapidly as it is practically possible.” The Young Democrats said “there is widespread discrimination throughout the State of Texas in the matter of employing those who are members of minorities … thereby keeping their standard of living lower than the majority of Texans.” They advocated “a fair employment practices code in Texas.” Personal Murder Apart from the Johnson reso lutions, the only floor debate on issues occurred over a resolution proposing that Texas abolish capital punishment. It said that “the sacrifice of human life is contrary to our highest ideals … The death penalty for crimes depicts in its gross form man’s inhumanity to man … Data clearly refutes its efficacy as a preventive measure … Man’s most Godlike characteristics are understanding and belief in man’s progressing rehabilitative nature.” James Gough, delegate from the University of Houston, declared that the resolution contravened “established experience in hundreds of years of law enforcement.” He said the death penalty is “the most effective deterrent to crime.” Support f o r abolition came from two delegates from Sam Houston State College at Huntsville. C. J. Halamicek argued, “I have knowledge that states that do not have capital punishment have fewer crimes of violence.” William H. Stinson of the same college, arguing against the theorem that “the only way to correct man is to kill him,” said “Many times a man goes to the chair due to lack of proper mental care the state should be providing.” Nat Littlejohn, delegate from Houston, said there would be “some merit in capital punishment if it was always swift, exact, and just,” but that too often it was not. “If we execute one person unjustly it is coldblooded murder,” he said. “I prefer abolition rather than ever running the chance of committing personal murder.” Colleges: We Are Starting Too Late \(In recommending a 20 percent increase in state spending for higher education, from $57 million in 1959 to $68 million in 1960, the Texas Commission on Higher Education, according to director Ralph Green in “Public Affairs Comment” for March, gave “priority to the need for attracting and holding qualified faculty, improving library resources and services, and adequately financing other activities which support the teaching departments.” The House has approved what are substantially t h e commission’s figures; but much opinion for a cut is reported from the Senate side of the legislature. James Howard, a classroom teacher at a state subsidized, but not fully state supported, college, writes for Observer readers an appraisal of the needs of public higher education in Texas. His figures come from the annual reports of the T. C. H. E. for 1957 and 1958. Texas has 18 fully state-supported colleges and universities and 30-odd state-aided public junior colleges. Registration at the 18 state colleges and universities now totals about 81,000 stu dents. All estimates of enrollment point to rapidly expanding student bodies in our public universities and colleges, and in private ones as well over the next ten or twelve years. Slightly more than half of the graduating seniors of Texas high schools now attend college. This proportion has been rising steadily since 1900 and is likely to continue to go up. College enrollments in Texas currently are climbing at the rate of eight percent per year \(1952 added up to a 48 percent gain. It is not simply that a higher proportion of high school graduates are entering college, Enrollments also increase because the population of Texas as a whole is increasing. The “war babies” born in the 1940’s are just now reaching the campuses. The birth rate took a sudden jump with the enactment of the draft law back in 1940 and has stayed high since. COLLEGES, THEN, are bracing COLLEGES, for a boom in enrollments that will knock the spots out of the GI boom of 1948-1950, when returning veterans crowded into colleges across the nation, taxing their facilities to the utmost. When it does come the boom will fill to overflowing classroom and dormitory. Unless the construction of these physical facilities is begun now, they will not be ready in time. Ralph Green, director of the Texas Commission on Higher Education, writes that the full force of the birth rate increases in the early 40’s “will reach colleges and universities within the next two to five years.” Needless to say, college faculties and Staffs are also likely to be swamped by the tide of students. It takes less time to build a college dormitory than to turn out a competent college teacher: four years for an undergraduate degree, one year for a master’s, and three more for a doctor’s degree. We already are too late to begin the educating of teachers to take care of the anticipated bulge in enrollments. The young men and women who will be recruited for that task are already in our colleges and universities. Many of them will probably be plucked from the vine unripened. We will have to be doubly careful if the quality of higher education is not to be watered down from what it is now. We will have experienced teachers, insufficient , laboratory space, and all the rest that commonly goes with a decline in quality. The problem will be to maintain whatever excellence we have reached. Instead of 18 or 20 to a class, we are probably going to have 25 and 30 and up. ANY TALK of curtailing our higher education effort in Texas nowadays is, therefore, singularly unrealistic. We are about to be engulfed with a flood of students \(the University of Texas alone has estimated a total enrollment of some 30,000 by 1970, unless rigid entrance reto “economize” by chopping down the budget requests of our state colleges and universities is at this juncture short-sighted and unintelligentto put it ineffectually. JAMES HOWARD THE TEXAS OBSERVER Page 8 April 11, 1959 The delegates overwhelmingly voice-voted through the abolition resolution. Texas Young Democrats also endorsed by resolution: a new state tax code commission; political equality by equal proportional representation for people in the cities; repeal of Article 14b of Taft-Hartley; more power to the Texas governor; national health insurance; more medical schools; state and federal subsidies to medical students in need; a state minimum wage law; more old age and unemployment aid; abolition of all poll taxes. What’s THE TRUTH about Catholics? This informative book explains in a clear and comprehensive manner, the teachings of the greatest teacher, Jesus Christ. the Son of God,