ustxtxb_obs_1959_09_18_50_00008-00000_000.pdf

AUSTIN A piece of mail sent to Texas editors under government frank from Sen. Lyn . don B. Johnson from Washington includes Johnson’s regular “Washington News Letter” and also a reprint of an article in the Congressional Record with the title, “Ike and Johnson Make Divided Government Work.” The reprint itself is marked, “Not Printed at Government Expense.” An extension of remarks by Sen. George Smathers of Florida, it covers both sides of a small sheet of paper. Sen. Smathers said in this reprint that the government has not been paralyzed in a period of “divided government” largely because of “the statesmanship and the determination of the Senate majority leader, Lyndon B. Johnson, that this government shall work.” Smathers, chairman of the Senate Democratic campaign committee, then inserted into the Record an article by Roscoe Drummond from the Washington Post and Times Herald July 20, 1959. This article was entitled, “Ike and Johnson Make Divided Government Work,” the same title used over the reprint, which incorporates the article. Drummond wrote that historians will “almost unanimously agree” that Eisenhower “has proved that a constitutionally lame duck President does not have to limp to the exit of his second term, that he can grow in power and political effectiveness, and that in so conducting himself Mr. Eisenhower has helped future THE TEXAS OBSERVER Page 8 September 18, 1959 Presidents faced with similar circumstances.” Secondly, Drummond wrote, the historians will conclude “that, simultaneously, Democratic Senate Leader Lyndon Johnsoninvaluably aided by Speaker Sam Rayburn of the Househas himself made an original, courageous, and incalculable contribution to the functioning of divided government by insisting upon making divided government work and by setting the maximum area of compromise between a Democratic Legislature and an opposition party President.” Drummond said also, “Senator Johnson has proved himself a constructive realist. He knows that Mr. Eisenhower won the Presidency, not Adlai Stevenson, and that Mr. Eisenhower’s nine million majority did not enthrone the Democratic platform.” Drummond’s article, enclosed in his newsletter by Johnson, also criticized Democratic national chairman Paul . Butler. “Butler wants to use divided government to make issues on which to try to win the White House next year,” Drummond wrote, while “Johnson wants to use divided government to get the best attainable legislation. The decision Lyndon Johnson laced was whether to paralyze the Government or transact the public business. Johnson’s great contribution during this unprecedented period is that he is choosing to transact the public business.” The envelope in which this material is contained, as received at the Observer office, was -marked in the left hand corner, “United States Senate, Office of the Democratic Leader, Washington, D. C./ Free” and in the right-band corner, “Lyndon B. Johnson, U.S.S.” WASHINGTON Conflicting summings up of the 1959 Congress, Texas “bisenator” support for abolishing the poll tax and establishing a national seashore area at Padre Island, and a key new subcommittee chairmanship for the junior senator were the principal developments among Texans in Washington as the Congress adjourned for the year. Senator Lyndon Johnson, in an article written for UPI, said the first session of the Congress produced a record “substantial, prudent, and designed to serve public rather than political needs.” He discussed economy \(cutting Eisenlabor bill, passage of Hawaiian statehood, and funds for “a crash program to battle heart disease, cancer, and other killing and crippling ailments” and listed other acts also passed. In housing he said two bills had been passed and vetoed and a third was pending. “The American people can look at the record of achievement, and they will find it to be solid, substantial, and enduring,” he said. In his weekly broadcast to Texans he discussed the labor bill in some detail. He said it “is the bill the public wanted” and represented the best from the House and Senate versions. With respect to loopholes in Taft-Hartley bans on secondary boycotts, he said, “The new labor bill sealed these loopholes. And this includes a clause covering ‘hot cargo’ deals, one of the most vicious forms of the secondary boycott.” A “firm but just” law, he said, the result was “superior in a lot of respects to the original proposals.” He said it neither penalizes nor rewards labor. Tight restrictions were written on organizational picketing, he said, although free speech was preserved; extortion picketing was banned; a provision covers the area, he said, of small business and their employees. He reviewed the bill’s provisions on honest procedures in unions and said that “racketeers and hoodlums,” who were “a very small minority of the labor movement, preyed not only on honest working men and women but on the public itself.” Speaker Rayburn, in a Dallas News interview, said the session was one of the most fruitful in his 47 years’ service. Especially he named passage of a compromise housing bill after the two vetoes and overriding Eisenhower’s second veto of a public works bill. He also mentioned approval of the one-cent gasoline tax increase. This week Johnson urged Congress to pass a $100-million-a-year program of federal insurance of loans to college studets. The loans, from colleges, would be insured by the government under Johnson’s plan. He said he would introduce the bill next session. The Senate has passed Sen. Ralph Yarborough’s bill for a program of college grants to “Cold War GI’s” shifting to loans if they fall back academically. House action is pending. 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Call the Sun Life representative in your district for more information about the Sun Life “money-back” plan, o: mail this coupon today. immmil =Now SUN LIFE OF CANADA MARTIN ELFANT 201 Century Buntline Houston, Texas CA 4-0686 Without obligation, I would like more details of the now Sun Lif Security Fund plan. NAME ADDRESS AG! Session Summed Up As Con ress Quits voted to extend the life of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. ‘Without Fire’ James Marlow, the AP’s Washing news analyst, said the Democrats could have roared like tigers but they just mooed under Ike. Marlow said one of the reasons was that Johnson and Rayburn “are conservative, middle-of-theroad managers without fire” who “followed so meekly along the road charted by Eisenhower that they sometimes gave the impression of standing in awe of him.” Sen. John Kennedy said on a TV program Johnson has done an excellent job as leader of a divided party and added: “But my viewand after all he is the senator from Texas and his view may be different, or it may be the same in some cases my view is that the Democratic Party has no purpose unless it is progressive and vigorous and liberaland responsible.” Sen. Joseph Clark, Pa., also on the program, said Sens. Humphrey and Symington feel the same way. Sen. William Proxmire, Johnson’s most persistent critic, said, “I think we may have made some slight progress, but I would not say that it has resulted in any real dent in the Johnson leadership program. We have not had a Democratic caucus since the first one called by Johnson in January after this present congress got under way.” However, I will continue my efforts next year. I am not at all discouraged.” The National Committee for an Effective Congress said the Congress ‘has been a failure” because Eisenhower was hung up on budget balancing, the Democratic leaders failed to face up to their historic responsibilities, and the conventional liberals were bereft of ideas and initiative. Ralph on Poll Tax Sens. Johnson and Yarborough have co-sponsored, with more than three score other senators, Sen. Holland’s proposed constitutional amendment obolishing the poll tax in the five states which still have it, Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Virginia. Senator Yarborough, shortly before midnight last Saturday, made this statement to the Senate on the subject: “There have been many changes in American political and governmental life since the Constitution was adopted. When the nation was formed, ownership of property was generally required as a qualification for voting. Indeed, even human beings were owned and traded, bought and sold as property in that long ago day. But as our democracy has developed all property qualifications fortunately have been abandoned, until now, a poll tax levied by five states is the only price tag on American Democracy. “Three states now have cumulative poll tax requirements, that a citizen must pay a poll tax two or three consecutive years before he can vote in one election. These are such unreasonable burdens upon the franchise and so undemocratic as to shock the national conscience. “For this reason, I joined with 60 other senators in sponsoring S. J. Resolution 126 proposing to amend the United States Constitution to abolish the poll tax in federal elections. “There are substantial numbers of residents in lower income brackets in these states who are disfranchised by imposition of having to pay a poll tax. Experience in states which recently abolished the poll tax shows that thousands of additional citizens voted when they no longer had to pay this uneven burden to participate in selection of their elective officials. “All of us will agree, I believe, that the most important and most basic right in our great system of government by consent of the governed is the right to vote in honest democratic elections at all levels of government. “Mr. President, surely all thoughtful Americans should support this move to extend the right to vote in federal elections to all Americans. This is fundamental to the democratic principles upon which this nation was founded.” Yarborough was named chairman of a special Senate “subcommittee on freedom of communications” to help “insure freedom, fairness, and impartiality in the treatment of news” by TV and radio. The day before this appointment, he had said to the Senate that there is a growing trend to use “public relations scare techniques to pass the laws of our land,” through “shock programs of mass fear aroused by a series of TV, radio, and news commercializations.” “Such fear and smear techniques have been used for years in Texas by the special and powerful interests, and against the people,” he said. He also condemned full page ads of private power companies in Time, Saturday Evening Post, and other magazines “based on half truths” and aimed at “destroying public power in America.” Yarborough upheld the program for $50 million in loans to colleges for new classrooms against Eisenhower’s veto, He cited the 1862 Morrill Land Grant College Act and asked, “If it is all right to create a whole college by the use of federal money, what is so wrong with this college classroom program?” Seaton Hints for Padre Secretary of the Interior Fred Seaton has written Johnson urging support of legislation to establish three seashore-park areas. “There is every reason to believe that Padre Island would be established as one of the areas under the bill, providing the problems involving conflicting land uses, such as mining and oil and gas, can be resolved,” Seaton told Johnson. The drive for a national seashore area on Padre is now a cooperative legislative effort by Sens. Johnson and Yarborough and Reps. Joe Kilgore and John Young. Sen. James Murray, chairman of the Senate committee on interior and insular affairs, last Tuesday responded to a joint letter from the four Texans asking for a committee hearing in Texas on the case for a national seashore area on Padre. “I am quite confident that the subcommittee can conduct a public hearing in Texas on this legislation later this year,” Murray told the four. Sen. Johnson announced on the Senate floor that Dec. 11 was the tentative date for the hearing, probably in Corpus Christi. Johnson predicted that the senators “will return to Washington lastingly convinced of the tremendous potential for a public recreation area at Padre Island … I believe that with this decision … we are a step further toward the preservation for future generations of a wonderful wilderness area on Padre Island.” Rep. Kilgore has introduced a bill to appropriate $15 million for three national seashore areas, noe on the Atlantic, one on the Pacific, and one on the Gulf Coast.