ustxtxb_obs_1959_11_27_50_00001-00000_000.pdf

Avalanche-Journal Photo Lab Johnson Gets His Barbecue at Snyder The senior senator campaigning for re-election and a delegation The one great rule of composition is to speak the truth THOREAU I ,.. th 1 ,4, ,–V61;34 e ,…., s9 a ee server 9`II,. .’0″&ec S 09 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. 05^ AVTeekly Newspaper Vol. 51 NOVEMBER 27, 1959 10c per copy No. 34 Lyndon’s Pitch to ‘Middle America’ AUSTIN Traveling by plane and helicopter, Senator Johnson has energetically and exhaustively presented to the citizenry his case for re-election and his platform as a presidential prospect. The American middle, he says, is “the new American majority,” and the issue in 1960 is “responsibility.” In the midst of his pitch to “middle-income America” a pitch which stresses unity, asks Americans to “turn away from what is wrong with us,” holds forth a goal of $10,000 a year for every family, and softpedals civil rights and business reformSenator Johnson nevertheless advocates extensive public works and defends welfare spending as good and reasonable. He boasts that the Democrats cut $1 billion from the President’s requests for foreign gifts and loans while he also advocates a “food for peace” program to send surplus U. S. food to needy people abroad. In this issue, having followed Johnson on and off for ten days and 1,200 miles, the Observer presents extensive excerpts from his speeches in North, West, and Central Texas and Houston, arranged by subjects. He is consciously making a bid for “the middle” in American life. In Dallas, addressing the United Savings and Loan League, he said that public discussion is often aimed at the extremes and continued: “The great middle of American life is ignored, and out of that neglect is born a problem more severe … We must guarantee them prudence in public finance and progress in public policy. To serve those families who stand on the middle rungs of the economic ladder the new majority of America we must pursue a course of prudent progress. “There are limits to what a man can do on, incomes of less than $7,000 a yearsevere limits. America will not be America if we are indifferent to those limitations and allow the vitality of these families to drain away.” Johnson also chose the workers’ sounding boardthe state labor convention in San Antonioto extend this “bid for the middle” in terms even more explicit. Dovetailing his hostility toward “division,” his desire for “unity,” and his emphasis on the fact that American workers make high wages, he said: “We have not come to a time when the nation can brush its hands and say that as far as raising living standards is concerned, our work is through. Our work is not thrOugh. It may only just have begun. “In thirty years, we have Made great strides upward and forward. The number of American families in the middle-income range has increased four-fold. These families today represent the backbone of our society, and the nation cannot be callous to their lot. “We must be more concerned with what their , labor earns for them than with what dollars earn for those who live by the wages of money. “Middle-income Americans have homes to buy and homes to pay for, children to educate, living standards to maintain, and hopes to keep alive. It must be the commitment of our policies to continue the advances middle-income Anierica has made.” The values of this approach were explicit, also, in Johnson’s description of his vision for the future at Snyder: “I don’t ask you to be crackpots. I don’t ask you to be unrealistic. I don’t ask you to be visionaries. All I ask is that we go back to some of the pioneer spirit that our grandfathers had … Let’s … take all this land This issue the Observer begins a period of somewhat intensive reporting and comment about Senator Lyndon Johnson. from here to Johnson City and see that it’s dotted with landowners, with kiddoes on the lawn, and tricycles on the sidewalks, and a high standard of living for all.” Reverting to a similar image before the labor delegates, he said, “We can have an average family income of $10,000. We can have a society in which a majority of our young have college educations … poverty and ignorance and disease are not consuming fears … taxes , are just and spending is responsible … if we keep from among us … division anti The issue of 1960 is not labor, it is not business, it is not the budgetand it certainly is not cranberry sauce. The issue is responsibility.” Whether Johnson will emphasize this middle-class appeal in his tours through the rest of the country or the more New Dealish speeches of his Stephenville and TEXAS UTILITIES FINANCE H-POWER RACE namics Corporation in San Diego, California. In trying to find ways to reproduce on earth the energy processes of the sun and the stars, the project’s scientists have been studying ways to hold a hot gas together while it is heated to a temperature several times that of the center of the sun and to continue to hold it while it reacts. The trick is to develop a system in which, under temperatures of several hundred million degrees, more energy is created than is consumed in achieving control of the reaction. What luck have they had? Why are they spending their money in fundamental research? The answers emerged during a symposium on nuclear fusion at the University of Texas last weekend. The University and the eleven utility companies co-sponsored the meeting, attended by 57 physics teachers from 38 Texas universities and colleges. The president of the Foundation, J. E. Cunningham, who is also president of Southwestern Public Service Co. in Amarillo, told the symposium at a banquet Friday night that in realism he granted that the principal purpose of the utility companies in the Foundation is “the eventual production of energy, by the mem \(Continued on Page General Dynamics Photo A Scientist Checks 300 Electrical Condensers Used in the fusion research of Texas utilities and General Dynamics, the condensers heat ionized gases to temperatures of 100,000 degrees. The ultimate objective is to bring the gases to 40 million degrees and deVise a means to contain them. AUSTIN Who will control atomic powerprivate business, government, or co-ops? The race for the economic production of this potentially cheap power began when the federal government spent $12 billion developing the atomic bomb. In his Dallas speech Oct. 17, exPresident H a r r y Truman warned of an “atomic power giveaway,” reasoning that since the government had developed the power source with such a huge investment, atomic power belongs to all the people. Eleven “investorowned electric utility cornpanies” in Texas have an opposite idea and they are doing something about it. Vowing that “it is neither necessary nor is it expedient to have the Federal government construct large-sized atomic energy electric generating stations,” these eleven companies are racing to beat the government to the discoveryand patentingof means for the economic generation of atomic power. Two years ago they banded together to form the “Texas Atomic Energy Research Foundation” and entered into a four-year research program on atomic fusion in collaboration with the General Atomic Division of General Dy