ustxtxb_obs_1960_07_29_50_00004-00000_000.pdf

Let those flatter who fear, it is not an. American art.JEFFERSON A Skeptical View A Y 21anier o Poaition L-A. DEMO CONV N Ti ON 171 . . Rosen in Albany Times-Union “Senator, I ,Like Your Style” Texas and the Parties orb ‘ idd i en THINK BACK, now, on the recent years of Texas party politics, during which Price Daniel has been insisting he is a loyal Democrat, and would support the nominees. The night Kennedy was nominated, Daniel said “support” meant “vote” period. He would not campaign for him, or lift a finger. The night Johnson was nominated, Daniel switched this position to include a little workhe did not say how muchfor the ticket. But, he added, he repudiates the platform. He chooses an extremely unfortunate phrase to characterize his party’s program on civil rights”an extreme position on human rights,” he calls it. Rather like excessive respect for the individual, or undue devotion to equality before the law. Governor Daniel never did mean, in pledging to support the Democratic nominees, that he had changed the kind of person he was in 1952 when he voted for Eisenhower. Those who reserved their -right to a skeptical view about his latter-day conversion to the Democratic Party were calumniated as extremists, splinter groups, and radicals. Now, however, it is Daniel who is the extremist, for he is in bed with J. Strom NOW LOOK, gentlemen, if you’re for a. sales tax, that all right. Nobody’s going to call you a fascist, or even a reactionary. If Harvard’s Galbraith can pull it off; so can you It’s becoming more and more respectable in Texas to soak the poor. But for heaven’s sakes, let’s not play games. John McKee of Ford Motor Co., a memberMr. McKee, that isof . the Governor’s subcommittee on new taxes, advocates a “transfer tax.” Sales, you see, are transfers; Does he think he’s fooling anyone? Well, not the press or his fellow committee members, whom he told outright, “That’s a new name for an old tax.” He went on to say, “we have got to get out of our minds the prejudice against a certain taxthe sales tax.” Perhaps he should start with his own mind. Does he think he can fool the voters out of their “prejudice” against a tax that lets the wealthy of f the easiest ? Governor O’Daniel tried MILTON MAYER, writing in the Progressive of the late Democratic convention, observes that the admission ticket to the rostrum “was, of course, the hatred of Communism. Nobody spoke nobody thought of speakingwho did not have the heroic virtue to declare, four-square, coppersheathed, and sword-in-hand, that he anti-Communist who was raring to lead his people against the enemy.” In the middle of this attack, as Mayer reports, a Mr. Leon Ackerman of Washington, D.C., published a fullpage newspaper ad across the country quoting Jesus Christ as having reputedly said : “Ye have heard that it hath been said, thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate Thurmond of South Carolina and Ross Barnett of Mississippi in repudiating the DemocratiC platform. He and his associates are a splinter in the side of the Democratic campaign. What sort of a position is Governor Daniel really in ? He is saying he will work for the Democratic candidates who are seeking election to implement principles he has repudiated. He “keeps his pledge” and his Dixiecrat friends and supporters, too. Or so he hopes. We are glad that J. Ed Connally has begun making appearances, as the state party chairman, boosting, without niggling and belittling remarks, the nominees to whom he committed himself as the Texas Democratic chairman. We hope that when the next test of Governor Daniel’s loyalty to the Democratic Party comes upthe obvious necessity that the September state convention throw out the Houston presidential electors and those from Dallas and anywhere else who will not pledge to vote for the Democrats in the electoral .college if the Democrats winhe will not find a way once again to “keep hiS pledge” and side with the Dixiecrats on principle. Oarnei by calling it a “transactions tax,” and the people were just as prejudiced against it. Mr. Strickland called it a “gross receipts tax,” and the voters, in a very prejudicial fashion, reelected Sen. Gonzales, retiring Mr. Strickland to his own gross receipts. Mr. McKee calls it a “transfer tax.” If that doesn’t work, will they try “exchange tax,” or “barter tax,” or “retail tax,” or “market tax,”or “counter tax,” or what? They will never call it ababy-buggy tax, or a hamburger tax, or a book tax, or a new gasoline tax, or a new beer tax, or .a new cigarette tax, or .a new liquor tax, or a tax on misfortune, or a tax on poverty, or a tax on need ; but no name will conceal these things that a sales , tax means. Even Mr. McKee’s new subtlety suggests, “transfer from who to whom?” The people are too prejudiced against their Own exploitation to care what it’s called. you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” We all hate Communism and what it stands for, distrust Nik, and as good Americans will blow Moscow skyhigh into the aurora borealis once they do it to us. We will stand firm on Berlin, scrap for the uncommitted Afro-Asians, negotiate a disarmament only with effective controls, appease only if we be appeasedand hope, with Faulknerthat in the last firered night of final destruction, man will not merely endure, he will prevail. Yet in the shorter haul, it somehow provokes a sadness beyond words that our politicians of both parties, the big men who will make the histories, as well as the more diminutive time-servers in their brief glory before the flashing lights and the tele AUSTIN If the two national conventions gauged the national temper, the United States is moving to the left. Particularly in civil rights, the Democrats and Republicans both adopted’ platform .planks whose clear intention is the reformationyes, the reconstructionof the South. Republicans from the South rejoiced when the. Democrats’ platform was too liberal for the South ; they did not expect their own party to say “me too,” but this is what happened in Chicago. Both parties agree, too, that not only must the nation keep up its defense posture; we must also, they concur, send food and capital abroad, and actively campaign for and come to deserve the sympathies of the peoples of the World. The Democratic Party continues to represent the people, the general run of mankind, more than the Republican Party, because of the Democrats’ domestic programs of public welfare, public works, support for small farmers, and official friendship with organized labor. The Republicans, dodge and shuffle as they did at Chicago, continue to represent big business,, resist humanitarian programs for the unfortunate, condemn public works as socialistic, celebrate private profit as “the realization of the individual.” It is now almost a Cliche that foreign policy is the issue of the national campaign ; it is a political commonplace that civil rights is an issue of foreign as well as domestic policy, and that the stances of the two parties and their candidates on such matters as the restaurant sit-ins will ‘crucially affect the November voting. But friends of popular democracy, of the Jef fersonian conception of government for the people instead_ of the Hamiltonian conception of government by the aristocrats, will notcannotforget that the Democrats are still the Jeffersonian and, the Republicans still the Hamiltonian, party. As TEXANS, we are growing tired of posturings by provincial Texas politicians evidently oblivious prompters, could not, however so briefly, reach down into the depths of our common humanity, striking some responsive chord that asked of us a quiet htimility in the midst of our own irrevocable strength. This is a terrile, terrible age. We will destroy and be destroyed, they tell us, in the tested corn-fodder rhetoric of the precinct canvass : with no poetry in the soul, no nonce of simple human grief for the despair of the race. to the real problems of the, nation and the world. We would not suggest that men like Price Daniel, Lyndon Johnson, or Thad Hutcheson, Albert Fay, stop acting like they want to. We do suggest the time is long past when Texas voters’ ought to go along sheepishly with a collection of politicians so far behind the times they can find no comfortable place in either national party. The Democratic delegation from Texas to Los Angeles hushed up its convictions on policy from the state convention onward. The reason for this was openly asserted at the state convention platform committee meeting. If the oilmen, insurance men, and Johnson men in control of that convention had put down on paper what they believed and what they did not believe in, Johnson’s candidacy at Los Angeles would have been labeled in : terly regional. To deceive the Democrats about who they were, they shut up their convictions in their bosoms, heaving slightly in admiration of their shrewdness. Of course, the national Democrats were not fooledby Johnson or the Texas delegationand Johnson’s support continued to be overwhelmingly Southern. The Republican delegates from Texas to Chicago could hardly have been manipulated into more foolishness than that into which they plunged themselves with grim and self-serious irresolution. Nixon, realizing that to defeat Kennedy, to hold New York, to appeal to the Negroes or the independents, he had to move his entire party to the left, joined Rockefeller on principles, at least for the nonce. The Texans ‘thought they won, but then lost, their attempt to reduce the civil rights plank to generalities. They broke faith with their own state convention to release themselves from the convention’s instructions that they vote for Nixon. When the situation cleared up on the convention floor, everybody was voting for Nixon, but by then the Texans had not only managed to join forces with the conservatives so rabid they can’t even carry the Republican convention, they had also impaired their claim to political consideration if Nixon wins. PERHAPS THE VOT-ERS of Texas are not so stupid, and would respond to more intelligence in public affairsmore sense of the opinions of the rest of the world,. more plain and honest reasoning on national of fairs. Texas politicians, Republican and Democratic, might give it a try. R.D. JULY 29, 1960 Ronnie Dugger Editor and General Manager Willie Morris, Associate Editor Sarah Payne, Office Manager RevonJive Chord THE TEXAS OBSERVER Published by Texas Observer Co., Ltd. Published once a week from Austin, Entered as second-class matter, April Texas. Delivered postage prepaid $4 per 26, 1937, at the Post Office at Austin, annum. Advertising rates available on reTexas, under the Act of March 3, 1879. quest. Extra copies 10c each. Quantity prices available on orders. EDITORIAL and BUSINESS OFFICE: 504 West 24th St., Austin, Texas. Phone GReenwood 7-0746. HOUSTON OFFICE: Mrs. R. D. Ran dolph, 4191/2 Lovett Blvd., Houston 1E, Texas.