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THE TEXAS OBSERVER 7e talib= Let those flatter who fear. it is not an American art.Jefferson Observer Notebook n air The two top administrators of the Dallas public schoolsSupt. White and Asst. Supt. Williamsstand justly chastised by events and public opinion for “approving” for use in the public schools tracts published by a mysterious private organization promoting the sales of its own books, pamphlets, tapes, and films. The fact that this was done in the name of an “anti-communism” emphasis in the curriculum makes the matter all the more suspect, for the most indefensible things usually take the best possible protective order. If the Dallas schools do not now teach the difference between pluralistic, free societies and monolithic communist states, they are not doing their job well. No public school should have to A debate at the University of Houston on the House un-American Activities Committee and its propaganda film Operation Abolition is reported fully in this week’s Observer, not because the meeting was important in its own termsit was not but because the debate and its subsequent accusations and innuendos were important symbolically in our Texas political culture. The film itself is inflammatory, destructive, and dishonest. The students, the Daily Californian, the San Francisco Chronicle, indeed anyone -who saw police brutality in the unfortunate events of the hearings or who believe the HUAC should be abolished and its functions taken over by the Department of Justice are Communist “dupes” and “stooges.” This is more than just an implication. This is what the film says. We object to a committee of the United States House of Representatives coming out so energetically for the truth, and then distorting it. We deplore an agency of the United States government defending so assiduously the good and the beautiful in American life, and then resorting to the methods of either sick or chaotic societies by branding honest and sound-intentioned fellow countrymen as puppets of traitors and spies. In the Houston meeting the conservative spokesman, when pressed, said that the national executive commit From the El Paso Herald-Post A new tax is proposed to help finance the state’s wasteful spending. As usual, it is to be levied on the people. The State Finance Advisory Commission suggests a payroll tax that will raise $214,967,000. The workers with a $5,000 salary will pay half the levy, or $25, the employer will pay the sametotal $50 per person. The person who earns $1,000 will pay the same rate, a total of $10. The tax on a $3 barrel of crude oil is 4.6 per cent, 13.8 cents. Raise the rate to 10 per cent, or 30 cents a barrel. Texas produces around a billion barrels a yearand Published by Texas Observer Co., Ltd. Entered as second-class matter, April 26, 1937, at the Post Office at Austin, Texas, under the Act of March 3, 1879. DECEMBER 23, 1960 Ronnie Dagger Editor and General Manager Willie Morris, Associate Editor Sarah Payne, Office Manager Published once a week from Austin, Texas. Delivered postage prepaid $5 per annum. Advertising rates available on request. Extra copies 15c each. Quantity prices available on order. Program resort to such tracts as “What Can I Do?” to inform students of the values of American society. The school system in Dallas should find a reputable text on comparative societies and use itnot this two-color blood-spattering propaganda. . Public schools should not teach propagandathey should not assume students cannot think for themselves they should teach the truth about communism, about free enterprise, about socialism, and let the chips of opinion fall where they may. Those afraid the free way of life will not prevail from its own strength are in their own curious way subversive of that free way. The people of Dallasif they care for their schoolsshould watch this program closely and “keep it clean.” tee of the Young Democrats, Ameri can liberal magazines, and a substantial number of Americans who would call themselves “liberal” \(and hence are more “susceptible” to the comof the Kremlin. A gentleman in the audience stood up to say that cornmunists had been agitating on racial matters in Houston, and then denied he had said anything about communists when he discovered later there was a reporter in the room. A group of women made exasperated squeals and guffaws at the scholarly young professor who criticized the film, and said “you’re a dupe” when a student satirized the Patriots’ line of reasoning on dupery. A young man vigorously asserted that communist spies and agitators, nothing else, made the revolution in Cuba. And so on. We wonder if this sort of thing is taking place all over Texas, wherever Operation Abolition makes the rounds? XnzaJ Cheer The great state which gives us River Oaks, the Shamrock, H. L. Hunt, and the vigorous states-rights editorials of maestro Dick West ranked 42nd among all states in old-age assistance payments and 45th in aid to dependent children during fiscal 1960, the Department of Public Welfare tell us. can produce more. The tax on that would be $300,0000,000, a raise of $162 million above the present tax of $138 million. If our taxers were as clever and free as the Arabs and Venezuelans, who tax 50 per cent, the legislature would make the Texas tax more than 30 per cent. The lawmakers charge you a $1 tax on the 20 gallons of gasoline produced by one of those $3 barrels of crude. By the way, Governor Daniel, who will be starting his third term when the legislature meets, doesn’t favor a fair tax on oil. He will fight a 30 per cent tax on crude, but the 65 per cent on cigarettes does not worry him. EDITORIAL and BUSINESS OFFICE: 504 West 24th St., Austin, Texas. Phone GReenwood 7-0746. HOUSTON OFFICE: Mrs. R. D. Randolph, 419% Lovett Blvd., Houston 16, Texas. . 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. We are dedicated to the whole truth, to human values above all interests, to the rights of man as the foundation of democracy; we will take orders from none but our own conscience, and never will we overlook or misrepresent the truth to serve the interests of the powerful or cater to the ignoble in the human spirit. AUSTIN Most Pernicious Pamphlet A pamphlet entitled “How to Recognize a Dallas Conservative” is being distributed, we understand, among public schools, civic groups, and church organiiations in areas where a number of pseudo-intellectuals and communist dupes now reside: namely, Chester Bowles, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, Walter Reuther, Arthur Goldberg, Abraham Ribocoff, Peter and Pat Lawford, and Mai and Sammy Davis Jr. The pamphlet, backed by city tax moneys no less, is making the rounds along with the highly distorted film Operation Demolition, which attempts to show that Dallas conservatives inspired the Adolphus Hotel riots against Lyndon and his lady in November. 1-1ERBCAEN The Pamphlet’ begins: “Can you recognize a Dallas Conservative? .. . There are no physical characteristics which will identify a Dallas conservative. Furthermore, as Dallas conservatives work quietly and grimly behind the scenes, one can never be completely sure. Many good Americans, especially in Dallas, have been duped into advocating causes which sound reasonable but are designed to further the plans of the Dallas conservatives. Thus it becomes doubly important that the citizen learn enough about Americanism and the factors of our life that have made our country a great free nation ; so he can detect the false philosophy of the Dallas conservatives or their dupes. “It is recommended,” the propaganda continues, “that the following subjects be studied so that there will be a clearer understanding of their relationship to Dallas conservative control : “The relationship of Dallas conservative free-private-enterprise and free-private-enterprise in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. “Un-Americanism and monopoly in the Dallas banks. “Do Dallas conservatives oppose a nationalized post office?” “Will Dallas conservatives support local control of outer space?” After charging “Dallas conservatives want America . . . They want your property and you,” the pamphlet then outlines a sure method of recognizing a Dallas conservative “in the club cars of trains or over martinis on cross-country flights. Turn to your traveling companion,” it suggests, “and ask him if he knows by what methods the socialists succeeded in gaining control of the public school free lunch program in the United States. If his eyes light up and his belly ripples, he is a Dallas conservative or one of their dupes. If he looks at you quizzically and then returns to his drink or cigar, if he is drinking or smoking, you will know he is One Of Us.” Example Under the headline “Integration Helps Bucs” in the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, an AP story points out that five of the 45 players on the Miller High Bucs championship football team are Negroes and 18 are LatinAmericans. “I don’t think we could have won the championship without players said. “We just joke about the race situationthree races rolled into one team.” Big-time high school football should take heed. We are reminded of a story told us by a local oil executive about a conversation he had with a school board member in a small Southwest Texas town not long after the Supreme Court decision of ’54. “Have you integrated.?” the oil man asked. “Well, this is what happened,” the school executive said. “We had a colored boy in town-6 feet 2, 215 pounds in pads, could pass 50 yards, a 9.9 hundredso we integrated.” His and Hers The prize Christmas gift adver tised in the current Neiman-Marcus catalogue : for the happily married couple, a pair of private airplanes labeled “His” and “Hers.” We trust the Dallas Vigilantes on UnAmericanism will make concerted efforts to keep the Communists from circulating this literature in the hungrier parts of Africa, Asia, and LatinAmerica, despite the fact that Stanley Marcus has said his store caters to the great American middle-cless “those with annual incomes of $7500 and up.” The Facts FACT, the new conservative or ganization for the greater dissemination of conservative principles among University of Texas students, started disseminating this week, according to Chandler Davidson, the “Beware the Jabberwock” of the Daily Texan, with a publication exposing the “labor barons” and “power-mad labor leaders” who got Jack Kennedy the presidency, and ridiculing the stand-in demonstrators at the two Drag theaters for not “thinking like adults.” A Book IMust reading for the readers of the Observer, and a book which the editors of FACT in a moment of warm-blooded young audacity might consider reviewing and disseminating: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee’s brilliant book on Southern tenant farmers in the ‘thirties. The photographs are by Walker Evans, who took them for the Farm Security Administration. America had a peasantry then, and in many area of the South it has it to this day, rooted .to the soil and to the indecencies of a system as tightly as any Russian serf before the 1860’s. This book is not included in the Neiman-Marcus Christmas catalogue this year. Archer Suggests / Archer Fullinghim, the colorful poet laureate of the Big Thicket, wrote in his column in the Kountze News this week: “Does anybody in Kountze ever buy a good book outside of the paperbacks ? How many people in Kountze ever read a novel by William Faulkner, who won the Nobel prize in literature. Is there anyone in Kountze who bought a hard-back book in the field of literature last year ? Did anybody in Kountze read Advise and Consent? “We have ceased to be the reading nation that we were in the 19th century and the early part of the 20th. We have ceased to read the classics; we have ceased to encourage our children to read. So when one reads in the papers that Silsbee is preparing to open a new public library, one applauds. Mrs. Paul Georgas of Silsbee, who is the guiding spirit of the new ilbrary, states that the people of Silsbee want a library. I doubt if they do, but she may make them want it. “We realize,” she said, “that you can’t get people started to reading overnight, but there is a definite need, and we are determined to put it over.” “Teachers need to read, parents need to read and their children need to read, and the way it is now teachers and parents don’t read any more than the children. It used to be that teachers led the way in reading. You could scarcely name a book they had not read. They say that in Russia everybody is reading. Forty years ago only six per cent of the people in Russia could read, now only six per cent can’t read. Our illiteracy rate is higher than that, but the regrettable thing about it in America is that a lot of people who are supposed to know how to read, can’t read, and these people usually got into high school or even graduated from high school. . . .” W.M 5he fa, Symiolic 21tate