ustxtxb_obs_1962_04_06_50_00002-00000_000.pdf

EXTRAVAGANZA IN SAN ANTONIO Target: Post Office, Darwin, Public Schools the various techniques employed by their captors. Their betrayal of fellow prisoners and their cruelty to each other, Reagan said, resulted from the fact that they had not been taught “the value of individual initiative.” They had learned nothing back home of “freedom, responsibility, honor, effort, vigilance, protection of others’ rights.” Part of the groundwork of the communists’ brainwashing methods was “laid right here at home.” The process is hastened, the film said, when citizens accept security from government old age pensions, social security, and other programs. The film set the motif for the testimony which followed. ‘Cause Guilt’ Mrs. Roy Adkins, the first witness, reviewed the sophomore and senior class editions of a textbook called English in Action. As in the communist brainwashing, she charged, the books use the “unexpected.” Students naturally expected a study of grammar in these books, but they tend to encourage “self-analysis and selfcriticism which tend to cause guilt.” The books employ these methods, through chapters on social adjustment, to get through “to the subconscious mind.” These textbooks, she said, challenge home and religious training. One question at the end of a chapter, for instance, asks: ” ‘How can a girl refuse a kiss without feeling prudish’ ” This query, she said, constitutes an invasion of the principles taught in church and home. “To me, being called a square would be considered a compliment.” But students like to go along with the majority and hate to be thought of as squares, she said. Dr. Carl Aijian criticized History of a Free People on two grounds. “One, there doesn’t seem to be enough emphasis placed on our heroes; and, two, there is an unrealistic approach to the problem of communism as it relates to us.” In some instances, the authors did not present “the other point of view,” as in the book’s discussion of the income tax amendment. This amendment, he said, “is considered by some authorities to be an unjust, totalitarian thing. The text should bring this out.” Aijian also argued for an expanded discussion of Booker T. Washington “to instill into our Negro students the glorious part they’ve played in our nation’s past.” The book’s treatment of Karl Marx, as with communism in general, is “too temperate and tepid.” Marx should be shown as “a violent, quarrelsome, contentious man,” a man whose personal life was a failure, who drew on “radicalism and vilification,” and who was “actually psychopathic.” In the section on socialism, Aijian said the following definition should be included: “Socialism is communism without the firing squad.” The book also fails to bring out that U.S. recognition of Russia in 1933 was “a foolhardy and immoral thing.” Nor, on Pearl Harbor, does the book show that “certain authorities knew the exact day and hour the attack would take place.” On the United Nations, no mention is made of the fact that “God and the Supreme Being are emitted from the UN Charter” and all other UN documents, nor that “some authorities have re THE TEXAS OBSERVER Page 2 April 6, 1962 ferred to the UN as a Tower of Babel.” Aijian said “vivid and graphic” description of communist methods should be included. “It should say, here is what really happens quote.” Students should be told that people are beaten to death under communism. Detailed descriptions of communist torture methods should be used. Communists, he said, have used wrenches to pull out the tongues of the people they have persecuted, and the tongues have been nailed to the floor. “This is what they should know,” he said. The book “doesn’t go enough into the horrors of communism and the dangers of socialism. The authors lean to the co-existence concept. I personally can’t subscribe to that.” Questioned by Alaniz, Aijian for textbooks, perhaps, “is indoctrination if you carry it to my degree of intensity.” Alaniz, saying he wanted to know what the witness meant when he cited socialist leanings, asked what present laws he opposed. Aijian said he found many aspects of the social security program “totalitarian, tyrannical, and wrong.” When he said social security “should be turned over by the federal government to the states, and financed by the states,” he was vigorously applauded. “We couldn’t finance the San Jacinto Monument,” Alaniz replied. Aijian also complained that the National Labor Relations Board is granted “vague and limitless power.” Alaniz said the state uses a number of regulatory agencies, such as the insurance commission and the railroad commission. When he continued to ask questions the audience shouted “Stop him! Stop him!” Aijian said he recently heard a veteran employee of the Post Office Department say that the post office system could better and more efficiently be operated by free private enterprise, “and I found that mighty refreshing thinking.” Six Recommendations Hank Brown, AFL-CIO president, said he was a San Antonio native and that he felt he represented “the 400,000 members of the Texas AFL-CIO.” He said “groups like Texans for America and the DAR and their allies in the far-out right” are moved by “fear of our democratic institutions and fear of the lessons of our history.” He made six recommendations: 1.All complaints about textbooks and all rebuttal from publishers be made available to the public, through the press, “from the beginning. Let the public know what the arguments are all about. Don’t wait until selections have been made and it is too late, as was done this time.” 2.A complete record of all changes made in textbooks should be made publicbefore books are adopted, “not wait until now, when public protests, if any, are moot and useless.” 3.The manner of debate about books before the textbook selection committee should be changed. “As the law stands now, the textbook choosers can hear charges against a book from anybody, but the committee can hear a defense from the publishers only.” The committee “should be allowed to hear scholarly defense by .anyoneparticularly by scholarsof particular passages which are being attacked.” 4.The textbook selection committee should include university level educators. “The law now requires that the textbook committee be composed solely of teachers, and it apparently means by that, teachers below the university level . . . a couple of university teachers on the selection committee might contribute to a fresh and wiser perspective.” 5.relieved of some of his power to appoint members of the textbook selection committee. “It is oneman domination of textbook selection because he alone selects the people who select the books.” 6.The law which forces upon the children of Texas antiquated textbooks needs revision. “Textbooks are now purchased on sixyear contracts, and since the TEA is usually strapped for funds and the books can be obtained cheaper if the contract is extended, it is usually extended for three years more. This means that the history books and the geography books chosen last year will probably still be in use in our schools in the 1970’s,” Brown said. Pastor Critical Rev. Eric E. Wagner, pastor of the Redeemer Lutheran Church, said he appeared “with the blessings of my fellow Lutheran pastors in San Antonio.” Reviewing A History of the World’s Peoples, he said the book follows “the pattern of a one-world concept in which the individual civilizations and nations tend to lose their identity as they blend more and more into one faceless whole.” Some 130 pages, Wagner complained, are devoted to “the Far Eastern Society” and only 60 to “the Anglo-American society which includes the nations of North America.” The book, he said, does not mention Roosevelt’s betrayal at Yalta or that two State Department communists, Alger Hiss and Leo Pasvolsky, co-authored the UN Charter which was “copied directly from the Soviet Constitution” and “supersedes our own Constitution.” He quoted Lord Beaverbrook: ” ‘Here in New York City you Americans have the biggest Fifth Column in the worldthe United Nations.’ ” Roberts asked Wagner if he was aware that such “great Americans” as Arthur Vandenberg and Tom Connally played a major part in organizing the UN. Wagner repeated that “a considerable amount of the UN Charter was taken from the Soviet constitution.” “What proof do you have?” Roberts asked. Responded Wagner: “Congressional records, testimony given in hearings, Iron Curtain ‘0 v e r America, and The Wedemeier Reports.” “It’s news to me,” Roberts said. This rejoinder drew a sally of booes and hisses. “For the audience’s information,” a red-faced Roberts said, “I have 70 hours credit in government.” “You need 170!” a matron on the front row shouted. Then followed another DunganAlaniz exchange. Alaniz said “a former distinguished member of the House” wished to testify at that time because he needed to return to his office. Dungan said Alaniz had not given the chair his application. “He asks to be given this courtesy as a former House mem ber,” Alaniz said”Maury Maverick Jr.” This brought the loudest round of booes yet heard at a textbook hearing. When Dungan ruled Alaniz out of order, the audience responded with claps and cheers. ‘Scientific Method The next witness, Mrs. Ray Barber, sat down in her chair after being sworn in and turned to Roberts to ask: “Can you please tell us where we can find a copy of the Soviet constitution?” “I’m afraid I don’t have any more access to it than you do,” Roberts replied. “You said you were a political scientist,” Mrs. Barber said. “I thought you could tell us. We’ve been looking for a copy.” This provoked considerable laughter. “Go to the public library,” Roberts said, “if they haven’t taken it off the shelves.” This time Roberts got a scattering of applause. Mrs. Barber proceeded to give an hour and 45-minute testimony in which she charged that teaching of the scientific method is being used “to indoctrinate young people” and “to erase our constitutional principles.” She charged mainly that “the falsely-labeled ‘scientific method’ which our youth are learning is destructive of our country’s political, religious, and racial distinctions in that the ancient intellectual method of the Greeks and namely the deductive logic of Aristotle is being substituted for the modern method of quest for knowledge verifying hypotheses with experimental investigation of facts and with mathematical proof.” Another attack on the political complexion of the textbook critics was registered by Sen. Franklin Spears. By this time, late in the afternoon, there were enough anticritics in the hall to give Spears some loud applause before and after his testimony. Spears argued that textbook selection is done by “qualified persons” with the advice of 800 professional educators and lay persons, and that this “represents the best system of selection consistent with a free and democratic society that depends upon its public educational system for the maintenance of its constitutional freedoms.” Charging that the House committee violates governmental separation of power and that texthook selection rests with the executive branch, Spears said the fear manifested in certain quarters is “a greater danger to our civil liberties and concepts of constitutional freedom than is the very tyranny we fear.” He quoted Mr. Dooley’s: ” ‘A fanatic is a man that does what he thinks the Lord would do if He knew the facts in the case.’ ” When he mentioned SMU president Willis Tate, the name drew much hilarious laughter from the _audience. ‘Grassroots Level’ Elton R. Cud-e, explaining that he had a mandate from the departmental convention of the American Legion, criticized a history text, Our United States, for not being sufficienly critical of the New Deal. He warned that federal control of education would “seek to destroy local controls,” and suggested textbook selection “at the grassroots level.” He said a treatment of the way FDR’s attempted purges of Congress in 1938 backfired should be amplified in the book. When he read from a James Truslow Adams history about the defeat in 1938 of the late Cong. Maury Maverick, there were extended cheers and laughter. John R. Zenger of New Braunfels, assailing This Is America’s Story, a history text, said the book points out that this country is “a democracy, of the people, for the people, by the people.” This is inaccurate, Zenger said. “This is not a democracy, but a republic.” The book’s descriptions of communism, fascism, and socialism are inadequate, Zenger said, in failing to list the slave labor, tortures, and Jewish persecution in Russia. “It’s more important for our kids to know about communism than fascism,” he said, because fascism was stamped out years ago. Mrs. Walter Flack, reviewing Adventures in American Literature, said “books are the result of the throbbing brains of thinkers” and warned that “those who would destroy our freedoms recognize the power of books.” She quoted Dr. Fred Schwarz of the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade on the power of books. “Do you realize, gentlemen, that if five percent of a book is propaganda it is heavily loaded?” Patriotism must be instilled in all textbooks, she said. The literature book under question, she said, “deliberately champions the so-called downtrodden, discontented, passive individual.” Stories by such authors as Faulkner, Benet, Steinbeck, and Hemingway have “a pattern there the same reality and sordidness as on TV and in the movies, which should not be taught students as good American stories.” She suggested a 1934 literature text should be used. It has stories by such loyal American writers, she said, as Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Harte, 0. Henry, Tarkington, and Joel Chandler Harris. Twenty authors mentioned in the textbook, she said, have communist-front citations: writers such as Eugene O’Neill, Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, Benet, and J. Frank Dobie. She described Hemingway’s “Old Man at the Bridge” as “a work of Spanish communist propaganda.” Darwin Assailed The second day’s session began appropriately with a brief lecture