ustxtxb_obs_1962_06_01_50_00005-00000_000.pdf

,` _ 4NP Gyis 5iP ONMITH. 4? TIME FOR REFORM The Language of Houston, Hogg, and Allred AUSTIN It’s time for another reform governor. If Don Yarborough is elected, there will be many constructive novelties. He is the sort of man who can be expected to get up in the morning, have breakfast, and then take a shirtsleeve, walking tour of a state agency to meet its workers and hear first hand what their problems are. The mere fact that he is active will prevent many malpractices and cause some reforms. It has been so long since Austin has had a governor here who took a really lively personal interest in the state government, the thought is hard to know what to make of. That is why it is a thought worth making a reality. In his campaign Yarborough has shown he has the underdog’s approach. He has taken steadfastly liberal approaches to most public questions. He has been getting a good press \(outside of the cities serviced by the Hoiles and Fentress propaganrefreshed by his directness, candor, and energy. Perhaps the word for the characteristic he most exudes is vigor. With this vigor, he could indeed make Texas a more modern state. As Joe Rauh of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action says, his very presence at a Southern governors’ convention would change its character. In an especially revealing interview with Garvin Perry of the Houston Press, Yarborough makes his intentions very clear. The battle, he says, is for economic independence, “a breaking away from the East Coast domination which has stifled Texas’ natural growth.” The theme is “preserving the economic independence of Texas and restoring the state to the level it should have based on its natural resources.” The main campaign issues are: 1.”Whether my opponent will have the courage to debate with me.” 2.”Whether the people will continue to allow Eastern monopolies and lobbyists to control Texas.” 3.”The choice of repealing the sales tax, as I would like to do, or of extending it to cover food and medicines and raising it two or three percent as will otherwise inevitably occur.” Yarborough’s immediate plans as governor: 1.Seek to double the present eightday Texas oil allowable. “If the monopolies learn that we are serious about getting Texas back into the oil business, they will see to it that the national balance is restored by lowered production elsewhere.” 2.Increase taxes on the huge natural gas pipelines to the East Coast and Middle West. “Natural gas is being sold to homeowners 1000 miles away cheaper than it is in Texas.” 3.Preserve the oil depletion allow4.Abolish the sales tax when its revenues can be replaced with the increased allowable, pipeline taxes, and new industry. 5, 6, and 7: Get new industry, advertise Texas, establish Padre Island national park eighty-eight miles long, and create a “Texas World Trade Commission.” \(Borrowing a leaf from Dwight Eisenhower’s 1952 campaign, 8.RAISE OLD AGE PENSIONS FROM $53 TO $83. That ought to be done! The proposal is not demagoguery, it is common sense. “Why in the world can’t we do this,” he asks, “if we put a tax on some of the natural resources that go out of this state?” 9.Repeal the so-called merit insur ance rating plan. This is not demogoguery, either. That plan is a principle backwards : you cannot assume a man is careless because he has been careless before, you cannot give the state the right to penalize a man on his private insurance rates for his past. This week, stressing his platform as the campaign closed, Yarborough added a tenth plank, a constitutional convention to make state government more logical and efficient by modernizing the constitution. We have thought such a convention should be delayed until the political climate was propitious. If Yarborough is elected with Kennedy in the White House, the climate could hardly be better. There is also another element in Yarborough’s constructive appeal. A good, mild, and kindly professor, R. C. Koeninger, chairman of the department of sociology at Sam Houston State in Huntsville, was fired by his regents without any given reason. This is the sort of outrage that has become commonplace in Texas’ lower education. Koeninger’s offense, one must necessarily speculate, was being a. Democrat at precinct meetings. Yar-, borough says he will appoint to state boards of regents “people willing to live in the 1960’s.” “We are going to see to it that professors are not coerced in their political opinions, that when they don’t get their contracts renewed they at least get a proper hearing.” Yarborough’s campaign has done the liberal movement good. We have many dedicated liberal politicians in Texas. Some have the sagacity that re-elects them, ‘some have the pertinacity that defeats them, but only one had the audacity to run for governor against the formidable field this year. He talks the language of /8am Houston, loyal to the American Union, Jim Hogg, defiant of aggregations of capital in the East, Jim Allred, loyal to the honest liberalisms of the New Deal. We hope Don Yarborough wins! At least we know now not to depend on the Belden Poll. R. D. OBSERVER NOTEBOOK MISSISSIPPI SURPRISE -SPACE CAPITAL A LETTER THE KINGSVILLE chapter cf the Texas State Teachers’ Association has asked the TSTA to integrate. Negro teachers are now barred from the state organization and have a separate group of their own. Segregation in schools is null and void, and Texas has undertaken school integration, the chapter’s resolution says. Segregation, it continues, is “morally indefensible,” yet by its constitution TSTA is “for white teachers only . . . which lessens the or-, ganization’s moral, professional, and political influence.” The Kingsville chapter instructs its delegates to the state group to support a revision of the charter to open TSTA to “all persons regardless of race, creed, or color.” Other local chapters should consider following suit. THE NATIONAL space agency people should frankly be concerned about the Negro kids in Houston going to jail for trying to get into movie theaters. Houston is the headquarters of our space effort, and someone in some high place would do well to appoint a special bureaucrat to make sure there are no local newspapers in our space ships going to the outer reaches. If the octo-poded, multi-headed creatures on other planets find out how fellow homo sapiens are disavowed in Space Capital, U.S.A., the ramifications on inter planetary friendship could be most serious indeed, and right at the outset. This is one more reason why we advocate states’ control of outer space. NOT TOO long ago Carolyn Russell, a junior at Lincoln High, a Negro high school in Dallas, penned this letter to The Dallas News. We are pleased to reprint it : “The American education system is failing in that it is committing the same mistake for which it is condemning the communist countries. Rather than being taught about democracy, students are being indoctrinated to it in much the same manner that students in communist countries are being indoctrinated to Marxism and socialism. Democracy is being shot into their brains like vaccine or vitamins. “The question of democracy vs. communism is being presented in’ a biased manner, which completely condemns communism and exultantly extols democracy. If the democratic way of life is so much’ superior to the communist way of life, we should not be afraid of losing young Americans to the communist cause by frankly exposing them to the acute shortcomings of our political system. The more cognizant that young Americans are of America’s shortcomings, the better prepared they are to correct them. “If American youth are falsely led to believe that they live in a Utopian society, when they meet the bitter realization that their beliefs are founded on a false security, they will be more gullible to the lies of communist propaganda and more likely to turn from democracy. If communists confront them with definite proofs contrary to the ones which they have been taught, these youth may feel that democracy has deceived them. They may plunge headlong into Communist Party activities and become a part of that faction which is attempting to undermine our American way of life. “On the other hand, if American youth are taught frankly and realistically the imperfections of their society, they will not be lulled into a false sense of security. They will be prepared to meet the communist challenge when it confronts them. They will be prepared to defend the American way of life.” -THERE is something very disturbing about the John Henry Faulk trial in New York City. We would not prejudge that case; though we are disposed to regard it as obvious that Faulk was damaged by McCarthyistic charges and threefore has a legitimate recourse to the civil law. But is it not a more profound comment on the present character of our national life that it has become libelous to call a man a communist? Communism is a politics, like democracy, socialism, monarchy, Democraticness, or Republicanness. It has become libelous in this country to say in error that a man’s politics is thus and so. The result is bizarre. At a very time when very, very few AmeHcans would for an instant consider choosing communism as their politics say, one in a hundred thousand, and probably very often someone with some personal or mental problem we are not free to choose communism. Subversive action, of course, is prescribed by every state. But didn’t we always use to think that subversive politics was permissible in a free country? Are not a man’s opinions just as radically his own business as his private life? Let us hope that somewhere as the New Frontier gives us more confidence again as a nation in the world, we can find the courage to let people who want to, be damn fools if they want to be damn fools. Let us hope that free speech will be restored again sometime in our land to its noble meaning in the time of Justice Holmes: freedom for the idea we hate. Yet us hope that it really is a new Frontierand not a Neurotic Frontier. Meanwhile, we must assimilate, as a fact of our way of life, that we can sue anybody who calls us cornmunistsbecause we’re not, by God!