ustxtxb_obs_1963_03_07_50_00008-00000_000.pdf

job,” Crain said, “it doesn’t make any difference whether he’s making 35 cents an houror 25 cents. Somethin’s better than nothin’ “a remark that brought explosive laughter from the audience. On the other hand, Rep. Don Brown, Galveston, said even 75 cents an hour is not enough to support a family on Rep. Carl Parker, Port Arthur, suggested that the issue was moral: “We’re requiring a businessman to make up for something lacking in his conscience.” The hearing lasted four hours, well into the supper hour, because Alaniz’ and Esquivel’s efforts to cut off their own witnesses failed. They insisted on being heard, and the chairman, Rep. Jerry Butler of Kenedy, said he would stay as long as necessary. Here are fragments of what some of them said : L. B. Cash, a Negro minister from Pittsburg, Tex.: “Even in repairing highways, Negroes are seldom seen . . .” Father Sherrill Smith, assistant pastor of St. Joseph’s church in San Antonio: “Some of us feel rather ashamed that we have to stand before the state of Texas and talk about 75 cents an hour. No man has a right to sweat others.” Charles Albidress, Jr., for Bexar county P.A.S.S.O.: “Who can these people turn to except to you? Nobody else. . . . All businessmen should be required to pay enough to keep people off charity.” S. Y. Nixon, Longview Negro, for his area’s N.A.A.C.P.: “If the committee that makes laws turns against him, then [the poor Negro] becomes infested, diseased, and a robber, and gives up on life.” Clarence Laws, Negro attorney from Dallas and regional secretary for the N.A.A.C.P.: “The income for Negroes is less than half that of whites in every category. . . . How can the American dream have any real meaning to them?” Curtis E. Neal, Jr., San Antonio, for the local N.A.A.C.P.: “Don’t look at the color of my face and tell me the ‘because you’re a black boy you won’t get a job as an engineer in Texas.’ ” Robin L. Washington, a retired army lieutenant colonel, for the El Paso N.A.A.C.P.: “I would hope that when [my son] attains his degree, that he could come back home and get a job in Texas on merit and merit only.” W. J. Jones, for the Huntsville N.A,A.C.P.: “What we’re asking for now is the right to work. . . . You 8 The Texas Observer oughta make people feel that they’re wanted and that they’re somebody.” Two witnesses appeared in opposition to the bills. A retired San Antonio groceryman, Kristjan Bredvad, dissented about Latin Americans being inadequately represented. “We’ve got ’em on our city council, we have ’em in every office in the courthouse, we have ’em in the legislature . . .” He recommended that the word “discrimination” not be used, it being “an ugly word,” and that the words, “a preference for,” be used instead. George Francis, a Negro who runs a janitorial service in San Angelo, and Dallas We are almost forced by our knowledge of the past and present to con clude that the prospect for peace for this country is non-existent and that war is inevitable. The world is filled with have-nots who look toward our country with envy and suspicion. There is no judge, preceptor, or super-power to provide order, since the United Nations, although a great force for peace, has permitted an exemption of the great powers from its authority. The sensitive conscience that should recoil from the thought of a nuclear holocaust is being given increasing reason to accept the thought. Our record for understanding Soviet capabilities and intentions is very poor. War has been for so long one of the fundamental institutions of human society, deeply embedded in our economy, our law, and our politics, that it requires a really serious effort of the imagination to conceive of a world from which it has been eliminated. Probably the one great hope for such a world is the fact that modern war machinery insistently confronts us with the choice between the total abolition of the institution of war and the total abolition of a civilized so The writer is senior partner of the law firm of Mullinax, Wells, Morris, and Mauzey in Dallas. He is also a national board member of Americans for Democratic Action. who employs one mexicano, two whites, and 13 Negroes, asked that he be let hire people for less than 75 cents an hour, at least to start them off. Re said he pays one man 50 cents an hour who is “not worth that much . . . . Don’t fix it where I can’t help little Johnny there.” Subcommittees on the legislation were appointed, but may never meet. Alaniz is re-drafting his fair employment bill and hopes it has a chance. Senator Franklin Spears of San Antonio has sponsored minimum wage and fair employment bills on the Senate side. ciety. A continuation of the present state of international affairs is bound, sooner or later, to produce a catastrophe in which most civilized values and all the present warring value systems must perish. As Walter Millis writes in A Warld Without War, “warmaking can slaughter the participants, but it cannot award the loser alive and whole to the winner.” THE IDEA of a rule of law in world affairs is gaining adherents. I believe that the history of this country is more congenial to a philosophy of peaceful co-existence than it is to the clamorings for invasions and bombings that we now and again hear. Although the United States has had a monopoly of war-making machinery on the American continents, it has demonstrated, particularly since 1845, that it has no ambition to own or control more land and that it wishes to live, to a considerable degree, by the American dream in the Declaration of Independence. But in the last decade our fears, if not our ambitions, have been moving us in some curious ways. There is a great confusion of tongues and motives, a real doubt whether the United States can in fact do without the war machinery, and given this confusion and this doubt, no real progress is likely to be made in the disarmament negotiations. When the Rand corporation started to study the conditions of surrender on the premise that this was Thoughts on War Otto Mullinax