ustxtxb_obs_1963_08_23_50_00002-00000_000.pdf

a ech your aoice 0. C. Fisher, the “Democratic congressman from San Angelo,” it says here, released his poll last week showing that the people in his district who answered him wish they had Goldwater instead of Kennedy as president by a margin of five to one. This raises a natural question. What’s a Democrat doing representing that district? The answer is a check-your-choice: There is one ingredient in this two-party recipe we’ve been mixing that nobody can have tasted, to see if it’s poison. Suppose we get everything to a suitable boil in the primaries, liberals winning the Democratic primaries, reactionaries the Republican primaries. What happens in November? It has been assumed the Democrats will continue to win, or at least that they can continue to win. We do not, of course, know. But the assumption has seemed reasonable in these lights: one, that this is a traditionally. Democratic state, and this would pull for a liberal Democrat, as it does for a conservative one; two, that a liberal Democratic nominee is assured direct access to public opinion before the November election and therefore has just as good a change of persuading voters to his side as a Republican; and -three, that Texas is basically a fairly liberal state, and the people have simply been robbed of their access to government as corporate interests have taken over both the Republican and the “Texas Democratic” parties. It is this last argument that has become seriously open to debate. How long can the population of Texas be subjected, without succumbing, to H. L. Hunt’s subtle It has become difficult for an obvious fact to make an impression on our complicated society. It has always been obvious to anyone who thought about it that Mexican-American children, who know only Spanish when they go to school, are at a grave disadvantage scholastically. Only English is spoken in school. To figure out what’s being said, the Spanish-speaking student in the first grade must try to figure out what one thing in English means by trying to understand what the teacher means by saying something else in English. For the first grade or two, Spanishspeaking students should be taught in Spanishincluding, of course, being taught English in Spanish. There have been three obstacles to the natural development of this simple and ob 2 The Texas Observer 1.He calls himself a Democrat, but his constituents know he’s just fooling. 2.He is a Democrat, but he doesn’t vote his convictions so he can represent his constituents. 3.He isn’t a Democrat. There may be some other possible answers, but we can’t think of any right now. mix of Christianity and reaction on Life Line; to Party Line, the Shreveport diatribes against Democrats; to the fulminations of the radical right in West Texas and Houston and Dallas; to the Texas Farm Bureau’s right-wing program for selected junior and high school students in short, to all the propaganda that the right wing in Texas has been pouring into the media and the schools? Well, if liberal Democrats are going to lose in November, it will be better to find that out so the national Democrats can shake themselves free of the illusion that Texas is a Democratic state and start sending top liberal Democratic speakers here. If Texans have been saturated with the propaganda of the radical right, the twoparty experiment is probably the only way we can find this fact out for sure. If liberal nominees are gOing to lose, we will gain much more in stinging knowledge from the fact, than we will lose in the defeat of conservative Democratic nominees who have only aided, abetted, and benefited from the right-wing virulence that now endangers the political sanity of Texas. vious solution. First, some Mexican-American leaders have objected that this would necessarily entail segregation. This objection failed to visualize the possibility of bilingual classrooms for the simultaneous benefit of Anglo and Mexican-American students. Happily, this objection may be abating. Second, a movement began to teach Spanish-speaking students English in pre-first-grade classes. This is okay, if it works; it’s better than nothing. Third, many superintendents and teachers just don’t think clearly enough about Spanishspeaking students’ problems, or don’t give enough of a damn about them, to change the system. We hope this issue of the Observer starts a debate that results in determined experimentation toward solving this . problem. Ooocl Move Nothing more heartening, as to the labor movement, has happened in Texas in the last ten years than the recent labor conferences in South Texas on the conditions of work for Mexican-Americans. It is not within the authority of the Texas AFL-CIO to try to organize new unionsthat job traditionally falls to the international unions. But no one in the United States needs union organization any more than do the farm workers, the domestic workers, and the retail shop workers in the southern part of Texas. In brazening their way into that hostile country, Texas labor leaders have shown that they have found again some of that fervor of the thirties that changed national history and made this a better country. It is not merely incidental that they took their key notesthe willingness to arouse, even to inflame the people against injustice; the willingness to demonstrate, for that basically is what the strike has always been, a demonstration from the Negro movement in the South. Let us hope that soon they and other liberal leaders in Texas will carry the same, and other related messages into East Texas, where still slumbers the other sorely abused minority group of our state. Uncle 5orn Everybody knows about the freedom songs, but we’re just now finding out about the Negroes’ new version of the schoolyard game, “It.” In this version, an Uncle Tom is “It.” Usually, a player is “It” when he’s tagged, but in the Negroes’ version, Uncle Tom is tagged from the start. Then everybody gives him the evil eye. If he keeps on being an Uncle Tom, he’s thrown out of the game. If he wants to stop being “It” and keep on playing, he quits being an Uncle Tom. It’s a pretty cruel game, similar to those played in every situation where the players are under great stress to stick together. We hope the players are very careful not to make a mistake, tagging the Uncle Toms. And once they are tagged, we would rather the players be quick about it, and throw them out of the game sooner rather than later. It’s not a good thing to brood too long. e Jleo J\(elauver In an age when politicians sneer, let anyone mention “the people,” Estes Kefauver never forgot them. His death deprived the United States of its most assiduous enemy of corporate monopoly. Year after year he bird-dogged the monoliths, and he caught them time and again abusing their power. In recent years he voted boldly for civil rights for Negroes, after which the people of Tennessee, far from punishing him, rewarded him with increasing trust and honor. The big press, especially Time Magazine, often made fun of him. He was a great senator. Here’s to him. Memo to ol i geraA eclect: .A ei-Zingual Progrant