ustxtxb_obs_1983_09_30_50_00006-00000_000.pdf

She went out to do justice, and to do justice for all people, and she had the courage to do it. . . . Though she grew up in a mansion here in Houston, she spent summers up in that timberland in East Texas. I grew up in that. It has an effect on you. I recall as a boy, after my older brother went away ‘to college, fishing in the Neches River by myself. I couldn’t swim. To tell you the truth I was scared, because when you got in where the river bends and the waters gurgle \(that’s where the bunch of us went swimming fastI’d get there I’d keep thinking I’d see an old cottonmouth swimming down the river and thinking if this bank caved in how would I get out of that deep hole. But I went. And things were quiet except for the gurgling waters and the occasional splashing of a snake or something. And then this little breeze would come along, and you could hear the pine trees kind of sigh and murmur. Then a hard gust of wind would come, and the sycamore leaves would rattle like you had clothes starched on the line and got dry, and they’d rattle against each other. And the oak leaves, whether they were red oaks or water oaks, they all had their different kinds of noise. That was back in the days before there was any radio, before there was any television. Only time we saw a band was when the circus went to the county seat, or they had some big kind of parade on a special occasion. Our music was the music of the woods. The trees were the instruments, and the wind was the force that blew them. It was almost like a Wagnerian opera if you stood alone under those trees, fishing, they had soft sounds and the loud sounds swinging back and forth. As a boy there I used to think, “Those trees are talking to me .. . what are they saying? . . . I wish I knew.” And then I’d think the only people before us who fished here were the Indians. And I wondered if the Indians could understand what the trees were saying. It had a mystic influence on you. Mrs. Randolph spent summers out in those woods too. It had that kinds of influence. . . . And maybe also she was influenced by the school books they had in those days. I remember before I hardly got into school, they were saying reading comes first. We had to memorize: “Woodman spare that tree. In youth it sheltered me. And I’ll protect it now.” You look around in school books now and you can’t find verses at least I can’t find them calling to protect the trees. . . . In memory of Mrs. Randolph and as thanks to Tom Bass for setting up this park . . . let’s resolve that we’ll make Texas a state that won’t have to be ashamed of being 48th in state parks. Let’s pull Texas up into the top ten. . . . We’re 49th in the union now on pensions, 49th in the amount we pay to dependent children, about $34 a month \(the national fighting all that. Mrs. Randolph’s successor in Houston and Harris County in precinct organization work is Billie Carr, a leader now in the Harris County Democrats and the organization, the Texas Democrats. Carr closed the dedication of the Frankie Carter Randolph Park by saying: “Mrs. Randolph was my inspiration, my mentor, my teacher, and my friend. Everything I am today I owe to that woman. . . . We were fortunate to live in her time. But let me tell you something, those of you who didn’t know her: you’re fortunate to live after her time because she made this a better world than when she found it. And she left all of us to carry on that great work. . . . You know what she would say at this very moment she would say, ‘Go drink your beer and have your fun and tomorrow, tomorrow, organize your precinct.’ “Li Hightower What I want to do and the reason I accepted the chairmanship of this Agricultural Council is to use the council as a forum, generally speaking, to develop a Democratic alternative that genuinely is different, that is not just “Has anybody seen Orville Freeman?”. We’ll do it better than Reagan will. But, in fact, we have the opportunity in ’84 because of the Presidential elections, because the farm economy is so disastrous, because the Republicans are going to take such an extreme position to do something fundamental to the 50-year-old act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act being the basic mechanism under which our policy has operated for 50 years. To do something fundamentally different rather than, as we have done in the past, just tinker with that mechanism. To lift ourselves up a little bit we have that luxury that you don’t get in Congress to lift ourselves above all the squab bling commodity groups, which have been pitted against each other. Stockman even said that in that Atlantic interview: “We deliberately tried to pit the commodity groups against each other.” Right now we have a farm program, really a series of programs a cotton program, a feed grain program, a tobacco program but we have no farmer program. We have no real principle underlying a farm policy that the public, broadly speaking, has consented to. So, you’ve got a farm policy that doesn’t work. A farm policy that deals with bushels and bales rather than people. The original concept is what we’ve got to go back to, which is a program that focuses on the people we’re trying to help in the first place. What we now do is spend a whole lot of money on programs that end up not helping the people. Next year you’ll see a phenomenon of rapidly rising food prices, farm bankruptcies, and the highest cost farm program in our history. That’s a hell of a farm program. So you think Reagan’s alienated what farm vote he had before? Well, yes. The Democratic farm vote will now not be fooled by Reagan. Let me put it like that. Let’s not make any wild assumptions about what the farm vote is going to do. But the Democratic farm vote that, in 1980, went for Reagan is not going for Reagan this time if the Democrats do their job. And that’s the job that I’ve been selected to take a leadership role in which is to formulate a new policy and then to carry that policy, if necessary, independently of the Presidential campaigns to the voters. And not just to the farm voters but, as I did in my election here in Texas, to the urban voters. The Democratic party national leadership has recognized, as we did here in Texas, that the greatest voter appeal for the family farm is in the cities. There’s a sympathy there a desire on the part of urban people to help farmers. But they have no mechanism for doing that. All they do is go to the supermarket. And if you were to do an exit poll of people at supermarkets, they’d say, ‘I wish more of my dollar was going to the farmer, but I don’t know how to get it there.” So you talk to them about farm policy and we’re talking about target 6 SEPTEMBER 30, 1983