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Summer Session Kansan Friday, July 12, 1963
Grass and Green Money
Let us quit beating about the prairie.
A lot of people want the U.S. government to buy 60,000 acres of pasture land east of Tuttle Creek Reservoir. The proponents are making noises about preserving the great grassland prairie for posterity.
WHO ARE they trying to kid?
The reason they want 60.000 productive, taxable acres turned into a national park is that it is good business. National parks draw tourists. Tourists spend money.
It is that simple: they want the tourists' money.
I HAVE NO complaint about that. Everyone, including the dispossessed farmers, would profit from establishing a national park.
But what is all this noise about preserving the grasslands for posterity? It has been preserved by the farmers and ranchers for 100 years. What makes anyone think they will destroy it in the next 100?
No, I'm sorry fellas. It's a clever ruse, but your profit motive is showing. All that is green is not grasslands.
OF COURSE, there are some die-hards who oppose the government spending money to take away good pasture land. Mostly the people who own it; they are the troublemakers.
They won't be deceived by all this side talk about preserving the grasslands.
They remember the hunk of baloney which
the Corps of Engineers flopped on the Congressional bargaining table while fighting to get its foot in the door.
"ALL WERE after is flood control; the dam will be dry and the land leased for farming when floods don't threaten." That was the noise the Corps made while it itchingly eyed a Congressional appropriation.
But after the Big Dam locomotive was highballing, the tune changed. "Come on, folks," the tune now went, "it's there—we might as well use it for recreation."
The rest is history.
NOW THEY want to decorate the playground with a 60,000 acre necklace of grassland.
They will get it done. Never doubt it for a minute. The federal government wants that 60,000 acre necklace for the neck of its Fairy Princess lake.
But they don't need to be so insulting in getting it. This red herring about wanting to preserve the grasslands for future generations smells of moldy money.
The farmers know it. Secretary Udall knows it.
The problem is that some of the people who want it also spend half their time talking about creeping socialism and the damnation of big government.
They hate big government. Except when it means money in their pockets.
— Terry Murphy
Dixie Going Republican?
By Nicholas C. Chriss
ATLANTA — (UPI) — The twoparty temperature is soaring in the South.
For the first time in more years than Democrates like to think about, the party of Abraham Lincoln is making serious inroads into the once solid South.
The results? As never before, Democrats in Dixie are moving fast to repair political fences that have gone unminded since Reconstruction days, 100 years ago.
This is how one veteran Democratic politico in North Carolina described the Republican take-over in his area and the sweeping changes engendered by a new and dynamic Republican task force;
FOR DECADES the Democratic party south of the Mason-Dixon line has been complacent. Elections have been automatic: Now the danger flag is up.
"A native of Michigan, this man
was trained in Iowa, had lived in our county only two years, was a good engineer, is a Roman Catholic in a Protestant community. He is now our sheriff"
Sen. Olin D. Johnston, D-S.C., put it a little more succinctly to a group of Mississippi Democrats. Johnston emerged bloodied but unbowed after a fight for office with a Republican political newcomer.
"Playing with Republicans is like playing with rattlesnakes," Johnston warned.
THE DEMOCRATS can no longer lay claims to being able to deliver Dixie sewed up in a bag. The race issue, the booming business climate, the death of the "one-crop" agriculture, reapportionment — all have made the changes inevitable.
The GOP still has a long way to go in the South — especially in local-level campaigns — but for the first time since Reconstruction, the machinery is being oiled and the
men doing it are eager, young and ambitious. In the South it is no longer a social drawback, nor is it impolitic, to belong to the Republican party.
Conservative, shrewd and hard-driving, young Republicans have launched a drive stretching from the sedate shores of Virginia to the ports of Texas.
EXAMPLES:
In last November's congressional election, the party picked up five new congressmen and GOP incumbents were swept back into office.
In what used to be known as the confederacy, the GOP doubled its vote over the 1958 mid-term election.
In Alabama, a political unknown sprang out of the business world and came so close to defeating veteran Democrat Sen. Lister Hill (who won by 7,000 votes) that the GOP called for a recount.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS
by Bibler
"THEY SCHEDULED HIM TO TAKE THREE FINALS TODAY."
The southern GOP can boast of greater victories in the national line-up, but on the state and local governmental levels where the party's strength is much slower in seeping down, these gains are even more significant.
MISSISSIPPI SENT its first Republican lawmaker in 100 years to the state legislature and the party has put up a bona fide candidate for governor.
In Georgia the Republics had little trouble placing three senators.
IT IS HERE, at the bottom of the head, that the Democrats have so long been solidly entrenched dispensing, for example, patronage.
In Alabama, the first Republican in 100 years was sent to the legislature from Montgomery County, the "cradle of the confederacy."
J. P. Coleman, former Mississippi governor and a candidate again this year, sized up his Republican counterpart this way: "For the first time in 100 years, they have a real candidate for governor in Mississippi."
That candidate is Rubel Phillips, a Democrat who jumped the party tracks after years of loyal servitude.
There is widespread belief among southern Republicans that the hope of the party in the next presidential election lies with Dixie.
A MAN WHO SHOULD KNOW,
put in this way:
"I'm very hopeful we will continue to pick up strength in the south. Unless we pick up in the south, we're just shooting fish in a rain barrel," said Thenrust B. Mor-
(Continued on page 3)
The Rotten Eggs Of Golden Geese
It was a grand idea.
You build a grand prix racing course around the lake and stage a race. They will flock in from thousands of miles.
THEY WILL come bearing alms (money). The local economy will thrive.
But something goes wrong. The crowd which follows the Midwestern grand prix "circuit" is not a gathering of angels.
No, indeed. They spend their alms on booze, beer and firecrackers. They get drunk. And they raise hell.
SUDDENLY, amidst a veritable shower of bottles, cans, bricks and firecrackers, the egg of the golden goose turns rotten.
And a policeman dies. His heart gave out. Beyond doubt, the man died because of the rioters.
Several of the rowdies are tossed into jail. Their worthy companions, mistaking inebriation for the spirit of freedom and liberty, storm the Bastille to free the oppressed.
BUT ALSO beyond doubt, the riots were there in Garnett because the local fathers invited them.
To be certain, the invitation did not include a blank check to riot and insurrection. But had the city fathers the sense to look beyond the preparation to sell nearly 10,000 cans of beer on one day, the riot could have been averted.
They had trouble last year. They had no reason to expect a band of angels in place of the hot-rodding beer-guzzlers. Angels don't dig car racing nor spend money like a drunken sports car buff.
NOW, NATURALLY enough, the city officials are wondering whether to kill the golden goose or try to cross-breed it with a gentler species.
If they decide to let the golden goose continue to race around Lake Garnett, it will be clear that they love money more dearly than life.
Racing sports cars around a curving, treacherous track does not add years to one's life expectancy. If the officials at Garnett do not end the race, they license the future death of some racing driver.
BUT THE decision will be tough to make. Dollars are not often attracted to Garnett, Kansas, as they are during the races.The profit motive is tough to sidetrack.
If they continue the races, they fairly beg for an encore of the past weekend's rioting. It is pointless to argue that they should be able to stage the races without having riots.
The sports car racing crowd has its large share of the nation's scud. Garnett and towns of its size are too small to entertain, legitimately, the youngbloods who frequent grand prix races.
The decision to continue the races is the decision to invite future trouble. That is unless they want to turn it over to the guiding auspices of the U.S. Army.
- TPM
BOOK REVIEWS
REMBRANDT, by Gladys Schmitt (Dell, 95 cents).
In her lush, flamboyant style Gladys Schmitt has created a fictional novel about one of the greatest painters of the Renaissance. This is a book that is big, long, detailed, reasonably accurate, and highly dramatic.
The reader is taken through the birth pangs of the great Rembrandt paintings, and sees the lush lowlands countryside and villages that provided inspiration for the painter. And there is a love story fit for the movies, that of Rembrandt for the heiress Saskia.
Many readers will be reminded of Irving Stone's novels of Van Gogh and Michelangelo. This book is a notch above these.
ANOTHER COUNTRY. by James Baldwin (Dell, 75 cents).
Unknown to most American readers a year ago, James Baldwin, through the drama of Negro revolt in America, has become a celebrated figure. Here is his most recent novel, one that was greeted with mixed notices and that deserved them.
It is not as good a novel as "Go Tell It on the Mountain," and it delivers Baldwin's message about the Negro in America in less telling form than in his collections of essays. Here we find Baldwin preoccupied with homosexuality as much as with race, and the preoccupation is a frustrating one. Readers who want to find what has made this young man such a disturbing force would do well to turn to the essays and to that excellent first novel, "Go Tell It on the Mountain."—CMP
Summer Session Kansan
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