Making Them Listen in Texas
FLEMING, THOMAS J.
Making Them Listen in Texas THE TEXAS COUNTRY EDITOR Edited by Eugene W. Jones World. 341 pp. $6.50. Reviewed by THOMAS J. FLEMING Author, "King of the Hill" Down in Tulia, Texas, a dot on the...
...It is an experience which every genuine liberal in the country might well ponder...
...They need to know its weaknesses, to be sure, but they also need to be told of its good points...
...The murder of our President was a victory...
...Those of us who have warred against them have lost a battle, but we have not lost the war...
...The vivid metaphor seldom comes his way...
...To vote for a favorite personality, regardless of party, is not unlike joining the Catholic or Methodist Church just because we happen to like the priest or minister...
...But if he believes that the good life is for everyone????not just a favorite few, if he believes that prosperity flows from the bottom upward, then he is a Democrat and should vote as such regardless of various personalities that float across the horizon from time to time...
...Dallas is the most Republican city of its size in the entire United States...
...This may smack too much of William Jennings Bryan, but Baggarly magnificently proved his devotion to his own principles in the 1960 political campaign when John F. Kennedy took the nomination away from Lyndon Baines Johnson, who is Baggarly's favorite living politician...
...In 1960, Senator Ralph Yar-borough told Baggarly: "The editorials that you wrote count as the most important single factor in our victory in 23 of the 25 South Plains counties and in an overwhelming majority of the Panhandle counties...
...This idea, that it is the party not the man that counts, may sound almost quaint to sophisticated Easterners...
...Similarly he declares...
...Sometimes we wonder what impression is made on our youth when they hear their parents and their elders demean the Federal government...
...Baggarly is not a great writer...
...It is a shame that his jewels have not been placed in a better setting...
...Perhaps his best effort in this department was dubbing Wes Izzard...
...Baggarly has repeatedly written editorials against what he calls "the coalition of malcontents...
...Baggarly is heartily in favor of the two-party system...
...Reviewed by THOMAS J. FLEMING Author, "King of the Hill" Down in Tulia, Texas, a dot on the map midway between Amarillo and Lubbock, Herbert Milton Bag-garly edits a weekly paper called the Tulia Herald...
...They "read subversion into every governmental act...
...Eugene W. Jones, a professor of political science at Way-land Baptist College, compiled the book and could not resist writing a long dull introduction, plus introductions to each of the eight sections, repeating himself ad infinitum along the way...
...It has a circulation that seldom exceeds 4,500, but Baggarly does not let that bother him...
...Men who never pray, who never attend church, suddenly become disturbed over the school prayer decision of the Supreme Court...
...It's nice to know that in the age of McLuhan a man with a typewriter and honest convictions can still make people listen...
...This Democratic disarray has produced the basic credo of Bag-garly's political faith...
...For the Johnson-Humphrey ticket, Baggarly boosted Swisher 11 per cent over neighboring counties, delivering 75 per cent of the vote for the Democratic victors...
...We congratulate these people for their achievements...
...Of course the independent will suavely avow that he votes on issues, not personalities...
...If, he says, a man "conscientiously believes that prosperity flows from the top down then perhaps he should be a Republican...
...I have long felt it is no accident that the emergence of the actor as a potent political candidate has coincided rather closely with the growth of this so-called independent vote...
...With a curse on their breath they demand that prayers be recited in the schoolroom...
...But in nine cases out of 10, especially since the advent of television, I suspect his decision is made for highly impressionistic reasons...
...Of Amarillo he says, "Probably no other city in the 50 states is more ultra conservative...
...Baggarly is an unabashed liberal Democrat, Texas style...
...Constitution in Montgomery, Alabama...
...Though he is still writing about the far Right, the following lines are in many ways equally true for the Left in California and New York...
...For the lunatic fringe, for the fanatical hate groups, the extremists to the Left, to the Right, it was the inevitable harvest of the seeds they have been sowing for more than three years...
...In identifying them his thinking is obviously shaped by his memories of bitter poverty in north Texas during the Depression years...
...LBJ won Baggarly's heart during his first campaign for the U.S...
...In New York and California, the once solid majorities of the Democratic party have been ripped asunder by ideological power struggles between the moderates and the militant Left wing...
...If ever a man might have legitimately resented John F. Kennedy, it was Baggarly...
...They need to hear more on the subject of what's right with America...
...We congratulate them for their perseverance...
...The thing that really matters is not the breadth of a candidate's smile, his lack or possession of a sense of humor, or his isolated remarks removed from their context—it is his philosophy, his sense of feeling for the masses —and above all, the philosophy of the party that nominated him...
...Such a reaction only proves how totally the "independent" syndrome has captured the imagination of the supposedly intelligent voter...
...He goes national, however, when he begins discussing what has been his primary political experience, the near-destruction of the Texas Democratic party by Shivercrats and Dixiecrats...
...ultra Right-wing columnist of the Amarillo Daily News, "the Tzzard of Was...
...Senate when he stayed up all night talking politics with the country editor????ending with an inevitable bowl of roadside chili in the dawning...
...In the tradition of Harry Golden and William Allen White, he thinks large thoughts about the national scene and expresses them in trenchant terms for the residents of Swisher County...
...Instead, he fought Texas anti-Catholic prejudice and conservative bias like the proverbial one-armed paperhanger...
...How can they have any respect for their government when they hear nothing but a one-sided description of its graft, its corruption and the like...
...Down his way most of the malcontents are conservatives...
...The issues that concern him are more often than not crop supports and other problems of a farming community...
...He does include one praiseworthy thing, however, a survey of the country editor's impact on Swisher and the surrounding counties...
...If you tell your kids that the mayor is a dirty crook . . . that the commissioners are corrupt, how can you expect them to obey the laws of the city, to respect authority...
...What makes Baggarly worth reading is his clearheaded common sense and flinty fondness for political reality...
...When President Kennedy died in Dallas, Baggarly wrote what many consider his finest column...
...A Democrat is as hard to find within a civic club or similar group as a copy of the U.S...
Vol. 50 • January 1967 • No. 1
