What Are Your Political Roots?

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In our central Texas city the street where my family lived, in one block, was the length of the streets on either side of it that were both two blocks long.  In other words, each of the parallel streets on either side of ours had perpendicular streets coming into them in mid-block, in T-shaped intersections, while there were no intersections in our block.

Behind our home was a big vacant lot (until I was about 14 years old, when a big house was built there).  Garrett Street ran into Justin Street right at that lot.  If Garrett had been extended a block further, our house would have been destroyed.  From school, I knew several children who lived on Garrett.  I would occasionally climb over the chain-link fence at the back of our yard and go visit them.

One girl whom I knew in junior high lured me over to her family's house about four blocks up Garrett so that I could help her canvass her neiborhood selling something like candy or maybe magazines in order to benefit some organization she belonged to.  They were nice homes along there, and the folks who answered the doorbell were nice people.

I was especially struck by one gentleman, who was not the dad of anyone we knew, but who wanted to chat for a while (and seemed to know my Dad).  He seemed to be wearing work or even dress slacks with an open-collar white long-sleeve dress shirt.  He was fun to talk to and bought some of whatever I was selling for "Marilyn" - maybe my only sale!

I tried to describe this man to my folks at the supper table that night.  They knew right away who I was talking about: U. S. Senator Ralph Yarborough.  This must have been around 1957.

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I didn't know it that day - or for a considerable number of years after that, in fact - but Ralph Yarborough was a significant part of the political culture in Texas in which I was raised, which I drank up and absorbed through my very pores, and which still influences the way I think and feel about most public issues.  I'm proud of that fact too.

In the years of my early maturity, Yarborough was identified by the press as a "liberal Democrat."  All successful Texas politicians in those days were Democrats; it was a one-party state.  But there did tend to be two distinct wings of the party, one that was said to be represented by Lyndon Johnson - the senior Senator from Texas - and the other represented by Yarborough, the junior Senator.  It was widely believed that the reason John Kennedy was in Texas when he was assassinated was that he was working to shore up the rift between the Johnson and Yarborough wings of the Texas party.

Yarborough is recalled today as one of the last "New Deal Democrats" of Texas.  (Johnson himself could also be remembered this way, I think.)  I take this to mean Yarborough distrusted unrestrained big business, especially "speculators" who make their money not by providing goods and services but merely by turning over their money.  A New Deal Democrat like the junior senator from Texas would also believe that the federal government plays the key role of intervening in the economy either to stimulate growth when that is needed or to restrain unfair practices that block equal opportunity for all Americans. 

By the 1960s, a political leader influenced by the liberal policies of Franklin Roosevelt would also have been a strong supporter of public education, organized labor, and equal civil rights for all races and social groups, as Ralph Yarborough was, as I understand it.

Thus, he supported his colleague Lyndon Johnson on civil rights and other Great Society policies even though he criticized the whole-hog involvement of Johnson's government in the War in Viet Nam.

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One would think that Senator Yarborough would be appalled today at the huge gap between the richest Americans and everyone else.  He would recognize immediately that his most treasured values are unattainable when the vast Many in the U. S. today are so completely dominated by the super-rich Few.

I suspect that, like any other reasonable person, the senator would feel uncomfortable at the degree to which Big Money dominates politics - the heart of a democracy - and distorts and emasculates the media.  But these are not issues he had to deal with in his own time.

On the other hand, he would have seen immediately that the vast inequity in the distribution of wealth we are experiencing directly prevents the realization of his most cherished values:  public schools that are available to all are bad and growing worse with every dollar pulled out, the legal system favors the big corporation and the wealthy person, and with every passing day the economic opportunity available to the illiterate, weak, and poor person shrinks in relation to better-positioned others.

He would be appalled at the absence of liberty, equality, and fairness in the U. S. today.  Senator Yarborough, that nice man from over the back fence and up the street, would be appalled.

And I am too.  Yes, Ralph, I'm appalled too.


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