If Sam Houston recognized his bravery, he must have been good. Brock, this congressman from Texas for twenty-five yrs, Sam Rayburn, came from Tennessee to Texas. His father was a Confederate Cavalryman. In his office he had pictures on the wall but they were all pictures of Robert E. Lee. I would like to see this today. But, of course, they wouldn't dare.
Rayburn
who hated the railroads, whose freight charges fleeced the farmer, and
the banks, whose interest charges fleeced the farmer, and the utility
companies, which refused to extend their power lines into the
countryside, and thus condemned the farmer to darkness. Rayburn who
hated the "trusts" and the "interests"- Rayburn who hated the rich and
all their devices. Rayburn who hated the Republican Party, which he
regarded as one of those devices-hated it for currency policies that,
*he
said, "make the rich richer and the poor poorer"; hated it for the
tariff ("the robber tariff, the most indefensible system that the world
has ever known," he called it; because the Republican Party "fooled ...
the farmer into" supporting the tariff, he said, the rich "fatten their
already swollen purses with more ill-gotten gains wrung from the horny
hands of the toiling masses"); and hated it for Reconstruction, too: the
son of a Confederate cavalryman who "never stopped hating the Yankees,"
Rayburn, a friend once said, "will not in his long lifetime forget
Appomattox"; for years after he came to Congress, the walls of his
office bore many pictures, but all were of one man-Robert E. Lee; in
1928, when his district was turning to the Republican Hoover over Al
Smith, and he was advised to turn with it or risk losing his own
congressional seat, he growled:
"As long as I honor the memory of the
Confederate dead, and revere the gallant devotion of my Confederate
father to the Southland, I will never vote for electors of a party which
sent the carpetbagger and the scalawag to the prostrate South with
saber and sword." Rayburn who hated the railroads, and the banks, and
the Republicans because he never forgot who he was, or where he came
from.
He was impeccably honest - when he died, his savings consisted of $15,000. The filth nowadays, come out richer than they went in.
~~
Reborn
**************************
*
Mr.Pippen adverted
to the importance of the present election - important in many respects,
but chiefly in respect to the Tariff and Texas. The
Tariff must be reduced; it was grinding the South to powder. The
northern manufacturers were declaring dividends of 25 and 30 per cent
per annum, while the poor farmer at the South could scarcely "make both
ends meet." The Tariff must be reduced - it made the rich richer and the
poor poorer
