Bush, I will judge each agricultural measure on the basis of whether it gets the
Government further into, or out of, private business." Bush added that farm subsidies are
among "our most expensive federal programs."
Another of Bush's recurrent obsessions was his desire to break the labor movement.
During the 1960's, he expressed this in the context of campaigns to prevent the repeal of
section 14 (b) of the Taft-Hartley law, which permitted the states to outlaw the closed
shop and union shop, and thus to protect state laws guaranteeing the so- called open shop
or "right to work," a device which in practice prevented the organization of large sectors
of the working population of these states into unions. Bush's editorializing takes him back
to the era when the Sherman Anti-trust Act was still being used against labor unions.
"I believe in the right-to-work laws," said Bush to a group of prominent Austin
businessmen at a luncheon in the Commodore Perry Hotel on March 5. "At every
opportunity, I urge union members to resist payment of political assessments. If there's
only one in 100 who thinks for himself and votes for himself, then he should not be
assessed by COPE."
On March 19 Bush asserted that "labor's blatant attack on right-to- work laws is open
admission that labor does have a monopoly and will take any step to make this monopoly.
Union demands are a direct cause of the inflationary spiral lowering the real income of
workers and increasing the costs of production." This is, from the point of scientific
economics, an absurdity. But four days later Bush returned to the topic, attacking United
Auto Workers President Walter Reuther, a figure whom Bush repeatedly sought ot
identify with Yarborough, for demands which "will only cause the extinction of free
enterprise in America. A perfect example of labor's pricing a product out of existence is
found in West Virginia. John L. Lewis' excessive demands on the coal industry raised the
price of coal, forced the consumer to use a substitute cheaper product, killed the coal
industry and now West Virginia has an excessive rate of unemployment."
On Labor Day, Bush spoke to a rally in the court house square of Quanah, and called for
"protection of the rights of the individual laborer through the state rather than the federal
government. The individual laboring man is being forgotten by the Walter Reuthers and
Ralph Yarboroughs, and it's up to the business community to protect our country's
valuable labor resources from exploitation by these left -wing labor leaders," said Bush,
who might just as well have suggested that the fox be allowed to guard the chicken coop.
East Texas was an area of unusually high racial tension, and Bush spent most of his time
there attacking the civil rights bill. But the alliance between Yarborough and big labor
was one of his favorite themes. The standard pitch went something like this, as before the
Austin businessmen. Yarborough, he would start off saying "more nearly represents the
state of Michigan than he does Texas." This, as we will see, was partly an attempted,
lame rebuttal of Yarborough's charge that Bush was a northeastern carpetbagger. Bush
would then continue: "One of the main reasons Yarborough represents Texas so badly is
that he's spending most of his time representing labor interests in Detroit. His voting
record makes men like Walter Reuther and James Hoffa very happy. This man has voted