This text was obtained via automated optical character recognition.
It has not been edited and may therefore contain several errors.

---

*1
the first primary. Then, in the general election, I defeated Al
Woodard by some 2,000 votes!
In January of 1964, I began my first term in the Mississippi House of Representatives. I believed that I was now privileged to serve four years in the most conservative legislature in our once-great Nation. It did not take me long to discover that the very opposite was true. There existed now a very definite trend toward liberalism. A liberalism intensified by the ever increasing amount of taxpayer's money being poured into our state by the Washington bureaucrats! Most of my colleagues could not learn the oft repeated fact that federal aid results in federal control. The ever increasing onslaught of propaganda directed by the liberals in Washington, the universities, the churches, and the news media was taking it's toll. Their Council of State Governments, located on the campus of Chicago University, tunneled liberal legislation into the state legislatures where it was railroaded through both houses by liberal head-nodders despite vigorous opposition from
the conservative minority.
I had promised my constituents to invest any idle state funds in interest-bearing securities which would, of course, take millions of dollars away from the favored banks, thus putting these millions to work for the over burdened taxpayers of our state. It was not easy. My first bill introduced early in 1964, was declared unconstitutional in an opinion written by our bank comptroller, Lewellen Brown. He held that demand deposits could not be invested, which did protect the powerful state bankers for a few more years, but I never quit. I spent the rest of my first term investing what is known as special funds, money held by the many state agencies and commissions. The Game and Fish Commission Protection Fund came first, $260,000.00 on deposit in a southwestern Mississippi bank for twenty-six years, earning interest for the banker but none for the taxpayers. I authored a bill making it mandatory for the state treasurer to invest this money in United States Treasury Bills, which paid 7 per cent interest, said interest to be credited to the fund from which the principal came. Within five months this fund earned some $9,000.00 and my investment of idle funds was bn the way!
That initial success led to many others, because I had
66
committed to memory an amendment which I used whenever I discovered an idle state fund that could be invested. A majority of my liberal colleagues supported the investment of idle funds, probably because they would now have more money to squander. At times I doubted myself, but lived in hope that the day would come when the electorate would have the wisdom to elect a legislature conservative enough to use all the interest earned solely to reduce the state's bonded indebtedness! At the time only four states had a higher per capital tax than Mississippi, despite the fact that Mississippi had the lowest per capita income in the nation. Undoubtedly due to the 40 percent Negro population, a segment that has never paid more than 10 percent of all taxes in the State.
The pressure of the many disappointments during my first term was overwhelming! It made me sick to witness the cowardice and the willingness of the majority of my colleagues to appease the Washington bureaucrats. I can still hear the parroting from the podium, "If you don't do it, the federal government will do it for you." A sizable number of us pled for sanity, and warned against the folly of deficit spending and federal control. All to no avail! And to think that our great nation was founded on the right of the separate states to govern themselves! A right that was lost with the War Between the States! And the humiliations suffered by the glorious South at the hands of the hate mongering carpetbaggers and their yankee bosses in the North. The blatant discrimination fostered upon the white South during reconstruction made any discrimination suffered by the Negro look like a Sunday School class!
I introduced the "Liberty Amendment" in the beginning of my first term and, with the help of my friends in the House and Senate, from the "Women for Constitutional Government", and from the "Citizens' Council," Mississippi became the seventh state to adopt this amendment, which is second only in its ability to save our nation to abolishing the Federal Reserve fraud!
There was so little resistance to liberalism. Governor Paul Johnson paid his political debts by fulfilling promises, the first of which was a Research and Development Center. The Center was the first big liberal agency in the State and was headed by a
67