The Last Brake?

If there is one outstanding thing about the career of soft-spoken William Moreland, 61, it is that he has managed to last so long as school superintendent of Houston. Almost since he took over in 1945, his schools have been in trouble--largely because the powerful right-wing forces on the school board and in the city have been determined to keep Houston free of anything that could be remotely called "controversial." In one way or another, Houston's school board has chalked up as impressive a record of sheer orneriness as any big-city board in the nation.

With effective assistance from Houston's strong corps of Minute Women, the right-wingers have waged a continuous war against teaching about the United Nations or using any UNESCO material in the schools. They succeeded in eliminating the annual U.N. essay contest, flooded the town with anti-U.N. literature, e.g., "United Nations Seizes, Rules American Cities." They have denounced such speakers as former Rhodes Scholars Stringfellow Barr and Clarence Streit, partly because some citizens decided that the Rhodes program (launched in 1903) was nothing but a scheme to promote British rule of the world. They also kept out Pasadena's former Superintendent Willard Goslin. "A very controversial figure," said one school-board member, adding, "I don't know anything about the man."

Not Pure Capitalism? In 1949 the board banned Magruder's standard textbook, American Government, because two members objected to the paragraph beginning: "The United States is called a capitalistic country, but it does not have pure capitalism. It has capitalism subject to increasing government control as our manner of living becomes more complex . . ." In 1953 it fired Deputy Superintendent George Ebey, not because it could find any proof that he had once been proCommunist, as one citizen charged, but because he had become "controversial." In the course of an investigation as a result of the Ebey case, the National Education Association reported that hundreds of Houston teachers said they had been subjected to various kinds of political pressure.

Through all such hassles, Superintendent Moreland went quietly about his work, upping teachers' salaries, importing the best assistants he could, and trying to be a voice for moderation. He bore Ebey's dismissal philosophically, did not even get ruffled when a local radio commentator named Joe Worthy took to the air to urge parents and pupils to form a secret club to tattle on teachers who did not echo the right-wing line. But last week Moreland's monumental patience came to an end when the board flung itself into another orgy of book banning.

Mad Whirlpool. The spark behind the latest bannings was newly elected Mrs. Earl Maughmer Jr., wife of a police sergeant. She objected to a widely used text called Geography of the World for High Schools because it praised the U.N. in the foreword, also condemned a book which Yale Geographer Stephen B. Jones helped write because one of its chapters bore the title: "It's All One World." Then she went after a twelfth-grade text called Applied Economics because it said that the Government had certain obligations "to promote the welfare of all the people." Said one board member: "That's Socialism, isn't it?" Out went the three books.

Finally fed up, Superintendent Moreland handed in his resignation. Said the Scripps-Howard Houston Press: "A black day for Houston ... In our opinion Dr. Moreland was just about the last brake that has kept the Houston school system from plunging into a mad whirlpool of uncontrolled extremism that has threatened it all these years. Dr. Moreland was a voice of sanity . . . We predict: after Moreland--the deluge."

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