Beauty, Beauty Everywhere

None of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society inaugural promises produced such a glad commotion as his declaration that natural beauty should replace man-made ugliness in America.

Hundreds of letters have poured into the White House from garden-club la dies, Sunday drivers, bird watchers, country editors, city mayors, and all manner of green-thumb lobbyists. Residents of Wayland, Mass., held an art show to dramatize the need for cleaning up the town dump. Missouri's Governor Warren Hearnes offered prizes for the best dogwood-redbud plantings in a statewide prettification program.

United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther proudly announced that he and his neighbors in Detroit suburbs would plant 5,000 trees along a barren 25-mile creek bed. Three hundred volunteers waded into the polluted Potomac River one Sunday morning and dragged up 540 armloads of rubbish. Columnist Drew Pearson donated ten tons of manure from his Maryland dairy farm to Lady Bird Johnson's campaign for new plantings in Washington.

"Ugliness Is Bitterness." Last week the national face-lifting drive moved into even higher gear when 844 carefully selected delegates--including architects, urban-renewal experts, businessmen, Government leaders, conservationists--crowded into a Washington building auditorium for a White House Conference on Natural Beauty. Lady Bird, opening the affair, said: "Ugliness is bitterness, an eroding force on the people of our land. We are all here to try and change that." Laurance Rockefeller, conference chairman, briskly told the conferees: "Our task is to produce specific ideas and come up with solutions."

The delegates spent two days in discussions about various blots on the landscape and the villains who put them there. "Our enemy is the highway engineer," said a woman delegate from Nebraska, suggesting that all such engineers should be required to take a course in esthetics, including the reading of great poets. Najeeb Halaby, former Federal Aviation Agency chief, said that public officials "are not usually brave enough" to do what they must to preserve natural beauty.

Blasted hardest of all were junkyard owners, who sent their own representatives, tried desperately to defend themselves by defining their roadside eyesores as "a retail automobile-dismantling shop engaged in a business that is neither dishonest nor degrading." Harvard Law School Professor Charles Haar snapped back, "The only way to clean up these places is through strong legislation; voluntary actions on the part of junkyard owners are few and far between."

Behind the Curtain. President Johnson, full of praise, spoke at the conference, called Laurance Rockefeller a "selfless patriot," joked about the White House upheaval caused by the crusade for beauty. "This afternoon, after a particularly hectic day yesterday and after a late lunch, I went in about 4:15 to get my afternoon nap," said Johnson, "and I dozed off to sleep immediately after I put my head on the pillow. And some time or other I awakened and I could hear a little soft music in the background and a lot of conversation, and I said, 'My, am I dreaming? Is Laurance Rockefeller back in town again?' And I got up and went out and pulled the curtain and peeped behind it and looked, and there was not only Laurance Rockefeller and Lady Bird and the 60 others that started out with them, but a thousand more that joined them."

But the President was deadly serious when it came to the beautification program, and to prove it he sent a message to Congress asking for four new laws to clean up roadsides. One would put controls on billboard advertising by making it impossible for states to receive federal highway grants after July 1, 1970, unless they removed signs erected within 1,000 ft. of the road. Despite arguments that roadside signs help keep motorists awake and despite the fact that many states put up their own billboards to advocate safe-driving practices. Johnson said, "It is neither in the interests of the advertising industry or the nation to permit a further decrease of our dwindling natural beauty."

The President also asked for similar controls over junkyards, insisting that they all be screened or placed at least 1,000 ft. from the road before a state could get federal highway aid. Beyond that, Johnson asked that states be required to use 3% of their federal road funds "for natural beauty" and that one-third of the aid each state receives for secondary roads should be used to build scenic roads and landscape federal-aid highways.

"These bills," the President said, "are evidence of our determination not to be a neglectful generation. Their passage will ensure this Congress the gratitude of future generations of Americans who will be allowed to enjoy the same gifts of nature which are our heritage."

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