America the More Beautiful

THE LAND

For 18 months, Lady Bird Johnson has been dashing about planting a tree here, dedicating a park or playground there, and cheering conservation-minded citizens everywhere. Of all the Great Society programs, beautification is the one closest to her heart, and future generations are likely to remember her for her campaign to beautify America, much the way Eleanor Roosevelt is recalled as the first First Lady to show up in a coal mine or Jacqueline Kennedy as the hostess who brought chic to the White House.

Lady Bird's fervor and her whole program may seem a little corny, but they have touched a genuine national concern. Into the small White House office that she has set up to handle the beautification drive come up to 400 letters a week and countless phone calls. Last week Lady Bird was off again, this time on a threeday, 4,300-mi. swing through the West, accompanied by Interior Secretary Stewart Udall. In California, she dedicated Point Reyes National Seashore and almost got trapped by a wave. She switched from natural to artificial beauty long enough to help open the San Francisco opera season. Next day she planted a horse-chestnut seedling at Monterey, then hurried along to unveil a plaque along the Big Sur Scenic Highway near Carmel.

Love of the Land. It was appropriate enough for Governor Pat Brown to accompany her every step of the way. Lady Bird endorsed him pointedly: "No one knows better than the grass-roots conservationists the value of having a believer in the Governor's chair." One quip had it that the real reason for her trip was "to beautify Pat Brown"--who needs all the help he can get in his race with Republican Ronald Reagan.

If politics comes naturally to Lady

Bird, so does her love of the land. Though she is generally credited with inspiring the Highway Beautification Act of 1965 ("the Billboard Bill"), she has no official authority. The proper measure of her success is the grassroots response she evokes. From businessmen and mayors to garden-clubbers and oldtime conservationists, she is receiving a rousing chorus of "America the Beautiful"--or, more precisely, "America Must Be More Beautiful."

Roses & Honeysuckle. At least 30 state conferences on beautification have been held since the-White House Conference on Natural Beauty in the spring of 1965. Countless mayors and city councils have appointed local beautification committees. On the national level, Laurance Rockefeller is heading a twelve-member Citizens' Committee on Beautification that will make specific recommendations to the President on coordinating the work of some 20 federal agencies dealing with recreation and natural beauty. Executives of all the major oil companies have met with Mrs. Johnson in the White House to discuss their wayside service stations; CITGO has issued a landscaping manual to its 488 station operators, will underwrite $700,000 of new planting.

Even at a modest level, the citizens are finding beautification a worthy cause. In Gary, Ind., the wife of Mayor A. Martin Katz came back from the White House Conference on Natural Beauty determined to follow Mrs. Johnson's example; she took up a collection of money and materials from individuals and businesses, renovated an old pavilion, restocked a lagoon, and installed night lighting in Marquette Park. In San Jose, Calif., Mrs. Lorna Smith watched Lady Bird on TV, picked up a trowel, marched out and planted a 30-ft. bed of iris next to the bus stop.

Beacons of Blossoms. Project Green Thumb, a much-praised part of the antipoverty program, resulted directly from a meeting of Lady Bird with representatives of the Farmers' Union. Now, in pilot projects in four states, retired farmers from 55 to 78 years old work three or four days a week using their know-how with the soil to carry out roadside beautification projects.

Nowhere has Lady Bird's beauty crusade had more impact than in Washington, D.C. There her Committee for a More Beautiful Capital has enlivened the city's triangles and circles with trees, flowers and grass, turned the entrances into beacons of blossoms. The principal shopping thoroughfare, F Street, is being torn up to make room for a new landscaped center strip with fountains. Her own personal project is the Capital Mall, where her plans call for sidewalk cafes, gardens, pools and bicycle paths, and a new museum to house the Hirshhorn sculpture collection.

Nor does Lady Bird's eye miss the capital slums. One project: the beautification of schools in the city's poorer districts. "Broken windows cost the District of Columbia $118,000 each year," she says. "I stood in front of a school one day and counted 26 broken windows on one side alone. But--and here is the magic--at the nine schools we have landscaped, the breakage has dropped to almost nothing."

Lift of Spirit, Surge of Pride. Her powers of persuasion are considerable--and her speech writers are good too. To the population of Page, Ariz., assembled to witness the dedication of the 710-ft. Glen Canyon Dam, Lady Bird Johnson last week recalled "those disfigurements of rocks and trees where someone with a huge ego and tiny mind has splashed with paint or gouged with knife to let the world know that Kilroy or John Doe was here." But the beautification drive, she went on, "is a new kind of 'writing on the wall'--a kind that says proudly and beautifully, 'Man was here.' "

Beauty may not be the nation's most urgent issue, but it is significant that in an earlier day, it might have seemed almost frivolous. Today, in a basically affluent society, people have the time and the means to take it seriously. The most earnest liberal reformers now assert that the big challenge, in one form or another, is the quality of the American environment.

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