A Price to Pay for the Town Hall Rage
By David S. Broder
WashPost
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Watching the muscular tactics being used in congressional town meetings by some opponents of health-care reform, I keep thinking somebody should remind the Republican leaders who are reveling in the scenes about Bruce Alger.
Alger was the first Republican congressman elected from Texas in the modern era, winning a Dallas district in 1954. In 1960, just a few days before the presidential election, he was part of a crowd of several hundred people who surrounded Lyndon B. Johnson, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, and his wife, Lady Bird, when they arrived for a luncheon at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas.
Many of the demonstrators carried signs labeling the Texas senator a "Judas." Alger's placard read: "LBJ Sold Out to Yankee Socialists."
As I later wrote, the Johnsons "were engulfed by the crowd, and for more than half an hour, were reviled and jostled as they slowly made their way across the lobby. Johnson refused offers of police assistance, telling an aide that 'if the time has come that I can't walk with my lady across the lobby of the Adolphus Hotel, then I want to know it.'
(More here.)
WashPost
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Watching the muscular tactics being used in congressional town meetings by some opponents of health-care reform, I keep thinking somebody should remind the Republican leaders who are reveling in the scenes about Bruce Alger.
Alger was the first Republican congressman elected from Texas in the modern era, winning a Dallas district in 1954. In 1960, just a few days before the presidential election, he was part of a crowd of several hundred people who surrounded Lyndon B. Johnson, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, and his wife, Lady Bird, when they arrived for a luncheon at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas.
Many of the demonstrators carried signs labeling the Texas senator a "Judas." Alger's placard read: "LBJ Sold Out to Yankee Socialists."
As I later wrote, the Johnsons "were engulfed by the crowd, and for more than half an hour, were reviled and jostled as they slowly made their way across the lobby. Johnson refused offers of police assistance, telling an aide that 'if the time has come that I can't walk with my lady across the lobby of the Adolphus Hotel, then I want to know it.'
(More here.)
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