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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.