Master of the Senate (170 page)

W
HEN, FURTHERMORE
, hard-eyed men in both parties—the poll-takers and strategists to whom politics is percentages—began analyzing the 1956 election results, certain percentages leapt out at them: those in the columns headed
Negro.

The trend among African-American voters which in 1952 had so disturbed Democrats—and so encouraged Republicans—had intensified in 1956, they
realized. In 1952, the 68 percent of the black vote that Adlai Stevenson had polled had been far below the percentages that Democratic strategists had come to expect. In 1956, Stevenson’s percentage was 61 percent. “Of all the major groups in the nation’s population,” pollster George Gallup reported, “the one that shifted most to the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket was the Negro voter.” And at the same time that the Democratic share of the Negro vote had declined, the size of that vote had grown—not in the South, of course, where a mere 15 percent of eligible Negroes had voted—but in the North, for between 1952 and 1956 the Negro exodus to northern cities had continued.

The concatenation of these two trends—an increase in the black vote and in the percentage of that vote going Republican—intensified the hopes tantalizing the GOP. It was in the big cities of California and the North’s eight big industrial states that the Negro vote—perhaps three million black voters—had been concentrated in 1956, and, “from every available evidence,” as the Democratic pollster Richard Scammon told his clients, during the next four years that vote “will continue to increase.” This possibility provided the GOP with a great opportunity: to take the big states and thereby to be able to hold the White House even without an Ike at the head of the ticket.

The more closely that these trends were analyzed—congressional district by congressional district, ward by ward—the more attainable that prospect appeared. The larger the Negro population in a particular district or ward, the larger had been Eisenhower’s margin of gain between his two elections. The heart of New York’s Negro population, for example, was the city’s Sixteenth Congressional District: Harlem. And in Harlem, where once a Republican presidential candidate counted himself lucky if he received 10 percent of the vote, Eisenhower had received 17 percent in 1952 and 34 percent in 1956. In Illinois’s First Congressional District—Chicago’s South Side—his share had increased from 25 percent to 36 percent. And “even a 50–50 break in the up-to-now heavily Democratic Negro vote might well push key doubtful states into the Republican column,” Scammon concluded. The Democrats might then be denied the White House until some new major adjustment of American political forces shifted the balance their way.”

And, strategists saw, a key reason for the Republican trend among African-American voters remained: the Democrats’ control of Capitol Hill. “The Negro voter by and large appears convinced that it is the Democrats who prevent any legislative help in his race’s striving for a better share in American democracy,” the
Atlantic Monthly
reported. “The Negro voter, and the white voter, too, who feels strongly on the subject, sees only Mississippi Senator Eastland blocking the door of his powerful Judiciary Committee and backed by Southern Democrats determined to filibuster any civil rights legislation.” NAACP lobbyist Clarence Mitchell, speaking to NAACP branches across the country during the 1956 campaign, had said that a heavy Negro vote for Republicans “would automatically eliminate twenty-one Southern chairmen
from the key committee posts they now hold.” Campaigning in Harlem, Vice President Richard Nixon had told audiences that civil rights legislation “cannot pass … as long as the filibuster exists in the Senate.” (He also said that if Eisenhower was elected, “we are going to have performance on civil rights, not just promises,” because Eisenhower “is going to have a vice president who opposes the filibuster.”) The effectiveness of such pleas had been documented in the upsurge in the GOP vote in Harlem. Said Mitchell after the campaign: “Seldom in the long political history of our country has a man been so helpful in defeating members of his own party as Eastland.” Democrats knew Mitchell was right. Returning to Washington from Oregon, where he and his wife, Maurine, had made more than 350 speeches urging the re-election of Wayne Morse, Richard Neuberger said that although “less than two percent of Oregon’s population is colored,” “we are continually confronted with the charge that a vote for Senator Morse … was a vote to continue Senator Eastland as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee….”

There was a further disturbing note for Democrats. The concentration of northern Negro voters in the cities’ ghetto wards, together with gerrymandering that kept the Negro vote confined to those wards, meant that the shift in that vote toward the GOP had not yet been heavily felt in elections below the presidential level. But, as
U.S. News & World Report
said, if the shift continues, “it could affect the choice” of aldermen, city councilmen, and scores of House members. “This kind of political fallout in Negro precincts is causing major recalculations of party strength all over America.”

The recalculations were going on in both parties. Once a basic Democratic belief had been that the party could not afford to alienate the South. Now there was a new calculation. The eleven southern states had a total of 128 electoral votes, and that figure included Texas, which Eisenhower had carried twice and whose twenty-four electoral votes could no longer be considered safe for a Democratic presidential candidate. Without Texas, the South’s electoral vote was 104. The nine key northern states had 223 electoral votes. Accustomed though Capitol Hill had become to discounting Hubert Humphrey’s extravagant rhetoric, his remark that the Democrats were “digging their own grave” brought many nods in Democratic offices. “The civil rights dilemma loads down the Democrats in the North, as the Old Man of the Sea sat athwart the shoulders of Sinbad the Sailor,” said Senator Neuberger; unless the party’s stance on that issue was changed, “the result could be banishment for the Democrats for many decades from the executive branch of government.” Long indispensable, the South might, suddenly, now be expendable.

And while Democrats were constrained from taking full advantage of these new calculations by another reality—a change in the party’s stance might alienate the committee chairmen who were so important a source of its strength—no such constraint operated on the GOP. Republicans had little to lose, and a great deal to gain. Give us a civil rights bill, one Republican leader
told James Reston, “and by 1960 we will break the Roosevelt coalition of the large cities and the South, even without Eisenhower.” No sooner had the 1956 election results been analyzed than Republican leaders began laying plans to exploit the situation, and among these leaders were the party’s two leading candidates to succeed Eisenhower, both of whom, as it happened, were from California, with its 194,000 Negro voters, which meant that both men had been sensitized to the potentials of black voting power (and both of whom, as it happened, were there in the Senate Chamber with Lyndon Johnson, one of them, William Knowland, seated just across the aisle from him, the other, Richard Nixon, on the low dais just a few feet away, his eyes almost level with those of the tall Majority Leader). Knowland, the Taft acolyte whose passion for civil rights had heretofore been extremely well concealed, now unequivocally promised the NAACP’s Mitchell that he would lead the fight to pass a civil rights bill in 1957. As for Knowland’s rival, as Marquis Childs said, “One thing even Nixon’s bitterest enemies have never denied him. That is a sure understanding of the main chance.” And, Childs wrote, Nixon was “working with all the intensity of a very intense nature, to try to shape … for his party” a strategy to position it on the right side of “the issue that contributed, more than any other, to the Republican landslide of last November.” Nixon’s ally, of course, was Brownell, and the Republican Attorney General had lost none of his enthusiasm for his proposed bill that would give the Justice Department “unprecedented power” to enforce a “broad array” of civil rights—the bill in whose inherent aims, and political possibilities, he deeply believed. Within a few days after the election, it was known that the Brownell Bill would be reintroduced in 1957. In 1956, it had been introduced late in the session, late enough for the Senate to avoid confronting it, but the Senate would not be able to avoid confronting it again.

S
INCE THE 1956 ELECTION
, there had been a further escalation of white hostility in the South. When the new school year had begun in September, before the election, there had been only minor progress in the seventeen states which, before the
Brown
decision, had required school segregation. Of the 2,731,750 Negro schoolchildren who were in school that September in the seventeen states, some 115,000–4 percent—were in schools also attended by whites. And even that small figure was misleading, for almost all of those 115,000 were in border states. In the eleven former Confederate states, 3,400 of Texas’ 248,000 Negroes were in integrated schools; a total of 1,200 more were in integrated schools in Arkansas or Tennessee; three years after
Brown
, that was the extent of southern compliance with the Court’s decree. And as John Bartlow Martin found on his tour through the South that Fall, “in recent months resistance [to school desegregation] has been hardening”; in most of the Deep South, he reported, “there is no prospect of school integration in the foreseeable
future.” State legislatures would be convening in January, and scores of bills had been introduced that would have the effect of nullifying the educational integration decree. In Virginia, they were introduced by legislative members of the Byrd Machine. There was no time to lose, Harry Byrd said; a federal judge had issued a ruling designed to force integration in Virginia. “We face the gravest crisis since the War Between the States.” If laws were not passed to circumvent the ruling, he said, six-year-old children of both races would be “assembled in little huts before the bus comes, and the bus will then be packed like sardines…. What our people most fear is that by this close intimate social contact future generations will intermarry.” The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee called for “massive resistance” to all such court rulings; law enforcement, he said, should be “by the white people of this country.”

Other bills dealt with voting, intending to make it more difficult for African-Americans to register—not that such legislation seemed particularly urgent, for while black voting had been rising sharply in the North, in the South voting statistics were little more encouraging than those on schools. Among the more than six million Negroes in the eleven southern states who were twenty-one years of age in 1956, only 1,238,000 had been registered—still only one in five. There were entire counties in these states—counties in which thousands of Negroes lived—in which not a single Negro was registered to vote. In Mississippi, the number of registered Negroes may actually have declined during those four years. Further increases seemed likely to come even more slowly. Five states still had a poll tax, and in all the southern states the use of literacy tests and of outright intimidation, economic and/or physical, was increasing. A new tactic—wholesale “challenges” by Citizens Councils representatives of Negro voters on a county’s registration lists—had been instituted in 1956, and it had proven effective: in one Louisiana parish, more than three thousand of the four thousand registered Negroes had been purged from the registration books shortly before the 1956 election—and its use was expected to increase. The number of Negroes who actually voted in the South may actually have been smaller in 1956 than in 1952.

Nor was it only in schools and voting that the South was strengthening its defenses. “The [legislative] hoppers of the South are spilling over with legislation aimed at keeping the Negro ‘in his place,’” Stan Opotowsky of the
New York Post
found on a tour of the South in December, 1956. One bill that was about to be introduced—and passed—in Louisiana specifically prohibited the performance of George Gershwin’s musical
Porgy and Bess
since it raised the possibility of blacks and whites appearing on the same stage; it also prohibited the annual meeting of the state Red Cross, since a previous annual meeting had been attended by Negroes and whites.

Anger was escalating everywhere in the South. In the White Citizens Councils, the South had found, in John Bartlow Martin’s phrase, “a flag to rally round,” and in 1956 as in 1955 tens of thousands of white southerners joined
their rolls. One huge rally followed another. The Councils’ vigilance extended into areas previously not thought of: incensed that some of Southern Bell’s party lines were used by both black and white subscribers, Mississippi’s Monroe County Council demanded that the company segregate its telephones.

The Councils’ targets included not only Negroes but white southerners whose racial views, while perhaps not pro-integration, were unacceptably moderate. They, too, Opotowsky found, “are subjected to the same terror if they dare stray from the most rigid segregation line.” “There is a consistent and insistent attempt to force all white southerners into a rigid pattern of defiance of the courts and to a position of rigidity on every aspect of the race question,” said Morris B. Abram, president of the American Jewish Committee. And these “enormous pressures,” Abram said, were succeeding. “The field is being preempted by the extremists.” The White Citizens Councils had the South—the white South as well as the black—firmly in its grip. “The domination is total,” Opotowsky wrote. “There is no middle ground, no shade of gray. Only black and white. And woe betide the black.” Reported Martin: “The Deep South is solid once more.”

Even more ominously, a growing number of southern whites were not satisfied with the Councils’ actions. There was, the
New York Times
reported that December, “an upsurge by the frustrated elements that want more boldness and action.” The Ku Klux Klan, in disrepute for more than a decade because of its violent redneck tactics, was again on the rise: that Fall, Martin reported, it “has burned crosses in the fields and paraded openly through many a small town.” And the Klan, as Opotowsky pointed out, “does not claim the niceties which the Councils wear as their mantle. They’re back to flogging again.” In one incident, in Camden, South Carolina, a white fifty-two-year-old high school music teacher was taken from his car, tied to a tree, and beaten with tree limbs and with a wooden plank by a group of men in white hoods because it was thought that he had advocated school integration. Only later was it learned that the beating had been given to the wrong man; the music teacher had, in fact, opposed integration.