Master of the Senate (24 page)

Liberals had hoped that because of the contradiction between fighting for democracy abroad while denying it to some citizens at home, the war might shame Congress into allowing the passage of the most modest of civil rights proposals: to outlaw the poll tax, or to make permanent the Fair Employment Practices Commission or FEPC. While shame could move the House, however, it couldn’t budge the Senate. The House passed Roosevelt’s poll tax bill in 1942, and sent it to the Senate, where a filibuster led by Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi killed it. The Administration tried again in 1944. The House passed the bill again, and civil rights advocates mounted an all-out effort to persuade the
Senate to act this time. Looking out over the packed visitors’ galleries, Drury saw some—not many, but some—black faces. “We seldom seem to have these visitors except when the poll tax or the FEPC is under discussion,” he wrote in his
Senate Journal.
“It is as though somebody had the idea that their presence might be a silent reproach….” The committee room was packed, too, “with hopeful Negroes who applaud the witnesses eagerly and from time to time stand in silent prayer that the bill will pass.” But, sitting in the Press Gallery, Drury also saw the double doors swing open, and “the poll-taxers suddenly trooped in, obviously just done with a conference.” And the reproach, he saw, was “utterly wasted on the southerners.”

So long as they felt threatened, felt that there was a significant danger that a filibuster might be cut off by a cloture vote, and that they therefore might need the support of at least a few moderate senators, the southerners veiled their arguments in principles palatable to moderates: in the sacredness of the Constitution and the sovereignty of the states. But as soon as they began to feel that they had enough support to win, the veil dropped away in private conversations to reveal what lay beneath. “Hell,” a young southern spokesman calmly told Drury in confidence one day in 1944, “this wouldn’t put niggers on the voting lists even if it did go through. Niggers don’t vote in my state and niggers aren’t going to vote in my state.” That, he said with a grin, was that. And, Drury noted, when the southerners felt totally secure, the veils were let fall on the Senate floor itself, as the southern senators, “leaving the realms of practical constitutionality where they had the company of sound men … repaired instead to the ancient bloody ground on which whites and ‘Nigras’ contend.” Senator Bankhead of Alabama (son of Senator Bankhead of Alabama) began the trend,

(“Dotted here and there through the galleries, Negroes, many in uniform, sat silent and impassively listening,” Drury wrote in his
Journal.
“Of the hopeless despair that must have been in some of their hearts they gave no sign.”) Burnet Rhett Maybank of South Carolina added that “Regardless of what decisions the Supreme Court may make and regardless of what laws Congress may pass,” the South would handle black Americans as it saw fit. “Mark my words,” a southerner told Drury, Maybank
“is not joking;
the South isn’t joking any
more.” Things were coming “to a boil…. Back them [the southern senators] into the corner a little further and see what they do.” Drury felt that he had not even begun to comprehend the depth of southern rage and resentment over the proposed federal interference in its affairs. “As far as the eye can see there is discontent and bitterness, faint intimations of a coming storm like a rising wind moving through tall grass….” And at the climax of the 1944 debate, when the vote came—the vote on cloture for which a two-thirds vote was required—not only was there once again not two-thirds, there was, once again, not even a majority; thirty-six senators voted for cloture, forty-four voted against.

T
HEN, IN 1945
, there was a new President, who had been one of them—a senator popular with his colleagues—until just four months before, and, as David McCullough writes, conservative senators of both parties were “happily claiming that the New Deal was as good as dead, the ‘Roosevelt nonsense’ was over, because they ‘knew Harry Truman.’”

Truman’s first address to Congress was what McCullough calls “a rude awakening” to his former colleagues: a call not merely to continue the New Deal but to extend it, to “widen our horizon further.” With Japan’s surrender soon thereafter, the need for new initiatives became more compelling. The war had brought homebuilding virtually to a halt; the families of hundreds of thousands of returning veterans were living in inadequate housing; the new President proposed a broad federal program to construct a million new housing units, as well as to provide rent supplements to enable lower-income families to live in them; and to make at least a start on clearing the nation’s slums. Social Security had spread a safety net between millions of the nation’s families and the bottomless abyss of old age in an industrialized society, but tens of millions were still unprotected; Truman called for coverage for an additional three million workers, as well as for an increase in benefits eroded by inflation. He asked for a higher minimum wage for workers on the low end of the industrial totem pole, who in 1945 were still working for sixty cents an hour, and for broad new assistance for the unemployed.

Those were only the first of Harry Truman’s demands on Congress. In succeeding messages, he proposed a federal education program of broader dimensions, and of a new focus: on poorer states. He proposed tax reforms to shift the burden off “the little man” onto the corporations which had reaped huge profits from the war. Health insurance that would make the miracles of modern medical care available to all citizens without regard to their ability to pay had been a dream of liberals for decades; now Truman proposed a system of national health insurance. And the new President went further on race than his great predecessor had dared. Injustice fell most heavily on the twelve million Americans whose skins were black—no meaningful progress against social and economic racial discrimination had been made since the Civil War.
Truman not only resubmitted Roosevelt’s FEPC and poll tax legislation but also proposed what Roosevelt had not: bans on racial discrimination in schools, hotels, restaurants, and theaters, and, to enforce these laws, the creation of a new Civil Rights Commission and of a new civil rights enforcement arm within the Department of Justice. Thirty-one black Americans were known to have died at the hands of lynch mobs—mobs that went unpunished by local officials and juries—since 1940; Truman proposed making lynching a crime under federal law.

Congress knew how to deal with such presidential presumption. Truman’s major domestic proposals were presented in September, 1945. One of them—to outlaw the poll tax—was passed by the House; it was filibustered—and killed—in the Senate. As for the others, when December came, every one had been blocked or ignored. And December, of course, brought other priorities. “Congressmen, who habitually put off thoughts of legislation with the first glimpse of holly, were scrambling again to get home for the holidays—no matter what kind of a mess they might be leaving,”
Time
reported. “And a mess it was.”

The mess continued through the congressional session of 1946. November of that year brought a change in party control of Congress—the Republicans won both houses for the first time in eighteen years—but not in philosophic control; in 1947 and 1948, the conservative coalition, now headed not by a Democrat but by Ohio’s coldly aristocratic Senator Robert Taft, still ruled; it was, as
U.S. News & World Report
noted, “rewriting the Truman legislative program, line by line.” Tax relief was indeed given—but mostly to corporations and to upper-income taxpayers. The minimum wage was left unchanged. Three years after the President had proposed a low-cost homebuilding program to meet a desperate national need, there was no homebuilding legislation. Three years after he had proposed a massive program to improve education, there was no education legislation. The major domestic accomplishment of the Eightieth Congress was a Labor-Management Relations Act, the “Taft-Hartley Law,” which union leaders called the “slave labor law.” On some issues during these years, the House, despite the dominance of conservative committee chairmen, had given in to the public eagerness for change. But when it did, the Senate stood firm. In May, 1946, with the nation paralyzed by a railroad strike and editorial writers hysterical, Truman appeared before a joint session of Congress to ask for legislation that would allow him to assume government control of vital industries hit by strikes, to punish defiant union leaders, and to draft strikers into the military. One house of Congress—the lower house—rushed to comply, by a 306–13 margin. The other house didn’t. Confronted by the spectre of federal intervention in business, the Senate, refusing to bow to the hysteria of the moment, voted against the bill, 70 to 13.

•    •    •

O
CCASIONALLY THE
H
OUSE
seemed swayed—almost despite itself—by cries for justice. On the thorniest issue, the issue on which the House’s defenses had crumbled more than once, the Senate stood like a rock.

“My very stomach turned over when I learned that Negro soldiers, just back from overseas, were being dumped out of army trucks in Mississippi and beaten,” Harry Truman wrote in a letter at this time. “When the mob gangs can take … people out and shoot them in the back, and everybody in the surrounding country is acquainted with who did the shooting and nothing is done about it, that country is in a pretty bad fix from the law enforcement standpoint.” In a special message to Congress in 1948, the President repeated his pleas for more effective laws to ban the poll tax and to protect the right to vote, to strengthen and make permanent the FEPC, to end discrimination in interstate travel by train, bus, and airplane—and he called for a federal law against “the crime of lynching, against which I cannot speak too strongly.” Tom Connally denounced Truman’s message as “a lynching of the Constitution.” The actions of other southern senators, as David McCullough writes, spoke as loudly as their words. Much as he usually enjoyed attending the Democrats’ annual Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Washington, Senator Olin Johnston of South Carolina said he would boycott it this year because Truman would be the guest of honor, and “because, as he explained to reporters, he and his wife might be seated beside a ‘Nigra.’” (He needn’t have worried. The three black Americans among the eleven hundred guests were seated at a table in the rear.) And of course in 1948—as in the previous three years of Truman’s presidency—no civil rights legislation was passed. During the thirty-one years since the passage of the cloture bill “to terminate successful filibustering,” cloture had been invoked nineteen times—and passed four times, the last time in 1927. And none of these cloture petitions had concerned civil rights legislation. The Senate had never—not once—overridden a filibuster on civil rights.

Public contempt for Congress was growing steadily. Journalists discussed the institution in clichés: “The inefficiency of Congress is a national scandal,” Richard Strout wrote. Academics placed its inefficiency in broader context. Yale Professor Wallace Hamilton said that because of congressional ineptitude, “the life of representative government is at stake.” Commentators made jokes about it. “The Senate’s rules provide that the Senate may not perform its duties,” Russell Baker was to say. There was, in a way, a national consensus on the issue. “For generations,”
Fortune
was to say, “Americans swore that there was no better government in the world or in history…. Is it the truth? It no longer is. Now [there is] a situation that admits of no national complacency: the legislative machinery, which is the heart of democracy, is breaking down.” Even many congressmen agreed; as one said, “The people think we are a bunch of clowns.” And in particular the Senate, whose incompetence had been thrown into dramatically sharp relief by the flames of Pearl Harbor, and, since the war, by its use of the colorful filibuster, was viewed—with anger—as the principal
obstruction to America’s majority will. As Russell Baker was to write, “For years the House diligently passed comprehensive civil rights legislation and the Southern minority in the Senate just as regularly killed it.” The Senate had been an object of ridicule for almost a century; “never,” one of its historians was to write, had Americans been “more critical of the United States Senate than in the years which followed World War II.” “I’ve never seen such chaos,” Alben Barkley said.

In 1948, President Truman ran against the “Do-Nothing Eightieth Congress”—how deep a chord he hit when on his come-from-behind cross-country whistlestop tour he said it was “run by a bunch of old mossbacks still living back in the 1890s” was demonstrated by the election results (and by the roars of approval when he told audiences, “After a new Congress is chosen, maybe we’ll get one that will work in the interests of the people and not the interests of the men who have all the money”). When, before the election, in a political masterstroke, he called Congress into special session, demanding that it pass some of the legislation he had advocated (and that the Republican platform had advocated, too), GOP national campaign manager Herbert Brownell told congressional Republicans that it might be a good idea to make at least a gesture at passing some of that legislation, particularly some relating to civil rights, since the black vote was becoming an important factor in presidential elections.

But when Truman entered the House to deliver his speech opening the special session, some senators and representatives did not even rise from their seats. “No, we’re not going to give that fellow anything,” Senator Taft said. What did the Senate care about public opinion? Its opinion about majority rule had boiled over repeatedly during the Truman Administration, an opinion held not only by Senate demagogues like Bilbo (who had taken the floor to say that “a mob is a majority; without the filibuster the minority would be at the mercy of the majority”) but by Senate grandees like Tydings, who, asked on the Senate floor whether democracy was not “predicated on the rule of majority,” replied, shouting in anger: “The rule of the majority. The rule of votes. Majority to Hades! The rule of the majority! The rule that has brought more bloodshed and turmoil and cruelty on this earth than any other thing I know of!” Liberals, and, most infuriatingly, that liberal Washington press corps, might criticize the filibuster, but the southern senators worshiped it: it was their defense against that despised majority. Any threat to the filibuster they regarded as a threat to the rights of man. To a request to impose cloture, the stately Walter George solemnly intoned: “We are called upon to go Nazi.” “It was cloture that crucified Christ on the cross,” Tydings cried.