Master of the Senate (74 page)

Elected Democratic Leader in 1925, Robinson was Minority Leader until 1933, when the Roosevelt landslide made him Majority Leader, and he ran his party with a firm hand, dividing up Senate patronage, appointing as Senate employees men loyal to him, disciplining rebellious senators. But he ran it on behalf of the President—no matter who the President happened to be. During the first ten years of his leadership, it was Coolidge and Hoover, and Robinson supported, and had Senate Democrats support, many Republican policies.
*

Robinson’s leadership of the Senate coincided, moreover, with one of the most distressing periods of Senate impotence. During the Depression years of 1930, 1931 and 1932, Democrats held a
de facto
majority in the Senate, but when Wagner, La Follette, and Norris proposed measures, many of them backed by a majority of their party, to alleviate America’s pain, Robinson stood not with them but with President Hoover. In 1931, for example, his party, together with progressive Republicans and independents, favored a massive drought relief program for America’s desperate farmers—and, at first, so did Robinson, himself the son of an impoverished farm family. But when Hoover insisted on a more modest program—a program so meagre as to be all but useless—Robinson abruptly switched to the President’s side, calling the liberal proposal “a socialistic dole,” in an abject surrender that a fellow southern Democrat, Alben Barkley, called “the most humiliating spectacle that could be brought about in an intelligent legislative body.” In 1932, with America still begging for congressional leadership, Robinson said, “I know there is great unhappiness and dissatisfaction, but I do not think any legislation can secure correction.” “He has given more aid to Herbert Hoover than any other Democrat,” Al Smith declared. It was only after the President was Franklin Roosevelt that corrective legislation began to pass.

During the Hundred Days, journalists glorified Robinson for the speed with which he rushed bills through; the humorist Will Rogers said that “Congress doesn’t pass legislation any more; they just wave at the bills as they go by.” The bills going by, however, were not Robinson’s but Roosevelt’s, and increasingly they were bills for which Robinson, at heart a typical southern conservative, had a deep distaste.

When he tried to explain his doubts to Roosevelt, however, the President—“not interested,” as the author Donald C. Bacon writes, “in Robinson’s views on matters of policy”—barely listened. FDR expected him simply to follow orders, and Robinson followed orders, continuing to push the President’s program—in part because “his loyalty to presidents … had always been strong,” in part, perhaps, because this President kept dangling before him the Supreme Court appointment that was his heart’s desire. “Joe’s job is to keep the Senate pleasingly obedient” to the “commands” of “his beneficent master,” Alsop and Catledge wrote in 1936. And although the next year Robinson began to show signs of a new independence, that was the year he had his fatal heart attack as he was fighting for the Supreme Court-packing bill Roosevelt hadn’t even bothered to tell him about in advance. Even this Senate Leader of whom it has been written that “He did more than any predecessor to define the potential of party leadership” defined it primarily in terms of the program of the Executive Branch; “forceful” and “effective” though he may have been, he was forceful and effective only when he was doing the President’s bidding and was backed by a President’s power. In creating and developing public policy, his role was, in fact, less than minor, since the legislation he advanced was, on balance, legislation of which he deeply disapproved. And the extent to which his power was based on presidential backing was demonstrated when he tried to exert authority on internal Senate matters about which the Administration had no interest—then his vaunted authority seemed strangely diminished; Huey Long “drove Joe nearly mad,” Alsop and Catledge wrote. “He was outskirmished by Huey again and again in guerrilla warfare on the floor.” It was partly Robinson’s fear of having another Huey Long on his hands that led him to capitulate to the freshman Richard Russell’s demand about a committee assignment. With the single exception of Robinson, at the time Lyndon Johnson came to the Senate in 1949, the great names of the Senate—not only the great names before the formal post of Leader was created (Clay, Calhoun, Webster, Benton, Sumner) but the great names after the post was created (La Follette, Norris, Borah, Byrnes, Vandenberg, Taft)—had not been Leaders, which may have been why they were great names. And even Robinson’s performance in many ways confirmed that a Leader possessed power largely to the extent that he was an agent of the White House; if the vividness of his performance covered up that bleak reality, reality it was nonetheless.

W
ITH THE PASSAGE OF YEARS
, in addition to “priority of recognition,” a few other prerogatives had accreted, through custom rather than formal rules, around the majority leadership: by 1949, it had, for example, become the custom for the Leader to be the only senator who made the motions that called bills off the Calendar (the list of bills eligible for consideration by the Senate) to the Senate floor, where they could be debated and voted on—a custom which
in theory allowed him to determine the order of business and thus the priority in which bills were considered. If there was any moment at which the Majority Leader appeared to be truly directing the Senate’s business, it was during this “Call of the Calendar,” when, standing at the Leader’s front-row center desk, he made the motions that called bills to the floor.

The realities of Senate power, however, robbed these prerogatives of most of their significance. The Majority Leader’s control over the Calendar, for example, was exercised only as an agent of his party’s Policy Committee; that committee determined the schedule by which bills were considered on the floor, and told the Leader which bills to call off. And since that committee included some of the party’s most powerful senators, a Leader was exercising that control only as one, and not the controlling, member of that committee. And while a Majority Leader might be able to call a bill off the Calendar, he could not put it
on
the Calendar: in the case of virtually all significant bills, that power, like so many other real powers in the Senate, belonged to its fifteen Standing Committees; a bill could go on the Calendar only after a committee voted to report it out. And over those committees a Leader had no authority at all. He had no control over their membership, determined as it was by seniority and by his party’s Committee on Committees (called by the Democrats their “Steering Committee”), of which he was a member (on the Democratic side, the chairman) but on which the southerners and their allies had a majority, so that it was they or
their
Leader (“You had to see Russell on committee assignments”) who determined those assignments. (The party Leader’s inability to reward or punish senators by making or withholding assignments also meant that he had no authority in an area vital to senators.) The Leader could not set the agenda of a Standing Commitee, or intervene in any way with the committee’s workings; that was the province of its chairman, who was chosen by seniority, and only by seniority, not by a Leader. A Leader couldn’t make a chairman put a piece of proposed legislation on the committee’s agenda for hearings, and couldn’t make him have the committee vote on the bill so it could be reported out to the Calendar, which meant that the Leader did not in fact control what legislation came to the floor. And, as William S. White was to say, “woe to any Majority Leader who goes to [a chairman] to ‘demand’ anything at all. This is simply not done in the Senate.” On the rare—very rare—occasions on which it
was
done, the affronted chairman could count in his resistance to the demand on the support of the other fourteen chairmen, wary of the establishment of a precedent that might one day be used against
their
power in
their
committees. In 1949, the chairmen were as baronial as ever, secure in their committee strongholds; the Majority Leader was only a first among equals—and, often, not even all that first. The so-called Senate Leader was an official not of the Senate but only of his party, and even within that party he had little power to lead.

This situation was particularly frustrating for a
Democratic
Senate
Leader. The Democratic Party was, in the public mind, the more liberal of the two parties, and the Democratic presidents—Roosevelt and Truman—who had held the presidency since 1933 had sent to the Senate, year after year, liberal legislation. Since the Democrats were the majority in the Senate for all but four of those years, and since there was a large Democratic liberal bloc there (in 1949, no fewer than nineteen or twenty Democratic senators bore a liberal label), and since this bloc was very vocal, with eloquent speakers who continually demanded the passage of that liberal legislation, the public and the press expected the Democratic Leader not only to fight for, but to achieve its passage.

The Senate Democrats were divided by a seemingly unbridgeable chasm, however, and the power in the Senate—virtually all the power—was not on the liberal side of that chasm. The committee chairmen who held that power were almost all southern and/or conservative. A Democratic Leader trying to pass Administration legislation found himself trapped on the wrong side of an angrily divided party. And the situation was similar in the Senate GOP, even if less acute because the Republicans, being in the minority, were not
expected
to get legislation passed. Both parties were dominated by their conservative elders; it was they, not the Majority and Minority Leaders, who held senatorial power.

A Senate “Leader” had little power to lead even on the Senate floor. Because of the tradition of unlimited debate, even after he had brought a bill to the floor, any one of his ninety-five colleagues could halt consideration of the measure merely by talking. Since, as White wrote, “No one may tell any senator how long he may talk, or about what, or when,” a Majority Leader “cannot even control from one hour to the next the order of business on the floor.” Any attempt to do so—to limit the debate in any way—would raise in the minds of southerners and conservatives the spectre of a threat to the sacred. Any Leader contemplating an attempt to break the filibuster that was the tradition’s ultimate expression would know that he would have White’s “eternal majority” firmly against him. And even when there was no filibuster, White noted, “there remains the quicksand of rules that were made for deliberation, and even for obstruction, but never for speed and dispatch. A Senate Leader may wheedle and argue; he may thrash about and twist and turn in his frustration. But he does not successfully give ‘orders’ unless these happen to be welcome to the ostensible ‘followers.’” His “party associates may thumb their senatorial noses at him just about as they please.” The title of “Leader” brought with it no power that would have made the title meaningful; any attempt to truly
lead
the Senate was almost foreordained to end in failure.

W
HICH LED
to another unpleasant aspect of the leadership. Failing to understand the realities of Senate power, press and public thought a “Leader” was a
leader
, and therefore blamed the Leaders—particularly the “Majority
Leader”—for the Senate’s failures. As White wrote: “A large part of the public has come to think that it is only the leaders … who somehow seem to stand, stubbornly and without reason, against that ‘action’ which the White House so often demands.” And heaped atop blame was scorn. Many Washington journalists were liberals, eager for enactment of that liberal legislation which seemed so clearly desired not only by the President but by the bulk of the American people and impatient with the Majority Leaders who, despite the fact that they were leading a
majority
, somehow couldn’t get the legislation passed. Not understanding the institutional realities, the journalists laid the Leaders’ failure to personal inadequacies: incompetence, perhaps, or timidity. This feeling was fed by liberal senators, some of whom seemed to comprehend the intricacies of Senate power little more than the reporters, and who continually assailed the Leaders in speeches and interviews. The journalists mocked the Senate Leaders—in print, so that the job carried with it the potential not merely for failure but for public humiliation on a national scale.

L
YNDON JOHNSON HAD
had a ringside seat as potential became reality. His arrival on Capitol Hill as a young congressman in 1937 had virtually coincided with Robinson’s beleaguered, and disastrous, last stand on the Senate floor, and he had seen what happened to the Majority Leaders who succeeded Robinson: Democrats Alben Barkley of Kentucky and Scott Lucas of Illinois, and Republican Wallace H. White of Maine.

Barkley had been forced on the Senate by Roosevelt, whose arm-twisting had given him the leadership by a single vote over the conservative favorite, Pat Harrison of Mississippi, and the Senate didn’t let him forget it. The southerners routinely embarrassed Barkley on the Senate floor, jeeringly calling him “Dear Alben” in mocking reference to the salutation in Roosevelt’s letters which gave him his marching orders. Hardly had he been elected Leader—leader of the largest majority in the Senate’s history—when he lost on a routine motion to adjourn; attempting the following year to round up Democratic votes to support an Administration tax bill, he managed to marshal exactly four; “a public humiliation for Senator Barkley,” one newspaper called it. Barkley felt (as Kern and Robinson had felt) that his primary responsibility was to pass the Administration’s program; that was why he often simply recited speeches written by the White House. But his first four years as Leader were four years, 1937 to 1941, during which not a single major Administration bill was passed. Some journalists called Harrison “the real leader of the Senate majority,” others said it was Jimmy Byrnes of South Carolina; on one point, however, all observers were agreed: the leader was not the man who held the title of Leader.