The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act (33 page)

Still, beginning in the 1930s, the ideological differences between the national and Southern Democrats began to manifest themselves politically. Though Franklin Roosevelt largely agreed to the Southerners’ demand that blacks be excluded from most New Deal programs, he also worked to isolate the South where he could—for instance, by backing a motion at the 1936 Democratic National Convention to rescind a rule that a candidate, in order to secure the presidential nomination, had to win two thirds of the delegates, which gave the Southern bloc veto power. He and his successor, Harry S. Truman, also pushed to expand opportunities for blacks and wear away at federal support for segregation; however insufficient Roosevelt’s Fair Employment Practices Commission was, it and other, similar steps were symbolic acts that left little doubt in Southerners’ minds about where the Democratic Party was headed.

At the same time, enterprising white Republicans began to make inroads in the South. Until the 1950s, the Southern GOP was microscopic. In most places it consisted of a post office box and a few part-time loyalists; in other places it was mostly a black-run affair, whose leaders worked mostly for the patronage that would trickle down to them from national Republicans when their party was in power. But after the war, the Southern economy—goosed by the influx of defense money plants and military bases—began to boom, and with it the demand for a pro-business political party. With that influx of business came new ideas, and new people, migrants from other parts of the country who did not feel a blind compulsion to vote for the Democrats. In 1957, Meade Alcorn, the Republican National Committee chairman, announced that Lee Potter, an Arlington, Virginia, party operative, would lead “Operation Dixie,” an effort to make “substantial Republican gains in Congressional, state, and local elections throughout the South” over the next decade.
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Some pro-civil-rights Republicans saw this as a positive development; going back to Abraham Lincoln, there was a strand of the party that believed in a “Silent South” that supported civil rights and other Republican values but was cowed into submission by Democratic oppressors. Given the opportunity to express themselves, the thinking went, they would go Republican. But whether or not those voters existed (and they probably did not, at least in the numbers that liberal Republicans hoped), party strategists made the cynical decision to run to the right on race, pitching a pro-segregation, pro-business platform that rapidly won over the region’s booming capitalist class.

The turn to the far right caused no end of hand-wringing in certain corners of the party. “The argument that civil rights as a Republican cause must be abandoned or watered down is both immoral, and, in light of the party’s condition nationally, extremely foolish,” wrote the editors of
Advance
magazine, a liberal Republican journal, in 1962. But the results spoke for themselves. By 1962 the Republicans were not only running viable candidates in statewide elections but turning in respectable, if not winning, results. Lister Hill, the Alabama Democrat, nearly lost to a race-baiting Republican that year, while W. D. Workman Jr. won a respectable 42.8 percent against Olin Johnston in the South Carolina Senate race. And in Texas, John Tower became the first Republican to win a Senate seat in the state since Reconstruction.
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These results terrified the Southern solons who had spent their careers in command of the political process. The Solid Democratic South, they feared, was rapidly disappearing—not because the civil rights revolution was demolishing their raison d’être (though it certainly was), but because the Republicans were able to vocalize a new, subtler, and more palatable but no less strident racial message, one that rejected overt appeals to racism in favor of code words in the language of anti-Washington and pro-big-business.

By the time the civil rights bill arrived on Capitol Hill, Southern Democrats faced three choices: they could ditch their party for the Republicans; move to the left and hope to ride the wave of an expanding, post–Jim Crow black electorate; or double down on segregation and white supremacy, hoping to save their own careers if not their party. All these tendencies existed in the Senate in early 1964, and it is telling that when the civil rights bill came over to the Senate in February, the Southern Democrats threw everything they had behind the last option, making it clear from the first day that they would filibuster until either they or the bill died. White supremacy and Jim Crow were more than ways of life for these men; they were ideologies, and like old Soviets who held on to Stalin long after the Berlin Wall fell, most Southern Democrats simply could not conceive of a world where whites and blacks did not live in carefully circumscribed, master-and-servant relationships.

That is not to say that there was complete cohesion among the Southerners. While some, like Strom Thurmond and Sam Ervin, were willing to go all out to fight the bill, others, particularly younger, more worldly members like George Smathers, Al Gore Sr., and William Fulbright, were less determined and even considered possible crossover votes for the bill. None of them ultimately did cross over, but they helped in less overt ways: voting for or against key amendments (or not at all), supporting quorum calls, and providing back-channel intelligence. Among other things, Fulbright provided valuable information about Southern planning sessions to the White House through one of his aides, John Yingling.
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Holding these differing factions together was the unofficial chairman of the Southern Democrats, Georgia senator Richard Brevard Russell. Since 1948 the wiry, nasal-voiced patrician had led his troops time after time against civil rights bills. Under his rule, the Southerners had filibustered all but one of the civil rights bills that reached the Senate floor, and that was only because that bill, the 1957 civil rights act, had already been gutted by his acolyte, the then majority leader Lyndon Johnson (technically, even that bill had been filibustered, though only by a single senator, Thurmond, who spoke for eighteen hours against it). All but one Southern filibuster had resulted in the targeted bill’s defeat, and again, that bill, the 1960 civil rights act, squeaked through thanks to Johnson’s willingness to negotiate away all but a few meaningless titles.

And yet by the early 1960s, Russell was coasting on reputation; he was considered an anachronism by many in the Senate, and even among the Southern Democrats. On January 23, 1964, the country approved the Twenty-Fourth Amendment, banning poll taxes, a step Russell called “an embarrassment to me.” Unruffled, one Georgia state senator who supported the amendment said that despite whatever sway Senator Russell might have held in the past, the people of Georgia “are now going forward with a little different beat of the drum.”
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Yet if Russell was an anachronism, he also recognized that the days of the old racial order were numbered. He simply wanted it to change at his own glacial pace. “I believe the Negro has been imposed upon,” he told
Newsweek
in August 1963. “He has been subjected to indignities. But we shouldn’t upset the whole scheme of constitutional government and expect people to swallow laws governing their most intimate social relations. The tempo of change is the crux of the whole matter. Any realist knows that the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine is finished.”
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Russell had long been torn by two competing desires—to integrate the South into the American mainstream, but also to protect traditional Southern society, particularly its racial hierarchies. Now, suddenly, the region was slipping quickly toward his first goal but away from his second, and he did not know how to respond. At times he seemed ready to give up completely; in October 1963 he wrote on a desk pad, “As of today am completely disassociated from any leadership responsibility of our group . . . too many hearts are not in it who have same priority.” As Johnson’s close aide George Reedy reflected, “I think Russell realized that a civil rights bill was inevitable, and I think that he also thought it was better to get the thing over with.”
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But as the debate on the bill neared, Russell showed no sign of giving up. “I shall oppose this misnamed civil rights proposal with all the power at my command,” he wrote to a constituent in early December 1963. “I must say, however, that we are terribly handicapped in our opposition. The two major parties have been combined in bidding for the minority bloc vote to such an extent that they disregard states’ rights and the opinion of Southern white people amounted to nothing in their sight.” When asked whether he would compromise, he said there was as much a chance of his laying down his opposition as Stone Mountain, a rocky outcropping east of Atlanta held sacred by Confederate sympathizers, moving to Dalton, Georgia, a hundred miles north.
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And so, as the bill neared passage in the House, Russell pressed forward with his planned filibuster. The idea behind the maneuver is simple, deriving from the seemingly virtuous notion that the Senate is a deliberative body, which considers all aspects of a piece of legislation before approving it. Unlike in the House, debate on the Senate floor is unlimited, brought to an end only when at least two thirds (now three fifths) of the senators agree to end discussion and bring the bill to a vote, a step called “cloture.” To prevent cloture, the Southerners needed to organize just thirty-four senators in opposition. There were not enough of them to do that alone, but in the past they had drawn the balance from conservative Republicans as well as small-state senators, who saw the filibuster as a critical tool in protecting their diminutive constituencies from the political power of larger states. Russell’s hope—a Hail Mary pass, really—was that he could keep this coalition together through the middle of 1964, when, he predicted, renewed black protests and the ensuing violence would turn white America against the bill.

Russell organized his 21 men—19 Southern Democrats plus Tower and West Virginia senator Robert Byrd, who was not technically a Southerner but sided with the Southern faction in opposing civil rights legislation—into three platoons, led by Hill, Louisiana’s Allen Ellender, and Mississippi’s John Stennis. Each platoon was responsible for keeping the debate going for a day; the other two days they rested. Rest was important: youngsters like Fulbright (fifty-eight years old) and Gore (fifty-six) aside, the Southern Democrats were significantly older than the Senate average, and some, like the seventy-six-year-old Willis Robertson of Virginia, were so feeble they could speak for only a half hour at a time before growing winded. Still, like the Confederacy during the Civil War, they did not have to defeat their opponents outright; they just needed to draw out the fight long enough that the other side gave up.
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None of this was a secret to the bill’s supporters, led by Hubert Humphrey and his Republican comrade, California’s Thomas Kuchel. They were devising their own strategies in response. The first order of business was to decide whether they would try to out-talk the Southerners, grinding them down until they stopped talking and simply conceded the debate was over, or whether they would try to shut off debate by rounding up the sixty-seven votes needed for cloture. Most senators and their staffs supported the second option; there was simply no telling how long the Southerners could hold out, and the longer they waited, the more the country might turn against the bill.

That, at least, was the view inside the Capitol. Those outside, like Mitchell, Rauh, and the other civil rights lobbyists, saw things differently: to them, the bigger risk was in the compromises that might be made to win over conservative Republicans—and in particular Everett Dirksen, the Senate minority leader. They had reason to be skeptical: since 1950, no cloture vote on civil rights had ever won even a simple majority of the senators present and voting, let alone two thirds.
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For all involved—the Southern Democrats, the pro-civil-rights faction, and the movement activists—the variable that would determine whether they got their way was the man who succeeded Johnson as Senate majority leader, Mike Mansfield. How far would Mansfield push the bill? The problem was, no one except Mansfield himself knew the answer.

Mansfield was in every way the opposite of his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson: quiet and mannerly where Johnson had been loud and often willfully rude, a stickler for rules and scrupulous honesty where Johnson had been willing to do just about anything in the name of a favored piece of legislation. “These fellows are about as similar as Winston Churchill and St. Francis of Assisi,” a colleague told
Time
magazine. Johnson liked to spit and curse; Mansfield puffed serenely on his pipe, packed with his favorite Sir Walter Raleigh tobacco. Johnson had cobbled together a scattered empire of office space around the Capitol; after taking over in 1961, Mansfield relinquished much of it. His treatment of Johnson’s favorite room, S-211, located just off the chamber floor, must have grated on Johnson the most: it was designed as the Senate library and decorated with ceiling frescoes by the artist Constantino Brumidi, but Johnson had given it a gaudy new paint job and hung fluorescent lights that obscured the art hidden above. Reporters took to calling it the Taj Mahal. When Johnson left, he made a bid to keep it as a base for when he sat as president of the Senate, but Mansfield denied the request. He then had Johnson’s lights and other latter-day interventions removed and left the room empty, taking a much smaller office across the hall instead.
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Mansfield ran the Senate in much the same way: hands off, minimalist, letting senators go their own way—he called himself the “servant not the suzerain of the Senate,” a new tack that most of his colleagues loved, except when it produced fits of anarchy in the chamber. He was quiet to the point of exasperation; TV interviewers said they had to prepare twice as many questions for him as usual, knowing his answers would be terse. And yet Mansfield was greatly admired among his colleagues, particularly the Southerners, for his respect for Senate tradition—something they no doubt thought they could abuse when necessary.
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