by Risen, Clay
The year ended with no real public sense of when the bill would finally get moving. But privately, Clarence Brown had been slowly increasing pressure on Smith to act. Brown, like McCulloch and Halleck, was an unlikely civil rights champion. He was an acolyte of the isolationist, archconservative Ohio senator Robert Taft, and he tended to work closely with Smith to stymie liberal legislation that came through the Rules Committee. Like McCulloch, he was born in rural Ohio, and worked there until entering politics. And like McCulloch, as a young boy he had drunk deeply from the Midwestern abolitionist tradition; born less than thirty years after the end of the Civil War, it is likely that he knew more than a few proud Ohio veterans and antislavery activists. Brown’s district was also home to a segment of the Underground Railroad, and later to Wilberforce University and Central State University, both historically black institutions. Finally, again like McCulloch, Brown spent time as a young man in the South—in his case, as a college student at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. The town and the university were steeped in Southern history: Robert E. Lee had been president of the institution after the Civil War; across a broad parade ground stood the Virginia Military Institute, where many Confederate Army leaders had studied or taught, including its most famous professor, Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. There can be little doubt that Brown saw Jim Crow racism up close, and like McCulloch was marked by it for life.32
As soon as the bill cleared the Judiciary Committee, Brown told Smith that he expected the Rules Committee to take it up in a timely manner. At first, Smith was diffident, though he knew well that without Brown and the conservative Republican committee members he controlled, he could not hold off consideration forever. Brown, in turn, was getting pressure from Halleck and McCulloch. On December 4, five days before Celler introduced the petition, Brown met with Smith and told him that “the heat was getting so great”—and he made clear that with the committee’s non-Southern Democrats lined up in favor of the bill, it would take just two or three Republicans to form a pro-bill majority that would, under the House rules, be able to force Smith to move the bill forward. “I don’t want to run over you, but . . .” Brown told the chairman.33
In fact, underneath the partisan contretemps, Brown, Halleck, and McCulloch were working closely with John McCormack and Albert on a bipartisan plan to rescue the bill from Smith. Without informing Johnson, the Democrats agreed not to push the discharge petition too strongly, and it is telling that the signature of neither Democrat ever appeared on the sheet. In exchange, Brown said he would give Smith until the beginning of the next session of Congress to open hearings, and if he still refused, Brown and his fellow Rules Committee Republicans would join the liberals in a coup against the chairman to send the bill to the floor. Johnson must have eventually signed on to the deal, because, as Robert Loevy, a political scientist who was serving a Senate fellowship in the office of California’s Thomas Kuchel that year, observed, White House pressure for a discharge petition petered out by the end of the year.34
But if the pressure in Washington was waning, a new, unprecedented source of pressure was waxing, far from the capital. In South Bend, Des Moines, Bismarck, and countless other Midwestern cities and towns, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish religious leaders were organizing their own campaigns for progress on the bill. The National Council of Churches, under J. Irwin Miller, led the way. Since the council’s September conference in Lincoln, Nebraska, hundreds and then thousands of civil-rights-minded church people had canvassed the region, delivering sermons, leading letter-writing campaigns, visiting congressmen, and organizing rallies, all in places where the sight of black skin was a rare occurrence and civil rights was a faraway concern. Much of the organizing was done by Victor Reuther, Walter Reuther’s brother, who worked for the UAW as well as the NCC’s Commission on Religion and Race. Reuther was a union man through and through, but he also understood that unions had little influence in the Republican Midwest—and yet that was where the survival of the bill might well be decided. Reuther organized the Lincoln conference, and in October he created a program in which teams of activists went from town to town drumming up support behind the bill, “like circuit-riding Methodist evangelists,” in the words of historian James F. Findlay.35
As the year came to an end, the campaigns became increasingly sophisticated, leveraging the broad intelligence network provided by the LCCR’s constituent organizations. Lists of congressmen with their religious affiliations and even home churches and synagogues circulated widely. The NCC maintained an extensive reporting system, so that any time a member had contact with a representative or senator, the information gleaned—would he back the discharge petition, would he vote for the bill—could be analyzed and used to fine-tune lobbying efforts. A half dozen religious groups, from the Friends Committee for National Legislation—the lobbying arm of the Quakers—to B’nai B’rith, sent regular newsletters with detailed, updated information for letter writers and rally participants. One particular tactic worked wonders: as soon as a representative boarded a plane at National Airport in Washington to go back home, word would go out—oftentimes from a sympathetic member of the representative’s own staff—to his minister or priest, who would then just happen to be at the airport when the representative landed. The minister would strike up a conversation, and quickly hit on the pressing matter of civil rights. Miller had his own spin on that tactic: whenever he was leaving Washington on his private plane, he would offer a few Midwestern Republicans a flight home—and then lobby them relentlessly, twenty thousand feet in the air.36
Of particular effectiveness was James Hamilton’s contact list of five thousand influential, activist church figures across the Midwest. He regularly sent them detailed updates about the bill’s progress; he also sent “immediate action memos” to a smaller group of ministers when he needed, say, a flurry of phone calls to a key representative just before a big vote.37
In the end, the church pressure worked where unions and civil rights groups—and Democratic presidents—could not. Republican representatives returned from their Christmas vacations complaining of the near-constant visits, letters, and phone calls from their ministers and fellow congregants urging them to support the bill. Nor could they ignore two pressing facts: nearly two thirds of all Americans supported the bill, and nearly four out of five approved of the job President Johnson was doing. The case for obstructing civil rights legislation had never been thinner, and the case for getting it out of the Rules Committee—if not voting for it—had never been stronger.38
As early as December 5, the day after Brown had first confronted Judge Smith over the bill, Smith had said in a formal statement that while he thought the bill was a monstrosity, “I realize the great national interest that has been aroused on both sides of this controversy and it is my intent, with the approval of the majority of the Rules Committee, to hold hearings on this bill reasonably soon in January.”39
Two weeks later, he went even further, virtually conceding defeat. “I know something about the facts of life around here,” he said, “and I know that many members want this bill considered. They could take it away from me, and they can do it any minute they want to.” Smith was not giving up, but he was recognizing reality: in the present political environment, he could slow the bill for a few weeks, but there was nothing he could do to stop it. As he told Robert Kimball in January, “You’ll have to run over us; we know that, and we know we’ll be run over.”40
On the morning of January 9, 1964, Chairman Smith gaveled to order the Rules Committee hearings on the civil rights bill. It was a cold yet humid morning—a particularly enervating climatic combination that Washington seems to excel in—and some fifty reporters, along with assorted onlookers and scores of House staff, crammed sweatily into the forty-five-seat Room H-313. The room was at the northern end of the Cannon House Office Building, a stunning neoclassical pile designed by Carrère and Hastings, the same firm that built the New York Public Library. Out its windows
, behind Smith, the audience could see the equally imposing Library of Congress.41
The room felt like a sauna, but the real heat was on Smith: the night before, Johnson, in his first State of the Union address, had reiterated his call for rapid action on the bill. “Let this session of Congress be known as the session which did more for civil rights than the last hundred sessions combined,” the president had said at the very beginning of the speech.42
And yet Smith was not going to let the bill roll through his committee. He had opened the hearings as promised, but he did not say how long he would go before closing them. This was the man who had retreated to his 170-acre northern Virginia farm to delay hearings on the 1957 civil rights bill. He claimed a barn had caught fire, prompting Speaker Sam Rayburn to quip, “I knew Howard Smith would do most anything to block a civil rights bill, but I never knew would resort to arson.” If anyone expected the bill to now sail through the Rules Committee, they did not know Howard Smith.43
Smith called Celler as his first witness. “Mr. Celler,” he said, “there is a rumor around that you want to get a rule of H.R. 7152.”44
“I confirm the rumor,” Celler replied.
Smith, along with Brown, proceeded to grill Celler relentlessly for two days. It was not the Brooklynite’s finest hour. He offered vague, contradictory answers to questions about arcane but important details of the bill. He denied, against all evidence, supporting the parts of the subcommittee bill “which I felt were too drastic,” adding, “I personally did not agree to all terms of the subcommittee bill.” At one point Katherine St. George, a Republican from New York, leaned over to Smith and said, “You’ve got him pretty well tangled up.”
“I didn’t tangle him up,” Smith replied. “He tangled himself up. He just doesn’t know what’s in this bill.”45
Celler’s efforts at sympathy for the South came off as patronizing and careless. “I am not unaware of the price that must be paid for the advancement and the culmination of the cause of civil rights,” he said. “It is easy for myself and other Northerners to demand that some change their mores, their customs, wrench away from tradition, but it is like asking one to sever hand from wrist. I wish, truly, it could be otherwise, but unfortunately it cannot. The die is cast.”46
Most of Smith’s and Brown’s questions focused on the bill’s last few days before Celler’s committee. When pushed to explain why he and the Justice Department only sent copies of their final, compromise bill to their allies on the committee the night before the vote, Celler replied with mock amazement—there was no need to do so earlier, since the final version, he said, was substantively the same as the subcommittee draft. “The bill that was reported by the subcommittee practically contained every single subject that is in the bill before you now,” he said, “so that if anyone says they had not seen that bill or its terms or its phrases, it is beyond my comprehension how they could say that.”
Smith refused to let Celler’s audacious historical revisionism stand. “I am astonished if the parliamentarian told you that you could railroad a bill through without giving members the opportunity to discuss it,” he said.
Celler feigned offense. “That is a rather unusual word and sort of taboo—‘railroad’—we do not railroad anything through.”
“Would you prefer strong-arm?” Smith replied.47
Later Smith hit Celler with a surprise punch. “I have just received a letter this morning, which I was going to bring to your attention later, from the National Women’s Party,” he said. “They want to know why you did not include sex in this bill. Why did you not?”
Before Celler could respond, St. George chortled, “If I may be facetious, is that’’—sex, that is—‘‘another dim memory, Mr. Celler?”48
But Celler, who was never one to pass up a chance at shtick, played along. “It reminds me of the Frenchman who was going up the Empire State Building in New York. Somebody said, ‘How do you like it?’ He said, ‘Well it reminds me of sex.’ ‘Reminds you of sex? Why is that?’ The answer was, ‘Everything reminds me of sex.’”
Smith was in no mood to play along. Despite his segregationist beliefs, he was also a longtime advocate for women’s rights. He had sponsored repeated efforts to pass an Equal Rights Amendment, and he was a close friend of Alice Paul, the founder of the National Women’s Party (NWP). “You did not answer my question,” he told Celler.
“This is a civil rights bill,” Celler said.
“Don’t women have civil rights?”
“They have lots of them. They are supermen.”
Smith pushed harder. “I have not found out yet why you did not put sex in.”
“Do you want to put it in, Mr. Chairman?” Celler replied.
“I think I will offer an amendment. The National Women’s Party were serious about it.”
After Celler came McCulloch. Smith tried to pin him down on the bill’s final few hours, to admit that it had, indeed, been railroaded. How had he managed to read the bill so quickly? Smith asked. “Because of my receding red hair,” McCulloch joked. But he was just parrying; he had no intention of selling out Celler. “Really, I said so much about every item on this bill for months and months, more time for explanation would have been unnecessary.” McCulloch’s performance over the next day and a half was everything Celler’s was not: serious, clear, impassioned, witty when necessary but always tacking back to the heart of the bill. “My interest in civil rights legislation is to give a governmental urge and help to a thing that is necessary if we are not indefinitely to have two classes in this country.”49
McCulloch could hardly imagine it, he said, “if, by reason of my red hair, my darling daughter could not go to the municipal swimming pool in my town if she wanted to. I have great feelings, strong feelings, against any system which would prohibit my son from playing softball, basketball, or skiing in the public park which is financed by me as a negro.”
Of all the obvious divisions between the supporters and opponents of the bill—race, region, religion—none was as stark as the mark of empathy. Men as different as McCulloch and Celler, who disagreed on almost everything else, still managed to come together behind government action on civil rights because they had the moral imagination to see themselves in the place of a black American. Those who did not have that capacity, or refused to exercise it, managed to utter such inanities as “If I were cutting corns, I would want to know whose feet I would have to be monkeying around with. I would want to know whether they smelled good or bad”—as Mississippi representative William Colmer said during the hearing.50
With Celler and McCulloch out of the way, Smith turned to the hearing’s main event: more than a week of testimony from Southern Democratic representatives lambasting the bill, the Judiciary Committee, the Kennedy administration, and the civil rights movement itself. The speeches were mostly rehashes of the Southern Democrats’ arguments from the summer—the 1883 Civil Rights Cases prevented the use of the Equal Protection Clause to bar discrimination; the states had the right to run their own elections—along with new attacks on the FEPC. They seemed to compete over who could draw the most grandiose, frightening caricatures of the bill. Representative William Tuck of Virginia claimed that “the right of homeowners to freely build, occupy, rent, lease, or sell their homes is destroyed under Title VI.” (He also said, “We have lived in peace and harmony between the races for a period of more than 300 years, more than any other place in the Western hemisphere.”) Not to be outdone, Alabama’s George Huddleston Jr. said, “If this is a watered down version of the subcommittee’s civil rights bill, as the chairman of the full committee has said, the water was saturated with hemlock.” But the best line of the hearing was uttered by John Dowdy of Texas. Attacking the speed and support with which the bill had moved through the full Judiciary Committee, he said, “If you ran a skunk across the floor and had ‘civil rights’ written on the side of it, it would be the thing to vote for because it is called civil rights.”51
While the Ru
les Committee prattled, Lyndon Johnson was doing his best to clear a path for the bill once it left the House. His first task was to get the tax cut bill out of the Senate Finance Committee, where it had been stalled by its chairman, Harry Byrd of Virginia. Byrd was a segregationist and enemy of the bill, but he was also a budget hawk. He held up the tax bill in part to derail the civil rights bill, but also to win spending concessions from the president. On December 4, Byrd had told Johnson that he would release the tax cut bill if the White House could trim its upcoming budget to $100 billion. Johnson then spent the next several weeks driving his advisers and budget experts to trim spending wherever they could.52
Johnson’s efforts on the tax cut were not solely to benefit the civil rights bill. He needed to prove he could carry on Kennedy’s legislative torch, he needed a quick win in Congress to solidify his political capital, and he believed, as Kennedy did, that the cut really would provide a shot in the arm to the economy. But all those things, including the tax cut—and even, in some ways, the civil rights bill itself—were but a prelude to Johnson’s real goal: a massive antipoverty program. Hints of that vision began to dribble out around the first of the new year; even as Johnson was promising Byrd that government efficiency was of paramount importance, he was telling George Meany and Walter Reuther that the budget savings would go to new and enlarged social programs.
