The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act

by Risen, Clay

  Then, on January 18, he summoned King, Wilkins, Young, and Farmer—all of whom he had kept in close touch with over the holidays—to the White House for a morning meeting. But instead of discussing the civil rights bill, Johnson unveiled a new project: a “war on poverty,” one that would aim billions in federal dollars at the entire spectrum of the nation’s social ills: money for better schools, money for better housing, money for job training, money for community development. The president “made it very clear that he feels the fight on poverty and illiteracy is a vital part of the fight on discrimination,” said Farmer after the meeting.53

  But Johnson also felt that too much pressure from the outside could derail the bill. On January 21, Johnson called Clarence Mitchell and Joe Rauh to the White House. He told them that he stood by his word from November and would continue to push for the civil rights bill without weakening amendments—but without any strengthening amendments, either. Katzenbach, he explained, had devised a precise but risky strategy that depended on keeping the bill as intact as possible, and changes in either direction would kill it. Surprisingly, Mitchell and Rauh agreed, and they told their LCCR colleagues to hold off pressing for a stronger bill.54

  At the same time, the president renewed his pressure on Halleck to get the bill moving. Newspapers were reporting that even though the hearings had started, the timetable for the bill to reach the floor had slipped from early February to sometime in March. Some two dozen Southern Democrats were still scheduled to testify, and Smith was limiting sessions to just three days a week. And so, on January 18, with the discharge petition stuck at 178 signatures, Johnson called the minority leader into his office. The bill needed to get to the House floor soon, for Halleck’s own sake. “If I were you, Charlie,” he said, “I wouldn’t dare . . . go out and try to make a Lincoln Birthday speech; they’ll laugh you out of the goddamned park when Howard Smith’s got his foot on Lincoln’s neck.” Johnson also reiterated his promise to try to land a science center at Purdue; with Halleck still there in the room he called James Webb, the NASA administrator, to see what could be done.55

  It is unclear whether Johnson’s pressure on Halleck had any effect, or whether it was Brown getting tired of Smith’s antics, but over the next few days rumors began to circulate that Rules Committee Republicans were “increasingly restive,” as the New York Times reported, and were working with Northern Democrats on a plan to take over control of the committee from Smith. At the same time, Speaker McCormack began his own pressure campaign, telling Smith that he wanted the bill out by the end of the month. And, of course, Halleck did not need Johnson to tell him about the importance of getting the bill out of the House before the Lincoln Day holiday, when Republicans traditionally headed home to trumpet their party’s position on civil rights.56

  The legislative agenda was not the only thing on Johnson’s mind; the president was at the same time fighting off a nagging scandal involving Bobby Baker, a former protégé who had been named secretary of the Senate while Johnson was majority leader. Among other things, Johnson had taught him the importance of precise vote counting among senators. After Johnson left for the vice presidency, Baker had held the same position under Mike Mansfield, who followed Baker’s advice closely. But in early October 1963 Baker resigned under a cloud of ethics charges stemming from his involvement with a series of companies that appeared to have benefited from government kickbacks. And while none of the specific accusations related to Baker’s time working for Johnson, the Capitol Hill rumor mill declared the president guilty by association, and his enemies in the Senate began to circle, speculating about investigatory hearings to be held that spring.57

  On January 22, Richard Bolling informed Smith that the end was nigh: if he did not conclude the hearings within a week, a bipartisan group of representatives would take over the committee. The next day, after a closed-door meeting by the panel, Smith announced that he would indeed bring things to a close by January 30. “I’ve been around a long time,” said the eighty-year-old chairman, “and I recognize the facts of life, and one of the facts of life is that this bill is going to the floor, and that it is going soon.” Later that day, he announced the terms and schedule for the House debate, should his committee pass the bill. The House would take up the bill on January 31 and finish by February 11, just in time for the Lincoln Day recess. When he was finished, Clarence Brown congratulated him. “You have done everything, Mr. Chairman, which you have stated you would do.”58

  At noon on January 31, 1964, the Senate chaplain, Bernard Braskamp, opened the House debate on the civil rights bill with a short invocation. “As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men,” he said, quoting from Galatians 6:10. Carl Albert then called quorum, and three short bells pealed through the House offices. As the members trickled in, the elaborate preliminary steps to get the debate going began. First, the House had to pass a resolution accepting the Rules Committee’s guidelines for the debate—in this case, there would be ten hours of debate, with each member limited to five minutes of speech time.59

  Moreover, the bill would be considered by the “Committee of the Whole,” a common procedure whenever the House debates a bill. Though the composition of the House and the Committee of the Whole are the same, the latter operates under different rules: most importantly, there are no recorded votes, and no one in the galleries is allowed to take notes. The procedure originated in medieval England, and was used whenever Parliament wanted to discuss matters away from the king’s purview—which is why, as part of the procedure, the ceremonial mace, a symbol of the executive branch, is removed. That was also why, after Braskamp’s invocation, Speaker McCormack, who had authority over the entire House but not its committees, stepped down from the leadership dais, and Eugene Keogh, a New York Democrat, took his place.60

  By the numbers, the debate seemed like a forgone conclusion: there were only a hundred or so reliable Southern Democratic votes, and as long as the Republican leadership stuck with the bill, they would combine with the unified Northern Democrats to produce an overwhelming affirmative vote. But there were still risks. In a memo to Celler on January 28, Judiciary Committee counsel Foley raised the possibility that the Southern Democrats could try to send the bill back to the Judiciary Committee—or another committee altogether—on procedural grounds. “The opponents of the bill will argue that the bill providing for an FEPC should have been referred to the Committee on Education and Labor, which had already reported a similar proposal.” There were also any number of weakening amendments that opponents could bring up for a vote; all they had to do was wait for a moment when most of the bill’s supporters were off the floor. And since individual votes were unrecorded, the Southern Democrats could also sway wavering supporters—say, people who were voting yes simply because Halleck told them to—to take a swipe at the bill. For such unrecorded, so-called teller votes, all members had to do was mark “yea” or “nay” on a card, then take it to a clerk at the back of the chamber. “It was easy for a congressman to slip into the line supporting a crippling amendment without being held responsible,” recalled Katzenbach. “To keep the bill intact required votes, and that meant people one could count on into the small hours of the morning.”61

  With such risks in mind, Katzenbach and his team girded for battle. First, he had David Filvaroff and his drafting team compile a thick loose-leaf binder of information on the history and legal basis of each title. The “green book,” as it was called, then went out to each friendly representative. At over a hundred pages it was incredibly thorough, and within days requests for copies of the book began arriving from outside groups, not just in Washington but around the country—so many that the department, which understood the benefit of having such a resource spread as widely as possible but was also quickly running out of copies, had to start rationing them. Filvaroff and his staff also took over a coat-closet-size office just off the chamber floor, where they provided technical assistance on the finer points of the bill to membe
rs and their staffs.62

  To keep an eye on the proceedings, Katzenbach also set up a duty roster of Justice Department lawyers to sit in the gallery and watch for anything suspicious. Though House rules prohibited them from taking notes, they could keep track of how many “friendly” members were on the floor; if there were not enough, and a key vote was about to start, they would head for a pay phone and call Katzenbach, who would send his troops out to round up AWOL representatives. And while they were not supposed to communicate with anyone on the floor, they also developed a system of signals with Celler’s Judiciary Committee staff so that Celler could get the department’s approval on whether to order the Democrats to accept a particular amendment.63

  The Justice Department was not the only group watching the proceedings on the floor. Along with the official whip systems run by the two parties’ leadership, the liberal Democratic Study Group set up its own whip network: twenty-one of its members were each assigned five or six friendly representatives to keep track of; if one of their charges went missing during a key vote, they would send a staffer to fetch him. The system was run by Frank Thompson, who, as an added incentive, plied compliant representatives with booze. “Frank Thompson was one of the unsung and unnoticed heroes of the House Democrats,” Katzenbach wrote.64

  At the risk of overkill, the LCCR had yet another whip system of sorts. A small army of college students, organized by a twenty-five-year-old labor activist named Jane O’Grady, set up camp in Thompson’s office; from there “O’Grady’s Raiders” roamed the halls of the House office buildings looking for wayward congressmen. When they found one, they would gently harass him with reminders about how much his vote mattered on civil rights. At least, they thought they were being gentle; after several days House members began to complain to the LCCR leadership, which had set up a command post in a suite at the Congressional Hotel just south of the House buildings, and O’Grady’s raids were scaled back.65

  As the members were working their way through the bill on the floor, lobbying activity by LCCR groups heated up off of it. Busloads of foot soldiers rolled in daily from across the country—church groups from Iowa, union workers from Cleveland, civil rights activists from New York City. When they arrived, they received instructions from the LCCR on whom to visit and how to present themselves. Union members were told to avoid Republicans, while church groups were assigned to rural and Midwestern representatives. They also received helpful tips for navigating Congress: “When in a congressman’s office, get a visitor’s pass, so you can go to house gallery afterward,” noted one helpful sheet from the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, one of the many LCCR affiliates active during the debate.66

  Watching over everything were Rauh and Mitchell of the LCCR, who rarely left their circuit between the House gallery and their headquarters in the Congressional Hotel the entire debate. At one point Representative James A. Haley of Florida referred to the pair as the “vultures” in the gallery who had managed to steamroll the bill through the House. (This was not the first time they had been derisively nicknamed by a Southern Democrat: Senator Harry Byrd had long since taken to calling Mitchell and Rauh the “Gold Dust twins,” after a pair of black children who graced the label of a popular scouring powder from the early twentieth century.)67

  To the surprise of many Northern Democrats, the Southern Democrats were much less organized than they had expected. They held a single, closed-door strategy meeting on January 30, where about sixty of them agreed to focus their attacks on Titles II, VI, and VII—but also to limit their speeches and avoid delaying tactics, because they did not want to turn off wavering members who might otherwise support their crippling amendments. In practice, though, they approached the debate pell-mell, throwing up amendments with no apparent plan of how to get them passed. Their whip system, wrote the New Republic in a postdebate postmortem, “was in total disarray,” with many Southern Democrats skipping the debate entirely. The whole exercise must have seemed beside the point to many, since it was going to pass in any case—and the stronger the bill they sent to the Senate, the easier it would be for their colleagues across the Capitol to filibuster it.68

  From the outset of the debate, the Northern Democrats exerted almost complete control over the proceedings. They faced a barrage of amendments, some of them ridiculous attempts to excise entire titles, but many of them cleverly crafted to whittle back small pieces of the bill in ways that might bring over fence sitters. On February 3, they handily defeated an amendment by Louisiana representative Edwin Willis to remove the three-judge-panel provision from Title I—allowing plaintiffs in voting rights cases to have their cases heard by three judges, selected by a circuit court judge instead of just one assigned by roster—which he claimed encroached on states’ rights, and which some observers feared had a good chance of garnering enough Republican sympathy to pass. The next day—the same day Johnson signed the Twenty-Fourth Amendment, banning poll taxes—the bill’s backers shot down an amendment by Representative Meader to limit the public accommodations law to hotels that served interstate travelers. At one point Lindsay asked Meader how close to interstates a hotel or motel had to be to count. Meader said two and a half miles was fine, but three miles was too far—prompting Morris Udall of Arizona to utter a short poem: “Where the roads turn and twist, civil rights don’t exist, but on Interstate 4, you can’t bar the door.”69

  A few amendments did get through, though even those passed with the consent of the Democratic leadership. In one instance, Representative Willis, a relatively centrist Southern Democrat and a close ally of the White House who, as a member of the Judiciary Committee, had helped moderate some of the most vicious attacks on the bill, asked Celler to give him a vote on a small amendment, something he could take back to his voters to prove his segregationist standings. Helping Willis might not cost much, Celler and Katzenbach figured, and it might help limit Southern intransigence on other bills. And the change Willis requested was a relatively innocuous one: to prevent the Civil Rights Commission from investigating “bona fide” private clubs, leaving them more or less free to discriminate. Since the bill made clear in other titles that such clubs were already off-limits, Celler said yes to Willis’s amendment. From the floor, Celler said, “I am a pragmatist. I believe it proper in order to get this matter expedited and get this bill passed and sent to the Senate, I would accept it and concur in the gentleman’s wishes.” Ben Zelenko, one of his counsels on the Judiciary Committee, was on the House floor with him, and Zelenko said he “almost quit on the spot.” He went up to the gallery to find Burke Marshall, to see if the Department of Justice would intervene. Marshall, though, dismissed him with a dose of Solomonic wisdom. “We have to give away things,” he said. “After all, we have to deal with the Southerners tomorrow.”70

  There were a few moments where the civil rights forces lost control of the proceedings. On February 7, Representative Oren Harris of Arkansas offered an amendment to cut back Title VI by removing judicial review and changing it from a mandatory cutoff of funds to a discretionary power—which, in the hands of a less progressive president, might not be used at all. So far, such amendments had been assiduously batted down by the leadership. But at that instance, with most of the Republicans off the floor, Majority Whip Hale Boggs of Louisiana unexpectedly seconded Harris’s motion. The few Republicans who were on the floor, including John Lindsay, exploded in anger. Suspecting a plot by Democrats to weaken the bill for partisan advantage, Lindsay shouted that it was “the biggest mousetrap that has been offered since the debate on this bill began” and that it would “gut” the title. “I am appalled that this is being supported in the well of the House by the majority whip,” he said. “Does this mean there is a cave-in in this important title?”71

  McCulloch, who had been in the bathroom, rushed to the floor. His wife, Mabel, who was sitting next to Roy Wilkins in the gallery, leaned over to the NAACP president and whispered, “Look! Bill’s face is red. He’s mad!” When he had compose
d himself a little, the Ohio congressman took the microphone to announce: “If we pick up this old provision which does not provide for judicial review, I regret to say that my individual support of the legislation will come to an end.”

  Finally, Celler took his old friend aside and convinced him that there had been no conspiracy and that Boggs was simply talking out of class—a fact Boggs readily conceded. Celler then announced that he and the Democratic leadership were “unalterably opposed to the amendment.” A teller vote was taken, and the amendment lost 80 to 206.72

  On February 8, Howard Smith submitted the amendment he promised Celler he would add during the Rules Committee hearing: the inclusion of “sex” in the language of the FEPC. Smith’s amendment caught no one by surprise—not only had he announced his plan during the Rules Committee hearing, but he had said as much during a January 26 appearance on Meet the Press. When May Craig, a correspondent for the Portland Press Herald, asked him if he was serious about submitting the amendment, he said, “Well, maybe I would. I am always strong for the women, you know.”73

  Smith’s amendment was immediately opposed by Edith Green of Washington, one of just eleven women in the House at the time (there were also two in the Senate), who had been enlisted by the White House to offer the most compelling speech against it—she was, after all, a woman, and one with strong anti-sex-discrimination credentials. Green argued that whatever the merits of the amendment, Smith was simply trying to add a poison pill to the bill, one that would drive away support from otherwise liberal male representatives. “At the risk of being called an Aunt Jane, if not an Uncle Tom,” she said, “let us not add any amendment that could get in the way of our primary objective.” But her efforts were to no avail—despite a few minutes of wolfishly chauvinist joking by Celler, the amendment passed 168 to 133. When the vote was announced, a woman in the gallery shouted, “We’ve won, we’ve won!” Another yelled, “We made it, God bless America.” Guards moved quickly to remove them.74