Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  The President fought with a President’s weapons—with eloquence, matchless eloquence. In a March 4 speech at a triumphal victory dinner of his party—to thirteen hundred of the top Democratic federal jobholders at the Mayflower Hotel—he reminded them of why they held their jobs: because their party, in its New Deal, embodied the majority desires for meaningful social legislation. He reminded them of how the Supreme Court had “vetoed” New Deal legislation. And he warned them that if the party permitted the Supreme Court to thwart the people’s will, the people would turn away from the party. “Here is one-third of a nation ill-nourished, ill-clad, ill-housed—now! Here are thousands upon thousands of farmers wondering whether next year’s prices will meet their mortgage interest—now! Here are thousands upon thousands of men and women laboring for long hours in factories for inadequate pay—now! If we would keep faith with these who had faith in us, if we would make Democracy succeed, I say we must act—now!” Five days after the speech came an even more effective weapon: the chat. Out of ten million radios on March 9 came the warm, rich voice, simply asking his followers to trust him:

  You who know me can have no fear that I would tolerate the destruction by any branch of the government of any part of our heritage of freedom…. You who know me will accept my solemn assurance that in a world in which democracy is under attack I seek to make American democracy work….

  And he fought with a President’s private weapons—which he likewise wielded with matchless skill. As it became apparent that opposition to judiciary “reform” was more widespread than he had anticipated, presidential aides began to sound out individual senators more carefully, and there were surprises. One senator of whose vote the White House had been certain—regardless of his views on the particular issue—was Joseph C. O’Mahoney of Wyoming. Not only had he been a loyal assistant to Postmaster General James A. Farley, Roosevelt’s political major domo, but, as the representative of a beet-sugar state, he “was also heavily obligated to the administration on sugar bills, and would need more help in the future.” Now it was reported that O’Mahoney was calling the bill “undemocratic,” and Farley contacted him—and thereafter assured Roosevelt that O’Mahoney was “on board.” The Man in the White House was a master at pulling levers attached to senators. “Kentucky’s Democratic Senator Marvel M. Logan had been recalcitrant about the Court plan,” Leonard Baker reports, but Kentucky needed flood control projects. “Senator Logan became a supporter of the plan. Kentucky got its flood control projects.” Routine judicial and patronage appointments in many states were suddenly held up because “Mr. Farley is working on them.” And the Senate was a New Deal Senate, after all. Democratic Leader Robinson counted the votes now, and assured Roosevelt of a majority.

  And indeed if the vote had been taken then, not long after the proposal was made, the President would probably have had his majority.

  But the vote wasn’t going to be taken then, for the Senate, thanks to the Founding Fathers, also had weapons, most crucially its rule allowing “unlimited” debate. Deliberation requires time—and the Senate was going to get time. Roosevelt and Robinson summoned the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Ashurst of Arizona, to the Oval Office. Ashurst was usually soft-spoken and complaisant, but he was, as they may have forgotten, the same Senator Ashurst who eighteen years before had demanded, “Who is this Colonel House?” Roosevelt and Robinson attempted to persuade him to place a limit—perhaps two weeks apiece—on the length of time each side would have to present witnesses before his committee, but Ashurst felt that the Court-packing proposal was “the prelude to tyranny,” and, thanks to the Founders, he had a weapon to fight “tyranny.” “I replied that I would avoid haste, would go slowly and give the opponents of his bill ample time and opportunity to explore all its implications,” he told the President. There would, he said, be no time limit at all.

  The President, Ashurst was to recall, “received this statement with disrelish.” But there was nothing the President could do about it. Judiciary Committee hearings in the Senate Caucus Room went on for more than two months, and during that time there were many speeches on the Senate floor, and the passage of time did just what the Founders had intended. As Alsop and Catledge wrote:

  It is easy to make fun of such public speaking as the country was treated to during the court fight. Turgid, repetitious, crammed with non-sequiturs, richly ornamented with appeals to prejudice and self-interest, couched in an English which would have made Edmund Burke weep for very horror at the fate of the language—most of it was all these things. But it gave the country a chance to think the issue over. By sheer force of its repetitions it dinned the arguments for and against into the ears of the electorate.

  In 1937, as in 1919, there were “the great stump-speaking tours across the country, which senators resorted to as they never had before except in the League of Nations fight.” Their speeches were reported in depth in newspapers, and heard on the radio; the airwaves were filled each night with the oratory of both sides in a remarkable public debate. And as America heard the arguments, America’s initial enthusiasm for the President’s proposal began to diminish.

  And the delay, moreover, was affording not only America’s people but America’s senators “a chance to think the issue over.” Every time a Roosevelt supporter who had given a hint of wavering appeared in the cloakroom or in a Capitol corridor, a reporter wrote, “you were certain to see one or two opposition senators pleading, persuading, exhorting or shaming the worried man into independence.” More and more senators began to feel that the issue was too big for them to be influenced by customary political considerations. Summoned to the Oval Office along with a prominent liberal professor from Harvard, Wyoming’s O’Mahoney found himself the recipient of a lecture on the need for “co-operation” between the executive and the judiciary. The lecture was delivered with the full measure of presidential charm, and, Alsop and Catledge wrote, beet sugar “may not have been completely absent from O’Mahoney’s mind.” But, they wrote, the concept of the American constitutional structure held by the Senator and the professor was “rather more conventional than the President’s. As they listened to the President calmly explaining what he wanted, they could not forget the doctrine of separate powers.” Not long thereafter, O’Mahoney unexpectedly appeared at a meeting of senators opposed to the bill. He wanted to join them, he said; he would oppose the bill to the end, no matter what the political cost.

  Similar evolution was taking place in the attitude of other senators, as day by day, the great issues involved were examined and re-examined. Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, long a leader in Senate fights for liberal causes, was coming to see that the Court plan implied an alteration in the whole balance of governmental power in favor of the White House. What, he wondered, would come next? He refused to fight for this cause. Wheeler was a senator other senators followed. Roosevelt sent his aide Thomas G. Corcoran to him with an offer. Its details would be a matter of dispute; at the very minimum, Wheeler would be allowed to give “advice” on the nominations of two of the six justices. Wheeler had accepted other offers from Corcoran before, but he refused to do so on the Court-packing plan. “I’m going to fight it with everything I’ve got,” he told Corcoran. The President hurriedly invited his old friend Burt to dine at the White House that evening; the Senator replied that the President had better “save the plate for someone who persuaded more easily.” George Norris, “the great old man of liberalism,” asked himself the question, how would he have stood “if Harding had offered this bill.” And then he gave his answer: he would have opposed the bill had Harding offered it—and he would oppose it though Roosevelt offered it.

  And while much of the repetition of arguments was boring and banal, some was not—particularly when, the Judiciary Committee having reported it out unfavorably by a 10–8 vote, with the formal recommendation that it not pass, debate on it began on the floor.

  As Majority Leader Robinson rose at his desk, in “the high, wide chambe
r, so meaninglessly decorated with square yards of tan and gray and faded yellow, [so] colorlessly illuminated by its huge sky-light,” the galleries were jammed, Alsop and Catledge were to relate. “There were senators’ wives, diplomats, connoisseurs of the Washington scene, hundreds upon hundreds of sight-seers…. The overwhelming impression was that the plain people of America had come to see their government in action. In the pitlike space which the galleries enclose was the government they had come to see, scores of rather elderly, remarkably ordinary-looking men.”

  As Robinson roared threats, and defended the President, opposition senators bombarded him with questions that emphasized loyalty not to a President but to a Constitution. As senators dueled with words, the rage on both sides often boiled over; on one such occasion, “Robinson and his followers and the leaders of the opposition were all on their feet, all bellowing at once. Order was gone; the fascinated galleries buzzed with excitement; and on the floor such a scene of bitterness and hatred, fury and suspicion was enacted as the Senate had not witnessed in a quarter century.”

  There were moments when the debate served the purpose that the Founding Fathers had intended—as, for example, when the speaker was Senator Josiah Bailey of North Carolina. Bailey was usually ponderous, given to pounding on his desk and shouting out the points he wanted to stress. But the independence of the judiciary was sacred to him, and he had been preparing this speech for weeks—and he delivered it with pounding and shouting, but also with what Alsop and Catledge call “all the force of absolute conviction.” Listening senators rose, walked hastily to the cloakrooms and brought colleagues to the floor to hear, or sent pages to fetch others from their offices. Soon “every desk for rows around the speaker was filled—a sure sign of interest—and the chamber was perfectly still. That rare thing, a successful and convincing argument, was being made on the floor.” Leaving the Chamber, Robinson telephoned his White House liaison. “Bailey’s in there and he’s making a great speech,” he said. “He’s impressing a lot of people….” In the back, on “freshman row,” where the new Democrats were seated behind the Republicans, were three senators of whose votes Robinson had been confident. Now, they changed their minds and went (along with a fourth freshman who had earlier decided to oppose the bill) to inform Roosevelt to his face of their decision. Thus confronting a popular President would have posed immediate political danger for a member of the House of Representatives, up for re-election in another year, but these senators were safe in their seats for another five years; Roosevelt might not even be President when they stood for re-election.

  After two weeks of debate, Robinson suffered a heart attack in his apartment, where a maid found him dead. Following a state funeral in the Senate Chamber, thirty-eight senators accompanied the Majority Leader’s body home to Arkansas, aboard a train on which the debate raged as bitterly as ever. Vice President Garner, who had come up from Texas to travel with the senators, arrived—the senators greeted him “like a long-lost father”—counted votes, and on the return to Washington, went directly to the White House and asked the President, “Do you want it with the bark on or the bark off?” and when the President opted for the latter, told him flatly he was licked, and with his permission, arranged a “compromise” that left the Supreme Court untouched. Attempts were made to couch the result in terms that would save the President’s face, but old, sick Hiram Johnson of California stumbled heavily to his feet and asked, “The Supreme Court is out of the way?” And when Senator Logan replied solemnly, “The Supreme Court is out of the way,” Johnson said: “Glory be to God!” The old senator had spoken the words half to himself, but the galleries heard them. For a moment, the Chamber of the Senate of the United States was silent and frozen—the red-faced, white-haired little man on the dais, the men sitting at the quadruple arc of mahogany desks who had beaten the unbeatable President, the crowd in the galleries above. And then there was a burst of wild cheering. Garner still held his gavel, waiting to call for the yeas and nays. But before he did so, he let the people cheer their fill.

  THE BATTLE OVER THE SUPREME COURT, like the battle over the Treaty of Versailles, ended in victory for the Senate—and the victory reverberated far beyond the issue itself. Franklin Roosevelt, who by his political genius and his popularity had stripped the Senate of its power, now had inadvertently, by his arrogance and miscalculation, handed that power back, uniting the opposition senators against him, as an historian of the Senate puts it, “in a way they would have been completely incapable of achieving on their own.” Uneasy though they were over the New Deal’s heavy spending, its support of labor and blacks, its whole liberal agenda of social reform, conservative Democratic senators, particularly from southern and border states, had been cowed by FDR’s seemingly invulnerable popularity. They were cowed no longer. Moreover, in opposing the Court-packing bill, they had worked with Republican senators—and had realized the similarity of the Republicans’ philosophy to their own.

  The bipartisan conservative coalition that formed in both houses of Congress demonstrated its strength within the year. With the number of unemployed creeping ominously upward again, in November, 1937, with the Court fight over, the President, in an attempt to end this “Roosevelt recession,” summoned Congress into special session and presented it with an ambitious package of “must” bills. Not one passed.

  A President—even Roosevelt—was all but helpless to break this power. When in 1938 he attempted to “purge” Senate Democrats Walter George of Georgia, Millard Tydings of Maryland, and Ellison (Cotton Ed) Smith of South Carolina, going into their own states to campaign against them, the resentment of southern voters to presidential intervention in their states’ internal politics was summarized in newspaper headlines—in Maryland denouncing Roosevelt’s “invasion,” in Georgia likening his campaign to General Sherman’s pillaging of the state during the Civil War. And the intervention gave Roosevelt not a single victory. In George, Tydings, and Smith, moreover, Roosevelt had selected incumbents he had felt could be defeated. He never even tried to take on other, more solidly entrenched conservative senators running in 1938, such as Nevada’s Patrick McCarran and Colorado’s Alva Adams. Exasperated by “the sense that Congress did not reflect the sentiments of the country,” the New Dealers had, as the historian John Garraty puts it, “attempted to nationalize the [Democratic] party institution, to transform a decentralized party, responsible only to local electorates, into an organization responsive to the will of the national party leader and the interests of a national electorate.” But the Senate had been armored against the will of a national leader or a national electorate. It had been designed not to respond to but, should it wish to do so, to resist the “sentiments of the country.” Even if the President had succeeded in ousting George, Tydings, and Smith; even if he had fought, and defeated, McCarran and Adams; even if he had campaigned against, and defeated, every incumbent senator, of any persuasion, running in 1938, he would have changed the membership of only one-third of the Senate. Two-thirds of the Senate would still have been untouched.

  The conservative Democrat-Republican coalition was formidable in both houses of Congress—in the House of Representatives its heart was the Rules Committee headed by Howard Smith of Virginia—but most of the coalition’s key figures were senators: southerners like Bailey, Tom Connally of Texas, and Carter Glass and Harry Byrd of Virginia; border-staters like Tydings; Republicans like Arthur Vandenberg and, after 1939, Robert Taft of Ohio. And year by year its strength grew. The Court fight, as Garraty says, “marked the beginning of the end of the New Deal.” During the remaining seven years of Roosevelt’s Administration, Congress blocked every major new domestic law he proposed. One by one, the older Supreme Court justices resigned, and as Roosevelt filled their places, the Court moved steadily to the left. The lower levels of the federal judiciary also moved left, as the effect of presidential appointments accumulated. Congress moved nowhere. The Senate moved nowhere. In domestic affairs, the Senate was again what it had b
een with brief exceptions during the four generations since the Civil War: the stronghold of the status quo, the dam against which the waves of social reform dashed themselves in vain—the chief obstructive force in the federal government.

  The Constitution’s Framers had given the Senate power to block legislation, to stand as the rampart against the exercise of popular and presidential will. This power was only a negative power, a naysaying power, the power to obstruct and to thwart. But it was an immense power—and the Framers had built the rampart solid enough so that it was standing, thick and strong, in the twentieth century as it had stood in the nineteenth century.

  BUT THE FRAMERS had intended the Senate—had intended Congress as a whole—to have other, more constructive, powers. In the nineteenth century, the Senate had exercised these powers. In the twentieth century it didn’t.

  In part the explanation lay in changes in the world outside the Senate, in the enormous growth and complexity of government which demanded a dispatch and a body of expertise possessed more by the executive than the legislature; in the activist presidents who attracted the attention of press and public at the expense of Congress.