Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  He employed this rationale from his earliest days in the Senate. During the 1930s, lynching was the most urgent civil rights issue, and twice, in 1935 and 1938, liberal senators attempted to bring major anti-lynching bills to the floor, where, they felt, the bills would pass; the 1938 measure bore the sponsoring names of no less than seventy senators. Both times the Senate was blocked from voting by southern filibusters, in which Bilbo and Smith and Connally and Maybank pouted and postured—and in both of which Richard Russell delivered full-dress speeches, closely reasoned, calm in tone. And it was noticeable that when Russell spoke, “more colleagues were present to listen than at most Senate sessions” because “they considered Russell something of a moderate on this issue” and therefore “had unusual interest in what he had to say.”

  Standing, erect and dignified, fingertips resting on his desk, he dealt with the proposed bills on broad, philosophic grounds. The bills had grave implications, he said. They were attacks on principles—sacred principles: the Constitution was sacred; the constitutionally guaranteed sovereign rights of states were sacred; passage of the bills would shake the very bedrock of American government. And they were attacks as well, he said, on a way of life, on a whole civilization; they would, he said, “strike vital blows at the civilization of those I seek to represent.”

  This civilization—the southern way of life, gracious, civilized—was eminently worth preserving, he said. And, he said, it was based on a harmonious relationship between the races. It had not been easy to achieve this harmony, he said. It had “been evolved painfully through seventy years of trial and error, suffering and sacrifice, on the part of both races.” It was based on segregation. “We believe the system of segregation … is necessary to preserve peace and harmony between the races.” This system, he said, benefited not just whites but blacks; it “promotes the welfare and progress of both races.” Just look, he told his fellow senators in one speech, how much the system had done for blacks: “In a short space of time the race that had only known savagery and slavery had been brought into a new day of civilization, where education and opportunity had been provided for them.” In another speech, he said, “I challenge all human history to show another instance where in the brief span of seventy-five years as much progress has been made by an uncivilized race as has been made by the southern Negro.” And he assured the Senate that not only southern whites but southern blacks agreed with this. “The whites and blacks alike in our section have learned that it is better for the races to live apart socially,” he said.

  We have worked hard and painstakingly down through the years to evolve a plan of having the Negro in our midst with the least possible friction, and we have made remarkable progress in adjusting to inevitable problems and conflicts which arise when two races live side by side.

  Of course problems still existed, he said, but the problems were not nearly as serious as they were portrayed. Lynchings, for example, were undeniably deplorable. No one could defend that practice; certainly he was not defending it. But, he said, in a 1938 speech, the problem of lynchings was greatly exaggerated. Lynchings, he said, had been nearly eliminated. The North, with its outbreaks of gangland murders, was more violent than the South. Federal anti-lynching legislation was therefore not only unconstitutional but “unnecessary and uncalled for.” Furthermore, federal legislation would be “an unjust reflection on the people of the South” since it would “pillory” a “great section of this country before the world as being incapable of its own self-government.” The South was itself eliminating lynchings, he said; nonetheless northern liberals were saying to it, “You are a clan of barbarians. You cannot handle your own affairs unless we apply to you the lash and the spur of federal power.” And the proposed solutions, he said—not only the anti-lynching bills but the anti-poll tax bill and other anti-segregation legislation—would only aggravate the problem. Many of these proposals could be administered only by force: federal troops. “I’m as interested in the Negro people of my state as anyone in the Senate,” he was to say once. “I love them. But I know what’s going to happen if you apply force—there’ll be violence.” The poll tax and lynching bills were opening wedges of a program designed by northern liberals to change the political structure which had kept the two races living together in harmony; “if it were adopted in its entirety, [it] would destroy the white civilization of the South.”

  And finally, he said, these bills would violate a great principle—one which he was sure no senator, thinking of his own state’s interests, would want violated. The federal government was forbidden by the Constitution from interfering in the internal affairs of any state, and if the Senate allowed such interference, no state would be safe. The poll tax might be unwise, he said—but it would be far more unwise to abolish it by federal law: “Let the poll tax be repealed, if it should be, at the proper place. We have not yet come to the state of affairs in Georgia where we need the advice of those who would occupy the position of the carpetbagger and the scalawag of the days of Reconstruction to tell us how to handle our internal affairs.”

  IN THIS SPEECH, and in scores of others during his thirty-eight years in the Senate, Russell indignantly defended himself against implications of racism. Once, after listening to northern liberal senators denounce southern racism, he said in an impassioned reply: “I don’t know those people they’re talking about. I just don’t know the South they talk about. I have no greater rights because I am a white man. I’m proud of being a white man and I’ll do all I can to encourage any other race to be proud of itself.”

  In scores of speeches he reiterated that he was interested in progress, and opposed only to attempts to force progress too rapidly by means of outside—federal—interference, which, he said, would only inflame passions and make the situation worse, not better. And in scores of speeches he assured the Senate that outside interference was not necessary, because the South was solving its problems itself—was, in fact, well on its way to solving them. As his biographer was to summarize: “Russell did not deliver racist diatribes. His tone was moderate, and he never said anything malicious about blacks. He aimed to educate and convince northern [senators] that the South should be left alone to handle racial problems.”

  And he did convince them. At the close of Russell’s 1938 speech against lynching legislation, Borah of Idaho walked over to him and congratulated him—and then took the floor himself to echo Russell’s argument that the bill was a violation of states’ rights. (Whereupon Russell rose in his turn to say, “The people of the South will ever revere the name of William E. Borah.”) George W. Norris—even Norris—said that the southern arguments had convinced him to vote against cloture.

  He convinced northern liberals that he was not a racist, that he didn’t hate the Negro, that he was a moderate who truly wanted progress in racial relations—convinced them so thoroughly that for decades descriptions of Richard Russell by the predominately liberal corps of Washington journalists were couched in terms that verged on idolatry. In a 1963 cover story—typical of twenty-five years of such descriptions—Newsweek informed its readers that “Richard Russell is at opposite poles from the stereotype some Northerners hold of a Deep-Dixie segregationist—the gallus-snapping, Negro-baiting semi-illiterate. Senator Russell … is a courtly, soft-spoken, cultured patrician, whose aides and associates treat him with deferential awe. Modest, even shy, in manner, devastatingly skilled in debate, he has a brilliant mind, encyclopedic learning….”

  This respect was based on the belief that, as Newsweek’s longtime chief congressional correspondent, Samuel Shaffer was to state flatly, “Russell was not a racist,” and that he had “an essential reasonableness in this prickly area.” “Russell’s view must be respected,” Shaffer wrote. “He did not say ‘no’ to change but tried to regulate the pace of change to prevent the disorder he believed would follow upon change forced down the throats [of the South].” Harold H. Martin wrote in the Saturday Evening Post in 1951 that Russell’s opposition to civil
rights legislation, “honest and unshakable,” was based on his conviction that such legislation, “if passed, would lead to rioting and bloodshed in the South.” Journalists clothed his opposition in a romantic view of the South. In an admiring cover story in 1957, Time explained that “Dick Russell’s roots lie deeply and inextricably in the long-lost dream of the Old South. He was brought up … amid a smoky Georgia haze of swollen, mud-yellow streams and blowing red dust, of pine-cone fires and fireflies and summer thunder, of white new-blown cotton and wild peach blossoms and slow mules dragging their lazy load.” And Russell epitomized the best of that heritage, Time said. “Dick … admired and respected [Negroes] in that special, paternal Southern way.”

  The Washington press corps and northern liberals paid Russell, in fact, what for them was their ultimate compliment: they assured their readers that, no matter what Dick Russell was forced to say for the record, his heart was in the right place. As Martin put it in that 1951 article: “Civil righters who like Russell personally and who note that he bears no resemblance in speech or manner to the classic Northern concept of the Southern demagogue are inclined to think that he is far more liberal in his heart than he is in his votes.” And Martin added, “Russell, indeed, feels none of the demagogue’s hatred toward the Negro, and he despises the Ku Klux Klan mentality which looks upon the Negro as something less than a human being….”

  His opposition to proposals to allow black Americans to vote, and to protect them from lynch mobs—his opposition, in fact, to any and all civil rights proposals—was, these journalists said, opposition he was forced to make for political reasons, because otherwise he could not be re-elected. His speeches, they said, were speeches made only for the consumption of his constituents. Dick Russell, they said over and over, year after year—as year after year, decade after decade, Dick Russell fought civil rights bills—Dick Russell didn’t really mean the arguments he was making.

  He was such a decent man, they said—he couldn’t mean them.

  BUT OF COURSE the high ground is generally the best ground from which to fight—and never more so than in twentieth-century senatorial battles for the Lost Cause. The South, with its twenty-two votes, was as outnumbered in the Senate as it had been in the Civil War. It needed allies to win. And potential allies—non-southern senators sympathetic to the southern position or at least willing to support it in return for southern support for pet causes of their own—didn’t want to be labeled as racists. If they were to be bound to the Cause, its racial aspects had to be toned down, so that votes against the poll tax or anti-lynching laws could be cloaked in loftier—constitutional—principles, in philosophy rather than prejudice. Richard Russell’s rationalizations made it easier for non-southern senators seeking rationalizations to vote with the South; his approach, so different from that of the Senate’s racist demagogues, was vastly more effective in defending the cause that was so precious to him. And the more perceptive of the southern senators realized this. As Sam Ervin was to put it: “Dick Russell always carried on his combat in such a knightly fashion that he never aroused the antagonism of the people most determined to overcome his efforts. He had an uncanny capacity to do that…. Most southerners possess that capacity more or less to a limited degree, but Dick Russell possessed it to an unsurpassed degree.”

  And the South was not only fireflies and peach blossoms and white new-blown cotton, not only gentility and graciousness, not only a sturdy Jeffersonian yeomanry, not only the gallantry of Longstreet and Pickett and of staunch Stonewall on the ridge, not only a place of—in the words Richard Russell spoke on the Senate floor—“peace and harmony between the races.” As Richard Russell could hardly have avoided knowing, since at least two incidents that somewhat disproved those words occurred not just in Georgia, and not just in Barrow County, but right down the road from his home.

  In 1908, when Dick was an eleven-year-old boy in Winder, a young Negro was arrested in Winder and charged with assaulting a “respected white woman.” A judge in nearby Gwinnett acquitted him after a witness testified that the accused had actually been at another location at the time of the alleged crime. Upon his return to Winder, however, the black youth’s train was met at the station by what the Winder News called “a reception committee of unknown parties.” Taken to “a secluded spot,” he was given 175 lashes with a buggy whip to “persuade” him to leave town. (“During the persuasion,” the newspaper said, the youth “admitted” his guilt.) No one was prosecuted for the crime. In 1922, when Dick was already in the State Legislature, a black resident of Winder, Jesse Long Reed, was charged with the attempted murder of a twenty-three-year-old white woman (“He … left the black bruises of his hands on her white neck,” the Winder News reported). Arrested as he was eating in a local restaurant, Reed was taken to jail, where “people from all directions began gathering” and “there was talk of lynching.” A county judge ordered the sheriff to “get the negro out of Winder.” As he was driving his prisoner to Atlanta, however, the sheriff “found the road completely blocked with five or six automobiles” about three miles outside town. “About 25” masked men armed with pistols dragged Reed from the car, hung him from a pine tree and riddled his body with bullets. “For hours people gathered to view the negro as he hung by the neck,” with some families building fires, spreading blankets, and eating picnic dinners. The sheriff said he could not identify any of the lynchers because they wore masks, and no one was ever prosecuted for the crime.

  Russell had arrived in the Legislature to find the Governor, Hugh M. Dorsey, and a group of legislators attempting to pass anti-lynching legislation—since during the past four years alone there had been fifty-eight lynchings in Georgia. Russell did not participate in this attempt. During his ten years in the Legislature—the last five as Speaker of the House—there were other lynchings in Georgia. There is no record of Russell’s views on the subject. There is only the fact that in the House that he headed, no anti-lynching legislation was passed. He “avoided,” in his biographer’s careful term, “inflammatory and emotional issues such as lynching….”

  When Russell was elected Governor, he became chief executive of a state whose criminal justice system was considered something special even for the South, in the harshness with which its courts and prisons treated those who came within its purview, the overwhelming majority of whom were black. “Georgia exceeds in size and wealth most of the nearby states, but its prison system must be placed at the bottom of the list,” the National Society of Penal Institutions declared. Russell was very proud of that rigor, and of the role he played in maintaining it—so proud, in fact, that when, in 1969, a reporter interviewing him about his pre-Senate career neglected to raise the subject, Russell raised it himself.

  “I suppose I was the harshest Governor on criminals” in the history of Georgia, he said. “All the statistics the last time I saw [them] showed I pardoned and paroled fewer people than any Governor they ever had.” Even as harsh a governor as his successor Eugene Talmadge (known as “Whippin’ Gene” because he said that while he had never actually been a member of the Ku Klux Klan, “I used to do a little whippin’ myself) had, Russell said, pardoned three times as many criminals as he had. Georgia’s criminal justice system as a whole, Russell said, was exceptional in the fairness with which it dispensed justice. Pointing out that he had been a criminal lawyer in his early career, he said, “I had never seen a man I knew was innocent, convicted.”

  The incident during his governorship that brought him, for a brief time, into the national spotlight revolved around the harshest aspect of that system. In 1932, America was stunned by the publication of I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang.* Its author, Robert E. Burns, a young white New York accountant, successful before the First World War, had emerged from the war shell-shocked and unable to hold a job, wandered south to Georgia where, “so hungry I was seeing things,” he was partly persuaded and partly intimidated by two men into joining them in robbing a grocery store of four dollars and ei
ghty cents. Arrested in 1922, he was sentenced to six to ten years in the Georgia chain gangs, where men wore a heavy iron shackle on each ankle and were manacled together at work all day, and in their bunks at night—those of them lucky enough to be in bunks and not in the notorious “cage wagons.” Burns saw men tortured in medieval stocks, beaten with heavy leather straps, and worked to death until, within a year, he escaped.

  During the next several years, he became a reporter and then the editor of Chicago magazine, before Georgia detectives showed up in his office in 1929. Georgia prison officials promised him a release or a parole within ninety days if he returned voluntarily. As soon as he returned, however, the promise was broken; he was remanded to the same chain gang to complete his full sentence. Escaping within a year again and making his way to New Jersey, he wrote his book, which received respectful reviews. The “real importance” of this “breathtaking and heart-wrenching book … lies in the baring of Georgia’s incredible penal system … which manages to defeat essential justice and outrage humanity,” said the New York Times. “The conditions he describes there, the filth, the starvation rations, the inhuman shackles and chains, the body-breaking labor, the vicious cruelty, would be almost unbelievable if it were not that… investigators … substantiate what he says.” And the New York Herald Tribune said, “One would like to hear the answer of Georgia authorities to this burning book.”