Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  Over and over again, that evening and all through the night, the liberals were warned about the fate of the Democratic Party if they persisted, that the southerners might even walk out of the convention and form their own party, that at the very least the party would be split wide open and the last hopes of victory would vanish. And warnings were issued also about the fate of Humphrey, who the liberals all assumed would lead the floor fight, for, as one of his biographers was to put it, only his oratory could “give them a chance … on the convention floor.” Pulling Rauh aside in a hotel corridor, Truman’s assistant for minority affairs, David K. Niles, laid it on the line: “Joe, you won’t get fifty votes on your minority plank, and all you’ll do is ruin the chances of the Number One prospect for liberalism in the country.” Another member of the Administration was angrier: “You ADA bastards aren’t going to tell us what to do,” he said.

  Humphrey was told to his face that speaking for the minority plank would ruin—permanently—his own career; that, as Ross reported, “he was sacrificing a brilliant future for a crackpot crusade. ‘You’ll split the party wide open if you do this. You’ll kill any chances we have of winning in November.’” And for many hours of that night, Rauh recalls, Humphrey “was not at all sure what to do…. He was reluctant to make a big fight and speech on the floor.” He was well aware that, “personally,” as Ross put it, “he had much at stake”—starting with his own upcoming bid for the Senate. “If he won, he was likely to be one of the national leaders of the party….” And, as Ross puts it: “Humphrey’s personal sympathies were firmly engaged in the cause, of that his colleagues never had any doubt; on the other hand, he was a professional politician who was being asked to challenge the entire national leadership of the party.”

  Humphrey himself was to recall that “It was sobering … we were opposed by all of the party hierarchy.” He was well aware, he was to say, that the customary course in such a situation was to compromise. “I knew that the traditional thing to do was to make a gesture toward what was right in terms of civil rights, but not so tough a gesture that the South would leave the Democratic coalition.”

  But, Humphrey was also to say, some issues were beyond compromise. “For me personally and for the party, the time had come to suffer whatever the consequences.” At about five o’clock in the morning, after he and a small group of liberal friends had been talking for hours in a hotel room, he said abruptly, “I’ll do it.” His friend Orville Freeman recalls him saying, “If there is one thing I believe in in this crazy business, it’s civil rights. Regardless of what happens, we are going to do it. Now get the hell out of here and let me write a speech and get some sleep.” And the next afternoon, after the majority plank had been proposed, Hubert Humphrey, in a stifling hall (the Secret Service had closed all the doors in anticipation of Truman’s arrival to accept the nomination) packed to the rafters with hot, bored delegates impatient to hear the President—many of them hardly knew who Humphrey was—stepped to the microphone.

  For once he paused for a long moment before beginning to speak, as if he was gathering himself, a very thin figure perspiring so heavily under the glare of the lights that sweat made his black hair glisten and ran down his high forehead; and his face, as David McCullough puts it, was “shining,” with sweat and sincerity. “No braver David ever faced a more powerful Goliath,” Paul Douglas, who was sitting in the throng below him, was to say twenty years later. “I can see Hubert still, his face shining with an incandescent inner light.” And as he began to speak, his words slashing across the murmur of the restless throng, “the audience,” as one writer put it, “grew quiet, suddenly aware that someone they wanted to listen to was talking.”

  For once his speech was short—only eight minutes long, in fact, only thirty-seven sentences.

  And by the time Hubert Humphrey was halfway through those sentences, his head tilted back, his jaw thrust out, his upraised right hand clenched into a fist, the audience was cheering every one—even before he reached the climax, and said, his voice ringing across the hall, “To those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights—I say to them, we are one hundred and seventy-two years late.

  “To those who say this bill is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this—the time has arrived in America. The time has arrived for the Democratic party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”

  “People,” Hubert Humphrey cried, in a phrase that just burst out of him; it was not in the written text. “People! Human beings!—this is the issue of the twentieth century.” “In these times of world economic, political and spiritual—above all, spiritual—crisis, we cannot and we must not turn back from the path so plainly before us. That path has already led us through many valleys of the shadows of death. Now is the time to recall those who were left on the path of American freedom. Our land is now, more than ever before, the last best hope on earth. I know that we can—know that we shall—begin here the fuller and richer realization of that hope—that promise—of a land where all men are truly free and equal.”

  ALL HIS LIFE, Hubert Humphrey had had a voice that could bring people to their feet, that could make them raise their banners and march, and people came to their feet now, banners raised, marching.

  The Minnesota delegation’s seats were surrounded by those of Georgia to their left, Louisiana to their right, Virginia behind them, and Kentucky in front of them, so that when the Minnesotans jumped up, the first delegation to do so, coming shouting to their feet as Humphrey shuffled his papers together and turned away from the podium, their banners were surrounded by the seated, glaring delegates of the South. But their banners were not alone for long. While Humphrey had been speaking, there had been something else that Paul Douglas would never forget: “hard-boiled politicians dabbing their eyes with their handkerchiefs.” Turning to Ed Kelly, the Mayor of Chicago, who was seated beside him, Douglas said, “Mr. Mayor, that was a great speech.” Mr. Mayor, he said, we can win now. “If Illinois will lead a parade,” we can win. “We will fall in behind you.” Kelly had been adamantly opposed to the stronger civil rights plank because he thought it had no chance of passage and would only divide the party. “Paul,” Kelly said now, “we ought to have a parade, and Illinois ought to lead it. I would like to do so. But I am getting old, my legs are tired, and I couldn’t hold up under this terrible heat.”

  “He paused for a moment,” Douglas was to recall, “and then he said, ‘But, Paul, I want you to lead the parade.’” Lifting the Illinois standard from its socket, Kelly handed it to Douglas, and then turned to the delegation, pointed at Douglas, and motioned them to follow him. The towering, white-thatched figure moved down the aisle. A forty-piece band that had been organized by James Caesar Petrillo, president of the American Federation of Musicians, had been kept hidden under the podium because it was not supposed to begin playing until President Truman appeared in the hall later that evening to give his acceptance speech. But Petrillo had been staring up at Hubert Humphrey as Humphrey spoke, and suddenly now, Petrillo motioned the band to begin playing. As Douglas led Illinois forward, the big California delegation fell in behind it. “Then New York, overcoming the caution of its Tammany leaders … Delegation after delegation joined us…. Here and there groups of sullen Southerners and conservative Northerners remained stubbornly in their seats, but the main mass of Democrats was moving with jubilant feet toward a better and more equal America.”

  In the vote on Humphrey’s minority plank, Truman’s Missouri, Barkley’s Kentucky, Democratic Chairman Howard McGrath’s Rhode Island, and of course the southern delegations all voted no. But Illinois’s sixty votes, which had been controlled by Kelly and which had been counted in the southern camp, were cast for the minority plank. And then came the states of the Northeast: the thirty-six votes of New Jersey, the ninety-eight votes of New York, the seventy-four votes of Pennsylvania (“the latter,” Irwin Ross writes, “an implied repudiat
ion of the chairman of the platform committee, Pennsylvania’s own Frank Myers”). The vote, 651½ to 582½ was for the minority plank. A huge roar of triumph filled the hall. Later, analyzing the victory, Humphrey would say it could be explained “in part by conscience, in part by political realism.” The bosses of the Northeast “probably supported us because they wanted something to attract the votes of liberals, Negroes, minorities, and labor. Maybe they wanted to protect us from the appeal on the left of Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party….” And, “they reflected, and our victory reflected, a deep current running in the party and in the country.” But that evening, there was no analysis, there was only triumph. “All we knew was that we, a group of young liberals, had beaten the leadership of the party and led them closer to where they ought to have been.” Leaving the hall, Minnesota’s National Committee-woman Eugenie Anderson heard a reporter say, “Can you beat that? The ADA has licked the South.”

  “AT THE WHITE HOUSE,” as McCullough has written, “angered by the turn events were taking, Truman spoke of Humphrey and his followers as ‘crackpots’ who hoped the South would bolt.”

  Southerners did walk out during the balloting for the presidential nominee, but only some southerners: the Mississippi delegation and half of the Alabama delegation. Those that remained decided at the last minute to nominate their own candidate (Russell), but he received only 263 votes (to Truman’s 947½). Delegates from four southern states eventually formed a Dixiecrat party and nominated their own candidate, Strom Thurmond, but in the November election those four states, with a mere thirty-nine electoral votes, were all that Thurmond carried. And, as McCullough writes, “The fact was the convention that seemed so pathetically bogged down in its own gloom had now, suddenly, dramatically, pushed through the first unequivocal civil rights plank in the party’s history; and whether Truman and his people appreciated it or not, Hubert Humphrey had done more to reeled Truman than would anyone at the convention other than Truman himself.” A crucial element in the President’s stunning upset victory in November was the allegiance of blacks in the big cities.

  At the time, there were not a few comparisons between Humphrey’s speech and what has been described as “the only convention speech that ever had a greater impact on the deliberation of the delegates”—William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” oration of half a century before—but later events were to blur the memory of Humphrey’s speech so that today it is all but lost to history. Nothing, though, could ever dim the memory of that speech for those who were there to hear it. “It was the greatest speech I ever heard,” Paul Douglas would say a quarter of a century later. “He was on fire, just like the Bible speaks of Moses.” Recalling the “magnificent” line about moving out “into the bright sunshine of human rights,” Douglas would say, “To me, he will always be the orator of the dawn.” And at the time, the speech, and the national acclaim it brought him, gave a boost to Humphrey’s career. Although no Democrat had ever won popular election to the Senate in Minnesota, he had entered the race against the formidable incumbent, Joseph Ball. Now, arriving back in Minneapolis after the convention, he was hoisted to the shoulders of a crowd that carried him through the streets, and he went on not only to win, but to win in a rout. His arrival in Washington in January, 1949, as a senator-elect was heralded on the cover of Time magazine, on which the “glib, jaunty, spellbinder with a listen-you-guys’ approach” was portrayed as a whirlwind spiraling into the capital. The “Number One prospect for liberalism in this country” was greeted by Washington liberals as a man who, as The New Republic said, “has a well-knit liberal philosophy and a powerful urge to right wrongs”—as a politician whose beliefs were so firmly held that he was willing to fight for them without compromise, and who, in the face of long odds, could win.

  The subject of the cover story considered this image accurate. His victory at the convention, the victory he had won without compromise, had apparently made him believe that his ideals could become reality without compromise. In his autobiography, The Education of a Public Man, published a quarter of a century later, he would recall his feelings after the Democratic convention: “I had taken on our establishment and won. It was a heady feeling. But it confirmed something I felt and hoped. You could stand for a principle in politics and you could move an unwilling party toward a necessary goal.”

  But in the next sentence of that autobiography, Hubert Humphrey wrote, “How slowly and with what difficulty you kept it moving I was yet to learn.”

  It was the Senate that taught him.

  HUBERT HUMPHREY came to Washington determined to right the wrongs he hated so deeply, and, euphoric because of his convention victory, and because of Truman’s, which liberals viewed as a mandate for progress in civil rights, he was understandably confident that he could defeat the establishment in Washington as he had defeated the establishment at the convention—overconfident, in fact, so that his stridency, always annoying to new acquaintances until they had had a chance to discern the sincerity and passion beneath it, was at its most irritating.

  Arriving to be greeted by journalists’ predictions that, despite the liberal victory, Congress would again stall civil rights legislation, the freshman senator called a press conference (a well-attended press conference) to inform reporters that “there are enough votes in Congress” to pass the legislation “if [members] are honest and sincere—and I warn them that if they are not honest and sincere they may have trouble in the future.” Friends tried to facilitate Humphrey’s entree to the capital’s Democratic establishment and took him to lunch with one of its pillars, Jim Rowe, at the august Metropolitan Club. “My God, I was shocked,” Rowe would recall. “This guy was just awful. He knew everything about everything.” Dining at a nearby table was Arthur Krock, and when Rowe pointed him out to the newcomer, Humphrey said that Krock was always too hard on civil rights advocates. But now, Humphrey said, he had arrived in Washington and “I’ll knock his block off.” When Krock wrote a column criticizing him, he replied in a letter to the Times that attacked the columnist by name, as well as “the unholy alliance of the Republican party with the conservative wing of the Democratic party.” He employed similarly uncompromising terms in a speech to a black audience at Howard University, denouncing the filibuster not only as “purely and simply an undemocratic technique to permit rule by a minority” that “will fail because history is against them, the people are against them, the times are against them” but also as a “rotten political bargain” between Republicans and southern Democrats. Even worse, he showed up at the Senate Dining Room one day with a black member of his staff, Cyril King, and when the head waiter, himself a black man, told them they could not be served (one can only cringe at the thought of one black man forced to tell another that because of his color he was not welcome as a guest), Humphrey first softly, and then loudly and angrily, kept insisting that he and King were going to eat together, until at last they were allowed to do so. Worse still, he accepted the national chairmanship of the ADA, an organization regarded by the “unholy alliance” with hatred and scorn, accepted it because, as he was later to say, he felt that by doing so, “I would be more than a freshman senator … I would become a national leader.”

  The Senate, whose new Majority Leader, Scott Lucas, was the man who in Philadelphia had called Humphrey “a pip-squeak,” responded in typical Senate fashion. When Humphrey rose on the floor (much too soon, by Senate standards) to deliver his maiden speech, he chided the Senate for its slow pace (“Sometimes I think we become so cozy—we feel so secure in our six-year term—we forget that the people want things done”) while supporting Senator James Murray’s proposal for the creation of a Missouri Valley Authority that would “do for the dust bowl what the Tennessee Valley Authority has done for the hillbilly hollows of the South” and would be as well “a symbol of liberalism to the large majority of Americans who voted liberal last November and in other Novembers.” A symbol it was, and the Senate referred it to, and buried it in, committee,
as it did, in 1949, bills embodying improvements in the minimum wage and health care, repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, and other pledges made at the Democratic convention. And 1949 was also, of course, the year of the civil rights battle in which Lyndon Johnson gave his maiden speech—the battle Richard Russell won decisively, cementing the “undemocratic technique” into place more firmly than ever.

  If that was the Senate’s response on governmental issues, there were responses on a more personal level, responses for which Humphrey, unable to hold a grudge, was, as he would later say, “unprepared.” (Although he might have been prepared, given the fury still raging against him in the South; an editorial in the Dothan, Alabama, Register said: “His name is anathema. It will remain for history to tag him as the demagog he is.”)

  Scott Lucas, Humphrey was to realize, “still had not forgiven me for Philadelphia”—and neither had the southerners who had placed Lucas in the majority leadership. Humphrey’s requested committee assignments were Foreign Relations and Agriculture. While there was no opening for a freshman on the former, there was one on the latter, and it might have seemed logical for Humphrey since he was from an agricultural state. He was assigned instead to two of the least desirable committees, Government Operations and Post Office, and, in a peculiarly senatorial version of a covert sneer, he was, as one of his biographers was to put it, placed in “the juniormost seat on the Labor and Welfare Committee, whose ranking Republican member was Taft, author of the law Humphrey was committed to repeal.” (Humphrey responded by writing an article for the American Political Science Review in which he attacked the seniority system as “the most sacred cow in the legislative zoo” and tendered the Senate some additional advice: to “give the spirit of youth a larger place in our legislative halls.”) “The extra perks of office that [Lucas] could deny, he did deny.” Since Humphrey was deeply interested in foreign affairs, the Majority Leader didn’t appoint him to any of the many congressional delegations that traveled to foreign countries between sessions. Humphrey requested a seat on a new Select Committee on Small Business, but he was not one of the freshmen appointed to it. Vice President Barkley intervened to add Humphrey’s name to a Senate group traveling to Germany, and, with President Truman’s backing, persuaded Lucas to add him to the Small Business Committee, but he could do nothing about a dozen other slights Lucas managed to inflict. Humphrey despised Lucas (who, he was to say, “of course always voted with us on civil rights [in the Senate] … because it wasn’t going to pass anyway”). As he had proven in Philadelphia, he could defeat Lucas in open combat, but in the Senate nothing was open.