LYNDON JOHNSON’S EXULTATION was justified for many reasons, but one of them was not the effectiveness of the bill he had gotten passed. To excuse its inadequacies, his partisans in later years would argue what Joe Rauh argued at the time: that little as it was, it was better than nothing. There was a phrase that summed up that argument—“Half a loaf is better than none”—and the phrase could be employed to evoke poignant overtones: “It seems to me,” George Reedy said, “that people who sneer at half a loaf of bread have never been hungry.” The validity of this metaphor to describe the Civil Rights Act of 1957 was undercut, however, by the Act’s results, for in terms of what was needed to bring justice to black Americans, the Act was not half a loaf of bread, or even a slice. Hubert Humphrey had described it more accurately when he called it a “crumb.”
Even before it was signed, events overtook it. On September 3, five days after the final Senate vote had sent the measure to the White House for signature but before Eisenhower had signed it, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas had, as Stephen Ambrose writes, “presented Eisenhower with exactly the problem he had most wished to avoid, outright defiance of a court order by a governor,” and after three weeks of further defiance, all the controversy that had surrounded Part III became moot. Richard Russell had said that if Part III was passed, it would give the President power to enforce school desegregation with federal bayonets; Part III had been removed. But on September 24 the President nonetheless enforced school desegregation with bayonets, sending a thousand paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division, bayonets fixed, into Little Rock to ensure the safety of nine Negro schoolchildren who wanted to attend Central High School. At least part of the blame for the crisis has to be laid at the President’s doorstep: as Ambrose was to write, “By allowing events to run their course, by attempting to negotiate with Faubus, by failing to ever speak out forcefully on integration, or to provide real leadership on the moral issue, he found himself in precisely the situation he had most wanted to avoid. His options had run out. [He had] no choice but to use force.” But when he decided to use it, there was no legal impediment; as Brownell had contended all along, the President clearly had the power to use force to compel obedience to a court order—with or without Part III.
Equally important, with Part III gone, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 dealt only with voting rights. The Act did not even pretend to deal with such manifestations of injustice as segregation in housing, in restaurants, in schools. “When Johnson took Part III out of the House bill, he set back integration in the South for seven years,” Joe Rauh was to say. “Part III passed in 1964—the Part III that was taken out in ’57 in essence became a part of the ’64 Act. But for seven years there was no federal power to bring injunction suits.”
As for Part IV—the amended Part IV—it proved to be all but useless, not only because local election officials, certain that they would still be tried by friendly juries, were emboldened to continue discriminatory election practices, but because of what would be called a “lack of will within the administration to enforce” that Part. During its remaining three years in office, the Eisenhower Justice Department filed only ten suits against southern registrars for “arbitrary refusals to register” qualified Negroes. These suits were stalled by state judges; one Georgia judge ordered officials in Terrell County to withhold voter records from federal agents even if a special police force had to be enlisted—and presumably armed—to enforce that order. At the end of 1958, in the eight southern states in which the Southern Regional Council was able to obtain official figures, not only had the number of registered black voters not risen, it had actually fallen—and those states did not include Mississippi or Alabama, probably the two most recalcitrant states, where no official registration figures were kept; at the end of 1960, the net gain in black registration in the Old Confederacy appears to have been a flat zero.
There were other reasons, however, to justify Johnson’s sense of accomplishment.
The Act was, after all, the first civil rights legislation that had been passed in eighty-two years—and that fact had tremendous significance. For decades, for more than three-quarters of a century, men and women, black and white, who fought for social justice had watched as civil rights bills died in the Senate—every bill, without exception. Many supporters of civil rights no longer believed that a civil rights bill would ever be passed by the Senate.
The Civil Rights Act of 1957 changed that, as Lyndon Johnson tried to explain to journalists and liberals who criticized its inadequacies. “It’s just a beginning,” he told them. “We’ve shown that we can do it. We’ll do it again, in a couple of years.” Critics of the Act “were right in claiming that it contained only limited substance … but they failed to recognize the irrelevancy of the point,” George Reedy was to write. “The crucial significance of the civil rights bill was that it opened a major branch of American government to a tenth of the population for which all legislative doors had been slammed shut since 1875”—and once the doors were opened, it would be impossible to close them again. Johnson believed “that if he got one civil rights act through, he could get more…. He felt if you could get something through, it would be no longer a question of yes or no, but how much.” Lyndon Johnson tried to explain this, over and over again, to the journalists and liberals who criticized the bill at the dinner parties he attended. “We’ve started something now,” he would say. “Don’t worry, it’s only the first. We know we can do it now. We know the ropes.” He was right. After decades, generations, in which the great dam had been impenetrable, the sharp point of a wedge had now been hammered into it. The point could hardly have been tinier. But once the point of a wedge is hammered in, the rest of the wedge will, sooner or later, follow.
GETTING THE FIRST ACT THROUGH—“starting something”—was important for another reason. If “half a loaf” is an invalid metaphor with which to justify the Civil Rights Act of 1957, there is another metaphor which, though even more amorphous, is more justifiable, when there is taken into account the effect of the bill’s passage on men and women who for so long had watched every other bill die in the Senate.
The opening of “legislative doors” that “had been slammed shut since 1875” meant, Reedy says, that perhaps other laws, stronger laws, “could be passed someday,” and the “impact of this upon people who had previously been denied participation in the institutions that ruled over them was extraordinary.” On the afternoon of the day on which the Senate was passing the civil rights bill, Robert Graetz, a white minister whose Montgomery home had twice been dynamited because of his support of the bus boycott, was talking to Murray Kempton. Kempton, having observed the Senate in action, was pessimistic about the prospects of future legislation, but Graetz said that now that one bill was being passed, soon “There will be a [strong] voting rights bill, and then sooner than you think, there will be Negro representatives in the Legislature.” Kempton said that this seemed like a wild dream. “Perhaps it is,” Graetz said, “but if we did not believe it, we could not live here, and we would be wrong to be as happy as we are.”
The Civil Rights Act of 1957 was more than half a loaf, a lot more. It was hope.
AND THERE WERE STILL OTHER REASONS for Lyndon Johnson to be exultant.
In 1957, great historical forces—a rising demand for social justice, a new militancy among blacks, new political equations that endowed the black vote with new significance—had come together in a tide sweeping toward the enactment of new civil rights legislation. But great forces had swept forward before and always, if they reached the Senate, they had been blocked by the Senate. Had it not been for Lyndon Johnson, they would have been blocked by the Senate again. At the moment that he stepped wholeheartedly into the civil rights fight, these forces had seemingly been blocked by the Senate again. That they had in some measure been victorious in that body, and therefore in government as a whole, had been due to him; he had understood the forces (“The world is moving to the left; you can either move with it or b
e crushed”), and had ridden them, and at the same time had directed them into channels that made it possible for them to flow forward and win for social justice a beachhead staging area from which, the next time the forces came together, they could advance still further.
The direction that he had given these forces, and the maneuvers he had made on their behalf, had all been legislative in nature. During the civil rights fight of 1957, Lyndon Johnson had displayed, in discovering underneath the seemingly impenetrable southern defiance a weak spot (voting) on which southerners might yield; in locating underneath the impassioned northern rhetoric an area (loss of the right of jury trial) in which some northerners felt themselves on weak moral ground; and in using these two points of vulnerability to carve out, amendment by amendment, an area of reconciliation that could attract a majority—in doing all this he had displayed a remarkable ability in that most vital of legislative arts: the art of compromise. In seeing the need to bring together the South and the West, and in recognizing, in the Hells Canyon Dam, the means of bringing them together, he had displayed a mastery of legislative strategy on a grand, nationwide, scale. By grasping in a moment, on the Senate floor, the possibilities in Clint Anderson’s amendment; by seizing that moment before it could vanish from the floor; by delicately adding jury trial amendment after jury trial amendment until he finally had the amendment that would attract enough votes to let the bill pass, he had displayed a mastery of small-scale, intricate legislative maneuver. In a republic which had, during the past century of its existence, grown accustomed to thinking of governmental leadership almost solely in terms of executive leadership, he had provided a vivid demonstration of the potentialities in legislative leadership. A master of a profession cannot but know he is a master, cannot but feel joy and pride in exercising that mastery. Lyndon Johnson knew what he had done, and gloried in what he had done. So I went to a few key southerners and persuaded them…. And then, in return, I got the western liberals … and then I was able to show that as long as they trusted me…
His triumph was a triumph of something even larger than legislative expertise and leadership. The common ground on which he had at last brought both sides together was not ground he had discovered, but ground he had created. The bill he had gotten passed might still bear the number—H.R. 6127—that it had been given in the House of Representatives when it was still the Eisenhower Administration’s bill, but it bore little resemblance to the bill drawn up by Attorney General Brownell. The excisions in and amendments to it that Lyndon Johnson had fashioned had been so substantial that the bill was in effect a new bill, in whose creation he had had the major hand. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 was therefore a demonstration not only of legislative expertise and leadership, but of legislative creativity—of creativity on a very high order.
And this was a demonstration that was badly needed. As C. Vann Woodward, perhaps the nation’s pre-eminent historian of southern history, wrote in the October, 1957, issue of Commentary, “The trouble was not in the House of Representatives, which frequently yielded to the pressure, but in that formidable institution,” the United States Senate. “Moving between the incorrigible right and the immovable left, Senator Johnson worked mainly in the shifting center to shape and mold a … workable compromise to replace a futile stalemate. The air of compromise is rarely appreciated fully by men of principle,” and working out this compromise was very difficult. Its success “called for political astuteness on Johnson’s part amounting to genius … The senator, it proved, had what it took.”
ON THE SUNDAY after the Act’s passage the great media organs that set the liberal tune pulled out all the stops. There was so much praise in the New York Times and the Washington papers that it couldn’t be confined to one section. The Post, that Sunday, carried not only an editorial that reflected Philip Graham’s opinions (“Mr. Johnson came out of the debate a national rather than a regional figure”), but, under the headline “JOHNSON’S MASTERPIECE,” a political analysis by Robert Albright (“The Senate last week did an incredible thing…. Famed for his legislative miracles, this beyond any doubt was Johnson’s masterpiece”), and, in the Society section, a long profile by Mary Van Rensselaer Thayer that began “This, but definitely, is LBJ Week.” In the Washington Star there was an editorial, as well as an analysis of his tactics by David Koonce (“Some of the veteran observers in the Senate Press Gallery … confidently expected to be writing about a civil rights filibuster for weeks and months…. Everybody knew there would be a filibuster. Everybody, that is, except Lyndon Baines Johnson …”), and a long profile in the Society section by Liz and Leslie Carpenter. A few days later, The New Republic weighed in: “Moderates of both parties share [a] feeling of triumph…. [T]he leaders were thoroughly reasonable men…. Here was bipartisanship at its best….” Douglas Cater of the Reporter, so critical of Johnson in the past, now extended himself to make amends. Reedy had written a long memorandum and given it to Cater “for background,” and Cater asked permission to use sentences from Reedy’s memo as if Johnson himself had spoken them to him, Cater, in an interview. Reedy edited the quotes (“Eye think it is all right providing the words I have bracketed in the first paragraph are eliminated,” he told Johnson), and Cater used them as edited, no matter how they distorted reality. His article said, “Johnson remarked to me recently: ‘It was realized that there could be no “compromise” in the sense of an empty and evasive deal.’… ‘Everything that happened, short of technical drafting work, took place right on the Senate floor in plain sight of the press and public’” The article as a whole substantially revised Cater’s earlier view of Johnson. And there was praise for Lyndon Johnson in publications that had very seldom bestowed praise on him in the past—the publications that he needed. “Senator Lyndon Johnson’s performance in driving the ‘right-to-vote’ bill through the Senate … is the most remarkable feat of political generalship in years…. Johnson is a spectacular operator.” Those sentences came from the AFL-CIO News. The AFL-CIO! Meany! Labor! Labor, which always liked liberals—and which had never liked him. That Sunday he sat at home watching the morning television shows on which he was invariably praised, and on Monday morning there was a memorandum from Willie Day Taylor on shows he hadn’t been able to watch: “Sen. Bible was also complimentary of your leadership on WTOP’s City Side.” Columnists compared him favorably to America’s great legislative leaders of the past. “Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson is now recognized as a modern Henry Clay, the great compromiser on the issue of slavery,” said Ray Tucker. No wonder he was exultant, euphoric. Just before he left for Texas, Joseph C. Duke, the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms, presented him with a large American flag, together with a letter “to certify that the enclosed flag was flown over the Senate wing of the United States Capitol from the First to the Thirtieth of August, Nineteen Hundred and Fifty-seven, during which period was adopted by the United States Congress the Civil Rights Bill.” Lyndon Johnson took the flag back to the ranch with him, and on his first morning home, Lady Bird had it raised to the top of the tall flagpole on the front lawn. It fluttered there against the sky—that brilliant blue “sapphire” Hill Country sky, so often cloudless in summer, that had spelled doom for his father and his father’s father. When he had been a boy, Lyndon had watched his father and mother look up at that sky, hoping in vain for a sign of the rain that could save their land. He had looked up at it himself then, in vain. When he looked up now, the blue in the flag was deeper than the sky’s blue, and across the sky’s pitiless brightness, broad red and white stripes waved triumphantly, sapphire blue no longer doom but only background.
Liberal suspicion of Lyndon Johnson had not been completely dissipated, though—far from it. Even during the first chorus of praise there were dissenting voices. Some of the liberal senators who had fought to the end for a stronger bill were unable to reconcile themselves to the one that had passed, feeling the public had been led to believe it would achieve at least small advances in civil rights, while they felt that in f
act there was no chance of that. Wayne Morse, urging Eisenhower to veto it, called it a “hoax and sham bill.” And they were bitter about Lyndon Johnson. “Johnson,” Paul Douglas was to write, somehow “emerged from the shadows of opposition as the great apostle of civil rights…. [The bill] was a triumph, so he said, for his policy of moderation over the extremists, who would have prevented action by their wild talk. Some of his favorite columnists, including William S. White, burst into a chorus of antiphonal praise. Somehow I now became the man who had impeded progress. Johnson, our opponent, became, in their version, the great hero.” Not all liberal newspapers saw good in the bill—or in the man who had masterminded its passage. “The moderate Texas leadership … seems willing to sacrifice anything except party unity,” the Detroit News editorialized. Liberals at their dinner parties still argued among themselves about the bill, and about Lyndon Johnson. Bethine Church would never forget the explosion of pent-up anger with which Clayton Fritchey, director of the Democratic National Committee’s Public Affairs Division, greeted her husband when, at a Georgetown party, Frank walked through the front door, or how Fritchey continued, “for hours, it seemed,” to assail Frank in a “brutal, brutal argument” for helping to pass the jury trial amendment. “Some of his [Church’s] liberal friends thought it was the damnedest sellout in history,” his aide John Carver would recall. Paul Douglas used a memorable phrase: the bill, he said, reminded him of Lincoln’s old saying that “it was like a soup made from the shadow of a crow which had starved to death.” Within a day, it seemed, that saying was being repeated over dinner tables in Georgetown and Cleveland Park. And as time passed, and the ineffectiveness of the Act became increasingly evident, liberal criticism was to grow louder.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 159
