An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964

by Todd S. Purdum

  For all the presumed drama of the opening day of debate, the scene in the Senate was oddly ordinary. Humphrey’s and Kuchel’s voices floated out toward the pale yellow marble-trimmed walls of a mostly empty chamber, and disappointed tourists trudged into the galleries above at quarter-hour intervals in search of something that might pass for debate. “Let there be extended debate, full debate, debate on every section, subsection and title,” Humphrey declared. “But the difference between extended debate and a filibuster is that debate is designed to give life to legislation, and is designed to arrive at a decision—either affirmative or negative—a decision of will, yea or nay. A filibuster is designed to kill legislation, to bury it, to paralyze it.”

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  HUMPHREY AND KUCHEL HELD the floor so long that Richard Russell did not have a chance to begin the southern rebuttal until the following day, Tuesday, March 31. When he did, he was livid with Humphrey, complaining that the majority whip had spoken for four or five hours. “For some reason,” Russell allowed, “he appears to think that he not only calls the tune but does all the dancing.” When Humphrey rejoined that he had spoken only for three hours or so, the dour Senator Spessard Holland of Florida interjected, “It merely seemed like a longer time, so little was actually said.”

  The southerners accused the pro-civil-rights forces themselves of staging a filibuster, with their extended speeches in support of the bill, even as Russell drily acknowledged, “It may take some time for us to discuss the bill adequately.” When Kuchel noted that a “clear majority” of senators favored the bill, Russell pounced. “The Senator assumes, of course, that a majority is always right,” he said. “That is the most violent and erroneous assumption that has ever been asserted. A minority has the responsibility to undertake to correct the views of any majority.”

  Soon enough, Russell’s bumptious colleague Strom Thurmond of South Carolina—who held the Senate’s all-time filibuster record for his twenty-four-hour, eighteen-minute tirade against the 1957 civil rights bill—was on his feet to undertake the task of correction. Thurmond began with Title I, which barred unequal application of voter registration requirements in federal elections. He insisted that such protections were unnecessary because the NAACP was already busy bringing voting rights suits, and added, “Today, the Negro is almost a favored class of citizen in America.” Thurmond argued that a recent report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights had found not a single confirmed report of voter discrimination in South Carolina.

  Senator Jacob Javits of New York, well prepared by the Justice Department briefing books at hand, was quick to contend that an absence of sworn complaints of discrimination should not be taken as proof of anything. He noted that in McCormick County, South Carolina, only one of forty-nine registered black citizens appeared to have voted in the 1960 presidential primary, and none in the general election.

  George Smathers of Florida, a segregationist of a more genteel stripe, couched his arguments on a loftier plane. “The proponents seek to set fire to the barn in order to get rid of a couple of rats,” Smathers said. “We are doing a good job. If we are permitted to continue to do it, in time the evil will disappear, and citizens will no longer be deprived of the right to vote because of race, color or creed.”

  But Thurmond was having none of this. He spoke skeptically of the constitutionality of the entire Fourteenth Amendment, because it was passed during Reconstruction, when the South was under the heel of the northern boot. This was too much even for Hubert Humphrey, who was moved to exclaim, “I never thought I would live to see the day when anybody would doubt that the Fourteenth Amendment was as much a part of the Constitution as the Bill of Rights.”

  Such a day had now come, and the fight was on in earnest.

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  THE MAN LEADING THAT fight for the South—the man who had led it with devastating effectiveness for more than a generation—was perhaps the most respected, and also the most quietly feared, man in the Senate: Richard Brevard Russell Jr., the courtly, learned, lonely bachelor from Winder, Georgia, who had come to Washington at the dawn of the New Deal and in the ensuing three decades had become the acknowledged master of the Senate’s rules and procedures and the proud custodian of its unspoken codes and folkways.

  “Baseball fan. Roman bearing. Tends toward hypochondria,” is how Roger Mudd of CBS summed Russell up in a succinct sketch that spring. “Almost impossible to anger but a devastating debater … Modest. His Congressional Directory biography totals seven words.”

  Indeed, by this stage in his long and distinguished career, Russell had no need to impress anyone, friend or foe. The son of a family that had lived in Georgia and North Carolina since colonial times—“descended from the oldest and choicest American stock,” an admirer said—Russell was, as his fellow southerner Lady Bird Johnson once put it, “Quality.”

  Russell’s great-great-grandfather, a British sympathizer during the Revolution, had been forced to flee to the Bahamas, but the family eventually returned and Russell’s own father became a lawyer, Superior Court judge, and finally chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court. Like every southern boy, as William Faulkner once wrote, young R. B. Russell grew up always able to imagine that it was not yet two o’clock on the afternoon of Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, when the tide had not yet turned and defeat was not yet inevitable for his beloved South. He was taught to cherish every fact and legend of regional gallantry and valor, and when Lyndon Johnson’s daughter Luci married Patrick Nugent in 1966, “Uncle Dick” Russell’s gift to her would be an inscribed copy of Gone with the Wind.

  By age twenty-five, he was speaker pro tem of the Georgia State Assembly, and at thirty-three he was elected governor, sworn in by his own father, the chief justice. Just two years later, in 1932, he won a special election to the United States Senate, where he became a staunch supporter of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal farm legislation and rural electrification (and he would be the driving force behind creation of the National School Lunch Act after World War II). But by the late 1930s, he was also a leader of the “Conservative Coalition” of southern Democrats and midwestern and western Republicans that held the balance of power in Washington.

  When Lyndon Johnson arrived in the Senate in 1949, he asked Bobby Baker who was the most influential senator. Baker replied that while all senators were equal, Dick Russell was the most equal, “incomparably the truest current Senate type, and incomparably the most influential man on the inner life of the Senate,” as the journalist William S. White would write. In fact, when the Senate faced a difficult task—such as the investigation into Harry Truman’s firing of General Douglas MacArthur in 1951—it was Russell to whom the Senate turned. Soon enough, Lyndon Johnson made it his business to be assigned a seat on Russell’s powerful Armed Services Committee, listening and learning at the hand of a teacher he called “the Old Master.”

  And Johnson, with his gift for courting and flattering and winning over older men to his side, soon accomplished a feat even more extraordinary. He enticed the solitary Russell to after-work suppers and, later, Sunday brunches at his and Lady Bird’s welcoming home on Thirtieth Place, Northwest. Russell had largely shied away from Washington social life, and Lady Bird said it was all but impossible to get him to accept an invitation far in advance. But the Johnsons persisted, and in those friendly, filial, spur-of-the-moment get-togethers, Lyndon Johnson was, indeed, learning from a master.

  Russell eschewed the crude populist racism of southern demagogues like Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi and “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina—and for that matter, the showy, seriocomic antics of Strom Thurmond. Instead, he grounded his implacable opposition to desegregation in the Constitution itself. Indeed, he always took care to refer to the southern caucus that he led as the “Constitutional Democrats.” As a result, national magazines and newspapers whose correspondents stood in awe of Russell’s legislative skills took pains to portray him as being “at opposite poles from the stereotype some N
ortherners hold of a Deep-Dixie segregationist—the gallus-snapping, Negro-baiting semi-illiterate,” as Newsweek put it in 1963. Time said he “admired and respected” blacks in “that special, paternal, Southern way.” Many journalists wanted to believe, as the Saturday Evening Post reported as early as 1951, that Russell was “far more liberal in his heart than he is in his votes.”

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  YET DICK RUSSELL’S VOTES told a stark story. In 1949, he led the fight to change the cloture rule to require two-thirds of the whole Senate to cut off debate, instead of just two-thirds of those senators present. (He once said he would “vote to gag the Senate when the shrimp start whistling ‘Dixie.’”) After the Supreme Court’s Brown decision in 1954, he drafted the final version of the southerners’ “Declaration of Constitutional Principles,” less grandly known as the “Southern Manifesto,” calling the decision “a clear abuse of judicial power” and promising to use “all lawful means to bring about a reversal of this decision which is contrary to the Constitution and to prevent the use of force in its implementation.” (Lyndon Johnson was one of only three southern senators who refused to sign.) Russell denounced the 1957 Civil Rights Act that Johnson labored so craftily to pass as sure to create “unspeakable confusion, bitterness and bloodshed in a great section of our common country.” After it passed, a constituent wrote to him to say he was fighting a losing battle. Russell responded that he was trying to delay desegregation “ten years if I’m not lucky, two hundred years if I am.” In the debate over the 1960 civil rights bill, he organized his three squads of southerners to break the back of the exhausted civil rights supporters, block cloture, and gut the legislation.

  And in occasional public flashes, bits of his deepest private views emerged. During World War II, he made no secret of his belief that blacks lacked physical courage even if, as he once told his sister, they were quick to kill in anger. To a constituent who objected to black and white troops using the same hospitals (and even the same maternity wards) on southern Army bases, he wrote, “It is a terrible mistake and I hope we will be able to convince the Army of it before it is widely advertised and becomes a serious issue.” In a debate over one of his pet causes—cutting the budget of Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime Fair Employment Practices Commission, he told his colleagues, “Any man who wants to take a position that he is no better than the Negro is entitled to his own opinion. I do not think much of him, but he can think it.”

  “I don’t like to say too much about people like Senator Russell,” Lyndon Johnson’s loyal cook, Zephyr Wright, would tell an oral history interviewer after both men were dead, “because he was at the Johnsons’ quite a bit. To me, when he was there, naturally he portrayed a different way of life than he did in Congress, because he was a very nice person. But when I read about him and heard about the things he was doing and saying in Congress, then I got a very different feeling about him.”

  What Russell was saying and doing in Congress in the spring of 1964 could not have pleased Zephyr Wright. On March 16, during the debate on the motion to consider the bill, he revived an old chestnut, proposing a program of voluntary “racial relocation,” which would offer government subsidies aimed at achieving a black population in each state “as near to the national average as practicable and feasible.” Under such a plan, the federal government would pay blacks to move north and west, and white northerners to move south, with the goal of producing a black population of 10.5 percent in all regions. The Atlanta Constitution, the most influential newspaper in his own state, took him to task for perpetuating “for all the nation to see an image which Southerners are trying to overcome, the callous attitude that Negroes can be moved about like chess pawns.” State Senator Lamar Plunkett of Georgia allowed that “the people of Georgia are now going forward with a little different beat of the drum. Those who are not thoroughly conversant with it may lose the beat.” But Russell was unapologetic, telling Business Week, “I’m not an anthropologist, but I’ve studied history. And there is no case in history of a mongrel race preserving a civilization, much less creating one.” Russell’s proposal went nowhere.

  In truth, for all his erudition, for all his mastery of the rules, Russell had limited options, as he knew better than anyone. In 1952, spurred on by the sentiment so often repeated in Washington with a sigh—that Dick Russell would make a better president than any man in national life, if only he weren’t from the South—Russell himself had decided to test the proposition by actually mounting a campaign for the White House. He failed, miserably, and some of his best friends thought he was never again quite the same psychologically. “It’s one thing to know something academically,” George Reedy would say. “It’s another to have it hit you in the face.”

  Now even some of Russell’s onetime allies were throwing his own words back at him, and the beat was changing. He was sixty-six years old, and his emphysema was bothering him more and more. He was exhausted by the dual demands of the filibuster and his service on the special commission, chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren, charged with investigating the Kennedy assassination—an assignment that Lyndon Johnson had forced upon him. His best hope for the southerners that spring was to keep talking—with luck, until summer, when he knew the Senate would have to break for the presidential nominating conventions and then be unable to wrestle with anything so contentious in the middle of a fall election campaign. “We knew there was no way in hell we could muster the necessary votes to defeat the civil rights bill,” Russell’s fellow Georgian Herman Talmadge would recall. “But we thought we could filibuster long enough to get the other side to agree to amendments that would make it less offensive.”

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  AS THE FILIBUSTER BEGAN, however, Russell had one other hope besides prolonged talk: Everett Dirksen, who on the very day the southerners began their counterattack on the bill was marshaling his own forces. Like Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey, Russell knew that Dirksen was the wild card—in fact, the trump card—in the whole civil rights debate. And Dirksen’s publicly expressed doubts about the public accommodations and fair employment practices sections of H.R. 7152 entitled Russell to think he might yet win the Illinoisan to his side.

  But even as the southerners trumpeted their determination to defeat the bill, Dirksen was making it clear to his fellow Republicans that he was already looking for a way to make H.R. 7152 more passable. All during the prefilibuster over the motion to consider, Dirksen had largely stayed out of the public parliamentary maneuvering. Instead, he worked quietly with his key legal aides on the Judiciary Committee—Cornelius “Neal” Kennedy, Clyde Flynn, and Bernard Waters, known collectively as “Dirksen’s Bombers”—to analyze the bill. “Dirksen asked us to take a look at the bill and make it as acceptable as possible to as large a number of people as possible,” Flynn would recall. “We met with him literally fourteen hours a day, month after month,” Kennedy remembered.

  Dirksen and his staff concluded that Title VII, covering employment discrimination, would pose particular problems in northern states like Illinois that already had strong fair employment statutes. “If the powers granted in this Title are exercised,” the minority leader wrote to Walter McAdoo, executive vice president of the Keystone Steel & Wire Company, a large employer in Peoria, “it will be one great headache for industry and business all over the country.”

  Dirksen’s concern was also fueled by an intense employment discrimination controversy in his home state involving Motorola, the big electronics company that was a major employer in suburban Chicago. Earlier that year, a black hearing examiner for the Illinois State Fair Employment Practices Commission had ordered Motorola to hire a black applicant who had failed an ability test and had directed the company to stop using the test on the grounds that it discriminated against “culturally deprived and disadvantaged groups.” The case, which was still pending before the full commission, had become a cause célèbre among conservative opponents of Title VII, who contended that it presaged the sort of overreaching th
at a new federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission would attempt.

  On March 31, at a closed-door meeting of the Republican Policy Committee, the party’s Senate brain trust, Dirksen outlined some possible amendments to Title VII that might keep the bill from “harassing businessmen,” as he put it. These included proposals aimed at easing employment record-keeping requirements, plus other measures intended to avert conflicts between state and federal fair employment rules and to give precedence to states with effective laws already on the books. He also floated the far more controversial idea of revising Title II of the bill, the all-important public accommodations section, to allow for voluntary compliance within one year, before the attorney general could sue for an injunction to block discriminatory practices. It was his first effort to share his evolving ideas beyond his own inner circle, and he took in his colleagues’ views. They persuaded him to hold off on any changes in Title II for the moment.

  As Dirksen tested the Republican waters, the pro-civil-rights forces were facing a crucial test of their own. At the meeting of the bipartisan floor leaders’ group on Wednesday, April 1, Joe Rauh declared: “Let’s face it. We have a bill now which is beyond our wildest dreams.” But with the first weekend of the filibuster fast approaching, and the probability that many senators would be out of town campaigning in an election year, Humphrey’s allies worried that they would be unable to muster a quorum for the projected Saturday session on April 4.