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

by Todd S. Purdum

  Dirksen summarized the long history of once controversial reforms that had become an accepted part of American life, from laws mandating pure food and drugs, to those barring child labor and governing wages and hours, to the creation of the civil service system and the advent of women’s suffrage. Then, paraphrasing Victor Hugo, Dirksen declared, “No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.”

  He cited the nearly half million black Americans who had served as he had in the armed forces in World War I, and the nearly two million who had served in World War II, and asked, “What do you think they told their kids about the freedom they experienced wherever they served abroad?” When asked about the criticisms of his proposed amendments, Dirksen responded laconically by citing the story of a young airman on his first bombing mission who had shouted to his commander in panic, “Sarge, they’re shooting at us!”

  “Yes,” the sergeant replied, “they’re allowed to.”

  As to the bill’s ultimate fate, Dirksen expressed not a sliver of doubt. “Let editors rave at will and let states fulminate at will,” he said, “but the time has come and it can’t be stopped.”

  * * *

  THE REPUBLICANS CAUCUSED AGAIN on May 20 and 22 to go over Dirksen’s proposed changes, while the southerners continued to rail against the package in speeches on the Senate floor. For weeks, the segregationists had hoped that strong showings by George Wallace in the presidential primaries might help rally public opinion to their side. But now Russell was forced to acknowledge that not even Wallace’s 43 percent plurality in the Maryland primary on May 19 would have any real effect on the bill’s fate. “The Senate is usually the last place in the government to get the drift of American public opinion,” Russell told reporters.

  Finally, on Tuesday, May 26, Dirksen formally introduced his package of revisions, cosponsored with Mansfield, as “an amendment in the nature of a substitute,” which meant it would replace the existing version of H.R. 7152 in its entirety. As a result of the discussions with his Republican colleagues, he had inserted a provision in Title VII making it explicit that no employer or union could be required to give preferential treatment or establish quotas because of any racial imbalance that might exist in a company or union. He explained that the origins of the compromise stretched back to John Kennedy’s proposals of the previous June. “As I look back now upon the time that has been devoted to the bill, I doubt very much whether in my whole legislative lifetime any measure has received so much meticulous attention,” he said. “We have tried to be mindful of every word, of every comma, of the shading of every phrase. We have attempted to be fair in giving everyone an opportunity to present his case.”

  Mansfield then dared to “hope that it will not be too long before an attempt is made to invoke cloture, because, in my opinion, that is the only way by which we can face the issue, an issue which I sincerely wish had come before my time or afterward. But the issue is here, and it cannot be evaded, dodged or delayed much longer.” Hubert Humphrey praised the compromise’s “practical, commonsense approach.”

  But Russell was not ready to give up just yet. “I realize that those who have participated in this historic gathering feel ‘it is all over now,’ except for counting the votes and sending the messages to the states that are not to be covered by the bill, and sending the emissaries of the FBI to the states that are to be covered by it,” he said bitterly. Humphrey jumped up in protest. “Mr. President,” he insisted, “those of us who have worked on this measure do not feel that way. We are most respectful of our colleagues.”

  A few minutes later, Russell concluded, “As one who lives in the South, as one who has never been ashamed of being a Southerner, and as one who believes that the people of the South are as good citizens as people anywhere else in the country, I resent this political foray. It may be that the proponents will be successful in getting this measure through by gagging those associated with me in opposing this bill; but I will always maintain that I do not believe it is consistent with the fundamental principles of fair play to which all American citizens usually subscribe.”

  * * *

  A FORCED LULL FOLLOWED the introduction of the Dirksen substitute. The Memorial Day recess was looming and so were a series of memorial fundraising dinners commemorating what would have been John Kennedy’s forty-seventh birthday on May 29. President Johnson used the break to try to round up a few more votes for cloture. On Tuesday, May 26, he lobbied his old friend and protégé Howard Cannon of Nevada. When Cannon, a highly decorated World War II pilot, had come to the Senate in 1959, Johnson had mentored him, giving him a seat on the Armed Services Committee. Now the president gently raised the question of cloture on H.R. 7152. “It wasn’t a sell-type meeting,” Cannon would recall. “He didn’t push as hard on this as he did on other things.” But the running tally for cloture was adding up.

  The next day, Mansfield announced that he hoped to be able to hold a cloture vote in early June. “You have to hit bedrock some time and have a showdown,” he said. The following Monday, June 1, Dirksen promised to circulate an annotated copy of his proposed changes, to make the differences from the original bill “crystal clear, with brackets and underscoring.”

  And then, just at the moment when his powers of persuasion were needed most, Dirksen fell seriously ill, with a bad chest cold that kept him at home. For weeks he had been running on fumes, and the hectic pace and unrelenting pressure had taken their toll. “Listen, they forget I’m no spring chicken anymore,” he complained. “I get out of this damn place at eight, nine or ten o’clock, drive home, have dinner at eleven and get up in the morning at dawn. My main problem is getting enough restorative sleep.”

  Russell now seized on this moment to say that he was ready to begin voting on the remaining jury trial amendments right away. But Humphrey and Mansfield knew they did not yet have the last needed votes for cloture lined up. So the pro-civil-rights forces now had to stage a slowdown, holding the floor in what amounted to a kind of counterfilibuster. Because Dirksen was not present to explain the proposed changes from the floor as had been planned, Humphrey did his part on Thursday, June 4, outlining the new package, including the inclusion of the Mansfield-Dirksen jury trial amendment. That same day, Mansfield proposed a tightly limited plan in which senators would vote on the pending jury trial amendments separately and then on the substitute bill. But Russell was unwilling to be so tightly constricted, preferring to have the flexibility to bring up any of the hundreds of potential amendments still pending. “If we go in the basis which the Senator from Georgia has outlined, we shall be here until 1984 and we will still be voting on amendments,” Mansfield complained.

  In Dirksen’s absence, Bourke Hickenlooper’s long-simmering frustrations boiled over. As head of the Senate’s Republican Policy Committee, the party’s agenda-setting group in the Senate, he resented being given short shrift by Dirksen, who was junior to him in service. “Bourke had the feeling that without talking to a number of his older colleagues, like himself, Everett had the tendency to run off and sit down with Hubert and sort of take over as representing the Republicans in the Senate without having done perhaps as much coordination as he might have,” Hickenlooper’s fellow Iowan Jack Miller would recall. “To the average observer, there was no friction, but in the corridors and cloakroom, there were comments.”

  Hickenlooper now rallied other conservatives—some of whom had been on the verge of supporting cloture—to hold out for further changes. When Dirksen returned to his office on Friday, June 5, he found a revolt in progress. At a meeting that morning, Hickenlooper led the charge, but Norris Cotton of New Hampshire and Roman Hruska of Nebraska also complained, each of them wanting consideration of amendments of their own. Mansfield had been hoping to hold the cloture vote as early as Tuesday, June 9, but Hickenlooper wanted it postponed until Wednesday, because many senators would be attending the national governors’ conference in Cleveland on Monday. That was a reasonable enough request, and Mans
field agreed to set the cloture vote for Wednesday, June 10. Then Hickenlooper sprang a surprise. He asked the Senate’s unanimous consent to vote on three amendments on Tuesday: Thruston Morton’s jury trial amendment (which had been just slightly revised); another by Norris Cotton restricting the coverage of Title VII’s employment discrimination provisions to businesses with one hundred or more employees (instead of twenty-five, as in the House-passed bill); and still another of his own devising, to delete all provisions relating to aid for desegregation of public schools.

  There was instant panic, as neither the pro-civil-rights forces nor the southerners knew just how Hickenlooper’s proposal might play out or how it would affect each side’s advantage in what was now clearly the endgame. If the civil rights forces blocked Hickenlooper’s demand, would he retaliate by rallying his conservative allies to oppose cloture? If Russell blocked him, would he do the opposite? “I fear that if we accept the proposal,” Paul Douglas said, “we shall open a Pandora’s box.” Russell drily noted that Hickenlooper seemed to be having much more success than he had in getting movement on consideration of amendments, noting that Mansfield had met his own proposals with “a grin” and “a very polite declination.”

  To give both sides time to review the bidding, Russell proposed deferring consideration of Hickenlooper’s request until the next day, Saturday, June 6.

  Overnight, Hubert Humphrey received commitments from three Republicans—Karl Mundt, Roman Hruska, and Norris Cotton—that in exchange for a vote on the new amendments, they would definitely support cloture. Jack Miller of Iowa, a Catholic and a former law professor at Notre Dame, had already announced that he would agree to cut off debate, having been heavily lobbied by the archbishop of Dubuque. This meant that there were now almost certainly enough Republican votes lined up to assure the sixty-seven votes needed, but Hickenlooper was still a question mark.

  As the Senate reconvened on that Saturday morning, Hickenlooper again asked for unanimous consent to debate the three amendments—with four hours allotted for each—on Tuesday, June 9. No objection was heard. When Russell remonstrated with Humphrey for agreeing to Hickenlooper’s demands while refusing his own earlier request for votes on amendments, the majority whip was candid. “Well, Dick,” he said, “you haven’t any votes to give us on cloture and these fellows do.”

  So Morton’s jury trial amendment—the very amendment that just a month earlier had loomed as a potentially lethal threat to the bill because it might unleash a flood of weakening amendments—now became the price the civil rights forces were willing to pay to achieve cloture. It was a small enough price in the end. Justice Department lawyers determined that the amendment—which would allow jury trials in all cases of criminal contempt under the bill (except for voting rights cases under Title I) with maximum penalties of $1,000 or six months in jail—would do no real harm to the bill.

  On Monday, June 8, Mike Mansfield rose on the Senate floor, addressed the presiding officer, his fellow Montanan, Lee Metcalf, and began the process of invoking cloture. “We, the undersigned Senators,” he said, “in accordance with the provisions of Rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate, hereby move to bring to a close the debate on the bill.” The cloture motion would now be voted on at ten o’clock Wednesday morning, after the Senate waited the required two days. Debate would be limited to one hour.

  But first the Senate had to deal with Hickenlooper’s demands, which it did on Tuesday. The Morton amendment—once so controversial—passed by a vote of 51 to 48. “Does this jury amendment bother you any?” Lyndon Johnson asked the attorney general after the vote.

  “No, I think it makes it much more difficult, but hell, we can live with it,” Bob Kennedy replied.

  The Hickenlooper amendment to withhold financial aid for desegregation of public schools failed 40 to 56, while Norris Cotton’s amendment to exempt businesses with fewer than one hundred employees from Title VII’s fair employment provisions failed 34 to 63. Every obstacle to the cloture vote had now been cleared away.

  Every obstacle but one, that is. As the day wound down, Mike Mansfield drily warned his colleagues, “It is my understanding that there may be speeches beyond the hour of 12 o’clock midnight tonight.” And at 7:38 p.m., the redoubtable Robert Byrd of West Virginia took to the floor with an eight-hundred-page speech, vowing to talk through the night in the filibuster’s last gasp. “As I have indicated, and as I repeat, the bill would not create any new civil rights,” Byrd declared. “In my judgment, it would impair the civil rights of all Americans. It cannot be justified on any basis—legal, economic, moral or religious.” Byrd attacked the bill section by section. He read newspaper articles and editorials criticizing it. At one point, Humphrey interrupted to inquire when Byrd might finish. “I have enough material to carry me, if I proceed to read it carefully and painstakingly, as I am now doing, another twelve or fifteen hours,” Byrd replied. “But I shall hardly be able to carry on for that length of time. I assure the amiable and able Senator from Minnesota that I shall indeed complete my recitation no later than 9:59 o’clock a.m., in time to recess in accordance with the previous order.” When Humphrey thanked him for his courtesy, Byrd replied with flights of poetry:

  The roses red upon my neighbor’s vine

  Are owned by him but they are also mine.

  His was the cost, and his the labor, too.

  But mine as well as his the joy, their loveliness to view …

  So why be selfish, when so much that’s fine

  Is grown for me, upon my Minnesota neighbor’s vine …

  “I thank the Senator from West Virginia,” Humphrey replied with an exaggerated flourish. “He has just reminded me that at my abode and domicile out in Northwest Chevy Chase, there is a fence banked with beautiful red roses. I shall go to them and in the morning, at approximately 9:59 a.m., I shall bring my good friend the Senator from West Virginia some of those beautiful red roses that were so patiently planted and nourished by Mrs. Humphrey, and which are viewed by the neighbors and loved by all.”

  And with that, Humphrey concluded, “As we say in that fine land of the Scandinavians, ‘Buenos noches.’”

  That night, Humphrey told Lyndon Johnson that he was sure of sixty-eight votes for cloture, forty-two of them from Democrats. (J. Howard Edmondson of Oklahoma, whom Johnson had also lobbied, had agreed to vote for cloture because of the adoption of the Morton jury trial amendment.)

  “Well, the Republicans are doing a little better than we are, aren’t they?” Johnson said. Indeed, in proportional terms, they were. Dirksen felt confident that he had at least twenty-six out of thirty-three Republican votes.

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING, WEDNESDAY, June 10, Dirksen rose early at Heart’s Desire and went into his own garden to clip some long-stemmed roses to take in to the office. He had stayed up late the night before with his wife, Louella, typing his twelve-page speech in the large-font typeface that he used for floor speeches. He arrived just as Byrd was finishing his soliloquy. Fourteen hours and thirteen minutes in all, it was the single longest speech of the whole debate on H.R. 7152.

  At 10:00 a.m., the Senate chamber was packed, with 150 standees, including many House members, lining the pale yellow walls. In the overflowing galleries, there were precisely six black spectators, including the faithful Clarence Mitchell and Cecil E. Newman, an old friend of Humphrey’s and the editor of the St. Paul Recorder, a black newspaper. Nick Katzenbach and Burke Marshall had to sit on the steps in a gallery aisle.

  Mike Mansfield rose to begin the hour-long debate on the cloture motion by noting that on the Senate’s calendar, it was still the legislative day of March 30, the day the filibuster had begun. “If my memory is correct, we are now in our third month and first legislative day of debate,” he said. Mansfield then read a poignant letter he had received from a twenty-nine-year-old Montana woman, a mother of four.

  “I was conceived by a pair of good, respectable, hard-working white parents,” the w
oman had written. “I was allowed to grow and mature, to have faith in myself and my future, and when I married and gave birth to my lovely children, to have faith in them and their future … This morning, the thought occurred to me, that by that same accident of birth, I could have been conceived by a pair of equally good, respectable, hardworking Negro parents. The process is the same, but what immense differences there would have been in my life and upbringing. How heartbreaking it must be for a child to have to learn that his future is sharply limited even if his intelligence and his ability is not. How confusing it must be for a child to learn that he may not buy an ice cream cone or a Coke in the same shop as a lighter-skinned child, even though his dime has the same value as the other.

  “At night, when I kiss my children goodnight, I offer a small prayer of thanks to God for making them so perfect, so healthy, so lovely, and I find myself tempted to thank Him for letting them be born white. Then I am not so proud, either of myself, nor of our society, which forces such a temptation upon us. And that is why I don’t feel that this is a southern problem. It is a northern problem, a western problem, an eastern problem. It is an American problem, for all Americans. It is my problem. I am only one person, one woman. I wish there was something I could do in this issue. The only way I know how to start is to educate my children that justice and freedom and ambition are not merely privileges, but their birthrights.”

  Richard Russell now rose, unmoved by Mansfield’s eloquence. “Mr. President, the argument the Senator from Montana made in behalf of this bill has an emotional appeal—but no more emotional appeal than that which could be made for a purely socialistic or communistic system that would divide and distribute among all our people every bit of the property and wealth of the people of these United States.” He concluded, “I appeal to the Senate to vote down this gag rule … I appeal to Senators to rise above the pressures to which they have been subjected and to reject this legislation that will result in vast changes, not only in our social order but in our very form of government.”