The Age of Eisenhower
Page 48
If the president did not understand how the South viewed his “moderate” civil rights bill, he found out on July 2, 1957, when Senator Richard Russell of Georgia rose to speak on the floor of the Senate. This deeply respected, indeed venerated senator, a man who for many even in the North embodied the very ideal of the southern gentleman, who poured his heart and soul into his work on behalf of a threatened southern way of life, now stood at his desk and launched a devastating attack on the civil rights bill. So powerful were the volleys, so accurate the fire, so explosive the charges that the bill never recovered from the wounds Russell inflicted that day.
Russell began by crying foul: the president, he said, had told the country he wanted a bill to protect voting rights. But what the attorney general had sent to Congress was something else altogether. It had been “cunningly designed to vest in the Attorney General unprecedented power to bring to bear the whole might of the Federal government, including the armed forces if necessary, to force a commingling of white and Negro children in the state-supported public schools of the South.” Not only that, but the bill proposed to give the attorney general such sweeping powers that he could “force the white people of the South at the point of a Federal bayonet to conform to almost any conceivable edict directed at the destruction of local custom, law or practice separating the races, and enforce a commingling of the races throughout the social order of the South.”
At first Russell’s attack sounded like the kind of apocalyptic fearmongering that one could hear across the South in the 1950s, from tobacco-stained taverns to corporate boardrooms. But Russell was not merely venting racial bile. He went on to dissect, with expert skill, the most threatening part of the bill. Section 3 was somewhat obscure, and Russell meant to shed light on it. It proposed to give the attorney general the power to appeal to a federal court for an injunction against any individual who obstructed, or who was planning to obstruct, a citizen’s right to equal protection of the laws. If the injunction was then violated, and a court order ignored, a judge could assess penalties, including fines and imprisonment, without reference to a jury trial. In essence it allowed the Justice Department to use the federal courts to bypass local police forces and municipal and state authorities when a citizen’s civil rights were at risk. And those civil rights were not precisely defined in the bill, leaving wide discretion to the attorney general. They could cover school integration, interstate transportation, seating in movie theaters and restaurants, and any number of fields in which the attorney general decided equal protection was being denied.
Russell was right about this: Brownell later admitted in his memoirs that Section 3 “gave the attorney general direct authority to enforce Court orders to desegregate public schools and to enter cases such as the Emmett Till murder.” This would have been news to Eisenhower, who understood Brownell’s bill to be chiefly an augmentation of voting rights protections. Brownell had tried to slip the real import of the bill past the president and Congress. Russell blew the whistle on him using egregious language: “If you propose to move into the South in this fashion, you may as well prepare your concentration camps now, for there are not enough jails to hold the people of the South who will today oppose the use of raw federal power to forcibly commingle white and Negro children.”18
The following day Eisenhower regrettably gave credence to the suspicion that he was unfamiliar with the content of his signature piece of legislation. At a news conference the press asked him to comment on Russell’s allegations that the bill was a “cunning device” to enforce racial integration. “Naturally, I’m not a lawyer and I don’t participate in drawing up the exact language of proposals,” he admitted. “I know what the objective was, which was to prevent anybody illegally from interfering with any individual’s right to vote.” In that case, asked James Reston of the New York Times, should the bill be revised to make it more precise? “Well,” said Ike, “I would not want to answer this in detail because I was reading part of that bill this morning, and there were certain phrases I didn’t completely understand.” In essence Russell was right: Ike did not grasp the scope of his own bill.19
Eisenhower could not have been pleased that Brownell had left him vulnerable to this charge. He called the attorney general that afternoon, obviously still stinging from Russell’s withering criticisms. The notes taken by Ann Whitman reveal that Eisenhower was indeed poorly informed about the purposes of the bill. He insisted to Brownell that for two years he had been seeking legislation to allow the attorney general to halt “interference of the right to vote.” But now he found the bill was “somewhat more inclusive,” giving the federal government wide powers—perhaps too wide. “If the bill has been expanded to a form so general that it scares people to death, that is something else again.” By the end of the day, Ann Whitman noted, the president was “very worried” about civil rights.20
Well might he worry. His bill was in trouble. When he met with Republican legislative leaders on July 9, he could see they were wavering. Representative Charles Halleck asked just how important Section 3 was to the administration. Senators Everett Dirksen and Leverett Saltonstall reported that the sentiment in the Senate was running against that part of the bill; compromise was now a “foregone conclusion.” The next morning that message was reinforced when Senator Russell met with Eisenhower. No notes were kept of their conversation, but Ann Whitman wrote down a summary afterward. Russell made an “emotional” case against the bill. Eisenhower emerged from the meeting telling his staff “he would be willing to listen to clarifying amendments to the Bill as it stands. He is not at all unsympathetic to the position that people like Senator Russell take.” The meeting, according to Mrs. Whitman, had restored “some measure of friendship between the Senator and the President.” No wonder Fred Morrow feared a “capitulation to the South.”21
Johnson too pressured Eisenhower. In a secret meeting, so secret that it was not even recorded in the highly detailed presidential appointment book, Johnson informed the president of the facts of life in the Senate. According to Brownell, “Johnson went directly to the Oval Office” and told Eisenhower “that the entire bill would be defeated on the Senate floor if section three . . . was included. He said he had the votes to do this. The president was convinced and agreed that this provision be dropped.” Brownell added, “Eisenhower made this decision without consulting me”—a damning comment from the chief field general for the civil rights bill.22
On July 16 Eisenhower tried to change the narrative. Russell had successfully defined the civil rights bill as a case of federal overreach and a return to the evil days of Reconstruction. Eisenhower now issued a White House statement that insisted his bill sought mainly “to protect the constitutional right of all citizens to vote regardless of race or color.” To that end, federal courts should be allowed to enforce their orders, and local juries could not be allowed to stand in the way of such federal enforcement. Beyond that, Eisenhower said, all he sought was “assistance in efforts to protect other constitutional rights of our citizens”—as tepid a statement of support for the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as one could possibly imagine. In political code words Eisenhower had publicly invited Congress to toss out Section 3 of the bill in hopes of saving Section 4, which focused on voting rights protections.23
The normally somnolent Senate began to act. Johnson announced his intention to move the bill to the Senate floor for debate. The Senate passed a procedural vote to make the bill the “business of the Senate,” a move that came only because Johnson approved it. He promptly served notice that the bill would be amended, knowing that the Senate would move to kill Section 3.24
Eisenhower seemed unperturbed by these developments, saying the next day at his weekly press conference that in the civil rights bill “the voting right is something that should be emphasized.” He backed away from the part of the legislation that strengthened the federal government’s hand to enforce school integration. And he strongly repudiated the idea that
the federal government would ever have to use force to compel obedience to the law. “I can’t imagine any set of circumstances that would ever induce me to send Federal troops . . . to enforce the orders of a Federal court.” This public retreat disheartened both the Republicans in the Senate who had been working hard to pass the bill and their liberal Democratic colleagues. Senator Richard Neuberger of Oregon, an outspoken liberal, said in exasperation after Eisenhower’s press conference that the president “revealed, first, that he is not thoroughly familiar with the contents of his administration’s bill, and second, that he is not enthusiastically in favor of what he does believe the bill to contain.” It was a harsh indictment, one now widely shared in the Senate. Ike had thrown in the towel on Section 3.25
Johnson delivered the coup de grâce a week later, allowing a vote on an amendment to cut the offending section from the bill. It passed, 52–38, in what the New York Times called “a heavy defeat for the administration.” Brownell’s bold proposal to tip the balance of power from the states to the federal government in the struggle to enforce civil rights had been disemboweled on the Senate floor. The federal government’s ability to enforce federal law on school desegregation, racial violence, lynching, intimidation, economic retaliation, and job discrimination had been denied to the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. The leader of the liberal forces in the Senate, Paul Douglas, a Democrat from Illinois, bitterly remarked that the death of Section 3 would arouse “gleeful pleasure among the advocates of apartheid and white supremacy but deep sadness amongst those who are struggling for men to live together.”26
IV
Eisenhower had retreated from what he saw as an indefensible position. But he did not leave the field of battle. The position to which he now withdrew, and which he defended with the conspicuous vigor missing so far from the civil rights debate, was the other major part of the bill, the section Eisenhower really did believe in: Section 4, designed to protect the right of African Americans to vote. “No person,” the proposed law read, “whether acting under color of law or otherwise, shall intimidate, threaten, coerce, or attempt to intimidate, threaten, or coerce any other person for the purpose of interfering with the right of such other person to vote.” If such interference occurred or seemed likely to occur, “the Attorney General may institute for the United States, or in the name of the United States, a civil action or other proper proceeding for preventive relief, including an application for a permanent or temporary injunction, restraining order, or other order.” Nothing could be simpler: the attorney general could go to a federal court to get an injunction against any local official who sought to deny black people the privileges of the Fifteenth Amendment.27
Eisenhower assumed that because he had shown such solicitude for southern opinion on Section 3, he could now expect a reasonable degree of cooperation on Section 4. He told his congressional allies that he would fight for it. In particular he wanted to block the southerners’ effort to attach a “jury trial” amendment to the bill, the purpose of which was to interpose a jury between a judge and a defendant in a contempt case. Typically judges could issue injunctions and assess penalties in cases of contempt—that is, a case of open defiance of a court order—without a jury. The purpose of Section 4 was to extend the powers of federal judges to enforce voting rights laws by opening civil or criminal contempt proceedings against anyone who hampered the rights of American citizens to vote.
The southerners devised a clever strategy to blunt the effectiveness of such powers. They did not wish to publicly oppose the right to vote, so instead they shaped the debate as one of an unwarranted expansion of federal power. They conjured up a fearful image of federal judges throwing southerners in jail without trial. It seemed un-American that a judge could imprison a person without a jury trial, but in fact it was common in contempt cases and entirely legal. No matter: southerners were joined by pro-labor and liberal Senators who were concerned about federal judges overturning workers’ rights to strike. There was now a coalition persuaded that the Civil Rights Act would open the door to a dramatic extension of federal judicial power.
The administration denied any such purpose in the voting rights bill and also insisted that a jury trial in a case of contempt would dramatically weaken the ability of federal judges to enforce federal voting rights law in the South since southern juries could hardly be relied upon to convict white people for the crime of denying black voters their rights. But these arguments proved hard to sustain against the wily tandem of Johnson and Russell, who prophesied that federal troops would soon be marching across the South to force racial commingling at the end of a bayonet, while jailing without trial the millions of decent southerners who might be inclined to resist this federal assault on their cherished way of life.28
Johnson, needing to keep the bill alive while simultaneously gutting it, went back to work, offering incentives, twisting arms, persuading pro-labor senators that union officials who valued the right to strike would also benefit from certain restraints placed on the attorney general’s powers, even appealing to liberal senators that the right to trial by jury was sacrosanct. Whipping together his Democratic forces and winning over a dozen, mostly Old Guard conservative Republicans as well, on the evening of August 1 Johnson managed to pass the jury trial amendment in a 51–42 vote.29
It was a stunning blow to Eisenhower and his team. Not only had they lost the battle for Section 3, but now they had been outmaneuvered on Section 4 as well. In a meeting of his cabinet the next morning, Eisenhower seethed with rage. The vote was “one of the most serious political defeats of the past four years, primarily because it was such a denial of a basic principle of the United States.” He issued a public statement to the press, effectively labeling the Senate action an assault on the right to vote. “The result cannot fail to be bitterly disappointing to those many millions of Americans who realized that without the minimum protection that was projected in Section 4 of the bill . . . many fellow Americans will continue, in effect, to be disenfranchised.” The jury trial amendment, which hobbled federal judges from enforcing federal law, “would weaken our whole judicial system.” In her diary Ann Whitman called August 2 “the blackest of black days.” In a meeting of congressional leaders a few days later to survey the damage, Deputy Attorney General William Rogers called the resulting bill “a monstrosity—the most irresponsible act he had seen in his time in Washington.” To provide the attorney general with the power to enforce voting rights but then place local juries in his way was like “giving a policeman a gun without bullets.” The result would be defiance and mockery of federal power. A few days later Ike wearily wrote to his friend Bob Woodruff, “The week has been a depressing one. I think the country took an awful beating.”30
It was not only the country but Eisenhower that had been beaten—twice in one week, by Lyndon Johnson. In large part this defeat occurred because Eisenhower fought on unfamiliar ground, namely, Capitol Hill. Nor did his field officers, especially Minority Leader Knowland, prove adequate to the task of besting Johnson, perhaps the most gifted parliamentary tactician of his generation. But the defeat may also have been due to Eisenhower’s own absence of zeal. Again and again on civil rights he expressed “moderate” opinions in the face of men whose views were immoderate. He sought gradual change where others sought immediate progress or none at all. He showed dispassionate common sense; his opponents fought with passionate zealotry. It was immensely frustrating for Eisenhower to discover that while his appeal to moderation made him admired in the country as a whole, it disarmed him in Congress. Compromise was the ultimate outcome of most congressional proceedings, but to win even half a loaf, you had to fight fiendishly for a whole one while threatening to burn down the bakery. This was not Eisenhower’s style.
What remained to him was a depressing and unpalatable choice between vetoing the civil rights bill—his signature legislative proposal for 1957—or signing a weak and perhaps harmful bill into law. For a few weeks he fulminated. He bitt
erly resented that Johnson had painted him into a corner; he told Republican congressional leaders on August 13 he “thought it ironic that the Democrats had succeeded in making it appear that any civil rights legislation that might be enacted would be their proposal,” while if he vetoed the bill, he would seem to have opposed civil rights. Of course that was just what Johnson had intended. Even so, most senior Republicans believed the president had to sign the bill. Nixon and Knowland both advised accepting the bill and seeking improvements in a later session. Eisenhower was not so sure. He “spoke at length in favor of fighting it out to the end to prevent the pseudo-liberals from getting away with their sudden alliance with the Southerners on a sham bill.” But once again the passion he expressed in the Cabinet Room did not appear in the public arena, where it counted.31
Fearful that Eisenhower might indeed veto the entire bill because of the odious jury trial amendment, Johnson threw the administration a small crumb. Working with legislative aides in the Justice Department and the White House, he agreed to tweak the amendment ever so slightly. In the revised language a jury trial would be triggered in contempt cases only when a judge desired to impose a fine greater than $300 or 45 days in jail. That is, the small-fry cases of minor harassment could still be handled by a federal judge without a jury present. But in major cases in which a judge sought to punish violators of civil rights with real jail time, the defendant could rely on having a jury of his southern white peers ready at hand to protect him and the ways of the Southland. On August 29 the final version of the bill passed the Senate, 60–15, with only southern Democrats opposed. Eisenhower reluctantly signed the bill into law on September 9.32