Southern Democrats did notably well in the seniority-based committee system because their districts were not competitive. From the end of Reconstruction until the 1970s, the South was a one-party town; Republicans were virtually nonexistent there. Most elected Democrats held on to their offices for many terms; they were usually able to defeat primary challengers who were less well-known, less well funded, and helpless to deliver congressional pork to their districts and states. Unfairly apportioned districts favored sparsely populated rural communities over urban centers. State legislative bodies in the South, which were biased toward conservative rural populations, drew up districts that granted far less representation to residents of the cities, where most African Americans lived. Even when there were big population shifts—African Americans moving into cities—the apportionment of districts stayed the same. Thinly populated rural white districts had the same number of representatives as densely populated urban areas.
Even when the number of northern liberals increased in the House and the Senate during the 1950s, committee chairmen could push back against their demands for legislation. A measure required a majority vote on a committee to send it to the floor of the House or the Senate for action by the full body. The conservative coalition could usually provide enough Republicans to secure a conservative majority, but Democratic chairmen always had the ultimate power on their committees—to do nothing at all. The Mississippi senator James Eastland, an ardent racist who took over as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1956, liked to joke that as chairman of the Subcommittee on Civil Rights he was always a roadblock to legislation. “Why, for the three years I was chairman,” he said, “that committee didn’t hold a meeting. I had special pockets in my pants, and for years I carried those bills everywhere I went and every one of them was defeated.”6 Of course, the bills were never actually defeated; they were simply never deliberated or voted on by the committee. If the Senate leadership had been motivated, they could have freed those pocketed civil rights bills from captivity in Eastland’s committee by adding the contents of the bills as amendments to other bills or by taking advantage of rules that allowed senators to forcefully discharge legislation from the hands of a recalcitrant chairman. The House leadership had similar tactics available to its members. But representatives and senators were usually reluctant to violate any aspect of the committee process, because each member benefited from it in those areas most important to his political career; if a member stayed long enough in Congress, he might even capture a chairmanship and its powers for himself. Any challenge to a committee chairman would become a precedent that could ultimately limit any representative’s prerogatives. Liberals were well aware that there were already a few senior liberals—like Emanuel Celler on the House Judiciary Committee—who used their powers as chairmen to move liberal bills to the floor.
Southern chairmen were powerful also because of the importance of their region to the Democratic Party when it came to picking presidents. No Democrat could win the White House without winning the South, which therefore remained the electoral base of the party. Between Reconstruction and 1952, no Republican presidential candidate had won any state from the Old Confederacy. Liberal Democrats became even more cautious about angering southern leaders after the 1952 election, when the Republican Dwight Eisenhower won in Virginia, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas. In 1956 he added Louisiana to the tally.
On those occasions when one of the more liberal committees—House Education and Labor, for example, or House Judiciary—reported out a bill, the conservative coalition could still count on its voting power to defeat the bill on the floor. Even as the number of northern liberals increased in the House and the Senate during the late 1950s, southern Democrats had enough votes, along with their Republican allies, to kill most bills. In 1957 and 1958, southern Democrats and midwestern Republicans controlled 311 out of 435 seats in the House, and they held 71 out of 96 seats in the Senate. Even after the midterm elections of 1958, which increased the number of northern liberals in both chambers, the conservative coalition retained a ninety-two-vote majority in the House and an eighteen-vote majority in the Senate. John F. Kennedy didn’t have any coattails; in 1960, Democrats lost twenty-two seats in the House, among them a substantial number of liberals.7
In the Senate, which the journalist William White called “the South’s unending revenge upon the North for Gettysburg,” members of the conservative coalition had an additional tool at their disposal: the filibuster.8 It was first used in 1837, when a minority took advantage of the ambiguity in the chamber’s rules regarding extended debate. A group of Democrats held the floor to demand that the Senate expunge from the record a censure of Andrew Jackson that had passed in 1834 after the president withdrew deposits from the Bank of the United States. After loading up on cold hams, turkey, and coffee, the senators only had to give speeches for a few hours before the rest of the Senate gave in and passed the resolution they were demanding.9 This event became the precedent for future sessions; the Senate held on to the notion that the majority could not limit debate but a minority of one or two or several senators could extend debate to intolerable lengths and to the exclusion of any other Senate business.10 The rules and traditions that developed around the practice of the filibuster permitted any member of the Senate to prevent a bill from being voted on as long as he stayed on the floor and kept talking—about almost anything. In the 1950s and 1960s, senators, or small groups of senators, regularly used this tactic to prevent civil rights legislation from reaching a vote. The filibuster was the ultimate reason why liberal senators chose not to take the risk of violating committee rules, procedures, and traditions to pull civil rights bills out of committees run by racist southern chairmen: they knew from experience that any civil rights bill that made it to the Senate floor would surely die there by filibuster.
In 1917, senators had provided a mechanism for ending filibusters. Frustrated by a Republican filibuster against arming merchant ships in the middle of World War I, Democrats, with the support of President Woodrow Wilson, passed “Rule 22,” which allowed senators to shut down a filibuster by voting for “cloture.” According to the original rule, a filibuster could be stopped only with the support of two-thirds of the chamber, which by 1961 comprised sixty-seven votes. Unless there were enough votes for cloture, a filibuster could continue until a bill died and was buried under unlimited talk. In 1938, southern senators—among them Louisiana’s Allen Ellender, who said, “I believe in white supremacy, and as long as I am in the Senate I expect to fight for white supremacy”—killed an antilynching bill by mounting a six-week filibuster.11 Southern Democrats did the same against anti–poll tax legislation in 1942, 1944, 1946, and 1948. In 1946 and in 1950, the southerners filibustered a proposal to make the Fair Employment Practices Commission, which had been established during World War II to maintain racial calm at wartime production plants, a permanent institution to combat racial discrimination in the workplace. Liberals sometimes used filibusters too. In 1953, Senator Wayne Morse filibustered for twenty-two hours and twenty-six minutes against legislation to allow states the right to control natural resources in certain offshore lands.
These committee arrangements and Senate rules were the structural barriers Congress presented to President Kennedy when he entered the White House in January 1961. To those liberals who hoped that Kennedy would emerge as an effective liberal president, Congress presented a daunting challenge.
A NEW GENERATION OF LIBERALS WANTS MORE
Liberal politicians who entered Congress in the late 1950s and early 1960s knew that Congress itself was the main roadblock to their agenda. These liberals, primarily northerners, were part of a generation that had been inspired by FDR and his New Deal. They were committed to protecting and expanding Roosevelt’s domestic record, though they were keenly aware of the other formidable obstacles they faced, among them the prevailing cold war mentality, which made political activity perilous for anyone whom conserva
tive opponents could label a socialist or a communist. These liberals believed that the best way to separate themselves from the far left was to demonstrate their commitment to a muscular policy against the Soviet Union. The liberals were also well aware that they had been unable to advance their domestic agenda under Eisenhower, who balanced the federal budget by reducing spending and enjoyed close to 60 percent approval ratings throughout most of his two terms in the White House.
The postwar liberal movement was driven by the actions of legislators, interest groups, and grassroots activists. All of them believed the New Deal had been enormously successful in easing the pain of the Great Depression and enacting domestic policies to create a more just capitalist economy. The economy was now expanding at a rapid clip. Unemployment was low, inflation was contained, and the gross national product was getting bigger every year. More and more people were enjoying the economic security that came with being part of the American middle class. The liberals’ goals in the postwar period were to create programs that would help more Americans enter the middle class and to tackle structural problems that existed in good times and bad—racial inequality, inadequate health-care coverage, underfunded education, urban decay, and chronic poverty—but could best be addressed when the economy was producing economic rewards for a majority of the workforce.
Starting in the 1948 election and continuing with each election through the 1958 midterms, the liberal bloc in the House and the Senate had gradually expanded. The spread of organized labor in northern states, the influx of African Americans into the North, and the growth of urban areas, which tended to be more liberal politically, had resulted in the election of more legislators who supported the New Deal and wanted the federal government to do more. In traditionally Republican areas of some states—California and Ohio, for example—organized labor was providing pivotal support in getting liberal Democrats elected.
Younger senators, among them Paul Douglas of Illinois, Clair Engle of California, Vance Hartke of Indiana, Herbert Lehman of New York, Ed Muskie of Maine, and Harrison Williams of New Jersey, were itching to challenge the southern Democrats.12 They didn’t want to follow the advice Speaker Sam Rayburn had given a newly elected congressman named Lyndon Johnson and others of their predecessors that they should “go along” to “get along.” They didn’t want to cooperate if it meant accepting that their principled aims would continue to be thwarted; they wanted to marshal their resources, use the advantages they had in Congress, and win.
An archetype of this generation was the Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey. Raised in South Dakota, Humphrey was a product of prairie populism who idolized William Jennings Bryan and Franklin Roosevelt. The politics of the 1930s captivated him; he wrote a master’s thesis at Louisiana State University, where he graduated in 1940, about the philosophy of the New Deal. “Democracy and socialism,” Humphrey wrote, “are alike motivated by the desire to free the individual from oppression and to guarantee to each an opportunity for personal happiness, for self-realization, for practical liberty and spiritual freedom.”13 When he moved back to the University of Minnesota to pursue a doctoral degree in political science, he studied parliamentary procedure and learned how conservatives used congressional rules to block liberal legislation. He also served in the Minnesota branch of the federal War Production Board and as assistant director of the War Manpower Progress Commission. After a stint as a professor at Macalester College in 1943 and 1944, during which he worked as the manager for FDR’s campaign in Minnesota, Humphrey decided to enter politics rather than just teach about it. He was active in the Democratic Party and in the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, which he and other local Democrats created in a 1944 merger with Minnesota’s relatively successful left-wing Farmer-Labor Party. He continued to endear himself to liberal organizations. In 1945, organized labor helped him win election as mayor of Minneapolis by rallying working-class Democrats to his side. His administration created the first Fair Employment Practices Commission in municipal government. Three years later, he ran for the Senate. In the middle of his campaign, he drew national attention during the Democratic convention in Philadelphia when he called on all Democrats to endorse a stronger civil rights plank in the party platform than most, including President Truman, were willing to accept. He declared, “To those who say that this bill of rights program is an infringement of states’ rights, I say this: the time has arrived in America for the Democratic party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”14 The Mississippi and half of the Alabama delegations stormed out of the convention hall and lined up soon afterward behind the States’ Rights Democratic Party and the candidacy of South Carolina’s segregationist governor Strom Thurmond.
After his election to the Senate in 1948, Humphrey continued to rattle conservative cages. He launched his senatorial career with a speech on the Senate floor in which he called the filibuster “a violation of the principle of majority rule on which our democracy is based.” He also delivered a speech in which he proposed the elimination of the Joint Committee on Reduction of Nonessential Federal Expenditures, a committee chaired by the Virginia senator Harry Byrd, one of the giants of Capitol Hill. Humphrey, who was already persona non grata among southerners for his support of civil rights, accused Byrd’s committee, which was responsible for eliminating waste and extravagance, of being wasteful and extravagant. Notwithstanding his gracious demeanor, Byrd was not a man who took criticism lightly. He was known among his colleagues for being quick-tempered. Six days after Humphrey’s speech, Byrd offered a rebuttal, in which he corrected “misstatements” Humphrey had made. Senior members of the Senate then stood up to denounce Humphrey, one by one, for four hours straight. When the Minnesotan, who slouched in his chair throughout the verbal beating, stood up to offer his response, his colleagues left the chamber. In the hallways of the Senate, senior members whispered derogatory statements about Humphrey within earshot.15
Over his years in the Senate, Humphrey learned to moderate his tone and to accept compromise. Doing so allowed him to serve as the informal liaison between the Senate majority leader, Lyndon Johnson, and the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Johnson, who felt he could use Humphrey to control and contain the liberals, had convinced the Minnesota senator that he had to be more pragmatic if he didn’t want to “suffer the fate of those crazies, those bomb-thrower types like Paul Douglas, Wayne Morse, Herbert Lehman. You’ll be ignored, and get nothing accomplished you want.”16 Humphrey took Johnson’s advice and moderated his style but always with the clear objective of securing a place for liberals at the legislative bargaining table.
In 1959, younger liberal members of the House, frustrated with the power of the southern Democrats and their Republican allies, formed a caucus they called the Democratic Study Group (DSG). The caucus included about eighty members from twenty-one states, so it had the potential to be a substantial force in the House. It had grown out of an informal network of liberals, elected in 1954 and 1956, who had signed the “Liberal Manifesto” circulated by the Minnesota representative Eugene McCarthy, which outlined the goals of the more urban and liberal members of the chamber. The goals of the DSG were to lobby congressional leaders for liberal legislation and for procedural reforms that would weaken southern conservative committee chairmen and to help the growing body of new liberal members gain seats on important committees. The DSG employed a talented staffer named William Phillips to do research—on the powers of committee chairmen and other issues—intended to assist caucus members in devising successful legislative strategies.
Senator Humphrey, the members of the DSG, and other liberal legislators were not working alone as they prepared their challenge to the conservative coalition in Congress. They could count on a number of interest groups that were formed in the late 1940s and the 1950s to fight for their agenda. One was the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), created in 1949 by professors, policy makers, and ac
tivists committed to pursuing tough anticommunist policies along with a progressive domestic agenda that included federal government actions to secure civil rights for African Americans. In 1955, the two major wings of organized labor, the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, merged to form the AFL-CIO, which represented almost fifteen million workers. The AFL-CIO constituted a powerful counterforce in Washington to the Chamber of Commerce and other business groups and provided local union affiliates with a national lobbying operation. The AFL-CIO’s president, George Meany, and Walter Reuther, who headed the United Automobile Workers, enjoyed a level of direct access to presidents that labor could never have imagined decades earlier.17 The AFL-CIO and all the groups devoted to civil rights, including the ADA, participated in the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, which coordinated communication and lobbying among more than fifty civil rights organizations.
The Fierce Urgency of Now Page 3