The Fierce Urgency of Now

by Julian E. Zelizer

  Chairing the Rules Committee gave Smith immense power. The committee, often referred to as the “legislative gatekeeper,” controlled the agenda for the House. The committee held hearings to determine the rules that would govern how the bill was debated on the floor and what the time limit on debate would be. These decisions were enormously consequential; the scheduling of the debate and the rules attached to a bill would create or limit opportunities for opponents to amend legislation in ways intended to sink it.

  Since taking over as the chairman of the Rules Committee in 1955, Smith had skillfully used procedural tactics to defeat many liberal bills. He had been supported in his efforts by his alliance with the Mississippi Democrat William Colmer and the five Republicans on the committee. The ranking Republican, Ohio’s Clarence Brown, a man with little tolerance for experiments in domestic policy, had been a staunch opponent of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and was Smith’s reliable ally on most issues, though not on civil rights. Smith also had the full support of the House Republican leader, Charles Halleck from Indiana. Halleck liked to call himself “100 percent Republican” and was known for lines like “Once you are in a war the only thing to do is win it.” He didn’t like the government to spend too much money on the disadvantaged and had little respect for politicians who tried to solve the nation’s social and economic problems.6

  The Democratic Study Group had challenged Howard Smith’s power in 1961 by pushing a reform through the House that expanded the size of the Rules Committee from twelve to fifteen—the new members were two liberal Democrats and one moderate—but the reform didn’t do liberals much good. Most members of the Rules Committee still refused to cross their intimidating chairman, and the committee had stifled thirty-four of Kennedy’s proposals the year after the reform was enacted.7

  Civil rights bills were always at the top of Smith’s hit list. He did not believe in racial equality, and he had no intention of acceding to any demands to expand the rights of African Americans. Congressional proponents of civil rights would have to force a bill out of Smith’s committee. They believed the best method for doing so was House Rule 57, one of several procedural reforms adopted in 1910 (and revised in 1931). According to this rule, a simple majority of House members could bring any legislation directly to the floor if they signed on to a “discharge petition” that had been submitted to the clerk of the House, who would keep secret the names of the signers. Traditionally, legislators were cautious about using discharge petitions. Members of the majority party did not want to embarrass the Speaker by joining a rebellion against a committee chairman the party had officially appointed, and no member of either party wanted to do anything that might undermine the committee system through which any member might someday gain a chairmanship. Of 331 discharge petitions filed with the clerk between 1931 and 1962, only three of them accumulated enough signatures to force a bill to the floor.8 Lyndon Johnson remembered one of those cases from May 1938, when he had just entered the House. Presidents traditionally kept out of procedural matters inside the other branches of the government, but when Franklin Roosevelt threw his active support behind a discharge petition to move a wages and hours bill to the floor of the House, the discharge petition got all the necessary signatures in just two hours and twenty-two minutes.9 In the days immediately after he became president, Johnson told liberals that a discharge petition would be essential. “We’ve got to petition it out,” the president told the head of the United Steelworkers, David McDonald.10

  On December 9, Congressman Celler filed a petition with the clerk of the House to discharge the civil rights bill from the Rules Committee to the floor. Northern Democrats literally ran to line up in the aisles to sign the petition, even before Speaker John McCormack called the House to order at noon. A hundred thirty-one members, including twenty-four Republicans, had signed by 7:14 p.m. After the initial burst of enthusiasm, the line trailed off, and liberals still needed more signatures.11

  The driving force behind the discharge petition was the Missouri Democrat Richard Bolling and his colleagues in the Democratic Study Group. Bolling, who had first been elected to the House in 1948, was a highly intelligent liberal who had studied the minutiae of the legislative process and was cognizant of how important the skillful use of legislative procedure had been to the success of southern Democrats. Now DSG members, 125 or so, lobbied their colleagues to sign the petition. They emphasized to colleagues that signing would be a critical statement of where a member stood on the issue of civil rights and the power of the senior southern Democrats. Getting enough signatures was an uphill battle; about 100 members of the Democratic caucus were southerners, and big-city Democrats, who had enough clout in the existing system to make them hesitant to endorse the petition, numbered 60.12 By December 13, Democrats had gathered about 150 total signatures for the discharge petition. If they got 10 more Democrats, as Richard Bolling expected they would, plus 40 to 50 more Republicans favorable to civil rights, they would be very close to the 218 votes they needed.

  At this point, Judge Smith was getting the message that the petition could succeed, which would be a humiliating defeat for the Rules Committee chairman. He was getting pressure from inside the Rules Committee too, particularly from the ranking member, Clarence Brown. Though Brown was a staunch conservative, he was one of the midwestern members of his party who remained proud of the antislavery tradition of the GOP; he often boasted that the main line of the Underground Railroad, on which slaves had escaped from the South to Canada, ran directly through his district. He had been motivated by the civil rights movement and believed that most of his midwestern colleagues were as well. Now he wanted the chairman to allow his party colleagues on the committee to vote to send the bill to the House floor.

  Johnson, fearing that delay would be Smith’s most effective tactic, sent clear signals to Democrats that he expected them to sign the petition.13 He told his close political confidant Robert Anderson, who had been Eisenhower’s Treasury secretary, that Smith intended to “run it over until January. And then January, they’ll be late coming back, and he’ll piddle along and get into February, and then maybe they won’t get it out until March. And then in March, the Senate [will] be able to filibuster it until it goes home, and there’ll be nothing done.” Johnson would not accept delay, and he didn’t want extended debate. “This country is not in any condition to take that kind of stuff . . . and that’s going to hurt our section, and it’s going to hurt our people. And it’s going to hurt the conservatives.”14 Johnson wanted action, and he wanted it now.

  In an effort to spread this message through the news media, the president implored Katharine Graham, the owner of the Washington Post, to publicize the delays in the House in a way that would make clear they amounted to obstruction. He told Graham that every House member who refused to sign the discharge petition should be considered “as being anti–civil rights, because he is even against a hearing.”15 On December 6, four days after Johnson’s phone call to Graham, the Post published an editorial titled “Tyrant in the House,” which reported to readers that “the tyrant who heads that Committee [Rules], Howard Smith of Virginia, has held up an imperious hand forbidding the House to act on civil rights legislation which, if it came to the floor, would certainly be endorsed by a majority of the members.”16

  Over the Christmas weekend, civil rights activists, working through the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, traveled to the districts of undecided representatives to generate constituent pressure on them to support the discharge petition. “Our efforts during the next two weeks,” said Arnold Aronson, one of the top officials in the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, “when most members of Congress will be home for the holidays must be directed toward getting them committed to this goal.” The National Council of Churches passed a resolution calling upon church members to write their legislators urging them to sign the petition.17 An unofficial moratorium on demonstrations that had been in effect since Ken
nedy’s assassination ended with civil rights protests in five southern cities. In Columbia, South Carolina, more than a hundred college students marched through the downtown area carrying signs that read, “We Want Fair Employment Practices Now” and “We Want Restaurant Desegregation Now.” There were 126 people arrested for disorderly conduct. In New Orleans, an interracial group of about four hundred protesters attended a memorial service for Kennedy and then marched to a post office where they mailed letters to the Louisiana congressional delegation urging them to vote for the civil rights bill. In Chapel Hill, North Carolina, nine people, including a retired eighty-year-old minister, conducted a sit-in at a local restaurant until the police carried them away. In Atlanta, Georgia, Martin Luther King led a demonstration in the downtown area. “The cancer of segregation,” he told everyone in attendance, “cannot be cured by the Vaseline of gradualism or the sedative of tokenism.”18

  Back in Washington, Clarence Brown met with Judge Smith to tell him that he was putting Republicans in an extremely awkward spot by pressuring them not to sign the petition and in effect place themselves on the side of those who opposed civil rights.19 Brown’s comments increased the pressure on Smith by demonstrating that the DSG could gain the backing of Republicans in its discharge efforts.

  In an effort to stall the petition, Smith had announced back in early December that the Rules Committee would hold hearings sometime in January. The move worked; there were 165 signatures on the petition, but Bolling was unable to obtain any more after Smith scheduled hearings. Nevertheless, the DSG considered its lobby a success. It had forced the stubborn chairman to conduct hearings, and it had the 165 signatures, which were a clear threat to Smith that if he went back on his word, more representatives would sign on and the bill would likely be discharged.

  The House Rules Committee opened hearings on the civil rights bill on January 9, 1964, in the committee’s regular meeting room in the Capitol—a cramped Victorian parlor with mahogany walls, red velvet drapes, and an ornate chandelier—where members usually deliberated on nothing more than the time limit and the rules for debate on a bill. This time Smith planned to conduct formal hearings, including discussion of the substance of the bill; his aim was to use the hearings as a platform from which to attack the legislation and delay the floor vote as long as possible. About a dozen reporters squeezed into the room, shoulder to shoulder. Committee members sat in black swivel chairs around a green baize table. A bust of George Washington hung over the nonworking fireplace.20

  Smith had realized he could not kill the bill in his committee. The liberals had forced his hand with the discharge petition, and the civil rights movement had created irresistible pressure on members of Congress. Public opinion had shifted so drastically as a result of the protests that Smith was now standing against a massive tide of public and congressional opinion. Public support for civil rights had risen from 49 percent in June 1963 to 61 percent in January 1964. In the South, most white respondents conceded that congressional passage of the legislation to end segregation was virtually inevitable, even if they weren’t eager to live with the results.21 But though Smith knew he couldn’t kill the bill, he believed he could still wound it.

  The chairman “opened the proceedings by taking his long cigar from his mouth, raising his bushy eyebrows and saying benignly to the witness, 75-year-old Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn . . . ‘It’s rumored around here that you want to get a rule on H.R. 7152.’” Smith had called Celler as a witness in an attempt to challenge the legitimacy of the Judiciary Committee’s vote on the bill by criticizing how its chairman had handled his hearings. It was a futile stab. Celler, who knew that Smith would extend his hearings for as long as he could, warned, “Patience is finite. Is it small wonder that the Negro’s patience and forbearing are at an end . . . But the die is cast. The movement for civil rights cannot be stayed.”22

  On January 18, while the Rules Committee hearings were in progress, Lyndon Johnson met with Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer, Roy Wilkins, and Whitney Young at the White House. The president’s guests anticipated a discouraging lecture from Johnson about the math in the Senate, much the same as what they had heard from Kennedy after their march on Washington.

  Johnson surprised them. He sat with the civil rights leaders in a circle of chairs beside a fireplace in the Oval Office. As he spoke, the leaders leaned forward in their seats, attentive to his every word. Johnson wanted to demonstrate to them just how broad his commitment was to a transformation of race relations and to assure them that he would fight tooth and nail for the civil rights bill once it passed the House Rules Committee. In the first part of the conversation, the president described a poverty proposal his staff was working on and explained why he believed fighting poverty was an essential part of the civil rights struggle. He wanted to approach the problem of race relations from a broader perspective, he told the men; he wanted to resolve not only segregation but the multiple factors that perpetuated racial inequality. He explained his views as having evolved from his own upbringing and work in Texas, where he had seen the impact of poverty on Mexican Americans and African Americans who were struggling to survive.

  The president then focused on civil rights legislation. He promised the leaders he would push for the bill without “a word or comma changed.” As he was speaking, the president picked up the phone to make an apparently spontaneous call to the legislative liaison Lawrence “Larry” O’Brien, which had actually been prearranged before the meeting started. Johnson asked O’Brien how many signatures they now had on the discharge petition. O’Brien reported that they now had 178 signatures. Johnson asked O’Brien to bring him the names of twenty-five Republicans and fifteen Democrats who could still be persuaded to sign. After hanging up the phone, he turned back to King and his colleagues and told them he would need their help in pressuring these members to sign.23 He also told them that he wanted the House to vote on the bill before Lincoln’s Birthday on February 12, a day on which Republicans usually returned to their districts; the president didn’t want these legislators to face any constituents who might have been mobilized by opponents of the bill to demonstrate against civil rights.

  The civil rights leaders were pleased with what they heard from Johnson. Each in turn expressed his agreement with the president, particularly on the economic dimensions of racial inequality. The unemployment rate among African Americans, Whitney Young said, was a “national disgrace.” Martin Luther King, who had for years been thinking and talking about the connections between racial and economic inequality,24 called poverty a “real catastrophe” for the African American community.

  It was the first time these men felt they were talking to a president who was listening to them. In their press conference, King called the meeting a success. Young told reporters, “One out of four Negroes is unemployed. One of every six Negro families lives in a house classified as substandard. Five hundred thousand Negro youths between the ages of 16 and 21 are out of work and out of school. We regard this as not a mild recession for the Negro but a catastrophic situation, a national disgrace.” King noted that the president had not asked them to compromise on the civil rights bill and that they had no intention of doing so. African Americans would reject “any watering down,” of the bill, King said.25 The following day, many of the major newspapers carried stories about the meeting and some included photographs of Johnson sitting with the African American leaders in his office. The stories sent a strong signal to Smith and other southern legislators that there was common cause between the president of the United States and the civil rights leaders.

  Although in public they continued to condemn the legislation, privately Smith and his conservative allies were angling for surrender in the committee on the best possible terms—so they could fight on the most favorable terrain on the House floor.26 One southerner told the Wall Street Journal, “We can talk ourselves blue in the face about the evils in this bill and nobody’s going to listen. If we ca
n’t find more outside help pretty soon, I’m afraid the cause is hopeless.”27

  On January 30, after nine days of hearings, during which Smith had forced his panel to review every single word in the bill and offered southerners yet another platform to deliver speeches attacking civil rights, the Rules Committee, by a vote of 11 to 4, reported the legislation to the entire House. Five Republicans joined 6 Democrats to vote in favor of the bill; the 4 southern Democrats voted against it. Judge Smith had been able to obtain support in the committee for an “open rule,” which meant that in the course of debate on the House floor members could propose amendments that could be added to the bill by the vote of a majority of the House. The civil rights bill would thus be vulnerable to amendments that would weaken it and also to “poison pills,” amendments containing provisions designed to make the bill unacceptable to members who would otherwise have voted for it. According to the rules attached to the bill, the House would consider the legislation by the committee of the whole, which meant that the vote of each member would not be recorded, thereby giving legislators considerable room to hide their ultimate decision from constituents and the press unless observers in the galleries could figure out what they had said to the teller who was keeping tabs. Civil rights supporters were still confident, however, that they could block any poison pills that southern conservatives might propose on the floor.

  DEBATING RACIAL JUSTICE ON THE HOUSE FLOOR

  On the opening day of debate in the House of Representatives, eager visitors lined up in the corridors to wait for any seats that became available upstairs in the galleries. Tourists were having trouble getting seats, because the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights had organized its members to watch the proceedings and monitor how every legislator voted on proposed amendments. In an era when television cameras were not permitted in the chamber and many votes were unrecorded, the physical presence of civil rights activists—opponents called them “gallery vultures”—was also intended to exert pressure on representatives involved in the debate.28