If the voyage of the civil rights bill through the Senate had been a five-act play, the cloture vote on June 10, 1964, was the climax at the end of the fourth act. All the drama was spent; everything else was anticlimax.
The southerners maintained a brief resistance by offering an enormous number of amendments which went down to defeat. After a few days, their vitality sapped, Russell, Stennis, and Hill were ready to quit, but Thurmond, Ervin, and Long insisted on continuing. On June 17, however, Thurmond and Ervin informed Humphrey that they were giving up. They presented a final batch of amendments two days later with the same dismal result.
On June 18 Goldwater spoke, announcing his intention to vote against the bill. “My basic objection … is constitutional.” It would create “a federal police force of mammoth proportions.” It would also foster an “informer” psychology, with “neighbors spying on neighbors.” These were “hallmarks of the police state and landmarks in the destruction of a free society.” If his vote was misconstrued, Goldwater said, “let me suffer its consequences.” Many Republicans, Dirksen among them, feared that the worst consequences would be to their party. The minority leader had tried to turn Goldwater around by playing on his Republicanism. Such a vote, Dirksen urged, would undermine his own candidacy for President and the remainder of the Republican ticket in November. “But,” Goldwater said, “he didn’t convince me.” Dirksen, angered, publicly denounced Goldwater’s vote against the Civil Rights Act.
On June 19 Mansfield made another of his “long” speeches. He praised everyone—Dirksen—“this is his finest hour”; Humphrey—“has performed herculean feats”; and so on through the ranks. He closed with a tribute to Kennedy. “This, indeed, is his moment, as well as the Senate’s.” Dirksen was equally generous and stressed the “moral basis” for the bill. He closed by saying, “I am prepared to vote.”
The roll was again called. Engle entered in his wheelchair and, again, pointed to his eye. The vote was 73 to 27. Four senators who had opposed cloture now voted for the bill—Bennett, Bible, Young, and, having it both ways, Carl Hayden. Two who supported cloture—Cotton and Hickenlooper—voted against the bill.
This was Humphrey’s day. After the vote a large crowd gave him a thunderous send-off for his return to Minneapolis. But it was a sad moment. He was going to be with his son, Robert, who had cancer and faced surgery the next week. There were not many who now doubted that Lyndon Johnson would pick Hubert Humphrey as his running mate.
On June 19, the day of final Senate action, Celler and McCulloch issued a joint statement. While they did not approve of everything the Senate had done, none of its amendments did “serious violence” to H.R. 7152. A conference could “fatally delay enactment.” They reasoned that Eastland on the conference committee could do untold damage, perhaps even opening the way for another filibuster. Further, Charlie Halleck wanted to get the Republicans out of town before the Fourth of July so they could get ready for their San Francisco convention on the 13th. These considerations called for House adoption of the Senate bill with no amendments.
But this required another rule. Howard Smith, Larry O’Brien warned the President on June 18, “will delay as long as possible … unless we move to cut him off.” There were two possible ways to go. One was to suspend the rules, a procedure designed for noncontroversial bills, which this one certainly was not, and required a two-thirds vote, which was likely but not certain. But it was allowed only on the first and third Mondays of the month, which meant July 6. Halleck did not like that at all. The other was to force a hearing by the Rules Committee. Three members could file a request and, if the chairman ignored it for seven calendar days, eight members could compel him to comply.
The Senate bill reached the House on June 22. Celler immediately asked unanimous consent to a motion to “agree to the Senate amendment.” A brigade of southern congressmen objected. Anticipating this, Celler introduced a resolution for House concurrence with the Senate bill and Speaker McCormack immediately sent it to the Rules Committee.
Smith, stalling, scheduled the hearings on the last possible day, June 30, at 10:30 a.m. At the outset Ray Madden, the Indiana Democrat, informed the chairman that a majority of the committee intended to conclude the hearings at 5:00 that afternoon. Celler and McCulloch testified that morning; four southerners in the afternoon. At precisely 5:00 Richard Boiling, the Missouri Democrat, demanded a vote on a motion to report immediately. It carried 10 to 5. Boiling now took the committee away from Smith, moving that Madden, rather than the chairman, make the report to the House. The southerners protested vehemently, but to no avail. The motion carried 8 to 7.
On July 2 in the House Madden called up the resolution for concurrence with the Senate bill. The “debate,” mercifully, was brief. Smith bitterly attacked the “raw, brutal power of the majority.” John Lindsay, the liberal New York Republican, lauded McCulloch and the House gave the quiet man from Ohio a standing ovation. Charles Weltner, reflecting the changing mood of his district in Atlanta, stated that he had voted against the bill originally, but now “I will add my voice … to a new reality.” Then Celler got his standing ovation—led by Judge Smith! The roll call went 289 to 124. There were 153 Democrats and 136 Republicans in the majority; 91 Democrats (88 from the South) and 35 Republicans in the minority.
Lyndon Johnson was ready. This would be no routine bill-signing ceremony. On the evening of the day the House acted, July 2, 1964, the elegant East Room of the White House shimmered in the light from its chandeliers. That day Larry O’Brien had given the President the guest list, which ran to eight pages. There were a great many members of Congress, a large delegation from the cabinet, particularly the Department of Justice, the Civil Rights Commission, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, black organizations, the AFL-CIO, the churches, and women’s organizations, among others.
As he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the President addressed this assemblage and the nation over television and radio. “This,” he said, “is a proud triumph.” The law said that those who are “equal before God shall also now be equal in the polling booths, in the classrooms, in the factories, and in hotels, restaurants, movie theaters, and other places that provide service to the public.” “Let us close the springs of racial poison.” Johnson announced that former Florida governor LeRoy Collins, who was present, would be director of the Community Relations Service under Title X. He would soon send Congress a request for an appropriation to implement the law. That afternoon he had directed the federal agencies charged with responsibilities under the statute to get to work at once. The President then signed 72 copies of the new law, passing out that many pens.
At the close of the ceremony the President met off the record with the black civil rights leaders—Martin Luther King, Jr., Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, James Forman, Clarence Mitchell, A. Philip Randolph, and a few others. Johnson was accompanied by the top echelon of the Justice Department—Kennedy, Katzenbach, and Marshall—Governor Collins, Secretary of Commerce Luther Hodges (whose department would house the Community Relations Service), and Lee C. White, who handled civil rights in the White House and who made the notes.
For at least a year Kennedy and Marshall had worried that these nonviolent leaders were losing control over the movement, that power was slipping to the younger, more militant black leaders who had little concern for persons and for property. During 1963 there had been serious disorders in Chicago and Philadelphia followed in early 1964 by riots in New York City and San Francisco. On April 22, 1964, demonstrators had shouted the President down when he spoke at the New York World’s Fair. Now Johnson told the mainline black leaders that “the rights Negroes possessed could … be secured by law, making demonstrations unnecessary and possibly even self-defeating.” According to David J. Garrow, King and some of the others read his statement to mean that he did not want riots during his campaign for the presidency because they “would play into the hands of Republican candidates.”
The President also poi
nted out that there would be constitutional challenges to the Civil Rights Act. It was critical that the cases should be selected carefully for court test to guard against unfavorable decisions by the lower courts even if they were later overturned by the Supreme Court. The black leaders promised that they would cooperate with the Justice Department.7
The passage of the Civil Rights Act was a rare and glittering moment in the history of American democracy and of the Congress. It proclaimed the triumph of good over evil, of justice over bigotry, of the national interest over the sectional and partisan interests. It was fitting to be proud of the nation and of its leaders both at the time and in retrospect.
The Civil Rights Act was so important, so lengthy and complex, reached back so far into history, plucked at so many strings in the legislative process, and aroused so much controversy that it is impossible to narrow the credit for its passage to an individual or to a small group. Fortunately, the supply of credit is so ample that there is more than enough to spread around widely.
One must start, of course, with the civil rights movement of the late fifties and early sixties—simply put, with the black demand for the abolition of Jim Crow. This took place primarily in demonstrations at the local level in the South—on the buses, in the schools, at lunch counters, in stores, in hotels and restaurants, and so on. Here demonstrators put their bravery and their bodies on the line, often paying a heavy price. These demonstrations caught the attention of executives, legislatures, and the courts at all levels of government. Over time the civil rights movement persuaded the great majority of white people in the North (and many in the South) of the justice of their cause. More than anything else, that swelling of white public support guaranteed victory. Perhaps most important in the final critical stage was the conversion of the churches, which won over the nation’s conscience.
Insofar as political leaders were concerned, John Kennedy must be first to win credit. While he took more than two years to make up his mind, once committed he went all the way. He was the bold initiator, he voiced the moral imperative, and he was the architect of the grand legislative strategy. In his gut reaction to Birmingham he must have sensed that the American people would understand, in Dirksen’s words, that civil rights was an idea whose time had come.
The Department of Justice team—Robert Kennedy, Nicholas Katzenbach, and Burke Marshall—performed superbly. They were responsible for the language of the law, for extensive lobbying, for honoring the commitment to McCulloch, for helping to keep Lyndon Johnson on course, and for participating in a number of important legislative decisions.
President Johnson had trouble with the legislative strategy at the outset, but he came around firmly. He spoke out strongly and often; he refused to compromise with his old friend Senator Russell; he kept the pressure on the Senate Democratic leadership; and he helped to move up to and beyond the magic 67 by persuading doubtful senators, particularly from the West, to vote for cloture.
In the House the Brooklyn street urchin, Emanuel Celler, and the Ohio plowboy, William McCulloch, played critical but different roles. Celler insisted that the bill that cleared the House must be strong. With the help of his fellow opera buff, Peter Rodino, he was responsible for putting Title VII in the bill. McCulloch, if anything, deserves even more credit. Despite his own reservations, he accepted Celler’s tough bill. More important, McCulloch dictated the legislative strategy: no compromise with the Senate. This forced a southern filibuster and, once it was broken, guaranteed passage of Celler’s bill.
The performance of the Senate leaders—Mansfield, Humphrey, and Dirksen—can be summed up in one word: magnificent. Each deserved to wear in his buttonhole a freshly cut marigold from Dirksen’s garden.
4
The War on Poverty
THROUGHOUT history human societies have been plagued by poverty, none more so than the subclass separated from the mainstream elements. In his magisterial history of the rise of capitalism, Fernand Braudel wrote of “the circles of hell” in European cities inhabited by the huge numbers of the “sub-proletariat” of paupers, beggars, and vagrants. Established citizens feared them and denounced them as the “scum of the earth, excrement of the cities, scourge of republics.” They wanted the poor to be quiet, to be invisible, to go away. The authorities would drive them out, put them to work, keep them under lock and key, or send them overseas.
At the outset, the rise of industrialism, by widening the gap between rich and poor, made poverty worse. But the traditional features carried over: a large subclass of the poor concentrated in the towns and the propensity of prosperous citizens and governments was to deny their existence. On very rare occasions, however, intellectuals and writers interceded to speak for the poor, demanded that they be heard, insisted that their conditions be addressed. This occurred in England in the nineteenth century with the “discovery of the poor” around midcentury and their “rediscovery” at the end of that century.
There were two elements in this awakening: London and its great chroniclers—Henry Mayhew, Charles Dickens, and Charles Booth. By 1850 industrialized London contained 2.3 million people, making it the largest city in the world. Rapid growth had deformed the metropolis, leaving behind large pockets of poverty, the infamous “rookeries.” Almost nowhere else was the contrast between the “two nations” that Disraeli called “the rich and the poor” more stark.
Henry Mayhew, a brilliant journalist, in 1849 launched a series of articles in the Chronicle on the London poor which ran for a year. He then wrote weekly pamphlets, 63 in all, between 1850 and 1852. In the earlier pieces he concentrated on the working poor and contrasted the workers’ poverty with the rich of London. The later pamphlets shifted to the city’s more eye-catching “street folk”—street sellers of almost anything, street performers, and street children. These people shunned steady jobs, were often in trouble with the police, were sexually promiscuous, and were sometimes members of “peculiar races”—the Irish and the Jews.
The original articles and pamphlets spawned a throng of imitators, inspired novels and plays, and stimulated parliamentary efforts to remedy the evils. Mayhew evolved the concept of a culture of poverty, an intractable problem not particularly amenable to philanthropic or economic solutions.
The discovery of the poor had a large impact upon novelists, notably Charles Dickens. Because he was a great writer and was enormously popular, Dickens did more to arouse an awareness of the poor than anyone else. Several of his novels were set in poverty—Oliver Twist, Hard Times, Our Mutual Friend; in many of the others there was an important “low” character. “What other reformers hoped to do by legislation,” Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote, “he did by a supreme act of moral imagination. He brought the poor into the forefront of the culture. … ”
Charles Booth, who wrote the 17-volume Life and Labour of the People of London (1889–1903), was a meticulous scholar who devoted many years to the study of poverty in London. He defined the poor as those who fell in income beneath the employed working class, which he described as “comfortable.” His most important finding, based on careful house-to-house surveys, was that almost one-third of the city’s population lived in poverty.
Concern over the poor inspired institutional changes in British society—the rise of trade unionism and the formation of the Labour Party. These developments, in turn, led to Britain’s first large step toward the welfare state, which included old age pensions, labor exchanges, health insurance, unemployment insurance, and higher taxes on the rich. David Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequeur, in introducing “the people’s budget” in 1909, said, “This is a war budget for raising money to wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness.” Perhaps there is a connection between Welsh and Texas hype.1
For a century following the English discovery of poverty no one in the U.S. studied the problem systematically. But a significant number of gifted writers, artists, and photographers, especially during the Great Depression, placed the poor on center stage.
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Jacob Riis, himself a Danish immigrant, became an investigative reporter for the New York Evening Sun and made the tidal wave of immigration into the city his beat. His articles and books, notably How the Other Half Lives (1890), provided a compassionate and comprehensive portrait of the life of the poor in the city’s tenements and sweatshops. Riis was drawn to Manhattan’s ethnic ghettoes—the Irish on the West Side, the Germans on the East Side, the Italians way downtown and in “Little Italy” in Harlem, the Negroes uptown, and the Jews on the Lower East Side.
In the next century the massive unemployment, homelessness, and transiency created by the Great Depression stirred literary and artistic imaginations. Reginald Marsh and Raphael Soyer, both superb painters and both addicted to walking the streets of New York, concentrated on the poor—in breadlines, in flophouses, on park benches, in tenements, in missions, on the waterfront. They realistically depicted urban poverty with passion and sympathy. But the event that aroused the greatest interest was the Dust Bowl of the mid-thirties, which destroyed farms and wiped out farm families, launching the great trek of the Okies, Arkies, and Mizoos to California. John Steinbeck was inspired to write the fiction masterpiece of the era, The Grapes of Wrath. Woody Guthrie, himself an Okie, became the folk minstrel of the great migration. The photographers of the Farm Security Administration, notably Dorothea Lange, captured the haunting faces of the migrants on film.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which ranked behind only Steinbeck’s novel, was also concerned with rural poverty. James Agee, a novelist and critic, wrote the text, and Walker Evans, a luminary among the FSA photographers, provided the pictures. The book was a penetrating and heartrending portrait of the dreary lives of three poor white tenant farmer families in Alabama.
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