by Risen, Clay
However, this was not an opinion shared by insiders, even those with an interest in promoting the achievements of the president. Without denying that the president played an important symbolic role, they cast doubt on the notion that he was the hard-driving general behind the bill. “I don’t recall that he had to get deeply involved as this played out,” said Larry O’Brien. Humphrey agreed: “We did not bother the president very much. We did give him regular reports on the progress of civil rights over at the Tuesday morning breakfasts. But the president was not put on the spot. He was not enlisted in the battle particularly. I understand he did contact some of the senators, but not at our insistence.”36
The press reported much the same during the filibuster. “As majority leader, the president was all muscle and scant conversation. In the present impasse, the criticism is freely heard that the reverse is true,” wrote the columnist Doris Fleeson in the Washington Star. “Reporters covering the civil rights story in detail agree that they have seen no traces of the old brooding and impatient Johnson presence that they learned to know so well during the Eisenhower years.”37
Meanwhile, those on the Senate side bristled at the suggestion that Johnson had played a central role in passing the bill. “Aside from reinforcing his support for the House bill and pushing Mansfield and Humphrey to get tough with the Southern Democrats, President Johnson did not become deeply involved in the detailed planning and negotiations,” wrote John Stewart. Frank Valeo was even sharper, saying that Johnson’s vaunted legislative skills were of little advantage when it came to passing the bill: “He never understood how it would be possible to do it by cloture. He’d already been away from the Senate for a period of time, and things change, attitudes change so fast. Unless you’re there all the time, listening to what’s going on and picking up reactions to the news everyday, you very quickly lose touch with the changing trends.”38
And while Valeo had every interest in promoting the role of his boss, Mike Mansfield, his account accords with what people were saying at the time about the president’s involvement—even what Johnson himself was saying. Johnson had tried to force Mansfield to pursue a more aggressive filibuster strategy; when the majority leader refused, Johnson took a backseat, either because he realized his influence was limited or because he thought Mansfield’s plan was a time bomb and he did not want to be too close to the pyrotechnics when it exploded. “Whatever Dirksen and the attorney general agree on,” he said in April, “I am for.” In other words, Johnson positioned himself so that he could plausibly claim the bill as his own should it pass, but just as plausibly distance himself should it fail.39
Nevertheless, over the decades, Johnson’s role in the bill’s passage has grown to mythic proportions. Recent accounts have him lobbying senators, handing out orders, and drawing the grand strategies that would carry the bill to his desk. The equal and in some cases even more vital roles played by Dirksen, Humphrey, McCulloch, Katzenbach, and the Kennedys, among many others, have been diminished or forgotten, while the important but hardly singular role played by the president has ballooned to the point where “Civil Rights Act” is more often than not preceded by the possessive “Johnson’s.”
But as the record shows, while Johnson did play an important role—most notably getting Harry Byrd to release the tax cut bill so that it could clear the Senate before the filibuster—he was just one of a cast of dozens. (Even his maneuverings with Byrd were of only hypothetical importance; the tax cut bill presented no procedural obstacle to the civil rights bill, only a political one, and no one can be sure what would have happened had the filibuster begun with the tax cut bill on hold). Meanwhile, Johnson’s personal lobbying efforts were few, and—like his efforts to win over Robert Byrd—as often as not failures. The only instance in which his efforts made a clear difference was in getting Carl Hayden to agree to withhold his vote against cloture—a helpful, but hardly decisive, achievement. And finally, Johnson’s strategic advice, though it makes for colorful anecdotes, was neither original nor particularly well heeded. By the time he told Humphrey to “spend time with Dirksen!” in February 1964, the Senate leadership had already spent six months devising a plan for winning over the minority leader. And Mansfield simply ignored the president’s insistence that he “get out the cots” and force a round-the-clock filibuster.
None of this is to suggest that Johnson did not play a central role in the bill’s success. His decision to put the full weight of the presidency behind the bill from virtually the moment he took office was courageous; though he saw political gain to be had from aligning himself and his party with the civil rights movement, he also understood the risks involved. What made the difference was his fundamental belief in the moral rightness of the bill, and his urgency to see that rightness turned into action immediately. Had Johnson wavered—had he even once suggested, in a press conference or interview, that Congress should cut bait and negotiate—he would have done immense harm to the legislation.
But it is important to remember that while Johnson played a central role, he did not play the central role. Humphrey, Dirksen, McCulloch, and Katzenbach—not to mention Rauh, Mitchell, and King—were arguably much more important. At the same time, we must remember that there was no single central character, no prime mover, but rather dozens of contributors. And while this lesson is particularly true for the Civil Rights Act, it is also true for the history of American lawmaking in general. One reason Johnson’s role in the bill became shorthand for the success of the bill itself is precisely that: when we talk about important actions by the federal government through history, we tend to let the presidents’ names become proxies for the dizzying complexity of a law’s actual history. Thus we remember it was Lincoln who freed the slaves, even though dozens of congressmen wrote and supported the laws that pushed him to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. We remember the New Deal as Franklin Roosevelt’s doing, as if he wrote and negotiated and revised every change in each law himself, rather than recognizing the critical work done by his staff and allies in Congress, let alone the social movements outside of the government that made them possible.
Nowhere is this disjunction more true than with regard to the Civil Rights Act, and yet there are few pieces of legislation that we more closely associate with a single executive figure. Johnson was pushed by the civil rights movement and its congressional allies as much as or more than he pushed them. And he came into the story in the middle. The Civil Rights Act was not his bill by any stretch. But the reason to recognize that fact is not in order to dismiss Johnson, who does deserve a large amount of credit. Rather, it is to come to a better understanding of how legislation works, and in doing so to grasp more firmly the course of American political history.
On the evening of July 2, after Johnson had signed the bill, Bill Moyers found his boss in a state of “melancholy.” According to Moyers, Johnson then uttered what has become the single most famous line associated with the Civil Rights Act: “We just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.” The line has come to symbolize Johnson’s political savvy, his recognition of the high political price the Democrats would pay for the bill, and his foresight into the future of the American South.40
Moyers’s anecdote gets to a fundamental truth about all landmark legislation: the larger and more pathbreaking it is, the higher its opportunity costs. There can be little doubt that the Civil Rights Act helped cleave the South from the Democratic Party. But this was a process that was already well under way and would have continued with or without the bill. The Northern Democrats did not suddenly “get” civil rights religion in 1963, nor did the South wake up to the realization that its beloved Democratic Party was moving away from it on July 2, 1964. At the presidential level, the South had been voting Republican since Eisenhower won four states of the former Confederacy in 1952. By 1964, John Tower had been in his Texas senator’s office for two years; Republicans had run competitive, if losing, congressional and state-level races in seve
ral Deep South states; and Strom Thurmond was on the verge of bolting the party after serving as a “Democrat in Name Only” for several years. And the white South was, despite its occasional populism, always Republican in spirit, if not allegiance: with just a few cities speckled across a rural, religion-soaked population, it better resembled the Republican heartland of small Midwestern towns than it did the industrialized urbanism that had long dominated the Democratic Party. Moreover, the South was always more wary of activist government than the modern Democratic agenda could safely allow—and not just because of race, though certainly that was a key driver of its suspicions. As Robert Penn Warren wrote in 1955, “I remember another lawyer, hired by another group: ‘Hell, all Southerners are Republicans at heart, conservative, and just don’t know they’re Republican.’” The Civil Rights Act, to the extent that it made a difference in the Southern realignment, simply added fuel to a fire that had been burning for decades.41
But there is another, more significant cost paid by the authors of the Civil Rights Act that needs examining. For a variety of reasons, they repeatedly considered and rejected the possibility of including substantial measures to combat economic inequality as well as discrimination. Some felt it was too much to ask for in any single piece of legislation; and, besides, the pressing issue of the moment (to them) was Jim Crow, not the largely Northern ghetto. In the end they argued, unconvincingly, that Title VII’s ban on employment discrimination would eventually provide sufficient opportunity for blacks to climb out of poverty. But it is one very good thing to remove a man’s shackles; it is another very pernicious thing to insist that, having done so, he should be able to compete with men who have spent their entire lives in freedom. The Civil Rights Act would not erase the legacies of a century of enforced black poverty on its own. In his book A Thousand Days, a memoir-cum-history of the Kennedy administration, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. wrote, “To the Negroes of the North the rights it offered were those they nominally possessed already. And to the heart of the now boiling Northern unrest—to the frustrations in the black ghettos of the cities—it offered nothing.” The very notion of civil rights legislation, as it had come to be understood in Washington, “had little to say to the unemployed, undereducated, untrained Negroes wandering aimlessly down the gray streets of Harlem or Watts, to boys and girls in their teens abandoned by their fathers and adrift in a desolation of mistrust and corruption, to the hoods and junkies and winos and derelicts.”42
Neither Kennedy nor Johnson was blind to this fact—nor were many members of Congress, nor were their administrations. As Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz said in a speech in Chicago on the same day Johnson signed the act, “The plain fact is that freedom and groceries are both important, and neither is enough without the other.” Kennedy had already been planning a major push against poverty for his second term, and Johnson picked up that flag and kept marching. In a May 1964 commencement speech at the University of Michigan, Johnson outlined his plan for a “great society” initiative that “demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time” through federal programs to improve education, urban areas, rural communities, and job opportunities. A year later, at Howard University, he said, “It is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”43
These two speeches announced and outlined the Great Society, and in particular the War on Poverty. And yet those grand initiatives, though they achieved much, were nowhere near large enough to approach, let alone resolve, the problem of black economic inequality. With fewer and fewer jobs available in the inner cities, with crime rates rising and the quality of schools plummeting, the administration’s efforts amounted to little more than pilot programs, single sorties when a full-on assault was required.
In the end, the Civil Rights Act was aimed explicitly and exclusively at the South, largely because its supporters believed that was the only way to win over enough votes from non-Southern skeptics. And they may have been right. But what they did not consider was the amount of political capital they would have to spend to get any bill through Congress, and what the opportunity cost of spending that capital on a region-specific, rights-focused piece of legislation would be. Nor did they sufficiently appreciate the struggles facing blacks outside the South, either because of direct, explicit discrimination or the lingering effects of slavery and racism. In a tragic counterpoint to the triumph of July 2, two weeks later, Harlem and parts of Brooklyn erupted in three days of rioting. The violence was touched off by the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager, but it also gave vent to black anger over unemployment, police brutality, school and housing discrimination, and poor city services in minority neighborhoods. Similar rioting broke out in South Central Los Angeles the next year, Cleveland the year after, Newark and Detroit in 1967, and in more than a hundred cities, including Washington, Baltimore, and Chicago, after the April 4, 1968, assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Each riot had its unique flashpoint, but each followed a similar pattern of looting and destruction that spoke to the depths of black frustration with ghetto life. There is no saying whether an even larger Civil Rights Act, with provisions to address issues such as housing discrimination and the job market, could have prevented the violence. The point is that their occurrence underlined the failure of Congress, at the critical moment, even to try.
The simple fact is that in the early to mid-1960s, the federal government faced a unique moment—what the political scientists Robert Weisbrot and G. Calvin McKenzie call the “liberal hour”—when it was able to greatly expand its powers and purview over the nation’s political, economic, and social life. The moment was fleeting and would not return for a long time. The decisions made regarding which laws to push for, which programs to create, are difficult to question—given the urgency of the racial situation in mid-1963, Title II was rightly the most important thing on the federal agenda. And yet the decision to pursue purely legal change, and to leave economic relationships alone, says much about the intellectual and moral limitations of midcentury liberalism. For too many legislators, it really was enough to simply remove the chains from the black man’s hands.
And yet such criticisms—which are really just observations about the tragic logic of American politics—cannot diminish the historic achievement of the Civil Rights Act. It did not put an end to American racism, nor did it eliminate the unique challenges of African American life. But it did much to alleviate both, and it reoriented the country—both the government and the people—onto a path toward true racial equality. That point may never be reached, but thanks to the Civil Rights Act, the country has moved very far along. For all the bill’s lost opportunities and negotiated shortcomings, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 remains the single most important piece of legislation passed in twentieth-century America.
Acknowledgments
No one can write a book of serious historical research without the help of countless archivists and librarians. The people at the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the Kennedy Library and Museum, the Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum, the Presbyterian Historical Society, the Center for Jewish History, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Georgia, the Ohio State University, Wayne State University, the University of Montana, and the University of Buffalo deserve my deepest gratitude. I am especially indebted to Allen Fisher and his colleagues at the Johnson Library. Rodolfo Villarreal-Ríos at the University of Montana and Lindsey Patterson at the Ohio State University provided critical research assistance into the papers of Mike Mansfield and William McCulloch, respectively.
I also thank all the people who lent their time to speak with me about their experiences working on the bill, including Birch B
ayh, Al Bronstein, John Doar, David Filvaroff, Nicholas Katzenbach, Robert Kimball, Roger Mudd, Jack Rosenthal, Lee White, and Ben Zelenko.
Adam Goodheart, the C. V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, and Washington College were kind enough to give me a Frederick Douglass Fellowship in the spring of 2013, which supported me during the outset of my writing. Jeff Shesol and David Greenberg read parts or drafts of the book and provided me with invaluable feedback; for that I am very thankful.
My agent, Heather Schroder, gave me the initial impetus to pursue a book about the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and she later helped me shape my proposal and find it a home. Fortunately, that home was with Peter Ginna and the people at Bloomsbury Press, who helped turn my awkward manuscript into what I hope is a compelling narrative.
I would be remiss if I did not thank all of my coworkers at the New York Times op-ed department, who provided me with encouragement and inspiration.
Finally, to my family—Talia, Elliot, Joanna, Mom, Dad, Michael, and the rest: thanks for being there, and for putting up with me for all these years, and not just the ones when I was writing this book.
Bibliography
Author Interviews
Birch Bayh, Al Bronstein, John Doar, David Filvaroff, Jack Greenberg, Nicholas Katzenbach, Robert Kimball, Roger Mudd, Jack Rosenthal, Michael I. Sovern, Lee White, Ben Zelenko.