When we of the South rise here to speak against… civil rights proposals, we are not speaking against the Negro race. We are not attempting to keep alive the old flames of hate and bigotry. We are, instead, trying to prevent those flames from being rekindled. We are trying to tell the rest of the Nation that this is not the way to accomplish what so many want to do for the Negro. We are trying to tell the Senate that with all the sincerity we can command, but it seems that ears and minds were long ago closed.
He himself was opposed to the poll tax, Lyndon Johnson said, but the Constitution gave the states, not the federal government, the right to regulate elections, and Truman’s anti-poll tax proposals were therefore “wholly unconstitutional and violate the rights of the States.” He himself, “like all other citizens, detest[ed] the shameful crime of lynching,” he said, “but we”—the southern senators—are trying to tell the other senators “that the method proposed in the civil rights legislation will not accomplish what they intend”; lynching is dying out; “I want to remind senators of the changing character of the South: an enlightened public already has rendered such a law virtually unnecessary even if it were not unwise in its scope.”
At times, Johnson’s rhetoric grew so impassioned that he went even further than the other southerners. He denounced the proposed FEPC, for example, in terms that seemed to suggest that it might lead to a return of something not far from slavery.
It is this simple: if the Federal Government can by law tell me whom I shall employ, it can likewise tell my prospective employees for whom they must work. If the law can compel me to employ a Negro, it can compel that Negro to work for me. It might even tell him how long and how hard he would have to work. As I see it, such a law would do nothing more than enslave a minority.
So harmful would the proposed FEPC legislation be (it “would necessitate a system of Federal police officers such as we have never before seen…. It would do everything but what its sponsors intend…. It would do nothing more than resurrect ghosts of another day to haunt us again. It would incite and inflame the passions and prejudices of a people to the extent that the chasm of our differences would be irreparably widened and deepened”) that, Johnson said, “I can only hope sincerely that the Senate will never be called upon to entertain seriously any such proposal again.” And he presented one ingenious new rationale—a “novel argument,” the Washington Post called it—to support the right to filibuster. In the recent presidential election, he said, Harry Truman had been far behind. “But there was no cloture rule on the man in the White House. There was no rule limiting him to an hour’s debate because two-thirds of the Nation thought they had heard from him all they could hear, or all they wanted to hear.” So Truman had kept talking. Because “Mr. Truman … dared to keep speaking, because Mr. Truman [did] not bow before the opinion of the majority … the people were listening and were changing their minds.”
In general, however, his arguments were calm, reasonable, moderate. They were based on the constitutional rights of states and senators—in particular, in the case of senators, on the right to unlimited debate—and on the contention that civil rights legislation was not needed because the South was solving its racial problems on its own, and that such legislation would only inflame passions.
In later years, some journalists and historians would make much of his statements in his maiden Senate speech that his opposition to civil rights legislation was based not on racial prejudice but on constitutional grounds, that, as Time magazine put it, “He had no quarrel with the aims of civil rights advocates, only their methods.” He had indeed said this—but so had Richard Russell. Johnson’s arguments in his maiden speech closely mirrored the arguments Richard Russell had made familiar, the arguments Russell had persuaded southern senators to adopt, the arguments, reasonable-sounding but unyielding, that if accepted would leave southern black Americans as unprotected as they had always been against mob violence and intimidation, against discrimination in the workplace and in the general conditions of life, as unable as they had always been to vote as freely as white Americans.
Russell was very pleased with Johnson’s speech. He had been given a copy of it on the previous day, and after reading it, he had contacted the other southern senators—telephoning many of them personally—to tell them he would appreciate their presence on the Senate floor when Johnson spoke. He had insured a high attendance in the Press Gallery by telling reporters that Johnson’s maiden speech would be, as reporter Leslie Carpenter put it, “worth a story.” When Johnson had finished speaking, and was standing for a moment taking sips of water from a glass a page had placed on his desk, the southern senators hurried over to congratulate him. A “long line” of southerners “formed to shake [Johnson’s] hand,” a reporter wrote. Russell was the first man on it. Johnson’s speech, Russell was to say, was “one of the ablest I have ever heard on the subject.”
LYNDON JOHNSON’S MAIDEN SPEECH was delivered during one of the century’s most bitter civil rights battles, for Truman’s dramatic 1948 election victory—after a campaign during which his commitment to civil rights never wavered, a campaign, furthermore, in which black voters played a newly important role in key northern cities—had combined with the Democratic recapture of Congress and the arrival on Capitol Hill of aggressive civil rights advocates like Hubert Humphrey and Paul Douglas, plus a rising public outcry against Jim Crow, to give liberals confidence that the long-awaited day of social justice was at last at hand, that Congress’s Southern Bloc could no longer stand in its way. “The President can get most of his program, and without so much compromise, if he constantly calls upon the great public support manifest for him in this election,” the liberal columnist Thomas L. Stokes wrote. Even Arthur Krock agreed that this time “it seems improbable that” the southern citadel could stand.
But as the southern senators realized when they caucused on January 13, their general was ready. He saw the cause in which he was fighting as holy, and he was ready to battle for it. Yes, Richard Russell told a reporter, the odds against the South were indeed long. “It is clear that the only thing we can do now is to gird our loins and shout the cry of centuries: ‘The enemy comes: to our tents, O Israel!’” And he was armed with more than battle cries. No sooner had Truman won than Russell had begun throwing up his breastworks; even before the Senate convened, his aides were drawing up a list of all federal laws that would expire during the first six months of 1949 so that, as he would later explain, he would “know if there are any of them of any importance that will build up a logjam of discussion behind … the civil rights bills”—in other words, any whose passage the Administration could not afford to have delayed, so that threat of delay in general Senate activity by a civil rights filibuster would be more effective. And this scouting expedition found pay dirt: federal rent control laws—the only protection against exorbitant rents for millions of families in northern cities—were scheduled to expire on March 31. If the southerners could hold the floor into March, pressure would mount on northern senators to surrender on civil rights so that a bill extending rent control could be brought to the floor and passed. And there were other Administration proposals—to repeal Taft-Hartley, to continue the European Recovery Program, to strengthen NATO—that could not move along the legislative path so long as southerners held the floor, and that could therefore be held hostage to civil rights; Russell “made it clear that if Truman and his legislative leaders pushed any plan to [impose] cloture, the President’s entire legislative program might be in jeopardy.” The great general renewed his old alliances, including the one that consisted of a “wink and a nod.” The fervently isolationist Robert Taft wanted something: the defeat or reduction of Truman’s proposals for international cooperation and mutual aid. Although Russell was, of course, no isolationist, The Nation now reported that “a number of former influential internationalists and interventionists are modifying their position” to conform to Taft’s; these internationalist senators were southerners. When an amend
ment was introduced to reduce Truman’s proposed budget for the European Recovery Program, Senate observers understood at once that the vote on this amendment would be crucial, for, as one wrote, “it will forecast the Senate’s position on other questions of foreign policy.” And the amendment’s sponsors were Taft—and Russell. The price for Russell’s support, The Nation was to explain, was “Taft’s help in scuttling the civil rights program.”
Taft was the bellwether for about half the Republican senators; the bellwether for the other half was Vandenberg. As the Senate’s president pro tempore in 1948, Vandenberg, citing those loopholes in Rule 22, had said that “the integrity of congressional procedures” gave him “no alternative” to ruling against liberal attempts to impose cloture. He said that while cloture could be applied on a debate on a bill that was already on the floor, it could not be applied on a debate on a motion to bring a bill to the floor (a ruling which of course made the threat of cloture almost totally ineffective).
The way to keep Vandenberg as an ally, Russell told his southerners, was to make the 1949 cloture vote a vote on the validity of Vandenberg’s 1948 ruling, which the Republicans who respected the old senator would be reluctant to repudiate. Moreover, so long as Vandenberg held to his position on cloture, his towering reputation would give other Republicans the screen of parliamentary complexity when they voted against cloture, and their support would allow the southerners to hold the floor. Therefore, Russell told his troops, the emphasis in the 1949 battle must be kept on the point that Vandenberg had emphasized: the right of unlimited debate. Their self-discipline must be tighter than ever; in their speeches they must limit the irrelevancies. As soon as the Administration brought up any motion to make the civil rights bill the pending business of the Senate, or to strengthen Rule 22, the southerners must take to the floor—and keep the debate on that one point. Russell’s strategy worked. As the Administration’s plan to reverse the cloture ruling became apparent, The New Republic would report that Vandenberg was “working busily behind the scenes to vindicate his original decision.”
In addition, like the incomparable legislative strategist he was, Russell made his first stand not on the civil rights bill, and not on the motion to take up the bill. Majority Leader Lucas, with the full weight of the White House behind him, had made a motion to change the Senate rules to allow cloture to be applied on a motion to take up a bill. The southerners launched a filibuster on that motion. This gave the South one additional line of defense. Should it be lost, there would still be two other positions to fall back to.
And the South didn’t lose. Public pressure for cloture—for civil rights—mounted steadily. There were black faces in the Senate corridors. The NAACP announced that its secretary, Walter F. White, “has virtually moved to Washington to talk with the necessary people.” Editorialists raged. But somehow the votes to invoke cloture were never there, and after weeks of skirmishing, the focus was shifting to the implications of the filibuster for rent control and other bills, and Lucas was confessing that the “logjam” on Senate business was intolerable. “The filibuster could go on for weeks,” the Majority Leader said, and while it was going on, “rent control would go out the window”—and other major bills might not come to a vote, either.
Then, the day after Lyndon Johnson gave his maiden speech, Vice President Barkley, presiding over the Senate, ruled that cloture could be applied to a motion. Russell instantly appealed, called for a vote, and, reading previous cloture precedents, said that Barkley was wrong and Vandenberg right—that Vandenberg’s ruling had in fact been a model of statesmanship and wisdom. Vandenberg then rose to reply to Barkley, and said that while he was in favor of civil rights legislation and wanted to change Rule 22, the way to change the rule was “not simply to disregard what it clearly meant,” as Barkley had done. “Under such circumstances there [would be] no rules, except the transient, unregulated wishes of a majority,” he said. The only way to change the rules, he said, was through the method authorized by the rules—Rule 22, actually—through a two-thirds cloture vote.
With that speech, the fight was over. Walter White heard it “with sinking heart.” “Mr. Vandenberg has … given an aura of respectability to those who wanted an excuse,” he said. When the vote was taken on Barkley’s ruling, Russell had twenty-three Republican votes to go with twenty-three Democratic votes, for a total of forty-six. The pro-civil rights vote was forty-one.
The embattled group of southern senators had won—and they knew whom they owed their victory to. “With less than 25 percent of the membership of the Senate, the Southerners have won one of the most notable victories in our history,” Harry Byrd wrote Virgil Chapman. “The credit goes mainly, of course, to our great leader, Dick Russell…. I do not think that even Robert E. Lee …”
A great general does not allow a vanquished enemy to escape from the battlefield, and with the votes in his pocket, Richard Russell was in a position to exact vengeance on those who had dared to try liberalizing the cloture rule. Suggesting “to his cohorts that the opposition be taught a lesson,” as one writer put it, he pushed through the Senate a “compromise” on cloture. Under it, cloture could in the future be applied to motions as well as to bills. But under it, also, cloture would no longer require only the votes of two-thirds of senators present, which had been the requirement in the past—a requirement that would, if only a bare quorum of forty-nine senators were present, have allowed cloture to be imposed by as few as thirty-three votes. Under Russell’s “compromise,” cloture would now require, no matter how many senators were present, the votes of two-thirds of the entire Senate—sixty-four votes. After Truman’s victory, after all the rising hopes for civil rights, not only did the Senate citadel against civil rights still stand, its walls were actually higher than before.
IN LATER YEARS, it would become an accepted part of the Lyndon Johnson legend that, apart from his maiden speech, he distanced himself from the southern fight in 1949. He gave the impression—an impression accepted by historians—that he refused to become part of the Southern Caucus that met under Russell’s leadership. After her extensive conversations with Johnson, Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote that “he decline[d] Russell’s invitation to join the Southern Caucus.” In their biography of Johnson, Evans and Novak wrote that “In his first weeks as a Senator … Johnson made clear that he would not attend the Southern Caucus.” And this belief is understandable, not only because of the convincingness with which Johnson made his statements, but because of statements by William H. Darden, who was one of Russell’s secretaries from 1948 to 1951 and later became an ally of Johnson’s. (As President, Johnson appointed Darden a judge.) Darden said flatly in an oral history interview with the Lyndon Johnson Library that “Senator Johnson did not participate in that Southern Caucus.” And when the author interviewed him in 1986, he said flatly, “I was the one who would notify the southern senators of the meetings. Russell always told me to say there will be a meeting of the ‘constitutional Democrats.’ I would not call Lyndon Johnson. Russell would tell me who to call.”
Because of his determination to become President, Johnson was certainly desperate to avoid being identified with the Caucus. Once, returning to his office at about the time a Caucus meeting ended, he was unexpectedly confronted in the corridor outside the main door to 231 by an Associated Press reporter. When the reporter began asking him about the Caucus, Johnson moved past him and opened the door. When the reporter began to follow him through it, Johnson pushed it shut and held it closed against the reporter’s efforts to open it. An astonished Connally and Busby saw the Senator bracing himself against the door while saying loudly, “No, no. No, no.” “After he got the door shut,” Busby says, “he turned and went into his [private] office.” Summoning Busby, he explained, “That little shit from the AP wanted me to comment.”
But Johnson’s later contention that he had refused to join the Southern Caucus would have come as a shock to Richard Russell, had he been alive to read it. While Russel
l was alive—in 1971, shortly before his death—an interviewer said to him, “I read where he [Johnson] would not attend your southern conference.” Russell interrupted to correct him. “Yes, he did,” he said. “Yes, he did. He did attend it. He attended all of them until he was elected Leader.”
Russell furnished the interviewer with details of his typically unpressuring invitation to Johnson to attend. “I called him and said, ‘Now we’re having this meeting on this and I don’t want to embarrass you—I don’t know what your views are on this, but I want to tell you about the meeting and invite you if you want to come, but if you don’t want to come, nobody but you will ever know that I ever called you.’ Well, that made a tremendous impression on Johnson—he hadn’t been accustomed to that kind of policy … well, he came to the meeting….”
In fact, it appears that Russell was mistaken in saying that Johnson attended all the Southern Caucuses. After one, on January 12, 1949, Russell told New York Times reporter Clayton Knowles that Johnson had not attended because he was “at another committee meeting.” There is, however, reason to believe that Johnson attended at least some meetings of the Southern Caucus. The Russell Library in Athens, Georgia, says that Russell’s papers contain no lists of the names of the senators who attended the various Southern Caucuses, and the author has not been able to find a list in any newspaper. And the total number of senators who attended each meeting not infrequently varies from newspaper to newspaper. But after one caucus in February, 1949, the New York Times reported that “twenty-one [Southern Democrats] met in Russell’s office.” The Times did not name the twenty-second southerner, but all news accounts agree that the liberal Florida Senator Claude Pepper was never invited to Southern Caucus meetings. During the 1949 fight, a second southerner—Estes Kefauver of Tennessee—announced that he would not support the southern stand on cloture. The New York Times article on the next Southern Caucus did not specifically give the number of senators who attended, but said, “The caucus counted two of the twenty-two southern senators—Pepper and Kefauver—as lost and gone over to the … opposition.” The Washington Post article said, “Southern senators caucused,” and “some twenty Southern senators are” united against cloture. And while it may (or may not) have been true that Judge Darden didn’t call Johnson’s office, someone called. Mary Rather would make an entry on Johnson’s Desk Diary when she was notified that a Caucus was scheduled. In the early days of 1949 alone, she made such entries for February 11, February 24, March 1, March 5, March 11, March 14 and March 15, sometimes entering them as “Meeting of Southern Senators,” sometimes referring to them by the phrase Russell preferred: for example, “Saturday, March 5–10:30 AM, Constitutional Democrats Meeting.” And she told the author that while Johnson didn’t attend all the southern meetings, “I’m sure he attended some of them.”
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 37