An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964

by Todd S. Purdum

  “I am appalled that this is being supported in the well of the House by the Majority Whip,” Lindsay exclaimed. “Does this mean there is a cave-in in this important title?” Lindsay and his allies worried that Boggs “was doing something at the behest of the leadership,” and perhaps even of the president himself, Robert Kimball would recall.

  Bill McCulloch had been off the floor in the men’s room when Boggs first spoke up in support of Harris. But now he was back in the chamber and was fed up at what seemed the latest betrayal of his good faith. He had already salvaged H.R. 7152 from Manny Celler’s runaway Subcommittee No. 5. He had worked with the Kennedy White House to forge a workable compromise. Only the previous day, he had watched as the Democrats had allowed the life of the Civil Rights Commission to be limited to another four years, instead of being made permanent, as he had wanted, and as the White House had agreed in October. Now Hale Boggs’s move looked like the latest effort—perhaps an effort backed by Lyndon Johnson himself—to do just what everyone had promised Bill McCulloch would not be done: pare down the bill.

  The New York Times’s account of the moment described McCulloch’s face as white. But his wife, Mabel, watching from the gallery with Roy Wilkins beside her, knew him better. “Look,” she told Wilkins. “Bill’s face is red. He’s mad.”

  McCulloch took the microphone to say he had been “absent from the floor on important official business” when the amendment came up, then added: “If we pick up this old provision from the bill which did not get consideration and which does not provide for judicial review, I regret to say that my personal support for the legislation will come to an end.”

  In hindsight, Robert Kimball judged, McCulloch and Lindsay might have overreacted, and it was soon clear that the Harris proposal did not have support from the White House. But in the wake of McCulloch’s emphatic declaration, there was stunned silence—and for the civil rights supporters, cold fear—before the amendment was voted down 80 to 206 on a standing vote. Every single Republican voted with Bill McCulloch, who had saved the day yet again.

  * * *

  NOTHING IN THE SEVEN days of debate so far could compare with the circus that erupted on Saturday morning, February 8, as the members considered Title VII, the section of the bill barring discrimination in employment on the grounds of race, creed, religion, or color. Once again, Judge Smith was the culprit.

  “Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment,” he drawled, before handing the clerk a piece of paper, from which he then read, “After the word ‘religion’ insert ‘sex’ on pages 68, 69, 70 and 71 of the bill.” Howard Smith, that courtly, chivalrous, devious country squire, had just proposed to include women as a protected class in the bill. Barely able to suppress a smile, he urged his colleagues to rectify “this grave injustice … particularly in an election year.” Two hours of panicked pandemonium ensued.

  In fact, Smith’s move could not have come as a surprise. At the moment he spoke, just two states in the Union—Hawaii and Wisconsin—had laws prohibiting sex discrimination in employment. On the contrary, many states had laws offering special exemptions and protections for female employees, limiting the hours they could work, or the weight they could lift, or the dangerous jobs they could perform. Such measures had been sought during the earlier decades of the twentieth century in a spirit of progressivism. But since at least World War II, women’s rights groups had been strongly pressing for laws barring sex discrimination, as Judge Smith himself well knew.

  In 1956, during the initial debate over the creation of the Federal Civil Rights Commission, Smith had supported an amendment to include gender discrimination in the commission’s jurisdiction, arguing, “If this iniquitous piece of legislation is to be adopted, we certainly ought to try to do whatever good with it we can.” Clarence Mitchell, fearing that the inclusion of gender would amount to a poison pill that could kill the whole bill, organized opposition to it, and Manny Celler joined in, but the provision was accepted over their opposition. While the bill creating the commission passed the House, it ultimately failed to pass the Senate. The commission idea was then successfully revived as part of the 1957 Civil Rights Act—but without the sex provision.

  From the moment John Kennedy proposed H.R. 7152 in 1963, some rights groups, led by the National Women’s Party, pressed to have sex discrimination covered by the bill, and the cause was backed by Representatives Martha Griffiths, a Michigan Democrat, and Katherine St. George, a Republican from New York. Griffiths, for one, believed that Smith’s support could insure a least a hundred votes on the House floor. On January 9, the very day the Rules Committee had begun its hearings on the bill, Smith told Manny Celler that the National Women’s Party wanted to know “why you did not include sex in this bill.”

  Celler, who for all his other virtues was a notorious male chauvinist and a bitter foe of long-running efforts to pass an equal rights amendment to the Constitution, countered: “Do you want to put it in, Mr. Chairman?”

  “I think I will offer an amendment,” Smith replied.

  Twelve days later, Bill Colmer brought up the issue again in the Rules Committee, and on January 26, May Craig, one of the most prominent female Washington correspondents of the day, asked Smith on Meet the Press if he would offer an amendment from the floor.

  “I might do that,” the judge replied.

  Now, at the eleventh hour, Smith had done just that, and Manny Celler was livid. He warned that such language would be an “entering wedge” for the ERA, and fretted that it could lead (as it, indeed, eventually did) to the overturning of state laws aimed at protecting women, to the drafting of women into the military, and to revisions in alimony and rape laws. (As it happens, Judge Smith would have probably been all too glad to see state laws limiting working hours and conditions for women overturned, since Virginia’s many textile mills depended on cheap female labor.)

  The Democrats had suspected that Judge Smith might make mischief, so they were armed with rebuttal arguments gathered in advance. Representative Edith Green, an Oregon Democrat, now rose to quote a letter from the American Association of University Women opposing the amendment. “I do not believe this is the time or the place,” Green said.

  Clarence Mitchell, Joe Rauh, and Marvin Caplan of the Leadership Conference all shared the fear that Smith’s amendment “could doom the bill, but we had no choice,” Caplan would recall. And so Mitchell rushed down from his perch in the gallery to call Congressman James Roosevelt of California, the son of Franklin Roosevelt, off the floor and urge him to inform the bill’s managers that the sex provision would, in the end, strengthen the bill.

  Whatever Smith’s deepest motives, it was now a bipartisan coalition of five women members who took up the fight: Frances P. Bolton, Republican of Ohio; Catherine May, Republican of Washington; Edna F. Kelly, Democrat of New York; and Martha Griffiths and Katherine St. George. Countering Celler, St. George declared: “I can think of nothing more logical than this amendment at this point. We outlast you. We outlive you, we nag you to death … We are entitled to this little crumb of equality. The addition of the little, terrifying word ‘s-e-x’ will not hurt this legislation in any way.”

  In the largest counted vote on any measure considered that day, Smith’s amendment passed 168 to 133 on a teller vote (with mostly southern and Republican support, Martha Griffiths, who was one of the tellers, would recall). As the tally was announced, one woman in the gallery shouted out, “We’ve won! We’ve won!” while another cried, “We made it! God bless America!” before male doorkeepers escorted them out of the chamber.

  Perhaps emboldened by the success of Smith’s gambit, Representative John Ashbrook, a conservative Republican from Ohio, now offered an amendment proposing that “it shall not be unlawful employment practice for an employer to refuse to hire and employ any person because of said person’s atheistic beliefs.” McCulloch held his tongue, while Celler simply said, “There is no need for your amendment.” It passed anyway, 137 to 98 on a standing vote.


  * * *

  THE NINTH AND FINAL day of debate began on Monday morning, February 10, with Celler and McCulloch again staving off the vast proportion of proposed amendments to Title VII, the bill’s employment discrimination section. They accepted a handful, including one from the reactionary William Colmer of Mississippi that would allow employers to refuse to hire Communist Party members.

  As the afternoon ground on, Celler and McCulloch plowed through the bill’s remaining sections, defeating still more amendments—including an attempt by the South Dakota Republican E. Y. Berry to finance economic development efforts on Indian reservations. It was now apparent that the bill would pass that evening. About four o’clock, Clarence Mitchell and Joe Rauh were sitting in the House gallery, taking a breather and savoring their anticipated success, when a message came that the White House was trying to reach them, and Rauh ducked out to a pay phone.

  “What have you done to get the bill on the floor of the Senate?” Lyndon Johnson demanded, heedless, for the moment, of the reality that no bill had yet actually passed the House. “You’ve got to go see Mansfield right away and talk about all of this.” Minutes later, Johnson called Roy Wilkins with the same message. “No lobbyist could ever outdo Lyndon Johnson,” Wilkins would recall. “He even knew how to raise you on the pay phones.”

  Titles VIII and IX—providing for the collection of voting statistics by race, and for the review by the highest federal appeals courts of civil rights cases bounced back by district courts to state courts—passed with little fuss.

  The last substantive amendment to be considered was a proposal by Robert T. Ashmore, a South Carolina Democrat, to create a new Community Relations Service to help localities peaceably resolve race-based disputes. Such a measure had first been proposed by Lyndon Johnson as part of the 1957 bill, and then was revived in the Kennedy administration’s original bill, before being dropped in the Judiciary Committee negotiations in October. Celler and McCulloch happily accepted the idea now, in part because they knew that if the service worked as intended, it might minimize federal intervention in local affairs, an issue of concern to conservatives in both parties. It passed on a voice vote, as a newly numbered Title X.

  There was one more round of procedural wrangling as members at last ended their deliberations as the Committee of the Whole—where recorded votes on amendments had not been permitted—and resumed sitting as the House, where one-fifth of the members could force an on-the-record vote on any amendment adopted in the Committee of the Whole. John Bell Williams, a Mississippi Democrat, tried to force such a vote on Judge Smith’s “sex” amendment and John Ashbrook’s protection for atheists, but his attempt failed, as did an effort by Bill Cramer of Florida to recommit the entire bill to the Judiciary Committee. Finally, Speaker John McCormack asked the members, “Shall the bill pass?”

  One by one, the members answered the roll call, until the final tally was 290 to 130 in favor of passage. One hundred fifty-two Democrats and one hundred thirty-eight Republicans voted aye, with ninety-six Democrats (eighty-six of them from the states of the Confederacy) and thirty-four Republicans (including ten from the South) voting nay.

  The lopsided margin was deeply satisfying for the bill’s supporters. “It was sort of a source of great pride, feeling of success that we’d done something we should have, earned our keep,” Representative John Dingell of Michigan would recall. Congressional Quarterly estimated that “well over a thousand persons from every state in the union” had come to town to lobby for the bill, representing organizations as diverse as the AFL-CIO, the National Council of Churches, and the Japanese-American Citizens League. (By contrast, the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers—business lobbies that might have been expected to weigh in, especially on the public accommodations section—were largely neutral and noninvolved.)

  The pro-civil-rights forces’ diligent gallery-watching efforts paid off. Of the 124 amendments offered to the bill (including amendments to amendments), only thirty-four were adopted, and most of those were technical. And the strategic lobbying by the church groups in the Midwest bore fruit, too: there was only a single “no” vote among the fifty-five representatives from Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, while eight of the twelve representatives from Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota—all of them Republicans—also voted in favor of the bill.

  In gratitude to the members and aides who had tolerated her raiders’ days of bird-dogging, Jane O’Grady stayed up most of the night with Peggy Roach of the National Catholic Conference baking vanilla sugar cookies frosted with chocolate equal signs to take around to the offices the next day.

  At the White House, President Johnson worked with Larry O’Brien and Pierre Salinger to draft a statement thanking the key players, taking particular care to mention McCulloch and Halleck by name. “I think naming Halleck is an advantage, in that it puts the arm a little bit on our friend Ev Dirksen,” Salinger advised. “I think so, too,” Johnson agreed. (At the same time, ever sensitive to local sensibilities, Johnson wondered whether it would help or hurt to thank Majority Leader Carl Albert, who was taking heat from his Oklahoma constituents for his support of the bill. Five minutes later, after consulting with Speaker McCormack, Johnson called Salinger back to say, “Just go ahead and include” Albert, but after all the fuss, it appears that no statement was ever issued.)

  Then Johnson launched a round of congratulatory thank-you calls. He just missed Bill McCulloch, who was already on his way to Bermuda for an intergovernmental conference on European migration (or, in other words, a brief vacation). When he reached Charlie Halleck just after 8:30 p.m., Johnson said, “I was mighty proud of you,” and Halleck replied, “By golly, we got this thing back of us—and with a great big vote, Mr. President … It’s been a good debate and wound up in pretty good feeling … and I think maybe is going to be all right.” In fact, the voluble Halleck had been oddly silent throughout the entire debate, perhaps still atoning for his perceived perfidy of October. He made no statement of either support or opposition on the bill, and the Republican Policy Committee never once met to discuss it, because to have done so would have been to expose the party’s lingering internal divisions over whether to support first Kennedy, and now Johnson, on civil rights. When Halleck went home to make a Lincoln Day speech in Indiana and another in Nebraska, he made no mention whatever of the civil rights bill.

  Outside the Capitol, in the cold and falling snow, Clarence Mitchell waited on the steps with Roy Wilkins, who was preparing to film a television interview. As Wilkins talked, Mitchell suddenly found himself sensing the full meaning of the vote. “I knew that we had just won an important part of the fight, but hearing it as a news comment helped to give it perspective and historical depth,” he would recall. “I have always loved the Capitol and now there was a reason for a faster pulse-beat when I looked at it.” Mitchell headed over to the Congressional Hotel, where the Leadership Conference team was celebrating. “Someone put a champagne glass in my hand, but remembering I did not drink, quickly exchanged it for a glass of tomato juice,” he would remember. “We were all happy. I doubt very much that any group of persons lobbying for a bill really liked each other as much as we.”

  * * *

  LESS THAN AN HOUR after the final vote, at 9:07 p.m., Lyndon Johnson asked the White House telephone operators to find Robert Kennedy. The attorney general came on the line as the president was talking with Larry O’Brien in the Oval Office.

  “Bobby?” Johnson asked.

  “Hi, Mr. President,” Kennedy replied.

  “Congratulations.”

  “Yeah, it was very nice, wasn’t it,” Kennedy continued.

  “I thought it was wonderful—290 to 130,” Johnson answered. “You can’t do better than that.”

  “No, I would think that would put a lot of pressure on them in the Senate, wouldn’t you?” Kennedy asked.

  “Yeah,” Johnson said, adding that Kennedy should now work with O’Brien and the Senate Maj
ority Leader, Mike Mansfield, about how to put the bill directly on the Senate calendar, without a stop in the Judiciary Committee, where James Eastland of Mississippi would be just as determined to bury it as Howard Smith had been in the House.

  “Now, will we be able to talk with you tomorrow?” Kennedy asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Johnson replied.

  That was significant, because Johnson and Kennedy had barely seen each other since the assassination—much less plotted civil rights strategy. After the still grieving Kennedy took his family on a Colorado skiing vacation for Christmas, Johnson had hoped to divert him in mid-January by sending him on a diplomatic mission to try to persuade President Sukarno of Indonesia from delivering on his threat to “crush” the newly independent Federation of Malaysia, which shared a common border.

  Kennedy was able to work out a tentative agreement for a cease-fire and negotiations on the border dispute, but when he returned to Washington, expecting to brief the president in private, he was instead asked to put on a dog and pony show for Johnson and the ranking members of the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees. Johnson never followed up on the report, leading Kennedy to conclude that the president’s intentions had not been sincere to begin with.

  This was the context in which the two met privately on the afternoon of Tuesday, February 11, after a group strategy session with O’Brien, Katzenbach, and Marshall about how to handle the bill in the Senate. It was the sharpest, bitterest encounter the two men had ever had, and while their accounts of it would differ slightly in language and emphasis, the weight of the evidence suggests that Johnson’s tone was, as the columnist Charles Bartlett would remember, “so … savage.”