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

by Todd S. Purdum

  In 1947, he began experiencing severe vision problems, and doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore advised removal of his left eye. Instead, he temporarily retired, but by 1950 he felt strong enough to challenge an old friend from the American Legion, the Democrat Scott Lucas, for his seat in the United States Senate. With the support of Joseph R. McCarthy, the senator from neighboring Wisconsin who was just then beginning his campaign to “kick the perfumed pinks and punks out of our State Department,” Dirksen won. Two years later, backing Taft at the Republican Convention in Chicago, Dirksen unleashed pandemonium on the floor by pointing his finger at the party’s moderate 1944 and 1948 presidential nominee, Thomas E. Dewey, and bellowing: “We followed you before and you took us down the path to defeat!”

  Taft’s loss of the nomination to Dwight D. Eisenhower was a bitter pill, and Dirksen spent most of Ike’s first term veering between grudging support for the president and nipping away at his policies, keeping a “foot or finger in every possible camp,” as Lyndon Johnson’s aide George Reedy would recall. Among Dirksen’s policy differences with Eisenhower was civil rights, and the senator was far ahead of the president on the issue, as early as 1953 proposing a federal civil rights commission and grants and aid aimed at encouraging southern states to ease segregation. He pressed for an endorsement of the Supreme Court’s Brown decision in the 1956 Republican Party platform, eventually retreating to a statement that the party “accepts” the decision in the face of Eisenhower’s reluctance to go further.

  He vigorously supported the 1957 Civil Rights Act in the Senate, opposing Eisenhower’s willingness to drop Part III, with its powers of federal intervention in desegregation cases, and opposing Johnson’s proposed jury trial amendment. “Seldom in my long legislative experience have I seen … so many ghosts discovered under the same bed,” he declared at one point in the debate, “but I am confident that if the civil rights bill is enacted, the heavens will not be rent asunder, the waters will not part, the earth will not rock and roll, and we will go on.”

  But, as his biographer Byron Hulsey has written, Dirksen knew that he had “hamstrung himself by speaking out so clearly in the early stages of the debate. In the future, he kept his thoughts to himself and thus retained more flexibility as legislation snaked its way through Congress.”

  * * *

  WITH H.R. 7152 NOW before the Senate, Dirksen was in an ideal position to capitalize on just such flexibility, and he had not yet made his full intentions clear. From the first, he had told John Kennedy he would support the bill—with the glaring exception of its symbolic and practical heart: Title II, on public accommodations. Dirksen also had serious concerns about Title VII, the section on fair employment. And while the Republicans in his caucus were not as divided as their Democratic counterparts on civil rights, it would be no simple matter for Dirksen to round up a majority of Republicans in support of the House-passed bill.

  Of the Senate’s thirty-three Republicans, twenty-one, including Dirksen himself, could be classified as conservatives, with deep concerns about the degree of intrusion into free enterprise and private property that H.R. 7152 would entail. Just five Senate Republicans were regarded as moderates, while seven—including such stalwart supporters of civil rights as Jacob Javits and Kenneth Keating of New York, Clifford Case of New Jersey, and Thomas Kuchel of California—were reliable liberals. So finding the twenty-odd Republican votes needed for cloture was by no means guaranteed, as Dirksen well understood.

  Hubert Humphrey knew that, too, and Lyndon Johnson’s emphatic lectures notwithstanding, Humphrey was hardly sitting on his hands. He knew that managing the bill would “test me in every way,” he would recall, but he had his own considered strategy for getting the job done. “This time I assured myself, it would be different,” he added. While the southerners talked, “we would organize.” Humphrey decided to appoint seven floor captains, one for each section of the bill, to manage debate, with the help of large green three-ring binders full of background material compiled by the Justice Department and kept handy on the floor at all times. Philip Hart of Michigan would be responsible for the voting rights section, Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania for equal employment, Warren Magnuson of Washington for public accommodations, and so on.

  Humphrey had a well-earned reputation as the Democrats’ reigning Happy Warrior. He had emerged from a bitter, brutal primary campaign for the presidential nomination against John Kennedy in 1960 with his good humor intact (“I think I did pretty well for a Protestant,” he would tell the Gridiron Club in 1963), and as majority whip had become a valued Kennedy loyalist in Congress—and a frequent goad on civil rights. Now he resolved to use all his considerable charms in pressing for a strong bill.

  “I had to make up my mind as to my mental attitude and how I would conduct myself,” he would remember. “I can recall literally talking to myself, conditioning myself for the long ordeal.” He added, “I made up my mind early that I would keep my patience. I would not lose my temper and, if I could do nothing else, I would try to preserve a reasonable degree of good nature and fair play in the Senate … I knew that if the southerners could get the pro-civil rights people divided and fighting among themselves, the opponents would win.”

  From the minute the bill arrived in the Senate on February 17, Mike Mansfield was equally prepared. After the clerk read H.R. 7152 for the first time, the majority leader made sure he would retain as much control as possible over it. Invoking a parliamentary tactic, he objected to a second reading of the bill, which allowed him to short-circuit what would normally have been the next step in the legislative process: immediate referral of H.R. 7152 to James Eastland’s Judiciary Committee, a graveyard of civil rights legislation as full of tombstones as Howard Smith’s House Rules Committee. Instead, by blocking a second reading, Mansfield preserved his own power over the bill’s path, and he announced that he would soon move to place it directly on the Senate calendar. “We hope in vain if we hope that this issue can be put over safely to another tomorrow, to be dealt with by another generation of Senators,” he said. “The time is now.”

  But Mansfield, a courtly, laconic former professor at the University of Montana, also shared Humphrey’s view that debate should be civil and dignified. “This is not a circus or a sideshow,” he insisted. “We are not operating a pit with spectators coming into the galleries late at night to see Senators of the Republic come out in bedroom slippers without neckties, with their hair uncombed and pajama tops sticking out of their necks.” Some Democrats chafed at Mansfield’s relaxed hand. One of his own staff lawyers, Charles Ferris, would recall that he learned to be careful in drafting memos on pending legislation for his boss, because Mansfield would immediately share them with Dirksen. “Mansfield always was, you know, from our point of view, too deferential to Dirksen,” Humphrey’s chief legislative aide, John Stewart, would recall. “But he believed in fairness and he believed that each senator deserved full respect and opportunity to function in the Senate and that’s what made the Senate a different and distinctly important institution, and those qualities had to be preserved.”

  The degree to which Mansfield and Humphrey were in charge of the Senate action was reflected in the degree to which Lyndon Johnson chafed at their pace. On Wednesday, February 19, the day after the president’s first meeting with Humphrey as floor manager, Richard Russell and his southern caucus met and vowed to use every tactic at their disposal to delay the bill. That same afternoon, talking by telephone with Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman, Humphrey’s old friend from Minnesota, Johnson expressed frustration that a pending cotton-wheat bill—a bill that Johnson wanted out of the Senate before the civil rights bill hit the floor—was gumming up the Senate calendar, in part because the Senate had not been in session to receive a required report from Freeman’s department. “Oh, that god-damned, no-good outfit,” the president said. “I never saw a Senate operate like that one in my life. I just don’t know what to do.”

  The next d
ay, with his aide Bill Moyers on another extension, Johnson complained to Mansfield that Mary McGrory of the Washington Star had called Moyers to say that she had been unable to discern any clear or coordinated strategy for passing the bill, or any active consultations between Democrats and Republicans. “Well she hasn’t been around to see me,” Mansfield replied. “She hasn’t been around to see Hubert.” Johnson acknowledged that it was up to Mansfield “to arrange the strategy because if I got into it, they’d say I was bossing the Senate and directing them.” He suggested Mansfield himself call McGrory and tell her “that you discussed at the breakfast the other morning what the plans of the leadership were, and that they’re satisfactory to the White House, but that you make those decisions yourself.” Finally, noting McGrory’s close relationship with Robert Kennedy, Johnson said, “Justice, I imagine, Mike, is starting this. She’s got awfully close sources over there … She’s just a troublemaker and they want to start the trouble.”

  In fact, Humphrey and Mansfield already had a considered strategy, and they had consulted extensively with Bob Kennedy, Nick Katzenbach, and Burke Marshall about it. They were also well prepared to work with pro-civil-rights Republicans. On Friday, February 21, Dirksen named Thomas Kuchel, a strong civil rights supporter from California and one of his party’s liberal stalwarts, to serve as the Republican floor manager for H.R. 7152. His top aides had already been closely consulting with Humphrey’s, and Humphrey quickly welcomed Kuchel as my “co-partner.”

  But by early the following week, with the civil rights bill, the cotton-wheat bill, and the long-sought tax bill all stacking up in the Senate, Johnson could once again not resist a word or two of micromanagement. On Tuesday, February 25, the president advised Humphrey that it made sense to delay consideration of civil rights for a few more days, until the agriculture subsidy bill could be passed, in part because its passage might appease the southern senators whose states depended on those crops. But as a southerner himself—and a man about whom the most avid civil rights supporters were still somewhat skeptical—he did not want to be seen as driving the train. “Now, on your civil rights things, Hubert, I think you’ve got to be awfully careful that you don’t leave that at the White House, because they’ll say it’s a plot of the cotton South,” the president insisted.

  “No,” Humphrey dutifully replied, “I’m taking the full responsibility.”

  The next day, Wednesday, February 26, the tax bill conference report at long last passed the full Senate. Johnson had kept his pledge to bring in a federal budget under $100 billion, and Harry Byrd had kept his promise to allow the tax bill to proceed. With that business out of the way, Mike Mansfield promptly asked that H.R. 7152 be read for the second time. Then, invoking a provision under Senate Rule XIV, the majority leader asked that the bill be placed directly on the Senate calendar—an unusual procedure that nevertheless required only a simple majority vote. Richard Russell immediately objected that this course would violate the Senate’s Rule XXV, which had been passed after Rule XIV, calling for all bills to be referred to the relevant standing committee. But as Russell himself would have been the first to remember, he had lost this very point of order in 1957, when the Senate voted to let that year’s civil rights bill bypass the Judiciary Committee, and now the Senate’s presiding officer, Lee Metcalf of Montana, simply cited the 1957 precedent as controlling, and overruled Russell.

  Interestingly, in 1957, Mansfield had voted to send the civil rights bill to committee (as had John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson) while Everett Dirksen, eager to help the Eisenhower administration get its bill through, had voted to place the bill directly on the calendar. Now, however, with his own commitment to H.R. 7152 still equivocal, Dirksen, the senior Republican on the Judiciary Committee, took the opposite tack. He argued that the only witness ever to testify before the committee on the bill had been the attorney general himself (in those long summer colloquies with Sam Ervin), and that Title VII, the fair employment practices measure inserted in the compromise House bill, had never been considered by any Senate committee at all.

  Russell’s and Dirksen’s objections were joined by Wayne Morse, an Oregon Democrat and strong civil rights supporter who was nevertheless a stickler for Senate procedure and traditions. “We would make a great mistake if we put this bill directly on the calendar and proceed to turn the Senate into a Committee of the Whole and debate it,” Morse insisted. But, Humphrey rejoined, the civil rights bill had been in committee—Eastland’s committee. “The problem was that it did not come out of committee,” he said. “I have been around here long enough to know that the only way civil rights legislation can really be gotten before this body is through extraordinary, but legal, means.” Several hours of heated debate now followed, but in an ominous sign for Russell and the southerners, Mansfield carried the day, 54 to 37, with twenty Republican votes.

  And then, in an apparent gesture of goodwill that stunned both civil rights supporters and opponents, Mansfield himself requested unanimous consent that the bill be referred to the Judiciary Committee after all, with instructions that it be reported back “without recommendation or amendment” by Wednesday, March 4. Mansfield apparently did so in hopes of winning eventual support for cloture from Senator Ernest Gruening, a Democrat from Alaska and another stickler for procedure, but the immediate effect of his gesture was to alienate nearly everyone else. Jacob Javits of New York shot to his feet and objected to the unanimous consent request, thus blocking Mansfield’s gambit.

  Before the Senate could debate whether to actually take up H.R. 7152—to make it the Senate’s “pending business”—the pro-civil-rights forces would have to endure a few more days of debate on the cotton-wheat bill. That did not really bother Hubert Humphrey, who was playing a long game.

  “He used to say, you can read the Bible all the way through, and you can read the Constitution from beginning to end, and you can memorize the Bill of Rights, and you’ll never see the word ‘efficiency’ mentioned once,” recalled Walter Mondale, who would serve alongside Humphrey in the Senate in the 1970s. “And he had time. He would use time, use time, use time. He decided not to do it in a hurry, but do it slowly and well.”

  * * *

  WHEN GOD HANDED OUT glands, Humphrey’s longtime press secretary, Norman Sherman, liked to say, Hubert took seconds. Indeed, throughout his life he seemed possessed of some perpetual excess of energy, a drive that could only be released in talk, action, and then more talk. He always had, Richard Russell once complained, “more solutions than we have problems.”

  Hubert Horatio Humphrey Jr. was born in 1911, in Wallace, South Dakota, and grew up in nearby Doland, population 660, where his father was a struggling druggist. Hubert Humphrey Sr. was a rare Democrat in a Republican town, one who, the locals liked to say, “never sells you a pill without selling you an idea.” He was himself a font of loquacious energy, and he told his son, “Stay out of bed as long as you can. Most people die there.” Even before he was able to reach the taps of the soda fountain in his father’s store, young Hubert went to work. Hard times hit the Dakotas early, and when Hubert was sixteen years old, his family was forced to sell their house to pay the bills; it was the first time he saw his father cry, and he never forgot the sight.

  In Doland’s small high school, Humphrey played football and basketball, ran the half mile, acted in plays, blew the baritone horn, and graduated as a star debater and the valedictorian. “I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had gone to a large high school,” he would recall. In 1929, he lit out for the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, some three hundred miles from home, and made ends meet by getting a job washing dishes in the basement of—of course—a drugstore, where he survived by eating the mistakes, the returned food and milkshakes, from the lunch counter upstairs. At the end of his freshman year, his father thought there might not be enough money to send him back, but finally he decided Hubert simply had to return, because “There’s only one thing to do here and that’s just fade away
and go broke.”

  Soon enough, though, Humphrey’s college career was interrupted, and he dutifully went home—like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life—to help his father, who had now moved to Huron, South Dakota, run one of the Walgreen chain’s first drugstores, an emporium, Humphrey would recall, that rarely did twenty-five dollars a day in business in those lean years. Finally, in 1932, realizing that if this was to be his lot, he had better learn the trade, Humphrey went off to a six-month pharmaceutical cram course in Denver, learning in six months what other students absorbed in four years, then returning to Huron to work in the store from 7:00 a.m. to midnight most days. To supplement their income, he and his father mixed their own patent medicines—for humans and hogs alike—including a concoction called “Humphrey’s Sniffles,” intended to compete with Vicks nose drops but made with vegetable oil and a touch of benzocaine, “so that even if the sniffles didn’t get better, you felt it less.”

  Somehow in the midst of those long workdays, Humphrey met and began courting Muriel Buck, a girl from a prominent local family with whom he was able to share dreams he found it hard to confess to others. “Maybe I seem foolish to have such hopes and plans,” he wrote her in August 1935 from Washington, where he had gone to attend his sister’s graduation from George Washington University, “but Bucky, I can see how someday, if you and I just apply ourselves and make up our minds to work for bigger things, we can someday live here in Washington and probably be in government politics or service. I intend to set my aim at Congress. Don’t laugh at me, Muriel. Maybe it does sound rather egotistical and beyond reason, but Muriel I do know others have succeeded. Why haven’t I a chance?”

  Hubert and Muriel were married in September 1936—at eight o’clock in the morning, so the drugstore would not have to be closed during the busiest hours. The newlyweds were happy with each other, but Humphrey was miserable in his work, suffering headaches and nausea. Finally, he told his father that he knew it was time to go back to college in Minnesota. “I wanted to learn something, anything, new,” he would recall. He signed up for twenty-one credit hours, though the limit was fifteen. Because he had been gone from the campus for six years, he came back as a contemporary of former students who were now assistant professors, and he and Muriel formed an energetic social circle, surviving on hamburger, root beer, and good talk. He graduated in June 1939, having finished three years’ work in two, and accepted a $450 fellowship for graduate study in political science at Louisiana State University.