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

by Todd S. Purdum

  There now began “a most difficult and impecunious time,” Humphrey would recall, as Muriel made sandwiches every morning for Hubert to take to campus to sell for a dime. In a Louisiana where Huey Long’s son Russell was the LSU student body president, Humphrey discovered the roiling, gothic nature of southern politics, and also the brutality of Jim Crow. Growing up in south Dakota, the only blacks he had ever encountered were workers on road crews building a highway from Doland to Redfield, and he would ride their mule-drawn dump trucks and chat, to the shock of his mother. When he first saw separate White and Colored signs for drinking fountains and toilets, Humphrey would recall, “I found them both ridiculous and offensive. I remember my naïve reaction: ‘Why, it’s uneconomic.’” (Years later, as Senate majority whip, he would always ride in the front seat with his black chauffeur, Tom Graham, because he thought it looked pompous to sit in the back.)

  Returning to Minnesota, Humphrey took a job with the Workers’ Education Program, a jobs training effort under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, in which he came to know labor leaders throughout the state. In 1943, to his considerable surprise, he was recruited by labor groups to run for mayor of Minneapolis at age thirty-two, one of eleven candidates competing in a nonpartisan open primary. He lost by slightly less than six thousand votes, but two years later, he tried again and won by more than thirty thousand votes.

  Minneapolis had a “weak mayor” system of government, in which the city council traditionally held the dominant role. But Humphrey had the sole power to appoint the police chief, and he used it to name a tough new commander, who took on gambling and graft in what was then still a wide-open town. Humphrey raised license fees to pay for more and better-trained police officers, all the while fighting Communist influence in the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, which he had helped create. “By 1948, newspapers in Minnesota had begun to describe me as ambitious, as though it were a sin,” he would recall. In fact, he was sinful (or virtuous) enough to win the DFL nomination for Senate that year.

  * * *

  HUMPHREY’S SUCCESSFUL INTRODUCTION OF the civil rights plank at the Democratic National Convention that summer—and his Senate victory alongside Harry Truman’s upset comeback that fall—made him an instant national celebrity. The January 17, 1949, issue of Time put his face on the cover, with a stylized tornado whirling in the background, and described him as “a glib, jaunty spellbinder with a ‘listen-you-guys’ approach.” But his new colleagues in the Senate, where the power still rested disproportionately with the southern barons, were not so impressed. While Humphrey watched from the gallery as the last special session of the Eightieth Congress concluded, one senator after another studiously ignored him, until Lister Hill of Alabama finally noticed him and asked him to come down to the floor.

  It did not go unnoticed when Humphrey took a black staff member, Cyril King, later governor of the Virgin Islands, to lunch in the Senate dining room, only to be told by an embarrassed black headwaiter that they could not be served. Humphrey made such a fuss that they were seated, but in the Senate cloakroom one day soon thereafter, he was crushed to his core to hear Richard Russell mutter, “Can you imagine the people of Minnesota sending that damn fool down here to represent them?” The Saturday Evening Post pronounced Humphrey “the Senate’s gabbiest freshman.”

  But gradually, Humphrey’s ebullience, good humor, and essential decency would win over even his most stubborn colleagues, and by 1964 he was as esteemed a member of the club as any man. Milton Young, a North Dakota Republican who suffered from recurrent debilitating migraine headaches, would never forget Humphrey’s sensitivity. Humphrey, the former pharmacist, could always tell when Young was suffering an attack, and he would go around the chamber getting members to talk more softly so Young “could stay in the Senate without abusing his headaches,” Walter Mondale would recall. “He always believed that if you really put your mind to it … and brought a lot of bright people in, that you could solve anything, that there were no intractable problems,” Humphrey’s longtime aide Bill Connell remembered.

  In 1960, Humphrey had every reason to be bitter at John Kennedy after their primary fight. Instead, he campaigned for him vigorously in the general election, reminding an overwhelmingly Scandinavian and Protestant audience in northern Minnesota that the Vikings had occupied Ireland for a hundred years and had intermarried with the local Celts. “Look at Kennedy!” Humphrey exclaimed. “See that rusty reddish hair, those blue eyes, that ruddy complexion? Why, he is one of us!”

  * * *

  ON THE AFTERNOON OF Friday, February 28, two days after the passage of Mike Mansfield’s motion to put the bill on the Senate calendar, H.R. 7152’s floor managers, Humphrey and Thomas Kuchel, met in Humphrey’s office with their key legislative aides. This bipartisan gathering of senators and aides would become a daily—sometimes twice daily—ritual in the long fight to pass the bill, its precise makeup and meeting place varying from time to time but its mission never changing in the months ahead.

  On this occasion, the group was joined—as it often would be—by Clarence Mitchell and Joe Rauh to plot the first steps in strategy. All who were present agreed that they should accept nothing less than the House version of H.R. 7152, and that they should stay in close touch with Bill McCulloch and Manny Celler as the Senate action unfolded. Kuchel proposed that the Senate not allow any committees to meet during the coming civil rights debate. “It doesn’t bother me if the committees do not meet,” he said. “This should be a show.” Humphrey warned that the Senate should prepare to meet from 9:00 a.m. to midnight, including Saturdays, and that the pro-civil-rights forces would need “faith and perseverance.” Russell, he warned, would run “a war of nerves. He will yell, ‘Benedict Arnold, traitor and lynch law.’ He is like that French general who always said, ‘Attack, attack, attack!’ If he were on a bear hunt, he would let rabbits out of the cage and have the hounds chase them. He doesn’t want us to get bear.”

  Humphrey well understood the paradox of the coming filibuster—a term that derives from the Dutch word for “freebooter,” or pirate, and that had come to be used in the Senate after the Civil War to describe those who would hijack debate. A filibuster would place the greatest burden not on the southerners, who would simply have to show up one or two at a time to talk in desultory opposition, but on the pro-civil-rights forces, who would have to be able to produce fifty-one senators on the floor any time the southerners called for a quorum in order to keep Senate business from grinding to a halt. It was this very reality, Mike Mansfield believed, that had resulted in the weakening of the 1960 civil rights bill. Round-the-clock sessions had not so much worn down the southerners, who could hold the floor with only a handful of well-rested troops, but “rather the exhausted, sleep-starved, quorum-confounded” proponents of civil rights, who were only too happy to compromise in the end.

  Quorum calls not only gave the filibusterers time to rest their feet and voices, they also posed a keen parliamentary risk for the pro-civil-rights troops. Under the Senate’s rules, each member was allowed to deliver just two speeches on the same subject in a single “legislative day.” If a quorum could not be mustered, the Senate would have to adjourn—instead of simply recessing, as was its more typical practice—thus starting a new legislative day, allowing the southerners to make even more speeches in opposition. (If each filibusterer simply made two twelve-hour speeches, that alone could use up eight to ten weeks of debate.) Moreover, if the Senate adjourned while a motion to consider the civil rights bill was pending—as Mike Mansfield had announced the motion to consider H.R. 7152 soon would be—the motion would die, and the process of calling the bill up would have to start all over again the next day. So it was of utmost importance, as a demonstration of will if nothing else, that the pro-civil-rights side be able to deliver a quorum on demand and keep the current legislative day alive.

  To that end, Humphrey set up two platoons of about twenty-five members each, and each day, one
platoon would be expected to answer every quorum call. Together with Humphrey and his title captains, Kuchel and his Republican troops, and the handful of southern Democrats that could always be counted on to be on the floor, that system could be expected to produce the warm bodies needed for a quorum.

  Humphrey’s aide John Stewart, a twenty-nine-year-old political science graduate student from the University of Chicago, came up with another innovation: a daily mimeographed newsletter, written with style and wit, to be distributed by the pro-civil-rights forces, summing up floor debate and the state of play, listing the quorum duty rosters, and generally helping “to keep Senators and their staffs fully informed.”

  All this careful planning—and Bill McCulloch’s steadfast insistence on no compromise on the House bill—left the civil rights proponents hopeful that they had at last reversed the long-standing dynamic that had prevailed in the Senate. “You had a situation where you really couldn’t compromise and expect to have anything other than a huge mess on your hands,” Stewart would recall. “And in that set of circumstances, common sense prevailed and told you that, you know, in the past it has always been the advocates who have blinked. And once you blink in a filibuster situation, you’re doomed. It may take a while, but you’re basically doomed to lose the core of what you’re after, so you can’t blink. And if you just hold out long enough, there will be countervailing power that will—that you’ll flip the whole equation such that it’s the filibusterers who are the ones who are going to blink.”

  Whatever Lyndon Johnson’s apprehensions about trying to win cloture, no one understood this reality better than he. At his news conference on Saturday, February 29, the president was asked whether he would be willing to compromise on the public accommodations section or otherwise water down the bill. “I have never discussed this with anyone and I would suspect that those rumors which you talk about, which I have read about, are strictly Republican in origin,” the president insisted. “I will say that the civil rights bill which passed the House is the bill that this administration recommends. I am in favor of it passing the Senate exactly in its present form. I realize there will be some Senators who will want to strengthen it, some who will want to weaken it. But so far as this administration is concerned, its position is firm and we stand on the House bill.”

  But privately, Johnson still had his doubts about the Senate leadership team. On Friday, March 6, the president asked Larry O’Brien to make certain that Bob Kennedy agreed with Humphrey and Mansfield’s easy-does-it approach. “Now, you be damned sure the attorney general agrees to the procedures they’re following,” Johnson instructed O’Brien.

  “You know Mike a helluva lot better than I do,” O’Brien replied. “But I didn’t get any impression, I haven’t … he’s been. Anytime you bring up all night sessions, he really bridles, you know, just gets stiff-backed and by God, he’s just not going to do it.”

  “I just want to be sure the attorney general approves of this,” Johnson again insisted. “Because I sure don’t. And if they agree with him, all right. But my judgment is they ought to start right out going right around the clock until they get it.”

  “Well, I have a feeling that he’ll—” O’Brien began, before the president again interrupted him.

  “You be sure that you explain to him that’s my judgment on the matter, but I want them to handle the bill, and I’ll work with them any way I can. And if Hubert and them work it out, that’s their business. They ain’t going to damn sure put it in my lap because I’m for civil rights—period. And that means all night, every night. I’ll stay here all night, every night, to do it myself and I’ve passed two of them myself. And I never passed them on any nine-to-four basis.”

  Bob Kennedy and Burke Marshall would later say that Johnson wanted the attorney general’s approval at every step of the way because the president did not see how the bill could pass and did not want to shoulder the sole blame for its failure. But that very evening, the president showed that he needed no reminder of what the fight for the bill was about. As he worked late in the Oval Office, Lady Bird corralled him and Gerri Whittington and Marianne Means, a Hearst Newspapers reporter who was one of the president’s favorite journalists, to head to the White House swimming pool for a predinner dip. They found suits for both women but, as Lady Bird noted in her diary, “Lyndon was astonished that Gerri Whittington couldn’t swim, and in his very forthright way, he said, ‘What’s the matter, couldn’t you go in any public pools?’ And she, I must say, with very creditable poise, said, ‘That is right, so I never learned to swim.’”

  * * *

  IF HUMPHREY AND HIS allies were cautiously optimistic about the coming battle, Richard Russell was not. He had vowed a fight “to the bitter end,” but speaking on the CBS News program Face the Nation on Sunday, March 1, he offered a pessimistic political analysis of the southerners’ plight. “President Kennedy could have lost this bill completely, or in large part, and not one of those who were affected directly by it would have held it against President Kennedy,” he said. “I think President Johnson feels that if he loses any substantial part of it, that it will cast all of his statements of support for it in doubt as to their sincerity. That really makes it a much more difficult position as to any possible compromise than there would have been had President Kennedy not met his tragic fate.”

  9

  We Shall Now Begin to Fight

  MONDAY, MARCH 9, 1964

  THREE WEEKS AFTER H.R. 7152 arrived in the Senate, Mike Mansfield at last prepared to offer his motion to consider the bill. The final roadblock had been removed the previous Friday, March 6, when the cotton-wheat bill passed the Senate. At his news conference the next day, President Johnson said, “I believe the Senate is prepared now to diligently apply itself, and I hope it stays on the subject until a bill is passed that is acceptable.” He declined to estimate the length of the coming debate. “I don’t think anyone really knows how long the matter will be discussed,” he said. But he did predict that “the majority of the Senate will have an opportunity to work its will,” which was a veiled way of acknowledging that the southern filibuster would have to be broken.

  One day later, on Sunday, March 8, Hubert Humphrey appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press and, blithely ignoring Everett Dirksen’s openly voiced doubts about the bill, predicted that the Republican leader would regard the civil rights issue as “a moral, not a partisan, one.” “I believe we can win this time,” Humphrey said, “because there is a time in the affairs of men and nations when an idea comes to fruition. I really believe the American public recognizes the need for civil rights legislation.” He told the program’s moderator, Lawrence Spivak, “There will be no wheels and no deals and no compromise that will in any way fundamentally affect or alter this bill.” When one of the program’s panelists, May Craig, asked about Howard Smith’s sex amendment, which had been incorporated into the House bill, Humphrey smiled and answered, “I think we can accept that provision and it is a workable one.”

  Now, just hours before the Senate was due to begin consideration of the bill, Humphrey met in his office with the bipartisan floor leaders’ group for a pep rally. “The House bill is a good bill,” Humphrey assured the gathering. “In fact, there is so much good with it that it is hard to tamper with.” Moreover, Humphrey told his colleagues, they would be getting plenty of help from a powerful and newly organized group of allies. “The secret of passing this bill,” he confided, “is the church groups.”

  Organized religion had played a key role in American political debates from abolition to Prohibition. But never before had mainline denominations wielded their clout on the question of civil rights in ways they were now prepared to do. Led by the National Council of Churches and its Washington representative, James Hamilton, and working closely with the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the interfaith coalition had kept up a ceaseless stream of lobbying activity since the previous summer. Workshops aimed at organizing grassroots efforts had been held
in places like Denver, Indianapolis, and Columbus, Ohio. (Of all the letters received by Charlie Halleck about H.R. 7152 in the weeks when the bill was under active consideration in the House, more than four in ten were from correspondents who identified themselves as associated with church groups.)

  For his part, Tom Kuchel’s aide Stephen Horn carried an index card in his wallet with careful notation of the religious denominations of seven Republican senators he believed might vote for cloture (Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa was a Methodist, for example, while his Hawkeye colleague Jack Miller was Catholic.) Newspaper accounts of the debate over the bill had kept equally close track of religious affiliation, with one long article in the Charlotte Observer noting the denomination of every key player in the House debate.

  Now, with the Senate poised to take up the bill, the National Council of Churches issued a bulletin on March 6. THE CRUCIAL SENATE FIGHT IS ABOUT TO BEGIN, it warned. THE EFFORTS OF THE RELIGIOUS FORCES OF OUR NATION WILL AGAIN BE THE DECIDING FACTOR … THE BATTLE AHEAD OF US WILL ONLY BE WON AS WE CONVINCE OUR SENATORS THAT WE ARE DEEPLY COMMITTED TO THIS CIVIL RIGHTS BILL AS AN IMPORTANT STEP ON THE ROAD TO FREEDOM AND JUSTICE FOR ALL AMERICANS.