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

by Todd S. Purdum

  Hubert Humphrey’s aide John Stewart and his wife, Nancy, were active in their local United Church of Christ, and throughout the Senate debate on the bill Stewart regularly contributed articles to Christianity & Crisis, the liberal biweekly Christian journal that had been founded in 1941 by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr to urge American intervention in World War II. Stewart’s article in the March 2 issue was titled “The Testing of Lyndon B. Johnson,” and it offered an insider’s perspective on the coming fight.

  Because the Senate did not have the usual option of trading away parts of the House-passed bill, Stewart wrote, “The normal complement of expendable items that provide the currency of the legislative process is simply not available to the president under existing circumstances.” At the same time, he noted, “the southern opponents will be dealing with a constellation of forces never before assembled in support of civil rights legislation. Under this combination, the filibuster may reveal itself to be a paper tiger. President Johnson appears ready to find out.”

  * * *

  IT WAS ONE OF the mid-twentieth-century Senate’s many quirks that its “morning hour,” the period at the beginning of each workday reserved for routine housekeeping tasks—the reading of the previous day’s journal, the presentation of memorials and committee reports—actually took place in the afternoon and lasted two hours, or until 2:00 p.m. if the Senate convened as usual at noon. During the morning hour, a motion to consider a bill—that is, to make it the pending business of the Senate—was not debatable. So if Mike Mansfield had wanted to call up just any old bill as the first order of business on an ordinary Monday, he might have done so in a matter of seconds.

  But March 9, 1964, was no ordinary Monday, and H.R. 7152 was not just any old bill. So, a few minutes after noon, when Mansfield offered a routine motion to dispense with the reading of the previous day’s journal, Richard Russell was first on his feet, asking that the journal be read “slowly and clearly enough for all members of the Senate to understand.” With a wink to a watching Hubert Humphrey, Russell made his aim clear: to drag out the proceedings past 2:00 p.m., when the morning hour would end and Mansfield’s motion to consider the bill would again be debatable.

  “Mr. President,” Russell intoned, explaining the reasoning behind his delaying tactic, “this measure not only is the strongest of its kind to be proposed since Reconstruction. It is much more drastic than any bill ever presented even during the days of Reconstruction. And I state unhesitatingly that no member of the Reconstruction Congress, no matter how radical, would have dared to present a proposal that would have given such vast governmental control over free enterprise in this country so as to commence the process of socialism.”

  Two hours and five tedious minutes later, Mike Mansfield again took the floor, to make his motion to consider H.R. 7152, and his message was solemn. “There is,” he said, “an ebb and flow in human affairs which at rare moments brings the complex of human events into a delicate balance. At those moments, the acts of governments may indeed influence, for better or for worse, the course of history. This is such a moment in the life of the nation. This is that moment for the Senate.”

  The southerners were unmoved by Mansfield’s ringing appeal. They simply began talking—hour after hour, then day after drowsy day—in what amounted to a kind of prefilibuster on the question of whether to simply take up the bill. The fear among civil rights supporters was that they might just keep talking, preventing the Senate from even beginning to consider H.R. 7152, until Congress adjourned for the Republican Convention in July.

  Humphrey and Kuchel and their troops could only do their best to stay organized. On the afternoon of March 10, the bipartisan floor leaders group agreed to have David Filvaroff, the young Justice Department lawyer who had helped draft the bill in the House the previous fall, or one of his colleagues always on duty to answer any questions that pro-civil-rights senators might have about the bill during the debate. Peter Smith, another young Justice Department lawyer, had started work just the day before, and his first assignment was to “sit in the gallery and take note of anything that the Democratic right-wing nuts would say, and if there wasn’t an immediate response, and a correct one, from Humphrey or one of his people, we were to run down” to Senator Warren Magnuson’s hideaway office just off the Senate floor, “and write up what the answer should be,” and send it onto the floor for use by Humphrey and his troops.

  For his part, Russell had organized three teams of six southerners each to take responsibility for action on the floor. Humphrey countered with six teams of his own, each of whose leaders was expected to produce four to six of his colleagues after every quorum call. There now began a pattern on the pro-civil-rights side that would last throughout the debate: Each morning, the floor managers, their staffs, and Justice Department aides would meet to go over plans for the day. At least twice a week, Clarence Mitchell and Joe Rauh would join them. And every evening, the Senate staffers would reconvene to review the day’s action and tie up any loose ends. Such diligence impressed even Lyndon Johnson, who asked Larry O’Brien about the possibility of inviting the hardworking aides and their wives to the White House for a little break.

  By Wednesday, March 11, as the southerners drawled on, the civil rights supporters were already talking about how to handle the touchy matter of senators who wanted to offer amendments to strengthen the House bill. At their meeting that day, Joe Rauh told the bipartisan floor leaders group that the Justice Department was so concerned about upsetting Bill McCulloch with any amendments that it had asked Clarence Mitchell to take a position against even those that would strengthen the bill—which Mitchell said he could not do. When Rauh wondered if there was any “jelling” in the situation yet, John Stewart replied that things were “still fluid,” to which Patricia Connell of Senator Kenneth Keating’s office could not resist adding, “It is better fluid than frozen.” The harried staffers looked for humor wherever they could find it. On Thursday, March 12, Kuchel’s legislative aide Stephen Horn, who kept a detailed diary of the deliberations of the floor leaders’ group, noted, “It is a very jocular crowd. Department of Justice representatives are no longer present.”

  By that same day, Stewart’s journalistic brainchild, the daily civil rights newsletter slipped under senators’ office doors overnight, was beginning to cause a stir. A typical issue noted that there had already been seventy days of public hearings on the civil rights bill, with 275 witnesses and 175 written statements, running to a record of 5,792 printed pages.

  But the southerners were not impressed. “Who writes these mysterious messages,” an irritated John Stennis of Mississippi inquired, “which come to Senators before the Congressional Record reaches them, and in them attempt to refute arguments made on the floor of the Senate?”

  “There is no doubt about it,” Humphrey proudly replied. “The newsletter is a bipartisan civil rights newsletter. For the first time, we are putting up a battle.” Then, in a typical gesture of magnanimity, he announced, “If anyone wishes to have equal time, there is space on the back of it for the opposition.”

  Indeed, Humphrey was proving that it was possible to disagree without being disagreeable. Near the end of this same day, Senator Willis Robertson of Virginia made a speech excoriating every section of the bill, and when he was done, strode over to Humphrey and offered a small Confederate flag pin for the majority whip’s lapel. Humphrey accepted the offering and praised Robertson (the father of the future televangelist Pat Robertson) for his “eloquence and his great knowledge of history and law, but also for his wonderful … gentlemanly qualities and his consideration to us at all times.”

  Robertson returned the compliment in the highest terms, noting that “if it had not been for the men from Wisconsin and Minnesota, when Grant finally came down to Virginia, we would have won, but they formerly belonged to Virginia. We could not whip them.” The pair then ambled off arm in arm to Humphrey’s office to share a drink.

  * * *

&
nbsp; ON SATURDAY, MARCH 14, Lyndon Johnson taped a television interview with the three major networks, reviewing his first hundred days in office, to be broadcast the following night. “The Negro was freed of his chains a hundred years ago,” he said, “but he has not been freed of the problems brought about by his color and the bigotry that exists. I know of nothing more important for this Congress to do than pass the Civil Rights Act as the House passed it.”

  As the southerners’ talkathon continued, the civil rights proponents kept up their own side of the debate, not only on the Senate floor but in the daily newsletter. The March 16 edition cited “The High Cost of Racial Discrimination to Our Economy,” quoting a 1962 report by the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers saying that the nation’s gross national product might rise 2.5 percent if barriers to discrimination in employment were removed, and by 3.2 percent if there were no barriers in education. “This, of course, in no way measures the heaviest cost of all—the loss of human dignity accompanying racial discrimination,” the newsletter noted.

  That same day, Robert Kimball of John Lindsay’s staff reported to Stephen Horn that Bill McCulloch was getting “progressively worried” about the protracted Senate debate, as civil rights disturbances continued around the country. A protest over a segregated barbershop in Yellow Springs, Ohio, not far from Piqua, had turned violent and led to the arrest of one hundred people, many of them students at Antioch College, leaving the Ohio delegation “up in arms,” Kimball added. He said McCulloch now estimated that the House Republicans would lose 25 percent of the votes they had obtained for passage of the bill if the vote were retaken today. That was worrisome, because H.R. 7152 would have to go back to the House for final approval if the Senate changed so much as a word.

  By this point, the strain on the pro-civil-rights forces was showing in other ways, too. It took them sixty-seven minutes to complete a dinner-hour quorum call, and the newsletter of March 17 chided, “The more promptly that the Senate responds to such quorum calls, the more efficiently we can proceed.”

  In Humphrey’s quest for ways to bolster support for the bill, no idea seemed too far-fetched. In a memo to his staff, the majority whip noted that the actor Marlon Brando had told him that he had sounded out Johnny Carson, Steve Allen, Jack Paar, and Hugh Downs about promoting the bill on their television shows, and Humphrey expressed enthusiasm about the possibility. Humphrey’s aide Bill Connell urged him to ask Lyndon Johnson to lobby top network executives to join the cause, and went so far as to draft a memo from Humphrey to the president, urging that they enlist entertainers popular in the Midwest—including Lawrence Welk, Bob Hope, John Wayne, and the cast of The Beverly Hillbillies—to stage a television special promoting civil rights as a way of pressuring wavering Republican senators to support cloture. (There is no evidence the memo ever made it to the White House, and nothing came of the idea.)

  But the bipartisan floor leaders’ group also took some care not to overplay its hand, agreeing in a meeting on March 18 that it was too early to enlist large numbers of union members or average citizens to come lobby the Senate in person. “If fifty Negroes came,” Clarence Mitchell suggested, “the newspapers would say they are overrunning the town.” By this point, the southerners were dragging out debate by asking unanimous consent to make off-topic speeches that would not count against their allotted total on civil rights, and had so far used only twelve of the thirty-eight speaking slots available to them under the two-speeches-a-day rule. The calendar might read March 19 in the Capitol itself, but in the Senate it was still the legislative day of March 9. Joe Rauh and others argued that the slowdown was not so bad, and actually favored the pro-civil-rights forces, allowing them more time to gain support for the bill while avoiding any votes on cloture when success was still uncertain.

  At a meeting with the floor leaders’ group in Humphrey’s office on Friday, March 20, Kuchel suggested asking Bill McCulloch to come and join one of their daily meetings. Nick Katzenbach, who was present that day, reported that he was not sure McCulloch would do so, noting that while the congressman had always opposed weakening amendments, he had been equally careful not to say what kind of strengthening amendments he might support. After the meeting, Kuchel and Stephen Horn met Robert Kimball for coffee in the Senate dining room, and Kimball informed them that McCulloch was under pressure from other House Republicans to “go slow” in the face of unfavorable mail and mounting public concern over continuing civil rights demonstrations.

  Finally, by March 24, word began to circulate on Capitol Hill that the southerners were ready to allow a vote on the Mansfield motion to consider the bill. Jerry Grinstein of Warren Magnuson’s staff reported that the southern caucus had voted 7 to 5 to let the bill come up. The precise reason for this about-face has never been clear, but the best guess is that Richard Russell had begun to fear that continued foot-dragging on the mere consideration of the bill might prompt more Republicans to support cloture once H.R. 7152 reached the floor.

  Once again, the pro-civil-rights side went out of its way not to be seen as gloating. Stephen Horn drily noted in his diary, “There is a feeling that Martin Luther King should stay out of the gallery when the vote is underway” on the motion to consider.

  On March 26, after sixteen days of what Time called “drone and drawl talk,” Mansfield at last got a vote on his motion to consider H.R. 7152, and it passed overwhelmingly, by a vote of 67 to 17—a blow to the southerners. But then Wayne Morse, a stickler to the end, offered a motion to recommit the bill to the Judiciary Committee, with instructions to report it out by April 8. Everett Dirksen would have accepted this course, but Mansfield moved to table—in effect, reject—the motion. Mansfield carried the day, but only by a much closer vote of 50 to 34, with six northern and western Democrats and nine Republicans (including Dirksen) supporting Morse, in a sign of just how difficult it would be to break the filibuster. (Mansfield was especially worried that if the bill went to committee, it would come back to the floor without any privileged status, and the fight to get it on the calendar and make it the pending business would have to be waged all over again.)

  Richard Russell was philosophical. “A skirmish has been lost,” he said. “We shall now begin to fight the war.” Martin Luther King was just as determined. He threatened “direct action” if the bill was not passed by the first of May.

  * * *

  MONDAY, MARCH 30, THE day after Easter, was anything but springlike on Capitol Hill. It was cold and snowing, and the early-flowering forsythia and cherry blossom buds were frozen as Roger Mudd of CBS News took up his camera position on the Senate steps in galoshes and a snap-brim felt hat, interviewing Hubert Humphrey, who had been forced to borrow a too-large overcoat from the CBS Washington bureau chief, Bill Small, at the last moment.

  But inside the Senate chamber, the bright sunshine of human rights beamed hot from Humphrey’s heart as he began his fifty-five-page opening speech in support of H.R. 7152.

  “I cannot overemphasize the historic importance of the debate we are beginning,” Humphrey told his colleagues, on what just happened to be the ninety-fourth anniversary of the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, which had prohibited federal and state governments from denying a citizen the right to vote based on “race, color or previous condition of servitude.” “We are participants in one of the most crucial eras in the long and proud history of the United States, and, yes, in mankind’s struggle for justice and freedom which has gone forward since the dawn of history.” The stakes, the majority whip added, were of the largest possible scale. “If freedom fails here—in America, the land of the free,” he demanded, “what hope can we have for it surviving elsewhere?”

  Three and a half hours later, after Humphrey had gone through the bill, title by title and point by point, his Republican counterpart, Tom Kuchel, actually managed to out-talk him, making a fifty-six-page address of his own. “This issue should not be a partisan fight,” Kuchel said. “It should be, and is, an American fight. T
he record that is being made in the Senate today will go a long way, not merely to demonstrate that the Senate desires to pass legislation in the civil rights field, but also to provide the people of this country and all branches of government with the clear and unequivocal intention by which the bill will be fashioned in plain English.”

  From the White House, Lyndon Johnson telephoned Ted Kennedy, to praise him for a television appearance in support of the bill the day before, and to assure him once more of his commitment as “just a trustee that’s trying to carry on the best I can” to pass the bill as a memorial to John Kennedy. “We’re going to put over his program,” Johnson said, “and he’s going to be proud of it—if we all survive.”

  If anyone on that late March morning understood the potential pitfalls ahead for the civil rights bill, it was Lyndon Johnson. But the president and his allies knew something else: that the mood of the country was changing. Just twenty-four hours earlier, on Easter Sunday, the Reverend Billy Graham had held a service for thirty-five thousand intermingled black and white congregants in a football stadium in Birmingham, the largest integrated audience in the history of Alabama. Even as the Senate opened debate on the bill, the Supreme Court was hearing oral arguments on the Prince Edward County, Virginia, school discrimination case, in which the county had simply closed all its schools rather than accept integration, a move that Solicitor General Archibald Cox told the court amounted to an “experiment in ignorance.” That same week, Mrs. Malcolm Peabody, the mother of the Republican governor of Massachusetts, and a group of fellow demonstrators were arrested in St. Augustine, Florida, for attempting to integrate the restaurant of the Ponce de Leon Motel, in the same city where Lyndon Johnson’s stand for desegregation had lasted for precisely one evening the year before.

  The mood of the Senate itself was changing, too, with liberal freshman Democrats like Birch Bayh of Indiana, Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, and George McGovern of South Dakota—all young World War II–era veterans—bringing a fresh perspective and a new concern for social justice to the institution. Bayh had managed black G.I. baseball players in postwar occupied Germany. Inouye had lost an arm fighting in Italy with his segregated, all Japanese-American regiment, but came back to face fresh prejudice. “When I returned home from the war, from the hospital with four ribbons and a captain’s bar,” he recalled, “I was denied entrance to one of the big restaurants” outside Honolulu.