In fact, they failed to produce the needed bodies—to disastrous embarrassment. When the Senate convened at eleven o’clock that morning (still the “legislative day” of March 30, of course), Mike Mansfield, following standard procedure, noted the absence of a quorum, and the clerk began to call the roll. Humphrey was forced to announce the expected absence of more than forty Democrats, for one reason or another, while Kenneth Keating announced that a dozen Republicans were also hors de combat. This led the presiding officer, Mansfield’s Montana colleague, Lee Metcalf, to announce that a quorum was not in fact present.
If the Senate lacks a quorum, the rules allow only two options: adjourn or take action to produce a quorum. Since adjournment would allow the southerners to start a new legislative day, Mansfield immediately moved that the Senate sergeant at arms be directed “to request the attendance of absent Senators.” And then, knowing full well that even such a move could not produce a quorum with so many senators out of town, Mansfield short-circuited that process by asking Metcalf whether a motion to recess until Monday would be in order, so that the two-speech clock would not have to start all over again on a new legislative day, allowing the southerners to prolong the filibuster even further. Because the roll call had not yet started, Metcalf ruled that the motion was in order. “I am afraid we are face to face with a travesty on the legislative process,” Mansfield told his colleagues. “I believe it is a shame and an indignity upon this institution. In order to prevent this situation from turning into a farce, I move … that the Senate now stand in recess until Monday morning next at 10 o’clock.” Forty-one excruciating minutes after it had convened, the Senate did just that.
For their part, a majority of the southerners had not even bothered to show up that morning, and most of the handful present in the chamber voted in favor of the motion to recess, apparently satisfied that the failure to produce a quorum was humiliation enough for the pro-civil-rights side.
An embarrassed Humphrey explained after the vote that too many senators “just wouldn’t stay in town.” But ever the optimist, he predicted, “I’ll bet there’ll be so many Senators here Monday that you will think each state sent four.”
When Humphrey and his pro-civil-rights allies convened that Monday morning in his office, the majority whip was unbowed. Having been told by Kuchel and other Republicans of Dirksen’s potential amendments to Title VII, Humphrey urged his colleagues not to dismiss Dirksen’s ideas out of hand. “My position is no amendments, but I want to praise Dirksen,” Humphrey said. “He’s not trying to be destructive. He’s trying to be constructive. There’s no chance of getting cloture unless we have Dirksen.”
* * *
ON THAT MONDAY, APRIL 6, the filibuster edged into its second week. There were few new arguments to be made, so the southerners just kept on making the same old ones. George Smathers complained that if the bill passed, “There will have to be an Attorney General’s section as big as the Pentagon building in order to hold all the lawyers that will have to be employed.” Then, in practically the next breath, he acknowledged, “It would be less than candid of me to say that in the past, in parts of the South, discrimination has not been practiced against Negro citizens. It is true that there has been discrimination; and I’m afraid there will be discrimination, so long as we are human beings and so long as we remain alive.” He went on to say that, because of Reconstruction, southerners themselves knew something of discrimination, and added, “I point out that on the floor of the Senate, we who come from the South are but a small group, with a membership of only some 18. No Southerner has been elected President of the United States for more than 100 years. Why? Because of discrimination.”
Smathers’s Orwellian interpretation of Reconstruction was a sign of the perverse lengths to which the southerners would go to defend the peculiar institution of Jim Crow. Over and over again in the weeks and months of the long debate, they would resort to sophistry and solipsism, sarcasm and spitefulness, that would have been shocking enough in the antebellum era, much less in the second half of the twentieth century.
The segregationists suggested that H.R. 7152 should be called “the Discrimination Act of 1964,” as John McClellan of Arkansas put it, or “a bill to regulate the American people,” as Herman Talmadge of Georgia suggested.
“The good Lord did as much segregating as anyone I know of when he put one race in one part of the world and another race in another part of the world,” Russell Long of Louisiana said early in the debate. “We folks in the South are not hypocrites about this matter. We think it is absolutely desirable that the white people should continue to be white and that their children and grandchildren should be the same; and we let our children know that we think just that. We think it desirable to encourage the colored people to exert themselves in the same direction.” To this homily, Paul Douglas of Illinois replied drily, “In spite of the protestations that have been made by our Southern friends that they do not want mixing of the races, race-mixing has occurred in the past in the South, and most of it was not initiated by the Negroes.”
On another occasion that April, Long was moved to muse: “Would it not be fair to ask what kind of fix the colored folks would be in if they had not been brought to this country, but had been allowed to roam the jungles, with tigers chasing them, or being subjected to the other elements they would have to contend with, compared with the fine conditions they enjoy in America.” And on the same day, Long engaged in a collegial colloquy with Strom Thurmond on the subject of the police methods used to subdue civil rights demonstrators.
“Is the Senator familiar with the fact that the prod sticks have been described as cattle prodders because they have been used on cattle?” Long asked. “Is the Senator further familiar with the fact that the prod sticks are not designed for cattle but are designed for exactly the kind of ‘animals’ that they are touching: namely, reluctant human beings who insist on getting in the way of a policeman?”
Thurmond gamely replied: “It seems to me that a stick of that kind might be appropriately used. There is not very much electricity in one. I remember once going through a secret organization ceremonial—a fraternal organization. There was a man after me with one of those sticks and I ran for about 100 yards. I had to run fast to keep ahead of that stick because while it mostly tickled, it tickled pretty much. It would force one to move—it does not hurt anyone—but it is a practical means of getting people to move on.” (The daily civil rights newsletter cited this exchange under the heading “Quote Without Comment.”)
Sometimes, the southerners simply told lies, as the incorrigible James Eastland of Mississippi did when he interrupted a speech by William Proxmire of Wisconsin about race-based economic and employment discrimination. “I have lived in the South my whole life,” Eastland sputtered. “I have not seen the first instance of economic discrimination in the South.”
Proxmire then read from a United States Department of Agriculture Report on Greenwood, Mississippi, that found that nearly half the daily attendees in the public schools were black, yet Negro students received only one-fifth of the free school lunches distributed in the district. “I live near Greenwood, Mississippi, and I do not believe a word of that,” Eastland shot back.
“This is from the Department of Agriculture,” Proxmire insisted.
“That does not mean it is true,” Eastland replied. “I know the conditions there. I know the conditions in my own area. I live in the county adjoining Greenwood. They get exactly the same treatment and there is no such thing that I know of as economic discrimination there.”
The exchanges were not without humor. Willis Robertson of Virginia, complaining about Title VII’s requirements for nondiscrimination in employment, told of a Jewish banker who had approached him, saying he would not want to have to employ blacks or gentiles because they would not know his business. Informed that he might well have to, Robertson said, the banker exclaimed, “Then I had better sell out right now!” Hubert Humphrey could not resist as
king, “Can the Senator from Virginia inform us whether that would be a good opportunity for a bargain?”
But no amount of levity could mask the fundamental gravity of the debate. One day in mid-April, Olin Johnston of South Carolina undertook to lecture the civil rights supporters, insisting: “There is considerable evidence that segregation in the South has worked far better than integration in the North. Repeated incidents of mob actions in the streets of Southern cities—and cities all over our land—should not make us lose sight of the fact that Southern states, despite their relatively low per capita incomes, do not have the high rates of crime and juvenile delinquency of those states which are hotbeds of agitators against so many American institutions.”
Soon thereafter, Sam Ervin of North Carolina joined Johnston in offering Jacob Javits, the liberal Republican civil rights supporter from New York, “our gratitude for his willingness—notwithstanding his failure to cure the racial ills of New York—to try to ram a new law down the throats of the people of our states.”
“Does not the Senator from South Carolina,” Ervin continued, “think that, as we say in North Carolina, ‘That is downright kind and generous of the Senator from New York’?” Javits jumped into the debate to say, “I am delighted to be the object of such affection by these two distinguished Senators from the South. But it strikes me that charm never covered up a running sore. And that is what we are dealing with.”
* * *
ONE DEVELOPMENT OUTSIDE THE Senate chamber that Richard Russell hoped his delaying tactics might work in the southerners’ favor was a strong showing by George Wallace’s white supremacist presidential campaign against Lyndon Johnson for the 1964 Democratic presidential nomination. Wallace’s candidacy was symbolic; he never expected to win. But all eyes were on the Wisconsin primary on Tuesday, April 7. In fact, Wallace won a surprising 33.9 percent of the vote that day, racking up big tallies in Milwaukee’s white ethnic neighborhoods, and taking 264,000 votes against 511,000 for Governor John W. Reynolds, who was running as Johnson’s surrogate. Reynolds had said that even a 100,000-vote showing by Wallace would be a “catastrophe,” but Hubert Humphrey was now quick to dismiss Wallace’s performance as “a flop, F-L-O-P.”
And indeed, the Wisconsin results did little to affect the progress (or lack thereof) in the Senate’s debate over H.R. 7152. On the day of the primary, Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut conducted a vigorous defense of Title VI, the provision covering antidiscrimination in federally financed programs, which would allow (but not compel) Washington to cut off funds to state and local programs that practiced racial discrimination. “Of all the provisions of this civil rights bill,” Ribicoff told the Senate, “none rests on so simple and so sound a principle as does Title VI. That principle is taxpayers’ money, which is collected without discrimination, shall be spent without discrimination. The principle requires no argument. It is based on simple justice. It is based on decency.” But John Stennis of Mississippi countered that the measure would “grant all this power to Federal departments and agencies … in a carte blanche bill.”
That afternoon, Stephen Horn of Tom Kuchel’s staff talked to John Lindsay’s aide Robert Kimball, who told him that Bill McCulloch had returned home from a trip to Ohio “shaken up” by the impact that a grassroots advertising campaign by a segregationist group called the “Coordinating Committee for Fundamental American Freedoms” was having on “rational people.” The work of John C. Sattefield, a former president of the American Bar Association, and William Loeb, the rabidly conservative publisher of the Union Leader in Manchester, New Hampshire, and financed in part by public funds from the State of Mississippi, the committee had run newspaper ads around the country denouncing H.R. 7152 as a “$100 Billion Blackjack.”
Meantime, Everett Dirksen kept noodling over his proposed amendments to the fair employment section. On April 7, he briefed the Republican Policy Committee on his latest ideas. These included a provision under which no federal action could be taken to resolve an employment discrimination complaint where a state law or fair employment agency already existed without first giving state authorities ninety days to resolve the matter. Dirksen would also limit the powers of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to seeking voluntary compliance with its findings. He did not want federal record-keeping requirements to be superimposed on existing state agencies. He would include union hiring halls among the “employment agencies” covered by the bill, to make sure that employers would not be blamed for hiring decisions that were in fact dictated by unions. And he would specify that the results of technical studies by the commission would be made public but that the findings of individual efforts at conciliation would not. He would give all enforcement powers under Title VII to the federal courts, and not to the commission itself. He also proposed to delete Howard Smith’s “sex” provision from the House bill. And at a press briefing after the private luncheon, he surprised reporters and other senators alike by declaring that he might just like to strike Title VII altogether.
Dirksen was testing the waters, trying to ascertain what kind of measures his own Republican caucus would accept. But such public rumblings alarmed the pro-civil-rights forces. Humphrey once again urged forbearance, arguing that Dirksen was still sounding out his own troops, not making any final pronouncements. At a meeting of the bipartisan floor leaders’ group on Thursday, April 9, Humphrey advised that he and his colleagues should “follow the course of not being openly antagonistic to Dirksen. The Republicans must carry the fight. Let the Republicans argue it out with their own leader. Dirksen told me that if he could not get support, then he would have to retreat.”
In the same meeting, in a sign of just how closely H.R. 7152’s supporters in both parties were cooperating, Stephen Horn suggested that the pro-civil-rights Republicans believed “that Dirksen will go through his public acting process, take a licking and then be with us.” He asked how many Democratic votes would be available to turn back Dirksen’s potentially “gutting amendments,” and when Humphrey’s aide John Stewart replied, “Between thirty-five and forty,” Horn exulted, “Then we’ve got him.”
But they didn’t have him yet, as no less an expert than Lyndon Johnson knew. That same day, as he waited in the Oval Office to be connected on a telephone call to Richard Russell, the president read aloud to Jack Valenti from a draft statement on civil rights. “We’re going to pass the civil rights bill,” the president read. “Nothing has happened to deter us from that course. The demands of justice and decency will make that certain.” Then he stopped and asked Valenti, “Do you think that’s true?”
Even as the president worried, the civil rights cause got a small shot in the arm from a rare moment of emotion on the Senate floor, as Ted Kennedy, seventeen months into his tenure as the junior senator from Massachusetts, made what he would forever after refer to as his “maiden speech,” though he had actually earlier made brief remarks on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and Northeast Airlines.
“A freshman Senator should be seen, not heard; should learn, not teach,” Kennedy said, as his wife, Joan, and sister-in-law Ethel listened intently in the gallery, on a day in which the Senate would sit for thirteen and a half hours, the longest one-day stretch of debate in the filibuster so far. “This is especially true when the Senate is engaged in a truly momentous debate.” Then he went on to speak of his state’s own long history in absorbing waves of immigrants, and of overcoming discrimination “by persuasion where possible, by law where necessary.”
“We have not suffered from this effort,” he added. “Indeed, we have been strengthened.” Finally, his voice breaking, he said, “My brother was the first president of the United States to state publicly that segregation was morally wrong. His heart and soul are in this bill. If his life and death had a meaning, it was that we should not hate but love one another; we should use our powers not to create conditions of oppression that lead to violence, but conditions of freedom that lead to peace.”
No Re
publicans were present to hear Kennedy’s speech. They were caucusing with Dirksen, to hear him outline his proposed amendments. As Stephen Horn had suggested, Dirksen was now undertaking to find out just where the fissures in his caucus lay, and predictably enough, it was the liberals in his flock who balked first at his ideas. Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, one of two women in the Senate and Dirksen’s longtime friendly adversary in a campaign to name a national flower (she favored the rose), implored him to retain Judge Smith’s “sex” amendment, noting that it had been included in the House bill with strong support from Republican congresswomen. (Humphrey was under equally strong pressure to retain Smith’s amendment; John Stewart was lobbied fiercely by Betty Friedan, who only the year before had published The Feminine Mystique and who now told Stewart, “If Senator Humphrey and his cronies have any thought about dropping sex from the coverage of this bill, I’m here to tell you they’d better forget about that, because if they do that, you don’t know what trouble is.”)
The Republican caucus reached no quick consensus on Dirksen’s proposals. But there was widespread concern among civil rights supporters that Dirksen’s emphasis on state action to correct employment discrimination would allow southern states to create their own sham fair employment agencies or commissions, which could then take precedence over federal efforts and delay effective relief. After the caucus, Kenneth Keating said the proposed amendments “would seriously weaken the effectiveness of the bill,” while Clifford Case said that it might be necessary “for those of us who favor a strong civil rights bill to take the position from now until Kingdom Come” of opposing cloture, or anything other “than an effective bill.” One unnamed moderate told the New York Times, “The Senator from Illinois may not be Mack the Knife but he’s certainly Ev the Dirk.”
An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 Page 29