34

Finesses

EVEN WHILE THE EASTLAND MATTER was being pushed through, another threat to Lyndon Johnson’s hopes of winning the 1956 Democratic presidential nomination—another threat born out of the escalating civil rights conflict—was boiling up on Capitol Hill. Feeling itself under attack on a dozen fronts, the South now rallied its forces—with a rallying cry that came from its Capitol citadel.

Infuriated by the Brown ruling, southern senators had been working since the beginning of the year on a proclamation that would guide the region’s future response to that ruling. “A Declaration of Constitutional Principles” was its formal title, but the press quickly coined a shorter name: the “Southern Manifesto.” Drafted by South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, with assistance from Virginia’s Harry Byrd, it had been edited by Richard Russell, and its more intemperate phrases had therefore been deleted and its arguments decked out in legalisms that seemed reasonable and logical—as long as one ignored the fact that it had been the Supreme Court, not Congress, that had, in Plessy v. Ferguson, interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to mean that separate but equal facilities were perfectly legal, and that therefore the Supreme Court had the right to reinterpret the Amendment. The southern “Declaration” said that since “there has been no amendment [to the Constitution] or Act of Congress” to override the Plessy decision, the Warren Court had had no “legal basis for its action” in overriding it in Brown. In a “clear abuse of judicial power,” the Manifesto declared, the Court had simply “substituted their personal and social ideas for the law of the land,” encroaching on “the reserved rights of the states.”

Some of the Manifesto’s arguments demonstrated Russell’s gift for cloaking injustice in words of reason. The separate but equal doctrine “is founded on elemental humanity and common sense, for parents should not be deprived by government of the right to direct the lives and education of their own children,” it said. The Brown decision, it said, “is destroying the amicable relations between white and Negro races that had been created through ninety years of patient effort by the good people of both races. It has planted hatred and suspicion where there had been heretofore friendship and understanding.” And the Manifesto called on the South to resist the Brown decision. Commending “those States which have declared the intention to resist forced integration by any lawful means,” it said that “We pledge ourselves to use all lawful means to bring about a reversal of this decision which is contrary to the Constitution and to prevent the use of force in its implementation.” Its signatories were nineteen senators and eighty-one representatives from the eleven states of the Old Confederacy, and it was read in full on the Senate floor on March 11—just nine days after the shouted “ayes” that had put Eastland in Judiciary’s chair—by the South’s greatest orator (in the House it was simply inserted in the record). And it made headlines across the nation—as it should have, for the Southern Manifesto was nothing less than an outright call by one hundred elected legislators in the national government for massive, unified, defiance of an order from the nation’s highest court. Hardly had Walter George’s organ-like tones stopped rolling across a hushed and solemn Senate when Wayne Morse rose to his feet. “One would think that Calhoun was walking across the floor of the Senate today,” he said.

THE SOUTHERN MANIFESTO and Herbert Brownell’s civil rights bill menaced—from opposite sides—Lyndon Johnson’s master plan. Manifesto and bill both threatened to add kindling to the civil rights issue on Capitol Hill. Johnson’s strategy for winning his party’s presidential nomination—to hold his southern support while antagonizing northern liberals as little as possible, or at least not antagonizing them any more than he already had—was feasible only if the issue did not blaze up on the Hill, since if it did, he would have to take his position prominently on the southern side. For his strategy to work, the civil rights issue had to be tamped down in Congress, his involvement with it minimized.

And it was. Nineteen of the twenty-two southern senators signed the “Declaration of Constitutional Principles.” The three who didn’t were the two senators from Tennessee, both of whom had national political aspirations in 1956—Estes Kefauver for President and Albert Gore for Vice President (and Tennessee, of course, was the only southern state in which Negro voters had become a political force to be reckoned with)—and Lyndon Johnson. His explanation for not signing, however, was different from that given by the two Tennesseans. They declared that they hadn’t signed the Manifesto because they didn’t agree with it, Gore calling it “a dangerous, deceptive propaganda move which encouraged southerners to defy the government and to disobey its laws.” Johnson declared that he hadn’t signed it because he hadn’t been asked to sign it—that, in fact, he had never even seen it, that, as William S. White wrote, “he had not been shown the document because” the Southern Caucus “did not want to appear to be trying to ‘formulate Democratic or Senate policy.’”

Johnson’s statement that he had never seen the Manifesto may have been disingenuous, since he had been present during at least one Southern Caucus—on February 8, in Walter George’s office—when the Manifesto was being revised sentence by sentence. And his explanation was to evolve over time, his portrayal of himself—to journalists and to some of the more friendly liberal senators—to become increasingly heroic. The southerners had not asked him to sign, he said, because they knew he wouldn’t, as a matter of principle. It evolved further—into an implication that he had refused to sign despite intense southern pressure. “You liberals—you have all got your big heroes,” Johnson told Hubert Humphrey. “I want you to notice who signed and who didn’t. Now all your bomb-throwers over there think I am the worst thing that came down here…. But I didn’t [sign].”

His explanations were accepted uncritically by those journalists he could count on to be uncritical. His refusal to sign, White was later to write in his biography of Johnson, “was, indeed, an act of courage,” although “it was other things as well. [Johnson] believed his responsibilities as leader of all the Senate Democrats would have prohibited him from adopting the sectional view of the Manifesto, even if he had not considered it wrong in principle.” They were accepted by some liberal senators: Richard Neuberger took the floor of the Senate to call Johnson’s refusal to sign “one of the most courageous acts of political valor I have seen take place in my adult life.”

Actually, however, it was easy for him to avoid signing the Manifesto because of what Richard Russell wanted for him—and had persuaded the Southern Caucus to want for him. By this time, George Reedy says, “Russell was very determined to elect Johnson President of the United States.” And, Reedy says, “There was no question whatsoever that anybody that signed” such an inflammatory, anti-civil rights document “could never become President of the United States.” As Russell’s biographer, Gilbert C. Fite, wrote, “Russell was much more interested in pushing Johnson for President, which he was then doing, than in having another name on the Manifesto.”

By 1956, of course, the other southern senators understood the importance of Russell’s plan, and, except for two or three of them, agreed with it. Since it was recognized that “he had to work with all sides” in the Senate, John Stennis says, “it wasn’t held against him by the southerners, I’ll put it that way, that he didn’t sign it.” Carried away by his eloquence, Johnson had gone too far, however. Growing worried that his statements might raise doubts among southern senators about his true feelings, he issued other statements—designed to reassure them that while his hand may not have written his name under theirs, his heart was with them. One of his statements dovetailed with the Manifesto’s argument that the Brown decision had usurped the sacred constitutional rights of the individual states. “In my opinion, the solution of the problem cannot be found on the federal level, for it involves basic values reflected in the sovereignty of our States,” Lyndon Johnson said. “It’s my hope that wise leaders on the local levels will work to resolve these differences.” A reporter who asked him to clarify that statement wrote that “He [Johnson] believed the integration problem was one best left to individual states to handle.” And indeed, on the very day, March 12, 1956, on which the front page of the New York Times reported the issuance of the Southern Manifesto, there was, also on the front page, another article, which provides more than a hint that Johnson’s non-signing of the Manifesto had caused no strain between him and the other southern senators—that it had actually been a strategic maneuver arranged among them, “A JOHNSON BOOM STARTS IN SOUTH,” the headline on this article stated, and the article quoted several southern senators as supporting Johnson’s possible candidacy for the Democratic nomination—and among the southerners quoted were the Manifesto’s two principal architects, Strom Thurmond, the former presidential candidate of the States Rights Party, who said Johnson would be an “attractive candidate,” and the South’s general, Richard Russell, who said that if Johnson decided to make the race, “I will support him one hundred per cent.” In a later statement, Russell said, “There is no question in my mind that Johnson is the best qualified man and more sympathetic with the Southern point of view on civil rights than any other candidate.”

The percentage Russell named turned out to be a popular one among Johnson’s southern senatorial colleagues—Louisiana’s Ellender, for example, said that if he ran, “I’d be one hundred per cent for Johnson”—except when that figure was not large enough to fully express their enthusiasm for his candidacy: “I’m for him not one hundred percent but one thousand per cent,” Florida’s Smathers said. Within weeks, almost every signer of the Southern Manifesto had endorsed the colleague who didn’t sign.*

FINESSING THE SOUTHERN MANIFESTO was easy for Lyndon Johnson, and so was the finessing of Hennings’ four civil rights bills, now that Eastland was chairman of the committee under whose jurisdiction they fell. No sooner had Eastland taken Judiciary’s gavel than he made clear that in his view filibusters need not be confined to the Senate floor; they could be staged in his committee as well—with one difference: while ending a filibuster on the floor was difficult, in his committee it was impossible. A committee that has no written rules is governed by the general Senate rules, he explained, and “the Senate rules provide that a cloture petition must be signed by sixteen senators.” Judiciary, he pointed out, had only fifteen members. “There wasn’t any way anyone could file a cloture petition” in the committee. “So we had unlimited debate.” A committee member could speak on any subject as long as he wished—and once he began speaking, there was no way on earth to stop him. When Hennings raised his hand to make a motion to bring up one of his civil rights bills for consideration by the committee, the senator sitting next to him, South Carolina’s Olin Johnston, quickly raised his, and it was Johnston whom Eastland recognized. “Olin the Solon” asked for permission to read a legal brief that dealt with some other—non-civil rights—matter. The brief was a lengthy one, and Olin was a notoriously deliberate reader. And the committee met—once a week—for only ninety minutes. It was to take Johnston five committee sessions to finish reading the brief. During those five weeks, Hennings or some other liberal member of the committee would sometimes raise a hand and try to make a motion to schedule meetings more frequently, but Eastland would explain that the Senator from South Carolina was speaking, and a senator could not be interrupted. An interruption could be accomplished only by the filing within the committee of a cloture petition, he explained—and he was sorry to have to remind the committee that there were not enough members on it for a petition to be filed. A committee member could, of course, make a motion to establish a rule to permit the filing of a cloture petition with less than sixteen signatures. But of course that motion would be subject to Senate rules—which meant that debate on it would be unlimited. “Stepin Fetchit, in his prime, had nothing on the slow-motion paces through which Eastland is dragging the Senate Judiciary Committee,” Louis Lautier of the Baltimore Afro-American wrote.

The Brownell Bill now before the House Judiciary Committee was a very different story. Dodging the Manifesto had been easy for Johnson; it was only a symbol, a rallying cry. The bill was substance, hard substance. Broad in scope and skillfully drawn, its passage would revolutionize the treatment of Negroes in America. It had to be stopped.

It had to be stopped, furthermore, before it reached the Senate floor. The South could feel confident that it could stop any civil rights bill on the floor by filibustering, but for Johnson, the South’s use of that tactic, guaranteed to antagonize northern liberals, would be damaging. Imbued as it was with drama, the tactic invariably turned a national spotlight on the Senate, and on the Senate’s Majority Leader, and liberals would be reminded of Johnson’s previous efforts to preserve Rule 22 and thereby preserve the filibuster and thwart civil rights. Johnson could not afford a floor fight of any type, in fact: any public battle would turn that spotlight on the Senate stage—and reveal him standing with the South.

The bill had to be stopped, in fact, before it reached the Senate Calendar, the place from which it could be sent to the floor. Once it was on the Calendar, any liberal senator could then make a motion to bring it off the Calendar to the floor. The southerners would then have three options: to move to table that motion, to defeat the bill outright, or to filibuster it. But in the heated civil rights atmosphere of 1956, any of these options would precipitate an attention-getting floor fight. Once a senator moved to “proceed” to the “consideration” of a House-passed civil rights bill, there was no way, really, to keep the measure from receiving the attention that Johnson didn’t want it to have. The very arrival of the House civil rights bill on the Senate Calendar would deal a body blow to his presidential ambitions. And unlike bills introduced by senators—Hennings’ bills, for example—a bill that had originated in, and been passed by, the House could not be kept from the Calendar simply by referring it pro forma to a committee. Senate rules allowed a House-passed bill to be referred to a committee only by unanimous consent; a single liberal objection would send H.R. 627 not to Judiciary but directly to the Calendar. It had to be kept from getting there.

And it was—because Johnson had Rayburn on his side, and because the Senate was still the Senate.

Eisenhower’s insistence on getting input from all Cabinet members delayed the arrival of Brownell’s bill at the House of Representatives until April 9, late in a congressional session for a controversial measure to arrive on the Hill. Emanuel Celler’s selfless willingness to subordinate his bill to the Brownell version allowed the combined measure, H.R. 627, to be reported out of Celler’s Judiciary Committee quickly—on April 25—but scheduling the measure for floor action was the province of the House Rules Committee, a conservative bastion headed by Representative Howard Smith of Virginia. And the bill would only be scheduled for early action if a strong effort was made to push it through—and although Rayburn had let Boiling know he was sympathetic to at least some of the bill’s aims, the Speaker did not give it such a push.

Asked years later for an explanation of Rayburn’s procrastination, Boiling said it involved the hopes he and other liberals had for civil rights legislation and Rayburn’s hopes for a Democratic victory in November—and Johnson’s hopes for the presidency.

Boiling—Rayburn’s young protégé and “point man” on civil rights—was getting a close-up view of Lyndon Johnson at the Board of Education and at several dinners in a private dining room at Martin’s at which he was the only person present with Mr. Sam and Lyndon. And, observing Johnson behind closed doors, he was struck by the depth of Johnson’s affection for the Speaker (“I had seen him kiss Rayburn on the head many times, of course, but the first time I saw him do that and say, ‘How are you tonight, my beloved?’ I just couldn’t believe it,” Boiling says); by the nakedness of Johnson’s desire for the Democratic nomination (“He was just desperate for it, he was slavering for it,” he says); and by the extent to which Johnson felt his chances for the nomination depended on H.R. 627 not reaching the Senate in 1956. “He [Johnson] would say he’d be ‘destroyed’ if it got there—that was his word: ‘destroyed.’” In addition, watching Johnson evening after evening behind closed doors, the young liberal got an impression of Johnson’s attitude on civil rights. “Johnson said he didn’t want to face it [a civil rights bill] in 1956,” Boiling says. “He didn’t want to confront it. And more. He said he didn’t want it. I began to have a very funny feeling about Johnson. The more I saw of him, the more suspicious I got. [He was] really quite negative on civil rights.” Whatever his reasons, Boiling says, Johnson was “just desperate” for H.R. 627 to be delayed in the House long enough so that the Senate would not have to take it up in 1956. “He didn’t want it pushed in the House.”

Rayburn, Boiling says, went along with Johnson’s wishes. He did so partly because those wishes made political sense. With the congressional session already so far advanced, no matter how hard the bill was pushed through the Rules Committee and the full House, it couldn’t possibly be passed by the House in time for there to be any chance of Senate passage. The only result of a Senate floor fight would be to spotlight to the electorate, on the very eve of the Democratic National Convention, the party’s deep divisions—and the fact that the committee chairman who was keeping the bill bottled up was a Democrat. There was no point in rushing. Partly, Boiling says, Rayburn was responding with his usual paternal sympathy to Johnson’s desperation. While the Speaker knew that Adlai Stevenson had the nomination sewn up and that Johnson had no chance to get it, “Lyndon was asking him for help, and he loved Lyndon, and he didn’t want to hurt him.”

“To my shame,” Boiling admits, he, too, went along and did not try to persuade the Speaker to push the bill. For a civil rights bill to pass the Senate, Johnson’s support was essential, he felt; without it there was not even a remote possibility of breaking a southern filibuster. “It was what Lyndon wanted to do that counted over there.” There was no chance that Johnson would give a civil rights bill his support in 1956—and therefore there was no point in trying to rush the bill through the House that year; there would be a better chance for the bill to pass the following year, when it might be possible to get it over to the Senate earlier in the session. So, Boiling says, “I didn’t press in the Rules Committee, and since I was known as Mr. Rayburn’s man on the Rules Committee, and it was generally understood that I was speaking for [him], since I didn’t press, no one pressed.” It was not until some weeks after Judiciary reported out the bill that Rayburn threw his weight behind it, summoning Rules Committee members to his office. When he did that, Rules Committee Chairman Smith said, “The jig’s up. I know it.” But, because of Rayburn’s delay, H.R. 627 was not reported out by Rules until June 27, and debate on the measure did not begin until July 16. Trying to catch the liberals unprepared, southerners suddenly called for a vote at an unexpected moment on July 23. But “Speaker Rayburn senses the mood of the House better than any living man”; stepping down from the dais, he caught Boiling in the corridor. “You’d better get your boys in here,” he said. Boiling started to reply with a joke, but then he saw Rayburn’s face. “I started running,” he says—“just as fast as I could run.” As the members Boiling rounded up came pouring into the Chamber, the House’s overwhelming sentiment, out of conscience or calculation or both, for civil rights legislation became clear: the vote by which the bill passed was 279 to 126. July 23 was the Tuesday of the last week that Congress would be in session, however, so that there was obviously no time for it to be passed by the Senate, and Johnson expected no objections to sending it to Judiciary. He had not wanted to confront it in 1956—and, it seemed, he would not have to.

SMOOTHLY THOUGH THE GEARS of Johnson’s strategy were running, however, a bit of sand was now to be thrown into them—by the men who were always trying to throw sand into his gears: the “red-hots” and “crazies” he despised, the little group of Senate liberals.

Under the procedure customary at the time, after a bill was passed by the House of Representatives it would be “engrossed”—typed, with any amendments inserted, in the precise form in which it had been passed—in the office of the House Enrolling Clerk, and then printed, by the nearby Government Printing Office; the printed copy would then be brought to the House dais and signed by the Clerk of the House, Ralph R. Roberts, as a guarantee that the copy was correct. Then, one of the “Reading Clerks” at the dais would carry it by hand to the Senate, walking the length of that long corridor that runs between the two Chambers. Opening the swinging doors at the rear of the Senate Chamber, he would wait until one of the Senate clerks on the dais noticed him and walked up the center aisle to stand beside him. When the presiding officer nodded to the Senate clerk to give him permission to speak, he would announce: “Mr. President, a message from the House.” Then, making an “obeisance”—a deep bow—to the presiding officer, the House clerk would say: “Mr. President, I am directed by the House to deliver to the Senate H.R. 627, a Bill to provide means of further securing and protecting the civil rights of persons within the jurisdiction of the United States, in which the concurrence of the Senate is requested.” Handing the bill to the Senate clerk, he would bow again, and leave. The Senate clerk would bring the bill to the dais, the presiding officer would enact the customary pro forma ritual, asking for unanimous consent to have the bill read a first and second time and referred to the “appropriate committee,” in this case Judiciary. July 23 was a Tuesday; the Senate was planning to adjourn for the year by Saturday of that week; Judiciary met on Mondays—there wouldn’t be another meeting of Judiciary at which the bill could be brought up (not that Eastland would allow it to be brought up anyway). The civil rights bill would be dead on arrival at the committee—quietly dead: no debate, no floor fight, no spotlight on Lyndon Johnson’s position on civil rights.

A handful of Senate liberals, notably Paul Douglas, Herbert Lehman and Tom Hennings, were, however, determined, that, in the case of this bill, that would not happen—that the bill would not be buried in Judiciary but brought to the floor. They had decided to try to accomplish this by refusing to give the unanimous consent required in the presiding officer’s ritual; when he asked if there were any objections, one of them, probably Douglas, would object. The bill would therefore not be referred to a committee, but instead, as a House-passed measure, would be placed directly on the Senate Calendar.

Other senators could try to stop Douglas from objecting by demanding the floor themselves so he couldn’t be recognized; Johnson could use the Leader’s first recognition prerogative for the same purpose. But this tactic would work only briefly, not for the four days remaining in the session: for a senator not to be recognized for four days would be virtually, if not totally, unprecedented. “I don’t know of any instance in history where that has happened,” says the Senate historian Richard A. Baker. “Not recognizing only works for a limited time. Eventually anyone who wants to speak will be recognized. Every other senator knows it could be him someday.”

These liberals were fully aware of the arguments against the maneuver they were planning: that, in Douglas’ own words, “The session was nearing its end,” that there was therefore no possibility of passing the bill, that their fight was a hopeless gesture foredoomed to failure. They understood that, as he would later write, “the Democratic Party would [be] revealed as badly divided on the eve of the national convention,” that African-American voters would be reminded that Eastland and other southern committee chairmen were Democrats, that the maneuver would rouse journalists to ridicule and the party’s hierarchy—including the party’s powerful and vengeful Senate Leader—to fury. But Paul Douglas believed in the Senate’s “informing function,” believed, as he was also to write, that “even if every battle was unsuccessful, constant but peaceful struggle would hasten the ultimate coming of needed reforms.” He believed that justice would prevail if only men would not stop fighting for justice. He and Lehman and other liberal senators believed also that there was an informing function not only of the Senate but about the Senate—“that the southerners’ power had to function behind the scenes” to be effective, that turning “the searchlight on” that power would eventually erode it—and that there was no better time to turn on the searchlight than a national election year. He felt keenly, as well, that while a lot of public sentiment had been mobilized that year for civil rights, not nearly as much had been mobilized as couldbe mobilized—that while the leaders of the liberal battalions, the officers of labor unions and Jewish organizations and big church groups, were strong for civil rights, the battalions themselves had not been mobilized, their members had not been sufficiently educated; that the support for civil rights, while vocal, was still not the mass movement that was needed—and that there was no better instrument for education and mobilization than a Senate debate. And besides, these liberals felt, why did the session have to be nearing its end anyway? Why couldn’t the Senate adjourn instead while the conventions were being held, and then return to work in the Fall? Even Reedy, in his memoir, was to write, in a statement that conflicts rather strongly with the memos he was writing to Johnson in 1956, that while “the prospect of any legislative action [still] seemed more remote than a landing on the moon,” and “their [the liberals’] only power was to make noise,” nonetheless “it was an uncomfortable noise that grated upon the ears, and, in time, the national conscience….”

Moreover, Douglas and Lehman and their colleagues felt that even if their fight on behalf of black Americans was only a gesture, didn’t those women in Montgomery who for months had been trudging long miles every day—who were still trudging that July—didn’t those women deserve a gesture? Might not a gesture be meaningful to Emmett Till’s mother, to Autherine Lucy, to the millions of black citizens whose children were still not being allowed to attend school with white children—despite an order from the country’s highest court more than a year before? Surely they deserved a gesture, needed a gesture—a gesture from Capitol Hill, a sign that someone there was making a fight, futile though it might be, on their behalf? Douglas and Lehman had no doubts about the answer to that question. One of Lehman’s aides, William Welsh, who loved the old man, tried to dissuade him from making the hopeless fight that year. He might find that only a very few senators were willing to make it with him, Welsh warned. What if it was only a very few? Welsh asked. “Even if it’s only me, I’ll make it,” Lehman said.

And there was, to these liberals, yet another consideration. America’s black citizens needed to feel that they had a political party; the Democratic Party must stand for their rights, must not supinely surrender to its southern wing. “Paul felt that in a way he was fighting for the soul of the Democratic Party,” says Douglas’ aide Frank McCulloch. And that fight had implications beyond the party. What would be the reaction of black Americans if they came to feel that even in that party no one was lifting a finger in their behalf, that there was no hope for them within the system? Wouldn’t they begin to think more seriously about redressing their wrongs by means outside the system, even by desperate means: by civil unrest, by riots? Paul Douglas was not the only liberal who felt that, as he said, “If we don’t fight, someday there will be a revolution.”

And finally, to the arguments against what they were planning, there was a further answer that was rooted in the very pragmatism that Johnson and the Democratic Party hierarchy cherished. For, these liberals felt, the party’s tough old pols might be wrong in their belief that making this hopeless fight would be disastrous in a presidential election year. They might be very wrong. After all, in 1948, one of their number, a young mayor from Minneapolis, had told the party that it must “get out of the shadow of states’ rights” and into the “sunshine of human rights,” and had inspired its national convention to defy the South and all it stood for. The result of that defiance had been a southern walkout and a States Rights party—but, for Harry Truman, the result had been victory, a victory in which a crucial factor was much larger than usual pluralities in liberal precincts, pluralities given him in part because the Democrats had not surrendered to the South but had, by letting the South leave the party, saved its soul.

Wary of Johnson, the handful of Senate liberals devised a strategy that they felt would ensure against the Leader sneaking the bill past them and into Judiciary. Instead of waiting for H.R. 627 to arrive in the Senate, Paul Douglas would, upon its passage by the House, go immediately to the House Chamber and wait for the bill to be engrossed and then printed by the Government Printing Office, even if that took several hours. He wouldn’t leave the House Chamber until the printed document had been brought to the Speaker’s dais, and then he would accompany the clerk who carried it to the Senate, so that the liberals would know its exact whereabouts at all times. And as a further safeguard, from the moment Douglas left for the House, another liberal would be stationed on the Senate floor at all times, just in case the bill was somehow sneaked past Douglas, so that if it arrived in the Senate, and the Senate’s presiding officer asked if there were any objections to referring it to Judiciary, there would indeed be an objection. But Johnson, with Rayburn’s help, was able to keep the gears running smoothly. Notified that the House had passed the bill, he put in the presiding officer’s chair Lister Hill, not because the Alabaman was an astute parliamentarian—although he was—but because he possessed another qualification more important for the task Johnson had in mind for him: while most of the southern senators talked in a deliberate drawl, Hill didn’t; he was the southerners’ fastest talker. And Johnson told Hill not to leave the chair until H.R. 627 arrived—which Johnson knew was not going to take very long. Normally, the engrossing and printing of a House bill took several hours; in the case of H.R. 627, that routine was speeded up—radically. In a seldom-used procedure known as “hand engrossing,” the marked-up bill was rushed from the dais down to the House Enrolling Clerk’s office on the Capitol’s Ground Floor, the floor beneath the Principal Floor on which the House and Senate Chambers are located, and there it was quickly retyped, in clean form. And then its route was changed. Instead of being sent to the Government Printing Office, as was usual, or back to the House dais for signing, the retyped bill was carried directly to the Senate, not from the House but from that Ground Floor office.

The Enrolling Office was not in the House wing but in the Capitol’s central portion, so when Joe Bartlett, the House clerk carrying H.R. 627, ran up the nearest staircase to the Principal Floor, he was already near the Rotunda, almost halfway to the Senate wing. Douglas may already have passed that point on his way to the House, or perhaps he simply passed Bartlett without being aware of who he was—or what he was carrying. Whatever the explanation, however, the bill, on its way to the Senate, somehow passed Douglas as he was heading for the House to ascertain its whereabouts. Arriving in the House, Douglas began asking clerks on the dais when H.R. 627 would be sent to the Senate—but H.R. 627 was already in the Senate.

Douglas had stationed Lehman as the liberal sentry back on the Senate floor, but Lehman naturally felt he had time to spare before the House bill could possibly arrive, and “allowed himself,” as one account puts it, “to be briefly decoyed off the floor”—no one now remembers how. He was therefore not in the Chamber when Bartlett walked in, to be greeted by the Senate employee Johnson had stationed at the door to meet him: Bobby Baker. Mike Mansfield was delivering a speech on foreign relations, but Baker quickly nodded to Hill, Hill quickly asked Mansfield to yield, and as soon as the bill was delivered to the dais, the Southern Caucus’s fastest talker read, very fast, the bill’s title, then said, very fast, “Without objection, the bill will be read the second time and referred to the appropriate committee. The Chair hears no objection,” and referred it to Judiciary.

Someone on the House dais finally informed Douglas that the bill had already been sent to the Senate. Rushing back along the corridor, banging into tourists, he burst into the Chamber, where Mansfield was speaking again. When Hill saw him, Douglas was to recall, “a half-suppressed smile swept over his face. Then I knew the worst.” When he went up to the dais, Hill told him the bill had already had its first and second readings, and had been referred to Judiciary. “Paul, my dear boy, we move in accordance with the time-honored rules and procedure of the Senate,” Hill said. Douglas noticed that “the Southern parliamentarian and the clerk looked up with the air of grave and impassive disapproval they always presented to civil-rights liberals,” that impassivity which so imperfectly masked the fact that, as the liberals were aware, they were being laughed at.

THE LIBERALS were to make one last effort to bring civil rights to the Senate floor in 1956. Noting that not one of the year’s other fourteen civil rights bills had been reported out by the Judiciary Committee, Douglas introduced a motion—actually a petition—to discharge the committee from further consideration of the fifteenth, H.R. 627, a petition that would, the liberals believed, trigger a discussion on the issue.

Leading Democratic pols—the practical politicians—were furious. “As you know, I am an old civil rights man myself,” Jim Rowe wrote Johnson. “However, on this one you are so clearly right that I myself should like to shoot Douglas.” They needn’t have worried, however. Once again, Johnson out-maneuvered the crazies—with a tactic given him by Russell. When they learned what Douglas was about to do, there was a huddle at Russell’s desk, with Russell, Johnson, and Walter George whispering and planning, hard and fast. And then Johnson put George in the chair, because what was needed now on the dais was not fast-talking but the figure who best embodied the full dignity and authority of the Senate rules. When Douglas, standing at his desk, made his motion, George told him it was out of order, reminding him that petitions could be filed only during the morning hour, except, of course, by unanimous consent. When Douglas asked for such consent, Russell said curtly, “I object.” Douglas thereupon announced that he would file his petition during the morning hour the next day, Wednesday, July 24, but Johnson had a surprise for him. As the Senate was concluding its work on Tuesday evening, instead of making his customary motion that the Senate adjourn until the next day, Johnson moved instead that it recess until the next day.

None of the liberal senators or their staff members appear to have realized the significance of the word Johnson used, but they were to learn it the next morning, when Douglas made his motion. Walter George, back on the dais, told him it was out of order because petitions could be filed only during the morning hour. Douglas said this was the morning hour. George recognized the Majority Leader. While the southerners and many Republicans, in the words of one reporter, “sat there grinning like so many happy owls,” Johnson said that of course it wasn’t: the “morning hour,” Johnson reminded Douglas, was the first hour of each new legislative day. A legislative day begins after each adjournment, not after a recess, so there would be no morning hour until the Senate adjourned, except, of course by unanimous consent. Douglas asked for such consent. Russell said, “I object.”

“So we are stopped from even considering a bill that has already been passed by the House,” Senator Lehman said. Not at all, Lyndon Johnson said, with an expression of great earnestness on his face. It was only that civil rights always engendered a long discussion, and a long discussion in the very last days of a session would keep the Senate from considering other legislation, and there was important other legislation to consider, such as the foreign aid bill and a bill to raise executive department salaries which President Eisenhower said was indispensable. It was clear to the liberals that Johnson intended to prolong the current legislative “day” until the session ended.

Douglas made a motion that the Senate adjourn for five minutes so that a new day could begin, but Johnson was ready for that, too. It was the party leadership, not individual senators, who had the right to adjourn the Senate, he said. “There will not be an adjournment based on what one senator says or two senators say!” he shouted. And when the Majority Leader finished, the Minority Leader took the floor to support him. Johnson had told Knowland that if a discussion on civil rights began, the bills considered indispensable by the President—his President—would never pass before adjournment. And he had also persuaded Knowland that Douglas, by moving to adjourn the Senate, was usurping the prerogative of party leaders—not only the Democratic Leader but the Republican Leader—and was deliberately insulting them. “It is only kidding the minority groups and the American people” to propose a bill in the last days of a session “which everyone knows as a practical matter cannot be accomplished,” Knowland said.

If the southerners were laughing at the liberals, so was the Washington press corps—for the liberals’ failure to grasp the implications of the “recess” move. “Let us consider a couple of idealists [Douglas and Lehman], who were so busy thinking good thoughts that they forgot to do their homework on such mundane matters as senatorial procedure…. The two students … failed their study course in Senate rules,” Frederick Othman wrote. There was little discussion in the press about the civil rights issue—from some articles the reader would hardly know there was an issue. Journalistic analysis concentrated on the “recess” maneuver, on tactics rather than substance. And the analysis seemed always to accept as a given the Johnson-Knowland argument that bringing up civil rights legislation in the last days of the session would result in the death of other needed legislation; the author has been unable to find a single article pointing out that that possibility could have been avoided by simply changing the session’s closing date.

Once Johnson and Knowland had made the discharge petition a “leadership matter,” with all the implications of that phrase, it would have taken a foolhardy senator, Democratic or Republican, to support Douglas. His motion to briefly adjourn the Senate was beaten, and he knew it. More important to him, the cause of civil rights was beaten again. Standing at his desk, the picture of defeat, his white head bowed, his blue seersucker suit, which he had worn for two days, rumpled with wear, he said, “I say this with great sadness. The Senate has a very heavy burden on its conscience.” Because of the Senate rules, moreover, he could see no hope of the cause winning—ever. “We know as men,” he said to his colleagues, in a low, sad voice, “that the rules … have been skillfully devised to prevent any action on civil rights which is obnoxious to members from the South. I think it is now clear that it will be impossible under the rules … with the present temper of the Southern senators … and of the leadership on both sides … ever to bring a civil rights measure to a vote in this body.” And when Douglas finished, Richard Russell rose to tell him that the rules would not be changed—ever. Russell stood erect, his head tilted back with his nose in the air, his well-tailored suit newly pressed, his white shirt starched, the embodiment of victory (“I can still see him standing there, so calm, just gloating,” Frank McCulloch, the mildest-spoken of men, would say years later, hatred in his voice). “All men differ on [this] proposed legislation,” Russell said. “Some may believe it is good and salutary. Others … believe it is largely political in its inspiration … totally and completely in violation of … the Constitution, destructive of the rights of the states.” Whenever “such nefarious schemes are presented in the future,” Russell promised, “there will be members of the Senate who will… resort to every weapon at their command to prevent their being imposed upon the people of this country.”

LYNDON JOHNSON’S TACTICS to this point can be explained by the imperatives of his presidential strategy: his need to keep civil rights legislation bottled up with as little publicity as possible. Now, however, he made a motion for which strategy alone is not an adequate explanation. Calling for a vote on Douglas’ adjournment motion, Walter George, still in the chair, started to ask for a voice vote, which would have been a chorus of a few ayes and many nays, decisive but mercifully brief. Then, however, right in front of him, Johnson stood up at his desk. And when George recognized him, Johnson asked for a roll-call vote.

“This was the dirtiest trick Johnson ever played,” Joe Rauh would say forty years later. “It was just Johnson putting his foot on Douglas’ face.” “It was an effort to humiliate,” Frank McCulloch says. “That was its only purpose. A quick voice vote would have defeated it [the motion]. Douglas had made it knowing he was going to lose.”

The effort succeeded in its purpose. For a while, Douglas stood at his desk, and then he sat down, as, one by one, his colleagues, the men he had to work with every day, voted against him—almost every one of them. Even men he had thought he could count on did not stand by him in the face of Lyndon Johnson’s power. Wayne Morse did not stand by him, or Estes Kefauver, or Richard Neuberger, or Clifford Case, or Pat McNamara or Thomas Kuchel. “Even my friend and ally Humphrey voted ‘No,’” Douglas was to say. In the end, only five senators voted for his motion: two members of his own party, Herbert Lehman and Tom Hennings, and three Republicans: Langer, George Bender and Irving Ives. Seventy-six senators voted against him.

Years later, Paul Douglas would remember that after that 76–6 vote, “I tried to walk out of the Chamber with my head high.” Muriel Humphrey, who knew she had just seen a man crushed before her eyes, was standing outside the door; Douglas would never forget the “concerned look in her eyes.” He paused for a moment to kiss her cheek. Walking on, he came to the elevators, and stood there for a moment—the hero who had charged up a beach when he was too old to charge up a beach, the brilliant economist who had dared to rally economists behind the New Deal—stood there in a kind of daze. By this time, his young assistant Howard Shuman had come running after him, and after a moment, Douglas spoke to him, bitterness in his voice. “Push the button three times,” he said. “Let’s pretend I’m a senator.” When he reached his suite, he went into his inner office, shut the door behind him, and cried, cried “for the first time in years,” he was to recall—cried less for himself than for his cause, the great cause, and for the strategic mistakes he felt he had made in fighting for it. “How many senators really care about civil rights? I asked myself. How could we ever reverse the tide? And what an imperfect and erring instrument I was to fail in so crucial a moment.”

THE SENATE HAD WON AGAIN. The citadel of the South, the dam against which so many liberal tides had broken in vain, was still standing, as impenetrable as ever. And it was standing thanks in substantial part to its Majority Leader. For years, the South had had a formidable general in Richard Russell. In 1956, as in 1955 and 1954 and 1953, it had had another formidable general in Lyndon Johnson. Lyndon “organized the Southern Democrats against civil rights this year so successfully that it was crushed,” Willis Robertson of Virginia wrote a friend.

Johnson’s maneuver had paid off not only for the South but for himself. As the New York Times reported: “With a series of parliamentary delaying tactics he blocked attempts by Northern liberal Democrats such as Paul H. Douglas of Illinois and Herbert H. Lehman of New York to bring up the bill. He thus retained the friendship of the Southern group, which is expected to give him the … convention influence that he desires.” As for the northern liberals, those who had followed the fight closely were infuriated with Johnson’s tactics. In a formal statement, ADA National Chairman Joseph Rauh said: “He has brought the Democratic Party to its lowest point in twenty-five years.” But thanks to Johnson’s legislative skills, there hadn’t been enough of a fight to capture public attention on a larger scale, so his relationship with the party’s liberals in general was no worse than it had been before. Despite the dangers inherent in the Southern Manifesto and H.R. 627, he had kept civil rights from damaging his chances for reaching the presidency.

*Johnson loyalists would also argue that Johnson’s non-signing was an act of political courage because of the political risk it put him under in Texas, but a better idea of the sentiment in Texas is the fact that of Texas’ twenty-one congressmen, seventeen (including Sam Rayburn) did not sign. The other Texas senator, Price Daniel, did sign.