3

Seniority and the South

AFTER THE WAR, the institutional inertia seemed to grow worse, in part because with the war’s end the rationale for executive dominance lost some of its force, in part because the war’s end allowed journalists to focus on the inertia more intensely—and in part because with the passage of time one cause of the inertia was indeed growing worse, since its root cause was the passage of time, and its effect on men.

Seniority—not even mentioned in the original Senate rules, much less in the Framers’ deliberations; not even a consideration during the first half century and more of the Senate’s existence—was in a way a child of slavery. That issue came to overshadow all others, so political parties had to be able to count on loyalty from senators who sat on or chaired the committees that dealt with its various aspects. In December, 1845, party caucuses took over the power of committee appointments within the Senate, passing resolutions that committees would be chaired by members of the majority party, that members of committees be carried over from Congress to Congress, that rank within each committee be determined by length of service in the Senate, and that the most senior member of the majority party would automatically become chairman.* Thereafter, party caucuses drew up lists of committee appointments; the Senate as a whole simply accepted them. A senator’s rank on a committee was therefore determined by one qualification, and one alone: how long he had sat on it. And, as a student of the Senate noted, “once appointed to a committee,” he could sit on it “as long as he desires.” In his 1956 book on the Senate, Citadel, William S. White wrote that chairmanships “are not awarded by any party leader or group of hierarchs but, in nearly every instance, simply go to that man of the dominant party who has been longest on the committee,” and “once a chairmanship is attained it is not in practice lost by any man” except when his party loses its majority in the Senate, and when his party regains the majority, he regains his chairmanship. “The perquisite… may be considered to be for the political life of the holder; it is in this sense hardly less than an old-fashioned kingship.”

By the beginning of the Gilded Age, the “seniority rule” had hardened into unwritten law; it was because not even the Senate Four would contravene it, not even when a member’s views turned out to offend them, that the Four were careful in assigning new senators to committees. “The committee assignments of one year would affect chairmanships ten years later,” a Senate historian notes. Although other factors contributed, the Senate’s decline during the Gilded Age paralleled this hardening.

By the mid-twentieth century, when Lyndon Johnson arrived in the Senate, seniority had been what White called “an ineluctable and irresistible force” for decades. It governed every aspect of formal Senate business, determining not just where senators sat at the long committee tables (ranking down from the chairman to the newest members at the far end; when the most junior member came to his first committee meeting, he found his name plaque at the table’s foot), but the order in which they could question witnesses: questioning, as White wrote, “proceeds in the immemorial way—by seniority—first from the top man on the majority side, then to the top man on the minority side, back again to the majority side, and so forth.” It determined not only committee but also subcommittee chairmanships: when a subcommittee (whose members had been appointed by the chairman of the parent committee) met for the first time, the chair was taken automatically by the senator from the majority party who had been on the parent committee longest.

Seniority also governed the Senate in ways that were seldom written about, but that were decisive in the body’s impact on national life. Little journalistic attention was paid, for example, to the “conference committees,” composed of delegations from each house which were appointed ostensibly only to resolve differences between the Senate and House versions of a bill (but in the case of the Senate, its conferees were authorized to insert new material) and to report back to each house an agreed-upon “compromise” version for final ratification. But after the more dramatic floor debates and votes were over, these committees met behind closed doors, generally in the Senate wing of the Capitol, and these secret meetings were often decisive in determining a bill’s final form, since the version reported back to the two houses was generally accepted; as George H. Haynes, author of the most authoritative work on the Senate’s first 150 years, the two-volume The Senate of the United States, asked: “What chance is there, especially in the hectic closing hours of Congress, for members to decide whether they ought to agree to concessions that have been made?”—particularly since reopening the subject would mean reopening debate on the entire bill, thus effectively killing it. And since the members of conference committees were almost invariably the most senior members of the committees that had reported out the bill in the first place, the reliance on these “conferences” led, in Haynes’ words, to the assigning of “tremendous powers over legislation to a small group of senior senators” more conservative than the Senate as a whole. As the liberal Hubert Humphrey, who also came to the Senate in 1949, was to discover,

Too often, particularly in areas of concern to liberals, [the] senior members … had voted against the bill in question or against important amendments which had been added as the result of floor debate. It was not unusual, therefore, for legislation to come back in final form without important parts that already passed the Senate. It was a take-it-or-leave-it situation then and the ultimate weapon for conservatives who might have been beaten earlier.

Seniority governed not only formal but informal Senate business. A newly elected senator encountered it on his first day on Capitol Hill, when he applied to the Rules Committee for one of the ninety-six office suites—and was informed that he had his choice only of those that had not already been chosen by senior members, and that even after he had chosen a suite, and moved in, should a more senior member change his mind and ask for it, it would be reassigned to him. Seniority governed the assignment not only of offices but of desks on the Senate floor, and of parking spaces in the Senate garage. It determined a junior senator’s place at official dinners—far below the salt. So vital was the exact degree of his seniority in a senator’s career that elaborate—and rigid—formulas had been devised to determine it. Senators sworn in on the same day, for example, were ranked according to previous service in the Senate, followed by service in the House, and then within the Cabinet. If necessary, the holding of a governorship was factored in. And if it was still impossible to differentiate between two senators, White says, “one may be declared senior to the other simply because his state was the earlier of the two involved to enter the Union….”

Only what White calls “the passage of time” could make it appropriate for a freshman senator to rise on the floor. A new member of almost any legislative body is well advised to remain silent for a time, but in the Senate that time was supposed to last longer—until, in fact, the elders let him know it was time for him to speak. A young senator was to recall that for months after he had been sworn in, he “did not rise once.” Then, “one day, a matter came up with which I had had considerable experience.” An older senator “leaned over to me and said, ‘Are you going to speak on this?’ I said, ‘No.’ … ‘I think you should speak,’ he replied.” And when the freshman remained reluctant, the older senator said, “‘Look, I am going to get up on the floor and ask you a question about this bill. Then you will have to speak!’ And that’s how I made my first speech in the Senate.” Waiting for such permission was wise. “Any fledgling who dared to so much as open his mouth on the floor” without it, one observer wrote, might suddenly realize that the senior senators seated at their desks were staring at him with expressions he could hardly consider approving. And as word of what he was doing circulated, other senior senators would come to the Chamber and sit at their desks, so that they, too, could join in the cold stares.

The feelings about premature speech were very strong. Once, a freshman finished a speech on the floor and sat down next to the great Walter George. When no compliment on his oration was forthcoming, the freshman, trying to make conversation, asked George how the Senate had changed since his own early days in it. “Freshmen didn’t use to talk so much,” George replied. An elderly senator loved to recall the birthday of the revered Senator Borah years before. “A number of the older men got up and offered brief, laudatory speeches about it. Borah was pleased. Then a freshman senator—one who had been in the Chamber three or four months—got to his feet” to join in the chorus of praise. “That son of a bitch,” Borah whispered loudly. “That son of a bitch.” Borah “didn’t dislike the speaker,” the elderly senator would explain. “He just didn’t feel that he should speak up so soon.”

The more impressive a new senator’s pre-Senate accomplishments might be, the more determined were the Senate elders to teach him that those accomplishments meant nothing here.

“We are skeptical of men who come to the Senate with big reputations,” one “old-timer” said during the 1950s. Former governors were the worst; they seemed to think that they deserved more respect than the average freshman. They were quickly disabused of this notion. As one former governor related, “Back home everything revolved, or seemed to revolve, around the Governor. I had a part in practically everything that happened. There was administration. There was policy making. But [in the Senate] there was just a seat at the end of the table.” Senators who had previously “reached national fame … have found four years and more not to be long enough to feel free to speak up loudly in the Institution,” White wrote.

THE PASSAGE OF TIME had another, darker side, of course.

Because senators’ terms were so long, and because many of them served so many terms (in 1949, when Lyndon Johnson came to the Senate, ten senators were in their fourth or fifth term, which meant they were nearing, or had passed, a quarter of a century in the Senate), the body’s membership changed little from decade to decade—which meant that the membership was growing steadily older. In the nineteenth century, the average age of senators had been forty-five: by 1900, it had passed fifty. By 1940, it was sixty, and thirteen senators were in their seventies or eighties (in an era in which the average life span was far shorter than it would become later), and there were increasing references to Capitol Hill’s “senility system,” a phrase which seemed funny only until Hiram Johnson, born in 1866, shuffled slowly into the Foreign Relations Committee room, in which he had once been a towering figure, leaning heavily on a cane and supported by his wife, to sit through hearings, usually silent but occasionally straining to address a question in a barely audible voice with long, painful pauses between words: “Is—it—not—true—that…” (When reporters asked Johnson if he planned to run again in 1946, when he would be eighty years old, he said he did—and probably would have, had he not died in 1945.) One day in 1945, seventy-seven-year-old Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee fainted during a speech. His ailment proved to be only indigestion, but Allen Drury, observing from the Press Gallery the anxiety on other senators’ faces as they huddled in little groups below him, realized that “the ghost of Death” is “never far from the mind of the Senate.” Rome’s Senate had, of course, been conceived as an assembly of elderly men, and of all the Roman concepts that had been realized in America’s Senate, none had been realized more fully. It was a place of old men, old men in a young nation; not a few of them had been born before their states had even been states.

Since chairmanships were awarded by seniority, the seniority rule’s most significant impact on America’s Senate—and on America—therefore came through the chairmanships of the Senate’s fifteen great standing committees, those committees whose decisions were almost never overruled. The chairmen were the real powers in the Senate; a committee could not even meet except at its chairman’s call. He and he alone set his committee’s agenda, he alone appointed its staff, decided the number of subcommittees that would be established, and what bills would be referred to them. A party leader—a Majority or Minority Leader—was only a mere primus inter pares (and not all that primus either) among fiercely independent senatorial barons, unassailable in the committee rooms that were their strongholds. The removal of a chairman was all but unthinkable; no chairman had been removed for more than a quarter of a century. “The ‘Old Bulls’—the committee chairmen—ran the Senate,” one observer recalls. And a gavel in one’s hand was no defense against the infirmities of age. In 1940, when seventy-five-year-old Arthur Capper of Kansas became ranking Republican member of the Agriculture Committee, he was already deaf, an old man so frail that one reporter called him “a living shadow, one hand cupped behind his ear and a strained expression on his face” as he tried to hear witnesses’ testimony, “breaking in from time to time with some hurrying querulous question.” But in 1946 the Republicans became the majority party in the Senate, and seniority elevated Capper, now eighty-one, to Agriculture’s chairmanship, although by that time, as another reporter noted, “he could neither make himself understood, nor understand others.” Democrat Carter Glass of Virginia had ascended to the chairmanship of the Appropriations Committee in 1932, when he was seventy-four. During the 1940s, Glass was very ill—had been very ill for years, sequestered in a suite in the Mayflower Hotel that always had a guard at the door. He had not even appeared on Capitol Hill since 1942. By 1945, there were even suggestions that perhaps Glass, then eighty-seven, should resign. But, as Drury reported, “from the guarded suite … through whose doors no outsider has passed in many months to see what lies within, has come the usual answer. Mrs. Glass has replied for the Senator. The suggestion will not be considered.” In Glass’ temporary absence, the seventy-seven-year-old McKellar presided over Appropriations. “In his day,” Allen Drury wrote, “Old Mack from Tennessee” had been “the most powerful and the most ruthless man in the Senate,” but that day was drawing to a close. More and more frequently during the 1940s, after he had been presiding over a committee hearing for some hours, he would pound the gavel to signal the session to begin. (McKellar was sensitive about his age. Once he was politely asked in a Senate corridor, “How are you today, Senator?” As the journalist Russell Baker relates, “In reply, the old man, interpreting the words as a reflection on his failing health, raised his cane, thwacked it angrily across the fellow’s collarbone, and passed on without a word.”) When Lyndon Johnson arrived in the Senate in 1949, McKellar, now eighty-one, was still Chairman of Appropriations; five other committee chairmen were in their seventies.

As disgust with the Senate’s ineptitude intensified after the war, a hundred critics focused on the seniority system as a major culprit. Columnist Ernest K. Lindley wrote in 1949 that “it has been condemned in recent years by almost every authority or impartial observer of Congress.” Pointing out that under that system, ability counted for nothing, energy counted for nothing—intelligence, passion, will, principles, all counted for nothing—they noted that, in the words of Roland Young, secretary of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the seniority rule makes impossible “the utilization of the best material for the most important offices. Tenure and ability are not the same thing.” The Washington Post, referring to Congress as a “gerontocracy,” said that “to consider nothing but length of service in the choice of chairmen is to put Congress under a crippling handicap.” And there was another point. Since chairmen owed their places not to their party’s leader in the Senate or to their national political party but solely to what the political scientist George B. Galloway called “the accident of tenure,” they were therefore independent not only of the senatorial leader but indeed of their party, and of its platforms, promises, and philosophy—of party responsibility in the largest sense. The system “flaunts established political principles: that of party government; of a legislature responsible to the electoral mandate,” Young said. Furthermore, since, particularly in the Democratic Party, “the seniority line,” as the political scientist E. L. Oliver put it, “is also the line of cleavage between progressives and conservatives,” reliance on seniority put effective control of the Senate (and of the House) “into the hands of men wholly out of sympathy with the party platform, with the national administration, and with the clear majority of Congressmen elected upon the party ticket.” “Adherence to blind choice under the seniority rule … makes a farce out of the democratic principle,” the Washington Post said. Such arguments ignored the fact that it was not that principle but rather independence (including independence of the “electoral mandate”) that was the Founding Fathers’ most cherished desideratum for senators—that the seniority rule was, as one Senate historian did in fact note, “a protection against boss rule of the Senate.” But it was also true that parties had not been a major factor in government when the Fathers had been drafting the Constitution, and that independence of party, when parties had become so integral a part of the governmental process, had skewed the Senate’s relationship to that process. Seniority therefore added, in George Goodwin’s words, “a new non-constitutional dimension … to our constitutional system of separation of powers.” Feeling that the will of the people would be thwarted as long as the rule stood, the critics demanded that it be abolished. “If either of the two major parties is to serve as a vehicle for social action,” Oliver wrote, this “archaic procedure … will have to be scrapped…. Unless such a change is made, the expressed attitudes of the people will not be embodied in legislation.”

ADVOCATES OF THE SENIORITY SYSTEM, however, pointed out that its rigidity eliminated the bitter, time-consuming fights and political logrolling that would otherwise accompany the selection of committee chairmen at the beginning of each new session of Congress. “Nobody has ever produced a really workable alternative,” William White says. And harshly though that system might be assailed, it was protected by a very powerful force: itself. Junior senators might sneer at it, but senators are human, and as, with the passage of years, they accumulated the power and perquisites which were based on that system, the logic behind it, its fairness and justice, became increasingly clear to them. It was, in many cases, the rock on which they based their campaigns for re-election, since their more sophisticated constituents—the ones most deeply concerned about the outcome of that campaign—were well aware of the benefits the incumbent’s seniority gave to his state, gave, to a disproportionate extent, to them. “The longer I stay in Washington, the more sympathetic to [the seniority rule] I become,” Senator Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts said. The chairmanships that senior senators held because of that rule—had become, as one observer was to put it, a part of their identity, “a part of their being … almost of life itself.” There seemed no realistic possibility of persuading them that the rule should be changed. And since these were the senators who held the power—all the power—in the Senate, there was no realistic possibility that the rule would be changed. William White said flatly that “The Senate would no more abandon it than it would its name.”

NOTHING ABOUT THE SENATE would be changed, it seemed. The Senate’s world was made up not only of the Capitol’s north wing but of another building, which pointed at that wing from across broad Constitution Avenue. This building was known simply as the “Senate Office Building” (there was only one Senate office building then; new senators were warned to spell out its name in full when giving a constituent their address; as one senator observed, “If you give him the abbreviation—S.O.B.—he will not know whether you are calling him one, or expect him to call you one”), and it indeed contained only offices and committee rooms, but these were the offices of senators and Senate committee rooms, and the building was the Senate office building; “Never in the history of the world was there such an office building,” the New York Times marveled when it opened in 1909.

In authorizing its construction, the Senate had made clear that it should embody senatorial philosophy—the same philosophy of restraint and dignity that had motivated the body to decree that its Chamber should be unadorned. The man directing the search for an architect said he was looking for one “of mature years … and it would not scare me off to hear his colleagues say that ’He is a little old-fashioned …! That is what we need now: a little of the old-fashioned but correct architecture.” And the architects selected—Carrère & Hastings of New York—had captured that philosophy perfectly.

It was a vast structure—low (only three stories high on the side facing the Capitol, five stories on the far side, so steeply did Capitol Hill fall away) but long, so long that from its majestic entrance pavilion, modeled on the pavilions of the Louvre, stretched away a colonnade of thirty-four thirty-foot-high columns, columns fluted for beauty and paired for strength, a towering colonnade that was in itself longer than a football field and that angled away from the Capitol in a diagonal that seemed to go on endlessly—except that there was, far down Constitution Avenue, an end: another, matching, if slightly smaller, entrance pavilion. In this building, the Times said, “a thousand men would feel lonesome”; it covered “what in New York would be a space of several city blocks.” The building’s exterior was a white Vermont marble selected for its unusual purity and hardness. The trees in front of that colonnade were still small enough in 1949 so that their leaves did not yet blur the facade or soften it, and from the Capitol’s Senate wing the long line of tall columns and the majestic pavilions that flanked them gleamed at you across the Capitol’s lawns, brilliant and dazzling in the late-afternoon sun, or loomed majestically through rain on a gray day.

But like the House Office Building on the other side of Capitol Hill, also by Carrère & Hastings, the Senate Building was designed so that it would not compete with but complement the Capitol, toward which both buildings were canted in such a way that they were in effect pointing at it.* The building’s roof would be ornamented only by a simple balustrade, the architects said, not by prominent decorative elements which might “detract from the effect of the Capitol building.” And while the Capitol’s exterior was lavishly ornamented, it was decided that that would not be the case with the facade of the Senate and House Office Buildings.

The ground level of the Senate Building, the base of the long row of columns, was of the simplest design: Concord granite rusticated but otherwise unadorned so that except for small arched windows, the long lines of that hard stone stretch unbroken down Constitution Avenue. The capitals of those formidably paired columns are very simple, and the long entablature, a football-field-length entablature, that the columns support is very different from the Capitol’s entablatures, crammed as are the Capitol’s with reliefs of heroic figures. The entablature of the Senate Building is unbroken by a single decoration: on its entire length there is not a single carving of a leaf or an acorn or a bird—stretching down Constitution is nothing but a long, broad band of gleaming white marble, with, above it, only the simplest narrow classic egg and dart molding, and that simple balustrade. Architectural historians noted that the Senate Building was “more conservative” than other government buildings of the time. If the exterior was stately, even majestic, the stateliness and majesty were restrained, dignified, severe, uncompromisingly austere—testimony in granite and marble, that very hard marble, to the Senate’s grandeur and power, and to its philosophy.

THE BUILDING’S INTERIOR was testimony to other aspects of that philosophy. Inside its main entrance across from the Capitol was a circular arcade of piers (modeled on the piers of the Royal Chapel at Versailles) out of which rose arches supporting a circle of eighteen columns that in turn supported a coffered dome that soared up to a circular skylight sixty-eight feet above the floor. But the grandeur of this spacious rotunda was a grandeur of utter simplicity, of what one critic described as an “elegance” that was “almost stoic” in its “exceptional restraint.” Suggestions had been made that colored marbles be used on the columns, but this was the home of the body that had kept its Chamber untainted by a single painting; “Color would take away from the dignity and monumental character of the design,” John Carrère replied. He allowed gray marble circles to be set into the rotunda’s shining white marble floor.* Otherwise, the white marble of the entire grand entrance to the Senate Office Building—piers, arches, columns, dome—was unrelieved by any color except for the marble’s grayish veins. Opposite the doorway, beyond the circle of piers, was a palatial double stairway, in the same white marble and in the style of the Italian Renaissance, and at the top was the Senate’s “Conference Chamber,” a room (later known as the “Senate Caucus Room”) worthy of the Senate: spacious (it would seat three hundred spectators comfortably), high-ceilinged, its marble walls ranged by twelve massive Corinthian columns. And out from the rotunda stretched the corridors lined with other, smaller marble chambers for public investigations and hearings, and with the individual office suites of the senators themselves.

These were senatorial corridors.

They were long—four hundred feet long, some of them; there were more than three miles of corridors in the Senate Office Building—and their ceilings were so high that, broad though they were, they appeared narrow. And they were dim and somber. A row of old-fashioned lighting globes dotted the ceilings, and their lights were reflected down the center of the white marble floors in a line as rigid as if it were an element set into the marble. But the globes were too high and spaced too far apart to cast much light, and the corridors were so long that even on sunny days the light from the window at their far end penetrated only a little way down them, and some corridors had no windows at the end. And along each side of a corridor was a row of very tall, dark mahogany doors, towering over anyone walking past them and stretching down each side of the dim corridor like a long line of forbidding sentinels guarding the dignity of the men within.

The corridors were empty—empty not only of ornament (there were no flags, national or state, in the hallways of the Senate Office Building then, no state seals on the doors; “it was considered beneath the dignity of a senator to put out a flag or a seal,” one reporter who spent a lot of time in that building recalls; “the only thing you would see in the halls was umbrellas on rainy days”) but of people. There were relatively few visitors—the influx of constituents dropping by their senators’ offices in 1949 was only a trickle compared to what it would later become in the era of mass air travel—and so vast was the building that visitors were swallowed up by it. And so were the approximately eleven hundred people—ninety-six senators, their staff and Senate maintenance people—who worked in the building in 1949, particularly because there was very little visiting between offices then. The building’s mores were as rigidly formal as its architecture. In his thirty-fifth year in the Senate, John L. McClellan of Arkansas was to boast that during those thirty-five years he had never once been inside another senator’s office. Robert C. Albright, who covered the Senate for the Washington Post, wrote in 1949 that “You can tread marble miles of Senate Office Building corridors without ever seeing an open door.” When a door was opened, furthermore, the face of the receptionist inside was not always all that welcoming; “dropping in was not encouraged,” a secretary recalls. About ten in the morning, many staffers congregated in the “cafeteria” (a cafeteria lined with fluted pilasters) on the second floor for coffee, and to socialize with their counterparts on other staffs; the rest of the time there was little socializing—and little traffic in the halls. Sometimes when you turned into one of those corridors, there would be a little knot of reporters waiting outside a closed door or questioning a senator who had just come out; a remarkably large proportion of committee sessions then were executive, or closed, sessions. Sometimes a figure—black against the light from the window behind him, his face all but unrecognizable in the gloom even if he was a senator—would be walking toward you. But quite often, it seemed, when you turned into a corridor there would be, in that long, long space, no one at all.

The corridors were silent. Voices seemed to be swallowed up by their length and their height. And of course so empty were they that often there was no voice to be heard, and you would be walking down a corridor in a silence broken only by the click of your heels on the marble floor and the distant pings of elevator bells, walking in silence between the rows of tightly closed doors that towered over you in the gloom.

And the building, grand though it was, was merely a setting for the men for whom it had been built—those ninety-six human institutions known as “senators.”

The senators were very conscious of their prerogatives. Carl Hayden of Arizona was outwardly polite and courtly to the members of his staff, and to anyone who greeted him in the halls, but when he had lunch, or a cup of coffee, in the cafeteria, he would lay his cane on the table at which he had decided to sit, even if there were already staffers sitting at it, and, recalls one, “when he got to the head of the line and came back, you’d better be gone.”

And more than a few senators were not friendly and polite at all—except to their fellow senators. Staff was staff, and that meant they were so far below the level of senators that even the most ordinary courtesies would be wasted on them. There were senators who would not even return the greeting of a staff member if they met him in a corridor of the Senate Office Building. Some senators—Taft was a prime example—seemed to make a point of not returning a greeting. “If you saw Senator Taft coming down the hall, you wouldn’t say hello to him,” one staff member says. “He just wasn’t a man you would say hello to. He was always deep in thought.”

They knew how to deal with violations of their prerogatives. A senator wanting to use an elevator pushed the buzzer three times. The elevator operator was supposed to ignore all other buzzes and proceed immediately to pick the senator up. In fact, even if there were passengers already in the elevator, with the elevator going in the opposite direction, the operator’s instructions were to immediately reverse direction and proceed to the senator’s floor, bringing his passengers along. These instructions were ignored at an operator’s peril. If he was not on the alert and did not immediately respond to the magical three buzzes, some senators were understanding, but others were not. Hearing an elevator car continue to move away from him after he had rung, Senator William Jenner of Indiana would, in an instantaneous burst of rage, smack his palm repeatedly against the bronze elevator door. And everyone in the building knew what had happened when, one day, Pat McCarran of Nevada “got passed by” after he had rung. “He just turned on his heel and went back to his office and called the Sergeant-at-Arms and the kid was fired on the spot,” recalls an aide.

Senators were deeply conscious of what they called their “dignity.” One of them, forced by defeat to leave the Senate, lamented what he had lost. “Where else in our land can be found perquisites so plentiful, traditions so rich, individual respect so deep … dignity and honor so complete?” he asked. There were occasional angry outbursts and individual feuds that lasted for years, and it had become noticeable during the 1940s that some of the new senators were a little more informal than their frock-coated predecessors. But the older senators—and these were, of course, the ones who ran the Senate and set its tone: most of the twenty-two southerners, of course, and the New England Brahmins like Lodge and Saltonstall, and Republican leaders like Taft and Eugene Millikin, and, naturally, Chairman Hayden of the Rules Committee—were, in dealing with each other, models of senatorial formality. They talked to each other in private, in fact, as they talked to each other in public, addressing each other not by name but by title, and duplicating the elaborate formality of the Senate floor even behind the closed doors of executive sessions. During one such Rules Committee session, for example, Chairman Hayden began a statement by saying: “My distinguished colleague, the Senator from New Hampshire, Mr. Bridges, advised the chairman of this committee that …” Another member of the Rules Committee then said: “I think that is right. The wise chairman of this committee, as usual, has made a very valuable statement.” The closed doors of their offices were a symbol of the fact that informality was not encouraged. Personal relationships were governed by ceremony and ritual. When one senator wanted to visit another in his office, he would telephone to ask when it would be convenient for him to drop by and, when he arrived, would never walk into the senator’s private office until the receptionist had telephoned to announce him. And on such visits, the business talk was invariably preceded by a long ritual of senatorial friendship. “You just didn’t barge in and start talking business,” one administrative aide recalls. “It just wasn’t done.” The Senate Office Building was, in January, 1949, a place of courtesy, of courtliness, of dignity, of restraint, of refinement and of uncompromising austerity and rigidity. Its corridors were corridors of power—of the Senate brand of power, cold and hard.

AS SENIORITY’S grip had tightened on the Senate, so had the grip of the South. The correlation between the two had, of course, been apparent even before the Civil War; seniority had, after all, given “the chairmanship of every single committee” to the “slaveholding states” by 1859. Republican opposition to slavery had made the South so solidly Democratic that it was the most rigidly one-party section of the United States. Its senators were sent back to Washington term after term, long-running stars (“Human institutions with southern accents,” one journalist called them) on a capital stage on which the rest of the cast seemed to be constantly changing. (A notable exception were the southern members of the House of Representatives.) And although the eleven states of the Old Confederacy held only twenty-two of the ninety-six seats on the Senate floor, they held a far larger proportion of the gavels in the Senate committee rooms—particularly the gavels that represented the greatest power. In 1949, when Lyndon Johnson came to the Senate, the three most powerful Senate committees, by most rankings, were Appropriations, Foreign Relations, and Finance. Southerners were chairmen of all three. And southern dominance extended further down the list of the fifteen Standing Committees. Only two of the fifteen—District of Columbia, which administered the capital city, and Rules, which handled “the housekeeping administration of the Senate”—were, White was to say, “not especially relevant to great public issues.” Of the other thirteen committees, exactly one was not chaired by either a southerner or by a senator who was a firm ally of the South. Nor was the dominance limited to the chairmanships of those committees. The more powerful the committee, it seemed, the more its membership was stacked in depth by southerners. If there was one committee which in 1949 was considered the most powerful of all, it was Appropriations, because of its control of funding for the departments and agencies of the federal government; “No matter how much you legislate, the main ingredient is money and whatever type of program you have, its success is dependent on adequate financing,” a senator was to say. Successful though a senator might be in winning authorization from one of the legislative committees for a project vital to his state, the money for the project still had to be appropriated. Of the thirteen Democrats on Appropriations, seven were southerners. And decisions on appropriations requests were made first—and very seldom overruled—by one of Appropriations’ subcommittees, each of which was given, as a student of the process noted, such great “latitude” in its field that decisions went “largely unchallenged” by the full committee. In 1949, Appropriations had ten subcommittees. Southerners were chairmen of six. Nor was the dominance of subcommittees—of Appropriations or other committees—limited to their chairmen. One senator—not a southerner—was to describe “an interlocking directorate of southerners who are on every subcommittee in depth. If you get rid of one, you still have another southerner.”

The power thus conferred on the South was reinforced by other factors. One was ability. Unlike senators from other sections, southern senators, White wrote, “had no chance of getting a serious nomination for the Presidency, and they knew it.” And because in the South United States Senator was therefore the highest title at which political men could realistically aim, that title attracted men of a very high caliber, so that many southern senators were exceptional individuals, of great personal force and talent.

Another factor was a particular use to which abilities were put. When southerners came to the Senate, they came to stay; they studied the Senate’s rules and precedents with the concentration of men who knew they would be living by them for the rest of their lives. Forty “Standing Rules” had been adopted by the Senate in 1884, and amended and re-amended over the ensuing decades, and there were hundreds of pages of precedents establishing the rules’ meaning. Many of the southern senators did a lot of reading in those rules and precedents. They gave themselves individual seminars in them: in the 1920s, Vice President Charles G. Dawes, presiding over the Senate, realized that on the lower dais before him was “a modest young man who knew all the rules”; in 1935, Charles L. Watkins of Arkansas, a lowly clerk who had been helping to keep the Senate Journal, or minutes, was appointed the Senate’s Parliamentarian, and southern senators would drop in to his office just off the Senate floor and sit for long, leisurely conversations about rules and precedents, and about the theory and logic behind them. As a result, they knew what they covered, and what they didn’t cover; knew how to use them—and how to get around them. “Because of his instinctive sympathy with the Institution and all that is in it, the southern senator is like a man who can put his hand instantly to any book in a cherished library,” White wrote. “In consequence he is a past master of the precedents, the practices, and even the moods of the Senate and as a parliamentarian formidable in any debate or maneuver.” With a frequency that would be almost unimaginable at the end of the century, there would be detailed discussions on the Senate floor about parliamentary procedures. In skirmishes and pitched battles in any parliamentary body, of course, rules and precedents play an important role, and the degree to which the southerners had mastered them more fully than their opponents was repeatedly apparent: it was striking, for example, how often, in such fights, after the South’s opponents had launched a maneuver, a southern senator would rise to beg to point out, courteously but firmly, that the maneuver was, under one precedent or another from some long-past decade, simply out of order, and how often, when the presiding officer looked up the precedent, he had regretfully to rule that that was indeed the case. Once, in a Democratic caucus, one of the Senate elders was saying that he had made a practice, at the beginning of each new Congress, of reading through the volume ofSenate Procedures, hundreds of pages long, underlining passages as he went. “I recommend that every senator read that book frequently,” he said. Turning to a colleague, a non-southern senator whispered sneeringly, “This is one senator who has no intention ofever reading that book.” The senator who was not from the South thought he was demonstrating his sophistication, or perhaps his sense of humor. What he was really demonstrating was why, when liberals tried to fight on the Senate floor, they were like children in the southerners’ hands.

And the South’s power in the Senate rested on another keystone that was as solid as the chairmanships and the seniority rule, although it was not a rule, not even an informal one, but rather a rule’s absence. This missing rule was one that would force senators to stop talking about a bill, and vote on it.

A provision to make possible this most fundamental of legislative functions—a provision for “moving” the “previous question,” for a senator to make a motion demanding that a measure be brought to a vote without further debate or amendment—had been adopted by the British Parliament in 1604. America’s House of Representatives had adopted it in 1789, later—because it had so many members—coupling it with a provision that the maximum time a member could hold the floor was one hour. By 1948, some version of this motion had been incorporated into the functioning of forty-five of America’s forty-eight state legislatures, and of most of the legislative bodies in the world’s other countries as well. Indeed, the so-called “previous question” motion had been one of the first rules adopted by the Senate itself in 1789, but when the rules were modified, in 1806, it was omitted, as was perhaps understandable in a body created as insurance against the will of a majority of states being imposed over the wishes of a minority of states, since what better insurance could there be than to make sure that a measure embodying the majority will would never come to a vote so long as a small group of states, or for that matter one state (or for that matter one senator), didn’t want it to? For many years after 1806—for 111 years, to be precise—the only way a senator could be made to stop talking so that a vote could be taken on a proposed measure was if there was unanimous consent that he do so, an obvious impossibility. And there took place therefore so many “extended discussions” of measures to keep them from coming to a vote that the device got a name, “filibuster,” from the Dutch word vrijbuiter, which means “freebooter” or “pirate,” and which passed into the Spanish as filibustero, because the sleek, swift ship used by Caribbean pirates was called filibote, and into legislative parlance because the device was, after all, a pirating, or hijacking, of the very heart of the legislative process.

Like seniority, filibustering became a tool of the South early on. The first senatorial filibustero, in fact, was Randolph of Virginia, who in 1825 talked day after day to prevent a vote on a series of measures, proposed by President John Quincy Adams, that Randolph felt would give industrial New England an advantage over the agrarian South. During the decades after the Civil War, the filibuster would be used by senators of other sections or persuasions to block votes on a variety of subjects—the elder La Follette was one of the most aggressive filibusterers—but most frequently by southerners, and in 1872, at southern instigation, the device was strengthened by a precedent that held that, in the absence of any rule to the contrary, a senator could not be called to order for irrelevancy in a debate, that he could therefore prevent a vote on any bill by talking about any subject he chose.

A curb on the practice was enacted in 1917, after President Wilson had added a phrase to the American political lexicon by denouncing “a little group of willful men” (actually eleven senators, including La Follette and his fellow liberal George Norris) who had talked to death Wilson’s proposal to arm American merchantmen against German submarine attack. The Senate, at Wilson’s goading, passed a rule, Rule 22, permitting debate upon a “pending” measure to be closed off when, after a petition for such “cloture” was presented by sixteen senators, it was approved by two-thirds of the senators present and voting. (After a cloture motion was passed, each senator was allowed to speak for one hour before the vote was taken.)

The rule was drafted by a bipartisan committee, “whose stated purpose was to terminate successful filibustering,” Galloway says, but the committee had made a mistake, one of omission, leaving a loophole, and you couldn’t make mistakes against the South. While Rule 22 made cloture possible on any pending measure—any bill that had been brought to the floor to be dealt with next—other Senate rules required a motion, and vote, to make a measure pending, and the 1917 rule neglected to mention such a vote. A senator or group of senators could therefore begin talking as soon as a motion was made to bring to the floor a bill they didn’t like—and there was still no procedure to impose “cloture” and stop them from talking, and therefore a vote on that motion could never be taken, and the bill would never get to the floor, thus never reaching the stage at which cloture could be applied. Nor was this the only loophole. The other, also discovered by a southern senator, was created by an apparently unrelated clause in Rule 3, which said that each day’s session should be begun by reading the previous day’s Journal, or minutes. This reading was normally simply waived, or “suspended,” but, Rule 3 said, “the reading of the Journal shall not be suspended unless by unanimous consent; and when any motion shall be made to read or correct the same, it shall be deemed a privileged question, and proceeded with until disposed of.” One day in 1922, the Senate was about to take up a bill designed to stop the practice of lynching. Tall, courtly Pat Harrison of Mississippi sauntered up to the dais, and asked Parliamentarian Watkins if that meant that so long as he was discussing the Journal on the floor, cloture could not be imposed on him. Watkins told Harrison that was indeed the case, and Harrison and other southerners thereupon discussed the Journal, keeping from the Senate floor not only the anti-lynching bill but any other bill, until the bill’s sponsors gave up and withdrew it.

Like the seniority system, the filibuster was protected by a very powerful force: itself. Since the loophole in Rule 22 allowed any motion to bring a bill to the floor to be filibustered, bringing a civil rights bill to the floor would require a change in Rule 22. And changing Rule 22 would require a motion to change it—which could be filibustered. This was perhaps the ultimate legislative Catch-22: any attempt to close the loophole allowed the loophole to be used to keep it from being closed. And because of it there was no realistic possibility that the filibuster would be changed. The filibuster was not a device employed in normal Senate activities as the chairmanships were, since it was used mainly in cases of exceptional threat to the South. But the threat of the filibuster was always there—hanging over, and influencing, every attempt by the body to deal with matters dear to the South. The Senate’s tradition of unlimited debate was perhaps even more important to the South than the seniority system, as was demonstrated by the fact that while the South held a disproportionate share of committee chairmanships in the House as well as the Senate, there was no filibuster in the House, and that body therefore not infrequently passed civil rights legislation—which then died in the Senate.

The Senate, White summed up, “is, to most peculiar degree, a Southern Institution … growing at the heart of this ostensibly national assembly.” To a southern senator, White wrote, the Senate was “his great home.” And because of the southerners’ “entrenched position of minority” within the Democratic Party in the Senate, the home rested on a deep bedrock of power. “In the final decisions of the Senate it is nearly always the Southerners whose influence is most pervasive and persuasive.” Not only was the Senate “the South’s unending revenge … for Gettysburg,” he said, it was “the only place in the country where the South did not lose the war…. While his party has in general maintained a liberal and forward-looking outlook,” for generations the southern senator has “kept unchanged his dream of the past.” And, White said, as long as the South held the Senate—its great stronghold—that dream would continue unchanged.

THIS REALITY WAS in a way softened in the public consciousness by the trappings, and the values, of the Senate, as if their identity with the values of the South were what mattered. Courtesy and courtliness were characteristics of the southern aristocracy—and of the Senate, where these traits were not only esteemed but were reinforced by the body’s rules. The rules imposed a verbal impersonality on debate to ensure civility and formality. All remarks made on the floor were required to be addressed not directly to another senator but to “Mr. President” (the presiding officer at the time)—a device that functioned as a psychological barrier between antagonists. Senators speaking on the floor were also required to refer to each other only by title, a device which placed the emphasis on the office rather than the individual (“If I may venture to offer a reply to the distinguished senior Senator from North Dakota”) and was therefore, as a Senate historian notes, “a safeguard against asperities in debate and personalities of all kinds.” Referring to another senator by name—or by any form of the second person—was forbidden. “There is but one ‘You’ in the Chamber, and that is the Presiding Officer,” Senator George Hoar had said in 1909. “‘You’ can never under any circumstances be applied to an individual senator.” During the 1940s, as a Senate observer wrote, addressing a fellow senator in the second person was still “almost an unforgivable sin. It must always be in the third person.” Using exaggeration to make his point, Alben Barkley of Kentucky advised a freshman, “If you think a colleague is stupid, refer to him as ‘the able, learned and distinguished senator,’ but if you know he is stupid, refer to him as ’the very able, learned and distinguished senator.” The Senate rule—Rule 19—against “asperities” applied not only to individuals (“No Senator in debate shall directly or indirectly, by any form of words, impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator”) but to states (“No Senator in debate shall refer offensively to any State of the Union”). It was out of order not only for a senator to attack a colleague, but even to read on the floor an attack by someone else—a newspaper article or letter, for example; “when such matter by inadvertence has been read, by direction of the Senate, it has been expunged from the record,” says the Senate historian. And should a senator violate that edict, not only the senator attacked but any other senator, or the presiding officer, could call him to order, and “when a Senator shall be called to order” under Rule 19, “he shall sit down”—at once, without another word—“and not proceed without leave of the Senate,” leave which could only be granted by formal motion. And, says another historian, “To be called to order under Rule 19 was considered a disgrace then [during the 1940s and ’50s]. Your colleagues wouldn’t meet your eyes. You were in disgrace.” The decorum that characterized the floor of the United States Senate at mid-century was difficult even to imagine at the century’s end. So thoroughly had southern influence brought to the Senate floor the flavor—the graciousness, the formality, the civility (right down to a gift for “gracefully waving away mere political differences with an opponent”)—of the Southland that, in the words of Russell Baker, writing in 1961, the Senate’s manner was “as elaborately courteous as a Savannah lawyer’s.”

The South was a land of oratory, and many of the great moments in the Senate’s history, even during the dark postwar years, were, as White relates, moments when one of the “archaically eloquent” southern orators rose to make a full-dress speech.

He will begin softly, with wry self-deprecation, almost with an embarrassment of humility….

He will find to have been very sound, indeed, nearly all that has been said before, by foe and friend. And then, as he goes along and the clock hands slip by, the tone, at first imperceptibly, will change. The voice toward which men had been leaning more or less intently, so low and calm was it, will begin to rise in volume and to fall in tone. And at the end it has become a commanding pipe organ, rolling and thundering out before the wicked, the foolish and the insensitive.

The very philosophy on which the Senate had been founded “was peculiarly Southern both in flavor and structure,” White noted. The “most influential” of the Senate’s founders—Madison, Charles Pinckney and others—“were themselves men of Southern trait and Southern view,” he pointed out. They embodied in its very conception “a quite unhidden concept not only that the Institution should not be popular but that its personnel should be aristocratic.” One of the keystones of the philosophy on which they constructed it—“that providing for the equal voice of each state in the new Institution”—was of course the philosophy that has been cherished by the Senate, and the South, to this day. Another was continuity. “The breath of life of the Senate is, of course, continuity,” White wrote. “And … continuity of service is” the southerners’ “special property.”

So dominant was the southern senator within the Senate, in fact, that the public saw that institution in his image, an image of a senator with a flowing mane of gray hair, a cutaway coat, string tie, and an organ-like, melodic, mellifluous voice. The image had been embodied in the famous radio cartoon character, Senator Claghorne, whose unctuous drawl delighted America on the Fred Allen comedy show every Sunday night; Claghorne was the dominant image in the public mind of the American senator, part of the joke that the Senate had become.

BUT IT WAS a cruel joke.

The enormous power held by each of the southern committee chairmen individually was multiplied by their unity, by what White called a “oneness found nowhere else in politics.” The symbol was the legendary “Southern Caucus,” the meetings of the twenty-two southern senators which were held in the office of their leader, Richard Brevard Russell of Georgia, whenever crisis threatened—meetings that were, White said, “for all the world like reunions of a large and highly individualistic family whose members are nevertheless bound by one bond.” In those meetings, the southern position was agreed upon, its tactics mapped, its front made solid. Sometimes, leaving that office, its members would walk as a body to the Senate Chamber and enter together, in an unspoken show of unity. The tall double doors in the center of the Chamber’s rear wall would swing open, and there they would be: George of Georgia, Byrd of the Byrds of Virginia, Old Mack from Tennessee, Cotton Ed, and, in cutaways, string ties and flowing gray manes, Clyde Roark Hoey of North Carolina, who still wore a high wing collar, and Marse Tom Connally of Texas. Up in the Press Gallery, a reporter would whisper to his fellows, “The South has arrived.”

And of course the South had allies, and not alone from the border states of Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and West Virginia—states in which, during the Civil War, Confederate sympathies had run high. Its allies also included Republican conservatives who had been driven into their arms during the 1937 Court-packing fight, and had remained there ever since. And since these Republicans were from the safest Republican states, the essentially one-party bastions of conservatism in the Midwest and New England that also returned senators term after term, they, too, had long tenure—and the power that goes with it. So even during the rare Congresses in which the Democrats were in the minority, this conservative coalition, its power cemented into place by a firm admixture of seniority, still ruled the Senate, and the South still held its power there. Southerners helped GOP conservatives defeat liberal economic legislation, and in return these conservatives, most of them from states without enough black voters to punish them, tacitly refrained from supporting the civil rights legislation anathema to the South, and from breaking southern filibusters.

The coalition was, in fact, growing steadily stronger, as was shown by the fate of the major domestic bills that Roosevelt sent to Capitol Hill after 1937. Although he had won re-election in 1940 and 1944, two victories which might be considered an endorsement of the New Deal and a mandate to extend its liberal domestic policies, to pass new social legislation for the third of a nation still ill-clothed, ill-housed, ill-fed, not one of those bills had passed. A Congress dominated by southern conservatives may have given the President a free hand in running the war; on the domestic front, Roosevelt never got a single major domestic bill through Congress after the Court-packing fight.

OF ALL THE AREAS in which the Senate failed America, it failed most memorably on the issue that was the single most important issue of the time: race.

So strong was the South, with its conservative allies, in that body that sometimes it disdained to use the two loopholes that allowed filibusters to keep civil rights bills from coming to the floor. It let the bills come to the floor—and filibustered them there, confident that civil rights proponents could not muster the two-thirds vote necessary to impose cloture. Nor was this confidence misplaced. In January, and again in February, 1938, after an outbreak of horrifying lynchings in the South, anti-lynching bills had been introduced in the Senate. Southern filibusters were begun, cloture petitions were filed, and in neither case could even a simple majority, much less the needed two-thirds, be obtained.

Liberals had hoped that because of the contradiction between fighting for democracy abroad while denying it to some citizens at home, the war might shame Congress into allowing the passage of the most modest of civil rights proposals: to outlaw the poll tax, or to make permanent the Fair Employment Practices Commission or FEPC. While shame could move the House, however, it couldn’t budge the Senate. The House passed Roosevelt’s poll tax bill in 1942, and sent it to the Senate, where a filibuster led by Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi killed it. The Administration tried again in 1944. The House passed the bill again, and civil rights advocates mounted an all-out effort to persuade the Senate to act this time. Looking out over the packed visitors’ galleries, Drury saw some—not many, but some—black faces. “We seldom seem to have these visitors except when the poll tax or the FEPC is under discussion,” he wrote in his Senate Journal. “It is as though somebody had the idea that their presence might be a silent reproach….” The committee room was packed, too, “with hopeful Negroes who applaud the witnesses eagerly and from time to time stand in silent prayer that the bill will pass.” But, sitting in the Press Gallery, Drury also saw the double doors swing open, and “the poll-taxers suddenly trooped in, obviously just done with a conference.” And the reproach, he saw, was “utterly wasted on the southerners.”

So long as they felt threatened, felt that there was a significant danger that a filibuster might be cut off by a cloture vote, and that they therefore might need the support of at least a few moderate senators, the southerners veiled their arguments in principles palatable to moderates: in the sacredness of the Constitution and the sovereignty of the states. But as soon as they began to feel that they had enough support to win, the veil dropped away in private conversations to reveal what lay beneath. “Hell,” a young southern spokesman calmly told Drury in confidence one day in 1944, “this wouldn’t put niggers on the voting lists even if it did go through. Niggers don’t vote in my state and niggers aren’t going to vote in my state.” That, he said with a grin, was that. And, Drury noted, when the southerners felt totally secure, the veils were let fall on the Senate floor itself, as the southern senators, “leaving the realms of practical constitutionality where they had the company of sound men … repaired instead to the ancient bloody ground on which whites and ‘Nigras’ contend.” Senator Bankhead of Alabama (son of Senator Bankhead of Alabama) began the trend,

warning direly of a reviving Ku Klux Klan “if you force this on us.” Smacking his lips and managing to look dour, kindly and upset all at once, he remarked with the most exasperating yet the most innocently patronizing air that if you “treat the Nigras right, treat them good, give them justice, they’ll stand by you…. But when you threaten white supremacy, that’s something else. Our women, our children, our institutions” are in danger. The K.K.K., if need be, will ride again.

(“Dotted here and there through the galleries, Negroes, many in uniform, sat silent and impassively listening,” Drury wrote in his Journal. “Of the hopeless despair that must have been in some of their hearts they gave no sign.”) Burnet Rhett Maybank of South Carolina added that “Regardless of what decisions the Supreme Court may make and regardless of what laws Congress may pass,” the South would handle black Americans as it saw fit. “Mark my words,” a southerner told Drury, Maybank “is not joking; the South isn’t joking any more.” Things were coming “to a boil…. Back them [the southern senators] into the corner a little further and see what they do.” Drury felt that he had not even begun to comprehend the depth of southern rage and resentment over the proposed federal interference in its affairs. “As far as the eye can see there is discontent and bitterness, faint intimations of a coming storm like a rising wind moving through tall grass….” And at the climax of the 1944 debate, when the vote came—the vote on cloture for which a two-thirds vote was required—not only was there once again not two-thirds, there was, once again, not even a majority; thirty-six senators voted for cloture, forty-four voted against.

THEN, IN 1945, there was a new President, who had been one of them—a senator popular with his colleagues—until just four months before, and, as David McCullough writes, conservative senators of both parties were “happily claiming that the New Deal was as good as dead, the ‘Roosevelt nonsense’ was over, because they ‘knew Harry Truman.’”

Truman’s first address to Congress was what McCullough calls “a rude awakening” to his former colleagues: a call not merely to continue the New Deal but to extend it, to “widen our horizon further.” With Japan’s surrender soon thereafter, the need for new initiatives became more compelling. The war had brought homebuilding virtually to a halt; the families of hundreds of thousands of returning veterans were living in inadequate housing; the new President proposed a broad federal program to construct a million new housing units, as well as to provide rent supplements to enable lower-income families to live in them; and to make at least a start on clearing the nation’s slums. Social Security had spread a safety net between millions of the nation’s families and the bottomless abyss of old age in an industrialized society, but tens of millions were still unprotected; Truman called for coverage for an additional three million workers, as well as for an increase in benefits eroded by inflation. He asked for a higher minimum wage for workers on the low end of the industrial totem pole, who in 1945 were still working for sixty cents an hour, and for broad new assistance for the unemployed.

Those were only the first of Harry Truman’s demands on Congress. In succeeding messages, he proposed a federal education program of broader dimensions, and of a new focus: on poorer states. He proposed tax reforms to shift the burden off “the little man” onto the corporations which had reaped huge profits from the war. Health insurance that would make the miracles of modern medical care available to all citizens without regard to their ability to pay had been a dream of liberals for decades; now Truman proposed a system of national health insurance. And the new President went further on race than his great predecessor had dared. Injustice fell most heavily on the twelve million Americans whose skins were black—no meaningful progress against social and economic racial discrimination had been made since the Civil War. Truman not only resubmitted Roosevelt’s FEPC and poll tax legislation but also proposed what Roosevelt had not: bans on racial discrimination in schools, hotels, restaurants, and theaters, and, to enforce these laws, the creation of a new Civil Rights Commission and of a new civil rights enforcement arm within the Department of Justice. Thirty-one black Americans were known to have died at the hands of lynch mobs—mobs that went unpunished by local officials and juries—since 1940; Truman proposed making lynching a crime under federal law.

Congress knew how to deal with such presidential presumption. Truman’s major domestic proposals were presented in September, 1945. One of them—to outlaw the poll tax—was passed by the House; it was filibustered—and killed—in the Senate. As for the others, when December came, every one had been blocked or ignored. And December, of course, brought other priorities. “Congressmen, who habitually put off thoughts of legislation with the first glimpse of holly, were scrambling again to get home for the holidays—no matter what kind of a mess they might be leaving,” Time reported. “And a mess it was.”

The mess continued through the congressional session of 1946. November of that year brought a change in party control of Congress—the Republicans won both houses for the first time in eighteen years—but not in philosophic control; in 1947 and 1948, the conservative coalition, now headed not by a Democrat but by Ohio’s coldly aristocratic Senator Robert Taft, still ruled; it was, as U.S. News & World Report noted, “rewriting the Truman legislative program, line by line.” Tax relief was indeed given—but mostly to corporations and to upper-income taxpayers. The minimum wage was left unchanged. Three years after the President had proposed a low-cost homebuilding program to meet a desperate national need, there was no homebuilding legislation. Three years after he had proposed a massive program to improve education, there was no education legislation. The major domestic accomplishment of the Eightieth Congress was a Labor-Management Relations Act, the “Taft-Hartley Law,” which union leaders called the “slave labor law.” On some issues during these years, the House, despite the dominance of conservative committee chairmen, had given in to the public eagerness for change. But when it did, the Senate stood firm. In May, 1946, with the nation paralyzed by a railroad strike and editorial writers hysterical, Truman appeared before a joint session of Congress to ask for legislation that would allow him to assume government control of vital industries hit by strikes, to punish defiant union leaders, and to draft strikers into the military. One house of Congress—the lower house—rushed to comply, by a 306–13 margin. The other house didn’t. Confronted by the spectre of federal intervention in business, the Senate, refusing to bow to the hysteria of the moment, voted against the bill, 70 to 13.

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OCCASIONALLY THE HOUSE seemed swayed—almost despite itself—by cries for justice. On the thorniest issue, the issue on which the House’s defenses had crumbled more than once, the Senate stood like a rock.

“My very stomach turned over when I learned that Negro soldiers, just back from overseas, were being dumped out of army trucks in Mississippi and beaten,” Harry Truman wrote in a letter at this time. “When the mob gangs can take … people out and shoot them in the back, and everybody in the surrounding country is acquainted with who did the shooting and nothing is done about it, that country is in a pretty bad fix from the law enforcement standpoint.” In a special message to Congress in 1948, the President repeated his pleas for more effective laws to ban the poll tax and to protect the right to vote, to strengthen and make permanent the FEPC, to end discrimination in interstate travel by train, bus, and airplane—and he called for a federal law against “the crime of lynching, against which I cannot speak too strongly.” Tom Connally denounced Truman’s message as “a lynching of the Constitution.” The actions of other southern senators, as David McCullough writes, spoke as loudly as their words. Much as he usually enjoyed attending the Democrats’ annual Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Washington, Senator Olin Johnston of South Carolina said he would boycott it this year because Truman would be the guest of honor, and “because, as he explained to reporters, he and his wife might be seated beside a ‘Nigra.’” (He needn’t have worried. The three black Americans among the eleven hundred guests were seated at a table in the rear.) And of course in 1948—as in the previous three years of Truman’s presidency—no civil rights legislation was passed. During the thirty-one years since the passage of the cloture bill “to terminate successful filibustering,” cloture had been invoked nineteen times—and passed four times, the last time in 1927. And none of these cloture petitions had concerned civil rights legislation. The Senate had never—not once—overridden a filibuster on civil rights.

Public contempt for Congress was growing steadily. Journalists discussed the institution in clichés: “The inefficiency of Congress is a national scandal,” Richard Strout wrote. Academics placed its inefficiency in broader context. Yale Professor Wallace Hamilton said that because of congressional ineptitude, “the life of representative government is at stake.” Commentators made jokes about it. “The Senate’s rules provide that the Senate may not perform its duties,” Russell Baker was to say. There was, in a way, a national consensus on the issue. “For generations,” Fortune was to say, “Americans swore that there was no better government in the world or in history…. Is it the truth? It no longer is. Now [there is] a situation that admits of no national complacency: the legislative machinery, which is the heart of democracy, is breaking down.” Even many congressmen agreed; as one said, “The people think we are a bunch of clowns.” And in particular the Senate, whose incompetence had been thrown into dramatically sharp relief by the flames of Pearl Harbor, and, since the war, by its use of the colorful filibuster, was viewed—with anger—as the principal obstruction to America’s majority will. As Russell Baker was to write, “For years the House diligently passed comprehensive civil rights legislation and the Southern minority in the Senate just as regularly killed it.” The Senate had been an object of ridicule for almost a century; “never,” one of its historians was to write, had Americans been “more critical of the United States Senate than in the years which followed World War II.” “I’ve never seen such chaos,” Alben Barkley said.

In 1948, President Truman ran against the “Do-Nothing Eightieth Congress”—how deep a chord he hit when on his come-from-behind cross-country whistlestop tour he said it was “run by a bunch of old mossbacks still living back in the 1890s” was demonstrated by the election results (and by the roars of approval when he told audiences, “After a new Congress is chosen, maybe we’ll get one that will work in the interests of the people and not the interests of the men who have all the money”). When, before the election, in a political masterstroke, he called Congress into special session, demanding that it pass some of the legislation he had advocated (and that the Republican platform had advocated, too), GOP national campaign manager Herbert Brownell told congressional Republicans that it might be a good idea to make at least a gesture at passing some of that legislation, particularly some relating to civil rights, since the black vote was becoming an important factor in presidential elections.

But when Truman entered the House to deliver his speech opening the special session, some senators and representatives did not even rise from their seats. “No, we’re not going to give that fellow anything,” Senator Taft said. What did the Senate care about public opinion? Its opinion about majority rule had boiled over repeatedly during the Truman Administration, an opinion held not only by Senate demagogues like Bilbo (who had taken the floor to say that “a mob is a majority; without the filibuster the minority would be at the mercy of the majority”) but by Senate grandees like Tydings, who, asked on the Senate floor whether democracy was not “predicated on the rule of majority,” replied, shouting in anger: “The rule of the majority. The rule of votes. Majority to Hades! The rule of the majority! The rule that has brought more bloodshed and turmoil and cruelty on this earth than any other thing I know of!” Liberals, and, most infuriatingly, that liberal Washington press corps, might criticize the filibuster, but the southern senators worshiped it: it was their defense against that despised majority. Any threat to the filibuster they regarded as a threat to the rights of man. To a request to impose cloture, the stately Walter George solemnly intoned: “We are called upon to go Nazi.” “It was cloture that crucified Christ on the cross,” Tydings cried.

When emotions rose, the southern senators couldn’t even be bothered to conceal the fact that it was not “Nigras” alone whom they despised. Mississippi’s Bilbo addressed a letter to a New York woman of Italian descent, “Dear Dago.” The Magnolia State’s other senator, James O. Eastland (who would some years later stare coldly down a committee table at Senator Jacob Javits of New York, a Jew, and say, “I don’t like you—or your kind”), now said that if the FEPC bill was constitutional “ten thousand Jewish drygoods merchants represent a discrimination against the Anglo-Saxon branch of the white race” and Congress should therefore “limit the number of Jews in interstate business.” It wasn’t only Italians and Jews whom the southerners wanted kept in their places. While Jim Dombrowski of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare was testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Eastland repeatedly sneered at his “typically old Southern name.” And of course there were always the Native Americans. Defending American businessmen who did not want to employ them, Senator Bankhead explained that “There is something peculiar about an Indian which causes the white American not to want to be too closely associated with him.”

“This is the spectacle presented by the United States in the wake of a war against fascism and racism,” I. F. Stone wrote caustically in The Nation in 1948. A majority of the American people might endorse Truman’s proposals, not merely on civil rights but on a dozen other issues, and in towns and cities across the United States audiences might cheer the President’s assault on the Capitol Hill “Do-Nothings”—the Senate didn’t care. To many senators the New Deal was nothing more or less than “socialism,” and in opposing it, they were simply doing their duty. The majority might call for change—social change, economic change; these senators knew what a majority was: the majority was “the mob.” They had been elected to protect America against the mob. Against long odds, a President had just swept all before him. What was a President to them, to these senators who said, “We were here before he came, and we’ll be here after he’s gone”?

And, of course, the Senate—particularly these southern senators who dominated it—didn’t have to care. The six-year terms and the staggering of those terms decreed by the Founding Fathers had armored the Senate as a whole against public opinion in the nation as a whole; the majority will of the United States could reach the Senate of the United States only in very diluted form—“the Senate, as a Senate,” could indeed “never be repudiated.” And by decreeing that in the Senate each state would have the same two votes regardless of population, the Fathers had further ensured that within the Senate, population wouldn’t matter—that the majority wouldn’t matter. The right of unlimited debate—a logical outgrowth of the Founders’ insistence on protecting minority rights—had bolted around the small states yet another layer of armor against the majority will. Nor could national public opinion touch an individual senator. Each senator was answerable only to the will of the majority of voters in his own state, and of course the stands the southern senators were taking did not hurt but helped them with those voters. And thanks to the seniority rule, once these senators were re-elected, the only thing that mattered was that they had been re-elected: their inexorable progress to the committee chairmanships would continue. The Senate decided who would hold its posts of power—and the Senate decided alone.

The 1948 elections proved the point. Infuriated by the liberalism of their party’s President and their party’s platform, which actually included a fairly strong civil rights plank, a States Rights Party was formed, with its own presidential candidate, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who denounced the FEPC as “Communistic,” Truman’s proposed integration of the armed services as “un-American,” and said, “There’s not enough troops in the Army to force the southern people to admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our churches.” But despite all the furor engendered by the new party, it carried a mere four states. Not only had President Truman won, he had won by turning the election into a referendum on Congress. In terms of majority rule, the South had been thoroughly repudiated. Although Truman had won, however, the southern senators hadn’t lost. A liberal tide had washed over the rest of the country, as it had washed over the country in 1904 and 1912 and 1936. But while it had swept a liberal majority into the Senate, not a single southerner standing for re-election had been defeated. The majority party—in both houses of Congress—would be Democratic, not Republican. But in both House and Senate, the committee chairmanships would again be held by southerners. If anything, southern power on Capitol Hill would be stronger, not weaker; the attribute which in the Senate meant power was seniority, and seniority was inexorable and cumulative; the senators who would return in January would return with more—not less—of that asset. The South’s point of view might have been repudiated; its “position of entrenched minority” in the Senate was untouched.

Although Truman had won on the basis of his “Fair Deal” program, that program’s fate would still be controlled by anti-Fair Deal southerners. And in the unlikely event that Truman’s proposals somehow emerged from committee, there was still the filibuster in the Senate. What was the legislation that had been defeated in the Senate in 1948? Legislation for civil rights, for aid to education, for aid to housing, for a fairer minimum wage, for better health care. An entire agenda of social justice—to a considerable extent endorsed by the nation—had been blocked in the Senate. Similar legislation had been blocked in the Senate for a decade and more. There was no reason, despite Truman’s victory, to think it would pass now.

The Senate’s Golden Age had ended almost a century before. During the ensuing decades, the institution had been subtly altered, decade by decade, into something significantly different from the body that had been envisioned by the Founding Fathers. They had wanted it to be independent, a place of wisdom and deliberation armored against outside forces. But the rise inside the Senate itself of forces they had not sufficiently foreseen—the rise of parties and party caucuses, and of party discipline; the transformation of America’s infant industries into gigantic economic entities which had representatives sitting in the Senate itself—had undermined the Senate’s independence from within, and the impact of these new forces on the Senate had been heightened because the armor against outside forces remained in place. Still protected against the people and the President, both of which wanted social progress, the Senate was unprotected against internal forces that opposed social progress, and that were indeed making it much less a place of wisdom and deliberation. Other internal developments—most importantly, seniority and the filibuster—had further distorted the Founders’ dream. They had envisioned the Senate as the moderating force in government, as the cooler of the popular will; cool had become cold, had become ice, ice in which, for decades, with only a few brief exceptions, the popular desire for social change had become frozen. Designed as the deliberative power, the Senate had become instead the negative power, the selfish power. The “necessary fence” against executive and popular tyranny had been transformed, by party rule and by the seniority rule, into something thicker and higher—into an impenetrable wall against the democratic impulses it had originally been supposed only to “refine” and “filter,” into a dam against which waves of social reform, attempts to ameliorate the human condition, dashed themselves in vain. Except for brief moments—the beginning of Wilson’s presidency, for example, and the Hundred Days of Roosevelt’s—when the floodgates in the dam suddenly swung wide and the tides swept through, cleansing the great Republic, the Founders’ armor had resisted every attempt by others to force them open; the Senate had been designed as the “firm” body; it had become too firm—too firm to allow the reforms the Republic needed.

Never had the dam been more firm than during the last decade, the decade since the conservative coalition had learned its strength. During that decade, despite the mandate of three presidential elections, it had stood across and blocked the rising demand for social justice, had stood so solidly that it seemed too strong ever to be breached.

In January, 1949, when Lyndon Johnson arrived in it, it was still standing.

*After a revision of the Senate rules in 1921, the seniority that determined rank within a committee was seniority within that committee, not in the Senate as a whole.

*Although the House and Senate Office Buildings were originally quite similar in design, a fourth story was added to the House Building in 1908. (To ease overcrowding, a second House Office Building was built in 1933.) Trying to economize, the House used imitation marble and limestone in the interior; the Senate insisted on the finest marble throughout the interior, at an additional cost of about a million and a half dollars. The contrast in the cornerstone-laying of the two buildings displayed the difference in philosophies. The cornerstone-laying for the House Office Building, in 1905, was carried out with pageantry and speeches, including one by President Theodore Roosevelt: his celebrated “muckraking” speech. The Senate instructed the Capitol architect to “omit everything that would give the laying of the stone any prominence.” There were no speeches at all; as the Washington Post reported, “workmen went about the job as if it were an ordinary piece of stone.” Only a few spectators—and, so far as can be determined, no senators—were present.

*The coffered panels in the ceiling would, decades later, be painted crimson and outlined with gold leaf.