The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act (29 page)

Johnson then told them about the present state of the legislation. “He said he was running into great difficulty,” said Farmer, “but he’s got to get that bill through, he’s got to get it through, it’s of vital importance.” During the meeting he made a point of taking a call from Soapy Williams, one of the most high-profile white civil rights supporters in the president’s inner circle. The men came away impressed. “LBJ is a man of great ego and great power,” King told some of his aides after the meeting. “He is a pragmatist and a man of pragmatic compassion. It just may be that he’s going to go where John Kennedy couldn’t.”
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While Johnson and the LCCR worked their separate campaigns to get the Rules Committee moving, the Committee for Fundamental American Freedoms was also shifting its operation into high gear. The committee had already decided to keep its powder dry on the House, where the liberal majority made passage almost inevitable, and instead focus on softening up public sentiment for the coming showdown in the Senate. In the October 12 issue of
National Review
, James Kilpatrick wrote an article that provided the basic intellectual playbook for the Southern Democrats’ opposition to the bill; almost every argument that had or would emanate from the mouths of the anti-civil-rights legislators was expressed in his relatively brief piece. He attacked both the individual planks—Title I was an unnecessary infringement on states’ rights to control their own elections, Title II was an invasion of private property, Title VI gave the president dictatorial power over the federal budget—and made general claims about the bill’s appropriateness. Some were anodyne: “In a calmer climate,” he wrote, “the bill’s defects would be readily apparent.” Others relied on painfully tortured logic. Discrimination is not bad, he claimed, because it happens all the time: “When a Virginian buys cigarettes made in Virginia, for that reason alone, as opposed to cigarettes made in Kentucky or North Carolina, he discriminates,” Kilpatrick wrote. “Every one of these acts of ‘discrimination’ imposes some burden upon interstate commerce.”
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By December, John Satterfield had secured funding for the committee into 1964, and he was lining up senators to deliver targeted speeches at the outset of the filibuster, a set of opening salvos that he hoped would knock the bill off its momentum. Lister Hill, an Alabama senator with a strong pro-labor record, had agreed to give a speech about how the bill would demolish union hiring and seniority practices. “Things are rocking along very well,” Satterfield wrote in a December 3 letter to William Loeb.
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It did not help that dissension was growing among the fragile bipartisan coalition that had moved the bill out of the Judiciary Committee. The Republicans were afraid that the Democrats were maneuvering to embarrass them over the discharge petition, and that they would look like obstructionists if they did not do something to get the bill out of the Rules Committee. On December 11, Republicans on the House floor announced they would call up the civil rights bill using the Calendar Wednesday procedure, a rarely used—and even more rarely successful—process by which the House gives each committee the right to bring a bill directly to the floor without going through the Rules Committee; the bill is then debated for two hours and then voted on.
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Though the procedure is designed specifically to let committees bypass the Rules Committee, it is considered a nuclear option, and a Pyrrhic victory for a bill—with only two hours for debate, there is little opportunity to organize votes or win over wavering representatives. And it was not a practical option for the civil rights bill, since the committees would be called alphabetically, and the Judiciary Committee was the tenth out of eighteen—giving the Southern Democratic chairmen of preceding committees ample opportunity to hem and haw and draw out the procedure until the day ended.

Still, the Republicans announced their intention that morning to go ahead with the maneuver—if nothing else, it would force the Democrats, who were committed to the discharge petition route, to go on record opposing a maneuver to save the bill. “The Republicans who developed this civil rights bill” were now being shut out of managing it, charged John Lindsay on the House floor. The Democrats’ position was “political demagoguery at its lowest level,” said New York’s Frank J. Becker and Washington’s Thomas M. Pelly. A heated debate erupted. Richard Bolling, the liberal Judiciary Committee member from Missouri, denied that the Democrats were playing politics; rather, it was a pragmatic question. “Calendar Wednesday is an impractical, if not impossible way to consider the civil rights bill,” he said. But it was also very easy for the Republicans to initiate: because Calendar Wednesday was a regular part of the House daily schedule, but was almost always done away with by unanimous agreement of all the members present, all the Republicans had to do was refuse to consent to skip that part of the agenda. To head off such a move, Albert offered a motion to adjourn the House early, which passed 214 to 166 on largely party lines. That may have saved the Democrats from voting against the civil rights bill, but it also deepened partisan hostility at a crucial time. And while McCulloch later insisted that he “did not think the partisan sparring would endanger the bill’s bipartisan support,” the discharge petition count remained frozen at 150.
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The year ended with no real public sense of when the bill would finally get moving. But privately, Clarence Brown had been slowly increasing pressure on Smith to act. Brown, like McCulloch and Halleck, was an unlikely civil rights champion. He was an acolyte of the isolationist, archconservative Ohio senator Robert Taft, and he tended to work closely with Smith to stymie liberal legislation that came through the Rules Committee. Like McCulloch, he was born in rural Ohio, and worked there until entering politics. And like McCulloch, as a young boy he had drunk deeply from the Midwestern abolitionist tradition; born less than thirty years after the end of the Civil War, it is likely that he knew more than a few proud Ohio veterans and antislavery activists. Brown’s district was also home to a segment of the Underground Railroad, and later to Wilberforce University and Central State University, both historically black institutions. Finally, again like McCulloch, Brown spent time as a young man in the South—in his case, as a college student at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. The town and the university were steeped in Southern history: Robert E. Lee had been president of the institution after the Civil War; across a broad parade ground stood the Virginia Military Institute, where many Confederate Army leaders had studied or taught, including its most famous professor, Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. There can be little doubt that Brown saw Jim Crow racism up close, and like McCulloch was marked by it for life.
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As soon as the bill cleared the Judiciary Committee, Brown told Smith that he expected the Rules Committee to take it up in a timely manner. At first, Smith was diffident, though he knew well that without Brown and the conservative Republican committee members he controlled, he could not hold off consideration forever. Brown, in turn, was getting pressure from Halleck and McCulloch. On December 4, five days before Celler introduced the petition, Brown met with Smith and told him that “the heat was getting so great”—and he made clear that with the committee’s non-Southern Democrats lined up in favor of the bill, it would take just two or three Republicans to form a pro-bill majority that would, under the House rules, be able to force Smith to move the bill forward. “I don’t want to run over you, but . . .” Brown told the chairman.
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In fact, underneath the partisan contretemps, Brown, Halleck, and McCulloch were working closely with John McCormack and Albert on a bipartisan plan to rescue the bill from Smith. Without informing Johnson, the Democrats agreed not to push the discharge petition too strongly, and it is telling that the signature of neither Democrat ever appeared on the sheet. In exchange, Brown said he would give Smith until the beginning of the next session of Congress to open hearings, and if he still refused, Brown and his fellow Rules Committee Republicans would join the liberals in a coup against the chairman to send the bill to the floor. Johnson must have eventually signed on to the deal, because, as Robert Loevy, a political scientist who was serving a Senate fellowship in the office of California’s Thomas Kuchel that year, observed, White House pressure for a discharge petition petered out by the end of the year.
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But if the pressure in Washington was waning, a new, unprecedented source of pressure was waxing, far from the capital. In South Bend, Des Moines, Bismarck, and countless other Midwestern cities and towns, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish religious leaders were organizing their own campaigns for progress on the bill. The National Council of Churches, under J. Irwin Miller, led the way. Since the council’s September conference in Lincoln, Nebraska, hundreds and then thousands of civil-rights-minded church people had canvassed the region, delivering sermons, leading letter-writing campaigns, visiting congressmen, and organizing rallies, all in places where the sight of black skin was a rare occurrence and civil rights was a faraway concern. Much of the organizing was done by Victor Reuther, Walter Reuther’s brother, who worked for the UAW as well as the NCC’s Commission on Religion and Race. Reuther was a union man through and through, but he also understood that unions had little influence in the Republican Midwest—and yet that was where the survival of the bill might well be decided. Reuther organized the Lincoln conference, and in October he created a program in which teams of activists went from town to town drumming up support behind the bill, “like circuit-riding Methodist evangelists,” in the words of historian James F. Findlay.
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As the year came to an end, the campaigns became increasingly sophisticated, leveraging the broad intelligence network provided by the LCCR’s constituent organizations. Lists of congressmen with their religious affiliations and even home churches and synagogues circulated widely. The NCC maintained an extensive reporting system, so that any time a member had contact with a representative or senator, the information gleaned—would he back the discharge petition, would he vote for the bill—could be analyzed and used to fine-tune lobbying efforts. A half dozen religious groups, from the Friends Committee for National Legislation—the lobbying arm of the Quakers—to B’nai B’rith, sent regular newsletters with detailed, updated information for letter writers and rally participants. One particular tactic worked wonders: as soon as a representative boarded a plane at National Airport in Washington to go back home, word would go out—oftentimes from a sympathetic member of the representative’s own staff—to his minister or priest, who would then just happen to be at the airport when the representative landed. The minister would strike up a conversation, and quickly hit on the pressing matter of civil rights. Miller had his own spin on that tactic: whenever he was leaving Washington on his private plane, he would offer a few Midwestern Republicans a flight home—and then lobby them relentlessly, twenty thousand feet in the air.
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Of particular effectiveness was James Hamilton’s contact list of five thousand influential, activist church figures across the Midwest. He regularly sent them detailed updates about the bill’s progress; he also sent “immediate action memos” to a smaller group of ministers when he needed, say, a flurry of phone calls to a key representative just before a big vote.
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In the end, the church pressure worked where unions and civil rights groups—and Democratic presidents—could not. Republican representatives returned from their Christmas vacations complaining of the near-constant visits, letters, and phone calls from their ministers and fellow congregants urging them to support the bill. Nor could they ignore two pressing facts: nearly two thirds of all Americans supported the bill, and nearly four out of five approved of the job President Johnson was doing. The case for obstructing civil rights legislation had never been thinner, and the case for getting it out of the Rules Committee—if not voting for it—had never been stronger.
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As early as December 5, the day after Brown had first confronted Judge Smith over the bill, Smith had said in a formal statement that while he thought the bill was a monstrosity, “I realize the great national interest that has been aroused on both sides of this controversy and it is my intent, with the approval of the majority of the Rules Committee, to hold hearings on this bill reasonably soon in January.”
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Two weeks later, he went even further, virtually conceding defeat. “I know something about the facts of life around here,” he said, “and I know that many members want this bill considered. They could take it away from me, and they can do it any minute they want to.” Smith was not giving up, but he was recognizing reality: in the present political environment, he could slow the bill for a few weeks, but there was nothing he could do to stop it. As he told Robert Kimball in January, “You’ll have to run over us; we know that, and we know we’ll be run over.”
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On the morning of January 9, 1964, Chairman Smith gaveled to order the Rules Committee hearings on the civil rights bill. It was a cold yet humid morning—a particularly enervating climatic combination that Washington seems to excel in—and some fifty reporters, along with assorted onlookers and scores of House staff, crammed sweatily into the forty-five-seat Room H-313. The room was at the northern end of the Cannon House Office Building, a stunning neoclassical pile designed by Carrère and Hastings, the same firm that built the New York Public Library. Out its windows, behind Smith, the audience could see the equally imposing Library of Congress.
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