The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act (30 page)

The room felt like a sauna, but the real heat was on Smith: the night before, Johnson, in his first State of the Union address, had reiterated his call for rapid action on the bill. “Let this session of Congress be known as the session which did more for civil rights than the last hundred sessions combined,” the president had said at the very beginning of the speech.
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And yet Smith was not going to let the bill roll through his committee. He had opened the hearings as promised, but he did not say how long he would go before closing them. This was the man who had retreated to his 170-acre northern Virginia farm to delay hearings on the 1957 civil rights bill. He claimed a barn had caught fire, prompting Speaker Sam Rayburn to quip, “I knew Howard Smith would do most anything to block a civil rights bill, but I never knew would resort to arson.” If anyone expected the bill to now sail through the Rules Committee, they did not know Howard Smith.
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Smith called Celler as his first witness. “Mr. Celler,” he said, “there is a rumor around that you want to get a rule of H.R. 7152.”
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“I confirm the rumor,” Celler replied.

Smith, along with Brown, proceeded to grill Celler relentlessly for two days. It was not the Brooklynite’s finest hour. He offered vague, contradictory answers to questions about arcane but important details of the bill. He denied, against all evidence, supporting the parts of the subcommittee bill “which I felt were too drastic,” adding, “I personally did not agree to all terms of the subcommittee bill.” At one point Katherine St. George, a Republican from New York, leaned over to Smith and said, “You’ve got him pretty well tangled up.”

“I didn’t tangle him up,” Smith replied. “He tangled himself up. He just doesn’t know what’s in this bill.”
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Celler’s efforts at sympathy for the South came off as patronizing and careless. “I am not unaware of the price that must be paid for the advancement and the culmination of the cause of civil rights,” he said. “It is easy for myself and other Northerners to demand that some change their mores, their customs, wrench away from tradition, but it is like asking one to sever hand from wrist. I wish, truly, it could be otherwise, but unfortunately it cannot. The die is cast.”
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Most of Smith’s and Brown’s questions focused on the bill’s last few days before Celler’s committee. When pushed to explain why he and the Justice Department only sent copies of their final, compromise bill to their allies on the committee the night before the vote, Celler replied with mock amazement—there was no need to do so earlier, since the final version, he said, was substantively the same as the subcommittee draft. “The bill that was reported by the subcommittee practically contained every single subject that is in the bill before you now,” he said, “so that if anyone says they had not seen that bill or its terms or its phrases, it is beyond my comprehension how they could say that.”

Smith refused to let Celler’s audacious historical revisionism stand. “I am astonished if the parliamentarian told you that you could railroad a bill through without giving members the opportunity to discuss it,” he said.

Celler feigned offense. “That is a rather unusual word and sort of taboo—‘railroad’—we do not railroad anything through.”

“Would you prefer strong-arm?” Smith replied.
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Later Smith hit Celler with a surprise punch. “I have just received a letter this morning, which I was going to bring to your attention later, from the National Women’s Party,” he said. “They want to know why you did not include sex in this bill. Why did you not?”

Before Celler could respond, St. George chortled, “If I may be facetious, is that’’—sex, that is—‘‘another dim memory, Mr. Celler?”
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But Celler, who was never one to pass up a chance at shtick, played along. “It reminds me of the Frenchman who was going up the Empire State Building in New York. Somebody said, ‘How do you like it?’ He said, ‘Well it reminds me of sex.’ ‘Reminds you of sex? Why is that?’ The answer was, ‘Everything reminds me of sex.’”

Smith was in no mood to play along. Despite his segregationist beliefs, he was also a longtime advocate for women’s rights. He had sponsored repeated efforts to pass an Equal Rights Amendment, and he was a close friend of Alice Paul, the founder of the National Women’s Party (NWP). “You did not answer my question,” he told Celler.

“This is a civil rights bill,” Celler said.

“Don’t women have civil rights?”

“They have lots of them. They are supermen.”

Smith pushed harder. “I have not found out yet why you did not put sex in.”

“Do you want to put it in, Mr. Chairman?” Celler replied.

“I think I will offer an amendment. The National Women’s Party were serious about it.”

After Celler came McCulloch. Smith tried to pin him down on the bill’s final few hours, to admit that it had, indeed, been railroaded. How had he managed to read the bill so quickly? Smith asked. “Because of my receding red hair,” McCulloch joked. But he was just parrying; he had no intention of selling out Celler. “Really, I said so much about every item on this bill for months and months, more time for explanation would have been unnecessary.” McCulloch’s performance over the next day and a half was everything Celler’s was not: serious, clear, impassioned, witty when necessary but always tacking back to the heart of the bill. “My interest in civil rights legislation is to give a governmental urge and help to a thing that is necessary if we are not indefinitely to have two classes in this country.”
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McCulloch could hardly imagine it, he said, “if, by reason of my red hair, my darling daughter could not go to the municipal swimming pool in my town if she wanted to. I have great feelings, strong feelings, against any system which would prohibit my son from playing softball, basketball, or skiing in the public park which is financed by me as a negro.”

Of all the obvious divisions between the supporters and opponents of the bill—race, region, religion—none was as stark as the mark of empathy. Men as different as McCulloch and Celler, who disagreed on almost everything else, still managed to come together behind government action on civil rights because they had the moral imagination to see themselves in the place of a black American. Those who did not have that capacity, or refused to exercise it, managed to utter such inanities as “If I were cutting corns, I would want to know whose feet I would have to be monkeying around with. I would want to know whether they smelled good or bad”—as Mississippi representative William Colmer said during the hearing.
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With Celler and McCulloch out of the way, Smith turned to the hearing’s main event: more than a week of testimony from Southern Democratic representatives lambasting the bill, the Judiciary Committee, the Kennedy administration, and the civil rights movement itself. The speeches were mostly rehashes of the Southern Democrats’ arguments from the summer—the 1883 Civil Rights Cases prevented the use of the Equal Protection Clause to bar discrimination; the states had the right to run their own elections—along with new attacks on the FEPC. They seemed to compete over who could draw the most grandiose, frightening caricatures of the bill. Representative William Tuck of Virginia claimed that “the right of homeowners to freely build, occupy, rent, lease, or sell their homes is destroyed under Title VI.” (He also said, “We have lived in peace and harmony between the races for a period of more than 300 years, more than any other place in the Western hemisphere.”) Not to be outdone, Alabama’s George Huddleston Jr. said, “If this is a watered down version of the subcommittee’s civil rights bill, as the chairman of the full committee has said, the water was saturated with hemlock.” But the best line of the hearing was uttered by John Dowdy of Texas. Attacking the speed and support with which the bill had moved through the full Judiciary Committee, he said, “If you ran a skunk across the floor and had ‘civil rights’ written on the side of it, it would be the thing to vote for because it is called civil rights.”
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While the Rules Committee prattled, Lyndon Johnson was doing his best to clear a path for the bill once it left the House. His first task was to get the tax cut bill out of the Senate Finance Committee, where it had been stalled by its chairman, Harry Byrd of Virginia. Byrd was a segregationist and enemy of the bill, but he was also a budget hawk. He held up the tax bill in part to derail the civil rights bill, but also to win spending concessions from the president. On December 4, Byrd had told Johnson that he would release the tax cut bill if the White House could trim its upcoming budget to $100 billion. Johnson then spent the next several weeks driving his advisers and budget experts to trim spending wherever they could.
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Johnson’s efforts on the tax cut were not solely to benefit the civil rights bill. He needed to prove he could carry on Kennedy’s legislative torch, he needed a quick win in Congress to solidify his political capital, and he believed, as Kennedy did, that the cut really would provide a shot in the arm to the economy. But all those things, including the tax cut—and even, in some ways, the civil rights bill itself—were but a prelude to Johnson’s real goal: a massive antipoverty program. Hints of that vision began to dribble out around the first of the new year; even as Johnson was promising Byrd that government efficiency was of paramount importance, he was telling George Meany and Walter Reuther that the budget savings would go to new and enlarged social programs.

Then, on January 18, he summoned King, Wilkins, Young, and Farmer—all of whom he had kept in close touch with over the holidays—to the White House for a morning meeting. But instead of discussing the civil rights bill, Johnson unveiled a new project: a “war on poverty,” one that would aim billions in federal dollars at the entire spectrum of the nation’s social ills: money for better schools, money for better housing, money for job training, money for community development. The president “made it very clear that he feels the fight on poverty and illiteracy is a vital part of the fight on discrimination,” said Farmer after the meeting.
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But Johnson also felt that too much pressure from the outside could derail the bill. On January 21, Johnson called Clarence Mitchell and Joe Rauh to the White House. He told them that he stood by his word from November and would continue to push for the civil rights bill without weakening amendments—but without any strengthening amendments, either. Katzenbach, he explained, had devised a precise but risky strategy that depended on keeping the bill as intact as possible, and changes in either direction would kill it. Surprisingly, Mitchell and Rauh agreed, and they told their LCCR colleagues to hold off pressing for a stronger bill.
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At the same time, the president renewed his pressure on Halleck to get the bill moving. Newspapers were reporting that even though the hearings had started, the timetable for the bill to reach the floor had slipped from early February to sometime in March. Some two dozen Southern Democrats were still scheduled to testify, and Smith was limiting sessions to just three days a week. And so, on January 18, with the discharge petition stuck at 178 signatures, Johnson called the minority leader into his office. The bill needed to get to the House floor soon, for Halleck’s own sake. “If I were you, Charlie,” he said, “I wouldn’t dare . . . go out and try to make a Lincoln Birthday speech; they’ll laugh you out of the goddamned park when Howard Smith’s got his foot on Lincoln’s neck.” Johnson also reiterated his promise to try to land a science center at Purdue; with Halleck still there in the room he called James Webb, the NASA administrator, to see what could be done.
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It is unclear whether Johnson’s pressure on Halleck had any effect, or whether it was Brown getting tired of Smith’s antics, but over the next few days rumors began to circulate that Rules Committee Republicans were “increasingly restive,” as the
New York Times
reported, and were working with Northern Democrats on a plan to take over control of the committee from Smith. At the same time, Speaker McCormack began his own pressure campaign, telling Smith that he wanted the bill out by the end of the month. And, of course, Halleck did not need Johnson to tell him about the importance of getting the bill out of the House before the Lincoln Day holiday, when Republicans traditionally headed home to trumpet their party’s position on civil rights.
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The legislative agenda was not the only thing on Johnson’s mind; the president was at the same time fighting off a nagging scandal involving Bobby Baker, a former protégé who had been named secretary of the Senate while Johnson was majority leader. Among other things, Johnson had taught him the importance of precise vote counting among senators. After Johnson left for the vice presidency, Baker had held the same position under Mike Mansfield, who followed Baker’s advice closely. But in early October 1963 Baker resigned under a cloud of ethics charges stemming from his involvement with a series of companies that appeared to have benefited from government kickbacks. And while none of the specific accusations related to Baker’s time working for Johnson, the Capitol Hill rumor mill declared the president guilty by association, and his enemies in the Senate began to circle, speculating about investigatory hearings to be held that spring.
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On January 22, Richard Bolling informed Smith that the end was nigh: if he did not conclude the hearings within a week, a bipartisan group of representatives would take over the committee. The next day, after a closed-door meeting by the panel, Smith announced that he would indeed bring things to a close by January 30. “I’ve been around a long time,” said the eighty-year-old chairman, “and I recognize the facts of life, and one of the facts of life is that this bill is going to the floor, and that it is going soon.” Later that day, he announced the terms and schedule for the House debate, should his committee pass the bill. The House would take up the bill on January 31 and finish by February 11, just in time for the Lincoln Day recess. When he was finished, Clarence Brown congratulated him. “You have done everything, Mr. Chairman, which you have stated you would do.”
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