The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act (35 page)

Yet those who saw Dirksen as an empty custom-tailored suit drastically underestimated him. He was vain and opportunistic, certainly. But he was also a man who had risen from humble origins into the seat of American power, and he had not forgotten it. Born to German immigrant parents in Pekin, Dirksen had tasted something of the sting of ethnic hatred during World War I and after, when anti-immigrant, and in particular anti-German, sentiment swept through the small-town Midwest. Dirksen was not without racial insensitivity—during a 1924 business trip through the Deep South, he wrote to his wife that “the energy and ambition of those who till the land must have flowed away and left a residue of indolent white trash and niggers”; from a hotel in Vicksburg, Mississippi, he wrote that “Jews control the business here.” But he was also appalled by the immense support that the Ku Klux Klan drew in the Midwest that same decade, and it was that experience, more than his offhanded racism and anti-Semitism, that he brought with him as he moved up through the ranks in Congress, first as a representative and then in 1950, after taking a two-year leave from politics to deal with an inflamed retina, as a senator.
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Whatever his past trespasses, Senator Dirksen built a decent record as a civil rights supporter. He was no Bill McCulloch, but he regularly introduced legislation calling for a voluntary FEPC, a federal antilynching law, and an end to poll taxes; he also championed the cause of black women’s associations in their campaign to win federal tax-exempt status. Window dressing for black voters back home, perhaps, but his record on civil rights was respectable enough to get him named chairman of the subcommittee on civil rights and immigration for the 1956 Republican National Convention.
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None of this meant that Dirksen was bound to support cloture, let alone the civil rights bill. His opposition to Title II as an invasion of private property rights was real and heartfelt. But it also meant that what Dirksen wanted out of the bill, and what people thought Dirksen wanted out of the bill, were two different things. Whether those mismatched expectations could be reconciled might be the question that decided whether the bill survived the filibuster.

Dirksen may have been the leader of the Senate Republicans, but on civil rights he did not speak for all of them. The liberal Republicans largely spoke for themselves on the matter—though they found themselves in an increasingly tough spot. Men like Clifford Case of New Jersey, Kenneth Keating and Jacob Javits of New York, and Thomas Kuchel of California were well to the left of many Democrats on most issues, and they were stalwart in their support of strong federal action on civil rights. Yet they found themselves in a party moving slowly but surely to the right. As the election season approached, it became increasingly clear that the Republican nominee for president would be their colleague Barry Goldwater of Arizona, a man they had assiduously tried to alienate for years, to no avail; at the same time, they watched as grassroots activists and big-business interests in the GOP opened a campaign to win over Southern voters, even at the expense of their party’s historical commitment to African Americans.

The liberal Republicans had a working yet uneasy relationship with the liberal Democrats. On the one hand, they all wanted the same thing—namely, a strong civil rights bill. From the beginning, they met regularly, either in person or through their staff, and they coordinated their speeches and press appearances. Yet they were also each jockeying for the better position on the issue going into the 1964 campaign, and each was willing to use the bill as a weapon. The Democrats drew the Republicans in at least in part so that if the bill failed, they could spread the blame to the other party. Meanwhile, the Republicans planned to push for amendments to strengthen the bill—not because they thought they could win them, or wanted to jeopardize the bill, but simply to be on record supporting a bigger civil rights act when they knew the Democrats, per their leadership’s orders, would have to oppose them. On February 23, Kuchel got things rolling by calling for extending Title I to cover both federal and state elections, the first of many such grandstanding amendments that served only to inflame the Democratic leadership.
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John Satterfield and the Committee for Fundamental American Freedoms watched all of this unfold with eager anticipation. Like Russell and the Southern Democrats, Satterfield knew that defeating the bill was going to be tough. And yet he also saw the fissures, the potential breaking points where a well-placed lobbying campaign could chip away a senator’s support for the bill. Not for nothing did he seed a series of editorials in the right-wing
Chicago Tribune
, which ran for over a week in late February. The
Tribune
was the biggest paper in the Midwest, and one of the most powerful voices in Dirksen’s home state. Each day a pair of pieces—one a bylined analysis, the other an unsigned editorial—took apart one of the bill’s titles. For anyone who had followed the debate in the House, the paper’s positions were nothing new: they said, for example, that Title I, on voting rights, was unnecessary; Title II, on public accommodations, was unconstitutional. Title VII was said to raise the specter of affirmative action: “The effect of this section is to attempt to legislate discrimination in reverse through preferential hiring.” And the entire bill represented a dangerously large step toward a socialist dictatorship. “If the
Tribune
had not exposed the civil rights bill I would not have known any of its frightening aspects,” wrote a reader in one of the many fawning letters to the editor that ran during the series. “The provisions of this bill sound like the mandates laid down to a conquered enemy by the conqueror.” (To its credit, the paper also ran a letter that took eloquent exception to the
Tribune
’s scare tactics: “Surely the American legal traditions will survive this assault, for a greater integrity will be served. A civil rights law, like stitches in a wound, will eventually dissolve invisibly into the body of our Republic.”)
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Alongside the
Tribune
coverage, Satterfield targeted smaller newspapers across the Midwest, as well as trade and professional groups that might be able to bring pressure on their home-state senators. He also bought up mailing lists for tens of thousands of people across the region, to whom he sent form letters that they could personalize and then send to their congressmen. He also sent out a series of booklets against the bill to anyone who requested them, including one that featured the minority reports from the Judiciary Committee (reports that Satterfield had mostly written himself). Russell was a particularly active subscriber to the CCFAF’s publications: he sent a copy of one of the committee’s antibill pamphlets with every copy of the bill requested by constituents. Satterfield’s highest-profile move was a full-page advertisement that ran in some two hundred non-Southern newspapers in March. The ad was dominated by the headline
billion
dollar
blackjack—the
civil
rights
bill
, denouncing the legislation as “socialist.”
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And it worked: by early March, senators were reporting an inundation of mail against the bill, much of it written in the same language and drawing on the same arguments. There was little doubt that the letter writing had been organized by CCFAF: Mansfield received a stack of identical missives, all noting that “according to a Past President of the American Bar Association”—i.e., Satterfield—“this bill is unconstitutional.” And yet, given the bill’s chances in Congress and tenuous support among the public, such letters could not be dismissed easily. By mid-March, senators in places like New York and Idaho were reporting that their mail was running four to one against the bill, and in some parts of the Midwest as high as ten to one.
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It was within this context of shaky coalitions and organized public opposition that Mansfield moved, on February 26, to have the civil rights bill read a second time. He then asked that the bill be placed directly on the Senate calendar, bypassing Eastland.
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Russell shot out of his chair to object—as did Wayne Morse, a maverick Democrat from Oregon. Morse had been a Republican, but switched parties in the early 1950s to protest the GOP’s selection of Eisenhower and Nixon for the presidential ticket. In 1953 he set the record for a one-man filibuster, speaking for more than twenty-two hours against a bill to allow oil drilling in certain wetlands (a record broken four years later by Strom Thurmond’s attack on the Civil Rights Act of 1957). The Democrats welcomed Morse into their fold but did not appreciate his maverick tendencies. Rowland Evans and Robert Novak called Morse “the Senate’s one-man obstacle course.”
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Morse was a civil rights man, but he also believed the bill would benefit from some time in the Judiciary Committee, where its supporters could build up an evidentiary case for it. To Mansfield’s consternation, Dirksen fell in line with Russell and Morse, raising fears that the minority leader was being courted by the Southern Democrats. Yet in the end, Mansfield won his motion handily, 54–37, including twenty Republicans. Mansfield then asked unanimous consent to refer the bill to the Judiciary Committee for two weeks, after which it would return the bill without changes. He was hoping to win over the vote of Alaska senator Ernest Gruening, who had supported Morse’s motion to send the bill to committee but who, unlike Morse, did not firmly support cloture. As the civil rights lobbyists in the gallery went wild, both Javits on the left and Eastland on the right objected; Eastland said that such constraints on his committee would make any hearing a demeaning waste of time. Since Mansfield had asked for unanimous consent, not a vote, their opposition was enough to quash it, and the day ended in confused relief. The first hurdle had been cleared.
36

With the civil rights bill on the calendar, Humphrey began to organize his campaign in earnest. Two days later, at 11:00
a.m.
, he sat down with Katzenbach and Marshall in his whip office at the Capitol to coordinate the White House and Senate strategies. Humphrey loved that room; though it was uncomfortably long and narrow, it offered a view out on arriving visitors, and Humphrey would often stand at the window, “watching the tourists, parents with small children, holding hands, skipping up the broad stairs. Buses would disgorge troops of Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts in neat uniforms. There was a freedom and joy in their movements as they came to gawk and talk to their elected representatives.”
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At the meeting, Katzenbach gave Humphrey his blessing to work closely with the Republicans, regardless of how it would look politically. The bill, Katzenbach said, depended for its survival on the appearance of a united front, one that would induce wavering senators to get on board. At the same time, he insisted that Humphrey use his prerogative as the bill’s floor manager to arrange for all proposed amendments to be funneled through the two parties’ leadership in order to be considered. In other words, if a senator had an amendment to the bill, they would have to submit it to Humphrey and Kuchel for approval.
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With the Justice Department’s endorsement in hand, that afternoon Humphrey met for the first time with Kuchel, the minority whip and Dirksen’s designee to run the Republicans’ civil rights effort. The son of an Anaheim newspaper editor, Kuchel (pronounced KEE-kul) was a protégé of Earl Warren and a lifelong politician, entering the state assembly a few years after graduating from the University of Southern California’s law school. In 1952, Warren, then governor, appointed him to fill the remainder of Richard Nixon’s Senate term. As a senator, he had laid down a progressive voting record, particularly on civil rights. But he had made a name for himself nationally as a stalwart critic of the far right, which he often brushed up against during the course of his political career in California’s bustling Orange County.
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Humphrey and Kuchel were well matched: energetic, popular, charismatic, and completely committed to civil rights. At the meeting, which included Rauh, Wilkins, and Mitchell, the two agreed to a set of principles for fighting the filibuster. First, they had to set a strategy to maintain quorum. Contrary to the image created by such films as
Advise & Consent
, most of the Senate is not on the floor at any one time, even during important debates, and even though the Senate rules require a majority of fifty-one members to operate. Often they are back in their offices, or not even in Washington at all. That is because the rule is only enforced when a senator suggests the absence of a quorum, at which point a clerk reads off the list of senators, calls go out to the senators’ offices, and as long as at least fifty-one appear by the end of the clerk’s reading, the quorum is met. If the count falls short, though, the Senate must adjourn.
40

Under normal circumstances, senators rarely make quorum calls—they interrupt the day’s schedule and inconvenience their colleagues. But during a filibuster, a quorum call becomes a powerful weapon. For one thing, quorum calls soak up time, often an hour or more, time that the filibustering senators do not have to spend speaking. It also wears out the other side, whose members have to trek back and forth to the Senate floor, often several times a day. In contrast, the filibusterers can take it easy and let all but a few of their number leave the floor, since it is in their interest to have the Senate adjourn as often as possible—not only does adjournment also soak up time, but it means that Rule 19 resets, giving each senator two new speeches to make. (Although Mansfield had said he would not enforce that rule this time, there was no guarantee.)