Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (61 page)

Some people at the time grew hopeful following this result. Whatever the faults of the bill, they said, it was the first civil rights law to get through Congress since Reconstruction. Johnson, they added, had done what he had to do and had demonstrated a statesmanship that made him a viable presidential candidate—a goal that he clearly had in mind. The
New York Times
called the law "incomparably the most significant domestic action of any Congress in this century."
¹⁴
All these optimists pointed to features of the act that seemed promising: creation of a Civil Rights Commission, establishment within the Justice Department of a civil rights division, and empowerment of the Attorney General's office to bring injunctions when would-be voters complained. In fact, however, the jury trial amendment, along with earlier compromises, gutted the bill of any practical impact, and the Eisenhower administration brought only a handful of suits against alleged violaters during the next three years. By 1959 the law had not added a single black voter to the rolls in the South.
¹⁵
A second voting rights law, passed in 1960, was equally ineffectual, and at the end of the Eisenhower years only 28 percent of southern blacks of voting age had the franchise. In Mississippi the percentage was 5.
¹⁶

No racial controversy of Eisenhower's second term, however, was more discouraging to civil rights activists than the confrontation over school desegregation in Little Rock in the late summer of 1957.
¹⁷
The struggle came as something of a surprise, for the city's mayor and school board had planned to comply in a token fashion with court rulings on the subject. But the governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, demagogically commanded 270 National Guard troops to move in around Central High School on the day before school was set to open. The troops, he said disingenuously, were needed to maintain law and order at the school. In fact, they were there to keep the nine black children assigned to Central High from entering.
¹⁸

The crisis escalated dangerously during the next three weeks. On the first school day the black students heeded the advice of the school board and stayed home. But on the second day they were escorted to school by two white and two black ministers, only to be stopped by the Guard. They left, walking with dignity through a taunting, cursing crowd of white students and townspeople who had been stirred up by Faubus's intervention. Television cameras captured their ordeal and sent images of the event to amazed and angry viewers all over the globe.

Eisenhower now confronted a possibility that he had only two months earlier said he could not imagine: using troops to enforce desegregation orders of the federal courts. He shrank from the prospect. For the next eighteen days he tried to resolve the issue by conferring with the mayor and even with Faubus himself, who flew to the President's summer retreat in Newport, Rhode Island. Meanwhile the National Guard remained at the school, and the black children stayed home. Faubus removed the guardsmen only when a federal court ordered him to, by which time local passions had become inflamed to potentially violent proportions.

With the guardsmen gone, the nine black students came again to school on Monday, September 23—three weeks after the crisis had begun. But only 150 local policemen were on hand to protect them from a large and angry mob of whites. When the mob learned that the children had managed to get inside Central High (through a delivery entrance), leaders started shouting, "The niggers are in our school." The mob then began attacking black people on the street as well as "Yankee" reporters and photographers. The local police were clearly sympathetic to the mob; one took off his badge and walked away. The mayor, frightened by the specter of large-scale violence, cabled the White House to ask urgently for the dispatch of federal troops. The black students were taken out of school and sent home, whereupon the mob slowly dispersed.

Eisenhower still resisted the step of sending in troops. Instead, he denounced the "disgraceful occurrences" at Little Rock and ordered people to desist and disperse. But the next day, with the black children still at home, 200 whites showed up at the school. The President then carried out what Sherman Adams, his top aide, later said was "a constitutional duty which was the most repugnant to him of all his acts in his eight years at the White House."
¹⁹
He sent 1,100 army paratroopers into Little Rock and federalized the Arkansas National Guard, thereby removing it from Faubus's command.
²⁰
In issuing the orders Eisenhower acted not as a defender of desegregation but as commander-in-chief. Faced with Faubus's defiance and with violence, he concluded reluctantly that he had no choice. It was the first time since Reconstruction that federal troops had been dispatched to the South to protect the civil rights of blacks.

The President's actions earned him very mixed reviews. Southern politicians reviled him, with Senator Richard Russell of Georgia comparing the soldiers to "Hitler's storm troopers."
²¹
The lieutenant governor of Alabama, Guy Hartwick, exclaimed that "Pearl Harbor was a day of infamy. So was Eisenhower's brutal use of troops."
²²
But most advocates of forceful civil rights activity were upset that Ike had been so indecisive. The President's dallying, they said, gave comfort to extremists and besmirched the image of the United States all over the world.

The soldiers arrived on Wednesday, September 25, and stayed until the end of November. The guardsmen remained for the entire academic year. Eight of the students stuck out the year, and one, Ernest Green, graduated with his senior classmates and went off to college at Michigan State. It was never easy for them, however, because a small minority of their white schoolmates regularly cursed, pushed, and spat on them. Local whites threatened to dynamite the school and to kill the school superintendent. (One such attempt was actually made but failed.) Faubus, seeking headline-grabbing fame, was enthusiastically re-elected in 1958 and for three more terms after that. In the 1958–59 academic year he closed all the schools in Little Rock rather than see desegregation in the city. Other emboldened southern leaders followed in his footsteps and swelled massive resistance throughout much of the South in the late 1950s. By 1960 blacks were despairing about the chances for meaningful help from politicians and were resolving to take action themselves.

A
MERICAN CRITICS OF
Red Scare excesses derived fleeting satisfaction from a few developments of the late 1950s. But they, too, found these years frustrating.

The most significant sign of change in such matters came from the Supreme Court. By 1956–57 Warren was emerging as an advocate not only of civil rights but also of civil liberties. Others on the Court joined him to swing the tribunal toward a more liberal course. Chief among them were the two veterans appointed by FDR, Black and Douglas, as well as a newcomer named in 1956 by Eisenhower, William Brennan, Jr., of New Jersey. Before nominating him Eisenhower did not examine Brennan's views with much care—if he had, he would hardly have proposed him. Like many conservatives in the late 1950s, the President was both stunned and upset by what followed, for the Court began in 1956 to clear away some of the anti-Communist laws and regulations that had flourished during the Red Scare. It declared its civil libertarianism most clearly on June 17, 1957, which anti-Communist foes denounced as "Red Monday." Then and two weeks later a series of decisions strengthened constitutional guarantees against self-incrimination, construed the anti-Communist Smith Act of 1940 narrowly so as to guard against political trials, protected individuals from having to answer questions (from HUAC) about others, and ruled that certain defendants had rights to see reports by FBI-paid informants. As a result of these decisions, the government virtually gave up efforts to prosecute Communists under the Smith Act.
²³

Civil libertarians applauded the verdicts. I. F. Stone said that "they promise a new birth of freedom. They make the First Amendment a reality again. They reflect the steadily growing public misgiving and distaste for that weird collection of opportunists, clowns, ex-Communist crackpots, and poor sick souls who have made America look foolish and even sinister during the last ten years."
²⁴
Other Americans, however, were confused and upset by the trend. Eisenhower, asked about some of the cases at a press conference, mused, "Possibly in their latest series of decisions there are some that each of us has very great trouble understanding."
²⁵
Justice Tom Clark, worrying about national security, complained that the Court, in affording accused people access to FBI data, provided "a Roman holiday for rummaging through confidential information as well as vital national secrets."
²⁶

Right-wing Americans who were already angry at the
Brown
decision were especially quick to seize on these new cases and to attack the Court. The John Birch Society, mobilizing in 1958, focused considerable resources on impeaching Warren and on curbing the authority of the Court. Prominent conservative senators led a similar, more serious assault on Capitol Hill—one that would have trimmed the Court's jurisdiction over the areas of loyalty and subversion. They employed the familiar tactic of connecting Communism and support for civil rights. The Court, said Eastland of Mississippi, was "being influenced by some secret, but very powerful Communist or pro-Communist influence. "
²⁷

Advocates of judicial restraint offered more temperate criticisms of the Court. Among them were some of the justices themselves, notably Felix Frankfurter, who remembered how the Court's conservative activism in the 1930s had created a constitutional crisis. Judicial boldness, he thought, could foment (indeed, was fomenting) attacks on the Court in the 1950s—this time from the Right. By the late 1950s Frankfurter and John Marshall Harlan, whom Eisenhower had appointed in 1955, openly called on the Court to moderate what they considered to be its excesses of judicial activism. Edward Corwin, a Princeton professor emeritus widely regarded as one of the nation's foremost authorities on constitutional history, went so far as to write the
New York Times
, "There can be no doubt that . . . the court went on a virtual binge and thrust its nose into matters beyond its own competence, with the result that . . . it should have its aforesaid nose well tweaked. . . . The country needs a protection against the aggressive tendency of the court."
²⁸

Thanks to the efforts of Johnson and others in the Senate, Congress did not hamstring the Court. But it was a near thing; in August 1958 the conservative coalition lost a key motion to limit the Court's power by the narrow margin of 49 to 41. Perhaps aware that it risked retaliation, the Court itself seemed cautious in 1959. In the
Barenblatt
case of that year it alarmed civil libertarians by upholding, 5 to 4, a contempt citation of Barenblatt, an educator who had cited the First Amendment in refusing to cooperate with HUAC.
²⁹
When the Court resumed its civil libertarian course in the 1960s—in retrospect,
Barenblatt
was anomalous—conservative critics erupted again. Their anger exposed a durable aspect of American thought in the postwar era: anti-Communist feelings at home remained strong indeed.

Nothing did more during these years to excite such emotions than the successful launching by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957 of
Sputnik
, the world's first orbiting satellite.
Sputnik
was small—about 184 pounds and the size of a beach ball. But it whizzed along, going "beep beep beep" at 18,000 miles per hour and circling the globe every ninety-two minutes. A month later the Soviets launched
Sputnik II
. This weighed some 1,120 pounds and carrried scientific instruments for studying the atmosphere and outer space. It even accommodated a dog, Laika, which had medical instruments strapped to its body.
³⁰

Americans reacted to these dramatic accomplishments with an alarm approaching panic. The Soviets, it seemed, had far outpaced the United States in rocketry. Soon they might conquer space, perhaps to establish dangerous extraterrestrial military bases. Meanwhile, American efforts to catch up seemed ludicrous. On December 6 a nationally televised test of the Vanguard missile proved deeply embarrassing. The missile rose two feet off the ground and crashed. Press accounts spoke about "Flopnik" and "Stay-putnik." G. Mennen Williams, Democratic governor of Michigan, ridiculed the American effort:

Oh little Sputnik
With made-in-Moscow beep,
You tell the world it's a Commie sky
And Uncle Sam's asleep.
³¹
Williams at least offered a light touch. Other critics, especially Democrats, hammered at the administration for failing to keep pace with the enemy. Senator Henry Jackson of Washington spoke of "shame and danger." Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri added, "Unless our defense policies are promptly changed, the Soviets will move from superiority to supremacy. If that ever happens, our position will become impossible."
³²