Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (79 page)

The new President also recognized that great effort was necessary if the bill were to become law. Kennedy's measure was certain to pass the House in some form in 1964, but to maintain credibility among liberals, many of whom deeply distrusted him, LBJ had to lead a strong bill through the gauntlet of the Senate. Johnson recalled, "If I didn't get out in front on this issue [the liberals] would get me. . . . I had to produce a civil rights bill that was even stronger than the one they'd have gotten if Kennedy had lived. Without this, I'd be dead before I could even begin."
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As expected the House approved a bill early in February by the comfortable margin of 290 to 130, leaving the Senate to determine the fate of the measure. When Johnson heard of the vote, he wasted no time. "All right, you fellows," he phoned aides celebrating in a House corridor. "Get over to the Senate. Get busy. We've won in the House, but there is a big job across the way."
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Johnson and his aides knew that southern senators, led by Russell of Georgia, would try to filibuster the bill to death. Passage depended on his ability to get the Senate to vote for cloture, the only way to stop the interminable talk. Under rules at the time cloture required the votes of two-thirds of the Senate.

The key to getting two-thirds was GOP minority leader Dirksen of Illinois, whose ultimate position on the bill would guide many of the thirty-two other Republicans (one-third of the chamber) in the Senate. But Dirksen, a colorful and loquacious conservative, was on the fence. On the one hand, he seemed to favor some sort of bill. On the other, he (and many other Republicans) wanted portions softened. Some sought to emasculate the measure. While Johnson was willing to consider modest changes, he knew that liberals demanded a tough bill such as the one that had passed in the House. Over the next several months he spent hours wooing Dirksen, a friend and former colleague, sometimes by inviting him to the White House, swapping stories with him, and drinking with him into the night.
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Johnson drove his staff members, keeping them around until late. He regularly quizzed Larry O'Brien, his congressional liaison, on exactly what various senators had said that day, and he kept long tally sheets of senators' names and columns for Y
ES
, N
O
, and U
NDECIDED
. AS Califano said later, "Johnson would devour these tally sheets, thumb moving from line to line, like a baseball fanatic reviewing the box scores of his home team. It was never too late to make one more call or hold another meeting to nail down an uncertain vote."
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In making such an effort, Johnson had many useful allies. These included liberal labor union leaders like Walter Reuther as well as activists like Clarence Mitchell, chief lobbyist for the NAACP. Other civil rights leaders from SNCC, CORE, and SCLC pitched in. Church leaders applied pressure throughout the struggle, at one point weighing in with a prayer vigil—"coercion by men of the cloth," some observers said—at the Lincoln Memorial.
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On the Hill, Johnson relied heavily on Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, who became floor leader for the bill. A longtime champion of civil rights, Humphrey hoped to be named LBJ's running mate in the 1964 campaign. Like Johnson, he lobbied hard with undecided senators. He joked later, "I courted Dirksen almost as persistently as I did [my wife] Muriel."
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The filibuster lasted three months, an all-time record, during which time opponents of the bill grew increasingly emphatic. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona predicted that the bill would "require the creation of a federal police force of mammoth proportions."
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Toward the end Dirksen exacted some concessions, including one that limited sanctions against school segregation to de jure practices in the South. He then announced that he and most other Republicans were satisfied with the bill as it had come from the House. They voted for cloture, which was approved on June 10 by a margin of 71 to 29. Opponents were twenty-one southerners, three Democrats from outside the South, and five Republicans, including Goldwater. The bill later passed, 73 to 27. Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act on July 2.
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The act contained a number of strong provisions. It banned racial discrimination in privately run accommodations for the public, such as theaters, movie houses, restaurants, gas stations, and hotels, and authorized the Attorney General to eliminate de jure racial segregation in public schools, hospitals, playgrounds, libraries, museums, and other public places. The act stated that schools, as well as other federally assisted institutions, faced loss of federal funds if they continued to discriminate. It also authorized the Attorney General to bring suits on behalf of parents complaining of discrimination in the schools and declared that the government would assume their legal costs.

The law also included a section, Title VII, that forbade discrimination in employment and specified the category of sex in addition to those of race, color, religion, and national origin. The inclusion of sex as a category was originally the handiwork of House Rules Committee chairman Howard Smith of Virginia. His motive was to defeat civil rights legislation, which he vigorously opposed. If the amendment passed, he figured, liberals committed to protective legislation for women might feel obliged to oppose the entire bill, which then would fail. But Smith miscalculated, for liberals voted overwhelmingly for the final bill on the floor of the House. Title VII remained in the bill that went to the Senate and emerged unscathed in the act that Johnson approved in July. So did provision for creation of an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Such was the process by which Title VII and the EEOC, later to become keys to unanticipated and unprecedented federal enforcement of gender equality, entered the law of the land.
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No law, of course, can work wonders overnight, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act was no exception. Voting rights remained to be protected. Many employers and unions evaded the strictures against job discrimination. De facto racial discrimination remained widespread in the North, especially in housing and schooling. Many school districts, mainly in the Deep South, continued to employ ruses of one sort or another to avoid desegregation in public education. Until 1969, when the courts cracked down, little progress was made in this ever-sensitive area of race relations. Finally, the law did not pretend to do anything to better the mostly abysmal economic condition of black people in the United States. Like the war on poverty, it was a liberal, not a radical, measure. It aimed to promote legal, not social, equality.
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The civil rights act was nonetheless a significant piece of legislation, far and away the most important in the history of American race relations. Quickly upheld by the Supreme Court, it was enforced with vigor by the Johnson administration. That required a huge expansion in the reach of the State, for there were many thousands of hospitals, school districts, and colleges and universities affected by provisions of the law.
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Although many southern leaders resisted, most aspects of enforcement proved effective in time, and the seemingly impregnable barriers of Jim Crow finally began to fall. Black people at last could begin to enjoy equal access to thousands of places that had excluded them in the past. Few laws have had such dramatic and heart-warming effects.

In retrospect, a comment by Dirksen at the time best explains why the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed. Citing lines attributed to Victor Hugo, Dirksen mused, "No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come." He added, "In the history of mankind, there is an inexorable moral force that moves us forward."
⁵²
His point, of course, was that the drive for civil rights had acquired a momentum and a moral power by 1964 that not even filibuster rules in the Senate could withstand. The momentum, in turn, derived from the thousands of heroic efforts by civil rights activists in the preceeding years. It came from the bottom up, from the grass roots, not from the top-down strategies of VIPs in Washington.

This was true, but it was also true that Johnson had dominated the Washington stage. Some liberals still distrusted him, to be sure, as did black leaders, who suspected correctly that he, like Kennedy, was using the FBI to spy on civil rights activists. But most civil rights lobbyists on the Hill conceded his role as a star. Bayard Rustin said later that Johnson and his aides did "more . . . than any other group, any other administration. . . . I think Johnson was the best we ever had." Mitchell added that LBJ "made a greater contribution to giving a dignified and hopeful status to Negroes in the United States than any other President, including Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Kennedy."
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These were appropriate tributes to presidential leadership of an unusually high order.

W
HILE JOHNSON WAS
confidently commanding the ship of state in Washington, social and ideological forces elsewhere in the nation were beginning to press on the mainstream of American politics. These forces came from both the right and the left. Driving them, as so much else in the 1960s, were the imperatives of class, region, and race.

Two rising political figures especially alarmed liberals in 1964. The first to emerge as a threat to Johnson's ambitions was Governor George Wallace of Alabama. Early in his political career Wallace had directed his appeals mainly at working-class whites, paying relatively little attention to racial issues. Then and later he considered himself more of an economic populist—a spokesman for ordinary people—than a representative of the Right.
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In 1958, however, he had lost a primary contest for the governorship to John Patterson, who Wallace felt had whipped up Negrophobia in order to beat him. Wallace was furious. "John Patterson out-nigguhed me," he was said to have cried after the primary. "And boys, I'm not going to be out-nigguhed again."
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He wasn't. Winning in 1962, he exclaimed at his inauguration in 1963, "From this cradle of the Confederacy, this very heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland . . . I say, segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!" As governor he continued to be liberal on economic and educational issues, but he became a hero to many southern whites when he "stood in the schoolhouse door" to block the court-ordered admission of two blacks to the University of Alabama in 1963.

Wallace was an unusually powerful public speaker. A former Golden Gloves bantamweight, he was feisty and combative. He conveyed a passion and a body language that electrified crowds who came to hear him. Charged up, his eyes glowing with intensity, he seemed scarcely able to control himself. Johnson called him a "runty little bastard and just about the most dangerous person around."
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His appeal transcended racial issues, important though those were. Again and again Wallace spoke as the champion of the common man. He attacked intellectuals, do-gooders, federal bureaucrats, radicals, Communists, atheists, liberals, civil rights workers, student protestors—soft and pampered elites all—who were threatening hard-working people. His was an appeal, reminiscent in some ways of McCarthy's, that tapped with unexpected depth into the class and regional resentments of American life.

He also had unlimited ambitions. He therefore decided to enter some Democratic presidential primaries in the spring of 1964. His purpose, he said, was to sound an alarm against the civil rights bill, which was then tying up the Senate. But he also planned to bring his larger message to a national stage. The results staggered liberals. Although Wallace had little money and no real organization, he attracted large and enthusiastic crowds, especially in white working-class areas, where his angry assaults on distant government bureaucrats aroused passionate support. In April Wallace carried 34 percent of the votes cast in the primary in Wisconsin, a normally liberal state. Later in the spring he won 30 percent of the vote in Indiana and 43 percent in Maryland. "If it hadn't been for the nigger bloc vote," he said of Maryland, "we'd have won it all."
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Wallace knew that he had no chance to win a presidential election, but he nonetheless unnerved political adversaries. In June he announced that he would run as an independent on a third-party ticket. By early July he had managed to get on the ballot in sixteen states. There was talk that he might receive enough electoral votes in the South to deprive Johnson of outright victory, thereby forcing the issue to be resolved by the House of Representatives.

While Wallace was rising to national prominence, conservative Republicans were developing a remarkably well organized effort on behalf of a much more ideologically pure right-wing political figure, Goldwater of Arizona. Goldwater was an affable man who had many friends on the Hill. Tall, trim and handsome, he was tolerant in his personal relationships. He belonged to the NAACP. He had been among the most consistently right-wing senators since he had come to Washington in 1953. Contemporaries labeled him a conservative, and he wrote a popular summation of his beliefs entitled
The Conscience of a Conservative
in 1960. In fact, however, Gold water was a political reactionary who opposed virtually all efforts of the federal government to intervene in domestic social policy, including civil rights legislation. The graduated federal income tax, he believed, infringed on individual freedom, his highest value. An ardent anti-Communist, he seemed anxious to send in military force to settle overseas disputes. Goldwater's outspoken criticisms of Johnson's policies in 1964 attracted a fervent, well-financed following of conservatives and reactionaries, most of them upper-middle-class, who determined to make him the GOP presidential candidate in 1964. Diffidently, for Goldwater did not much want to become President, he agreed to run for the nomination.