Master of the Senate (154 page)

In 1951, and again in 1952, Johnson opposed bills that would have increased criminal penalties for hiring illegal aliens. With the wetback problem growing worse in 1953, Mexican-American leaders pleaded with Johnson to support a bill earmarking four million dollars for an intensified campaign by the Immigration Service against illegal importation of wetbacks. If the bill was defeated, they predicted, South Texas would be “flooded” with migrant workers, whose willingness to work endless hours for low wages would cause “suffering to native workers.” Johnson led the opposition to the bill, which was defeated. This was too much even for the G.I. Forum, which passed a resolution noting that “whereas, Senator Johnson owes in large measure his position in the U.S. Senate to the vote of thousands of citizens of Mexican descent in South Texas … [h]is vote is in utter disregard of the friendship in which he has been held by [those] citizens.” Claiming that his vote had been due only to the lateness, and excessiveness, of the Immigration Service’s budget request, Johnson replied that “I am sorry that the friendship that I have shown throughout the years … should be … cast aside” because of a single vote. “There is no group for which I have done more and to whom I feel more friendly than the Latin
Americans,” he added. “I have tried to show my friendship in a number of practical ways and I shall not be deterred from continuing to do so by resolutions which seem to me at least to be unfair.”

The resolution did not have much impact on his actions. In 1953, the Eisenhower Administration attempted to stop the illegal importation of wetbacks, but Johnson opposed the program. On several other issues of major concern to the Mexican-Americans Johnson was also on the growers’ side. During his first seven years in the Senate—1949 through 1955—he was willing to help the Mexican-Americans on any issue on which their interests did not conflict with the interests of the Anglos. When the two groups were in conflict, he almost invariably came down on the side of the whites. He kept the support of Hector Garcia and other leaders in part because he had convinced them that “his heart was right,” in part because of the patronage and prestige he gave them—and in part because of another factor, which both John Connally and Ed Clark were to sum up in the same question: “Where else were they going to go?” The Republican Party had no power in Texas. Within the state’s all-powerful Democratic Party the alternative was the party’s Shivers wing, so right-wing and unapologetically racist that any enemy of that wing must be their friend. After Tom Connally, no friend to Mexican-Americans, left the state’s other Senate seat, he was succeeded by Price Daniel, also no friend to Mexican-Americans. As Stanford Dyer wrote, “Johnson was aware that his civil rights record was the subject of much concern among Texas minorities. Yet he also knew that he had everything to lose and nothing to gain politically by supporting civil rights legislation. Texas minorities would continue to support him until some Texas politician promised them more, and this was not likely to happen in the near future.” The Mexican-Americans of South Texas never stopped supporting Lyndon Johnson. They couldn’t—as he was well aware: There was nowhere else for them to put their support. Although Forum leaders were “disappointed” with Johnson on some issues, Forum official Ed Idar Jr. was to tell Pycior that “we were not ready to make an enemy of the man.” In 1954, they had no difficulty recognizing his opponent Dudley Dougherty’s ineptitude, and had no wish to be allied in any way with that hapless political
naïf.
In that election Johnson received the overwhelming majority of Mexican-American votes in South Texas, whether those votes were merely “counted” by
patróns
or freely cast. After his victory, Johnson wrote Dr. Garcia, whom he called his “special friend”: “Believe me, I am well aware of all you did to help make our great victory possible. I will never forget it. Please let me know when I can be of service—and I mean that from the bottom of my heart.” After the lesson he had learned in the Longoria affair, however, Lyndon Johnson had not again—in 1949 or the next six years—taken the field on behalf of Mexican-Americans in any battle in which there was danger of antagonizing the South Texas Anglos. Having learned the cost of siding with the oppressed, he took his stance, over and over, on the other side.

He was on that side in Washington, too. It was less than a month after the legislative hearings on the Longoria affair, in fact, that Lyndon Johnson took the field not with the friends of social justice but with its foes by delivering, as part of the southern battle against President Truman’s civil rights legislation, his “We of the South” maiden speech—the speech that Richard Russell called “one of the ablest I have ever heard” and that moved the Houston NAACP to telegraph Johnson, “The Negroes who sent you to Congress are ashamed to know that you have stood against them on the floor today.” It was during that same 1949 battle that Johnson stood as a southern “sentry” against northern maneuvers for civil rights, and all during that year, the year of the Longoria affair, he repeatedly convinced Russell that he would be a loyal soldier in Russell’s cause, even voting for the Eastland Bill that would, had it passed, have made segregation mandatory in public accommodations in the District of Columbia.

He had stayed on that side in the years since 1949, voting against FEPC and anti-poll tax legislation as well as against legislation to outlaw discrimination in unions, voting for legislation that would have allowed draftees to serve in segregated Army units—voting on the side of the South not only in 1949 but in 1950 and 1951 and ’52 and ’53 and ’54 and ’55. And in 1955, having won the majority leadership with southern support, he used the Leader’s power to crush the hopes of Senate liberals for a change in Rule 22 and to turn back liberal attempts to ban segregation in armed forces reserve units. His empathy and tenderness for people oppressed simply because their skins were dark, strong though it was in his makeup, was not as strong as his need for power. The compassion, genuine though it was, had always—always, without exception—proven to be expendable. That had been true throughout his life before he got to the Senate—and it was true after he got to the Senate. The Longoria affair had been proof of the compassion—and of its expendability. The next seven years had been further proof. By the end of 1955, Lyndon Johnson had held positions of public authority—State NYA Director, Congressman, Senator—for twenty years, and for twenty years the record had been consistent. Whenever compassion and ambition had been in conflict, the former had vanished from the landscape of Lyndon Johnson’s career. For it to become a permanent element of that landscape, it would have to be compatible with the ambition: compassion and ambition would both have to be pointing in the same direction. When the year 1955 came to an end, that had not yet occurred, and once again ambition had won.

Now, in 1956, it won again.

L
YNDON
J
OHNSON HAD DETERMINED
, down on his ranch during his heart attack summer of 1955, that the surest path to the presidency was to win the Democratic nomination for that job in 1956: then, even if Eisenhower decided to run again and that nomination therefore became worthless, he would, as the party’s last standard-bearer, be the front-runner to win its nod in 1960, when Eisenhower would not be running. Almost ridiculously long as were the odds against his winning the nomination—favored (in the most favorable poll) by a meagre 3 percent of the country’s rank-and-file Democrats, and by exactly twenty-nine out of 1,944 county chairmen outside the South—he had therefore spent the autumn of 1955 grabbing for the prize, flying across the country to rustle up financial support, forcing Adlai Stevenson into the primaries, accepting both the chairmanship and the favorite-son nomination of the Texas delegation, trying to blunt at least somewhat the knife edge of liberal antipathy toward him by passing the Social Security Bill.

Despite his overtures to liberals, however, the base of his support—the
sine qua non
of his candidacy—was the South: his strategy was to arrive at the Democratic Convention in August with most of that region’s 324 votes; to add to that base some western support; to keep Stevenson from winning on an early ballot; and then, with the convention deadlocked, to become its compromise choice. And for the South, of course, one issue loomed above all others.

T
HAT ISSUE WAS LIKE A WOUND IN 1956
, a wound that, as the year went by, gaped wider and wider, red and raw, across the bland face of peaceful, prosperous 1950s America.

Nineteen fifty-six had hardly begun when the scars of the Emmett Till case were abruptly ripped open anew—when the two murderers decided to tell the world their story.

They did so because, having been acquitted of Till’s murder, they could
not be tried again for the same crime—and because of greed. A journalist, William Bradford Huie, offered them four thousand dollars for their story, and Roy Bryant and Big Milam were broke and needed money, and in the Mississippi Delta four thousand dollars was a lot of money. And, they did so for applause. They were sure that if they told the world the whole story, explained the good reason they had had for executing the visitor from Chicago, people—not “nigger lovers” from the North, perhaps, but plenty of people—would understand, and approve. As Huie said in his article, published in the January 24, 1956, edition of the national magazine
Look
, Bryant and Milam “don’t feel they have anything to hide”; rather, they felt they had something to boast about.

Their original intention, Milam explained to Huie, was to “just whip” the boy “and scare some sense into him”—that
had
to be done, of course; “when a nigger even gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman,” stern measures had to be taken. But young Till had not been scared, Milam said. “We never were able to scare him. They had just filled him so full of that poison he was hopeless.” Even after they drove him to the toolhouse, and beat him on the head with their pistols, he refused to be scared, Milam said. So, of course, he and his half brother Roy had no choice. “What else could we do? He was hopeless. I’m no bully. I never hurt a nigger in my life…. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are gonna stay in their place. Niggers ain’t gonna vote where I live. If they did they’d control the government. They ain’t gonna go to school with my kids…. Me and my folks fought for this country, and we’ve got some rights.” That was the reason, he said, that he had told Till, “I’m going to make an example of you.” That was the reason he and Bryant took the youth to the cotton gin, forced him to load the exhaust fan onto the truck, and then drove him to the bank of the Tallahatchie. That was the reason he shot him in the head.

The lawyers who had been so proud to defend Bryant and Milam were also quoted in Huie’s article. They had advised their clients to cooperate with the journalist because they, too, felt that people would understand if only the reasons were explained. And, being men of higher education and broader outlook than their clients, they had an additional reason: they felt that the case should be publicized as widely as possible because it would make clear to the rest of America the futility of trying to impose desegregation on the South. Milam was not a pleasant person, one of the lawyers admitted to Huie: “He’s got a chip on his shoulder. That’s how he got that battlefield promotion in Europe; he likes to kill folks.” But, the lawyer explained, there was a need for men like Milam and Bryant: to “keep the niggahs in line.” And the country should understand, he said, that the “niggahs” were
going
to be kept in line. “There ain’t gonna be no integration,” he told Huie. “There ain’t gonna be no nigger votin’.
And the sooner everybody in this country realizes it, the better.
If any more pressure is put on us, the Tallahatchie River won’t hold all the niggers that’ll be thrown into it.” Publication of the true facts of the case would be valuable,
therefore, to “put the North and the NAACP and the niggers
on notice”;
it might even force the repeal of school integration, “just like Prohibition.” And the “true facts” did indeed reach audiences not accustomed to seeing how parts of the South kept blacks in line, because after
Look
, with a circulation of three million, published Huie’s article, it was excerpted in
Reader’s Digest
, with a circulation of eleven million—much of which was in the North’s largely white suburbs.

T
HEN, STILL EARLY IN 1956
, the wound was widened. In February, the Supreme Court ordered the University of Alabama to admit its first black student—and with that order, white fury spilled over. The Till atrocity and the Mississippi voter-registration murders had been violence by individuals. The Alabama incident escalated abruptly into violence by mob.

The would-be student was twenty-six-year-old Autherine Juanita Lucy. Quiet and shy, the young woman had been brought up on her father’s farm in backcountry Alabama, her home an unpainted frame shack and her high school another unpainted frame shack, but she wanted to be a librarian, and had put herself through a small Negro college. She applied to the graduate program in library science at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, but was not accepted because of her race. With the help of the NAACP, she sued for admittance, on the grounds that Alabama had established no institution, separate or not, in which blacks could obtain a library degree, and now, in February, her suit was granted, and the university’s trustees complied, although, to avoid contaminating the otherwise all-white student body, she was barred from dormitories and dining halls so that the other students would not be forced to live or eat with her.

That restriction did not satisfy some students. For two days, Autherine Lucy went to classes, passing burning crosses on campus, amid what she was to call “hateful stares,” and then, on February 6, came the “day I’ll never want to live through again.”

Ms. Lucy went from class to class in a dean’s car that day, “chased from one building to another,” a reporter wrote, “as though she was an animal pursued by a pack of hounds.” At each building there was a mob, made up not only of students but of rednecks from the countryside and hard-bitten factory workers from the industrial plants near Tuscaloosa, and the mobs threw eggs and stones, smashing the car’s windows, as they shouted, “Kill her! Kill her!” “There was murder in the air,” the reporter wrote, but state highway patrolmen on the scene made no move to protect her, or to arrest any of the stone-throwers, reportedly on orders from Governor James (Big Jim) Folsom. As the mob grew larger and more menacing, university officials asked for city fire engines to be sent, so that fire hoses could be used if necessary, but no engines appeared. Finally, the mob trapped her in a building, and she had to stay there
(“I could still hear the crowd outside”) until, after a very long time, the police arrived. The disturbances spread from the campus to downtown Tuscaloosa; when the rioters spotted cars driven by Negroes, they blocked their paths, smashed their windows, and climbed on their roofs and stomped dents in them. The university’s trustees reacted by suspending not the rioters but her, “for her own safety”: had they not done so, they said, there was the possibility of a lynching. “God knows I didn’t intend to cause all this violence,” she said. “I merely wanted an education.”