Master of the Senate (25 page)

When emotions rose, the southern senators couldn’t even be bothered to conceal the fact that it was not “Nigras” alone whom they despised. Mississippi’s Bilbo addressed a letter to a New York woman of Italian descent, “Dear Dago.” The Magnolia State’s other senator, James O. Eastland (who would
some years later stare coldly down a committee table at Senator Jacob Javits of New York, a Jew, and say, “I don’t like you—or your kind”), now said that if the FEPC bill was constitutional “ten thousand Jewish drygoods merchants represent a discrimination against the Anglo-Saxon branch of the white race” and Congress should therefore “limit the number of Jews in interstate business.” It wasn’t only Italians and Jews whom the southerners wanted kept in their places. While Jim Dombrowski of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare was testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Eastland repeatedly sneered at his “typically old Southern name.” And of course there were always the Native Americans. Defending American businessmen who did not want to employ them, Senator Bankhead explained that “There is something peculiar about an Indian which causes the white American not to want to be too closely associated with him.”

“This is the spectacle presented by the United States in the wake of a war against fascism and racism,” I. F. Stone wrote caustically in
The Nation
in 1948. A majority of the American people might endorse Truman’s proposals, not merely on civil rights but on a dozen other issues, and in towns and cities across the United States audiences might cheer the President’s assault on the Capitol Hill “Do-Nothings”—the Senate didn’t care. To many senators the New Deal was nothing more or less than “socialism,” and in opposing it, they were simply doing their duty. The majority might call for change—social change, economic change; these senators knew what a majority was: the majority was “the mob.” They had been elected to protect America against the mob. Against long odds, a President had just swept all before him. What was a President to them, to these senators who said, “We were here before he came, and we’ll be here after he’s gone”?

And, of course, the Senate—particularly these southern senators who dominated it—didn’t have to care. The six-year terms and the staggering of those terms decreed by the Founding Fathers had armored the Senate as a whole against public opinion in the nation as a whole; the majority will of the United States could reach the Senate of the United States only in very diluted form—“the Senate, as a Senate,” could indeed
“never
be repudiated.” And by decreeing that in the Senate each state would have the same two votes regardless of population, the Fathers had further ensured that within the Senate, population wouldn’t matter—that the majority wouldn’t matter. The right of unlimited debate—a logical outgrowth of the Founders’ insistence on protecting minority rights—had bolted around the small states yet another layer of armor against the majority will. Nor could national public opinion touch an individual senator. Each senator was answerable only to the will of the majority of voters in his own state, and of course the stands the southern senators were taking did not hurt but helped them with those voters. And thanks to the seniority rule, once these senators were re-elected, the only thing that mattered was that they
had
been re-elected: their inexorable progress to the committee chairmanships
would continue. The Senate decided who would hold its posts of power—and the Senate decided alone.

The 1948 elections proved the point. Infuriated by the liberalism of their party’s President and their party’s platform, which actually included a fairly strong civil rights plank, a States Rights Party was formed, with its own presidential candidate, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who denounced the FEPC as “Communistic,” Truman’s proposed integration of the armed services as “un-American,” and said, “There’s not enough troops in the Army to force the southern people to admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our churches.” But despite all the furor engendered by the new party, it carried a mere four states. Not only had President Truman won, he had won by turning the election into a referendum on Congress. In terms of majority rule, the South had been thoroughly repudiated. Although Truman had won, however, the southern senators hadn’t lost. A liberal tide had washed over the rest of the country, as it had washed over the country in 1904 and 1912 and 1936. But while it had swept a liberal majority into the Senate, not a single southerner standing for re-election had been defeated. The majority party—in both houses of Congress—would be Democratic, not Republican. But in both House and Senate, the committee chairmanships would again be held by southerners. If anything, southern power on Capitol Hill would be stronger, not weaker; the attribute which in the Senate meant power was seniority, and seniority was inexorable and cumulative; the senators who would return in January would return with more—not less—of that asset. The South’s point of view might have been repudiated; its “position of entrenched minority” in the Senate was untouched.

Although Truman had won on the basis of his “Fair Deal” program, that program’s fate would still be controlled by anti-Fair Deal southerners. And in the unlikely event that Truman’s proposals somehow emerged from committee, there was still the filibuster in the Senate. What was the legislation that had been defeated in the Senate in 1948? Legislation for civil rights, for aid to education, for aid to housing, for a fairer minimum wage, for better health care. An entire agenda of social justice—to a considerable extent endorsed by the nation—had been blocked in the Senate. Similar legislation had been blocked in the Senate for a decade and more. There was no reason, despite Truman’s victory, to think it would pass now.

The Senate’s Golden Age had ended almost a century before. During the ensuing decades, the institution had been subtly altered, decade by decade, into something significantly different from the body that had been envisioned by the Founding Fathers. They had wanted it to be independent, a place of wisdom and deliberation armored against outside forces. But the rise inside the Senate itself of forces they had not sufficiently foreseen—the rise of parties and party caucuses, and of party discipline; the transformation of America’s infant industries into gigantic economic entities which had representatives sitting in the
Senate itself—had undermined the Senate’s independence from within, and the impact of these new forces on the Senate had been heightened because the armor against outside forces remained in place. Still protected against the people and the President, both of which wanted social progress, the Senate was unprotected against internal forces that opposed social progress, and that were indeed making it much less a place of wisdom and deliberation. Other internal developments—most importantly, seniority and the filibuster—had further distorted the Founders’ dream. They had envisioned the Senate as the moderating force in government, as the cooler of the popular will; cool had become cold, had become ice, ice in which, for decades, with only a few brief exceptions, the popular desire for social change had become frozen. Designed as the deliberative power, the Senate had become instead the negative power, the selfish power. The “necessary fence” against executive and popular tyranny had been transformed, by party rule and by the seniority rule, into something thicker and higher—into an impenetrable wall against the democratic impulses it had originally been supposed only to “refine” and “filter,” into a dam against which waves of social reform, attempts to ameliorate the human condition, dashed themselves in vain. Except for brief moments—the beginning of Wilson’s presidency, for example, and the Hundred Days of Roosevelt’s—when the floodgates in the dam suddenly swung wide and the tides swept through, cleansing the great Republic, the Founders’ armor had resisted every attempt by others to force them open; the Senate had been designed as the “firm” body; it had become too firm—too firm to allow the reforms the Republic needed.

Never had the dam been more firm than during the last decade, the decade since the conservative coalition had learned its strength. During that decade, despite the mandate of three presidential elections, it had stood across and blocked the rising demand for social justice, had stood so solidly that it seemed too strong ever to be breached.

In January, 1949, when Lyndon Johnson arrived in it, it was still standing.

N
EWLY ELECTED SENATORS
of the United States are sworn in in groups of four. They stand in the rear of the high-ceilinged Senate Chamber, their “sponsors” (generally their state’s senior senator) at their side, and when each new senator’s turn comes, his sponsor takes his arm and escorts him ceremoniously down the broad, shallow steps of the center aisle, between the rows of mahogany desks at which Webster sat, and Clay and Calhoun, and Borah and Norris and the La Follettes, father and son, down to the well, where, on the dais, above it, the Senate’s President is waiting, framed by marble columns. When, on January 3, 1949, the Secretary of the Senate called Lyndon Johnson’s name, old Tom Connally, a hero in Texas since Johnson had been a boy, took his arm in a firm grip, and they walked together down to the dais where the legendary Arthur Vandenberg was standing, stiffly erect, right hand already raised for the oath. “Do you solemnly swear that you will support and defend the Constitution of the United States?” Vandenberg asked, and Lyndon Johnson said “I do.”

He had traveled a hard path to get to the Senate—from a hard place: the remote, barren Texas Hill Country, a land of loneliness and poverty, and for the young Lyndon Johnson, born on August 27, 1908, son of failed and ridiculed parents, a land of humiliation and fear, even the fear of having his home taken away by the bank.

For a while he had come along that path fast—remarkably fast.

At twenty-one, while still an undergraduate at a little teachers college known as a “poor boys’ school,” he was running two campaigns, one for a state legislator, the other for a candidate for lieutenant governor, in a block of Hill Country counties, and politicians all over Texas began hearing about “this wonder kid” who “knew more about politics than anyone else in the area.” By the time he was twenty-three, a congressman’s aide who had only recently arrived in Washington with a cardboard suitcase and no clothes warm enough for a northern winter (and who for months didn’t have enough money to buy any), he
was the “Boss of the Little Congress,” a club of congressional aides that he had made influential on Capitol Hill. By twenty-six, he had been appointed the National Youth Administration’s director for the State of Texas, thereby becoming perhaps the youngest person the New Deal ever put in charge of a statewide program. At twenty-eight he was elected to Congress, after a campaign against seven better-known opponents. Within four years, using money from Texas contractors and oilmen, he injected new energy into a stagnant Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, gained influence over other congressmen, and a toehold on national power. And when, in April, 1941, one of his state’s senators died, and a special election was called to fill the vacancy, Franklin Roosevelt allowed him to announce his candidacy from the White House steps, and the belief in Washington was that Lyndon Johnson, still only thirty-two years old, would become America’s youngest senator. During that campaign, polls showed him pulling steadily away from his principal opponent, Texas Governor W. Lee (Pappy) O’Daniel, and that belief seemed justified.

And then, in an instant, with one slip, he was stopped.

He hadn’t made many slips. He was always telling his aides, “If you do
everything
, you’ll win,” and during his decade-long ascent of the political ladder, he had done
“everything
,” had worked so hard that a tough Texas political boss said “I never thought it was
possible
for anyone to work that hard,” had worked with a feverish, almost frantic intensity that journalists would describe as “energy” when it was really desperation and fear, the fear of a man fleeing from something terrible. Throughout all that decade, moreover, he had planned and intrigued, trying to think of everything, unceasingly careful and wary. But at the very end of that 1941 race—on Election Day itself—he had relaxed. In his euphoria over apparent victory, he violated an old adage of Texas politics by reporting too early in the day the vote totals from the corrupt counties he controlled, thereby letting O’Daniel know how many votes were needed from the corrupt counties
he
controlled, and giving him the opening necessary to win.

And with that defeat, the years of triumph ended—to be followed by very different years. He had expected that another chance at a Senate seat would come almost immediately, with the election in 1942 for the full term, but the Second World War deprived him of that chance—and he was not to get another for seven years.