Echos from the Past: A Book Report

I have just finished reading Robert Caro's Pulitzer Prize winning Master of the Senate, a biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson documenting his Senate years (1948-1960) and the inner workings of that body. For most of those years Johnson served as Majority Leader and controlled the Senate and its agenda, earning the moniker "Master of the Senate". Reading this book is a commitment, running 1100 pages. Although at times overwhelming in minutia, the book is a fascinating study of the events and issues of the 50’s, the personalities of the Senate members and the Majority Leader’s exercise of power over those members - the strong and the weak. It is both an enlightening and appalling read.

Common wisdom says there are things you really don't want to know, like how sausage or creamed corn is made. The workings of the US Senate might fall in that category but as a citizen and voter you really should take a deep breath and a strong whiff even though it is not pleasant.

The House of Representatives with its 435 members and 2 year terms is a body with plenty of attention seeking prima donnas, knee jerk responses to issues, horse trading for pork for the home folks and designed to reflect, in James Madison's term, "the popular will".

But our Founders did not trust the "popular will", so a 2nd legislative body, the Senate, the "upper chamber", in Madison's words, was designed to be the deliberative body, "a cooling engine to counteract the boiling House of Representatives, a necessary fence .. it is to consist in its proceedings with more coolness, with more system, and with more wisdom, than the popular branch" - a body to protect the people from themselves. 

And the Senate was designed to protect itself from the people, with 6 year terms and appointment by state legislators to a term long enough to insure their independence. (Senators were not elected by popular vote until 1913.) With 100 members, 2 per state, it is in no way representative and intentionally gives outsized power to states with small population; the result being, a majority of people cannot pass laws unless a majority of states agree. And up until the Civil War the Senate held true to the Founder's vision, the "Golden Age" of the giants of the Senate, where compromise, even on the pre-Civil War fractious issue of Free vs. Slave states, could be accomplished. Of course that civility became quite uncivil in 1861.

As the House grew in size and became more and more dysfunctional with reorganizations every 2 years, the Senate became the dominant legislative force, with rules that gave inordinate power to committee chairmen and rules to enable obstruction. The Senate was designed to slow things down. And to this day, the thing the Senate does best is block things. 

(Note: Men only. The first woman senator was Rebecca Felton of Georgia, appointed in 1922. In 1932, Hattie Caraway of Arkansas became the first woman elected to the Senate. And there were never more than 2 women serving Senators at a time until 1993). 

Senators serve for 6 years and there is little turnover. Only a third of the Senate stand for election in any given election year. In the mid-20th century, the Senate's seniority rules assured the major Senate committees, those bodies that determine what legislation actually reaches the Senate floor for debate and vote, were led by Southerners who all had safe seats dating from the 30's. Richard Russell of Georgia, Harry Byrd of Virginia, James Eastland of Mississippi, Russell Long of Louisiana, John McClellan of Arkansas, Claude Pepper of Florida - led the Armed Services, Finance, Judicial, Appropriations, Rules, Foreign Relations committees, stifling those bills threatening the Jim Crow status quo - and orchestrated by Lyndon Baines Johnson, Majority Leader from Texas 

But the main reason for bills failing to be passed were the rules originally intended to allow for lengthy and calm debate of contentious issues. It got perverted. The filibuster, sometimes referred to as "talking a bill to death" and cloture, a motion to end debate but requiring a super-majority to pass, allow a small minority to block initiatives they oppose. (Strom Thurmond  spoke for 24 straight hours in a filibuster attempt to block the 1957 Civil Rights legislation.) The 22 Senators of the Southern Caucus could block any bill that smacked of rights for the African-American population. And in many cases, they were supported by Midwest & Western Senators, who traded their votes against civil rights bills for favorable votes from the Southerners for Western dam construction (e.g. Hell’s Canyon). For these Senators, from states with few black voters, the votes were not all that damaging to their electoral prospects - as opposed to their integrity.

In the 40's and 50's, opposition to civil rights legislation became the focus for the Southern Caucus, going all out to block each and every initiative. After WWII, returning black servicemen were no longer willing to accept the status quo of the Jim Crow South and the indifference of the North. The lynchings (Tuskegee Institute has recorded the lynchings of 3,446 blacks between 1882 and 1968); the murder of Emmet Till, a 14 year old boy who was brutally beaten to death and his body dumped in the Tallahatchie River, supposedly for whistling at a white woman; the harassment and expulsion of Autherine Lucy, the first African-American student at the University of Alabama. These outrages, coupled with the blatant voter suppression throughout the South, awakened Congress and the country to this massive injustice. 

Poll taxes, literacy tests and “vouchers” - a requirement for a prospective black voters to be attested to by an already registered voter - made voter registration difficult in the extreme. In 1948 Bullock County, Alabama, with a black population of 11,000, there were exactly 5 registered black voters, who were limited by Alabama law to 3 vouchers each. So in Bullock County, precisely 15 black voters could be registered per election cycle. This system was replicated throughout the South. Coupled with voter intimidation, the suppression efforts were so successful that only 2% of registered black voters actually voted throughout the South in 1948. This discrimination was not disguised and the US House attempted to address it, passing civil rights bills in 1936, 1938, 1944, 1946, 1948 and 1950 - all of which failed to pass the Senate, filibustered to death by the Southern Caucus under the smokescreen of states rights. 

In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs. Board of Education that school segregation, so called “separate but equal” was unconstitutional. The South reacted with church bombings, lynchings, KKK night riders and outright defiance. The federal government responded with troops in Little Rock to enforce school integration but the seminal event was Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, leading to a year-long bus boycott and the emergence of Martin Luther King as the Gandhi of The Civil Rights Movement.

In 1957, largely due to Lyndon Johnson's obsession with becoming President, a Civil Rights Bill again reached the Senate. Rebuked in his attempt for the Democratic nomination in 1956, Johnson believed that in order to fulfill his dream he had to disassociate himself from the Southern Caucus, or at least appear to do so. He decided a Civil Rights Bill must pass the Senate. The ‘57 bill from the House was a "dream bill", with Part 3 specifying equal rights covering a broad spectrum and Part 4 ensuring voting rights. But LBJ conspired with the Southern Caucus to gut the bill and to agree to pass only the Part 4 voting rights in exchange for no filibustering, justifying the gutting publicly, claiming that if blacks had voting rights they could change other things through the ballot. The South of course objected, so LBJ finagled an amendment to Part 4 to state that anyone indicted for violating voting rights had the right to trial by jury. i.e. a southern white jury like the jury that acquitted the confessed murderers of Emmett Till. A "worse than nothing" bill according to the NAACP. But in the end this token Civil Rights Bill of 1957 was accepted as "finally something", the first civil rights bill to become law since 1875. Perhaps something that could provide hope. And LBJ’s image as a Southern segregationist moved slightly left and opened the path to becoming John F Kennedy’s VP pick in 1960.

It must be noted that upon becoming President in 1963, Lyndon Baines Johnson, if not for Vietnam, would have secured a powerful legacy with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the greatest advancement of civil rights in American history, short of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863.

The 50's were a shameful period, a period defined by white privilege. Now there are people hard at work to send us back to the 50's, with state by state attacks on voting rights and extreme gerrymandering to assure representatives pick their voters rather than voters picking their representatives - and a Senate that refuses to even hear debate on the Right to Vote Act. Basic human and civil rights are being rolled back by copy-cat state legislatures without objection from Congress or Supreme Court. When civil/human/voting rights are under attack, what is needed urgently is Madison's “more wisdom Senate”. So far what we have seen is a mirror of the 50’s version - except the names of the perpetrators have changed. And We The People seem strangely ambivalent. Democracy is a fragile thing, hard won, easily lost.

"The fabric of democracy is always fragile everywhere because it depends on the will of citizens to protect it, and when they become scared, when it becomes dangerous for them to defend it, it can go very quickly."   Margaret Atwood

"The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment." Robert Hutchins

Time to stand up.

Copyright © 2022 Dave Hoplin