Sublime

Despite the last-minute passage of the Social Security bill, liberal antipathy to Johnson was as strong as ever—stronger, in fact: 1956 had, after all, been the year of the natural gas fight and the exemption of highway workers from the David-Bacon Act, and new revelations about Johnson’s relationship with Brown & Root. Under a headline that wa

THE SENATE HAD WON AGAIN. The citadel of the South, the dam against which so many liberal tides had broken in vain, was still standing, as impenetrable as ever. And it was standing thanks in substantial part to its Majority Leader. For years, the South had had a formidable general in Richard Russell. In 1956, as in 1955 and 1954 and 1953, it had ha

And with the filibuster still as firm as ever, there was no chance at all for the passage of civil rights legislation in the Senate in 1953 or 1954 or 1955. During those years, sixty-one separate civil rights bills were introduced in the Senate. Not one made it to the floor. The tide, whipped forward now by the wind of hope, had at last reached the

During the first seven years of the postwar era, moreover, there had been a President in the White House who had been determined to harness that tide, a President who not only reiterated the requests of his predecessor, twice passed by the House but twice rejected by the Senate, for the creation of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission a

Of all Truman’s other proposals—on desegregation of public facilities, on the FEPC, on the poll tax—not one got through the Senate in 1946, 1947, or 1948. With Russell basing his arguments on constitutional grounds (“We are not defending the poll tax as such. We are defending the rights of the States to govern their own elections and to keep Federa

Johnson’s voting record—a record twenty years long, dating back to his arrival in the House of Representatives in 1937 and continuing up to that very day—was consistent with the accent and the word. During those twenty years, he had never supported civil rights legislation—any civil rights legislation. In Senate and House alike, his record was an u