National Affairs: Vicious Stuff

Carrying out the careful strategy laid down by Georgia's Richard Brevard Russell, Southern Senators were busily infiltrating Northern lines with Old South courtesy, sowing confusion with legalisms, and arguing more in sorrow than in anger against the Administration's civil rights bill. But somehow Virginia's old warrior, Harry Flood Byrd, failed to get the word. One day last week he rose up in the Senate in fine old-fashioned Southern style to attack the civil rights bill head on.

Designing drafters, charged he, had "hidden the fact that a Reconstruction Era statute could be invoked under the bill to provide the armed might of the U.S. for enforcement of the bill's provisions. This bayonet force is only a sample of the kind of vicious stuff of which this bill is made." Who were the designing drafters? Rasped Byrd: "I strongly suspect that the modern Thaddeus Stevens* now cloaked in the robes of the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme

Court has a thorough and complete knowledge of what could and would be done under the bill. And likewise, I suspect that the A.D.A., the N.A.A.C.P.'s Gold Dust Twin, has at least guilty knowledge." Nor were these all the plotters. Heading the list: Attorney General Herbert Brownell, "of whom the bill would make a 20th century American Caesar."

"Too Far Too Fast?" Soon after Byrd sat down, the Senate voted by a lopsided 71 (29 Democrats, 42 Republicans) to 18 (Southern Democrats all) to begin debate on the rights bill already passed by the House. But no sooner had civil rights become the Senate's order of business than Minority Leader Bill Knowland's coalition commenced to come apart at the seams.

The root of the trouble was that Russell & Co. had succeeded in stirring up doubts about the House bill's potent Section III, authorizing the Attorney General to seek injunctions not alone when voting rights are in jeopardy, but when any civil rights violation occurs. Southern Senators finally argued some liberal Democrats and some Republicans into trying to work out a compromise limiting the Attorney General's power. But despite caucuses and corridor whispers, no compromise acceptable to all elements within the coalition could be found. Causing part of the difficulty was President Eisenhower himself, who one day advised the Senate to "keep the measure an effective piece of legislation'' protecting all civil rights, next day told his press conference: "If you try to go too far too fast . . . you are making a mistake.".

Finally Bill Knowland threw up his hands at trying to achieve a compromise, announced that all attempts had stopped and that the Senate would simply vote on the amendment offered by an awesome coalition-within-the-coalition—liberal New Mexico Democrat Clinton Anderson and liberal Vermont Republican George Aiken—to strike out Section III entirely.

The True Aim. Knowland's troubles, of course, stemmed from the fact that in spite of such bombast as Harry Byrd's, Dick Russell's strategy had been amazingly effective. So persuasive were the Southern arguments that most of the Senate and the President too had completely lost sight of the true aim of the civil rights bill of 1957. Wrote TIME'S Congressional Correspondent James McConaughy at week's end: