National Affairs: Death for Civil Rights

For two days in the Senate last week a dogged trio of liberal Democrats—Missouri's Tom Hennings, New York's Herbert Lehman and Illinois' Paul Douglas—urged the Senate to blast the Administration's Civil Rights bill out of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Argued Paul Douglas, while Mississippi's Jim Eastland, Judiciary Committee chairman, chomped on a dead cigar: "If we pierce behind the complex rules and procedures, we know, as men, that the rules of the Senate have been very skillfully devised to prevent any action on civil rights which is obnoxious to the members from the South . . . I do not believe the American people can permanently postpone dealing with this issue. But the members of the Senate who are in this quiet and at times pleasant club cannot hope to escape the scrutiny of public opinion, not only of this country, but of the world."

But the three Democrats, as they well knew, were working against the clock. Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson and Minority Leader Bill Knowland joined hands in the argument that too much legislation was backed up for the Senate to get bogged down in a long debate on civil rights. (And this was precisely the way that Southerners in the House had planned it as they stalled off a favorable House civil-rights vote—279 to 126—until early last week.) "The Senator from New York is a practical man," Knowland put it to New York's Lehman. "It is only kidding minority groups and the American people to go through a lot of idle gestures."

Thus was civil rights blocked off for the duration of the 84th Congress and postponed, in effect, for the 85th. "I merely say," Georgia's Dick Russell summed up the prospects for civil rights in the 85th, "that when such nefarious schemes as these are presented in the future—and we hear that they will be—there will be members of the Senate who will resort to every weapon at their command to prevent such proposals being imposed on the people of the U.S."