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The Civil Rights Act of 1960 |
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In 1959 the Eisenhower administration presented a civil rights bill to Congress which, among other things, extended the life of the Civil Rights Commission and gave the U.S. attorney general the power to inspect state and local voting records in elections for U.S. Government offices. The bill received immediate consideration in the House of Representatives, where House Judiciary Committee Chairman Emanuel Celler referred it to a special subcommittee headed by himself. Celler had very carefully appointed a number of pro-civil rights supporters to this subcommittee - Subcommittee No. 5. Southern members of the House frequently charged that the subcommittee had been "stacked" in favor of civil rights.
As would be expected, the subcommittee took the Eisenhower proposals and added to them. A Part III was included in the subcommittee bill, even though President Eisenhower had refused to include Part III in the administration proposals.
The creation and use of Subcommittee No. 5 was one of the important civil rights developments during the Eisenhower years. In the years following 1960, House Judiciary Chairman Celler continued to groom the subcommittee as a strong pro-civil rights group. When the bill that eventually became the Civil Rights Act of 1964 came before Subcommittee No. 5 in the fall of 1963, the subcommittee reported out one of the strongest civil rights bills that had ever been presented to the U.S. Congress. The subcommittee bill was so pro-civil rights that President Kennedy called Chairman Celler to a series of meetings at the White House at which the bill was toned down so that it would have a better change of eventual passage in the Senate.
Following consideration by the House Judiciary Committee, President Eisenhower's 1959 civil rights proposal ran into a stone wall of opposition in the House Rules Committee. The chairman of the House Rules Committee, Representative Howard Smith of Virginia, would disappear from Washington for long periods of time when a bill he disliked was supposed to be under consideration by his committee. With the Rules Committee chairman absent, no action could be taken on the bill in question. When the 1957 civil rights bill came before his committee, Chairman Smith left town for his Virginia farm because, he said, his dairy barn had caught fire and burned down. He went back to the farm again in 1959, arguing that his dairy cattle were sick and needed him close by.
House Judiciary Chairman Celler sought to solve the problem of Smith's stalwart opposition by circulating a discharge petition. If 1/2 of the members of the House signed the discharge petition, the 1959 Eisenhower civil rights bill would move automatically from the Rules Committee to the House floor for debate and passage. The petition came within 10 names of the 218 required signatures when Chairman Smith relented and allowed the Rules Committee to vote out the bill. Apparently only the "threat" of a successful discharge petition was enough to shake the bill free.
This technique for overcoming the obstacle of Chairman Smith and the House Rules Committee was used over and over again during the 1960s. For instance, when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was mired in the House Rules Committee in January of 1964, circulation of a discharge petition helped to inspire Chairman Smith to let the committee majority release the bill.
By February of 1960 the Eisenhower civil rights bill was, as expected, mired in the Senate Judiciary Committee. At this time Eisenhower's attorney general, William P. Rogers, proposed that court-appointed referees be sent into the South to register black citizens to vote. The Rogers proposal, which had the support of President Eisenhower, called for U.S. judges to send in referees wherever they found a "pattern or practice" of discrimination in the voter registration process.
Democratic members of the Senate criticized the Eisenhower voting rights plan. They pointed out that blacks would have to go through lengthy and legally treacherous court proceedings in order to get court-appointed referees sent into the South to register black voters. The Democrats argued the president of the United States, and not the courts, should dispatch U.S. registrars down into Dixie to put blacks on the voting rolls.
This controversy over how to register blacks to vote in the South, first aired publicly in early 1960, would continue until the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In the end, it was the president appointed registrars rather than the court appointed referees who were sent into the South to put large numbers of blacks on the voter registration rolls.
Perhaps more important was the development of the concept of "pattern or practice" for determining when the U.S. Government should override states' rights and enforce national civil rights laws. In the final stages of the Senate debate on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, an aide to Republican Senator Everett M. Dirksen of Illinois proposed that U.S. Government laws banning racial segregation in public accommodations and employment only apply in those states where there was a "pattern or practice" of discrimination. This compromise language, first proposed in 1960 by Attorney General Rogers, broke a stalemate and helped gain needed votes to cloture a southern filibuster and enact the 1964 civil rights bill into law.
A legislative maneuver was used to get Eisenhower's 1960 civil rights bill past Chairman James Eastland (Dem., MS) and the Senate Judiciary Committee. On February 15, 1960, the civil rights bill came up for debate on the Senate floor as an amendment to a minor bill concerning the leasing of a surplus U.S. Army building to a school district in Missouri. The southern Democrats in the Senate immediately began a filibuster, primarily against the prospect that Part III would be adopted and would give the U.S. attorney general the power to intervene directly in racial relations in the South.
Late in February, in an effort to break the filibuster, the Senate went into round-the-clock sessions. The 18 filibustering southerners, divided into 6 teams of 3 senators each, had no trouble keeping one 3 person team on the Senate floor while the other 5 teams rested. Those opposing the filibuster, however, had to keep 51 senators (a quorum) at the Capitol ready to meet a quorum call at any time. The result of round-the-clock sessions was to exhaust the pro-civil rights senators, not the southerners.
The failure of round-the-clock sessions to break the filibuster of the 1960 civil rights bill was a lesson to civil rights supporters that dominated their thinking during the early 1960s. The southerners could not be exhausted by 24-hour-a-day sessions, but the pro-civil rights senators could be. It meant that there was only one way to end a filibuster - get 2/3 of the Senate to vote cloture. Thus, when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were undergoing southern filibusters in the Senate, round-the-clock sessions were not attempted to break the filibuster. In both cases civil rights supporters, from the very beginning, saw a successful cloture vote as the only way to end the filibuster and get meaningful civil rights legislation passed in the Senate.
Once it became clear that round-the-clock sessions would not stop the southern filibuster of the 1960 civil rights bill, pro-civil rights senators attempted a cloture vote even though they did not know if they had enough votes for cloture. The results were disastrous. The cloture motion did not even receive a majority vote, let alone come close to the required 2/3 vote. The Senate quickly defeated Part III, the southerners ended their filibuster, and the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which now dealt weakly with voting rights, was enacted into law.
The failed cloture vote on the 1960 Civil Rights Act strongly influenced civil rights legislative strategy making in both 1964 and 1965. The lesson was clear. Never attempt a cloture vote until absolutely positive that 2/3 of the senators are going to vote for cloture. Neither the Civil Rights Act of 1964 nor the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were brought to a cloture vote until civil rights supporters were certain they had the necessary votes. Attempts to hold cloture votes before the votes were in hand were assiduously avoided.
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