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June 26 - August 31, 2025
“gerontocracy,”
Like the seniority system, the filibuster was protected by a very powerful force: itself. Since the loophole in Rule 22 allowed any motion to bring a bill to the floor to be filibustered, bringing a civil rights bill to the floor would require a change in Rule 22. And changing Rule 22 would require a motion to change it—which could be filibustered. This was perhaps the ultimate legislative Catch-22: any attempt to close the loophole allowed the loophole to be used to keep it from being closed. And because of it there was no realistic possibility that the filibuster would be changed.
What was the legislation that had been defeated in the Senate in 1948? Legislation for civil rights, for aid to education, for aid to housing, for a fairer minimum wage, for better health care. An entire agenda of social justice—to a considerable extent endorsed by the nation—had been blocked in the Senate. Similar legislation had been blocked in the Senate for a decade and more.
Still protected against the people and the President, both of which wanted social progress, the Senate was unprotected against internal forces that opposed social progress, and that were indeed making it much less a place of wisdom and deliberation.
He had traveled a hard path to get to the Senate—from a hard place: the remote, barren Texas Hill Country, a land of loneliness and poverty, and for the young Lyndon Johnson, born on August 27, 1908, son of failed and ridiculed parents, a land of humiliation and fear, even the fear of having his home taken away by the bank. For a while he had come along that path fast—remarkably fast.
While Lyndon Johnson was not, as his two assistants knew, a reader of books, he was, they knew, a reader of men—a great reader of men. He had a genius for studying a man and learning his strengths and weaknesses and hopes and fears, his deepest strengths and weaknesses: what it was that the man wanted—not what he said he wanted but what he really wanted—and what it was that the man feared, really feared.
“Mr. Johnson took to the Senate as if he had been born there,” he says. “It was obvious it was his place.” His place. All at once, in the Senate—in this place that was so different from any other place he had ever been—Lyndon Johnson seems to have felt, within a very few weeks of his arrival in it, at home.
Dick Russell, they said over and over, year after year—as year after year, decade after decade, Dick Russell fought civil rights bills—Dick Russell didn’t really mean the arguments he was making.
Nor did any of the articles mention that the southerner who said that anti-lynching legislation was “unnecessary and uncalled for,” who said that the South was a place of “peace and harmony between the races,” had had, very close to his home, at least two lynchings for which no one was ever convicted or even prosecuted. None mentioned that the southerner who asserted so passionately that the South could take care of the lynching problem itself had done nothing to take care of it as Speaker or Governor.
Richard Russell was the only senator who sat on both the Democratic Policy Committee, which controlled the flow of legislation to the floor, and the Democratic Steering Committee, which controlled the party’s committee assignments.
In the Twenties, tariffs and profits and the stock market rose and rose again—and wages, so inadequate to begin with, fell further and further behind, so that workers received a steadily smaller share in the prosperity their toil had helped to create.
Only a complete transformation of the American economic system—“the complete passing of the old order of capitalism” with its laissez-faire government and unfettered economic individualism—would cure the problems, Olds said. The old ideal of democracy had become perverted; the idea of political freedom had resulted in the loss of the economic freedom which alone could really insure political freedom. “Without such a transformation,” he wrote, “to millions of workers … the Fourth of July will loom as anything but the birthday of liberty.”
When New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, angered by rates he considered onerous for the city’s low-income families, proposed building a municipal power plant to establish a yardstick by which the utilities’ rates could be measured, Olds worked with La Guardia’s office on it—and exulted when, as he was to recall, “just one day before the Mayor went before the Board of Estimate for authorization,” a power company official sullenly announced substantial rate reductions. And he exulted a year later, when the same official admitted that after the reduction electric usage had increased so
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I think my ideas have been going through a constant process of change.… I think it has been my continuous philosophy … that this country has got to work out its solutions in terms of its own traditions; that one of the great things in democracy is that it has the possibility of assimilating change, so that instead of … break-ups you have a constant evolution of the system”)
A single figure was standing between the big producers, already the possessors of great wealth, and wealth far greater.
Everyone in Washington knew the story. Truman of the Truman Committee was the title of an inspiring political Horatio Alger saga. And, in a city in which so many men viewed great events at least partly through the lens of personal opportunity, many men—including many senators—saw very quickly how a new war, or even a “police action,” could provide the backdrop for a repeat version of the same scenario. But no one saw the opportunity as quickly as Lyndon Johnson. And no one moved as quickly—or as deftly—to take advantage of it.
Lyndon Johnson had never had to learn these techniques. From the moment he entered politics—from those first Hill Country campaigns, now so many years behind him—he had seemed to know them, to know them instinctively, and to practice them with a rare ingenuity, a resourcefulness, a sureness of touch, as unerring as it was untaught.
syndicated columnist Holmes Alexander was to say. “The guy can write. What you notice right away about these Johnson reports is that they’re low in federal gobbleygook and high on the peppy turns of phrase which make for public understanding.… This stuff Johnson puts out is written to be read.”
No matter how much time a man was willing to spend arguing with Lyndon Johnson, Lyndon Johnson was willing to spend more.
It had done, in short, precisely what the Founding Fathers had wanted the Senate to do, what their Constitution had designed it to do: to defuse—cool off—and educate; to make men think, recall them to their first principles, such as the principle that in a democracy it is not generals but the people’s tribunes who make policy. “It was, in all truth, a demonstration of what the Senate at its best was capable of doing,” White was to say.
The responsibility for Congress’ failures, Galloway wrote, “lies in large part at the door of Senate filibusters.… Filibusters have delayed for decades the enactment of social legislation passed by the House of Representatives and desired by a majority of the American people.”
Lyndon was the guy to see if you wanted to get a bill off the Calendar, Lyndon was the guy to see if you were having trouble getting it passed in the House, Lyndon was the guy to see for campaign funds. There wasn’t anything Lyndon was using these facts for as yet. But in ways not yet visible, power was starting to accumulate around him—ready to be used.
Johnson had positioned his party precisely as he—he alone—had wanted it positioned, and the wisdom of his strategy was dramatically apparent. Grand in scale, this overarching political plan that he had conceived down on the ranch in a flash of inspiration had proved to be a political masterstroke.
For the first time since college and the NYA, Lyndon Johnson had direct power over other men. And as soon as he got it, he showed how he was going to use it. Power, Lord Acton said, corrupts. Not always. What power always does is reveal.
Johnson wouldn’t understand. He would refuse to understand. Considerations important to the Senator—even the consideration of political survival—did not divert him from his purpose. “He could charm you or knock your block off, or bribe you, or threaten you, anything to get your vote,” Jackson would explain. “And he’d get it. That was the difference.”
Thus did Lyndon Johnson revolutionize the Senate, severely modifying its proud heritage of unlimited debate without changing a single rule.”
If all his senators were present when the roll call began, and he could see that there were absentees on the other side, he wanted the roll to be called at a fast pace. If he didn’t have all his men there—if some stragglers hadn’t been found yet—then he wanted the roll call to be slow. And during the years when he was Leader, the roll was called at precisely the pace he desired.
Lyndon Johnson knew that the illusion of power was almost as important as real power itself, that, simply, the more powerful you appeared to be, the more powerful you became. It was one of the reasons for his great success.”
“If time means a lot, don’t stop,” Lyndon Johnson said. “Keep going.”
And there was another important matter. “Doctor,” he said, “let me ask you something. Will I be able to smoke again if this is a heart attack?” The doctor said, “Well, Senator, frankly, no,” and Johnson, with what Oltorf recalls as “a great sigh,” said, “I’d rather have my pecker cut off.”
A television set was installed in his room; a visitor found him “simultaneously watching TV, listening to the news through an earphone receiver on a tiny transistor radio, and carrying on a lively conversation with a nurse.”
Gunnar Myrdal’s monumental An American Dilemma, published near the end of the war, which documented the pervasiveness of white racism in America and disproved the clichés about the innate inferiority of Negroes on which that racism was based, and which made readers grasp the terrible gulf between America’s behavior and the ideals on which America had been founded; and whose scathing import—that America had blamed the black man for what it had done to him—was working its way, gradually but steadily, into America’s consciousness.
But although the verdict in the trial was simply one more in the long line of defeats for justice in the South, in a larger sense the Emmett Till trial was not a defeat. For the trial, and the verdict, had been brought to the attention of the world.
“The educational process had begun”; the Emmett Till trial “became the first great media event of the civil rights movement. The nation was ready; indeed, it wanted to read what happened.”
saw that their lives were permeated with injustice. “I swore then and there,” Lyndon Johnson was to say, “that if I ever had a chance to help those underprivileged kids I was going to do it.” It was at Cotulla, Lyndon Johnson was to say, “that my dream began of an America … where race, religion, language and color didn’t count against you.”
And Lyndon Johnson won these victories for America’s downtrodden because he possessed not only the quality of compassion, but a rare gift for translating compassion into the only kind of accomplishment that would be meaningful.
LYNDON JOHNSON was not to become the champion of the poor, particularly the poor of color, solely because of his compassion or his governmental genius, however. Indeed, had his accomplishments on their behalf depended solely on those traits, they might never have become reality.
Summing up the Longoria affair for the author of this book in 1986, John Connally would explain Johnson’s “backtracking” by saying it was consistent with his entire life: “He never wanted to be a dead hero.”
The physician was totally bound up with their cause, and Johnson convinced him that he, too, wanted to advance that cause, but that he would be able to do so only if he continued to hold power, and therefore
Having learned the cost of siding with the oppressed, he took his stance, over and over, on the other side. He was on that side in Washington, too.
His empathy and tenderness for people oppressed simply because their skins were dark, strong though it was in his makeup, was not as strong as his need for power. The compassion, genuine though it was, had always—always, without exception—proven to be expendable. That had been true throughout his life before he got to the Senate—and it was true after he got to the Senate.
journalists do a better job of covering revolution than evolution.
He then attacked “the people … so filled with prejudice that they even resort to violence; and the same way on the other side of the thing, the people who want to have the whole matter settled today”—a comparison that equated violent southern mobs with men and women whose only crime was to be active in the cause of civil rights. There was no explicit criticism from Eisenhower even for Emmett Till’s murderers.
The recalculations were going on in both parties. Once a basic Democratic belief had been that the party could not afford to alienate the South. Now there was a new calculation. The eleven southern states had a total of 128 electoral votes, and that figure included Texas, which Eisenhower had carried twice and whose twenty-four electoral votes could no longer be considered safe for a Democratic presidential candidate. Without Texas, the South’s electoral vote was 104. The nine key northern states had 223 electoral votes.
Among the more than six million Negroes in the eleven southern states who were twenty-one years of age in 1956, only 1,238,000 had been registered—still only one in five. There were entire counties in these states—counties in which thousands of Negroes lived—in which not a single Negro was registered to vote. In Mississippi, the number of registered Negroes may actually have declined during those four years.
So Lyndon Johnson changed—and changed the course of American history. For at last this leader of men would be leading, fighting, not only for himself but for a great cause. This man who in the pursuit of his aims could be so utterly ruthless—who would let nothing stand in his way; who, in the pursuit, deceived, and betrayed and cheated—would be deceiving and betraying and cheating on behalf of something other than himself: specifically, on behalf of the sixteen million Americans whose skins were dark.
Lyndon Johnson, who as President just a few years later would do so much to end the racial discrimination that was a keystone of the South’s way of life, who would do more to end racial discrimination than any other President of the twentieth century, was being given a crucial boost toward the presidency by the South’s own senators, fervent believers, most of them, in racial discrimination. And at least some of them were helping Johnson at least partly because they believed that while, if he were to become President, he might have no choice but to do something about racial discrimination, they
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The most important thing a man tells you is what he’s not telling you.
But the fundamental nature of the deal is what Johnson said it was—in return for southern votes for Hells Canyon, “I got the western liberals to back the southerners” on civil rights. While, from vote to vote, the number of westerners would vary, whatever the number needed, the number would be there.
it is ever proposed to use the military forces of this Nation to compel the people represented by other senators to conform their lives and social order to the rest of the country, those senators need not be afraid of the word ‘filibuster’ or of attempting to exercise all their rights under the rules.”
