Master of the Senate (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #3)

by Robert A. Caro

Edgar A. Guest’s “It Couldn’t Be Done” (“There are thousands to tell you it cannot be done, / There are thousands to prophesy failure, / There are thousands to point out to you one by one, / The dangers that wait to assail you. / But just buckle in with a bit of a grin, / Just take off your coat and go to it; / Just start in to sing as you tackle the thing / That ‘cannot be done,’ and you’ll do it”),

The Civil Rights Bill of 1957 was going to suffer the same fate as the civil rights bills of 1950, and 1948, and 1946, and 1944, and 1938, and 1936. There was not going to be a vote on it on the floor. It was going to die, in a filibuster, on the motion to bring it to the floor. The dam that for so long had held back the tide of social justice was going to hold it back again. Civil rights was going to lose. Lyndon Johnson was going to lose.

It seemed that this bill was going to die, too. Time to save it was growing very short. With every moment, the mood of sullenness and hostility on the floor was worsening, hardening. It hardly seemed likely that any amendment from these southerners who were shouting “rape” and “Gestapo” at the liberals—or from the southerners’ allies—would be considered by the liberals, much less accepted by them.

Auerbach’s solution would require merely the addition to O’Mahoney’s amendment of a new paragraph, one authorizing the use of civil as well as criminal contempt, Cohen explained. But, he explained, that new paragraph might help create the necessary new ground, the new ground that could become the middle ground, the common ground, for a compromise that would enable the civil rights bill to pass. While southern senators would still be able to tell their constituents that the bill, by including a jury trial amendment, guaranteed southerners trials by southern juries and was therefore so weak as to be meaningless, northern senators, on the other hand, would now know that, despite that guarantee, the bill contained strong enforcement provisions unvitiated by any provision for trial by southern juries.