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

by Robert A. Caro

In creating a Senate for the new nation, its Founding Fathers had tried to create within the government an institution that would speak for the educated, the well-born, the well-to-do, that would protect the rights of property, that would not function as an embodiment of the people’s will but would rather stand—“firmly”—as a great bulwark against that will. They had succeeded. DURING

At the turn of the century, with the onset of the Progressive Era, the tide became a wave—a great wave of conscience, of anger over injustice, of demand for a cleansing of government and for a mobilization of government to meet the needs of its people. The wave of Progressivism and reform washed across America, through statehouses and city halls, even through the White House. When the wave crashed against the Senate, it broke on the Senate, the waters falling away from it as they had been falling away for half a century. The Senate stood as it had been standing for so long—a mighty dam standing athwart, and stemming, the tides of social justice.

They had envisioned the Senate as the moderating force in government, as the cooler of the popular will; cool had become cold, had become ice, ice in which, for decades, with only a few brief exceptions, the popular desire for social change had become frozen. Designed

A Georgia friend once told Russell, “You’re just fighting a delaying action.” Russell replied: “I know, but I am trying to delay it—ten years if I’m not lucky, two hundred years if I am.” A delay of some decades would be a considerable victory. And, during those decades, a lot could happen. The mood of the country could change, could become more conservative, more supportive of the southern way of life, or at least less overwhelmingly determined that that way be changed. A long enough delay might almost be the equivalent of victory for the South.

“It is the politician’s task to pass legislation, not to sit around saying principled things,”

Since 1949 that migration had been accelerating dramatically, because the mass production of the mechanical cotton picker and the introduction of chemicals that killed the weeds between cotton plants which formerly had had to be laboriously chopped out made human hands largely unnecessary in the cotton field.

In 1910, 90 percent of all American Negroes had lived in the Old South. By 1956, almost half—about eight million of the sixteen million African-Americans in the United States—lived in the North.

there was an article in the Progressive. Entitled “The Legend of Lyndon Johnson,” it said that his contention that he stood midway between “Thurmond and Douglas, between the Southerners and the liberals,” is “far from being the whole truth,” for while “Johnson himself is not the type of Southerner whose opposition to civil rights stems from the sincere depths of bigotry,” while “early in his life, he taught classes of Mexican-Americans,” and while “his opposition to civil rights springs not from passion but from political calculation,” that fact does not make him any less dangerous a foe of civil rights. “Johnson never strays far from his real power base in the Senate—his fellow-Southerners,” the article said. “In fact, many observers still consider him little more than a pliant instrument of Senator Russell.” And its evaluation of Johnson as a Majority Leader was devastating: “He knows everyone’s value—and knows even better his price, if he has one. He is not the leader of great causes, but the broker of little ones.” That article was written by David C. Williams, editor of ADA World, the official publication of that body of “crazies” and “red-hots.”

he had understood the forces (“The world is moving to the left; you can either move with it or be crushed”),