DC Confidential - David Schoenbrod

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Senator Humphrey because I worked in his office as a summer intern.15 These Southern senators had no self-consciousness about their opposition to civil rights legislation. They would never relent. In 1962, Southern opposition to civil rights legislation seemed like an immovable object. That’s why its passage in 1964 was a surprise.

      In 1963 came the March on Washington amid growing unease in the heartland of America about Jim Crow segregation. When the leaders of the march assembled on the high stage built in front of the Lincoln Memorial, they saw below them a host of marchers stretching out a mile along the Lincoln Monument Reflecting Pool. This host—of which I was a part—seemed to me like a community, a communion in the root sense of the word. It was vast and it was determined. The immovable object of bigotry had met an irresistible force.

      Dr. King’s speech, and, in particular, the “I have a dream” passage, which he added on the inspiration of the moment, convinced the marchers that the irresistible force would prevail. As Clarence Jones, whom Dr. King commissioned to write a draft of the speech, stated a half century later:

      If you read the text of the speech, while you might be impressed and moved by certain parts of it, you would probably think it was a good speech, but not necessarily a profound or powerful speech. . . . What made the speech an extraordinary speech was a combination of factors. [It was delivered] at a gathering of the largest group of people assembled anywhere in the country at any time in the history of the United States for any purpose, 25 percent of whom were white. [It] was in the capital of the United States. [It was] at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation. . . . Dr. King, to me, spoke on that day in a way I had never heard him speak before, and had never heard him speak since.16

      Dr. King’s words moved the marchers, and the marchers’ reaction moved King. Then, too, everyone there understood that the march would have a vast audience through television. As we listened, we knew that his words would sway the people watching at home. As Jones put it, “Once those words hit the ears of the listener at home, all that was left was to let their meaning take hold and stir the conscience of everyone who was tuned in.”17

      Dr. King’s Dream, it seemed, would move the immovable object. And so it would, but not at first. Immediately after the march, King and other leaders met with President John Kennedy and asked him to put some real effort into getting Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act that he had endorsed. What they heard from the president was, in Jones’s words, “the March hadn’t done much for him. . . . [Kennedy] was more worried about his party’s chances come election day than about the Negroes’ chances for justice. Despite the rousing success of The March, he wasn’t going to give The Movement any genuine support.”18

      In 1964, only five months after the march and two months after the assassination of President Kennedy, Dr. King and other key civil rights leaders met with President Johnson. The leaders walked into the Oval Office with little hope that the Civil Rights Act would pass soon, but by the time they left, they were confident that it would. According to Johnson biographer Robert Caro, the president needed a strong civil rights bill to secure the support of liberals in the 1964 election, but, more than that, he believed passionately in civil rights. Ironically, one tactic that President Johnson used to sell the legislation to the country is that its passage would honor John Kennedy.19

      In the end, the Civil Rights Act got passed only because the Senate voted to stop the Southern filibuster, which had blocked the bill for fifty-seven days. In 1964, a motion to stop a filibuster required sixty-seven votes. The motion passed 71–29. Senator Humphrey, who was the floor manager of the bill, a diverse team of other senators, and President Johnson eked out this victory by winning over not only a few reluctant Democratic senators but also the overwhelming majority of the Senate’s Republicans.20

Figure 4

      Photograph by David Schoenbrod, 1963.

      FIGURE 4. Some members of the “communion” listening to a speech at the March on Washington.

      Because by 1964 the northern heartland of America had come to share the Dream, the Senate finally had the votes to stop the filibuster that year, where it had not in 1962. The bulk of the swing senators who voted to stop the filibuster owed their elections to voters who, as Caro described them, were “traditionally conservative midwestern Republicans”—and who increasingly supported civil rights.21 These voters wanted their representatives in Congress to vote for civil rights for African Americans. Their clergy told their senators so. The Dream had reached and touched Americans in most of the country because, in the end, most people want to be fair.

      There was open debate on the Civil Rights Act. Members of Congress made clear the burdens as well the benefits. They not only promised the right not to be discriminated against in employment, schools, hotels, restaurants, and other public accommodations but also imposed the corresponding duties—duties not to discriminate—on employers, schools, and businesses that provide public accommodations. Businesses and governments that failed to do their duty would have to lay out large sums of money to comply with court orders and pay damages. By taking responsibility for the burdens as well as the benefits, the legislators produced an act of Congress rather than just a hope of Congress. They took real personal responsibility for important legislation.

      I emphasize the role of Midwestern Republicans in the passage of the civil rights legislation because, today, some on the left view those on the right as devoid of the capacity to be fair, and some on the right return the favor. My point is that although the parties are different today, most citizens on both the left and the right have the capacity, somewhere down deep, to be fair. The trickery is one of the things that gets in the way. Based upon an exhaustive analysis of thousands of questions asked in polls over fifty years, political science professors Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro reported that “people of all sorts, in all walks of life, tend to form their policy preferences not only on the basis of narrow self-interest but in terms of group interests and—especially—the public good, or perceived national interest.”22

      Trickery gets in the way of fairness because it masks the responsibility of elected officials and thereby lets them avoid the open debate that, as discussed throughout the chapter, educates citizens on how proposed acts of Congress will affect other people. The sense of fairness thus awakened can get people to moderate their positions. Human nature being what it is, there will always be many fights in Congress, but when Congress resolves the disagreements in the open, taking responsibility for the burdens as well as the benefits, voters can accept the overall system as fair and therefore accept the results. Win some, lose some. The Economist approvingly summarized the viewpoint of Nobel Prize–winning political economist and professor of economics James M. Buchanan as follows: “A democratic system can maintain legitimacy despite rancorous politics if broad agreement exists on the fairness of the underlying rules [of decision].”23

      The circle of repeated demand, feedback, and decisions resulting from open debate promotes virtue. This virtuous circle could, as previously noted, put the goodness in peoples’ hearts into the heart of government.

      With open debate, Congress’s function becomes like that of an orchestra conductor. By beating time and setting the mood, the conductor provides a context in which the ensemble can make music together even as its members express themselves individually. Analogously, Congress is supposed to provide a context in which society can prosper even as its members pursue their individual aims.24 To do so, Congress must make clear what benefits and burdens it is enacting and thereby set realistic expectations of what people can expect from one another and their government. A Congress that does this job well helps people respect rather than hate one another.

      In contrast, when a system seems unfair, as when people butt in line or Congress uses tricks to evade blame for the unpopular consequences of its decisions, fairness to our fellows goes out the window and harmony becomes acrimony. That is why the drafters of the Constitution were smart in putting stock in members of Congress taking responsibility and openly debating the consequences of its critical choices.25

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