Master of the Senate (23 page)

A curb on the practice was enacted in 1917, after President Wilson had
added a phrase to the American political lexicon by denouncing “a little group of willful men” (actually eleven senators, including La Follette and his fellow liberal George Norris) who had talked to death Wilson’s proposal to arm American merchantmen against German submarine attack. The Senate, at Wilson’s goading, passed a rule, Rule 22, permitting debate upon a “pending” measure to be closed off when, after a petition for such “cloture” was presented by sixteen senators, it was approved by two-thirds of the senators present and voting. (After a cloture motion was passed, each senator was allowed to speak for one hour before the vote was taken.)

The rule was drafted by a bipartisan committee, “whose stated purpose was to terminate successful filibustering,” Galloway says, but the committee had made a mistake, one of omission, leaving a loophole, and you couldn’t make mistakes against the South. While Rule 22 made cloture possible on any pending measure—any bill that had been brought to the floor to be dealt with next—other Senate rules required a motion, and vote, to
make
a measure pending, and the 1917 rule neglected to mention such a vote. A senator or group of senators could therefore begin talking as soon as a motion was made to bring to the floor a bill they didn’t like—and there was still no procedure to impose “cloture” and stop them from talking, and therefore a vote on that motion could never be taken, and the bill would never get to the floor, thus never reaching the stage at which cloture could be applied. Nor was this the only loophole. The other, also discovered by a southern senator, was created by an apparently unrelated clause in Rule 3, which said that each day’s session should be begun by reading the previous day’s
Journal
, or minutes. This reading was normally simply waived, or “suspended,” but, Rule 3 said, “the reading of the
Journal
shall not be suspended unless by unanimous consent; and when any motion shall be made to read or correct the same, it shall be deemed a privileged question, and proceeded with until disposed of.” One day in 1922, the Senate was about to take up a bill designed to stop the practice of lynching. Tall, courtly Pat Harrison of Mississippi sauntered up to the dais, and asked Parliamentarian Watkins if that meant that so long as he was discussing the
Journal
on the floor, cloture could not be imposed on him. Watkins told Harrison that was indeed the case, and Harrison and other southerners thereupon discussed the
Journal
, keeping from the Senate floor not only the anti-lynching bill but any other bill, until the bill’s sponsors gave up and withdrew it.

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. The filibuster was not a device employed in normal
Senate activities as the chairmanships were, since it was used mainly in cases of exceptional threat to the South. But the threat of the filibuster was always there—hanging over, and influencing, every attempt by the body to deal with matters dear to the South. The Senate’s tradition of unlimited debate was perhaps even more important to the South than the seniority system, as was demonstrated by the fact that while the South held a disproportionate share of committee chairmanships in the House as well as the Senate, there was no filibuster in the House, and that body therefore not infrequently passed civil rights legislation—which then died in the Senate.

The Senate, White summed up, “is, to most peculiar degree, a
Southern
Institution … growing at the heart of this ostensibly national assembly.” To a southern senator, White wrote, the Senate was “his great home.” And because of the southerners’ “entrenched position of minority” within the Democratic Party in the Senate, the home rested on a deep bedrock of power. “In the final decisions of the Senate it is nearly always the Southerners whose influence is most pervasive and persuasive.” Not only was the Senate “the South’s unending revenge … for Gettysburg,” he said, it was “the only place in the country where the South did not lose the war…. While his party has in general maintained a liberal and forward-looking outlook,” for generations the southern senator has “kept unchanged his dream of the past.” And, White said, as long as the South held the Senate—its great stronghold—that dream would continue unchanged.

T
HIS REALITY WAS
in a way softened in the public consciousness by the trappings, and the values, of the Senate, as if their identity with the values of the South were what mattered. Courtesy and courtliness were characteristics of the southern aristocracy—and of the Senate, where these traits were not only esteemed but were reinforced by the body’s rules. The rules imposed a verbal impersonality on debate to ensure civility and formality. All remarks made on the floor were required to be addressed not directly to another senator but to “Mr. President” (the presiding officer at the time)—a device that functioned as a psychological barrier between antagonists. Senators speaking on the floor were also required to refer to each other only by title, a device which placed the emphasis on the office rather than the individual (“If I may venture to offer a reply to the distinguished senior Senator from North Dakota”) and was therefore, as a Senate historian notes, “a safeguard against asperities in debate and personalities of all kinds.” Referring to another senator by name—or by any form of the second person—was forbidden. “There is but one ‘You’ in the Chamber, and that is the Presiding Officer,” Senator George Hoar had said in 1909. “‘You’ can never under any circumstances be applied to an individual senator.” During the 1940s, as a Senate observer wrote, addressing a fellow senator in the second person was still “almost an unforgivable sin. It must
always be in the third person.” Using exaggeration to make his point, Alben Barkley of Kentucky advised a freshman, “If you think a colleague is stupid, refer to him as ‘the able, learned and distinguished senator,’ but if you know he is stupid, refer to him as ’the
very
able, learned and distinguished senator.” The Senate rule—Rule 19—against “asperities” applied not only to individuals (“No Senator in debate shall directly or indirectly, by any form of words, impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator”) but to states (“No Senator in debate shall refer offensively to any State of the Union”). It was out of order not only for a senator to attack a colleague, but even to read on the floor an attack by someone else—a newspaper article or letter, for example; “when such matter by inadvertence has been read, by direction of the Senate, it has been expunged from the record,” says the Senate historian. And should a senator violate that edict, not only the senator attacked but any other senator, or the presiding officer, could call him to order, and “when a Senator shall be called to order” under Rule 19, “he shall sit down”—at once, without another word—“and not proceed without leave of the Senate,” leave which could only be granted by formal motion. And, says another historian, “To be called to order under Rule 19 was considered a disgrace then [during the 1940s and ’50s]. Your colleagues wouldn’t meet your eyes. You were
in disgrace.”
The decorum that characterized the floor of the United States Senate at mid-century was difficult even to imagine at the century’s end. So thoroughly had southern influence brought to the Senate floor the flavor—the graciousness, the formality, the civility (right down to a gift for “gracefully waving away mere political differences with an opponent”)—of the Southland that, in the words of Russell Baker, writing in 1961, the Senate’s manner was “as elaborately courteous as a Savannah lawyer’s.”

The South was a land of oratory, and many of the great moments in the Senate’s history, even during the dark postwar years, were, as White relates, moments when one of the “archaically eloquent” southern orators rose to make a full-dress speech.

The very philosophy on which the Senate had been founded “was peculiarly Southern both in flavor and structure,” White noted. The “most influential”
of the Senate’s founders—Madison, Charles Pinckney and others—“were themselves men of Southern trait and Southern view,” he pointed out. They embodied in its very conception “a quite unhidden concept not only that the Institution should
not
be popular but that its personnel should be aristocratic.” One of the keystones of the philosophy on which they constructed it—“that providing for the equal voice of each state in the new Institution”—was of course the philosophy that has been cherished by the Senate, and the South, to this day. Another was continuity. “The breath of life of the Senate is, of course, continuity,” White wrote. “And … continuity of service is” the southerners’ “special property.”

So dominant was the southern senator within the Senate, in fact, that the public saw that institution in his image, an image of a senator with a flowing mane of gray hair, a cutaway coat, string tie, and an organ-like, melodic, mellifluous voice. The image had been embodied in the famous radio cartoon character, Senator Claghorne, whose unctuous drawl delighted America on the Fred Allen comedy show every Sunday night; Claghorne was the dominant image in the public mind of the American senator, part of the joke that the Senate had become.

B
UT IT WAS
a cruel joke.

The enormous power held by each of the southern committee chairmen individually was multiplied by their unity, by what White called a “oneness found nowhere else in politics.” The symbol was the legendary “Southern Caucus,” the meetings of the twenty-two southern senators which were held in the office of their leader, Richard Brevard Russell of Georgia, whenever crisis threatened—meetings that were, White said, “for all the world like reunions of a large and highly individualistic family whose members are nevertheless bound by one bond.” In those meetings, the southern position was agreed upon, its tactics mapped, its front made solid. Sometimes, leaving that office, its members would walk as a body to the Senate Chamber and enter together, in an unspoken show of unity. The tall double doors in the center of the Chamber’s rear wall would swing open, and there they would be: George of Georgia, Byrd of the Byrds of Virginia, Old Mack from Tennessee, Cotton Ed, and, in cutaways, string ties and flowing gray manes, Clyde Roark Hoey of North Carolina, who still wore a high wing collar, and Marse Tom Connally of Texas. Up in the Press Gallery, a reporter would whisper to his fellows, “The South has arrived.”

And of course the South had allies, and not alone from the border states of Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and West Virginia—states in which, during the Civil War, Confederate sympathies had run high. Its allies also included Republican conservatives who had been driven into their arms during the 1937 Court-packing fight, and had remained there ever since. And since these
Republicans were from the safest Republican states, the essentially one-party bastions of conservatism in the Midwest and New England that also returned senators term after term, they, too, had long tenure—and the power that goes with it. So even during the rare Congresses in which the Democrats were in the minority, this conservative coalition, its power cemented into place by a firm admixture of seniority, still ruled the Senate, and the South still held its power there. Southerners helped GOP conservatives defeat liberal economic legislation, and in return these conservatives, most of them from states without enough black voters to punish them, tacitly refrained from supporting the civil rights legislation anathema to the South, and from breaking southern filibusters.

The coalition was, in fact, growing steadily stronger, as was shown by the fate of the major domestic bills that Roosevelt sent to Capitol Hill after 1937. Although he had won re-election in 1940 and 1944, two victories which might be considered an endorsement of the New Deal and a mandate to extend its liberal domestic policies, to pass new social legislation for the third of a nation still ill-clothed, ill-housed, ill-fed, not one of those bills had passed. A Congress dominated by southern conservatives may have given the President a free hand in running the war; on the domestic front, Roosevelt never got a single major domestic bill through Congress after the Court-packing fight.

O
F ALL THE AREAS
in which the Senate failed America, it failed most memorably on the issue that was the single most important issue of the time: race.

So strong was the South, with its conservative allies, in that body that sometimes it disdained to use the two loopholes that allowed filibusters to keep civil rights bills from coming to the floor. It let the bills come to the floor—and filibustered them there, confident that civil rights proponents could not muster the two-thirds vote necessary to impose cloture. Nor was this confidence misplaced. In January, and again in February, 1938, after an outbreak of horrifying lynchings in the South, anti-lynching bills had been introduced in the Senate. Southern filibusters were begun, cloture petitions were filed, and in neither case could even a simple majority, much less the needed two-thirds, be obtained.