One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (36 page)

Constitutional Prayer Amendment, Inc., soon became Becker's staunchest ally. Eisenhower, though retired from public service, gave the organization his strong endorsement. “I am opposed to any effort to eliminate mention of God in governmental practices,” he wrote. “Your basic purpose of keeping before the public the clear fact that our form of government rests upon a religious faith is one of which I heartily approve.” Active politicians offered support as well. By early 1964, the organization's
letterhead included thirteen sitting governors, as well as notables such as Conrad Hilton, Jackie Robinson, Francis Cardinal Spellman, Bishop James A. Pike, and William Randolph Hearst Jr. Now known as the Constitutional Prayer Foundation, the group convened pro-amendment organizations to coordinate strategies in February. “The only battle we need to fight is to get the bill out of Congress,” said Father Robert Howes of Massachusetts Citizens for Public Prayer. “After that is achieved, I am sure the public will approve it.” The way to do that, argued Dr. Charles Leaming of Florida's Committee for the Preservation of Prayer and Bible Reading in Public Schools, was to “get the citizens of each and every state to deluge their congressmen with letters.”
¹⁴

The deluge soon came. “Congressional mail on this issue has grown to flood proportions,” the
New York Times
reported, “exceeding the mail of the civil rights controversy.” Representative Lionel Van Deerlin, a Democrat from California, noted that congressmen were “being inundated with constituent mail, the great bulk of which favors an amendment.” Minnesota representative Alec Olsen claimed mail ran “at least 200 to 1 in favor of such an amendment,” while Representative R. G. Stephens of Georgia was so overwhelmed by the volume—more than a thousand letters in all—that he began sending correspondents a form letter response. “For the first time since I came to Congress,” a midwestern Democrat admitted off the record, “I've given up trying to answer the mail.” As the pressure from constituents continued, more and more congressmen relented. In February, the Republican Policy Committee formally endorsed the Becker Amendment and urged the Judiciary Committee to discharge it. Celler refused, insisting that a “staff study” of the proposed amendments was still under way. But this transparent tactic only led more congressmen to sign the discharge petition. As the spring wore on, unofficial reports estimated it had nearly 170 signatures. “It's no secret,” the
Wall Street Journal
reported, “that many more members, including some hostile to the proposal and others adverse to the irregular procedure, have warned Mr. Celler that pressure from home would force them to sign unless he made some move.”
¹⁵

Facing imminent defeat, Celler announced in mid-March that the House Judiciary Committee would finally hold hearings in April. Still, the chairman made it clear that he was, in the words of columnist
Anthony Lewis, “not in a hurry to rush an amendment out.” “The nature and importance of the subject,” Celler claimed, “require that the committee have all the benefit of all the best thinking of all schools of thought” during deliberations. When Celler scheduled the first day for April 22, Becker said he was “amazed” at the late date. The chairman not only delayed the hearings by weeks, Becker charged, but deliberately scheduled them to coincide with the opening of the New York World's Fair to bury the proceedings in the press. (The old Brooklyn politician protested: “I never dreamed of the World's Fair!”) Moreover, Becker fumed, the chairman had “set no date or time-limit” for the end of the hearings, which meant they could drag on until it was too late to pass the amendment. These “devices for delay and derision,” he charged, were yet more signs of Celler's “total and unalterable opposition” to the proposals. Defiant, Becker promised to maintain “insurmountable pressure” until this “one-man roadblock” was “smashed.”
¹⁶

While Celler's delaying tactics enraged supporters of the Becker Amendment, they proved crucial in giving opponents time to mobilize. Most civil libertarians and religious organizations had assumed the campaign for a constitutional amendment would go nowhere, but as momentum shifted in Becker's direction they realized, almost too late, what was happening. In March, ACLU headquarters sent its affiliates warnings that the discharge petition drive was “becoming alarming.” They scrambled to find allies. The Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, the political voice of the eight largest Baptist bodies in the nation, soon announced its opposition, claiming the Becker Amendment threatened their religious liberty. A week later, the American Jewish Committee denounced it as “the most serious challenge to the integrity of the Bill of Rights in American history.” On St. Patrick's Day, representatives of Protestant and Jewish organizations and civil liberties groups gathered at a hastily arranged meeting in New York. Sizing up the situation, they realized the Becker Amendment had “an excellent chance” of winning a majority of votes from the Judiciary Committee. If that happened, the full House and Senate would invariably vote for it, and, in short order, it would be swiftly ratified by the states.
¹⁷

At the New York meeting, an ad hoc committee was formed, led by Reverend Dean Kelley of the National Council of Churches (NCC).
¹⁸
A
Methodist minister and an absolutist when it came to the separation of church and state, Kelley became the NCC's executive for religious liberty in 1960, a post he would hold for three decades. Preventing passage of the school prayer amendment would prove to be one of the most daunting tasks of his long career. “We're up against the saints of the American Legion and the Junior Chamber of Commerce,” he told a reporter, “and they're pretty formidable.” As he surveyed the political landscape, Kelley saw that the opposition was not simply outnumbered but also largely hidden. “For the most part,” the
Wall Street Journal
reported, “even lawmakers adamant in their opposition have kept silent in public.” As a result, congressmen who opposed the amendment were often unaware of colleagues who felt the same. Kelley's committee connected them to one another and, more important, gave them political cover. Because congressional opponents of the amendment had been stigmatized as being “anti-God,” they were desperate for supportive statements from religious leaders. Representative Charles Wilson of California, for instance, begged the Anti-Defamation League to find rabbis who would speak out against the amendment. “Any help you can give in this regard,” he wrote, “will be much appreciated.”
¹⁹

At regular sessions at the NCC offices in Washington, Kelley's committee worked to bring the House back from the brink. Its members enlisted the Lutheran Church, the Episcopal Church, the Methodist Church, and the United Church of Christ in a massive letter-writing campaign against the amendment and convinced church publications to denounce it as well. Its members visited congressmen, especially swing members of the Judiciary Committee, “to indicate strong religious opposition to the amendment, and to make clear that Congressmen may expect help from pastors in their district if they oppose the amendment.” To make the ministerial presence perfectly clear, the committee suggested, members should be sure to wear their clerical collars during their visits. “The essential point to get across to the Congressmen (by mail and other means, as well as formal testimony) is that
religious groups oppose changing the First Amendment
.” By all accounts, the message got through. Members reported “very favorable interviews” with six “swing members” on the House Judiciary Committee, “pleasant but inconclusive conversations” with three more, and “strong disagreement” from only two. “Probably no
opinions were changed as a result of this activity,” they concluded, but it seemed likely that a few opponents were now “encouraged to take a more active part in the hearings.”
²⁰

As the hearings drew near, these opponents of the prayer amendment sized up the House Judiciary Committee, like trial lawyers trying to read a jury. Celler, they knew, would be a powerful ally, but the majority of the committee members would likely side against them. Nine had introduced prayer amendments of their own, and many more had made statements supporting the idea. The anti-amendment forces knew they could not win a vote at that moment. According to their estimates, nearly half of the committee would support sending an amendment to the full House for a vote, with another quarter leaning that way. An ACLU official reasoned that their best hope “would be either to lengthen the period of time for the hearings, and thus delay matters, or obtain a division within the Committee that would help to fashion opposition when the issue is reported to the House.” They had to slow things down.
²¹

T
HE HEARINGS ON THE PRAYER
amendments proved to be a major endeavor. Celler convened the full Judiciary Committee for sessions that ultimately stretched to six weeks, from April 22 to June 3, 1964. From the first day, the large committee room was packed to capacity, with a long line of would-be spectators waiting outside. Reporters crowded the press tables, while television crews clogged the hallways with lights and equipment for spot interviews. Nearly two hundred people appeared in person as witnesses, with countless others offering opinions in speeches, sermons, letters, petitions, scholarly articles, and government data entered into the official record. When finally printed, the report on the hearings sprawled to fill three large volumes of single-spaced, almost illegibly small text, 2,774 pages in all. Celler insisted that a full airing of all views was essential. There were 147 resolutions pending before the committee and, even allowing for similarities between bills, they still fell into thirty-five distinct categories. “Their number and variety attest to the widespread interest and the many schools of thought on this important subject,” the chairman announced. “It will be our privilege to consider the testimony of distinguished church leaders, of experts in the field of Constitutional law,
theology and education, and of exponents of all points of view.” Critics charged that the leisurely pace was a deliberate tactic intended to run out the clock. The Senate was at the time tangled in a filibuster over the Civil Rights Act, and Congress as a whole would adjourn in June to make way for the Republican National Convention the following month. Celler's critics repeatedly pressed him to curtail the hearings, but he refused.
²²

The first week was devoted to testimony from congressmen. Most had been sponsors of their own prayer amendments, but almost all of them now supported Becker's version. While representatives were traditionally afforded great deference at House hearings, these proceedings turned combative quickly. “The most significant fact about the first week of hearings,” Dean Kelley reported, “was that the reception afforded most of the witnesses was
hostile
rather than
hospitable
.” The minister had expected such “persistent probing” from Celler, but he was delighted to see another eight members take the same approach. “The persistent interrogation is broken occasionally by heated exchanges between the members of the Committee,” Kelley marveled. Tensions there had been building for quite some time. For most of the summer and fall of the previous year, the Judiciary Committee had been the epicenter of a series of sharp-edged debates over the pending Civil Rights Act. Southern Democrats had been badly beaten in that struggle and now were looking for revenge. “One detects in their intensity a lingering animus from the civil rights hearings,” Kelley noted. “Perhaps they feel that
this
time they will get back at the Committee, the Supreme Court and the rest of the national ‘establishment,' if they have to use God to do it.”
²³

The first witness, naturally, was Becker. He had barely begun condemning the “fraternity of secularists” who struck prayer from the schools before he was repeatedly interrupted by the committee. He struggled to make it through his written remarks and then found his claims challenged by the committee's counsel. Becker read a rabbi's sermon supporting religion in schools, for instance, but counsel produced a letter from the rabbi arguing against the amendment. Becker likewise cited James Cardinal Gibbons, but the attorney demonstrated that the prelate had been misquoted. Becker did not back down. He dismissed the committee's report, which detailed the potential problems in the amendment, as full of “figments of the imagination.” When a committee member pointed out that
religious bodies were lining up against the amendment, Becker simply dismissed them. “I think the opposition comes from the leadership of these groups but not from the mass of people,” he said. For over two hours Becker and his opponents engaged in a heated back-and-forth, until the committee had to break for lunch. He seemed eager to continue, but the morning exchange apparently took a toll. When they reconvened, Celler announced that “Mr. Becker has been taken ill and will not be able to appear” for his scheduled afternoon session.
²⁴

Becker's colleagues carried on without him. Much like their constituents who had flooded Congress and the Supreme Court with angry letters, these congressmen invoked the many religious expressions in public life to make their case. New Jersey Republican James Auchincloss drew inspiration from the revised Pledge of Allegiance and the new national motto, for instance, while Nevada Democrat Walter Baring pointed to the use of the Bible at swearing-in ceremonies for federal officials. Changing the Constitution, they argued, would merely confirm these established traditions. “The effect of this amendment,” insisted Eugene Siler, a Republican from rural Kentucky, “would be to put in writing and upon our constitutional document itself what we have already put on our pieces of money and upon the marble piece above the Speaker's chair in the House of Representatives: ‘In God We Trust.'”
²⁵