The Negative Power

(See Cover)

The necessary consequence of taking the sense of the community by the concurrent majority is . . . to give to each interest or portion of the community a negative on the others. It is this mutual negative among its various conflicting interests, which invests each with the power of protecting itself;--and places the rights and safety of each, where only they can be securely placed, under its own guardianship. Without this there can be no systematic, peaceful, or effective resistance to the natural tendency of each to come into conflict with the others; and without this there can be no Constitution. It is this negative power--the power of preventing or arresting the action of the government . . . which, in fact, forms the Constitution . . . and the positive which makes the government. The one is the power of acting--and the other the power of preventing or arresting action. The two, combined, make constitutional government.

--John C. Calhoun

"It was a terrible fight," said Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, resting briefly in Washington after a 2,245-mile campaign in the broiling Florida sun.

Russell won, 357,072 to 281,162, but in such a way as to underline the near-hopelessness of his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. His votes came from those parts of Florida that are still the South--from the piney woods, the swamps, the celery plantations and the cattle ranches. The other Florida--the big cities where ex-Northerners live--went for Estes Kefauver, who may have from four to seven of the state's 24 convention votes. Florida showed that Russell is the candidate of the South; outside the South, he has almost no support and plenty of bitter opposition. There is no lesson of American politics clearer than that such a sectional candidacy has little chance of winning the presidency.

A few days after his Florida victory, Russell's campaign got another boost--with another reverse twist that emphasized its hopelessness. Alabama's Senators Sparkman and Hill, who are Fair Dealers and not members of the Southern bloc, endorsed him. But in so doing they said: "He has always remained loyal [to the party] and may be counted on to do so in the future." In politics, this is like saying that the endorsee can be counted on not to steal a red-hot stove. Sparkman and Hill are not so much interested in promoting Russell's candidacy as in discouraging another walkout of Southern Democrats. They are probably right in predicting that Russell will remain loyal. The significant fact, however, is that Russell himself refuses to say flatly that he will abide by the convention decision. The farthest he will go is: "I don't foresee anything that will cause me to leave the party. But I'm not going to take any paralyzed oath not to bolt."

That is the heart of Russell's candidacy --the latent threat of revolt used as a bargaining lever on the party. It explains why Dick Russell, a modest and sensible man, and one of the Senate's best, is going through the torture of campaigning for an office he hasn't a chance in a thousand to get. His campaign will make no sense to those who regard politics as a series of popularity contests or Gallup polls on the issues of the day. But in terms of American politics as it is and always has been, Russell is fulfilling an important role as the mobilizer of what Calhoun called "the negative power."

Majorities & Minorities. The American genius for practical politics is older and probably more important than the American genius for producing things. It was partly inherited from Britain, and increased during the process of deliberately creating a new nation by proclamation, negotiation and contract--a very odd way for a nation to come into being.

The Founders were painfully aware of the necessity of carrying with them more than a majority. All 13 states and every large interest had to be placated and reassured. This necessity found many expressions in the Constitution, and even more in the political life that developed under the Constitution. As in other democracies, however, the majority was sometimes tempted to override minorities. U.S. minorities, like others, reacted against this "tyranny of the majority," but in the U.S., the drive to restrain the majority took an odd form. Calhoun, opposing the Jacksonian majority in his own party, and sensing that the slaveholding interest was bound to become a minority without hope of victory, articulated the doctrine of "the concurrent majority." He meant that every essential group in the nation had a veto on policies directly affecting it. Thus policy could only be formed, as the Constitution was formed, by negotiation and compromise.

Calhoun tried to express this principle as a constitutional right of a state to nullify federal laws. He was beaten, and the Civil War established the constitutional supremacy of the national will (majority rule), subject only to the explicit safeguards of the Constitution.

Wide Embrace. But Calhounism survived in a far more subtle and resilient form than legal nullification. It was built into the structure of the American party system. All Europeans and many Americans are bewildered by the tendency of American parties to imitate each other as closely as possible. There are differences between them, but these tend to fade in the heat of the competition of both parties for all important groups of voters. There are no group interests so far apart that an American party will not try to enclose them in its embrace.

Conflicts of interest and of principle are more often resolved inside the parties than they are settled by ideological contests between the parties. Calhounism survives in a great and much maligned American institution, the smoke-filled room, where party leaders can do what the ballot box cannot do: measure the intensity with which various groups will react for or against (especially against) certain proposals. The majority may be mildly in favor of a policy, and a minority (sectional or otherwise) may be fanatically against it. Under those circumstances, the American politician will often withhold support until he can find a way of placating the minority.

That this system has its weaknesses and grave dangers is too obvious to need saying. But it is the American political system, it works better than most (e.g., the French), and somewhat surprisingly, it does not prevent quite rapid change in policy where change is clearly needed and skillful leadership is applied.

Richard Russell is carrying out a somewhat abnormal variation of the Calhounian process. It is abnormal because the South's political position is abnormal-- partly as a result of historic Republican departures from normal American political processes.

The Ghost of Thad Stevens. The post-Civil War Republican Party, under the leadership of Pennsylvania's Thaddeus Stevens, engaged in a non-Calhounian effort to establish the uncompromised will of the. majority in a section that was bitterly unreconciled to that will. The G.O.P. finally gave up, without having either broken or reconciled the South's resistance. Contrary to all the basic rules of American politics, it never again made a serious effort to win the South. In consequence of his deep-seated opposition to the Republican. Party, a Southern Democrat cannot bring himself to do what all other minority groups do when their veto is overriden by their party--shift to the other party.

The crisis of which Russell is the symbol is caused by the fact that the voting Negroes found it possible to leave the party of Abraham Lincoln, but the Southern whites did not find it possible to enter the party of Thaddeus Stevens. In key Northern states during the 1930s and 40s, Negroes gave the Democrats the margin of victory. Legitimate Negro demands of faster progress toward equality became an important practical factor in

Democratic politics. These demands were reinforced by 1) a world war against enemies who professed extreme racist doctrines, and 2) a postwar international situation in which the U.S. was severely handicapped by the racial inequalities inside its borders.

The concrete expression of these demands was the Truman FEPC program. It was probably supported by a majority of Americans, but it was violently opposed by the majority in that section of the country that it affected most intimately. The program was beaten in Congress by the filibuster (another form of the Calhounian veto). Northern Democrats used their majority to force an FEPC plank into the 1948 platform.

Substitute for Shift. The Democratic leaders relied (correctly, as it turned out) on the inability of the Southerners to do the normal thing and shift parties. But after the failure of the Dixiecrat bolt at the 1948 convention, opposition to Truman and the FEPC grew in the South. As 1952 approached, Southern leaders resolved to stop Truman and FEPC inside the party--or to bolt it and throw the victory to the Republicans, which is the South's substitute for a normal shift of votes across party lines.

Russell's candidacy was originally a demonstration in force against Truman. How much it had to do with his decision not to run may never be known. Succeeding in their main objective, the Southerners keep the Russell candidacy alive and the South solid in order to veto some other unacceptable candidate and to force a compromise on FEPC.

Before 1936, the South did not have to resort to the threat of revolt. Its interest was protected by the rule requiring two-thirds of the delegates to nominate a candidate for President. When Roosevelt ended the two-thirds rule, he opened the way to the Southern revolt of 1948 and the muffled Southern revolt of 1952.

Steeped & Basted. Richard Brevard Russell stands bald head and broad shoulders above the course he represents, although he was steeped in Southern traditions and basted on both sides. His great-great-grandfather, John Russell, was a South Carolina plantation owner who held 100 slaves. General Sherman, on his way through Georgia, burned the cotton mills and freed the slaves of Grandfather William John Russell. Richard Brevard Russell Sr., Dick's father, was a Georgia lawyer and judge who served as the state's chief justice for 15 years before he died in 1938, at the age of 77.

Dick was born in the windswept town of Winder (rhymes with binder) in the rolling, blood-red Georgia hills 52 miles northeast of Atlanta. With twelve brothers & sisters, he grew up in a stern, religious home. Father was a Presbyterian, mother a Methodist, and the full text of the Bible had been read aloud in the home twice before Dick was 13. Justice was dealt with a peachtree switch and a leather strap, and Dick still remembers the time his mother whipped him "until the blood came."

When Dick was six, his father put the name of Russell on Georgia's map by incorporating a settlement a mile and a half east of Winder. It became a flag stop on the Seaboard Air Line Railroad's Atlanta line, so father Russell could commute to his office in Atlanta. Dick's mother, now frail and 84, still lives in Russell, Ga. (pop. 150) with her oldest grandson, Richard Russell Green.

Barefoot Boy. In his boyhood, Dick was a source of some family embarrassment. He wouldn't wear shoes. When the neighbors saw him walking around on cold days wearing a hat and overcoat but no shoes, some of them thought his parents couldn't or wouldn't buy him any. Not until he was twelve was he consistently shod. At 54 he still likes to pad barefoot around the farm when he is home, and around the house when he is in Washington. Says he: "I still don't like slippers."

In school, Dick's marks were only fair. He went to Gordon Military College at Barnesville, Ga., and to the State A. & M. school at Powder Springs, where board was $6.40 a month and each student did 36 hours' work every month. At the University of Georgia, he was both a serious student and a cheerleader, but no campus politician. After he got his law degree in 1918, he did a short stint in the Naval Reserve, then returned to Winder and hung out his shingle.

On his 23rd birthday, he was elected to the Georgia general assembly. He has been in public office ever since, has never lost an election. For ten years Russell served in the assembly, became its parliamentary expert and its presiding officer. Then he decided to move up. In 1931, Chief Justice Richard Brevard Russell Sr. swore in Richard Brevard Russell Jr. as governor of Georgia. He was 33, the youngest governor in the state's history.

From 102 to 18. Taking over in the depth of the depression, the new governor was forced to slash state expenditures 32%, reduced the number of state departments from 102 to 18, wiped out 26 boards of trustees and substituted one board of regents to run the state's higher-education system. He was just getting into full stride in the middle of his first term when Georgia's Senator William J. Harris died. Governor Russell ran for the unexpired term, beat Veteran Congressman Charles R. Crisp, dean of Georgia's house delegation, in a red-hot primary, and went to Washington at 35, the youngest member of the U.S. Senate.

In the 20 years since then, Georgia's Russell has become one of the most respected men in the Senate. On the Senate floor, he is polite to the point of courtliness. In the cloakrooms, he manages to give more favors than he asks, and probably has more colleagues under obligation to him than any other Senator.

Russell works long hours, carefully studies every important piece of legislation, has a knowledge of Senate rules unequaled on Capitol Hill. Once, yielding to Russell in debate, Illinois' Senator Paul Douglas said: "I yield, though my knees are knocking, to one of the subtlest men and one of the most able field generals who ever appeared on the floor of the Senate."

As chairman of the vital Armed Services Committee, Russell has gained a knowledge of military affairs respected throughout the Pentagon. He has been highly successful in translating from the Pentagonese for other members of the Senate. Last year, after presiding over the explosive MacArthur hearings, he won compliments from both Harry Truman and Douglas MacArthur.

Second Bachelor. In the highly unlikely event of Dick Russell's becoming President, he would be the second bachelor-President in U.S. history.* His mother always urged him to pay some attention to the new schoolteacher or some other Georgia maid, but his father's advice seemed to have more effect. Said the judge: "Marry your work if you are going into a public career."

A bachelor-Senator might become quite a social lion in Washington, but Dick Russell is no partygoer. "I got caught up with that during my first year in Washington," he says. "I went up there with the country idea that if you were invited anywhere you had to go or you would be impolite. That liked to killed me the first year."

In Washington, Russell has lived with his sister, Mrs. J. K. Stacy, and at the Mayflower. In Russell, Ga., his mother still keeps his room in the family home. The Senator likes to point out that he has "enough family to fill the White House and overflow into Blair House across the street." He counts 39 nieces and nephews and ("at the last count; all the returns are not in yet") eleven grandnieces and grandnephews.

His campaign speeches make sense but they are platitudinous, delivered in an old

Southern oratorical chant. On the stump in Florida, he seemed tired and strained.

If Russell combined the oratorical abilities of Daniel Webster, William Jennings Bryan and Franklin Roosevelt, he still would have little chance of being the next President of the U.S. He is working to build up the South's old veto power, but there are other vetoes in the Democratic Party. Truman and his friends hold one, and they would almost certainly exercise it against the candidate of the anti-Truman Southern bloc. Truman's veto is also the greatest hazard facing Kefauver's nomination. Organized labor holds another veto, recognized most spectacularly in the famous order, "Clear Everything with Sidney."

Who Has the Least? An astute Democratic leader last week predicted that 1) no Democrat will enter the convention with 300 votes (Russell may have the most), and 2) the nomination will not go to the man with the biggest initial bloc, but to the one with the fewest enemies--a perfect expression of the Calhounian principle.

Another top Democrat, looking the field over, took no comfort from what he saw. In his view, Kefauver will not stand up well under Republican campaign hammering. Adlai Stevenson will be badly hurt by the fact that he was a character witness for Alger Hiss. Barkley is too old. Harriman's platform and television performances probably would be the worst of the lot. Oklahoma's Kerr is relatively unknown.

The Democrats can probably settle the issues of interest and principle that divide their party. It will be easier for them to unite (in the American party sense) than to find a strong candidate. It is the first question--how to re-establish a basis for party unity--that primarily concerns Dick Russell. The Democratic drive for FEPC will probably recede into a compromise, but that will not necessarily mean that political progress for the Negro will be checked.

A Southern Voice. What makes Calhounism work are the never-ceasing changes that go on below the level of politics and are ultimately reflected in the American party system. Russell will probably achieve tacit party recognition of the Southern Democrats' right to a very large voice in policies primarily affecting the South. But neither Russell nor anybody else can quiet the new accents in the Old South. The industrialization of the South is breaking old patterns, and thousands of Negroes are still migrating North, where nearly a third of them now live, and where the critical struggle to determine the Negro's place in U.S. life will probably occur.

Meanwhile, changes impend in Southern political alignments. If the Republicans nominate Eisenhower, who looks remarkably unlike Thaddeus Stevens, observers expect that he will get more Southern votes than any Republican in history. That could lead to the extension of the two-party system to the South. With it could come a re-establishment of the delicate operations of Calhounian compromise which do not require the clumsy open threats of bolts by party leaders.

Then the states'-rights issue would die down again. Nearly everybody in American public life is for (and against) states' rights. Russell and his friends had no qualms about turning their backs on states' rights when they were voting for New Deal farm and spending policies in the '30s. They have had few such qualms since. The cry of states' rights is now what it was in Calhoun's day: a creak in the machinery of intraparty compromise between majorities and minorities.

* The first: James Buchanan.

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