The Wooed & the Wooing

Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield was on his feet, waiting. Into the Senate and down the aisle came a clerk of the House of Representatives, carrying the House-approved civil rights bill.

"Mr. President," said Mansfield, "I request that House bill 7152 be read the first time." The Senate clerk read the bill's title. "Mr. President," said Mansfield, "I object to the second reading of the bill today." Those two sentences were part of an elaborate parliamentary maneuver aimed at bypassing the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Mississippi's James Eastland, who could be expected to keep the bill gathering dust for months. By his action, Mansfield retained control of the bill's course. He then announced that the Senate will first take up the Administration's new farm bill, will probably next consider a $16.9 billion authorization bill for military equipment, then turn to the sweeping civil rights measure. This is not likely before March 2.

No Pyrotechnics. Mansfield told the Senate that he had appointed Majority Whip Hubert Humphrey, a longtime champion of civil rights,* as floor manager of the bill. Humphrey will have one Democratic deputy for each of the bill's three major sections: Washington's Warren Magnuson on public accommodations, Pennsylvania's Joe Clark on FEPC, Michigan's Philip Hart on new judicial procedures.

After setting his tactics in train, Mansfield sought to shape the moral tone of the impending debate. In a Senate speech, he declared: "Individually, each Senator will consult his conscience and his constituency on this issue. It is for each Senator to determine whether he is prepared to ignore, to evade or to deny this issue or some aspect of it. But it would be a tragic error if this body as a whole were to elect the closed-eyes course of inaction.

"I can think of nothing better designed to bring this institution into public disrepute and derision than a test of this profound and tragic issue by an exercise in parliamentary pyrotechnics.

For the truth is that we will not find in the Senate rules book even the semblance of an answer to the burning questions which now confront the nation and, hence, this Senate. We Senators would be well advised to search, not in the Senate rules book, but in the Golden Rule for the semblance of an adequate answer." "Hope for the Republic." Mansfield also made a special plea to Republican Leader Everett Dirksen. Said he: "I appeal to the distinguished minority leader, whose patriotism has always taken precedence over his partisanship, to join with me--and I know he will--in finding the Senate's best possible contribution at this time to the resolution of this grave national issue." The South's top tactician, Georgia Democrat Richard Russell, was also wooing Dirksen with words of praise.

Said Russell: "I cannot refrain, even if it does harm to the Senator from Illinois, from expressing to him my great admiration for his political courage. It gives one hope for the future of the Republic to see a man who has convictions and the courage to sustain them even though it may endanger his seat in the Senate."

Since Republican votes obviously will be needed to choke off a certain Democratic filibuster against the civil rights bill, there was ample cause for courting Dirksen, who has expressed personal doubt about the measure's public-accommodations section. But in his response, Dirksen left his wooers on both sides in considerable doubt. Said he: "I trust that the time will never come in my public career when the waters of partisanship will flow so swift and so deep as to obscure my estimate of the national interest. I trust I can disenthrall myself from all bias, from all prejudice, from all irrelevancies, from all immaterial matters, and see clearly and cleanly what the issue is and then render an independent judgment. Already, some amendments have occurred to me. I shall try to shape them. I shall try to put them in form. If I think they have merit, I shall offer them."

*As mayor of Minneapolis, Humphrey made that city one of the nation's first to establish a fair employment practices commission; as a delegate of the 1948 Democratic Convention, his civil rights oratory inspired a platform plank that led to a Dixiecrat walkout.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.