The Great Societizer (Page 4)

Caro, however, suggests that Johnson might have destroyed the Senate in order to save it, since these changes came at the cost of diminishing deliberations, where individual senators could educate and inform the public on the great issues of the day. He quotes Paul Douglas, liberal Democratic senator from Illinois during the 1950s and oftentimes a foe of Johnson, who charged, "Under Johnson, the Senate functions like a Greek tragedy. All the action takes place offstage, before the play begins. Nothing is left to open and spontaneous debate, nothing is left to the participants but the enactment of their prescribed roles." Caro goes further, suggesting that by limiting debate, Johnson was making the Senate an expression of his own mania for control and aversion to debate and dissent.

Regardless of Johnson's real motivations for limiting debate, this is an overly romantic view of Senate proceedings, in which debate consists more of partisan bickering and mundane bloviating than reasoned and informed discourse. Furthermore, unlimited debate is tailor-made for defenders of the status quo, allowing them great power to block any measure to which they object. Caro even seems to acknowledge this in a footnote, where he quotes Johnson aide Harry McPherson, "Complaints about limiting debates...often turned out to be based on a plaintiff's annoyance that he must either miss a vote or forgo a speaking engagement back home. And besides, who knew better than liberals the enervating consequences of unlimited debate."

Caro may be right that Johnson saved the Senate, but he doesn't consider whether it was worth saving in the first place. Yes, Johnson did reform the chamber so that it could legislate more effectively, but the institution remained and remains a throwback to a predemocratic era. Not only does the Senate's equal representation of states grossly distort the one-person, one-vote principle, but the ability to filibuster means that forty-one senators, even if they represent the twenty-one smallest states (with only 11 percent of the total population), can veto any piece of legislation. And since Republicans predominate in small states, the institution serves only to magnify their power. For example, even though Democrats have a 50-49 edge in the current Senate (the remaining member is Independent Jim Jeffords of Vermont), sixty senators represent states won by George W. Bush in the 2000 election. By saving the Senate, one might argue, Johnson only succeeded in maintaining an institution that has traditionally served to reinforce conservatives and the status quo.

In 1956, Johnson thought the time was right to make his move for the Democratic nomination. But this effort was doomed before it even began. First, he refused to be an active candidate, thus much of the support from the South and West that might have been his if he wanted it went to other candidates. Even if Johnson had run a more active and skillful campaign, it was clear that he never had enough liberal support to win the nomination. For all that he had accomplished in the Senate, Johnson was still viewed as suspect by Democratic liberals. In some ways, as Caro suggests, the liberals' criticism was unfair. Johnson was no Hubert Humphrey, to be sure, but he was also no Richard Russell or James Eastland. During his twelve years in the Senate, Johnson's Americans for Democratic Action liberal-voting score was fifty-six, just about average for the party and essentially splitting the difference between the Southern Democratic average of thirty-seven and the Northern Democratic average of seventy-five. Moreover, during his tenure as majority leader from 1955 to 1960, Johnson's average score was sixty-five.

But Johnson recognized that his overall ADA score was not the real issue. By the mid-1950s, Democratic liberals increasingly used civil rights as a litmus test for support. According to Caro, Johnson would tell friends privately, "I want to run the Senate. I want to pass the bills that need to be passed. I want my party to do right. But all I ever hear from the liberals is Nigra, Nigra, Nigra." (During the 1964 campaign, Johnson would use the same refrain in a very different context, telling a New Orleans audience of a dying Southern senator who wanted to give one more speech, a good Democratic speech, because the only speeches the people of his state ever heard were "Nigra, Nigra, Nigra.") Caro goes on to add that the conclusion for Johnson was clear:

He knew now that the only way to realize his great ambition was to fight--really fight, fight aggressively and effectively--for civil rights; in fact, it was probably necessary for him not only to fight but to fight and win: given their conviction that he controlled the Senate, the only way the liberals would be satisfied of his good intentions would be if that body passed a civil rights bill. But therein lay a seemingly insoluble dilemma: that way--the only way--did not seem a possible way. Because while he couldn't win his party's presidential nomination with only southern support, he couldn't win it with only northern support either. Scrubbing off the southern taint thoroughly enough within the next four years to become so overwhelmingly a liberal favorite that he could win the nomination with northern votes alone was obviously out of the question, so dispensing with southern support was not feasible: he had to keep the states of the Old Confederacy on his side. And yet a public official who fought for civil rights invariably lost those states.

This dilemma sets up another book within a book and the dramatic climax of Master of the Senate, the battle over the 1957 Civil Rights Act. This is where Caro's gifts as a storyteller really come alive, and his account provides what is surely one of the best analyses of the legislative process ever written. Moreover, Caro is right to label Johnson's role in the passage of this legislation as an exercise of "genius." But Caro goes too far in suggesting that the 1957 Civil Rights Act marked a turning point at which Johnson's "compassion, and the ability to make compassion meaningful, would shine forth at last."

Caro does recognize that the practical impact of the 1957 legislation was inconsequential and far less significant than the later Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And while the bill's proponents described it as half a loaf, Caro agrees with Humphrey, who described it as a "crumb." Nonetheless, Caro claims that as the first civil rights measure to pass the Senate and to be enacted into law since 1875, the legislation was of immense symbolic importance and the harbinger of things to come. "The Civil Rights Act of 1957," according to Caro, "was hope." Caro has a point, but a debatable one. The law did raise hopes, but by accomplishing so little, many of those hopes ended up dashed. Furthermore, while the 1957 act was a first step toward more effective legislation, it would take another eight years to complete the journey, eight more years of Jim Crow and disfranchisement, of oppression and violence. Hope was better than nothing, but help is what was really needed.

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