Citizen Rauh: An American Liberal's Life in Law and Politics

11. HHH, JFK, and LBJ

chapter eleven HHH, JFK, AND LBJ Hubert Humphrey pushed through possibly the worst bill of our time in an effort to escape the wrath of the McCarthyites. —joe rauh to josephine gomon FDR’s Heirs Hubert Horatio Humphrey, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and John Fitzgerald Kennedy, each an heir to the political house FDR built, played critical roles in Rauh’s efforts to rede‹ne the shape of liberalism and the Democratic Party after 1945. The son of a Doland, South Dakota, pharmacist, Humphrey embodied the virtues and grievances of the farmers, small shopkeepers, and industrial workers of the upper Midwest, who formed the militant Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party in the 1920s. Entering politics in 1943, he lost his ‹rst bid to become mayor of Minneapolis that year, but helped to unite the Democrats and the Farmer-Laborites into the Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) and purge Communists from the organization. After winning the mayor’s of‹ce in 1945, Humphrey helped found the ADA, built a strong record in the city by combating racial and religious discrimination , and gained national recognition with his 1948 convention speech on behalf of the minority civil rights plank. A year later, he became the ‹rst Democrat since the Civil War to be elected to the United States Senate from Minnesota. By 1960 he ranked among that chamber’s most liberal members, sharing Rauh’s vision of the party’s future in civil rights, the role of the ADA, and liberal anticommunism.1 Three years Humphrey’s senior, Johnson had been born in a small farmhouse in Stonewall, Texas, the eldest of ‹ve children, a descendent of several 133 generations of Baptist preachers and local political notables. Like other Southerners of his generation, Johnson brought to Roosevelt’s Democratic coalition a streak of economic populism and a desire to pull his state and region out of its grinding poverty with infusions of federal dollars. Sam Rayburn , a rising power in the House of Representatives, took Johnson under his political wing, and through Rayburn’s in›uence, LBJ headed the Texas National Youth Administration, won a seat in the House of Representatives in 1937, and was elected to the Senate eleven years later. In the Senate Johnson promoted the economic development of Texas via federal spending in military installations and on the state’s infrastructure, especially dam construction and rural electri‹cation. Reelected to the Senate in 1954, he soon became the youngest majority leader in history and, many said, the most powerful. In a state hostile to organized labor and devoted to maintaining the formal and informal segregation of African- and MexicanAmericans , LBJ’s public record marked him as an enemy of both unions and civil rights. Civil liberties ranked even lower in his scheme of values. By 1960, Rauh considered Johnson his most cunning and determined enemy in the struggle to reshape the party’s agenda in the direction of expanded economic justice, racial equality, and civil liberties.2 In 1956 Johnson was only one of three southern senators who did not endorse the so-called Southern Manifesto denouncing the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education as “contrary to the Constitution” and “a clear abuse of judicial power,” but that same year he used his power as majority leader to torpedo a House-passed civil rights bill written with the encouragement of Eisenhower’s attorney general. The measure would have created a civil rights commission with limited investigative powers and an expanded civil rights division in the Department of Justice, and would have authorized civil suits to protect voting rights. Johnson made certain the bill went to the hostile Judiciary Committee, dominated by southern segregationists , where it died. A year later Johnson orchestrated passage of the ‹rst federal civil rights law since Reconstruction, but one that excluded House-passed provisions giving the attorney general power to ‹le civil actions to enforce the Supreme Court’s Brown decision and mandating jury trials in cases of civil contempt, a requirement that gave all-white juries an effective veto over federal district judges. LBJ warned Senator Richard Russell of Georgia that the legislation, which he called “the nigger bill,” was necessary to counter the rising protests in the South by African-Americans, who had mounted a successful boycott of Montgomery buses. “These Negroes, they’re getting 134 citizen rauh pretty uppity these days,” he told Russell, “and that’s a problem for...