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4. Galloping with the Crowd
- Louisiana State University Press
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31 4 GALLOPING WITH THE CROWD The election of was Lyndon Johnson’s wake-up call. The inability of the Democratic-controlled Congress to address civil rights helped send record numbers of urban and middle-class black voters flocking to Republican Dwight Eisenhower in that year’s presidential election. Estimates varied, but most agreed that Eisenhower had increased his black support by almost percent since . The Gallup polling organization concluded that “of all the groups of the nation’s population, the one that shifted most to the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket . . . was the Negro voter.” More startling to Democrats was that Eisenhower carried five southern states while winning record numbers of black votes in a second landslide over Adlai Stevenson. Democrats were most alarmed that Eisenhower had won those southern states with the help of black voters. In Stevenson’s black support had been strongest in the South. Four years later, however, the shift of blacks to the Republican ticket was most abrupt in the South. Attorney General Brownell’s gambit in —proposing a Republican civil rights bill—had paid great dividends. His dogged advocacy of civil rights had helped the Republicans in the North and the South. But Richard Nixon also deserved credit. In Harlem, the vice president had effectively appealed for black votes by arguing that the Republican party in Congress was “solidly behind” the administration’s civil rights program. Nixon said if blacks supported Eisenhower “and elect a Republican Senate and House of Representatives , you will get action, not filibusters.” At the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Dinner in New York, shortly before the election, Nixon declared that “most of us here will live to see the day when American boys and girls shall sit, side by side, at any school—public or private—with no regard paid to the color of their skin. Segregation, discrimination, and prejudice have no place in America.” While Nixon, Brownell, and other Republican leaders recognized the potential that black votes held for continued electoral success—perhaps enough votes to make theirs the majority party—the WHEN FREEDOM WOULD TRIUMPH 32 victory did not seem to whet Eisenhower’s appetite in the same way. He appeared doubly resolved to pursue an incremental, self-styled policy of “steady progress without rashness.” Leaders of both political parties pored over the election returns with great interest. For Republicans, a stronger push for civil rights legislation in now seemed the clear path to greater victories in the future, perhaps even the key to winning control of the Senate in the midterm elections of . For Democrats the results were more vexing. Despite the Republican presidential landslide, Senate Democrats had widened their slim majority by one vote—allowing Johnson to claim vindication for his often nonconfrontational legislative strategy. Yet a growing chorus of liberals ignored this minor triumph. They maintained that Johnson’s refusal to challenge Eisenhower had, in fact, contributed to Stevenson’s embarrassing defeat. Johnson and House Speaker Rayburn, they complained, had drawn no distinctions between the two parties and therefore had presented voters with no reason to reject Eisenhower. Democratic National Committee chairman Paul Butler, an aggressive, sometimes strident liberal from Indiana, was a leading proponent of this criticism. Frustrated that Johnson and Rayburn usually disregarded the party platform and marched to their own legislative beat, Butler became an assertive spokesman for the party’s liberal wing. In late , hoping to unify congressional Democrats with their national committee, noncongressional Democrats such as Adlai Stevenson, Dean Acheson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Arthur Schlesinger, and John Kenneth Galbraith joined Butler to form a group known as the Democratic Advisory Council. These Democrats did not create the organization simply to challenge Johnson’s leadership. Among other things, Butler and others merely wanted to prod Johnson and Rayburn into more aggressive action on the party’s agenda. In that spirit, Butler invited Johnson, Rayburn, and a host of House and Senate members to join the new group. Only two—Humphrey and Kefauver —accepted. Johnson and Rayburn “thought that the place for the Democratic Party to set policy was in the Congress,” said Stevenson’s campaign aide Newton Minow, “and that the best politics was to go along with Eisenhower whenever possible, and fight with him only when they thought it was very, very important.” Butler and other more combative liberals abhorred that strategy. Even Humphrey, Johnson’s faithful liaison to the liberals, concluded that congressional Democrats must shed their legislative lethargy and begin advancing an aggressive liberal agenda. [18.117.183.172...
