The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act by Clay Risen Page B

members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, has been ignored. Johnson was not, in this instance, the “master of the Senate”: he persuaded exactly one senator, Carl Hayden of Arizona, to switch his vote on the filibuster, and in that case Hayden simply moved from a “nay” to being conspicuously absent during the first roll call. Meanwhile, Johnson tried and failed to win over several members of the Southern Democratic bloc, including Al Gore Sr. of Tennessee and J. William Fulbright of Arkansas. And the Senate leadership behind the bill, under Mike Mansfield of Montana, stubbornly rejected Johnson’s demand to play hardball against the filibusterers by forcing the Senate into round-the-clock sessions. Rather than directing the bill from on high, Johnson, like everyone else, was trying to make sense of a fluid situation, and was often reacting to and channeling—and being channeled himself by—the many different figures and forces arrayed for and against the bill.
    Rather than focusing on King and/or Johnson as the prime movers behind the bill, this book emphasizes the pluralism of the process, the complex and contradictory cast of characters who pushed and pulled the bill toward (or away from) the president’s desk. There was the Republican representative William McCulloch, the deeply conservative small-town Ohio lawyer whose quiet passion for civil rights helped save the bill from being derailed in the House Judiciary Committee. There was Everett Dirksen, whose support for the bill brought over enough Republicans to defeat the filibuster. And there was Representative Howard Smith, the archsegregationist from Virginia who amended the bill so that it banned sex discrimination—a move that he hoped would turn off congressional male chauvinists but that actually opened the door to equality for millions of American women. It was the varied efforts of these and other men, not the genius of a single historical actor, that made the Civil Rights Act.
    An exclusive focus on King and Johnson also marginalizes the important efforts of thousands of labor, civil rights, and religious activists to win passage. One of the central but often forgotten stories behind the bill is how it catalyzed a nationwide movement behind black equality, drawing in retired white parishioners in Iowa, auto workers in Detroit, black college students in South Carolina, and Jewish seminarians in New York City. In many cases, particularly among whites outside the South, lobbying for the bill—either through letter writing, or local demonstrations, or trips to Washington—was their first involvement with civil rights, and with social activism (as the rest of the 1960s and later decades can attest, for many it would not be their last). Yet the bill could not have passed without their sheer numbers and relentless effort. As Georgia senator Richard Russell, the leader of the filibuster, wrote to a friend after the bill passed, “We had been able to hold the line until all the churches joined the civil rights lobby in 1964.” 4
    Finally, because neither King nor Johnson played much of a role in writing or negotiating the bill, telling the story of the Civil Rights Act through them obscures the significant ways in which the bill changed over the year between its submission by Kennedy and its signature by Johnson. In a March 1964 article in the Nation , Martin Luther King Jr. called the civil rights bill “the child of a storm, the product of the most turbulent motion the nation has ever known in peacetime.” Kennedy did not want a ban on employment discrimination in the bill at all, and his initial version did not include Title VII. But civil rights lobbyists persuaded House Judiciary Committee chairman Emanuel Celler to add it. After that, though, the means of enforcing the ban were whittled back by the administration and congressional Republicans. Separately, the idea of adding significant federal spending on jobs and worker training to help poor