Lyndon B. Johnson Quotes

The Civil Rights Bill of 1964

He was right. Even the vaunted Southern Filibuster was broken by the strategy and tactics Johnson and Senator Humbert Humphry, the Floor Leader for the 1964 Civil Rights Bill.

Johnson had proposed an extremely strong civil rights bill. Most Washington insiders assumed that he would gain favor amongst fair minded whites and Blacks for making the attempt, but then he would compromise with the Southerners, and water down the bill to something that had little or no teeth. His staff were trying to learn from Johnson, which aspects of the bill he was willing to compromise on assuming that the President could never get Congress to pass the bill in its original form. They were really surprised at the President’s answer and assumed that he could not do it. They were more surprised when he did drive the bill through Congress without any substantive compromises. It was the most powerful and effective Civil Rights legislation passed since Reconstruction a century earlier.

He was responding to Mississippi Congressman William Colmer-- {637395}. Southern racists frequently accused other members of Congress of being intimidated by civil rights leaders rather than voting for civil rights legislation out of conviction. Many of them, like Colmer, were so insular that revanchist that they did not realize that other whites could really believe that segregation was not a necessary and good thing.

Humphrey was the Mayor of Minneapolis then.

See Henry Clay for an earlier expression of this point.

at the Department of Justice He was commenting on the fact that when he was an official of the Civil Rights Division of the U. S. Justice Department, the Southern members of Congress would not allow any appropriated money to be spend for Civil Rights reform activities. So they would do the Civil Rights work and call it something else so the Southerners who dominated the key Congressional Committees just never knew what was happening in the Department. Ideally, government officials would not try and deceive members of Congress, but the racism of a minority of Congress had been corrupting American life and law since the Constitution was originally ratified. Somoral corruption just brought on another type of moral corruption.

Hollings who was one of the senior experienced senators was offended by the degree to which the George W. Bush Administration and the Republican leadership had turned to lobbyists to draft legislation and amendments to pending legislation. Lobbyists often have specialized information that members of Congress do not have, so there has been in modern times communications between lobbyists and members of Congress and their staffs. However, during the Bush Presidency the practice reached an extreme where lobbyists would even write the legislative language and give it to the members in whom they had invested by giving them large campaign contributions and many perks. K Street is the fanciest street in Washington DC with some of the most expensive office space. A substantial proportion of the lobbyists have K Street offices, hence the metaphor.

The President wanted Anderson to relay his message to other Republicans which he did. At that time the Southern racists were almost all members of the Southern bloc of the Democratic Party. Most Republicans were then advocates of non discrimination. By 2010 virtually all the racists, nativists, neo Nazis, anti Catholics, and anti Semites had gravitated to the Republican party if they were still active in politics. Reasonable Republicans were embarrassed as reasonable Democrats had been before the shift which resulted from passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Goldwater was not a racist personally, however he opposed the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 against the leadership and majority of the Republican Party, and he initiated a “Southern Strategy” whereby he invited the racists of the South who were furious that Democrat Lyndon Johnson had abandoned them and ended legal segregation forever, to leave the Democratic Party. They did, and while they and the hard core of ultraconservative Goldwater republicans were not enough to overcome the public disapproval of the callous strategy and Goldwater’s nuclear positions. However, the coalition that Goldwater had assembled formed the base of a new Republican Party which gave Ronald Reagan strong majorities, and in the early 21st century the Goldwater coalition of Southerners, Goldwater conservatives gained control of the Republican Party and purged most of the moderates and polarized American politics ending even the traditional bipartisanship in Foreign Affairs.