Naturally, Spessard Holland was not about to ignore the condescension visited upon him by Richard Russell, a man who claimed him as a friend. Thus began, as the Senate session of March 14th, 1962 wore on, a lengthy exchange between the two during which various other senators chimed in. To begin, Holland attempted to clarify with Russell that the former had approached the latter previously on the subject of a poll tax amendment and been met with signs of support. Russell avowed that while this was partially the case – Holland had approached him in 1949 in quest of support – he had never plainly stated that he was in favor of the measure in question. On the contrary, he went on to say, he had explained to Holland during their most recent conversation on the topic that he felt any anti-poll tax measures enacted at the federal level – in addition to flying in the face of the sovereignty of the individual states – was fundamentally wrongheaded in the era of the civil rights movement. “If there were any idea that the adoption of such an amendment would appease the so-called champions of the civil-rights program in the United States,” said Russell, the Senator from Florida “was entirely mistaken, but that, on the contrary, the adoption of this amendment would be like feeding a couple of peanuts to a hungry bear: It would only whet his appetite for more—in this case, for further legislation.”
Holland, to his credit, did not rise to the bait which Russell’s invocation of the ongoing domestic struggle over civil rights plainly represented. The Georgian had just accused the Floridian of attempting to appease the liberal proponents of reform, the implication of which – from the perspective of a conservative Southerner – was arguably that the latter was somehow weak, overly fearful, or lacking in determination. But Holland’s response was only to declare that,
I [am] not interested in appeasement
in any way […] In my opinion every citizen should, as a matter of right, be
entitled to vote for President, Vice President, and Senators and Representatives;
and that is all that is involved in this case. I do not like to think of the
fact that in the part of Alabama just across the boundary line from the State
of Florida […] there are citizens who cannot vote for President or Vice
President unless they pay this tax, whereas directly across the boundary line,
in Florida, the citizens who live there are not limited by such a requirement.
I do not like to think of the fact that the citizens in our sister State, which
we love so much, are confronted with that necessity.
In truth, Holland’s
willful disregard for the fact that any conversation about the poll tax was
bound, in 1962, to become a conversation about the civil rights movement didn’t
do him any favors. The energy he spent repeatedly denying that his overall aim
was in any way connected to the contemporary struggle on the part of the
nation’s Black community for the full recognition of their political rights was
undeniably energy which would have been better spent elsewhere. Nevertheless,
one can almost admire his stubbornness. His objection to the poll tax, in his
own words, was also admirably straightforward and clear. “Every citizen should,
as a matter of right,” he said, “be entitled to vote for President, Vice
President, and Senators and Representatives [.]” Being able to boil down his
position to such a simple, arguably self-evident statement doubtless went a
long way towards allaying many potential objections.
Russell, unsurprisingly, chose this
moment to pivot once again to a discussion of the supposedly meagre material
cost of the poll tax rather than risk admitting that the thing was not morally
justifiable. It made for a rather lengthy diatribe under the circumstances, but
one still worth citing at length. The Georgia senator’s habit of dilatory
exposition in an attempt to obscure the issue at hand was a classic example of
the kind of rhetorical obstructionism regularly employed by Southern lawmakers
in the 1950s and 1960s in an attempt to stave off the passage of civil rights
legislation. “I have always taken the position that this tax does not really
prevent anyone from voting [,]” Russell accordingly began,
And I am not impressed by the
arguments of those who today weep because of “the great burden of this tax” on
voting […] in my own State this tax was not levied on women—women could vote
without paying the tax; and it was not levied on veterans or on persons beyond
age 55, as I recall. So the tax then applied only to a relatively small group
of voters—those supposed to be in the prime of life and capable of earning
their livelihood. Furthermore, every dollar received from the poll tax went
into the school funds. It is said that the poll tax is a very onerous burden.
However […] every one of the original States had voting restrictions much more
onerous than the $1 poll tax […] Indeed, up to the time when there were some 25
or 30 States. there were very rigid property-ownership requirements or
restrictions in connection with voting for instance, that one who wished to
vote had to show that he had paid taxes on approximately $500 worth of
property—and that was at a time when the dollar was really worth a dollar—long
before the great inflation which has occurred since those days […] He had to
own real estate or be a freeholder before he could vote. I had occasion to
check into it and see just what proportion of the taxes paid in the United
States today is involved in this horrendous, heavy, burdensome levy on the poor
people to keep them from voting. It gets down to where one can hardly write the
figure out. It is less than thirty-seven millionths of 1 percent of the total
tax bill of the American people. If that is reduced to figures, one must put
down a decimal, a 0, a 0, a 0, a 0, a 3, and a 7—thirty-seven millionths of 1
percent of the tax bill that the American people pay represents this crushing
burden that is denying the people suffrage in the United States.
It is worth
exploring the various components of this argument piecemeal, if for no other
reason than to cultivate a more thorough understanding of precisely how the
opponents of these kinds of reform measures attempted to sway their fellow
senators against them. To that end, let us first consider this “relatively
small group of voters” to which, Russell asserted, the poll tax in Georgia once
applied.
In the Peach State, the senator
avowed, before its poll tax was repealed in 1945, said tax applied only to men
who were not veterans and who were under the age of fifty-five. And in the
decade between 1940 and 1950, Georgia’s population lay somewhere between about
three and three and a half million. In consequence of these facts, even if
these aforementioned exclusions ensured that as many as two million people were
exempt from having to pay a tax in order to vote, that still left potentially
one million Georgians subject to said monetary restriction. Russell’s claim, of
course, was that these million or so people were “supposed to be in the prime
of life and capable of earning their livelihood [,]” but this is fairly
obviously an oversimplification. Not only did Russell have no way of knowing exactly
what proportion of this supposedly able-bodied cohort was actually capable of
regularly earning a living – that is, how many were free from chronic injury,
chronic illness, or were considered broadly “employable” – but he entirely
failed to account for the plainly observable fact that working even a fulltime
job was not – and indeed is not – any kind of guarantee that the individual so
employed will have access to discretionary spending. To this day, millions of people
in the United States who work fulltime jobs live below the poverty line and
cannot afford to spend even a single dollar on something other than their own
survival. This state of affairs was doubly true in the relatively
underdeveloped regions of the rural American South of the 1940s, and it was –
and, indeed, is – triply true for those who belonged to the region’s Black
community. Institutional discrimination within the economic sphere severely
limited the job prospects of millions of Black Georgians – not to mention Black
Americans across the nation – and effectively ensured that seemingly
non-essential expenses like poll taxes were beyond their ability to pay.
Russell’s second point also
represented something of an oversimplification. Or, if not that, exactly, then
a kind of rhetorical bait-and-switch. It was very much the case, of course,
that until the 1820s and 1830s, most states placed property qualifications on
the ability of their citizens to vote. In New York, for example, until 1821,
residents were required to own the equivalent of at least forty pounds of
either private property or land in order to register as voters. This was also
the case in Massachusetts – forty shillings in land or forty pounds in personal
property – until 1820 and in Virginia – fifty acres of vacant land,
twenty-fives acres of cultivated land, or a town lot and a house twelve feet by
twelve – until as late as 1850. Compared to these kinds of restrictions – the
purpose of which was to purposely disenfranchise the “lesser sort” within
American society – being required to pay a single dollar every year would
indeed appear to be hardly any kind of burden at all. A great accomplishment, one
might call it, this shift towards universal suffrage. A triumph of American
democracy. What such naval gazing fails to acknowledge, however – and that from
which Russell doubtless hoped to distract his fellow senators considering – was
that the elimination of onerous franchise qualifications was really only worth
commemorating once every single American citizen of the proper age could vote.
It was undeniable that the United States, circa 1962, had made great strides
since its founding in terms of who qualified for citizenship and who among its
citizens had access to the ballot. But the mere fact of these strides in no way
excused the continued disenfranchisement of certain communities of American
citizens. A far larger proportion of the American population could vote in 1962
than was the case in the 1790s, to be sure, but many millions were still barred
from doing so by way of exclusionary measures like poll taxes. This was simply
the fact of the matter.
Finally, Russell sought to conclude the cited diatribe with a bit of old-fashioned statistical obfuscation. What he had done, he explained, was “check into it and see just what proportion of the taxes paid in the United States today is involved in this horrendous, heavy, burdensome levy on the poor people to keep them from voting.” And the figure that he discovered – or purportedly discovered; he cited no sources whatsoever – was what one might charitably call vanishingly miniscule. “Less than thirty-seven millionths of 1 percent of the total tax bill of the American people [,]” he said, a number that “gets down to where one can hardly write [it] out.” But while thirty-seven millionths of 1 percent might sound like such a small amount of anything as to be practically insignificant, it was nevertheless provably the case that this relatively tiny component of the American republic’s overall tax bill still accounted for the disenfranchisement of millions of American citizens across the five states where poll taxes were still actively collected. What Russell was counting on, of course, was that his fellow senators would decline to consider the real numbers behind the calculations he presented. That, and the simple fact that many of them remained woefully uninformed as to the circumstances under which the poorest Americans were forced to live.
Being senators, Russell and his colleagues naturally travelled in rather exalted circles, rubbing shoulders with business leaders, foreign potentates, and their fellow statesmen far more often than with the least fortunate among their constituents. And even among those who evidenced a more populist bent to their politics – who possessed strong connections with the labor movement, say, or kept generous hours at the constituency offices – the fact that economic disparities, as a rule, most strongly impact communities of color would still more or less ensure that most of the senators serving in the 87th Congress in 1962 – an overwhelmingly white cohort of public servants – had never encountered someone who literally couldn’t afford to pay a poll tax. Russell’s argument, therefore, struck at two fronts. First, by discussing the impact of the poll tax in terms of percentages rather than real numbers, it gave the assembled senators an easy excuse to disregard out of hand the notion that said tax was in any way onerous or burdensome. And second, it played upon the almost certain inability of any senator to recall a specific example of one of their constituents being disenfranchised by the same. The poll tax, as aforementioned, remained active in only five states, all of which were in the American South and all of which were dominated by the segregationist wing of the Democratic Party. Not only were the representatives of these states in the Senate exceptionally unlikely to volunteer any concrete examples of voters having been disenfranchised by the poll tax in direct defiance of Russell’s assertion, but even if they wanted to, it was very nearly a certainty that none of them had ever had so much as a civil conversation with a member of one of the communities in their state most likely to be so affected.
Unfortunately, before Senator Holland could offer his own analysis of the obvious flaws in Richard Russell’s arguments, another of his fellow Democrats inadvertently dragged the conversation into something of a discursive cul-de-sac. It was assuredly a well-intentioned interjection on the part of Illinois Democrat Paul Douglas (1892-1976), but one which sadly played directly into Senator Russell’s hands: did the Senator from Georgia likewise disapprove of the 19th Amendment? In light of the Georgian’s stated antipathy towards any measure that infringed upon the sovereignty of the states, it was not necessarily an unreasonable question. After first making a joke of the fact that the amendment in question – that which removed any restrictions upon the ability of women to vote – has been approved several years before he even began his career in politics, Russell then stated that if he had been a member of the Senate in 1919, he probably would have voted against it. Not a surprising admission, in fairness, and certainly in keeping with the Georgian’s stated position. But when Douglas then asked Russell whether or not he likewise disapproved of the 15th Amendment, the conversation took a turn form which it would recover only at length.
What Russell proceeded to engage in, across several exchanges with his fellow Senators, is what was known in the context of late 19th century American politics as “waving the bloody shirt.” Rather than engage in any kind of substantive examination of his feelings on the subject of the 15th Amendment and the changes that it had wrought upon the basic fabric of American social and political life, the Georgian instead continually sought to recall the horrible loss of life which the Civil War had extracted from the South as though that selfsame bloodshed had earned Southerners perpetual immunity from being questioned on matters pertaining to the Reconstruction and its legacy. “That amendment [,]” he began accordingly, referring to the aforementioned 15th,
Was written in the blood of the Civil
War, and was inevitable after Appomattox, and the South is reconciled to it. We
were not happy about it, but it was written in blood, by the bayonets of the
soldiers of our friend from Illinois and other States who overpowered us in the
most calamitous and fratricidal strife this Nation has ever seen. We paid a
terrific price for our idea that we could depart in peace or that one
Southerner could lick four Yankees. We were not able to show the latter. We
found out one could lick three. We were confronted with that fact as a practical
proposition. We were faced with that advantage, and I think we have very little
to be ashamed of. But the 15th amendment was written in the blood that was so
grievously shed in the Civil War and was a natural concomitant of Appomattox.
The question that Russell was asked – whether he favored the 15th Amendment or not – was obviously meant to get at the degree to which his stated belief in the right of the states to determine the parameters of the franchise would extend to endorsing a position which, in 1962, was publicly unsupportable for all but the most rabid white supremacists. That is, it was meant to force Russell to admit that he would prefer it if any state that so desired could deny the vote to any of its citizens based on the color of their skin. But while he might have felt that such an end really was desirable, Russell could not publicly say so lest he turn the ongoing debate – in a way that he had just warned Senator Holland against – into a conversation about civil rights. Thus did he attempt a diversionary invocation of the American Civil War.
A seemingly successful invocation, as it turned out. The debate then ongoing in the Senate almost immediately ceased to be about whether Russell favored absolute state control over the franchise – which, again, he very likely did – and instead devolved into a kind of memorialization of the suffering that the South had been forced to endure over the course of the first half of the 1860s. Russell’s position, in effect, was that he could not speak to the suffering being daily inflicted upon the nation’s Black community in the form of the poll tax because he was himself too distraught over the suffering of his Southern kinsman of a century past. In this mode, he thus continued. “No, I cannot say,” he avowed,
Considering the sorrow and the great
losses that were inflicted on the people of my blood and of my kin, that we
rejoiced in the outcome of the Civil War, but I would not repeal the 15th
amendment. I would not deny to a man of color or any other race the right to
vote; nor would I deny it if I had the power to do so. But I am not
enthusiastic about the amendment.
Regrettably, this
was not the end of the conversation. Though he had gotten around to more or
less answering Douglas’s question, Russell apparently still had some things to
say on the subject of the Civil War. To that end, when further asked by his
colleague from Illinois, Senator Douglas, about his thoughts on some of the
provisions of the aforesaid 15th Amendment, the Georgian first
responded by asserting that he did not agree with certain interpretations of
the same only to once more evoke the memory of the War Between the States. “If
the Senator is going to try to get me to apologize for the Civil War at this
late date [,] Russell declared,
Or to get on my knees any further
than was necessary at Appomattox, I shall not do it. I am proud of our part in
it, though it was one of the greatest tragedies this country was confronted
with. I am proud of the record the people of my blood made in it, and men of my
clan shed their blood on battlefields from Gettysburg to Brice’s Cross Roads.
Central to Russell’s plan, no doubt, was to appeal to the emotions of his fellow senators. In spite of the fact that it had taken place a century prior, the Civil War remained a deeply relevant cultural touchstone in contemporary American political and popular culture. More than a few Senators and Representatives could claim fathers or grandfathers who served on one side or the other, and the Southern political elite in particular continued to attach a great deal of importance to the events of the conflict and its aftermath. It would not have been difficult, therefore, to elicit a chorus of reactions in the Senate – even as late as 1962 – by invoking the Civil War and the suffering endured by its various participants. As each member of the Senate so roused took their turn speaking fervently of the contributions of their kin, the intended topic of conversation – an anti-poll tax amendment – would simply fade into the background. And for a moment, at least, this is what started to happen. New Mexico Democrat Dennis Chavez (1888-1962) asked for Russell to yield the floor and then proceeded to enumerate the various contributions of his own forebearers to that same conflict. His grandfather fought the Confederates during their campaign in New Mexico, he said. They did what was right, just as Chavez himself endeavored to do. Russell must have been overjoyed. Naturally, he thanked Senator Chavez for his and his forebear’s contribution. And then, in keeping with his latest obfuscatory strategy, he continued with his commemoration of the Civil War and its Southern participants. But while the Georgian’s next declaration on this particular topic thankfully turned out to be his last, it was also, arguably, the most distressing of the lot.
“The story of the Civil War [,]” said Russell,
Is a sad and tragic one, but I have
no apologies to make for the South […] The southerners were mistaken in a great
many instances, but they paid in blood for their mistakes. There is no higher
coin in which payments can be made. I wish to say further that any man of
southern descent has a right to be proud of the record made by those men who
wore the gray, and history does not record a more indomitable or longer drawn
out fight against overwhelming odds than was made by the Confederacy. Their
valor was so great that it is a part of the common heritage of every part of
this Union, and every good American should appreciate it as a part of the
history of his country.
His attempt at distraction notwithstanding – his remarks were less about the Civil War than they were about anything other than the poll tax – there was something deeply troubling about the sentiment that Senator Russell seemed to be expressing. “The southerners were mistaken in a great many instances,” he said, “but they paid in blood for their mistakes. There is no higher coin in which payments can be made.” In what “instances” might the Southerners have conceivably been mistaken to a greater extent than their defense of the institution of slavery and their willingness to kill to uphold it? A grave error, that, and one that it would not seem wise to forget. And yet Richard Russell seemed to be claiming that recompense had been made. The people of the South, he said, “paid in blood for their mistakes [,]” as if that blood could wash away the essential fact of their grave error. As if the fact that they lost the war wholly absolved the Confederacy and its supporters of the crime that was – and is – slavery.
What did any of this have to do with Senator Holland’s anti-pol tax amendment? Very little, looked at one way; a great deal, looked at another. The purpose of the poll tax – as enacted in the various Southern states over the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries – was to essentially negate the effects of the 15th Amendment by legally denying to most members of the region’s Black community their constitutionally-guaranteed right to the electoral franchise. It was a direct – if delayed – reaction to the outcome of the Civil War and very much carried the stamp of Southern bitterness concerning the same. By bending the conversation towards a memorialization of the conflict – specifically by invoking the mix of sorrow and pride with which Southerners tended to view it in retrospect – Russell was thus arguably serving to remind his fellow Senators of where the poll tax came from and what purpose it was intended to serve. That is, from his perceptive, the righting of a great historical wrong. At the same time, of course, Russell’s remarks could also fairly be construed as little more than a strategic distraction. As stated previously, the suffering that the senator was endeavoring to call to mind took place a century prior and was experienced primarily by soldiers who volunteered to fight in service of a group of pro-slavery insurrectionists. Their bloodshed was not meaningless, to be sure – their losses, and those of their families, were most definitely real and significant. But this fact obscured the vital reality that an anti-poll tax amendment was intended to address. While thousands of Southerners may have suffered for having supported and fought for the Confederacy over the course of the American Civil War, many millions more were suffering in the states of Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, Virginia, and Alabama at the very moment Senator Russell was speaking. Nothing more could be done for the Civil War dead that hadn’t been done already. But something most certainly could be done for those whose right to the franchise was being actively denied because they could not afford to pay a tax.
Senator Holland, to his credit, was savvy enough to keep this fact squarely in mind. He was a Southerner himself, of course, and the son and grandson of Confederate veterans. But while he was willing, to an extent, to add his voice to that of Senator Chavez in celebrating the contributions of his forebears to the course of American history, he did not allow himself to be distracted from his ultimate goal. “I commend the distinguished Senator for speaking with such fervor about the service and the sacrifice of the men of the South,” he said,
And it would also be true to say the
same of the women. It happens that both my grandfathers and my father bore to
their dying day upon their bodies wounds they had suffered in various battles,
and all of them on the southern side. The reason for my rising, however, is to
avert what I fear might occur as the result of the questions of my
distinguished friend, the Senator from Illinois, which might indicate that the
15th amendment was the only field in which the poll tax operated.
Notwithstanding the
fact that he was among the intended targets of Senator Russell’s emotional
diversion into the 1860s, Holland was adamant that the conversation remain
firmly planted in the 1960s. That is to say, it was the poll tax that concerned
him and it was the poll tax that the was prepared to discuss. When Russell
responded that he did not think “the 15th amendment touches the poll tax in any
place or in any shape, form or fashion, in my own view [,]” Holland seized upon
the opening and began to steer things back on course.
“I agree with
the Senator [,]” the Floridian said.
The point I make is that the poll tax
amendment I shall offer later, when the appropriate time comes […] will operate
in favor of colored people and of white people, in favor of people of all
colors, religions, and creeds. It was shown in my own State, when we repealed
the poll tax in 1937—and I had a modest part in doing that, as a member of the
State senate at the time—that at the next election, in 1940, at which time the
colored people were not voting in my State, there was an immense increase in
participation in voting by the white people. This resulted from the fact that
many people, because of penury or because of carelessness or because of a
dislike of what they saw happening in some counties as a result of the poll tax,
had not participated in the elections. These people came in to participate […] I
think the Senator is correct in stating that the proposal does not come under
the ordinary classification of the ordinary civil rights legislation. It
applies to majorities, to minorities, and to every person of every color. It
attempts to give to people who otherwise qualify the right to cast their votes
for elected Federal officials. The Senator well knows that is the case. I
merely wished to make the record clear.
Once again,
Holland’s stubbornness arguably rises to the point of being admirable. Not
everything that he said could necessarily be characterized as praiseworthy, of
course. In specifically citing the role he played in his home state’s repeal of
its own poll tax in the late 1930s, the Floridian gave evidence of the extent
to which his efforts in favor of a federal ban on such franchise restrictions
were bound up with his sense of personal and professional pride. Likewise,
Holland’s offhand remark that, circa 1940, “the colored people were not voting
in my State” completely – and doubtless purposely – elided the extent to which
the government of the Sunshine State continued to engage in vote suppression
even after its poll tax was repealed. But while Senator Holland’s motives might
not have been entirely unimpeachable – moved as he was, it seemed, by pride
more than any particular concern for the community that that poll taxes were
designed to disenfranchise – his determination was nevertheless more than a
little impressive. While Senator Russell cycled through one rhetorical approach
after another in an attempt to either discredit the Floridian’s position or
else divert the conversation entirely, Holland remained steadfast, resolute,
unphased. He had labored for almost fifteen years to reach this pivotal moment,
and the purposefully tangential ramblings of a crafty Georgian simply weren’t
going to get in his way.
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