The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part LXXVII: “The Heavy Current of Expression”

    The vagueness of expression to which Senator Spessard Holland was forced to resort in pursuit of an amendment eliminating the poll tax – a result of his rather awkward position between the upper chamber’s reformers and its conservatives – continued to hamper his efforts as his conversation of March 16^th, 1962 with Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright went on. TO that end, having just heard Holland proclaim that his fundamental objective in eliminating the poll tax was to promote “a representative expression from the states,” Fulbright naturally sought a degree of clarification as to exactly what this somewhat ambiguous language was intended to signify. “Do I draw the right conclusion from his statement [,]” he asked of the Floridian,

That thereby he believes the quality of the government of the State and the representation of the State is superior to those whose voters do not participate in the same percentage? Does the Senator see any connection between the enlarged participation and the quality of the representation of the State?

It was a fair enough question. Holland spoke of “representative expressions” and “cleaner government” without clearly stating whether or why either of these things might have been particularly desirable. Was he saying that the states that could boast of higher voter participation percentages possessed inherently superior governments as a result? The Floridian, as ever, continued to be somewhat circumspect. “The point the Senator from Florida has made,” he said,

And the only point he has made, is this. It is not to point any finger of criticism at any State, but simply to point out that it is established, as was stated yesterday, that it is the business of other States, because the States have an interest in the electoral results of other States in seeing that there is a representative expression by those States. That is the only point the Senator from Florida wishes to make.

It was true enough that Holland had explained why and how states that lacked poll taxes of their own might have claimed a direct interest in the electoral practices of those that still possessed them. Presidential elections were national affairs with national consequences, and poll taxes were capable of effecting the outcome of said elections in such states where they remained in force. But he still declined to explain either what he understood the phrase “representative expression” to mean or why such an outcome was supposed to be desirable.

    All credit to J. William Fulbright for being sharper than the average senator; the man was not one to be handled. Having asked Holland for clarification and received nothing of the sort, he thereafter proceeded to seize upon his colleague’s rhetorically ambiguous tone and demanded specific confirmation or denial of what the Floridian seemed to him to be saying. “I do not quite follow the Senator in his point about the quality of our government,” he thus retorted,

And that goes not only to the quality of its participation but to that of its representatives, whether they be local officials, Governors, Representatives, or Senators. If the Senator is trying to make the point that, because there is a large participation and more people vote, thereby there is a higher quality of Representatives and Senators and Governors, I would like to see the Senator demonstrate it, because I do not follow that point, and I do not believe it.

Again, Fulbright’s request seemed to be an entirely reasonable one. Since Holland had declined to provide a clear answer to his previous question, the senator from Arkansas was forced to hypothesize. Did Holland mean to say that a higher percentage of voter participation was bound to lead to a higher quality of government? And if that was what he meant, could he prove the validity of the claim? Could he show precisely how these two things were supposedly connected? 

    Unsurprisingly, the Floridian could not. This isn’t to say that the answer he came out with was necessarily all that bad. He may not have been able to prove, as Fulbright demanded, that higher voter turnout inevitably led to a higher quality of government, but he nevertheless managed to make a moderately compelling case for increasing ballot access as a potential good in itself. “In my concluding remarks, I say, regardless of the views of the Senator from Arkansas,” he began,

That the Senator from Florida has great confidence in the verdict of the people. What I am trying to do is get the people to give a verdict. Obviously, where only a small percentage of the people are giving the verdict, the Senator from Florida thinks the whole Nation has an interest, and in these 5 States which are trying to swim upstream against the heavy current of expression of the other 45 States, that people should be encouraged and allowed to vote, without putting obstacles in the way, as to whether they can make the payment, or laying down a certain means of collection, or whether they will or will not be intimidated. The Senator from Florida believes in the expression of the people of each State. As a State senator, he voted to give his people full expression, and he expects to vote the same way here.

While Holland once again neglected to explain why, exactly, gaining the input of as many eligible voters as possible represented an innately positive outcome for the United States as a whole, the response that he did provide to Senator Fulbright was at the very least posed in a reasonably convincing way. The issue, he explained, was that the American people weren’t being allowed to benefit from a comprehensive evaluation of their own collective intentions. There was a bigger picture, in short, that they weren’t being allowed to see. Who did the American people really want as their president? Until every eligible voter in every state was allowed to cast a ballot, the readily available answer would only ever be a partial one. Would the addition of a few million votes spread across a small handful of states realistically change the outcome of any given presidential election? Maybe it would. Probably it wouldn’t. The specific outcome wasn’t the point. The point was that until everyone who was qualified to vote did vote, the validity of the final outcome of any such elections would always be somewhat in question. America’s vaunted democracy would always be incomplete.

    This paean to the true potential of democratic expression wasn’t even the most interesting part of Holland’s answer, however. What most stands out in the Floridian’s response to Senator Fulbright – specifically in light of the former’s otherwise very circumspect approach to reform – was his declaration that the five states in which poll taxes remained the law of the land were “trying to swim upstream against the heavy current of expression of the other 45 States, that people should be encouraged and allowed to vote, without putting obstacles in the way, as to whether they can make the payment, or laying down a certain means of collection, or whether they will or will not be intimidated.” There was nothing particularly shocking in Holland placing himself on the side of those who believed that “people should be encouraged and allowed to vote, without putting obstacles in the way, as to whether they can make the payment, or laying down a certain means of collection [,]” to be sure. This had been his acknowledged objective from the start. But for the Democratic senator from Florida, in the spring of 1962, to endorse the proposition that “people should be encouraged and allowed to vote, without putting obstacles in the way, as to […] whether they will or will not be intimidated [?]” That was equal parts remarkable and quite unexpected.

    Let us recall, first and foremost, that Holland was a Southern Democrat who came up through Florida state politics in the 1930s and 1940s and first arrived in the United States Senate in 1946. Not only, as a Democrat, had he wholly imbibed the doctrine of states’ rights and fashioned himself, as a public servant, into one of its most erstwhile defenders, but he had also come to identify the policy of racial segregation – in common with his fellow Southern Democrats – as paramount to the Southern way of life and inviolable as a matter of constitutional law. He believed, in short – had always believed – that the principle of “separate but equal” was both necessary to the functioning of contemporary Southern society and could be implemented by any state without fear of federal interference. The Floridian had already made this stance clear when he appended his name to the aforementioned Southern Manifesto in 1956. And as the major events of the Civil Rights Movement played themselves out in the United States over the course of the 1960s, he would confirm his position time and time again. He would vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He would vote against the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He would go on to vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1968. In most cases, without fail, the man was as ardent a segregationist as one was like to find in the contemporary Senate.

    On that specific note, it also bears recalling that when Senator Keating mentioned the finding of the Civil Rights Commission that the five remaining poll tax states all had means at their disposal of suppressing the Black vote beyond and outside of the poll tax itself, Holland – alike with his fellow Southerners Hill and Eastland – had nothing at all to say. This observation on Keating’s part was aimed at Hill and Eastland in particular, of course, the purpose being to aid in convincing them that the poll tax was functionally unnecessary to their most cherished goal of Black voter suppression and could be safely done away with as a result. But it was also true – though the New Yorker had no reason to say as much – that Florida was also as guilty as Mississippi or Alabama of just the same crime. That is, while Florida had done away with its poll tax in the late 1930s, it most certainly had not ceased using other methods to prevent its Black residents from voting.

    Since the repeal of said poll tax in June of 1937, for example, Black men continued to be lynched in the State of Florida. Cellos Harrison was murdered in his jail cell in 1943 after being reindicted for a murder that he was previously cleared of on appeal. The following year, Willie James Howard was forced to jump to his death into the Suwannee River after sending a Christmas card to a white female coworker. These names were but two of many. Since the repeal of said poll tax, Black citizens also continued to face the threat of violence in response to demands for equal treatment. In 1956, during the Tallahassee Bus Boycott – launched in sympathy with the Montgomery Bus Boycott by Black students from Florida A&M University – numerous Black bus passengers were arrested while several were directly threatened by members of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Furthermore, since the repeal of said poll tax, attempts at organization by Florida’s Black community – in an attempt to play within the rules set by the state’s white political leadership – were met with dismissal, repression, and violence. Of particular note was the fate which befell Black activist Harry T. Moore (1905-1951), a teacher by trade who helped organize the Brevard Country chapter of the NAACP, personally investigated lynchings, filed lawsuits against white primaries, and led voter registration campaigns. He was fired from his teaching job in 1946 specifically because refused to give up his work as an activist and was then murdered in 1951 when a bomb went off under the floor of his house. All of this was in an attempt to put Black Floridians “in their place.” The poll tax had been repealed, but nothing else had really changed. Black people living in the Sunshine state were not suddenly free to vote as they wished. Indeed, they were not free to do much of anything without explicit white approval. Until 1956 – thanks to the success of the Tallahassee Bus Boycott – they could not choose where to sit on public transit. As late as the 1940s, on pain of death, they had to be careful to whom they spoke and how. And as late as 1951, any attempt to make best use of existing legal and judicial institutions might conceivably have resulted in anything between job termination and murder.

    Bearing all of this in mind is what makes Holland’s aforementioned remark such a meaningful one. It was the determination of the forty-five states in which there were no poll tax laws, he avowed – Florida being among them – “that people should be encouraged and allowed to vote, without putting obstacles in the way, as to […] whether they will or will not be intimidated.” What were the lynchings, and arrests, and wrongful terminations, and murders described above if not a campaign of intimidation? The state and people of Florida were not just trying to punish specific offenders for real or perceived crimes when they saw to the deaths of Cellos Harrison, Willie James Howard, and Harry T. Moore. And they were not just attempting to enforce a specific corpus of state law when they precipitated the arrest and brutalization of the Tallahassee Bus Boycott’s student participants. These men and these students may have been the immediate victims of the force so exerted, but they were not really the intended targets. It was the larger Black community at which all of these actions were aimed. Cellos Harrison was not killed solely in an attempt to enforce “eye for an eye” justice. He was killed to serve as an example to every other Black person in the State of Florida. So was Willie James Howard. So was Harry T. Moore. Did the state government directly participate in any of these murders? Perhaps not. But by turning a blind eye to such extrajudicial killings, the political leadership of the Sunshine State sent a very clear signal to all those white Floridians who had ever considered taking matters into their own hands in regard to the perceived ills of the Black community. “Put them in their place,” they were saying. “You have our permission.”              

    Why should the government of Florida have thus sanctioned vigilante violence? The answer would seem to be rather obvious. The more terrified the state’s Black inhabitants were of voicing any sense of dissatisfaction with the reigning status quo, the less likely they were to organize, to protest, to take direct action, or to vote. Their fear would accordingly neutralize them as a political force in the State of Florida, thereby allowing the established white leadership to continue benefitting from Black economic activity without having to cater to Black interests, or even to acknowledge that such interests existed. And where did Holland fit in all this? Did he know about it? Was he culpable? Of course he was. Not only had he been serving as one of Florida’s representatives in the Senate since 1946, but between 1941 and 1945, he’d been the Sunshine State’s governor. He knew exactly what kind of treatment Black people often received in the State of Florida and exactly how, as a member of the political elite, he was expected to respond. Consider the 1941 lynching of one A.C. Williams as a case in point. Arrested on charges of burglary and attempted rape – the alleged victim, it bears noting, being a twelve-year-old white girl – Williams was abducted from his jail cell in Jackson County, beaten severely and shot several times, and then miraculously escaped from his tormentors, only to be re-arrested, re-abducted, and finally shot to death. These circumstances alone would have made it a strange and noteworthy case, to be sure. How many Black men, in the history of the American South, managed to survive one lynching only to be lynched for a second time? But what ultimately made the A.C. Williams case such a controversial one at the time was the rather sensitive moment in American history at which the relevant events took place.

    American newspapers, circa 1941, had already been filled for several years with increasingly brutal accounts of events transpiring across the Atlantic in war-torn Europe. German Nazis and Italian Fascists were perpetrating atrocities across the continent and the American people were finding it harder and harder to simply turn away from such appalling behavior even if the events in question were taking place on the other side of the world. Add to this the fact that the rash of lynchings which had swept the South over the course of the 1920s and 1930s had been met with increasingly harsh and vivid coverage in scores of Northern newspapers, and it was fair to say that, by the 1940s, even some Southerners were beginning to grow self-conscious about their longstanding traditions of “communal justice.” Nobody in the contemporary South was particularly inclined to suffer comparisons in the national press to Adolf Hitler and his legion of butchers. And it was also true that some Southerners themselves had become distressed by the aforementioned descriptions of anti-Black lynchings that were then commonly seen in print. The Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL), brainchild of Texas suffragist Jessie Daniel Ames (1883-1972), was perhaps the most prominent outgrowth of this latter impulse towards social reform. Anti-lynching activists like Ames were not necessarily in favor of bringing an end to the era of Jim Crow, mind you. They were still white Southerners who tended to maintain fairly patrician ideas about racial and social hierarchy. But they did believe, in the words of Ames herself, that mob violence was “Hateful and hostile to every ideal of religion and humanity [and] debasing and degrading to every person involved [.]” And so they campaigned for state anti-lynching laws, promoted respect for judicial authority, and called for the thorough investigation of any and all confirmed lynchings.

    Now, none of this is to say that Southern popular opinion had wholly turned against lynching as of the early 1940s. There remained, among a broad swath of the population of the contemporary American South, a persistent conviction – fed by stubbornness, bigotry, and fear – that lynching, while unpleasant, remained an essential tool by which regular, middle-class white people might effectively deal with the so-called “negro problem.” In the minds of those who held to this conviction, there was simply no way that Northern newspapermen and activists could possibly understand the challenges facing white Southerners in attempting to preserve their way of life and maintain a degree of (extremely one-sided) intercommunal peace. The South’s Black community was the South’s responsibility to deal with, in short, and the white inhabitants thereof weren’t about to just give up what they considered to be one of the most effective tools for doing so just because some people were beginning to feel a little uncomfortable. So it was that Spessard Holland, newly minted Governor of the State of Florida, found himself in the midst of a somewhat fraught situation upon being informed of the murder of A.C. Williams in the spring of 1941.

    On the one hand, it was plain to see, Holland couldn’t simply do nothing. The aforementioned ASWPL had some four million members by the beginning of the 1940s, all middle or upper-class white women who, thanks to his own efforts in repealing the state’s poll tax, could vote more easily than ever before. And at the same time, for a governor intent on promoting tourism and investment, he would have done himself no favors at all by sitting idly by while the national press turned the murder of A.C. Williams into a symbol of American brutality comparable to the worst crimes of European fascism. On the other hand, of course, Holland also couldn’t do too much. Though white, middle-class Florida women might have wanted him to take a hard line against the practice of lynching and its perpetrators, white, middle-class Florida men were not in a position to forgive a governor who appeared to agree with the Northern press that vigilante “justice” was fundamentally unacceptable. They had just elected Holland as the governor of the Sunshine State by a margin of thirteen points over primary rival Francis Whitehair (1900-1977), but they would gladly rescind their support if it appeared as though he was the wrong man for the job after all. That is, if he appeared not to understand what really mattered to the people of Florida.

    There was also, of course, the matter of the federal government. Even by contemporary Southern standards, Florida’s reputation in terms of extrajudicial violence was shockingly poor. The Sunshine state had witnessed more reported cases of lynching in the 1920s and 1930s than any other state in the region while the government of the same had shown little inclination to do much of anything about it. It was, in consequence, arguably only a matter of time before the Roosevelt Administration opted to take matters into its own hands. Granted, Roosevelt had tread carefully in his first two terms, preferring to quietly encourage Black entrepreneurship and court the favor of Black community leaders without directly appearing to threaten the powerbase of the Southern Democrats whose support he needed to pass various pieces of New Deal legislation. But by the beginning of the 1940s, FDR had grown confident enough in his own popularity and in his control over the Democratic Party – his election to an unprecedented third term in 1940 being very much a case in point – that he began to shift in favor of using federal resources for the purpose of improving the living conditions and economic opportunities available to the nation’s Black inhabitants. One of the most significant outcomes of this shift in focus was the creation, in 1939, of the Civil Rights Section of the United States Department of Justice. In short order, this new arm of the larger federal law enforcement apparatus began to investigate violations of free speech, labor rights, and voting rights, and in 1940 even succeeded in ensuring that a white police officer charged with assaulting a Black youth while the latter was in custody in the State of Georgia did not have their charges dismissed by the relevant judicial authorities. Circa 1941, it was true, the Civil Rights Sections had yet to successfully bring about the prosecution of any of the perpetrators of a lynching. But the Department of Justice had definitely begun to investigate such incidents with greater rigor than ever before.

    So, what did Holland ultimately decide to do? Caught between calls for law and order on one side and a communal impulse towards self-conscious conservativism on the other, how did he resolve the situation to the satisfaction of all involved? Well, like any politician worth their salt who wants to be seen as though they are doing something without actually having to do it, Governor Spessard Holland called for an investigation. A man named Maurice Tripp was assigned to look into the matter who then spent two weeks poking around in Jackson County. On May 25^th – less than two weeks after Williams was found dead – he submitted his report, the conclusion of which declared that Tripp had found, “No mob sentiment. The largest number ever involved was only four persons. There has been no crowd or gathering of any great number of people. The sentiment of the general public is they feel that the officers did their duty.” This seemed to satisfy Holland well enough. When asked if he was planning to pursue the case any further, a spokesperson avowed – in so many words – that he was simply too busy with his duties as governor to take on the role of detective as well. He did ultimately opt to turn Tripp’s findings over to the Department of Justice, though not until July of 1942, long after whatever trail there might have been had long since gone cold. Reviewing the case on behalf of the DOJ, Assistant Attorney General Wendell Berge (1903-1955) pointedly observed that, “The situation was one that really justified and required an armed guard and protective custody in its best sense. The sheriff’s failure to do this is perhaps directly responsible for the second episode in this unfortunate affair.” Nevertheless, because so much time had passed, and because clear evidence of malice on the part of law enforcement was essentially non-existent, the Department of Justice opted to quietly close the case. To this day, the murderers of A.C. Williams have yet to be identified.  

    Governor Spessard Holland had thus shown himself to be a man who, when faced with a concrete example of attempted intimidation by one portion of his constituents against another, responded by doing only slightly more than nothing at all. It was accordingly a rather curious thing for Senator Spessard Holland to draw specific attention to the fact that, as of the early 1960s, certain people in certain states might still have been the victims of concerted campaigns of intimidation. In Holland’s opinion, it seemed, it was the position of the State of Florida that people should not have had to suffer being potentially frightened away from the ballot box any more than they should have been required to pay a poll tax in order to vote. But hadn’t he shown himself to be perfectly accepting of the use of intimidation tactics? Wasn’t it true that Black people living in the State of Florida had suffered intimidation throughout his own term as governor? And weren’t they still suffering from the same treatment in 1962? The only honest answers to these questions could not be other than “yes,” “yes,” and, emphatically, “yes.” To live in the American South as a Black person in the 20^th century was to be the target of suspicion, discrimination, and violence. No Southern state existed in which this was not the case. And Florida was no different, notwithstanding Holland’s efforts to make it a desirable destination for vacationers and investors alike. The legislature of the Sunshine State may have opted to repeal its poll tax nearly three decades prior, but that only served to eliminate a means of state-directed racial oppression. State-sanctioned racial oppression – in the form of vigilante violence – was yet given free rein.

    Given what is known of Holland’s personal and ideological proclivities – the pride he claimed to feel in his forebears who fought for the Confederacy, his later record of voting against both the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965), etc. – one is inevitably forced to wonder how it was that he felt comfortable making the statement cited above. How could he claim – albeit indirectly – that potential voters were being intimidated in states where poll taxes were still being collected without inviting his reformist allies to scrutinize the goings-on in his own state? How could he avoid tethering himself to the larger movement for civil rights – something he seemed especially loathe to do – when the values he claimed to espouse were exactly those being given voice by a number of contemporary civil rights activists? “I am against state-directed voter intimidation,” he was saying, “and it is for that reason that I believe the poll tax must go.” But what would be his answer if the aforementioned activists proceeded to direct this same sentiment towards the State of Florida and its government? How would he respond to his fellow Southerners if they began accusing him of an act of betrayal? If they said he was as bad as the activists for claiming that anyone in the South was the victim of a concerted campaign of intimidation? The man seemed to be voluntarily putting himself in a bind.

    Perhaps, in Holland’s mind, there was an important distinction at play. The poll tax, after all, was a mechanism of state policy. It restricted access to the ballot by way of an exercise of state power. But most other contemporary methods by which the Southern franchise was restricted were comparatively informal, coming, as they did, at the hands of private individuals or organizations. Violence, to be sure, or the threat thereof remained a common means by which prospective Black voters in a state like Florida were kept away from the polls. And it remained the prerogative of the various state parties and their leadership whether or not Black candidates or voters were permitted to take part in primary races. So what did the state have to do with any of this? As far as the states’ rights orthodoxy of contemporary Southern Democrats was concerned, political parties were private organizations whose behavior – as far as subjects like membership were concerned – was not the responsibility of the state to police. And while it was certainly true that the states then governed by Southern Democrats all looked upon violence and the threat of violence as crimes punishable by law, the leadership of these states also tended towards the principle that it was not rightfully the place of state officials to interfere with or else question the decision making of county or municipal officials. If a local investigation of a lynching or a riot in which the victims were Black turned up inconclusive evidence, in short, most contemporary Southern Democrats would have declined to press for a more thorough, state-led follow-up. Local officials knew what was best for their communities, they were inclined to avow, just as private organizations were perfectly capable of regulating their own behavior.

    In what way is any of this relevant? Furthermore, in an environment where state governments could attempt to police the behavior of private organizations and local officials in an attempt to secure more equitable outcomes for their Black constituents but simply choose not to, is the distinction between state-directed voter suppression and state-sanctioned voter suppression really all that meaningful? Well, no, in point of fact, it isn’t. But for the likes of Spessard Holland, it might still have been personally relevant in spite of being practically meaningless. Perhaps, if he could only convince himself and his Southern peers that endeavoring to remove official barriers to voting did not equate to a desire to seek the legal removal of unofficial barriers, he could reconcile the apparent contradiction in his promoting a major electoral reform project at the federal level while still personally believing in the spirit of Jim Crow at the state level. It was, after all, as Kenneth Keating had said: Southern states had a great many means at their disposal to restrict access to the ballot besides the poll tax. And the poll tax had the downside of disenfranchising poor white voters as well as most Black voters. So maybe, thought Holland, it was time for the South to embrace a new reality. Maybe it was simply no longer necessary for the Black vote to be suppressed by way of laws and regulations. Florida had done away with its poll tax back in the late 1930s and managed to avoid an electoral revolt at the hands of newly enfranchised Black voters. For that matter, so had every other Southern poll-tax state whose legislators later opted to vote in favor of repeal. Party organizations, local officials, and concerned private citizens seemed perfectly capable of maintaining the status quo on their own. So why not let them? Why not, in keeping with the fundamental principle of small-government conservatism, peel back another layer of needless regulation and allow the people themselves to see to their own best interests?

    If Holland had indeed come to this conclusion, it would certainly explain his willingness to claim that the tide of history flowed in favor of freedom from electoral intimidation. The poll taxes that had originally been implemented across the American South at the end of the 19^th century in an attempt to reaffirm the rule of racist white Democrats following the collapse of Reconstruction had simply outlived their usefulness. Northern politicians had long since shown that they were either willing to allow their Southern counterparts to govern their states as they saw fit or simply lacked the power to pursue meaningful civil rights legislation. This being the case – that is, undisputed white rule in the South having been entirely cemented following the “hiccup” that was the immediate post-bellum era of multiracial democracy – Southern Democrats could now safely and more fully embrace the conservative, hands-off style of government to which their principles inclined them. There was no need to be heavy-handed anymore, or to sweep up poor white voters in measures that were never meant to target them. On the contrary, it was time for the South to fully enter the 20^th century. Or rather, it was time for these five Southern states to join the rest of the South in this exact realization. Florida, South Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia; these states had all abandoned the poll tax without coming to any harm. Indeed, as far as Holland was concerned, they were all of them the better for it. They were freer, more prosperous, more attractive in terms of migration. And while it was true that in these states there existed fewer legal impediments to Black political participation, this fact in no way reflected a less than absolute commitment on the part of the political elites therein to the basic principle of white supremacy. It may have been, of course, that the leadership of these five holdout states were simply afraid to join their brethren, afraid to give up one of the central legal pillars of the Jim Crow regime. But as Holland endeavored to explain to them – with a degree of patience bordering on heroic – they truly had nothing to fear. Nothing would change for them that really mattered. The South – for the foreseeable future – would remain as white as ever.

The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part LXXVI: “Cleaner Government, In the Main”

    Before Senator Spessard Holland had a chance to expand upon the significance of his findings vis-à-vis the Election of 1960 and the impact of poll taxes upon the same, he was rather predictably stopped short by Senator James Eastland’s request that he yield once more for a question. Holland had just mentioned that the Mississippian had been wrong about “the primary [being] the place where the larger participation in voting takes place” in his state, so this was not entirely unexpected. In contemporary one-party states like Alabama and Mississippi, the Democratic primary was usually more important than the general election in terms of deciding winners and losers, and for that reason tended to be jealously guarded by the officiating partisan authorities. So began a rather testy exchange between the two Southern senators. “Of course,” Eastland began, “the Senator from Florida knows that many voters do not turn out for a primary election when the candidates in the primary election do not have opposition. Is that not true?” Holland’s initial response was calm enough. “They do not turn out to the same degree [,]” he allowed. “I have noticed that in Alabama there was very strong opposition in various races—for instance, in the election for the chairmanship of the public utilities commission.” After extracting a promise from Holland that he would be fair in his evaluation, Eastland then asked of the Floridian whether or not he was aware, “that it takes the election of county officials to get out large numbers of voters in Alabama, Mississippi, and other States.” The two went back and forth like this – talking past each other rather than to each other – for quite a while before Holland was finally able to come to his point. Senator Hill intervened, in the meantime, after Holland expanded the scope of his discussion to include recent electoral events in Alabama. Both Eastland and Hill each insisted that voter participation in their home states in 1960 had been low because everything of consequence had been decided by the relevant primaries. Holland asserted, conversely, that the outcome of that year’s general election had been far from a done deal in either state.

    Holland’s evidence for this claim was rooted in a plainly observable fact. In spite of Alabama and Mississippi both being dyed-in-the-wool Democratic states, neither of them ultimately pledged their entire slate of Electors to the candidate for president chosen by the Democratic Party. Mississippi selected eight men as its Electors who identified themselves to the voters as being formally unpledged, the lot of which then cast their ballots for Virginia Senator Harry F. Byrd (1887-1966) and South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond (1902-2003), neither of whom had formally declared themselves as candidates for high office. Stranger still, in neighboring Alabama, five Electors were chosen who had pledged themselves to the Kennedy/Johnson ticket while six more unpledged Electors were voted in alongside them. When it then came time for Alabama to cast its Electoral College ballots in December of 1960, these six likewise voted for the ad-hoc Byrd/Thurmond ticket. More worrying than this strange outcome, however – particularly from the perspective of the Democratic Party – were the electoral statistics behind it. As Holland went on to explain,

With reference to the State of Mississippi […] 108,000 were for the regular Democratic slate, 116,000—or 8,000 more—were for the unpledged slate; and 73,000 were for the Republican slate—or a total of 297,000 voters out of the total of 1,171,000—which […] is just a shade over one-fourth of the mature, adult citizens of that State. And let me say that the 116,000 were a little less than 10 percent of the total number of such citizens in the State.

What this all amounted to, in essence, was that the disposition of Mississippi’s electoral votes in 1960 was decided by one hundred and sixteen thousand people. Or, to put it another way, if the eight thousand people who put the unpledged slate over the top had voted another way – for the Democratic slate, for the Republican slate, or not at all – Mississippi would have chosen the pledged Kennedy/Johnson Electors over the unpledged Byrd/Thurmond Electors.

    Was this fact in any way relevant to the discussion at hand? Well, yes, it very much was. If things had turned out a little differently in certain other states in 1960, the absence of Mississippi’s eight Electoral Votes in the Democratic column might have been extremely consequential to the ultimate outcome of the contest. If Illinois, for example, where Kennedy ended up winning by less than nine thousand votes, instead broke for Nixon, it would have put Kennedy at 276 Electoral Votes and Nixon at 246. And if South Carolina, where Kennedy also won by less than ten thousand votes, had done the same, the result would have been Kennedy – 268, Nixon – 254. With two hundred and sixty-nine Electoral Votes required to claim victory, the election would subsequently have been thrown to the House of Representatives. Granted, the Democrats controlled more House delegations in the outgoing 86^th Congress – thirty-three to the Republican’s nine – thereby guaranteeing a Kennedy victory regardless. But it still would have represented the first time a president was chosen based on a contingent election since 1825. One can only begin to guess at the furor such an outcome would have aroused among contemporary Republicans. Their candidate came within less than one percentage point of winning the popular vote and did end up winning more states than the Democratic nominee. If the final tally had also placed him just over twenty Electoral Votes shy of victory, having the House then overwhelmingly elect Kennedy would surely have seemed like a slap in the face. Republican legislators would doubtless have begun talking soon thereafter about amending the Constitution in order to prevent any such subversion of the popular will from ever taking place again. Would they have succeeded? It is impossible to say. But one can be sure that they would not have taken such an outcome lying down. And all because eight thousand Mississippi Democrats could not stomach voting for a Catholic whose supported civil rights reform.

    As far as Holland was concerned, this state of affairs – whereby a minority of voters in one of the nation’s less-populated states effectively held the power to change the course of American history – could not simply be ignored or accepted. “If the people in every State do not have a stake in that kind of situation,” he declared accordingly, “then I do not know what I am talking about.” As far as his Southern compatriots were concerned, of course, that was exactly right. Eastland attempted to demonstrate this as fact by referring, again and again, to the absence of down-ticket races in Mississippi in 1960. “The Senator from Florida has already stated [,]” he said,

That it took an election for county officials and State officials to get out a large vote. The Senator from Florida said that was the case in Mississippi and in Alabama and in other States. But I point out that last year in the State of Mississippi and in the State of Alabama there were no elections for county officials and there were no State official tickets.

Holland attempted to counter this assertion – that few Mississippians took part in the 1960 presidential election because Mississippians only really went to poll when there were state and county offices up for grabs – by speaking in fairly glowing terms about the efforts of the Magnolia State’s leading Democrats during the 1960 campaign. “I distinctly remember,” he said,

And it is to the credit of the senior Senator from Mississippi  and to the credit of his distinguished junior colleague—that both of them were out fighting at every crossroad and corner where they could be heard, fighting for the regular Democratic electors, while at the same time […] the Governor of that State and certain Members of the House of Representatives from that State were out fighting for the unpledged elector candidates; and instead of its being just a milktoast affair it was a hard fought and very actively fought election [..] I make no reflection on anyone. I know they were doing exactly what they thought was right […] The point I am making is that the result of all that was that the full electoral vote of that State was dominated by a little over 116,000, out of a total of 1,171,000 that could have qualified to vote if they had been permitted to qualify under the laws of the State.

Holland’s aim, to be sure, was to highlight the incongruity between the significant efforts expended on all sides by the members of Mississippi’s political class in 1960 and the comparatively paltry turnout that was the ultimate result.

    He claimed otherwise, at least at first. “The sole reason for bringing up this point [,]” he said, “is that it will result in giving credit to the Senator. The Senator from Mississippi and the Senator from Alabama have fought for the Democratic cause.” But then, without missing a beat, he revealed his true intentions. “I do not like to compare States [,]” the Floridian continued, “but in that same election, in my State, where nothing like the same degree of campaigning took place, the vote was 1,540,000.” He did not like to compare states, though in this case he would make an exception. And it was a startling comparison, to be sure. In spite of the tremendous effort supposedly expended by certain Democratic Party luminaries during the Election of 1960, voter turnout in Mississippi, in terms of ballots cast for president, amounted to less than one quarter of those otherwise eligible to vote. Now, Florida, to be sure, was a much larger state – something which Holland was quick to acknowledge – but of its three million eligible voters, some one and one half million – or fifty percent of the total – cast ballots during that same race. And this was in spite of the fact that, according to Holland, “nothing like the same degree of campaigning took place [.]” Why should that have been the case? The Floridian did not say so outright, though his inference was clear enough. This was the poll tax at work.

    Eastland did not care to engage with this line of thinking, or so his immediate response would seem to indicate. Rather than refer, once again, to the absence of down-ticket races as sufficient explanation for the relatively poor voter turnout in Mississippi in 1960, he instead asked Holland a very simple, but loaded, question. “How did the Senator's State vote?” he said. “Our State voted for the Republican nominee [,]” Holland answered truthfully. “The Senator's State voted for Mr. Nixon [,]” Eastland clarified. “Yes [,]” Holland replied. “The Senator's State went for unpledged electors.” “That is true,” admitted Eastland, “but I was fighting for the Democratic ticket.” “I compliment the Senator [,]” said Holland. “I am not criticizing him for it.” It was this last comment, for whatever reason, that seemed to set the Mississippian off. The senator from Florida had also fought on behalf of the Democratic ticket, Eastland avowed, in spite of the fact that his state ultimately voted Republican.

But I would not attempt to pass judgment on the State of Florida, which the Senator has done toward my State and the State of Alabama, when the Senator from Florida knows no more about conditions in those States than the man in the moon.

Evidently, the senator from Mississippi was getting a little tired of the senator from Florida claiming to know what went on in the former’s home state in such detail. More broadly, he was surely also growing just the least bit irritated that Holland continued to speak about the State of Mississippi in such a consistently condescending manner while claiming all the while that he greatly respected its inhabitants and government. Why was Mississippi being singled out for granting its Electoral Votes to a pair of sound Democrats like Harry Byrd and Strom Thurmond when Holland’s own state had granted its even larger share of votes to the Nixon/Lodge ticket? If Florida was so enlightened for having eliminated its poll tax, then why had it produced such a distasteful result in 1960?

    Eastland did not actually ask these questions, though one can be certain they were on the minds of more than a few of his Southern colleagues. The best evidence for this was provided by Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright (1905-1995), who requested to cut in before Holland and Eastland could finish their increasingly heated conversation. “From what the Senator has said happened in his own State,” Fulbright subsequently asked, “does that lead to the conclusion that the more votes there are, the wiser the decision? It seems to me that is not so, from the results in Florida. There may be something to be said for a smaller electorate.” One can debate whether or not the senator from Arkansas was jesting, but the fact of what he suggested remains. Florida voted Republican in 1960. Florida had also famously – per Holland’s frequent allusions to the same – done away with its poll tax in the late 1930s. Were these two circumstances connected? Fulbright wondered if they were, and if – speaking more generally – a larger electorate actually led to poorer outcomes. Claiming a Republican victory in Florida as a fundamentally poor outcome for American democracy was a deeply partisan thing to do, of course, but one which might be expected from a politician so soon after a particularly close election. What should not have been expected – what should arguably never be expected – was Fulbright’s assertion that there was likely something worthwhile in restricting access to the ballot. That distasteful results could be traced to excess democracy.  

    Eastland had already said as much himself – “Day before yesterday [,]” Holland recalled, “the junior Senator from Mississippi stated that in his opinion the qualifications for voting should be further restricted, instead of enlarged” – but in this instance, the Floridian appeared unwilling to simply wave the matter off. “I point out [,]” he continued, “that that philosophy runs upstream, definitely, against the experience of our whole country and the ambition of our whole country to enlarge voting participation.” Whereas this should have been an entirely uncontroversial statement, however – that is, something which every senator in attendance should have agreed with implicitly – Fulbright was not quite finished being aggressively partisan. “I think that is debatable,” he countered, “in view of the election record made by the people both in Florida and nationally.” Thus having aspersions cast again upon the behavior of himself and his fellow Floridians, it was no wonder that Holland’s response was to go on the offensive once more. “The Senator is entitled to his opinion [,]” he began cordially enough.

Incidentally, when the Senator from Arkansas was not on the floor, I called attention to the fact that the poll tax States were the ones that had lost population. In the case of his own State, it has gone down to four Representatives. The State of Florida has gone up to 12. When I came to the Senate, our States had the same population.

It was not a complicated argument, to be sure, but a damning one for being based on plainly observable facts. Arkansas had lost seats in the House, and Florida had gained seats. The exact significance of these developments was, truthfully, up for debate. But one could not deny that while Florida was on the ascent in terms of its power and influence within the great councils of state, Arkansas – like Mississippi and Alabama – was decidedly on the decline.

    Fulbright, to his credit, was swifter on the uptake than Senator Eastland. Whereas the gentleman from Mississippi hadn’t responded at all to Holland’s pointed jab, the gentleman from Arkansas made a spirited attempt to parry it. “I will say to the Senator [,]” he responded accordingly, “that it is the quality we are more interested in than the quantity, and in the quality of our States, I think ours has gone up.” It was a rather catty thing to say, of course. But it was becoming, in fairness, a rather catty conversation. “Certainly ours has gone up,” Holland countered in turn, “and it has gone up, in part, because of the very fine people who have come from Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama, and have swollen our population; and we are grateful to them.” Fulbright answered this with a rather telling rejoinder of his own. “I think the rise in quality in Arkansas is due to this exodus,” he said, “because the lowest paid and the most undiscriminating are the ones who leave.” Granting that he was in the midst of an argument that wasn’t really about anything – the two people involved weren’t attempting to change each other’s minds so much as they were just trying to make each other look foolish – it’s never a good idea for a United States Senator to describe the migration of low-paid workers out of their state as a net positive. Not only is it a horribly classist thing to say – something which, in fairness, not every senator is particularly keen to avoid – but it makes no economic sense at all.

    Not only does every state – Arkansas included – have low-wage jobs that need to be filled by low-wage workers, but the loss of any wage-earners in significant quantities over a short period of time inevitably has a negative impact on the economy in question. Because people working in low-wage jobs aren’t just providing needed labor and services to other members of the community. They also have individual buying power which in turn creates demand for more labor and more services. In particular, low-wage workers tend to spend more money on food, utilities, and healthcare than both their middle-class and upper-class counterparts, creating a close, dependent relationship between a healthy retail sector and a substantial working class. If low-wage workers are fleeing an economy, that economy is therefore going to suffer. Businesses will start to be starved for customers, profits will go down, tax revenues will decrease, and budgets will become tighter across the board. This is not an outcome that anybody – even an Anglophilic, high-toned former academic like Fulbright – should desire. And yet, it was the outcome the senator form Arkansas seemed to actively welcome when he countered Senator Holland’s assertion that Florida was gaining population at Arkansas’s loss. “The rise in quality in Arkansas is due to this exodus,” he said. The quality of what, exactly? Business closures? Labor shortages?

    The truth, of course, is that Senator Fulbright wasn’t speaking to Senator Holland in terms of economic class. The phrase “the lowest paid and the most undiscriminating” was not meant to indicate that the people Fulbright was glad to see the backs of were just poor and just uneducated. What it meant – what he meant – was that the people leaving Arkansas were Black. In the South of the early 1960s, Black people made up the overwhelming majority of the region’s working-class inhabitants. They were paid the least, had the least and poorest schooling, and the fewest opportunities for economic and social advancement. And while it was a simple truth that Southern states likes Arkansas, Alabama, and Mississippi needed poor Black people to fill the low-wage jobs that kept their economies humming along – to the benefit of white business owners in the middle and upper-classes – the white political leadership of these same jurisdictions still persisted in viewing the Black community as inherently undesirable. If every Black inhabitant of Arkansas migrated, en masse, to some other state, it would surely be a minor miracle if Arkansas’s economy didn’t collapse. But people like Senator Fulbright would still claim – albeit off the record – that this kind of exodus was what they really wanted. Such sentiments flew in the face of certain fundamental economic realities, of course, but they were also exactly in keeping with the inherently illogical racial animus of the contemporary Southern political class. Florida was becoming politically stronger while Arkansas was becoming weaker. But while the senator from Arkansas should have been alarmed at this development, he claimed, on the contrary, to be substantially elated. Why? Because Florida was becoming Blacker while Arkansas was becoming whiter.            

    Senator Holland was entirely characteristic in his response to this subtle invocation of white supremacist thinking on the part of Senator Fulbright. Not wanting to engage in any line of debate that would tie his longstanding desire to eliminate the poll tax at the federal level to the growing movement for civil rights – for reasons personal as well as political – he offered a brief, non-specific acknowledgement and then immediately pivoted back to the subject at hand. “I thank the Senator for that observation [,]” he said simply before going on to declare that, 

I think it is established that other States of the Union have an interest in improving an electoral process which is not bringing, and which cannot be sure of bringing, a representative expression from the States. So far as the Senator from Florida is concerned, from his own experience in this field in living in a State which had poll taxes, and then knocked out poll taxes, and then saw participation in voting jump up and up and up, largely because of that […] he knows it does encourage participation. It gives citizens more will to get into elections and I think tends to bring about cleaner government, in the main.

This statement, in itself, was deeply characteristic of Holland’s overall approach. He was not working on behalf of any specific community or interest, but rather simply attempting to promote the notion of “good government” in a general sense. It was all very practical, if also a bit vague. He was speaking from personal experience, he said, having lived in a state with a poll tax and then witnessed the results of its repeal. But while the statistics bore out what he had seen with his own eyes – namely, that more people voted after the repeal than before – it was not entirely clear how this change led to “cleaner government.”

    Or Holland didn’t make it clear, at least. He didn’t explain why high voter turnout was a good thing while low voter turnout was a bad thing. Nor did he elaborate on the merits of ensuring that low-income citizens could vote on the same terms as their wealthier neighbors. High turnout is better, to be sure, just as access to the ballot should never be a function of income. Unless civil rights are distributed equitably and without bias, class and communal resentments can build up to the point of catastrophe. But the stated objectives of the senator from Florida were notably somewhat broad. In some ways – indeed, in many ways – he seemed to be simply retreading the populist playbook of his political youth. For an up-and-coming member of the Democratic Party in the late 1930s, there was certainly hay to be made out of advocating for greater working-class participation in state and federal politics. The economy was in tatters, unemployment was through the roof, and resentment of traditional political elites and their corporate backers was exceptionally widespread. Coupled with the lingering impulses of the Progressive Era towards common-sense reform and anti-corruption, an elected official in a poll tax state like Florida need not have made specific promises as to the positive effects of repeal in order to successfully rally a coalition in support of the same. Certainly, there was still the racial component of the poll tax, the significance of which would have to be downplayed in order to overcome the inertia of the reigning status quo. But as Kenneth Keating pointed out – and it was assuredly as true in the late 1930s as it was in the early 1960s – Southern states that were in the thrall of pro-segregation Democrats had a great many methods of suppressing the Black vote at their disposal. The loss of the poll tax in service of expanding ballot access to poor whites would accordingly have been an easy lift, provided the right facts and figures were emphasized.

    By 1962, of course, a great deal had changed. Economic justice – or what passed for the same in the United States of the early 20^th century – was no longer the same urgent priority that it had been in the depths of the Great Depression. On the contrary, the events of the preceding decade had made clear – between the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision, the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955/56), the Little Rock Crisis (1957), and the passage of the first civil rights act since Reconstruction – that racial justice was going to be the landmark issue confronting the nation in the 1960s. As it became clear the extent to which this was going to be the case, however – as members of Congress, the labor movement, and various facets of civil society increasingly began to challenge the validity of the status quo – the supporters of Jim Crow started to adopt a sort of knee-jerk siege mentality. Every previously unchallenged mechanism of white supremacy was now vulnerable to legal, legislative, and popular attack, in short. And every attack so offered was characterized in turn by the forces of segregation into an all-out attempt at destroying the very essence of the American republic. The rhetoric employed by Senator Hill and Senator Eastland during the debate surrounding Holland’s proposed amendment is evidence of exactly how tense things could often become as a result. If these men were to be believed, the federal government was intent on completely dissolving the states as sovereign entities and was using the Civil Rights Commission as the vanguard of its efforts. Holland, as noted previously, adopted a fairly cautious approach as a result, endeavoring always to avoid tying his proposed amendment to the wider movement for civil rights. But while this certainly didn’t prevent him from rallying support from among those of his fellow senators for whom racial justice was an important concern, it did somewhat limit the kinds of arguments he could make.

    Because what would be the most direct result of the approval of Spessard Holland’s proposed amendment? Voter turnout would increase, of course. Holland had seen as much himself in Florida. But also, more specifically, Black turnout would increase. Southern states – it bears repeating – would still have any number of methods at their disposal for preventing Black voters from exercising the electoral influence otherwise due to them by their numbers. But the loss of the poll tax in states like Alabama and Mississippi was nevertheless bound to increase the real number of Black people who cast ballots in federal elections. Not only that, but it was also bound to encourage further efforts to erode the Jim Crow regime and dismantle, one by one, the remaining impediments to Black voting. Barring a tremendously conspicuous effort on the part of Southern Democrats to prevent them, these things would happen. And as to what would happen next, the contemporary Southern imagination would surely have reeled. In the immediate, Keating was right; very little was likely to change. But the things that would change – and the larger significance of those changes – was all but guaranteed to send most Southern Democrats into a fit if openly discussed. They were already throwing fits in the Senate, to be sure. But how much more acrimonious would it all become if the subtext of the conversation suddenly became the text? Significantly, to say the least. Paralyzingly, one might fairly wager. And so Holland, in consequence, attempted to keep things…vague. Certain facts and certain figures were very important to his argument. Census data, voter participation numbers, things of that nature. But the likely outcome of success? “Good government.” “Cleaner government.” A more “representative expression from the States [.]”

The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part LXXV: “Exceedingly Interesting and Enjoyable”

    As quickly as he had shifted his tone during the Senate session of March 16^th from one of weary gratitude to something perhaps best described as acidic condescension – the better to upbraid his Southern critics, J. Lister Hill and James Eastland – Senator Holland then proceeded to switch moods yet again, this time to his more customary attitude of matter-of-fact persistence. He was eager, he said, to answer the question posed the day prior by his colleague from Kentucky, the aforementioned Senator Morton, as to whether or not the Kennedy Administration supported the abolition of the poll tax. It was his contention that they did, of course, but he was particularly keen on offering proof that could be read into the Record. So it was that Holland proceeded to quote at length from a piece of testimony delivered before an arm of the Senate Judiciary Committee by Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach (1922-2012). It was Mr. Katzenbach’s conviction, it would seem – and in this, he claimed to speak for both the Department of Justice and for the President himself – that while poll taxes may once have served the purpose of actively expanding access to the franchise – a poll tax being, in his words, “easier to meet than general taxpaying or property qualifications” – its purpose was altered in the late 19^th century,

In order to block and discourage the citizen’s participation at the polls. Today it operates unduly to restrict the rights of national citizenship by disenfranchising thousands of white and Negro voters. It is an arbitrary condition which bears no reasonable relation to a citizen’s fitness to vote.

While this would seem to have been a fairly definitive declaration of the Kennedy Administration’s position on the nature of the poll tax and the need for its abolition, there nevertheless remained some amount of disagreement – however good-natured – between Senator Holland and Senator Keating. The New Yorker remained convinced, based on other remarks made by representatives of the Justice Department, that simple legislation was still the preferred method of eliminating the poll tax, though he was still by no means opposed to Senator Holland’s prospective amendment. The Floridian seemed not at all distressed by this assertion – he admitted that the Attorney General himself had voiced his support for both the statutory and constitutional approaches – and merely attempted to point out what recent history had proven; namely, that an anti-poll-tax bill was unlikely to receive sufficient support in the Senate to secure passage.

    It was, in all, a very cordial exchange, and one which in no way threatened to derail or divert the course of the debate. Accordingly, it fell to Senator Eastland to once more needlessly complicate the proceedings. First – after gaining permission from Holland to pose a question – he asked Senator Keating precisely why it was that the Attorney General had offered his support for legislation eliminating literacy tests while favoring a constitutional amendment as the best method for banning poll taxes at the federal level. When the New Yorker answered that the Attorney General had actually expressed his support for legislation eliminating either qualification while also voicing specific support for an anti-poll-tax amendment, Eastland proceeded to demand further explanation for the apparent inconsistency. If it was the position of the Justice Department that legislation was the proper method for eliminating literacy tests, he insisted, should it not have followed that this same method was the proper approach for eliminating poll taxes? Keating’s response, as ever, was a measured one. While he still claimed to favor the statutory approach in both cases, he agreed with the conclusion offered by the Civil Rights Commission that discriminatory literacy tests, of the two, more clearly represented a violation of the terms of the 15^th Amendment and therefore did not require a separate amendment as a remedy.

    To this further invocation of the authority of the Commission on Civil Rights, Senator Eastland reacted with characteristic pettiness. “Can the Senator state an instance where the literacy test has been used to disqualify a person from voting?” he demanded. “Can he name any person who has been so disqualified?” When Keating began to refer back to the testimony of the Attorney General, the Mississippian then proceeded to cut him off. “I am talking about the Senator’s knowledge [,]” he said “Does he know of any? Does he know what he is talking about?” Managing, somehow, to maintain an even temper, Keating assured his Southern colleague that, “There are plenty of instances cited in the reports of the Commission on Civil Rights.” When this, too, failed to mollify the senator from Mississippi – “Who are they?” he insisted – Keating was forced to repeat himself. “The Civil Rights Commission has volumes of evidence on that,” he asserted, “but it is entirely beside the point here.” When Eastland became more agitated still, the New Yorker at last gave vent to his simmering frustration. “I do not propose to engage in unnecessary debate upon a subject which has no pertinency to the proposed amendment which relates to the poll tax [,]” he declared.  

The Senator from Florida very kindly yielded to me, but I did not ask him to yield to me for the purpose of engaging in an extended discussion with the Senator from Mississippi about information readily available in the reports of the Commission on Civil Rights.

Keating, too, clearly had limits in terms of his patience. He was willing to engage with Eastland, at least, and willing to answer some of his questions. But there was a point beyond which he was not willing to be drawn out. The Mississippian, as ever, was trying to distract his opponents by bogging the discussion down in an argument about minutiae whose emotional resonance far outstripped its actual significance to the matter at hand.

    The names of those unlucky Americans who had been disenfranchised as a result of discriminatory literacy tests or poll taxes were not, under the circumstances, of any great importance. Nor was the fact that Keating seemed unable to call any one of them to mind. These people did exist. Their stories had been recorded by the Commission on Civil Rights and their names had been published in its publicly available report. Calling out any one of them on the floor of the Senate would have done nothing to either change this fact or enhance the likelihood that they would receive speedy relief from the assembled lawmakers. Nor would it have quieted down the likes of James Eastland of Mississippi. Because he was not actually demanding proof that such individuals existed. He knew full well that they did. Rather, what he wanted was to make it seem as though they didn’t by forcing the supporters of electoral reform to cast doubt on their existence. It was a sound rhetorical tactic, to be sure – a way of maneuvering one’s opponent into appearing to admit that their primary argument lacked a solid foundation – but not one to which Keating was going to allow himself to fall victim. “I do not propose to engage in unnecessary debate upon a subject which has no pertinency to the proposed amendment [,]” he said, thereby refusing to grant Eastland the rope the Southerner had been persistently trying to play out.

    The Mississippian was not about to admit defeat just because he’d been called on his nonsense, of course. On the contrary, his next move was to unilaterally claim victory. “When a Senator makes a statement on the floor of the Senate he should be prepared to back it up [,]” he said. “On this question I ask the Senator to name one living human being whom a literacy test has prevented from voting. He cannot do it. That shows what is behind this whole thing—nothing.” The fallacy at the heart of this declaration is plain enough to see, of course. The fact that Keating was seemingly unable to name even a single disenfranchised victim of the discriminatory literacy tests and poll taxes that remained in force in certain states did not mean, ipso facto, that such people did not exist. He might have done himself the favor of memorizing the name and details of one such person, if for no other reason than to force Eastland, at such a moment as this, to demonstrate how little he actually cared about such things, but it would likely have made very little difference in the long run. Eastland might just as well have cast his eyes upon the most recent report of the Commission on Civil Rights and read any number of these names himself. He would not do that, of course, having previously argued that the Commission was one of the great enemies of the Southern people. But the record of their existence was there for his perusal all the same. That Eastland chose to disregard this fact did not strengthen his argument one iota. Very much to the contrary, it weakened it considerably.

    Holland, once again, attempted to appeal to reason. Keating may not have been able to name even one individual whose right to the ballot had been taken from them by contemporary poll tax laws, but the Floridian had seen more than enough of these people with his own eyes to speak unequivocally to the truth of their existence. “As one who has lived in a former poll tax State,” he said,

Who is familiar with the conditions which prevailed there under the poll tax, which were less onerous than those now existing in Mississippi, I know that many of our citizens were precluded from voting. I have seen at the polls good ladies come in, expecting to vote, and finding that either their husbands had forgotten to pay their poll taxes, or that they themselves had forgotten to pay them. I have seen literally dozens of people turned away from the voting booth in the precinct where my wife and I vote in those far-away days prior to 1937, when we abolished the poll tax. I do not pretend to be able to name the persons to whom this experience has accrued in the State of Mississippi, because I do not have the pleasure of knowing many people there.

What more proof did the assembled senators need than the good word of one of their own? Holland had known these people, marked them by the dozens, and had come to the Senate to speak on their behalf. Naturally, this did not satisfy Eastland, but then only a fool would think otherwise. From all that Holland had related, he heard only the man’s admitted ignorance of conditions in Mississippi. “I deny that [,]” he thus retorted.

The Senator has described horrible conditions that he says existed in the State of Florida. I deny categorically that any such thing has happened in the State of Mississippi. I defy anyone on the floor of the Senate to name anyone to whom it has happened.

Evidently, the poll tax in Mississippi operated in an entirely different fashion and had entirely different effects than had previously been the case in Florida. What those effects might have been, specifically, Eastland was not inclined to say, save that they absolutely did not result in the disenfranchisement of a single individual. 

    Unmoved by Eastland’s protest, Holland continued to make his case. Previously, he had read into the Record certain remarks made by Assistant Attorney General Katzenbach to the Senate Judiciary Committee on the subject of the poll tax and its potential abolition. Now, he was determined to quote from such testimony once more, this time on the part of the Attorney General – one Robert F. Kennedy (1925-1968) – as delivered to the Judiciary Committee of the House. “A constitutional amendment is a realistic and commendable path to the same goal [,]” Kennedy had reportedly stated. “There should be little doubt of the speedy ratification of such an amendment, since 45 of our 50 States already do not have such useless legislation. I therefore endorse this method of eliminating the poll tax as a condition for voting in elections for Federal offices.” This, as far as Holland was concerned, should have settled any possible doubts. “I do not see how anyone hearing these words,” he said, “or seeing them in the printed record can doubt what the opinion of the Attorney General is and what he has endorsed, because he is endorsing the constitutional method, which we are intending to use here.” When Eastland predictably declined to concede the point – “his reasoning would apply also to a bill [,]” he remarked – Holland then proceeded to quote from a letter from President Kennedy himself. This letter, he said, had been sent to him personally, and it made perfectly clear where the leader of the Executive Branch – not to mention the leader of the Democratic Party – stood on the issue of the poll tax.

    President Kennedy, it seemed, while serving as a senator, had been one of the many cosponsors of Holland’s most recent amendment proposal. And while that measure had ultimately gone down to defeat in the 86^th Congress, he nevertheless expressed his support for the same proposal being reintroduced during the life of the 87^th Congress. “I assure you of my continued support for the principles set forth in that legislation [,]” he declared accordingly.

Adoption of this proposal would constitute an important contribution to good government. It would encourage wider voter participation in the elections for President, Vice President, Members of the U.S. Senate, and Members of the House of Representatives. Participation is inevitably accompanied by a strengthened sense of civic responsibility. I recall your having said many times that the abolition of poll taxes in Florida contributed to sound government in your State. It was a source of regret that, although this measure passed the Senate by the overwhelming vote of 70 to 18 early in 1960, it failed to be enacted. I understand that the failure of the House to act was due largely to complicated factors unconnected with the merits of the proposal. This year, a new opportunity to enact this amendment is presented. I hope it will be considered and approved by the Congress during this session and submitted to the states for ratification.

It was not, to be sure, a particularly energetic endorsement. Then again, one couldn’t reasonably expect every declaration on President Kennedy’s part to be the next “New Frontier” speech. But it was clear, at the least, what the President was getting at. He had supported Holland’s anti-poll-tax amendment while serving as a senator as recently as the 86^th Congress. As the President of the United States, he continued to support Holland’s efforts to that exact same end. And while he, as the leader of the Executive Branch, had no formal role to play in either the initial approval or the final ratification of any theoretical anti-poll-tax amendment, it was nevertheless his hope that just such an amendment would be approved and ratified with due speed.

    Holland was careful not to claim this presidential endorsement as some kind of binding executive mandate, of course. “I do not think the President of the United States has the right,” he stated pointedly,

Nor do I think he has tried, to tell any Senator or Member of the House how he should vote; but I think the President has the right, and it is his duty constitutionally, on matters of grave import, to advise Congress on the state of the Nation; as to how he believes the Nation may be better served under our laws. He has certainly done that in the course of this letter, and I am very happy that he has seen fit to do so.

This was, to be sure, a canny line on Holland’s part. So much of the domestic power of the President of the United States comes from the ability of the office to sway rather than demand and cajole rather than order. The Presidency, for better or worse, carries a great deal of moral weight – being, as it is, the only elected office in the nation whose constituency is the nation – and by applying that weight with care, presidents can accomplish and have accomplished a great deal within the domestic sphere in spite of having little formal power therein. Presidents, yes, and also the allies of the same. Eliminating the poll tax was not Kennedy’s pet project, after all, but clearly, he thought it to be worthwhile enough to lend the weight of his new office to a former Senate colleague. He wrote a letter, sent it to Holland, and then Holland waved it around. “The President,” he said, “is on my side.” It was not a binding declaration, again, but then it didn’t need to be to be effective. Because what kind of Democratic senator, in their right mind, would come out in opposition to the express desire of a Democratic president in the second year of their first term of what looked likely to be a two-term presidency? The kind with few friends and little influence, Holland undoubtedly hoped. The kind that talked to excess and yet was hardly ever heard.

    The Floridian seemed eager to make this hope manifest when next he turned his attention back to his Southern compatriots. Specifically, it was to Senator Hill that he shifted his focus, and to the remarks the man had previously made on the subject of franchise restrictions in the states. “I complimented him [,]” he said,

As highly as I could compliment anyone for the scholarly way in which he dealt with the subject of the constitutional history of the States of the Nation in his long and exceedingly interesting and enjoyable address yesterday. He saved me the necessity of going into that subject, because certainly a part of our case on the constitutional amendment is to show the history that lies back of it. I compliment him again on the thoroughness of his research.

Again, one cannot help but read a degree of irony into Holland’s uses of the word “long” and the phrase “exceedingly interesting and enjoyable,” particularly so when one studies the rest of his remarks. “I comment, however,” he went on to say,

That nine-tenths of his speech, or perhaps more, was spent on that feature of this question which has nothing at all to do with this case, except that he firmly established what I would have otherwise had to establish, namely, that this is a constitutional question and that it can be dealt with properly only by a constitutional amendment. So I thank the distinguished Senator from Alabama for that.

“Nine-tenths” of Hill’s speech, it seemed, had “nothing at all to do with this case.” The Floridian might as well have declared that his colleague had completely wasted his breath. Hill had established, at the very least, that the future disposition of the poll tax was a constitutional question. And Holland was grateful enough for that, if indeed for nothing else.

    Hill’s narrative amounted to little, Senator Holland continued to explain, because he had left out the most important and the most relevant detail of all. Though it was true that a great many states, at one time or another, had instituted some form of franchise restriction, Hill “did not see fit to say, which he could truthfully have said, that every one of those restrictions and limitations has long since been removed by the States themselves [.]” Were franchise restrictions like the poll tax legal and constitutional? Holland freely agreed that they were. But clearly, though the Senator from Alabama had neglected to say as much, the vast majority of the American people had effectively turned against their continued use. By 1962, only five out of fifty states continued to restrict the franchise based on the individual payment of poll taxes. And however much men like Hill and Eastland might have tried to deny or ignore it, this fact, in itself, was exceedingly significant. Because the elections being contested in these states under the aegis of the poll tax were not county or state-level alone. Senators were being chosen, and Representatives, and presidential electors. This made the outcomes of the elections in question matters of national significance.

    The Electors chosen by the voters of Alabama or Mississippi, for example, helped to decide who the next president would be. Was it conceivable that their votes would end up tipping the balance in favor of one candidate over another? Absolutely. And the same could be said of the Representatives and Senators elected in these very same states. Alabama and Mississippi were each entitled to the same number of Senators as every other state, thereby granting them the same relative power over cabinet appointments, judicial appointments, binding treaties, and constitutional amendments. It would be fair to say, in consequence, that the voters of Mississippi possessed a degree of power over the foreign and domestic affairs of the nation rather out of proportion with their actual numbers. Bearing this in mind, it could also be said to have mattered a great deal to the inhabitants of particularly populous states like California, and New York, and Pennsylvania, and Florida both whom the voters of states like Alabama and Mississippi chose to represent them and how the laws of these states regulated the franchise therein. State sovereignty, to be sure, need not have been thrown out the window. But if a small handful of less populous states chose their lawmakers and presidential electors along drastically different lines than did the majority, it was bound to create a rather skewed and unsatisfactory outcome for all concerned. Californians and Floridians were apt to feel as through they were being held hostage by these smaller poll tax states – the result being an atmosphere of acrimony and resentment – while the likes of Mississippi and Alabama were liable to feel as though their priorities were not being taken seriously in the great councils of the nation. 

    Holland sought to illustrate exactly how and why this might all come to pass by delving into some of the electoral statistics recently compiled by the House and the Senate. The issue, he said, was that Senators, and Representatives, and Electors,

Are elected […] by such scanty percentages of the people of their States as to give rise to the question what would have happened had there been actual participation in the election by a much greater number of voters. Let us consider this question for a moment. I have before me not only the list appearing in the records of the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments of the Committee on the Judiciary […] but also the statistics of the presidential and congressional election of November 8, 1960 […] Clearly those two records show what happened in that particular election. First, it is shown that the two fine States of Alabama and Mississippi […] appear at the very end of the list of 50 States, from the standpoint of the percentage of their civilian population of voting age who participated in that election. The State of Mississippi is shown by these data to have participated in the election to the extent of 25.63 percent of the qualified electors or those who were of qualified age, or just a tiny bit over one-fourth of them. The good State of Alabama, according to this list, is right at the 31-percent mark [.]

Compared to the rates of electoral participation seen in other states, these were distressing figures indeed. In California, the voter participation rate for president in 1960 was 67.4%. In Florida, it was a flat 50%, and in Pennsylvania, it was 70.5%. When one also takes into account the differences in relative population between these states, the extent to which the likes of Alabama and Mississippi were operating under almost completely different assumptions about electoral democracy becomes clearer still. In California in 1960, some six and a half million people cast ballots in support of one presidential candidate or another. In Mississippi in that same year, a little less than three hundred thousand people did the same. And while those nearly seven million Californians represented the majority of that state’s total voting age population of slightly less than ten million, Mississippi’s vote for president was decided by a comparatively tiny fraction of its one and a quarter million eligible voters. In California, therefore, electoral democracy could be described as solidly majoritarian. In Mississippi, meanwhile, it was decidedly a question of minority rule.