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 86th 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 20th 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 [.]”
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