Though it should have long since become obvious during the events of the Senate session of March 16th, 1962 that Florida Senator Spessard Holland was still, in actual fact, as dedicated to the principle of white supremacy as any of his fellow Southerners who spoke in opposition to his anti-poll tax campaign, the representatives of the five holdout states remained persistently attached to their fear and their suspicion. Granted, the man’s actions appeared more than a little worrying at a glance. He was attempting to dismantle one of the foundational legal components of the Jim Crow regime. He had partnered himself with anti-segregationists and reformers. And he did claim to believe that people should have been able to vote free from intimidation. Florida had not become a beacon of social and political integration as a result of his efforts as state senator, governor, and senator, of course, but it would still have been hard to deny that the things he was saying and doing were scary from the perspective of a Southern Democrat of the period. And so, though they did not need to, a handful of Southern senators continued to resist his efforts. Holland may have finally assembled an overwhelming coalition of support in the upper house for the anti-poll tax proposition that he’d been pushing for since the late 1940s, but the holdouts still had one indispensable tool at their disposal. As senators in good standing, they still have the privilege of the floor. They could still talk, in short. And talk is what they did.
Enter, once again, Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright. Having listened to Holland explain why it was he felt that the electoral laws of the states were any concern of the federal government – and following a little procedural wrangling to determine exactly who held the floor – the gentleman from Arkansas then proceeded to explain in fairly plain language where it was that he and his fellow holdouts stood on the issue at hand.
We have been up and down the hill on
this subject so many times that our discussions are no longer a debate, but a
ritual. As Senators will recall, we considered this same proposed amendment in
1960, another election year, and it passed the Senate by an overwhelming vote
of 72 to 16. The 65 sponsors of the current amendment include some of the most
able and persuasive Members of this body. Although support for the amendment is
powerful, it is not overwhelming, and I hope that those of us who oppose it
will be able to convince some of the supporters on the merits of our case.
Fulbright and his
colleagues, in essence, knew that Holland’s proposed amendment was
fairly likely to be approved. Essentially the same proposal had already been sent
to the House some two years prior. And with sixty-five co-sponsors, the same
result seemed quite probable in this instance as well. Probable, but not
certain. Support for Holland’s amendment, Fulbright noted, was strong, but “it
is not overwhelming [.]” There yet remained some space into which the Southern
holdouts could insert themselves – a crack in the façade of support that Holland
had assembled which could, with care, be successfully levered apart. The key
was to keep talking, keep prodding, keep probing for vulnerabilities. Until the
moment the vote was called, the battle was neither lost nor won.
So it was that Fulbright continued
to talk, and talk, and talk. The poll tax was perfectly constitutional, he
said, as made clear by the courts, and thus could not be eliminated by federal
statute alone. Only by amending the Constitution, he said, could such a change
be affected nationwide. But this could not be squared with the expressed desire
of the people of Arkansas. The poll tax law in place in the Natural State was
really rather liberal, he explained.
Members of the Armed Forces are not
required to pay the tax [and] those who become 21 after the deadline for paying
the tax can vote in the elections during the year covered by the tax […] There
are no restrictions for reason of race or color in the application of the tax.
In addition to
these supposedly generous terms, Fulbright also hastened to add that, “we do
not have a registration law in Arkansas and the list of persons who have paid
their poll tax serves as a registration list for the election officials. Some
form of registration is obviously required, and ours is well established,
efficient, and reliable.” Evidently, in addition to being something of a trifle
in terms of its actual impact, the poll tax in Arkansas would have been
something of a pain to replace. Fulbright did not bother to explain why he felt
it reasonable that those who had served their country in the military deserved
to be able to vote free of charge, of course. That might have required him to
admit that, on some level, he believed that certain aspects of citizenship were
– and should remain – conditional. Just so, he also entirely failed to account
for the apparent inability of the state of Arkansas to create a voter
registration system that was not dependent on the poll tax. It would have been
something of a chore to do so, certainly. It would have taken time, and effort,
and possibly led to certain procedural errors in the meantime. But it would not
have been impossible. It need not even have been that difficult. And if it
meant clearing the way for the Natural State’s poorest citizens to vote, wouldn’t
the effort have been worth it?
Leaving this implicit question
unanswered – if for no other reason than he had no answer to give – Fulbright
went on to level a further objection to Arkansas’s potential loss of its poll
tax. His home state, he said,
Is a relatively underdeveloped State.
We do not have the tax base to support a school system comparable to those in
the more industrialized States. Our people are making great sacrifices in an
attempt to build up our school system, and in fact make a far greater effort in
relation to ability to pay than the national average. Revenue from the poll tax
is devoted exclusively to support of the public schools, and if the tax is
abolished by passage of this proposed amendment our already underfinanced school
system will suffer […] If the Congress would pass a realistic Federal aid to
education bill along the lines approved in the Senate last year, the loss of
this revenue would not be such a significant factor in my consideration of this
issue. However, the possibility of such a bill getting through the House this
session is, to put it mildly, remote. Arkansas is in need of more funds for its
public schools rather than less, as would be the case if our poll tax is
abolished.
There is a lot going on in this statement that warrants unpacking. For one thing, it would seem to reiterate Fulbright’s intention as being primarily pragmatic. Unlike certain of his Southern counterparts, he was not arguing against Senator Holland’s anti-poll tax proposal on ideological or legal grounds. Rather – whether he sought to draw attention to its relative liberality, the logistical concerns that would accompany its elimination, or the financial shortfalls that were sure to result – his objection or Arkansas’s potentially losing its poll tax was based almost entirely on the practical effects of its presence or absence. And his case was arguably the stronger for it.
Rhetorically speaking, there really wasn’t much to the assertion that American republicanism itself was doomed in the event that Congress voted to abolish poll taxes. In the context of a Senate debate, this would seem to be the definition of an unverifiable hypothesis. What Fulbright was saying was comparatively straightforward. It wasn’t that he believed that the nation was likely to crumble. It was just that, without its poll tax, Arkansas would be in a bit of a pickle. Its voter registration system would have to be substantially rebuilt, for one, and its education budget would suddenly find itself stretched precariously thin. These were not abstract allegations but rather concrete concerns – Fulbright even went so far as to quote specific dollar figures in his explanation – and for that reason they were much harder for his opponents to dismiss. He wasn’t panicking unnecessarily or being particularly alarmist. He was merely speaking on behalf of the interests of the people he’d been elected to represent. Indeed, so reasonable was his position that he even left open the possibility of compromise. “If the Congress would pass a realistic Federal aid to education bill along the lines approved in the Senate last year,” he noted, “the loss of this revenue would not be such a significant factor in my consideration of this issue.” The meaning of this declaration would seem to be quite clear. That is, if Congress were to allocate more education funds for state schools, Fulbright might be convinced to drop his objection to eliminating the poll tax. Such an outcome, he went on to note, did not seem particularly likely, but the fact that he made the offer was noteworthy all the same. The man had problems that he was trying to solve and he was willing to negotiate in order to solve them.
The subject of schools and school funding, of course, leads us to a discussion of perhaps the most interesting element of the case Fulbright attempted to make. One of the senator’s primary concerns about the elimination of the poll tax at the federal level, as aforementioned, was the hole it would open up the Natural State’s education budget. In 1961 alone, he noted, over five hundred thousand dollars had been collected in the form of poll taxes which was then funneled into Arkansas’s school system. In the absence of the poll tax and the revenue it generated, therefore, Fulbright’s home state – underdeveloped as it was – would be forced to cope with a shortfall on the order of half a million dollars. What he wanted to happen – but which he strongly suspected would not – was for Congress to pass an education funding bill to help make up for the loss. As it stood at that moment, however, with no such funding in sight, he would have no alternative but to continue opposing Holland’s amendment. “Arkansas is in need of more funds for its public schools rather than less,” he declared, “as would be the case if our poll tax is abolished.”
Now, Fulbright, it bears remembering, was something of an academic at heart. Not only had he studied at the University of Arkansas, George Washington University, and even Oxford, but between 1936 and 1941, he had served first as a lecturer and then as the president of his selfsame alma mater. Shortly thereafter – after having been elected to the Senate in 1944 – he also famously proposed and helped gain approval for the eponymous Fulbright Program, the purpose of which is to improve intercultural relations and international diplomacy through educational exchange. Granted, by 1962, Fulbright had since mostly refocused his attentions as a senator upon the realm of foreign affairs, a shift notably marked by his vocal opposition to American involvement in the Korean War and his criticisms of the Kennedy Administration’s heavy-handed behavior towards Cuba. But even as he increasingly defined himself as one of the Senate’s foremost experts in the realms of diplomacy and foreign relations, he never entirely abandoned his belief in the power and importance of education. In the early 1950s, for example, as Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908-1957) began the campaign of red baiting that would ultimately paralyze the nation in a fit of fear and paranoia, Fulbright risked his career by speaking in opposition to accusations that the Fulbright Program, along with other educational exchange mechanisms, were serving to foster pro-communist sentiments. This, after the Arkansan had earlier determined to refrain from confronting McCarthy directly so as to avoid becoming the target of scrutiny himself. Evidently, so convinced was Fulbright of the virtues of education – and of the value of the program that bore his name in particular – that he was willing to risk being tarred as a communist sympathizer in an attempt to protect access to the same.
Which brings us full circle to Fulbright’s argument cited above. The poll tax, he said, was important to the people of Arkansas because it represented one of the largest single sources of education funding in the state. If Congress were to approve a federal education grant in the near future, the senator freely admitted he would be apt to change his mind about the amendment then under discussion. But as this outcome seemed unlikely, his opposition remained. Arkansas needed the poll tax, in short, so he would fight to ensure it could keep it. For a man like Fulbright, whose public career was a monument to the belief that education had the power to both uplift and enlighten individuals and nations alike, this was a perfectly understandable position to adopt. If the people of Arkansas were going to have access to the quality public education that they needed in order to overcome the economic disadvantages that came with living in what one of their own senators freely described as an “underdeveloped state,” the government thereof would need to be able to lay its hands on every possible source of funding. For a Southern Democrat, on the other hand, to suggest that acquiescence with federal regulation of state electoral law could be purchased at the price of federal education funding represented a more than slight deviation from that faction’s contemporary ideological norm.
Southern Democrats, recall, had made up a large portion of the “conservative coalition” that emerged in the middle of the 1930s in response to the increasingly expansive vision of government being advanced by the Roosevelt Administration in the form of the New Deal. Though receptive to FDR’s various relief policies and reform initiatives during the height of the Great Depression in the early part of the decade, these conservative southerners gradually grew concerned that increasing public dependence on federal resources and federal authority might eventually erode the power of the individual states. In consequence, they opted for an informal alliance with their similarly distressed Republican counterparts in an effort to arrest the pace of what they perceived to be the inexorable consolidation of political power being undertaken by FDR. In the years that followed – through the culmination of the Depression, the Second World War, and the opening stage of the Cold War – this alliance gradually solidified into a highly effective cohort of conservative senators and congressmen with whom successive liberal-minded administrations had no choice but to seek compromise. Between them, they consistently succeeded in defeating any number of attempts on the part of progressive presidents and legislators to allocate federal funding for infrastructure, health insurance, housing, and employment assistance, all the while maintaining that free enterprise remained the key to America’s place of prominence on the world stage and that local problems were almost always best served by local solutions.
So it was strange, then – or at least noteworthy – for a Southern Democrat like J. William Fulbright to speak unambiguously in favor federal funding for education. Not only was the man a member of the conservative wing of his party, but the state he represented had rather famously been at the center of a recent dispute between local and federal authority over access to publicly funded education. The Little Rock Crisis (1957) had served as a kind of proving ground for the implementation of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, and during the events of which it was made quite clear that the leadership of the Arkansas Democratic Party was willing to go to some lengths to defy federal authority within the realm of public schooling. Indeed, it took President Eisenhower invoking the Insurrection Act (1807) and calling in the 101st Airborne Division before the nine black students who had registered to attend Little Rock Central High School were even able to enter the building. Bearing this in mind, one is given to wonder from where Senator Fulbright summoned the audacity to lament his state’s lack of access to federal funding for education. Not but five years prior, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas (1910-1994) had made a point of attempting to prevent the federal government from enforcing its authority over the Natural State’s public education system. Notwithstanding the fact that the Supreme Court had ordered the desegregation of public schools in the spring of 1954, Faubus remained of the opinion into the fall of 1957 that it represented a usurpation of local authority to let anyone other than the relevant school board trustees determine precisely how and on what timetable integration would take place. How was it, then, that in 1962 one of the senators representing that exact same state could claim to actively desire more federal intervention into the Arkansas public school system? How could he, with a straight face, ask for federal education funding when the governor of his state had just called out the National Guard in an attempt to prevent the enforcement of a federal court order on the grounds that education was a state responsibility?
It may have been the case that what Fulbright wanted was a lump sum of money with no ideological strings attached. Funding, that is, without any prerequisites or quid pro quos. So long as the state government and the local school boards decided what became of it, after all, what did it really matter where the money came from? So long as the state came by it honestly, of course. But why would a Congress whose members were increasingly receptive to the prospect of using their authority to advance the cause of civil rights ever approve an education funding bill that didn’t at least attempt to trade federal monies for promises of progressive reform? And why would President Kennedy, who had been vocal about his support for integration and civil rights during the 1960 campaign, deign to sign it? While the Little Rock Crisis itself had been more or less resolved by the end of 1959, integration was still an ongoing project – and ofttimes a tumultuous one – in many other Southern states. It therefore only stood to reason that the federal authorities in Congress or in the executive branch who favored the continued enforcement of the Brown v. Board decision would use the monetary needs of schools in “underdeveloped” states like Arkansas, or Alabama, or Mississippi to extract promises from state officials that such enforcement would not be delayed. Granted, it might have been seen as cruel to withhold money from school districts that were badly in need solely for the purpose of enforcing an unpopular judicial mandate. A Southern senator might reasonably have asked if it was right to punish the students in an underfunded school district for the actions, or lack thereof, of local school board officials. But then again, this was Congress – horse-trading had always been part of the legislative process. If the backers of a particular bill couldn’t trade promises to secure its passage, one can be fairly certain that nothing would ever get done.
Fulbright, being a senator, must have known all of this, of course. He had to know he couldn’t ask for money without someone trying to put a condition on the grant. But while he surely would have preferred that Arkansas receive federal education funding without conditions, he did also seem conscious that his state had something valuable to trade. “It is ironic [,]” he said, “that although the Congress refuses to enact a Federal-aid-to-education bill, on the other hand it seems eager to deprive a State-in this case my State-of this means of raising revenue from its own people for its schools.” He was speaking of the poll tax, of course, and the fact that its elimination would leave the Arkansas school system somewhat the worse for wear in terms of funding. But wasn’t this also an implicit offer of exchange? Fulbright was fighting to preserve the poll tax because federal education funding was not forthcoming. Did it not stand to reason, then, that if Congress did approve such a funding proposal, Fulbright would cease his resistance? The man may not have said those words exactly, but the facts he laid out certainly implied that this was the case.
And if it was true that he was willing to make a deal with Senator Holland – abstention from the anti-poll tax debate in exchange for support for a federal education bill, for example – then this would once again seem to align Fulbright more with the Floridian than with the likes of Eastland or Hill. While these latter two were determined to oppose Holland’s effort to eliminate the poll tax primarily on philosophical grounds – it was not the place of Congress to set the parameters of state election law, they said – the Arkansan seemed much more concerned with the specific fortunes of his own state. The worst effect of losing the poll tax, he asserted, was the tremendous strain it would place on the Natural State’s education budget. If legislation came along that would alleviate this strain, he might be inclined to drop his objection. Holland had arguably staked out a similar position for himself. He was not arguing for eliminating the poll tax as a Southern Democrat, per se, so much as he was arguing as a representative of the State of Florida. The Sunshine State had ditched its poll tax long ago and was much the better for it. So why shouldn’t every state follow Florida’s example? Why shouldn’t Florida – as represented by its august senator, one Spessard Lindsey Holland – lead the nation to a brighter future?
