Undeterred by
his fellow Southerners’ various bad faith attempts at counterargument, Senator
Spessard Holland of Florida responded by trying out several novel approaches
for himself as the Senate session of March 15th, 1962 wore on. First,
seemingly in response to Alabama senator J. Lister Hill’s earlier invocation of
the Framers and their supposed intentions, he tried out the historical angle.
Property qualifications were once the norm in terms of conditioning the
franchise, he avowed, but these regulations had all been repealed over the
course of the 19th century. The American people, during the 1820s
and 1830s, gradually embraced a more liberal definition of democracy than their
forebears would have found acceptable, the result of which was a dramatic
expansion of the nation’s legally qualified electorate. The poll tax was no
different, as near as Holland could tell – its time had simply come and gone. Couldn’t
Senator Hill see that? Hill, for his part, decidedly could not. “Some definite
changes have been made [,]” he admitted, referring to the electoral laws of the
various states,
But I point out that those who are
opposing this proposed constitutional amendment are fighting for the right of
their States to make their own decision as to whether they want this small,
minimal poll tax. That is our right; it is our right under the Constitution of
the United States [.]
Rather than push
back against this change in focus, Holland opted to embrace it. “I recognized
the fact that this is a constitutional matter [,]” he said,
And for that reason I am proposing a
constitutional amendment, rather than a statutory proposal […] I ask my friend,
the Senator from Alabama, whether the Constitution has provided, since the day
when it was adopted, that the regular way to go about changing fundamental law
in any State or in all States is to proceed by way of the submission of a
constitutional amendment, which requires the approval of three-fourths of the States
before it can become operative; and is it not also true that that right existed
long before Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, or any of the later admitted States
came into the Union?
Hill, seemingly
not to be outmaneuvered, responded by again changing the emphasis of his
argument. “There is no question that that procedure is provided by the
Constitution of the United States [,]” he said, “But that procedure does not
mean that it is an invitation to try to take away from the States the rights
which have been guaranteed to them since the time when the Constitution of the
United States was first written.” A moment before, he'd been talking about the
rights of the states under the Constitution; now he was talking about what was right
notwithstanding the same. Coming from an avowed proponent of states’ rights, of
course, this was a very by-the-book sort of answer. In seeking to protect what
they believe to be the unchallengeable sovereignty of the various constituent
states of the American republic, advocates of this species of political
philosophy have historically vacillated between invoking what protections they
feel they can locate in the Constitution and denying that certain other aspects
of that same document actually apply. They hold fast to the 10th Amendment,
for example, and its guarantee that “The powers not delegated to the United
States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to
the States respectively” while also ignoring any clauses that confer superior
authority upon the federal government. The Supremacy Clause – which states that
“This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in
Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the
Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land” – consequently
tends to be ignored or downplayed, as does the aforementioned section of
Article II that grants Congress power over the election of its own members. The
result is something of a contradictory position. States’ rights advocates like
Hill will tend to claim that the Constitution actively prevents the federal
government from interfering in the internal affairs of the various states while
at the same time glossing over those sections of the same document that permit
exactly that.
Being also, by
conviction, a states’ rights Southern Democrat, Senator Holland was naturally
well familiar with this approach to constitutional discourse. Indeed, as his
response to the Brown v. Board decision had shown, he was himself perfectly
willing and able to denounce the federal influence over state law that the
Constitution mandated while at the same time claiming the protection of the
Constitution itself. In this instance, however, seemingly blind to all
considerations but his goal of eliminating the poll tax, the Floridian plowed
unceasingly forward as though Hill offered no resistance. “The Senator from
Alabama recognizes, does he not,” he proceeded to enquire,
That the other 45 States, which have
considerable interest in the election of the President, the Vice President, and
the Members of Congress, also have some rights, including the complete
privilege and right, under the Constitution, to ask that this matter be
submitted to the conscience of all 50 States? They have that right, do they
not?
Philosophically
speaking, this was also a very cogent point. The Constitution does give a
two-thirds majority of the states the right to alter that selfsame document
notwithstanding the objections of the remaining third. In effect, this means
that a supermajority of Americans has the right to make decisions about the
structure and character of the federal union itself regardless of the
objections of a minority as large as thirty percent of the total. By design, of
course, such supermajorities will only take shape around matters of sufficient
importance to a sufficiently large swath of the electorate so as to ensure that
any changes made as a consequence will not result in immediate regret or
repeal. The fact nevertheless remains, however, that as a result of this
arrangement, decisions of the highest import may sometimes be foisted upon minorities
numbering in the millions without allowing said millions any form of
institutional recourse. If the majority has the numbers, to put it simply, the
majority gets what it wants.
Under different conditions, to be
sure, Holland would not be the one to make such an assertion. The notion that,
as he put it, a majority of the states, “have some rights, including the
complete privilege and right, under the Constitution, to ask that [any] matter
be submitted to the conscience of all 50 States” would not normally have been a
source of comfort to the elected representative of a Southern state in the
midst of the mid-20th century struggle for civil rights. But, as
discussed above, his desire to eliminate the poll tax at the federal level had
seemingly placed the Floridian in a rather unusual position. And Senator Hill,
at something of a loss, could only respond with equivocation. “I would say that
any American citizen has a right to ask for any change he may see fit to
request [,]” he cautiously admitted. “But the fact that he has a right to
request such a change does not mean that the change he proposes is wise and
should be made or is justified by any existing condition or any particular
situation.” It was, once again, a rather weak argument under the circumstances,
and arguably a testament to the fact that Hill’s position was similarly
rickety. He could not say, unambiguously, that what Holland was asserting was
false for the very simple reason that it wasn’t. Nothing in the text of the
Constitution could protect any state or group of states from being forced to
comply with a federal mandate if said mandate took the form of an amendment to
the Constitution itself. For that reason, then, Hill was forced to try –
somewhat shakily – to claim the moral high ground. The fact that the majority
of states could force change upon those in the minority, he declared,
did not mean that such an action was necessarily justifiable. Simply because
they could, in essence, did not mean that they should.
Again, and under the circumstances,
this did not make for much of an argument. The thing that Hill was decrying as
a morally unjustifiable intrusion into the internal affairs of a handful of
Southern states was, after all, the morally unjustifiable disenfranchisement of
millions of financially disadvantaged Americans. Indeed, his assertion that the
addition of an anti-poll tax amendment to the text of the Constitution was
legally sound but morally wrong could just as easily have been directed at the
poll tax itself. Going by the increasingly flaccid state of his discourse, one
wonders if he knew this to be the case. From aggressively driving his point
home, he now seemed to be on the defensive. Senator Eastland appeared to be as well,
if his next interjection was any kind of proof. “The distinguished Senator from
Alabama knows that in connection with the Federal highway system, the vast
amount of money is contributed by the Federal Government, is it not?” the
senator from Mississippi began. “That is
correct [,]” Senator Hill responded, before going on to clarify that the figure
was something like ninety percent of the total. “Every American citizen has a
right to use those highways, does he not?” said Eastland. “That is correct [,]”
said Hill, “he does, indeed. It is interstate commerce.” “Does the Senator from
Alabama know [,]” continued Eastland, “that the State of Maine collects a poll
tax, and that a resident of Maine cannot obtain a driver's license until he
pays that poll tax, and cannot drive on the Federal highways in the State of
Maine until he pays that poll tax?” “Yes [,]” said Hill. “In other words, the
payment of that poll tax is a prerequisite to driving on the Federal highways.”
“Is not that situation similar to the one now confronting us?” asked Eastland.
“Certainly,” said Hill, “because the Federal Government has a very large,
direct, and immediate pecuniary interest in that matter, having put up 90
percent of the funds for the construction of those highways.” “That is right
[,]” said Eastland, finally coming to the point. “Why does not the
distinguished Senator from Florida try to correct that condition, instead of
picking on several of his neighboring States in the South?”
In the parlance of the professional
comedian, there was a lot of shoe-leather on that argument. It was a roundabout
claim made in a very roundabout way, and one which, while not entirely without
merit, was rather beside the point. Granted, there may have been a conversation
worth having about the State of Maine’s then-standing policy to withhold driver’s
licenses from its citizens unless and until they had paid their annual poll
tax. After all – and as the pair of senators rightly observed – the people of
Maine paid into the federal highway system on the same basis as their fellow
citizens living in other states. Why, then, were the inhabitants of the Pine
Tree State restricted from making use of this piece of infrastructure that
they’d already helped fund by a law which demanded that they first pay a fee? It
was a perfectly fair question to pose in the general context of the United
States Senate, but this fact did not at all excuse the five Southern states in
question from using essentially the same tactic to deny their poorest citizens
the right to vote. Responding to criticism by pointing at someone else and
asking why they’re not the one being scrutinized doesn’t necessarily do
anything to alter the validity of the original criticism. It may indeed have
been the case that the State of Maine was behaving in an unjustifiable manner, but
this did not change the fact that the states of Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas,
Virginia, and Alabama were likewise withholding from certain of their citizens
something which should have been theirs by right.
Once again, and to his credit,
Holland simply refused to engage. His position on this issue was a simple one,
and he adamantly refused to engage in any pointless attempts at misdirection. “If
I may be allowed to answer,” he thus replied,
In a patient way, the question that
was raised by the Senator from Mississippi, the Senator from Florida hates to
see people right across the line in Alabama, exactly like people in Florida,
who can vote and do vote, deprived of their right of voting because they have
either forgotten to pay the poll tax, or because they did not have the $6 to
pay it […] The Senator from Florida does not think that is a sound situation.
He feels he has a complete right to move toward a sounder participation of all
citizens, and makes no apology to anybody. He has stood arm in arm with his distinguished
friends in opposition to other measures, but the Senator from Florida cannot
for his life see how anybody can oppose something which is so basically
American as to have this submission to the jury of States, which has been a
part of our Constitution since it was founded.
One once more
cannot help but be struck, when reading this very plainspoken assertion of the
fundamental nature of certain rights under the American system of government,
by the utter incongruity of the words themselves and the politics of the man
who gave voice to them. Holland claimed that his only motivation was that it
pained him to see any of his fellow Americans “deprived of their right of
voting because they have either forgotten to pay the poll tax, or because they
did not have the $6 to pay it [.]” There was nothing legally questionable about
this state of affairs, of course. The Supreme Court had repeatedly ruled that
poll taxes were perfectly permissible under the terms of the Constitution. But
the pain that Holland claimed to feel spurred him to action regardless.
The Floridian did not like what was going on the states of Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, Virginia, and Alabama, and so he sought to use his power as a United States Senator to change it. By his own admission, he had “stood arm in arm with his distinguished friends in opposition to other measures,” but in this case, for whatever reason, he felt compelled to make an about face. On any other day of the week, Spessard Holland was a firm believer in states’ rights, segregation, and – concomitantly – white supremacy who would vehemently deny the authority of the federal government to decide which state laws were either acceptable or invalid. To his thinking, and that of men like him, it simply was not the place of those who came from one state to tell the government of another how it ought to conduct itself. Every state was sovereign and embodied the will of its citizens. To bend to the directives of an outside authority would accordingly represent a betrayal of that selfsame popular will. On this day, however – March 15th, 1962, to be exact – Holland could not “for his life see how anybody can oppose something which is so basically American as to have this submission to the jury of States [.]” It was no wonder his Southern colleagues seemed so disappointed.
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