The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part LXXIX: “The Privilege of Being a More Responsible Citizen”

Granting that his primary approach seemed to be a somewhat more conditional form of opposition than was common among his compatriots, Senator J. William Fulbright did not entirely abandon the standard line of the Southern Democrat as he drew his argument to a close during the session of March 14^th, 1962. Though his main concern was apparently the funding shortfall that would result from Arkansas’s loss of the poll tax, he also made a point of asserting that the tax in itself wasn’t really any kind of burden. For one thing, he said, it didn’t actually prevent people from voting. According to the Civil Rights Commission, he said,         

The absence of complaints to the Commission, actions by the Department of Justice, private litigation, or other indications of discrimination have led the Commission to conclude that, with the possible exception of a deterrent effect of the poll tax—it does not appear generally to be discriminatory upon the basis of race or color. Negroes now appear to encounter no significant racially motivated impediments to voting in 4 of the 12 Southern States: Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Virginia.

The fact that Eastland and Hill believed that nothing reported by the Civil Rights Commission could possibly be worth hearing while Fulbright was evidently willing to regard them as a trustworthy source of information is most definitely worth remarking upon. It was Eastland who had said, during the previous day’s debate, that, “If there ever was something loaded against decent people of this country, it is the Civil Rights Commission.” Hill then offered his own agreement, and even Holland felt the need to put some distance between himself and this particular investigatory body. That Fulbright took rather the opposite tack – “If the Civil Rights Commission was unable to find any evidence of discrimination due to existence of a poll tax requirement [,]” he said, “I am sure that none exists” – speaks once again to his exceptionally canny style of debate. Unlike certain of his fellow Southerners, he was not willing to turn up his nose at a potentially useful piece of evidence just because it happened to come from a particular source. He was making the same case that they were, defending the South on the same terms. The only difference was that he could bring himself to use federal resources to his own advantage. And so much the better. By seeming to accept the findings of the Civil Rights Commission, Fulbright effectively forced those reformists who also relied on these findings to explain how it was possible that the same information could be used to affirm two wildly differing conclusions.

            But if even for a moment this willingness to embrace the findings of the Civil Rights Commission put fear into the hearts of his fellow Southerners, Fulbright quickly assuaged that fear by next proceeding along the same lines as Hill and Eastland had done previously. “Last year 68,970 Negroes in Arkansas qualified to vote by paying the poll tax [,]” he went on to say. “Nothing prevented this number from being substantially higher-other than failure to pay the small sum of $1 per person for the privilege of exercising the highest duty of citizenship.” Laying aside, for the moment, the question of exactly how small a sum one dollar is or is not, the population figure Fulbright quoted would seem to bear a degree of scrutiny. The year prior, he said – 1961, presumably – a little under sixty-nine thousand Black people qualified to vote in Arkansas after having paid the poll tax. One assumes this was meant to be an impressive figure. Why else, indeed, would Fulbright have cited it? But it is, in fact, an entirely meaningless number in and of itself. Just under sixty-nine thousand Black people qualified to vote by paying the poll tax, he said. But how many Black people actually lived in contemporary Arkansas? According to the Census of 1960, the Natural State’s population then amounted to 1,923,295. Of that, some seventeen percent were recorded as being members of the state’s Black community. As of 1961, therefore, the total Black population of Arkansas should have been something on the order of three hundred and twenty-seven thousand. Fulbright’s cited figure of sixty-nine thousand registered Black voters would accordingly only amount to just over twenty percent of this total.

            Consider, by way of comparison, certain analogous figures recorded during the Election of 1960. In Massachusetts in that year, there were a little over three million people who were of the lawful voting age. And of that number, something on the order of two million four hundred and seventy thousand ultimately voted in the race for president. This made for a total voter participation rate of seventy-six percent. In Holland’s own Florida – where one and a half million people out of a voting-age population of three and a half million actually voted – the rate was substantially lower at fifty-one percent. In Arkansas, by comparison, only four hundred and thirty thousand out of a voting-age population of slightly over one million voted for some candidate or other, placing the Natural State’s voter participation rate at only forty-one percent. By the standards of the time, this was not a particularly impressive turnout. Only four states saw fewer people vote in spite of being otherwise qualified to do so – Virginia (33.4%), South Carolina (30.5%), Mississippi (25.5%), and Georgia (30.4%) – while the vast majority boasted participation rates in excess of fifty percent. Bearing these facts in mind, Fulbright’s claim that just under sixty-nine thousand Black people had registered to vote in Arkansas in 1961 would seem to be a rather pitiful statistic. Even allowing for the fact that, circa 1960, the voting age population across the states averaged out to about sixty percent of the total population, far fewer Black people were participating in electoral politics in Arkansas than should otherwise have been the case. Indeed, if the demographic breakdown of the Natural State’s Black community more or less mirrored that of the general population – and there is no particular reason to believe that it didn’t – more than twice as many Black people were of voting age than Fulbright claimed actually registered to vote by paying the poll tax.

            This was to be expected, of course. Not only was Arkansas one of the few states where poll taxes were still being collected, but there most certainly also existed a climate of intense hostility on the part of most white inhabitants thereof against any attempt by the Black community to assert itself politically. What is harder to explain is what Fulbright hoped to achieve by obliquely confirming what the supporters of Holland’s amendment already well knew. It would have taken access to contemporary population data to place the figure quoted by Fulbright in its proper context, of course. But this sort of information would hardly have been beyond the grasp of a United States Senator. A few inquiries here, a little calculating there, and any one of them would have been able to show that Fulbright was effectively undercutting his core argument. Perhaps it was a simple matter of arrogance on his part. Perhaps he didn’t think that anyone present would bother to question whether or not the registration figure he quoted represented a respectable percentage of the Black community in his state. Then again, maybe he was only being very literal-minded. The argument against the poll tax, after all – on the part of the proposed amendment’s Northern supporters if not that of its principal author – was that it prevented Black people from voting. How better to respond than with impressive-sounding figures? “In Arkansas,” said Fulbright, “almost seventy thousand Black voters paid their poll taxes last year. In what way were they victims of oppression? In what manner were they being disenfranchised?” A particularly knowledgeable senator might have countered this easily enough, of course, by pointing out that seventy thousand represented but a fraction of the Natural State’s voting-age Black population. But Fulbright, as it happened, had an answer to this as well.

            Voting, the Arkansan explained, was not something to be taken lightly. Indeed, as he declared previously, it was “the highest duty of citizenship” and ought to have been approached with an appropriate sense of gravity. “The task of being a responsible citizen in a democracy has never been easy [,]” he went on to explain.

If we are to make our Government work as it should, every citizen must give long and careful consideration in exercising his privileges of franchise […] Surely, the payment of a dollar poll tax, which Arkansas requires, is a small price to pay for the privilege of being a more responsible citizen. It is inconceivable to me that the caliber of our public officials, and the workings of our governmental system in general, could in any way be improved by the casting of a vote by a person who does not care enough about his Government to pay a $1 poll tax, or as one could correctly call it, registration fee.

Thought of in this wise, a poll tax was not so much a way to discourage voting among certain disadvantaged communities as it was a way to ensure that those who did vote took the matter seriously. To pay for the privilege was to express a more than idle interest in the workings of government, in essence, and it was Fulbright’s opinion that quality of engagement was more important to making the American government “work as it should” than mere quantity. The payment of a dollar was not a particularly high price to pay, of course – “This amount would not even keep a smoker in cigarettes for a week [,]” the senator remarked – but it seemed to him an appropriate charge “for the privilege of being a more responsible citizen.”

            To those who might have claimed that sixty-nine thousand registered Black voters was a pittance compared to Natural State’s actual voting-age Black population, Senator Fulbright accordingly had a rather neat response at the ready. It wasn’t that Arkansas’s poll tax had stopped those of the state’s Black inhabitants from registering to vote who otherwise would have done so. Rather, it was simply that those sixty-nine thousand registered Black voters were the only members of their community who cared enough to pay the tax and take part in their state’s government. It was interest discrimination rather than economic discrimination; a way of filtering out those who would vote thoughtlessly or irresponsibly from the sober and responsible few whose careful discrimination was what the country most needed in order to function. Indeed, Fulbright remarked, “It is inconceivable that a $1 tax is such an overwhelming obstacle that it discourages interested citizens of any color or race from qualifying to vote.” Those who wanted to vote, did vote, was essentially the senator’s position. The tax was only there to ensure that those who wanted to, really wanted to. There was just one problem with this particular line of logic, of course. Though it may have been “inconceivable” to Senator Fulbright that any American citizen might have found a one-dollar tax to be an “overwhelming obstacle” to exercising the franchise, such taxes were absolutely the reason why certain Americans did not vote.

            Having already discussed precisely why this should have been the case, it will suffice here to say that Fulbright – in common with many a public official across the history of the United States – either grossly underestimated or simply chose to ignore the degree to which some of his fellow Americans were sunk in the most desperate type of poverty imaginable. One dollar, he said, would not “keep a smoker in cigarettes for a week [,]” as if smoking was the one need that all Americans would always seek to fill. True, even the poorest among us will seek to feed their own vices. People living in poverty drink. People living in poverty smoke. Their money, to be sure, would be better spent elsewhere. But anyone with an even ounce of compassion should be able to understand that those who live in desperation often have a greater need for solace than most. And just because a poor person has money to spend on cigarettes, this should not be taken to mean that they have anything like disposable income. Nor should their poverty be taken to mean – as Fulbright seemed to suggest – that they aren’t capable of making perfectly sound decisions. A poor person – particularly a poor Black person – living in Arkansas in the early 1960s might have looked at their living conditions, their finances, and the political status quo, and have quite reasonably concluded that no matter how they chose to vote – if they were to pay the poll tax in order to do so – the basic circumstances of their life were not liable to change. Even if they were able to make it to a ballot box without being threatened or molested, were any of the candidates on offer likely to cater to their needs? Almost certainly not. If there was no poll tax – and if the threat of violence was not hanging over the whole affair like a veritable sword of Damocles – then perhaps there might have been something to the idea of rallying the vote of the poor in favor of large-scale reform. As it was, however, knowing for a certainly that the community of interest to which they belonged largely lacked the opportunity to make itself heard, a poor Arkansan – be they Black or white – would not be remiss in concluding that the dollar they might have spent on the poll tax would be better off spent buying them a smoke.

            As it happened, Fulbright was not only guilty of lacking in imagination or compassion. His closing argument also revealed an attachment to worn-out cliches. Among his fellow Southern senators, he had previously shown himself to be among the canniest, the most astute, and the most likely to make a compelling argument as to the broadly useful purposes of the poll tax. But in spite of all this, by way of last words, he chose to default to a series of tired tropes. “By bringing up this proposal [,]” he said of Holland’s anti-poll-tax amendment,

A Pandora's box, filled with every conceivable type of so-called civil rights legislation, will be opened. The Congress has much urgent business to transact this session, and the committees are working on many bills of far-reaching importance which may be delayed indefinitely if we get bogged down in another extended debate over legislation in this field […] It is a puny, trifling issue to occupy the time and attention of this body. No doubt in some districts it may still be good for a few votes for its advocates, but as a matter of real importance to the effectiveness of our democracy, it is an illusion and unimportant. If the poll tax is to be abolished the States should do it. I urge that the proposed amendment be defeated.

In many ways, this was a close mirror of what Senator Richard Russell had proclaimed in opposition to Holland’s amendment during the session of March 14^th. Of the broader anti-poll-tax crusade, the Georgian had rather acidly remarked that it was,

A political fantasy which has been pursued vigorously by a number of political paladins on white horses, and carrying shields and spears and swords, since long before I ever came to this body […] If ever there has been a scarecrow that has been completely exercised by having been dragged around this Chamber and presented in different forms, by different means, in different ways, by different men, and for different purposes, it is the so-called poll tax legislation.

Fulbright added to this dismissive assessment of the inherent value of the proposed anti-poll-tax amendment a lament – common enough among legislators who wish to avoid discussing the true nature of their opposition to a given measure – concerning the time that looked to be wasted unless the Senate dropped the matter entirely. Such complaints were not wholly unfounded, of course, particularly as the ongoing responsibilities of the upper house were expanded as a result of the New Deal and the many and various reforms necessitated by WWII. The Senate simply didn’t have as much time on its hands in the 1960s as it had in the 1920s, to put it simply, and there was something to be said for at least trying to keep things on schedule. The only problem with this line of thinking was that it flew in the face of a simple truth. Namely, that some of the most time-consuming conversations a given legislative body might have are also, inarguably, the most necessary.

            Consider, by way of comparison, the topic of slavery and its abolition. When it finally came time to banish the institution to the dustbin of history with the passage of the 13^th Amendment by the House of Representatives in January of 1865, it would not have been entirely unreasonable for a given member of that same body to suggest – as Fulbright suggested almost a century later – that, “The Congress has much urgent business to transact this session […] which may be delayed indefinitely if we get bogged down in another extended debate […] in this field [.]” The American Civil War had come to end over the course of the spring and summer of that year, it was true, and the reintegration of the rebellious Southern states was only a matter of time. But no one could possibly have claimed that Congress no longer had very much business to transact simply because the Confederacy had functionally ceased to exist. The demobilization of both the much-expanded Union Army and what remained of the now-defunct Confederate Army was a monumental task on its own, and still pending. As was the reconstruction of various pieces of damaged or destroyed federal infrastructure and the aforementioned reintegration of the now-occupied Southern states. And yet, in spite of all of this important business – and surely still more besides – the ultimate fate of slavery itself was undeniably of the greatest importance.

It was an extremely thorny topic; one which, even in the absence of most Southern congressmen and senators, was bound to lead to inflamed tempers and excessively drawn-out arguments. Some would oppose abolition on the (patently racist) grounds that it would inevitably lead to social and economic equality for Black Americans. Others would claim that for Congress to thus meddle with the basic principle of private property would represent a direct contradiction to the broader spirit of the Constitution itself. Granted, the Senate had approved the thing quickly enough by a vote of thirty-eight to six only four months after its introduction. But from the time of the first failed attempt at approval in the House in June of 1864 to practically the moment it was finally passed in January of 1865, it more often than not seemed scarcely possible that the anti-slavery amendment would ever be submitted to the states. The whole subject was simply too raw, too volatile, and too monumental to permit easy passage. But did this mean, necessarily, that the topic should have been dropped? Should Fulbright’s perfectly sound assertion that practical matters ought to take precedence over subjects liable to stir up emotions have been applied? Fulbright, in his heart of hearts, would probably have answered in the affirmative. Being a Southerner, a Democrat, and a devotee of states’ rights, he had every reason to believe that rushing a vote on an anti-slavery amendment before the representatives of the states that stood to be most dramatically affected had been reseated in Congress represented both bad federalism and yet another in a long list of Northern crimes against Southern sovereignty. No, the proper order of things was plain. First, secure peace, then reintegrate the states, then settle the matter of slavery. And if the first two tasks leave too little time to complete the last? Well, there’d always be time in the next Congress, or perhaps the Congress after that.

If the logic Fulbright sought to deploy prevailed in every applicable instance, one does indeed wonder at how little Congress would ever achieve. Only the most uncontroversial measures imaginable would be considered or approved, leading to a fairly short series of unanimous votes and a tremendous legislative backlog. Indeed, it would seem likely that, in fairly short order, Congress would cease to function altogether. Differences in spending priorities will almost always lead to disagreement, and what is Congress if not a chamber for sorting out how money is going to be spent? If the top priority of the assembled lawmakers is not to get “bogged down in another extended debate [,]” how could they possibly discuss anything of importance? Granted – and this has less often been the case in the 21^st century than during the 20^th – there are certain measures that seem to enjoy broad support year after year. Farms bills, road bills, defensive reauthorization bills, and so forth. But sometimes even these boilerplate proposals become vehicles for determined legislators to take a stand on a given issue. And what then? If a senator decides they want to attach a controversial rider to the federal budget and threatens to filibuster the same unless it’s given an up-or-down vote, what, according to Fulbright, is supposed to happen next? True, without some support, the senator in question wouldn’t get very far at all. But as long as they have enough friends in the upper chamber to block a vote on cloture, the result would seem to be an impasse. Are the other senators just supposed to shrug and say, “We’re too busy to get bogged down, we’ll just have to deal with the budget later?” The budget is the thing that they’re supposed to be busy with. And if it takes time to sort it out – to hear out the renegade senator and negotiate some kind of settlement – isn’t that the whole purpose of Congress? To debate what needs debating?

            In addition to being patently ridiculous in itself, Fulbright’s lament for the “urgent business” that a discussion of an anti-poll-tax amendment would supposedly distract the Senate away from also ran directly counter to another of his own assertions. The concept of an anti-poll-tax amendment, he said, was, “A Pandora's box, filled with every conceivable type of so-called civil rights legislation […] The Congress has much urgent business to transact this session […] which may be delayed indefinitely if we get bogged down in another extended debate […] in this field.” But he also said, with his very next breath, that it was, “a puny, trifling issue to occupy the time and attention of this body” and that, “as a matter of real importance to the effectiveness of our democracy, it is an illusion and unimportant.” So which was it? Was the debate over the poll tax so emotionally charged as to require more time to sort through than Congress had to spare at that moment in time? Or was it so completely insignificant as to be rightly dismissed out of hand? Fulbright did describe it as “an illusion” – perhaps its seeming importance was just that: illusory. It wasn’t that it really did matter, only that some people mistakenly believed that it mattered. If this is what he meant to say, it is no wonder he did so in a rather oblique and indirect manner. Senator Holland, you’ll recall, had been attempting to secure the passage of an anti-poll-tax amendment since he first came to the Senate in 1947. It accordingly would have been a rather unkind thing on the part of Senator Fulbright to explicitly declare that anyone who regarded the issue of the poll tax with any kind of gravity was in fact grossly mistaken. If, indeed, this is what the Arkansan meant to say. His parting words, as aforesaid, were something of a muddle.