The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part LXXIV: “The Political Climate That Has Resulted”

        The March 16^th portion of the 1962 Senate debate on the proposal that would shortly become the 24^th Amendment was opened, as aforementioned, by yet another attempt on the part of Southern senators J. Lister Hill and James Eastland to keep said proposal from reaching the floor. If the Senate was determined, they said, to “meddle in the affairs of the sovereign states” by approving an amendment that would nullify the poll tax laws still in force in Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Virginia, and Arkansas, then why not “go into all phases of that question” and seek to invalidate the poll tax laws of Maine and Vermont as well? The citizens of those latter states could not obtain driver’s licenses unless they paid their yearly levy. And wasn’t being unable to drive a far harsher practical restriction upon the day-to-day activities of the average American than being unable to vote? The Southerners’ intent, of course, was not really to be of assistance to the peoples of Maine or Vermont. Rather, they sought only to elicit a particularly spirited response from the representatives of those states then present in the Senate chamber. The more forceful the response, the more aggressively they would reply in kind, with the end result being – in theory – a long and acrimonious debate that did nothing more than divert attention away from the actual business at hand. And in the immediate, at least, they seemed to succeed. Senator Holland, Senator Keating, and Senator Aiken were all champing at the bit to respond to the pair’s proposal. Eastland was only too glad to yield the floor to each of them in turn. And why not? His plan was working. So long as his colleagues kept talking, they would never get around to voting.   

        Whereas Holland was the first called upon, however – and whereas it was ostensibly his proposal being debated – Kenneth Keating was in fact the first of the trio to take the floor. His remarks, Holland explained, were much shorter than the Floridian’s, and so he preferred to let the New Yorker take the first crack at a response. And Keating, as it turned out, was interested in seeking a compromise, or at the very least in reminding his colleagues in the Senate that their disagreement on the issue at hand seemed more a matter of execution than of substance. “Poll tax legislation [,]” he accordingly reminded his fellow legislators,

Has been passed five times in the other body but has never been approved by the Senate […] On the other hand, the Senate has approved a constitutional amendment to abolish the poll tax, but this has never been approved in the House. Obviously there is overwhelming sentiment in Congress against requiring any American to pay a fee before he can vote. But a difference of views as to the appropriate procedure has prevented final action. In my opinion it is more important that we break this deadlock than that we continue to wrangle over procedure. I do not believe that a poll tax amendment will set any precedent for dealing with other civil rights problems by constitutional amendment, as some of my colleagues fear. Each issue has its own setting, and I would never concede that those who vote for a poll tax amendment are barred from supporting solutions to other civil rights problems by simple legislation.

Keating had evidently been paying close attention to both the general progress of anti-poll-tax initiatives in the recent history of Congress as well as to the specific objections raised thereto by segregationist Southerners like Hill and Eastland. And while there was, he thus observed, a clear consensus among the members of the House and the Senate alike that “requiring any American to pay a fee before he can vote” was fundamentally wrong, the two bodies as yet seemed unable to agree on how to best ensure that such practices were discontinued. “A difference of views as to the appropriate procedure has prevented final action [,]” he astutely remarked. But this need not have been the case provided those involved remained open to compromise.

        For his own part, Keating certainly had a preference in terms of how he felt the poll tax ought to be addressed. “In my opinion,” he went on to say, “we can deal with the poll tax problem either by statute or constitutional amendment. I favor the statutory approach because it is more likely to win House approval than a constitutional amendment and because a statute will not be subjected to the complicated and uncertain ratification process.” But this by no means was meant to indicate that the New Yorker was fundamentally against the idea of an amendment. He was, after all, one of the over sixty co-sponsors of Senator Holland’s aforementioned proposal and would continue to offer his support to the same until it was approved or withdrawn. The point, Keating affirmed, was not to ensure that one’s own pet initiative was the only one that ultimately succeeded – a sentiment arguably aimed at Holland as much as at anyone – but rather to ensure that whatever measure that seemed likeliest to secure enough votes to achieve passage was not starved of those votes in consequence of some misplaced fit of pique. Legislation, in his estimation, was the likelier of the two approaches to succeed, but this by no means should have disqualified Senator Holland from pushing for his amendment. Because whether the poll tax was ultimately abolished by way of statue or amendment, there could be no denying that it absolutely needed to go.     

        Keating said as much by way of his next remarks, aimed directly at Hill and Eastland. “The poll tax persists in only five States [,]” he observed,

Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia. Whatever may have been its purpose in the early years of our Republic, it is a fact of history that it was instituted in these five States as a method of preventing Negroes from voting. In recent years, the poll tax has become as much an obstacle for voting by poor white citizens as Negroes, and those States which retain the poll tax have among the lowest percentages of voting participation in the Nation. It is clear from the reports of the Commission on Civil Rights that much more effective techniques have been devised to disenfranchise Negro voters, but we do not have to close our eyes to the history of the remaining poll tax provisions in determining the most appropriate method for their abolition.

The aforementioned Southerners, recall, had spent a great deal of their collective time on the floor of the Senate during the present debate delivering lengthy and detailed overviews of the history of franchise restrictions in the states. Evidently, they were keen on establishing not only the constitutionality of such measures within the American system of republican government – none of the measures in question having ever been struck down by the courts – but also the existence of abundant precedent for what amounted to very fine-grained regulation by the states of their respective electorates. But whereas Keating did not attempt to deny any of the statistics that Hill and Eastland had sought to dispense, he did actively affirm that such facts were not relevant to the discussion at hand.

        “Whatever may have been its purpose in the early years of our Republic,” he said of the poll tax in particular, “it is a fact of history that it was instituted in these five States as a method of preventing Negroes from voting.” This did Senator Keating, like Holland had done before him, attempt to drag the conversation away from the abstractions favored by Hill and Eastland and back towards an examination of the fundamental facts at hand. Yes, the New Yorker affirmed, many states had seen fit at some point in their history to restrict the electoral franchise to some supposedly worthy subset of the population at large. What mattered under the present circumstances, however – what was germane to the discussion at hand – was that the five specific states that the proposed amendment would affect instituted their respective poll tax laws for the specific purpose of denying the vote to an otherwise qualified portion of the electorate. And in the process, these selfsame states had also disenfranchised additional groups. They had aimed at poor Black people and ended up hitting poor white people as well. The result was that the five states in question boasted some of the lowest voter participation rates in the whole country. Was this a desirable outcome? Senator Keating did not think so, nor seemed willing to entertain the notion than any among his colleagues might believe that it was.

        Despite his palpable sense of disappointment, however, Keating was attempting to chart a course of pragmatism. “It is clear from the reports of the Commission on Civil Rights that much more effective techniques have been devised to disenfranchise Negro voters,” he observed. The Civil Rights Commission, of course, was the bugbear of the contemporary Southern segregationist, and something from which even Senator Holland was careful to maintain a discreet distance. But Keating was a Northerner, and a Republican at that, and so seemed to have nothing to fear in invoking this particular investigatory body. And what was the specific finding the New Yorker had called to the Senate’s attention? Only that the states in questions possessed more effective means than the poll tax of deciding whom among their inhabitants could vote. Under different circumstances, this might have been a fairly damning accusation. As it was, it came off as something closer to a weary observation. The five states where the non-payment of a poll tax was sufficient to justify the denial of the franchise – all of which had instituted poll taxes for the express purpose of disenfranchising otherwise qualified Black voters – possessed ample alternative means of determining who could vote on the basis of skin color. And if that was true, why not just dispense with the poll tax altogether? Why continue to uphold the supposed legitimacy and desirability of what was not even the most effective means of limiting the electoral franchise? Again, this came off as something of a weary observation on Keating’s part. Indeed, it might even be taken as a concession to the supporters of segregation. But there was also something terribly practical – if unglamorous – in thus attempting to make the most of things. The region’s Black community was already being prevented from voting six ways from Sunday, none of which but the poll tax was then under discussion. So why not part with the poll tax, asked Keating, for all the difference it would make? Chances were, the white South would barely even feel it.

        This was not all that Senator Keating had to say on the subject, to be sure. In addition to avowing that the poll tax was simply unnecessary to the white South’s primary objective of depressing Black participation in the electoral process, he also believed the poll tax to be unsustainable in principle. Specifically, he asserted that the rationale being deployed by Southerners like Hill and Eastland in defense of the tax simply didn’t hold up to scrutiny. Their argument, he said, was that “the poll tax is a “qualification” for voting under article I, section 2 of the Constitution and therefore beyond control by Federal legislation [.]” But, he then countered,

Not all qualifications for voting are lawful. A qualification which is designed to deny the right to vote on racial grounds can no more stand against the 15th amendment than a qualification designed to deny the right to vote to women could stand against the 19th amendment. Moreover, a property qualification for voting, in my opinion, is an arbitrary qualification which is no more entitled to recognition under article I, section 2, than would be a State law that redheaded people could not vote, or those with one arm, or vegetarians.

Here, too, the New Yorker was attempting to cut through the layers of obfuscation lately deployed by his Southern compatriots. Various states had previously established qualifications on the franchise in keeping with the authority ostensibly granted to them by the terms of Article I, Section 2.  But not only did this fact offer no protection whatsoever against certain kinds of qualifications being explicitly banned by way of constitutional modification – as in the cases of the 15^th and 19^th Amendments – it also did nothing to alter the simple truth that certain kinds qualifications could not possibly be justified. A state could, for instance, pass such laws as would prevent redheads, or amputees, or vegetarians from voting, but in no way would such legislation represent either a reasonable or a morally defensible exercise of that same state’s legal authority. And a poll tax, Keating avowed, was no different in principle, punishing people, as it did, on account of circumstances beyond their control.

        Before finally surrendering the floor to endlessly patient Senator Holland, the New Yorker concluded by proceeding to clarify that there were more such reforms to come. That is, while the poll tax was the only topic presently under discussion, it represented only one of many aspects of the contemporary American electoral system that Keating believed desperately needed to be addressed. “Let me emphasize [,]” he stated accordingly,

That this is only one of the many issues with which we must cope in order to bring our electoral processes up to date. It will affect a relatively small number of Americans compared to the number denied the right to vote by discriminatory literacy tests, by arbitrary residence requirements, and by other obstacles to the exercise of the franchise. Whatever we accomplish today will be only a small beginning in overcoming the myriad of unreasonable impediments to voting which now prevent millions of Americans from going to the polls on election day.

Whether this statement was meant to be taken as a veiled threat or a solemn promise, it would be difficult to say. Being a Northern Republican, Keating had relatively little reason to appease the Senate’s segregationist stalwarts like J. Lister Hill or James Eastland. Ideologically speaking, they were already more than likely to be completely and irrevocably opposed to one another more often than not. This was probably why Keating felt comfortable invoking the authority of the Civil Rights Commission. As a New Yorker from the same party as the president that had chartered the thing – Dwight Eisenhower, that is – he was already as good as guilty of whatever crimes men like Hill and Eastland believed it was in the process of perpetrating against the South. And if that was the case – if Keating was going to be suspected and distrusted by Southern segregationists no matter what he did – then it made about as much sense for him to apply a bit of pressure with his parting words as it did to say nothing at all. The New Yorker certainly did seem intent on striking some kind of compromise. But perhaps he felt that this could only be achieved by putting a bit of fear into the opponents of reform. By making them think he and his allies were coming for everything, maybe Keating could scare the likes of Hill and Eastland into making a few comparatively insignificant compromises. It was, if nothing else, at least worth a try.

        Or so Senator Keating may well have thought. One does wonder what Senator Holland’s take might have been. Though evincing a degree of persistence that appeared to baffle his fellow Southerners, Holland never seemed intent on purposefully antagonizing or dismissing those who stood in opposition to his proposed amendment. Granted, there were times when he seemed to grow weary of the persistent posturing of Senator Hill and Senator Eastland. But for the most part, he demonstrated a degree of restraint perhaps best described as superhuman. He indulged in many diversions, seeking only gently to direct the conversation back to the topic at hand. And never once did he accuse his fellow Southerners of attempting to intentionally waste the Senate’s time. And they were doing exactly that, of course. They were wasting the Senate’s time. Holland could have stopped them, could have invoked cloture, used the sixty votes he’d lined up in advance and put the whole thing to bed. But he didn’t. He went carefully, gently, trying not to cause offense. He said nothing against the South, nothing against his fellow Southern senators. He kept things grounded, straightforward, simple. This wasn’t about civil rights, he said, knowing that to say otherwise would cause a great deal of self-conscious handwringing among his anxious Southern colleagues. It was just that Senator Holland wanted more people to be able to vote. Was that so radical? So revolutionary? So threatening to the Southern way of life?

        Bearing all of this in mind, Senator Keating’s words of support – while outwardly welcomed by Senator Holland – must have struck the Floridian deep down as something of a mixed blessing. Holland was trying to be careful, trying to achieve his desired goal without upsetting too many of his fellow Southerners. And yet his close ally, Senator Keating, was seemingly doing exactly that. Having been in the chamber the day before when Holland barely got away with tiptoeing around the Civil Rights Commission and its activities, Keating had to know that name-checking the Commission explicitly would not play well with Hill and Eastland. He also had to be aware that declaring the abolition of the poll tax at the federal level to be only the first of many more reforms he intended to pursue was not likely to be an uncontroversial statement. Indeed, Keating seemed intent on antagonizing the Southerners and their ilk, presumably for the purpose of making them more willing to agree to minor compromises. But this, categorically, was not Holland’s objective. The two men may have had the same essential goal in mind – i.e., the elimination of the poll tax at the federal level – but they seemed to be approaching this common objective from very different angles.

           Keating – like a lot of Northern legislators during this period in American history – had become increasingly alarmed by the sheer number of obstacles that stood in the way of millions of Americans exercising their basic rights as citizens and believed that it was among his duties as a United States Senator to attempt to remove these same barriers. The poll tax therefore represented to Keating but one of many “unreasonable impediments to voting” he and his fellow reform-minded lawmakers were intent on confronting and dispensing with over the course of their tenures in office. Holland, on the other hand, had no such lofty ambitions in mind. All that he cared about – all that he wanted to achieve – was the abolition of the poll tax at the federal level by way of a constitutional amendment. He said exactly this more than once in the course of the relevant debate, affirming time and again that he cared only about the plight of the luckless poor of five affected state. He had nothing to say about literacy tests, or voter intimidation, or the state of the electoral rolls in Southern counties with large Black populations and small Black electorates. He was not a reformer. All that Spessard Holland wanted was to replicate one of the great triumphs of his youth. As a newly minted state senator in Florida in the late 1930s, he’d helped make possible the repeal of that state’s poll tax in a fit of populist enthusiasm. And now, as one of Florida’s two representatives in the United States Senate, he wanted to extend this signal accomplishment into the federal realm as well. He didn’t want to upset anyone. He didn’t want to stir up trouble. He just wanted, if at all possible, to get this one thing done.

        The resulting difference in perspective and intention between Holland and Keating is in many ways representative of the rather strange situation the former had put himself in by pursuing federal electoral reform into the early 1960s. He had pursed this same objective nearly from the moment he was first elected to the Senate in 1946, of course, and had come tantalizingly close to achieving success some two years prior during the 86^th Congress. He was accordingly not in a position, as of 1962, to turn down the assistance of those whose immediate goals aligned with his own. And as a result of his open-mindedness – his willingness to work with those whose politics he would normally have abhorred – he managed to cobble together the majority he needed to see his beloved amendment passed. One potentially unpleasant consequence of this approach, however, was that some of the people who rose to speak in support of his proposal were bound to end up doing so in a way that Holland himself might have preferred to avoid. They talked of civil rights, mentioned other reforms they wished to pursue, and freely disregarded certain Southern sensitivities. And in so doing, they inevitably planted the seed – in the minds of the upper chamber’s other Southern members, at least – that Florida Senator Spessard Holland was openly in league that meddlesome group of lawmakers who just couldn’t seem to restrain themselves from interfering in the internal affairs of the South. Given how uncomfortable this all must have made the habitually conservative Holland feel, one is again given to marvel at just how much the issue of the poll tax seemed to mean to him.

        But while the man did press on far longer than most others might have in his place, some degree of fatigue did eventually begin to show. His opening remarks for the day, delivered immediately after Keating concluded his own, were sober and honest, but also noticeably wearied. “The time of the debate up to now,” he observed,

With the single exception of that just occupied quite briefly by my distinguished friend from New York has been, I believe, entirely used by those who are opposed to the motion to consider the joint resolution, in order that it may be made a vehicle for the proposed constitutional amendment to outlaw the poll tax as a prerequisite for voting for elective Federal officials [.] I shall speak on this subject at some length later, but I wish the RECORD to show now I am grateful for this opportunity to discuss the measure.

The man was nothing if not courteous. Though the Senate’s March 16^th session had been going on for some time already, this was the first chance Holland had been given to speak in defense of the proposed constitutional amendment whose relative merits were the reason for the discussion at hand. The opponents of the measure had been permitted to speak first. One of the proposal’s Northern supporters was then given the chance to follow. Holland was now the fourth person to speak, and still he found it in himself to express his gratitude for the opportunity.

        “This is the 14th year I have offered the proposal in the Senate [,]” he continued in the same tired but appreciative tone.

I have tried not to be discouraged from Congress to Congress. I have had very courteous treatment from members of the Committee on the Judiciary. On five occasions full hearings have been held on the proposed constitutional amendment. On three occasions subcommittees have reported the measure favorably to the full committee. I regret to say that our distinguished friends on the full committee have never been given the opportunity to report the measure. I think there never has been a time when it was not clear that a majority of the membership of the full committee was in favor of reporting favorably the proposed constitutional amendment. I shall make no further comment on that, except to say I am grateful for the fact that the leadership on both sides of the aisle is now supporting the bringing up of the vehicle measure, in order to see if it may be adapted to the purpose which I have just expressed; that is, that it may become a proposed constitutional amendment of the sort I have described.

One could easily imagine just about any other senator giving up on their cherished pet project after so many years of thankless toil. Several times, Holland related, he came very near to success, between favorable hearings in the Judiciary Committee and the aforementioned close call in 1960. But time and again – doubtless thanks in no small part to the intervention of the long-serving chairman of said committee, one James Eastland of Mississippi – the relevant proposal failed to make it to the Senate floor and Holland was forced to begin anew in the next Congress. Bearing all of this in mind, the fact that Holland didn’t give up – that he plugged away at the same endeavor for fourteen years with seemingly little hope of success – becomes all the more remarkable. Clearly, this thing meant a great deal more to the Senator from Florida than anyone might have guessed.

        This fact became clearer still as Holland next proceeded to excoriate the actions and arguments of his most ardent critics in the Senate. To Senator Hill, for example, he expressed gratitude for,

Establishing historically something I probably would have had to establish in the event he had not helped me so kindly; namely, that this is a constitutional question, requiring a constitutional amendment, and that all the first States of the Nation either had a poll tax or much more onerous provisions limiting and restricting the exercise of the voting privilege.

Further to this, the Floridian also remarked on the point of order Hill had adamantly declared he was going to raise. Namely, that using a normal piece of legislation as a kind of container for an amendment went against the rules of the Senate. In the face of this implicit threat, Holland declared – in so many words – that he was unimpressed and uncowed. “It appeared to me quite clear that the distinguished Senator from Alabama had little confidence in the validity of the point of order which he mentioned,” he observed,

Because if he had much confidence in it he would have allowed us to make the joint resolution the pending business, and would have allowed the point of order to come up for early disposition. I would think, after listening to his learned and scholarly discussion of 4 or 5 hours yesterday, that he lacks confidence altogether in the validity of any point of order as to the procedure which we are following, and I certainly agree with him in that conclusion if he has reached it.

Hill’s partner in crime was not spared this same treatment, Eastland having made his own threat to arrest the process by which Holland’s amendment was to proceed to a vote. “I also note that my distinguished friend from Mississippi [,]” the Floridian continued,

Apparently also has little confidence in that point of order, because he has outlined an amendment to the constitutional amendment which he says he will propose in due time, having to do with the good States of Maine and of Vermont and with the fact that they levy a poll tax which has no connection whatever with the voting privilege but is connected with the right of the citizens and residents to get automobile licenses […] I agree with the distinguished Senator from Mississippi that there is little confidence to be placed in the point of order, and I think we shall note that that is the case a little later in the course of the debate.

The Senator from Florida, it seemed, had decided to come out of his corner swinging. Suddenly and unexpectedly – though without entirely losing his customary veneer of long-suffering cordiality – the man had switched from patient persistence to aggressive condescension. The result was a series of increasingly bruising rhetorical and political condemnations. Florida, he went on to say in that vein, was a rapidly growing state, having gained fully four Representatives in Congress as a result of the Census of 1960. Maine, Vermont, Alabama, and Mississippi, on the other hand, had all lost one Representative each. Most observers would not necessarily have connected these ostensibly separate developments, there being any number of other states besides these four from which individuals might have migrated. In Holland’s mind, however, the precise nature of what had happened was plain enough to see. “I am quite willing to say that some of that gain,” he declared of his home state’s recent windfall, “particularly in connection with the good people of Alabama and Mississippi, who have joined us and who have been very welcome, must have been due to the fact that people were trying to escape from the political aura that surrounds the poll tax.” The same could apparently be said of the two New England states as well, the result being that all four jurisdictions were supposedly bleeding away their populations. “Some of the people from [Maine and Vermont] are attracted to us [,]” he explained,

Because we have no such condition as that about the issuance of drivers’ licenses, which, of course, has no relation at all to the subject of the debate. I am [also] very sure that we are getting many good people from Alabama and Mississippi because they resent the imposition of the poll tax and they resent the political climate that has resulted in some areas of those two grand States because of the poll tax imposition.

Though he phrased his remarks politely enough, there could be no mistaking the Holland’s intent. He did not say directly, of course, that any of the four states in question had done anything wrong, or foolish, or morally questionable. Nor did he describe the “political climate” or “political aura” which resulted from the collection of poll taxes as being inherently undesirable in itself. He merely stated it as his opinion that some of the people who had left Maine, and Vermont, and Alabama, and Mississippi between 1950 and 1960 – some number of whom, he believed, had thereafter settled in Florida – likely did so because they did not like “climate” connected to the collection of poll taxes. Again, in a literal sense, this could not be described as a condemnation. In point of fact, it was simply a hypothesis based on a fairly cursory analysis of readily available population statistics. In its effect, however – the effect almost certainly desired by Holland – it was a sharp blow aimed directly at those who would attempt to question the Floridian’s motives.

More than once in the course of the 87^th Congress, Holland’s Southern colleagues had questioned the rationale behind his anti-poll-tax crusade. What business was it of the Senator from Florida whether or not the states of Alabama, or Mississippi, or Texas, or Virginia, or Arkansas either collected poll taxes or made access to the ballot contingent on individual payment of the same? Weren’t the states sovereign entities? Weren’t they permitted, by the terms of the Constitution, to condition the franchise as they saw fit? The whole idea, in short, was baffling to them. Holland was a Southerner, a Democrat, and a supporter of states’ rights, just as they were. Why should he have made it the primary objective of his career in the Senate to circumvent state authority by way of a constitutional amendment banning poll taxes? Holland did attempt to explain himself, as plainly and patiently as he could manage. The poll tax depressed voting in the states where it was annually collected, he declared. It was manifestly unjust in the way it politically punished those who were already disadvantaged. Indeed, it was an abiding source of grief to Holland that people living in states like Alabama or Mississippi should lack certain of the privileges possessed by their fellow citizens in a state like Florida in consequence of conditions they could not control.

If the opponents of the relevant amendment proposal actually heard any of these explanations, of course, was another matter entirely. By and large, they seemed not to, preferring instead to keep hammering away at the same mix of explicit threats and doomsaying rather than actually engage with what the Floridian had to say. And so, at length, Holland more or less let them have it. Florida, he declared, was a growing, prosperous state. And Florida had been without a poll tax since the late 1930s. Alabama and Mississippi, he meanwhile observed, were actively in the process of shrinking. Between the Census of 1950 and the Census of 1960, their respective populations had in fact each decreased enough to require the loss of one of their Representatives in Congress. Both of these states also ranked near the bottom of recent surveys in terms of voter participation. Was it a coincidence that these two states were also among the tiny handful that still required the payment of poll taxes as a condition for exercising the franchise? Did Florida’s gain and their loss have nothing at all to do with one another? Holland’s answer, of course, was that one directly contributed to the other. Florida had abolished its poll tax, and now Florida was flourishing. Alabama and Mississippi had stubbornly chosen to hold onto their poll taxes, and now both states were seemingly languishing. Was this mere speculation on Holland’s part? To some extent, certainly. But it was also a plainly observable fact that the populations of Alabama and Mississippi had been decreasing. These two states were losing bodies and, in consequence, were losing power. Is that what their political leaders wanted? To drive people out of their respective states while bleeding away their influence in Congress?

The poll tax need not have been the only reason for these developments, to be sure. Economics is almost always the primary driver of human migration. But Holland’s point seemed to be that the poll tax was among the most obvious and easily managed of the various potential causes. That people didn’t like poll taxes seemed to be the general thrust of what he was saying. Why else would they be in force in only five of the fifty states? Why else would every other state that had once restricted access to the ballot based on their payment ultimately decide to do away with them? Clearly, indisputably, poll taxes were no longer popular. Even more so, perhaps, as the residents of states in which they continued to be collected could freely observe the effects of their repeal in neighboring jurisdictions. After all, why shouldn’t a poor Mississippian living in the early 1960s have looked with jealousy upon an equally poor resident of the nearby Sunshine State? Economically disadvantaged though they both might have been, the Floridian possessed something which was beyond the Mississippian’s grasp. So, why shouldn’t this have sparked migration? If all that it would take for a disenfranchised Mississippian or Alabaman who was unable to pay their poll taxes to once more take their place among the nation’s voting public was to migrate a handful of miles, who could blame them for doing just that? Not all of them would be able to afford it, of course. But those that could had a great deal to gain and very little to lose by doing so. And wasn’t that a kind of tragedy in itself, that Alabama and Mississippi should have thus engineered their own gradual decline? That this need not have been the case was exactly Holland’s point. Abolishing poll taxes at the federal level might not have entirely staunched the flow of people out of Alabama and Mississippi, but it certainly wouldn’t have made either state look any less attractive. And what did they stand to lose in the bargain? Nothing, practically speaking. As Senator Keating had earlier noted, in the five states in which access to the ballot was still tied to the payment of poll taxes, local authorities still had far more effective means at their disposal for depressing voter turnout in certain minority communities. So, why not give it a shot? Why not listen to the voice of the people who were actively leaving states like Mississippi and Alabama and assist in the abolition of an ultimately self-destructive policy?

The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part LXXIII: “All Phases of That Question”

    The portion of the debate on Florida Senator Spessard Holland’s proposed anti-poll-tax amendment that took place during the March 16^th, 1962 session of the United States Senate was substantially less cordial than that which occurred over the course of the session of the previous day. Having failed to make much headway in their attempt to see the measure categorically defeated, Southern senators James Eastland and J. Lister Hill seemed to grow more desperate and less genial as their attempts at obfuscation and diversion were repeatedly rebuffed or dismissed. And while the odds remained strongly in favor of the eventual passages of Holland’s coveted joint resolution – his sixty-something cosponsors having remained steadfast in their support – having to listen to their opponents babble on and on until they tired themselves out inevitably took its toll on Holland and his various allies. The result, before very long, was a discussion that seemed to have about as much to do with the relative merits of the constitutional amendment the Floridian was seeking to propose as it did with the sectional rivalries of the day, the specific partisan circumstances of the early 1960s, and the character of the legislators involved. And this was, in many ways, par for the course. The rhythms of representative democracy, even at the best of times, are often defined as much by the personalities of the individuals doing the representing as by who or what they claim to represent. That being said, the March 16^th, 1962 debate on what would soon enough become the 24^th Amendment to the Constitution would seem to be a particularly fascinating example of just that. While the Civil Rights Movement was, at that moment, already in effect, it was still early in the process by which the most egregious ills of the Jim Crow regime would eventually be dismantled. Battlelines were yet in the process of being drawn and it remained possible – if only just – for a segregationist Southerner like Spessard Holland to pursue electoral reform without necessarily fearing for his continued electability. 

    This isn’t to say, of course, that Holland’s fellow Southerners didn’t try their damnedest to disrupt the relevant proceedings. Far from concluding that their efforts of the previous day had proven the futility of their cause, a night’s contemplation instead seemed to convince Eastland and Hill that the way forward for them lay in sabotage. Specifically, they sought to weaponize the power of the federal government to “meddle in the affairs” of the various states in order to court the ire of their Senate colleagues from Maine and Vermont and expand the discussion about poll taxes into a wider conversation on the nature of American federalism. And in order to do this, they proposed an amendment of their own. “The Senator from Mississippi does not believe in meddling in the affairs of the sovereign States [,]” Eastland stated by way of an opener.

However, if the Senate is determined to meddle in the affairs of my State and other States on the question of the poll tax, it is my judgment that we should go into all phases of that question. If the Senate is determined to adopt such an amendment, then at the proper time the distinguished Senator from Alabama and I shall offer an amendment to the joint resolution which would prohibit the requirement of the payment of a poll tax to operate a motor vehicle on the public highways. I think the people of the great States of Maine and Vermont should be rescued from such a condition, if Congress proposes to meddle in the affairs of the States.

This represented, of course, the instrumentalization of one of the arguments Eastland and Hill had deployed the previous day. Namely, that the poll taxes levied by Maine and Vermont, because they prevented the nonpaying citizens of those same states from obtaining driver’s licenses, were more egregious in practice than those of Alabama or Mississippi. On March 15^th, this assertion had effectively gone nowhere. Not even the senators from Maine and Vermont had deigned to respond. And so now, a day later, the pair were attempting to drive that same issue home in manner was more likely – they hoped – to elicit a forceful response.

“Today,” as Eastland accordingly went on to explain,

Under the statutes of Maine and the statutes of Vermont, before a person can secure a license to operate a motor vehicle, he must pay a poll tax. Our plan is much more pertinent to those States, because in Maine and Vermont the U.S. Government contributes up to 90 percent of the cost of the construction of highways. Those highways are open to everyone. They are for public use. Yet those States provide that a motor vehicle may not be operated unless the driver has paid a poll tax.

Again, this could hardly be said to represent new information. The pair had explained this exact set of circumstances to their colleagues in the Senate during its March 15^th session without much effect at all. All that differed this time was the broader context of the conversation. Whereas previously, Eastland and Hill had only been attempting to divert their fellow senator’s attention, now, they sought to splinter the coalition Holland had assembled in favor of his proposed amendment by introducing a very targeted poison pill. They cried crocodile tears all the while, to be sure, unwilling as they repeatedly stated that they were to “meddle in the affairs of other States” under less than catastrophic circumstances. But the passage of an anti-poll-tax amendment was evidently a bona fide catastrophe. And so the pair of Southerners were willing, in this instance, to endorse the usage of federal power in such a way that they would otherwise have abhorred on general principle. 

    In some ways, Hill and Eastland’s latest strategy amounted to a species of political accelerationism. Not in the contemporary 21^st century sense of the term, perhaps, by which right-wing and left-wing groups seek to promote social collapse and regeneration by the intensification of unrestricted capitalism on the one hand and interethnic social strife on the other. But there was undeniably a quality of calculated abandon to what the pair of Southerners proposed. By their own admission, they detested even the thought of federal power being used in a coercive manner against the states. So why, then, faced with just such a measure in the form of Holland’s aforementioned amendment, were they now proposing to move even further in that same direction? The answer, seemingly, was that they hoped to turn the majority of their fellow senators against ever even contemplating any such initiative again. Senator Holland wants to pass an amendment because he doesn’t like the laws in certain states? Well, why stop there? Why doesn’t every senator pick out a state law they don’t like and draft an amendment that will strike it down? Why doesn’t the Senate make it its sole business going forward to police the laws of the states? Like a teenager caught with a cigarette and told by their parents to smoke the whole pack, a Senate thus glutted with extremely specific amendments targeting one state law after another would become – figuratively speaking – too sick to function. Was this actually going to happen? Almost certainly not. But by attempting to kick off the process by which it might happen – in the form of an amendment intended to change the behavior of only two out of fifty states – Hill and Eastland were threatening to mire the Senate in a great deal of pointless sectional and partisan conflict in much the same way that senators in the present era can elicit a desirable reaction by merely threatening to filibuster a bill that they claim to dislike.

    In any case, after going on once more about the cost of the federal highway system – the federal government, they repeated again and again, paid for ninety percent or better – Hill and Eastland then proceeded to proclaim the existence of a transparently absurd set of conditions under which the peoples of Maine and Vermont were supposedly suffering. “As the Senator from Mississippi has pointed out in connection with the Maine statute and the Vermont statute,” Hill began, “if a citizen of one of those States does not pay his poll tax, he not only cannot drive his automobile, but he cannot even drive his car if he wishes to leave the State, if he sees fit to leave it. Is that correct?” “That is correct [,]” Eastland dutifully replied. “One who does not pay his poll tax can move out of Alabama or out of Mississippi; but one who does not pay his poll tax cannot even move out of either Maine or Vermont with his family.” “So,” Hill then asked, “so far as Maine and Vermont are concerned, such a person is absolutely a captive there; he cannot drive in his car out of either of those States, if he does not pay his poll tax, and if he is a citizen of one of those States. Is that correct?” “Yes,” answered Eastland, “the Senator from Alabama is entirely correct, as he usually is.” All of this amounted to a patently ridiculous assertion, of course. While it may have been the case, legally speaking, that such residents of Maine and Vermont as were unable or unwilling to pay their annual poll taxes were formally prohibited from being granted a license to operate a motor vehicle, this did not necessarily mean that they were therefore “captive” within said states. Besides the fact that nothing in the laws of either of those states – as cited by Senator Eastland – declared that non-payment of a poll tax would result in the active confiscation of a driver’s license that had been issued previously, it was also most assuredly the case that a significant number of people in both of these states could and did drive either without being licensed or with a license that had expired.

    The largest group of people whose very existence defied Eastland and Hill’s cited claim were the doubtless many thousands of Mainers and Vermonters who had paid their poll tax, been granted licenses, and then found themselves unable or unwilling to pay again. They would be caught, of course, if their license expired and they sought to have it renewed without first ensuring that their accumulated tax burden had been paid in full. But in the meantime, between renewals, nonpayment could hardly be said to result in immediate captivity. On the contrary – and in direct contravention to the assertion made by Senator Eastland – a resident of either state could easily pay their poll tax, obtain a license, refuse to pay any further, wait until just before the relevant renewal period, and then leave the state forever. They would have to get a new license wherever it was they settled, of course, but payment of a poll tax would almost certainly not be a prerequisite.

    It has also historically been the case that in rural areas of the United States – which both Maine and Vermont possess in abundance – people learn to drive at what might seem to most city dwellers to be a shockingly young age. And one result of this tendency is that, by the time most young people are first getting their learner’s permit, these country-bred youths have already been behind the wheel for quite a number of years. Folks who come from rural America, in consequence – and this was particularly the case in the early to mid-20^th century – sometimes don’t even bother going to the trouble of being formally licensed. This being especially the case in particularly remote regions of the country located at great distance from the nearest outpost of the relevant licensing body, it would seem a reasonably safe bet to conclude that a significant number of the people whose wretched fate Eastland and Hill were lamenting had no cause to fear being perpetually stranded in their home states. They had started driving without being licensed and they would simply continue to do so, quite apart from whether or not they were able or willing to pay their poll taxes.

    Finally, it was also almost certainly the plain truth that a great many people in the states of Maine and Vermont were – as of the spring of 1962 – operating motor vehicles while possessed of licenses that had expired. Indeed, this is almost certainly the case in just about every licensing jurisdiction in the world at any given time. Sometimes, people don’t notice that their licenses have expired. Or they do, but they put it off. Or they do, and try to renew it, but they just can’t seem to find the time. And all the while, they keep driving themselves to work, and to pick up their children, and to doctor’s appointments, and so on. If ever they were pulled over, they’d be in for a citation and a fine, at the least. But unless and until they ever run afoul of the law – and most people don’t get pulled over more than a handful of times in their life – the fact that they’re not legally permitted to drive a car does not in any way stop them from doing exactly that.

    None of this should be taken as any kind of judgement upon the good peoples of Maine and Vermont, mind you. They were not, and are not, especially or unusually irresponsible, or in any way lacking in civic virtue or respect for the law. The same things that were true of these two states in the early 1960s could be said about any other state at that same moment in time. And this is exactly the reason that Eastland and Hill’s argument made no sense. The relationship in these two Northeastern states between poll taxes and motor vehicle licenses was no more absolute than that which exists at any given time anywhere between motor vehicle licenses and those who actually get behind the wheel. Simply because a given jurisdiction requires a person to possess a valid license in order to drive a car, one cannot then conclude that everyone who does drive within said jurisdiction actually possesses a valid license. Some people don’t feel the need to bother with licenses. Some people forget to renew them when they expire. These are simply facts of life. But no one becomes incapable of driving the very moment the law says they should. As discussed above, there were – and are – plenty of ways that a person who is technically no longer licensed to drive a car – or was never licensed to drive a car – can still go on doing so without any repercussions. Just so, it was most certainly that case that a person living in either Maine or Vermont in the early 1960s could have neglected to pay their poll taxes for years on end – thus becoming legally ineligible to operate a motor vehicle – without in any way becoming “captive” within the confines of either of those states.

    As was the case with just about every argument they had made within the context of this particular debate, neither Eastland nor Hill were necessarily intent on making particularly logical or consistent assertions, however. They did not want their fellow senators, in short, to give what they were saying a great deal of thought. On the contrary, all that they desired was to engage their colleagues’ emotions. They wanted to rile them up, to trigger their sympathies, to get them feeling rather than thinking. The various scenarios they went on to paint would seem to make this quite clear. “If such a person remains in either the State of Maine or the State of Vermont,” Senator Hill continued, “he cannot drive his car to business or to church or to take his children to school or to seek recreation or to visit his friends or to go to the hospital.” Senator Eastland, by way of agreement, then went on to add that, “If a resident of one of those States found that his wife was dying, he could not take her in his automobile to a hospital, unless he had previously paid his poll tax.” Since, as aforementioned, the basic premise of these assertions was patently illogical, the only purpose they could have served was to tug at the heartstrings of those who were listening. Driving to work, driving to church, driving one’s children off to school; the invocation of such simple tasks was doubtless meant to conjure images of the celebrated “regular American” to whom the nation’s public servants so often pledge their fealty. To rob their fellow citizens of the ability to thus earn a living, worship freely, or see to their children’s proper upbringing was accordingly tantamount to the most heinous of crimes. And as far as Senator Eastland and Senator Hill were concerned, this was exactly what the states of Maine and Vermont were doing. By making the issuance of a driver’s license contingent on the payment of an annual poll tax, Maine and Vermont were guilty – supposedly – of preventing millions of their own residents who either could not pay or would not pay from taking part in some of the most essential aspects of the contemporary American experience.

    This simply wasn’t true, of course, for the reasons discussed at length above. But truth, once again, wasn’t what Hill and Eastland were aiming for. What they sought, above all, was a convenient form of distraction. First, they wanted to direct their fellow senators away from any further consideration of the questionable morality of the poll tax laws then in force in their home states. Certainly, some people could argue that placing financial restrictions on the franchise was not in the best interests of the affected community. But what about placing the same restrictions on one of the most basic activities that most adult Americans engaged in? People voted once or twice every handful of years, but millions of Americans drove somewhere every day of their lives. So, in what way were the poll tax laws at that moment in force in Alabama and Mississippi worse, in a practical sense, than those on the books in Maine and Vermont? It was a game of sleight-of-hand, in essence, an attempt at misdirection. “Look over there,” the pair of Southerners might have said, “and whatever you do, don’t look back.” Cheap chicanery, one might call it. Sensationalism. Mawkishness. Or, as far as the Senate goes, business as usual.  

    Their homes states having thus been accused of subjecting the inhabitants thereof to a downright un-American set of conditions, the representatives of Maine and Vermont then present in the Senate chamber – Edmund Muskie (1914-1996) and Margaret Chase Smith (1897-1995), and Winston L. Prouty (1906-1971) and George Aiken (1892-1984), respectively – would most assuredly have been forgiven for actively condemning the relevant remarks. If Hill and Eastland then persisted, this would surely have prompted further discussion. Not about the necessity or the propriety of banning the poll tax by constitutional fiat, mind you, but rather about which state’s poll tax was the most objectionable in its effects. And the longer that this new conversation was dragged out by its Southern instigators, the more time the pair would have to think up new ways of keeping a proposal for an anti-poll-tax amendment from actually reaching the Senate floor for a vote. The two men would never admit this, of course. As far as their fellow senators were concerned, Hill and Eastland cared only about the wellbeing of their fellow Americans. “I do not believe in meddling in the affairs of the great States of Maine and Vermont,” the Mississippian reiterated accordingly,

But if we are going into this question we should certainly rescue their people and give them adequate access to the highways for which the Federal Government puts up most of the money to maintain. The distinguished Senator from Alabama and I, if the Senate is so determined, give notice that, at the proper time, we will offer an amendment to this measure.

Bad enough that the man should once more declare his aversion to “meddling in the affairs” of states not his own while in the same breath proposing to do exactly that, but Eastland’s use of the word “rescue” here was doubtless particularly galling to the aforementioned representatives of Maine and Vermont. But while Senator Aiken, for his part, did wish to respond, it turned out that he would have to wait for his turn to come around before doing so. As Eastland concluded his remarks, he requested the right to yield the floor to Senator Holland, and then to Senator Keating, and then finally to George Aiken. The Mississippian’s remarks had evidently wrought their desired effect.

The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part LXXII: “I Know What the President Wants”

    The strange line of argument Mississippi Senator James Eastland had begun on March 15^th, 1962 in an attempt to dismiss the anti-poll-tax proposal of his fellow Southerner, Spessard Holland – specifically by acclaiming the judgement of the Kennedy Administration on the subject of UN voting rights – only got stranger as the man invoked yet another international body that had little all to do with the subject at hand. “While I am one of those who do not feel that either the United States or any State thereof is bound legally by any decision that might be rendered by the International Court of Justice,” the Mississippian declared,

It would not be inappropriate to ask that the decision be deferred until such time as we might have the benefit of the decision of the International Court of Justice on the principle involved. At least, whatever the decision is, there is a possibility that the inconsistency inherent in the position taken by the United States in international affairs and the urgency for this proposed constitutional amendment in domestic affairs might be resolved if the Court held that payment of assessments could not be required as a prerequisite for a nation voting in the General Assembly of the United Nations. Personally, I think it would be very appropriate for the Court to hold that a nation should be required to pay its assessments as a prerequisite to voting, and, by the same token, I hold that my State should have the fundamental right to continue to make such a requirement.

The contradictions inherent to this declaration on the part of Eastland would seem to be abundantly clear even based on little more than a cursory assessment of the same.

    Not only was the “the inconsistency inherent in the position taken by the United States in international affairs and the urgency for this proposed constitutional amendment in domestic affairs” not at all in need of resolution– if, indeed, such an inconsistency existed – but it was truly the height of absurdity for the Mississippian to assert that such an outcome might come at the behest of an organization which he himself avowed had no claim of authority over “either the United States or any State thereof [.]” What did it matter if the Kennedy Administration held that nonpayment of annual dues should result in a loss of voting privileges at the UN and that the poll tax was unsupportable and should be entirely done away with? In what way was this a problem in need of solving? And for that matter, what kind of solution was appealing to the ICJ? In Eastland’s own words, he did not feel that “either the United States or any State thereof is bound legally by any decision that might be rendered by the International Court of Justice [.]” So what, then, did it matter what the ICJ concluded? What sense was there in dismissing them and then invoking them in the same breath? Truly, as a piece of rhetoric, Eastland’s argument made no sense. Which is why it’s overwhelmingly likely that it was never intended to convince or to persuade anybody of anything. Eastland was not trying to make a sound rhetorical point. Rather, he was simply trying to keep people talking. And at this – if in no other sense – the Mississippian succeeded quite capably.

    Being something of a stickler for detail, the otherwise canny Senator Holland in this instance opted to take Eastland’s bait and proceeded to spend a distressingly large portion of what was supposed to be a debate on his proposed poll tax amendment instead attempting to correct his fellow Southerner. “I point out to him [,]” he said of Eastland, “that I see no similarity between the situation in the United Nations to which he has referred and the situation relative to the poll tax.” In response to this, the senator from Mississippi was only too happy to dig in his heels. “I am certainly sorry the distinguished Senator from Florida does not see this [,]” he responded.

It is very similar. It is very plain. Yes, the Charter of the United Nations provides that a nation has to keep up its assessments in order to vote. That assessment can be onerous to a country. It is identically the same principle contained in the State Constitution, that one has to pay a poll tax in order to vote; but that poll tax is not onerous. It is exactly the same principle.

By thus refusing to budge, Eastland was not attempting to conclusively prove the validity of a particular assertion. Rather, he was simply trying to waste the Senate’s time in general and Senator Holland’s time in particular. Doubtless, his hope was that, given a sufficient interval, he and his allies – Hill, Russell, and the like – might succeed in peeling away the support that the Floridian had so far managed to amass. So long as Holland kept responding – kept trying to show his fellow senator that Eastland was wrong – the Mississippian accordingly had every reason to keep insisting that he was right.

    Holland thereafter continued to play directly into Eastland’s hands. “I am afraid that my distinguished friend has not studied the question very carefully,” he said, “because if he had I think he would find the situation there is not similar to this.” The Floridian spoke of the Soviets, and special assessments, and bond issues, and the Congo, none of which had anything to do with the poll tax or its elimination. But he kept talking all the same, kept trying to prove Senator Eastland wrong. Indeed, he might have gone on doing so indefinitely – in the midst of Eastland’s periodic but steadfast denials – had a previously uninvolved senator not unexpectedly taken the floor. Thruston Ballard Morton (1907-1982), a moderate Republican from Kentucky, asked if his fellow Southerner would yield for a brief comment and had the following to say. “I think the Senator from Mississippi [,]” he said, “has made an interesting point. I trust that someone speaking for the administration, if not this evening, at least tomorrow, will answer as to whether or not the President of the United States is against the poll tax.” So it was that Senator Morton did what Senator Holland should have done himself. The debate then under way was supposed to be about an amendment to eliminate the poll tax at the federal level. Eastland had tried – and for the moment, at least, succeeded – in making it about voting privileges in the United Nations. And Holland had followed suit, losing sight of his stated objective almost entirely. So Morton, for whatever reason, felt compelled to intervene. Eastland’s point, he observed, was an interesting one, if the senator was indeed correct. But it naturally fell to the Executive Branch to speak for itself on such matters. The Mississippian, as noted previously, thought that the Kennedy Administration more or less supported the poll tax by default. But what would President Kennedy himself say on the matter if prompted?    

    Doubtless sensing that he was about to lose his opponent’s attention, Eastland attempted – somewhat clumsily – to cut off this avenue of escape. “There is no answer to it [,]” he flatly replied.

That is the proposal. We have the testimony of the Secretary of State. We have the testimony of the Ambassador to the United Nations. They say, “You cannot vote unless you pay your assessment”; and it can be an onerous assessment.

What this more or less amounted to, on Eastland’s part, was an assertion that actually asking the Kennedy Administration about the poll tax was pointless. By their recent statements about the UN, they’d made their feelings quite clear. Interestingly enough, this was Holland’s response as well. “Replying to the suggestion made by my distinguished friend from Kentucky,” he said, paying due compliment to Morton for his well-timed attempt at rescue,

I invite his attention to the fact that the record of the hearings in this particular matter shows that the Assistant Attorney General, Mr. Katzenbach, who appeared to testify on various pending constitutional amendments, made it very clear that on this particular amendment he was authorized to speak for the President in these words, as shown on page 388:

I am authorized on this to speak for the administration and for the President.

That comes after the time he said:

The Justice Department supports the proposed amendment as a realistic technique which seeks the early demise of the poll tax.

Those statements appear in several other forms during the course of the statement, that the President had given specific support to this and to this alone, of the various proceedings.

Again, the intended meaning was clear: “Don’t bother asking, we already know what’s going to be said.”

    On the cusp of losing his grip on the situation – Holland was now turning one of his own tactics against him – Eastland defaulted to a tried-and-true strategy. “Will the Senator tell us from what he is quoting?” he asked. And as he had done previously, Holland parried this attack with ease. “From the printed record of hearings before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments of the Committee on the Judiciary of the U.S. Senate [,]” he replied plainly. “The Senator from Mississippi is, of course, the chairman of the full Committee on the Judiciary.” As had been the case previously, Eastland had no choice but to respond in the affirmative. “This is a print from one of the subcommittees of his committee [,] the Floridian continued. “There is no question about it.” Having now found himself dancing to Senator Holland’s tune rather than his own, Eastland accordingly grasped for a different angle of attack. “Does the Senator not know that the Attorney General testified today in favor of abolishing the poll tax by legislation?” he said. Evidently, the Mississippian was eager to turn the committee assignment Holland had just invoked back to his own advantage. But it was too late. Holland – with the aid of Senator Morton – had successfully regained the initiative. “I had not heard that,” he freely admitted, “but I know what the President wants; and that is not in accord with his wishes [.]”

    Again, Senator Eastland tried to make best use of his available resources. As Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, who could speak to its proceedings better than he? “I believe the testimony today was on the literacy test, by legislation, but of course that involves the same principle [,]” he said accordingly. But while this comment did finally give Holland some pause, it simply wasn’t enough to arrest his accumulated momentum. “For some reason unknown to me [,]” he granted,

The Justice Department has taken the position that the literacy test is in a different category from the poll tax question. I do not know why. I certainly do not give the rubber stamp of complete approval to everything coming from the Justice Department, but I say that the Justice Department and the President are both clearly on record before the subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments of the Senator's own committee as supporting the amendment which is proposed, and the feeling that that is the practical and constitutional way to go after the poll tax.

This was – or should have been – something of a knockout blow. Not only had it been made exceptionally clear that both the President of the United States and the United States Department of Justice were in favor of abolishing the poll tax by way of an amendment to the Constitution, but explicit proof of this exact sentiment was to be found in the records of the proceedings of the Senate Judiciary Committee. As the long-serving Chairman of that same august body, Eastland could not deny this simple fact without either flatly lying to his fellow senator – something which even he was loathe to do – or appearing to be dangerously out of touch. Rather than admit defeat, however – and surely, his primary aim had been defeated – the Mississippian began rather embarrassingly to flounder.

    “There is no question that they so testified,” Eastland thereafter admitted of the aforementioned Deputy Attorney General,

But what does that have to do with what I said? Of course they testified to that, but what I said is that the policy of the U.S. Government has endorsed the principle of the poll tax in international affairs, because we say that no nation shall vote in the United Nations unless it pays its assessments, even though they be onerous.

So it was – at his own hands, no less – that the motives of the Senator from Mississippi were made completely transparent. Since he could no longer even subtly imply that the Kennedy Administration was actually in favor of the poll tax – for the very simple reason that it had been conclusively shown not to be true – Eastland instead opted to declare that this had never been his objective to begin with. All that he was arguing – all that he had ­ever been arguing, he claimed – was that “the policy of the U.S. Government has endorsed the principle of the poll tax in international affairs [.]” Was this a particularly relevant assertion to the discussion at hand? Decidedly not. But it was one that Eastland would stand by regardless any attempt by his colleagues to convince him otherwise. Would they make the attempt? He seemed to hope so. Why else was he being so obstinate about something that was so fundamentally unimportant? Why else, but to provoke a response? Why else, but to drag things out further?

    For his part, Senator Holland seemed to sense that his opponent was nearly spent. And while his response to Eastland’s strategic collapse was not as cruelly dismissive as it might have been, his comments, moving forward, were appropriately matter of fact. “The reason for that statement [,]” he said, referring to the original declaration of the Kennedy Administration on the subject of UN voting rights, “is that the charter, to which we are bound by treaty, so provides.” Eastland’s half-hearted, if characteristic reply, was that, “The State constitutions so provide.” Holland then answered with what might as well have been the thesis statement of his whole anti-poll-tax initiative. “The Federal Constitution does not so provide,” he noted,

And the Federal Constitution is changeable, and changeable in the method we are seeking to follow. The submission to the jury of the States is a method which existed before the Senator's State and mine came into the Union.

By adhering to such plain logic all along, Senator Holland might surely have saved himself a great deal of trouble. Because there was nothing that Senator Russell had said, that Senator Hill had said, or that Senator Eastland had said that in any way refuted the simple fact that Holland could do exactly what he intended to do without in any way violating any standing statutes or constitutional provisions. Perhaps out of sympathy, perhaps out of a sense of collegiality, he chose to indulge his fellow Southerners, let them talk, engaged with their arguments. But this basic truth – that Holland not only had the right to propose an anti-poll-tax amendment but also the necessary support among his colleagues to see it off – had always been the only thing that really mattered. It could not be argued away, it could not be refuted: the poll tax could be banned by way of constitutional amendment. And so, as the debate of March 15^th finally wound down to its inevitable conclusion, this is where Holland naturally chose to leave off.

    Senator Eastland, for whatever reason, chose to flail for a little longer. He asserted, one last time, “that the U.S. Government in international affairs has adopted the principle of the poll tax. The Senator cannot explain it away. The Senator cannot laugh it away. The Senator cannot brush it away. It is there.” But if Holland had been willing to indulge his Southern colleague earlier in the day, now he seemed far more inclined to be dismissive. “I am laughing it away,” he said,

Because I see no possible comparison between the two. The United States and the other governments are able to pay their assessments. The thing we protest against is the fact that people oppressed by penury and poverty are not always able to pay them, and have not paid them.

Eastland did not seem to take this very well. His immediate response was reflexive, confrontational. “I defy the Senator to name one individual in my State or in the State of Alabama whom the poll tax has disqualified [,]” he demanded. Again, Holland was dismissive.  “I do not care to go into that subject [,]” he stated simply. The Mississippian then goaded him again, daring him to name even one person so affected. But Holland wouldn’t budge. So it was that after a final parting exchange – which saw Holland lament the poor rate of voter participation in Alabama and Mississippi, Eastland accuse him again of working with the Civil Rights Commission, and Holland patiently explain that this was patently untrue – Senator Eastland finally gave notice that he had run out of things to say. “I move,” he said, “pursuant to the order previously entered, that the Senate take a recess until 12 o'clock noon tomorrow.” At long, long last, the Senate debate of March 15^th, 1962 on the subject of Senator Holland’s proposed anti-poll-tax amendment had come to an end. Would that the senators present had known what March 16^th would bring.

The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part LXXI: Sound and Fury

    After a relatively brief foray into the various other matters which the Senate was due to confront at that moment in time, the session of March 15^th, 1962 did eventually return to the subject of the poll tax and its elimination. Specifically, it returned to the same three-man dynamic which had characterized the earlier discussion on the matter. Senators Eastland and Hill continued – by whatever means they could conjure – to throw obstacles into the path of a swift passage of a Senate Joint Resolution while Senator Holland – with abiding patience – continued to calmly but firmly dismiss them. In this instance, rather than Hill, it was Eastland who took the lead, though the substance of his commentary ended up being much the same as that of his colleague. Or rather, as that of his colleagues, for he chose initially to return to a point made previously by Senator Russell. As the Georgian had asserted during the discussion of March 14^th, Senator Holland’s apparent intention to substitute a proposed amendment for a piece of legislation was not only highly irregular but also plainly unconstitutional. “The senior Senator from Florida [,]” Eastland accordingly observed,

Now proposes to be an alchemist, one who would transfer base metals into gold, or a magician so adept that he can drop a rabbit in a hat and pull out a polecat. His proposal confronts a constitutional barrier that is insurmountable.

It now being his turn to play the dutiful straight-man, Senator Hill then piped in with his assuredly planned response. “It is a fact, is it not,” he said, referring to Holland’s previous attempt to secure an anti-poll tax amendment in 1961, “that it was a resolution to amend the Constitution of the United States?”

    This was not a question that anyone particularly needed answering, of course. If the text of the Congressional Record was not clear enough on the matter, the incident in question had occurred in that same Senate chamber less than one year prior. Holland had last attempted to secure an amendment in the usual manner. And now, as a trio of Southern senators had each of them made clear, he was advancing the same measure in a distinctly different fashion. Indeed, it was Hill’s contention – and Eastland’s, and Russell’s – that Holland was knowingly attempting to circumvent some of the most essential rules of Senate procedure by doing so. “It was recognized [,]” Eastland thus elaborated,

That the only way the Senate can proceed to amend the Constitution of the United States is by means of a joint resolution. which does not have to go to the President of the United States. In fact, we would violate the Constitution of the United States if we tried to proceed to amend the Constitution through legislation. However, that is what is being attempted in this case.

Hill, as was his wont, then stepped in to explain. “Any proposal to amend the Constitution of the United States must be passed by two-thirds votes in both Houses of Congress,” he affirmed, “whereas a legislative proposal requires only majority votes.” Thus it was, at long last, that the southerners put forward a somewhat substantive argument.

    There are distinct procedural requirements in place when it came to the approval of legislation and amendments, respectively. A proposed amendment to the Constitution, in order to be submitted to the approval of the states, has to first receive the formal approbation of two-thirds of a quorum of each of the houses of Congress. A normal piece of legislation, by comparison, needs the support of only a simple majority in both chambers before being sent on to the President for their signature of veto. Practically speaking, of course, the existence of the filibuster effectively raises the threshold of support for normal legislation to two-thirds as well, but this is only true if a senator – or a group of senators – are inclined to force the issue. And in the years before the creation of the “two-track” system in the early 1970s, most senators tended not to. Southern, pro-segregation Democrats deployed them most frequently – specifically when the Senate moved to consider a civil rights bill of some sort – but even they understood that constantly grinding the business of Congress to a halt would ultimately hurt their cause more than help it. In consequence, while the distinction to which Eastland and Hill were attempting to draw the attention of their colleagues was indeed a very real one, it was also somewhat ambiguous as to whether it applied in all cases. In this particular case, it really was a moot point. At last count, Senator Holland’s joint resolution had some sixty-eight co-sponsors, more than enough to clear the threshold of support required to either defeat a filibuster or secure the approval of a proposed amendment. If that number were lower and a filibuster was somehow prevented from taking place, of course, one might conceivably have claimed that Holland was trying to play a fast one by gaining approval for a proposed amendment by way of a simple majority vote. But since this was demonstrably not the case – since Holland, as aforementioned, already had more support than he needed – Hill and Eastland’s objective remained somewhat unclear.

    Unclear, that is, until they went on to explain themselves further. Responding to Senator Hill, Senator Eastland signaled his agreement before elucidating one last crucial point. “Throughout the entire history of the Senate,” he explained,

When constitutional amendments have been substituted or when a legislative proposal has been amended by striking out all after the enacting clause and inserting, in lieu thereof, a proposal to amend the Constitution of the United States, that has been done by unanimous consent of the Senate; and that is the only proper way and the only legal way in which it can be done. Therefore, I now give notice that under no conditions can unanimous consent be obtained, because I and other Senators will object.

One is given to wonder why it was that neither Hill, nor Eastland, nor Russell had seen fit to make this argument at some earlier point in the discussion. For hours, they been arguing between them that the poll tax was perfectly permissible under the American system of republican government, that there was precedent in its favor stretching back as far as the Anglo-Saxons, and that seeking to eliminate it by way of an amendment would somehow trigger the end of American civilization. They’d even avowed – if somewhat unconvincingly – that attempting to substitute a proposed amendment for a piece of normal legislation was improper and impermissible. But until now, for whatever reason, they’d never made their case quite as simply as Holland had been making his. The Floridian had been saying, since nearly the beginning, that he simply wished to submit the elimination of the poll tax to the jury of the states, and that the Constitution gave him the power to do so. Had his opponents responded just as early on that while his intentions were all well and good, the method he had chosen was not possible within the context of contemporary Senate rules, one wonder how much more quickly the whole matter might have been resolved.

    Regardless of their exact reasoning – the intricacies of which remain mysterious to this day – the pair of senators who’d stood in opposition to Holland’s anti-poll tax amendment since the start of business on March 15^th did eventually arrive at a practical argument against it. As far as substituting a proposed amendment for a normal piece of legislation was concerned, “unanimous consent is required [,]” Eastland avowed. “That is the way it has been done throughout the history of this body.” And unanimous consent was not something that the Mississippian was at all inclined to provide. “I, for one,” he continued, “do not give unanimous consent; and I emphatically object to having the present amendment in the nature of a substitute attached to Senate Joint Resolution 29.” Now, any reasonable person would tend to conclude from this statement that the discussion at hand was more or less at an end. If, as Senator Eastland made note, unanimous consent was both required of Holland’s proposal and not in the least bit forthcoming, the Senate should accordingly have moved on while the Floridian considered his options. His joint resolution still had over sixty guaranteed votes. And so its passage – once it got to the floor – was something of a fait accompli. Holland would just need to find a new way to introduce it. In the meantime, as Holland strategized, Hill and Eastland could go to work chipping away at the coalition the Floridian had assembled. Provided they worked fast enough – and were convincing enough – they needn’t have spoken another word on the floor.

    As it happened, however, this was not the end of Hill and Eastland’s little routine. They could have rested their case. Indeed, perhaps they should have rested their case. Instead, they kept arguing, kept grasping, kept casting about for purchase. More than winning the debate at hand, they seemed to just want it to keep going. And so they switched, yet again, to another topic of conversation entirely. Eastland began with a little reflection before finally coming to the point. “While I am one of those who have always believed that the poll tax was a legitimate prerequisite to exercise of the franchise,” he said,

And that it was unwise to adopt any constitutional amendments which would deny to a State the right to levy a poll tax if it so chose, I do admit that over a long period of years a great number of persons have disagreed with my personal views in this regard. It is now heartening to see that the pendulum is swinging back to my point of view. No less person than the President of the United States, in a recent message to Congress, wholeheartedly endorsed the principle involved in the poll tax.

Earlier that same day, Eastland had attempted to make this exact argument. Holland declined to take the bait at the time, so here was Eastland trying to make it again. “It is the opinion of the United States that special assessments voted by a two-thirds majority of the General Assembly are obligatory [,]” he elaborated.

The President here is not only stating his opinion, but he purports to speak for the United States. If the United States believes that a nation which does not pay its assessments should be denied the right to vote in the General Assembly of the United Nations, then where is the consistency in saying that a sovereign State cannot require a small per capita or head tax as a prerequisite for its citizens to exercise the privilege of suffrage?

    As with so much of what either Eastland or Hill had said over the course of the debate concerning Senator Holland’s proposed anti-poll tax amendment, there really wasn’t very much to this argument. What Eastland was arguing for, in his own words, was consistency. If the government of the United States was prepared to uphold the notion that a lack of annual dues payments within the context of the United Nations should render the delinquent country unable to cast a vote therein, then it only made sense for that same government to recognize the right of any of the American states to withhold the franchise from those of its citizens who similarly failed to pay a head tax. “Is there any reason or justification that a separate standard of conduct should be imposed on nations than that which is required of the individuals who make up any sovereignty, be it a State or a nation?” the Mississippian asked his fellow senators accordingly. His answer, of course, would have been a resounding “no,” notwithstanding the fact that the premise of the question was more than a little nonsensical. Not only was the United States in no way legally obligated to maintain any degree of practical consistency between the many and various mechanisms of its foreign and domestic policy, but the specific comparison to which Eastland was attempting to draw his colleagues’ attention was also an exceptionally awkward one.

    The United Nations possesses no more authority over its members states than those member states are willing to grant it. Not being able to vote therein, while certainly frustrating to those countries that value concepts like international law and collective decision making, accordingly amounts to very little if a given nation is determined to pursue a particular course. Granted, UN peacekeeping missions have helped to arrest the violent activities of certain countries in the past, but as often – indeed, perhaps more often – UN resolutions are little more than dead letters. If enough members states possessed of sufficient practical power between them don’t care to enforce a particular decision of the UN, then it doesn’t really matter who voted for what. The citizens of Mississippi, circa 1962, did not have the same relationship with the government of their state. Citizens were not directly responsible for policing other citizens, for one thing. The state itself was possessed of all the power and all the resources necessary to enforce its own decisions on its own terms. Also, the number of areas in which state authority could and did affect the day-to-day existence of the people of Mississippi far exceeded the relatively narrow scope of influence which the United Nations could possibly claim to hold over the nations of the world. In consequence, whereas a UN member state could decline to pay its dues and then violate international law with relative impunity – knowing that, so long as it maintained good relations with the right countries, nothing would come of its brazenness – a citizen of the Magnolia State who hadn’t paid their poll tax could not similarly violate state law with the expectation that their friends and neighbors would simply decline to hold them to account. Mississippi, as aforementioned, had all the resources and all the legal justification that it needed in order to enforce obedience to its authority upon any and all perceived violators. In consequence, one of only ways for a Mississippian who felt that a given law or policy was unjust and should not be obeyed to translate their feelings into action was to vote.

    To be sure, organized campaigns of civil resistance have wrung tremendous change out of even the most stubbornly conservative regimes. But for those unwilling to potentially risk their lives – a state of mind for which no one should be made to apologize – electoral politics represents the surest means by which governments can be made to respond to the changing needs of those who are otherwise beholden to their authority. And while there are any number of ways in which even the most progressive electoral systems are weighted or biased towards certain outcomes or demographics, it also cannot be denied that, historically speaking, elections have been directly responsible for some of the most dramatic political developments – revolutions; transformations – ever recorded. Mississippi, at the best of times, is susceptible to this basic characteristic of democratic regimes the world over. The citizens of Mississippi can vote their way to the change that they want to see. And it is for that reason, among others, that the ability of Mississippians – and Americans more broadly – to vote was, is, and will always be extremely important. The United Nations, by comparison, really isn’t a democratic regime. Member states can and do vote, of course. But there really isn’t any guarantee that their votes are going to trigger any meaningful change. Sometimes they do, to be sure. Sometimes successful UN resolutions result in dramatic international collective action. But as often as not – again, really more often than not – being able to vote in the UN General Assembly or the Security Council, or being barred from the same, really doesn’t stop sufficiently powerful countries – or those possessed of sufficiently powerful allies – from simply doing whatever it is they want to do.

    Assuming that he was even aware of this distinction – and let us assume, for his own sake, that he was at least that perceptive – one may rest assured that Senator Eastland was only interested in justifying his previously stated position. It didn’t matter to him in the slightest that barring a citizen of a given state from voting was not at all, in its practical effects, like barring a member nation of the UN from exercising that same right. All that he cared about was that, when looked at from a certain angle, recent declarations on the part of the Kennedy Administration could be argued to equate to support for the principle of the poll tax. Under normal circumstances, Eastland did not give a toss for the United Nations. Nor was it in any way a given that he should have embraced the policy pronouncements of President John F. Kennedy. Though the two men were members of the same political party, Kennedy was a Northwestern liberal while Eastland was a Southern conservative. And while Kennedy needed the support of men like Eastland in order to push his various legislative priorities through Congress, what men like Eastland needed from Kennedy was that he simply let the South keep being the South. If there was much love between them, in short, it was a marriage of convenience first and foremost. And yet here, on March 15^th, Senator James Eastland of Mississippi invoked Kennedy and his administration as though he held them in the highest esteem. “The President of the United States,” he said, “the Secretary of State of the United States, the Ambassador of the United States to the United Nations have in principle endorsed the theory of the poll tax and have made it the official policy of the United States Government.” One wonders whom Eastland would not have spoken of in the most glowing terms if only they would say something that could vaguely be construed as supportive.

The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part LXX: “The Men Who Sat in the Convention”

        Being unable – or rather unwilling – to offer a counterpoint to Senator Hill’s and Senator Eastland’s claims of ignorance as to the damage being daily wrought by the existence of poll taxes in their states, Spessard Holland accordingly remained silent and allowed the two of them to maintain the floor as the Senate debate of March 15^th wore onward into the evening. The result was an extended monologue on the part of the ever-persistent Hill that stretches across several pages of the aforementioned Congressional Record. The substance of this monologue is substantially unimportant. The Alabaman was not really trying to use his words to make a particular point. Rather, he was trying to use them simply to take up space. It was a filibuster, in essence, if rather a short one that was doomed to failure. Holland, as noted previously, already had the sixty votes he needed. All that his opponents could really do, in consequence, was try to draw the thing out in the hope of possibly changing a few minds. Holland could have stopped him, of course, by invoking cloture and proceeding to a vote. But for whatever reason, he didn’t. And so Hill spoke, at length, about the history of poll taxes, and about property qualifications, and about how voting was not really a right. And then he segued, somewhat awkwardly, into a needlessly precise recounting of the Philadelphia Convention (1787). The words “sovereign” and “sovereignty” were very much in evidence. He began recounting specific motions. He quoted liberally from various debates. He flashed forward to the 1860s, and the 1910s, and the 1940s.  He went on, and on, and on, and on. And in spite of speaking at such great length, he ultimately ended up saying very little.

        This should not be taken to mean that certain of the things Hill did say were not revealing in themselves. For example, his invocation, at one stage, of “a right which is the most sacred right, perhaps, possessed by any American citizen-the right to the ballot” rather seemed to fly in the face of his earlier assertion – along with Eastland – that “voting [is] a privilege and not a right, and a privilege which can be restricted or denied [.]” How was it that a right considered to be “the most sacred” could also be restricted or denied? Were the words “right” and privilege” interchangeable in Hill’s mind? In effect, they seemed to be, to the extent that it sometimes suited his purposes to use one to the exclusion of the other. When attempting to justify the levying of poll taxes, voting was privilege that could be granted conditionally or even withheld. And when discussing the sovereign authority which the states supposedly held over the limits and parameters of the franchise, voting was a right of greater value than any an American could claim to possess. Doubtless, this inconsistency was not by design. That is to say, Hill did not intend to draw attention to his erratic use of terminology. Rather, he was simply making a series of discreet rhetorical choices. The effect he sought to achieve dictated the particular word he would ultimately deploy. Evidence, one might argue, of a somewhat less than coherent vision based more on self-interest and persuasion than upholding a particular principle.     

        What also becomes quite clear as one sifts through Hill’s avalanche of quotations and encomiums is that he, like so many American statesmen before and after him, tended to think about the Founding Generation as though they were infallible demigods whose every word and deed possessed the weight and significance of scripture. It’s a common enough affliction, to be sure, but one which never ceases to be of concern when it makes itself known in those possessed of significant institutional power. In his mind, it seemed, the Framers were not just very wise, or very thoughtful, or very intelligent, or very decisive. On the contrary, they were the most “distinguished lawyers and students of government” and the most “capable political draftsmen” that could have been found “at that time in all the world” or “today or at any other time in all the world [.]” “Where could a more brilliant galaxy of stars in the field of statesmanship be found [,]” he went on to say, “than these great lawyers, students of the philosophy of government, students of human nature, men of commonsense and wisdom […] ?” For someone whose job it is to ensure that the government of which they are an officer continues to function in a way that is responsive to the changing needs and intentions of its constituents, such fawning admiration for the authors of the same would seem liable to result in the formation of a dangerously proscriptive attitude.

        At the time that Senator Hill spoke these words, almost two hundred years had transpired since the outbreak of the Revolutionary War and the initial formation of the United States of America. It would be fair to say, in consequence, that the country which existed under that name in 1962 bore only a partial resemblance to that which first coalesced in the 1770s and 1780s. War, economic depression, internal and external migration, and at least two industrial revolutions – among other things – had served to transform nearly every aspect of American society, the priorities of the average citizen far from the least among them. And the government of the United States had remained substantially responsive all the while. Laws changed, the role of government changed, even the Constitution changed. Or rather, they were changed. Generations of American statesmen, in keeping with the needs and desires of their many and various constituents, steadily altered and expanded the essential functions and definitions of the federal government and the state governments. And so it was that even the vaunted Constitution – that most venerable and unchanging of the world’s fundamental governing charters – had been altered, as of the early 1960s, a fully twenty-three times. Was this fact symbolic of some failing on the part of the Framers? Were the men and women responsible guilty of abandoning the wisdom of their forebears? Of course not. People change, both as individuals and as a community, and the governments that serve them must also change in step. This is good and this is natural. This is the way it’s supposed to work.

        This is also why the attitude displayed by Senator Hill during his aforementioned monologue was such a fundamentally distressing one. Whether he truly believed it or not – and one can reasonably conclude from his general approach to debate that he tended to believe whatever suited him in the moment – what the Alabaman was essentially saying was that the Framers were not to be questioned, under any circumstances, ever. Might they have come to some potentially uninformed conclusions during the drafting the United States Constitution? Was it possible that certain of their theories had not been borne out by experience? Could the passage of nearly two centuries have simply rendered some of their ideas obsolete? Hill’s answer to these questions, seemingly, was “no,” “no,” and “never.” As far as he was concerned – at least at this moment in time – the framework of government hashed out by the Framers simply wouldn’t tolerate scrutiny. They were perfect, it was perfect, and those who said or thought anything to the contrary were guilty of an unforgiveable betrayal.

        It was a patently ridiculous attitude, of course, and one which flew in the face of logic as well as experience. Not only do the powers and dimensions of government need to change periodically in order to prevent them from becoming needlessly and self-destructively restrictive, but the United States government had been changed many times over the course of its lengthy history. The authority of its various branches had waxed and waned in response to the particular needs of the moment while its basic parameters and scope had undertaken a process of slow but steady evolution. Hill had witnessed this himself over the course of his life and career. At the time of his birth in 1894, there were no income taxes at the federal level, no direct election of senators, no federal suffrage for women, and no Electoral Votes for the District of Columbia. The federal government was much less involved in the daily lives of the American people and the office of President of the United States was in something of a trough in terms of its relative power and prestige. But through war and economic uncertainty, generation after generation, he’d seen the United States transformed. Since joining the Senate in the late 1930s, he’d even been a part of its transformation himself. And yet, despite the evidence of his own senses and his own experiences, J. Lister Hill could find it in himself to claim that the Framers had got it right the first time. That change, fundamentally, was bad.

        This mindset even seemed to extend, unfortunately, to opinions rendered by certain of the Framers while in the process of accomplishing great deeds. That is to say, it wasn’t just the Constitution as originally drafted to which Hill believed his countrymen ought to bind themselves, but also the various remarks that were made by its authors in the act of drafting. He quoted Oliver Ellsworth (1745-1807), for example – a delegate from the State of Connecticut – as having avowed during the Philadelphia Convention, that “The states are the best judges of the circumstances and temper of their own people.” As far as Hill was concerned, this simple phrase in itself was the very soul of wisdom. “Note that language [,]” he pointedly remarked.

The States - the people back home, the people who gather in the State capitals, the people who go to the ballot boxes back in the hamlets, the communities, and the crossroads - “are the best judges of the circumstances and temper of their own people.” Would anyone dispute that today?

Within the larger context of Hill’s obvious regard for the Framers, that final question seemed posed as though it was some kind of dare. In effect, he was defying anyone among his colleagues in the Senate to rise and speak against the wisdom of one of the hallowed Framers of the Constitution. Ellsworth’s word, in itself, was not law, of course. He was certainly a wise man, for his time, and a talented lawyer and jurist, so much so that he eventually became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. But he was just a man. Among his fellow delegates to the Philadelphia Convention, he spoke his opinion, his vote was counted, and the result was what it was. His words were not special any more than were those of his colleagues. Oliver Ellsworth said one thing, Maryland’s Luther Martin (1748-1826) said another, and Pennsylvania’s James Wilson (1742-1798) yet a third. What if these men – or indeed any group among the Framers – disagreed with one another on some fundamental point? Whose word is sacrosanct? All of them? None of them? Or just the one that seems most agreeable?

        The inability of anyone to answer these questions in a way that doesn’t quickly devolve into an ideological litmus test is precisely the reason that Hill’s treatment of the Framers makes so little sense. It is one thing to hold to the letter of the Constitution. It is, whatever its flaws, the nation’s fundamental governing charter and the supreme law of the land. And as the product of generations of collective contemplation and debate, its various clauses should be implemented attentively and alterations to the same considered carefully. But the words of the Framers, even when spoken during the process of framing said document, should not – cannot – be treated with the same strict approbation. Not only do the words of an individual Framer not represent the collective wisdom of the whole cohort – least of all those who actively disagreed with him – but they were also never intended to take on a force and power of their own. The Virginia delegate James Madison (1751-1836) endeavored to record the Convention debates, not for the purpose of creating a supplementary set of strictures to which subsequent generations would hold themselves to account, but for the purpose of allowing those not present to understand how and why the Constitution ultimately took the shape that it did. They were supposed to be illuminating, to provide insight, to broaden perspective. They were not supposed to be thrown around as though they had the weight of law.

        That Senator Hill felt otherwise is made quite clear from the substance of his lengthy oration of March 15^th, the result of which is a series of assertions that are internally inconsistent and even nonsensical. At one point, for example, he avowed that,

The men who sat in the Convention, who engaged in the debates in the Convention, who engaged in the actual drafting of the Constitution, knew best of all, knew far better than any who should come after them, what their intent and purposes were in writing the Constitution.

A reasonable enough contention in itself, even excepting the existence of Madison’s aforementioned Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention. But then, later in the same speech, Hill went on to say – speaking about the various state ratifying conventions – that,

The meaning of section 2 of article I was so clear that the question was not even raised in the conventions of Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware, and Georgia; and, so far as the reports show, in New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Maryland no question was raised about the section. It was so clear that even a fourth grade school child on reading it would know what it meant.

So which was it, then? Did the Framers know “best of all […] far better than any who should come after them, what their intent and purposes were in writing the Constitution” or was the meaning of the Constitution so obvious that “even a fourth grade school child on reading it would know what it meant [?]” Was the Constitution inscribed in the firmament itself by a race of demigods whose motivations were patently divine and also inscrutable to mere mortals, or was it possible for a schoolchild to understand its purpose at a glance? Hill did not intend for anyone listening to try to answer this question, of course. He was not trying to pose questions. He was trying to establish the veracity of a feeling. That being, in essence, that the Framers and their works were fundamentally perfect. 

        By way of a parting word on the subject of Hill’s pseudo-filibuster of March 15^th – the discussion of which, though it has admittedly been rather lengthy, still pales in comparison to the duration of the speech itself – consider the following assertion as a kind of case in point as to Hill’s position. Speaking, once again, on the subject of the Framers’ supposed intentions, Hill asked his fellow senators,

What would it have availed the people to break the tyranny of the British Crown, had they, themselves, set up here in Washington a government with central arbitrary power? They were determined, after all the sacrifices they had made, and all their bitter sufferings, to reserve the power in their own hands. I repeat that in order to do this, they knew they had to maintain the sovereignty of the States, because within the States - and within the States alone - are the citadels of governmental power.

It should be fairly obvious where this assertion as to the intentions of the Framers falls down. If the sum total of what that group of statesmen intended to do was “reserve the power in their own hands” and “maintain the sovereignty of the States [,]” why is it that their most famous collective achievement was the creation of an empowered national government? The states, in the 1780s, were already fully sovereign. The Articles of Confederation bound them together only loosely, the result being a government quite incapable of asserting what limited authority it could claim to possess on paper. This being the case – and the maintenance of state sovereignty being, according to Senator Hill, the primary objective of the Framers – one is accordingly forced to ask why it was that the Philadelphia Convention took place at all if not for the purpose of achieving some other objective?

        The reason that Hill’s statement on the matter doesn’t seem to make sense, of course, is that the senator from Alabama was not arguing about the intentions of the Framers in good faith. The Framers became “framers” by coming together and putting quill to parchment. They understood – if not always in the same way – that there were some things which their individual states simply could not accomplish and which their existing national government simply could not achieve. It was for this reason that they gathered, for this reason that they debated, and for this reason that they ultimately submitted the product of the efforts to the scrutiny of their fellow Americans. Were it otherwise – were they truly of the opinion that “they had to maintain the sovereignty of the States” – they might have saved themselves a great deal of trouble and simply stayed home. The fact that they didn’t – the fact that they met, and debated, and ultimately produced a new government charter – arguably points to what it was Hill was trying to achieve.  He was, after all, a conservative. And as a conservative, it behooved him to try to paint a conservative picture of the Framers and the Constitution.

Americans of every generation and every political stripe imaginable have tried to claim that their own political position possesses the sanction of the Founders. They seek to impute the existence of precedent for their own beliefs and to imply that disagreement with the same entails a rejection of what is most sacred. Such is the nature of the nation’s founding mythology. It can be extremely powerful when invoked in the right way. And so it is that everyone wants a piece of it for themselves. J. Lister Hill was no different. He believed – for good reasons or bad – that within the frame of government described by the Constitution, the individual states remained the primary receptacles of sovereign power. Indeed, the states, to his thinking, created the Constitution, and certainly would not have done so if it meant weakening their own authority in the areas of law and policy that mattered most. Like any good American, Hill sought proof of this conviction. And like any good American, he turned to the words and deeds of the Framers. These men, it’d been well recorded, were often deeply suspicious of excessive centralization. Their loyalties lay with their home states more often than with the nation itself, and their attempt to craft a new frame of government for the latter very much carried the stamp of this somewhat parochial turn of mind. So it was that Hill believed he was entirely justified in his various assertions. The Framers had been eager to protect the sovereignty of the various states they called home, both out of a sense of loyalty and as a check against the power of the central government they were seeking to create. They’d also made a point of delimiting the specific powers to be possessed by each, and ensured – if somewhat belatedly – that those not specified fell to the states. Did this not make them, in effect, conservative? Were they not seeking, fundamentally, to preserve the essential sovereignty claimed by each of the states since they’d been founded as colonies under charter from the Crown? Hill, one can be sure, would have answered vehemently in the affirmative.

The problem with this stance, of course, is that it ignores a great deal of contradictory evidence. To be sure, the Framers were deeply suspicious of central authority as a group. But they also met in Philadelphia for the purpose of creating a central government. None of them – with the possible exception of Alexander Hamilton – was desirous of seeing the authority of their home state gradually outpaced by a national government. But they also firmly believed that a national government possessed of some power was increasingly necessary to prevent the gains of the late Revolution from being lost. They were certainly conservative in some aspects of their thinking, and some among them were most certainly more conservative than others. But they were also, without a doubt, some of the most radical thinkers of their age. Many of them had served in the Continental Congress, or the Continental Army, or gone abroad as American diplomats. They’d shed their blood, and risked their lives, and gambled the loss of all they held dear. And in consequence, not only could it be said that they had successfully stared down one of the most powerful empires in the history of the world, but they also dared to imagine a world in which some of the most entrenched precedents imaginable simply no longer applied. They’d all been born, to a man, in a world in which “God Save the King” was the only acceptable toast. And by 1787, they were sitting together to forge a government that recognized no greater authority than that of the people themselves.

This is all to say, in essence, that the Framers defy being easily instrumentalized. Not only were they a diverse group from one individual to another, but there were ambiguities aplenty to be found within the beliefs and experiences of any one of them. And so, in turning their words and deeds into precedent for one’s own beliefs, one must ultimately discard or ignore a great deal of who and what they really were. Human beings, that is to say. More intelligent than most, perhaps. Blessed with insight and imagination. Men of vision, to be sure, but men all the same. In attempting to turn them into something more than this, Senator Hill was ultimately guilty of making them into something less. He was not the first, and he would not be the last, but his attempt was just as foolish and as wrongheaded as all the rest. Because while the Framers, as a group, could agree on very little – a fact which reading the Philadelphia Convention debates should make quite clear – one of the few things that united them was a common belief in the right of human beings to govern themselves. People could be reasonable or unreasonable, compassionate or cruel, insightful or foolish. Every one of them, indeed, had the capacity to save themselves or doom themselves. But nothing, for all their flaws, made them fitter to be subjects than citizens.

The Founding Generation came to embrace this essential conviction over the course of the events that led to the Revolution and spent the decades that immediately followed building a nation upon the same. Power, they believed, could not justify obedience. Only power wrought by consensus was worthy of submission. That this idea rightly underpinned the Founder’s rejection of British authority, the likes of Senator Hill would surely have acknowledged without question. But by unthinkingly raising the Framers to the level of deification, he was essentially spitting in the face of the men he so claimed to revere. The Framers told their fellow Americans not to bow to any power that could not be justified by reason. And what was J. Lister Hill doing but asking his fellow senators to do just that? What were the Framers, as characterized by Hill, but a cohort of ancient tyrants whose words were not to be questioned?

The senator himself, to be sure, would never have asked himself this question. He would almost certainly never have realized that by rigidly invoking the example of the Framers he was showing his ignorance of their greatest lesson. And this is because he was a conservative, a man steeped in tradition and precedent. His world, like that of many conservatives, fitted him like a glove, and he not about to indulge in speculation that this might not ultimately be for the best. Things were as they were because that is how they were meant to be. The Framers had seen to that, he was convinced, and there was simply no cause to think otherwise. Further on in his extended oration, he quoted Andrew Jackson to this same effect. “The destruction of our State governments [,]” said Old Hickory, “or the annihilation of their control over the local concerns of the people would lead directly to revolution and anarchy and finally to despotism and military domination.” This from the man who famously threatened to deploy the United States military against the government of South Carolina in an effort to enforce the collection of a series of taxes. But such – as has been demonstrated – was Hill’s approach all over. He cited what suited him, ignored what didn’t, and dared his fellow senators to raise their voice in opposition. And in the end, no one did.

Eastland, predictably enough, chimed in with encouragement now and then. Hill’s speech, if the senator from Mississippi was to be believed, was “the most logical, most profound, and most statesmanlike [..] ever heard on this question. He has gone to the very vitals of the issue, and […] he has made the best argument on this question that has ever been delivered on the floor of the Senate.” Hill, equally predictably, then finished on a note of sanctimonious triumphalism. “Let us stand united, strong, and resolute in our unity [,]” he declared,

Let us support squarely the rights of the people of the United States and the rights of the States of the United States, that our Government may be preserved. Let us stand squarely upon the Constitution of the United States - rock of freedom, ageless and enduring foundation of our rights, our hopes, and our democratic faith.

It was at this point – to the relief of many, no doubt – that the subject of the poll tax was temporarily dropped. Debate on the matter ceased for a time as the Senate moved on to consider other business. As the persistence displayed by both Spessard Holland and J. Lister Hill should make clear, however, the issue could not be described as having been conclusively settled. Not only did both men have more to say on the topic of poll taxes, but they’d say a great deal more just on the 15^th of March alone.