The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part LXXVI: “Cleaner Government, In the Main”

    Before Senator Spessard Holland had a chance to expand upon the significance of his findings vis-à-vis the Election of 1960 and the impact of poll taxes upon the same, he was rather predictably stopped short by Senator James Eastland’s request that he yield once more for a question. Holland had just mentioned that the Mississippian had been wrong about “the primary [being] the place where the larger participation in voting takes place” in his state, so this was not entirely unexpected. In contemporary one-party states like Alabama and Mississippi, the Democratic primary was usually more important than the general election in terms of deciding winners and losers, and for that reason tended to be jealously guarded by the officiating partisan authorities. So began a rather testy exchange between the two Southern senators. “Of course,” Eastland began, “the Senator from Florida knows that many voters do not turn out for a primary election when the candidates in the primary election do not have opposition. Is that not true?” Holland’s initial response was calm enough. “They do not turn out to the same degree [,]” he allowed. “I have noticed that in Alabama there was very strong opposition in various races—for instance, in the election for the chairmanship of the public utilities commission.” After extracting a promise from Holland that he would be fair in his evaluation, Eastland then asked of the Floridian whether or not he was aware, “that it takes the election of county officials to get out large numbers of voters in Alabama, Mississippi, and other States.” The two went back and forth like this – talking past each other rather than to each other – for quite a while before Holland was finally able to come to his point. Senator Hill intervened, in the meantime, after Holland expanded the scope of his discussion to include recent electoral events in Alabama. Both Eastland and Hill each insisted that voter participation in their home states in 1960 had been low because everything of consequence had been decided by the relevant primaries. Holland asserted, conversely, that the outcome of that year’s general election had been far from a done deal in either state.

    Holland’s evidence for this claim was rooted in a plainly observable fact. In spite of Alabama and Mississippi both being dyed-in-the-wool Democratic states, neither of them ultimately pledged their entire slate of Electors to the candidate for president chosen by the Democratic Party. Mississippi selected eight men as its Electors who identified themselves to the voters as being formally unpledged, the lot of which then cast their ballots for Virginia Senator Harry F. Byrd (1887-1966) and South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond (1902-2003), neither of whom had formally declared themselves as candidates for high office. Stranger still, in neighboring Alabama, five Electors were chosen who had pledged themselves to the Kennedy/Johnson ticket while six more unpledged Electors were voted in alongside them. When it then came time for Alabama to cast its Electoral College ballots in December of 1960, these six likewise voted for the ad-hoc Byrd/Thurmond ticket. More worrying than this strange outcome, however – particularly from the perspective of the Democratic Party – were the electoral statistics behind it. As Holland went on to explain,

With reference to the State of Mississippi […] 108,000 were for the regular Democratic slate, 116,000—or 8,000 more—were for the unpledged slate; and 73,000 were for the Republican slate—or a total of 297,000 voters out of the total of 1,171,000—which […] is just a shade over one-fourth of the mature, adult citizens of that State. And let me say that the 116,000 were a little less than 10 percent of the total number of such citizens in the State.

What this all amounted to, in essence, was that the disposition of Mississippi’s electoral votes in 1960 was decided by one hundred and sixteen thousand people. Or, to put it another way, if the eight thousand people who put the unpledged slate over the top had voted another way – for the Democratic slate, for the Republican slate, or not at all – Mississippi would have chosen the pledged Kennedy/Johnson Electors over the unpledged Byrd/Thurmond Electors.

    Was this fact in any way relevant to the discussion at hand? Well, yes, it very much was. If things had turned out a little differently in certain other states in 1960, the absence of Mississippi’s eight Electoral Votes in the Democratic column might have been extremely consequential to the ultimate outcome of the contest. If Illinois, for example, where Kennedy ended up winning by less than nine thousand votes, instead broke for Nixon, it would have put Kennedy at 276 Electoral Votes and Nixon at 246. And if South Carolina, where Kennedy also won by less than ten thousand votes, had done the same, the result would have been Kennedy – 268, Nixon – 254. With two hundred and sixty-nine Electoral Votes required to claim victory, the election would subsequently have been thrown to the House of Representatives. Granted, the Democrats controlled more House delegations in the outgoing 86^th Congress – thirty-three to the Republican’s nine – thereby guaranteeing a Kennedy victory regardless. But it still would have represented the first time a president was chosen based on a contingent election since 1825. One can only begin to guess at the furor such an outcome would have aroused among contemporary Republicans. Their candidate came within less than one percentage point of winning the popular vote and did end up winning more states than the Democratic nominee. If the final tally had also placed him just over twenty Electoral Votes shy of victory, having the House then overwhelmingly elect Kennedy would surely have seemed like a slap in the face. Republican legislators would doubtless have begun talking soon thereafter about amending the Constitution in order to prevent any such subversion of the popular will from ever taking place again. Would they have succeeded? It is impossible to say. But one can be sure that they would not have taken such an outcome lying down. And all because eight thousand Mississippi Democrats could not stomach voting for a Catholic whose supported civil rights reform.

    As far as Holland was concerned, this state of affairs – whereby a minority of voters in one of the nation’s less-populated states effectively held the power to change the course of American history – could not simply be ignored or accepted. “If the people in every State do not have a stake in that kind of situation,” he declared accordingly, “then I do not know what I am talking about.” As far as his Southern compatriots were concerned, of course, that was exactly right. Eastland attempted to demonstrate this as fact by referring, again and again, to the absence of down-ticket races in Mississippi in 1960. “The Senator from Florida has already stated [,]” he said,

That it took an election for county officials and State officials to get out a large vote. The Senator from Florida said that was the case in Mississippi and in Alabama and in other States. But I point out that last year in the State of Mississippi and in the State of Alabama there were no elections for county officials and there were no State official tickets.

Holland attempted to counter this assertion – that few Mississippians took part in the 1960 presidential election because Mississippians only really went to poll when there were state and county offices up for grabs – by speaking in fairly glowing terms about the efforts of the Magnolia State’s leading Democrats during the 1960 campaign. “I distinctly remember,” he said,

And it is to the credit of the senior Senator from Mississippi  and to the credit of his distinguished junior colleague—that both of them were out fighting at every crossroad and corner where they could be heard, fighting for the regular Democratic electors, while at the same time […] the Governor of that State and certain Members of the House of Representatives from that State were out fighting for the unpledged elector candidates; and instead of its being just a milktoast affair it was a hard fought and very actively fought election [..] I make no reflection on anyone. I know they were doing exactly what they thought was right […] The point I am making is that the result of all that was that the full electoral vote of that State was dominated by a little over 116,000, out of a total of 1,171,000 that could have qualified to vote if they had been permitted to qualify under the laws of the State.

Holland’s aim, to be sure, was to highlight the incongruity between the significant efforts expended on all sides by the members of Mississippi’s political class in 1960 and the comparatively paltry turnout that was the ultimate result.

    He claimed otherwise, at least at first. “The sole reason for bringing up this point [,]” he said, “is that it will result in giving credit to the Senator. The Senator from Mississippi and the Senator from Alabama have fought for the Democratic cause.” But then, without missing a beat, he revealed his true intentions. “I do not like to compare States [,]” the Floridian continued, “but in that same election, in my State, where nothing like the same degree of campaigning took place, the vote was 1,540,000.” He did not like to compare states, though in this case he would make an exception. And it was a startling comparison, to be sure. In spite of the tremendous effort supposedly expended by certain Democratic Party luminaries during the Election of 1960, voter turnout in Mississippi, in terms of ballots cast for president, amounted to less than one quarter of those otherwise eligible to vote. Now, Florida, to be sure, was a much larger state – something which Holland was quick to acknowledge – but of its three million eligible voters, some one and one half million – or fifty percent of the total – cast ballots during that same race. And this was in spite of the fact that, according to Holland, “nothing like the same degree of campaigning took place [.]” Why should that have been the case? The Floridian did not say so outright, though his inference was clear enough. This was the poll tax at work.

    Eastland did not care to engage with this line of thinking, or so his immediate response would seem to indicate. Rather than refer, once again, to the absence of down-ticket races as sufficient explanation for the relatively poor voter turnout in Mississippi in 1960, he instead asked Holland a very simple, but loaded, question. “How did the Senator's State vote?” he said. “Our State voted for the Republican nominee [,]” Holland answered truthfully. “The Senator's State voted for Mr. Nixon [,]” Eastland clarified. “Yes [,]” Holland replied. “The Senator's State went for unpledged electors.” “That is true,” admitted Eastland, “but I was fighting for the Democratic ticket.” “I compliment the Senator [,]” said Holland. “I am not criticizing him for it.” It was this last comment, for whatever reason, that seemed to set the Mississippian off. The senator from Florida had also fought on behalf of the Democratic ticket, Eastland avowed, in spite of the fact that his state ultimately voted Republican.

But I would not attempt to pass judgment on the State of Florida, which the Senator has done toward my State and the State of Alabama, when the Senator from Florida knows no more about conditions in those States than the man in the moon.

Evidently, the senator from Mississippi was getting a little tired of the senator from Florida claiming to know what went on in the former’s home state in such detail. More broadly, he was surely also growing just the least bit irritated that Holland continued to speak about the State of Mississippi in such a consistently condescending manner while claiming all the while that he greatly respected its inhabitants and government. Why was Mississippi being singled out for granting its Electoral Votes to a pair of sound Democrats like Harry Byrd and Strom Thurmond when Holland’s own state had granted its even larger share of votes to the Nixon/Lodge ticket? If Florida was so enlightened for having eliminated its poll tax, then why had it produced such a distasteful result in 1960?

    Eastland did not actually ask these questions, though one can be certain they were on the minds of more than a few of his Southern colleagues. The best evidence for this was provided by Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright (1905-1995), who requested to cut in before Holland and Eastland could finish their increasingly heated conversation. “From what the Senator has said happened in his own State,” Fulbright subsequently asked, “does that lead to the conclusion that the more votes there are, the wiser the decision? It seems to me that is not so, from the results in Florida. There may be something to be said for a smaller electorate.” One can debate whether or not the senator from Arkansas was jesting, but the fact of what he suggested remains. Florida voted Republican in 1960. Florida had also famously – per Holland’s frequent allusions to the same – done away with its poll tax in the late 1930s. Were these two circumstances connected? Fulbright wondered if they were, and if – speaking more generally – a larger electorate actually led to poorer outcomes. Claiming a Republican victory in Florida as a fundamentally poor outcome for American democracy was a deeply partisan thing to do, of course, but one which might be expected from a politician so soon after a particularly close election. What should not have been expected – what should arguably never be expected – was Fulbright’s assertion that there was likely something worthwhile in restricting access to the ballot. That distasteful results could be traced to excess democracy.  

    Eastland had already said as much himself – “Day before yesterday [,]” Holland recalled, “the junior Senator from Mississippi stated that in his opinion the qualifications for voting should be further restricted, instead of enlarged” – but in this instance, the Floridian appeared unwilling to simply wave the matter off. “I point out [,]” he continued, “that that philosophy runs upstream, definitely, against the experience of our whole country and the ambition of our whole country to enlarge voting participation.” Whereas this should have been an entirely uncontroversial statement, however – that is, something which every senator in attendance should have agreed with implicitly – Fulbright was not quite finished being aggressively partisan. “I think that is debatable,” he countered, “in view of the election record made by the people both in Florida and nationally.” Thus having aspersions cast again upon the behavior of himself and his fellow Floridians, it was no wonder that Holland’s response was to go on the offensive once more. “The Senator is entitled to his opinion [,]” he began cordially enough.

Incidentally, when the Senator from Arkansas was not on the floor, I called attention to the fact that the poll tax States were the ones that had lost population. In the case of his own State, it has gone down to four Representatives. The State of Florida has gone up to 12. When I came to the Senate, our States had the same population.

It was not a complicated argument, to be sure, but a damning one for being based on plainly observable facts. Arkansas had lost seats in the House, and Florida had gained seats. The exact significance of these developments was, truthfully, up for debate. But one could not deny that while Florida was on the ascent in terms of its power and influence within the great councils of state, Arkansas – like Mississippi and Alabama – was decidedly on the decline.

    Fulbright, to his credit, was swifter on the uptake than Senator Eastland. Whereas the gentleman from Mississippi hadn’t responded at all to Holland’s pointed jab, the gentleman from Arkansas made a spirited attempt to parry it. “I will say to the Senator [,]” he responded accordingly, “that it is the quality we are more interested in than the quantity, and in the quality of our States, I think ours has gone up.” It was a rather catty thing to say, of course. But it was becoming, in fairness, a rather catty conversation. “Certainly ours has gone up,” Holland countered in turn, “and it has gone up, in part, because of the very fine people who have come from Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama, and have swollen our population; and we are grateful to them.” Fulbright answered this with a rather telling rejoinder of his own. “I think the rise in quality in Arkansas is due to this exodus,” he said, “because the lowest paid and the most undiscriminating are the ones who leave.” Granting that he was in the midst of an argument that wasn’t really about anything – the two people involved weren’t attempting to change each other’s minds so much as they were just trying to make each other look foolish – it’s never a good idea for a United States Senator to describe the migration of low-paid workers out of their state as a net positive. Not only is it a horribly classist thing to say – something which, in fairness, not every senator is particularly keen to avoid – but it makes no economic sense at all.

    Not only does every state – Arkansas included – have low-wage jobs that need to be filled by low-wage workers, but the loss of any wage-earners in significant quantities over a short period of time inevitably has a negative impact on the economy in question. Because people working in low-wage jobs aren’t just providing needed labor and services to other members of the community. They also have individual buying power which in turn creates demand for more labor and more services. In particular, low-wage workers tend to spend more money on food, utilities, and healthcare than both their middle-class and upper-class counterparts, creating a close, dependent relationship between a healthy retail sector and a substantial working class. If low-wage workers are fleeing an economy, that economy is therefore going to suffer. Businesses will start to be starved for customers, profits will go down, tax revenues will decrease, and budgets will become tighter across the board. This is not an outcome that anybody – even an Anglophilic, high-toned former academic like Fulbright – should desire. And yet, it was the outcome the senator form Arkansas seemed to actively welcome when he countered Senator Holland’s assertion that Florida was gaining population at Arkansas’s loss. “The rise in quality in Arkansas is due to this exodus,” he said. The quality of what, exactly? Business closures? Labor shortages?

    The truth, of course, is that Senator Fulbright wasn’t speaking to Senator Holland in terms of economic class. The phrase “the lowest paid and the most undiscriminating” was not meant to indicate that the people Fulbright was glad to see the backs of were just poor and just uneducated. What it meant – what he meant – was that the people leaving Arkansas were Black. In the South of the early 1960s, Black people made up the overwhelming majority of the region’s working-class inhabitants. They were paid the least, had the least and poorest schooling, and the fewest opportunities for economic and social advancement. And while it was a simple truth that Southern states likes Arkansas, Alabama, and Mississippi needed poor Black people to fill the low-wage jobs that kept their economies humming along – to the benefit of white business owners in the middle and upper-classes – the white political leadership of these same jurisdictions still persisted in viewing the Black community as inherently undesirable. If every Black inhabitant of Arkansas migrated, en masse, to some other state, it would surely be a minor miracle if Arkansas’s economy didn’t collapse. But people like Senator Fulbright would still claim – albeit off the record – that this kind of exodus was what they really wanted. Such sentiments flew in the face of certain fundamental economic realities, of course, but they were also exactly in keeping with the inherently illogical racial animus of the contemporary Southern political class. Florida was becoming politically stronger while Arkansas was becoming weaker. But while the senator from Arkansas should have been alarmed at this development, he claimed, on the contrary, to be substantially elated. Why? Because Florida was becoming Blacker while Arkansas was becoming whiter.            

    Senator Holland was entirely characteristic in his response to this subtle invocation of white supremacist thinking on the part of Senator Fulbright. Not wanting to engage in any line of debate that would tie his longstanding desire to eliminate the poll tax at the federal level to the growing movement for civil rights – for reasons personal as well as political – he offered a brief, non-specific acknowledgement and then immediately pivoted back to the subject at hand. “I thank the Senator for that observation [,]” he said simply before going on to declare that, 

I think it is established that other States of the Union have an interest in improving an electoral process which is not bringing, and which cannot be sure of bringing, a representative expression from the States. So far as the Senator from Florida is concerned, from his own experience in this field in living in a State which had poll taxes, and then knocked out poll taxes, and then saw participation in voting jump up and up and up, largely because of that […] he knows it does encourage participation. It gives citizens more will to get into elections and I think tends to bring about cleaner government, in the main.

This statement, in itself, was deeply characteristic of Holland’s overall approach. He was not working on behalf of any specific community or interest, but rather simply attempting to promote the notion of “good government” in a general sense. It was all very practical, if also a bit vague. He was speaking from personal experience, he said, having lived in a state with a poll tax and then witnessed the results of its repeal. But while the statistics bore out what he had seen with his own eyes – namely, that more people voted after the repeal than before – it was not entirely clear how this change led to “cleaner government.”

    Or Holland didn’t make it clear, at least. He didn’t explain why high voter turnout was a good thing while low voter turnout was a bad thing. Nor did he elaborate on the merits of ensuring that low-income citizens could vote on the same terms as their wealthier neighbors. High turnout is better, to be sure, just as access to the ballot should never be a function of income. Unless civil rights are distributed equitably and without bias, class and communal resentments can build up to the point of catastrophe. But the stated objectives of the senator from Florida were notably somewhat broad. In some ways – indeed, in many ways – he seemed to be simply retreading the populist playbook of his political youth. For an up-and-coming member of the Democratic Party in the late 1930s, there was certainly hay to be made out of advocating for greater working-class participation in state and federal politics. The economy was in tatters, unemployment was through the roof, and resentment of traditional political elites and their corporate backers was exceptionally widespread. Coupled with the lingering impulses of the Progressive Era towards common-sense reform and anti-corruption, an elected official in a poll tax state like Florida need not have made specific promises as to the positive effects of repeal in order to successfully rally a coalition in support of the same. Certainly, there was still the racial component of the poll tax, the significance of which would have to be downplayed in order to overcome the inertia of the reigning status quo. But as Kenneth Keating pointed out – and it was assuredly as true in the late 1930s as it was in the early 1960s – Southern states that were in the thrall of pro-segregation Democrats had a great many methods of suppressing the Black vote at their disposal. The loss of the poll tax in service of expanding ballot access to poor whites would accordingly have been an easy lift, provided the right facts and figures were emphasized.

    By 1962, of course, a great deal had changed. Economic justice – or what passed for the same in the United States of the early 20^th century – was no longer the same urgent priority that it had been in the depths of the Great Depression. On the contrary, the events of the preceding decade had made clear – between the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision, the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955/56), the Little Rock Crisis (1957), and the passage of the first civil rights act since Reconstruction – that racial justice was going to be the landmark issue confronting the nation in the 1960s. As it became clear the extent to which this was going to be the case, however – as members of Congress, the labor movement, and various facets of civil society increasingly began to challenge the validity of the status quo – the supporters of Jim Crow started to adopt a sort of knee-jerk siege mentality. Every previously unchallenged mechanism of white supremacy was now vulnerable to legal, legislative, and popular attack, in short. And every attack so offered was characterized in turn by the forces of segregation into an all-out attempt at destroying the very essence of the American republic. The rhetoric employed by Senator Hill and Senator Eastland during the debate surrounding Holland’s proposed amendment is evidence of exactly how tense things could often become as a result. If these men were to be believed, the federal government was intent on completely dissolving the states as sovereign entities and was using the Civil Rights Commission as the vanguard of its efforts. Holland, as noted previously, adopted a fairly cautious approach as a result, endeavoring always to avoid tying his proposed amendment to the wider movement for civil rights. But while this certainly didn’t prevent him from rallying support from among those of his fellow senators for whom racial justice was an important concern, it did somewhat limit the kinds of arguments he could make.

    Because what would be the most direct result of the approval of Spessard Holland’s proposed amendment? Voter turnout would increase, of course. Holland had seen as much himself in Florida. But also, more specifically, Black turnout would increase. Southern states – it bears repeating – would still have any number of methods at their disposal for preventing Black voters from exercising the electoral influence otherwise due to them by their numbers. But the loss of the poll tax in states like Alabama and Mississippi was nevertheless bound to increase the real number of Black people who cast ballots in federal elections. Not only that, but it was also bound to encourage further efforts to erode the Jim Crow regime and dismantle, one by one, the remaining impediments to Black voting. Barring a tremendously conspicuous effort on the part of Southern Democrats to prevent them, these things would happen. And as to what would happen next, the contemporary Southern imagination would surely have reeled. In the immediate, Keating was right; very little was likely to change. But the things that would change – and the larger significance of those changes – was all but guaranteed to send most Southern Democrats into a fit if openly discussed. They were already throwing fits in the Senate, to be sure. But how much more acrimonious would it all become if the subtext of the conversation suddenly became the text? Significantly, to say the least. Paralyzingly, one might fairly wager. And so Holland, in consequence, attempted to keep things…vague. Certain facts and certain figures were very important to his argument. Census data, voter participation numbers, things of that nature. But the likely outcome of success? “Good government.” “Cleaner government.” A more “representative expression from the States [.]”

The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part LXXV: “Exceedingly Interesting and Enjoyable”

    As quickly as he had shifted his tone during the Senate session of March 16^th from one of weary gratitude to something perhaps best described as acidic condescension – the better to upbraid his Southern critics, J. Lister Hill and James Eastland – Senator Holland then proceeded to switch moods yet again, this time to his more customary attitude of matter-of-fact persistence. He was eager, he said, to answer the question posed the day prior by his colleague from Kentucky, the aforementioned Senator Morton, as to whether or not the Kennedy Administration supported the abolition of the poll tax. It was his contention that they did, of course, but he was particularly keen on offering proof that could be read into the Record. So it was that Holland proceeded to quote at length from a piece of testimony delivered before an arm of the Senate Judiciary Committee by Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach (1922-2012). It was Mr. Katzenbach’s conviction, it would seem – and in this, he claimed to speak for both the Department of Justice and for the President himself – that while poll taxes may once have served the purpose of actively expanding access to the franchise – a poll tax being, in his words, “easier to meet than general taxpaying or property qualifications” – its purpose was altered in the late 19^th century,

In order to block and discourage the citizen’s participation at the polls. Today it operates unduly to restrict the rights of national citizenship by disenfranchising thousands of white and Negro voters. It is an arbitrary condition which bears no reasonable relation to a citizen’s fitness to vote.

While this would seem to have been a fairly definitive declaration of the Kennedy Administration’s position on the nature of the poll tax and the need for its abolition, there nevertheless remained some amount of disagreement – however good-natured – between Senator Holland and Senator Keating. The New Yorker remained convinced, based on other remarks made by representatives of the Justice Department, that simple legislation was still the preferred method of eliminating the poll tax, though he was still by no means opposed to Senator Holland’s prospective amendment. The Floridian seemed not at all distressed by this assertion – he admitted that the Attorney General himself had voiced his support for both the statutory and constitutional approaches – and merely attempted to point out what recent history had proven; namely, that an anti-poll-tax bill was unlikely to receive sufficient support in the Senate to secure passage.

    It was, in all, a very cordial exchange, and one which in no way threatened to derail or divert the course of the debate. Accordingly, it fell to Senator Eastland to once more needlessly complicate the proceedings. First – after gaining permission from Holland to pose a question – he asked Senator Keating precisely why it was that the Attorney General had offered his support for legislation eliminating literacy tests while favoring a constitutional amendment as the best method for banning poll taxes at the federal level. When the New Yorker answered that the Attorney General had actually expressed his support for legislation eliminating either qualification while also voicing specific support for an anti-poll-tax amendment, Eastland proceeded to demand further explanation for the apparent inconsistency. If it was the position of the Justice Department that legislation was the proper method for eliminating literacy tests, he insisted, should it not have followed that this same method was the proper approach for eliminating poll taxes? Keating’s response, as ever, was a measured one. While he still claimed to favor the statutory approach in both cases, he agreed with the conclusion offered by the Civil Rights Commission that discriminatory literacy tests, of the two, more clearly represented a violation of the terms of the 15^th Amendment and therefore did not require a separate amendment as a remedy.

    To this further invocation of the authority of the Commission on Civil Rights, Senator Eastland reacted with characteristic pettiness. “Can the Senator state an instance where the literacy test has been used to disqualify a person from voting?” he demanded. “Can he name any person who has been so disqualified?” When Keating began to refer back to the testimony of the Attorney General, the Mississippian then proceeded to cut him off. “I am talking about the Senator’s knowledge [,]” he said “Does he know of any? Does he know what he is talking about?” Managing, somehow, to maintain an even temper, Keating assured his Southern colleague that, “There are plenty of instances cited in the reports of the Commission on Civil Rights.” When this, too, failed to mollify the senator from Mississippi – “Who are they?” he insisted – Keating was forced to repeat himself. “The Civil Rights Commission has volumes of evidence on that,” he asserted, “but it is entirely beside the point here.” When Eastland became more agitated still, the New Yorker at last gave vent to his simmering frustration. “I do not propose to engage in unnecessary debate upon a subject which has no pertinency to the proposed amendment which relates to the poll tax [,]” he declared.  

The Senator from Florida very kindly yielded to me, but I did not ask him to yield to me for the purpose of engaging in an extended discussion with the Senator from Mississippi about information readily available in the reports of the Commission on Civil Rights.

Keating, too, clearly had limits in terms of his patience. He was willing to engage with Eastland, at least, and willing to answer some of his questions. But there was a point beyond which he was not willing to be drawn out. The Mississippian, as ever, was trying to distract his opponents by bogging the discussion down in an argument about minutiae whose emotional resonance far outstripped its actual significance to the matter at hand.

    The names of those unlucky Americans who had been disenfranchised as a result of discriminatory literacy tests or poll taxes were not, under the circumstances, of any great importance. Nor was the fact that Keating seemed unable to call any one of them to mind. These people did exist. Their stories had been recorded by the Commission on Civil Rights and their names had been published in its publicly available report. Calling out any one of them on the floor of the Senate would have done nothing to either change this fact or enhance the likelihood that they would receive speedy relief from the assembled lawmakers. Nor would it have quieted down the likes of James Eastland of Mississippi. Because he was not actually demanding proof that such individuals existed. He knew full well that they did. Rather, what he wanted was to make it seem as though they didn’t by forcing the supporters of electoral reform to cast doubt on their existence. It was a sound rhetorical tactic, to be sure – a way of maneuvering one’s opponent into appearing to admit that their primary argument lacked a solid foundation – but not one to which Keating was going to allow himself to fall victim. “I do not propose to engage in unnecessary debate upon a subject which has no pertinency to the proposed amendment [,]” he said, thereby refusing to grant Eastland the rope the Southerner had been persistently trying to play out.

    The Mississippian was not about to admit defeat just because he’d been called on his nonsense, of course. On the contrary, his next move was to unilaterally claim victory. “When a Senator makes a statement on the floor of the Senate he should be prepared to back it up [,]” he said. “On this question I ask the Senator to name one living human being whom a literacy test has prevented from voting. He cannot do it. That shows what is behind this whole thing—nothing.” The fallacy at the heart of this declaration is plain enough to see, of course. The fact that Keating was seemingly unable to name even a single disenfranchised victim of the discriminatory literacy tests and poll taxes that remained in force in certain states did not mean, ipso facto, that such people did not exist. He might have done himself the favor of memorizing the name and details of one such person, if for no other reason than to force Eastland, at such a moment as this, to demonstrate how little he actually cared about such things, but it would likely have made very little difference in the long run. Eastland might just as well have cast his eyes upon the most recent report of the Commission on Civil Rights and read any number of these names himself. He would not do that, of course, having previously argued that the Commission was one of the great enemies of the Southern people. But the record of their existence was there for his perusal all the same. That Eastland chose to disregard this fact did not strengthen his argument one iota. Very much to the contrary, it weakened it considerably.

    Holland, once again, attempted to appeal to reason. Keating may not have been able to name even one individual whose right to the ballot had been taken from them by contemporary poll tax laws, but the Floridian had seen more than enough of these people with his own eyes to speak unequivocally to the truth of their existence. “As one who has lived in a former poll tax State,” he said,

Who is familiar with the conditions which prevailed there under the poll tax, which were less onerous than those now existing in Mississippi, I know that many of our citizens were precluded from voting. I have seen at the polls good ladies come in, expecting to vote, and finding that either their husbands had forgotten to pay their poll taxes, or that they themselves had forgotten to pay them. I have seen literally dozens of people turned away from the voting booth in the precinct where my wife and I vote in those far-away days prior to 1937, when we abolished the poll tax. I do not pretend to be able to name the persons to whom this experience has accrued in the State of Mississippi, because I do not have the pleasure of knowing many people there.

What more proof did the assembled senators need than the good word of one of their own? Holland had known these people, marked them by the dozens, and had come to the Senate to speak on their behalf. Naturally, this did not satisfy Eastland, but then only a fool would think otherwise. From all that Holland had related, he heard only the man’s admitted ignorance of conditions in Mississippi. “I deny that [,]” he thus retorted.

The Senator has described horrible conditions that he says existed in the State of Florida. I deny categorically that any such thing has happened in the State of Mississippi. I defy anyone on the floor of the Senate to name anyone to whom it has happened.

Evidently, the poll tax in Mississippi operated in an entirely different fashion and had entirely different effects than had previously been the case in Florida. What those effects might have been, specifically, Eastland was not inclined to say, save that they absolutely did not result in the disenfranchisement of a single individual. 

    Unmoved by Eastland’s protest, Holland continued to make his case. Previously, he had read into the Record certain remarks made by Assistant Attorney General Katzenbach to the Senate Judiciary Committee on the subject of the poll tax and its potential abolition. Now, he was determined to quote from such testimony once more, this time on the part of the Attorney General – one Robert F. Kennedy (1925-1968) – as delivered to the Judiciary Committee of the House. “A constitutional amendment is a realistic and commendable path to the same goal [,]” Kennedy had reportedly stated. “There should be little doubt of the speedy ratification of such an amendment, since 45 of our 50 States already do not have such useless legislation. I therefore endorse this method of eliminating the poll tax as a condition for voting in elections for Federal offices.” This, as far as Holland was concerned, should have settled any possible doubts. “I do not see how anyone hearing these words,” he said, “or seeing them in the printed record can doubt what the opinion of the Attorney General is and what he has endorsed, because he is endorsing the constitutional method, which we are intending to use here.” When Eastland predictably declined to concede the point – “his reasoning would apply also to a bill [,]” he remarked – Holland then proceeded to quote from a letter from President Kennedy himself. This letter, he said, had been sent to him personally, and it made perfectly clear where the leader of the Executive Branch – not to mention the leader of the Democratic Party – stood on the issue of the poll tax.

    President Kennedy, it seemed, while serving as a senator, had been one of the many cosponsors of Holland’s most recent amendment proposal. And while that measure had ultimately gone down to defeat in the 86^th Congress, he nevertheless expressed his support for the same proposal being reintroduced during the life of the 87^th Congress. “I assure you of my continued support for the principles set forth in that legislation [,]” he declared accordingly.

Adoption of this proposal would constitute an important contribution to good government. It would encourage wider voter participation in the elections for President, Vice President, Members of the U.S. Senate, and Members of the House of Representatives. Participation is inevitably accompanied by a strengthened sense of civic responsibility. I recall your having said many times that the abolition of poll taxes in Florida contributed to sound government in your State. It was a source of regret that, although this measure passed the Senate by the overwhelming vote of 70 to 18 early in 1960, it failed to be enacted. I understand that the failure of the House to act was due largely to complicated factors unconnected with the merits of the proposal. This year, a new opportunity to enact this amendment is presented. I hope it will be considered and approved by the Congress during this session and submitted to the states for ratification.

It was not, to be sure, a particularly energetic endorsement. Then again, one couldn’t reasonably expect every declaration on President Kennedy’s part to be the next “New Frontier” speech. But it was clear, at the least, what the President was getting at. He had supported Holland’s anti-poll-tax amendment while serving as a senator as recently as the 86^th Congress. As the President of the United States, he continued to support Holland’s efforts to that exact same end. And while he, as the leader of the Executive Branch, had no formal role to play in either the initial approval or the final ratification of any theoretical anti-poll-tax amendment, it was nevertheless his hope that just such an amendment would be approved and ratified with due speed.

    Holland was careful not to claim this presidential endorsement as some kind of binding executive mandate, of course. “I do not think the President of the United States has the right,” he stated pointedly,

Nor do I think he has tried, to tell any Senator or Member of the House how he should vote; but I think the President has the right, and it is his duty constitutionally, on matters of grave import, to advise Congress on the state of the Nation; as to how he believes the Nation may be better served under our laws. He has certainly done that in the course of this letter, and I am very happy that he has seen fit to do so.

This was, to be sure, a canny line on Holland’s part. So much of the domestic power of the President of the United States comes from the ability of the office to sway rather than demand and cajole rather than order. The Presidency, for better or worse, carries a great deal of moral weight – being, as it is, the only elected office in the nation whose constituency is the nation – and by applying that weight with care, presidents can accomplish and have accomplished a great deal within the domestic sphere in spite of having little formal power therein. Presidents, yes, and also the allies of the same. Eliminating the poll tax was not Kennedy’s pet project, after all, but clearly, he thought it to be worthwhile enough to lend the weight of his new office to a former Senate colleague. He wrote a letter, sent it to Holland, and then Holland waved it around. “The President,” he said, “is on my side.” It was not a binding declaration, again, but then it didn’t need to be to be effective. Because what kind of Democratic senator, in their right mind, would come out in opposition to the express desire of a Democratic president in the second year of their first term of what looked likely to be a two-term presidency? The kind with few friends and little influence, Holland undoubtedly hoped. The kind that talked to excess and yet was hardly ever heard.

    The Floridian seemed eager to make this hope manifest when next he turned his attention back to his Southern compatriots. Specifically, it was to Senator Hill that he shifted his focus, and to the remarks the man had previously made on the subject of franchise restrictions in the states. “I complimented him [,]” he said,

As highly as I could compliment anyone for the scholarly way in which he dealt with the subject of the constitutional history of the States of the Nation in his long and exceedingly interesting and enjoyable address yesterday. He saved me the necessity of going into that subject, because certainly a part of our case on the constitutional amendment is to show the history that lies back of it. I compliment him again on the thoroughness of his research.

Again, one cannot help but read a degree of irony into Holland’s uses of the word “long” and the phrase “exceedingly interesting and enjoyable,” particularly so when one studies the rest of his remarks. “I comment, however,” he went on to say,

That nine-tenths of his speech, or perhaps more, was spent on that feature of this question which has nothing at all to do with this case, except that he firmly established what I would have otherwise had to establish, namely, that this is a constitutional question and that it can be dealt with properly only by a constitutional amendment. So I thank the distinguished Senator from Alabama for that.

“Nine-tenths” of Hill’s speech, it seemed, had “nothing at all to do with this case.” The Floridian might as well have declared that his colleague had completely wasted his breath. Hill had established, at the very least, that the future disposition of the poll tax was a constitutional question. And Holland was grateful enough for that, if indeed for nothing else.

    Hill’s narrative amounted to little, Senator Holland continued to explain, because he had left out the most important and the most relevant detail of all. Though it was true that a great many states, at one time or another, had instituted some form of franchise restriction, Hill “did not see fit to say, which he could truthfully have said, that every one of those restrictions and limitations has long since been removed by the States themselves [.]” Were franchise restrictions like the poll tax legal and constitutional? Holland freely agreed that they were. But clearly, though the Senator from Alabama had neglected to say as much, the vast majority of the American people had effectively turned against their continued use. By 1962, only five out of fifty states continued to restrict the franchise based on the individual payment of poll taxes. And however much men like Hill and Eastland might have tried to deny or ignore it, this fact, in itself, was exceedingly significant. Because the elections being contested in these states under the aegis of the poll tax were not county or state-level alone. Senators were being chosen, and Representatives, and presidential electors. This made the outcomes of the elections in question matters of national significance.

    The Electors chosen by the voters of Alabama or Mississippi, for example, helped to decide who the next president would be. Was it conceivable that their votes would end up tipping the balance in favor of one candidate over another? Absolutely. And the same could be said of the Representatives and Senators elected in these very same states. Alabama and Mississippi were each entitled to the same number of Senators as every other state, thereby granting them the same relative power over cabinet appointments, judicial appointments, binding treaties, and constitutional amendments. It would be fair to say, in consequence, that the voters of Mississippi possessed a degree of power over the foreign and domestic affairs of the nation rather out of proportion with their actual numbers. Bearing this in mind, it could also be said to have mattered a great deal to the inhabitants of particularly populous states like California, and New York, and Pennsylvania, and Florida both whom the voters of states like Alabama and Mississippi chose to represent them and how the laws of these states regulated the franchise therein. State sovereignty, to be sure, need not have been thrown out the window. But if a small handful of less populous states chose their lawmakers and presidential electors along drastically different lines than did the majority, it was bound to create a rather skewed and unsatisfactory outcome for all concerned. Californians and Floridians were apt to feel as through they were being held hostage by these smaller poll tax states – the result being an atmosphere of acrimony and resentment – while the likes of Mississippi and Alabama were liable to feel as though their priorities were not being taken seriously in the great councils of the nation. 

    Holland sought to illustrate exactly how and why this might all come to pass by delving into some of the electoral statistics recently compiled by the House and the Senate. The issue, he said, was that Senators, and Representatives, and Electors,

Are elected […] by such scanty percentages of the people of their States as to give rise to the question what would have happened had there been actual participation in the election by a much greater number of voters. Let us consider this question for a moment. I have before me not only the list appearing in the records of the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments of the Committee on the Judiciary […] but also the statistics of the presidential and congressional election of November 8, 1960 […] Clearly those two records show what happened in that particular election. First, it is shown that the two fine States of Alabama and Mississippi […] appear at the very end of the list of 50 States, from the standpoint of the percentage of their civilian population of voting age who participated in that election. The State of Mississippi is shown by these data to have participated in the election to the extent of 25.63 percent of the qualified electors or those who were of qualified age, or just a tiny bit over one-fourth of them. The good State of Alabama, according to this list, is right at the 31-percent mark [.]

Compared to the rates of electoral participation seen in other states, these were distressing figures indeed. In California, the voter participation rate for president in 1960 was 67.4%. In Florida, it was a flat 50%, and in Pennsylvania, it was 70.5%. When one also takes into account the differences in relative population between these states, the extent to which the likes of Alabama and Mississippi were operating under almost completely different assumptions about electoral democracy becomes clearer still. In California in 1960, some six and a half million people cast ballots in support of one presidential candidate or another. In Mississippi in that same year, a little less than three hundred thousand people did the same. And while those nearly seven million Californians represented the majority of that state’s total voting age population of slightly less than ten million, Mississippi’s vote for president was decided by a comparatively tiny fraction of its one and a quarter million eligible voters. In California, therefore, electoral democracy could be described as solidly majoritarian. In Mississippi, meanwhile, it was decidedly a question of minority rule.

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?