THE CONGRESS: The Dam Is Breaking

“Let me make it crystal clear,” said House Republican Leader Joe Martin after a solemn conference with President Eisenhower, “there is no weakening in our position.” Swami Martin was talking about the Administration’s struggle for a strong civil rights bill, but his crystal ball was cloudy: the Republican position was, in fact, weakening second by second.

Question at issue: Should the House of Representatives accept the watered-down civil rights bill passed by the Senate? Joe Martin was all for shelving the bill in hopes of getting a better one in Election Year, 1958. But Martin and like-minded Republicans were fighting a lonely battle. They had been left in the lurch by such organizations as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Americans for Democratic Action and the A.F.L.-C.I.O., all of which, after years of making 100% civil rights an article of faith, were now willing to settle for less. Editorialists and cartoonists who only a few weeks before had been denouncing the Senate’s weak bill were now denouncing the Republicans for opposing it (see cartoons). Liberal Northern Democrats, let off the hook by the retreat of the N.A.A.C.P., the A.D.A., et al, delightedly accepted the Senate bill and the unexpected opportunity to avoid a North-South Democratic Party split.

Republican Senators who had gone through the long, bone-tiring fight for a strong bill seemed unwilling to do it again. Minority Leader William Knowland frankly wanted the House to accept the weak bill. New York’s Republican Jacob Javits, who has made a political career out of civil rights, was proclaiming: “I want a civil rights bill, not a campaign issue.” That left it up to House Republicans—and, finding themselves virtually isolated in the effort for a strong bill, they began giving way despite Leader Martin’s pleas to stand fast. Illinois’ Leo Allen, the senior Republican on the House Rules Committee, pithily summed it all up: “The dam is breaking.”

Thus, at week’s end, it was likely that the House would accept the Senate civil rights bill with one major amendment: the Senate provision requiring jury trials for all criminal contempt cases would be narrowed to include only those pertaining to voting rights. After that, the prospect was for President Eisenhower to sign the bill—probably with an accompanying message criticizing it and promising that the Republicans would be back next session with a stronger bill.

It remained for Secretary of Labor Jim Mitchell to make the first effective public reply to the political doubletalk that the G.O.P. sponsors of strong civil rights legislation are somehow standing in the way of progress by opposing the Senate’s weak version. “It is very disappointing to me,” said Mitchell at a news conference in San Francisco, “to see so many of those to whom we usually look for support in the field of civil rights running from the field before the whistle is blown.”

Pointing specifically at the A.D.A., the A.F.L.-C.I.O. executive council and U.A.W.-C.I.O. President Walter Reuther as those who ran first and fastest (TIME, Aug. 19), Mitchell traced the recent history of the civil rights bill: “The House sent President Eisenhower’s sound civil rights bill to the Senate with its approval. The Senate then, in the words of Dr. Ralph Bunche, made the bill ‘disappointingly weak’ by crippling that provision which would ensure equal voting rights for all Americans . . . And then, before the House had a chance to make any move to put strength back in the bill, a substantial body of onetime civil rights supporters backed down and quit. They gave as a reason: ‘Something is better than nothing.’ All I can say to them is this: this isn’t the philosophy that made our country what it is today.”