National Affairs: The Rearguard Commander

It was appropriate that Georgia’s Senator Richard Brevard Russell pronounced virtually the last words in the week that smashed the civil rights bill. For courtly Dick Russell had also had the first important words in the civil rights debate. In the interval the words, thoughts and plans of this extraordinarily influential Senator had been echoed, magnified, repeated, debated in both houses of Congress, at the White House, in presidential press conferences, on radio, TV, and in newspaper editorials across the land. When the time came for his resolute Southern rearguard to do battle against the first civil rights bill since 1875 that seemed destined to pass, the legions of his enemies were reeling in confusion.

Dick Russell did not direct the tactics that broke the bill. That was the work of Majority Leader Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was more interested in holding together a Democratic Party than in preserving the extreme rights of the Deep South. But Rearguard Commander Russell chose the intellectual battlefield, laid down the lines of argument, and was never dislodged by the overwhelming manpower mustered by the Republican leadership, by the Democrats’ own liberals, by the brigades of Administration lawyers, or even by the President of the U.S. It was one of the notable performances of Senate history.

“It’s Up to You.” It began July 3, when Russell called his Southern colleagues to a caucus in his office, Room 205 of the Senate Office Building. The meeting was informal—no votes, no minutes. Not even the most trusted secretary was allowed in the room. “Well, fellows,” he said, “I think there are some things we ought to talk about.”

Russell took his accustomed seat at the head of the table, opened the discussion and did most of the talking. Softly in his Southern cadence he outlined dangers to the South in the new situation. No one was better qualified to assess it: in his 24 years in the Senate he had fought ten extended battles over race legislation, from the 30-day filibuster of the anti-lynching bill in 1935 to the nine-day filibuster over Harry Truman’s Fair Employment Practices Act in 1950. Always the legislation had actually been withdrawn and the South had won.

This time the tactics that had worked in the past might not work again, he said. The Solid South was weakening; Tennessee and Texas no longer regularly attended Southern caucuses, and the South’s senatorial dependables were down from 22 to 18. It was clear that the dependables might not have the physical resources to win a filibuster. Secondly, they could no longer count on substantial aid, comfort, or at least neutrality from conservative Republicans who once helped Southern Democrats in the interests of defeating the civil rights legislation of a Democratic Administration.

This time President Eisenhower was proposing the legislation, Republican Senate Leader Knowland was in the forefront, and Vice President Nixon was turning on the heat behind the scenes. Therefore, argued Russell, the Southerners should not try to smother the civil rights bill of 1957 with words; instead, they should first try to amend the bill drastically, and be prepared for its eventual passage, even though they might reserve the right to try a filibuster at the bitter end.

Two Southerners were not so sure: South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, hero of the Dixiecrat uprising in the Democratic Party in 1948, suggested that they march in a body down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House to see Eisenhower and tell him they would not back down; his stalemate Olin (“the Solon”) Johnston had a 40-hour speech ready for one of the biggest filibusters of all time. Calmly Russell argued Thurmond out of his proposal. He told Olin the Solon to keep his speech handy, just in case. Then Virginia’s Harry Byrd summed up the sense of the meeting. “Dick,” he said, “it’s up to you.”

“Let’s Keep Germane.” Dick Russell got down to the business of detail. A master of legal terrain, with uncanny insight into the minds of his adversaries, he knew where the weak spots lay. The Justice Department had advertised the civil rights bill as “moderate right-to-vote legislation,” but had written into it complex injunctive powers that rested, so said the Southerners, on the “Force Acts” of Reconstruction. Dick Russell defined two outstanding targets: the bill’s Part III, which granted authority for the U.S. Attorney General to get injunctions from Federal Courts to prevent abuses of all kinds of Negro rights; Part IV, the specific “right to vote” clause, which could be undermined by a jury-trial amendment that would ultimately leave Southern defendants in the hands of Southern white juries.

Then Russell assigned the sectors—North Carolina’s genial Sam Ervin, who had sat on the subcommittee hearings on the legislation, would scout the overall area; Arkansas’ Bill Fulbright (the darling of Northern literary liberals) and Alabama’s John Sparkman, another man of liberal repute and Adlai Stevenson’s running mate in 1952, would concentrate on jury trial; Alabama’s Lister Hill, a liberal in good standing with labor, would ring the alarm bells in the ranks of organized labor, which is historically opposed to the use of Federal Court injunctions in strike situations; Arkansas’ John McClellan, noted by television and general repute across the whole country for his stern morality, would stress the immorality of Part III. Russell’s fellow Georgian, Herman Talmadge, proposed that the Southerners take every opportunity to get onto TV-radio forums like Face the Nation and Meet the Press; Russell quickly endorsed the idea.

Lawyer Russell handed out a word of caution to all: “We’ve got a good case on the merits. Let’s keep the argument germane. Let’s see if we can keep our speeches restrained, and not inflammatory.”

Presidential Break. Senator Russell had assigned himself the most exacting and perhaps the most surprising role of all: any harsh words that had to be spoken would be spoken not by Georgia’s cowlicked Talmadge, not by Mississippi’s Racist Jim Eastland, but by Richard Brevard Russell himself. It was understood without words that a diatribe from a Talmadge or an Eastland would predictably get lost, as usual, in the Senate swirl; but if it came from reasonable, respected Dick Russell, a sharp blast would be heard with respectful attention. One day last month Dick Russell put on a brand-new, dark blue (his best color) suit, took the Senate floor to denounce the civil rights bill as nothing but another Reconstruction-style force bill, “cunningly contrived,” based on bayonet rule, and designed to “destroy the separate system for the races on which the social order of the Southern states is built.

“If it is proposed to move into the South in this fashion,” he cried, “the concentration camps may as well be prepared now, because there will not be enough jails to hold the people of the South who will oppose the use of raw federal power forcibly to commingle white and Negro children in the same schools and in places of public entertainment.”

The speech and the strategy had precisely the telling effect that Dick Russell had intended. President Eisenhower began to back away—”I was reading part of that bill this morning and there were certain phrases I didn’t completely understand”—and set up a man-to-man meeting with Dick Russell in the White House. Such Northern Republicans as Massachusetts’ Leverett Saltonstall and New Jersey’s Alexander Smith, such Western liberal Democrats as Montana’s Mike Mansfield and New Mexico’s Clinton P. Anderson allowed that they had no notions of coercing the South. Such powerful Northern newspapers as the New York Times, Washington Post and Times Herald and the Washington Star carefully re-examined their consciences to see whether they were being fair to Russell’s position, came out extolling a great many of its merits.

As the South gained one point after another in debate, the rearguard commander became a new kind of Confederate hero back home. “The South owes a great debt to Senator Russell,” cheered the often critical Savannah News. “He has proven himself an unflinching champion of the region that gave him birth.” Said the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “The South’s hour may not yet be at hand.”

The Truest Type. Dick Russell was able to work his magic—make disciples out of followers and converts out of adversaries and victory out of defeat—not because he is a Southern hero in the Senate but because he is a Senate hero who happens to be from the South. He basks in the tradition, the reticent splendor, the interplay of interests, the quests for compromise of the chamber that have been called a Southern institution. With incomparable style he translates his Southern virtues and personal virtues—courage, courtesy, consistency, consideration for others, hard work, good faith, sense of history—into the equipment needed to belong to, even to dominate, the Senate’s influential “Inner Club.” New York Timesman William S. White calls Dick Russell “the truest current Senate type and the most influential man on the inner life of the Senate.”

Russell does not have a personal enemy in the Senate. He speaks to the floor of the Senate and not to the press gallery, and he willingly lets other Senators take the acclaim for his successes. He is reluctant to give advice to other Senators, seldom volunteers it, invariably—when pressed for it—prefaces the advice with a kind, nonpartisan “Well, coming from your state, I’d suggest you do . . .” Rarely has Russell been known to solicit a vote on any other than the merits of the case, and rarely does he present more than the basic argument. He assumes that the Senators, however young, however green, are intelligent enough to reach their own decisions. Says Dick Russell, gravely unassumingly, dispassionately: “I cover all the ground I can stand on.”

Such is the regard in which he is held in the Senate that he is continually nominated for key bipartisan jobs—flying around the world to inspect World War II battle points, skillfully presiding over the explosive, eight-week Senate investigation into Harry Truman’s firing of Douglas MacArthur, etc. Twice—in 1951 and 1953—the Senate Democratic leadership was offered him, and twice he gracefully declined. “I’m more concerned with my own thinking,” he said, “than with the Democratic Party nationally.”

Red Dust & Fireflies. Dick Russell’s roots lie deeply and inextricably in the long-lost dream of the Old South. He was born in Winder (rhymes with binder), 46 miles northeast of Atlanta, the son of a struggling county courthouse lawyer. He was brought up with six brothers and six sisters amid a smoky Georgia haze of swollen, mud-yellow streams and blowing red dust, of pine-cone fires and fireflies and summer thunder, of white new-blown cotton and wild peach blossoms and slow mules dragging their lazy load. The family was poor—”If we wanted a drink of water, we had to draw it out of the well; before we ate, we knew that wood had to be chopped for the stove”—but the glory of the Old South for such as the Russells was that poverty was no social handicap if the family stock was good and if the family showed the right kind of regard for Southern tradition.

Dick was brought up to become nothing less than a repository of Southern traditions and an exemplar of Southern character. Father was a Presbyterian and mother a Methodist, a strict disciplinarian who wielded the peachtree switch and leather strap on the children “until the blood came.” Twice, before Dick was 13, the Bible was read aloud in family meetings—all the way through. Well Dick learned the old family stories—great-grandfather had owned a plantation and 35 or 40 slaves; grandfather had his cotton mill on Sweetwater Creek burned down and his slaves set free by Sherman’s men, and grandmother had to flee from Marietta escorted by the family coachman, a slave named Monday Russell (because he was born on Monday); Old Slave Monday lived on to serve in that carpetbag Georgia state legislature come Reconstruction. Dick was taught to call Negroes “the colored people” and he admired and respected them in that special, paternal Southern way. Once, when he considered joining the Ku Klux Klan, his father took him aside and handed out some advice that was to last Dick the rest of his life: “Son, any organization where the members are not willing to go around unmasked—I’d go slow about that.”

The Youngest Man. Dick’s father was respected across the state as a lawyer, and was appointed to state offices all the way up to Georgia’s chief justice, but he was defeated whenever he tried to run for such popular-vote offices as governor. Young Dick was concerned about his father’s failures. Once he went with his father to the governor’s mansion in Atlanta and said: “Daddy, I want to live here someday.” And in 1931, after learning about military discipline at Gordon Military College, law at the University of Georgia, politics in ten years in the Georgia State legislature, he declared for the job he had always wanted.

It was hard-up Depression time, and Dick borrowed $1,000 on a life insurance policy, got hold of a battered Oldsmobile coupé to go campaigning 40,000 miles across the state and got elected. He was sworn in by his father, the chief justice (appointed) and then began to rack up such a record of efficiency and integrity—he cut 102 state departments, bureaus and commissions to 17, even dropped his father from two patronage jobs in the state university system—that he was able the next year to run for U.S. Senator and win. In January 1933 Dick Russell, 35, youngest governor in the history of Georgia, became the youngest man in the U.S. Senate.

At once he showed the sense of belonging, the respect for the Senate as an institution that has long characterized the true Senator. He memorized the 40 rules of the Senate; then he set up regular sessions with the Senate parliamentarian to study the precedents. As the years rolled on, Dick Russell became such a master of Senate procedure that Illinois’ Paul Douglas once said: “I yield, though my knees are knocking, to one of the subtlest men and one of the most able field generals who ever appeared on the floor of the Senate.”

The Big “If.” Many of Dick Russell’s Georgia friends believe that he reached the apex of his national reputation and personal political ambition when he declared himself a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1952. “If Russell had been from Indiana or Missouri or Kentucky,” wrote Harry Truman in his memoirs, “he may very well have been the President of the U.S. … He had ability, integrity, and honesty . . . But being from Georgia, where the race issue was so heated, he did not have a serious chance . . .” In any event he settled down more seriously than ever to serve his nation in the Senate, working twelve-to 14-hour days, six and seven days a week. He now lives frugally in a small apartment in Washington’s Woodner Hotel—a bachelor wedded to his cause—and often he cooks his own breakfast of scrambled eggs and grits.

Dick Russell leaps forward whenever the South is challenged, whether it be Truman on FEPC or Eisenhower in civil rights. “Am I a white supremacist?” he said one day last week amidst his rearguard action. “I don’t know what you mean. If you mean that any white man is superior to any Negro, no, I can’t agree. There are some very distinguished Negroes. Negroes have made gigantic progress in 90 years. Whether they are entitled to the credit, or whether the white people are entitled to the credit, is something I have never weighed. I don’t know.”

New Carpetbaggers. It is the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, he went on, that is the new kind of “carpetbagger.” As for the White Citizens’ Councils, “the N.A.A.C.P. gave birth to them.” He added: “I’m as interested in the Negro people of my state as anybody else in the Senate. I was brought up with them. I love them. But I know what’s going to happen if you apply force —there’ll be violence. We’ve had our troubles, but we’ve solved them pretty well.

“I hear Paul Douglas and these fellows speaking up here, and feel I am in a dream. I don’t know those people they’re talking about. I just don’t know the South they talk about. I have no greater rights because I am a white man. I’m proud of being a white man and I’ll do all I can to encourage any other race to be proud of itself.” Dick Russell says: “I’m not going to change my convictions.”

Even though Dick Russell’s convictions are unchanging, his South is changing, and rapidly. Negroes are moving north. Whites are moving south. Beyond that, thousands of Southerners—along with thousands of Northerners and Westerners—are moving off the land and away from all its feudal and racial dreams (the Confederacy’s Jefferson Davis made a point of hailing “the people of the Southern states . . . whose almost exclusive occupation was agriculture”) to the smoky cities and the slamming machines that the Old South was inclined to scorn as a baser, egalitarian culture.

In this sort of strategic situation, the civil rights forces are bound to keep coming on, this year, next year, year after next, inexorably. Even now Dick Russell’s rearguard is fighting from a line set back more deeply in the Southern heartland than ever before. For all of his brilliant strategic success in breaking the back of the civil rights bill of 1957, some sort of civil rights bill, however scrawny, will almost surely be enacted one day soon, and the fact of the passage may, in the long perspective of history, count for more than the substance.

Richard Brevard Russell of Georgia, quiet, able, dedicated defender of the old cause, knows this too. “You’re just fighting a delaying action,” a philosophical friend in Georgia once observed. “I know,” said Dick Russell. “But I am trying to delay it—ten years if I’m not lucky, 200 years if I am.” But Dick Russell does not really trust to luck in fighting his Senate campaigns. He believes, as he told his Southern colleagues at their secret caucus, in fighting a “case on the merits.” And over the long pull, Dick Russell does not have much of a case.