Authors: Jim Newton
Segregationists girded for battle. Richard Russell, the Senate’s wiliest negotiator, charged that the bill would transform the attorney general into a “czar” with unbounded powers. He helped beat the bill in 1956, in part because Eisenhower refused to support the provisions regarding the attorney general. Then, during the 1956 campaign, Eisenhower reversed himself on that point. So when Congress addressed the matter in 1957, it now confronted the president himself, along with the memory of Till and the growing national impatience with southern racism.
Russell waged a side campaign against the bill, hoping to amend it and thereby undermine it. Specifically, he and other southern opponents of the legislation inserted a requirement that any person charged with contempt in federal court be entitled to a jury trial. Since southern juries had already demonstrated their willingness to forgive white perpetrators, Russell knew that such an amendment would gut Brownell’s proposal. Moreover, their amendment shifted the tenor of the debate: the Eisenhower administration was forced to explain why it opposed jury trials rather than why it insisted on protecting civil rights. The amendment, Eisenhower realized, was a smoke screen to obscure the real debate. But the president could hardly say that publicly—to do so would be to accuse the South of such ingrained bigotry that it could not convict even the most egregious racist felons. James Byrnes, the former governor of South Carolina, called his friend Eisenhower’s bluff, writing to the president that the bill’s provisions regarding jury trials would allow the Department of Justice to circumvent the law.
Ike disingenuously denied it, but he knew what he could not say: the Department of Justice did not trust southern whites to render justice in crimes against blacks.
Compounding the attempt to circumscribe the practical effect of the bill was a second amendment to curtail its reach. Rather than authorize the attorney general to prosecute all violations of civil rights—and to allow judges to hold violators in contempt—this amendment, again backed by Russell and Lyndon Johnson, would restrict the reach of the bill to violations of voting rights. That would eliminate the use of the new federal powers to force school integration, where Russell was particularly determined to hold the line. On July 2, Russell charged that the bill was “cunningly designed to vest in the Attorney General unprecedented power to bring to bear the whole matter of the Federal government, including the Armed Forces if necessary, to force a co-mingling of white and negro children in the state-supported public schools of the South.”
Eisenhower was disoriented by Russell’s attack, fleeing the White House for the quiet of Gettysburg and trying to contain a foul humor. He tried to rebut Russell’s charge at a news conference. At first, it looked as if he would succeed. The bill, he stressed, was intended only to prevent people “illegally from interfering with any individual’s right to vote … and so on.” Ike’s “and so on” left ample room for the bill to comprehend the full range of civil rights protections. Sensing that the president was being evasive, the
New York Times
’s James Reston pressed further and asked whether Eisenhower would be willing to limit the new law to voting rights. Trapped, Ike stumbled: “Well, I would not want to answer this in detail, because I was reading part of that bill this morning, and there were certain phrases I didn’t completely understand.” That was hard to believe. This was legislation that had been debated for more than a year. Ike was just getting around to reading it?
Eisenhower’s equivocation hurt his bargaining position, and on July 10 he met for an hour with Russell. Brownell was not present. Eisenhower again expressed his sympathy for the strain on Southerners. He stood fast on protecting voting rights but agreed to consider Russell’s “clarifying amendments.” The two parted on friendly terms. Separately, and also without Brownell, Eisenhower conferred with Lyndon Johnson, who warned the president that the bill would be defeated unless Eisenhower agreed to drop the provision that allowed the attorney general to defend all civil rights. Brownell regarded that as an empty threat, but Eisenhower did not.
So even as the White House geared to push the bill through, soliciting support from prominent Americans who opposed the efforts to weaken it—Jackie Robinson, for instance, cabled that he had “waited this long for bill with meaning—can wait a little longer”—Eisenhower cut a compromise that symbolized his civil rights record. He agreed to drop the provision giving the attorney general broad authority and limit him to cases involving voting rights. Brownell was disappointed but consoled himself with the bill’s passage. Though less than he had hoped for, it marked the first such legislation passed by Congress since Reconstruction and established meaningful precedent in the federal enforcement of civil rights. Eisenhower’s compromise was reached on August 23 and was, Brownell later reflected, “a highly practical decision.”
Could Eisenhower have held out for a more meaningful bill? Perhaps. Certainly Brownell thought he could. But Ike was often inclined to trust congressional leaders to count votes better than he could; in this case, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina had already waged the longest filibuster in Senate history, and Johnson warned that the bill might not pass.
Eisenhower’s reluctance to force a confrontation also reflected his instinctive desire to move slowly and with bipartisan support, especially in this area. In any event, the bill, even as amended, placed Eisenhower’s stamp on the civil rights movement and set the precedent for more ambitious legislative achievements in the following decade. As president, Johnson would more fully embrace some of the ideas he resisted when he was a senator from Texas. More immediately, however, Eisenhower’s ambivalence encouraged others to test his willingness to defend a cause he did not enthusiastically champion.
That was tragically compounded by Eisenhower’s comments at a news conference during the heat of the deliberations. Before the August 23 agreement was reached, Russell and other southern senators had charged that Eisenhower was preparing to use military force to integrate schools. Ike tried to put an end to that argument at a July 17 meeting with the press. The first question that day came from Merriman Smith of United Press International. Smith asked whether Eisenhower believed the bill changed his authority or merely extended existing powers that dated to Reconstruction. Eisenhower dodged, saying, as he often did, that he was not a lawyer and thus not a constitutional expert. But this time he added: “I can’t imagine any set of circumstances that would ever induce me to send Federal troops into a Federal court and into any area to enforce the orders of a Federal court, because I believe the common sense of America will never require it.” Again, he hoped for a middle way between forced integration and determined resistance.
It had been a trying summer. Eisenhower had embarrassingly lost his temper with the Court, and Congress had bedeviled him on international aid, school construction, and civil rights. In late August, a reporter asked him to assess Congress’s work that session. Eisenhower admitted that he was “tremendously disappointed,” a sentiment he reiterated even after the deal was cut on civil rights. Worse yet, he had weathered those hot Washington weeks without Mamie. She was troubled by medical problems and on August 6 was admitted to Walter Reed for a hysterectomy. The procedure lasted two hours and was gingerly covered by the same press corps that reported Ike’s every bowel movement from Denver. After Mamie’s operation, Ike arrived bearing a bouquet of carnations—“Mamie Pink”—and found his wife recuperating but cranky. The doctors, Eisenhower told reporters, were delighted by Mamie’s progress. But, he added with a smile, “this does not mean … that her disposition is necessarily so good about it.” Nearly a month later, Ike reported to Sherman Adams that she was still “just plain miserable.” She and her husband eagerly looked forward to a cool escape from Washington; Ike pined for the northern woods of Wisconsin, but the press of business made that impractical. Instead, he and Mamie picked the Navy base at Newport, Rhode Island. Both the president and the First Lady badly needed a break.
Even before they departed, there were warnings of trouble from the American South. As children prepared to return to school that September, resistance was hardening in some areas. Communities across the old Confederacy determined to thwart integration no matter what the law demanded.
One community that had decided to obey the Court, however, was Little Rock, Arkansas. There, the local school board had, by the standards of the day, done a reasonable job responding to
Brown v. Board of Education
. Three days after the decision was handed down, the Little Rock school board acknowledged “our responsibility to comply” and pledged to do so as soon as the Court detailed the rules. Despite community reservations, the board drafted a proposal to integrate local schools over a ten-year period. The plan was submitted to a federal judge, Ronald Davies, who approved it as consistent with the Court’s edict in
Brown II
that schools desegregate “with all deliberate speed.” Most Little Rock residents accepted the plan as “the best for the interests of all pupils in the District.”
The Arkansas State Legislature disagreed. There, elected leaders vowed to disrupt any attempt at integration. They passed a host of bills intended to thwart integration as they stiffened their resolve. Into that growing controversy stepped Governor Orval E. Faubus. Born in Greasy Creek, Arkansas, in 1910, Orval Eugene Faubus was the son of a militant farmer with an antipathy toward capitalism; Orval’s middle name honored Eugene Debs. The young Faubus taught school and labored on behalf of the poor until deciding to run for public office in 1938, and at that point he made the first of many cynical accommodations to further his career: abandoning some of his more radical views, he endorsed Roosevelt’s New Deal. Military and public service bolstered Faubus’s political résumé through the 1940s, and in 1954 he challenged the incumbent governor, Francis A. Cherry. They waged a spirited campaign—Cherry at one point suggested that Faubus was a Communist—but Faubus narrowly won the Democratic primary before dispatching his Republican opponent in the general election, a perfunctory second act of most southern political campaigns of that era.
If Faubus’s background gave little hint at racial animus, however, it did reveal ample willingness to adjust politics to expediency. In 1957, facing reelection and worried that he was perceived as soft on segregation, Faubus took up the mantle. Under the court-sanctioned integration plan for Little Rock, nine Negro students were expected to be admitted to Central High School on September 3. Instead, Faubus mobilized the state’s National Guard under the pretext of preserving public safety but in fact to prevent the black children from going to their neighborhood school. He succeeded: the children were turned away.
Such brazen defiance of a federal court carried staggering implications for the rule of law, as Eisenhower recognized. Could governors choose which federal orders they would obey? Would public opposition justify defiance? That path led to anarchy, and Eisenhower, whatever his feelings about
Brown
, was unwilling to countenance such disregard of federal authority.
As Faubus prepared to seek an extension of the desegregation order—and to head off a contempt citation for defying the existing order—Eisenhower invited him to Newport for a face-to-face meeting. The invitation was gingerly brokered by the Arkansas congressman Brooks Hays, who persuaded Faubus to accept an invitation if it were offered. Faubus agreed, and then Eisenhower, by prearrangement, extended it. Brownell advised against even that. The attorney general was convinced Faubus was playing the issue for his reelection and would never cave.
The governor arrived on Saturday morning, September 14. It was just five days since Eisenhower had signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
They began the meeting alone, a departure from the White House protocol. Faubus said later that their initial banter was about the war and Faubus’s service in Patton’s army, a topic that can only have emphasized Ike’s superior authority. When it came to the conflict between them, they presented dramatically different proposals to break the impasse. Faubus requested a ten-day break—“breathing room,” in his words—as well as the assistance of federal marshals in restoring order. Eisenhower, who must have been surprised at the idea of turning over federal marshals to a governor acting in defiance of a federal court order, replied that Faubus should leave the National Guard in place but amend its orders from keeping out the black students to escorting them. If Faubus would do that, the president said, the Justice Department would urge Judge Davies not to find the governor in contempt. Lest Faubus misunderstand, Ike made it clear who controlled the situation. “In any area where the federal government had assumed jurisdiction and this was upheld by the Supreme Court,” the president reminded the governor, “there could be only one outcome—that is, the state would lose.”
Faubus now faced a dilemma entirely of his own making. He could accede to the power of the federal government, and almost certainly lose his office as a result; or he could defy that authority, and almost certainly lose, either in court or on the ground or both. He chose to play for time.
Both men agreed to release statements following the meeting. Eisenhower’s was forceful. He recognized Faubus’s “inescapable responsibility … to preserve law and order in his state” and stressed that the governor had told him of “his intention to respect the decisions of the United States District Court.” Faubus’s statement implied agreement, famously acknowledging that
Brown v. Board of Education
was the law and required obedience. Nevertheless, once back in Arkansas, Faubus refused to direct the guard to protect the black students. As for his stated acknowledgment of the rules laid down by
Brown
, he explained: “Just because I said it doesn’t make it so.” The governor now insisted that “the changes necessitated by the Court orders cannot be accomplished overnight.” Contrary to what he had promised the president, Faubus continued to resist.