Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Read online

  National concern over the deepening Depression gave the Democrats control of the House of Representatives in 1930 for the first time since 1919, and while the GOP clung to a 48–47 plurality in the Senate, the margin was meaningless, since La Follette’s insurgent Republicans were not inclined to follow President Hoover’s policies. And when Congress convened in December, 1931, the month in which twenty-three-year-old Lyndon Johnson arrived in Washington as secretary to one of the newly elected Democratic congressmen, it did so in the midst of a nationwide demand for action. The mail sacks that the staffs of senators and representatives opened each morning were filled with desperation now, as a nation’s people begged their government for help.

  But little help came from the White House. President Hoover’s solution to the Depression was still largely to maintain that it was over, and that proposals for direct federal aid for relief, or for increased spending on public works, were as unnecessary as debt relief for farmers—although thousands of American families were losing their farms, relief funds had run out for states and municipalities, and every day the soup kitchen lines grew longer.

  And little help came from Capitol Hill. The House was even more confused and disorganized than usual; a columnist called it “the Monkey House,” and his sentiment was echoed by some of the congressmen themselves; declared John McDuffie of Alabama: “Representative government is dead.” In the other wing of the Capitol, some senators—the younger La Follette, New York’s Robert F. Wagner, George W. Norris of Nebraska, Hugo Black of Alabama—sought to rise to the crisis, with proposals for a federal public works program, a federal system of unemployment insurance, direct federal relief. But there was little agreement among these senators, and little leadership. Many senators seemed to doubt whether Congress could do anything in the crisis. Senator Thomas Gore of Oklahoma was probably expressing the general sentiment when he said dourly that you could no more relieve the Depression by legislation “than you can pass a resolution to prevent disease.” When, after months of wrangling over details, a relief and public works bill finally passed Congress, Hoover vetoed it, and there was never a realistic chance that the Senate would override the veto. And that was the high point of congressional action to fight the Depression; in the midst of one of the nation’s gravest crises, Congress failed to meet for nine months—adjourning in March, 1931, it did not reconvene until January, 1932.

  By the time it reconvened, there were between 15 million and 17 million unemployed men in America, many of whom represented an entire family in want. Reminders of the nation’s desperation were all over Washington—“Bonus Marchers,” twenty-five thousand penniless World War veterans, paraded up Pennsylvania Avenue in May and then pitched tents in parks, so that “Washington, D.C., resembled the besieged capital of an obscure European state.” But for Congress, 1932 was seven months of wrangling and delay, and the measures it passed were so inadequate as to be all but meaningless; under its relief bill, passed after months of haggling, the average stipend for a family of four was fifty cents per day. When vital tax and tariff reforms were introduced, special interest groups and states traded tariff proposals back and forth until, in May, one senator shouted, “Have we gone mad? Have we no idea that if we carry this period of unrest from one week to another, a panic will break loose, which all the tariffs under heaven will not stem? Yet we sit here to take care of some little interest in this state or that…. ‘My state! My state!’ My God! Let’s hear ‘My country!’ What good is your state if your country sinks into the quagmire of ruin!” For months, Forum magazine said, “the country [has] been looking on, with something like anguish, at the spectacle of the inability of the national legislature for dealing with the crucial problem of national finance.”

  Congress adjourned in July, 1932. By the time it reconvened in December, 158 of its members had been defeated in the election, as had President Hoover. But the congressmen—and Hoover—were still going to be in office until March.

  The winter ahead was a winter of despair. When the lame-duck Congress convened, crowded around the Capitol steps were more than twenty-five hundred men, women, and children chanting, “Feed the hungry! Tax the rich!” Heavily armed police herded the “hunger marchers” into a “detention camp” on New York Avenue, where, denied food or water, they spent a freezing night sleeping on the pavement, taunted by their guards. Thereafter, when Congress was in session a double line of rifle-carrying police blocked the Capitol steps. And behind these bodyguards, Congress spent yet more months posturing and procrastinating, angrily deadlocking over conflicting relief bills, while arguing interminably over whether to legalize beer. As for the “President-reject,” as Time called him, he spent those months trying to commit his successor to a continuation of his discredited policies. As, that winter, farmers began to march in what might have been the prelude to revolution, as the nation’s great banks began to close, Washington still did nothing substantive. A great nation was collapsing, and its government, of which the Senate had once been a pillar, seemed paralyzed, utterly unable to prevent the collapse. Senators came to the Chamber wearing money belts as the safest place to keep their cash. The institution which had once excited the admiration of great statesmen now aroused only contempt.

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  THEN, AT HIS INAUGURATION on March 4, 1933, the new President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, declaring that “This nation asks for action, and action now,” summoned Congress into special session. If there was a single moment in America’s history in which the slow slide of power—now in its fourth decade—from Capitol Hill to the White House suddenly became an avalanche, so that, for decades thereafter, governmental initiative came overwhelmingly from the Executive Branch, with the legislature only reacting to that initiative, it was that session—the session that lasted a hundred days, and was so significant a landmark in the nation’s history that it became enshrined as the Hundred Days, the session in which a President proposed, and proposed, and proposed again, in which he proposed the most far-reaching of measures—a session in which Congress scampered in panic to approve those proposals as fast as it could.

  Should Congress fail to provide immediate action, the second Roosevelt said, “I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad executive power to wage war against the emergency.” When Congress convened on March 9, he had waiting for it an Emergency Banking Relief Act that included sweeping presidential authority over the Federal Reserve System. The bill had not yet been printed—only one typed copy was available—and it was read to the House, which limited debate to forty minutes; even before that time expired, representatives were shouting, “Vote! Vote!” and the vote was by a unanimous shout. The Senate was in a similar rush. When Huey Long of Louisiana proposed an amendment, he was shouted down, and the bill—a bill few senators had even seen—was passed, 73 to 7. Roosevelt signed the legislation into law on the same day, less than eight hours after he had sent it to Capitol Hill. An hour later, he was outlining to congressional leaders—long habituated to deference to the powerful veterans’ lobby—an economy program that included a reduction of veterans’ pensions, to be accomplished through delegation of sweeping authority to the President. Four days later, the House having passed the bill, the Senate voted for it, 62 to 13, and on the same day voted to amend the Volstead Act to allow the sale of beer and light wine, thereby defying the Prohibitionist lobby, as powerful as the veterans.

  “COME AT ONCE TO WASHINGTON,” the second La Follette telegraphed Donald Richberg, an old Theodore Roosevelt Progressive, “GREAT THINGS ARE UNDERWAY!” Said Will Rogers: “They know they got a man in there who is wise to Congress, wise to our so-called big men. The whole country is with him, just so he does something. If he burned down the capitol, we would cheer and say, ‘Well, we at least got a fire started anyhow.’” Even conservatives cheered. And before Congress adjourned on June 15, Roosevelt had sent a total of fifteen measures
to Capitol Hill, fifteen measures that resulted in fifteen major legislative Acts that would transform forever the relationship between America’s government and its people—that would extend at last to that people, battered by forces too big for them to fight alone, the helping hand of government for which they had been asking not only during the three years of the Depression but for many decades before. These Acts embodied concepts expounded by Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, concepts that had headed the Progressive agenda for decades but that for decades had perished on Capitol Hill, so often among the desks of the Senate. During the Hundred Days, the chairmanships of many major Senate committees were, thanks to seniority, in the hands of conservative southern Democrats. But the Senate—like the House—passed the fifteen bills with so little debate that one might have thought there had never been any resistance to the philosophy behind them. Congressmen and senators often had little idea of what they were voting on, or how it would affect America, but the new bills were enthusiastically rushed to passage.

  Following adjournment, when Capitol Hill had time to reflect, some of the enthusiasm faded. “Roosevelt had gone far beyond any other President in asserting executive authority, not only asking for legislation but sending over a brief message and a detailed draft of each bill he had wanted passed, and many Congressmen resented the feeling of being ‘lackeys’ or ‘rubber stamps’ of a chief executive who had taken over the legislative function,” Alvin Josephy says. “A number of southerners, particularly, were concerned about the extension of federal power at the expense of the states.” Enthusiasm faded in both House and Senate, but some senators were uncomfortably aware that the Senate was supposed to be the principal bulwark against executive authority; after a century and a half of fulfilling that responsibility, during the Hundred Days the Senate had abdicated it. Nonetheless, there were heavy House and Senate majorities behind the New Deal in 1934 and 1935, years which saw passage of a Social Security Act which set up a national system of old-age insurance, and of laws to break the power of private utilities and make possible the electrification of rural America, and to raise the taxes of the wealthy. And the New Deal was ratified by the Democratic landslide of 1934. In 1936, Roosevelt declared, “I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master.” And the ensuing Roosevelt landslide gave his party unprecedented majorities on Capitol Hill; when Congress reconvened in January, 1937, there would be only eighty-nine Republicans left in the House, and in the Senate there were so many Democrats—seventy-six—that they could not all be seated on the right side of the Chamber, as was traditional; twelve freshmen Democrats, along with four minority-party senators, were placed in the last row on the left side, behind the sixteen Republicans, all that was left of the once-invincible GOP majority.

  DURING THE NEW DEAL, there were isolated reminders of what individual senators could still accomplish. The Tennessee Valley Authority is generally listed by historians as a creation of the Roosevelt Administration, and indeed Roosevelt saw the need and the promise in a plan to revitalize the impoverished Tennessee River Basin by using the huge Woodrow Wilson Dam at Muscle Shoals, idle since the First World War, and constructing a network of other dams, in a vast program of flood control, soil conservation, rural electrification, and diversification of industry. And Roosevelt pushed that plan to reality in 1933. But on the day FDR decided to push it, he said to a man standing looking down at Muscle Shoals with him, “This should be a happy day for you, George,” and Senator George Norris of Nebraska replied, “It is, Mr. President. I see my dreams come true.” All through the 1920s, businessmen had lobbied Congress to turn the dam over to them and let them operate it strictly for profit, and all through the Twenties, in the face of that decade’s pro-private business attitude, and of the determination of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover to privatize the dam, Norris had fought to keep it under government ownership. His power as chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee had enabled him to do so. If a single senator had not, through the administrations of three antagonistic Presidents, succeeded in preserving from private hands the power generated by the river’s waters, that power would not still have been available for public development when a friendly President arrived on the scene. Similarly, the great National Labor Relations Act of 1935, the “Magna Carta for Labor,” which at last placed between the power of mighty corporations and the masses of their workers the shield of government protection, was the creation of Senator Robert F. Wagner of New York, who pushed it through the Senate after Roosevelt had promised southern Democrats, adamantly opposed to the measure, to remain neutral. Roosevelt “never lifted a finger” in its behalf, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins was to say. The TVA, the National Labor Relations Board, and other accomplishments of the 1930s often lumped together with accomplishments of the Roosevelt Administration, are actually monuments to senators. And when, in a single vivid historical moment, the need for the powers bestowed on the Senate by the Founding Fathers was suddenly made blindingly clear, the Senate as a whole demonstrated that it still possessed those powers—and could use them.

  Not only had the 1936 Roosevelt landslide given his party overwhelming legislative majorities, the leaders of those majorities—House Speaker John Bankhead and Senate Majority Leader Joseph Robinson—had, as one account put it, demonstrated “an all but unblemished record of perfect subservience to the White House.” FDR’s control of two branches of the American government seemed as firm as Thomas Jefferson’s had seemed after his landslide victory in 1804.

  About the 1804 election Henry Adams had commented that “the sunshine of popularity and power” had “turned the head of a President.” After the 1936 election, perceptive observers had the same concern. Watching FDR’s triumphant return to Washington after the election, “the smiling President in his open car,” the cheering mobs who “turned out in tens of thousands to receive him as a conquering hero,” Joseph Alsop and Turner Catledge were reminded of a Roman triumph and wondered “whether the President possessed an inner censor, to take the place of the ribald slave who stood in each triumphing general’s chariot to remind him that, after all, he was no more than mortal.” Their concern would soon prove justified. After his landslide, Jefferson, in control of two branches of government, had turned his attention to the lone branch still dominated by the other party—the judiciary—moving, in the impeachment of Samuel Chase, to curb its independence. Now Roosevelt, too, moved against the judiciary’s independence. The Supreme Court had declared crucial New Deal measures unconstitutional. The President drafted a plan to enlarge the Court by appointing as many as six new justices whose philosophy agreed with his. And he made his move, as Alsop and Catledge were to write in The 168 Days, their colorful study of the Court-packing fight, in a way that showed that his triumph at the polls had filled him with “such an overconfidence as must come to any man after four years of glittering, uninterrupted success in great matters.”

  Having had the Court plan prepared in strict secrecy, he didn’t bother to discuss it with his party’s congressional leaders, as if such discussion was no longer necessary. When he summoned them to the White House on February 5, 1937, they had not the slightest inkling of what the meeting would be about. When they arrived, headed by the white-haired, ruddy-faced Vice President Garner, a conservative Texan who, beloved and respected on Capitol Hill, not only presided over the Senate but wielded almost as much influence in it as Robinson (but who had also been kept completely in the dark), and had all been seated in the Cabinet Room, a secretary came in with mimeographed copies of the bill, already drawn up in final form, and of the President’s accompanying message, and distributed them around the table. As they began reading these documents, the President summarized their contents—cursorily. He had very little time, he explained; he was holding a press conference to announce the Court plan in a few minutes. And wi
th that, he wheeled himself out of the room.

  The congressional leaders’ first reaction was a stunned silence. Then, in the car driving them back to the Capitol, Hatton Sumners of Texas, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said, “Boys, here’s where I cash in my chips.” And when, in the long lobby behind the Senate Chamber, senators clustered around Garner asking his opinion of the President’s bill, the Vice President told them—in pantomime: holding his nose with one hand, with the other, he made a Roman thumbs-down gesture. But Roosevelt was unconcerned. When, a few days later, the congressional leaders returned to the White House to discuss compromise, Roosevelt made clear that compromise would not be necessary. Congress would approve the bill as he had dictated it, he said. “The people are with me.” And Roosevelt’s confidence was understandable. Who could stand before such a President, at the very zenith of his popularity and power?

  But America’s Founding Fathers had created the Senate to stand against just such a President—to stand against the President and the people, to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority. In 1805, in a battle to preserve the independence of the judiciary, it had stood firm. And now, in 1937, in another such battle, it was, all at once, standing firm again. Roosevelt wanted his bill to be taken up first in the House, “because,” as the journalist Leonard Baker explains in a study of the Court-packing fight, “all House members run for reelection every two years” and the Administration therefore “believed that FDR’s political coattails had most impact on that side of the Capitol”; the bill, having passed the House, would then arrive in the Senate with momentum behind it. But Sumners, equally aware of those considerations, refused to call the measure up in his House Judiciary Committee so that the Senate would take up the measure first. And suddenly, as Alsop and Catledge wrote, “the shabby comedy of national politics, with its all-pervading motive, self-interest, its dreary dialogue of public oratory and its depressing scenery of patronage and projects, was elevated to a grand, even a tragic plane.”