8

LIBERAL WITHOUT APOLOGY

Humphrey had a romantic, Jeffersonian view of farmers as dedicated to hard work, family, and democracy, and the New Dealer in him believed that the federal government should aid farmers just as it had subsidized railroad, steamship, and airline companies. But he also recognized that the number of farmers was rapidly declining as part of the labor force from more than 40 percent in 1900 to about 10 percent to 12 percent in 1955. Traditional small family farms were giving way to very large, highly mechanized farms with increased output owing to the scientific revolution in agriculture. The family farm was becoming part of the past, and he worried that America was becoming “all metropolitan.”1

In 1956, the senator called for a “Farmer’s Bill of Rights,” which included improving the standard of rural living and preserving “family values.” This meant 90 percent parity payments (the approximate government standard since World War II) for farmers who earned up to $5,000 annually and permitting large “set asides” of land for crop reduction or conservation, with the land serving as full collateral for nonrecourse government loans for which farmers would not be personally liable. At the same time Humphrey counted Minneapolis’s food processing and agribusiness companies as vital constituents who provided him and his DFL Party with money and votes.²

However, the Eisenhower administration proposed legislation in 1956 to create a sliding scale of 52 percent to 75 percent of parity payments. To offset farmers’ income losses and curb production, the administration also proposed to establish a two-part Soil Bank Program: an Acreage Reserve System that would pay farmers to take land out of production or turn under crops already planted and put land into a Conservation Reserve for up to ten years. Presumably, this would provide farmers with income for land taken from production, reduce surpluses and storage costs, and reassure foreign countries that the United States would not dump its surplus farm goods on them.3

Humphrey strongly opposed the legislation even as Majority Leader Johnson questioned his battle against the administration’s bill. But the Minnesotan became the voice of his party and rallied Democrats, including key southerners, along with some midwestern Republicans, to win a 50–44 vote restoring high price supports for dairy and other products and creating new land set asides for wheat, corn, and cotton. He put his prestige on the line and won, as the national media noted.⁴

Eisenhower, with strong public support, vetoed the bill, and the Democrats failed by a wide margin to gain an override. Congress soon rewrote the legislation, which passed with the administration’s specifications: parity payments for reducing acreage of wheat, corn, and cotton, for example, were set at about 65 percent of current market price, and for other farm produce at 75 percent to 85 percent, and land put into a Conservation Reserve soon soared to over 28 million acres. The president disliked a provision requiring the government to “dump” five million bales of cotton on the world market at about 20 percent less than it had paid to southern growers, but overall he had gained his way. Humphrey said that this was the “best bill” the Democrats could get, and he called attention to an expanded Food Stamp Program and Congress’s commitment to study the parity issue.⁵

Johnson was pleased, too, and savored making Eisenhower’s initial veto a November 1956 election issue. He thanked Humphrey “for all you have done for me in the past session,” and said that “one of the things that will always stand out” with him would be “Hubert Humphrey leading the fight on the agriculture bill. Maybe we didn’t get all of it,” but they had pushed Eisenhower on parity and “made him take our soil bank.” Notably, Johnson said that the last thing he remembered was Humphrey saying, “Come, let us reason together.” Humphrey and Johnson seemed to have come to understand each other better, maybe because Humphrey was “shifting over to Lyndon Johnson’s point of view,” as the Texan pointed out. Johnson also said that he hoped Humphrey would take a day or two off from his campaign for vice president—at least “the Texas press tells me he is a candidate!”—in order to visit his ranch.⁶

Humphrey sought the Democratic nomination for vice president in 1956 despite his belief that Eisenhower would likely win reelection. The senator hoped that his own strong campaign would position him to gain his party’s presidential nomination in 1960. He and Freeman prevailed on Adlai Stevenson to run in the Minnesota primary, assuring him of the backing of the DFL leadership and victory. The DFL Central Committee issued an unusually early endorsement of Stevenson, who announced his entry into the Minnesota primary in mid-January 1956. The DFL leaders and their cadres had to deliver the votes on March 20 to set the former Illinois governor en route to another presidential nomination and incline him to choose Humphrey as his running mate. The senator sought to raise his national stature by persuading Democratic leaders to select him to deliver the keynote address at the party’s convention.7

More populist-oriented and independent DFLers balked at having a presidential nominee thrust upon them, however, and Hjalmar Peterson, a prominent old-line Farmer-Laborite, entered Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver’s name in the Minnesota primary. Kefauver’s populist style—in contrast to Stevenson’s more sedate manner—drew large, enthusiastic crowds in the state’s mining and agricultural regions. Humphrey sensed the gathering political storm but believed he had to remain in Washington to continue his fight over the agriculture bill rather than return to Minnesota to campaign for Stevenson.

Kefauver built momentum with an uncontested win in New Hampshire’s primary in March and stunningly upset Stevenson in Minnesota. Humphrey sought to ascribe this to crossover voters in the heavily Republican Minneapolis suburb of Edina. But even Humphrey, Freeman, and Congressman Gene McCarthy failed to win delegate seats as Kefauver swept seven of the state’s nine congressional districts and forty-eight of its sixty delegates to the Democratic convention. Humphrey was “heartsick”—and humiliated. “I’m walking around in ashes and sackcloth,” he told Stevenson. Or as Gaylord Nelson, a Wisconsin state senator and later governor and US senator, would recall, “Old Humphrey had to go around for a whole year kissing asses.”⁸

Stevenson was equally humiliated but promptly adopted a folksier campaign style, agreed to the first televised presidential debate in Florida’s primary, and won narrowly in May, although this was due largely to his being perceived as more conservative on the race issue, while his supporters in the northwestern region (Tallahassee) branded Kefauver a “leftwing integrationist.” In California, strong Democratic Party backing and financing benefitted Stevenson, who ran as a more liberal candidate, although he always said “gradually” when referring to desegregation. He won by a surprisingly large margin, and Kefauver soon suspended his campaign, virtually assuring Stevenson’s nomination.⁹

Humphrey failed to secure the role of keynote speaker; southerners wanted no repeat of his 1948 convention oration. But his fortunes seemed to rise dramatically on July 20 when, after a Democratic leaders’ dinner at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, Stevenson invited Humphrey and his legislative counsel, Max Kampelman, to his room and asked for names of prospective vice presidential candidates, saying that he did not want Kefauver.

Humphrey offered several names, including Senators Albert Gore of Tennessee, G. Mennen Williams of Michigan, Stuart Symington of Missouri, and John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. Stevenson praised Humphrey’s qualifications and asked him to consider himself, although he would need to gain southerners’ assurances that he was an acceptable nominee.10

Humphrey and Kampelman left the hotel that night “with stars in the skies and in our eyes,” Kampelman wrote, and an excited senator called his wife, Muriel, at 4:00 a.m. to break the seeming good news. But Humphrey’s elation may have been premature. He and Kampelman believed that Stevenson had agreed to choose the senator if he gained southern backing, but later Humphrey conceded he might have “over interpreted” Stevenson’s words and he had meant only that southern support would improve his prospects. At the time, however, Humphrey felt assured; Senator Walter George was on record as recommending his selection, and soon other southerners, including House Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas, Representative Brooks Hays of Arkansas, Senators Lister Hill of Alabama, Richard Russell of Georgia, and Lyndon Johnson (who also wanted the nomination) indicated that they would help. Humphrey declared his candidacy for vice president—an unprecedented step—and had McCarthy travel across the country to garner support.¹¹

Humphrey arrived at the Democratic convention on August 13 in Chicago overconfident and unprepared for a rapid turn of events. He assumed that he was Stevenson’s choice for vice president and began to write his acceptance speech and plan his campaign. He pursued a safe political course by refusing to join a liberal group led by ADA chairman Joseph Rauh that sought to rewrite the party’s civil rights plank that only mildly affirmed the 1954 Brown decision and desegregation and rejected “all proposals” for use of federal troops to enforce judicial rulings. Humphrey said that he would take it as a “personal insult” when Rauh announced that his group was going to have Robert Short, a prominent businessman and owner of the Minneapolis Lakers basketball team who headed the Minnesota delegation, speak to the convention in favor of a stronger resolution, which was voted down. This gave labor leaders such as Walter Reuther, the longtime UAW president who inclined toward Kefauver for vice president, reason not to support Humphrey.¹²

The field quickly grew crowded. After Kefauver withdrew from the presidential race, Johnson’s backers opened campaign headquarters for him, but his “favorite son” approach gained little support. He sent word to Stevenson that he wanted the second slot or to be in the room when the choice was made. Kennedy, who was thirty-nine years old and had been elected to the Senate only in 1952, also wanted the nomination, if only, like Humphrey, to prepare to run for president in 1960. And Kefauver soon surprised everyone by indicating his willingness to settle for second place.13

Stevenson never replied to Johnson and worried about having a Catholic, like Kennedy, on the national ticket, although he did think that Kennedy would increase his appeal to urban minorities. The senator had become an instant celebrity on the first convention night as narrator of a Hollywood-style film celebrating Democratic Party achievements from Roosevelt to Truman. Stevenson also gave Kennedy more national spotlight by having the young senator nominate him, and he won easily on the first ballot over New York governor Averell Harriman, with Johnson a distant third.¹⁴

Stevenson shocked party leaders by forgoing the nominee’s usual prerogative to choose a running mate and instead put the choice to the convention delegates. Rayburn, the convention chair, feared a divisive political fight, as did Johnson, who said that this was “the goddamned stupidest move a politician could make.” But Stevenson persisted that the people had a right to decide who would be next in line in the event that the president could not fulfill his term. He may have sought to inject excitement into his campaign or avoid offending any of the candidates by choosing from among them. Kampelman insisted that Stevenson had to know that allowing the convention to decide virtually assured Kefauver’s selection; he had the most organized and committed delegates, and he could help in border or southern states.¹⁵

Humphrey was stunned; he learned of the decision only as he watched the convention on television. He and his aides grew furious and then frenzied. Humphrey had visited delegations but had not thought it necessary to ask for binding commitments, and he soon learned that much of his support was tenuous. He had presumed that Florida senator George Smathers, despite his conservatism and anti–civil rights record, backed him. But Smathers immediately supported his close friend Kennedy, who made a quick decision to enter the race despite opposition from liberals like Eleanor Roosevelt, who said that he had failed to stand up to Joseph McCarthy. Reuther and other labor leaders now openly backed Kefauver, and even Short told Humphrey that the Minnesota delegation would vote for him only on the first ballot, after which about half of the delegates would go to Kefauver.¹⁶

Humphrey stood no chance. Kefauver garnered 466 votes on the first ballot, Kennedy got 294 votes from New England and the South, and Humphrey ran a poor fifth with 134 votes, trailing both Gore and New York City mayor Robert Wagner Jr. As the second ballot neared, Johnson tried to switch Texas’s support from Gore to Humphrey, but the delegates refused, and as the roll call proceeded, Johnson cast Texas’s 56 votes for the “fighting sailor,” with Kennedy soon surging to within 38 votes of victory. At that juncture, according to Humphrey, Kefauver pleaded with him for help from the Minnesota delegation, and he sent word to his state’s delegation to switch to Kefauver despite having committed earlier to Kennedy. Humphrey later said that he saved Kefauver’s nomination, although his breakthrough came late on the second ballot when Gore suddenly withdrew in his favor, allowing Tennessee, Missouri, and Oklahoma to switch to him and to spur his win over Kennedy, who dramatically moved to make the nomination unanimous before the voting ended.17

Humphrey was deeply hurt and angered. He believed that Stevenson had left him in the lurch, and he was cold and rejecting, but civil, when the presidential nominee called the next day, presumably to apologize. By contrast, when a few days later Humphrey told Kennedy that he had unpleasant dreams about his failure to deliver Minnesota, Kennedy said it was of no matter. Kennedy had garnered new national celebrity, the convention’s only “hero,” Stevenson said. Humphrey left Chicago feeling rejected and vowed never again to go to a convention so unprepared or to seek the vice presidency.¹⁸

Johnson sought to console him. He wrote Humphrey to acknowledge that he was having “a bad year and my heart goes out to you.” But, the Texan said, he had long recognized Humphrey as “one of those bold spirits that is tempered rather than weakened by adversity” and had the energy and ability to rise in the future. Perhaps more important, Johnson said, in the past few years he had seen the rise of a liberal philosophy “which holds that words are more important than deeds.” But as a liberal, “you have breasted that current and clung fast to the position that there is nothing incompatible with liberalism and achievement.” Thus, even though the vice presidential race may have been personally costly in relations with some colleagues, Johnson said it gave Humphrey a “unique status” in the country and meant that “you will be on the scene as a national leader long after the others have been forgotten.” It also “put you in my book on this special page I reserve for men of integrity, and men whom I am proud to call ‘friend,’ and nothing will ever affect your standing in my eyes.”¹⁹

Stevenson had little chance against Eisenhower, who remained highly popular despite a curtailed work schedule due to a heart attack in 1955 and illness in 1956. Eisenhower’s campaign benefited from relative peace and prosperity. His first postwar summit with Soviet leaders in July 1955 did not alter the Cold War standoff but produced “the spirit of Geneva.” The president, who told his brother Edgar in 1954 that no political party could survive if it did away with basic New Deal programs, agreed to legislation raising the minimum wage and expanding Social Security to include self-employed and salaried professionals, servicemen, domestic and religious workers, and farmworkers. He fostered the St. Lawrence Seaway Project that opened the Great Lakes to oceangoing vessels—a boon to Humphrey’s Minnesota—and the 1956 Federal Highway Act that delighted the oil, automobile, and construction industries by proposing to build 41,000 miles of interstate highways financed by taxes on gasoline, tires, and trucks. The administration did curtail parity payments, but the Soil Bank Program ameliorated farmers’ losses.20

Stevenson laid out his vision of a “New America” that promoted moderate new education, health care, and natural resources programs in a fast-paced campaign in which he hoped to contrast himself with Eisenhower, who made only scripted television appearances and let Nixon do the barnstorming. But Stevenson’s grueling pace soon made him appear tired and prone to error.²¹

Humphrey, vice chair of the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee, sought to rally his party. He traveled constantly and gave many speeches, especially in the Middle West, focusing on agricultural policy and blaming the Republicans for causing a 25 percent decline in farm income since 1952. In his native South Dakota, he persuaded young George McGovern, who had taught history at Dakota Wesleyan and was now executive secretary of the state Democratic Party, to run for a House seat. Humphrey also made numerous appearances in California. Finally, he sought to prepare the way for Stevenson’s major foreign policy proposal by releasing his own Disarmament subcommittee’s staff report stating that the United States needed to reach agreement with Moscow to halt hydrogen bomb tests as a first step to foster arms cuts.²²

Stevenson had raised the idea of a nuclear test ban and replacement of the draft with trained military men in a speech to the American Legion in Los Angeles. The test ban accorded with growing scientific concern about deadly atomic fallout, and many Pentagon planners viewed the draft as inefficient. But Eisenhower, a former five-star general, curtly rejected the proposals as endangering national security.²³

Following Humphrey’s subcommittee release, however, Stevenson declared on October 15 that the United States should not have to choose between “appeasement and massive retaliation” but instead had to develop a more professional military and promote arms control and a ban on nuclear tests before other nations began to produce atomic weapons. Eisenhower again cited his commander-in-chief role and long record of military commands and insisted that America’s need to negotiate from strength included the draft and nuclear bombs.24

Eisenhower’s campaign was further strengthened in late October by the Suez Crisis and brief Hungarian uprising. Although American officials disdained Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser, who saw himself as a spokesman for Pan-Arab nationalism, sponsored fedayeen (guerrilla) raids on Israel, and recognized Communist nations, the United States agreed to help finance the $1.3 billion Aswan Dam on the Nile to provide vital irrigation and electricity.²⁵

But after Nasser bought weapons from Czechoslovakia in 1955 and recognized the PRC in 1956, the United States canceled the Aswan loan. The Egyptian leader then nationalized the Anglo-French–owned Suez Canal to gain its tolls and rejected a US plan to have a “Users Association” run it. The British, French, and Israelis undertook military action in late October, with Israeli forces striking in the Sinai Peninsula and heading toward the canal, while the British called for a halt but bombed Egyptian air fields and landed paratroopers. The Egyptians blocked the canal and blew up a major oil pipeline to Europe. Eisenhower, fearing that a major conflict with the Muslim world would bring Soviet intervention in the Middle East, pressured the British to halt their joint military action, which ended on Election Day.²⁶

The weekend before the election, the Soviets sent 200,000 troops and four thousand tanks into Hungary to crush an uprising against its oppressive control there and then deposed recently appointed premier Imre Nagy, who sought to withdraw his country from the Warsaw Pact. The administration assailed the Soviet action, but Eisenhower rejected US intervention as infeasible, thus revealing that the Republican slogan of “liberation” was empty. But the Suez and Hungarian crises allowed the president to emerge as a man of peace and reassuring military leader in a dangerous era.²⁷

Eisenhower won in a landslide, capturing 57 percent of the popular vote, forty-one of forty-eight states, and gaining 39 percent of African American voters, nearly twice his 1952 showing. The Democrats retained control of Congress, adding 1 Senate seat for a 49–47 margin and gaining 2 House seats for a 234–201 edge. The latter included Humphrey’s new protégé, George McGovern, the first Democrat elected to national office from South Dakota since 1936. And despite Eisenhower’s winning 54 percent of Minnesota’s vote, Humphrey’s friend Freeman narrowly gained reelection as governor, McCarthy won overwhelming reelection to the House, and the DFL preserved its 5–4 margin over Republicans in the state delegation.²⁸

Immediately after the election, Humphrey called on the Democrats to commit to a renewed “liberalism” to replace the “centrist” views of the party’s congressional leadership. The Democrats could not win by running on economic “trouble” and were “digging their own graves” by failing to enact civil rights legislation. “We must design a new liberal program,” he argued.29

A group of liberals on the Democratic Party’s executive committee called for the formation of a twenty-member Democratic Advisory Council (DAC) to shape such a program. Humphrey joined the DAC, along with Stevenson, Truman, former secretary of state Dean Acheson, and Eleanor Roosevelt. But Johnson and Rayburn curtly rejected it as infringing on Congress’s affairs, and when that body reconvened in January 1957, the majority leader angrily told Humphrey, “You broke faith with me.” Humphrey denied this, telling Johnson that he could get more votes out of the Senate than anyone else. You are a “great, great leader, Lyndon. I was simply trying to make you an even better leader.”³⁰

Humphrey was fired up to fight for civil rights. “I am a liberal without apology,” he told his Senate colleagues in January 1957. “Insofar as I am sorry for anything it is not because I am a liberal but because I am not more liberal.” He also quoted the Belgian writer and Nobel laureate Maurice Maeterlinck, who said that a progressive on the road to the future would always find a thousand men seeking to preserve the past but that “even the most timid of us” were obligated not to add to nature’s “immense deadweight.”³¹

The Senate’s barrier to the future remained Rule XXII’s required two-thirds vote of all senators to end a filibuster. So on the first day of the new Congress, Humphrey, Douglas, and a group of liberals supported New Mexico Democrat Clinton Anderson’s resolution to permit this “new” Senate to set its own rules. But Johnson moved to table the motion, and he and Russell warned Senate newcomers that they would get poor committee assignments if they did not support Rule XXII. Humphrey sought to evade a vote by securing a parliamentary ruling from Nixon, the Senate’s presiding officer, but was told that this could be advisory only. Johnson’s motion passed, and the liberals had to take consolation in having done better than their loss in 1953. “We actually gained more votes than we had a right to expect,” Humphrey wrote to Reuther, “and surely more than the opposition had anticipated.”³²

The heating civil rights struggle could not be ignored. During the past two years, numerous African American groups had been pressing for school desegregation and voting rights and beginning to boycott segregated public transportation systems, while in March 1956 some 101 representatives and senators (but not Johnson, Kefauver, or Gore) signed a “Southern Manifesto” calling for repeal of the Brown decision. Growing numbers of southern White Citizens’ Councils openly, and often violently, sought to block integration and intimidate its proponents. Nonetheless, Eisenhower’s strong gains in the 1956 election among African Americans in northern cities, where he won about 35 percent of the vote in Harlem and Chicago’s South Side, heightened Republican interest in civil rights legislation. Humphrey argued forcefully that the Democrats should not allow “the Eisenhower Republicans to put their trade-mark” on a civil rights bill.33

Humphrey quickly introduced in January 1957 eleven civil rights measures and a twelfth omnibus bill to protect voting rights, end the poll tax, make lynching a federal crime, provide equal employment opportunity, and establish a civil rights division in the Justice Department. He listed the right to vote first, he said, because this “is the key to the rest of our human rights objectives.” But his measures were soon brushed aside to allow focus on the administration’s civil rights bill, crafted by Attorney General Herbert Brownell, that proposed to: (1) create a Civil Rights Commission to investigate violations and a civil rights division in the Justice Department; (2) authorize the attorney general to seek federal court injunctions against local officials and private parties who infringed a wide range of civil rights protected by the Fourteenth Amendment; and (3) permit federal judges to impose civil or criminal contempt penalties on persons who violated voting rights.³⁴

Humphrey was happy to have Republican support for civil rights, but southern senators remained adamantly opposed. Johnson, despite having been in the southern camp, recognized that the “civil rights controversy” could not be “called off,” and as majority leader he had to act, especially if he wished to preserve his presidential ambitions. The issue became more pressing in June 1957 after Republicans in the House voted with liberal Democrats to pass the Brownell bill. A similar Senate coalition used a procedural maneuver to skirt hostile James Eastland’s Judiciary Committee to put the measure on the docket, assuring that it would reach the floor.

Johnson and his biographer Robert Caro have claimed that the Texan enabled this breakthrough by secretly arranging for liberal-oriented western senators to pledge to vote only for a very moderate civil rights bill, with mollified southerners agreeing in turn to federal funding for a Hells Canyon Dam on the Snake River between Idaho and Oregon, which was never built. Historian Irwin F. Gellman has demonstrated, however, that no contemporary evidence supports this claim. Humphrey could not remember any details on the matter, and the House killed the Hells Canyon bill twenty days before the Senate would vote on the civil rights bill.³⁵

Regardless, Russell led the attack on the bill, focusing first on Part III, granting the attorney general injunctive authority to protect a wide range of civil rights, including accommodations in public places. He charged that the provision allowed the attorney general to bring a civil rights suit even without the affected party’s involvement and deftly noted that Part III incorporated an 1870 law, the so-called Force Act, which authorized the president to use federal troops to enforce judicial rulings. Russell claimed that this portended imposition by “bayonet” of a second and brutal Reconstruction era.

Eisenhower surprised his own staff by saying that he thought the bill limited the use of troops to voting rights issues, although he and Brownell knew that school desegregation was a burning issue. Further, after Johnson arranged a Russell-Eisenhower meeting, the president stated that he did not understand “certain phrases” in the bill—a remark he would long regret—and a week later he said that the attorney general should intervene in school desegregation cases only if local officials requested this, which seemed unlikely.36

Humphrey was appalled. “One day Ike is for the bill,” he wrote, “the next day he doesn’t know what is in it, and the third day he backs off of it. It is unbelievable.” Humphrey dismissed his colleagues’ complaints that the bill gave the attorney general too much power; he wished that they expressed the same sense of outrage over the denial of voting rights or jobs to African Americans. “All this fuss, all these histrionics,” he said, “all the diversions about race riots and troops use and all the rest is for the birds.”³⁷

Still, Humphrey was willing “to conciliate, to calm, and to heal.” He joined with Republican minority leader William Knowland to offer an amendment eliminating the bill’s reference to the Force Act that passed 90–0. However, the real issue, Humphrey suspected, was southerners’ determination to eliminate Part III completely because it implied federal support not just for voting rights but many civil rights, including school integration.³⁸

Fearing a filibuster, Johnson persuaded Senator Clinton Anderson of New Mexico, a civil rights proponent, to join with liberal Republican George Aiken of Vermont to propose an amendment to eliminate Part III. The majority leader also told Eisenhower that he had the votes to kill the bill if Part III remained, but this implied defeat of other administration legislation. The president, without a word to his attorney general, made what Brownell called a “political decision” to give way.³⁹

Humphrey fought the Anderson-Aiken amendment; he insisted that Part III merely extended court jurisdiction to allow individuals to sue for equitable relief for violation of their rights. Further, authorizing the attorney general to sue in their behalf was “not a new right,” as southerners argued, but an additional remedy to buttress existing statutes that protected individual rights. But the Senate voted to eliminate Part III.40

The legislation now protected only the right to vote, but Russell and his allies, including Johnson, demanded that Part IV, which provided for judges to impose civil or criminal contempt penalties on individuals who violated court orders pertaining to voting rights, be amended to guarantee the right to a jury trial. The jury trial proposal seemed reasonable; labor unions had long favored this to protect against judges who often held their leaders in contempt for defying injunctions against strikes.

Humphrey found the jury trial issue “terribly difficult.” His Populist background emphasized its importance, but he also knew that in the South it was almost impossible to get an all-white jury to convict a white person for having harmed an African American. Further, the oft-cited Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial applied to criminal prosecutions, not judicial contempt rulings and the power of courts to enforce them. He viewed the jury trial issue as a ruse to kill the bill.⁴¹

Humphrey was equally angry that so many southern senators attacked a bill that sought only to guarantee the right to vote. The bill was not about the right to vote only in the South, he said, but in the whole country, and the senators needed to decide whether this was one nation or forty-eight separate entities.⁴²

Humphrey worked quietly toward a compromise based on a proposal from Carl Auerbach, a friend and University of Wisconsin law professor, who distinguished between civil and criminal contempt: civil contempt did not require a jury trial because an individual could free him- or herself from a penalty by carrying out the court’s order, whereas criminal contempt required a jury trial because the offending person was subject to a lasting penalty. Auerbach’s proposal would allow northern senators to claim that the bill had procedures to enforce voting rights, and southern senators could tell their constituents that in criminal contempt cases they would be assured of a trial by southern (white) peers.⁴³

Humphrey invited Auerbach to Washington to put his proposal into legislative language but made clear that publicly he would oppose a jury trial to appease liberal groups. He consulted with Johnson, who enlisted help from various New Dealers as well as Acheson and his colleagues at the prominent Washington law firm of Covington and Burling. This group enlisted Kefauver and Senator Joseph C. O’Mahoney, a senior, independent liberal from Wyoming and proponent of a jury trial in criminal contempt cases. The two senators proposed an amendment that differentiated between civil and criminal contempt and assured a jury trial in the latter case.

Recently elected senator Frank Church of Idaho offered a key addendum: repeal of the section of the US Code that barred citizens from federal juries who did not meet their state’s requirements for jury service (the usual southern state requirement of being registered to vote kept most African Americans off federal juries). Church proposed instead to extend the right to federal jury duty to any citizen who was over age twenty-one and competent. Thus liberals could claim that the civil rights bill would not only reinforce the right to vote but create a “new civil right,” allowing African Americans to serve on juries.44

Humphrey and liberals like Douglas still opposed the jury trial compromise because southern registrars would be able to deny African Americans their voting rights and afterward have generally all-white juries find them innocent of criminal contempt. Eisenhower and Republican leaders also opposed the jury trial proviso but worried that Democrats would pass a weak civil rights bill and take credit for it in the 1958 elections. Organized labor, however, continued to favor the jury trial amendment, and numerous northern Democrats, including Kennedy, now saw the amendment as a compromise that would at least avert a filibuster, as did many southerners who thought that the jury trial proviso would allow them to accept a mild civil rights bill in lieu of fighting against a stricter measure later on.⁴⁵

Johnson put the amendment to a vote on August 1, stating that it established “a new civil right for all citizens—the right to a jury trial in all criminal contempt cases,” and it quickly passed. Humphrey became a leading advocate for the full bill, placing into the Congressional Record a summary of the legislation he had introduced in January under the title “Civil Rights: An Idea Whose Time Has Come.”⁴⁶

Humphrey insisted that America’s “greatest national weakness” was the “gap between our pretensions and our performance” in civil rights. He pleaded with his colleagues not to bury the bill despite opposition from major liberal organizations, and insisted to NAACP head Roy Wilkins, “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in politics, it’s never to turn your back on a crumb.” Wilkins called a leadership conference of sixteen major organizations, including the ADA, and as the Senate prepared to vote on August 7, they proffered their endorsement, which Humphrey immediately put before his colleagues. The bill passed 72–18, with 5 southern yea votes coming from Johnson and Ralph Yarborough of Texas and Gore, Kefauver, and Smathers.⁴⁷

Humphrey and others lobbied successfully to have an informal committee reconcile the Senate and House bills. He feared Republicans would kill the bill over the jury trial amendment despite NAACP support for it. As House minority leader Joseph Martin of Massachusetts said, the NAACP did not speak for all African Americans; Humphrey rejoined that it spoke for more of them than any other group, and he and the NAACP persisted that the Senate bill was better than no bill.48

Democratic negotiators reached a compromise on the jury trial amendment: it would apply only when criminal contempt penalties exceeded three hundred dollars or forty-five days in jail. The House readily passed the reconciled bill, and only Senator Thurmond waged a twenty-four-hour filibuster—disdained by southern colleagues as grandstanding—before he gave way to fatigue. The Senate approved the final bill, and Eisenhower, despite viewing it as insufficient, signed it into law.⁴⁹

The 1957 legislation marked passage of the first civil rights act in eighty-two years and made it illegal for anyone to interfere with voting rights in federal elections, permitted the attorney general to take preventive action, created a Civil Rights Commission (for three years, but later made permanent) to investigate the issue, and raised the Justice Department’s civil rights section to a full division. The law recognized the need to protect voting rights at the national level, although it was greatly weakened by excising of Part III—which would call for the attorney general to intervene in a wide range of civil rights matters—and by the addition of the jury trial amendment. As Humphrey said to Wilkins, the bill was a “crumb,” while Douglas, who reluctantly voted for it, likened it to “a soup made from the shadow of a crow which had starved to death.”⁵⁰

The bill was central to Humphrey’s core beliefs, however, and one for which he had struggled for nearly a decade. He wrote constituents that he voted for it because he was a “realist,” and this was the best bill he could get. As civil rights chronicler Robert Mann has stated, the legislation was a harbinger of things to come, including Martin Luther King’s immediate enlistment of nearly one hundred ministers in his Southern Christian Leadership Conference to begin voter registration drives.⁵¹

Humphrey would continue to work tirelessly at legislation and scoop up every “crumb.” He had accepted “less than I had hoped for,” he wrote a friend, but the bill represented a “singular advance.” Further, “I did not yield on principle,” he told his longtime DFL compatriot Eugenie Anderson. “I fought the good fight,” and surely made an impression on other senators. In fact, conservative John Stennis of Mississippi told him that he had made the “best and most powerful five minute speech by way of summary and challenge to the jury trial amendment that he had ever heard”—and he hoped that now Humphrey would devote his energies to other major issues. But in Humphrey’s view, “This is not the end of civil rights legislation. It is only the beginning.”52

Just as Eisenhower signed the bill, the nation confronted a major civil rights crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas, where the city’s school board, in response to a federal judge’s court order, had selected nine African American students to begin integration of the all-white Central High School. Democratic Governor Orval Faubus, seeking segregationist support for his reelection in 1958, stationed three hundred National Guardsmen outside the school to deny entry to the black students, although he claimed he wished to avert violence. When school opened on September 2, the troops blocked the students’ entry and again after the federal judge reiterated his order, which led him to request Attorney General Brownell’s intervention.⁵³

Eisenhower thought that the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown was “wrong,” and he was unwilling to press for integration. But he believed in the necessity of upholding federal court rulings and persuaded Faubus during a meeting in mid-September to change the National Guard’s orders from preventing the African American students’ entry to preserving the peace. However, he mistakenly took the governor’s conceding that the Supreme Court’s ruling was the “law of the land” to mean that he would respect the court order.⁵⁴

Humphrey joined with other liberal Democrats to express “disappointment” at Eisenhower’s failure to lead and said anything less than admission of the students to the high school would be a defeat for law and order and “the Constitution itself.” He thought it “almost unbelievable” that Eisenhower would not act while segregationists defied the Supreme Court’s ruling, and he called on the president to go to Little Rock and “personally take those colored children by the hand and lead them into the school.”⁵⁵

Faubus removed the troops following a federal court order on September 20. The “Little Rock Nine” entered the school under police escort on September 23, but threats from an armed and violent mob forced them to leave under escort. Eisenhower now determined that he could not permit “mob rule” to override a federal court decision, and the next day he sent in one thousand paratroopers and federalized the Arkansas National Guard. The students reentered the school and remained there all year.

Eisenhower’s use of troops in the South to enforce court orders—the first time this had occurred since Reconstruction—led to increasingly vitriolic resistance to integration by many southern leaders, who turned demagogic and alleged that the armed forces were being used to “mix the races” and were behaving like “Hitler’s storm troopers,” charges the president strongly denied.56

Humphrey was convinced, however, that Eisenhower’s failure to lead had allowed the conflict to escalate and the Soviets to “[make] hay while the sun shines.” He was alarmed by what he saw as growing tyranny in the South that silenced those who supported integration, whose views, he worried, were also hardening. He feared a domestic “cold war” that would diminish respect for the law and the process of persuasion. If whites, blacks, and the federal government did not find “common ground,” the white South would ultimately be won over “not by persuasion but by force.”⁵⁷

Thus, at the start of 1958, Humphrey immediately introduced legislation to strengthen the 1957 Civil Rights Act by making the Civil Rights Commission permanent, enacting an FEPC and a modified version of the previously excised Title III that allowed the attorney general broad discretion to intervene in civil rights matters, and increasing the number of FBI personnel trained to investigate in civil rights cases. But these measures remained buried in committees, and an effort to amend Rule XXII also failed.⁵⁸

Republican conservatives William Jenner of Indiana and John Marshall Butler of Maryland pushed legislation to reverse prior Supreme Court rulings bearing on admission to state bar associations and contempt of Congress rulings, which civil rights advocates feared would allow southern bar associations to disbar lawyers who accepted civil rights cases and weaken the Court’s independence. Johnson seemed willing to let conservatives voice opinions and have their bill come to a vote in August 1958, confident that it would lose. But Humphrey and Douglas and several other liberal senators had to argue vigorously that the measure would impede desegregation and managed to table the bill by only a narrow 49–41 vote.⁵⁹

This emboldened Douglas, with Humphrey’s support, to introduce a measure affirming the Senate’s “full support and approval” of the Supreme Court’s ruling that racial segregation in schools and on public transportation was unlawful. But Johnson, fearful of southerners’ wrath, angrily beat this back by threatening to tie it to various “anti-subversive” measures that liberals opposed. Senate conservatives, however, now pressed their second measure (HR 3), which passed in the House in July and proposed that no court could rule that a federal statute preempted state law unless Congress had specified this or there was a “direct and positive conflict” between federal and state law.⁶⁰

Humphrey and Senator Thomas Hennings of Missouri, chair of the Civil Rights subcommittee, assured Johnson that they had the votes to defeat the bill. But Senate conservatives attached it as an amendment to another measure and shocked liberals by defeating their motion to table it. Neither Humphrey and his allies nor Johnson seemed able to forestall a favorable vote, but they were saved, ironically, by Russell, who grasped that the proposed new law would create havoc regarding federal legislation and federal authority. The Georgian prodded Johnson to exercise his majority leader’s prerogative to call for adjournment to gain time to rally opposition to the bill.61

Johnson berated Humphrey in the Senate chamber: “I thought you had them beat. You boys screwed up. I don’t know what you did wrong. You screwed up. You told me wrong.” The majority leader continued his verbal assault in his office, having invited in New York Times’s Supreme Court reporter Anthony Lewis and the director of the Democrats’ policy committee, George Reedy. Johnson implored Humphrey to stop inciting Senate conservatives by attacking the filibuster or promoting a civil rights bill and not to worry that liberals would attack him for having abandoned his principles.

Humphrey did not reply to Johnson, whose purpose may have been to impress his listeners that he was on the right side of the issues and gain credit for having defeated HR 3. Johnson soon prevailed on numerous friendly conservative Republicans and Democrats who favored the bill to vote instead to recommit it to the Judiciary Committee, which they did by a razor-thin 41–40 margin in August. Humphrey told Johnson he was “a great American” and “FDR would have been proud of you,” while Lewis soon wrote of his great mastery of the legislative process but said nothing about his tirade at Humphrey.⁶²

Congress adjourned, with elections looming. Despite Eisenhower’s two sweeping victories, the Democrats had held a one- or two-vote majority in the Senate and a larger lead in the House since 1954. Their electoral prospects now improved due to the sharp 1957–58 recession that brought 7.5 percent unemployment, while unions were angry that seventeen states (mainly in the South) had passed so-called right-to-work laws authorized under the hated Taft-Hartley Act, and farmers were distressed at declining prices for their goods and reduced parity payments. Further, the Soviet Union’s launching of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, in October 1957 sharply undermined Americans’ belief in their scientific superiority, and the next month the commission chaired by H. Rowan Gaither Jr., head of the Ford Foundation, reported that Moscow was ahead of the United States in missile development and that American defenses were too weak to protect against a devastating Soviet ICBM first strike.⁶³

The administration was also plagued by House charges that the president’s chief of staff, Sherman Adams, had improperly accepted gifts from a friendly New Hampshire manufacturer in exchange for helping him deal with the Federal Trade Commission. All of this caused Eisenhower’s popularity to decline, and as usual, he did little to aid his party in the elections except to attack the Democrats, especially Humphrey, as “Gloomdogglers.”64

In November 1958, the Democrats gained 14 Senate seats to raise their slim margin to 65–35 and added 48 House seats to increase their lead to 282–154, the greatest Democratic congressional margins since the New Deal era. Humphrey was quick to congratulate Johnson: “The election is a great victory for you, the Democratic Party &, I believe, the country. Responsible performance by the Democrats in Congress … under your leadership has paid off.”⁶⁵

Humphrey personally benefitted from the election. Initially he supported Eugenie Anderson, his longtime DFL ally and former ambassador to Denmark, for his party’s Senate nomination. But he also encouraged McCarthy, who had grown restless after a decade in the House, to “give it all you got” and enter the Senate race. McCarthy defeated Anderson in a hard-fought primary and then toppled two-term incumbent Republican Edward Thye. Humphrey campaigned for McCarthy, loaned him staff, and facilitated generous funding from the Senate Democratic Campaign Finance Committee. McCarthy also profited from strong union support and an unusually high statewide DFL turnout. Governor Freeman easily won reelection.⁶⁶

McCarthy’s win marked the first time in fifty-seven years that Minnesota Democrats controlled the seat McCarthy won, giving Humphrey a new home-state ally. Even more important, as his political aide William Connell would say, the Senate had been transformed into “a liberal institution” that was more issues-oriented than before and less willing to compromise on principle. Most significantly, many senators now turned to Humphrey as well as to Johnson. The two men may not have become “equal partners,” but Humphrey had become more important than ever to the majority leader.⁶⁷

At the same time, Humphrey was also building a new, permanent home for his family. During the summers of 1952 and 1953, he had rented the vacation house owned by Ray Ewald, the wealthy Minneapolis dairyman who had befriended him during his mayoral tenure. The Humphrey family was so content in Ewald’s house in Waverly, a small town with a large lake, thirty-five miles west of Minneapolis, that the senator purchased two adjacent lakeside lots from his friend for the “giveaway” price of two hundred dollars. In 1957 Humphrey, always short of funds, scraped together enough money, aided by a Waverly bank mortgage and loans from Minneapolis friends and supporters, to build an attractive one-story home modeled from plans for Lyndon Johnson’s Texas ranch guesthouse. The new home included oak, cherry, walnut, and butternut wood-paneled rooms, a central fireplace that divided a modern kitchen from a big, beamed-ceiling living room with a large picture window facing south to the lake, a library, and four bedrooms, including a loft dormitory-style room. The Humphrey family also purchased a fourteen-foot motorboat, with the children working off the cost by doing chores instead of hiring household help.68

The financial assistance wealthy friends provided, in an era when ties between politicians and businessmen were not scrutinized, was indicative of Humphrey’s longer-term dependence on such people. His three sons, Hubert III, Robert, and Douglas, attended Shattuck Military Academy in Faribault, Minnesota, courtesy of scholarships provided to the school by Minneapolis-born William Benton, who had made a fortune in advertising before becoming Humphrey’s Senate colleague from Connecticut during 1950–52. Benton was a Shattuck alumnus and former board member. Eventually, Ewald also helped.

Later, when Humphrey became vice president, he would turn over his modest stock holdings to Dwayne Andreas, the multimillionaire agribusinessman who transformed the Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM) Company into a multinational powerhouse, to be put into a blind trust. Andreas commingled Humphrey’s funds with his own in his mutual income fund that invested heavily in ADM stock. Andreas never mentioned this arrangement to Humphrey, who never inquired. By the time of his death in 1978, Humphrey’s share of the mutual income fund was about half a million dollars, a significant sum in that era, especially after he had withdrawn several hundreds of thousands of dollars to establish trust funds for his children.

Humphrey had little interest in wealth, however, although he knew that to support his family comfortably he needed more money than he earned from his Senate salary of $22,500 and the $30,000 per year he averaged in speaking engagements, the highest in the Senate, although that amount was sharply reduced after he decided to seek the presidency. Humphrey felt disadvantaged because his major Democratic allies and rivals for leadership, such as Johnson, who grew wealthy from Texas dealings, and Kennedy, whose father was a multimillionaire, were able to spend significant sums for personal and political undertakings. As 1958 drew to a close, however, Humphrey’s eye was not on money but on travel abroad to establish himself as a foreign policy expert and the Democrats’ 1960 presidential nominee.⁶⁹