NEW MILEAGE FOR OLD PROMISES
New Mileage for Old Promises FOUR MONTHS ago, in our May issue, we ventured the doleful prediction that the second half of this first session of the 85th Congress would be as barren of achievement...
...The ingredients of disaster were there for all to see—a well-intentioned but weak and fumbling President and a bi-partisan coalition of conservatives ruling Congress in defiance of the pledges both parties had made when they went before the country in the fall of 1956...
...But the following morning at his news conference, in responding to a question, thei President first referred to his state...
...He had promised to make a statement but didn't...
...it provided enforcement machinery for the whole range of civil rights...
...President Eisenhower's behavior has been even worse than we feared...
...In fact, he was playing golf at the Burning Tree Club during the afternoon before the crucial vote on the jury trial amendment...
...Several Senators and Representatives wrote reprovingly of our "defeatist attitude," suggesting we shed our impatience and give Congress a chance...
...The bill died by a vote of 208 to 203, with 111 Republicans and 97 Democrats, the latter mostly Southerners, voting against, and 126 Democrats and 77 Republicans voting for...
...The blame rests on a group of Northern and Western Democratic liberals and Republican moderates who surrendered in the face of skillful strategy by Southern Senators...
...It is a lot easier to like Ike than to learn what it is that Ike likes...
...Still, there is no evidence that he used his enormous influence in any way to line up Republican support in the final hours of the struggle...
...A telephone line was kept open to the White House through the final vote for a call that might swing wavering Republicans, but no call came...
...The man means well...
...On May 23 the Chief Executive told Representative Samuel McConnell, Pennsylvania Republican, that the bill had his "full support...
...The school construction bill has been defeated, civil rights legislation emasculated, social security proposals ignored, health and housing measures tippled, immigration reform untouched, and extension of the Fair Labor Standards Act paralyzed...
...I am expressing it for him," was all the answer there was...
...He cancelled a press conference to avoid being drawn into a discussion of the legislation...
...Later the President seemed to stiffen, but he collapsed again the day the House faced the decisive vote...
...He wants to do what is right and decent, but he doesn't have the faintest idea what that might be...
...It was not difficult in May to express so sad an estimate of things to come...
...When the Senate stripped that provision from the measure, it proclaimed to the South, in effect, that it had no interest in supporting the United States Supreme Court's his-toric decisions on public school de-segregation, or any other civil rights, except the right to vote, which is, covered in Part IV...
...But a month later, June 26, he told another Republican, Representative Peter Frelinghuysen, New Jersey, that he declined to "pass judgment on all the details...
...But when he is on his own, at his news conferences, the President often embarks on rambling soliloquies that reveal a depressing lack of awareness of the position he has taken in a state paper, a disturbing absence of understanding of the contents of legislation he is supposed to be championing as Administration "musts," and an almost complete unwillingness to stand up and fight for the measures he thought he wanted Congress to enact...
...he is committed to "modern Republicanism" on domestic issues, but turns conservative when the going gets tough...
...They Hfc vital portions of the measure Hp passage the President had de-pded in his State of the Union jfjge early in the year, and had Irpported in his statement of the night before...
...New Mileage for Old Promises FOUR MONTHS ago, in our May issue, we ventured the doleful prediction that the second half of this first session of the 85th Congress would be as barren of achievement as the bankrupt first half...
...Eisenhower often expresses a sensible, statesmanlike point of view, however much restless progressives might find them too tightly anchored to the middle of the road to suit their concept of the job that needs doing...
...The circumstances surrounding the dismal defeat of the school construction bill tell the story as graphically as any...
...This year a measure appropriating $300,000,000 a year for each of the next five years—the funds to be distributed on a basis that compromised Republican and Democratic differences—reached the House of Representatives in late July...
...Part II would authorize the President to appoint an additional assistant attorney general in the Justice Department to head a new Civil Rights Division...
...Part IV would authorize the Attorney General to seek court injunction against actual or threatened interference with any citizen's right to vote, with violators subject to fine or imprisonment for contempt of court...
...Both parties are pledged to provide federal funds for the building of urgently needed public schools...
...The glittering promises both parties made in last year's election campaign have been neatly filed away...
...This was an Administration measure, prepared by Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr., at the President's request more than a year and a half before, but it took only a few moments of Presidential fumbling at a news conference to wreck the measure's chances of passage in its original form...
...He stood pat on Part IV, insisting that a jury trial amendment for cases of criminal contempt would impair the enforcement of the right to vote and weaken the judici-jiry's long established power to enforce its decisions...
...Part III would authorize the Attorney General, by request or at his own initiative, to seek court injunctions against actual or threatened infringement of any person's exercise of any civil right, including the right to attend an integrated school...
...ment of the night before and then proceeded to back away from full support of both the statement and the billl He said at his news conference that he didn't "quite understand" some phases of the bill, that he needed clarification from the Attorney Gen-eral, that he didn't really favor nels power to attack school segregation, and that he saw no reason to gree the Attorney General authority to start civil rights actions for persons not requesting them...
...Clearly the measure was not precisely the bill sought by the President, but just as clearly it represented a healthy start down the right road...
...The latter artfully succeeded in planting the fallacious belief that the original bill took away an existing right to trial by jury in cases of criminal contempt and thus "deprived some citizens of one precious right in the process of securing another for other citizens...
...It was in this form that the House passed the measure by overwhelming majorities both in 1956 and 1957...
...Representative George McGovern, South Dakota Democrat, was doubtless speaking for a great many of his frustrated colleagues in both parties when he summarized: "Ike himself likes everyone so well that he embraces with equal good humor all possible sides of issues on which there are sides to embrace...
...During the last campaign President Eisenhower spoke frequently of "the precious year" that had been lost through Congressional failure to enact legislation during the 84th Congress...
...But its doom was sealed by President Eisenhower's extraordinary equivocation when the fight was on...
...Eisenhower had expressed that feeling...
...Part I would create, for two years, a bi-partisan Commission on Civil Rights armed with subpena powers to survey violations of civil rights and report back to Congress with recommendations for remedial legislation...
...Another month later, July 23, when battle-lines were forming for the final showdown, his "full support" had degenerated to the point where he was "not entirely satisfied" with the measure but would accept it...
...When a Presidential press aide told reporters next day that the Chief Executive expressed "great disappointment," a reporter asked in what way Mr...
...Part III was killed by a vote of 52 to 38, with 34 Democrats and 18 Republicans voting for deletion while 25 Republicans and 13 Democrats voted against deletion...
...It has been totally unsuccessful...
...On the night the bill became the pending business before the Senate, Mr...
...The sorry spectacle in the Senate over civil rights, the equally depressing performance in the House over the school construction bill, and the President's vacillating conduct in both cases was characteristic of one of the most futile Congressional sessions in recent history...
...He covets peace, but embraces John Foster Dulles on his periodic pilgrimages to the brink of war...
...Part III was the heart of the bill...
...Eisenhower issued a formal statement, and a strong one, in behalf of the entire measure...
...He has been asked about the bill at nine of his seventeen news conferences this year and he hasn't been specific once...
...Four months later, with Congress about to adjourn as this is written, the record is as wretched as we feared...
...They will be as good as new and ready for more campaign mileage when the Congressional elections roll around next year...
...But these provisions were part of the original bill published by the House at the Jnp of the Administration...
...But the Presdient was specific on one provision...
...Congress and the country were soon to be exposed to another and more shocking exhibition of Presidential ineptitude and vacillation in the strange struggle over civil rights legislation...
...It is not the President who bears direct responsibility for the jury trial amendment, which would make conviction for criminal contempt all but impossible in the South...
...The President's curious behavior led the usually deadpan Associated press to observe: "Trying to pin President Eisenhower down at his news conference—on precisely what he wants and doesn't want in his Administration's civil rights bill—is not only tough...
...As it came from the Justice Department bearing the imprint of the Eisenhower Administration the legislation contained four sections, the first two of which provoked little controversy...
...But the Senate tore tremendous holes in the bill by knocking out Part III altogether and by attaching an amendment to Part IV which would require a judge to call in a jury in cases where criminal contempt is involved...
...A switch of three votes would have saved the measure, and there was no one in the House, Republican or Democrat, who didn't believe that a word from the White House would have reversed the decision and resulted in passage of the bill...
...In his messages to Congress and in the formal public statements that bear his signature, Mr...
Vol. 21 • September 1957 • No. 9
