THE RACE TO CONTROL THE STATES

...It is this concept of voting equality, with its vast power to reshape our society in more liberal form, that the Old Establishment seeks to destroy at all costs...

...The membership of the nationwide Council of State Governments reads like a roll call of the power structure of the state legislatures...

...Celler was enraged at this move, but "Judge" Smith calmly ignored his protestations, and the Tuck bill to evict Federal courts from the reapportionment field breezed through the House by a vote of 218 to 175...

...Members of the newly-organized National Commission on Constitutional Government, this contingent included such men as Thomas Graham, Speaker of the Missouri House...

...The stakes in this battle are high— control of state and county governments—and it is being waged on two fronts, one in the Congress and one in the states...

...Over on the other side of the Capitol, liberal Senators led by Paul Douglas of Illinois frustrated the ruralists and Dixiecrats by conducting a "baby filibuster" against a proposal of Republican Minority Leader Everett Dirksen to prevent Federal courts from ordering any legislative redistricting until January, 1966...

...Courts in Wisconsin and Michigan have ruled that county boards of supervisors must meet the "one man, one vote" criterion...

...This Congressional setback did not abate the determination of the rural forces...

...Various state Chambers of Commerce have donated funds to the NCCG war chest...

...Although Judiciary Committee Chairman Celler opposed the Tuck and McCulloch bills and tried to drag the hearings out to the end of the session, Representative Tuck executed an end-play around Celler by having his Virginia cohort, Rules Committee Chairman Howard W. Smith, lift his bill from the Judiciary Committee and send it straight to the House floor...

...With the aid and blessing of the Council of State Governments, and its executive director, Brevard Crihfield, the 1962 General Assembly launched the program to win legislative approval for the notorious "disunity amendments...

...A preliminary nose-count in Congress by the National Committee for Fair Representation supports the forecast of Brevard Crihfield of the Council of State Governments: "It's going to be tight...

...In their battle against fair apportionment, the ruralists have forged an effective coalition of powerful allies...

...But the Supreme Court's decision in Reynolds v. Sims—if not wiped out by one of the proposed amendments to the Federal Constitution—threatens to reduce or end rural dominance of state senates...

...Remember," Crihfield says, "there are forty-seven states in regular session this year...

...The resolution approved by these legislatures with astounding speed, and with the public—and sometimes the press—scarcely aware of what had happened, requests Congress to call a convention to amend the Constitution...

...The first step, says Crihfield, is to secure passage by as many states as possible of this new resolution for a Constitutional Convention...

...Leading the agrarian forces in Congress is William Tuck of southern Virginia...

...Although the Chicago meeting was firmly in the hands of a coalition of Northern ruralists and Dixie segregationists, two state legislators who supported the Supreme Court's decisions tried futilely to put the General Assembly on record as favoring the "one man, one vote" principle...

...Commission on UNESCO, complained later that "many states, had they been adequately represented, would have voted for our resolution...

...Last December's conclave was reminiscent of the one held two years earlier, which was determined to block the surge toward reapportionment by nullifying the Baker v. Can decision handed down by the Supreme Court in March, 1962...

...It has been adopted by sixteen state legislatures...

...Then, as now, a coalition of ruralists and Dixiecrats was backed by powerful business interests...

...During 1964 alone, legislatures reapportioned themselves in ten states, and the courts redistricted legislatures in four others...

...But instead, the rural-dominated states had packed the meeting...

...Crihfield sees "another plate of worms" behind the Reynolds decision, as its impact reaches down to the 100,000 smaller units of government across the country...

...Typical of the reaction was the cry of Representative William Jennings Bryan Dorn, a South Carolina Democrat, that the Reynolds decision meant "a long step toward Federal dictatorship by the Supreme Court...

...Within a period of days, a new coalition of powerful forces was organizing a rural counterrevolution to block and overturn the "one man, one vote" principle enunciated by the Court...

...Since state senates also hold the power to approve or disapprove appointments to state regulatory bodies, wherever ruralists dominate state senates they can tip the balance toward the appointment of reactionaries who favor the big utilities and the major manufacturing interests...

...the bulls-eye is the Reynolds v. Sims decision June 15, 1964, in which the Court ruled that the Constitution requires that "the seats in both houses of a bicameral state legislature must be apportioned on a population basis...

...Plans for the last-ditch assault were approved last December, at meetings in Chicago of the Council of State Governments and the General Assembly of the States...

...The Reynolds decision and companion rulings, and the fact that seventy per cent of all Americans now live in urban areas, should have sounded the death-knell for rural domination of the states...

...The author of the ABA resolution was Jonathan C. Gibson, chairman of the ABA's Jurisprudence Committee, an old hand in the anti-union right-to-work campaign and the legal vice-president of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad...

...By early March, 1965, seventeen states had approved identical versions, and California's legislature adopted a variation...

...Will the rural strategy succeed...

...If Congress takes the initiative, it will require a two-thirds vote in each house to send the Dirksen amendment, or some version of it, to the states for ratification...

...The Dirksen bill, Senate Joint Resolution 2, would allow apportionment of one house of a legislature on the basis of "factors other than population," if the state's voters approve in a referendum...

...It is these economic groups that back the ruralists in preserving the legislative status quo...

...Eight days after the Reynolds decision, five voters in Grand Rapids, Michigan filed a suit to reapportion the Kent County Board of Supervisors...

...The Michigan court, noting that a supervisor from the township of Plainfield represented only 925 voters, while it took 8,429 people from Grand Rapids to merit the same representation, ordered reapportionment...

...The immediate ancestor of the present amendment proposal on apportionment now being rushed through legislatures, it is also the forebear of the Dirksen amendment...

...Herbert Johnson, an Atlanta lawyer who led the floor fight against the resolution, says that the real force behind it was John C. Satterfield, the Yazoo City, Mississippi, lawyer who directed the lobbying drive last year against the civil rights bill...

...When the Dirksen resolution—with the names of every Republican Senator but one, and eight Democrats, as co-sponsors—was presented for hearings before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee weighted with a ruralist majority, it was endorsed by a parade of Senators and conservative lobbyists...

...The Dirksen amendment may be considered the 'stalking horse' of those who wish to preserve the rotten borough system in the state legislatures of the United States," said Senator Douglas...

...In California, where legislators elected by 10.7 per cent of the population control the state senate, a voter in a small county in the Sierras wields 422 times the elective power of his Los Angeles brother...

...Thus, the eight people living in New Hampshire's smallest house district cast ballots worth 222 times as much as those in the largest district...

...All but a handful of our state constitutions are written to perpetuate rural control of state legislative bodies, usually by guarantees that in at least one house of the legislature, each county or township shall be represented, regardless of population...

...But the ruralists, whose iron grip on the state legislatures has been loosened by the Supreme Court, still preach the same fear of the cities that the Nineteenth Century New Yorker did...

...Unless labor makes a major fight on this, we're dead," said one representative from Capitol Hill...

...Those legislators representing trees and acres, rather than a proper number of voters, too often are—or become—the voices and votes of reaction on behalf of powerful private interests...

...In Baker v. Can the Supreme Court had ruled that the Federal judiciary could enter the field of legislative apportionment and that when legislatures failed to correct serious malapportionment, the courts could make such corrections themselves...

...By last year the impact of that decision had been felt across the land...

...As president of the NCCG, the delegates to the Lincoln meeting elected Hal Bridenbaugh, a seventy-three-year-old Nebraska state senator...

...The strategy of the rural bloc has been outlined by Crihfield, the seasoned executive head of the Council of State Governments...

...The preservation of these special interests, along with the rural fear of the ethnic minorities in the cities, and the Southern fear of a larger Negro vote, spur the rural counter-revolution...

...Satterfield, an attorney for former Mississippi governor Ross Barnett, was the secretary of the Coordinating Committee for Fundamental American Freedoms which poured $120,000 of Mississippi tax money into the fight against the civil rights bill...

...Petersburg, Florida, were among the few who denounced it...

...The race between the courts forcing reapportionment, and the states striving to fend it off, could go down to the wire...

...The new version which has replaced the old one under the strategy approved by the 1964 General Assembly and the coalition, has surpassed its predecessor in winning legislative approvals...

...Beware the city," is their battle cry as they fight to hold back the urban revolution...

...Bridenbaugh says bluntly that its guiding principle is "We fear urban domination...

...Last fall he retired from the legislature to devote full time to the NCCG effort...

...But Senators Douglas, William Proxmire, Gay-lord Nelson, Joseph Clark, and other liberals succeeded in watering down the Dirksen proposal to the degree that when adopted by the Senate it was unacceptable to a House-Senate conference...

...The Court's decision was greeted by a collective howl of protest from rural interests in both the states and the Congress...

...Most of these delegates were also active in the Council of State Governments and in the General Assembly of the States, a biennial conclave of delegates sent by state legislatures at which the Federal government is ritually roasted...

...Crihfield and Bridenbaugh think so...

...Last February, the coalition enlisted its most prestigious ally when the House of Delegates of the American Bar Association voted in New Orleans to support the Dirksen amendment...

...It requires that thirty-four states, two-thirds of the total, must pass the resolution before Congress is compelled to call a convention...

...In its Reynolds v. Sims decision, the Supreme Court held that Alabama's failure to reapportion its legislature for more than sixty years had produced "a minority stranglehold" on that body...

...One of the amendments launched at the 1962 meeting would change the Constitution to bar the Supreme Court from any jurisdiction over apportionment...

...former Florida House Speaker William V. Chappell, Jr...

...A massive rural counter-revolution is being waged today...

...But the coalition is convinced that if twenty-five to thirty states approve it, Congress will act on its own accord in behalf of ruralists to avoid a convention, which many Congressmen fear would open a Pandora's box of Constitution-gutting...

...Irate rural Congressmen were not long in joining the bandwagon...

...Satterfield is a member of Gibson's ABA committee and worked behind the scenes in New Orleans to secure the 115 to 94 vote for the resolution...

...The National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S...

...Legislators are elected by voters," said Chief Justice Warren in the Reynolds decision, "not [by] farms or cities or economic interests...

...Organized resistance to the rural coalition has only recently come to the surface...

...Thus spoke a defender of agrarian virtue at New York state's constitutional convention in 1894, which took heed and drafted an apportionment plan firmly establishing rural domination of the state legislature..Seven decades later, a vast migration has depopulated our rural areas and crowded millions of people into our cities and suburbs...

...A Democratic member of both the House Judiciary and Un-American Activities Committees, Tuck led a maneuver which forced Judiciary Committee chairman Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn to hold hearings last July on the more than seventy anti-reapportion-ment bills hastily drafted by rural Congressmen...

...The stakes in the battle over reapportionment are tremendous...

...Voters in the cities and suburbs complain that state legislators ignore their growing needs for better schools, health and welfare facilities, and other public services, and refuse to appropriate enough money to stem the growing deterioration of urban communities...

...Four days after the Supreme Court decisions, the Southern Conference of the Council of State Governments met in Sarasota, Florida and issued a statement that "these decisions strike at the very heart of representative government...

...A loosely-organized group, the NCFR is made up of labor unions, church groups, the NAACP, and Americans for Democratic Action...

...A race is now on to amend the Constitution, as the ruralists fight to stave off the rapid pace of court-ordered reapportionment...

...The Eighty-eighth Congress adjourned without passing any reapportionment legislation...

...With the Federal courts pressing for reapportionment and posing an imminent threat to their bastions of power, the ruralists decided to band together and coordinate their opposition to redistricting...

...If the Reynolds v. Sims "one man, one vote" decision withstands the current assault on it, America's political map will be completely redrawn, with the political balance of power decisively shifting to the ever more populous cities and suburbs...

...In Chicago, rural leaders mapped out a two-pronged strategy to enact a constitutional amendment that would keep the Supreme Court's "one man, one vote" principle from working against rural control of state senates...

...It looks like Satterfield wrote it," said Johnson...

...Schaffer, a Democrat and a member of the U.S...

...In early 1964, forty-nine legislators from various states met in Lincoln, Nebraska, to organize the NCCG...

...The proposed amendment would permit any state which has a two-house legislature to apportion "the membership of one house of such legislature on factors other than population, provided that the plan of such apportionment has been submitted to and approved by a vote of the electorate of that state...

...The National Commission on Constitutional Government, is the new spearhead of the rural counter-revolution...

...But the opponents of the resolution saw a stealthier hand behind its drafting...

...This would freeze, in perpetuity, present rural over-representation on county boards and similar local units of government...

...At the hearings, Representative Tuck urged passage of his bill to bar Federal courts from jurisdiction over state reapportionment cases...

...While the rural power in state legislatures grudgingly gave up some seats in the lower houses of state legislatures under the pressure of the courts, it continues to fight against reapportionment of the upper houses, if the ruralists can maintain their grip on PETER IRONS, who did social science research at Harvard and Howard Universities, is associate editor of the United Automobile Workers legislative news-weekly...

...The mellifluous Dirksen wanted to give the ruralists time to develop their campaign for a constitutional amendment...

...Solomon Blatt, in his twenty-fifth year as Speaker of the South Carolina House...

...Atlanta lawyer Herbert Johnson fears that passage of a constitutional amendment returning legislative control to rural areas "would put them in such strong control that the cities will never get their fair share...

...In this case the Supreme Court held that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment dictates the principle of "one man, one vote," and ruled out any apportionment scheme of either house of a legislature that is not based strictly on population...

...Never in the history of the Federal Union has this strategy been successful...

...Today, that proportion has been reversed, but our legislative bodies still fail to reflect that massive change...

...Similar examples of the dilution of the urban and suburban vote abound, and the result is obvious...

...Another House of Delegates member at New Orleans, Virginia lawyer Edmund Campbell, also saw the resolution endorsing Dirksen's proposal as Satter-field's handiwork and felt it was designed to "freeze the present racial imbalance" in Southern legislatures...

...At a strategy meeting with representatives from the offices of liberal Senators, the outlook was gloomy...

...and Byron Tunnell, then Speaker of the Texas House and now Texas Railroad Commissioner...

...Before taking a look at these men and their methods, it is helpful to scan the map of political power across the country...

...The Court ordered that new districts be drawn on the basis of population alone...

...The first Congressional floor skirmish in the battle against reapportionment was fought last fall...

...Rural Congressmen and state legislators rose in anger by the hundreds as they foresaw the erosion of their entrenched citadels of power...

...Marvin Caplan of the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO, who is also director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, has donned another hat to coordinate the NCFR effort...

...Chamber of Commerce, the Liberty Lobby, and the American Farm Bureau Federation have lined up like a Greek chorus to trumpet their fears of "urban control...

...A liberal coalition, composed mostly of groups active in the civil rights lobbying effort last year, was formed several months ago under the title of the National Committee for Fair Representation...

...Organizations cracking a potent political whip have been flocking before Senate and House hearings to denounce the Reynolds decision...

...Even the liberal National Farmers Union, with its history of populism, voted by a narrow margin at its recent convention to support the amendment drive...

...A farmer and businessman from Dakota City, he had been a member of the Nebraska legislature for sixteen years...

...Completely overlooked in the sparse comment by the press is the fact that the amendment also provides that "Nothing in this Constitution shall restrict a state in its determination of how membership of governing bodies of its subordinate states shall be apportioned...

...In the same period, state and Federal courts declared that the re-districting plans of thirty-two states did not meet constitutional requirements...

...The two were state senators Gloria Schaffer of Connecticut and Charles Weiner of Pennsylvania...

...To the extent that a citizen's right to vote is debased, he is that much less a citizen...

...Its target is a series of landmark decisions of the Supreme Court...

...Legislators represent people, not trees or acres," wrote Chief Justice Warren...

...state senates, they can block progressive legislation or any measures that will benefit the cities and suburbs...

...It's going to be tight, but if Congress doesn't want a convention it has the Dirksen bill before it...

...Any amendment approved, whether by Congress or by a convention called through petitions from thirty-four legislatures, would have to be ratified by thirty-eight states within a seven-year period to become part of the Constitution...

...Already, more than twenty states have passed memorials and the number could well reach thirty-four...

...Seventy years ago, when the rural New York legislator claimed that urban citizens were "unfit for citizenship," only one out of three Americans lived in an urban area...

...And by the opening months of 1965, twenty-four states were under court orders to reapportion before the next legislative election...

...Senators Douglas and Proxmire, and the mayors of Chicago and St...

...Representative Tuck, a portly stereotype in the "Senator Claghorn" tradition, is a former state legislator and Virginia governor, and a cog in Senator Harry Byrd's machine which rules Virginia as a fiefdom...

...Representative William McCulloch, a small-town Ohio Republican and ranking GOP member of the Committee, took another tack and backed a constitutional amendment to allow any state with a two-house legislature (Nebraska has the only unicameral legislature) to apportion one house "on factors other than population...

...The Court was responding, as it had through its historic Baker v. Can decision in 1962, to the fact that the equality of representation principle has been so grossly violated by the states that in thirty-nine of them minorities as small as eight per cent could elect a majority of the members in either one or both houses of the legislature...

...One prong of the attack would be through Congress, and the other would be through state action...

...the cities and many suburbs have been short-changed in state aid for education and welfare...

...Instead, the ruralists dug in and began planning strategy to nullify the "one man, one vote" rulings...

...As Congressmen paraded before the Committee to denounce the Reynolds decision, more than twenty powerful state legislators sat quietly in the hearing room...

...Reynolds v. Sims loosened the iron grip of those who represent "trees and acres" rather than people...

...Its goal is to change the Constitution so that rural control of many state legislatures and county governments will be preserved...

...Who are the leaders of the rural counter-revolution, and what is their strategy to nullify the Reynolds decision...

...A citizen, a qualified voter, is no more nor no less so because he lives in the city or on the farm...