The Second Reconstruction of the South
From: bernhard1848@att.net
Responding to Lyndon Johnson's Second Reconstruction initiatives
assisted by liberal Republicans, Southern GOP leaders won control of
their party machinery to advance the staunchly conservative Senator
Barry Goldwater of Arizona for president in 1964. Thoroughly dismayed
by the Democratic party's drift into socialism as exemplified by the
leftist Hubert Humphrey, Senator Strom Thurmond joined the party of
Lincoln.
Bernhard Thuersam
The Second Reconstruction of the South:
"In his first address to Congress as president, late in November
1963, Lyndon B. Johnson called for "the earliest possible passage" of
the Kennedy civil rights bill. The new chief executive soon made it
clear that he was totally committed to the enactment of this broad
civil rights measure.
In steering the bill through the lower house, Emanuel Celler,
the floor manager, was assisted not only by liberal party members
identified with the Democratic Study Committee but also by Republican
leaders as William H. McCulloch, the ranking minority member of the
House Judiciary Committee.
Prospects were less encouraging in the Senate, given the
strategic positions of Southern leaders in that body and the difficulty
of overcoming filibusters. The senators from Southern States, led by
Richard B. Russell, condemned the bill, particularly the provisions
banning discrimination in public places. They regarded the measure as
unconstitutional because it restricted personal freedom and the right
to control one's private property.
The central issue, according to Russell, was the unrestrained
power the bill gave to the executive branch of the federal government,
which would permit political persecution of citizens by an ambitious
and ruthless attorney general and other bureaucrats. The Georgia
senator argued that the proposal originated in politics, was punitive
in nature, and would be sectional in its application. It was aimed
primarily at the South, like the Reconstruction laws of the 1860s.
Indeed, Russell declared, "the white people of the Southern
States" were "the most despised and mistreated minority in the
country." In this case the Southern congressmen reflected the feeling
of the preponderance of their white constituents.
Hubert H. Humphrey, who managed the bill in the Senate, and
other supporters created a sturdy coalition…The Southerners' last hope
was to attract enough conservative Republican backing to prevent the
adoption of cloture, which would make it possible to end a filibuster.
As Eric F. Goldman wrote a few years later: "Senator Russell
had a band of eighteen Southern senators [who] talked on and on – [and]
sometimes about the bill itself, calling it, to use the phrase of
Senator Russell Long, "a mixed breed of unconstitutionality and the
NAACP."
The pivotal figure in negotiations [with Republicans] was
minority leader Everett M. Dirksen of Illinois, with who the White
House held painstaking conferences. Dirksen moved slowly toward a
compromise…On June 10 the Senate adopted a cloture resolution by a vote
of 71 to 29…The power of the Southern bloc had been broken.
Twenty-one of the twenty-six senators from the South voted against
cloture and final passage of the bill.
In its origins the Second Reconstruction was clearly the result
of outside forces impinging on the South. Television news, in fact,
developed into a national medium partly through its experience in the
South, and many reporters and photographers first achieved recognition
when they came South to cover the civil rights story. According to
Robert MacNeil [of NBC], "the tone of network programming has been
emphatically liberal…." Senator Russell spoke for many [Southerners]
when he accused outside journalists of fostering "bitterness and hatred
against Southern whites" to such an extent that it had become "a
national disease."
In his analysis of congressional reaction to the violence [in
the South], David J. Garrow stresses the importance of newspaper
coverage, especially stories in the New York Times and the Washington
Post. In short, the news media became the primary instrument in shaping
the image of the South in the nation and the world."
(The South in Modern America, A Region at Odds, Dewey W. Grantham, Harper Collins, 1994, pp. 236-241)
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