Historical Figures Series: The Career of Hubert Humphrey

Part 2: Humphrey in the 1950s, The Rise of Civil Rights and His Entry into National Politics

In his early days in the Senate, Humphrey was regarded with hostility. In an early visit to the Senate cloakroom, Richard Russell, fully aware of his presence, audibly said to a group of Southern senators: “Can you imagine the people of Minnesota sending that damn fool down here to represent them?”

This had to do entirely with the makeup of the Senate at the time. With the Democratic bloc fundamentally comprising of the South, the Congress to which Humphrey had been elected was fundamentally conservative, anathema to the liberal issues men like him represented. It did not help that the unspoken etiquette of the Senate was that freshman senators should not be speak at all for at least their first year in office. This was just as anathema to a man like Humphrey, who already had a reputation for being known, as Roger Angell would refer to him, as a ‘lifetime .400 talker.”

Senators viewed their station as members “of the most exclusive club in the world.” Those on the inside knew what the dues of membership were in the 1940s. As an aide to Paul Douglas, elected to the Senate same year as Humphrey put it cynically but accurately:

“The quid pro quo was that the southerners, with their lock on the committees and on the money, parceled out their goodies to the trans-Mississippi Republicans and the Western Senators…They worked for segregation when the chips were down.”

Humphrey chose not to seek membership; instead he spent his freshman years violating almost every one of the Senate’s unwritten rules. Within his first week in office, he and an African-American aide Cyril King appeared in the Senate dining room where the only blacks allowed were the headwaiters. Humphrey insisted that they dine together. He made six major speeches and 230 remarks on the floors in his first ten months in the Senate, something no previous freshman senator would have dared to do. And he introduced legislation which no freshman would have ever done, and almost all of it on the kind of liberal issues that the Southern Bloc was appalled by — anti-lynching legislation, a permanent federal commission on Civil Rights, a bill to abolish to the electoral college were among the fifty-seven bills and joint resolutions he introduced in his first year alone.

For all of these actions Humphrey was ravaged by his fellow Senators, especially when he challenged the financial chair (and extreme segregationist) Harry Byrd. Humphrey took the hits and refused to surrender.

Lyndon Johnson clearly understood the nature of the Senate he was elected to, and behaved like traditional freshman did. He went out of his way to court Richard Russell in those early years, and the two instantly became friends and allies, with Johnson eventually referring to Russell, as ‘Uncle Dick.’ This meant allying himself with the cause of segregation: his first speech in the Senate was an argument in favor of the Southern filibuster. His actions alienated him from most liberals — but Humphrey appreciated and accepted his pragmatism: “He was trying to be a captain (of the Southern bloc) rather than a captive.” His methods were working; after just two years in the Senate, he was elected the whip of the Democratic party at the age of 41.

By 1952, the South had every reason to believe that the civil rights movement was losing steam; Truman, now a lame duck and immersed in the Korean conflict had abandoned it. Russell chose to lead the Southern democrats as their candidate for President at the upcoming convention. However, outside the South he was too much of a liability as a candidate and would receive only 261 votes from the delegations. In the last convention which took more than one ballot to determine a Presidential nominee, the party would end up drafting Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois to head the ticket. Stevenson’s platform was far mor open to civil rights than even the previous one, including changing the number of votes required for cloture in the filibuster and the civil rights plank being passed by unanimous vote. Humphrey had helped pushed the party forward.

At the time, no one seemed interested. By 1952 the Democrats had controlled the White House for twenty years and with the Korean War and the Red Scare major issues, a Republican victory would have been certain with any candidate. When Dwight Eisenhower, the hero of D-Day became the Republican nominee, it was inevitable. Eisenhower’s landslide victory may have been more of testament to his appeal than the Republicans, but there were elements that the Democrats found troubling. Not only had Eisenhower carried four Southern States in his electoral landslide — the first Republican in history to do so well in the South — the presence of the Alabama segregationist Senator John Sparkman was considered a major factor in Eisenhower receiving nearly forty percent of the African-American vote. The South, the bulwark of the Democratic Party for over a century, was increasingly becoming a liability to it. It did not effect Johnson’s career; in 1953, he was elected minority leader of the Senate. Johnson called Humphrey to ask for his support. Humphrey explained his issue with Johnson was his track record with liberals. Johnson was impressed by Humphrey’s honesty on the issue.

After his election Johnson asked Humphrey and said he was willing to talk about naming liberals to influential committees: “Every single request I made, he filled.” Humphrey had not supported Johnson but he was impressed with his integrity and pragmatism. For the next decade, their relationship would be akin to mentor and student.

Eisenhower’s administration began a moderate approach to civil rights but far more significant was the fact that Earl Warren, the Republican Governor of California, had been promised by Eisenhower the first vacancy on the Supreme Court. He had no reason to suspect that within a few months of his election, the current Chief Justice Fred Vinson would be dead of a heart attack. He would try to retract the offer from Warren, but Warren was appointed and took the oath of office in September of 1953. This decision, as much as anything else that happened in the Senate, would have a vast effect on the professional careers of Humphrey, Johnson and Russell.

On May 17, 1954 the Warren Supreme Court unanimously ruled in the case of Brown V. Board of Education that the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ that had been established as law in the ruling of ‘Plessy Vs. Ferguson’ in 1896’ was unconstitutional. The decision transformed race relations forever and no one was more aware of it than the Southerners in the Senate.

A few months away from becoming majority leader, Johnson privately expressed reservations. Publicly he knew that a Southern revolt against the ruling would split the Democratic party and further alienate the South. Quietly, he worked behind the scenes to undermine the legislative proposals many in the South were introducing.

Russell, however, backed the idea of Strom Thurmond to create what would become known as ‘The Southern Manifesto’ which would be signed by seventy seven Congressman and nineteen Southern Senators. There were three significant refusals, Al Gore Senior and Estes Kefauver of Tennessee — and Lyndon Johnson. Johnson knew the difficulties he was in based on his capacities as a Senator from Texas and as a man who was already harboring Presidential ambitions. Russell never pressured him because of his desire for Johnson to become President.

By 1956 Humphrey’s relationship with Johnson had made him a respected member of the Senate to both the liberal and conservative blocs. So in 1956, he made his first brazen move into national politics. Adlai Stevenson was running for the Democratic nomination again and Humphrey endorsed him in the Minnesota primary, with hopes that this action would lead to Stevenson choosing him as his vice president.

It backfired spectacularly. Estes Kefauver trounced Stevenson by nearly fifty thousand votes. Humphrey would not even be elected to represent Minnesota as a delegate to the convention.

Before the convention Humphrey thought his chances had been renewed when Stevenson told him he was on ‘the short list for vice president’ and he would get the nomination if he could certify himself among Southern Leaders in the party. Humphrey broke precedent and announced his candidacy, and secured endorsements from influential Southerners including Johnson and Russell.

At the convention, Stevenson broke his heart again. Stevenson had decided to let the convention choose his running-mate rather than him. He did not even bother to give Humphrey the courtesy of a phone call before he made his decision. The coup de grace came when Stevenson refused to push for strong platform language on civil rights, including legislation to ensure it. Muriel Humphrey later said it was his worst defeat.

After Eisenhower’s second straight Republican landslide — in which he now had carried five Southern states helped in part by the African-American vote in these states — both parties were looking at it differently. The Republicans assumed a stronger push for civil rights legislation would be a clear path to future victories. Democrats were less sure. Eisenhower’s landslide had given no coattails to the Republicans in Congress — indeed, the Democrats had gained a seat in the 1956 election. Liberals thought if they had taken a stronger path they would have done better in the election; Southerners thought by not directly confronting Eisenhower they had maintained their majority.

The chairman of the DNC Paul Butler believed in the former and after the 1956 election formed a group called the Democratic Advisory Council, mainly to prod Johnson and Speaker Sam Rayburn into more aggressive legislation. Humphrey was one of the few elected members who accepted offers to become a member of that group.

When Johnson — who had declined this invitation- learned of Humphrey’s acceptance, he was enraged. Initially, his anger was such that he wanted to ban Humphrey from his inner circle. In January of 1957, when Humphrey called him to discuss Senate business, Johnson was distant, finally telling him: “You broke faith with me.” Humphrey protested that he was “simply trying to make Johnson a better leader.” In the end, the temperamental Johnson realized that Humphrey was to important to him to cast aside and the two resumed their normal friendly relationships.

And Johnson knew that the Senate had to at least pass some kind of civil rights bill. One was about to come to the Senate: that June, the House passed a major bill helmed by Eisenhower’s chief Attorney General Herbert Brownell by 286–126. The new leader of the Republicans in the Senate California’s William Knowland represented the changing tide for Southern Democrats. Moderate Republicans and liberal Democrats were becoming weary of the alliance with the South.

The 1957 Civil Rights Bill called for no new rights; merely more effective federal enforcement of laws already and guarantees already on the books, among the most significant was giving the attorney general new injunctive powers to fight and prevent violations of voting rights and other civil rights. Russell used this part of the bill to wage the South wars on it, framing it terms of a second reconstruction which he knew would galvanize his southern bloc. He was not helped by the fact that Eisenhower feebly defended the bill when asked about and barely seemed to know of the details about it. Despite his apparent victory, Russell could see the writing on the wall, admitting to a friend that he was fighting a ‘delaying action.’

Johnson fought hard to win the compromise bill across, often chastising the Northern liberals who supported it so easily. “It don’t take a genius to be for civil rights from Minnesota,” he told Humphrey, mocking him when Humphrey told him there were only around 12,000 African-Americans in his state.

Humphrey played a relatively minor role in much of the debate on the bill on the floor, less because he was being overpowered by Johnson’s pragmatism but because his own was evolving. He knew the inflexible doctrine that his fellow liberals embraced was impractical when it came to legislation.

On August 7th the Senate passed its first Civil Rights bill since 1877: 72–18. The bill was admonished by liberals and African-Americans as ‘half a loaf’ at best. What was important was that it represented the first step at breaking through on civil rights in the twentieth century, something even Strom Thurmond — who engaged in the longest filibuster in history against it — admitted years after the fact.

This triumph, combined with a meeting with Khrushchev in 1958, would help Humphrey believe that it was his time to try to run for President. Few people thought that he would make much of a splash in his campaign. He would end up making a very big splash.

In the next article in this series, I will follow Humphrey’s first campaign for the Democratic nomination and his first in what would be a decade long struggle with the Kennedy family and how his ambitions and that of his friend Lyndon Johnson were about to collide for the first time on the national stage.