Everett Dirksen and the Republican votes that broke the 1964 filibuster

In the spring of 1964, the United States Senate had a counting problem. The Civil Rights Act had passed the House. A majority of senators were ready to pass it. And yet the bill sat on the Senate floor for months, tied in knots, because in the Senate a majority is not enough to end a debate. To cut off a filibuster in 1964 you needed two-thirds of the senators present and voting. With every seat filled and every senator in the room, that meant sixty-seven votes. There were sixty-seven Democrats in the Senate and thirty-three Republicans. Do the arithmetic and you see the trap. A bloc of Southern Democrats, led by Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, was determined to talk the bill to death, and the northern Democrats alone could not stop them. The votes to break that filibuster had to come from the Republican side of the aisle.

The man who had to produce them was a rumpled, silver-haired, fruity-voiced senator from Illinois named Everett McKinley Dirksen. He was the Minority Leader, and at that moment he was the most important person in Washington. Let me tell you what he did, how he did it, and what it means for a party that sometimes forgets its own history.

The man from Pekin

Everett Dirksen was born in 1896 in Pekin, Illinois, a small city on the Illinois River. He served in the House of Representatives from 1933 to 1949, then won election to the Senate in 1950 and took his seat in 1951. He became Senate Republican leader in 1959. He was famous for a voice that rolled like a church organ, for flowery speeches full of long words, and for an affection for the marigold, which he wanted to see named the national flower. Critics gave him the nickname "Wizard of Ooze," and he seemed rather to enjoy it.

Do not let the theatrics fool you. Dirksen was a sharp political craftsman. He understood that a minority leader cannot win by volume. He wins by knowing what his members will accept, by trading, and by being someone the majority and the White House must deal with. He was a conservative on spending, on the size of government and, in the early part of his career, on foreign affairs in a way that put him in the Taft tradition. You can meet Taft in Mr. Republican Robert Taft lost the nomination three times, yet won the party. But Dirksen was no ideologue. He was a legislator, and in 1964 the legislator's art was what the country needed.

The bill arrives from the House

The story begins in the House, where the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed on February 10, 1964. Its path there is itself a story about Republicans. The ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, William McCulloch of Ohio, worked closely with the Democratic chairman, Emanuel Celler of New York, and with the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to shape a bill that could pass. McCulloch insisted that the Republican side be treated as a full partner, and in return he committed a substantial block of Republican votes. The final House vote was 290 to 130 in favor.

Think about those figures, because they are the heart of the matter. Of the 290 yes votes, 152 were Democrats and 138 were Republicans. Of the 130 no votes, 96 were Democrats and 34 were Republicans. Do the percentages. Among Democrats, 152 of 248, or about 61 percent, voted yes. Among Republicans, 138 of 172, or about 80 percent, voted yes. A larger share of House Republicans than House Democrats supported the bill. The reason is simple: a large number of Democratic no votes came from the South, where the party's Southern wing opposed the legislation.

The Senate: months of debate

The bill reached the Senate in February. The Senate Majority Leader, Mike Mansfield of Montana, a Democrat, made the unusual decision to bring the bill directly to the floor rather than send it to the Judiciary Committee, which was chaired by a Southern segregationist, James Eastland of Mississippi. That avoided a committee burial. But it put the bill in the place where the filibuster was most powerful.

The debate began in March, and the Southern senators dug in. They held the floor in relays. One of them, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a Democrat, spoke for over fourteen hours in a single stretch. The Senate had never before voted to end debate on a civil rights bill, and in the entire history of the chamber, the use of cloture had been rare. By late spring, the filibuster had become the longest in the Senate's history, running from March into June.

The bill's floor manager was Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, a Democrat, and his Republican partner was Thomas Kuchel of California, the Republican whip. But everyone knew the question was Dirksen. Humphrey, Kuchel and the Johnson administration needed him. Johnson, a master of the Senate who understood Dirksen's pride, was reported to have given him room to shape the bill so that he could say it was partly his. It was a smart bit of political psychology.

Dirksen's price: the substitute amendment

Dirksen did not simply sign on. He said at the start that parts of the bill went too far, particularly the sections on public accommodations and on equal employment opportunity, and that he wanted changes. This is a case where a politician's reluctance was a strength rather than a weakness, because his insistence on revisions allowed some of the bill's more skeptical Republican senators to say yes.

Over several weeks of negotiation in Dirksen's office, a bipartisan group, including Humphrey, Kuchel, Attorney General Robert Kennedy's representatives in the Justice Department, and Dirksen himself, worked out a substitute amendment. In broad terms, the substitute changed some enforcement mechanisms in the employment title, so that the government's approach relied more on court proceedings and gave state agencies a first chance at handling certain complaints, and it adjusted other provisions. It did not gut the bill. The central guarantees, the ban on discrimination in public accommodations such as hotels, restaurants and theaters, and on discrimination in employment, stayed. Civil rights leaders were disappointed by some of the changes and accepted them as the price of passage. Dirksen could now say to his members that they were voting for a bill that had been improved by Republican hands.

You can read the whole story of the Republicans who made this happen, from the House committee to the Senate floor, in The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Republican Votes That Broke the Filibuster and in Republicans Delivered the Votes That Broke the 1964 Filibuster.

June 10: the cloture vote

On June 10, 1964, the Senate voted on cloture, the motion to end debate. It was the first time the chamber had ever voted to cut off a filibuster on a civil rights bill. The motion passed, 71 to 29. It needed 67 on a full count, and it got four to spare. Dirksen's speech before the vote was one of the great speeches of his career. He argued that this was an idea whose time had come, and that it would not be turned back. The Republican votes were critical: without a strong majority of the thirty-three Republican senators, the motion could not have reached the threshold.

That is the whole drama in miniature. The filibuster is a tool that protects the minority, and conservatives have defended it for good reasons, which we set out in Why the Filibuster Is the Best Friend a Minority Party Ever Had. But what ended it in 1964 was the same Senate rules working as designed: a two-thirds threshold that required a broad, bipartisan coalition. The bill passed not because one party steamrolled the other but because a bipartisan group in the middle assembled enough votes.

How the cloture rule came to be

To see why the sixty-seven mattered, it helps to know where the rule came from. For most of the Senate's first century and then some, there was no way at all to end a debate against the will of determined senators. That changed in March 1917, after a small group of senators blocked a bill to arm American merchant ships at the brink of the First World War, and the Senate responded by adopting Rule XXII, the cloture rule, which allowed two-thirds of those voting to cut off debate. For decades the rule was used sparingly, and it was widely understood that Southern senators could and would block civil rights legislation by talking. Between the rule's adoption and 1964, the Senate had never used it to end a filibuster against a civil rights bill, and a long line of earlier efforts had died in the talking.

That history is why the vote of June 10 was a turning point, and it is also why conservatives who defend the filibuster are not defending delay for its own sake. They are defending a rule that forces a broad coalition. In 1964 the coalition was there, and the rule did its job: it demanded persuasion first and a majority second. When the coalition is not there, the same rule protects a minority from being run over. The rule does not know which cause is good. That is both its virtue and its danger, and Dirksen understood it better than almost anyone.

Passage and signing

After cloture, the Senate moved to a final vote on June 19, 1964, and passed the bill 73 to 27. Of the 73 yes votes, 46 were Democrats and 27 were Republicans. Of the 27 no votes, 21 were Democrats and 6 were Republicans. The arithmetic is the same: among Democrats, 46 of 67, or about 69 percent, voted yes. Among Republicans, 27 of 33, or about 82 percent, voted yes. In the Senate, as in the House, a larger share of Republicans than Democrats voted for the bill.

The House then accepted the Senate's changes, and on July 2, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law.

The Republican who said no

It would be dishonest to make the story a tale of unanimous Republican virtue. Among the six Republican senators who voted against the bill was Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who was about to become the party's presidential nominee. Goldwater said he supported civil rights as a principle but that two titles of the bill, the ones on public accommodations and on employment, were unconstitutional extensions of federal power over private property and private business. His vote had huge consequences for the party, and that story gets its own treatment in Barry Goldwater lost 44 states and won the next generation of conservatives. I think the right way to hold both facts is this: the Republican Party was the party that supplied the margin for the Civil Rights Act, and the party also nominated, a few weeks later, a man who voted against it. Both are part of the record, and an honest account owns both.

What Dirksen did next

Dirksen's work did not end in 1964. He was a key supporter of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Senate's cloture vote on that bill again depended on his help. He also helped pass the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which included the Fair Housing Act. In 1967 he recorded a spoken-word album of patriotic recitations called Gallant Men that won a Grammy Award. He died on September 7, 1969, still serving as Senate Minority Leader.

What this teaches

Here is how I would put the lessons, since this is the kind of history that tends to be told in slogans.

1. A minority leader has real power if he knows how to use it. Dirksen held the key to the Senate's most important vote, and he got to shape the bill because he had something the majority needed.
2. Principle and procedure can work together. Dirksen's constitutional concerns were real, and his amendments reflected them. The final law was a better-balanced product for it.
3. Reform is built from coalitions, not purity. Dirksen got the bill passed by bringing others in, not by demanding that they agree with him on every point.
4. The record belongs to everyone. The party of Lincoln has a proud and complicated history on civil rights. We should know it well enough to tell it straight, including the Goldwater chapter, and we should refuse to let anyone use it to claim the party was absent.
5. The Senate's rules cut both ways. The two-thirds cloture threshold, which required a broad coalition to end debate in 1964, was later changed to three-fifths of all senators in 1975. You can have an honest conservative argument about which threshold is wiser, but you cannot have a serious argument without understanding how the rule works.

The bottom line

• The Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed the House and the Senate with a larger share of Republicans than Democrats voting yes, and it would not have cleared the Senate filibuster without Republican votes. Learn the numbers and the names.
• When someone tells you the Republican Party has always opposed civil rights legislation, ask them about Everett Dirksen, William McCulloch and Thomas Kuchel. Then be equally ready to discuss the Republicans who voted no, including Barry Goldwater, and the reasons he gave.
• If you serve in a minority in any body, from a school board to a legislature, remember Dirksen: you can shape outcomes by knowing what the majority needs and offering a price.
• Read the roll calls yourself. Congress.gov and the Senate's website list the votes by name.
• Teach your children this history. It is part of the American story, and it is part of ours.