Republicans Delivered the Votes That Broke the 1964 Filibuster

Which party broke the longest filibuster in Senate history? Your answer probably says more about where you got your history than about what happened. In the spring of 1964, the United States Senate was locked in the longest debate in its history over a single bill. If you grew up on the standard classroom version of this story, you may not have a confident answer. If you grew up on the version served up by certain cable segments, you may think the answer is something else entirely. The record says the answer is both parties, and that the margin that mattered came from the minority side of the aisle: the Republicans.

I'm not telling this story to win a cheap point. I'm telling it because a movement that does not know its own history will let other people write it. We have been told for decades, by people who ought to know better, that the Republican Party has no business in a conversation about civil rights. The party of Lincoln, the party that wrote the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments into the Constitution, did not forget its own history in 1964. It lived it. Let me walk you through what actually happened, in order, and then deal honestly with the objections.

The bill and the House

President John F. Kennedy sent a strong civil rights bill to Congress in June 1963, after the violence in Birmingham, Alabama, shocked the country. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. His successor, Lyndon Johnson, made the bill his first priority and told Congress in his first address to a joint session that the best way to honor the dead President was to pass it.

The bill had two main hurdles in the House. One was the Rules Committee, chaired by Howard Smith, a Democrat from Virginia, who was no friend of the bill. The other was the arithmetic of the Judiciary Committee, where the ranking Republican, William McCulloch of Ohio, insisted that the bill be a bipartisan product and that his party get a real say in its drafting. Without McCulloch and his Republican colleagues, there was no path. The House passed the bill on February 10, 1964, by a vote of 290 to 130.

Here is a detail worth the arithmetic. The House vote broke down by party this way, according to the standard historical tally: 152 Democrats voted yes and 96 voted no, while 138 Republicans voted yes and 34 voted no. Check it: 152 plus 138 is 290; 96 plus 34 is 130. In percentages, 138 of the 172 Republicans who voted supported the bill, about 80 percent, while 152 of the 248 Democrats who voted supported it, about 61 percent. A bigger share of Republicans than Democrats voted yes. And in the House, the Southern Democratic bloc was an important part of the no votes.

The Senate: where bills go to die

The House bill then went to the Senate, where everyone knew the real fight would be. Civil rights bills had a grim history there. For decades, Southern senators had used the filibuster to kill anti-lynching bills and other civil rights measures. In 1957, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina had held the floor for more than twenty-four hours trying to block a modest voting rights bill. The Senate's own rules made it nearly impossible to stop such tactics. Under Rule XXII as it stood in 1964, ending debate required the votes of two-thirds of the senators present and voting, which is 67 if all one hundred are in the room.

The Senate's Majority Leader was Mike Mansfield of Montana, a Democrat. The Judiciary Committee was chaired by James Eastland of Mississippi, a determined opponent, and the bill would have died there, so Mansfield arranged for it to go straight to the Senate calendar. Debate on the bill itself opened on March 30. The leader of the Southern forces was Richard Russell of Georgia, one of the most skilled parliamentarians the Senate ever had. Russell and his allies organized in teams to hold the floor in shifts. Robert Byrd, then a Democratic senator from West Virginia, spoke against the bill for more than fourteen hours at one stretch. The debate lasted well over two months.

On the other side, the bill's floor managers were Hubert Humphrey, a Democrat from Minnesota, and Thomas Kuchel of California, a Republican who served as the bipartisan captain. But the man everyone knew held the key was the Republican Minority Leader, Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois.

The math problem, and the man who solved it

Let me put the problem the way a vote counter would. The Senate in 1964 had 67 Democrats and 33 Republicans. If every Democrat had been on the same side, the Democrats alone could have just reached 67. But a bloc of Southern Democrats was determined to filibuster to the end. The bill's supporters therefore needed a substantial number of Republicans, and Dirksen was the one who could deliver them.

Dirksen was an unusual figure: a former House member from a small town in Illinois, famous for his rumbling voice and ornate speeches. He was also a conservative who had doubts about parts of the bill. He worried about the public accommodations title and about the enforcement provisions that touched employment. He did not simply hand over his votes. He made the bill better, in the view of its supporters, and in the process made it passable.

Throughout April and May, Dirksen negotiated with Humphrey, Mansfield, Kuchel and the Justice Department. They worked out a substitute text, introduced in mid-May, that made changes meant to meet Republican concerns. Among other things, the substitute stressed voluntary compliance and gave state and local authorities a chance to act before federal enforcement began. Dirksen's blessing allowed Republican senators who had been wavering to vote for cloture without feeling they had been rolled.

The vote came on June 10, 1964. For the first time in its history, the Senate voted to invoke cloture on a civil rights bill. The vote was 71 to 29. That is four more than the 67 needed. Before the vote, Dirksen made a speech that people still quote, reaching for a line often attributed to Victor Hugo about an idea whose time has come, and saying that the time for equal opportunity had come. The man who could easily have sat on his hands stood up and used his authority.

Nine days later, on June 19, the Senate passed the bill by a vote of 73 to 27. By party on final passage, 46 Democrats voted yes and 21 voted no, while 27 Republicans voted yes and 6 voted no. The totals: 46 plus 27 is 73, and 21 plus 6 is 27. As percentages, 46 of 67 Democrats is about 69 percent, and 27 of 33 Republicans is about 82 percent. Once again, a larger share of Republicans than Democrats voted yes. The House then accepted the Senate's version, and President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on July 2.

Before 1964: the quieter record

The 1964 fight did not come out of nowhere, and the record before it is worth a paragraph. Congress passed civil rights acts in 1957 and 1960, both signed by President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican. Both were modest, and critics at the time said so, but the 1957 law was the first federal civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, and it passed after Lyndon Johnson, then Senate Majority Leader, steered a weakened version through the Senate. Eisenhower also sent federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, in September 1957 to enforce a court order integrating Central High School. Go back further and the thread runs to the Reconstruction Congresses, which wrote the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, and to the Civil Rights Act of 1875, signed by Ulysses Grant. Each time, the law came with plenty of imperfection and plenty of support from both sides. The point is not that one party owns the story. The point is that the story is not what the caricature says it is.

The strongest objection: "That was a different Republican Party"

Now let me state the best case against the story I just told. It runs like this. The Republican Party of 1964 was not the Republican Party of today. Barry Goldwater, the party's presidential nominee that year, voted against the bill. The party then built a new base in the South in the following decades. And the Democrats who voted for the bill included men and women who had spent their careers defending segregation or who would soon turn their party in a new direction. Add it up, says the critic, and the 1964 vote proves nothing about who deserves credit now.

That is a serious argument and it deserves a serious answer. Here it is, in four points.

1. Goldwater's vote was a minority position inside his own party. He opposed Titles II and VII on constitutional grounds, arguing that the federal government had no authority to regulate private businesses and employers, and he said so while saying he opposed discrimination. You may think he was wrong on the law; the Supreme Court held otherwise in the months after passage. But six Republican senators voted no, and 27 voted yes. A party is more than its nominee.
2. The 1964 vote itself followed region more than party. The bulk of the no votes came from the South, from Democrats, and a handful of Republicans who shared Goldwater's constitutional view. Northern and Midwestern members of both parties voted yes in large numbers. If you want to tell the truth about 1964, say that a coalition of Northern Democrats and almost all Republicans passed the bill over Southern Democratic resistance.
3. The later political realignment of the South is a separate story, and it does not change what happened in June 1964. Historians argue about its causes: economics, suburban growth, religion, party organization, the Voting Rights Act, and more. Whatever you conclude about that, the votes were cast as they were cast. History does not get edited because later events complicate it.
4. The credit is shared, and honesty requires saying so. President Johnson, a Democrat from Texas, spent his political capital on the bill. Humphrey and Mansfield drove it. Ordinary members of both parties from the North risked their seats. The correct claim is not "Republicans did it alone." The correct claim is "it could not have passed without Republicans."

That last sentence is the point. I am not asking you to fight a pointless battle over who gets a trophy. I am asking you to know that when someone tells you the party of Lincoln was a bystander in 1964, they are wrong, and you can prove it with the roll call.

The aftermath: the law in court

The Act did not end the argument. Within months, businesses challenged its public accommodations title in court. In December 1964, the Supreme Court upheld the law in Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States and the companion case Katzenbach v. McClung, holding that Congress had the power to reach those businesses under the Commerce Clause. That was a constitutional stretch by some lights, and the debate over how far the Commerce Clause extends goes on, which you can read about in A Farmer's Wheat Crop and the Long Fight Over the Commerce Clause. Many conservatives today would say the better constitutional home for the ban on discrimination in public places was the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection, but the Court did not accept that path in 1964, and its actual ruling stands.

What the story teaches about the filibuster

This episode is also the best argument in American history for treating the filibuster with respect, even though it was used for a terrible purpose in this case. Think about it. The filibuster was the Southern bloc's weapon. And yet the way to defeat it was not to abolish the rule. It was to build a supermajority. Dirksen, Humphrey, Mansfield and Kuchel did the slow, boring work of persuading 67 senators. The result was a law that had broad support across the country, and it has lasted. You can compare that with the arguments in Why the Filibuster Is the Best Friend a Minority Party Ever Had, which traces how the rule works and how it has changed.

The 1964 Act also shows what a minority leader can do. Dirksen did not control the Senate floor. He was the leader of the minority. What he controlled was a bloc of votes that the majority needed. That kind of leverage is the subject of What the Minority Party in Congress Can Still Do When It Doesn't Run the Floor. And the road a bill takes from introduction to the President's desk, which Dirksen knew in his bones, is walked step by step in How a Bill Really Becomes Law, Including the Steps Schoolhouse Rock Skipped.

A final word on the Founders' design. Madison wanted the separate branches and chambers to force compromise, and 1964 is the proof. We covered that principle in Madison Built a Government Where Ambition Fights Ambition, and It Works. When the country finally reached a durable agreement on one of its deepest wrongs, it reached it by the slow process of persuasion that the Senate demands.

The bottom line

• In June 1964, the Senate voted 71 to 29 to end the filibuster of the Civil Rights Act, the first time cloture had ever been invoked on a civil rights bill. The votes that carried it came from both parties, and Republican votes were essential.
• On final passage, about 82 percent of Republican senators voted yes (27 of 33) compared with about 69 percent of Democratic senators (46 of 67). Know those numbers so you can answer anyone who says the party sat this one out.
• Be fair when you tell it. Say Johnson, Humphrey and Mansfield did their share, say Goldwater voted no and why, and say the later shifts in Southern politics are a separate story. Credibility is worth more than a cheap win.
• Look up the roll call yourself on the Senate's official website before you repeat any figure, including mine.
• If someone tells you your party has no stake in civil rights, ask them to read the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments and then the 1964 roll call. Then ask what they were going to say next.