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LYNDON AND CIVIL RIGHTS-41 The Listening Post \(Drew Pearson continues the inside story of how Sen. Lyndon Johnson of Texas maneuvered to put across the jury trial amendment to the civil WASHINGTON Just a few days before the vote on the jury trial amendment, Sen. Lyndon Johnson knew that he didn’t have the votes to win. He stalled for time. The fact that he finally won was considered nothing short of a political miracle. The tall Texan had first persuaded Southern senators to accept the jury trial amendment with Negroes on juries by telling them it would merely result in hung juries. One white man on the jury could always vote against conviction, could always protect white defendants. With the South behind him, therefore, what Lyndon needed was to cut into the huge bloc of 38 Re publican senators which G 0 P leader Knowland had lined up against the jury trial amendment. At this point, Lyndon and the Church-O’Mahoney-Kefauver group conceived the idea of extending trial by jury to all criminal contempt cases, including labor. This, in turn, swung three potent labor groups behind trial by jury. Their shift was what really defeated the AUSTIN A n interesting situation h a s arisen. Some of the people in Texas politics want to do something to make up to Dr. Byron Abernethy the setback he has suffered because he took his stand with their group. They talked about it five or six hours last Saturday and came to no conclusion ; the very idea was awkward, but the impulse was not, and so they kept trying to think of something. But there is no way to share really in some men’s wounds. There are situations in which commiseration doesn’t “go down,” to use the English phrase ; it is itself, as an emotion, too closely related to pity, and Byron Abernethy is anything but pitiful. With the restraint of a gentleman, the suspicion an educated man feels toward even his own contempts, the patience of a teacher for the exhausting of remedies, Abernethy has held his peace. He has refrained from the telling, embittered remarks a man so abused is thought to be entitled to. If he has had tides of resentment within him, he has coped with them rather than let them flood him. There is nothing anybody can or ought to want to do for him but change the situation which resulted in his being wronged. In real circumstances-16 years of tenure, a home in Lubbock, friendships there his life has been abused ; but an injustice has no authority over its immediate victim. As it has not succeeded in really wronging him, it has significantly wronged the teaching profession of the state and, worse, the children and youths they teach. The dismissal of Abernethy and the others could not have had a more frightening effect on the state’s teachers had it been carefully planned to accomplish that end, as perhaps it was. The sacrifi cial victims ranged from an inoffensive man who taught a program against which the directors had a man who was quietly for integra administration’s civil rights bill. The three labor groups were the United Mine Workers, the postal workers, and the Railroad Brotherhoods. How Lyndon won them, despite an emphatic, repeated resolution by the AFL-CIO executive council to the contrary, is the real story of how he won his battle. Here is how he did it : The Postal Workers have been desperately anxious to pass a pay raise bill. It must be okayed by Sen. Olin Johnston of South Carolina and his post office committee. So Johnston agreed to make postal pay increases the first order of bus Drew Pearson mess before his committee and keep it there until passedif the postal workers in turn would woo Republican senators over to the jury trial amendment. Lyndon Johnson and Johnston also agreed to push the postal pay increase over Eisenhower’s veto, if, as expected, he vetoes , it. Jerome Keating, able legislative representative of the letter carriers, kept his end of the bargain, buttonholed many senators. He is credited with swinging Sen. Kuchel of California away from his colleague, Knowland, in favor of the jury trial amendment. tion, to Abernethy, a bold and outspoken partisan for his ideals in the Democratic Party. Within the spectrum thus set vibrating fall large portions of the state’s teachers. What rights have they left, and dare they exercise them ? How many will pick tip and take flight for some Eastern or Western school where they leave a teacher’s private life to the teacher? The quality of a faculty defines the quality of a college. A hazy mind can’t spark young people even in a dry and air-conditioned room in a multiple-million-dollar building on a carefully landscaped campus. By plunging into politics with the ethics of political brigands, the directors at Texas Tech blackened the repute of their institution among teachers around the country at the very time when colleges’ faculty recruiting problems are more serious than they have been in years. It is easy for good professors to get jobs anywhere in the country now. When they think of Texas Tech they will think of Abernethy. When they think of the University of Texas, or Rice Institute, or SMU they will also think of Abernethy. Is it not the same state, the same social climate ? Isn’t that where they had that Rainey trouble just after the war? The children in public schools, the young men and women of the colleges of Texas are the ones the directors of Texas Tech really hurt and must answer to, for they will not have teachers they would have had. The board of directors meets again Saturday ; it has a last chance to correct its blooper. Cowboy Haley and Elevator Operator Hinn and Rancher Linebery may think they’re clearing the plains of the radicals, but perhaps, ever so remotely perhaps, the rest of the board will pause to think that what they are clearing off the plains is ideas, and that, after all, ideas are sometimes as useful as a good cotton crop. R. D. United Mine Workers The Mine Workers Journal had gone on record vigorously against the jury trial amendment. Its June issue had described it as “phony as a threedollar bill.” Despite this, John L. Lewis suddenly reversed his union and sent telegrams to every senator urging the amendment which his own magazine labeled phony. This switch was accomplished through Willy Hopkins, onetime member of the Texas Senate, a great friend of Lyndon Johnson, now counsel to the United Mine Workers. The fact that John L. Lewis was once socked the biggest fine in labor history by U.S. Judge Alan Goldsborough for violating a court injunction did not handicap Lyndon and Hopkins in swinging John L. around to the rewritten jury trial amendment. Lewis, in turn, swung at least one Republican vote away from Knowlandthat of Chapman Revercomb of West Virginia. Railway BrotherhoodsThis was the most influential labor group of all. The Brotherhoods have a Railway Retirement Act which they want passed and which is stalled in the House. However, the chief factor which swung them into line was the personal persuasion of Lyndon. Parting the Red Sea Lyndon got hold of Cy Anderson, warmhearted representative of the Railway Labor Executive Association, put his nose almost against Cy’s and told him that to save a split in the Democratic Party he had to swing the Brotherhoods behind the jury trial amendment. When Lyndon starts talking he can almost persuade the waters of the Red Sea to part. Cy Anderson got busy. He even persuaded ex Congressman Bob Mollohan of West Virginia to come to -Washington to use his influence. Harry See, lobbyist for the trainmen, also talked to key senators. It was this big push by labor which really rescued Lyndon Johnson on the jury trial amendment. There were two ironic facts about labor’s position : 1.It lined up with part of exactly the same Dixie-GOP coalition which put across the Taft-Hartley act. It was Taft and Northern Republicans who worked out the long standing coalition whereby the South voted against labor and Northern Republicans voted against civil rights. 2.Labor also lined up against important laws which it helped to passthe minimum wage act, the Davis-Bacon act, and the WalshHealy actall enforced by court orders. Enforcement of these laws by jury trials is almost unworkable. NoteAt the last minute, Johnson almost lost one Republican senator, Barry Goldwater of Arizona, because jury trials were extended to labor injunctions. Goldwater, a Phoenix department store owner who hates labor, went up to Knowland and told him he didn’t intend to rewrite the Taft-Hartley act in the civil rights bill. He promised to vote against the jury trial. Later Goldwater began to feel uncomfortable siding with Walter Reuther and Jim ‘Carey, former mainstays of the CIO, who fought against the jury trial compromise. Lyndon shrewdly detailed Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina to work on Goldwater. Thurmond, former Dixiecrat candidate for president, is Goldwater’s best friend in the Senate and finally swung him away from Knowland over to the jury trial amendment. \(This week, spokesmen for the NAACP and other national liberal groups urged passage of the bill as : Texas dailies did not speak with one voice on the amended civil rights bill on the right to vote. San Antonio Express called it “an historic milestone,” commended Johnson for voting for it \(but didn’t The Dallas News said “The two senators from Texas should not be subjected to criticism because they voted for the bill. It was a much better compromise than the South expected Fort Worth StarTelegram said it is directed against “the people of the South,” that Johnson “may be right” it’s the best the South cold get, but “Sentimentally, it might be wished that he could have taken another view …” …. Rep. 0. C. Fisher of San Angelo says in his weekly newsletter the civil rights bill is “a sop for the gullible Negro vote.” …. The Gallup Poll reports that Democrats vote for presidential candidates for ’60 this way : Sen. Kefauver 29 percent, Sen. Kennedy 23, Sen. Johnson 8, Gov. Clement 6 … Asked if they had heard about leading candidates, 92 percent knew of Kefauver, 69 percent Sen. Humphrey, 67 percent Sen. Kennedy, 50 percent Sen. Johnson. …. Sixty or seventy legislators gathered at Caddo Lake near Marshall recently for food, drink, fishing, boating, swimming, and the opening of the Charlie Heitman Jr. Memorial Nursery at Magnolia Springs, near Jasper. Rep. Reagan Huffman, Marshall, was the host officially, but local merchants put up the jack, as is the custom in Texas. …. Sen. Yarborough has started a Washington Report to Texas weeklies. …. H. M. Baggarly writes in the Tulia Herald on the Texas Tech controversy : “Since he \(Gov. Danpower to do anything in this particular case, why didn’t he demand an open hearing for the ousted professors ? …. he did nothing. Was he afraid to challenge big utilities and big business on the board even though they are responsible to him?” …. Senator Johnson has taken to treating the word liberal with quotation-mark prongs. When he referred to the Observer on the floor of the Senate recently he said it was the “most ‘liberal’ ” newspaper in the state. In his recent news letter on the jury trial, he noted O’Mahoney, Kefauver, and ‘Church were sponsoring the jury trial amendment, and he described them thusly : “All three are `liberals’.” …. The Texas Manufacturers’ Assn. has endorsed a new tipper limit on the federal income tax of 42 percent ; it is now 91 percent. TMA is also for decreasing the corporate maximum rate from 52 to 42 percent. …. The federal aid for school construction bill, defeated 208-203 in the U.S. House of Representatives, was solidly opposed by every Texas congressman. TMA comments : “But for the solid Texas front, it probably would have passed.” …. Speculation is afoot that George Nokes, ex-senator from Corsicana now living in Waco, is considering running against Lt. Gov. Ben Ramsey. He has been circulating in political circles. He was a liberal state senator, backed Ralph Yarborough until the 1956 election, when he supported Price Daniel. …. Dallas Times-Herald’s political writer Bob Hollingsworth says . liberal Dallas Democrats are “within reaching distance of control of precinct and county conventions in 1958 and overthrow of longstanding conservative control.” THE TEXAS OBSERVER Page 3 Aug. 16, 1957 A Remote Perhaps