ABSTRACT
The Democratic leadership in Congress was lumbering, “trying to smother issues,” as one liberal Democrat noted, yet adamantine in its power, recruiting such erstwhile militant liberals as Joseph Clark and Hubert Humphrey, whose eyes stretched beyond the Senate and who therefore worked with Lyndon Johnson. The leader of the Democrats was hardly more decisive. A newspaper editor and Democratic National Committeeman from North Carolina, Jonathan Daniels had served as Eleanor Roosevelt’s press secretary, then as advisor to Truman during the 1948 campaign. Harry Ashmore of the Arkansas Gazette, later a campaign aide in 1956, told Adlai Stevenson that the Court decision had ended the legal battle, that civil rights had lost its political significance, that the issue would no longer divide the Democratic party. The chairman of the Committee on Civil Rights said that “a united, democratic labor movement of 15 million Americans can be the greatest single force in our society for the swift expansion of civil rights.”
