Word: leaders
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Inept Show. The whole filibuster fight was hard for most people to understand, and even harder to admire. It had been a shoddy performance all around. The Administration had promised to fight for civil rights for Negroes, but Harry Truman had gone fishing in Florida, and his Senate majority leader, Scott Lucas, had put on an inept show, bellicose when tact was required, weak and confused when strength was called for. The Republicans had nailed civil rights into their party platform, but a majority of Senate Republicans had used a quibble over rules to keep civil rights from coming...
...battle went on with few outward signs of drama. Rumpled, red-eyed Senators shuffled on & off the Senate floor, but in offices and cloakrooms nerves snapped like old rubber bands. Democratic National Chairman J. Howard McGrath traded hot-tempered words with Negro Leader Walter White, who accused the Democrats of forgetting "the oldest law in politics: taking care of the people who took care of you on election...
Across the line in Arkansas, aggressive, young (36) Governor Sidney S. McMath was having as much trouble putting over civil rights as his good friend Harry Truman, who already had tapped McMath as the kind of progressive leader the South needs. The legislature adjourned after blocking McMath's anti-lynch, anti-poll tax program. To rebel cries that McMath was trying to produce a "mongrel" race, the governor replied wearily: "I thought we had gotten above that sort of thing...
Walkout. Canny Moisés Lebensohn, Radical Party leader, sniffed the heady, Peronista atmosphere and waited his chance for a dramatic move. It came when Peronista Arturo Sampay admitted in an unguarded moment that Article 77, revised to allow Peron to succeed himself, might be restored to its original form after the 1952 elections. Lebensohn leaped...
...Since the majority leader has now so brazenly admitted that this convention was called only for the purpose of re-electing General Perón," he shouted, "we can no longer take part in this farcical debate." As one man, the 48 Radicals tore up their copies of the new constitution, flung the pieces in the Peronistas' faces and marched out. "We shall return," declaimed Lebensohn over his shoulder. "We shall yet return to write another constitution...