Word: mansfield
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield confesses: "Frankly, I prefer private letters." The National Association of Manufacturers finds it far more effective, says a spokesman, "to send the head of one member plant into the office of a Senator than to send him a petition full of names of all the heads of our member plants." Of campus-circulated petitions, Harvard Historian Oscar Handlin, a confirmed non-signer, says: "I think they have no effect whatsoever except to let people blow off steam. In the past, the academic community was more responsible and therefore more effective...
Until recently, Southern Congressmen who denounced the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare's stringent new guidelines for school desegregation received a sympathetic hearing only from other Southerners. But Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield has now joined in the criticism of HEW, apparently in the belief that continued prodding for integration anywhere will succor a white backlash everywhere. The result of Mansfield's statement that the department is pushing integration "too fast" can only be to slow down the pace of school desegregation in the South, -- a pace that is and has always been unconscionably slow...
...clear that Wallace is hoping for another eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with the federal government. And it is equally clear that Senator Mansfield, in this election year, does not want to see more intra-party feuding over integration. Wary of a white backlash vote, Mansfield is not about to defend federal integration requirements in the face of warnings by Wallace that, "The people of this nation will not long tolerate this trifling with the safety and security of their children...
Quite possibly, it would have been politically advisable for Mansfield to keep silent during the attacks on HEW, rather than leaping to the defense of the guidelines. But his recent statement will only encourage Wallace and like-thinkers North and South. Equally important, it will encourage continued foot-dragging by Southern school officials, who because of their own prejudice or fear of political reprisals have done no more than allow a few Negroes to transfer to formerly all-white schools...
...this weren't enough, the liberal in Congress finds himself faced with an equivalent issue on civil rights as the white backlash becomes more and more a force to be reckoned with. "Slow down," says Senator Mansfield, and one more presumed supporter of Negro demands goes down the drain. The 1966 civil rights bill--a modest attempt to do away with a really minor part of a much vaster problem--gets buried in the process...