Word: rearguards
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...achieving the decision, Senate Democratic leadership skillfully gutted the first civil rights bill to approach congressional approval in 82 years. It was a triumph-of a sort-for the strategy laid down weeks earlier by the commander of the Southern Democratic rearguard, Georgia's Senator Richard Brevard Russell (see below). No one claimed that the debate had not been full or the tactics fair (the South argued redundantly but on the points at issue), or that the net bill did not mark some slight progress. But by the same token, no one could argue that the verdict...
...interval the words, thoughts and plans of this extraordinarily influential Senator had been echoed, magnified, repeated, debated in both houses of Congress, at the White House, in presidential press conferences, on radio, TV, and in newspaper editorials across the land. When the time came for his resolute Southern rearguard to do battle against the first civil rights bill since 1875 that seemed destined to pass, the legions of his enemies were reeling in confusion...
Dick Russell did not direct the tactics that broke the bill. That was the work of Majority Leader Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was more interested in holding together a Democratic Party than in preserving the extreme rights of the Deep South. But Rearguard Commander Russell chose the intellectual battlefield, laid down the lines of argument, and was never dislodged by the overwhelming manpower mustered by the Republican leadership, by the Democrats' own liberals, by the brigades of Administration lawyers, or even by the President of the U.S. It was one of the notable performances of Senate history...
...South gained one point after another in debate, the rearguard commander became a new kind of Confederate hero back home. "The South owes a great debt to Senator Russell," cheered the often critical Savannah News. "He has proven himself an unflinching champion of the region that gave him birth." Said the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "The South's hour may not yet be at hand...
...this sort of strategic situation, the civil rights forces are bound to keep coming on, this year, next year, year after next, inexorably. Even now Dick Russell's rearguard is fighting from a line set back more deeply in the Southern heartland than ever before. For all of his brilliant strategic success in breaking the back of the civil rights bill of 1957, some sort of civil rights bill, however scrawny, will almost surely be enacted one day soon, and the fact of the passage may, in the long perspective of history, count for more than the substance...