ment route would take a minimum of two years, but it would probably moderate southern opposition in Congress and head off a filibuster that might threaten the rest of Johnson's ambitious Great Society programs.

As the president pondered his course, events in Selma, Alabama, suddenly and dramatically altered the environment of his decisionmaking. In early January 1965, Martin Luther King, just back from Oslo where he had received the Nobel Peace Prize, had launched a series of demonstrations in this capital of the Black Belt to protest the biased practices that kept 98 percent of the community's adult Negroes from the polls. Along with the local SNCC workers, King led hundreds of blacks in daily marches to the Dallas County Courthouse to get their names on the voter lists. The Board of Registrars was open two days a month and during its office hours processed only a small fraction of the black applications. Compounding the tensions created by the board's dilatory behavior were the provocative actions of Sheriff Jim Clark and his armed deputies. By the beginning of February, the sheriff had arrested over two thousand protesters, including the Nobel laureate. 39

King's incarceration focused national attention on the denial of black voting rights. In the early 1960s, the sit-ins, freedom rides, and the Birmingham demonstrations had concentrated popular outrage on the indignities blacks were forced to suffer when they attempted to utilize public accommodations. Similarly, the riot at the University of Mississippi in 1962 had given impetus to the drive to end segregation in the schools. The 1964 Civil Rights Act struck hard at Jim Crowism in public places and schools, but significantly the one section of the bill that was substantially watered down dealt with the franchise. This alteration had occurred without much

ibid. The attorney general also suggested the possibility of legislation "vesting in a federal commission the power to conduct registration for federal elections." As a last choice, Katzenbach proposed a measure "granting to an agency of the federal government the power to assume direct control of registration for voting in both federal and state elections in any area where the percentage of potential Negro registrants actually registered is low."

39 See the testimony of Attorney General Katzenbach, U. S. Congress, House, Committee on the Judiciary, Hearings (Voting Rights Act of 1965), 89 Cong., 1 sess. (Washington, 1965), pp. 5ff. For an account of the mass arrests, see New York Times, Feb. 4, 1965.

notice, but King, with the unwitting cooperation of Sheriff Clark, George Wallace, and the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, rectified this oversight in the winter and spring of 1965 as the plight of Selma's voteless blacks shared the news spotlight with the administration's escalation of the war in Southeast Asia.

Johnson and the Justice Department lawyers had begun 1965 by preparing mild legislation on voting rights; by mid-February they were working feverishly to come up with stronger measures.40 Republican congressmen on both sides of Capitol Hill were demanding prompt action, and Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, appalled by the viciousness of the Alabama

40 Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson 1 (Washington, 1965): 5. In his State of the Union message Johnson declared, "I propose that we eliminate every remaining obstacle to the right to vote." Although he did not mention any specific suggestions, he had instructed Justice Department lawyers to draft language for the constitutional amendment. The attorney general's men were also giving some thought to legislation empowering federal registrars to supervise enrollment for national elections. "Justice Department Weekly Legislative Report to Lawrence O'Brien," Jan. 11 and 18, 1965, box 8, Reports on Pending Legislation, LBJL. According to Deputy Attorney General Clark, however, when Selma erupted the Civil Rights Divi

police, told Attorney General Katzenbach that he was ready for a "revolutionary" bill.41 Adding to the pressure for new legislation, Dr. King posted bail and flew to Washington for a meeting with the president. On February 9, he urged upon Johnson a voting rights proposal that would establish automatic machinery to eliminate the arbitrary power of the local officials, prohibit literacy tests, and provide for enforcement by federal registrars.42 A few days later, representatives of the NAACP informed the president that the planned constitutional amendment "would not be a satisfactory approach." 43 In this climate, the administration started searching for statutory language that would satisfy Congress and the civil rights groups, end the machination of southern officials, and survive the scrutiny of the courts.

Before the administration could get its legislation finished, the confrontation in Selma exploded, and Johnson had to deal with another crisis. Soon after being released from jail, King had announced plans for a "Freedom March" from Selma to Montgomery; almost immediately Governor Wallace banned all demonstrations on state highways. On Sunday, March 7, a showdown took place. With FBI agents and Justice Department observers scribbling notes on the sidelines, 525 orderly marchers were savagely attacked by state troopers and Sheriff Clark's deputies as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge just outside Selma. Pictures of men on horseback beating women and children were splashed over the next morning's front pages, leading to nationwide demands for the dispatch of federal soldiers to safeguard black rights in Alabama. Hospitalized with a skull fracture, SNCC's John Lewis complained, "I don't see how President Johnson can send troops to Viet Nam ... and can't send troops into Selma, Alabama."'44

sion was slow to respond; its attorneys did not have a specific bill ready, and they were constantly revising their proposals to meet the public outcry that disfranchisement be eradicated once and for all. Clark, interview with Mark I. Gelfand, Sept. 14, 1973.

41 Neil MacNeil, Dirksen: Portrait of a Public Man (New York, 1970), p. 252; New York Times, Jan. 24, 27, 1965.

42 New York Times, Feb. 10, 1965; David L. Lewis, King: A Critical Biography (New York, 1970), p. 269.

43 "Justice Department Status Report," Feb. 15, 1965, box

9, Reports on Pending Legislation, LBJL.

44 Quoted in New Republic, Mar. 20, 1965, p. 5.

More violence appeared to be in the offing when King, who had been in Atlanta on "Bloody Sunday," announced his intention of leading a second march in two days.

The president's response was swift- and characteristic. He sent Leroy Collins, director of the Community Relations Service, to Selma to avert a clash between King and the Alabama authorities. Working against a short deadline, Collins, with the assistance of John Doar, the Justice Department's mediator par excellence, fashioned an agreement that allowed King and his followers to cross the Pettus bridge and then stop and pray in front of a heavily armed line of state troopers before turning back.45 Neither the marchers nor the state police were happy with their assigned roles, but the scenario was played out peacefully. That evening, however, an enlistee in the freedom struggle, the Rev. James Reeb, a white minister from Boston, was fatally beaten by racist assailants on a Selma street.

The question of federal police action in Selma revived the controversy between Johnson and the suffragists which had begun the previous summer in Mississippi. Once again the president and his advisers opposed such intervention. Katzenbach worried about the precedent that would be set, doubted that a federal presence would actually promote calm or be effective, and feared that once troops or marshals were involved it would be extremely difficult to get them out. Johnson shared these concerns and had some political ones as well. Intervention by Washington, he believed, would make a martyr of Wallace, resurrect bitterness between the North and the South, and destroy the chances of passing voting rights legislation.46

The president apparently reconciled whatever contradictions he may have discerned between the politics and the morality of his

45 Fred Miller to George W. Culbertson, Apr. 15, 1965, Leroy Collins MSS, University of South Florida; Leroy Collins, oral history interview, with permission of Julia Chapman. For a slightly different version of the delicate negotiations, see Martin Luther King, Jr., "Behind the Selma March,” Saturday Review, Apr. 3, 1965, p. 16. John Doar has recently disclaimed that any deal was worked out with King and has contended that he did not know what the minister would do until he actually halted the march in front of the Alabama state troopers. Doar, interview with Mark I. Gelfand, Aug. 27, 1973.

decision. He never deviated from his ultimate goal of extending the ballot to the mass of southern blacks, but he was anxious to achieve his objective without stirring up the wrath of the opposition. Unlike the suffrage crusaders filled with burning rage against their racist oppressors, LBJ did not view southern white leaders as evil men whose sin must be painfully exorcised with righteous indignation. Instead, he preferred to reason, negotiate, and cajole- the famous "Johnson treatment." The Texan presented his ideas for racial change in a highly charged atmosphere where southerners wielded great power in Congress and elected officials in Dixie whipped up popular resistance. Thus, he sought to expand first-class citizenship for southern blacks and, at the same time, convince the white South to make the required adjustments peacefully and permanently. It was a task for a modern day Samson and a Solomon, and no political leader could have the strength or wisdom to satisfy both sides completely.

The chief executive, however, showed that he would use the armed forces as a last resort. When King won a federal court order allowing him to proceed with his march, Johnson met with Governor Wallace at the White House and bluntly informed him that the federal government would protect the marchers if Alabama did not. On March 18, Wallace telegraphed the president that he did not have the available resources to ensure the marchers' safety, hence Johnson federalized the Alabama National Guard to patrol the fifty-mile route from Selma to Montgomery.47 However, even the presence of troops did not prevent three nightriders from shooting and killing a white volunteer from Detroit, Viola Liuzzo.

Amidst the Alabama turbulence, Johnson personally presented his voting rights program to the Congress. On March 15, adopting the battle cry of the freedom struggle, he told the legislators and a nationwide prime time television audience, "It is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome." 48 Generally accepted as Johnson's finest hour, the president's performance touched even his harshest critics. "Your address," wrote John Lewis, a battle

47 Goldman, Tragedy, pp. 372-373.

48 Public Papers, vol. 1, pp. 196-197, 276.

The administration's bill was just as impressive; the Justice Department lawyers had done their job well. The measure replaced the cumbersome court procedures outlined in the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts with an automatic formula to wipe out discrimination. In states and counties where a literacy test was utilized and less than 50 percent of the population had gone to the polls in November 1964, the bill would suspend educational requirements for voting. Furthermore, it authorized the attorney general to assign federal examiners to register qualified voters in the designated areas. After some minor changes, the bill would be back on the president's desk for his signature by early August.50

The passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 demonstrated how reformist Johnson could be when his ethical and political senses coincided. The tremendous rise in black voting after 1965 was impressive, and its impact was felt throughout the South-Sheriff Jim Clark would be among the first to feel its strength at the polls. The days of wanton violence against southern blacks appeared to be coming to an end, and black neighborhoods were receiving a more equitable share of community services. The year 1968 would even see the seating of three black delegates as part of the Mississippi delegation at the Democratic Convention.51

49 Lewis to White, Apr. 20, 1965, box 47, SP 2-3, 1965 Hu 2-7 (Mar. 15, 1965), LBJL.

50 The biggest threat to the measure's enactment was posed not by its Dixie foes but by its northern liberal allies. At issue was how to get rid of the poll tax in state elections. Liberals wanted to abolish it by an amendment to the administration bill, but Justice Department lawyers thought a constitutional amendment was required. Fearing that the liberals' insistence on this point would mean the loss of Dirksen, whose revolutionary ardor had its limits, on the crucial cloture vote, the administration mobilized its resources to defeat the poll tax repealer. As a compromise, Johnson agreed to a provision in the bill that authorized the attorney general to test the constitutionality of the poll tax in the courts as soon as possible. In this instance, Johnson's maneuvering worked to perfection. Cloture was easily secured, and less than a year after the 1965 act went into effect the Supreme Court ruled the poll tax unconstitutional. For the administration's courting of Dirksen, see Katzenbach to Johnson, May 21, 1965, box 2, Henry Wilson Files, LBJL.

51 Charles N. Fortenberry and F. Glenn Abney, "Mississippi: Unreconstructed and Unredeemed," in William C. Havard, ed., The Changing Politics of the South (Baton Rouge, 1972), p. 494.

Yet having employed much of the authority of his office to help clear away the legal barriers to the exercise of the ballot by blacks, the president's political instincts and his perception of the nature of the federal system kept him from utilizing the act's full potential as a catalyst for change in southern politics. Federal examiners were sent only to fifty-eight out of one hundred eighty-five counties where less than a majority of the adult blacks were signed up to vote in 1965. Without a federal presence, many blacks reared in an environment of repression and brutality experienced extreme difficulty in remembering that politics was no longer for whites only. Nor did Johnson employ the full facilities of the federal government to bring blacks to the polls. As the civil rights organizations pointed out, he might have authorized various federal agencies such as the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Agriculture to sponsor nonpartisan programs in citizenship training. 52 The administration decided against a postcard campaign directed toward black neighborhoods that would inform residents when registration offices were open.53 Furthermore, the president did not encourage reorganization of his party in the South so that blacks could gain an equitable share of the leadership posts, and as the presidential term drew to a close in 1969 they remained virtually excluded from high Democratic councils in Dixie. 54

52 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Political Participation (Washington, 1968); L. Thome McCarty and Russell B. Stevenson, "The Voting Rights Act of 1965: An Evaluation," Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Review 3 (Spring 1968): 357-411.

53 New York Times, Dec. 5, 1965; Wall Street Journal, Dec. 28, 1965. The administration thought such types of activity should be undertaken by private civil rights groups.

54 U. S. Commission on Civil Rights, Political Participation,

Yet if, on balance, the president had significantly transformed the political world he had inherited from his predecessors and in which he had once thrived, Johnson was also a victim of his very successes. Under the Great Society, southern blacks enrolled to vote in record numbers. But with each new gain, Negro aspirations soared higher than the Johnson administration could fulfill them. The passage in 1968, for example, of a statute empowering the Justice Department to protect civil rights organizers was no longer relevant to many of the former COFO workers because they had already repudiated liberal reform ideology in favor of the exclusionary doctrines of black nationalism and black power. Furthermore, the president's escalation of the conflict in Vietnam diverted vital energies away from pursuing justice at home. As the bomb blasts reverberated ever more loudly from Southeast Asia, influential activists like Martin Luther King joined the chorus of voices protesting Johnson's war policies. Whereas the chief executive never accepted the arguments of the antiwar critics, like the militants he realized that the job of extending full freedom remained unfinished. In December 1972, shortly before his death, he confessed to a National Archives sponsored symposium on civil rights, "The progress has been much too small; we haven't done nearly enough. I'm ashamed of myself that I had six years and couldn't do more than I did." 55 Lyndon Johnson had broken the lock on the ballot box, but he did not open the door widely enough to complete emancipation.

p. 178. The federal agency concluded, "... there has been little or no progress in the entry and participation by Negroes in political party affairs-the key to meaningful participation in the electoral process."

55 Robert C. Rooney, ed., Equal Opportunity in the United States: A Symposium on Civil Rights (Austin, 1973), p. 164.

HAROLD T. PINKETT

Shortly before noon on March 6, 1935, a strange

yellow haze appeared in the sky above the nation's capital. Airplane observations over Washington showed that the haze was produced by a thick layer of dust extending upward some eight thousand feet. Early that evening a light rain fell. To the astonishment of Washingtonians the rain water was muddy before it reached the ground. A few hours later the clouds of yellow dust moved eastward, passed slowly over cities along the Atlantic coast, and finally fell on the decks of ships hundreds of miles at sea.

Some days later Americans in the east learned that they had experienced for the first time a "yellow rain"-a phenomenon that had become common in the Great Plains states from whence dust storms came. These storms, which had begun in 1933, they were told, were causing tons of rich topsoil from the fields of the Dakotas, Kansas, Colorado, Texas, and Oklahoma to be blown into their midst. News stories from these states depicted great distress. At Salina, Kansas, dust was so thick that it was impossible to see anything more than ten feet ahead. Houses were filled with dust that coated furnishings, drifted into every crevice, and made breathing difficult. Governor Alf Landon appealed for federal aid to save the state's farmlands. In Amarillo, Texas,

the tallest structures were hidden in a cover of dust that seemed to turn day into night. Wheat and other crops in the Panhandle were blown from their roots or buried in sand and dust drifts.

The distress caused by the dust storms of the 1930s was a powerful influence in spurring a national effort for the conservation of natural and renewable resources. One of the most noteworthy motion pictures ever produced by the federal government, The Plow That Broke the Plains, brilliantly captured the causes and pathos of the dust storms. Another famous government film that raised the national level of concern for conservation was The River. It depicted the importance of the Mississippi in American history from frontier days to the 1930s and emphasized that soil erosion, caused by floods, resulted in an estimated three billion tons of solid material being washed out of the nation's fields and pastures each year.

Such disastrous dust storms and floods led to the establishment of the Soil Conservation Service in 1935 as a permanent federal agency to promote soil conservation programs. Its records report on the conditions that brought these programs and disclose the zeal with which they were launched. They also tell much of the role of Hugh H. Bennett, acknowledged father of the soil conservation movement, and