Members Of The United States Senate

"Any education that matters is liberal. All the saving truths, all the healing graces that distinguish a good education from a bad one or a full education from a half-empty one are contained in that word."

"Lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they'll only let one girl go to the bathroom. Now think about it. Think about that issue. How is it that that's happened to us?"

"There is no "slippery slope" toward loss of liberty, only a long staircase where each step down must first be tolerated by the American people and their leaders."

"If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don't have integrity, nothing else matters."

"He has no credibility left."

"As a lifelong Republican who served in the Army in Germany, I believe it is critical that we review — and overturn — the ban on gay service in the military. I voted for "don't ask, don't tell." But much has changed since 1993. My thinking shifted when I read that the military was firing translators because they are gay. According to the Government Accountability Office, more than 300 language experts have been fired under "don't ask, don't tell," including more than 50 who are fluent in Arabic. This when even Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently acknowledged the nation's "foreign language deficit" and how much our government needs Farsi and Arabic speakers. Is there a "straight" way to translate Arabic? Is there a "gay" Farsi? My God, we'd better start talking sense before it is too late. We need every able-bodied, smart patriot to help us win this war."

"I have had the rich satisfaction of knowing and working with many openly gay and lesbian Americans, and I have come to realize that "gay" is an artificial category when it comes to measuring a man or woman's on-the-job performance or commitment to shared goals. It says little about the person. Our differences and prejudices pale next to our historic challenge."

"I think you know grandchildren now don't write a thank you for the Christmas presents that are walkin' on their pants with their cap on backwards, listenin' to the Enema Man and Snoopy Snoopy Poop Dogg and they don't like 'em."

"So the punchline for George Bush is this, you would have wanted him on your side. He never lost his sense of humor. Humor is the universal solvent against the abrasive elements of life. That’s what humor is. He never hated anyone — he knew what his mother and my mother always knew: hatred corrodes the container it’s carried in."

"I say to my colleague from New York that if someone who has a concealed carry permit... in the State of South Dakota that goes to New York and is in Central Park -- Central Park is a much safer place."

"I can't believe someone this ignorant gets elected to the United States Senate."

"Many southern politicians continued to use extreme language similar to Bilbo’s. Major southern figures such as James Eastland, Richard Russell, Strom Thurmond, and George Wallace played the race card and supported Jim Crow with all their energies well into the 1960s. But they usually avoided the kind of overt racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Italian remarks that Bilbo consistently expressed. Instead they employed code words; these legislators talked of the need to protect the South from “outside agitators” and the necessity of defending “state’s rights,” but rarely used the terms niggers or kikes."

"News of Senator-Elect Theodore G. Bilbo’s death in New Orleans brought on unparalleled rejoicing throughout civilized America...bartenders throughout the country [are] giving free drinks with which to toast the end of four decades of racial hatred."

"The Senate’s effort to deny Bilbo his seat was clear evidence of change. The war against Nazi Germany, the unifying effect of World War II, and America’s new role as the leader of the Western world altered elite attitudes outside of the South toward public racism. By 1947, such extreme rhetoric had become unacceptable from a major public figure."

"Theodore G. Bilbo was perhaps the most controversial public figure on the national scene.... The extremism of his pronouncements on race relations had polarized much of the country... To the vast majority of southern whites, Bilbo had become the leading spokesman in the fight to preserve that section's structure of racial segregation from those who wanted to bring about racial equality. To liberal whites and blacks, on the other hand, Bilbo was America's most vicious race-baiter."

"We would be hard put to find a kinder word for Theodore G. Bilbo than the classic observation that he was not always as bad as he was sometimes."

"Bilbo’s ejection was the official repudiation of the rotten southern political system based on racial hatred, the system that had kept southern congressmen in Washington for decades. Bilbo was a symbol of the past."

"Like everybody in Mississippi, I have been watching the newspapers and listening to the radio and have kept up with you, and just want you to know that friends and foes alike are for you 1000%... In Kemper, Winston, and Sunflower counties I have heard, during the past week, a score or more men who have never voted for you in their lives say that if the election was being held now they would vote for you regardless of who opposed you."

"I am very sorry that you are physically unable to continue your ‘fight’ in Washington at this time. As I see it, our civilization is already in the evening twilight of its existence, and nothing can stop it."

"Virtually the entire national media supported the move against Bilbo. The Boston Globe, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times all editorialized in favor of his removal. In a sign that Bilbo’s support was declining in the South, the Atlanta-Journal Constitution strongly approved of his removal, although it cited the war profiteering charges rather than his racist incitements as its rationale."

"There are diverse opinions as to the parliamentary means of preventing Theodore Bilbo from taking or holding a seat in the United States Senate, but there can be no reasonable or honest doubt of his unfitness to do so."

"The Bilbo compromise reached by the Senate late Saturday afternoon was really a victory for those who carried on the fight against the Senator-elect."

"The same groups which for the past four years have been fighting Senator Bilbo and what he stands for are behind this movement. But instead of having the courage to come into the Senate and say, “Throw him out because of his views on the poll tax bill,” they have camouflaged the issue."

"His endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan and his boast of membership appear to have genuinely shocked many Senators."

"He has become so vile that the men who would sit with him in Congress can bear him no longer."

"To those on the lowest rung of the ladder he does not offer a lift; he merely offers to create another rung, still lower, so that the progress of man will be a series of descending steps. This is the same sort of cheap thrill that was peddled in Germany by an ambitious house painter some ten years ago."

"The chances were very slim that he [Bilbo] would ever enter it [the Senate] again as a U.S. Senator."

"I thank God that there are men like you who are not afraid to tell the truth about the past."

"You are a menace to democracy and to the people defending it."

"I see Mississippi had disgraced itself again."

"I heartily indorse [sic] the stand you have taken against the Social Equality of the negros."

"The attacks on Bilbo only intensified in August when he revealed his old Klan membership on the radio program “Meet the Press.” He was unrepentant... The reaction to his admission was another example of changing elite perceptions. Dixie Demagogues, published in 1939, had exposed Bilbo’s Klan membership but drawn little notice; in 1946, however, the Federation of Italian Americans and the Shriners joined the chorus demanding Bilbo’s removal."

"The Senate ‘compromise,’ so-called, on the issue of Senator Bilbo’s admission, may be defended on the grounds of expediency, but not it seems to us, upon constitutional or moral grounds."

"Bilbo never took his Senate seat again. He went to a New Orleans hospital to have surgery for throat cancer and died there six months later on August 21, 1947. In death, he was hailed as a hero by defenders of white supremacy and condemned as a symbol of racism by Jim Crow’s opponents."

"It’s been six years since the voters have seen him, six years since they elected him as their senior senator to Congress. In that time, he has made himself known throughout the nation. Indeed, his infamy has spread across the high seas. In Germany, today, citizens of the Reich sometimes ask the American military, ‘What kind of man is this Senator Bilbo?’"

"We have considered filing a petition to oust him [Bilbo] by a two-thirds vote, but he would revel in the publicity of a trial. Of course, as a general thing, senators cannot begin denouncing other senators because they disagree with them, but certainly Bilbo is not on the same basis as any other senator that I know of."

"When Bilbo went home to campaign in the summer of 1946, he faced a dramatically different situation from that of 1940. Northern and border state Democrats no longer wished to campaign with him. An extraordinarily broad coalition of elites— including both the Nation and the Saturday Evening Post, the Communist Party and the Jewish War Veterans, Robert Wagner and Robert Taft— desired and/or seriously considered his expulsion from the Senate."

"I would gladly give Bilbo and Rankin to the other side. Speaking personally, I’d be glad to see them both out of public life altogether."

"For a long time now we have engaged in a long and bloody war to wipe out a regime which fostered racial antagonism . . . . Statements insulting to one or more of the many diverse groups which make up our great nation are a disservice to the principles on which this nation was founded and to those of our boys of all races and creeds who during the past few years have fought and in all too many instances died for the preservation of these principles."

"Proceedings [on removal] as soon as possible so that the people of our nation may retain the fruits of the victory which we have gained in the successful waging of war against Hitlerism, fascism, and Japanese militarism."

"But it took more than just a change in white attitudes to bring down Bilbo. A more energized black civil rights movement emerged from World War II as many African Americans, having fought for democracy abroad, demanded changes at home...Indeed, the remarkable courage of southern blacks who tried to vote during the 1946 election despite the threat of violence—along with pressure from the NAACP and black newspapers—was key to Bilbo’s removal. The changing attitudes of white elites, however, also helped to seal “The Man’s” fate."

"I am one of those unfortunates whose kids did not come back [from the war], and there were thousands of them, Catholic, Protestant and Jews, Negro and white, who died to keep this sweet land free. I hate and despise those bigots, like the nefarious Senator Bilbo of Mississippi."

"Senator Bilbo’s exhibition last Thursday made it appear that at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives we had destroyed Hitler’s racial obscenity in Europe only to have it parade in all its shameless arrogance at the very center of our democracy...Perhaps we should warn the other nations that Bilbo is an atavistic survival and not an effective symbol of American democracy...the challenge is nothing less than to extirpate from American public life all the evil intolerance that Bilbo and [Representative John] Rankin personify.”"

"Bilbo is a one-man chamber of horrors, an unanswerable argument in favor of elimination of an obscene evil from a free society of men."

"But elsewhere in the nation, still with fresh memory of the savagery against European minorities, there was a murmuring of real concern. . . . he [Bilbo] had chosen the aftermath of a war against the Nazis to invoke mob invective against ‘dagos’ and ‘kikes’ who had urged equal opportunity for the Negro."

"The FEPC appropriation was sustained today, after a vicious, dirty speech by Bilbo, who was hissed from the galleries and deserved it."

"The Senator is as much surprised as anybody over the notoriety achieved by his proposal to send Negroes to Africa. For that scheme had become a cold potato until revived by the furor among his excited critics when he mentioned it recently. He proposed it as a Senate bill in 1939 and it died a very natural death. He did not even bother to reintroduce it in subsequent sessions. But now it is given the dignity of controversy—something it never possessed before. The same sort of thing applies to the Senator’s recent speech before the Mississippi legislature. He undoubtedly has been making the same speech, off and on for years. The feverish reception accorded it here in the District must be the source of profound gratification to Senator Bilbo... Senator Bilbo is a duly constituted representative of the voters of Mississippi and they have supported him rather faithfully for over three decades. It is a waste of effort to quarrel with Senator Bilbo over his views or with the fact that he is here."

"Your conduct is a chilling deterrent to the world-wide belief that America is the symbol of democracy and human rights."

"From the opening until the final passage vote, debate was conducted with a bluntness as to racial questions which appeared to surprise and at times astound observers in the visitor’s galleries."

"In the end, Bilbo defeated his four opponents, garnering fifty-one percent of the vote to avoid a runoff and win re-election to a third term. Although Bilbo’s opponents shared his views on segregation, the attacks by northern politicians and newspapers had allowed “The Man” to portray himself, in classic southern tradition, as defending Mississippi’s way of life against outside interference... Indeed, Bilbo achieved his broadest geographic support ever, winning seventy-six out of eighty-two counties, including all but one in the Delta, the traditional center of anti-Bilbo sentiment."