Members Of The United States Senate

"Between the spring of 1944 and the summer of 1946, changing perceptions of racism and nativism transformed Theodore Bilbo from an unremarkable southern senator to a national, and indeed, international symbol of bigotry. His anti-black rhetoric, which had changed little since the late 1920s, became an outrage outside of the South as white elites became more conscious of the contradiction between American ideals and American practice. His anti-Italian and anti-Semitic statements, which appeared to be a relatively new part of his rhetorical arsenal, were especially unwelcome in the aftermath of the war and the Holocaust."

"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.”"

"Dr. Goebbels himself could not have hewed more faithfully to Nazi racial doctrines...Is there any possible reason then for keeping at the head of the District of Columbia a man who is using Hitlerian doctrine to disrupt national unity and sow seeds of discord and make our democracy appear ridiculous before the world?... So long as Mississippi wishes this kind of representation in the Senate the preponderant majority of citizens who believe in democracy and tolerance, live and let live, will have to endure it."

"He was out of office for three years, then won election to the Senate. There he has seldom spoken on national affairs."

"Furthermore, Bilbo’s racism did not seem to bother his fellow Democrats. Following his primary victory in 1940, he stumped for his party brethren in fifteen states during the fall campaign. Bilbo gave the keynote address to the Young Democrats of New York. Senator Joseph Guffey of Pennsylvania, noting that Bilbo’s speeches were well received in the Keystone State, called him "tops among Southern statesman as a campaigner." In addition to Pennsylvania and New York, Bilbo campaigned in several other states where Democrats competed for black votes. For instance, then-senator Harry S. Truman often relied on the African American vote in Kansas City and St. Louis. Still, Truman—who would desegregate the military less than a decade later—campaigned with Bilbo in Missouri. After his re-election, the future president wrote to Bilbo, “Can’t thank you enough for what you did in Missouri.”"

"Furthermore, elites often expressed or ignored other forms of bigotry. Anti-Italian sentiment, while less acceptable than anti-black sentiment, could still be seen in major news publications before the war. Indeed, this rhetoric appeared in descriptions of the most popular Italian-American of the day, New York Yankees star Joe DiMaggio...Similarly, anti-Semitism frequently went ignored within the larger culture."

"While some 500 Negroes listened with sympathetic interest in the public galleries, Senator Bilbo of Mississippi today urged Federal aid for colonization of large numbers of that race in Liberia."

"Last week, in the Senate, Theodore Bilbo finally cut loose with his first unprovoked outburst of rabble rousing... Hardly a newspaper reported it."

"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."

"World War II, however, brought about a significant change in elite attitudes. Due to the ideological war against Nazism, America’s emergence as a superpower, and the unifying nature of the conflict, the kind of virulent public racism that was a trademark of Bilbo’s career was no longer tolerated outside of the South. Bilbo’s career, from his return to the governor’s mansion in 1928 through the Senate debate over his seating in 1947, parallels and illustrates the declining tolerance of overt racism and nativism in the United States."

"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 principle of segregation of the White and Negro races in the South is so well known that it requires no definition. Briefly and plainly stated, the object of this policy is to prevent the two races from meeting on terms of social equality. By established practice, each race maintains its own institutions and promotes its own social life."

"What is the real issue at stake? Why this determination on the part of the South to maintain the color line and to fight back with all her strength against the combined efforts of certain groups in our Nation, white and black, to break down segregation and to destroy Southern ideals and customs? The answer is simple. The South stands for blood, for the preservation of the blood of the white race. To preserve her blood, the white South must absolutely deny social equality to the Negro regardless of what his individual accomplishments might be. This is the premise - openly and frankly stated - upon which Southern policy is based. This position is so thoroughly justified in the minds of white Southerners that it is sometimes difficult for them to comprehend the reasoning of those who seriously dispute it."

"If we sit with Negroes at our tables, if we attend social functions with them as our social equals, if we disregard segregation in all other relations, is it then possible that we maintain it fixedly in the marriage of the South's Saxon sons and daughters? The answer must be "No." By the absolute denial of social equality to the Negro, the barriers between the races are firm and strong. But if the middle wall of the social partition should be broken down, then the mingling of the tides of life would surely begin. It would be a slow process, but the result would be the same. And though the process be gradual, it would be none the less irresistible and inevitable. The lower strata of the white population would probably feel the first effects, and within the foreseeable future the middle and upper classes would be invaded. Then, the Southern White race, the Southern Caucasian, would be irretrievably doomed."

"I am honestly against the social intermingling of Negroes and Whites but I hold nothing personal against the Negroes as a race. They should be proud of their God-given heritage just as I am proud of mine. I believe Negroes should have the right [to indiscriminate use of the ballot], and in Mississippi too— when their main purpose is not to put me out of office and when they won't try to besmirch the reputation of my state."

"I call on every red-blooded white man to use any means to keep the niggers away from the polls[;] if you don’t understand what that means you are just plain dumb. I’m calling on every red-blooded American who believes in the superiority and integrity of the white race to get out and see that no nigger votes...and the best time to do that is the night before!”"

"No man can leave the Klan. He takes an oath not to do that. Once a Ku Klux, always a Ku Klux."

"Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, white elites outside the South—defined here as leading daily newspapers, weekly magazines, organizations, and political leaders—largely ignored Bilbo’s racist incitements."

"I deny that I exhorted, agitated, and made any inflammatory appeals to the passions and prejudices of the white population to foster, stimulate, inspire, create and intensify a state of acute and aggravated tension between the white and Negro races in the state of Mississippi... I want to say right here off the record that the Negroes of Mississippi have never had a better friend."

"I have just heard this Sunday night’s broadcast by you, the most limicolous liar and notorious scandalizing kike radio commentator of today."

"There are five million Jews in the United States and the majority of them are fine public citizens, but if Jews of your type don’t quit sponsoring and fraternizing with the Negro race you are going to arouse so much opposition that they will get a very strong invitation to pack up and resettle in Palestine, the homeland of the Jews, just as we propose to provide for the voluntary resettlement of the American Negro in West Africa their fatherland. Now do not pop-off and say I am in favor of sending the Jews to Palestine. What I am trying to say to you is that there are just a few of you New York ‘kikes’ that are fraternizing and socializing with the Negroes for selfish and political reasons and if you keep it up you will arouse the opposition of the better class of your race."

"Its purpose is to plant the seeds of devilment and trouble-breeding in the days to come in the mind and heart of every American Negro ... It is the dirtiest, filthiest, lousiest, most obscene piece of writing that I have ever seen in print. I would hate to have a son or daughter of mine permitted to read it; it is so filthy and so dirty. But it comes from a Negro, and you cannot expect any better from a person of his type."

"Do Senators propose that we spend $446,000 of the people’s money for 66 Negroes, 12 Jews, a few gentiles, and two Japs, just to be ‘lollypops’ for this country, ‘sugar boys’ going around pacifying?"

"I am ready to wage the most strenuous fight of my life to defeat the Fair Employment Practices Commission, the anti-poll tax bill, the anti-lynching bill, and the $4 billion loan to England...If you draft Negro boys into the army, give them three good meals a day, a good uniform and let them shoot craps and drink liquor around the barracks for a year, they won’t be worth a tinker’s damn thereafter."

"Of course, she did not understand my ultimate plan. If I can succeed eventually in resettling the great majority of Negroes in West Africa— and I propose to do it— I might entertain the proposition of crowning Eleanor queen of Greater Liberia."

"Stripped to his shirtsleeves, wearing a flaming red necktie with a diamond stickpin, he campaigned with a contagious passion, whipping crowds into frenzied excitement with his denunciations of ‘Wall Streeters,’ entrenched political interest groups, corporate monopolies and the establishment press."

"“I continuously travel the United States and give my word from close examination that the birds behind all this social race equality stuff are Jews— from that rat Winchell to the most illiterate second-hand man.""

"If you succeed in the passage of this bill, you will open the floodgates of hell in the South. Raping, mobbing, lynching, race riots, and crime will be increased a thousandfold; and upon your garments and the garments of those who are responsible for the passage of the measure will be the blood of the raped and outraged daughters of Dixie, as well as the blood of the perpetrators of these crimes that the red-blooded Anglo-Saxon white Southern men will not tolerate."

"It is essential to the perpetuation of our Anglo-Saxon civilization that white supremacy be maintained, and to maintain our civilization there is only one solution, and that is either by segregation within the United States, or by deportation of the entire Negro race to its native heath, Africa."

"It is the height of folly to assume that environment, discipline, education, and all other external devices can affect the blood, smooth down inequalities between individuals of the same breed, much less between different breeds, or transmute racial qualities... The Germans appreciate the importance of race values. They understand that racial improvement is the greatest asset that any country can have...They know, as few other nations have realized, that the impoverishment of race values contributes more to the impairment and destruction of a civilization than any other agency.”"

"When once the flat-nosed Ethiopian, like the camel, gets his proboscis under the tent, he will overthrow the established order of our Saxon civilization."

"I am utterly powerless. The State has no troops, and if the civil authorities at Ellisville are helpless, the States are equally so. Furthermore, excitement is at such a high pitch throughout South Mississippi that any armed attempt to interfere would doubtless result in the deaths of hundreds of persons. The negro has confessed, says he is ready to die, and nobody can keep the inevitable from happening."

"This is a white man's country, with a white man's civilization and any dream on the part of the Negro race to share social and political equality will be shattered in the end."

"It is further a plan of the almighty that the Negroes may be transferred back to the land of their forefathers."

"When this war is over and more than two million Negro soldiers, whose minds have been filled and poisoned with political and social equality stuff, return and ‘hell breaks out’ all over the country, I think I’ll get more help in settling the Negroes in Africa."

"To defeat this measure, so help me God, I would be willing to speak every day of the year 1938."

"Hypnotic in his power, a master of invective, and making astute use of his familiarity with the Bible, he swayed the white tenants, small planters and the bankrupt with his assaults on Wall Street...Like Huey Long of Louisiana, his stronghold is the rural sections. There he is hailed as a courageous and unfailing defender, and his public appearances have the flavor of revival meetings."

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

"Rarely cited by the Supreme Court today, Justice Black is generally viewed by the Court (as he was by Bickel) as too 'absolutist,' too unyielding, too unresponsive to other societal needs. But the Pentagon Papers case may, even now, best be recalled in Justice Black's opinion, the last he would write on the Court."

"The public welfare demands that constitutional cases must be decided according to the terms of the Constitution itself, and not according to judges' views of fairness, reasonableness, or justice. I have no fear of constitutional amendments properly adopted, but I do fear the rewriting of the Constitution by judges under the guise of interpretation."

"President Roosevelt [...] told me there was no reason for my worrying about my having been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He said some of his best friends and supporters he had in the state of Georgia were among members of the organization. He never in any way, by word or attitude, indicated any doubt about my having been in the Klan nor did he indicate any criticism of me for having been a member of that organization."

"The flagrant disregard in the courtroom of elementary standards of proper conduct should not and cannot be tolerated. We believe trial judges confronted with disruptive, contumacious, stubbornly defiant defendants must be given sufficient discretion to meet the circumstances in each case."

"Citizenship is no light trifle to be jeopardized any moment Congress decides to do so under the name of one of its general or implied grants of power."

"[A]ny broad unlimited power to hold laws unconstitutional because they offend what this Court conceives to be the ‘conscience of our people’ ... was not given by the Framers, but rather has been bestowed on the Court by the Court."

"The Court's justification for consulting its own notions rather than following the original meaning of the Constitution, as I would, apparently is based on the belief of the majority of the Court that for this Court to be bound by the original meaning of the Constitution is an intolerable and debilitating evil; that our Constitution should not be 'shackled to the political theory of a particular era,' and that to save the country from the original Constitution the Court must have constant power to renew it and keep it abreast of this Court's more enlightened theories of what is best for our society. It seems to me that this is an attack not only on the great value of our Constitution itself but also on the concept of a written constitution which is to survive through the years as originally written unless changed through the amendment process which the Framers wisely provided."

"For me, the only correct meaning of that phrase is that our Government must proceed according to the 'law of the land'—that is, according to written constitutional and statutory provisions as interpreted by court decisions."

"The proceedings of the original Constitutional Convention show beyond all doubt that the power to veto or negative state laws was denied Congress. On several occasions proposals were submitted to the convention to grant this power to Congress. These proposals were debated extensively and on every occasion when submitted for vote they were overwhelmingly rejected. The refusal to give Congress this extraordinary power to veto state laws was based on the belief that if such power resided in Congress the States would be helpless to function as effective governments. Since that time neither the Fifteenth Amendment nor any other Amendment to the Constitution has given the slightest indication of a purpose to grant Congress the power to veto state laws either by itself or its agents. Nor does any provision in the Constitution endow the federal courts with power to participate with state legislative bodies in determining what state policies shall be enacted into law."

"Bad men, like good men, are entitled to be tried and sentenced in accordance with law, and when it is shown to us that a person is serving an illegal sentence our obligation is to direct that proper steps be taken to correct the wrong done, without regard to the character of a particular defendant or to the possible effect on others who might also want to challenge the legality of their sentences as they have the right to do 'at any time' under Rule 35. If it has any relevance at all, the fact that there may be other prisoners in this country's jails serving illegal sentences would seem to me to make it all the more imperative that we grant appropriate relief in this case rather than search for some obviously dubious excuse to deny this petitioner's claim."

"Our Founders were no more willing to let the content of their prayers and their privilege of praying whenever they pleased be influenced by the ballot box than they were to let these vital matters of personal conscience depend upon the succession of monarchs. The First Amendment was added to the Constitution to stand as a guarantee that neither the power nor the prestige of the Federal Government would be used to control, support or influence the kinds of prayer the American people can say -- that the people's religions must not be subjected to the pressures of government for change each time a new political administration is elected to office. Under that Amendment's prohibition against governmental establishment of religion, as reinforced by the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment, government in this country, be it state or federal, is without power to prescribe by law any particular form of prayer which is to be used as an official prayer in carrying on any program of governmentally sponsored religious activity."

"The Establishment Clause, unlike the Free Exercise Clause, does not depend upon any showing of direct governmental compulsion and is violated by the enactment of laws which establish an official religion whether those laws operate directly to coerce nonobserving individuals or not. This is not to say, of course, that laws officially prescribing a particular form of religious worship do not involve coercion of such individuals. When the power, prestige and financial support of government is placed behind a particular religious belief, the indirect coercive pressure upon religious minorities to conform to the prevailing officially approved religion is plain. But the purposes underlying the Establishment Clause go much further than that. Its first and most immediate purpose rested on the belief that a union of government and religion tends to destroy government and to degrade religion. The history of governmentally established religion, both in England and in this country, showed that whenever government had allied itself with one particular form of religion, the inevitable result had been that it had incurred the hatred, disrespect and even contempt of those who held contrary beliefs. That same history showed that many people had lost their respect for any religion that had relied upon the support of government to spread its faith. The Establishment Clause thus stands as an expression of principle on the part of the Founders of our Constitution that religion is too personal, too sacred, too holy, to permit its "unhallowed perversion" by a civil magistrate. Another purpose of the Establishment Clause rested upon an awareness of the historical fact that governmentally established religions and religious persecutions go hand in hand. The Founders knew that only a few years after the Book of Common Prayer became the only accepted form of religious services in the established Church of England, an Act of Uniformity was passed to compel all Englishmen to attend those services and to make it a criminal offense to conduct or attend religious gatherings of any other kind-- a law which was consistently flouted by dissenting religious groups in England and which contributed to widespread persecutions of people like John Bunyan who persisted in holding "unlawful [religious] meetings . . . to the great disturbance and distraction of the good subjects of this kingdom . . . ." And they knew that similar persecutions had received the sanction of law in several of the colonies in this country soon after the establishment of official religions in those colonies. It was in large part to get completely away from this sort of systematic religious persecution that the Founders brought into being our Nation, our Constitution, and our Bill of Rights with its prohibition against any governmental establishment of religion."