Watching a group of intransigent lawmakers vowing to block action on popular legislation, while others in their party scramble to distance themselves from the mossbacks, calls to mind another filibuster in another age, one which was broken by popular pressure. Only it wasn't the president or victims of tragedy that did the trick then.
It was, believe it or not, the media.
Marshall McLuhan's most famous phrase, "The medium is the message," pointed to a shift in human communications so deep and far-reaching, we often mistake it for literal truth.
The idea that electronic communication, particularly television, is so new in human experience, and so direct in its impact on the human brain, that its power supersedes whatever content it delivers, was revolutionary and has led to ever more potent exploitation of that power.
But the simple and profound observation has led us to assume that electronic communication has no message, that form is content. And so we are not outraged when its purveyors make it so. But this powerful medium can indeed carry potent messages, and we would do well to not only remember that, but to constantly remind the medium's controllers.
In the history the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, many of the actors are cited as "heroes," lauded for their "courage," and rightly so. Certainly Presidents Kennedy and Johnson showed remarkable political courage in championing equal rights for all in the face of long-established, institutional racism. And no one, whatever his personal prejudice, can challenge the courage showed by the marchers, Riders and demonstrators who stood up to Jim Crow at the risk of direct, personal harm.
But one man is rarely acknowledged for the crucial--and courageous--role he played in the passage of the bill. True, he didn't face fire hoses or billyclubs or police dogs. But he did stand to lose his rewarding and influential position because of his decision.
In March of 1964, the Civil Rights bill was miraculously on the Senate floor, Majority Leader Mansfield having pulled a clever parliamentary trick to bypass the Judiciary Committee (headed by Dixiecrat James Eastland). Predictably, the Southern Bloc of 18 Democrats and 1 Republican began to filibuster the bill, as they had 11 times before on similar legislation.
At CBS News, producer Fred Friendly was sick of it. Contrary to his name, Friendly was a tough, irascible man who rarely soft-pedaled his opinions. And one of those opinions was that race segregation was an injustice that had to end.
Rather than write editorial commentaries or produce hour-long specials, however, Friendly had a brilliant idea: report the filibuster on television. Every day. Four times a day. And on every other CBS News radio broadcast.
This was long before Brian Lamb had started C-Span. Americans were used to hearing about the antics of their congressoids maybe once a day on the nightly news. But during the Southern Bloc's filibuster of the Civil Rights Act, CBS viewers saw, on every newscast throughout the day, Capitol Hill correspondent Roger Mudd standing in front of the capitol building, at all hours, in all weathers, recapping that hour's filibuster funnies. Eastland railing about states' rights. Stennis reading the phone book. Russell laying out, fat and naked, the Dixiecrats' credo: "We will resist to the bitter end any measure or any movement which would have a tendency to bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races in our (Southern) states."
For 12 weeks, four times a day, Mudd was on camera, telling viewers that the lawmakers they paid were tying up the nation's business, all to prevent their fellow citizens from using a water fountain or enjoying a soda in a restaurant. As the filibuster, and the coverage, ground on, southern viewers and, more importantly, southern network affiliates, howled. How dare CBS paint this fine lawmakers as nothing but yokels and bigots?
But the tactic worked. Eventually, enough of the Southern senators' constituents called and wrote in to tell them to knock off the clown show and, finally, on the 19th of June, a slightly compromised version of the bill passed the Senate, allowing for a House/Senate conference markup, final passage and signing by President Johnson on July 2nd, 188 years to the day after the American Continental Congress voted to declare the nation's independence from Great Britain.
The technique of pushing down to raise pressure back up is still at work today, as the president and some very few newsers keep the issue of firearms regulation in the public eye. That pressure may indeed succeed in getting the 90+ per cent of citizens the vote they demand on comprehensive background checks for gun sales.
Still, it's easy for the opponents of universal background checks to dismiss that pressure by pointing to its origins. "Oh, that's just Obama." "That's that liberal Chris Matthews again."
It was a lot harder to blow off the message when it was delivered every day and night by one of the Big Three and introduced to your dinner table by "the most trusted man in America."
Rather than despair at the changes in media, though, we might perhaps do well to redouble our efforts to influence it, as we attempt to influence our lawmakers. Just as those marble-hall mossbacks need our votes, the media need our eyeballs and, when enough people demand change of them they sometimes, surprisingly, oblige.
It's worth a try, because they're the only game we've got now. The media world is a much less "Friendly" place (and, yes, a much less Paley place) than it once was. But it's our world.
Because, in the end, we control what they so desperately need: our attention.