A couple of days ago I finished reading Robert Caro’s phenomenal Master of the Senate (which I earlier wrote about here). The last third of the book is about how Lyndon Johnson, the Senate majority leader for much of the 1950s, helped pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

As I was reading, I kept shaking my head at the parallels to the recent health care reform efforts in the Senate.

We tend to associate the legislative successes of the civil rights movement with the 1960s: The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in public accommodations (hotels, restaurants, place of recreation, etc.), and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed discrimination against voters on the basis of race. But there was a Civil Rights Act of 1957 as well. The bill was intended as a sweeping measure against racial discrimination in everything from public accommodations to voting. But there was a big roadblock: the southern senators were dead set against it. No civil rights bill had passed the Senate since 1875, and the southerners meant to keep it that way.

But Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, the de facto leader of the southern senators and an ardent enemy of civil rights, desperately wanted a southerner in the White House. No true southerner had been elected president since before the Civil War, and Russell considered this a great embarrassment. Russell himself had run in 1952 and had failed to win the Democratic nomination; he was too southern, too much an enemy of civil rights, had too much of the “scent of magnolias” on him, to win the support of northern Democrats. But he came to realize that Lyndon Johnson was a southerner who could win. And LBJ himself desperately wanted the presidency; he had half-heartedly run for the nomination in 1956 and had lost, and he vowed not to make the same mistake in 1960.

Both men knew that the only way for Johnson to win the 1960 Democratic nomination was for the Senate to pass a civil rights bill; Johnson, as the Senate majority leader, could reap much of the credit and win accolades from northern liberals. But the southern Democratic senators would filibuster any bill they didn’t like, and the northern liberals of both parties would stand for nothing less than a sweeping civil rights act.

Johnson needed to water the bill down enough so that southerners would at least agree not to filibuster it, but not weaken it so much that liberals would abandon it.

First he managed to throw out the sweeping “public accommodations” portion of the bill, so that the law would cover only voting rights. This angered the liberals, but he convinced them that voting rights were what was really important; if blacks could vote, they would have the political power to get the more sweeping antidiscrimination provisions passed eventually.

But he weakened the voting rights provision as well. As things stood, there was no federal law under which southern officials could be sued for prohibiting blacks from registering to vote. The 1957 bill meant to change that by allowing such lawsuits. But Johnson managed to get the bill amended so that these lawsuits would have to be conducted as jury trials. Of course, no southern all-white jury would ever convict a southern registrar. So this would render the bill completely toothless. Northern liberals were even more outraged.

What did Johnson give to the northerners? He managed to add an amendment that banned racial discrimination in any federal jury nationwide: not just in southern voting cases, but in all federal trials everywhere in the country. But while this seemed like a good thing, in the South it would have no effect on voting rights cases, because any conviction of a voting rights official would have to be unanimous, and no white on a southern jury would ever vote to convict.

This was enough to convince the southerners not to filibuster the bill. But northerners were dejected. The bill was practically worthless; why not let it die? Why vote for it?

Because it would be a psychological victory, and it could lead to more substantial victories later. As Caro writes:

[Johnson] knew… that the most important thing wasn’t what was in the bill. The most important thing was that there be a bill.

One of the reasons for this was psychological. The South had won in the Senate so many times that there existed in the Senate a conviction that the South could not be beaten, particularly on the cause that meant the most to it. … A victory over the South would begin destroying this mystique. Demonstrate that the South could be beaten and more attempts would be made to beat it.

Johnson saw this. … He used a typically earthy phrase to explain it. “Once you break the virginity,” he said, “it’ll be easier next time.” Pass one civil rights bill, no matter how weak, and others would follow.”

And there was a further reason, Lyndon Johnson saw, why the passage of any civil rights bill, no matter how weak, would be a crucial gain for civil rights. Once a bill was passed, it could later be amended; altering something was a lot easier than creating it.

The liberals came around, and the bill passed, and Eisenhower signed it into law.

And a few years later, Congress passed sweeping civil rights and voting rights measures. And the president who signed those bills into law was Lyndon Johnson.

(Look at Robert Kennedy in the front row of this photo — enlarge it, look at his face: what is he thinking, seven months after his brother’s assassination, as he watches his adversary Lyndon Johnson sign the Civil Rights Act that his brother fought so hard to get passed? He looks haunted.)

The Democrats can’t give up on health care reform. Ironically, now it’s the House that needs to take action, not the Senate. The House needs to pass the Senate bill. It’s not a perfect bill, but once health care reform is signed into law, it will be easier to fix it later. The “virginity” of health care reform will be broken. They could do this in a day and then move on to other things. And it would be a huge psychological victory as well.

Pass. The. Damn. Bill.