WI: Dwight Eisenhower is able to pass Civil Rights Act in 1957

As the title says, what if Eisenhowever is able to pass the Civil Rights Act in full as was initially intended (essentially making the Republicans, not the Democrats and Kennedy/Johnson the ones to pass the act). Without Storm Thurmond fillerbustering (idk how, maybe the southern democrats don't show up in protest).

How does this change the current party dynamic that currently exists in the U.S, does this change the left-right paradigm (do the Democrats become a conservative party whilst republicans the more liberal party).

Also how is America different as well with the act (albeit in a different form) passing a lot earlier, do the tensions of the 60's become less than before. Or in the south is it an increase in tensions between black and white or even leading to near civil war levels (seccession back on the cards in the southern states?).

It certainly opens up pandoras box and i certainly think it would change a lot of modern American history as we know it.
 
As the title says, what if Eisenhowever is able to pass the Civil Rights Act in full as was initially intended (essentially making the Republicans, not the Democrats and Kennedy/Johnson the ones to pass the act).

The Democrats had the majority in Congress, so in that sense whether the Act was watered down or not it, if it passed it would be a "Democratic" measure. But I'm puzzled by the Kennedy reference; absolutely nobody credited the bill to him. As for LBJ, it is questionable if the bill could have been passed if he didn't weaken it; Robert Caro notes that some midwestern and western Republicans regarded the filibuster as essential to protect the interests of their (small) states, so that even if they would vote for the bill itself (and some of them were far from enthusiastic about civil rights) they would never vote for cloture. "You get up to thirty-three votes [against cloture] real fast." https://books.google.com/books?id=U87rzAqVhbwC&pg=PA895
 
But I'm puzzled by the Kennedy reference; absolutely nobody credited the bill to him.

I think the point is less about crediting Kennedy directly for the Civil Rights Act, and more about how his death created a situation where Johnson had a greater degree of leverage to push something like that through Congress. No, Kennedy didn't achieve it himself, but the situation as it went down IOTL helped create the idea that it was the Democrats who were the party of Civil Rights. It also made Kennedy look, after his death anyway, like he played a much larger role in the push for change than he necessarily did.
 
The Democrats had the majority in Congress, so in that sense whether the Act was watered down or not it, if it passed it would be a "Democratic" measure. But I'm puzzled by the Kennedy reference; absolutely nobody credited the bill to him. As for LBJ, it is questionable if the bill could have been passed if he didn't weaken it; Robert Caro notes that some midwestern and western Republicans regarded the filibuster as essential to protect the interests of their (small) states, so that even if they would vote for the bill itself (and some of them were far from enthusiastic about civil rights) they would never vote for cloture. "You get up to thirty-three votes [against cloture] real fast." https://books.google.com/books?id=U87rzAqVhbwC&pg=PA895

yeah i'm talking about despite all these things he is able to convince the democrats (or enough) to cross the floor to agree with it.
 

Ak-84

Banned
Thd 1957 Act was passed since LBJ supported it. End of discussion. LBJ was a consummate politician. He knew that it had to be “watered down” to get it passed. As his later career showed, he supported a lot more than what came in 1957.

JFK actually voted against the 1957 Act being a private racist all his life. Ike wished the issue of Civil Rights would go away. Nixon was like LBJ a Civil Rights supporter.
 
I'm asking if Eisenhower was able to get it through (without any major compromises), that's what i'm asking for, not what was otl essentially
 
I'm asking if Eisenhower was able to get it through (without any major compromises), that's what i'm asking for, not what was otl essentially

Well, this could have some very interesting possibilities. The stance on Civil Rights was what ultimately led to Democrats becoming progressive and Republicans conservative, though plenty of other factors led to it.

Eisenhower, as a Republican, would've gotten the Afro-American community more on the Republican side and perhaps probably would've averted the use of the Southern Strategy that led to the Repubs becoming more and more conservative. While I don't think it wold be a full sway, it could mean that the parties would not become so ideaologically grid-locked (least, not the extent of now). Perhaps it could even downplay the importance of the more radical right-wing elements since they don't have a rigid choice for anymore.
 
The problem is that otl was probably the best that could be done under the circumstances that existed in 1957.
 
I'm asking if Eisenhower was able to get it through (without any major compromises), that's what i'm asking for, not what was otl essentially

The problem is that there is no plausible way Ike could have gotten it through without LBJ's support. I am not sure that even if LBJ had wanted to, he could have gotten a stronger bill through--but if he did (which would mean sacrificing southern support for his presidential bid--not very likely) it would be his accomplishment as much as Ike's. It would at best be a bipartisan victory, so it is hard for me to see the Republicans gaining that much from it. If the two parties have similar positions on civil rights, the African American vote in 1960 is likely to be cast along economic lines, with a resulting advantage for the Democrats, though hardly as overwhelming as the one they got from 1964 on. Indeed, that is what happened in OTL. Nixon arguably had a better record on civil rights than JFK (who had voted for the jury trial amendment) but it didn't particularly help him with the African American vote (admittedly the failure to respond to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s arrest the way JFK did played a role here, but there is no reason to think that the passage of a stronger bill in 1957 would have prevented it--and anyway Nixon was trailing JFK among black voters even before the arrest).
 
For a PoD, supposing one more Senate race had gone Republican in 56? Then, with VP Nixon casting the tie breaking vote, you’d have Knowland instead of LBJ as majority leader.
 
For a PoD, supposing one more Senate race had gone Republican in 56? Then, with VP Nixon casting the tie breaking vote, you’d have Knowland instead of LBJ as majority leader.

And he still almost certainly couldn't get cloture for a tough bill.

Not just most Democrats but 12 Republicans in the Senate voted for the jury trial amendment (with one voting "present"). https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/85-1957/s73 Again, remember that it took a two-thirds vote to get cloture: "On a cloture vote, you got up to thirty-three real fast." https://books.google.com/books?id=U87rzAqVhbwC&pg=PA895
 
GOP is still the "party of Lincoln".

Integration happens earlier and Southerners realize earlier that it isn't the end of the world. The South trends even more Republican in the long run because white Southerners are still culturally conservative and will dislike the counterculture that develops 10 years later, bit the Dems can't count on the black vote like they can in OTL.

The Great Return Migration begins earlier.

We could end up with a similar cultural divide to OTL (coastal elites vs flyover country) with the main difference being open racists are more comfortable as Democrats and black voters are more comfortable as Republicans.
 
The issue with the GOP is that the conservatives felt at this point this was a state and not national issue. As regrades "party of Lincoln " they stopped being that by 1900.
 
The issue with the GOP is that the conservatives felt at this point this was a state and not national issue. As regrades "party of Lincoln " they stopped being that by 1900.

I'm not asking about the logistics of it, i'm saying if enough liberal republicans (and lets say enough liberal democrats) band together to get it through as is, hell maybe even have one or the other of the lot have the numbers to get it through, what happens when it gets through.
 
What people here don't seem to realize is that Eisenhower himself thought that his original bill was a moderate one, almost entirely limited to voting rights. He did not understand the scope of section three:

"At first [Richard] Russell's attack sounded like the kind of apocalyptic fearmongering that one could hear across the South in the 1950s, from tobacco-stained taverns to corporate boardrooms. But Russell was not merely venting racial bile. He went on to dissect, with expert skill, the most threatening part of the bill. Section 3 was somewhat obscure, and Russell meant to shed light on it. It proposed to give the attorney general the power to appeal to a federal court for an injunction against any individual who obstructed, or who was planning to obstruct, a citizen's right to equal protection of the laws. If the injunction was then violated, and a court order ignored, a judge could assess penalties, including fines and imprisonment, without reference to a jury trial. In essence it allowed the Justice Department to use the federal courts to bypass local police forces and municipal and state authorities when a citizen's civil rights were at risk. And those civil rights were not precisely defined in the bill, leaving wide discretion to the attorney general. They could cover school integration, interstate transportation, seating in movie theaters and restaurants, and any number of fields in which the attorney general decided equal protection was being denied. Russell was right about this: Brownell later admitted in his memoirs that Section 3 'gave the attorney general direct authority to enforce Court others to desegregate public schools and to enter cases such as the Emmett Till murder.' This would have been news to Eisenhower, who understood Brownell's bill to be chiefly an augmentation of voting rights protections. Brownell had tried to slip the real import of the bill past the president and Congress.."
https://books.google.com/books?id=2PQXDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT522

Small wonder that Republican legislative leaders soon warned Ike that the sentiment in the Senate was running against section three, and that Ike pretty much acquiesced in the dropping of that section. "Senator Richard Neuberger of Oregon, an outspoken liberal, said in exasperation after Eisenhower's press conference that the president 'revealed, first, that he is not thoroughly familiar with the contents of his administration's bill, and second, that he is not enthusiastically in favor of what he does believe the bill to contain.'..Ike had thrown in the towel on Section 3.

"Johnson delivered the coup de grace a week later, allowing a vote on an amendment to cut the offending section from the bill. It passed 52-39, in what the New York Times called 'a heavy defeat for the administration. Brownell's bold proposal to tip the balance of power from the states to the federal government had been disemboweled on the Senate floor. The federal government's ability to enforce federal law on school desegregation, racial violence, lynching, intimidation, economic retaliation, and job discrimination had been denied to the nation's chief law enforcement officer..." William I. Hitchcock, The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s, p. 356. In short, there was never the slightest chance that the bill could survive a filibuster with section three. Once again, remember that thirty-three votes are all it took to defeat cloture.

Section Four, dealing with voting rights, was another matter. That Ike did understand, and he opposed weakening it through the jury trial amendment. But even a tough section four had virtually no chance of surviving a filibuster unless LBJ backed it (and maybe not even then). And the chances that he would back it were negligible. He wanted some sort of civil rights bill to pass to burnish his own legislative credentials and to make himself acceptable to northern Democrats but at the same time he understood that the South was an indispensable basis for his getting the Democratic nomination for the presidency, and he could not afford to alienate southerners too much. But even in the unlikely event that LBJ backs a stronger section four and it passes, it is still not going to represent a revolution in race relations. Something like the 1964 bill was just not possible in 1957.
 
Based on the level of opposition from the South, George Wallace runs for President in 1960 or 1964 instead of 1968. Nixon wins in 1960 if the Democrats become divided enough.

It might butterfly away Malcolm X and the Black Panthers.

Black voters support the Republicans at levels not seen since Reconstruction.

MLK becomes a relatively minor historical figure.
 
You would probably need to flip the Senate over to the GOP in 56 so they are in charge of the committees.

Another helpful change would be to have a better GOP leader. When Taft was dying he appointed Knowland as temporary leader but in theory senator Saltonsonall of Massachusetts was in line for leadership as GOP whip.

So put him in as leader and he and LBJ work together to pass bill but GOP gets more credit, and the image of Democrats opposing hurts them

Then have Nixon pursue the Northern Strategy in 1960 while there is, as suggested above, a stronger Southern independent campaign in 1960.
 
@David T Supposing the bill had passed with Section 4 intact, but sacificing Section 3’s broader civil rights protections?

Even that would have limited effects. The African American vote in the South would probably increase somewhat, but it really took the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which went much further than Section Four (e.g., providing federal voting registrars, doing away with literacy tests, providing for pre-clearance of changes in voting procedures, etc.) Poll taxes and literacy tests, even if administered fairly, would have a disproportionate effect on African Americans, and in any event, even with the contempt power, it would be hard to see that they would be administered fairly, hard to combat informal pressures against voting, etc. And in any event, by 1957, whites were a majority of the voting age population in most places in the South, even Mississippi.

All the same, a strong Section Four would cause a lot of resentment in the South toward LBJ for letting it go through (which is why he almost certainly wouldn't try--and in all fairness to him, it might not have been able to survive a filibuster no matter what he did). There might be a much stronger movement for unpledged electors (of the sort who voted for Harry Byrd in OTL in 1960)
 
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