since when has the left *had* morals to compromise ?

cjm: The left was right in the 50s and early 60s about black civil rights. It was their one great victory and they're going to ride it into the ground.

davidc: given that the civil rights movement was an unalloyed good thing, was the left soley responsible for it, or were there good people on both sides of the aisle ? i don't know enough about this period and issue to give an answer, but would appreciate it if anyone here can provide insight on this question.

didn't the soviets try and stir up race problems here, during the 50's ?

Civil Rights had always been a GOP issue but LBJ's one decent impulse was to actually pass some legislation. Decent people on both sides made it possible but it was really LBJ's accomplishment. Genuine concerns about federal overreach led some Republicans to oppose it and then white Southerners, who opposed it on racial grounds, switched parties.

David - The left were the chief opponents of civil rights until World War II. Only after Hitler discredited racism did they switch their views to pro-civil rights, and become "more Catholic than the Pope" (so to speak - I mean more pro-civil rights than conservatives) as anti-racism became a means for them to obtain power. Still, significant parts of the leftist coalition found it difficult to switch positions so quickly, and thus it was primarily Democrats who obstructed the civil rights laws in the 50s and 60s.

oj, I don't believe the switch of Southerners to the GOP was motivated by GOP positions on race laws. The Dems support for segregation may have helped maintain Dem support in the South despite disagreements on other issues; once the civil rights laws eliminated race as a political issue, other issues came to the fore: the Dems desire for big government centralization, opposite to the Southern tradition of states rights; the Dems Vietnam-era anti-war posture, opposite to the Southern strong-defense attitudes; and the increasing secularism and anti-Christian activism of the Dems, opposite to Southern religiousness. In the 1970s and 80s the shift of Southerners to the GOP was driven by those three issues.

pj;

White Southerners voted Democrat until 1964. It has to have had something to do with race.

oj:
"Civil Rights had always been a GOP issue but LBJ's one decent impulse was to actually pass some legislation. Decent people on both sides made it possible but it was really LBJ's accomplishment."

To expand on your first point:
-- In 1865, Congressional Republicans unanimously backed the 13th Amendment, which made slavery unconstitutional. Among Democrats, 63 percent of senators and 78 percent of House members voted: "No."
-- In 1866, 94 percent of GOP senators and 96 percent of GOP House members approved the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing all Americans equal protection of the law. Every congressional Democrat voted: "No."
-- February 28, 1871: The GOP Congress passed the Enforcement Act, giving black voters federal protection.
-- February 8, 1894: Democratic President Grover Cleveland and a Democratic Congress repealed the GOP's Enforcement Act, denying black voters federal protection.
-- January 26, 1922: The U.S. House adopted Rep. Leonidas Dyer's (R., Mo.) bill making lynching a federal crime. Filibustering Senate Democrats killed the measure.
-- May 17, 1954: As chief justice, former three-term governor Earl Warren (R., Calif.) led the U.S. Supreme Court's desegregation of government schools via the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. GOP President Dwight Eisenhower's Justice Department argued for Topeka, Kansas's black school children. Democrat John W. Davis, who lost a presidential bid to incumbent Republican Calvin Coolidge in 1924, defended "separate but equal" classrooms.
-- September 24, 1957: Eisenhower deployed the 82nd Airborne Division to desegregate Little Rock's government schools over the strenuous resistance of Governor Orval Faubus (D., Ark.).
-- May 6, 1960: Eisenhower signs the GOP's 1960 Civil Rights Act after it survived a five-day, five-hour filibuster by 18 Senate Democrats.
-- July 2, 1964: Democratic President Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act after former Klansman Robert Byrd's 14-hour filibuster and the votes of 22 other Senate Democrats (including Tennessee's Al Gore, Sr.) failed to scuttle the measure. Illinois Republican Everett Dirksen rallied 26 GOP senators and 44 Democrats to invoke cloture and allow the bill's passage. According to John Fonte in the January 9, 2003, National Review, 82 percent of Republicans so voted, versus only 66 percent of Democrats.
(From "Grand Old Party," Delroy Murdock, NRO, Feb. 18,2005)

As for LBJ's credit for the 1964 Civil Rights Act (from the Senate history pages):
"Georgia Democrat Richard Russell offered the final arguments in opposition. Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, who had enlisted the Republican votes that made cloture a realistic option, spoke for the proponents with his customary eloquence. ... Never in history had the Senate been able to muster enough votes to cut off a filibuster on a civil rights bill. And only once in the thirty-seven years since 1927 had it agreed to cloture for any measure."
There is no doubt that LBJ had to twist some Democrat's arms, but it seems even in this case that GOP support was the critical factor.

jd:

Yes, it wouldn't have passed without Republicans, but wouldn't have come to the floor without LBJ.

oj - Yes, racism had kept them voting Democratic, but when the Democrats joined the Republicans in opposing racism, there was no longer any reason not to follow their preferences on other issues into the GOP.

Democrat and Republican is not the same thing as left and right. PJ's point is that passing the civil rights' bill allowed conservative Dems to start crossing the aisle, and allowed liberal Republicans to do likewise. In the 50s and early 60s, the left was just better on this issue than we were. The people who marched in the South were not conservative, the people who went South to register voters were not conservative and the people who marched on Washington were, by and large, not conservative. It doesn't mean that there weren't conservatives who were on the right side, and there certainly were Republicans on the right side, but the push came from the left.