Customer Reviews

Longest Debate: A Legislative History of the 1964 Civil Rights Act

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The Whalen's account of the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act is riveting, focusing on elements of the story that are sometimes ignored -- especially the importance of House Republicans to enacting the most significant law Congress passed in the Twentieth Century.

Bismarck said something about laws and sausages being equally revolting in the way they're made. If you can stomach it, this book will take you inside the malodorous rendering of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The author, a former liberal Republican Congressman from Ohio, revels in the minutiae of the legislative process: committees and subcommittees, parliamentary procedure, voting blocs, pressure groups, tactics and personalities. It's an excellent book for the student of such dreary arts, but I found it deadly dull. One gets the impression of reading an instruction manual rather than a narrative history. I also take issue with the author's unmitigated support for the Act. He presents it as self-evidently moral. One_could_argue that it was immoral for private businesses (such as hotels and restaurants) to deny service to non-Whites, but is it the federal government's right to legislate private morality? At no point did the the author ponder how thia Act, which effectively gutted freedom of association and private property rights in America, was Constitutional. This was simply something that African-Americans and northern liberals demanded, so it had to be forced down the throats of the South, the legality of which was an irrelevancy. Because of this Act, American citizens are now prohibited from disposing of their property in the manner they choose to whom they choose. We now have a plethora of federal agencies whose egalitarian purview extends into every business in the land, and which are tasked with punishing and destroying any organization whose actions even suggest "discrimination" (which is whatever the federal government defines that as today). The 1964 Civil Rights act was an unconstitutional act of tyranny. I find that a far more interesting topic than the mechanics of how such a horrific Bill came to work its way through the Congressional digestive system.

This was a wonderful purchase. It reports the history of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from the perspective of an insider.