#159 Sidebar: The Master of the Senate
The History of the Americans
Jack Henneman
4.9 • 632 Ratings
🗓️ 5 August 2024
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On July 29, 2024, President Joe Biden visited The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The President referred to LBJ as “master of the Senate,” which reminded me of the opening pages of Robert Caro’s book of the same name. That introduction is itself a masterful description of the suppression of Black voters in the South, the meaning of voting, the history of the Senate, its historical resistance to civil rights, and LBJ’s role in changing all that. It is also filled with interesting observations about timeless aspects of American politics, and since I enjoyed re-reading it I’m going to read it for you with some annotations along the way.
Oh, and it turns out that President Biden, who knows a thing or two about the Senate, left a few things out for the audience in Austin.
Finally, I again recorded early in the morning outside in the Adirondacks, so there are a lot of tweeting birds in the background. Non-birdie recording will resume next time.
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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the website)
Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Vol. 3)
Remarks by President Biden Commemorating the 60th Anniversary of the Civil Rights Act | Austin, TX
The other volumes in Caro’s biography (I highly recommend the first two, and haven’t yet read the fourth):
The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Vol. 1)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast, episode 159. |
| 0:11.0 | I'm your host, Jack Heneman, and I'm recording this on August 4th, 2024. |
| 0:17.0 | Again, outside, early in the morning with the birdies tweeting in my secure undisclosed location |
| 0:26.5 | outside Tupper Lake, New York. If you are new to the podcast, we are telling the history of |
| 0:32.4 | the lands now encompassed by the United States from the beginning without intentional presentism. |
| 0:38.8 | This episode's a sidebar, which is our term for an episode that's off the timeline of the history |
| 0:45.1 | of the Americans, usually about something that randomly caught my eye or in recognition of a |
| 0:50.5 | holiday or something. On July 29 just passed, President Joe Biden visited Austin to speak at the Lyndon Baines Johnson |
| 1:01.9 | Library and Museum, which is known to we locals as the LBJ Library. |
| 1:08.1 | The ostensible purpose of the visit was to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the |
| 1:12.7 | passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which LBJ regarded as one of the crowning achievements |
| 1:19.7 | of his presidency. President Biden spoke for 26 minutes, mostly to argue for his recently announced package of proposed reforms of the Supreme Court of the United States. |
| 1:33.9 | I doubt that justices appreciated his opinions on that topic quite so much as the audience in Austin, but no matter. |
| 1:40.8 | He did try to tie it all to the occasion, speaking briefly of LBJ and hagiographic language, |
| 1:48.6 | which you can read in the transcript linked in the show notes. The president did say a curious thing |
| 1:54.6 | about his admiration for LBJ as a youth, quote, as a kid coming up, I always admired President Johnson for his public service, |
| 2:05.0 | whether it was as a schoolteacher in southern Tex, South Texas, he stuttered there, |
| 2:10.8 | a master of the United States Senate, a historic vice president and president. |
| 2:16.3 | His philosophy was simple. In a great society, |
| 2:19.8 | in a great society, no one, no one should be left behind. He'd say it's time for us to come |
| 2:26.5 | to see that every American gets a decent break and a fair chance to make good. |
| 2:33.2 | Back to me. |
... |
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