James Oliver Eastland (November 28, 1904 – February 19, 1986) was an American attorney, plantation owner, and politician from Mississippi. A Democrat, he served in the United States Senate in 1941 and again from 1943 until his resignation in late 1978. Eastland was a segregationist who led the Southern resistance against racial integration during the civil rights movement, often speaking of African Americans as "an inferior race". Eastland has been called the "Voice of the White South" and the "Godfather of Mississippi Politics".
The son of prominent attorney, politician, and cotton planter Woods Eastland, he attended the local schools of Scott County, Mississippi, and took courses at the University of Mississippi, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Alabama. He completed his legal education by studying in his father's office, attaining admission to the bar in 1927. Eastland practiced law in Sunflower County, Mississippi, and took over management of his family's cotton plantation. Becoming active in politics as a Democrat, he served in the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1928 to 1932.
When Senator Pat Harrison died in office in 1941, the governor appointed Eastland to fill the vacancy on the condition that Eastland not run in that year's special election to complete the term. Eastland served from June to September 1941. The special election was won by Wall Doxey. Eastland went on to defeat Doxey in the 1942 primary for the Democratic nomination for a full term. The Democratic Party was then essentially the only party in Mississippi, assuring Eastland's return to the Senate in January 1943. Eastland was reelected five times, serving until resigning in December 1978, days before the end of his final term. Eastland advanced through seniority to the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee, serving over 20 years, and President pro tempore of the Senate.
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Early life
Eastland was born in Doddsville, in the Mississippi Delta on November 28, 1904, the son of Woods Caperton Eastland, a lawyer and cotton planter, and Alma Teresa (Austin) Eastland. He was named James after his late uncle, who was allegedly murdered earlier in 1904 by Luther Holbert, who was subsequently lynched. In 1905 he moved with his parents to Forest, the county seat of Scott County, Mississippi. His father was active in Mississippi politics and served as a district attorney. The son attended the local segregated public schools and graduated from Forest High School in 1922.
Eastland attended the University of Mississippi (1922-1924), Vanderbilt University (1925-1926), and the University of Alabama (1926-1927). He studied law in his father's office, attained admission to the bar in 1927, and practiced in Sunflower County. Active in politics, he was elected to one term in the Mississippi House of Representatives, and served from 1928 to 1932. After completing his House term, Eastland remained active in politics and government. He was a sought-after campaign speaker, including speeches on behalf of the gubernatorial candidacies of Paul B. Johnson Sr. in 1935 and 1939. In addition, he was a member of the board of trustees of the state hospital for the insane.
In the 1930s, Eastland took over management of his family's Sunflower County plantation; he eventually expanded it to nearly 6,000 acres (24 km2). Even after entering politics, he considered himself first and foremost a cotton planter. Cotton plantations were adopting mechanization but he still had many African-American laborers on the plantation, most of whom worked as sharecroppers.
Senate career
Eastland was appointed to the U.S. Senate in June 1941 by Governor Paul B. Johnson Sr., following the death of Senator Pat Harrison. Johnson first offered the appointment to Woods Eastland, whom he had known since childhood; Woods Eastland declined and suggested his son. Johnson appointed James Eastland on the condition that he would not run later that year in the special election to complete the term, ensuring that no candidate would have the advantage of incumbency. Eastland kept his word, and served until November; the election was won by 2nd District Congressman Wall Doxey.
In 1942, Eastland was one of three candidates who challenged Doxey for a full term. Doxey had the support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Mississippi's senior U.S. Senator, Theodore G. Bilbo, but Eastland defeated him in the Democratic primary. At the time, Mississippi was effectively a one-party state, dominated by white Democrats since the disfranchisement of African Americans with the passage of the 1890 state constitution, which allowed poll taxes, literacy tests and white primaries to exclude them from the political system. This made winning the Democratic primary tantamount to election, and Eastland returned to the Senate on January 3, 1943. Roosevelt and Eastland developed a working relationship that enabled Eastland to oppose New Deal programs that were unpopular in Mississippi, while he supported the President's agenda on other issues. Eastland was effective in developing that type of arrangement with presidents of both parties during his long tenure in the Senate. Also effective because of his seniority, he gained major federal investment in the state, such as infrastructure construction including the Tennessee–Tombigbee Waterway and federal relief after disasters such as Hurricane Camille.
Early 1947 saw a renewed effort by the Truman administration to promote civil rights with activities such as President Truman addressing the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and delivering an address to Congress entirely dedicated to the subject. Eastland, among many other Southerners who saw the civil rights backing of the administration as an attack on their "way of life", addressed the Senate floor a week after Truman's speech on the matter, saying Southerners were expected to "remain docile" in light of their laws and culture being destroyed "under the false guise of another civil-rights bill." Six weeks before the 1948 United States presidential election, Eastland predicted the defeat of the incumbent President Harry Truman, telling an audience in Memphis, Tennessee that voting for him was a waste. After Truman's surprise victory, Eastland "remained publicly undaunted".
Nixon resignation
On February 14, 1974, Special Prosecutor for the U.S. Department of Justice Leon Jaworski wrote to Eastland complaining that President Nixon had refused to give him material that he needed for his Watergate investigation including 27 tapes relating to the Watergate cover‐up in addition to political donations of milk producers and the activities of the plumbers unit of the White House. The contents of the letter to Eastland were disclosed to the public by Jaworski the following month. In May, the House Judiciary Committee opened impeachment hearings against President Nixon after the release of 1,200 pages of transcripts of White House conversations between him and his aides and the administration. That month, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed a resolution supporting Jaworski observing that he was "acting within the scope of the authority conferred upon him". Eastland's support for the resolution was seen by observers as part of a pattern of Nixon backers turning against him in light of the Watergate scandal. In August, Newsweek magazine released Eastland's name as one of thirty-six senators who the White House believed would support President Nixon remaining in office in the event of impeachment. The article mentioned the White House believing some of the supporters were shaky and that thirty-four of them would need to remain firm to override a potential conviction. Within days of the article's release, Nixon resigned the presidency in the face of near-certain impeachment.
Senate President pro tempore
During his last Senate term, Eastland was the longest-serving member of the majority party and was elected President pro tempore. Eastland is the most recent President pro tempore to have served during a vacancy in the Vice Presidency. He did so twice during the tumultuous 1970s, first from October to December 1973, following Spiro Agnew's resignation until the swearing-in of Gerald Ford as Vice President, and then from August to December 1974, from the time that Ford became President until Nelson Rockefeller was sworn in as Vice President. Then, Eastland was second in the presidential line of succession, behind only Speaker of the House Carl Albert.
Political positions
Opposition to civil rights
Eastland opposed integration and the civil rights movement. During World War II, Eastland vocally opposed and denigrated the service of African American soldiers in the war. He incited protests and comparisons to Hitlerism following a vitriolic speech on the floor of the Senate in July 1945, in which he complained that the Negro soldier was physically, morally, and mentally incapable of serving in combat. Eastland claimed that the "boys from the South were fighting to maintain white supremacy". In 1944 Eastland said:I have no prejudice in my heart, but the white race is the superior race and the Negro race an inferior race and the races must be kept separate by law.The same year, he protested against Smith v. Allwright, which banned white primaries:This decision reveals an alarming tendency to destroy the sovereignty of the states. Our supreme court is usurping the legislative function, and Congress may yet prove the last citadel of constitutional government.As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Eastland would alongside fellow southerners Olin D. Johnston of South Carolina and Harley M. Kilgore of West Virginia be one of three senators to report negatively on Earl Warren when President Eisenhower nominated him to the Supreme Court. He later was one of eleven senators to vote against John Marshall Harlan II and one of seventeen to vote against Potter Stewart. When the Supreme Court issued its decision in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, ruling that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, Eastland, like the majority of Southern Democrats, denounced it. In a speech given in Senatobia, Mississippi on August 12, 1955, he announced:On May 17, 1954, the Constitution of the United States was destroyed because of the Supreme Court's decision. You are not obliged to obey the decisions of any court which are plainly fraudulent sociological considerations.
Eastland would become actively involved with the White Citizens' Council, an organization which boasted 60,000 members across the South and was called "the new Klan that enforces thought control by economic pressures." Eastland testified to the Senate ten days after the Brown decision:The Southern institution of racial segregation or racial separation was the correct, self-evident truth which arose from the chaos and confusion of the Reconstruction period. Separation promotes racial harmony. It permits each race to follow its own pursuits, and its own civilization. Segregation is not discrimination ... Mr. President, it is the law of nature, it is the law of God, that every race has both the right and the duty to perpetuate itself. All free men have the right to associate exclusively with members of their own race, free from governmental interference, if they so desire.
Antisemitism
In 1968, after opposing the nomination of Abe Fortas to Chief Justice, Eastland, as chair of the Judiciary committee, said "After [Thurgood] Marshall, I could not go back to Mississippi if a Jewish chief justice swore in the next president." In 1977, Eastland "sneer(ed) openly at Senator Jacob Javits, saying, 'I don't like you or your kind,' because Javits was Jewish."
Anticommunism
Eastland served on a subcommittee in the 1950s investigating the Communist Party in the United States. As chairman of the Internal Security Subcommittee, he subpoenaed some employees of The New York Times to testify about their activities. The paper was taking a strong position on its editorial page that Mississippi should adhere to the Brown decision, and claimed that Eastland was persecuting them on that account. The Times said in its January 5, 1956 editorial:
Our faith is strong that long after Senator Eastland and his present subcommittee are gone, long after segregation has lost its final battle in the South, long after all that was known as McCarthyism is a dim, unwelcome memory, long after the last Congressional committee has learned that it cannot tamper successfully with a free press, The New York Times will be speaking for the men who make it, and only for the men who make it, and speaking, without fear or favor, the truth as it sees it.
Eastland subsequently allowed the subcommittee to become dormant as communist fears receded.
Marijuana
In 1974, Eastland led congressional subcommittee hearings into marijuana, the report on which concluded:
... five years of research has provided strong evidence that, if corroborated, would suggest that marijuana in various forms is far more hazardous than originally suspected.
Relationship with FBI
Eastland was a staunch supporter of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and shared intelligence with the FBI, including leaks from the State Department. An investigation initiated by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and executed by former FBI agent Walter Sheridan traced some of the unauthorized disclosures to Otto Otepka of the State Department Office of Security. Hoover received intelligence that Eastland was among members of Congress who had received money and favors from Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic. Eastland had regularly defended him from the Senate floor. Hoover declined to pursue Eastland on corruption charges.
Later years
He maintained friendly personal ties with liberal Democrats such as Ted Kennedy, Walter Mondale, and Joe Biden.
In an event recounted by Patrick Leahy in his 2022 memoir, Ted Kennedy once sought to advance in the Judiciary Committee a bill that Eastland opposed. Eastland promised Kennedy that if Kennedy secured enough votes for the measure to pass, Eastland would place it on the committee agenda, though Eastland would vote against it. Kennedy believed he had secured the votes, and true to his word, Eastland included it on the committee agenda. When the question was called, it failed by one vote. According to Leahy, Eastland questioned one senator who had cast a no vote as to whether he had given Kennedy his word to vote in favor. The senator indicated that he had, but that he had then changed his mind. Eastland told the lawmaker in question that when one senator gave his word to another, he was honor-bound to keep it. Eastland then changed his own vote to yes, allowing Kennedy's bill to pass. Afterward, the senator Eastland questioned never had one of his bills included on the committee agenda. Eastland's closest friend and confidant was Leander Perez.
Eastland died at a hospital in Greenwood, Mississippi, on February 19, 1986, from pneumonia as a complication of other health issues; he was 81.
While at a fundraiser on June 18, 2019, presidential candidate Biden said that one of his greatest strengths was "bringing people together" and pointed to his relationships with Eastland and fellow segregationist senator Herman Talmadge as examples. While imitating a Southern drawl, Biden remarked, "I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland. He never called me 'boy,' he always called me 'son.'” New Jersey Senator Cory Booker was one of many Democrats to criticize Biden for the remarks, issuing a statement that said, "You don't joke about calling black men 'boys.' Men like James O. Eastland used words like that, and the racist policies that accompanied them, to perpetuate white supremacy and strip black Americans of our very humanity".
Portrayal in popular culture
Eastland was portrayed by actor Jeff Doucette in the 2016 HBO film All the Way and by Nicholas Bell in the 2022 film Elvis.