A justice once blocked a polling place; forty years later it was a national tactic
Rehnquist challenged Black voters' eligibility in Phoenix in 1962, and two years later the playbook became a nationwide "Operation Eagle Eye"; meanwhile Arab autoworkers in Detroit built political power out of a wildcat strike.
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The future chief justice stopped people at the polls
At Rehnquist's 1986 confirmation hearings, the most dramatic part was not his 14 years on the bench but what he did in Phoenix in the 1960s. Witnesses said he stood outside a polling place, walked up to a Black voter and asked "Are you a qualified voter?", demanding the person show identification and read aloud a passage of the Constitution. Rehnquist denied harassing or intimidating voters at the hearings, but acknowledged he had given legal advice to Republicans challenging voters' eligibility at polling places, and sometimes showed up in person. He called it an "election day project"; others called it a "ballot security program." That project later became a national strategy.
His conservatism took shape in high school
Journalist John A. Jenkins was doing interviews for a Rehnquist biography when his editor told him to dig into "the origins of his conservatism." Rehnquist was born in 1924 in Shorewood, Wisconsin, an all-white community, and attended an all-white high school. He was a senior when Pearl Harbor was attacked; he organized a school assembly called "Wake Up America," joined patriotic groups, and signed up as a block captain to report subversive activity to the FBI. After the war he entered Stanford Law School, finished first in his class, and then clerked for Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. Five months later, in 1952, the 28-year-old wrote a memo telling Jackson: you need not vote with the majority in Brown v. Board; there is a more principled position.
He saw integration as a personal choice, not a federal matter
Rehnquist's position was that integration was a question of personal choice, not something to be imposed on people, and that it should be decided by the states, not the federal government. This was a classic conservative stance, and it helped him establish himself among rising Republicans as an ideological purist. He brought that philosophy with him to Phoenix, which was still grappling with Jim Crow laws and the emerging civil rights movement. When the city council passed an anti-discrimination ordinance, he wrote letters to the editor and spoke at meetings, was noticed, and was encouraged to enter politics. That meant extra scrutiny of voters in Democratic-leaning precincts — Republicans believed many of them were voting illegally.
The voter-challenge playbook: returned mail means sending people to the polls
Tova Wang, research project director at Harvard Kennedy School's Ash Center, read FBI background-check excerpts: two white Republican challengers, one of them allegedly Rehnquist, at a polling place in an elementary school named for civil rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune on November 6, 1962, facing Black and minority voters, holding up a card with a passage from the Constitution and asking them to read it to prove literacy. The method was: first mail letters into Democratic precincts, and if the mail came back, send challengers to the polls to question eligibility. According to one FBI interview, the plan was to send large numbers of challengers into minority Democratic precincts at peak hours to clog the polling places, intimidate voters, or stall until they gave up. Arizona law allowed each party to send representatives to challenge suspect voters, but eligibility was ultimately decided by election officials.
Operation Eagle Eye: 1.25 million voters challenged nationwide
In the 1964 election, Republicans rolled out "Operation Eagle Eye." Its director, Charles Barr, told media including The New York Times that he expected to challenge or deter 1.25 million voters nationwide. The blueprint was the same as Phoenix: mail into Democratic precincts, and if it came back, challenge at the polls. On election day, The New York Times reported Republican officials saying 100,000 trained Republican workers were deployed in 35 key cities. The Miami Herald wrote that "hundreds of voters were swept up in partisan poll-watching, confused and frightened." The New York Times said the operation was launched in nearly every state. The FBI was asked to investigate leaflets distributed in Black precincts, aimed at creating delay, confusion and fear.
Goldwater lost; Rehnquist was playing a long game
Rehnquist persuaded Goldwater to oppose and vote against the Civil Rights Act, which became a symbol of Goldwater's extreme conservatism, and even some in his own party began to abandon him. But Rehnquist did not. Goldwater was crushed, and Rehnquist wrote his concession speech. The judgment in the episode is: Rehnquist did not care how others saw him, would rather be defeated on an issue than compromise, and believed he could win it back later — he was playing a long game. In 1971, at 47, he was nominated to the Supreme Court, and the voter-suppression allegations at his confirmation hearings did not hold up for lack of evidence. At his 1986 confirmation as chief justice, new witnesses appeared, including former federal assistant prosecutor James Brosnahan, but it was still one side's word against the other. He served on the Supreme Court for 33 years, until his death in 2005.
A neighborhood by the Ford plant held off bulldozers with a human chain
Ismael Ahmed's father came from Egypt to New York at age 10 on a cargo ship, and no one asked him any questions when he disembarked. In the 1950s the family moved to Detroit, settling in the South End of Dearborn — a narrow strip between the Ford Rouge plant and the city of Detroit. The Rouge plant had 90,000 workers at its peak. In the 1960s, the Edward C. Levy company used Ford waste to make asphalt, and big trucks drove through the neighborhood, spilling waste off open truck beds. After residents protested, the city decided to rezone the neighborhood as heavy industrial, which satisfied Ford and Levy and drove out the people who complained. Arab residents began to fight back: when bulldozers came to tear down houses, women and children formed a human chain in the street. They held on block by block, house by house.
Wildcat strike: the union bought Israel bonds, and workers walked
The Arab Workers Caucus discovered that their local UAW had bought more than $300,000 in Israel bonds, and the national union had bought far more. That meant roughly 15,000 Arab members of the UAW were spending money to support what they saw as a violent occupation. They ran an ad in the Detroit Free Press: these workers saw the purchase of Israel bonds the way Black workers saw UAW investments in apartheid South Africa. They petitioned the UAW with no result, then learned that UAW president Leonard Woodcock was to receive an award at a ceremony, and decided to organize a wildcat strike — a strike without union authorization. After more than a month of organizing, on November 28, 1973, about 2,000 workers walked out of the Dodge main plant, not only Arabs but also Black workers. That evening about 1,000 Arabs picketed outside the awards ceremony, and Woodcock slipped in through a back door. The UAW later sold off some of the bonds, but not all of them.
In their own words · checked verbatim
He approached the line on the outside of the polling place. He said, pardon me, are you a qualified voter to this black gentleman? And the man said yes. And he said, do you have any credentials to indicate that you are? The man said no.
It is about time the court faced the fact that the white people in the South, you men, don't like the colored people. The Constitution restrains them from effecting this dislike through state action. But it most assuredly did not appoint the court as a sociological watchdog to rear up every time private discrimination raises its admittedly ugly head.
The plan was to clog polls in heavily minority Democratic precincts. By sending an army of challengers to the polling place at peak voting periods and thereby intimidate some voters and scare them away from voting or frustrate voters by causing such a time delay that they would give up and leave without voting.
He does not care what anyone else thinks of him. He is willing to be defeated on an issue rather than compromise, in a belief that later he will be able to prevail.
OK, so we're being displaced. Israel's occupying the West Bank and taking this territory away from us. And then here in America, the one neighborhood where we have a foothold, people are trying to take things away from us here, too.
The workers who protested and walked out of the factory put their jobs on the line, put their livelihoods at risk for this bigger political cause. In many cases, many of the workers still didn't quite understand what was going on, to be frank, because of language issues and other things. But they took the chance anyway.
Figures
| Number of voters Operation Eagle Eye expected to challenge or deter | 1.25 million | 24:10 |
| Rehnquist's age when nominated to the Supreme Court | 47 | 28:20 |
| Length of Rehnquist's Supreme Court tenure | 33 years, until his death in 2005 | 29:21 |
| Workers who walked out of the Dodge main plant on November 28, 1973 | about 2,000 | 47:02 |
| Arabs picketing outside the awards ceremony | about 1,000 | 48:05 |
Glossary
- Operation Eagle Eye
- The Republicans' nationwide polling-place challenge program in the 1964 election, aimed at challenging or deterring 1.25 million voters.
- wildcat strike
- A strike launched by rank-and-file members on their own, without the approval of union leadership.
- Arab Workers Caucus
- An organization of Arab autoworkers in Detroit plants that launched the 1973 wildcat strike.
- UAW
- The main union in the American auto industry, protested by its Arab members in 1973 over its purchase of Israel bonds.
How to listen
Readers interested in the American electoral system, the voting-rights fight and grassroots political organizing; people working on political risk, community mobilization or labor research.
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