Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential front-runner, singled out two notorious segregationists who were his party colleagues in the Senate in the 1970s as examples of politicians he could work with.
Speaking at his third New York fundraiser with wealthy donors on Tuesday, Biden talked about Senators James O. Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia.
“I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland,” Biden, 76, said, according to a pool report, imitating the dead Southerner’s drawl. “He never called me boy, he always called me son.”
He then brought up another segregationist Democrat, “a guy like Herman Talmadge, one of the meanest guys I ever knew, you go down the list of all these guys.
“Well guess what? At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished. But today, you look at the other side and you’re the enemy. Not the opposition, the enemy. We don’t talk to each other anymore.”
Eastland, who died in 1986 aged 81, said many times that he thought black people belonged to “an inferior race.” When later asked if he would change anything in his political career, he said that he “voted my convictions on everything.”
Talmadge, who died in 2002 aged 88, once denounced the 1954 Supreme Court decision on school desegregation, saying ”there aren’t enough troops in the whole United States to make the white people of this state send their children to school with colored children.”
He denounced civil rights legislation as “sanctions aimed at the white Southerner” and mocked Democrats who battled segregation, saying: “It’s easy to pontificate on race relations when your biggest ethnic minority is Swedes.”
Biden served with Eastland and Talmadge when he began his 36-year stint in the Senate in 1973. He was then aged 30 and joined a chamber of 99 white men and one black man, Senator Edward Brooke, a Republican.
After recalling Eastland and Talmadge, Biden segued from segregationists to the Senate during the Obama administration, when he was vice president.
“Folks, I believe one of the things I’m pretty good at is bringing people together,” he said. “Every time we had a trouble in the administration, who got sent to the Hill to settle it? Me. No, not a joke. Because I demonstrate respect for them. This idea Mitch McConnell and I are buddies?
“Mitch McConnell is really a tough nut. But it’s real simple. We went up, the members were going to close down the government on New Year’s Day, I went up, I got him and I said, ‘OK, we’ll make a deal. You raise taxes $650 billion on the top 1%, you guys, and we’ll keep the tax cut under $250,000.’
“More than I wanted, less than he wanted. We got it done. I can give you 50 examples. So folks, sometimes it’s brass knuckles. You’ve got to fight hard and stay with principle and not move on it. I’m not bad at that.”
Biden boasted of his ability to work with the likes of Eastland at a campaign rally for Senator Doug Jones of Alabama in 2017. “I’ve been around so long, I worked with James Eastland,” Biden said.
“Even in the days when I got there, the Democratic Party still had seven or eight old-fashioned Democratic segregationists. You’d get up and you’d argue like the devil with them. Then you’d go down and have lunch or dinner together. The political system worked. We were divided on issues, but the political system worked.”
When Biden faced a reelection in 1978, Eastland even offered to help Biden’s Senate campaign. “I looked at Eastland. He said, ‘What can old Jim Eastland do for you in Delaware?’” Biden recounted at a 2016 Labor Day event in Pittsburgh, Pa. “I said, ‘Mr. Chairman, some places you’d help and some places you’d hurt.’ He said, ‘Well, I’ll come to Delaware and campaign for you or against you, whichever will help the most.’”
Biden also formed friendships with Republican segregationists Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.
Thurmond, a Southern Democrat who later switched parties, ran for president in 1948 as an independent on a segregationist platform and led a record-setting filibuster to block the Civil Rights Act in 1957. He later softened his stance on civil rights issues but never fully renounced his position on segregation or the racially inflammatory comments he made during his presidential campaign.
Biden delivered the eulogy at Thurmond’s funeral in 2003 after he had died aged 100, calling him a “brave man, who in the end made his choice and moved to the good side.” Biden said: “I disagreed deeply with Strom on the issue of civil rights and on many other issues, but I watched him change. We became good friends.”
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