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The Opening Salvos. Yet Sam Ervin's trial-by-jury issue has already come to dominate the civil rights fight, principally because the slogan can easily outrun the difficult and technical counter-explanation. It has so strengthened the Southern position that civil rights backers may find it impossible to obtain the 64 votes necessary to cut off a Senate filibuster. The Southerners are within shooting distance of a Senate majority for an amendment that would require jury trials in civil rights contempt cases; Wyoming's Democratic Senator Joseph O'Mahoney has announced his support of such an amendment, while apparently wavering are such influential Senators as Minority Leader William Knowland of California and Assistant Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana. Such an amendment, said Assistant Attorney General Warren Olney III, would "emasculate the whole bill." Olney's choice of words, retorted Southerners, merely proved that the original intention of the bill was to rape the South. With those salvos, the big guns of the civil rights bill began booming this week.
*With a single exception, trial by jury has never been required in contempt cases to which the U.S. Government was a party. The exception: the Norris-La Guardia Act of 1932 required jury trials in contempt proceedings arising from labor disputes. The provision was in effect repealed (with the enthusiastic approval of most Southern Congressmen) by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.