American politician and newspaper publisher (1887–1966)
Harry Flood Byrd Sr. (June 10, 1887 – October 20, 1966) was an American newspaper publisher, politician, and leader of the Democratic Party in Virginia for four decades as head of a political faction that became known as the Byrd Organization. Byrd served as Virginia's governor from 1926 until 1930, then represented the state as a U.S. senator from 1933 until 1965 and is the longest serving Senator from Virginia with his tenure lasting for over 32 years and 8 months.
He came to lead the conservative coalition in the Senate, and opposed President Franklin D. Roosevelt, largely blocking most liberal legislation after 1937. His son Harry Jr. succeeded him as U.S. senator, but ran as an Independent following the decline of the Byrd Organization.
Byrd succeeded to what had been the Virginia Democratic Party organization of U.S. senator Thomas Staples Martin, who died in 1919. Elected the 50th governor of Virginia in 1925, initially Byrd reorganized and modernized Virginia's government. His political machine dominated state politics for much of the first half of the 20th century.
Byrd was vehemently opposed to racial desegregation of the public schools, and was the leader of massive resistance, a campaign of opposition to the U.S. Supreme Court decisions in "Brown v. Board of Education" that led to closure of some public schools in Virginia in the 1950s. Students who were denied their education in several Virginia counties became known as the "lost generation". According to Clarence M. Dunnaville Jr., Byrd was a racist and avowed white separatist. Although Byrd paid his black and white workers similarly, he was vehemently opposed to racial desegregation even early in the New Deal, and later opposed Presidents Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy as well as losing presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, despite their all being fellow Democrats, because unlike Byrd they opposed racial discrimination within the federal workforce. The Byrd Organization also benefited from limiting the political participation of blacks and poor whites in Virginia by means of poll taxes and literacy tests, but managed to defeat opposition ranging from New Deal governor James H. Price to gubernatorial and senatorial candidate Francis Pickens Miller.
Although Byrd never announced himself as a presidential candidate, he received votes in the 1956 presidential election and 15 electoral votes in the 1960 election.
Early life and education.
Harry Flood Byrd was born in Martinsburg, West Virginia, in 1887 (just two weeks after future fellow U.S. senator Absalom Willis Robertson was born in the same community). His parents, Eleanor Bolling (Flood) and Richard Evelyn Byrd Sr., moved the young family to Winchester, Virginia, the same year.
Young Harry Byrd's father became wealthy as an apple grower in the Shenandoah Valley, and publisher of the "Winchester Star" newspaper. He represented Winchester in the Virginia House of Delegates, and served as that body's Speaker from 1908 until 1914. He was the United States Attorney for the Western District of Virginia from 1914 until 1920. Harry initially attended the public schools, but received most of his education from the private Shenandoah Valley Academy in Winchester.
Genealogy and family relations.
Byrd's ancestors included the First Families of Virginia. His paternal ancestors included Col Benjamin Harrison of Brandon Plantation, William Byrd II of Westover Plantation (who established Richmond) and Robert "King" Carter of Corotoman. His maternal ancestors included John Rolfe and Pocahontas. His ancestor William Byrd III squandered the Byrd family's once vast fortune through gambling and bad investments.
One younger brother was Naval aviator and polar explorer Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd (1888–1957). His other younger brother, Thomas Bolling Byrd (1890–1968), became an infantry captain during World War I. Their uncle Henry De La Warr Flood served in the House of Representatives of the U.S. Congress from Appomattox County from 1901 to 1921. Another uncle from Appomattox County, Joel West Flood, served as that county's Commonwealth Attorney (1919 to 1932), in the U.S. Congress (beginning in 1932 to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Henry St. George Tucker), and as a state appellate Judge (of the Virginia Fifth Circuit, based in Richmond, from 1940 to 1964).
Influence on character.
Born only twenty-two years after the end of the American Civil War, Byrd grew up in an era when "the Shenandoah Valley was still a place of genteel poverty ... Harry Byrd never lacked food, but he had no money for luxuries. No one had any money. If a man got into debt, there was small chance of getting out of it."
Even worse in Byrd's eyes was the dilemma of the state itself, which was also heavily in debt during Byrd's youth. Before the Civil War, Virginia had taken on debt to help finance many internal public improvements (canals, turnpikes, and railroads) through the Virginia Board of Public Works. Most had been destroyed during the War, although the debt remained and the infrastructure needed to be rebuilt to get crops and goods to market. Virginia's first postwar legislature had affirmed those debts at original terms (highly favorable to bondholders, which by then were mostly out-of-state purchasers at rates a small fraction of par value). Some related to improvements in the area that separated during the war to form the new State of West Virginia; those were litigated for decades until the United States Supreme Court ruled in 1915 that West Virginia owed Virginia $12,393,929.50. After the Reconstruction period, most of Virginia's governors insisted upon paying state bondholders, rather than pay for public education (newly added in Virginia Constitution of 1869) or other government services. The Readjuster Party, which briefly challenged the Conservative Party of Virginia (the latter of which became the Virginia Democratic Party), advocated adjusting the terms of the prewar bonds, but had a relatively brief lifespan. Thus, the issue of Virginia's public debt was far from resolved during Byrd's formative years.
Marriage and family.
Byrd married Anne Douglas Beverley, a childhood friend, on October 7, 1913. They lived with her parents in Winchester until 1916, when he built a log cabin, named Westwood, in Berryville at a family-owned orchard, and they moved there. The cabin was constructed from chestnut logs and remains one of the few examples of natural chestnut bark existing in the United States due to the chestnut blight. The Byrds had three sons: Harry F. Byrd Jr., Bradshaw Beverley Byrd, and Richard Byrd, and one daughter, Westwood Beverly Byrd. In 1926, Byrd purchased Rosemont Manor, an estate outside Berryville, adjacent to the family apple orchards. The family moved into the antebellum mansion in 1929, at the end of Byrd's term as governor, after some renovations.
Business career.
As a businessman, Byrd had several operations: publishing newspapers, running a local turnpike, and selling apples and apple products.
In 1903, Harry Byrd took over his father's newspaper, the "Winchester Star." Under his father's ownership, it came to owe $2500 () to its newsprint supplier, the Antietam Paper Company. The company refused to ship more newsprint on credit, so Byrd cut a deal to make daily cash payments in return for ownership. As Byrd would later say, "when you have to hunt for them that way, you get to know how many cents there really are in a dollar." He eventually bought the "Harrisonburg Daily News-Record" and several other papers in the Shenandoah Valley. His family operated these papers until April 1, 2018, when they were sold to the Ogden Newspapers Inc. of Wheeling, West Virginia.
Thus started what would become Byrd's famous "pay-as-you-go" policy. He developed a lifelong aversion to borrowing money and any indebtedness. "I stand for strict economy in governmental affairs," Byrd proclaimed. "The State of Virginia is similar to a great business corporation ... and should be conducted with the same efficiency and economy as any private business." In a fifty-year political career, no statement of Byrd's ever more succinctly spelled out his view of government.
In 1907, he founded "The Evening Journal" in nearby Martinsburg, West Virginia. He sold the paper in 1912 to associate Max von Schlegell.
In 1908, at the age of 21, he became president of The Valley Turnpike Company, overseeing the Valley Turnpike, a 93-mile (150-km) toll road between Winchester and Staunton. Earning $33 a month, he was required to drive the entire route at least twice a month to inspect it and arrange any repairs. As automobile traffic increased, he ensured road conditions were maintained within the available revenues. He held that office for seven years until his election to state office.
Byrd also owned extensive apple orchards in the Shenandoah Valley and an apple-packing operation which was among the largest on the East Coast. He later pointed out that he paid his African-American workers the same wages as his white farm workers.
In the 1950s, Edward P. Morgan's assistant visited Byrd's Northern Virginia farm during the apple harvest and was outraged by the living conditions of the migrant workers. This prompted Morgan to take up the issue of migrant labor in his CBS Radio Network commentaries. Producer Fred W. Friendly then prompted his close associate Edward R. Murrow to produce the television documentary "Harvest of Shame" on this issue.
Virginia politics.
In 1915, while still heading the Valley Turnpike Company, at the age of 28, Byrd was elected to the Virginia Senate. That election was to begin his 50 years of service in various roles in the state and federal government.
At the Virginia State Capitol in Richmond, as a new state senator, Byrd was initially a progressive with an early interest in road improvements. He was a member of the Senate Committee on Roads, the Finance Committee, the Steering Committee, the Committee on Privileges and Elections, and the Committee of Schools and Colleges. He advocated a tax on gasoline as a fair method of raising revenue for road construction.
However, he first came to prominence in 1922, when he led a fight against using bonded indebtedness as a method to pay for new roads. He feared the state would sacrifice future flexibility by committing too many resources to paying off construction debt. In 1923, Byrd was sued by the Virginia Highway Contractors Association because he said their activities "by combination and agreements may be very detrimental" to the State. The court dismissed the suit, stating the criticism was legal, imposing all costs upon the association. The publicity helped him to be elected Governor of Virginia in November 1925, easily defeating Republican Samuel H. Hoge in the general election.
In 1923, he became a member of the Virginia Society of the Sons of the American Revolution.
As governor, serving a term from 1926 to 1930, Byrd pushed through constitutional amendments that streamlined the state government and allowed for more efficient use of tax dollars. He also made property taxes solely a county responsibility. When it was obvious that increased spending on road construction was not enough to "get Virginia out of the mud," he pushed through a secondary roads bill that gave the state responsibility for maintaining county roads. These measures made Byrd seem like a New South progressive at first. However, many of his measures were more to the benefit of rural areas more interested in low taxes than better services. He instituted a "pay as you go" approach to spending, in which no state money was spent until enough taxes and fees came in to pay for it. Highways and tourism were his primary pursuits, says his biographer. "He advocated building roads to state shrines such as Jamestown and Monticello and called for historical markers along roadways, the first of which appeared in Fredericksburg. He held regional meetings to bring about closer cooperation between state and county road officials, prophesying that the road system could be completed within ten years through such cooperation... A tour of the highway system convinced him of the progress being made in extending the arterial network. Indeed, over 2,000 miles would be added to the system during Byrd's governorship, 1,787 of these miles in 1928. Road building was one way to keep the voters happy and prove the efficacy of pay-as-you-go."
While he was governor, Byrd built up contacts with the "courthouse cliques" in most of Virginia's counties. He curried support from the five constitutional officers in those counties (sheriff, Commonwealth's attorney, clerk of the court, county treasurer, and commissioner of revenue). This formed the basis of the Byrd Organization, which dominated Virginia politics well into the 1960s. They carefully vetted candidates for statewide office, and Byrd only made