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More than thirty years after its original publication, ...)
More than thirty years after its original publication, V. O. Key's classic remains the most influential book on its subject. Its author, one of the nation's most astute observers, drew on more than five hundred interviews with Southerners to illuminate the political process in the South and in the nation.
Key's book explains party alignments within states, internal factional competition, and the influence of the South upon Washington. It also probes the nature of the electorate, voting restrictions, and political operating procedures. This reprint of the original edition includes a new introduction by Alexander Heard and a profile of the author by William C. Havard.
"A monumental accomplishment in the field of political investigation."
—Hodding Carter, New York Times
"The raw truth of southern political behavior."
—C. Vann Woodward, Yale Review
"This book should be on the 'must' list of any student of American politics."
—Ralph J. Bunche
V.O. Key (1908-1963) taught political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and at Johns Hopkins, Yale, and Harvard universities. He was president of the American Political Science Association and author of numerous books, including American State Politics: An Introduction (1956); Public Opinion and American Democracy (1961); and The Responsible Electorate (1966).
Harry Flood Byrd was an American governor of Virginia and United States senator. He is noted for his efforts in leading of the Democratic political machine known as the Byrd Organization.
Background
Harry Flood Byrd was born on June 10, 1887 in Martinsburg, West Virginia, the son of Richard Evelyn Byrd, a newspaper publisher and lawyer, and Eleanor Bolling. He was a direct descendant of William Byrd, who immigrated to Virginia from England in 1670 and became one of the colony's most influential figures.
The Byrd family was always immersed in politics and government. His father was Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates and two uncles were United States congressmen from Virginia. One of his two brothers was Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd, the explorer. Byrd grew up in Winchester, Virginia, where his father published the Evening Star.
Education
Byrd studied at the Shenandoah Valley Academy, but dropped out in 1903 to take over management of the paper, which was then financially troubled. He never resumed his formal education.
Career
In Winchester, Byrd bought out and closed the competing newspaper, and in 1907 he established a newspaper in Martinsburg, West Virginia. In 1923 he purchased the Harrisonburg (Virginia) Daily News-Record. Beginning in 1906, Byrd was also an apple grower. He got his start by leasing a group of small orchards, but eventually he acquired his own Shenandoah Valley orchards in partnership with his brother Thomas.
The Byrds owned one of the largest apple warehouses in the nation, sold their crops throughout the Middle Atlantic region, and exported apples to England.
From 1908 until 1918 he served as president of the Valley Turnpike Company, which managed Virginia's first paved highway.
From 1915 to 1925, Byrd served in the Virginia state senate, where he rose to prominence as a fiscal conservative and a moderate on social issues. He supported legislation for workmen's compensation, protection for child laborers, and increased aid for education.
During World War I he served as Virginia's fuel commissioner. As chairman of the state senate's Roads Committee, Byrd took a leading role in the development of the state's highway system. He sponsored legislation establishing the Virginia Highway Commission and introduced a law that turned the Valley Turnpike into a freeway. Troubled by Virginia's staggering Civil War debt and concerned that a bond issue would put an undue burden on taxpayers, Byrd successfully led the opposition in 1923 to a statewide $50 million bond issue for the construction of highways.
Overcoming the opposition of Virginia's regular Democratic organization, Byrd was elected governor in 1925 and became Virginia's youngest chief executive since Thomas Jefferson.
In 1928, Byrd gained the passage of the South's first antilynching law, making all members of a lynch mob subject to murder charges. Although he was limited to only one four-year term as governor under the Virginia Constitution, Byrd nevertheless established his dominance in statewide politics when his gubernatorial candidate, John Garland Pollard, defeated the old guard's standard-bearer, Patrick Drury. For the next four decades, Byrd was the major force in Virginia's political affairs.
From 1955 until his resignation a decade later, he was chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and he used his position to urge presidents from Dwight Eisenhower to Lyndon Johnson to hold the line on federal expenditures. For much of his Senate career, he was chairman of a largely ceremonial panel called the Joint Committee on Reduction of Nonessential Federal Expenditures.
Despite his sharp differences with Roosevelt over domestic policy, Byrd generally backed the administration's foreign policy. He favored Roosevelt's effort to revise the Neutrality Act in 1939 in order to permit military aid to victims of Nazi aggression. Byrd also voted for the nation's first peacetime draft in 1940 and for lend-lease aid to the Allies in 1941.
During the Truman administration, Byrd voted with isolationists, opposing the Marshall Plan for aid to postwar Europe and the Point IV foreign-aid package. He supported American participation in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and helped draft legislation establishing the Atomic Energy Commission.
An opponent of civil rights reforms, Byrd was jolted by the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Influenced by Byrd, the Virginia legislature voted to have the governor close schools that were ordered to integrate by federal courts or cut off state funding for schools that integrated.
But in 1959 the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals struck down the segregationist closing laws, and a federal court in Norfolk ruled that such resistance was unconstitutional. Governor J. Lindsay Almond, Jr. , a Byrd ally, then persuaded the Virginia General Assembly to repeal the school-closing laws, and in February 1959 the color line was broken in Norfolk and Arlington schools without incident.
Byrd's political organization was dealt another blow in 1964 when the
Twenty-fourth Amendment to the Constitution outlawed the poll tax, which had restricted black participation in southern elections. In the 1960 presidential election, Byrd, while not a candidate, received six electoral votes from Alabama, eight from Mississippi, and one from Oklahoma.
During Byrd's final years in the Senate, he opposed Kennedy's 1962 tax cut and clashed with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson over Medicare.
Byrd was reelected to the Senate in 1964, but because of his wife's death and his own failing health, he resigned on November 6, 1965; his son Harry F. Byrd, Jr. , succeeded him. Byrd died at his country estate in Berryville, Virginia.
Achievements
Harry Flood Byrd was successful in both: political pursuits and also as a publisher of the Winchester Star. One of his major achievements was that in 1908 he became a president of the Valley Turnpike Company, (until 1918), he was also a member of the Virginia State Senate, (1915-25), Virginia State fuel commissioner in 1918 and chairman of the Democratic State committee in 1922. In 1926, he was elected as a Democrat the 50th Governor of Virginia, serving until 1930. After his term, he was the Democratic National committeeman and was elected as a Democrat to the United States Senate to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of Claude A. Swanson, serving (1933-65).
By paying off the newspaper's debts Byrd established a policy of pay-as-you-go advertising that assured a constant cash flow. His thrift and abhorrence of debt later became the dominant themes of his political career.
Although Byrd is remembered as a conservative stalwart, he was a progressive governor by the standards of his era. Under his Program of Progress, he streamlined governmental institutions by merging 100 loosely knit and autonomous bureaus, departments, and boards into fourteen departments directly under gubernatorial control. By implementing his pay-as-you-go policy in state expenditures, Byrd transformed a $1. 25 million deficit into a $2. 6 million surplus by the end of his term. He established tax incentives to attract new industry and eliminated the state tax on land to help farmers. He confronted oil companies and telephone companies to press for lower consumer rates, and he promoted rural electrification and conservation.
By virtue of both his service and power, he was one of the most prominent Virginians of the twentieth century. But much of that power was wielded in mostly vain opposition to the New Deal's big-government programs and the civil rights legislation of the 1960s.
Active in local Democratic politics, Byrd launched his political career in 1908, when he was elected to the Winchester City Council.
In 1932, Byrd was a favorite-son presidential candidate at the Democratic National Convention that nominated Franklin D. Roosevelt. Byrd supported Roosevelt, an old friend, and following the election, Roosevelt offered to appoint Byrd secretary of agriculture. Byrd declined and another Virginia Democrat, Senator Claude Swanson, was named to the Roosevelt cabinet as secretary of the navy. Governor Pollard then appointed Byrd to suceed Swanson in the United States Senate. During his years as a United States senator, Byrd rose to power as a leader of southern conservatives. Elected to six terms in the Senate, Byrd consolidated his influence and became one of the Senate's ranking oligarchs, partly because of his seniority and partly because of his affable, even-tempered personality.
Between 1933 and 1945, Byrd voted with Republicans 45 percent of the time. After endorsing Roosevelt's reelection in 1936, Byrd never supported another Democratic national ticket. Later Byrd had supported Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic presidential nomination but was neutral in the election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.
Views
Although friendly with Roosevelt, Byrd became one of the earliest Democratic critics of the New Deal. He supported the Emergency Banking Act of 1933 and early efforts to cut federal expenditures, but he disagreed with Roosevelt's decisions to devalue currency and to abandon the gold standard. Byrd also opposed the National Recovery Act and the original Social Security Act, although he later supported the revision that provided for contributions by employees and employers. Byrd supported the administration's soil-conservation and rural-electrification programs, but he helped forge the bipartisan coalition that blocked Roosevelt's attempt to increase the number of justices on the Supreme Court in 1937.
Quotations:
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. "
"If we can organize the southern states for massive resistance to this order, " Byrd declared, "I think that in time the rest of the country will realize that racial integration is not going to be accepted in the South. "
Membership
In 1923, he became a member of the Virginia Society of the Sons of the American Revolution.
Personality
Byrd had an affable, even-tempered personality.
Quotes from others about the person
Arthur Krock of the New York Times observed in 1953 that Byrd's "rare combination of integrity, ability, courage" and "specialized knowledge of complex subjects" made him a force to be reckoned with in the Senate.
Interests
As a businessman, Byrd had several operations: publishing newspapers, running a local turnpike, and selling apples and apple products. 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
Connections
He married Anne Douglas Beverley on October 7, 1913; they had four children. 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, an estate outside Berryville, adjacent to the family apple orchards. The family moved in 1929, at the end of Byrd's term as governor, after some renovations.
Father:
Richard Evelyn Byrd
1860–1925
wife :
Anne Douglas Beverley Byrd
1887–1964
mother :
Eleanor Bolling Flood Byrd
1864–1957
Son:
Westwood Beverley Westie Byrd
1916–1952
Son :
Richard Evelyn Byrd
1923–2009
Son :
Bradshaw Beverley Byrd
1920–1997
Son :
Harry Flood Byrd
1914–2013
Brother :
Thomas Bolling Byrd
1890–1968
Brother:
Richard Evelyn Byrd
1888–1957
ancestor:
William Byrd
associate:
Max von Schlegell
He sold The Evening Journal in nearby Martinsburg, West Virginia paper in 1912 to associate Max von Schlegell.
