VIRGINIA: The Gravest Crisis

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Above all things, I hope the education of the common people will be attended to; convinced that on their good senses we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.

—Thomas Jefferson to James Madison (1787)

Behind the massive walnut desk in Richmond’s proud, Ionic-fronted Capitol, designed by Thomas Jefferson in 1785, sat florid, heavy-shouldered J. (for James) Lindsay Almond Jr., 66th Governor of Virginia in the line of Jefferson, Patrick Henry, James Monroe, John Tyler and Harry Flood Byrd. He had, he admitted, been under “continuous pressure.” Just the night before, he and his wife had been awakened several times by telephone calls: “She’d jump up so I could get some sleep, and I jumped up so she could get some rest. Usually, it meant that both of us jumped up at the same time.” But for a man ready to preside over the dissolution of the public school system first proposed by Thomas Jefferson in 1779, Lindsay Almond was remarkably relaxed. “I feel very well, thank you,” said he. “But I would like to take a stroll in the country, for I love the country.”

Deeply Troubled. Virginia’s countryside was indeed something to love last week. In the Shenandoah Valley, apples clustered rich and red in Senator Harry Byrd’s vast orchards near Berryville. In the famed Tidewater region, haze shimmered blue over sparkling crystal estuaries. In the west, the beech’s first gold and the oak’s first russet welcomed autumn from the Appalachian crests. In the tangled Wilderness, dusk cast early purple shadows round Lindsay Almond’s family farm land.

Yet for all its peaceful beauty, for all its graceful ways, for all Lindsay Almond’s relaxed composure, Virginia was deeply, darkly troubled. The trouble lay in the issue of an era, an issue bound to come fittingly, inevitably to clearest focus in Virginia. It was as simple as this: Should Virginia obey the law of the land by allowing Negro children to attend school with whites? Or should Virginia close its public schools, blindly following a legalistic road that might well lead to the violence that Virginia’s leaders most deplore? U.S. Senator Harry Byrd, Virginia’s benign but absolute political boss, accurately measures the dimensions of Virginia’s problem. “We face,” he said recently, “the gravest crisis since the War Between the States.”

Law v. Politics. That crisis is not only Virginia’s or even the South’s: it is the nation’s. Far more than anything that jackanapes (by Virginia standards) Governor Orval Faubus can do in ragtag (by Virginia standards) Arkansas, Virginia will set the lasting pattern of Southern integration—or defiance. Virginia’s Senator Byrd has bitterly recognized that fact: the forces of integration, he said last month, are “working on the theory that if Virginia can be brought to her knees, they can march through the rest of the South singing Hallelujah.”

In Governor Lindsay Almond, highly skilled lawyer and vote-getting politician, the conflict between republican law and regional politics as dictated by prejudice comes to bear in a microcosm. Almond is a true son of the Virginia that gave to the U.S. eight Presidents, including Washington, Jefferson and Madison, the bone, blood and brain of the republic. He is equally a son of the Virginia that gave to the Confederacy its crimson fields, its grey-clad men, and above all its leaders, who should have known better.

His life intertwines his state’s segregation struggle much as the Virginia creeper chokes the mountain forests. As the attorney general who argued Virginia’s school cases before the Supreme Court, Lindsay Almond is one of segregation’s ablest legal advocates. “Don’t you kid yourself,” says a longtime Almond adversary, N.A.A.C.P. Special Counsel Thurgood Marshall. “He is a good lawyer.” Precisely because he is a good lawyer, Lindsay Almond understands that Virginia, in its “massive resistance” delaying tactics, is merely living from stay to stay. Sighed the Governor last week, “We might have to take it between the eyes.”

But Politician Almond cannot always afford the judicial view. Sworn to a no-surrender policy against integration, he can fan dangerous emotions with the best of demagogues, warning that the Supreme Court will soon “make it lawful for a Negro to intermarry with a white person,” describing civil rights programs as “ribald, unconstitutional, politically designed, cheap and tawdry” or “communistically conceived and sponsored.”

Again, as a onetime Lutheran Sunday-school teacher, Almond is genuinely devout. He gets real pleasure out of troweling around with roses, peonies and irises, because “among my flowers I can always feel the presence of deity.” He would be horrified if accused of un-Christian prejudice. Yet in fact he springs from the same land and loins as his blood brother, Joseph

Marion Almond, chief of the boiler room at the Bethesda Naval Hospital, who says: “As for ingetration [sic’], you can quote me that I am 100% against it. I never let any nigger come close to me.”

Strange Alchemy. But the most important factor about Lindsay Almond’s role is that he is the anti-integration straw boss for one of the nation’s oldest, most powerful and in many ways most sophisticated political machines, led by Harry Byrd, a symbol of Southern leadership with the capacity and influence for achieving the greatest good—or the greatest evil.

In their strange alchemy, Harry Byrd, Lindsay Almond and the Virginia political organization are the real secret of Virginia’s segregation struggle. Far from holding to Jefferson’s faith in the good sense of the common people, the Byrd organization is an oligarchy, composed of the few, chosen by the few to make decisions for the many. “Let the laws be enforced by the white people of this country,” cries Harry Byrd. He does not mean all the white people—or even most of them. Poll taxes and some of the nation’s most restrictive registration laws hold Virginia’s vote to the hard core of Byrd followers: never in history have more than 35% of Virginia’s adults voted in a presidential election; Lindsay Almond was elected Governor by only 16% of the adult population; in Charlottesville (pop. 30,000), Almond’s birthplace, only 466 voted in a 1955 election for the state senate.

Like a Club. In its oligarchic context, the Byrd organization is an alliance of gentlemen, and a gentleman is known more by his philosophy and politics than by his purse or pedigree (gentle-born

Millionaire Byrd* knew hard times as a youth; plain-born Lawyer-Politician Almond is far from wealthy). Almond has described the organization as well as anyone: “It’s like a club, except it has no bylaws, constitution or dues. It’s a loosely knit association, you might say, between men who share the philosophy of Senator Byrd.” Almond need only have added what he himself learned the hard way: that those who deviate from the Byrd philosophy soon cease to be gentlemen by organization standards.

Not as a flunky or errand boy, but as a man who can be trusted to keep Virginia the way Harry Byrd wants to keep it, Lindsay Almond was in full charge of the explosive political program of using legal stratagems to keep Negro children out of white schools.

Little White School. Almond was born in Charlottesville on June 15, 1898, the second of the five children of a Southern Railway locomotive engineer who retired, after a 1901 head-on collision, to his 250-acre family farm in rolling Orange County. There, near the tiny village of Locust Grove on the Chancellorsville battlefield, just four miles from the Wilderness thicket where Stonewall Jackson was mortally wounded by his own men, Lindsay Almond grew up. Lindsay did farm chores, worked nights with his mother at the kitchen table, learned to read and write even before he trudged off for the first time to the little white school a mile away.

Not born to the purple, Almond had to scrimp and save for his education. He worked in a sawmill and a gristmill, plowed a straight furrow, shocked corn and sowed wheat and milked cows, and, with the help of a $10-a-month scholarship, earned enough to go to the University of Virginia. At that, he had to quit for two years to take a $125-a-month job as principal of a four-room Orange County school before returning to Charlottesville and graduating, in 1923, from law school.

The Kind Who Goes Places. Settling down to practice in Roanoke, Lindsay Almond soon met a young state senator who was campaigning in 1925 for Governor. “I had admired his career in the state senate,” recalls Lindsay Almond, “and I knew that he was the kind of man politically who would go places.” Almond determined to go places right along with Harry Flood Byrd.

Almond campaigned for Byrd, who won easily and took over Virginia’s political leadership. Byrd’s favor took tangible form: in 1930 Almond was appointed assistant prosecuting attorney in Roanoke; two years later he was named to the hustings court bench in Roanoke. There, for 13 years, he held a pivotal place in the patronage-minded Byrd organization: in Virginia, local judges have the power to appoint courthouse officials responsible for as much as 70% of local expenditures. Almond resigned in 1945 to run for the U.S. House of Representatives, won with the Byrd organization’s hearty blessing and went off to Washington—but not for long. In 1948 the Virginia general assembly named him to fill an unexpired term as attorney general. He readily traded his $15,000 House salary for the $9,860 job as attorney general: he knew he was moving into the direct line of succession to the governorship.

In the Doghouse. Lindsay Almond very nearly messed up his own chances. In 1950 President Harry (“There are too many Byrds in the Senate”) Truman appointed one Martin Hutchinson to the Federal Trade Commission. For years, Hutchinson had been Virginia’s leading anti-Byrd Democrat, and Byrd bitterly and successfully fought the confirmation. Almond did not endorse Hutchinson, but he did, in an awesome mental lapse, write a letter describing Hutchinson as honest and able, i.e., a gentleman.

Almond’s apostasy put him squarely in Harry Byrd’s doghouse, and it was years before he fought his way out. By 1953, when Attorney General Almond ably and eloquently represented Virginia in the school desegregation hearings before the Supreme Court, he was plainly the logical choice to run for Governor. But Byrd pushed him aside in favor of lackluster U.S. Representative Thomas Stanley, a Henry County furniture manufacturer and one of the dullest candidates ever to go before the voting public.

Bumbling and stumbling throughout the campaign, Tom Stanley almost wrecked the Byrd organization. Running against him was State Senator Theodore Roosevelt Dalton, the most attractive Virginia Republican in years. It was only when Ted Dalton made the fatal mistake of endorsing a road bond program that Harry Byrd, longtime champion of pay-as-you-go road building, jumped into the campaign, picked Stanley up and carried him across the line. At that, it was perilously close: in Democratic Virginia, Republican Dalton took 45% of the vote.

Beginning of the Beginning. Many observers saw in the Stanley-Dalton race the beginning of the end for the powerful Byrd organization. But then, on May 17, 1954, came the event that Virginia’s politicians knew could be used to give the Byrd organization greater power and strength than it had ever known before: the Supreme Court’s historic school desegregation decision.

Mild-mannered Tom Stanley reacted temperately. “This news.” he said, “calls for cool heads, calm study and sound judgment.” He promised to set up a commission to work toward a plan “in keeping with the edict of the court.” Added he: “Views of leaders of both races will be invited.” That was the last anyone ever heard of that sort of commission: under heavy pressure from Virginia’s Southside politicians, Stanley finally named an all-white group headed by State “Senator Garland (“Peck”) Gray, a leading Byrdman who was soon describing the Supreme Court’s decision as “political and monstrous.”

Fatal Flaw. The Gray Commission came up with a plan aimed at starving integration to death. It proposed that

1) local school boards under court integration orders have the option of closing down or integrating (the assumption was that few would care to desegregate), and

2) at the same time the state be permitted to pay private school tuition for all white students who objected to integration or whose schools had been closed. In Europe on Senate business, Harry Byrd received a copy of the Gray Plan by mail from his son Harry Jr. A sincere segregationist, Harry Byrd could also see the political hay to be made out of fighting for a lily-white Virginia. In that sense, the Gray Plan had a fatal flaw: in such liberal cities as Norfolk and Alexandria, local authorities might permit a few Negro children to sit in white classrooms.

But Harry Byrd was much too shrewd to jump out front with objections to the Gray Plan. Before it or any harsher program could be put into effect, a change was required in one section of the Virginia constitution that prohibited the “appropriation of public funds” for “any school or institution of learning not owned or exclusively controlled by the state.” On the pretext of support for the Gray Plan with its fatal flaw, the Byrd organization fought hard for a constitutional amendment. Leading the way was Attorney General Lindsay Almond, a stem-winding stump orator, who thundered at Appomattox that defeat of the amendment would “engulf us in the blackness of indescribable chaos … A vote for amendment is a vote against government by the N.A.A.C.P. in Virginia.”

Massive Resistance. In Virginia’s constitutional referendum on Jan. 9, 1956, the amendment carried, 304,154 to 146,164, and the Gray Plan had outlived its usefulness. Poor Governor Stanley, who never quite seemed to get the word, hailed the vote as a “mandate” for the Gray Plan. But Harry Byrd interpreted it as a mandate for something much tougher. He promptly warned the legislature to go slow in enacting the Gray Plan’s provisions. In February, Byrd laid down the law with an outright demand for “massive resistance” against any sort of integration. And in July, Byrd met secretly in Washington with top organization lieutenants to chart the course for a massive resistance program that—in the name of states’ rights—would rip all authority out of the hands of local communities and arrogate it to Richmond.

Attorney General Almond was not at that meeting, but in the days that followed his office helped draft the legislation of massive resistance. In four weeks, the Virginia general assembly passed 16 school bills. Principal steps in massive resistance:

1) District school boards must refer all Negro applications for white schools to a three-man state pupil-placement board, which can reject them on any basis except color. (“We had to figure out a defense that was based on anything but race,” Lindsay Almond once explained. “You see, that would be going against the Supreme Court decision.”) The pupil-placement law has already been swept aside in some federal court districts.

2) When Negroes dispute the placement board’s decision in the federal courts, the district school board may be ordered to admit them or face contempt-of-court charges. If that happens, the Governor is required to shut down the school that is involved. Almond need not wait for the Negro children to set foot on the school grounds; he can, as he did last week at Warren County High School in Front Royal, take over as soon as there has been a final, unappealable integration order.

3) When the school is closed, Lindsay Almond must enter into a farcical attempt to reopen it on a “resegregated” basis. In practice, this means that he must try to persuade the Negroes to withdraw voluntarily.

4) When that fails and, for example, a grade school is integrated, then state funds are cut off from all grade schools in that district. If a high school is involved, the cutoff applies to all high schools in the district. At the same time, state tuition grants will be given to white children for private schools.

Back in the Byrdhouse. Clearly, massive resistance placed the governor right in the middle—and that was where Lindsay Almond wanted to be. He had worked hard to regain his privileged standing in the Byrdhouse, but just in case his one deviation was still held against him, he announced for Governor in November 1956 without consulting Harry Byrd ahead of time. Whatever his private feelings may have been, Harry Byrd recognized Almond as a hot vote getter—and formidable Republican Ted Dalton was again running for Governor.

With the Byrd organization’s enthusiastic segregationist backing, Lindsay Almond let out all stops. Negroes, he cried, were “threatening government by N.A.A.C.P. in Virginia by the cold steel of federal bayonets, and we will have none of it.” Ted Dalton, urging a system of limited integration, never really had a chance. And the dispatch of federal troops to Little Rock ruined him completely. Lindsay Almond was elected Governor of Virginia by a vote of 326,921 to 188,628—and the Byrd organization, playing fast and loose with segregationist emotions, was more firmly entrenched in power than ever.

Daily Deterioration. Governor Lindsay Almond remains much too good a lawyer to believe that Virginia’s massive resistance laws will hold water in court. The school-closing law, for one, still flies squarely in the teeth of a passage of Virginia’s constitution that requires the general assembly to “establish and maintain an efficient system of public free schools” (Lawyer Almond can hardly place much stock in the lame explanation that integrated schools are not “efficient”). But Politician Almond is in much too deep to back out, and as the focal figure in enforcing massive resistance, he has recently seen his position deteriorate almost daily.

A man given to regular hours, Lindsay Almond ate breakfast one recent morning with his handsome wife Josephine (the Almonds have no children but have raised Mrs. Almond’s nephew) in a little room overlooking the gardens of his executive mansion. At 8:55 he walked from the mansion to his Capitol office, eating up the short distance with strides of his long, thin legs (heavy in his upper body, Almond stands 6 ft., weighs 202 lbs.). Talking to newsmen that day, Almond seemed almost resigned to the future. “What,” he asked, “can you do in the face of overwhelming power?” Massive resistance meant resistance “by all lawful and honorable means . . . This is a government of laws, not men, and the court decisions made ultra vires are not the law of the land.” Yet when the showdown comes, Virginia has little choice but to submit. “This state can’t secede from the Union,” said Lindsay Almond. “Virginia has no desire for it.”

To Virginia’s rabid segregationists, their emotions whipped up by the sort of stump speeches at which Politician Almond excels, Lawyer Almond’s talk sounded dangerously soft. That night the phone began ringing in the mansion (Almond is one of the few U.S. Governors with a listed number). Under heavy pressure, Lindsay Almond hastily wrote letters urging Virginia school boards to refuse, even when under court orders, to assign Negro children to white schools. Politician Almond was taking a position that even he admitted “the courts might think is eyewash.”

Last week Virginia’s gravest crisis moved toward its climax. One after another, federal courts struck at massive resistance. Almond no longer talked so much in the lofty terms of the law. Informed that Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Simon Sobeloff had denied Warren County’s plea for an integration stay, Almond held a waspish press conference. Later, walking to his mansion, he bitterly recalled how Sobeloff, then U.S. Solicitor General, and “his assistant, N.A.A.C.P. Counsel Thurgood Marshall,” had argued on the same side in the original school desegregation cases. “We,” said Almond, referring to the segregation lawyers, “were like bastards at a family reunion.”

Next night Almond called a special press conference to announce that he was taking full control of the Warren County school district—and its closed high school. He thereby interposed himself, with his legal privileges as Governor of a sovereign state, between the school board and the Federal Government. That action would be tested in the courts. So would all the other laws of massive resistance. Politician Almond, who would dearly love to step into Harry Byrd’s shoes, would fight with all his considerable skills to keep the Commonwealth of Virginia the way the Byrd machine wants it. The national tragedy is that the 66th Governor of the Commonwealth, at a time when the nation needs the type of enlightened leadership that is its due from Virginia, declines to step into the shoes of such Virginians as Washington, Jefferson and Madison, the builders of the Union.

-William Byrd I came to Virginia from England in 1672, became a tobacco planter, slave dealer and president of the Colonial Council; William Byrd II (1674-1744) owned Westover plantation, 179,000 acres overlooking the James River; Harry Byrd’s father, Richard Evelyn Byrd (1860-1925), was speaker of the Virginia house of delegates and a U.S. district attorney; Harry’s brother, the late Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd, was the first man to fly to the North and South Poles.