Virginia: The Squire of Rosemont

As much by disposition as descent, Harry Flood Byrd was an aristocrat. Like his fellow Virginian, Thomas Jef ferson, he had doubts about a truly demotic society. In courtly but inflexible fashion, Byrd also believed that good government, like a good servant, shouldintrude as little as possible. He himself spent 50 years in public service, 33 of them in the U.S. Senate, and until the day of his retirement from politics in November 1965, he remained a gracious, gallant, increasingly isolated foe of big government and big spending. When he died last week of a malignant brain tumor, after lingering in a coma for four months, Harry Byrd, 79, had seen nearly every political theory he held dear invalidated by the clamorous demands of the age.

The Byrds came from England to Virginia in 1670, grew wealthy from 18th century tobacco plantations and the slave trade; Harry’s great-great-great-great-grandfather founded Richmond, that nostalgic capital of lost causes. In the 19th century the family invested less shrewdly, and by the time Harry was 15, the Byrds were on the brink of bankruptcy. He quit school, took over management of a family newspaper and made it prosper. He also staked out a small patch of orchard near the little town of Berryville, expanded his preserve until it encompassed 5,000 acres, and eventually became the world’s largest individual applegrower. Once established as the squire of Rosemont, his baronial estate in the lush, pristine hills near the state’s northern border, Byrd plunged into Virginia politics.

New Deal Neophyte. Inheriting a powerful Democratic machine that his lawyer father had run for years, Harry won a seat in the state legislature in 1915, was easily elected Governor in 1925. Byrd soon established his credentials as a pragmatic Wilsonian liberal. During his four years in the statehouse, he turned the state’s million-dollar deficit into a $4,000,000 surplus, fought the then potent Ku Klux Klan, and rammed through the South’s first tough antilynching law.

So impressed was President-elect Franklin Roosevelt that he decided, even before his inauguration in 1933, to appoint Virginia’s Senator Claude A. Swanson as Secretary of theNavy so that Harry Byrd could fill his unexpired term. Though a fervent New Dealer atthe time, Byrd was soon disenchanted by F.D.R.’s fiscal policies, principally his failure to make good on a campaign promise to cut federal spending by 25%. Years later, when the U.S. budget had mushroomed to 25 times its pre-Roosevelt size, Senator Byrd noted wryly: “I campaigned for the New Deal platform in 1932—and I’m still standing on it.” Roosevelt and Byrd quickly became enemies; F.D.R. even tried to pre-empt all federal patronage in Virginia in a conspicuously unsuccessful effort to undercut the Senator at home. Byrd never again endorsed a Democratic presidential nominee. By maintaininga “golden silence,” he helped Republicans carry the Old Dominion in every presidential election from 1952 until the Johnson landslide of 1964.

“Economize, Balance, Reduce.” The Virginian’s philosophy of government was blunt and uncompromising: “Economize, balance the budget, make some substantial debt payments, and eventually reduce taxes in all the individual brackets and on business.” Yet after he became chairman of the Senate Finance Committee in 1955, practically no one in Government heeded his homilies. For his part, Byrd used the powers of his position to slow down or distort legislation that he found distasteful.

He repeatedly delayed proposals for tax revisions, for increasing social security, and for instituting Medicare. His greatest anathema was civil rights legislation, which he condemned as “usurpation” of the states’ prerogatives. Byrd masterminded—and named—Virginia’s “massive resistance” to the Supreme Court’s school-desegregation ruling; he denounced the 1964 Civil Rights Act as “unconstitutional and unworkable.” Two years ago, Byrd was persuaded by his old friend, Lyndon Johnson, to stand aside and allow the President’s income tax cut to go through. Thereafter, Harry Byrd continued to oppose the Administration with his vote, but not with his committee. “That,” he said ruefully, “is how I help my President.”

The Organization. While decrying federal “paternalism,” Byrd ruled his own domain with a feudalistic hand. It was velvet-gloved, but his Virginia autocracy, known simply as “the Organization,” was one of the most powerful the U.S. had ever seen. Year after year, its candidates were elected without opposition. Yet Harry Byrd was more patriarch than demagogue, and his organization gave Virginia vigorously honest, thrifty government for decades.

Byrd’s machine stubbornly retained the poll tax to discourage voter registration; in 1961, only 17% of Virginia’s voting-age population cast ballots in the gubernatorial election. The Organization—once described as “a molecular attraction of 18th century thinkers”—could never adjust to the complex needs of an increasingly urbanized state where Negroes in time became fully enfranchised, and the suburbs of Washington spread an ever-creeping tide of sophistication into the body politic.

The exigencies of change were clear to younger men. When Byrd retired and had his son, Harry Jr., 51, named to fill his Senate seat, he was criticized by Virginians for perpetuating his political dynasty. Young Harry markedly tempered his philosophy, is campaigning as a moderate, modern Democrat. He is considered a slight favorite to win on Nov. 8. And such is the continuing magnetism of the Byrd name that Harry Jr. will undoubtedly attract thousands of votes from Virginians who proudly uphold the memory, if not all the convictions, of Rosemont’s old squire.