VIRGINIA: November Harvest

As the Shenandoah Valley glowed in autumn gold and scarlet last week. Virginia’s venerable Senator Harry Flood Byrd puffed through a restless routine. Each morning Byrd, now 70, hurried out to the apple orchards around his home at Berryville, supervised the harvest. But each afternoon the Senator settled down at his telephone to pass out political orders that crisscrossed Virginia in anticipation of a different sort of harvest. On Nov. 5 the Old Dominion elects a governor. When it does, the organization through which Harry Byrd has ruled his state for more than a quarter-century expects to reap enough white Democratic votes to bury Republican Candidate Theodore Roosevelt Dalton, 56, and Virginia’s embryonic G.O.P. once and perhaps for all.

“Nigra Votes Up North.” At the end of

a dust-dry summer, Harry Byrd’s apples are smaller than usual. But in the middle of an autumn that began with Little Rock, Byrd’s political harvest may well be a record-breaker. Four years ago the G.O.P.’s Dalton won a threatening 45% of the vote, competing against Byrd Candidate Thomas B. Stanley for governor, in an atmosphere of pre-integration calm and post-Eisenhower-election rosiness.

This year’s Democratic Candidate J. (for James) Lindsay Almond Jr., 59, is stronger than Governor Stanley: he was an able Congressman and attorney general, won Byrd’s grudging benediction for governor by starting early, shrewdly maneuvering other hopefuls out of contention. Nonetheless, Republican Ted Dalton had an outside chance against Almond because before Little Rock Dalton was talking sense about gradual integration and—to the quiet disgust of many Virginia Democrats—Almond was peddling the massive-resistance nonsense that Harry Byrd had decreed. Then the federal troops flew into Arkansas.

“What have we in the South done to justify these punitive measures?” Byrd asked a Richmond audience last week. “This is being forced upon us to humiliate the Southern people and perhaps destroy us. This whole business is simply to get some Nigra votes up North.” Boomed ex-Governor William M. Tuck to a rally at the Danville fair: “If the Democratic ticket fails to secure a resounding victory, it will be construed all over the U.S., and in fact the world, as a victory for Warren, Brownell, Eisenhower and the National Association for the Agitation of Colored People.”* Shouted Candidate Almond in the “Black Belt” town of Danville: “We mean to stand and fight with that honor characteristic of Virginia, to preserve Virginia’s sacred, sovereign right to govern her own internal affairs.”

Chaos & Turmoil. Principal purpose of the whole campaign is to smear Republican Dalton as an all-out integrationist. and, except in the traditionally Republican mountain counties in the far western corner of Virginia, the campaign has worked. Some of Dalton’s aides have quit, and his financing is poor. Today when tall, grey Ted Dalton shakes hands with a stranger and identifies himself, he is generally eyed with hostility. His audiences frequently number fewer than 100, and infrequently listen to his warning that Harry Byrd’s anti-integration laws will be clipped by the Supreme Court† and leave nothing but turmoil for Virginia. Dalton’s alternative: establish a pupil-placement plan similar to neighboring North Carolina’s, admit a few selected Negroes. Under such a system, says he, every Negro child would have to take individual action to enter a desegregated school; most schools would continue segregated “for maybe a hundred years.”

Ted Dalton is almost certain to be beaten next month. The result will be a loss for the whole South—not because Dalton is Dalton or is a Republican but because Harry Byrd, who could have used his vast influence for moderation, has chosen to win his victory by preaching defiant white supremacy. Democrat Almond, in winning the governorship on such terms, will inherit a state of chaos and hatred when the Supreme Court moves against Byrd’s system of legal subterfuge.

Proper designation: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. t One initial law already is before the Supreme Court after being clipped by the Federal District Court and the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. Both courts have held unconstitutional a Virginia plan transferring control of pupil placement from school boards to the state government at Richmond.