Harry F. Byrd
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. He came to lead the conservative coalition in the Senate, and opposed President Franklin D. Roosevelt, largely blocking most liberal legislation after 1937.[1] His son Harry Jr. succeeded him as U.S. senator, but ran as an Independent following the decline of the Byrd Organization.
For other people named Harry Byrd, see Harry Byrd (disambiguation).
Harry F. Byrd
James M. Dickerson
Joseph S. Denny
October 20, 1966 (aged 79)
Berryville, Virginia, U.S.
4, including Harry Jr.
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.[2]
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.[3] Students who were denied their education in several Virginia counties became known as the "lost generation".[4] According to Clarence M. Dunnaville Jr., Byrd was a racist and avowed white separatist.[5] 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.[6]
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.
Business career[edit]
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 (equivalent to $85,000 in 2023) 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.[11]
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.[12]
In 1907, he founded The Evening Journal in nearby Martinsburg, West Virginia. He sold the paper in 1912 to associate Max von Schlegell.[13]
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.[14]
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.[15]
National politics[edit]
In 1933 Byrd was appointed to fill a vacancy in the United States Senate; he won reelection as a Democrat in 1933, 1934, 1940, 1946, 1952, 1958, and 1964. Byrd and his colleague Carter Glass invoked senatorial courtesy to stop President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's nomination of Floyd H. Roberts to a federal judgeship in Virginia in 1939. Byrd broke with Roosevelt and became an opponent of the New Deal, but he was an internationalist and strongly supported Roosevelt's foreign policy. As war loomed in 1941 Congress approved his proposal for a joint House–Senate committee to look into ways of eliminating nonessential expenditures. By late September, the Joint Committee on Reduction of Non-essential Federal Expenditures was in operation with Senator Byrd as chairman; it built his national reputation as an economizer.
By the 1950s Byrd was one of the most influential senators, serving on the Armed Services Committee, and later as chairman of the Finance Committee. He often broke with the Democratic Party line, going so far as to refuse to endorse the re-election of liberal President Harry S. Truman in 1948. He also refused to endorse Adlai Stevenson in 1952. He voted against public works bills, including the Interstate Highway System, and played a key role in the passing of the 1964 Revenue Act. He had blocked the bill until President Lyndon Johnson agreed to decrease the total budget to under $100 billion. Subsequently, he helped push the Act through.[19]
Byrd retired from the Senate for health reasons in November 1965. His son, Harry F. Byrd, Jr., was appointed his successor.
U.S. presidential candidate[edit]
Having supported Al Smith, the Democratic governor of New York, in the 1928 U.S. presidential campaign, Byrd was selected by the Virginia Democratic Convention as a favorite son for the 1932 presidential nomination. According to the American political historian Steve Neal, at one point during the Democratic National Convention Byrd was offered the vice-presidential slot in exchange for instructing his 24 delegates to vote for Franklin D. Roosevelt, but declined because he believed he had a chance of winning the presidential nomination. Roosevelt won on the fourth ballot.[20]
Although Byrd never again formally sought the presidency nor became his party's candidate, Southern Democrats drafted him in several campaigns between 1944 and 1960. At the 1944 Democratic National Convention, Southern delegates opposed to Roosevelt's New Deal and racial policies nominated Byrd as the party's presidential candidate. He was nominated by Ruth Nooney of Florida, who said she did so without his knowledge or consent. He won 89 delegate votes to Roosevelt's 1,086 (James Farley of New York got one vote).[21][22] All the convention delegates from Louisiana, Mississippi and Virginia, and 12 of the 36 delegates from Texas voted for Byrd.[23] In 1952, both the Constitution Party and the America First Party nominated Byrd for vice president, and Douglas MacArthur for president, without the consent of either.[24] The slate got 17,205 votes nationwide.[25] In 1956, the year that Byrd initiated the "massive resistance" campaign, the States' Rights Party of Kentucky named Byrd as a presidential candidate. He received 2,657 votes in that state; in South Carolina, in the same election, he received 88,509 votes as the choice of an independent (i.e. unpledged) slate of electors with the endorsement of former governor James Byrnes and Senator Strom Thurmond.[26][27][28][29]
In 1960, Byrd received 15 votes in the Electoral College: eight unpledged electors from Mississippi (all of that state's electoral votes), six unpledged electors from Alabama (the other 5 electoral votes from that state went to John F. Kennedy), and a faithless elector from Oklahoma (the other 7 electoral votes from that state went to Richard Nixon).[30][31]
Death[edit]
Shortly after leaving office, Byrd died in 1966 from a brain tumor; he had been in a coma for four months.[32] He was 79 years of age and had been a senator for over 32 years. He was interred in Mount Hebron Cemetery in Winchester.[33]