Word: byrds
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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With the primary only a week off (in Virginia, as in all the South, the Republicans do not count), three mavericks were out to break the firm grip which Senator Byrd keeps on the governor's mansion of his home state. Debate waxed hot on Virginia's hustings. At pre-primary barbecues, crab feasts and picnics, Harry Byrd's obedient lieutenants acted like men who had to work for votes...
...citizens of tidewater counties last week, Candidate Battle appealed for votes with 50 barrels of iced crabs, enough beer to wash them down and a now-familiar Byrd-cry: that "out-of-state labor leaders" were plotting to overturn Virginia's "good government...
Battle concentrated his fire on the man who was the greatest threat to Harry Byrd's political future-bald, ruddy Francis Pickens Miller, 54, onetime Rhodes scholar, veteran of both World Wars, longtime New Dealer. Miller had the social background to appeal to many Byrd-backing Virginians (as a child, his mother had been taken for rides on General Robert E. Lee's horse, Traveller) and he had the support of Virginia's growing labor movement plus a large share of the Negroes, now voting in increasing numbers...
Ordinarily Byrd's steamroller would flatten a man like Miller with ease. But two other conservative candidates might divide Harry Byrd's traditional bloc of 110,000 to 130,000 machine-turned votes. They were Horace Edwards, 46, former mayor of Richmond, who broke with the machine last year when Byrd tried to keep Harry Truman's name off Virginia's ballot ; and Remmie L. Arnold, a pen & pencil maker and inveterate "joiner" (he is slated to become Imperial Potentate of the Shrine...
...Harry Byrd was outwardly confident. "I think," said he, "that John Battle has a very substantial edge in the race." But if Harry Byrd was wrong, plenty of Virginians would have reason to worry. While rampaging in the U.S. Senate over the growing U.S. bureaucracy, Harry Byrd had managed in 25 years of rule to build up a Virginia bureaucracy of 73,174 state and local public employees-one for every 41 Virginians...