Word: byrds
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Byrd organization is a phenomenon among political machines. The organization and its leader, despite long tenure, are scrupulously honest; e.g., Byrd once blew up when he heard one of his lieutenants boasting about having tapped state employees for campaign contributions. "Pay every one of those people back," he snapped. "I'll make it up to you out of my own pocket." Generally, Byrd rules with a soft, unobtrusive touch. Democratic Attorney General J. Lindsay Almond accurately describes the organization as "a club, except that it has no bylaws, constitution or dues. It's a loosely knit association...
Erosion of Power. Yet Virginia's tensions of change are reflected even in its politics. There are definite signs that the Byrd organization is crumbling. Harry Byrd is 69. Most of his top lieutenants are aging too-and the organization has conspicuously failed to bring along younger men. In 1954 a group of "Young Turks" in the house of delegates rebelled against the entrenched leadership, forced a compromise on the Byrd organization's penny-pinching budget program...
...face of such threatened erosion of his power that Harry Byrd, for the first time in his life, began fanning the emotion-sparked, political race issue...
Guerrilla War. It was perhaps Harry Byrd's closest approach to demagoguery. Virginia has nothing like the problem confronting other Southern states in desegregation. About 52% of the state's 3,759,000 citizens live in areas with less than a 10% Negro population; if the whites accepted school desegregation, their children would no more be inundated than white children in Chicago or Kansas City, Mo. Only 15% of Virginians dwell in communities of more than 40% Negro. When the Supreme Court handed down its school desegregation decision, Virginia reacted with calm reasonableness. Governor Thomas B. Stanley...
...Virginia's cultists, the Gray plan had a fatal defect: it offered local option on desegregation, and the Washington suburb of Arlington, for one, announced that it would integrate. Urged on by the hard core of his political following, Harry Byrd decreed against Virginia's white children being thus mixed in school (although many of them play unaffectedly with Negro youngsters from babyhood). At Byrd's bidding, Governor Stanley called a special legislative session and presented it with 23 bills, setting up a "defense in depth" against desegregation. As passed by the legislature, the program ensured...