Word: byrds
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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, should intrude 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...
...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...
...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...
...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 the Navy so that Harry Byrd could fill his unexpired term. Though a fervent New Dealer at the 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...
...irksome presence of such minuscule bills, there was always the danger that sloppy language or slippery shirttail riders would go through unnoticed in the rush. Last week a Senate amendment to deny poverty funds to civil rights rioters was passed - but only after its sponsor, Virginia Democrat Harry Byrd Jr., hurriedly rewrote it on the Senate floor because even he was unable to explain what his original wording meant. Oregon's Democratic Senator Wayne Morse cunningly pasted a rider on the higher-education aid bill that, if passed, would grant home rule to the District of Columbia...