Word: byrds
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...victim of changes at home. The civil rights movement and the end of the poll tax are adding Negroes to the voting rolls, while the old Harry Byrd machine, of which Smith is a prize cog, faces attack from all sides. Smith's district has been reapportioned to his disadvantage since the last election, now includes a large segment of liberally inclined Fairfax County, a suburb of Washington. Nonetheless, Smith's cause, like his equanimity, is far from lost. Much of the district is still rural and conservative, and there is considerable affection for the Bible-quoting, foxy...
...Organization had begun to bend--and crack. Thousands of conservatives who had clung to Harry Byrd's Democratic party found no home in the party of Godwin and Kellam. Last July, thy created the Virginia Conservative Party and attracted more than 70,000 votes for their candidate, William Story, an assistant school superintendent (since retired) and John Birch Society member. Last week they announced their own ticket for the Senate and urged their supporters to stay out of the Democratic primary...
Virginia's political picture this year is far more uncertain than it was last fall. Kellam and other leaders of the Organization tried to persuade Robertson, 79 years old today, to withdraw in favor of a younger Organization candidate. Kellam failed, and has endorsed Robertson and Byrd...
Whether he can throw many Negro votes their way is questionable. Boothe, in virtually every speech this month, has reminded his audience that he voted in 1959, as a state senator, for the plan which reopened public schools closed during a desegregation crisis, while Byrd Jr. voted against the proposals. (The plan passed the State Senate by one vote.) Robertson has consistently opposed civil rights legislation during his '33 years in Congress...
Rather, it has been youth vs. age (Spong is 45) and a sort of mixed liberalism against a newly-defined conservatism. "On fiscal matters I'm as conservative as he (Byrd Jr.) is," Boothe has declared. "But where funds were available (in the state senate) and needed--truly needed--I was willing to appropriate them." Byrd Jr., who likes to talk about what he's doing in the U.S. Senate rather than what he did in the Virginia senate, calls himself a "forward-looking conservative...