Word: byrds
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...repeatedly delayed proposals for tax revisions, for increasing social security, and for instituting Medicare. His greatest anathema was civil rights legislation, which he condemned as "usurpation" of the states' prerogatives. Byrd masterminded-and named-Virginia's "massive resistance" to the Supreme Court's school-desegregation ruling; he denounced the 1964 Civil Rights Act as "unconstitutional and unworkable." Two years ago, Byrd was persuaded by his old friend, Lyndon Johnson, to stand aside and allow the President's income tax cut to go through. Thereafter, Harry Byrd continued to oppose the Administration with his vote...
...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...
...government was blunt and uncompromising: "Economize, balance the budget, make some substantial debt payments, and eventually reduce taxes in all the individual brackets and on business." Yet after he became chairman of the Senate Finance Committee in 1955, practically no one in Government heeded his homilies. For his part, Byrd used the powers of his position to slow down or distort legislation that he found distasteful...
...Organization. While decrying federal "paternalism," Byrd ruled his own domain with a feudalistic hand. It was velvet-gloved, but his Virginia autocracy, known simply as "the Organization," was one of the most powerful the U.S. had ever seen. Year after year, its candidates were elected without opposition. Yet Harry Byrd was more patriarch than demagogue, and his organization gave Virginia vigorously honest, thrifty government for decades...