Word: byrds
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Exactly four men served Virginia in the United States Senate from 1920 until Harry Flood Byrd retired last week. That fact measures the continuity and power of the Virginia political organization most recently known as the Byrd Machine. But now the Machine is no longer Byrd's. In the last few years of the Senator's tenure, it has moved away from the ideological rigidity that has been its trademark for 70 years...
...Harry Byrd's uncle, Congressman Hal Flood, was one of the Machine's leaders till his death in 1921, and Byrd's father was speaker of the House of Delegates. But Byrd's own cleverness won him the governorship in 1925 at age 38, extraordinarily young for Virginia. With intelligence and attention to detail, he soon gained control of the already thirty-year-old Machine...
...Byrd's record as Governor is typical of Machine rule. He balanced the budget, turned a state deficit into a surplus, and levied higher taxes on persons with low incomes. He cut spending by reorganizing the state government. He had the legislature pass an anti-lynching law and sponsored a large road-building program (Byrd likes to drive: the automobile is apparently the only twentieth-century innovation he accepts...
...Byrd has dominated Virginia politics through networks of county officials entirely subservient to the Democratic organization. Men who disagreed with the Senator on any issue were simply denied public office for the rest of their lives. Dissenting candidates simply cannot win elections with the small, well-to-do electorate and incredibly low voter turnout. Few Virginia Governors have received the votes of as much as 10 per cent of the state's adult population in the decisive Democratic primary...
Holton carried two of the state's congressional districts: his own Roanoke area and the Tenth District in suburban Washington, which is heavily populated by federal employees; they can generally be expected to support a liberal candidate, and they plainly favored Republican Holton over his Byrd-backed opponent. If Holton moderates can resist the temptation to team up with the conservative-segregationist element, the G.O.P. will offer the Byrd machine even more serious challenges in future elections-when, presumably, the Goldwater thing will have faded...