Word: spongings
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...really impressed," a Law School politico said last week after talking with U.S. Senator William B. Spong Jr. (D-Va.). "I never realized a Southern politician could be articulate...
Despite his marked eastern Virginia drawl, Spong's knowledgeable discussions of the South's economic growth and Virginia's rapid urbanization show that he is quite different from the rural bosses who built their power in the South on segregation, economic stagnation, and a restricted electorate. The freshman Senator likes to emphasize his break with traditional Southern politics by exclaiming, with feigned astonishment and a trace of pride, "Why, did you know that I'm the first Virginia Senator ever elected from a city...
...Spong, who lives in Portsmouth, rose to prominence as the leader of the urban bloc in Virginia's General Assembly. For 30 years the late Sen. Harry F. Byrd's Organization dominated the state's politics, with the only opposition coming from the small Progressive wing of the Democratic Party. But within the last 10 years a band of moderates, consisting of representatives from Richmond, the urban areas of Northern Virginia, and Tidewater cities like Norfolk and Portsmouth has sprung up between the two extremes in the party...
Like most of the moderates, Spong is a middleaged, socially prominent lawyer. He graduated from Hampden-Sydney College, where his friends included the sons of three past Virginia governors, and then went to Europe with the 8th Army Corps during the Second World War. After the war, he studied law at the University of Virginia and at the University of Edinburgh. In 1954 he won election to the state's House of Delegates and two years later entered the State Senate. While he was in the Senate, he earned acclaim even from the Byrd people for a four-year study...
AFTER a decade of working with the Organization in the legislature, Spong decided to challenge it in a state-wide contest. Projecting the image of an attractive young problem-solver, he entered the Democratic primary in July, 1966, in an effort to wrest the nomination away from veteran Sen. A. Willis Robertson. Although he was helped by abolition of the poll tax and the subsequent growth in the Negro electorate, Spong's most active support came from a whole generation of young voters who could not identify with the old men in the Organization. Robertson conducted the best-financed...