Word: virginia
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...supported at lower levels, or seeks its own price on the open market. By a margin of one vote it revived a two-parity formula that will raise support levels for corn, wheat, cotton and peanuts. The one-vote margin for the two-headed system came from West Virginia's new Democratic Senator William R. Laird III (see below), who had been sworn in just an hour before the roll call, and was casting his first vote...
William Ramsey Laird III, West Virginia's new Senator, is a husky six-footer with prematurely grey hair and a leaning toward liberalism, "if liberal means one who is for the common good." At 39 he is the third youngest Senator (younger: Louisiana's Long, 37; Massachusetts' Kennedy...
Laird is a trial lawyer who has argued "many, many" cases of first degree murder charges and has had only one client hanged. Laird's parents left West Virginia for Keswick, Calif., where he was born. They died when he was five; Laird returned to Fayette County to be reared by his grandmother, aunt and uncle. The uncle, Dr. William R. Laird, adopted him. He attended Greenbrier Military School, King College in Bristol, Tenn., and West Virginia University, where he received a law degree in 1944 and made friends with a fellow student, Bill Marland. Marland...
Marland appointed Laird to the state board of education, where he faced the segregation problem, came to a personal conclusion that "the Supreme Court's opinions are the law of the land." (West Virginia has moved as rapidly toward integration as any border state.) Later Marland switched Laird to the state tax commission. The new Senator is a Presbyterian, a Lion, a Mason and an American Legionnaire (eligibility: a six-month Navy hitch in World War II during which he rose to seaman second class before receiving a medical discharge...
...idea for a Southern manifesto was conceived by South Carolina's Senator Strom Thurmond, who enlisted the powerful aid of Virginia's Senator Harry Byrd. At a caucus of Southern Senators, Thurmond produced mimeographed copies of his own arm-waving call for nullification. The caucus pushed Thurmond aside, ordered the paper rewritten by more temperate Senators. The final version was written mostly by Georgia's Senator Richard Russell, with amendments by Florida's Spessard Holland and Texas' Price Daniel and polishing by Arkansas' highly polished J. William Fulbright, a liberal hero. At that point...