Word: virginia
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Club Without Bylaws. Virginia's shrewd, courtly Harry Byrd became governor in 1926. He promptly sponsored a forthright antilynching law (Virginia retains today a poll tax that works not so much against Negroes as against non-Byrd-organized outlanders. who often forget to ante up in time). Byrd also spurned easy, inflationary financing in favor of a pay-as-you-go road plan (tourists in Virginia, who bring in $600 million a year, still drive comfortably along Byrd-planned highways). After Harry Byrd went to the U.S. Senate in 1933, his followers continued to give Virginia good government...
...club, except that it has no bylaws, constitution or dues. It's a loosely knit association, you might say, among men who share the philosophy of Senator Byrd." It is also a fact that men who do not share Harry Byrd's philosophy have been refused top Virginia office for a long, long while...
Erosion of Power. Yet Virginia's tensions of change are reflected even in its politics. There are definite signs that the Byrd organization is crumbling. Harry Byrd is 69. Most of his top lieutenants are aging too-and the organization has conspicuously failed to bring along younger men. In 1954 a group of "Young Turks" in the house of delegates rebelled against the entrenched leadership, forced a compromise on the Byrd organization's penny-pinching budget program...
...more important, Virginia's Republican Party, given impetus by the influx of new Alexandria-Arlington voters, has developed into a bona fide political force: Dwight Eisenhower twice carried the state, the first time by 80,000 votes, this year by 122,000; Virginia has two Republican Congressmen who have withstood the test of off-year elections; Democratic incumbents were hard pressed in three other districts this year; Republican State Senator Ted Dalton received more than 44% of the vote for governor in 1953. Expected to run again next year, he may threaten the organization's hold on Richmond...
Guerrilla War. It was perhaps Harry Byrd's closest approach to demagoguery. Virginia has nothing like the problem confronting other Southern states in desegregation. About 52% of the state's 3,759,000 citizens live in areas with less than a 10% Negro population; if the whites accepted school desegregation, their children would no more be inundated than white children in Chicago or Kansas City, Mo. Only 15% of Virginians dwell in communities of more than 40% Negro. When the Supreme Court handed down its school desegregation decision, Virginia reacted with calm reasonableness. Governor Thomas B. Stanley...