Wrong Turn at the Crossroads

The brilliant gold beeches, scarlet oaks and russet maples splashed their color against a green pine background as Virginia last week gloried in its autumn. Near Warrenton, the horn rang clear in the crisp dawn to summon pink-coated hunters. In the sandy jack-pine country near the North Carolina line, warehouses bulged with the Bright Tobacco that enriched Virginia by $84 million last year. In southside Virginia, below Richmond, jets of ocher-colored steam spewed from National Aniline's new, modernistic chemical plant. In Williamsburg, tourists moved quietly, reverently, through shrines that attest to Virginia's historic leadership. Near Berryville, plump apples were being pared, cored, cooked and canned in a spice-fragrant plant owned by Virginia's present-day political leader: U.S. Senator Harry Flood Byrd. And in Charlottesville, Mrs. Roger Boyle, the antisegregationist wife of a University of Virginia dramatics professor, sorrowfully displayed the charred remnants of a cross that had burned in her backyard because she had said what she thought.

All these were symbols. They were symbols of Virginia's natural blessings, of its graceful way of life, of its prospering agriculture and burgeoning industry, of its leadership role that has meant so much to the U.S.--and of the way that Virginia, which has more reason than other Southern states to trust in the future, is exercising its Southern leadership to move into the black, prejudice-ridden past.

Temple of Shintoism. The whole fabric of Virginia's 39,899 square miles is stretched to the breaking point between past and future. Along the James River, the masters of magnificent plantation homes look with distrust on the inevitable industrialization of their domain.

(Says a Virginia Chamber of Commerce official: "Sentimentalists don't want their historic James River to become the Ruhr of the South, but it's bound to happen.") Along the York River, a new $70 million American Oil Co. refinery is in full operation near Yorktown, where the grass-carpeted trenches of the final battle for American independence still twist in a mystifying maze. And along the Potomac, in the Arlington-Alexandria area across from the nation's capital, are beehives of brick housing developments inhabited by thousands of federal workers viewed by most Virginians as foreigners.

The commonwealth of Virginia is justly proud of its past. Virginia gave to the U.S. eight Presidents, of whom three--Washington, Jefferson and Madison--were the muscle, the heart and the mind of the Republic. Yet in its homage to history, Virginia has become increasingly a cult of the past, a temple of Shintoism in the U.S. In this sense Virginia is indeed less a geographical state than a state of mind, and the power of its longtime modern-day leader rests, as one of his aides said last week, on the fact that "Harry Byrd usually stands for what most Virginians think."

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.

The Byrd organization is a phenomenon among political machines. The organization and its leader, despite long tenure, are scrupulously honest; e.g., Byrd once blew up when he heard one of his lieutenants boasting about having tapped state employees for campaign contributions. "Pay every one of those people back," he snapped. "I'll make it up to you out of my own pocket." Generally, Byrd rules with a soft, unobtrusive touch. Democratic Attorney General J. Lindsay Almond accurately describes the organization as "a 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.

Far 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 as it has rarely been threatened before.

It was in the face of such threatened erosion of his power that Harry Byrd, for the first time in his life, began fanning the emotion-sparked, political race issue.

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, a Byrd protege, was widely applauded for his statement that he planned "no precipitate action," but would work for a program "in keeping with the edict of the court." A commission headed by State Senator Garland Gray produced a middle-road desegregation plan.

But to Virginia's cultists, the Gray plan had a fatal defect: it offered local option on desegregation, and the Washington suburb of Arlington, for one, announced that it would integrate. Urged on by the hard core of his political following, Harry Byrd decreed against Virginia's white children being thus mixed in school (although many of them play unaffectedly with Negro youngsters from babyhood). At Byrd's bidding, Governor Stanley called a special legislative session and presented it with 23 bills, setting up a "defense in depth" against desegregation. As passed by the legislature, the program ensured a decade-long guerrilla war against the Supreme Court: if one law were found unconstitutional, another would become effective; if it were found unconstitutional, another would take its place, etc. The key to the Stanley program: state funds are to be withheld from any school district that permits a Negro to sit with white children.

Disintegration of Order. Because of the civil-rights issue, the cautious processes of Virginia have become confused and troubled. Says Fletcher Dozier, grizzled Negro waiter in Norfolk's Commodore Maury Hotel: "I've lived here most of my life. I always liked the white people and I think they liked me. I wasn't called a nigger until I was 26 years old--and that was by a Canadian woman in Boston. But after a thing like this Supreme Court decision, you get to know who are your friends and who aren't. Now I see the way some fellow is acting, and I say to myself, 'There's a man I have to watch.' "

Harry Byrd's segregation program has met opposition even within his organization. Says Byrd-dogging Political Leader William Lee Prieur Jr. of industrial, Navy-base Norfolk: "After the program came out, I got the Norfolk legislators in here, and we agreed we just couldn't go along. I called Harry Byrd and I said, 'You're wrong on this. We can't support you.' He said, 'The people of Virginia will never accept desegregation. I'm going to resist this as long as I can.' " Says Norfolk's Democratic Mayor Fred Duckworth: "If we started to integrate, we'd have to give up our state aid, which is $2,000,000 a year, and 20% of the school's budget. But we also get $2,000,000 a year from the Federal Government to educate the children of Navy people. If they tell us to integrate and we don't, we lose their $2,000,000. So it's hell if we do and hell if we don't."

Towards Yesterday. Tragically, the Byrd program has hurt most what Harry Byrd is trying to protect: the education of Virginia's children. Construction of needed school facilities is lagging badly; school boards are hard put to find buyers willing to invest in Virginia's confusion.

The heartbreaking thing about Virginia is that, as the South's leader, it has chosen to lead the way backward into a dark yesterday. Its acts to date have been carefully legalistic (with such grim exceptions as Mrs. Roger Boyle's charred cross). But its less sophisticated sister states, following the bare pattern of their leader, have distorted Virginia's program into outright defiance of the Supreme Court. At his homeland's present crossroads, Harry Byrd is waving the South in a wrong direction that will be remembered long after he has departed.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.