Harry F. Byrd

I construe my election as a mandate to me as a businessman to institute the best methods of efficiency and economy in State affairs, so that the people may obtain in the public service a dollar's value for every dollar spent. Useless offices must be abolished, duplicated services must be consolidated, and the manifold activities of the State systematized and directed with the efficiency of a great business corporation.

Harry Flood Byrd Sr. (June 10, 1887 – October 20, 1966) was an American newspaper publisher, politician, and leader of the Democratic Party in Virginia for four decades as head of a political faction that became known as the Byrd Organization. Byrd served as Virginia's governor from 1926 until 1930, then represented it as a United States Senator from 1933 until 1965. He came to lead the "conservative coalition" in the United States Senate, and opposed President Franklin D. Roosevelt, largely blocking most liberal legislation after 1937. His son Harry Jr. succeeded him as U.S. Senator, but ran as an Independent following the decline of the Byrd Organization.

If we can organize the Southern states for massive resistance to this order... the rest of the country will realize that racial integration is not going to be accepted in the South.

Quotes

1920s

• I construe my election as a mandate to me as a businessman to institute the best methods of efficiency and economy in State affairs, so that the people may obtain in the public service a dollar's value for every dollar spent. Useless offices must be abolished, duplicated services must be consolidated, and the manifold activities of the State systematized and directed with the efficiency of a great business corporation.
  • Statement on 1 February 1926 as he took office as the 50th Governor of Virginia, as quoted by Richard F. Weingroff, "Senator Harry Flood Byrd of Virginia- The Pay-As-You-Go Man", published online through the U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration's "Highway History", updated 27 June 2017

1940s

• I favor a strong military but, if wartime spending is to be made a part of our budget in peacetime, and continued for many years, our system simply will not stand it.
  • Remark to Douglas Southall Freeman on 7 February 1948, preserved in Box 85 of the Freeman Papers. As quoted by Ronald L. Heinemann, Harry Byrd of Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), p. 251

1950s

• If we can organize the Southern states for massive resistance to this order... the rest of the country will realize that racial integration is not going to be accepted in the South.
  • Excerpt from Byrd's 1956 announcement of Virginia's strategy for responding to growing pressure from the U.S. government and U.S. Supreme Court to end racial segregation. As quoted by Ty Seidule in Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause (2020), p. 66

1960s

• At the dedication of the Shenandoah National Park [July 3, 1936], President Roosevelt, [Secretary of the Interior] Harold L. Ickes, and I were riding together from Panorama to Big Meadows. I suggested to Mr. Roosevelt that it would be a fine idea to connect the two parks, Shenandoah National Park and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, by extending the Skyline Drive. He quickly agreed that it was an excellent idea but stated that we must begin up in New England. The President then said to me, "You and Ickes get together for the right-of-way." The New England governors were contacted but were not interested. In the meanwhile I was made chairman of the right-of-way commission. And that is how it got started.
  • Statement regarding the creation of the Blue Ridge Parkway, built as an extension of Skyline Drive, both part of Shenandoah National Park, in a 1962 interview. Byrd was personally involved in the creation of Shenandoah National Park and one of several who have claimed to have thought of the Blue Ridge Parkway. As quoted by Harley E. Jolley, The Blue Ridge Parkway (1969), University of Tennessee Press

Quotes about Byrd

There are gentle men in whom gentility finally destroys whatever of iron there was in their souls. There are iron men in whom the iron corroded whatever gentility they possessed. There are men—not many to be sure—in whom the gentility and the iron were preserved in proper balance, each of these attributes to be summoned up as the occasion requires. Such a man was Harry Byrd. ~ Everett Dirksen

Incontestably what runs Virginia is the Byrd machine, the most urbane and genteel dictatorship in America. A real machine it is, though Senator Harry Flood Byrd himself faced more opposition in 1946 than at any time in his long, suave, and distinguished public career. ~ John Gunther

He began to break with Roosevelt when the New Deal got underway, and within a few years had become the most important and powerful of all his enemies among Senate Democrats. For session after session he intransigently bored away at Roosevelt budgets, Roosevelt appropriations, Roosevelt administrative agencies. Yet, a gentleman, he never attacked FDR blatantly. His good manners made him the more dangerous an antagonist. He could not be dismissed as a demagogue or spiteful partisan. ~ John Gunther

There are limits to what government can accomplish, dangers in long-term unbalanced budgets, and liabilities in dependence on the welfare state- for rich and poor alike. Byrd's flaw was that he did not translate these forebodings into imaginative solutions to the problems of modern society but instead fell back on old clichés and a narrow individualistic ethic that was no longer serviceable, a sterile legacy to show for thirty years of service. ~ Ronald L. Heinemann

He spent his remaining days at Rosemont, mostly bedridden, but not without having one last small impact on Virginia politics. On the eve of his son's reelection bid, he lapsed into a coma, and out of respect for him, the campaign was halted. Days later, Harry Jr. won a narrow victory over Armistead Boothe in the Democratic primary, but Willis Robertson and Howard Smith went down to defeat. The Old Guard had passed. ~ Ronald L. Heinemann

Byrd was born out of his time and into the wrong political party. ~ Benjamin Muse

A talented man, Byrd chose to stand outside the broad currents of his time and to set his face against the future... He began as a force and ended as an anachronism. ~ New York Times

There are those who end life feeling the future will nourish their cause. There are those also whose causes pass with themselves. Harry Byrd's cause belonged to the latter category. ~ J. Harvie Wilkinson III

History values men as much for what they are for as for what they espouse. Let not its view of balanced budgets determine its judgment of Harry Byrd. ~ J. Harvie Wilkinson III

• There are gentle men in whom gentility finally destroys whatever of iron there was in their souls. There are iron men in whom the iron corroded whatever gentility they possessed. There are men—not many to be sure—in whom the gentility and the iron were preserved in proper balance, each of these attributes to be summoned up as the occasion requires. Such a man was Harry Byrd.
  • Everett Dirksen, in a tribute to Harry F. Byrd upon his passing, quoted decades later to pay tribute to Harry F. Byrd Jr. by Frank B. Atkinson, Richmond Times-Dispatch, August 11, 2013, "Gentility and Iron, The Legacy of Harry F. Byrd Jr."

• Incontestably what runs Virginia is the Byrd machine, the most urbane and genteel dictatorship in America. A real machine it is, though Senator Harry Flood Byrd himself faced more opposition in 1946 than at any time in his long, suave, and distinguished public career.
  • John Gunther, Inside U.S.A. (1947), New York: Harper & Brothers, p. 705

• Senator Harry F. Byrd incarnates the cavalier-First-Family-of-Virginia tradition, except in one important particular. The Byrd family has a heredity like that of a Middle Europe princeling; indeed, for some generations, the ancestral estate at Westover resembled nothing so much as, say, an estate like that of the Potockis' outside Warsaw. Byrd's initial ancestor, William Byrd I, arrived in Virginia in 1674, and he and his son, William Byrd II, were powerful in pre-Revolutionary characters. But early in the nineteenth century the family began to disintegrate. The present Byrd, lacking nothing in aristocratic heritage, did lack something that usually attends an aristocratic heritage- money. The family, grown poor, had scattered; Byrd's father was Texas born, and he himself was born in West Virginia. Yet always the Byrds were tightly enmeshed in the old tradition. At the age of fifteen, young Byrd took over a newspaper in Winchester, Virginia, that for a long time had been unable to make ends meet and put it on its feet. He never had opportunity to go to high school or college. Byrd made the newspaper a successful property, and branched out in other fields; he is a very wealthy man today, and his Shenandoah Valley home, Rosemont, near Berryville, is a Virginia showplace. His fortune derives mostly out of apples. Virginia as a whole is the fourth apple-growing state in the union, and Byrd himself, with 200,000 trees and a million bushel a year crop, is believed to control about 1 percent of all American production. The outline of Byrd's career, especially in its motivations, is strikingly like that of his friend in the Senate, Arthur Vandenberg. Vandenberg also struggled for a living as a young man, as we know, and a consequent impulse toward security has dominated his behavior ever since. In Byrd's life story we may similarly find a characteristic that distinguishes him above anything else- his extreme obsessive hatred of debt, his dogged fixation on economy. He had to struggle for bitter years to get a family property out of debt. Both the United States Senate and the commonwealth of Virginia have seen the results of this transmuted into other spheres.
  • John Gunther, Inside U.S.A. (1947), New York: Harper & Brothers, p. 706-707

• Byrd interested himself in politics early, and he became a state senator and then in 1926 governor of Virginia. He is an able man (in industriousness and abstract competence he resembles Taft of Ohio) and his record as governor was in several aspects notable. He fought the gasoline and telephone companies, to drive rates down and thus save the public money; he put through an admirable antilynching bill, the first such bill in the South, making any member of a lynch mob subject to state authority and indictment on a charge of murder. As a result Virginia has not had a lynching for twenty years. Roosevelt liked Byrd at this time and wanted him in the federal Senate; as a result, when Claude A. Swanson was elevated to FDR's cabinet in 1933, Byrd got his Senate seat. He has been a senator ever since. He began to break with Roosevelt when the New Deal got underway, and within a few years had become the most important and powerful of all his enemies among Senate Democrats. For session after session he intransigently bored away at Roosevelt budgets, Roosevelt appropriations, Roosevelt administrative agencies. Yet, a gentleman, he never attacked FDR blatantly. His good manners made him the more dangerous an antagonist. He could not be dismissed as a demagogue or spiteful partisan. At the 1944 Democratic convention, he got eighty-nine votes for the presidential nomination; he was- and still is- the obvious candidate and hero of the Bourbon South that is Democrat in name only. He voted against the party's leadership on 61 percent of all roll calls in sixteen months in 1945-6.
  • John Gunther, Inside U.S.A. (1947), New York: Harper & Brothers, p. 707-708

• The Byrd machine is a highly efficient organization; it runs the Commonwealth as effectively as Pendergast ever ran Kansas City or Kelly-Nash Chicago, though with much less noise. In fact, from the point of view of its adhesive power in every Democratic county, its control over practically every office, no matter how minor, it is quite possibly the single most powerful machine surviving in the whole United States. Virginia, I heard it said, is the only "aviary" in the country; it is a cage the netting of which, though almost invisible to outsiders, is extremely close spun; the commonwealth is, so a friend in North Carolina told me- the remark is somewhat bitter- not only the cradle of American democracy, but its "grave." Byrd has never forgtten his Virginia interests. He pays as intimate and inflexible attention to state affairs as to federal. The machine works something like this. Its major instruments are, as always, jobs and patronage, plus the Virginia poll tax. First, through the Democratic National Committee, Byrd controls federal patronage. Next, he pretty well decides the choice not merely of governor, who in Virginia today cannot be other than a Byrd man, in turn controls the appointment of some thousands of state employees, and circuit court judges are chosen- for substantial eight-year terms- by the legislature; these in turn appoint the school trustees, county electoral boards, and trial justices. In each county there is a fixed ring of six or seven machine men. Some county officers like sheriff and tax assessor are elected but their salaries and expense allotments are, within limits, established by the State Compensation Board, also appointed by the governor under Byrd's control. The pattern makes a full interlocking circle. Nothing could be neater or more complete.
  • John Gunther, Inside U.S.A. (1947), New York: Harper & Brothers, p. 708-709

• Byrd entered the Senate at a time when his America of farms and small towns, formerly insulated from the shocks of world affairs and modernization, was dying. Rather than adjust to the revolutionary changes that occurred over the course of his lifetime, he chose to contest their inroads, becoming a cipher whose predictable negativism and welfare legislation revealed a parochialism that bordered on meanness and miserliness. Driven by a desire to preserve the old order, Byrd spent over thirty years fighting ever-increasing federal bureaucracies and budgets, protecting states' rights from intrusions by Washington, and defending racial segregation. Focusing attention on waste in government and pressing for reductions in federal spending, he won some minor skirmishes, but he lost most of the battles. His political philosophy of unregulated individualism and limited government was no longer appropriate for the modern world. Much of his personal value system remained sound- hard work, thrift, initiative, and responsibility- but the demands of the highly technological, mass consumer, global society called for modifications to this individualistic ethic through community planning, resource management, public assistance for the dependent, aid to education, and international commitments. Without a political opposition that might have forced him to reevaluate his position, Byrd could not overcome the limitations of his upbringing and his experience. He remained caught in the time warp of the early twentieth century when the nation was still closely tied to the libertarian principles of the old yeomanry.
  • Ronald L. Heinemann, Harry Byrd of Virginia (1996), Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, hardcover, p. 419

• Nevertheless, there was merit in the manner of the man and the portent of his prognostications. His major contribution as a senator was his repeated warning about the dangers of excessive federal spending, a warning that had more substance twenty years after his retirement than it did during the prosperous post-World War II years. There are limits to what government can accomplish, dangers in long-term unbalanced budgets, and liabilities in dependence on the welfare state- for rich and poor alike. Byrd's flaw was that he did not translate these forebodings into imaginative solutions to the problems of modern society but instead fell back on old clichés and a narrow individualistic ethic that was no longer serviceable, a sterile legacy to show for thirty years of service.
  Harry Byrd's retirement was short-lived. A few months later, as his condition deteriorated, he was diagnosed as having an inoperable brain tumor. He spent his remaining days at Rosemont, mostly bedridden, but not without having one last small impact on Virginia politics. On the eve of his son's reelection bid, he lapsed into a coma, and out of respect for him, the campaign was halted. Days later, Harry Jr. won a narrow victory over Armistead Boothe in the Democratic primary, but Willis Robertson and Howard Smith went down to defeat. The Old Guard had passed. On October 20, 1966, Harry Flood Byrd died in the same room where his wife had died two years earlier. He was buried next to her on a hill overlooking Winchester and the Valley and mountains he loved so much.
  • Ronald L. Heinemann, Harry Byrd of Virginia (1996), Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, hardcover, p. 419-420

• Harry Flood Byrd (1887-1966) was the most powerful political leader in twentieth- century Virginia. He served as governor from 1926 to 1930 and as a United States senator from 1933 to 1965. Byrd's political organization and pay-as-you-go philosophy kept taxes and public spending low in order to make Virginia attractive to business and industrial investors, but as a consequence road construction and support for public education and public health programs remained below national standards. For three decades Byrd's political allies dominated politics in the state. The Byrd organization collapsed following his death and the disastrous attempt by means of Massive Resistance to obstruct federal court orders in the 1950s and 1960s to desegregate the state's public schools.
  • Library of Virginia biographical summary of Byrd[1]

• Byrd was born out of his time and into the wrong political party.
  • Benjamin Muse, writing for the Manassas Messenger on 26 April 1949, as quoted by Ronald L. Heinemann, Harry Byrd of Virginia (1996), Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, hardcover, p. 295

• HARRY FLOOD BYRD was born in Martinsburg, West Virginia. He attended Shenandoah Valley Academy in Winchester, Virginia, after which he became manager of the Winchester Evening Star in 1902 and later its owner and publisher. He also established the Martinsburg Evening Journal in 1907 and became publisher of the Harrisonburg Daily News-Record in 1923. And while involved in journalism, he became of the largest apple growers east of the Mississippi River. He served in the Virginia State Senate from 1916 to 1925 and as Virginia Fuel Commissioner in 1918. Prior to becoming governor, he was elected chairman of the Democratic State Committee in 1921, following the death of his uncle Hal Flood. During his gubernatorial administration, lynching was made a state crime, subjecting all participants to charges of murder. In addition, the “short ballot” was adopted, limiting the list of individually elected Virginia executive branch officials to governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general. The executive branch was reorganized through the abolishment of more than thirty bureaus and the merger of all activities of state government under twelve departments. And counties were given the sole right to tax land while the state was given the sole right to tax intangible property. Byrd was appointed to a vacancy in the U.S. Senate in 1933, retaining the seat through election until 1965.
  • National Governor's Association biographical summary of Byrd[2]

• A talented man, Byrd chose to stand outside the broad currents of his time and to set his face against the future... He began as a force and ended as an anachronism.
  • New York Times editorial following Byrd's retirement from the United States Senate, dated 14 November 1965, as quoted by Ronald L. Heinemann, Harry Byrd of Virginia (1996), Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, hardcover, p. 419

• When the Supreme Court issued its decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, it overturned one aspect of the carefully constructed system of the racial police state in the South. Virginia did not accept the Supreme Court's decision. Initially, the Virginia governor Lindsay Almond counseled moderation, but the U.S. senator Harry Byrd, who controlled Virginia politics with an iron fist, reacted with fury when he heard Almond would acquiesce to the highest court in the land. "The top blew off the U.S. Capitol," Almond recalled. Byrd announced the state's strategy in 1956: "If we can organize the Southern states for massive resistance order... the rest of the country will realize that racial integration is not going to be accepted in the South." Almond was soon on board, declaring, "We will oppose with every facility at our command, and with every ounce of our energy, the attempt being made to mix the white and Negro races in our classrooms." Virginia followed that pronouncement with laws to back up its position, ordering schools to shutter rather than integrate.
  • Ty Seidule, Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause (2020), p. 66-67

• In 1958, Charlottesville and Norfolk schools as well as those in Prince Edward and Warren Counties closed by order of the governor. Thousands of schoolchildren went without education for half a decade so Virginia could, once again, maintain its racial code. The general assembly also created a voucher system using public funds to allow white parents to send their children to private schools. The federal courts ruled the closures and the vouchers unconstitutional, but Harry Byrd would not give up. He tried to persuade Governor Almond to call out the National Guard. One unverified account of the meeting suggests Byrd ordered Almond to shoot children if necessary. Almond allegedly replied, "I'll do it, Harry, if you put it in writing." White supremacists rarely give up their power without a fight. Almond finally relented, and token integration began peacefully in February 1959.
  • Ty Seidule, Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause (2020), p. 67

• Before developing a plan to issue bonds to pay for the Interstate System, General Lucius D. Clay might have been better off if he had taken a close look at a key Member of Congress, Senator Harry Flood Byrd of Virginia. If General Clay had done so, the financing mechanism of the Administration's plan probably would have been different. In the 1954 congressional elections, the Republicans lost control of the Senate. Senator Byrd was the new Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which would be responsible for the revenue portion of any legislation emerging from the Senate authorizing the proposed program. As the White House might have predicted, Byrd could be counted on to oppose the Clay Committee's financial proposal. A lifelong highway booster, Senator Byrd was also a lifelong pay-as-you-go man with a nearly pathological hatred of debt, whether personal or public.
  • Richard F. Weingroff, "Senator Harry Flood Byrd of Virginia- The Pay-As-You-Go Man", published online through the U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration's "Highway History", updated 27 June 2017

• Senator Byrd's final year in Congress would be 1965. His final battle was against the Voting Rights Bill of 1965. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., had dramatized the issue by leading a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to protest exclusion of blacks from voting. President Johnson used the momentum to seek immediate passage of a bill that would require Federal intervention in States that used poll taxes, literacy tests, and other means to exclude black voters. Byrd considered the bill "vicious" and "iniquitous in effect and contemptible in design." In August, over his protests, the bill was enacted.
  • Richard F. Weingroff, "Senator Harry Flood Byrd of Virginia- The Pay-As-You-Go Man", published online through the U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration's "Highway History", updated 27 June 2017

• Harry Byrd and his organizations were rich and valuable parts of any southern uniqueness of history and humanity. Byrd was born of the somber side of southern history. His organization, notwithstanding its faults, was truly coined from the mint of its time. If it was parsimonious, it emerged from a period when Virginia had little of which to give. If it feared deficits, it remembered the state's staggering Reconstruction debts. If it was oligarchic, it was so by reason of long inheritance. If it was regionally oriented, it bore still the scarred tissue of the Civil War. If it was rurally flavored, it respected the power of the farmer's franchise and the state's agrarian heritage. If it was slow- too slow- to change, Virginia had long been changeless.
  • J. Harvie Wilkinson III, Harry Byrd and the Changing Face of Virginia Politics, 1945-1966 (1968), Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, first edition hardcover, p. 350-351

• There are those who end life feeling the future will nourish their cause. There are those also whose causes pass with themselves. Harry Byrd's cause belonged to the latter category. In the nation a more positive role for federal government was fast becoming an American political axiom; likewise, Harry Byrd's Virginia would soon seem but yesteryear's quaint and curious memento. But Byrd's personal cause- his honesty, courtesy, in short, his humanity- was not tied to time. The greatest men have often urged dated or debatable specifics. George Washington urged against foreign alliances; Thomas Jefferson dreamed of an agrarian utopia; Woodrow Wilson warred against bigness in American life; Robert E. Lee struggled valiantly for a divided nation. History values men as much for what they are for as for what they espouse. Let not its view of balanced budgets determine its judgment of Harry Byrd.
  • J. Harvie Wilkinson III, Harry Byrd and the Changing Face of Virginia Politics (1968), Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, first edition hardcover, p. 351