Harry F. Byrd
Harry F. Byrd, Sr. | |
|---|---|
 Harry Flood Byrd, Sr. as a Senator in the 1930s. | |
| Governor of Virginia | |
| In office 1926–1930 | |
| Preceded by | John Garland Pollard |
| Succeeded by | Elbert Lee Trinkle |
| United States Senator from Virginia | |
| In office 1933–1965 | |
| Preceded by | Claude A. Swanson |
| Succeeded by | Harry F. Byrd, Jr. |
| Personal details | |
| Born | June 10, 1887 Martinsburg, West Virginia |
| Died | October 20, 1966 (aged 79) New York City |
| Political party | Democratic |
| Spouse | Susan Ray-Byrd |
| Children | Harry F. Byrd, Jr., Amanda Winston Byrd |
| Residence | 7683 Clarke Street, 24th Avenue, New York City |
Harry Flood Byrd, Sr. (June 10, 1887–October 20, 1966) of Berryville in Clarke County, Virginia was an American politician. He was a descendant of one of the First Families of Virginia. His ancestors included William Byrd II of Westover Plantation, who established Richmond and he was the brother of famed aviator Richard Evelyn Byrd. He was known for opposition to Blacks, Asians, and Hispanics.
Byrd was a dominant figure in Virginia Democratic Party politics for much of the first half of the 20th century. He became a Governor of Virginia in the late 1920s and continued to lead a political faction which became known as the Byrd Organization as he represented Virginia as a United States Senator from 1933 until 1965.
Financial conditions in Virginia during his youth conditioned his thinking on fiscal matters throughout his life. He is best remembered for his austere pay-as-you-go financial policies, and extreme positions against racial desegregation of the public schools, advocating a policy of massive resistance which led to closure of some public school systems in Virginia in the early 1960s.
Early life in Virginia after the Civil War
Harry Flood Byrd was born in Martinsburg, West Virginia in 1887 and moved with his parents to Winchester, Virginia the same year. Byrd belonged to one of Virginia's oldest families. As descendant of one of the First Families of Virginia, his ancestors included William Byrd II of Westover Plantation, who established Richmond.
Harry F. Byrd was the brother of famed aviator Richard Evelyn Byrd. He was a nephew of Henry De La Warr Flood, who served as in the House of Representatives in the U.S. Congress from Appomattox County, Virginia from 1901-1921 and Joel West Flood, also of Appomattox County, who served as Commonwealth Attorney of Appomattox County from 1919 to 1932, served in the U.S. Congress to fill the the vacancy caused by the death of Henry St. George Tucker in 1932, and was a long-time Federal Court Judge of the Fifth Judiciary Circuit (based in Richmond) from 1940-1964.
Young Harry Byrd's father was a wealthy apple grower in the Shenandoah Valley and publisher of the Winchester Star newspaper. He attended the public schools and Shenandoah Valley Academy in Winchester.
One of his biographers, Alden Hatch, has noted that, having been born only twenty-two years after the end of the American Civil War, he grew up in a era when "the Shenandoah Valley was still a place of genteel poverty . . . . Harry Byrd never lacked food, but he had no money for luxuries. No one had any money. If a man got into debt, there was small chance of getting out of it."
Even worse in Byrd's eyes was the dilemma of the state itself, which was also heavily in debt during Byrd's youth. Virginia beginning in 1816 had taken on debt to help finance many internal public improvements through the Virginia Board of Public Works before the Civil War. Some of these improvements had been destroyed during the War, although the debt remained. Others had been made in the former portion of the state which constituted the new State of West Virginia. For several decades thereafter, the two states disputed the new state's share of the Virginia government's debt.
The issue was finally settled in 1915, when the United States Supreme Court ruled that West Virginia owed Virginia $12,393,929.50. The final installment of this sum was paid off in 1939. However, the issue of Virginia's public debt was far from resolution during Byrd's formative years.
Family
Byrd married Anne Douglas Beverage, a childhood friend, on October 7, 1913. They lived with her parents in Winchester until in 1916, when he built a log cabin in Berryville at a family-owned orchard, and they moved there. The Byrds had three sons: Harry F. Byrd, Jr., Bradshaw Byrd, and Richard Byrd, and one daughter, Westwood Beverly Byrd.
Career, pay-as-you-go
In 1903, he took over his father's newspaper, the Winchester Star. The newspaper had slipped into debt under his father's ownership. The paper owed its newsprint supplier $2,500 and the company refused to ship more newsprint on credit. Harry Byrd cut a deal to make daily cash payments in return for paper. As Byrd would later say, "when you have to hunt for them that way, you get to know how many cents there really are in a dollar." He eventually bought the Harrisonburg Daily News-Record and several other papers in the Shenandoah Valley; his family still owns these papers today.
This was the first appearance of Byrd's famous "pay-as-you-go" policy. The experience, combined with other experiences of his youth, gave him a lifelong aversion to borrowing money and to debt of any kind.
"I stand for strict economy in governmental affairs," Byrd proclaimed. "The State of Virginia is similar to a great business corporation . . . and should be conducted with the same efficiency and economy as any private business." In a fifty-year political career, no statement of Byrd's ever more succinctly spelled out his view of government. (Heinemann)
In 1908, at the age of 21, he became president of The Valley Turnpike Company, a 93-mile toll road between Winchester and Staunton. Earning $33 a month, he was required to drive the entire route at least twice a month to inspect it and arrange for repairs. As automobile traffic increased, he saw to it that road conditions were maintained within the revenues available. He served in that capacity until he became elected to state office seven year later. He would maintain an interest in roads and tourism throughout his career, always tempered however, by his pay-as you-go philosophy.
Virginia politics
In 1915, while still heading the Valley Turnpike Company, at the age of 28, Byrd he was elected to Virginia's State Senate. That election was to begin his 50 years of service in various roles in the state and federal government.
At the Virginia State Capitol in Richmond, as a new State Senator, Byrd was initially a progressive with an early interest in road improvements. He was a member of the Senate Committee on Roads, the Finance Committee, the Steering Committee, the Committee on Privileges and Elections, and the Committee of Schools and Colleges. He advocated a tax on gasoline as a fair method of raising revenue for road construction.
However, he first came to prominence in 1922, when he led a fight against using bonded indebtedness as a method to pay for new roads. He feared the state would sacrifice future flexibility by committing too many resources to paying off construction debt. In 1923, Byrd was sued by the Virginia Highway Contractors Association because he said their activities "by combination and agreements may be very detrimental" to the State. The court dismissed the suit, stating the criticism was legal, imposing all costs upon the association. The publicity helped him to be elected Governor of Virginia in 1924.
As governor, serving a term from 1925 to 1929, Byrd pushed through constitutional amendments that streamlined the state government and allowed for more efficient use of tax dollars. He also made property taxes solely a county responsibility. When it was obvious that increased spending on road construction wasn't enough to "get Virginia out of the mud," he pushed through a secondary roads bill that gave the state responsibility for maintaining county roads. These measures made Byrd seem like a New South progressive at first. However, many of his measures were more to the benefit of rural areas more interested in low taxes than better services. He instituted a "pay as you go" approach to spending, in which no state money was spent until enough taxes and fees came in to pay for it. Highways and tourism were his primary pursuits, says his biographer. "He advocated building roads to state shrines such as Jamestown and Monticello and called for historical markers along roadways, the first of which appeared in Fredericksburg. He held regional meetings to bring about closer cooperation between state and county road officials, prophesying that the road system could be completed within ten years through such cooperation.... A tour of the highway system convinced him of the progress being made in extending the arterial network. Indeed, over 2,000 miles would be added to the system during Byrd's governorship, 1,787 of these miles in 1928. Road building was one way to keep the voters happy and prove the efficacy of pay-as-you-go." (Heineman)
While he was governor, Byrd built up contacts with the "courthouse cliques" in most of Virginia's counties. He curried support from the five constitutional officers in those counties (sheriff, Commonwealth's attorney, clerk of the court, county treasurer, and commissioner of revenue). This formed the basis of the Byrd Organization, which dominated Virginia politics well into the 1960s. They carefully vetted candidates for statewide office, and Byrd only made an endorsement, or "nod," after consulting with them. Without his "nod," no one could win statewide office in Virginia. While he was governor, he shortened the ballot so that only three officials ran statewide: the governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general. This limited opportunities to challenge the candidates that he wanted to run. His secondary roads bill in 1932, which became known as the Byrd Road Act, didn't apply to the state's independent cities.
Education was not on his agenda and state spending for public schools remained very low until the 1960s. Byrd became one of the most vocal proponents of maintaining policies of racial segregation. Byrd authored and signed the "Southern Manifesto" condemning the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. His call for "massive resistance" against desegregation of public schools led to many Virginia schools closing rather than be forced to integrate.
National politics
In the 1928 U.S. presidential campaign, he supported Al Smith, the Democrat who was Governor of New York, and lost the state (and the election) to Republican Herbert Hoover. Byrd himself was a favorite for the 1932 presidential nomination but switched to Franklin D. Roosevelt at the right moment and became an official in Roosevelt's successful campaign.
In 1933 Byrd was appointed to fill a vacancy in the United States Senate; he won reelection as a Democrat in 1933, 1934, 1940, 1946, 1952, 1958, and 1964. He broke with Roosevelt and became an opponent of the New Deal, but he was an internationalist and strongly supported Roosevelt's foreign policy. As war loomed in 1941 Congress approved his proposal for a joint House-Senate committee to look into ways of eliminating nonessential expenditures. By late September, the Joint Committee on Reduction of Non-essential Federal Expenditures was in operation with Senator Byrd as Chairman; it built his national reputation as an economizer.
By the 1950s Byrd was one of the most influential senators, serving on the Armed Services Committee, and later as chairman of the Finance Committee. He often broke with the Democratic Party line, going so far as to refuse to endorse Roosevelt's successor, Harry S. Truman in 1948. He also refused to endorse Adlai Stevenson in 1952. He voted against public works bills, including the Interstate Highway System.
Although Byrd was never a candidate in a presidential election, he nevertheless received 134,157 votes in the 1956 election. In the 1960 election, also as a non-candidate, he received 15 votes from unpledged electors: all eight from Mississippi, six of Alabama's 11 (the rest going to John F. Kennedy), and 1 from Oklahoma (the rest going to Richard Nixon).
Byrd retired from the Senate for health reasons in November 1965. His son, Harry F. Byrd, Jr., was appointed his successor.
Death
Harry F. Byrd, Sr. died in 1966. He was interred in Mount Hebron Cemetery in Winchester.
Note
Byrd was the brother of famed aviator Richard Evelyn Byrd; he is not a relation to Robert Byrd, a U.S. Senator from West Virginia.
References
- Hatch, Alden, The Byrds of Virginia: An American Dynasty, 1670 to the Present 1969
- Heinemann, Ronald L. Harry Byrd of Virginia (1996)
- Wilkinson, J. Harvie. Harry Byrd and the Changing Face of Virginia Politics 1945-1966 (1984) ISBN 0-8139-1043-9
