In a few weeks there will be yet another off-year Virginia election, making one wonder why the Old Dominion does it this way.
And if you think about it more than a few seconds, you’ll conclude that this has everything to do with Harry F. Byrd, the governor and U.S. senator whose one-party machine ran the state for 50 years.
There are a lot of eerie connections between Byrd and what some find popular today, such as tight-fisted state spending, toll roads, public private partnerships, a suspicion of education, anti-labor fervor and kind of duplicitous way of promoting feudalism if not dictatorship while all the while extolling the supposed values of freedom and integrity of Old Virginians George Washington, Tom Jefferson, James Madison, and so forth and so on.
Which is why, dear readers, we have off-year elections. One reason for them is that the Byrd Organization, dominated by Byrd who approved all candidates with a nod (sort of like Stalin), wanted very frequent elections do dull the electorate’s appetite for them.
The weird flip side of this is another Byrd-centered policy — that of not allowing governors to serve more than one term. The policy was a backlash against the Byrd machine. But it means that state governors never have enough time to accomplish much.
A few other Byrd leftovers:
- Rapid anti-unionism. Back in Byrd’s day, there were few labor unions in Virginia, save for some urban areas the Southwestern coal fields. There were a few strikes, such as a five-month-long one by the United Textile Workers at Dan River Cotton Mills in 1930-1931 along with later ones by car ferry and Vepco workers. Byrd used these strikes to push an extreme anti–labor line that is echoed today by conservatives who scream about the chance of workers using a check-off method to vote for or against union membership that is cheaper and more efficient than holding old-style elections that management types can more easily target.
- Byrd loved pay-go and was an early proponent of it. That, too, is echoed through the General Assembly today albeit it is a lot harder to maintain discipline for it.
- One of Byrd’s earliest jobs was to manage a toll road between Winchester and Staunton and he took regular trips on it to check maintenance. Could this be a precursor of the public private partnerships that some find so attractive today? Ironically, Byrd fought against Dwight Eisenhower’s Interstate highway system in the 1950s. Go that have been that federal money means federal control and oversight of contractors, so the Good Ole Boys might not get the gravy?
- Race relations. Forget it. Byrd was an unabashed racist and enthusiastically backed segregation.
- The ironies of his anti-federalism and his own political style. As Time wrote in a 1965 obituary, “While decrying federal ‘paternalism,’ Byrd ruled his own domain with a feudalistic hand. It was velvet gloved but his Virginia autocracy, known simply as the ‘Organization’,’ was one of the most powerful the U.S. had ever seen.”
True, Virginia has changed immensely from the Byrd Organization days as out-of-staters have poured into Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads, completely changing the electorate.
But in places such as Richmond and some of the more rural areas, the old structure seems to endure. You still sense that kind of pseudo-polite, smug paternalism that those with Family Names or power or money know a lot more about things than you do, are inherently wiser, so you’d better not make any trouble.
One thing Virginia needs, however, is more, not fewer, troublemakers.
Peter Galuszka
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