By Peter Galuszka
One of the most important figures who defined much of what was wrong with Virginia in the 20th century has died at age 98.
Harry F. Byrd Jr., the son of the man who set up the one-party system of control in the state smitten with the democratic ideals of Thomas Jefferson, passed away in Winchester, the small town at the tip of the state where publishing little newspapers and growing apples somehow became the launching pad for great political clout.
Byrd was a three-term U.S. Senator best known for supporting Massive Resistance against court-ordered school integration and maintaining a limited government dogma that gave Virginia attractively low taxes but has starved the state for revenues as it grew.
Otherwise, Byrd, who grew up as a child of the privileged elite partly in the Richmond Executive Mansion where his famous father was governor, did little.
He was famous for introducing very few bills on Capitol Hill, other than ones supporting a rollback of a moratorium of chromium ore controlled by the white-controlled government of Rhodesia and letting the late Confederate General Robert E. Lee become an American citizen again.
Otherwise, his role seemed to be playing patrician and supporting a Virginia controlled by an elite of white men. Hardly a visionary, he was a naysayer who helped split the Democratic Party after the turmoil of the 1960s.
While many newcomers to Virginia hardly know his name, Byrd has his apologists. The Richmond Times-Dispatch saw fit to print his obituary across half of its front page this morning. The newspaper, which until last year was controlled by the Bryan family which shared Byrd’s views, has been reeling for years from its association with Byrd.
Political reporter Jeff Schapiro, who wrote the obituary, described a scene in 1958 where TD publisher D. Tennant Bryan traveled to the Byrds’ Southern-fried estate to tell them that the newspaper was finally not supporting the Byrds’ Massive Resistance policies any more.
Note the irony: A supplicant publisher must travel to the mansion to apologize and tell the Big Men in the white suits that the newspaper can’t be racist any more. It is amazing what the TD will do to rewrite its history. But it is important for Virginia to hold to the real version and remember the Byrds for who they really were.
