Virginia's conservative Senator Harry Flood Byrd, 65, has controlled his state for 27 yearsever since he won the governorship back in 1925 and wrested control of the rural Democratic machine from Bishop James Cannon Jr., chairman of the Board of Temperance and Social Service of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Since World War II the Senator has had a lot of criticism and competition. In 1946, a Richmond lawyer named Martin A. Hutchinson ran up a startling 82,000 votes (against Byrd's 142,000) in the senatorial primary; in 1949, wellborn; Colonel Francis Pickens...
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