As much by disposition as descent, Harry Flood Byrd was an aristocrat. Like his fellow Virginian, Thomas Jef ferson, he had doubts about a truly demotic society. In courtly but inflexible fashion, Byrd also believed that good government, like a good servant, should intrude as little as possible. He himself spent 50 years in public service, 33 of them in the U.S. Senate, and until the day of his retirement from politics in November 1965, he remained a gracious, gallant, increasingly isolated foe of big government and big spending. When he died last week of a malignant brain tumor, after lingering in a coma for four months, Harry Byrd, 79, had seen nearly every political theory he held dear invalidated by the clamorous demands of the age.
The Byrds came from England to Virginia in 1670, grew wealthy from 18th century tobacco plantations and the slave trade; Harry's great-great-great-great-grandfather founded Richmond, that nostalgic capital of lost causes. In the 19th century the family invested less shrewdly, and by the time Harry was 15, the Byrds were on the brink of bankruptcy. He quit school, took over management of a family newspaper and made it prosper. He also staked out a small patch of orchard near the little town of Berryville, expanded his preserve until it encompassed 5,000 acres, and eventually became the world's largest individual applegrower. Once established as the squire of Rosemont, his baronial estate in the lush, pristine hills near the state's northern border, Byrd plunged into Virginia politics.
New Deal Neophyte. Inheriting a powerful Democratic machine that his lawyer father had run for years, Harry won a seat in the state legislature in 1915, was easily elected Governor in 1925. Byrd soon established his credentials as a pragmatic Wilsonian liberal. During his four years in the statehouse, he turned the state's million-dollar deficit into a $4,000,000 surplus, fought the then potent Ku Klux Klan, and rammed through the South's first tough antilynching law.
So impressed was President-elect Franklin Roosevelt that he decided, even before his inauguration in 1933, to appoint Virginia's Senator Claude A. Swanson as Secretary of the Navy so that Harry Byrd could fill his unexpired term. Though a fervent New Dealer at the time, Byrd was soon disenchanted by F.D.R.'s fiscal policies, principally his failure to make good on a campaign promise to cut federal spending by 25%. Years later, when the U.S. budget had mushroomed to 25 times its pre-Roosevelt size, Senator Byrd noted wryly: "I campaigned for the New Deal platform in 1932—and I'm still standing on it." Roosevelt and Byrd quickly became enemies; F.D.R. even tried to pre-empt all federal patronage in Virginia in a conspicuously unsuccessful effort to undercut the Senator at home. Byrd never again endorsed a Democratic presidential nominee. By maintaining a "golden silence," he helped Republicans carry the Old Dominion in every presidential election from 1952 until the Johnson landslide of 1964.