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Club Without Bylaws. Virginia's shrewd, courtly Harry Byrd became governor in 1926. He promptly sponsored a forthright antilynching law (Virginia retains today a poll tax that works not so much against Negroes as against non-Byrd-organized outlanders. who often forget to ante up in time). Byrd also spurned easy, inflationary financing in favor of a pay-as-you-go road plan (tourists in Virginia, who bring in $600 million a year, still drive comfortably along Byrd-planned highways). After Harry Byrd went to the U.S. Senate in 1933, his followers continued to give Virginia good government.
The Byrd organization is a phenomenon among political machines. The organization and its leader, despite long tenure, are scrupulously honest; e.g., Byrd once blew up when he heard one of his lieutenants boasting about having tapped state employees for campaign contributions. "Pay every one of those people back," he snapped. "I'll make it up to you out of my own pocket." Generally, Byrd rules with a soft, unobtrusive touch. Democratic Attorney General J. Lindsay Almond accurately describes the organization as "a club, except that it has no bylaws, constitution or dues. It's a loosely knit association, you might say, among men who share the philosophy of Senator Byrd." It is also a fact that men who do not share Harry Byrd's philosophy have been refused top Virginia office for a long, long while.
Erosion of Power. Yet Virginia's tensions of change are reflected even in its politics. There are definite signs that the Byrd organization is crumbling. Harry Byrd is 69. Most of his top lieutenants are aging too—and the organization has conspicuously failed to bring along younger men. In 1954 a group of "Young Turks" in the house of delegates rebelled against the entrenched leadership, forced a compromise on the Byrd organization's penny-pinching budget program.
Far more important, Virginia's Republican Party, given impetus by the influx of new Alexandria-Arlington voters, has developed into a bona fide political force: Dwight Eisenhower twice carried the state, the first time by 80,000 votes, this year by 122,000; Virginia has two Republican Congressmen who have withstood the test of off-year elections; Democratic incumbents were hard pressed in three other districts this year; Republican State Senator Ted Dalton received more than 44% of the vote for governor in 1953. Expected to run again next year, he may threaten the organization's hold on Richmond as it has rarely been threatened before.
It was in the face of such threatened erosion of his power that Harry Byrd, for the first time in his life, began fanning the emotion-sparked, political race issue.