The Patrician Bulwark: Byrd’s War Against FDR and the New Deal

Part II: Defeating the New Deal

Challenging the spirit of the times in the 1930s and coming out mostly on top, as Harry Byrd did in his war with FDR, was no small feat.

The Depression fundamentally reordered politics across America, and the policies enacted to address it lasted for generations. New programs and regulations accompanied new taxes and views of the government’s role in the economy, and the result was vast upheaval.

But some stood athwart the tide of FDR’s tyranny and demanded it stop. In some cases, they even succeeded as they did so. The most successful of these leaders was Harry Byrd, who was able to moderate FDR’s influence upon the Old Dominion so that, at the end of it all, Virginia was still recognizably Old Virginia.¹ There was a bit more aid for farmers, a bit more welfare for the worst off of the urban poor, but little other change. What had elsewhere proved an unstoppable force smashed against the rock of Byrd’s word in Winchester, and there stopped.

He could achieve this because of the Byrd Organization. A unique animal in American politics, it was the Democratic Party political machine in Virginia, built by Harry Byrd out of the crumbling edifice of the Martin Organization that preceded it.

What made it unique is that it 1) lasted for generations, and 2) was personally loyal to Harry Byrd and his brand of arch-conservative, patrician politics.² So, whereas other state political machines—such as that of Huey Long in Louisiana—had to generally go along with party dogma and embrace the New Age of socialism and regimentation, Byrd did not. Instead, he could use it to fight for traditional Old Virginia against the newfangled, tyrannical bureaucracy in DC that had set out to wholly destroy the America that would have been at all recognizable to the founders.

Aiding Byrd in this was that Virginia only allowed those who paid a poll tax to vote, which substantially limited the electorate, cutting it down to just the successful elements of society—landowners, professionals, large and small business owners, competent farmers, and the like. He did not have to play the part of a boisterous buffoon, clapping like a seal for the approval and votes of an underclass.

What made Byrd different from other conservatives in similar ideological positions, men who generally failed to conserve much, is that he was guided by a sense of duty. Immensely wealthy and heir to a noble name, he knew his family tradition was one of service to the state. He sought to emulate that in its best form to resist the tyrannical usurpations of first the FDR regime, then Truman’s “Fair Deal,” and then the Civil Rights Cultural Revolution.

That war against FDR is what we will cover today, picking up from the last article on how he built the Byrd Organization and why it gave him such an immense advantage in his attempts—many of which were successful—to resist the spirit of the times.

A note on sources: The primary works used for this article are Harry Byrd of Virginia by Ronald L. Heinemann, Harry Byrd and the Changing Face of Virginia Politics, 1945-1966 by J. Harvie Wilkinson (III), The Byrds of Virginia by Alden Hatch, Virginia: Bourbonism to Byrd by Allen W. Moger, and The Byrd Machine in Virginia by Michael Lee Pope. Additionally, I read Ronald Heinemann’s Depression and New Deal in Virginia: The Enduring Dominion to prepare for this article specifically. It is reasonably good, and pairs well with Heinemann’s biography of Byrd and Wilkinson’s book on Byrd’s fight against Truman and the Civil Rights Act. It is, however, about more than just Byrd, covering as it does the Depression in Virginia as a whole, not just Byrd’s reaction to FDR’s New Deal.

Listen to the audio version of this episode here:

[AUDIO] The Patrician Bulwark: Byrd’s War Against FDR and the New Deal

The Patrician’s War with FDR

The Foundations of Harry Byrd’s (Mostly Successful) War with the President

It was no real surprise that Harry Byrd found it impossible to work with FDR. Byrd was a gentleman, a man guided by honor. FDR, on the other hand, was not just a socialist but a liar. He misled voters while on the campaign trail by pretending to plan major spending cuts, while in reality he was planning the creation of a vast, bureaucratic welfare state. Further, he aimed to regiment society to entrench his own power.

Byrd was implacably hostile to this. He was, after all, a member of the proud Virginia political tradition. His family was one of the very few in America with a tradition and record of service over centuries,³ and the Organization he built was reflective of the class that composed it. It was “oligarchic,”⁴ perhaps, but also honest, focused on fiscal thrift, and entirely opposed to un-American welfare schemes. Yet further, the very idea of a “campaign promise”—a lie told to deceive voters—was abhorrent to such men; as gentlemen, their word was their bond, and their power was directly related to their reputation for honesty. As Clifford Dowdey writes in The Great Plantation:

It never occurred to the oligarchy to give the machinery of government over to professional politicians who would be front men of powerful interests. They had been trained in an aristocratic republic to believe that the class in power should do its own ruling, and very forthrightly without lurid appeals and empty promises.

After all, elected at a county level in a parochial society, the candidates were talking to men they had grown up with and who would be around personally to see that each promise was kept. There was no such thing as a “campaign promise.” A man gave his word on his honor, and if he broke his word he became a man of dishonor.

Such was true in colonial days, true in the antebellum period, and true in Harry Byrd’s day as well. To tell bald-faced lies to voters about their intentions, as FDR had done, was to them a monstrous and abominable thing.

This was to become a point of contention on which Harry always harped. Referencing Roosevelt’s 1932 campaign pledge to reduce federal expenditures by 25% and preserve fiscal solvency, Byrd long called himself “the last of the New Dealers.” He argued that he and his allies alone stood on their word and fought for what voters had elected them to do, which was to cut ruinously expensive government spending and restore business confidence in the country. As Wilkinson puts it:

"'I'm one of the last of the old New Dealers,' the Virginian once mused with only the tiniest twinkle of humor. 'I campaigned for the New Deal platform in 1932—and I'm still standing on it.' The 'New Deal platform' for which Byrd campaigned was Roosevelt's 1932 pledge of federal frugality—including a cut of 25 per cent in the cost of federal government. When the President pursued quite a different course, Byrd reacted accordingly."

But Harry’s hatred of FDR was more than a matter of prickly gentlemanly honor. He also saw in FDR a direct challenge to Virginia’s traditional order. It was a state ruled by a governing gentry that based its understanding of good government on staying out of debt, developing steadily and prudently by wise expenditure of the proceeds of limited taxation, and encouraging prudent development by being a state in which doing business was easy and profitable.

The Organization was hostile to debt, hostile to taxes, hostile to unions,⁵ and hostile to egalitarian prattle. FDR represented all of that, and much else besides. His New Deal came to be a force of federal intervention in the economy, deficit spending to fund a welfare state, a vast centralizing of power, and regulatory collectivism that came across as tyranny to those who, like Byrd, believed in the Constitution and individual self-reliance.

This is what set up the battle, particularly after the first year of FDR, between his administration and the Byrd Organization: on one side was the most conservative political force in America, a force led by gentlemen and that intended to ensure the able found flourishing possible, and on the other stood the side of communism-lite, with its intensive focus on subsidizing life at the bottom. Their views of “the good” were wholly incompatible.

In response, Byrd deployed all of his political pull and power to lead the charge of legislative resistance in Washington. Meanwhile, his Organization in Virginia continued to manage unyielding political control of the state, and ensured that the Old Dominion remained an island of fiscal solvency, low taxes, and conservative governance in the midst of a rising Red tide.

Byrd was largely supported by Virginians in this war with FDR. This was for a number of reasons.

For one, Virginia’s economy was relatively balanced between different sectors,⁶ and the Organization had kept debt levels quite low. Those prudent development policies meant that the impact of the Depression was significantly muted in Virginia.⁷ The state might not have been entirely Depression-proof, but it was certainly Depression-resistant compared to most other states.⁸ Times were still bad for almost everyone, but far from despair-inducing or catastrophic for all but the most unlucky or incompetent. Virginians thus had much to complain about generally, while still being positive about the Byrd Organization: their fate was better than that of almost everyone else in America, largely as a result of his leadership, and they knew it.⁹

Further, the “political consensus and social stability” brought by Virginia’s long-term state of rule by men like Byrd was one with which Virginians of all classes generally agreed, or at least was one they found acceptable, as a general thing.¹⁰ The men empowered by it had governed well and honestly, which is all one can really hope of government, and few wanted to change the general sort of rule by competent gentlemen to which Virginians had grown accustomed.¹¹ As Heinemann notes in Depression and New Deal:

By reason of blood, education, and social standing, the heirs of this tradition of noblesse oblige have determined what is best for the Commonwealth. They have been the caretakers of the status quo and the public treasury, and although frequently conservative to a fault, theirs has been an honest, frugal government. Above all else, civility has epitomized the reign of this long dynasty. The standards set by Washington and revitalized by Lee have been adhered to.

Perhaps most importantly, the state and its voters remained generally hostile to the idea of a welfare state. They might have treated some of FDR’s debt-enabled policies with less scorn than Byrd, but they were resolutely opposed to the sort of ambition-shredding, indolence-encouraging welfare state that FDR came to represent as the years wore on. Heinemann, describing this attitude towards welfare in Depression and New Deal, writes:

The Assembly’s failure to enact any relief legislation for the unemployed was not contrary to popular sentiment. Even if state leaders had been of a mind to raise taxes to finance reforms and relief, they would have encountered strong opposition from the citizenry. Although among the least taxed people in the country, Virginians were demanding tax reductions from their local governments because the depression was squeezing them so hard. Farmers claimed that the earnings from their crops were hardly enough to pay the taxes on the land. Said a Halifax planter: “Do you know what I got from a plantation a few miles from here? A dollar and twenty cents in cash, a bushel of peas, and four barrels of corn, and I let my tenant keep the bushel of peas because it appeared he needed the food.” Farmers formed taxpayers’ associations to pressure officials into economies in government.

Indeed, as one Richmond attorney put it, "Times were bad but not to the point of desperation even in the worst-hit communities. We tightened belts, hitched up trousers, economized, and resolved to beat the depression. In those days people did not want to be on relief.” This remained true throughout the Depression, with Virginia remaining far more hostile than most states to the idea of handing out welfare to all but the most needy.¹²

Altogether, this meant that Virginians were generally hostile to FDR’s schemes—though some particular programs involving conservation and agricultural price supports were received well—and supportive of the Organization’s efforts to resist the Cultural Revolution. As Heinemann writes in Depression and New Deal:

Self-help, stoicism, political indifference, and a feeling that Virginians were better off than others all combined to minimize protest in the Old Dominion. There was next to no support for the left; the Communist party polled eighty-six votes in the 1932 election, and although Norman Thomas’s Socialists enjoyed a brief “resurgence,” they received less than 1 percent of the vote (2,382 votes) . . . The absence of an active union movement in the state limited what little class consciousness existed among workers, and the extent of subsistence or general farming as opposed to market-oriented one-crop agriculture kept rural discontent low. Having insulated the state against the worst of depression, this traditional social order would prove almost impervious to the “revolution” soon to take place in Washington.

Now, it’s time to discuss what that war against DC and FDR entailed.

How Byrd Fought His War