The Patrician Bulwark: Harry Byrd, the Organization, and the Defense of Tradition in the Face of Spiteful Bureaucracy

Part I: Building an Organizational Power Base in Modernity

Was the vast societal change wrought by the 20th century unavoidable? Did we have to follow the path to national perdition that was the West’s drift to rule by socialistic bureaucracies?

Such is, typically, the message that is pushed by right and left alike: the choice was between the Reds, FDR, populist socialism of the sort exemplified by Huey Long, and the rightist bureaucracies of Continental Europe. After man had been mobilized, there was no longer a place for a different pattern of life, one more in keeping with Western tradition.

This is what we are told about America in particular: the social changes wrought by industrialization and hardships wrought by the Great Depression brought such extreme displacement and suffering that the only realistic options we had were to let the Reds win, or accept some sort of compromise with them of the sort offered by FDR and Huey Long. Either way, redistribution, an expansive government, and the “common good” (to be defined by the have-nots rather than the haves) were the golden calves of the day. Life, liberty, and property were to be left by the wayside because their exemplars—the Harding-style “conservatives” who were characterized as worshipping Mammon and nothing else—had so failed to conserve anything worthwhile.

But that isn’t quite true. Even if it was the predominant sentiment of the day, there were counter-examples. They show what path could have been taken in the face of national upheaval to restore sanity and prosperity while preserving the American way of life. The best of these is Harry Flood Byrd. A self-made apple orchard baron and newspaperman who became first governor, then Senator for Virginia, he ran the so-called Byrd Organization—the Democratic Party machine that dominated the Old Dominion for about half a century—with the aim of preserving not just his political power, but historic Virginia.

An heir of the great Byrd name, a direct descendant of the famed William Byrds of Westover and their tradition of public service, he was an authentic Virginia patrician who mustered all of the power of his state to resist first the New Deal, then the Fair Deal, then the Civil Rights Act. Throughout it all, he remained ever the patrician, and never a rabble-rouser of the Long type. There was no one with a concomitant level of power at the state level across the nation, and no one who wielded what power they had more wisely than Harry Byrd.

His story has been mostly forgotten. That is a great shame, as he is the man who stood athwart the tide of communism, socialism, regimentation, and bureaucratization in the mid-20th century and did not just command the tide to stop, but ensured it broke around his beloved Old Dominion. He is the man who discovered the path to resisting leftism in a way that was genuinely conservative, rather than a revolution of spite and envy cloaked in the skin-suited garb of the right.

In all that, Harry Byrd provides an incomparable lesson to us, and shows the path to resisting the left’s grasping attempts at tyranny without ourselves adopting that very same tyrannical impulse, and all the rotten wages it carries with it.

So, in the next series articles, I will show how Harry Byrd built an organization that enabled him to stand up to DC on behalf of Virginia and its unique way of life (that’s what this one is on), how he fought FDR over the fate of his state, how he fought the equality-obsessed Civil Rights regime that followed the Second World War, and what factors led to his ultimate defeat in the war against Civil Rights, and for a conservative America. In each article, I’ll do a deep dive into the history, and then articulate some lessons I think we should take away from it. There is much we all can, and should, learn from this, so I hope you find these as interesting to read as I found researching them.

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, and Virginia: Bourbonism to Byrd by Allen W. Moger. All four are reasonably good. Hatch’s is the most fun to read. Wilkinson’s describes the Byrd Organization the best. I also read, in preparation for this article specifically, The Byrd Machine in Virginia by Michael Lee Pope. It is quite a tiresome read—Pope is an inveterate leftist who has an obvious disdain for Byrd and his Organization—and is generally superficial rather than detailed. I would recommend reading any of the other books instead. Listen to the audio version of this lengthy article here:

[AUDIO] The Patrician Bulwark: Harry Byrd, the Organization, and the Defense of Tradition in the Face of Spiteful Bureaucracy

Harry Byrd: The Last Virginia Gentleman, the Patrician of the Atomic Age

Despite being quintessentially Southern—he was of centuries-old blood, fond of linen suits, lived in a manor home with oversized white-painted pillars, and an inveterate opponent of the Civil Rights regime—Harry Byrd was in many ways the exception that proved the rule, as he remained a true patrician in an era that had largely seen the erasure of such men. After all, Russell Kirk felt fully justified declaring, when writing The Conservative Mind in 1953:

Only vague cautionary impulses guided the South after 1865, combining with popular distrust of the negro, and lack of material resources, to slacken the rate of social alteration. The modern South cannot be said to obey any consciously conservative ideas--only conservative instincts, exposed to all the corruption that instinct unlit by principle encounters in a literate age. The affection for state sovereignty, the duties of a gentleman, and the traditions of society which Randolph and Calhoun extolled found their finest embodiment in General Lee; and, with Lee, these ideas yielded to superior force at Appomattox.

In much of the country this was true. No great leader shines forth from Georgia, South Carolina, or any of the other Southern states in the aftermath of the War Between the States. Their world had been wiped away, and the sort of men who exemplified it went with it.

But not in Virginia, a state Kirk sadly ignored. There, the deep and abiding belief in state sovereignty that once so characterized the South, and the sort of duty-minded gentlemen who fought for it, had not yet taken its last bow. That was thanks to Harry Byrd, who used his vast, self-made fortune not to recline in indolent splendor but to fight for Virginia’s traditional social structure well after such a form of life had been wiped away everywhere else it once had taken hold, from Charleston to the Cotswolds. Well, with the exception of Rhodesia, which was still battling on—thanks in no small part to Harry Byrd.

Byrd’s Background

Who was this man, Byrd, and why was he able to so gamely battle with a presidency so powerful it remade America?

Though born in Winchester, Virginia, he was the descendant of the Byrds of Westover, that famous line amongst the First Families that was so noted for its wealth, polish, and splendor before it flamed out so spectacularly with William Byrd III in the early years of the Revolution.

Popular memory, to the extent it even remembers the family, typically stops there. But William’s wife was able to save enough of the fortune despite his death and bankruptcy to keep the family intact, though not at Westover. Instead, it followed the path of many Virginians in those days, and escaped the worn-out soil of the Tidewater by heading West. Rather than tromping all the way to Kentucky, however, they stopped in Western Virginia—and remember, then there was no West Virginia, for that was not to come until the Civil War—and rebuilt in the hollers, hills, and valleys to the West of the Shenandoah.

There they trundled on for a few generations, and rebuilt the family’s fortunes in the face of poverty and Civil War to the point that Harry’s father, Richard, was a noted state politician in addition to being a lawyer. The town of Winchester in which they lived was noted for its commitment to both the Confederate cause and the general idea of the New South, which consisted of massive investment in the South that would turn those impoverished areas reliant on subsistence agriculture into wealthy industrial areas.¹

Byrd was thus a man of both modernity and the halcyon days of Virginia’s past, a living embodiment of what it had once been, and what it could be. His William Byrd ancestors, after all, had been highly influential not just in the governing of Virginia, but in the development of it too, and genteel poverty of the sort he exemplified was the general state of things all across the state, but particularly in Winchester.²

Wilkinson, noting how Byrd was to use this patrician heritage and personal sense of the past throughout his political career, writes, "Gentleman Byrd called to mind the Washingtons, Jeffersons, Lees, and Jacksons whom present-day Virginians had come to revere. He was a direct descendant of William Byrd of Westover... Harry Byrd always carried with him a sense of the past." Hatch, similarly, wrote: "He goes back to the British colonial Cavaliers, men gaily untroubled in the full exercise of their privileges, but bound by hoops of iron to the Spartan discharge of their responsibilities as they saw them."

Such is what Byrd was. He was a man of duty, a gentleman of not just wealth or virtue but power too, despite living in the jet and atomic age. In this, he would have made his William Byrd ancestors proud, particularly the resplendent and powerful William Byrd II.³

And he was far more rooted in Virginia tradition than just being a descendant of one of its famed first families. He also was fully versed in its theory and belief of states’ rights, understanding, as he put it, that “good government flows from separation of powers and that concentration and consolidation of power breeds corrupt and despotic rule." Such is what Virginians had always thought, and is an issue about which they were always right.

Byrd understood this, and his conservatism—unlike that present across much of the rest of the South in those days—was not mere reaction, but rather a cogent philosophy of life and government grounded in self-reliance, limited government, and devotion to an ancestral constitutional order. This is what he would use his powerful Byrd Organization—the state Democratic Party machine—to achieve.

Harry was different than many of his fellow Virginians in that he desired not just to defend his state’s way of life, but to go on the counter-offensive and take that ideology to Washington in an attempt to fight against the times. “I would vastly prefer to take the Virginia philosophy of government to Washington than to bring the current Washington theories to Virginia," he famously remarked. At another point, he told his constituents, "In this worthwhile struggle for the supremacy of sound principle, let us never forget: no cause that is right will ever be lost. The Virginia pattern of government will survive.”

How could one man achieve this in the face of such a merciless, spiteful, omnipresent government? He couldn’t. To achieve it, every state position would have to be filled, and representatives at the state and national level chosen, from amongst the ranks of his acolytes. He would have to ensure that his view of life—one that championed and allowed for what he had done in building a vast fortune in a tradition-oriented state—was the dominant one across the ranks of those who politically mattered. He needed allies, and he needed a political organization that would support him in fighting for his state’s way of life.

It was the Virginia Democratic “Organization” that was to serve this purpose for him. In it, he built a protective bulwark that shielded the state’s finances, institutions, and traditional way of life from Washington’s bureaucratic expansion and all the tyranny wrought by such a malignant cancer growing in the Chesapeake.

The Organization

The Duty to Govern

Like his ancestors in colonial days, Harry Byrd was raised to believe that those men of prominence in a community had a duty to involve themselves in politics, particularly at the state level. This belief remained constant throughout his life. In 1910, for example, he said, when just a young man starting out, “We think that men of business ability and enterprise should be elected to the council, men who will do their duty without fear or favor, and men who will be willing to devote time, energy and thought to giving the city a good, clean, healthy and efficient government.” Many years later, he remarked: “Politics is not a separate branch of knowledge. It needs a very deep background of general experience. No man, in my opinion, is qualified to assume political power until he has served a long apprenticeship to private business and has learned its connections with public affairs.”

And so, doing his duty by following in the footsteps of his father,⁴ as many a Virginia gentleman had done before him, he turned early success in the newspaper and apple business into a part-time political career that let him win renown as a state legislator. Indeed, he rose so quickly that it was when still a young man that he was chosen to be the chairman of the state Democratic party. He was chosen because of his many obvious virtues, as Moger notes:

Because of Byrd’s demonstrated political skill, his personal business success, and his generally likable qualities, all party leaders desired him as state Democratic chairman, and he was chosen to succeed his uncle.

This was to prove an important moment for the young man. Through this leadership position, he was to remake the state Democratic Party in his image and turn it into a “sure political base” that allowed him to fight for Virginia’s unique traditions, culture, and civilization against the vile rise of socialism and bureaucracy for the next five decades.⁵ He did so by creating the Byrd Organization, something that, like him, was fundamentally different than that which existed elsewhere in the country in his day.⁶

The Organization’s Origins

Byrd did so by taking over the Martin Organization, the state’s old political machine, and keeping it as intact as possible while gradually replacing its leading men with his men. The beginning of this process can be traced to his taking over the state Democratic Party. Pope, describing this origin of the machine and what it came to be, notes:

The birth of the Byrd Machine is often traced to the day Harry Byrd became chairman of the Democratic Party of Virginia in 1922, a position he used to carefully oversee the flow of money and power. At the time, he was a young state senator from the Shenandoah Valley who had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth-someone with a colonial pedigree and a father who would soon become Speaker of the House of Delegates.

The Byrd Machine was a statewide operation, but it operated as a network of courthouse rings. Sheriffs, judges and clerks of court conspired to hold power by using the mechanics of elections to control outcomes. For these Democratic Party officials, the bad old days of widespread voter participation led to anarchy and violence. They believed that the best way to uphold the principle of democracy was to limit who got to participate. The poll tax was the weapon of choice to control who was allowed to vote and, therefore, who was allowed to win.

This Organization was not a democratic force. It was an aristocratic one not unlike the sort of government that dominated colonial Virginia, and led it so well. As TIME magazine put it in 1958, "The Byrd Machine is an oligarchy, composed of the few, chosen by the few to make decisions for the many. In its oligarchic context, the Byrd organization is an alliance of gentlemen, and a gentleman is known more for his philosophy than by his purse or pedigree."

Meanwhile, Byrd kept those who mattered to the Organization loyal to it by leading it well, and then by governing the state well when called upon to serve in the gubernatorial role.⁷ He was called upon to serve for the same reasons he was made leader of the state party: he was honest, likeable, trustworthy, and competent. It helped that he was of famous blood, but most important was his unquestioned integrity.⁸

Particularly, he used his powers as governor to institute his famous “pay as you go” policy for highways—Virginia would stay out of debt by using gas taxes to pay for gradually more road construction rather than using huge state debt sales to fund immediate and rapid highway construction—and by reorganizing the state’s administrative bureaucracy substantially.⁹ Before him, it was bloated, inefficient, and ineffective. After he brought his businessman’s mind to the matter and slashed it dramatically, it was a far smaller, simpler, and more efficient administrative apparatus that survived.

Remaking the Organization

Governor Byrd had “consolidated nearly one hundred bureaus, boards, and departments, previously independent of the governor, into fourteen departments directly subject to the governor's control. The number of statewide elective officers was reduced from seven to three.” These “revolutionary, but sound”¹⁰ reforms had the added benefit of being hailed as “progressive” while also serving as “a device for machine control…[the substance of which] became increasingly conservative” over time.

Byrd was adept at using the media as a tool that, when cultivated correctly, could highlight his reforms and be quite a positive force for his administration.¹¹ Byrd, of course, always kept an eye on how each and every decision he made would affect the organization, and made sure to make the decisions that would strengthen it.¹²

In all this, Gov. Byrd—the youngest Virginia governor since Jefferson—had learned from earlier attempts in Virginia to reform the Martin Organization. Particularly, he learned the lesson that if Virginia and its mode of government were to change, they would do “slowly, and certainly not at the expense of the ruling class.”¹³

What Was the Organization?

Harry aimed to align incentives by using tax cuts,¹⁴ administrative reforms, state fee structures, and personal patronage to create an “interlocking network of General Assembly members, circuit judges, ‘courthouse ring,’ and machine leaders, dependent upon one another for job security, salaries, and election support.” Heinemann, describing how the Organization worked, writes:

“Control of the courthouse, the assembly, and the network of patronage and fees that sustained the loyalty between commanders and lieutenants remained the key to power, while constitutional limitations restricted the electorate, keeping it small and controllable.”

In other words, the same old system of cronies existed, but now they were aligned with his goals of providing Virginians with honest and competent governance while their traditions were not just maintained but strengthened. As one such crony, John Stewart Battle, put it in his 1949 campaign when asked about the Organization, “it is nothing more or less than a loosely knit group of Virginians who usually think alike, who are interested in the welfare of the commonwealth, who are supremely interested in giving Virginia good government and good public servants, and they usually act together.”

How the Organization Functioned

Much as the courthouse had once been central to the Virginia cursus honorum, it was integral to the Byrd Organization, as it is where those loosely knit Virginians met for political events,¹⁵ and was where the right sort of men were anointed.¹⁶ Pope, describing the importance of the county court network to the Organization, writes:

The center of power for the machine was the county courthouse, where organization functionaries kept the engine humming along. In election after election, county seats across Southside Virginia and up and down the Shenandoah Valley to the Eastern Shore competed with one another to see who could provide the most lopsided victory to machine candidates. The old Confederate statue guarding the courthouse was a not-so-subtle hint that retrograde forces were at work. Few people held as much power or had as much influence as the local clerk of court, who was welcomed in the back room of the senator’s Washington office and the hotel suites of his lieutenants in Richmond.

Besides being a natural gathering place in an agrarian community, what made the courthouse network so important to Byrd’s machine was part of the bureaucracy that Byrd had restructured earlier in his career: the State Board of Compensation, charged with determining salaries and expense allowances for all locally elected courthouse officials. As much discretion in allowances for expenses and salary standards was allowed, this meant the Compensation Board had considerable leeway to use its powers to push its agenda through the courthouses. Hatch, describing how this worked, wrote:

The upper echelon, including Byrd, would meet at the Commonwealth Club in Richmond or perhaps at Rosemont or in Winchester, and decide who would be the candidates for the state offices. Then E. R. Combs, Chairman of the Compensation Board, would telephone the different courthouses and tell the judge or county executive, ‘It will be so and so for Governor...’

Wilkinson provides a fun example of how this sort of oversight and control worked in practice. He writes:

A visitor to Lawrenceville in the late forties and early fifties might have noticed a small, elderly man passing frequently through the double-screen door of the courthouse. This gentleman was W. Emory Elmore, county clerk in Brunswick since 1920 and a well-known figure to practically everyone in Lawrenceville and the surrounding area. To his fellows he was a genuinely affable and Christian man-interested alike in the community's church life and golf course. His good nature at times overextended itself: when on the putting green, he conceded opponents' shots which even the great Sam Snead would have found difficult. No single man had more respect in Brunswick County than Elmore. When he died in 1955 his townsmen hung his portrait on the wall of the old county courtroom.

Emory Elmore also liked politics. To him politics and Harry Flood Byrd were a way of life-an absorbing hobby and a sacred duty. For twenty-seven years he served as chairman of the county Democratic committee;' for twenty-seven years and more he worked religiously for Byrd and the disciples of his political creed. When E. R. ("Ebbie") Combs went to Richmond to captain the Virginia operations of the Byrd organization, Elmore was a trusted local lieutenant. Even more important, he was known in Brunswick to be a close friend of the Senator himself, one of those allowed in the back room of Byrd's Washington office and Virginia hotel suites. In Brunswick County he had the inside word, was far more "in the know" than any local paper. Small wonder, then, that gubernatorial aspirants came to Brunswick as much as two years before election day to pay their respects to W. Emory Elmore.

Similar sorts of men helped Byrd, both as Governor and Senator, keep control of the legislature on behalf of the Organization. Particularly, the Speaker served much the same role as the Chairman of the Compensation Board, issuing orders and directing the flow of information. As Wilkinson writes: "In the House of Delegates the governor looked to the speaker. This powerful figure controlled the flow of action on the floor, made all committee appointments, referred new bills 'to the proper committee,' and doubled as chairman of the House Committee on Rules...”

The Poll Tax: Limiting the Electorate to Save the State

Aiding Byrd in this was the poll tax.

A central problem of any democracy is the franchise. Byrd and Virginia’s ruling class realized that true conservatism of the sort they epitomized—steady and competent patrician leadership that doesn’t rock the boat—is essentially impossible in a mass democracy, given the sorts of pressures put on the state by hard times.

So, they sought to limit the franchise, and succeeded in doing so.