I have a stack of Virginia history books on my desk. When those fail me, the internet often provides. This time, both have failed to deliver, but perhaps you can.
Friday marks the 70th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down school desegregation. That’s the topic of my main column. The Brown decision involved five lawsuits that were combined; one of those originated in Prince Edward County, which later shut down its schools for six years rather than integrate. Rachel Mahoney has a story about a member of the current Prince Edward School Board whose great-grandfather was one of the plaintiffs in that Prince Edward lawsuit.
Of course, in Virginia, the Brown decision was soon followed by Massive Resistance, the formal resistance to the order led by U.S. Sen. Harry Byrd Sr. While Byrd and his Byrd Machine ruled Virginia for about a half-century, they did not rule by unanimous consent. In writing about Byrd’s role in the resistance to the Brown decision, I became curious about the candidates who Byrd defeated along the way. Even in the narrow confines of an intentionally small and restricted electorate then, Byrd usually won with about two-thirds of the vote — a landslide, to be sure, but still, even back then one-third of Virginia’s voters stood against him. Some were Republicans; Byrd often lost in the traditional Republican counties along the Blue Ridge between Roanoke and the North Carolina line. Others were independents; some came from minor parties — Socialists, Communists (yes, Virginia had a Communist Party then), even the Prohibition Party, which survived long after Prohibition did. And then, in time, came challengers from within the Democratic Party, more liberal challengers to what was then an otherwise segregationist party.
The State Board of Elections website has all the election returns, but finding information about some of these candidates has proved more difficult, which is where I’m turning to you.
First, let’s run through all of Byrd’s statewide elections and his opponents:
1925 governor’s race: Last go-round for an 19th century politician
Byrd won the governorship with 74.1% of the vote to 25.9% for Republican Samuel Hoge. That was about typical for a governor’s race then. Hoge was born in Montgomery County, the son of a former state legislator and attorney general in the politically complicated years. Hoge, an attorney, was elected at age 25 to single term representing Patrick County in the House of Delegates in the 1880s. Later he moved to Roanoke and it was from there that, much later in life, he became the Republican nominee for governor.
1933 Senate race: Byrd wins his first Senate race against four opponents
Byrd, by now a former governor, was appointed to fill the vacancy created when President Franklin Roosevelt named Sen. Claude Swanson of Virginia as his secretary of the Navy. Byrd had to run in a special election that fall, though, to fill out the remainder of Swanson’s term. He faced four opponents: Republican Henry Wise, independent John Daniel, Socialist Elizabeth Otey and Newman Raymond of the Prohibition Party. Byrd took 71.3% of the vote, with Wise next at 26.7% and all the others under 1%. He carried every locality except three bedrock Republican counties along the Blue Ridge: Carroll County, Floyd County and Grayson County.
Otey occupies another part in Virginia history: A longtime women’s suffrage leader from Lynchburg, she became one of the first two women to run for statewide office — in 1920, the year women first had the vote in the Old Dominion, she was the Republican candidate for superintendent of public instruction. That’s an office we no longer elect. Thirteen years later, Otey had become a socialist, and then later went on to work in the Roosevelt administration.
1934 Senate race: Byrd wins a full term over six opponents
Byrd had to run again for a full term. This time he faced six opponents! Byrd took 76% while Republican Lawrence Page took 20.9%, but behind them were independent J.L. Litz, Socialist Herman Ansell, John Bowman of the Prohibition Party, Alexander Wright of the Communist Party, and independent Newman Raymond, who had been the Prohibition Party standard-bearer the year before. A Prohibition Party split! Litz hit 1%, all the others less than that.
Litz appears to be from Burkes Garden in Tazewell County and the same J.L. Litz who later lived in Wise County and served in the House of Delegates.
1940 Senate race: A segregationist against a socialist and a communist
This time Byrd faced no Republican opposition and took 93.3% of the vote, compared to 3.8% for Socialist Hilliard Bernstein and 2.8% for Alice Burke of the Communist Party. Bernstein grew up in Richmond, served in the Marines and at some point became active in the Socialist Party. In 1936, he was in Rockwood, Tennessee, supporting mill workers who were on strike. While there, he “narrowly escaped lynching,” according to the Tamiment Library at New York University. In 1937, Bernstein was among those who went to Spain to serve in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a group of American volunteers fighting against fascists in the Spanish Civil War. A website dedicated to the brigade says he was an assistant squad leader but soon returned to the United States “for medical reasons.” Over the years, “Bernstein wrote and published several collections of poetry, many dealing with themes from his service in Spain,” the website says.
Burke was a stenographer from Richmond; she and her husband, Donald, ran multiple times for statewide office during that era. They also spent time in Alabama trying to register Black voters, something that was dangerous to do in those days. During her 1941 governor’s race, she was arrested on eight-year-old charges from Alabama, where she’d been charged with speaking without a license, according to Smart Politics. I wrote about Burke several years ago when I was with The Roanoke Times. She holds the distinction of having run for statewide office in Virginia more than any other woman. Her platform doesn’t sound very Marxist today: She was for abolishing the poll tax, raising the minimum wage, electing school boards and fixing “transportation bottlenecks” in Hampton Roads.
1946 Democratic primary: The Hutchison challenge
This was the first time that Byrd faced a challenger for the Democratic nomination — Martin Hutchison. Byrd won with 63.5%, but we start to see some telling regional splits. Hutchison beat Byrd in much of Northern Virginia, the Richmond suburbs and Hampton Roads. Today, that would add up to victory but back then it didn’t. Interestingly, Hutchison also won some places west of the Blue Ridge that didn’t feel much attachment to the Byrd machine: Alleghany County, Clifton Forge, Craig County, Dickenson County, Lee County, Radford, Scott County and Wise County.
1946 Senate race: The last Republican challenge for 18 years
That fall Byrd faced five challengers. He took 64.8% of the vote to 30.5% for Republican Lester Parsons. Behind them were independent Howard Carwile at 2% and Communist Alice Burke at 1.3%, with Thomas Boorde of the Prohibition Party (which was still around!) and Socialist Clarke Robb both under 1%.
Boorde was a minister in Northern Virginia who pastored churches in Washington, D.C., and was treasurer of the national Prohibition Party.
Parsons carried eight localities, seven of them west of the Blue Ridge plus South Norfolk, which today is part of Chesapeake. He was also a significant figure in the small but growing Republican Party of that era. He grew up in Lee County, a bastion of Republicans, and later became an attorney in Norfolk. He ran for office multiple times, all unsuccessfully. He was a candidate for the U.S. House in 1924 and in 1945 was the Republican candidate for attorney general, then became its Senate candidate the following year. He remained active in the Republican Party long after that and, based on news coverage I’ve found, was often aligned with future Gov. Linwood Holton in various internal party struggles. He shows up in this WSLS-TV account from 1959 when he was named to the Republican National Committee.
That would also be the last time Republicans would nominate a candidate to challenge Byrd until 1946.
Carwile, who was born in Charlotte County and later became a lawyer in Richmond, was a perennial challenger to the Byrd Machine during that era, including a run against Lindsey Almond in the Democratic primary for governor in 1957. In 1966, Carwile was finally elected to the Richmond City Council and, in 1973, won a single term in the House of Delegates. His retirement from the House opened the way for a newcomer: Gerald Baliles, who would go on to win the governorship in 1985.
1952 Democratic primary: The Miller challenge
Byrd again faced a Democratic challenger: Francis Pickens Miller, who grew up in Rockbridge County and made his name as an anti-Byrd crusader in that era. Of all the Virginia politicians who never won higher office, Miller was one of the most influential, both nationally and in Virginia.
A military officer in World War I, he helped found the Council on Foreign Relations after the war and, come World War II, he was back in the service, doing intelligence work and serving on the staff of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower. In between, he served for a time in the House of Delegates, representing Fairfax County, where he got to see the Byrd Machine up close and didn’t like it. After World War II, he came home to Virginia and decided to challenge it.
Miller’s campaign for the Democratic nomination for governor in 1949 came close to succeeding — and might have if Byrd hadn’t intervened to save John Battle. Miller’s main issue was state funding of school construction; that proved so popular that Gov. Battle adopted the program as his own, so Miller is responsible for inspiring a wave of school construction in the 1950s; many of those schools remain in use. Politically, Miller’s two campaigns — for governor in 1949 and Senate in 1952 — helped widen the cracks in the Byrd Machine that eventually brought about its demise. That year, though, Byrd won with 62.7%. (Miller’s son, Andrew Miller, went on to be elected twice as attorney general, in 1969 and 1973.)
1952 Senate race: Republicans pass on a challenge but others don’t
In the general election, Byrd didn’t have a Republican opponent — that seems odd in a year that would prove fruitful for Republicans nationally with Dwight Eisenhower running for president. In fact, after a 1948 challenge to Democrat Willis Robertson, Republicans didn’t nominate any Senate candidates in Virginia until 1964. In his book “Harry Byrd and the Changing Face of Virginia Politics, 1945-1966,” J. Harvie Wilkinson writes that this was a combination of not having candidates interested — and Republican House members who didn’t want to divert resources from their own campaigns.
Instead, Byrd faced an “independent Democrat” in the form of H.M. Vise Sr. and Social Democrat Clarke Robb. Byrd won with 73.4%, with Vise taking 12.7% and Robb 12.4%. Byrd carried every locality except one — Vise won in Buchanan County.
1958 Senate race: Wensel makes history
With Massive Resistance in full force, Byrd got a free ride to the Democratic nomination. In the general election, there was no Republican. Instead he faced independent Louise Wensel and the persistent Clarke Robb, running as a Social Democrat. Byrd took 69.2% with Wensel at 26.4% and Robb at 4.4%.
Wensel was a doctor in Charlottesville. At the time, she was 39 and had only recently moved to the state from North Dakota, according to the Virginia Magazine for History and Biography. It didn’t take her long, though, to figure out how things worked and she didn’t much care for them — especially Massive Resistance. “I didn’t know much about politics; I just knew I wanted the schools kept open,” she said in an interview later in life, “but I thought all of this segregation, and discrimination against people because of their skin color was very foolish, very sad, tragic.”
The 120,224 votes Wensel received that year were more than any other woman running for office in Virginia had ever received — and the 26.4% of the vote was the highest percentage. In the early 1920s, Virginia elected some statewide offices we no longer have; I haven’t been able to find totals for those, but when it comes to the offices we now have, the previous high-water mark appears to have been the 5,347 votes — 1.4% of the total — that Virginia Foster Durr of the Progressive Party took in the 1948 Senate race against Willis Robertson. Wensel’s papers are archived today at the University of Virginia Library.
1964 Senate race: Byrd’s last campaign and first Republican opponent in 18 years
In Byrd’s final race, he faced six other candidates, including his first Republican challenger since 1946 — although Republicans weren’t very keen on the candidate they put up. Byrd took 63.8%, with Republican Richard May at 19%, independent James Respess at 10.3%, independent J.B. Bryan at 3.3%, independent Milton Green at 1.3%, independent Robert Pool Jr. at 1.2% and independent William Wright at 1.1%. I’m struck by how many independents were running that year, and how they all managed to top the 1% mark.
May was a retired businessman and diplomat from Gloucester County, a place with the wonderful name of Dragon Ordinary. You’ll notice that his totals are far below those of previous Republican candidates. There’s a reason for that. There was a split among Republicans that year, a split that foreshadowed others to come. For nearly two decades, Republicans had intentionally not challenged Byrd, partly for strategic reasons. Now there was another reason: Barry Goldwater conservatives were coming into the party and they were sympathetic to many of Byrd’s positions. They also bumped up against the traditionally more moderate “mountain-valley Republicans” who had felt quite the opposite. Nearly half the members of the party’s governing committee didn’t want to nominate anybody, but May eventually got the nod. Rep. Joel Broyhill, R-Arlington, “record his strenous objections,” Wilkinson writes, and the party chair in Mathews County quit in protest.
“The Byrd-May ‘campaign’ was one of the most bizarre United States Senate races in the twentieth century,” wrote Old Dominion University historian James Sweeney. Byrd didn’t campaign and gave no interviews. Many local Republican headquarters had materials on Goldwater, but not on May. When the party opened its state headquarters, May wasn’t even allowed to speak. A Republicans for Byrd group popped up. May threatened to quit the race, but soldiered on. In the end, Byrd carried all but three localities: May took Carroll County and Grayson County; Respess, an Alexandria-based attorney who described himself as an “independent Lyndon Johnson Democrat,” won in Charles City County.
By the next year, Byrd was dead, and within a few years, so was the Byrd Machine.
Who were these challengers who had dared stand against him? A few I’ve written about before, notably Otey and Miller. However, I’ve only found scant information about some of the others, none at all about still more. Who were they? Where were they from? What did they stand for? What motivated them to enter a race they knew they’d lose? Some of these candidates made little impression even at the time, but they all stood against the most powerful politician in the state — and some clearly helped set in motion changes that later remade the state’s political landscape.
In this week’s newsletter: Early voting trends
I write a free weekly political newsletter, West of the Capital, that goes out every Friday afternoon at 3 p.m. You can sign up for that or any of our other free newsletters on our newsletter page. Here’s some of what I deal with this week:
- Early voting trends across the state as the June 18 primaries approach.
- Voter registration this year is slower than in previous presidential years; why that’s probably bad news for Democrats.
