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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview A-0311-1, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
This is a two-part series examining the life and career of Virginius Dabney. In
this first part of the series, Dabney describes his family background as one of
Virginia's first families. His father's professorship at
the University of Virginia put Dabney into contact with well-known intellectuals
and politicians, including Woodrow Wilson and Edwin Alderman. He recalls the
layout of rural Charlottesville, Virginia, before the technological and
automotive boom. Dabney's relatively cloistered childhood was largely
devoted to education: he learned several languages and was diligent in his other
studies, also. His erudition aided his lifelong career as a journalist. Dabney
recounts his early experiences as a reporter for the Richmond News
Leader, where he covered state and national politics throughout the
1920s, including the virulent pro-prohibition campaign for Bishop James Cannon.
Influenced by H. L. Mencken, his writing captured the attention of Richmond Times-Dispatch managing editor, Allen Cleaton, and he later
became the editor of the newspaper. In 1934, Dabney traveled to Germany on an
Oberlaender Trust fellowship in order to observe the political changes
developing there. Much of the interview focuses on his editorial stance as a
southern liberal (among other things, Dabney describes the shifts in the
perception of southern liberalism over time). Dabney contends that an
editor's job is to interpret political and social events rather than
merely report on them. His early involvement with racial issues in the 1930s and
1940s led to his role with the Southern Regional Council in 1944. The majority
of the interview is spent evaluating the political leadership of Senator Harry
F. Byrd Sr. Dabney compares Byrd's limited government ideology with
the expanded federal bureaucracy under President Franklin Roosevelt's
New Deal policies. Dabney argues that Byrd's stronghold over state
politics resulted from restricting the vote to his select voters; however, the
aftermath of the civil rights movement expanded the franchise and signaled the
end to Byrd's political machine by the mid-1960s.
Virginius Dabney recounts his early experiences as a reporter for the Richmond News Leader as well as his later stint as the editor
of that newspaper. He also discusses his attitudes about the role of reporters
in the political and social arenas, and his work with the Southern Regional
Council.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
This is an interview with Virginius Dabney at his home in Richmond, Virginia, on June 10, 1975, interviewed by William H. Turpin and Daniel P. Jordan. This will cover his early career as a newspaper man, his education, and his family life until about 1934.
Mr. Dabney, I wondered if you would mind beginning with just a brief comment about your ancestry?
Well, of course, my father was a Dabney and my mother was a Davis. My father was the grandson of Thomas S. Dabney who was the subject of a very interesting book by Susan Dabney Smedes, who wrote this book about her father, Thomas S. Dabney, my great-grandfather. He lived in Gloucester County, Virginia, and moved to Mississippi in 1835 because his tobacco lands were worn out. He started a cotton plantation in Hinds County, Mississippi, and was extremely successful and one year he was said to have cleared $50,000, which in those days was really money. I don't know how much more you want me to say about that, he was ruined in the war and everything was wiped out. On my mother's side, John A. G. Davis, who was the chairman of the faculty of the University of Virginia, my great-grandfather, was murdered on the lawn by a student. They were having riots at that time and Davis went out on the lawn to see what was going on and one of the students had on a mask, and Davis went up to him to try to pull the mask off to see who it was, and the fellow pulled out a pistol and shot him.
What year was that?
1840. The year before, the previous chairman of the faculty had been horsewhipped by the students. It was really a lively era.
What was his middle name?
John A. G. Davis. John Anderson Gardner Davis. I am a collateral descendant of Thomas Jefferson, I don't know how much of this you want me to put in. I am a direct descendant of Martha Jefferson and Dabney Carr. I guess that is enough.
Well, there is a Huguenot strain in your ancestry, isn't there?
Well, it isn't Huguenot, we might clear that up. For a long time, we
thought that we were Huguenots, but Dr. Charles W. Dabney, who was
president of the University of Tennessee and of the University of
Cincinnati, after his retirement, did a lot of research and went to
England and looked at a lot of graveyards and records and found that
they spelled it various different ways. It was d'Aubigne in France, and
then they came to England and it became Daubney, or Virginia Magazine of History and Biography for April
1937, which clearly proves to my mind that we were not Huguenots, but
were Norman French and then English.
You have a grandfather, I believe, who was a newspaperman and for whom you are named?
Yes, my unusual name, Virginius. A lot of people ask me how I got it, so
I'll tell you for the record. My grandfather was just born at the time
that his father moved to Mississippi from Gloucester County. His father
was so distressed at leaving the
I think that you might mention a little bit about your mother and father. Your father was a historian?
I was going to mention them after I was born, but . . .
All right.
My father was a Heidelberg Ph.D. who came back to this country and taught
in his father's New York Latin School for a year or so, and then went to
Indiana University and was professor of history there. Then he came to
the University of Virginia in 1889 as a low-ranking member of the
faculty and succeeded the famous "Daddy" Holmes, George Frederick
Holmes, when he became so old that he had to retire. And so, my father
taught for forty-nine years at the University of Virginia, thirty-four
of which he was the only history professor. He taught all the history
and for nine of those years, he taught all the economics and for
twenty-three years, he was Dean of the Graduate School. And at the
height of his fame, he got $6000 a year.
He was a friend of Woodrow Wilson, I believe.
He was a very good friend of Woodrow Wilson. One of Woodrow Wilson's
nieces, I believe it was, wrote a book in which she says that my father
was one of five intimate friends of Woodrow Wilson. He had a lot of
letters from Wilson, which as you probably know, are in the
How did this relationship start?
They were at the University of Virginia together and became acquainted there, and Father got close to him in the fraternity, he was his protege in the Phi Kappa Psi's.
Did your father have any particular points of view or convictions that made an impression on you and about which you can talk?
Well, yes, I think he did, definitely. He was, above all, extremely
honest and honorable. He was so much so that I was very much impressed
with that characteristic. I remember that I did something once that
shocked him very much. I was supposedly trying to be a
violinist—I never got to first base with the violin. I had to
go downtown, walk down with my violin and take lessons and walk back. I
was supposed to come straight home so that Father could teach me German
or French; he was teaching me both of them. I got sidetracked. A friend
of mine, John Staige Davis, lived on the way, going up Rugby Road, and I
saw him in the yard and I decided that I wasn't going straight home, I
was going to go in there and pitch baseball with him, which I did. We
were throwing the ball back and forth and I looked
Don't you think that it's a little unusual . . . I read someplace that you didn't go to a formal type of school until you were thirteen.
Yes, my father and my aunt taught me until I was thirteen and went to Episcopal High School. It was an advantage because I was in a much higher form when I went there than the other boys my age. I graduated at sixteen, which was the youngest that anybody had graduated from Episcopal High School at that time. It took graduates through the first year of college so they could get advanced standing and get off a year. So, I got my B.A. in three years.
Was this your father's idea, that he teach you?
Yes, it was. You'd think that it would be bad in some ways and maybe it
was. I didn't see other boys during the morning, I never had to do any
night work at all, which was extraordinary, now that I think of it. I
seemed to get ahead faster than the other boys who were going to private
schools around there and yet, I didn't do any homework at night and
wasn't supposed to, thanks to the instruction that I had. I got along
more rapidly than I would have, and the the sort of isolation during the
morning didn't seem to make any difference. I played all kinds of sports
and was pretty large for my age and really was better than most of the
other boys. I didn't turn out to be any athlete later, but when I was
younger . . . we had a track meet between the Boy Scouts of Richmond and
Charlottesville. You'd think that Richmond would have much better
athletes than Charlottesville, which then had about five thousand people
or thereabouts. I was in the youngest group, which was, I think, up to
fourteen and I was twelve. I won everything. I won the 50, 100, 220
Did your father have any particular political point of view that might have been influential?
No, I don't think that he did because he was pretty conservative although he admired Woodrow Wilson a lot. He didn't agree with all of Wilson's ideas. He thought that Wilson was too liberal in some ways, and I became fairly liberal in my twenties and thirties and while he never argued with me about it, he was very careful not to take issue and be unpleasant in any way about it. I am sure that he didn't agree with me. For example, I do know one time when he thought I had gone off my rocker, when I advocated the federal anti-lynching bill in the 1930s. He couldn't see any point at all in having the federal government intervene in things like that. He was utterly conservative on the race question, really too much so.
Did your father instill a love of history in you? A major part of your career has been Virginia history.
Yes, he surely did, very definitely so. When I took all of his classes
except the Ph.D., it came very easily for me. Some things were hard for
me, but that was easy, languages and history. I didn't have a good grade
in math. They had something at that time at Virginia which the famous
Professor "Reddy" Echols called "the loophole for the
Well, you started very quickly writing books and apparently had an eye towards history. Do you think your father was primarily responsible for this? Wasn't Douglas S. Freeman editor of the paper when you joined the staff?
Yes, he was. I think that my father had more to do with it than any one
person and I think that in that respect, he influenced me a lot. I don't
know whether I ever discussed it, my wanting to write history at that
point was a rather premature thing to bring up. Of course, he did live
until way after I had written two books, so, he did, as I come to think
of it, have an influence on both of those books, The
Liberalism of the South . . . of course, he wasn't very
liberal, but he read it and complimented it very highly even though he
didn't agree with it. He didn't say that he didn't agree with it, he
just read it for accuracy more than anything else. The other one, Below the Potomac, which I dedicated to him, he also
thought well of. He said, although there are some views that I'm sure he
didn't agree with. So, he did influence me a lot in my interest in
history.
We might talk a little about your mother. What about your mother's influences and some of her traits?
Mother was a quite different personality from Father.
When did she die?
She died in '73. She was twelve years younger than my father, who died in '47, aged 86.
Was the family very religious? I know that you are Episcopalian, was that a very important part of your upbringing?
It was not particularly so, because Father was not religious at all. I
don't know exactly what his beliefs were. I asked him once if he
believed in the Hereafter and he said he did not and he didn't see any
reason to, that he saw no evidence that there was any life after death
and that we all went to dust and various chemical elements. He never
tried to influence us, though, against religion. We always went to the
Sunday School and church and Mother went to
Do you have any other recollections of your mother and father? I think
that you are about ready to be born.
I'm ready to be born.
You grew up in Charlottesville. Perhaps you could comment a little about life in Charlottesville in the early 1900s. Are there any recollections of it that might have made an impression upon you?
I was born in a house that's still there on Gordon Avenue. I don't know
the number. The last time that I went by there, it was something called
the Blue Ridge Health Center. Oklahoma!, the musical show, and one
horse which pulled the surrey. I rode the horse occasionally around for
fun. It wasn't a riding horse and I wasn't a rider either, I fell off on
Rugby Road and broke my arm when I was about ten years old. I was
galloping down Rugby Road and the horse suddenly decided to turn left
into Gordon Avenue and I just kept going straight and landed on my right
arm and broke it. That was almost the last time that I ever rode. It
didn't scare me particularly, but that horse wasn't any good anyway to
ride and so, I did very little riding. I played games with the other
boys around there all the time, baseball, football, and track, and
basketball, and tennis, and I went swimming in the reservoir up on the
mountain near the University Observatory.
You said that you were a scout?
Yes, I was a Boy Scout. It is really remarkable to think back to that
reservoir which was just a few hundred yards off the beaten highway,
near the Observatory. Everybody went in without a stitch on, including
university students, and it is amazing to me that some of the ladies of
the community didn't just happen to walk by there. It wasn't a remote
situation at all, just off the road about a few hundred yards, say. We
made a lot of noise, shouting and yelling and jumping in and diving in
and all that. And nobody ever thought of wearing bathing trunks. I
played a little golf at that time over on the university golf links
which have now been obliterated by the dormitories. I went fishing in
the pond. There was a pond where
Were there any memorable events in Charlottesville, or occasions that stand out in those early years?
Nothing much except the circus. When that came to town, we were always excited for days, and went down and waited for hours for the circus to show up with the animals and clowns and beautiful ladies in tights on horseback. One or two cages were always closed and you would have to go to the circus to see what was in those. At the tail end of the parade there was always a tin calliope tootling some kind of tune.
Did they have any reunions of confederate veterans back in the early part of the century?
They certainly had them, but I don't think that they were in Charlottesville, to any extent. They were always in Richmond. They had huge ones there every five years or so. They had meetings of the local camp of Confederate veterans in Charlottesville, of course, and we saw these old fellows in their faded uniforms around all the time. We always went out to the cemetery on Memorial Day and decorated the graves and somebody would make a speech.
That was fairly close to the Civil War, of course, just forty years or so. My father's father had been in the war and had a bullet in his chest the rest of his life.
He was a captain on Gordon's staff.
This was Virginius?
Yes. And Father was a red-hot Confederate always, although he didn't want
to fight the war over again, he was very emotional about
There is no relation here with the Presbyterian theologian, Robert L. Dabney, is there?
There is a distant connection, the same family. He was the ultra-reactionary of all time, pretty much against everything. I never knew him, but it was his son, much more liberal Charles W. Dabney, who researched the family and found that we were not of Huguenot ancestry.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
And then your grandfather, Virginius, for whom you were named, was he a Mississippian, and how did your family get back to Virginia?
None of those that you mentioned was born in Mississippi. Thomas S. Dabney, my great-grandfather, was born in Gloucester County, Virginia. Virginius Dabney, my grandfather, was born in Gloucester County. They moved to Mississippi and he grew up in Mississippi. The war came and various ones went into the war, the place was wrecked during the war. After the war, he was ruined financially, my great-grandfather, Thomas Dabney.
He lived there in dire poverty for fifteen years. Finally, when he was in his eighties, he moved to Baltimore with some of his daughters. The former slaves moved into the house and it burned down in the '90s. So, there is nothing left of it, really. A few bricks. I went there in 1940 and couldn't find a trace except these remnants.
So, Virginius was in Baltimore, is that right?
I don't believe he went to Baltimore. His father and his sisters were in
Baltimore. He was in the Civil War and
I'd like to get your family back to Virginia.
All right, at your service. What now?
Well, we got your great-grandfather, Virginius, starting at Princeton Prep.
He was my grandfather.
Your grandfather.
Yes, well, he left Princeton Prep because they wouldn't let him smoke.
Then he went to New York and started the New York Latin School and he
operated that for a number of years, ten years or maybe more. He had a
hard time making ends meet. There are very glowing accounts of the
school which I have, so I think that it was well run from a scholastic
standpoint, but not from a financial standpoint. I don't think that my
grandfather was much on business matters. He finally gave it up and went
on the New York Commercial Advertiser as an editorial
writer. He also wrote a very successful novel; it's quite old-fashioned
now and a lot of people would think that it was implausible but at the
time, it wasDon
Miff, which was a child's pronunciation of "John Smith." It's a
very fantastic title, which never would have occurred to me. But anyway,
it was compared to Rabelais and Thackeray and Sterne and I don't know
who all by the reviewers. He wrote a second book called, Gold That Did Not Glitter, which was much less successful.
Virginius Dabney was an advisor and reader for various New York
publishers and finally ended up as a deputy collector for customs for
New York City. I think that the reason for that was because he had a
stroke and was just slightly paralyzed and had a lot of friends in New
York and they got him this job as the collector of customs. He died of a
second stroke on the elevated railroad platform.
That was in about '94, wasn't it?
Yes.
How about your father, where was he born?
It happens that he was born in Memphis; I omitted one little interlude in
my grandfather's career. After my grandfather was married, he moved to
Memphis to practice law. He had taken law at the University of Virginia
because his father wanted him to Southern Literary Messenger. He was referred to
as "first editor," althought he didn't have the title, but he was about
the only one around who did any editing. The publisher, Thomas White,
was a businessman and didn't know anything
I believe that we have touched on your early education under the direction of your father and I wondered if we might move now to Episcopal High School and your experiences there and the activities.
Well, I went there at age thirteen, my father went up with me on the
train the day before, I never understood the reason why. We were
supposed to be there on a certain day and we went the day before. We
walked there from Alexandria, in those rugged individualist days, you
didn't worry about walking three miles, so we just walked on up. I and
one other boy were the only ones there that day. He is still living and
a good friend of mine, John T. Lewis Jr. The Episcopal High School then
was a little smaller than it is now, but not very much, it had about 185
boys. They had just finished two new dormitories which were regarded as
the ultimate in luxury, I suppose, although they were just like horse
stalls if you lived in them.
I was, as I mentioned awhile ago, very fortunate in my previous
instruction, since I was a couple of years younger than most of the boys
in my class. I graduated at sixteen and I played on the baseball team, I
was singles tennis champion. I was homesick as the devil the first year,
like everybody else. The school did a great deal for me; I couldn't
admire it more than I do. Mr. Hoxton, the headmaster, was a great leader
of the boys, he was a tremendous personality and a great athlete, which
was what we thought was most impressive. He was not particularly
intellectual, which I find unfortunate now, but at the time, it didn't
hurt me in the least. He was a charming gentleman, very upright, and
honorable, devoutly religious, but he never discussed any cultural
subject, as far as I can recall. On Sunday nights, the boys would call
on him and on other teachers and he was very agreeable and would talk
about almost anything except books or art. He was really just not
interested in those subjects. When I went on the board of the school,
some of us got together and decided that we were going to try to get an
art course in the curriculum. There wasn't any when I was in the school.
On the board, as I said, we brought the matter up and didn't get
anywhere with Mr. Hoxton; he just didn't think that was the sort of
thing that ought to be taught in a boys' school. Latin, Greek, and
mathematics were the three things that he thought were fundamental, plus
a few other things like English, government, and history. Well, after
we
Another shortcoming was that we were not urged by the school to take
advantage of the cultural opportunities in Washington. We had holiday
every Monday and you could go to Washington once a month, if you had the
money. If you were a monitor, you could go once a week. I was a monitor
my third year, but I seldom had the money to go to Washington, even once
a month. I had an allowance of 25¢ a week, which wasn't too unusual at
that time. Some plutocrats had a dollar a week, which seemed
astronomical to me. I would sometimes get money at Christmas and hoard
it so that I could go to Washington. When we went to Washington, it
seldom occurred to us to go to an art gallery or a symphony or to see
the workings of Congress. We would go to a cheap restaurant and get
lunch and maybe to a movie. We couldn't afford to go to any good
restaurant; we would go to the Washington Lunch and get hotcakes with
syrup. That was usually the extent of our splurge.
You were editor of the school paper, weren't you?
No, I was on it but I wasn't editor. I was only fifteen in the beginning of my last year.
Do you think that this was the beginning of your leanings toward journalism, at that time, at fifteen?
Well, this is an interesting angle. I was on the school paper one term
and tried out the next term and didn't get it. So, my experience was
limited. I was not on the annual. I came to Virginia and tried out for
College Topics; it's the Cavalier
Daily now. I tried out for College Topics and
didn't make that. I was on the annual and it did not occur to me during
my college career to go in for journalism, especially since I had failed
to get on the college paper. I always had some facility in writing; I
didn't have any trouble with English, but I just never thought about
going into journalism. When I was in my final year at Virginia, Mr.
Hoxton, the headmaster of Episcopal High, wrote and asked me if I would
be interested in teaching at the school next year, and I said I would. I
didn't know what I wanted to do and I thought
It still didn't occur to me to go into newspaper work until the middle of
that year, when my father wrote me and said, "Did you ever think of
going into journalism?" It was astonishing that I hadn't thought of it,
and as soon as he said that, the suggestion appealed to me. So, I went
down to Richmond to see Mr. Bryan, the publisher of the News Leader. He gave me a job effective that next summer, at
the magnificent salary of twenty dollars a week, which was just about
par for the course.
This was about 1921?
It was 1922, I came down in March of '22 and was to go to work the first of July.
We might comment a little on your stay at the University, moving beyond what you said, some of your activities and experiences.
Yes.
People you might have known there that you knew elsewhere . . .
Well, the fact that I was only sixteen didn't seem to bother me. I maybe
looked a little older, maybe looked seventeen or eighteen.
Although third-year French sounded pretty ambitious, I didn't have any
Now, eventually, you were elected to Phi Beta Kappa there, weren't you?
Yes.
And I believe that you said you took your father's history courses.
I took three of them and I got 97 and 98 on two and 90 on the other. His American history was the hardest, and that's the one that I got 90 on.
Did you live in a dormitory?
No, I lived at home. A lot of people would have thought that was a bad
idea, but I didn't find it so. Nor did I ever consider going anywhere
except to the University of Virginia. I think this showed that I was
immature, in that I had never even considered going anywhere else. A lot
of people would have thought, "This is going to be bad, going to the
University of Virginia and living with
What society?
TILKA was the name; the letters stand for something else. I've forgotten what. It is much like Greek letters for fraternities, they stand for something too. After you find out what it is, it is largely meaningless.
Do you have any recollections of individual professors who made an impression on you?
Yes, I do. Two English professors, Dr. Metcalf and Dr. James Southall
Wilson, both extremely interesting lecturers. Richard H. Wilson, who
taught French, a unique individual, a complete individualist. Some
people would call him a crank. He didn't have anything to do with
anybody, he had a walrus mustache and lived way down at the other end of
town and seldom came to faculty functions. He was a great intimate of my
father's in the early days, but he got on this jag of never seeing
anybody and living down behind a wall on Park Street in Charlottesville.
Father tried to get him to come out of his shell, but he never would do
it. But he wasl'amour."
That's great.
You don't still happen to have that essay around, do you?
No, I wish I had. I got 95; I didn't know that I was that great an
authority on "l'amour."
Do you recall any classmates that may have gone on to other careers about whom you have vivid recollections?
Yes. There was Edward R. Stettinius; he wasn't in the same class, but he
was one of the most popular people in college. I didn't know it at the
time, but he passed practically nothing. It was absolutely incredible.
They let him stay in school; you couldn't stay more than a semester that
way now. He made very low grades, which most people didn't realize at
all. He stayed there four years and then went to Europe with one of the
professors, Billy Patt, who was half Chinese, a charming and brilliant
fellow. Ed went with him to Europe and nearly everybody thought his
father was giving him a trip to Europe as a graduation present. I had
left school a couple of years before. When he became Secretary of State,
Time Magazine sent
Arthur Kinsolving, now a retired Episcopal clergyman, was rector of Trinity Church in Boston, the famous church of Phillips Brooks, and was distinguished after that as rector of St. James Church in New York. He is retired and living in Baltimore. He and I applied for a Rhodes Scholarship and he got it.
Henry J. Taylor, who is a columnist, was there at the same time that I was.
Were his views conservative at the time, or was it the kind of thing that you really didn't think about?
I don't know. I was there only a couple of years with him and I didn't know what his views were. He was on the college publications.
William L. Marbury, who became a prominent lawyer in Baltimore was there; his father was equally prominent and had the same name. He was a brilliant student, talented in various ways.
Were there any particularly memorable events? In modern times, we can think of some like student riots and that sort of thing, but was there anything of an unusual nature that occurred at the University while you were there?
No, I think that everything was pretty serene. The women stayed out of
the dormitories.
The Armistice was on what day . . . November 11?
November 11, 1918. I went to the University in September '17. In the fall of '18, another boy and I, Charlie Ferguson, whose father was Homer L. Ferguson, president of the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, decided that we just couldn't stand it any longer. The first week of November 1918, we were going to Washington and try to get in something. It was November 5. My father talked us out of going in the middle of the night. We were going to get on a train and just go. He said, "Don't be crazy, wait at least until tomorrow morning." So, we said, "All right, we'll wait until tomorrow morning." The next day was the false Armistice.
The war dislocated everything during that period, with
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
Mr. Dabney, I wonder if you might mention for us some formative influences. This could be perhaps an individual, it could be something that you read, could perhaps be an event of the times. Something that maybe in the 1920s would have shaped some of your beliefs and values.
I began reading a lot at that point. I realized that I hadn't read as
much as I should, except in my courses. I had to do a lot of reading for
some of them, but I didn't do any outside reading to speak of, and I
didn't during college keep up with current events well at all. I was
just in the typical ivory tower. This is a horrible confession for me to
make, but I never read a newspaper editorial in my entire life until I
went on the Richmond News Leader! I'm really ashamed
of that fact, but I just skipped the editorials. I don't know why, I
just wasn't interested in current affairs.
So, when I finally decided to go into newspaper work, I began reading
avidly newspapers and books in all my spare time. When I went on the
paper, the first six months, I think I learned more about the world
around me than I had
Did you start to read H. L. Mencken about this time?
I started reading Mencken at that time and Mencken in some ways was very
reactionary; on the plus side, he was against puritanism, prohibition,
and Babbitt and for freedom of the mind.American
Mercury but he wrote of them in a manner which wouldn't be
accepted today. For example, he referred to lynchings as "publicly
frying blackamoors." Mencken influenced me a great deal. I found his
writing extremely incisive and amusing and it opened my mind to concepts
and attitudes that had not occurred to me before. I think that next to
my parents, he was the greatest influence on me at that period.
How about Howard Odum? Was he active at this point?
He was active, but I wasn't aware of his existence until 1930, or
thereabouts. I came into personal contact with him in the late '30s and
worked with him on the Southern Regional Council we organized in
Atlanta. I'm getting a little ahead of the story here. On the paper, one
thing that was so educational for me was that I asked for all kinds of
assignments. I wanted to learn something about city government, state
government, the courts . . . I had never been in a court until I came on
the paper, I didn't know how they operated. I got awfully sick of
covering police court, but it was good for me to do it. I had a beat
called Southside and Chesterfield, which was one of the lowly
assignments on the paper. I had to go over to South Richmond on a
streetcar and go to the undertaker's first, view the corpses and get the
details of whoever had been killed in an accident, and then go to South
Richmond police court and see the cases that were tried there and what
was done with them, how they
So, the newspaper itself was a sort of a liberating experience?
Yes, very much. I found out what the other side of the tracks was like and what the world was like.
Did you have any trouble adapting to newspaper writing?
I was perfectly green at it and I was completely uninformed and
uninstructed. I think I learned pretty fast. However, I had a shocking
experience that gave me a lesson that I never forgot. They were
sufficiently unwise to send me to cover a bank failure and to go to the
State Corporation Commission for a statement on this bank failure. It
was a Negro bank, operated by a very prominent Negro named John
Mitchell, who was the leading Negro in Richmond. I was just as green as
I could be, and I went to see the chairman of the Commission and asked
him what he could tell me about failure of the bank. Well, he said, "I
don't think that if I were you I would use this, but what happened was
that somebody took valuable securities out of the bank and put
worthlesssomebody had done this. This was the crucial point. Well, the
Corporation Commissioner hit the ceiling and said that he had been
misquoted which he had, and the managing editor got after me in a big
way and said that it was a horrible mistake, which it certainly was; it
was absolutely inexcusable. I thought I might be fired. I ran into one
of the Bryans, who said, "Why in the world did they assign you to that?
Why didn't they get an experienced reporter? It is going to cost us
about $10,000." Which at that time was real money. Fortunately, in a
stroke of luck, what I said happened had actually happened. Mitchell had
taken the good securities out of the portfolio. He
Took your notes more carefully.
Yes, I would always verify things with the utmost care.
With the newspaper, I believe that you eventually came to specialize in political topics.
I don't know if you would call it specializing. By 1925 or '26, I was assigned to Governor Byrd's office and some of the state offices along with it. So, I did become better informed by a long shot about those matters than I had been, and I wrote about them regularly. That was one of the things that I became most interested in.
Were the big stories of the '20s, in looking back, prohibition and Cannon's influence in politics?
Yes, in the late '20s. But Cannon was also the big story in the 1900s, from 1906 to 1916, approximately. He was big news all that time. Then after prohibition came in, he was not nearly as active or in front of the news as he had been. Then later, when the agitation arose to repeal prohibition, he began moving back into the front of the picture. He was the spokesman, in Virginia at least, for the prohibitionists, and he also became active on a national scale in 1928, in the Al Smith-Hoover campaign when he led the fight against Smith.
You covered that campaign in Virginia?
I did and saw a little of the bishop personally and covered some of his
speeches and became interested when I heard from some of my friends
among the Methodists that he was going to be tried on various charges.
They tipped me off to the fact that he was going to be tried in Dallas,
for example, a couple of years before it happened. I decided to write a
book about Cannon, to be published at the time that he was tried, when
he would be on all the front pages, but I couldn't get any publisher to
risk it. I now see that they were perfectly right because he would sue
at the drop of a hat. His regular technique, when there was something of
a controversial and critical nature involving him, was immediately to
file suit, whether he was guilty or not and he would frighten the
defendant into paying a couple of thousand dollars not to have to go to
court. That happened over and over. Some of those concerned decided that
they weren't going to be bluffed. The Philadelphia
Record was one and a Catholic paper in Buffalo was another. I quote
both of them in the book on Cannon, which I couldn't get published until
several years after he died. By that time, most people didn't even
remember who he was. The younger generation wanted to know, "Who is
Cannon?" They had never heard of him. He was dead as a publicity factor
in 1949, when the book came out.
What were some of his character traits that made him successful for awhile, in that he dominated politics for a brief period in 1928?
Well, he was absolutely brilliant and he knew how to
We've both read the book and one thing that struck me as a small thing, but nonetheless interesting, is that he and Mencken apparently became social friends.
That was really curious. Mencken studied him like a frog under a microscope. He found Cannon fascinating and would have him and and Mrs. Cannon to meals. They had pleasant relations, at least on the surface.
You obviously didn't think a whole lot of Cannon as a person, while you might admire him as a politician or as . . .
He was a brilliant individual, nobody was smarter. I didn't admire him in any other way.
Is it just because he did things that you thought were a little bit questionable?
Yes, surely. I think he was a sincere prohibitionist, but the methods that he used to put it over and the things that he did in his personal life . . . a bishop of the Methodist Church gambling in bucket shops, hoarding flour during the war contrary to law, and so on. That's enough for us.
And then to add to that, this sort of self-righteous air.
Oh yes, and to be a bishop of the Methodist Church and preach to everybody else.
He apparently got away with quite a bit of money under various circumstances.
He did. There's that thing about selling his house in Washington. He knew
it was going to be condemned by the Supreme Court, but he pretended that
this was his home, and that he didn't want under any circumstances to
give it up. He didn't let on that he knew it was going to be condemned,
so he stuck them for all it was worth. He took the money and probably
The big election was '28 and of course, the stock market crash was in '29. Do you have any impressions of the impact of the crash and the beginning of the Depression in Virginia? I have sort of heard it both ways, that somehow, Virginia didn't suffer as much as other places.
That's true, it did not. It suffered an awful lot, though. Virginia wasn't in as bad shape as some of the others, but it certainly was a grim period. Everybody got salary cuts or got fired. I got three salary cuts, my father got two or three, everybody was scrambling around trying to make ends meet. Businesses were closing, thousands were out of work. It wasn't as bad here largely because of tobacco and nylon. Nylon prospered because silk became too expensive, and the big nylon plants expanded. Tobacco held firm and maybe increased its sales.
I think about this time too, in 1928, you moved from the News Leader to the Times-Dispatch. Could you
comment on why you made the move or what was involved?
It was not owned by the same family?
No, it was not. I was offered more money and more interesting work. I was
given a weekly column to write, a feature article on the editorial page,
and better hours. On a morning paper, you would normally have night
work, but they made a special dispensation for me for some reason that I
wouldn't have to work at night except when there was a big election or
something of the sort.News Leader, but I went down
later and worked into the afternoon on the Times-Dispatch and that suited me better. I also thought that I
had more future on the Times-Dispatch.
Who was editor of the Times-Dispatch when you went? Who
hired you?
The managing editor hired me actually, Allen Cleaton. The editor, LaMotte
Blakely, who was an extremely talented young fellow, was a heavy drinker
and finally committed suicide. Then, they got a couple of others in
there who were from New York and didn't know a darn thing about
Virginia. One of them was some sort of executive on the New
York World, which was a tremendously fine paper, but he didn't
know beans about Virginia and wasn't any good as an editor anyway. He
finally left and they got the former managing editor of the New York Evening Post, who was a nice person, much nicer than
his predecessor, but he didn't know anything about Virginia either, and
he finally left. That was when they made me chief editorial writer.
You were writing editorials during this period?
Well, on a small scale. I didn't have much time to do it really, and I was in Europe for six months on a fellowship when the publisher wrote me and said that he was appointing me chief editorial writer and that Vincent Byers, the editor at that time, was leaving as soon as I got back.
Who was the publisher at that time?
Charles P. Hasbrook, who died recently.
Was he the owner?
He was one of the owners. The major owner was in Norfolk, Samuel L.
Slover, who owned the Norfolk paper, and part of the Times-Dispatch.
The Bryan family owned the News Leader.
And all the while, Dr. Freeman was the editor of the News
Leader?
Right.
When you were with the News Leader, did you work with
him?
To a very limited degree. I didn't write any editorials; he was always very friendly to me. He helped me, he told me that whenever he wanted to give a story to the news staff, he always asked for me to take it. He said he thought that I was more accurate.
In the meanwhile, I guess that you had been doing some courting, you were married in 1923.
That's right, I had been courting for a couple of years before I managed
to make the grade. VMI was very much in the picture.
VMI was?
Yes, I had a hell of a time getting her away from VMI. She went up there for five years; I never heard of anybody doing that.
And whom did you marry?
Douglas Harrison Chelf. Her name was Douglas. That's another confusing
thing. Everybody thinks that she's the husband.
I believe that we've covered the major topics and unless there are some other afterthoughts, we are going to get all of this on transcripts later, so this might be a good place to stop.
I'm trying to think if there's something else.
I have a question about another point. I understand that there was sort
of a literary circle in Richmond in the '20s with Ellen Glasgow and
James Branch Cabell and the Reviewer. Were you
involved in any of that or impressed by any of it or influenced in any
way by it?
I was a novice at that time. The Reviewer was started
at just about the time that I went on the paper. I read it and I knew
Miss Glasgow and Mr. Cabell and was entertained by both of them from
time to time in their homes, but I didn't know either of them well. They
were both very nice to me and very helpful. The New York
Herald Tribune asked Cabell to write an article for their
magazine about Miss Glasgow, and he asked me to do it, which I did. She
read my Liberalism in the South and gave me a very
nice quote on it for advertising. She had a party for Gertrude Stein,
and my wife and I attended. I have a unique autograph of Gertrude which
you might like to see. It's on the Autobiography of Alice
B. Toklas, which of course, was actually by Gertrude Stein. I
met both of them at Miss Glasgow's and took the book over to the
Jefferson Hotel, and she autographed it in typical Steinesque style.
Notice that she says, "Mrs. and Mr. Virginius Dabney."
Will you read that into the tape. I keep forgetting that
This is what time period, Mr. Dabney?
1935, approximately. Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein were here and
Ellen Glasgow had this party and I got her autograph on the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and the autograph says, "To
Mrs. and Mr. Virginius Dabney in memory of a pleasant meeting, in memory
of a pleasant Richmond Times-Dispatch, in memory of a
charming Virginia, and in memory of a charming visit to Virginia.
Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas." One other thing that you might want me to
mention was the six months that I spent in Europe; I was a reporter when
I went over.
This is 1934?
1934, on a fellowship from one of these German foundations. It has two different names . . .
I believe that it's the Oberlaender Trust. I can't pronounce the German, though.
Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation and there was another name, the name of the man . . . Gustaf Oberlaender who founded the Oberlaender Trust. This was a fellowship to the German-speaking countries for six months. They didn't want me to get into the Hitler propaganda swirl, so they didn't say what I was coming over there for, which was actually to study the Nazis. They announced that I was coming over to "study periodical literature," which was complete nonsense. I went to the Berlin library once and looked at a magazine and that was my study of periodical literature. They didn't expect me actually to study that subject.
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
They allowed me to go to Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Paris in addition to pretty much every part of Germany. So, it was a wonderful six months and my wife and four-year-old daughter were with me. It was enormously helpful to me in my subsequent journalistic work, particularly with the Nazi issue, which was becoming more and more acute. When I got there, Hitler had been in office one year, the Blood Purge occurred while I was there, as well as the assassination of Chancellor Dolfuss of Austria. When I got back, I was all steamed up to write about Hitler, and I was just as sure as anyone could be that he was getting ready to start a European war. People in '34 and '35 were saying, "It isn't going to happen." A lot of them were fooled and said, "He is just trying to rebuild Germany, and he is going to be satisfied with Danzig and the Sudetenland," et cetera. I never had any idea that he would be. I wrote a series of editorials at the time of the Austrian Anschluss and the seizure of Czechoslovakia that caused a lot of comment, not only here but in other parts of the country. I think that it was probably the best series of editorials that I ever wrote on anything.
There were a number of newspaper editorialists in this country who took the other side and were sympathetic to Hitler during this time. I presume that you were not sympathetic to the Nazis.
I should say not. True, we didn't see much overt persecution of the Jews in '34. What the Nazis were doing then was smashing store windows of Jews. We didn't see that, but it had happened before we got there. Some of the Jews were wearing the Star of David by compulsion and we saw only one sign the whole time that we were there that was blatantly anti-Semitic. It said, "Jews not wanted. City Council of Dinkelsbuehl." That is a little town near Nuremberg—a most charming place except for that sign.
This is a second session of an interview with Virginius Dabney, editor
emeritus of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, at his home
in Richmond, Virginia, on June 12, 1975 and conducted by Dan Jordan and
William H. Turpin. The session today will be concerned with his
responsibilities and duties as an editor from 1936 until his retirement
in 1969. Generally, it will cover what he considers to be his
responsibilities as an editor, some comment on southern liberalism and
his books in that area, awards and honors that he received as an editor
and some of the issues, events and controversies that he wrote about as
an editor, FDR and the New Deal and the race question. Mr. Dabney, for
the first question, I would like to ask you . . . I'd like to know why
you became an editor as opposed to a newspaperman and then I would like
to know what you consider to be the responsibility of an editor. Is the
responsibility of an editor to be a moulder of public opinion, a leader
of public opinion, or merely a reflector of public opinion? Should an
editor guide the public or should an editor merely reflect what the
public is thinking?
Well, I wanted to be an editor because I thought it gave me an
opportunity to comment on and interpret what was happening, rather than
simply to record what was happening. It seemed to me to be a more
responsible role and one that I took more interest in than just
reporting the news, which I did for eleven years here in Richmond. I was
just about fed
Didn't you report for the New York Times during this
period a number of times?
Yes, for nineteen years, beginning in 1929—in the "Watchtower" section,
so-called. At first, it was simply on events in Virginia every week in
the Sunday Times, and then they gave me several
states. Then toward the end, they reduced the frequency of the articles
to about one a month. I had to try to keep up with everything that was
going on in several states. I finally got worn out with that and just
quit because it was too much of an effort to read papers from North
Carolina, South Carolina, and I think West Virginia, and write about all
that once a month. It took too much of my time, so I finally dropped it
after nineteen years. While I had the title of editor, I was not editor
of the whole paper but of the editorial page. Some editors have the
responsibility for the news department as well as for the editorial
page. I did not and didn't want to have it.
Why do you think that you were selected as editor of the editorial page
of the Times-Dispatch in 1936? Why did they select
you?
Well, nobody ever told me. But I had written for Scribners and American Mercury and The Nation and the Virginia Quarterly Review
during the period when I was a reporter. I suppose that made them
That came in 1936?
That came in 1936. I also had written during the 1920s for the Baltimore Evening Sun, which was the one that Mencken
wrote for every Monday. Somebody wrote in the same spot on the editorial
page the other days of the week. I met the editor of the Baltimore Evening Sun, Hamilton Owens, here in Richmond at
James Branch Cabell's house about 1924 or '25 and he asked me to be the
regional correspondent for the Evening Sun. I did
write a dozen or so articles for the Evening Sun,
which brought me to the attention of Mencken, for one thing, and also
some of the things that I wrote stirred up quite a row here in
Richmond.
Would you consider your writings in these national magazines and the Evening Sun and so forth fairly liberal for the
time?
I would say that they were liberal primarily on issues like prohibition
and the backwardness of the state in general. They were not particularly
liberal on economic and social issues at that time. I did not write
about the race problem just then. It gradually
Did you have any type of arrangement with John Stewart Bryan, who was your publisher at that time?
No, I didn't. You see, I was just a reporter on the News
Leader, and I left in '28 and went to the Times-Dispatch.
OK, the publisher there was . . .
Was Charles P. Hasbrook.
Did you have any type of arrangement of what he expected of you as an editor, what your rights and responsibilities were, what your duties would be, the extent of your determination of what the editorial page should be, after 1936?
After 1936, Hasbrook left and was succeeded by Mark Ethridge, who was
well-known. He had been editor in Macon, Georgia, and made a big
impression there and was then brought here from the Washington Post. I don't know exactly what he was on the Washington Post, something very special, but I don't
know what. They got him to come down to Richmond as publisher of the Times-Dispatch. He didn't stay very long because Barry
Bingham on the Louisville Courier-Journal lured him
there and put him in charge. We didn't have any particular understanding
about my position on issues. He was quite liberal and I was tending in
that direction—
I wonder if you might comment on your sort of overall philosophy of what the editor should be and what the role of the editor is and then we might move into the topic of liberalism, which is of course, important.
My feeling is that the editor ought to try to lead public opinion. Some
people say that you shouldn't expect to have any influence as an editor,
but it doesn't seem to me that that is a sound viewpoint. I may not have
had any influence, but I hoped to have some. When I was writing signed
articles every Sunday, I tried to, for example, influence public opinion
in behalf of Al Smith and against Herbert Hoover. I wrote on the strikes
in North Carolina textile mills and how the employers were beating up
and even shooting union organizers, which seemed to me to be pretty
outrageous. I wrote on prohibition a lot and the indefensible things
that were happening there. Prohibition agents were shooting people for
carrying whiskey in their cars. I didn't believe in prohibition anyway.
My father was a director of the Association Against the Prohibition
Amendment and that didn't go over well with some of the dry legislators
in the Virginia General Assembly, one of whom tried to get him fired
from the U. Va. faculty for being a director
Now, we mentioned southern liberalism, and you wrote an important book on liberalism in the South and were regarded as a southern liberal. I wonder if we might move into that general topic and perhaps begin with a sort of working definition of what liberalism in the South would be in the 1930s and '40s.
I think that a southern liberal at that time was in favor of doing
something about the rural South, getting some kind of better deal for
the sharecroppers, white or black, also try to change race relations
gradually. Everybody knew that it couldn't be done quickly, but we
wanted to move toward a better relationship between the races and a
better deal for the blacks. We felt that segregation was here to stay,
at least for the present. You couldn't even talk about abolishing
segregation at that time. I was not in favor of it and very few people
were. The Southern Regional Council was trying to bring about progress
for the Negroes within the "separate but equal" formula. It became more
and more obvious that there wasn't any equality. As a practical matter,
the schools, overall, were not equal, housing conditions were not, the
manner in which the streets were maintained in the cities was altogether
unequal. We tried for some years to see if we could bring about changes
so as to move substantially in the direction of equality, but we just
couldn't get many people to go along. Most businesspeople
There were some Negro leaders who were very aware of the difficulties. In Richmond there was Dr. Gordon B. Hancock, who was a Negro minister and a graduate of Colgate and Harvard who had studied at Oxford. He was a very sane, moderate man. He knew the difficulties that existed and realized that you couldn't go headlong just trying to tear into everybody with a meat-ax, as Mencken was doing—trying to force people to change. You had to persuade them and show them the reasonableness of what you were trying to do. The Southern Regional Council got just a handful of white business and professional men and women who would cooperate. One bank official and one lawyer worked with us, but by and large, you just couldn't get most leading whites to go along. Colgate Warder joined up and then a few ministers and newspaper editors. We made little headway. Dr. Hancock made a quite significant speech at one point in which he said, "It is important that the leadership on the race issue and the leadership of the Negro race be in Atlanta rather than in New York." He felt that if we kept it in Atlanta, we could control the situation and move on gradually. But we couldn't get enough people to see that, with the result that the NAACP in New York began moving very much faster than we thought was wise and pushed aggressively for the Supreme Court decision that came in '54. We were hoping that we could bring the South along more rapidly and delay that decision until we were more ready for it.
Is it possible to "type" a southern liberal in the '30s and '40s? We are dealing with a small number of people, of course, but what kind of person would have been in the southern liberal movement?
You mean the type of individual . . .
Or the names . . . well, both. I think that you covered some of the principles, but I am interested in the types of individuals. There was a handful of newspaper editors perhaps, or academic types?
Well yes, those were two of the principal categories. Howard Odum was one. Ralph McGill was one, Mark Ethridge . . . I'm trying to think of some other individuals.
Louis Jaffe. Didn't he win a Pulitzer Prize?
Yes, he was one. I don't think that he was at that first conference in Atlanta in '44. The Durham Conference of Blacks occurred in the fall of '43 and they had issued a statement or manifesto asking for progress in certain areas, but they didn't ask for integration. They specifically stayed away from that. They wanted to work within the separate but equal framework at that time.
I think that we will pick up the Southern Regional Council shortly, but could you comment on the evolution of your own views? I think that you said your father was on the conservative side. The Depression apparently made an impression on you, Mencken made an impression on you, but how do you account for your own liberal views at the time?
I've been puzzling over that, Dan, and I am a little bewildered to know
myself. It seems to have been a gradual process. The textile strikes in
the South awakened me to the injustices in that area. Seeing the
conditions under which Negroes in Richmond lived and over the South, the
unbelievable squalor and the conditions in the schools. The fact that
these black children were going to school in totally unsatisfactory
buildings with teachers who weren't reallyBirmingham News, and paid him $28 a
week. That was the sort of thing that was going on. There was a two-week
vacation if you didn't get sick. If you got sick, you got no vacation. I
got the measles one year and the pinkeye on top of it and I got no
vacation at all.
Well, Mr. Dabney, any one of these points that you are talking about that
you supported or opposed are things that are pretty traditionally
accepted in Virginia. Pretty traditionally accepted by the newspapers of
Virginia, the business community of Virginia. I'm talking about the
lower wages, the anti-labor thing, the anti-guild thing for example. How
could you support these things and work for what has to be considered an
establishment newspaper, the Times-Dispatch? How could
you support these things or fight against these things that you
Well, I was very much criticized for it. People thought that I was some kind of wild-eyed idealist, a balmy individual who was not aware of the realities and "why did I keep stirring things up?" I may be getting ahead of the story, but I first began working on segregation on streetcars in '43. Is that too far ahead?
Well, we'll be picking it up again, but it might serve as an illustration.
Well, it does illustrate the point. Many of my friends were against that, feeling that I was trying to change something that had been going on for generations and that if I just wouldn't talk about it, there wouldn't be any trouble. A friend of mine now, who is a prominent surgeon and retired, he's in his eighties now and has now completely changed on the race issue. At that time, he was a good friend of mine but he didn't know what in the world had gotten into me to be stirring this thing up. He came to see me and said, "What do you want to do this for? You are just making things worse. If you don't write about it, it will subside. The Negroes are perfectly content." Well, he told me the other day, "I have changed completely my views on this whole question."
Were you ever socially ostracized or threatened?
Not really, no. I wasn't persona grata with some
people, but they didn't say anything much, they just sort of shook their
heads.
How about your publisher? Any reaction from him?
No, he was remarkably nice about it. What happened was that when the
papers merged, Mr. Bryan became publisher of both papers in 1940 and the
agreement was that he was not to interfere with the editorial policy of
the Times-Dispatch. You see, he had published the News Leader over a long period. He acquiesced in that
because he thought it was desirable to have two conflicting points of
view. Nobody wanted to cook up opposing viewpoints arbitrarily, but if
the two editors were in sincere disagreement, there would be no
objection—at least within limits. Even when I broke loose on the
streetcar thing, he didn't raise any fuss. Actually, Mr. Bryan was a
liberal on the race issue.
You mentioned your surgeon friend changing his mind. I know that you were quoted at the time of your retirement as having felt that you had become more conservative on some questions through the years. Looking back at the 1930s, have you changed your mind about any stands that you took then, or if you could do it over so to speak?
No, I don't think I have changed my mind in any substantial way. The reason that I suppose I am regarded as conservative is that I really am conservative in relation to say, Ted Kennedy, or McGovern, or Arthur Schlesinger Jr. These are what we call "liberal" today. I consider myself conservative by comparison with each of them. And I certainly vastly prefer Governor Mills Godwin to Henry Howell. I believe that if Henry Howell were elected governor, he would do a lot of things that are contrary to what I think is good for Virginia. He seems to me to be demagogic and intellectually dishonest. But as for the race problem, I am in favor of everything that I favored in 1934.
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]
Well, unless you have something else that you want to say on southern liberalism, especially in the '30s, we might move into some awards and honors that you received for your editorial work. What we would like to do is just to mention some of these and have you give us the circumstances that led to your winning the award. Not so much the selection process, but the situation that you commented on that led to your receiving the award. In 1937, you received a Lee editorial award of the Virginia Press Association and what was that for, Mr. Dabney?
That was for editorials on the government of Henrico County, which was a typical Virginia county with a courthouse ring. The members there did not want to change anything, which is true of many counties still. Henrico was a heavily populated county on the edge of Richmond. It needed better management than this one-horse type of administration that had endured since the colonial era. A movement was launched for the adoption of a county manager, one of the first movements of the kind in the United States. I ran a series of editorials urging adoption, and got the prize.
Was that county manager form of government adopted?
Yes.
In 1939, you received an honorary degree from the University of Richmond and part of the citation mentioned your contributions to brotherhood.
I suppose that was on the race issue, because I had been pretty active on that at the time.
In 1944, another honorary degree from William and Mary and one from Lynchburg College. Were they for a stand that you had taken?
I imagine just in general, that I was more liberal than most people and was trying to change things in racial and industrial areas and trying to get rid of the poll tax.
In 1947 came the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. Was that awarded in '48 or '47?
It was awarded in '47 but given in '48. It's always very confusing, I never know whether to say that I got it in '47 or '48.
Well, it's good to have you say it, because we've seen it cited both ways.
I never know what to say myself. It was for editorials in '47 and no particular editorial or series was mentioned. It was simply for the work during the year, so I don't know what it was for, and I don't think I did anything great during that particular year.
Do you suspect it might be a cumulative thing over the years, for your leadership as an editor rather than one particular editorial or one series of editorials? It may just have been recognition of you as an editor over the years.
Well, I got an inside tip that the latter was the case. I can't quote who told me or exactly what he said, but that was what it was for.
OK, in 1948, a national editorial award from Sigma Delta Chi.
That was for the effort of the Virginia General Assembly—which became
angry at the Times-Dispatch for editorials attacking
it for many things—to investigate the paper. We had a series of
editorials, one of which in particular said that no matter what they did
or what the Byrd machine did or anybody else in the government did, we
were not going to be intimidated.
Then in 1952, another editorial award from Sigma Delta Chi.
That was for the editorial endorsing Eisenhower for president and criticizing the Truman administration.
Are you the only man to receive two awards from Sigma Delta Chi?
I was for a good many years and then about three years ago, somebody else got a second award.
We will pick up some of the more recent awards later, last session, but
we wanted to touch on editorial awards in this time period. We might
move now to your assessment of FDR and the New Deal, assessment as
editor of the Times-Dispatch in the 1930s. You have
been quoted as saying that you were an avid New Dealer at the time,
which suggests sympathy, of course, but could you comment on your
general reaction to what FDR was trying to do and what the New Deal was
all about?
I think that FDR did a great deal to set the country back on the right
track. I think the general approach to social and economic problems in
this country was ultraconservative. We had Hoover, whom I admired in a
great many ways, but his ideas were outmoded. I don't think that he did
the things that were necessary to get us out of the Depression, whereas
Roosevelt was largely instrumental in putting into
What about TVA and the concept of regional planning?
I'm not an authority on TVA, but it did a lot for the region. However, if it were carried to the extremes that some people wanted to carry it, with other TVAs all over the country, it would have been highly undesirable. I am not a believer in giving the entire public utility industry to the government. I believe that would have been the ultimate result.
As I understand it, the state of Virginia was slow to participate in some of the New Deal programs, some social security programs and some relief programs. Did you comment editorially on that in the 1930s?
Very much so, and we tried to take the hide off the legislature on that.
For example, unemployment insurance, they didn't go in for that at all.
They had to have a special session because the
Weren't Senators Glass and Byrd in the latter part of the '30s against most of FDR's programs, the programs that you generally supported? You obviously had a falling out or a difference of opinion with the two senators.
Yes, they were opposed to practically everything at that time, almost everything. Glass was not only opposed, but also so vitriolic that it was unbelievable.
He was a former newspaperman too, I believe.
That's right. Of course, I didn't like the court-packing thing at all. I
think that was the first time that the Times-Dispatch
really took out after FDR in a big way.
Did you support editorially FDR in all his elections?
Yes. With diminishing enthusiasm.
You were a member, I believe, of the Southern Policy Committee that was formed in 1935?
Right.
Could you comment on what that was about?
We were against the poll tax. We were for less politics in appointments
and more civil service.
Now, that's not the same thing as the Southern Electoral Reform League, is it?
No, nor the Southern Regional Council.
Yes, we'll pick those up later on. Well, did this Southern Policy Committee have a hand in shaping some tenant farm legislation?
Yes. The Bankhead Bill, I think we had a lot to do with that.
And what kind of work did you do? Was it a matter of investigating and reporting and making recommendations?
We had meetings periodically, mostly in Atlanta and heard from the authorities on various subjects. Howard Odum was active in it, Julian Harris, the editor of the Columbus paper in Georgia . . . it was not a very big group, about thirty, I think.
What was your role? Were you just a member?
That's all.
But then you supported it, obviously?
Yes.
In retrospect, would you change any of your views about Roosevelt and the New Deal? You've given us your assessment and the stands that you took. Looking back, would you modify any of that?
Not very greatly, I don't think I can state any specific thing.
Some historians say that Roosevelt's greatest contribution was the restoration of confidence.
I believe that. It's a very poor analogy and I hesitate to even make it and there is no similarity at all between Roosevelt and Hitler, except that Hitler gave Germany confidence too, when Germany was down and out.
Well, we might move next into some sort of miscellaneous issues and events and controversies in the '30s and '40s. You have mentioned several times a very important one and that is the poll tax question, and I wondered if you would comment in general on what your position was, and then we might move from that into some more specific questions.
Well, of course the poll tax had to be paid for three years and you had to pay it six months before the election There wasn't any doubt at all that it was designed to keep many citizens from voting. The Byrd organization would see that enough of its people were paid up, and they could be pretty sure that a large percentage of the others would forget all about it until it was too late. Those who got excited three months before an election were too late. That happened in thousands and thousands of cases.
Well, there was an element of corruption then, as well as an attempt to limit the franchise. Corruption being that people would buy up past fees and that . . .
The county treasurers would stimulate their followers to pay up or would
see in one way or another that they were qualified.
As I understand it, the poll tax became involved in a celebrated murder trial of a person by the name of Odell Waller, who was a black sharecropper, and it had to do with the nature of the selection of the jury. You editorialized on that, and I wish that you would sort of comment on what the issues were that were involved.
Well, the sharecropper murdered his landlord, as I recall it, a white man
with whom he had some kind of business dealings. A group concluded that
juries in Virginia were improperly chosen because they had to be
qualified voters. That meant that all of Odell Waller's category of
sharecroppers and poor people generally were eliminated from juries, and
therefore the juries tended to be anti-anybody like Odell Waller. I was
one of a group which came out publicly urging that Waller be given a
life sentence instead of electrocuted. I think maybe I caught more flak
on that than on anything that I ever did. People thought I had really
gone off my rocker for trying to do something for somebody who obviously
killed his landlord and they couldn't see what the poll tax had to do
with it. I pointed out that the United States government couldn't impose
any penalty higher than
You know, the interesting thing about this is that it is an early example of concern about the nature of a jury and the effect that it has on trials. Of course, a lot of modern day controversy is over that same question. In this same sort of vein about the poll tax, did you have any feelings about federal actions on the poll tax? Of course, there were many proposals and we now have an amendment to the Constitution.
One of the arguments that we regularly made for getting rid of it in Virginia was that they would pass a federal law abolishing it if we didn't do it ourselves by state action. The Byrd organization was in firm control, partly due to the poll tax, and they didn't have any idea of going along with that.
Well, what was your stand on the federal legislation? I believe that legislation was proposed in the '30s to abolish the poll tax by the action of the federal government.
I've completely forgotten about that. I don't remember. I think I probably said that we ought to do it ourselves.
And then closely related to the poll tax would be your participation in the Southern Electoral Reform League, which I gather was concerned about issues like the poll tax.
Well, I've forgotten all about that organization.
Let's see, in 1941, it was created, the Southern Electoral Reform League.
Did it ever get anywhere or do anything?
I was hoping that you would tell us that.
I don't think I can remember. There was one thing during that period that you may not be aware of, or you may be getting to it. This was the federal anti-lynching law.
That's the next subject. If you want to go ahead and comment on that . . . Virginia had a strong anti-lynching law, I believe, passed in Governor Byrd's years, but there was proposal for federal action.
We at the Times-Dispatch were really in the lead on
that. And we got a lot of other papers in the South to support it
too.
And you favored federal action in this instance?
Yes, because while Virginia had a good record, lynchings kept on
happening in other states and I just thought that it was time to put a
stop to it. I wrote an article for The Nation on it,
and although many other southern papers came out in favor of it, the
bill never was passed until a much later date.
Well, this brings forth a larger question and that is, when did you think it was proper for the federal government to act as opposed to the state government? In the lynching case here, you felt that federal action was needed, but in some other instances, I believe that you would favor state action.
Well, I just thought that it was better for the state to
Another category involving federal action, of course, was prohibition. Would you say that most of the support for that issue was spent when the prohibition amendment was repealed, or was it a continuing issue in Virginian politics in the '30s, after it was repealed.
It was pretty dead after that, they put in the ABC system and there wasn't much controversy. Bishop Cannon came back and tried to get some kind of legislation through, but nobody paid any attention to him. The most astounding and incredible thing that happened during the '30s, after repeal, was that amazing episode of burning up all the studies of alcoholism's effect on the human system.
Would you comment on that in general? It does seem incredible in retrospect.
I don't understand it yet, because prohibition had been repealed and we
thought that
Where?
One at the Medical College of Virginia and one at the University of Virginia.
When?
1937. It was very good, it was as moderate as it could be, and the State
Board of Education said that it was absolutely first class and ordered
ten thousand copies for distribution to the public schools. Whereupon,
before it had gotten to the legislature, the month before, I think, the
Times-Dispatch got hold of a copy and revealed
that it contained a couple of mild statements that alcohol in small
quantities was sometimes beneficial and another statement that you
cannot legislate morality by law. Those were the only two things that
could get anybody the least bit upset. But the minute that this got in
the papers, the WCTU and the Anti-Saloon League got busy along with the
Methodist and Baptist churches, and an avalanche of letters and
telegrams descended on the legislature when it met. They had stuff piled
high on their desks, all of it demanding that this outrageous study be
burned up. Only one or two members had read it and they thought it was
good. The other 138 voted to shovel all the copies into the
You mean that ten thousand copies had been printed?
Well, a thousand had been printed. They shoveled all 998 of them in; they saved two of them, the state of Vermont reproduced the study for their students, but all the other copies were sent into oblivion.
Did you editorialize on that?
Yes, indeed!
There's a statement that in 1934 you came out for hotel drinking or you had some reference to hotel drinking. What is hotel drinking?
I don't remember exactly, but I think it was legal drinking in restaurants or hotels.
By the drink?
Yes, such as we have now.
That wasn't adopted in Virginia until . . .
It was two or three years ago.
'71, something like that.
I believe that you also favored, about that time, bringing horse racing to Virginia?
Yes, legalized pari-mutuel betting. I think we advocated it.
Was that a very controversial thing, as it is now?
Yes, the same group that was for prohibition was against it. Other well-meaning people believed that a lot of high-powered gamblers and others like the Mafia might get a foothold here, as they have done with other racetracks.
Was fundamentalism pretty well spent after the 1920s, or were there any issues in particular in the '30s and '40s?
It never was bad in Virginia at any time.
And the Ku Klux Klan never was very powerful in Virginia, either.
That's right. To a limited degree in the 1920s, especially during the Al Smith era. It was more active then than at any other time.
Was the blue law question controversial during the '30s? Can you recall any editorials on the blue laws?
I don't believe it was.
How about the incident that some entitle "Edith and Her Pappy" and about which you wrote?
1935.
Yeah. Edith Maxwell, who lived in Wise County in the mountains, came home
late one night, and her father berated her for being out so late and she
apparently hit him in the head with a lead pipe or something. Anyway, he
died. Well, an uproar was started by the Hearst papers in particular.
This was a backward mountain region they said and the inhabitants were
out of tune withThe New Republic
about the case called "Edith and Her Pappy."
And your role was just to try to get the facts straight and try to sort of turn back the sensational account by the Hearst papers and others, which reflected, I guess, on Virginia mores and lifestyles.
And the whole southwest Virginia mountain area. A lot of people there go to college and are educated citizens. They aren't all just hillbillies.
Well, a more serious subject. Organized labor made some great strides
nationwide in the 1930s and I know that there were some dramatic
incidents in the South involving labor violence. My question is, what
Not nearly so much as in other states to the south, particularly the Carolinas. I came out in advocacy of the Wagner Act in 1935. That almost gave Colonel Slover a stroke; he was the principal stockholder and he sent a telegram raising the devil. One position that we took was that the employers in North and South Carolina who were shooting people in the back for organizing unions ought to be prosecuted.
[END OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE B]
Were you in favor of the basic right to organize, or was it more of a law and order type of thing?
I was in favor of the basic right to organize. I was also not in favor of the abuses that came along with the sit-down strikes in the late 1930s, when a lot of the automotive workers in Detroit just sat down all over the factories and took possession of them. I was opposed to John L. Lewis shutting down the country in the middle of the war, but I thought and think, that the right to organize is a basic right.
Will you comment on Governor Tuck's confrontations with organized labor? I understand that he wanted to turn into militiamen or state employees, workers that were on strike to keep certain operations going like Vepco.
I think he probably violated the law. It never
Did you editorialize on it at the time?
I'm trying to remember just what we did say. We jumped on Tuck at one point for exceeding his authority.
I have one final or general category for the '30s and '40s. It has to do
with state services and public education. I know that in your book, Liberalism in the South, you give very high marks to
the support of public education through the years and Virginia's record
was very poor through the '30s and '40s in public education and state
services. My question is, what position did the newspaper take in the
'30s and '40s on that?
Well, we were particularly aware of the low state of the black schools. There wasn't any justification for having separate and wholly unequal schools. At times, we expressed dismay over some of the things that were going on in the public schools. We also deplored the kinds of Ph.Ds they gave in education, and the methodolgy that was used, the sort of impractical approach to things, the training the teachers got.
Did you ever favor increasing taxation to improve public services?
I don't remember doing that.
I have a statement here that for example, you backed a state sales tax
and a statewide bond referendum, both aimed at helping education. This
was some information that I gained from the files at the Times-Dispatch. Apparently sometime during your editorship,
you supported a state sales tax.
That was very much more recently. That was during Godwin's administration.
During his first administration.
I believe that during the early period, the state often had a surplus that could have been spent for improvement of education, but apparently never was to a full degree. Do you recall any of those instances? I believe that Harry Byrd Jr. had a bill for returning the money to the tax payers.
Yes, he did. The Byrds in general were in favor of keeping as big a surplus as they could and maintaining the credit of the state above everything else, never going into debt for anything. If you had a surplus, just hang on to it, you might need it some day. That was the policy.
And in particular, it did not go to public services or education?
That's right.
In reflection, can you think of any other controversies or issues in the '30s or '40s in which you were involved editorially? Outside of, say, political elections, which we will get into tomorrow?
No, you have both done such a thorough job of taking up
Well, the final category is certainly important, and that's race. We have some specific questions, but two large subcategories would be the interracial movement in the South, of which you were a part, and then the campaign to desegregate the streetcars. We might start with just a few specific incidents and situations. One would be the Barbers Bill. This was before you were the editor, but nonetheless, you had some feelings about it. What did that entail?
Every time it came up, I wrote one of my Sunday articles about it. It
entailed an effort on the part of the Barbers Union, which was entirely
white, to institute two things, a Board of Barber Examiners and
examinations that could be rigged so that you couldn't possibly pass
them if they didn't want you to pass. The Board of Barber Examiners was
to be made up of white barbers and the questions were framed by those
barbers and they let the cat out of the bag in a publication which I got
hold of, a union publication. It said flatly that they were getting a
dollar and a half for haircuts in California and if they could just get
this thing in, they could up the price in Virginia. A dollar and a half
in that era, for a haircut, sounded like something out of this world.
There were some sample questions in the barbers' magazine about what to
ask. "How many hairs to the square inch on the average scalp?" "What is
the erector pilli muscle and what is its function?" I remember those
two. They would get a colored barber and ask him those things and say,
"Well, you don't know this and you can't barber." So, everytime that it
came up, I'd drag it out and write it all over again and we would defeat
it everytime. Finally, they brought in a bill so mild that
Now, you also wrote about the idea of having regional educational institutions where blacks could go to be trained in medicine and other professional lines. Could you sort of elaborate on that idea?
Yes. I think that it came up in veterinary medicine first. It was obvious
that it wasn't feasible to have a school of veterinary medicine in every
state. The idea was broached that you could have a very good one
somewhere and you could send students there, whether white or colored.
Then the idea came that there ought to be a good medical school for
blacks that they could go to, and a good law school and each
participating state would pay the cost of sending a student to that
institution instead of letting them in the white institutions. That
certainly seemed better than nothing. They weren't going to let the
blacks into the white institutions, so that seemed a lot better than
what we had. The year I lectured at Princeton, Professor Edward Corwin,
who was one of the great constitutional authorities, told me that he
thought that was constitutional and I put in Below the
Potomac what he said about it. Of course, it didn't have any
permanent effect,
Is this about the time that the SREB was pushing regional educational development? Are you aware of that?
I'm not aware of that.
The Southern Regional Education Board.
In Atlanta? It's still there, isn't it?
Yes, it still is, but this was in the '40s, I believe, when they were pushing . . .
That's why it was not necessarily a segregation question, but some thought this would be a sound approach to education at large.
The SREB, in that particular case, I think that there were some Supreme Court decisions that had thrown some doubt as to the validity of this on a segregated basis.
A case in Missouri, I believe.
Texas was involved in it, a law school or something.
Well, we might move next into some of the major topics dealing with race and one, it would seem to me, would be the southern interracial movement, and we might start with just sort of a comment about some of the philosophy of interracial cooperation, which in some locales in the South would be a very liberal idea in itself. Would you comment on sort of what the attitude of the movement was and then we will get into the particulars? What was the purpose and philsophy of interracial cooperation?
And why did you specifically get involved in something like this? What was your feeling toward the organization and movement?
We'll get into the specific organizations next.
Well, I think those that were in that movement thought the time had come to do something about the inequalities that existed. Blacks were human beings like whites, and they weren't being treated the way that they ought to be treated. It was felt that somehow, we ought to get a grassroots movement started to do something that would remedy the situation to the extent that we could do so. That was the general idea, and I felt that way. As I mentioned yesterday, I had not thought about it at all in my younger days and just forgot about it, but the more I came in contact with it as a newspaper reporter and newspaper editor, I became more and more vividly aware that things weren't as they should be, and that these people were citizens and they ought to be treated as such. A good many other people gradually awakened to that thought
And the context in the '30s and '40s would have been within a segregated framework? There was no advocacy of . . .
We weren't advocating integration then.
We might mention some of the organizations and get your reaction. I guess that one of the pioneers would be the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, which Mrs. Ames was very active in.
When that started, it was a very useful group and also regarded as a very
liberal thing by most of the southern whites. They did a good job mainly
in bringing white and black leaders together just to discuss things,
which never had happened before to any extent. That was a plus, but
after these discussions had been going on for a decade or so, the blacks
in particular realized that this had gotten to the point where it wasn't
getting
What was your role in the Commission on Interracial Cooperation? Did you participate in any of the meetings?
No, the first time that I got into any organization was the Atlanta Conference that followed the Durham one.
But you did subscribe to the literature, I think they had a clip sheet and some kind of periodical which you did receive?
The Interracial Commission?
Yes.
Yes.
You dealt with Mrs. Ames also, I believe, or corresponded with her?
Yes, I did. It's possible that I was in that Richmond or Virginia interracial group, but I don't remember any specific meetings.
Did you deal with Mrs. Ames enough to offer an assessment of her?
Very vaguely. I know that she was a fine person with great goodwill, but I don't really have anything else to say.
Were there any other Virginians who were actively involved in that at that time, people that you had known through the years or subsequently have come to know?
On the Interracial Commission?
Yes, this is a very early thing in the '30s.
Dr. S. C. Mitchell at the University of Richmond was certainly one of the
leaders. Dr. Gordon Hancock, whom I
We're talking about newspaper people, educators and ministers
Louis Jaffe.
Louis Jaffe was a member of that.
Let me ask about another group that was created in Birmingham in 1939, the Southern Conference on Human Welfare and your reactions to that.
I was supposed to be on the program of that meeting, chairman of one of
the groups. I became suspicious that the Communists were pulling the
strings behind the scenes, which turned out later to be the case. About
a week before they met, they chose Hugo Black as the outstanding
southern man in public life. At that time, Hugo Black was as radical as
The fact that he came from Alabama.
He was a Ku Klux Klaner, and he was really pretty demagogical. I was
fairly liberal at that time, but when I saw that he had been chosen, I
thought, "What's going on here?" They could have chosen any number of
people who were moderately liberal, but they got the most ultraliberal
person they could find who was prominent. I
We want to talk at length about the Southern Regional Council and perhaps
we should establish a little background before we get into the formal
origins. It seems to me that the background might include the impact of
World War II on race relations. Many people believe that thisAtlantic Monthly, in which you offered an
assessment of race relations and also some advice as to what might be
done. Would you summarize your feelings in that article and some of the
context of World War II in race relations?
And the reaction to that article.
Yes. At that time, race relations were becoming increasingly tense. It
looked as if we were going to have riots in various places. I thought
that we in Virginia were in danger of these riots. Some of the more
radical Negro leaders were pushing for integration now
and threatening to march on Washington. Rumors were going around that
people were to be assassinated with ice picks; everybody was getting so
tense that it seemed to me that a halt had to be called, at least
temporarily. My article was very badly received by the blacks. In fact,
one of them compared me to Hitler and called me a racist. I turned out
to be correct as to my prophecy that the riots were on the way because
the Detroit and Harlem riots occurred that summer. The article appeared
the preceding January. I didn't know whether the piece would do any
good; I was just alarmed over the situation and hoped that maybe people
would wake up to the danger.
In that article, did you suggest a withdrawal of progress that
I certainly didn't suggest that things go backward. I think . . . I haven't read the article in a long time, but I think I said that things should remain at the status quo until we could win the war, and that all this agitation and stirring up of people's emotions was damaging to the war effort
This has been called the really low point of esteem that people held you in as a liberal of the South at that time. Do you think that's correct, do you think that you got the most criticism of your position at this time?
Among so-called liberals, let's say.
Of the liberals.
Well, there might have been other low points, I don't know. I think that it was probably just as low during massive resistance. We can talk about that later.
In the meanwhile, of course, there had been a famous meeting in Durham of black leaders, I believe that came in '42.
Yes.
I wonder if you would comment on that meeting and then take it into the Atlanta meeting the next year.
Well, that meeting was a group of southern black leaders who perceived
that the Interracial Commission wasn't getting anything done and that it
was desirable to have a meeting of minds to get the white leadership and
black leadership in the South together so that they could perhaps map
out a program. It was not to include integration at that point. I'm sure
that everyone of those black leaders had that as
Your role in Atlanta was as a delegate, but you could have been the chairman, is that correct? I think that you deferred to someone else, maybe Ralph McGill, I've forgotten who did become the chairman.
Ralph did become chairman. I don't remember whether I could have or not.
We understand that you had declined to be considered as chairman of this Atlanta group because of the controversy over the article, "Nearer and Nearer the Precipice." You were afraid that this would be a negative impact on the formation of this Atlanta group.
It sounds logical. I know that they asked me to be chairman later and I didn't do it. Whether they asked me to be chairman at that time, I don't know.
Was that the reason that you refused later?
I don't recall that I had a specific reason. I think the main reason was that it involved so much time and work and I just didn't think that I could do it. It was during the war, I had no staff of editorial writers at one time and a limited staff the rest of the time, and I was exhausted everyday after work. I couldn't take on anything like that.
There was a continuation committee that sort of led from Atlanta to the
Southern Regional Council formation and you were the temporary chairman
of that. Or you oversaw it. Do you recall your
And at what point was this committee formed?
I believe that it was formed after Atlanta.
After Atlanta. That was when I was asked to be chairman. I know that I was asked sometime after the Atlanta meeting, and not very long after it. It was here in Richmond.
There was a meeting in Richmond.
Yes, and that was when I was asked to be chairman.
Do you recall any other Virginians participating in the origins of the Southern Regional Council, say in the Atlanta meeting or the Richmond meeting or in the formation of the Southern Regional Council?
Wilson Brown, a banker here in Richmond, the vice president of the State-Planters Bank, was a participant. He was almost the only businessman that anybody could persuade from any state to come to one of those meetings.
That was a weakness, I guess, of the organization.
Yes. Edmund M. Preston, who was a lawyer in the biggest law firm here, was an active participant.
Was there a controversy that you are aware of between Mrs. Ames and Howard Odum on the eve of the formation of the Southern Regional Council? The controversy involved Mrs. Ames's fear that the new organization would consume her group and that Odum would naturally work for a more regional kind of an approach.
I can believe that there was, although I don't know about this. I know
that some of the blacks that we met with at one time or another in the
Atlanta meeting, said very bluntly to Dr. Ashby Jones, who was at one
time chairman of the Interracial Commission, that the Interracial
Commission was accomplishing nothing and that it was time for a new
organization to take over. He
Now, Howard Odum became the first head of the Southern Regional Council and I know that you had worked with him in some instances and perhaps had read some of his basic works. Could you offer an assessment of Odum, who is regarded by many as sort of a key figure in the '30s and '40s in the South?
I think that he was. He was a pioneer. He saw a lot of the failings that
we had overlooked. He had a national reputation. He was hopeful of
getting big foundation money for this Regional Council and making it
much more effective than it was. He failed to get it, partly because—I
understand but I don't know this—but partly because Frank Graham was so
enthusiastic about the Southern Conference for Human Welfare that the
foundations were confused as to whom to give money to.
Initially, you were a charter member of the Southern Regional Council and on the board of directors, I believe, for some time. Did you disassociate yourself from the Council at any point? I know that eventually, it moved into a more activist role and formally endorsed the concept of integration as a desirable goal.
Well, at that time, I was not in favor of integration. That was about ten
years before the Supreme Court decision. I gradually
That was about 1951.
It may have been that late, I forget just when; it may have been the late '40s.
Was Lillian Smith a member of the SRC at the time that you were?
No, she was not. She may have become affiliated with it a little later.
[END OF TAPE 3, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 4, SIDE A]
Well, in November, 1943, you ran an editorial advocating the desegregation of streetcars and you made some other proposals, I believe as well, that black policemen should be used in the black sections of town and that a black staff be employed at an all black sanitarium. Could you tell us first of all, sort of the origin of those proposals and why you decided to advocate those particular things at that particular time?
Well, as to the streetcars, they were enormously crowded during the war,
everybody was riding them on account of the gas shortage and gas
rationing. It was extremely awkward for blacks to get on at the front of
a streetcar and have to push through a whole dense mass of white people
to get back to the rear. It didn't seem to make any sense. People were
inconvenienced, and if people didn't want to come into contact withNew York Herald Tribune,
the New York Post and the Boston and other papers up
there. I sent copies of our editorial to all the leading southern
editors urging them to aid in doing away with segregation on streetcars
and buses. Not a single one backed me up. Not Ralph McGill, not Barry
Bingham, not anybody, except the Kinston, N.C., Free
Press, a small daily.
Did any of them write you and give an explanation of why they would not?
No, they didn't acknowledge it.
Well, Mr. Dabney, this was quite a change, even though it might be very practical, wasn't this quite a change from your previous position of separate but equal? This is a change ending segregation, for whatever purpose it may be, and ending it at some point. Wasn't this sort of a break for you?
I suppose it was. It was kind of an entering wedge, actually. I felt that
sooner or later, there was going to be integration and that seemed to be
a valid way to begin the process without doing anything
You supported it two years later when it was brought up again? Editorially supported it?
Did the support pick up any support at all from other papers in Virginia in subsequent years?
In subsequent years?
Say like '44, or whenever the legislature reconsidered it.
No, it did not.
Now, you also, as I understand it, received very favorable response from a number of national figures who wrote you. Would you comment on that, perhaps some people who had criticized you earlier for "Nearer and Nearer the Precipice," or some of the NAACP officials who had perhaps been critical of some of your views and may have supported this and wrote you.
Yes, they did and I don't have any clear recollections as to exactly who
they were. I do remember an editor of the Pittsburgh
Courier who was tremendously excited about it and thought that
it was the beginning of the end of segregation.
P. B. Young?
P. B. Young of Norfolk was a good friend of mine. He didn't like the Atlanta article at all. I can't remember him specifically writing me about the streetcar thing, but I suppose he did. Some black columnists praised it, including one in his paper.
Was part of the rationale that a movement of goodwill in this particular area would enhance the credibility of white leaders in the South to deal with race problems?
Yes, I'm glad that you said that, because I forgot; that was one of the main considerations. It was part of carrying out the idea that Gordon Hancock had expressed, i.e., we wanted to keep the capital of the Negro race in the South and said, "If you can show some tangible evidence that the northern members of the race can see and feel is important, we in the South can control this situation." We felt that there would not be such a sudden and drastic change as occurred later.
Did the favorable general response, the letters to the editor, for example, encourage you to go beyond that stand, or did nothing else happen?
Not at that time. I've always felt strongly that the pace at which you do these things is very important. You can do things now, of course, in Virginia and Richmond that you couldn't even consider doing in 1954. Just taking it step by step, people become accustomed to the idea.
I guess that nothing was done on the proposal for black policemen in black sections of the city. Was that sort of lost in the concentration on the streetcar question, that proposal?
I'm trying to remember just when we did put those in. They were put in
around '46 or '47, at the same time that we desegregated the public
library. I was on the library board and there was no suit there, we just
decided that we were going to do it and the main opposition
And you had a role in that, as a member of the board?
Yes.
Was there any editorial comment on the desegregation of the library? Did you support it, or did you comment afterwards, or do you remember whether you took any editorial position?
I may have, I know that two chief people on the paper, who were not enthusiastic about the streetcar thing were in favor of the library desegregation. They were beginning to change—Tennant Bryan and Jack Wise.
Now, John Stewart Bryan took over the paper in 1940, but didn't the Norfolk, Colonel Slover, retain some kind of interest until a little later date? Did he have some type of interest in the '40s?
He had a minority interest, yes. He later disposed of it.
That was about 1948, but Wise and Bryan were the . . .
They were the managers. John Stewart Bryan died in 1944.
Did they try to influence you during the streetcar controversy? I know that you ran several editorials at that time and of course . . .
Well, I can tell you exactly what happened. I concluded that we ought to
come out for desegregation on streetcars and I didn't even go down to
see Jack Wise; John Stewart Bryan wasn't in town. I just called Wise on
the phone in the building and said, "Jack, I'm going to have an
editorial coming out tomorrow in favor of doing away with segregation on
streetcars." He gasped a minute and said, "What do you want
What about Mr. Bryan when he came back to town? Did he express displeasure?
No.
He didn't try to get you to change your views? How about on the library board? You said that . . .
They were in favor of that.
They indicated this to you, that they supported a move such as this?
Not in advance, but when the library board decided that we were going to do it. I don't recall ever talking to them about it until after it was done.
Do you think that you had a lot more freedom as an editor during this
period than they had on the News Leader, because of
the circumstances of the acquisition by Mr. Bryan in 1940? Do you think
that you had more freedom, do you think that they respected you more,
your feelings more, your views more and gave you a freer hand?
Well, it's hard for me to judge that because Freeman was the News Leader editor and he had been editor since 1915 and was
such a great figure in the community and everything else that I felt
that he was just doing what he wanted to do and he and Mr. Bryan pretty
much agreed on things anyway.
When did Mr. Freeman leave the News Leader?
He died not long afterwards, I believe.
In '53.
It seems to me that with the awards, such as the Pulitzer Prize and the SDX awards and so forth, that you were certainly building a reputation as an editor during this period, the late '30s and '40s.
I hope so.
Well, do you think that this reputation helped shield you from some criticism that you might have gotten otherwise, or attempts to influence you?
Yes, it did.
And probably in that same vein and we will get into this later, but I
know that in several instances, you became an ardent spokesman for some
very rich traditions in Virginia history. I am thinking of your Saturday Evening Post article on the first
Thanksgiving and your article in the New York Times
Magazine that sort of put Jamestown on the map again, and that
sort of thing. Do you think that also helped your credibility as an
editor? In other words, when you criticized the South, it was as
somebody who loved the South and appreciated the South and you weren't
an outsider, that people always resent, and that this, not merely
protected you, but gave you a sort of stronger shield as an editor?
Perhaps so, I never thought about it that way, but it's possible.
Can you think of any other instances involving segregation and desegregation in the '40s? You mentioned the library, for example, and we talked about the streetcars. Were there other wedges in the wall of segregation in Virginia in the '40s? Let's say before 1954, the '40s and early '50s.
I can't think of any.
I believe that we've covered pretty well, haven't we Bill, what we wanted to?
I think so. One last question, I sort of asked you this at the beginning of the session. Do you think that you were right? Would you have changed your mind and would you change your mind now about what you did in the '30s and '40s? Would you have moved faster toward integration or slower?
I don't think that I would change it appreciably, because I was going about as fast as public opinion would tolerate. I don't think that you could have gotten away with moving away out front on these things; people would have reacted so violently and there would have been a great backlash.
Do you think that at the same time there almost has to be somebody that gets out in front and the immediate reaction might be negative but . . .
Yes.
There is a certain position there where you can lead and beyond which there is a backlash.
Well, tomorrow, we'll talk about Harry Byrd and the Byrd organization, the machine.
Thank you, Mr. Dabney.
This will be an addition to the first session of an interview with Mr.
Virginius Dabney, the retired editor of the Richmond
Times-Dispatch, concerning his early life and early education,
his home life and so forth.
For ten years, 1907 to 1917, I spent part of every summer
What was your uncle's name, Mr. Dabney?
J. Staige Saunders. It was the Saunders family. He was a bachelor and there were several old maid sisters of his and one or two married ones. It was a large family and they had a big vegetable garden and a watermelon patch and cantelopes and apples and grapes and everything like that. We had to bag the grapes, that was part of our job. I never got so far as to milk the cows, I couldn't quite master that technique and there was always someone else to do it, fortunately. We slept sometimes upstairs in the hayloft in the barn. One of the boys slid down in the hay in his sleep and landed on his shoulder or head. It didn't hurt him very much, although he fell from the second floor.
Were there any hands on the farm?
Yes. A few black workers there. We helped them put rocks in the holes in the road. There were practically no automobiles in the community at that time, until just before I left in 1917. In the early days, everybody drove wagons or buggies; the roads were abominable and you had to pull rocks from the side of the road to fill up the mudholes. Going for the mail was a half-day's chore. You would get on a wagon or a horse and go three miles to the little post office at the railroad station and go to the store where they had all kinds of miscellaneous things. There was a blacksmith shop right there where a blacksmith shod horses. It was just an entirely different way of life from the present. Now, they have put a highway through there and people go through at about sixty miles an hour and everything has changed completely. The tempo of life is different and nothing is like it was.
They didn't have a summer baseball program did they?
No, but we had a tennis court, so-called, on the front lawn, which was simply a flat place in the yard and we took dry lime and made lines. There were no backstops. Imagine playing tennis with no backstops. We must have gotten as much exercise chasing balls as we did playing tennis.
That's the end of the addition to the first session.
This is an oral history project interview with Virginius Dabney, editor
emeritus of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. This is the
third session at his Richmond home, interviewed by William Turpin and
Dan Jordan on Friday, June 13. The session today will cover Mr.
Mr. Dabney, the public record is rather full on Harry Byrd Sr.'s background and his youth and his early political career. We would like to get your assessment of some aspects of it. By that, we would like to get your view as to how significant certain of those early events might have been. We might start with the fact that he dropped out of school and went to work and never really had a complete formal education. Do you see any connection with that and Byrd's overall attitude about public education?
Yes, I think that it has quite an application to much of his subsequent
career, because he felt that he had made it without going to college, he
had made it on his own. He didn't believe that the average person needed
all the government help and assistance that the New Deal provided. He
thought that it was creating loafers and ne'er-do-wells. He came along
as a rugged individualist, made it all alone, put the Winchester Star back on its feet when it was practically
bankrupt, and started raising apples and became the biggest private
apple grower in the world. He went on from there to get into politics
and in his political attitudes, he was much influenced by his own
career, I think. He believed that other people could do it if he could
do it, and he thought an awful lot of people were just sponging on the
government when they could look after themselves. He came into office
with the whole political organization behind him. Swanson and Glass were
then the leaders. He came in as governor with such fanfare and a great
majority in 1925 that he dominated the whole scene and froze out all
Let me ask you one other thing about that early career and you touched on
it. We know that "pay as you go" was an important part of the philosophy
of the Byrd organization and when he took over that financially ailing
newspaper, the Winchester Star, it was in debt. As I
understand it, he operated strictly on a pay as you go basis and got his
newspaper back on a COD basis. It is an oversimplification to say that
pay as you go, in a personal sense for Byrd, is associated with that
early experience?
I would say so. The principle is exactly the same.
Mr. Dabney, wasn't there some type of federal subsidy that was used to advantage for circulation purposes by newspapers during that period? Are you aware of a . . .
A postal . . .
A postal subsidy that meant virtually . . .
There may well have been. I don't know that far back whether it was in effect, but I imagine that he took advantage of it if it was, but I just don't have any knowledge on that.
He used the trains for circulation and it was much cheaper in certain areas used that in his pay as you go.
It may well be, because later on he was very happy to get federal money for the unemployed in Virginia and he didn't want to spend any state money.
He also, I believe, was president of the Valley Turnpike, which began as a toll road. Is it leaping very far to say that his experience there and his notion of building roads, was to have money and not borrow?
It is all perfectly consistent with his later philosophy. Yes, I do think so.
Wasn't he an early supporter of the amendment to the constitution, the Virginia constitution, to allow bonds for highway improvement?
In about 1918, he was. Astonishingly enough, I didn't know that until I began writing that book, and I put that in, as you know. In a couple of years, he reversed himself and was vigorously on the other side for the rest of his life.
A sort of key point in that was the election of 1923 referendum and I suppose that he took a chance in a sense in coming out so strongly against bonds, but it turned out to be a very shrewd political maneuver.
That was the beginning, really, of his rise to fame.
One other comment about the early period, you indicated that he was in
the Virginia state senate. I wonder if he cut any figure at all as a
senator? In other words, did he take any stands that were at all notable
in this early part of his career other than becoming familiar with the
way that the government worked? Was there anything
I don't know of any particular incidents. He was in there, I think, ten years and that was a good training ground for the political career that he was going to follow. He was Congressman Flood's nephew. Congressman Flood was a great power in Congress. Of course, Byrd's middle name was Flood and that helped him to get ahead. When he defeated that bond issue, as you say, that really put him in the front of things. I've forgotten whether he was chairman of the state Democratic committee before or after that. It was during that period.
Moving on to the governorship, there is a story that in 1924, when he was apparently thinking about his future, that Bishop Cannon told him not to run in the next gubernatorial race and that angered Byrd and he talked it over with his father who was a veteran politician and he decided that he would make his move at that point.
He told me that; I had never heard it until he told me. He said that Bishop Cannon got in a taxicab with him at the 1924 Democratic National Convention in New York and Cannon just said, "We've decided to run Walter Mapp and we don't think that this is anytime for you to run." Byrd said that made him mad. He had not planned to run at that time, but that when Cannon said that and he told his father about it, they decided that he was going to run.
In that race, he did oppose Mapp, and Mapp was supported strongly by Bishop Cannon. Does that mean that Byrd was sort of the outsider as a candidate or did he have most of the organization with him, or did the organization split? It's a little unusual.
I would say that Byrd had a much better "in" with the organization than Mapp. Mapp had some pull, but he never had been as much of an insider as Byrd. Byrd's father was speaker of the house; his uncle was in the Congress, he was in the middle of the power structure.
How serious was Cannon about that election? I know that there are sort of ebbs and flows in Cannon's power and interest in politics. Did he go all out for Mapp?
I think so. He and the head of the Anti-Saloon League, who was then the Reverend David Hepburn, got out a famous pink slip. Do you know about that?
No.
Well, when the red-light districts were being outlawed and Byrd was in the senate, every senator voted to outlaw the red-light houses, except Byrd. He voted to keep them. Well, if you didn't know Byrd, you might think that he was some kind of patron of the red-light districts and that is exactly the impression that the Anti-Saloon League tried to create. They got out a pink slip, "Vote on Outlawing Legalized Prostitution," or words to that effect. Under "Yes," they had the whole senate but one and under "No," they had Harry Byrd. They sent that all over the state, and made many people mad, who knew pefectly well that Byrd simply thought that was a better way to handle the problem. It helped him, I think, and probably got him more votes than otherwise.
What was his solution to the problem of prostitution?
He just thought that it was better to have it legalized and in one place than to outlaw it and let it spread around all through the city.
Byrd was governor from 1926 to 1930, and could you tell us what your
vantage point on that governorship was, where you were located when you
covered it
Well, I was a reporter on the Times-Dispatch assigned
to his office and other state offices and I saw him regularly under many
different circumstances.
[END OF TAPE 4, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 4, SIDE B]
Contrary to the expectations of the machine, he started off immediately
by instituting a lot of reforms that they were not happy about. He was
sensible enough to see that the time had come to get some
The short ballot was the major reform that he managed to get through. He had a tight squeeze on that; there were, I think, three parts to that and they all were approved by a close margin. It limited the number of politicians elected to state office to three, the governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general, whereas a number of others had previously been elected. Most voters didn't know a thing about these latter officials they were voting for. For most people they were just names. The progressive thought in the country at that time was to have a limited number of officeholders elected and the rest appointed by the governor, and to hold him responsible if things didn't work well. Byrd put that through after making a great campaign, and was applauded over the country for it.
He had a survey made by the New York Bureau of Municipal Research which
recommended a lot of things which were done, and some that were not.
Their recommendations were screened by a committee of Virginians, who
eliminated some of the recommendations, but enough remained. The number
of departments was reduced from something like 90 to 14 or thereabouts,
I can't remember the exact figures. Anyway, a lot of superfluous
deadwood was eliminated. A good deal of money was saved; it doesn't
sound like much now, it was either $400,000 or $800,000 a year,
depending on who did the estimating. Neither figure sounds very big now,
but in the early 1930s, that was an awful lot of money. So, Byrd became
recognized as a great progressive, forward-looking governor. He
One impact of his many changes was the centralized power in the governor and some people would regard that as paradoxical since Byrd, at least on the national level, opposed that notion and didn't like the idea of centralized power in the federal government. Do you have any comment on that?
The point was made by me a good many times in editorials and otherwise that there was a direct conflict between his attitude on one hand and on the other. I never had any statement from him on it. He just kept on fighting centralization in Washington and did not try to explain why it was that he did it in contradiction to his attitudes in state affairs. That's just one of those unresolved mysteries . . .
Well, he had a very tough anti-lynching law but he also, I believe, allowed to become law a bill that made segregation the law in public assemblies like auditoriums in the same time period. Was that controversial legislation?
Yes, that was a bill that John Powell, the pianist, espoused. Powell was
a genius as a musician and the opposite when it came to public affairs.
He got an absolute phobia about the race question. Somebody pointed out
to him that public assemblies at Hampton Institute were mixed.
Do you think that he saw both of these perhaps not so much as a race thing but as a desire to maintain a stablity of government, that lynching certainly would have disturbed the government and that if there had been enough emotion whipped up about mixed audiences, it certainly would have disturbed the government? Do you think that he may have looked at this simply as a way of maintaining stability?
That may have entered into it. I'll give him credit for thinking that mobs murdering people was just outrageous and had no place in a civilized government. I believe he really thought that.
When you were talking a few minutes ago about his pushing through the
short ballot, which you said was nip and tuck for some time there, do
you think that he was able to do this and these other things in this
reorganization of government because of the magnitude of his own
No, I don't think that he was particularly, although he was a very
affable, genial man with people he liked. His great forte was his
ability to organize, he was a tremendous organizer. All the politicians
said that he could organize a campaign better than anybody they ever
saw. When he got involved in a campaign, he would get on the phone and
he knew exactly whom to call up in every county. He had it all in his
head. He knew whom he could count on and what they could do, what
happened in that county the last time that there was an election and how
the vote stood. He was an absolute encyclopedia on all political
matters. He had a right-hand man, E. R. Combs, who was a southwest
Virginia product, reared in the old hard-boiled tradition of southwest
Virginia politics, who knew how to organize; after Byrd told him what to
do, he knew exactly how to do it. Combs knew where the bodies were
buried. I don't mean that there was a lot of stealing of money or
crookedness, but they were really hard-boiled when it came to putting
the heat on people to make them vote the way they wanted them to. When a
young man came into the Virginia General Assembly, Combs would make it
very plain to him, in a gentlemanly way, just what he had to do to "make
it." He was mild mannered and nice looking, and he would tell this boy,
"Now look, son, we want you to get ahead in this organization. We're
right with you now and we are going to cooperate with you and we want
you to cooperate with us. That's all we
Do you think, then, his masterful way of organizing a campaign, organizing the political process, was really what his strong point was?
That and knowing the ins and outs of government, how the government operated and how to make it more efficient and more economical. He knew all that very well.
Do you see anybody on the current scene now that even approaches him in that type of organizational method?
I don't know how good Mills Godwin is. I think he is very good and I always have admired him. As for that particular ability, I doubt if he's got it to the same extent; Byrd had it to a superlative degree.
You mentioned Combs. Were there other key lieutenants at this early point in time, say when Byrd was governor, people in the legislature, or people like Combs who held other positions and were indispensable men to Byrd?
Yes, I'm sure there were; the speaker of the house, for example, who changed from time to time, I can't remember exactly who was speaker when he was governor; his father, who had been speaker, had just died. His father didn't live to see him as governor.
Well, A. Willis Robertson, I believe, came on the scene about the time that Byrd served in the General Assembly. Were they close at that early point in time?
I think they were; they diverged later. At the time when they went in together, I think they were close. They were both from the Valley, and were both young men on their way up.
Mr. Dabney, Senator Byrd had been a newspaperman, a newspaper publisher and became governor. How was his treatment of the press of Virginia at that time? Was he open, was he receptive to be interviewed and so forth?
Yes, he got along with newspapermen very well and made friends with them. He sent each of them a box of apples every Christmas. I got boxes of apples for the entire time that he was in public life until he died. During the '30s, when I was just blasting him from time to time, he kept on sending the apples, which I think was pretty admirable.
Not rotten apples either?
They were good. Winesaps from the Valley, great big boxes.
Byrd is often regarded as a great friend of business, but it is true that when he was governor, he did tangle with the oil companies and . . .
Telephone too.
Telephone too. Could you comment on that.
Yes. He found out that gas was costing more in Virginia than in
neighboring states and he didn't see any excuse for that—why Standard
Oil or any of the others should charge more in Virginia than in North
Carolina or Tennessee, which they were doing. So, he said, "I'm going to
make them publish their prices in all these neighboring states." I
forget the exact details of how he was going to do that, but that was
the idea. He got a bill through the legislature somehow bringing out in
the open the fact that prices in Virginia were higher. They put on a
terrific lobby; he said he never had seen such a lobby. He put on all
the heat that he
In this particular circumstance, we have to recount all the highlights of it, tourism and conservation and what have you. But is it fair to say that there is no question in the public mind that Byrd was an extraordinary governor and that he had been very successful with his efficiency program and his attempts to harness the government and to economize the government?
Some of the anti-machine politicians who were frustrated over being
defeated so often would probably never admit that. For example, Governor
Westmoreland Davis, who preceded Byrd by two administrations and was
elected as an anti-organization governor because of a three-way race,
never would give Byrd credit for what he had accomplished. He organized
something called, I think, the Bureau of Research. He put to work
several people who were supposedly analyzing what Byrd
This is in the United States Senate?
Yes. So, all that made Davis extremely bitter. Another who never was reconciled was Henry W. Anderson, who was very much of a leading Republican politician under the Hoover Administration, ran for governor against Trinkle and was a very able man, He made some of the most preposterous statements about Byrd's administration, that it was as big a dictatorship as Russia or Yugoslavia or something like that. He just didn't make any sense at all on that particular matter.
Byrd's success as governor with his particular philosophy may have made him overconfident about being able to deal with national problems. At a particular point in time, the 1920s, he was able to harness the government and economize a lot and that more or less reinforced ideas he already had, and when he went on the national scene, he felt sure that he was on the right track, that it had worked for him.
Well, of course, Roosevelt came out at first, for economy, so Byrd was
very enthusiastic. Roosevelt said that we were going broke in no time if
we didn't cut the federal budget twenty-five percent. It certainly
sounds grotesque now. Byrd was all for that. He thought exactly
Before we leave the governorship, I would like to make one reference to the presidential election of 1928. We know, of course, that Cannon supported Hoover, the Republican candidate, and Byrd supported the Democratic nominee, Al Smith. My question is, did Byrd as governor, and at the very height of his prestige in a sense, go all out for Al Smith?
He did indeed. He went all out for Al Smith, he did his level best. He went over to the Valley where there were a lot of Dunkards and Mennonites, both of whom have deep anti-Catholic feelings because of events centuries ago in Europe. He went over there and made a very personal appeal and asked them to please vote for Smith as a personal favor to him. He made speeches all around and did everything that he could. He knew that if he lost, it would be a bad blow to him and he would maybe lose control of the state. When it went by 24,000 for Hoover, he was down in the dumps for quite a while. He didn't know what was going to happen. He finally solved the problem by getting a good dry Baptist to run that Cannon couldn't assail effectively, John Garland Pollard.
Before we move into that election, it seems to me that it's very ironic
in a way that Byrd went all out to defeat Hoover, because Hoover in many
respects, it seems to me, is like Byrd. They probably shared
ideologically a lot of positions. And yet, he probably worked as hard
That's right. He seemed to feel very strongly obligated to support the party nominee, but later on, as you say, he certainly did not.
Do you think that that experience in '28 colored his views on his participation in presidential elections? Did he get burned and learn something from it and sort of rethink that notion of commitment to national parties?
He certainly could have. He never told me that and I've never read that he said that, but I think that it is undoubtedly possible.
Would you comment on the next election, and that is sort of a key, the one that you mentioned in '29 that followed. Because, I guess that if Cannon had been able to win that one, the tide of politics in Virginia would have changed.
That really would have been it. You see, Cannon came out of this 1928
campaign arrogant and egotistical and throwing his weight around, and
demanding an apology from Byrd and all the other politicians who had
attacked him in 1928 campaign. Of course, Byrd had about as much idea of
apologizing to Cannon as of jumping over the James River at one leap. He
just dug his feet in the ground and decided that he was going to lick
Cannon or else. He knew that if he lost the next election, Cannon would
be the boss, and he put every ounce of strength that he had into first
choosing somebody that Cannon would find invulnerable and that Cannon
hated, and that Cannon couldn't control. John Garland Pollard, who was
then on the
In your book, you mention that one of the things that caused Pollard's victory, defeat of Brown, was a series of stories that held Cannon up to ridicule as a gambler and stock plunger and flour hoarder and so forth. It may be that I am just a little bit cynical in the light of Watergate, but where did those stories come from? Who originated those stories and how did they happen to come out at this particular time? What newspapers were involved, did you break any of them?
No, I did not. They broke in various papers. The papers were
He went to jail for it, didn't he?
Yes.
Now, which Harry Golden are you talking about?
The famous . . .
The writer?
Yes. It's the same. He was Harry Goldhurst running a bucket shop in New York, and Cannon had been dealing in stocks here in Richmond with John P. Branch, who was a great Methodist layman, very much on the q.t. Various people knew that he was doing it, but the papers couldn't get anything on him to show that this great pillar of righteousness was gambling in stocks right here in Richmond. But then, Golden or Goldhurst got in trouble with the authorities in New York for operating a bucket shop, and when they went through the books, here was Bishop James Cannon as one of his big patrons. So, it all came out in the wash right there and it really blew the lid on him. Cannon had bought $477,000 worth of stock with a payment of $2,500 and made about $9,000 through Mr. Goldhurst.
Moving on with Byrd . . .
I didn't think so at the time, but I have been looking at some of
Was Byrd offered the vice presidential nomination?
I think he was. He was offered either that or chairman of the national committee and I remember distinctly going to see Combs, his chief cook and bottle-washer, after that. Byrd had denied that he was offered anything like that, whatever it was, he denied it publicly. So, I was talking to Combs about it and I said, "I see that Byrd denied that he was offered that." He said, "Oh well, of course he was offered it, but he very properly denied it." Which was a good insight into the manner in which politicians operate. If you don't want to admit something, you just say that it isn't so.
Now, after the election, we know that Claude Swanson received a cabinet appointment. As I understand, there is some controversy about that. Perhaps Roosevelt wanted Byrd in the cabinet and Swanson was a sort of a messenger and Byrd took offense at that and said something to the effect that he, Byrd, was going to go after Swanson's seat and that Swanson had better take a cabinet position. Something to that effect.
Byrd and Swanson got at odds during the Smith campaign. Swanson didn't do
a darn thing after saying that he was going to help. Byrd told me of his
conversation with Swanson early in the campaign. He said,
Are you aware of any evidence to the effect that Roosevelt did want Byrd in the cabinet?
I don't know, but I think that he probably did.
Did anybody ever call to Byrd's attention in subsequent presidential elections, his anger with Swanson for failure to support the candidate in light of Byrd's—
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[START OF TAPE 5, SIDE A]
. . . we know that Byrd opposed much of what Roosevelt did and much of the later New Deal legislation. Are you aware of his supporting any important legislation that Roosevelt proposed? In the '30s.
Not on the domestic scene, but he always boasted that he supported everything in the way of strengthening the country against foreign aggression or in foreign affairs generally.
Was his brother an influence there at all, Admiral Byrd?
He may have been. I don't know that Admiral Byrd really took much interest in public affairs. He was so wrapped up in exploration that I doubt if he had much influence one way or the other.
Didn't Senator Byrd originally vote for the NRA?
Yes, he did, although he said he believed it was unconstitutional.
I think that much of Byrd's pronouncements on the New Deal are a matter of record and we might move into the '40s unless there is anything in the '30s that strikes you as worth pursuing. I gather he did not support Roosevelt, didn't vote for him in '36, but on the other hand did not come out publicly for Alf Landon either, did he?
No, he didn't. Would you like me to speak briefly about the clash that
Byrd had with the Times-Dispatch in the '30s over our
criticism of him when he voted against social security and unemployment
relief and . . .
I think that we certainly want that in there, but we might hold it for the relationship between you and Byrd, in the next section of this session.
Is there anything significant about the '36 election, the presidential election between Landon and Roosevelt?
I don't remember anything. I suppose that Byrd went through the motions of supporting Roosevelt, I don't know specifically what he did. I don't believe Glass did, I think he came out against him. Glass was so vitriolic in his references to many of the things Roosevelt did that I don't believe Glass made any pretense of supporting him.
In 1938, Roosevelt tried to purge certain congressmen who
Well, of course, the entire machine was solidly behind Howard Smith and not only that, Governor Jim Price, who was not in Howard Smith's corner politically, although a Democrat, told Roosevelt that he was making a grave mistake in putting up this young fellow, William E. Dodd Jr., against Howard Smith. Jim Price told Roosevelt that Dodd didn't have a prayer, which was certainly true. Dodd was a perfectly insignificant nonentity. His father was a famous historian at the University of Chicago, but Dodd himself was a political nobody . . . he simply spoke in liberal terms and against Howard Smith and Smith just snowed him under.
In 1940, I know that Carter Glass was a vigorous critic of Roosevelt breaking the second term tradition and seeking a third election. In fact, I believe that Glass nominated Jim Farley.
Yes, I think he did.
Did Byrd participate in the attempt to stop Roosevelt in '40? Do you recall any overtones of that campaign?
Let's see now, I get these conventions mixed up. I don't recall that anything very specific happened at that convention. That was when Wilkie ran, of course. Senator Byrd did not support Wilkie. Whether he went through the motions of supporting Roosevelt and remained regular and did nothing, I don't know.
In a related question about Glass, as I understand it, he was in a sense, physically ineffective for a number of years and in fact, did not meet roll call votes for many years and yet was a senator until '46. Was that controversial in Virginia? It's a delicate question, to be sure, but did that become an issue in Virginia politics?
To some extent it did, not to the extent that you might imagine, though. Some people issued statements in the press asking why Senator Glass didn't resign since he had been bedridden for years and was not attending to his duties in any way. There was not any tremendous uproar. There was a lot of talking quietly among politicians about it. I know one man who was in Congress at that time in Virginia told me recently that Glass . . . he was from Glass's district, and Glass kept him from appointing postmasters and people in the district for a year or so and wouldn't do anything himself and just infuriated this congressman because it made all the machinery stop in certain areas because Glass wouldn't let him do anything and wouldn't do anything himself.
Did you take any type of editorial position on Glass's illness?
You know, it's funny, I can't remember. I should have, I certainly think now that I should have and maybe I did, but I don't think so.
What kind of relationship did Byrd have with Glass when both were senators?
Very good. Glass treated Byrd as a kind of a son. He was a bit paternalistic and defended Byrd from attacks. Huey Long made a violent attack on Byrd in the Senate and Glass got furious and jumped up and walked over to Huey Long and banged his desk and told him not to do that again, or else. Things like that.
When Glass died in '46, there was somewhat of a scramble, I believe, for that seat and as I understand it, Byrd preferred Howard Smith, but of course, the position went to Robertson. Is there a story there?
Well, I think that the most interesting story is that
By the organization?
Yes, but he didn't want it. He told me that he didn't want, under any
condition, to raise his children in Washington.
Was the selection of Robertson an upset as far as Byrd was concerned, or just something that he preferred not happen? Was it a big issue and confrontation or just some sort of maneuvering?
I think it was just maneuvering, I don't believe he felt strongly about it or bitter at all.
In '47 and '48, Byrd opposed some of Truman's foreign policy measures, for instance, the Marshall Plan and Truman's doctrine of aid to Greece and Turkey. Was that a controversial thing in Virginia? Do you recall how the newspapers reacted to it?
I believe that his opposition was mainly because it cost so much money and he didn't feel sure that it would work. We spent so much in the war and Byrd's instinctive hatred of spending large amounts of money, I think, influenced him more than anything else.
He did support NATO later on, but of course, that was a military alliance.
Yes . . . did he not support the Marshall Plan?
He opposed the Marshall Plan.
He opposed that. I remember that he opposed the Truman plan for Greece, but I'd forgotten about the Marshall Plan. He had almost a phobia about going into debt.
In 1948, of course, we had the Dixiecrat revolt and do you recall Byrd's role in that? I know that he didn't support the Dixiecrats, but was he a party to it at all?
I can't remember clearly what he did. I know Bill Tuck, who was governor, was a Dixiecrat and made it fairly obvious. That was the year, wasn't it, that Byrd and Tuck tried to get that terrible piece of legislation through.
I would appreciate your comment on that. Perhaps first, a sort of identification of what it was and then any stand the paper may have taken on it.
Well, the idea was to beat Truman in any way possible, by fair means or
foul, almost. And then to keep him off the ballot legally, which really
seems weird indeed. That was such an outrageous proposition, we didn't
know whether Byrd and Tuck had combined on it or whether it was just
Bill Tuck. The Times-Dispatch came out as vigorously
as possible against it immediately, and a lot of other papers did, too.
Byrd and Tuck backed up very hurriedly and Byrd . . . I think I'm right,
tried to pretend that he didn't have anything to do with it, but it
turned out later that he had a lot to do with it and he had okayed it
before Tuck saw that it was introduced in the legislature.
A slight detour; what was your assessment of Truman at the time? Say, from '45 until '52?
My assessment then was very unfavorable. In later years, I wondered why
it was so unfavorable, because I read the recent book, Plain Speaking, which gave all of his side of everything . . .
of course, nobody else's side. The Glory and
the Dream by William Manchester, which goes over those years
that you just asked me about and there were things that Truman did that
were absolutely outrageous. He often behaved like a small-bore
politician who did petty things. There were quite a few crooks in the
government but Harry wouldn't admit it for years. The Internal Revenue
Service was shot through with grafters, a number of whom went to the
penitentiary. I think Truman himself was more honest than most
politicians. It wasn't until recent years that I concluded that he
really was one of the good presidents, despite these early shortcomings.
Somebody said that "he gagged on the gnats and swallowed the lions." He
made all these petty mistakes, but when it came to big issues, he
usually made the right decision.
Virginia went for Truman in 1948.
Yes, thanks to Strom Thurmond, who pulled enough votes away to throw it to Truman. Dewey would have gotten most of those votes.
Do you know what the newspapers supported editorially in that period?
We either didn't support anybody or we supported Truman. I don't think that we supported anybody. We denounced the Dixiecrats, I know that.
Wasn't Byrd a big friend of Russell?
Yes.
Was Byrd ever embarassed by the fact that he retained these powerful committee positions and yet on payday, so to speak, did not support the party in the presidential election?
Well, he must have given it a lot of thought and I don't doubt that he was needled a lot by his compatriots who were regular, but he just treated it as the lesser of two evils, I guess. When he made up his mind, he was about as hard to change as anybody I ever saw. He once told me, "When people get after me when I have made up my mind about something, it just makes me all the more determined not to change." And that's right. When he decided something, he had decided.
After you became an editorial writer for the Times-Dispatch and later editor, did you have conversations with
Senator Byrd, personal conversations, telephone conversations, did you
maintain a fairly close relationship with him?
Yes, it was all very friendly. When he introduced me to his friends up
there he would say, "Mr. Dabney is a New Dealer." He would say that
in
Even when you would have a falling out on a particular issue, you would still remain a certain friendliness?
Yes.
Did you support his reelection campaign in 1952?
For the Senate?
Against Miller, I believe.
Yes.
Did you support him in 1956, I believe, 1957, when he talked about not running for reelection? He announced that he would not run for reelection in '57, somewhere in there, and then after a few months, he came back and started running, said that he would run for reelection. Did you express to him at that time support? I find that people who were even his archenemies generally asking or were concerned that he would run for reelection then.
I was glad that he ran for reelection. I think that we could list the
reasons why he did it and you may want me to comment on that. There
were, I think, two main ones. One was that it would split the
organization wide open if he didn't. He was really worried because John
Battle and Bill Tuck were squaring off to run for his seat, and Battle
was from the more liberal side of the organization and Tuck was the
ultraconservative, and they were taking up sides. The thing was jelling
in these two directions and polarizing. There was going to be one hell
of a row between these two factions and that would not have been to
Byrd's liking at all. He had been the friend
Did you urge him not to get out?
Yes, I did.
We've gotten into the next category, which is Byrd the man and your relationship with him. We might pursue this relationship a little more. In the '30s especially, when you were writing editorials and taking positions that were contrary to his, would you hear from him about those positions? You apparently had a friendly relationship, but did he let you know that he was displeased or did he in any way try to pressure you or try to change your mind?
Well, he just expressed great dismay, if not anger, over our position. He said that he didn't know what we were trying to do and of course, he was upset by the letters that we ran. We didn't run all of them, didn't run the worst ones, only those that were signed and were fairly polite in their language. I told him that, I said, "Senator, you ought to see the ones that we didn't run."
At what period was this?
In the '30s, about '35, or '36, along in there when he was voting against all kinds of welfare measures for the unemployed and social security measures and all of that.
And you were attacking his votes, as well?
Yes.
Would he call or would he write, or would you hear indirectly?
Well, the main time that there was really a big confrontation, I was not
there. Colonel Slover, the publisher of the Norfolk paper and a major
stockholder in the Times-Dispatch, got hold of Mark
Ethridge, who was the Times-Dispatch publisher at that
time, and told Mark that he wanted him to meet him and Senator Byrd to
discuss the paper's position. They had this meeting and Byrd, the minute
that he saw Ethridge, practically rushed at him and was mad and red in
the face. They had words, quite loud words, but it didn't end in any
change of policy. Ethridge didn't back down. Slover was very much on
Byrd's side and was much upset over the things being said by the Times-Dispatch, like supporting the Wagner Act and
supporting Harry Hopkins whom Byrd and Slover both thought was a lunatic
or nearly so.
Was this in private? Wasn't there a sort of public confrontation, too? There might have been a little pushing or shoving between Mark Ethridge and Senator Byrd?
It might have been in the lobby of the Jefferson Hotel. I believe that's
where it was. There was something in the Richmond
Mercury the other day to that effect. I wondered how in the world
they ever got ahold of that. They said the confrontation took place in
the lobby of the Jefferson Hotel. It was in an article about the
Jefferson.
Your recollection is of a private meeting, but a very heated one.
It might have started when they greeted each other in the Jefferson Hotel. I think that's probably it.
You were not at that meeting?
No, I wasn't invited. Slover wanted to see the publisher of the Times-Dispatch and to let him and Byrd, the three of
them, discuss what was going on.
Your boss was Mark Ethridge, the publisher at that time?
Yes.
He told you about this meeting.
Yes.
Did he attempt to get you to change your mind or lighten up a little bit?
No, he didn't.
Or did he say to give him more?
No, he just said that we were going to go on doing the way that we were, which we did.
We might now have a sort of an assessment of Byrd the man. I know that this is very hard to do, but he was a remarkable person. What made him that way?
I think that he was extremely able. I have already spoken of his
administrative ability, his organizational ability and did I say that
his secretary, who had also been a secretary to three or four other
governors, told me that Governor Byrd could do twice as much work in
any
Did he give you an explanation?
No, he never mentioned it. It didn't make any political sense, I didn't
think, for him to come out publicly with a thing like that and then do
the opposite when everybody could see that he hadn't told the facts. But
with the exception of that, I can't think of another time when he wasn't
perfectly square with me or with anybody else. He insisted on his
organization personnel being persons of good character. He would have a
lot to say as to who ran for top offices. He would screen
Is this a point for getting into the organization, or do you want to pursue the personal qualities of Byrd?
I just wanted to ask you if this was something that Harry Byrd brought to the organization, this idea of the selection of the very best people available?
Well, I think that Senator Martin was a similar type. It is really remarkable that two such bosses should have arisen who were such honest men.
Were they related? I've heard that.
No, they were not. That's stated in The Byrds of
Virginia, but it's not a fact.
Well, we might move now to the Byrd organization as such, which is one of the most remarkable political machines, certainly in American history. Its longevity is practically amazing. We might approach it by talking about some of the qualities and characteristics of the organization. It seems to me that we would begin by saying that we must remember that there was an organization before there was a Harry Byrd. Is that correct? Could you sort of comment on that and the antecedents of it?
Well, yes. Senator Martin, whom I just mentioned, was in a similar position of running the organization from about 1893 until 1919 when he died. He was elected to the United States Senate over Fitzhugh Lee, to the consternation of the "ins" and the powers that be and he was a terrific organizer just like Harry Byrd. He was a behind-the-scenes organizer. He seldom spoke in public. He knew all the angles and he got in with the aid of railroad money, not necessarily anything dishonest, but the railroad put up the money. He was a lawyer for the railroad, the C&O Railroad. He got in with their help. From that time on he was the man who you had to see to get ahead in Virginia politics. He was an organizer, as I say, he worked through the courthouse rings. Each county courthouse was a center of politics, the officeholders and then the state legislature. Those people made a skeleton organization throughout the whole state and Martin worked with them. He died in 1919. Swanson and Glass were both prominent in public life at that time but there is not any clear view as to who was running the show after Martin died.
Hal Flood was also, I guess . . .
He was in there, too. As congressman, he didn't have quite the clout that
the other two did and they were sort of a triumvirate until Harry Byrd
won that bond issue fight and got into the forefront of things. He then
took over. He organized things even better than Martin did and he
entered the picture in a sort of dramatic way, first winning that bond
issue fight and then winning the governorship. He was young, vigorous
and attractive.
You mentioned earlier that individuals in the organization were very high type people and that is one of the great strengths of it. It has been said that it is government by gentlemen and of course, it seems to me that this alliance or organization with a lot of deep traditions in Virginia, back to the colonial period in fact, was always a powerful thing. But would you comment a little further on the type of individual who was active in the Byrd organization? Is it possible to generalize about the professions or that sort of thing? Who were the Byrd organization men, other than that they were the "better sorts?"
Well, I think that there were more lawyers than anything else, lawyers from small towns all over the state.
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[START OF TAPE 5, SIDE B]
There were large-scale farmers, members of the Farm Bureau Federation, for example, that type of individual who was not necessarily wealthy, but in comfortable circumstances. Every now and then somebody would get in who was anti-organization and would make a big play on representing the lower orders or the small farmers or the little people in the towns; they would get in, but they were always in the minority.
Could you name some of those over the period? I assume that you are talking about Henry Howell currently, and going back. Can you think of anybody right offhand?
I would say that Moss Plunkett, a Roanoke lawyer who ran for governor against Bill Tuck was one. Francis Miller, a really high type individual and not a demagogue, but a man who appealed to the less affluent members of society and felt that they were not getting a fair deal under the Byrd "better sort" doctrine, as you say. He appealed to all those people who fought the organization and were trying to get rid of the poll tax, which was one of the things that kept the organization in power.
I would like to move to the restricted electorate, but before I do that,
is it true that you don't find in the Byrd organization a kind of mass
leader that emerged in a lot of other southern states? T. Harry Williams
called Huey Long a "mass leader". There is a sort of
I know two orators of that type, who were not rabble-rousers. They were
orators of the old school with much flamboyant phraseology and
gesticulations. One is Willis Robertson and one is Lindsay Almond. They
would have been topflight politicians in 1895, they were speakers in
that tradition. Charles McDowell said in an article about Lindsay
Almond, "He was an orator in the style of Orange Courthouse about the
year 1910."
This wouldn't be your typical Byrd organization man, though, would he?
No, I don't think so. I think most of them are more restrained and dignified and less flamboyant.
You mentioned the poll tax and that does get us into the fact that the organization did operate in the context of a restrictive electorate and not a lot of people voted and the poll tax, I'm sure, is a factor. Could you comment on that a little further?
Well, from the time of the 1901-02 constitutional convention, the poll
tax was in effect. You had to pay three years in a row and six months
before the election in which you wanted to take part. It immediately
eliminated most of the black vote. It also eliminated a great many white
voters. Many white voters in time came to make arrangements with the
county treasurers, particularly in the
There were other devices too, I believe, in the 1902 constitution for restricting the franchise. Did Byrd ever acknowledge any awareness of the fact that this small electorate was a factor in his success?
No, I don't think he did so in so many words. It was just implicit in all of his actions and utterances that he didn't believe that the great mass of the people knew enough about affairs to vote the right way, that is, his way. He was afraid that if he let these hundreds of thousands of people vote, they would immediately start raiding the treasury and asking for handouts and all kinds of things that he opposed.
Wasn't this the publicly expressed view of Senator Martin and sort of a model of success for Byrd when he was growing up and Senator Martin was the leader of the organization? Didn't Martin express something along this line during the . . .
I believe that Glass, too, was a member of the convention and was . . .
Senator Glass very vigorously. I don't remember any specific quote from
Martin, but I don't doubt that he felt that way. Martin was bitter
against Woodrow Wilson because he moved in on the
I am struck in looking at the organization by the variety of ways in which politics and government seem to merge, and what it means is that the organization can influence offices from the lowest level all the way through. It seems to me that there were several ways that was done, and I would like to sort of explore some of those. One might be the State Compensation Board. Could you comment on what that was? I think it was considered a reform but it still gave some leverage to the organization.
Well, that was supposed to be a good way to control the salaries of the
local officials all over the state. It was a board of three officials
appointed by the governor. That was in theory, I suppose a good way to
do this, and actually, it was subject to all kinds of abuses if you got
the wrong people in control of that board. As a matter of fact, many
efforts were made to discover abuses and as far as I know, practically
nothing was ever discovered, but it was a "gun behind the door" with
three Byrd organization men on that board who could use it, if they
wanted to, against somebody who got out of line when the chips were down
on some issue. If a county officer didn't vote for the Byrd candidate
for something and he was up for a salary increase, this board had a
perfectly good way of just denying him the increase and pretending that
it was for some other reason. I know that Jack Kilpatrick made a
And Mr. Combs for a long time was the chairman?
Yes.
And simultaneously, he was the clerk of the senate, I believe, and secretary of the Democratic caucus. Would you comment on that sort of relationship or connection?
The comment is fairly obvious. He was on the inside of everything, which was exactly where Byrd wanted him to be and you had to see Combs about many things in state poltics rather than Byrd. People could say, "This is the Byrd organization and everything is fine because Harry Byrd is in control." But he didn't want to be thought of as running any of the details, so Combs was just the man to carry the ball.
What type of man would you call Combs? Would you say that he was a typical machine man, one that you described as an absolutely clean, honest person?
Yes. As I said awhile ago, he was from southwest Virginia and he no doubt
had been involved in skulduggery out there up to his neck with poll tax
payments against the law and phony mail ballots; that was just routine,
in the southwest. He was clerk of Russell County and Byrd brought him
here as, I think first, state treasurer and then he went on from there
to various other things. He was suave, polite,
To your knowledge, did he keep records like General Marshall, who supposedly had a black book and all through this period supposedly marked down names of people whom, if he ever got the chance, he was going to help . . . was there a lot of bookkeeping involved here or was it just sort of a knowledge of people?
If there was bookkeeping, I don't know about it.
What about the circuit judge in the Virginia system and how important was and is he?
Quite a cog in that whole county ring, of course. He was the top man in the county, he appointed a lot of the officeholders and still does in most counties . . . a lot of county officials and boards and things of that sort and was elected by the General Assembly, except in an interim situation when the governor appointed him subject to confirmation when the legislature next met. So, it was all kind of a wheel within a wheel with the county officeholders and the judge and the General Assembly and the governor all working together.
And the speaker of the house, as I understand it, had unusual powers as compared to speakers in other states.
He appoints all the House committees. As you can see, it is a tremendous power.
Was this county manager form of government a solution to some of this county politics?
A very great solution to a lot of it, but it is hard to get it adopted for that reason. It eliminates a lot of these county officeholders who do very little except sit around and play politics and draw their salaries and shake hands with the voters. It is the most inefficient, outmoded, indefensible system. Time and again there have been reports by students of government saying that we could get along much better with thirty counties than we have now, about ninety-six, and it would be more efficient and more economical. But in order to do it, you have got to get the people of the county to vote these county officeholders out.
One of the citations that you received that we talked about yesterday, I believe, was for your arguments in favor of the county manager form government in Henrico County. Can we presume from this that you were not only arguing for county manager governments but also against this collection of power in the county seats?
Oh yes, I think that every student of government who has said anything has said that the old system is incredibly inefficient.
But from the organization's standpoint, I guess that it was a foundation of power.
It was a godsend; that's why it is so hard to get rid of it.
Another characteristic of the organization, as I understand it, and one that I find rather unusual, would be flexibility. Apparently a lot of maneuvering went on and Byrd was prepared to accept as second choice somebody that he couldn't beat rather than split the organization. Is that a correct assessment? Could you give some examples, maybe?
Jim Price is the best example. Price was a Richmond member of the legislature and lieutenant governor who had never been an organization man. He was immensely popular, not only with the legislature but with the public. He was the leading Mason in the state and head of the Shrine and various things like that. He was very likable, attractive, a handsome man, so that he had a tremendous personal following. He announced that he was going to run for governor without consulting Byrd, which, of course, was the highest crime that you could commit. Well, Byrd didn't like that, and he decided that he was going to try to get somebody else to run against Price. He sent up a few trial balloons, all of which burst immediately. They didn't get off the ground. So finally, there was the most ludicrous sort of sudden leap onto the Price bandwagon by half a dozen key people in the Byrd organization. Not Byrd, of course, he had nothing to do with any of this; he would have you believe that he never had anything to do with state politics. Almost all of his chief lieutenants, right at Christmastime, announced that they had concluded that Lieutenant Governor Price was the man to be governor, and they endorsed him heartily. Price went in like a breeze. Then, when they got him in there, they just cut his throat from ear to ear. He couldn't get anything through the legislature. After he went out, Colgate Darden adopted a large part of his program and the machine put it through.
The machine was not too happy while Price was in office.
He even removed Combs, I believe, didn't he?
Yes, he went just far enough to infuriate the machine by removing Combs and two or three other people, but he didn't clean house. He might have built an organization of his own, but he was too kind and nice and gentle a person to really get rough. So, he booted out Combs and two or three other people and stopped there, with the result that he was just murdered in the General Assembly.
We talked about Byrd's philosophy in several instances and that is part of the success of the organization, the fact that it was an association of like thinking individuals. Is there anything that we need to add to what we have said about Byrd's philosophy? He obviously believed in economy and efficiency and the like.
How about something on the machine's philosophy on race? What would you estimate to be, if there is such a thing as the machine's policy towards race?
I don't think there was anything but the status quo for the first half of this century. The issue of race was very little to the fore; the poll tax eliminated most blacks from voting. Hardly anybody was urging that much be done about this. Until 1954, the issue practically didn't arise. The machine was just accepting the status quo. Such black votes as there were went almost solidly to the Republicans. When Roosevelt came in, they voted Democratic on the presidential level, but they didn't vote that way on the state level.
Geographically, where was the strength of the organization?
More than anywhere else, it was in the southside, which had more blacks in it, of course, but they didn't vote. It was just solidly pro-machine all over the southside and later, when the race issue really became acute, that was the stronghold of "massive resistance."
You've mentioned earlier some candidates who opposed organization candidates. You mentioned Plunkett, for example, and Miller. Would you like to comment a little further on any of the attempts to unseat an organization candidate, from the standpoints of the types of candidates, or effective from the standpoint of platform of anti-organization candidates? You can take Miller as an example if you want to, in '49, or Plunkett in '45. Or anybody else.
I think they were generally complaining about the poll tax, mail ballot frauds, the small electorate and the way in which the organization kept control of everything through the small electorate. The lock that the organization had on all the top positions in the state government and most of the legislative seats, the judgeships. They just thought that it was a tightly controlled setup and they were on the outside looking in and the great mass of Virginians were not taking part in the political process in any significant way.
Were you sympathetic with any of the complaints or charges or frustrations?
I was for quite awhile, yes. Later on, when they didn't have any candidates that seemed to be as good as the organization candidates, I was not.
What did you do in 1949?
Miller, Edwards, and Battle were running.
I supported Battle, who was less conservative than Byrd, but not as liberal as Miller. He was a very high type person, able, and an honest man.
Do you regard Miller as the most able of the anti-organization candidates through the years?
Yes, definitely and the best trained, the best educated.
And he had been in the General Assembly, I believe, hadn't he?
Yes, he had been in the General Assembly, he had been a Rhodes Scholar, he had been in Washington.
We might now have an evaluation of the organization, unless there is anything else that you want to add to the structure of it and how it worked.
No, I think that about covers it.
Well, I wonder then if you will give us an assessment of the positive aspects of it and then the negative aspects and then perhaps, the lasting impact of it.
Well, on the positive side, I think that the honesty of the operation was
the best thing that you could say. They did have people in positions of
authority who were not putting their hands in the till. It really is
astonishing to me that as long as I have been around here in Richmond,
over fifty years, there has been almost no dishonesty in the state
government. One man who was clerk of the Virginia Supreme Court of
Appeals embezzled and went to jail. He is the only state official in all
that time who has been convicted on any such charge, and it has been
extremely rare
Well, the positive aspects of it and then the negative.
Obviously, this operation was a tightly controlled one, and a lot of
people who could have made a contribution and could have served
advantageously in public positions, in the state government or
legislature, were frozen out. They might have done a better job than
those who were in. It was a minority operation, with an astoundingly
small vote in statewide elections during that whole period. Governors
would be elected by something like eleven or twelve percent of the
electors, or even fewer. That just isn't good. The level of government,
within limits, was good. Not enough money was spent on schools or
welfare, but the money
Do you want to assess the impact of the organization today, in 1975, say in the structure of government? Are there still structural remnants of the organization, in the General Assembly, for example?
Well, there is quite a lot, the short ballot is still with us and I think
that it ought to be. As I understand it, that is regarded as the
preferred governmental structure, with the governor held responsible.
How about philosophically? There is still a sort of conservative feeling that government should be run on an economical basis and that state services are sort of secondary considerations. Do you think that that has changed?
I think it must have changed a good deal because the services are so much
more adequate. Everybody has acquiesced in that; as soon as the
constitution was amended, the referendum on the issuance of bonds was
held and they were voted by the people. Mills Godwin and Linwood Holton
both aided in the campaign. So, I think that the climate of opinion
in
Do you think that it is the climate of opinion or the larger electorate?
It is a combination of both. The electorate has certainly had a big impact.
We might use that as sort of the final category and that is, what undermined the power organization after its joyous heyday.
Would you say that there is an organization now in Virginia and what undermining is there now?
Well, I can think of two or three things. The Supreme Court's "one man, one vote" ruling, civil rights legislation, the federal law abolishing the poll tax, all that just knocked the props from under the machine. As far as the electorate goes, they can't control it anymore.
You have a more urban electorate, too, haven't you, with different needs?
The urban areas are growing much more rapidly, people are moving into the urban centers, whereas in past years, the county courthouses controlled the situation. Now, it is about a fifty-fifty balance and becoming more and more urban.
Is there any blame for this demise on Harry Byrd Jr.? Do you think that his father could have kept the machine, or part of the machine, in operation when he could not have?
I don't think Harry Byrd Jr. is interested in controlling the state
situation at all. Apparently, all he wants to do is be a senator. He is
not trying to run things in
END OF INTERVIEW