Byrd machine

It was never able to gain a significant foothold in the growing urban areas of Virginia's many independent cities, which are not located within counties, nor with the emerging suburban middle-class of Virginians after World War II.

Readjusters aspired "to break the power of wealth and established privilege" of the planter class elites who had controlled Virginia politics since the colonial era and to promote public education.

The Readjuster Party's power was overturned in the late 1880s, when John S. Barbour Jr. (1820–1892) led the first Conservative Democrat political machine in Virginia, known as the Martin organization, aided by a poll tax enacted in 1902 that effectively disenfranchised blacks and poor whites.

[citation needed] Over forty years, Byrd built up relationships with the courthouse cliques, consisting of the constitutional officers in every county.

[4] Perhaps contrary to first appearances, the low public profile "clerk of the court" position held the greatest power in most counties within the Byrd organization.

This not only effectively stripped blacks and poor whites of the vote, but made the electorate the smallest relative to population in the postbellum United States.

[7] The courthouse cliques of the Byrd machine strove to ensure that "reliable" voters' poll taxes were paid on time, often as early as three years before an election.

While the organization never was able to establish a foothold in urban areas, blatant and deliberate malapportionment in favor of rural Southside Virginia and against the strongly Republican southwestern mountains, Democratic western coalfields, as well as the cities ensured statewide dominance.

However, Byrd's fiscal policy was principled conservatism, restructuring state government to streamline operations and use tax dollars more effectively.

He recognized that his rural constituency where most students left school after eighth grade to go to work on the family farm were less interested in state-supplied services like public education than in lower taxes.

[9] Rural areas were heavily over-represented in the General Assembly, ensuring that Virginia's per capita expenditures on education and social welfare remained among the lowest in the nation for decades.

The courthouse cliques' measures to restrict the number of voters made it possible for Byrd-supported candidates to win with as little as fifteen percent of the potential electorate actually being able to vote.

Many Virginia Democrats began drifting away from the national party due to Franklin D. Roosevelt's support for organized labor during the New Deal.

This only accelerated during the Civil Rights Movement, when Byrd drafted the Southern Manifesto in opposition to the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

Byrd came to lead the "conservative coalition" in the United States Senate, and opposed President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, largely blocking most liberal legislation after 1937.

Some Byrd Democrats, such as Governors John S. Battle and Thomas B. Stanley, were sober enough to realize that racial integration was inevitable, and were willing to take cautious steps toward rolling back Jim Crow laws.

However, their efforts were short-circuited in 1954, when a little over a month after the Brown v. Board of Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, Byrd vowed to block any attempts to integrate Virginia's public schools.

Byrd, on the other hand, issued a statement saying Virginia faced "a crisis of the first magnitude" and calling the decision by the Warren Court the "most serious blow" ever to states' rights.

In response, Stanley's successor as governor, J. Lindsay Almond Jr., drafted several laws that implemented an extremely gradual desegregation process, popularly known as "passive resistance."

In one of the first major cracks in the Byrd organization, a Republican won the special election to succeed Harry Jr.; that district and its successors have been in GOP hands since.

A series of Supreme Court rulings imposing one man, one vote on state legislatures eliminated the rural advantages that served as the core of the Byrd organization's power.

The Byrd organization finally broke down in 1969, when a split in the Democratic Party allowed A. Linwood Holton Jr. to become the state's first Republican governor since Reconstruction.

(Godwin had earlier served a term as governor, 1966-1970 as a Democrat, the last of the Byrd organization members to hold the state's top office.)

The Byrd organization's response to federal desegregation orders in the 1950s has shaped the contours of the state's social, economic and political landscape into the 21st century.