People From West Virginia

"Senator Harry F. Byrd incarnates the cavalier-First-Family-of-Virginia tradition, except in one important particular. The Byrd family has a heredity like that of a Middle Europe princeling; indeed, for some generations, the ancestral estate at Westover resembled nothing so much as, say, an estate like that of the Potockis' outside Warsaw. Byrd's initial ancestor, William Byrd I, arrived in Virginia in 1674, and he and his son, William Byrd II, were powerful in pre-Revolutionary characters. But early in the nineteenth century the family began to disintegrate. The present Byrd, lacking nothing in aristocratic heritage, did lack something that usually attends an aristocratic heritage- money. The family, grown poor, had scattered; Byrd's father was Texas born, and he himself was born in West Virginia. Yet always the Byrds were tightly enmeshed in the old tradition. At the age of fifteen, young Byrd took over a newspaper in Winchester, Virginia, that for a long time had been unable to make ends meet and put it on its feet. He never had opportunity to go to high school or college. Byrd made the newspaper a successful property, and branched out in other fields; he is a very wealthy man today, and his Shenandoah Valley home, Rosemont, near Berryville, is a Virginia showplace. His fortune derives mostly out of apples. Virginia as a whole is the fourth apple-growing state in the union, and Byrd himself, with 200,000 trees and a million bushel a year crop, is believed to control about 1 percent of all American production. The outline of Byrd's career, especially in its motivations, is strikingly like that of his friend in the Senate, Arthur Vandenberg. Vandenberg also struggled for a living as a young man, as we know, and a consequent impulse toward security has dominated his behavior ever since. In Byrd's life story we may similarly find a characteristic that distinguishes him above anything else- his extreme obsessive hatred of debt, his dogged fixation on economy. He had to struggle for bitter years to get a family property out of debt. Both the United States Senate and the commonwealth of Virginia have seen the results of this transmuted into other spheres."

"Finally, on January 16, 1928, Byrd asked the Virginia General Assembly to declare lynching “a specific State offense” that would allow the state attorney general to prosecute lynchings in addition to local authorities; to force counties or cities in which a lynching occurred to pay $2,500 to the lawful heirs of the person lynched; and to authorize the governor to spend whatever money considered necessary and appropriate to bring to justice members of a mob. Carefully guarding himself against charges of violating local authority, Byrd added that “it should be made clear that declaring lynching as a specific State offense does not take away the constitutional rights of accused citizens for trial in localities where the crime was committed.” The governor’s caveat limited the likelihood that white Virginians would be convicted of lynching; friends and neighbors rarely recognized guilt in such cases. On February 3, state senators James Barron of Norfolk and Cecil Connor of Leesburg introduced an antilynching measure. Two weeks later, the state senate passed the bill by a vote of 32 to 0 with eight abstentions. Although grateful that the Senate had taken a step toward “outlawing this crowning infamy of the century,” the Richmond Planet, a black newspaper, lamented that the legislature had “extracted the teeth” from Byrd’s original proposal by removing the monetary penalty provision. On March 1, the House of Delegates concurred with the Senate’s version by a margin of 74 to 5; a noticeable twenty-one delegates abstained. On March 14, 1928, Byrd signed into law the nation’s strictest antilynching measure and the first that directly termed lynching a state crime. No white person was ever convicted under the statute for committing crimes against an African American. Instead, Virginia’s landmark antilynching law was used only to punish whites for crimes against other whites."

"Byrd interested himself in politics early, and he became a state senator and then in 1926 governor of Virginia. He is an able man (in industriousness and abstract competence he resembles Taft of Ohio) and his record as governor was in several aspects notable. He fought the gasoline and telephone companies, to drive rates down and thus save the public money; he put through an admirable antilynching bill, the first such bill in the South, making any member of a lynch mob subject to state authority and indictment on a charge of murder. As a result Virginia has not had a lynching for twenty years. Roosevelt liked Byrd at this time and wanted him in the federal Senate; as a result, when Claude A. Swanson was elevated to FDR's cabinet in 1933, Byrd got his Senate seat. He has been a senator ever since. He began to break with Roosevelt when the New Deal got underway, and within a few years had become the most important and powerful of all his enemies among Senate Democrats. For session after session he intransigently bored away at Roosevelt budgets, Roosevelt appropriations, Roosevelt administrative agencies. Yet, a gentleman, he never attacked FDR blatantly. His good manners made him the more dangerous an antagonist. He could not be dismissed as a demagogue or spiteful partisan. At the 1944 Democratic convention, he got eighty-nine votes for the presidential nomination; he was- and still is- the obvious candidate and hero of the Bourbon South that is Democrat in name only. He voted against the party's leadership on 61 percent of all roll calls in sixteen months in 1945-6."

"I favor a strong military but, if wartime spending is to be made a part of our budget in peacetime, and continued for many years, our system simply will not stand it."

"The Byrd machine is a highly efficient organization; it runs the Commonwealth as effectively as Pendergast ever ran Kansas City or Kelly-Nash Chicago, though with much less noise. In fact, from the point of view of its adhesive power in every Democratic county, its control over practically every office, no matter how minor, it is quite possibly the single most powerful machine surviving in the whole United States. Virginia, I heard it said, is the only "aviary" in the country; it is a cage the netting of which, though almost invisible to outsiders, is extremely close spun; the commonwealth is, so a friend in North Carolina told me- the remark is somewhat bitter- not only the cradle of American democracy, but its "grave." Byrd has never forgtten his Virginia interests. He pays as intimate and inflexible attention to state affairs as to federal. The machine works something like this. Its major instruments are, as always, jobs and patronage, plus the Virginia poll tax. First, through the Democratic National Committee, Byrd controls federal patronage. Next, he pretty well decides the choice not merely of governor, who in Virginia today cannot be other than a Byrd man, in turn controls the appointment of some thousands of state employees, and circuit court judges are chosen- for substantial eight-year terms- by the legislature; these in turn appoint the school trustees, county electoral boards, and trial justices. In each county there is a fixed ring of six or seven machine men. Some county officers like sheriff and tax assessor are elected but their salaries and expense allotments are, within limits, established by the State Compensation Board, also appointed by the governor under Byrd's control. The pattern makes a full interlocking circle. Nothing could be neater or more complete."

"In 1958, Charlottesville and Norfolk schools as well as those in Prince Edward and Warren Counties closed by order of the governor. Thousands of schoolchildren went without education for half a decade so Virginia could, once again, maintain its racial code. The general assembly also created a voucher system using public funds to allow white parents to send their children to private schools. The federal courts ruled the closures and the vouchers unconstitutional, but Harry Byrd would not give up. He tried to persuade Governor Almond to call out the National Guard. One unverified account of the meeting suggests Byrd ordered Almond to shoot children if necessary. Almond allegedly replied, "I'll do it, Harry, if you put it in writing." White supremacists rarely give up their power without a fight. Almond finally relented, and token integration began peacefully in February 1959."

"At the dedication of the Shenandoah National Park [July 3, 1936], President Roosevelt, [Secretary of the Interior] Harold L. Ickes, and I were riding together from Panorama to Big Meadows. I suggested to Mr. Roosevelt that it would be a fine idea to connect the two parks, Shenandoah National Park and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, by extending the Skyline Drive. He quickly agreed that it was an excellent idea but stated that we must begin up in New England. The President then said to me, "You and Ickes get together for the right-of-way." The New England governors were contacted but were not interested. In the meanwhile I was made chairman of the right-of-way commission. And that is how it got started."

"Byrd entered the Senate at a time when his America of farms and small towns, formerly insulated from the shocks of world affairs and modernization, was dying. Rather than adjust to the revolutionary changes that occurred over the course of his lifetime, he chose to contest their inroads, becoming a cipher whose predictable negativism and welfare legislation revealed a parochialism that bordered on meanness and miserliness. Driven by a desire to preserve the old order, Byrd spent over thirty years fighting ever-increasing federal bureaucracies and budgets, protecting states' rights from intrusions by Washington, and defending racial segregation. Focusing attention on waste in government and pressing for reductions in federal spending, he won some minor skirmishes, but he lost most of the battles. His political philosophy of unregulated individualism and limited government was no longer appropriate for the modern world. Much of his personal value system remained sound- hard work, thrift, initiative, and responsibility- but the demands of the highly technological, mass consumer, global society called for modifications to this individualistic ethic through community planning, resource management, public assistance for the dependent, aid to education, and international commitments. Without a political opposition that might have forced him to reevaluate his position, Byrd could not overcome the limitations of his upbringing and his experience. He remained caught in the time warp of the early twentieth century when the nation was still closely tied to the libertarian principles of the old yeomanry."

"When the Supreme Court issued its decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, it overturned one aspect of the carefully constructed system of the racial police state in the South. Virginia did not accept the Supreme Court's decision. Initially, the Virginia governor Lindsay Almond counseled moderation, but the U.S. senator Harry Byrd, who controlled Virginia politics with an iron fist, reacted with fury when he heard Almond would acquiesce to the highest court in the land. "The top blew off the U.S. Capitol," Almond recalled. Byrd announced the state's strategy in 1956: "If we can organize the Southern states for massive resistance order... the rest of the country will realize that racial integration is not going to be accepted in the South." Almond was soon on board, declaring, "We will oppose with every facility at our command, and with every ounce of our energy, the attempt being made to mix the white and Negro races in our classrooms." Virginia followed that pronouncement with laws to back up its position, ordering schools to shutter rather than integrate."

"Before developing a plan to issue bonds to pay for the Interstate System, General Lucius D. Clay might have been better off if he had taken a close look at a key Member of Congress, Senator Harry Flood Byrd of Virginia. If General Clay had done so, the financing mechanism of the Administration's plan probably would have been different. In the 1954 congressional elections, the Republicans lost control of the Senate. Senator Byrd was the new Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which would be responsible for the revenue portion of any legislation emerging from the Senate authorizing the proposed program. As the White House might have predicted, Byrd could be counted on to oppose the Clay Committee's financial proposal. A lifelong highway booster, Senator Byrd was also a lifelong pay-as-you-go man with a nearly pathological hatred of debt, whether personal or public."

"There are those who end life feeling the future will nourish their cause. There are those also whose causes pass with themselves. Harry Byrd's cause belonged to the latter category. In the nation a more positive role for federal government was fast becoming an American political axiom; likewise, Harry Byrd's Virginia would soon seem but yesteryear's quaint and curious memento. But Byrd's personal cause- his honesty, courtesy, in short, his humanity- was not tied to time. The greatest men have often urged dated or debatable specifics. George Washington urged against foreign alliances; Thomas Jefferson dreamed of an agrarian utopia; Woodrow Wilson warred against bigness in American life; Robert E. Lee struggled valiantly for a divided nation. History values men as much for what they are for as for what they espouse. Let not its view of balanced budgets determine its judgment of Harry Byrd."

"Senator Byrd's final year in Congress would be 1965. His final battle was against the Voting Rights Bill of 1965. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., had dramatized the issue by leading a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to protest exclusion of blacks from voting. President Johnson used the momentum to seek immediate passage of a bill that would require Federal intervention in States that used poll taxes, literacy tests, and other means to exclude black voters. Byrd considered the bill "vicious" and "iniquitous in effect and contemptible in design." In August, over his protests, the bill was enacted."

"A talented man, Byrd chose to stand outside the broad currents of his time and to set his face against the future... He began as a force and ended as an anachronism."

"Harry Byrd and his organizations were rich and valuable parts of any southern uniqueness of history and humanity. Byrd was born of the somber side of southern history. His organization, notwithstanding its faults, was truly coined from the mint of its time. If it was parsimonious, it emerged from a period when Virginia had little of which to give. If it feared deficits, it remembered the state's staggering Reconstruction debts. If it was oligarchic, it was so by reason of long inheritance. If it was regionally oriented, it bore still the scarred tissue of the Civil War. If it was rurally flavored, it respected the power of the farmer's franchise and the state's agrarian heritage. If it was slow- too slow- to change, Virginia had long been changeless."

"Harry Flood Byrd (1887-1966) was the most powerful political leader in twentieth- century Virginia. He served as governor from 1926 to 1930 and as a United States senator from 1933 to 1965. Byrd's political organization and pay-as-you-go philosophy kept taxes and public spending low in order to make Virginia attractive to business and industrial investors, but as a consequence road construction and support for public education and public health programs remained below national standards. For three decades Byrd's political allies dominated politics in the state. The Byrd organization collapsed following his death and the disastrous attempt by means of Massive Resistance to obstruct federal court orders in the 1950s and 1960s to desegregate the state's public schools."

"Sometimes in our lives we all have pain We all have sorrow But if we are wise We know that there's always tomorrow."

"Lean on me, when you're not strong And I'll be your friend I'll help you carry on For it won't be long 'Til I'm gonna need Somebody to lean on."

"I grew up in the age of Barbra Streisand, Aretha Franklin, Nancy Wilson … It was a time where a fat, ugly broad that could sing had value. Now everything is about image. It’s not poetry. This just isn’t my time."

"Ain't no sunshine when she's gone It's not warm when she's away Ain't no sunshine when she's gone And she's always gone too long Anytime she's goes away"

"And I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know Hey I oughta leave the young thing alone But ain't no sunshine when she's gone."

"What few songs I wrote during my brief career, there ain’t a genre that somebody didn’t record them in. I’m not a virtuoso, but I was able to write songs that people could identify with. I don’t think I’ve done bad for a guy from Slab Fork, West Virginia."

"My first goal was, I didn’t want to be a cook or a steward … So I went to aircraft-mechanic school. I still had to prove to people that thought I was genetically inferior that I wasn’t too stupid to drain the oil out of an airplane."

"By this point in HIS first term President Obama already had a Nobel Prize. All President Trump has is a train station in a foreign country--not even a big country. Just a little one. Barely the size of Connecticut. Sad."

"[T]his is truly a great country. When true to ourselves we are unmatched. In the words of Irving Berlin, God bless America!"

"[T]ruth is the ground and condition of freedom. Unless it is true that human beings deserve to have fundamental liberties respected and protected, the tyrant does no wrong in violating them. Relativism, skepticism, and subjectivism about truth provide no secure basis for freedom. We should honor civil liberties because the norms enjoining us to respect and protect them are valid, sound, in a word, true."

"As human beings, we are rational animals, but we are imperfectly rational. We are prone to making intellectual and moral mistakes and capable of behaving grossly unreasonably—especially when deflected by powerful emotions that run contrary to the demands of reasonableness."

"Both views have had their glory moments, and both have had their moments of shame. Whether we’re conservatives or whether we’re liberals, it should remind us that we are human beings who are fallible."

"I'm increasingly convinced that the principal moral errors of contemporary western societies, especially among elites, are rooted in the triumph of Hobbes' view of human beings as basically machines for having experiences. It's the anthropology underwriting the Age of Feeling."

"The true liberal-arts ideal rejects the reduction of reason to the status of passion's ingenious servant. It is an ideal rooted in the conviction that there are human goods, and a common good, in light of which we have reasons to constrain, to limit, to regulate, and even to alter our desires."

"Personal authenticity, in the classical understanding of liberal-arts education, consists in self-mastery—in placing reason in control of desire. According to the classic liberal-arts ideal, learning promises liberation, but it is not liberation from demanding moral ideals and social norms, or liberation to act on our desires—it is, rather, liberation from slavery to those desires, from slavery to self."

"My own immigrant grandfathers came to the United States a little over a hundred years ago. Like most immigrants then and now, they were not drawn here by any abstract belief in the superiority of the American political system. My father's father came from Syria, fleeing oppression visited upon him and his family as members of a relatively small ethnic and religious minority group in that troubled country. My mother’s father came to escape the poverty of southern Italy. They both worked on the railroads and in the mines. ... Although both my grandfathers encountered ethnic prejudice, they viewed this as an aberration—a failure of some Americans to live up to the nation's ideals. It did not dawn on them to blame the bad behavior of some Americans on America itself. On the contrary, America in their eyes was a land of unsurpassed blessing. It was a nation of which they were proud and happy to become citizens. And even before they became citizens they had become patriots—men who deeply appreciated what America is and what she stands for."

"Our task should be to understand the moral truth and speak it in season and out of season. We will be told by the pure pragmatists that the public is too far gone in moral relativism or even moral delinquency to be reached by moral argument. But we must have faith that truth is luminously powerful, so that if we bear witness to the truth about, say, marriage and the sanctity of human life—lovingly, civilly, but also passionately and with determination—and if we honor the truth in advancing our positions, then even many of our fellow citizens who now find themselves on the other side of these issues will come around."

"I want immigrants to become Americans. I want them to believe in American ideals and institutions. ... I want them to believe, as I believe, in the dignity of the human being, in all stages and conditions of life, and in limited government, republican democracy, equality of opportunity, morally ordered liberty, private property, economic freedom, and the rule of law. I want them to believe in these ideals and principles not because they are ours but because they are noble and good and true. They honor the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of all members of the human family. They call forth from us the best that we are capable of. They ennoble us. Our efforts to live up to them, despite our failures and imperfections, have made us a great people, a force for freedom and justice in the world, and, of course, an astonishingly prosperous nation. It is little wonder that America is, as it always has been, a magnet for people from every land who seek a better life."

"People of faith--all faiths--need to understand that everyone, including the unbeliever, has a basic human right to religious freedom."

"When my liberal colleagues in higher education say, "You guys shouldn't be worried so much about these social issues, about abortion and marriage; you should be worrying about poverty," I say, "If you were genuinely worried about poverty, you would be joining us in rebuilding the marriage culture." Do you want to know why people are trapped in poverty in so many inner cities? The picture is complex, but undeniably a key element of it is the destruction of the family and the prevalence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies and fatherlessness."

"People who are aware that they are making contestable assumptions are much more likely to recognize that reasonable people of goodwill can, in fact, disagree—even about matters of profound human and moral significance."

"Republicans who are pleased by my calling out Dems on religious freedom should remember that religious freedom must be honored for everyone--including Muslims. Though some Repubs have been good on this, others (inc the President) have not been. There must be one standard for all."

"Limited government—considered as an ideal as vital to business as to the family—cannot be maintained where the marriage culture collapses and families fail to form or easily dissolve. Where these things happen, the health, education, and welfare functions of the family will have to be undertaken by someone, or some institution, and that will sooner or later be the government. To deal with pressing social problems, bureaucracies will grow, and with them the tax burden. Moreover, the growth of crime and other pathologies where family breakdown is rampant will result in the need for more extensive policing and incarceration and, again, increased taxes to pay for these government services. If we want limited government, as we should, and a level of taxation that is not unduly burdensome, we need healthy institutions of civil society, beginning with a flourishing marriage culture that supports family formation and preservation."

"Of course one could claim that the human embryo or fetus is not (yet) a human being, but that's just science-denial. Or one could claim that human beings in early developmental stages don't have dignity but that is a denial that dignity is inherent and that all humans are equal."

"(and more broadly in Europe) is no trivial matter: A 2013 study showed that 51 percent of anti-Semitic incidents in Sweden were attributed to Muslim extremists. 5 percent to right-wing extremists; 25 percent to left-wing extremists."

"I myself am not a Trump supporter, nor was I supporter of Obama or Clinton. But I had and have friends who supported all of them and who deeply disagree with me on profound moral questions. It wouldn't occur to me to banish them from my life. Argue? Yes. Banish? No."

"One needn't be a Christian to be pro-life. Many pro-life people aren't. But a fundamental tenet of Christian faith is the profound, inherent & equal dignity and right to life of every member of the human family. That, in the end, simply cannot be squared with the pro-choice view."

"It is the attitudes, habits, dispositions, imagination, ideology, values, and choices shaped by a culture in which pornography flourishes that will, in the end, deprive many children of what can without logical or moral strain be characterized as their right to a healthy sexuality. In a society in which sex is depersonalized, and thus degraded, even conscientious parents will have enormous difficulty transmitting to their children the capacity to view themselves and others as persons rather than objects of sexual desire and satisfaction."

"Art can elevate and ennoble. It can also degrade and even corrupt. Whatever should be done or not done by way of legal restriction of pornographic art, we ought not to make things easy on ourselves by pretending that art cannot be pornographic or that pornographic art cannot degrade. Nor ought we to avert our gaze from the peculiar insult and injustice involved in the government funding of pornography."

"My God! People! People!!! Do you not see where this goes??? Do the Dutch, who suffered under--and in many cases heroically resisted--Hitler's domination, forget that the "final solution" began with the dehumanization and eugenic killing of the handicapped?"

"[T]rue human rights champion whose compassion for victims of oppression and wisdom about international religious freedom shine through all we have accomplished."

"I wish we conservatives could clone Mona Charen so that we could keep one for ourselves and give the other to the liberal movement which is equally badly in need of a truth-teller to call out the hypocrites and snollygosters."

"Conscience as "self-will" is a matter of feeling or emotion, not reason. It is concerned not so much with identifying what one has a duty to do or not do, one's feelings and desires to the contrary notwithstanding, but rather with sorting out one's feelings. Conscience as self-will identifies permissions, not obligations. It licenses behavior by establishing that one doesn't feel bad about doing it—or at least one doesn't feel so bad about doing it that one prefers the alternative of not doing it."

"Others must do as their own consciences require, but I stand with @monacharenEPPC. She stands for true conservative, American, and Judaeo-Christian values."

"[O]ne of the nation's most respected legal theorists... his sheer brilliance, the analytic power of his arguments, the range of his knowledge... a deeply principled conviction, a profound and enduring integrity."