"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."