Michael Pope: The Rise and Fall of the Byrd Machine in Virginia Politics
On this episode, Pod Virginia producer Aaryan Balu interviews Michael Pope about his new book, "The Byrd Machine in Virginia: The Rise and Fall of a Conservative Political Organization." They discuss the origins of machine politics in the early 20th century, the legacy of Byrd's anti-union and massive resistance positions, and the ways echoes of the machine still resonate in Virginia politics. Learn more at http://linktr.ee/JacklegMedia Sponsored by the Substance Abuse and Addiction Recovery Alliance of Virginia
Episode Transcript
Aaryan Balu
On this episode of Pod Virginia, we talk about the Byrd machine. The political organization that ran Virginia politics for decades in the 20th century.
Michael Pope
They looked at the tactics or the readjusters and said, hey, we can make this work for our side of the aisle.
Aaryan Balu
We're joined by none other than journalist and author Michael Pope, about his new book, which details the rise and fall of the Byrd machine and its legacy on Virginia politics.
Michael Pope
I mean, like, this is a scar that is still with us. You know, I have spoken to African Americans who were denied public education for more than one school year.
Aaryan Balu
Stick around for this episode of Pod Virginia.
I'm Aaryan Balu, and this is Pod Virginia, the podcast that's changing things up this week. Thomas is on vacation, and that leaves me pretty much in charge of the show for this episode. Without really too much on the top. I want to jump in and talk to our guest. He's a longtime Virginia journalist, host of a mid-rate state politics podcast, and author of the new book, The Byrd Machine in Virginia, the rise and fall of a conservative political organization, Michael Pope, welcome to pod Virginia.
Michael Pope
Welcome to this mid-rate state podcast. Yeah, it's great to be a guest on pod Virginia. This is kind of weird. We're turning the tables. So, thanks for taking the time to talk to me about the Byrd Machine in Virginia.
Aaryan Balu
Absolutely. We actually met up this past weekend at the Resonate podcast festival; folks who listened to Monday's episode would have heard Thomas and Michael talk about it a little bit. But yeah, that was the first time we all got to really get together and look at all of the cool stuff that we do outside of the podcast, including you writing entire books.
Michael Pope
Yeah, you know, we launched this podcast a month before the pandemic happened. So, you know, most of our time has been all virtual. So, it's kind of strange that our Jackleg Media organization has literally never been in the same room at the same time. Until last weekend, when we were in Richmond for the Resonate podcast Festival, which was amazing. We got to hear some great speakers about how to put together a podcast, how to market it, how to make people listen to it, and ultimately how to make better podcasts. So hopefully, you will hear that as our episodes continue into the future.
Aaryan Balu
Yeah, but this episode is not about your work as a podcaster; it is about your work as an author. So, before we jump into talking about the Byrd Machine really quick, I want to make sure tonight there is an event going on for the launch event for this book. Can you talk a little bit about it just so folks know right off the top?
Michael Pope
Yeah, sure. Tonight, we are launching the book the Byrd Machine in Virginia, the rise and fall of a conservative political organization. The launch event will be at the Athenaeum, on Prince Street in Old Town, Alexandria, at seven o'clock tonight. So the Athenaeum is a really cool building. It used to be a bank. It has these great columns. It's kind of an iconic building in old town. And so I'm really pleased that they let me show up and talk about my book tonight at seven o'clock, but I have a great relationship with the folks that the Athenaeum for many years. I'm actually launched all four of my previous books at the Athenaeum. So I'm really happy to return to the Athenaeum for a fifth time to talk about the Bryd machine in Virginia. So if you are anywhere in Northern Virginia, head on over to Old Town tonight so you can pick up your own signed copy of the Byrd Machine in Virginia.
Aaryan Balu
Well, good with that in mind, let's talk about the book. Let's talk about this, this Byrd Machine, to start things off. I've heard about Harry Byrd as an influential figure in 20th-century Virginia politics. But what exactly is the Byrd Machine?
Michael Pope
Well, that's a more difficult question to answer than you might expect when I first moved to Virginia in 2004; one of the first things I wanted to do was learn about the political environment of the state that I was now living in. And so, you know, the more I researched about the politics of Virginia, the history of Virginia, how it works, the more I kept hearing this name, the Byrd machine, it will just pop up all the time to explain why things were the way they are. And so, after I heard that about 12, or 13 or 14 times, I said, what the heck is the Byrd machine actually? I should know more about this thing. And so, really, it was a matter of necessity in order just to understand why Virginia works the way it does and why things are laid out the way they are, and there is kind of an argument to be made that, in some ways, the Byrd machine is still with us, and it's still active because of the way things are set up in Virginia. A good example of this is, you know, Virginia is rare among states in terms of statewide elected officials. There are only three in Virginia the Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and Attorney General are the only three statewide elected officials. And the reason for that is because when Harry Byrd was Governor of Virginia way back in the 1920s, he worked to reorganize Virginia politics. So, a lot of these positions that used to be elected were no longer elected, which had the net effect of increasing the power of the Governor. And so, the actual sort of power centers of the organization, aside from the Governor, were all of your local courthouses. So, like, the local clerk of court was given an eight-year term. And so even today, this is sort of like the ghost of the Byrd machine, your local clerk of court is elected to an eight-year term because the clerk and the judges at your local courthouse, they ran the local political machine, and mainly from rural and conservative, you know, red Virginia, not urban Virginia, but the far reaches of the very rural stretches farmlands, that sort of thing. And so, you know, between the Governor having all this power to appoint officials that had previously been elected and the local courthouse rings, that all had relationships with the Byrd organization. That's how the machine perpetuated its power over a long stretch of time.
Aaryan Balu
What was that stretch of time, knowing that the endpoint might be an open question, still, you know, what ballpark? When was this happening?
Michael Pope
Sure, yeah, the 20s to the 60s would be the best way to look at that. So, Byrd was elected in 1925 as Governor of Virginia. And so, you know, then sets about reorganizing Virginia politics and how it works. And so, like, that's probably the best starting point of the Byrd machine, the 1920s. And then Byrd dies in 1966. So that's, you know, probably a really good place to, you know, put a pin in the end of the Byrd machine. I think, you know, for the purposes of my book, I kind of talked about the election of Republican Linwood Holton as Governor to be sort of the death knell of the Bryd machine. So that would be 1969. The election in 1969. When Republican Linwood Holton is elected Governor, that's, you know, from my read the end of the Bryd machine, I think a lot of our listeners would take issue with that. I think some people would say the word machine lasted much longer and had a much slower death over a longer period of time. But, you know, once you no longer have the Governor, you kind of no longer have the machine. So that's why I kind of dated it to the election of Republican Linwood held in 1969 as the end of the Byrd machine. It's also when you think about the beginning of the Byrd machine in the 1920s. So Byrd was elected in 1925. But it's also important to remember that he didn't create this thing out of whole cloth, right? So there was an existing political organization that he inherited, the Martin machine, which itself was a reaction to a separate machine, the Mahone machine. So like, by the time Byrd comes along, he really is in charge of the third political machine in Virginia.
Aaryan Balu
I want to get into those origins. Talk to me a little bit about what is the political climate these machines you talk about that led to Harry Byrd gaining power.
Michael Pope
Well, so taking you way back in time here, after the Civil War, there was a former Confederate General by the name of William Mahone who created the first political machine, which was the Readjuster9 party. So, the politics of that era were so focused on debt. So after the Civil War, Virginia had a huge wartime debt. So there were two schools of thought as to what to do the sort of more conservative what they called bourbon Democrats, you know, old school, blue blood, people who lived in plantations and were super wealthy, they wanted to pay the debt off. And then you had these other people like William Mahone, and the Readjuster that said, don't pay the debt readjusted, in other words, like figure out a way to not cripple yourself financially, so that you can, accomplish things that you want to accomplish with your government and figure out some way to not pay the debt, or at least not be crippled by it. So Mahone led this group called the Readjuster; we actually did an episode about the registers in 2020. While I was working on this chapter, by the way, so he puts together this political machine that, you know, it's kind of ironic for a former Confederate General to be working with African Americans who want to get elected, but that's what was going on with the Readjuster party. I mean, like, keep in mind, the other people involved in this debate on the other side of this debate, they're the blueblood wealthy people, the bourbon Democrats, the ones who lived in plantation houses, like the Readjuster’s are the opposition party, who oppose that philosophy of, you know, crippling your state by paying off the war that they didn't want to do that they wanted to readjust it. And so he puts together this coalition of African Americans seeking to represent African American communities. And this kind of a forgotten period in history, people today, when you think about that time period, you just sort of gloss over the peaks and the valleys, right? You just sort of think, oh, through the Civil War happened, and then there was reconstruction. And there's Jim Crow. Well, that's not really the chronology because there's this other really interesting chapter here, where the Readjuster’s take over, and a bunch of Black people were elected as members of the General Assembly and represented African American communities in Richmond as elected officials. And there were a bunch of them. And they were all Readjusters. And they work with Mahone as part of this first political machine. And when I say machine, there were some underhanded tactics that were involved here. Mahone, he does not really; I mean, he's a fascinating guy because he's very colorful, but like, don't think of him as a hero here because he engaged in a lot of underhanded stuff, in terms of like requiring state employees to donate to the Readjuster party. And then he would also require local government employees to donate a percentage of their income to the political party that was in power. And, you know, so, like, that's how the machine perpetuated its own power was through the financial assistance that was required of government employees. So like, that's, that's the first political machine, which kind of fell apart; it didn't last all that long. And then, you know, once it was deposed, the people on the other side of that argument, the funders, the bourbon Democrats, the ones who lived in the plantation houses, that's when they took over and created their own machine, which was done largely with railroad money.
Aaryan Balu
So they said, Hey, this looks like a good idea. Like whatever you're doing seems to be working.
Michael Pope
Yeah, seems to be the mechanics of how it works, not the issues or the tactics. They looked at the tactics of the Readjuster and said, Hey, we can make this work for what for our side of the aisle. And so the funders, the bourbon Democrats, ended up taking over, and it was led by this guy, Thomas Staples Martin, who was a railroad executive. And so the kind of big, big money here, I mean, like, you know, in our modern context, we think about organizations like, you know, Altria, or, you know, the pharmaceutical industry like big money, big power, that's the railroad industry in the late 1800s.
Aaryan Balu
Right, so you've got the Martin machine comes along, and then so yeah, how did we get the Bryd?
Michael Pope
Yeah, well, the Martin machine last, basically, so you know, was created, and all those railroad executives kind of worked together to create their own machine that had opposition. I mean, there were progressives, you know, so like, this is keep in mind, Virginia is a one-party state at this time period. So all the political dynamics are within the Democratic Party. So are we talking about the conservative wing of the Democratic Party? Or are we talking about the progressive wing of the Democratic Party? So that was the sort of tension going on during the Martin machine, which, you know, had to battle off? The progressives? You know, and people use the word progressive in this era probably a little bit differently than we think of progressives today. Because I mean, there was a racial component to a lot of this stuff, which is, you know, comes to a head in the early 1900s, 1901, specifically, when the ruling powers in Virginia, write a new constitution specifically to prevent a lot of people from voting. And then, you know, that's when you get African Americans are no longer voting, to the extent they did when the Readjuster’s were in power. So once you remove Black people, low-income people from the voter rolls, you get support for conservative wealthy Bourbon Democrats who then run Virginia for most of the rest of the century.
Aaryan Balu
Right. We enter in a sort of a new figure on the stage, right, Harry Byrd senior, who is this guy, and then what does he do to really cement this machine in Virginia politics for the next 50 years?
Michael Pope
Yeah, so blue blood. I mean, that's the first thing you want to know about Harry Byrd is that their last name Bryd that's a gold-plated name and Virginia politics. This is like one of the founding families that dates all the way back to the colonial era. His father was a really big deal in Winchester. His father was actually the Speaker of the House of Delegates. At one point, and so you know, when Byrd kind of emerges on the scene, he's part of this blue blood family that everybody knows his family, everybody knows his last name. And he kind of his first claim to fame is in the newspaper industry, kind of saving the Winchester newspaper from certain destruction. So, you know, returning strangely, interestingly, to the topic of debt, you know, so his own family newspaper, the Winchester star, has all this terrible debt that's crippling the newspaper, and it's on the verge of failure. And so, the family puts a very young, you know, in his 20s, Harry Bryd on the case to figure out how you're going to save this family newspaper. And his solution is something that ends up becoming really important, and the story of Harry Bryd, which is a system called pay as you go. So Harry Byrd created this in his 20s to save the family newspaper, which was, you know, you need paper; you need giant rolls of paper to publish the newspaper. Well, you, so the problem is, they couldn't afford to buy a bunch of giant rolls of newspaper. So what would happen is, he would actually drive to the company that sold the paper, this is a Maryland company called Antietam, the Antietam Paper Company, and he would literally drive out there every single day, and buy a giant roll of paper, take it back to the newspaper, publish the newspaper for the day because that's what he could afford, he couldn't afford two rolls, you can only afford that one roll, made it happen as a pay as you go kind of thing. And then the next day, he's out there again at the Antietam Paper Company. So day after day after day, he buys one roll at a time, eventually saving this newspaper, which by the way, is still with us.
Aaryan Balu
Talk to me about what he does to sort of cement his power and then the mechanics of sort of what the Bryd machine does for the next 50-odd years. I mean, you're gonna be summarizing most of your book and imagine, but, you know, what are the useful things to know about that, you know, how that organization worked?
Michael Pope
Sure, well, so he, you know, makes his rise to power, he saves the Winchester newspaper, he makes a lot of money in the apple business, he's elected as a very young guy to the Virginia Senate. And then, in 1925, he was elected Governor. And he kind of puts together this thing that becomes the machine. So part of this is a consolidation of power. I was talking about how, you know, when he was elected Governor, there were a lot of elected positions that just don't exist anymore. A lot of those positions that used to be elected are things that now the Governor appoints the person to do them, you know, like, especially cabinet secretaries. So before Harry Byrd reorganized the state government, there were a lot of cabinet secretaries that were elected by the people. So after Harry Byrd consolidated power and reorganizes the government, those people were now appointed by the Governor and answered to the Governor; they didn't answer to voters the answer to Governor. And so this is called the short ballot. So the short ballot is actually really important because it consolidates power in the Governor. And then so the most important thing becomes who is the next Governor, Harry Bryd, you know, after his one term becomes a US Senator and starts exerting influence over Virginia politics by making the determination of who becomes Governor, and so uses all of his power and influence at all of those local courthouse rings all over Virginia to make sure that the Bryd machine gives a stamp of approval, it was called the nod who gets the nod? Well, you know, one year, it's going to be Colgate Darden, and one year it's going to be Bill Tuck, and the next year, it's going to be John Battle. These are all decisions that are made kind of by the machine as a way to control the governors, you know, as a way to control the Executive Mansion, which is where all the power rested after he reorganized government with a short ballot. Right. So that's a kind of speedway of explaining how Harry Byrd reorganized government in a way that created the dynamics for a machine that he ran for, like, 50 years. And did you know this was a 50-year period that a lot of stuff was going on, mainly with labor unions and desegregation of schools, which kind of is the focus of what I was looking at in terms of what the Bryd machine did when they were in power over that 50 year period.
Aaryan Balu
Yeah, let's look at that. I mean, so so we can kind of see how the machine comes to power and maintains its power. So now the question is, what does it do with that power? What does that mean for Virginia politics? How does that affect things?
Michael Pope
Well, you got to start with unions busting. So the 1940s was a time when there was lots of unrest with labor unions. And sometimes it got violent, you know, with clashes between business and labor. And this is all over the country. And here in Virginia, there were all these clashes with labor. So along comes the time when the electric company, the power, the power, most of the homes in Virginia was a company called VEPCO, which, by the way, is now Dominion energy. So VEPCO employees at VEPCO decided they wanted to strike to get better working conditions and better pay. And so the Bryd machine Governor at that time was a guy by the name of Bill Tuck. And he had to figure out what to do about this, because, you know, the last thing that he wanted was everybody's power to go out, people would blame him as Governor, right? So he needed to figure out a way, from his perspective, to make sure that the lights stayed on and prevent unions from gaining more power and influence than they had in Virginia. And so he devised a strategy that was really interesting. It's kind of one of those things where I didn't see that coming, which is that he conscripted all of the employees of VEPCO into the state militias so that if they failed to show up to work, they would be court-martialed. And that is a strategy that worked and was able to successfully stop that VEPCO strike. And he followed that up the very next year by passing what we now call the right-to-work law, which had forever undermined the power of unions. So if you think about the legacy of the Bryd machine and that 50-year period that they ran Virginia politics, you don't want to overlook the significance of union busting and how the Bryd machine undermined the power of unions to the extent that is still with us, because we still have that so-called right to work law even today.
Aaryan Balu
Yeah. Wow. So you talked a little bit about another one of the issues, in addition to labor, which was desegregation. And that's going to get into; I'd imagine, the eventual fall of the burden chain; what was going on there?
Michael Pope
Yeah, this is the dark legacy of the Byrd machine, which is massive resistance. So you know, in the 1950s, when the Supreme Court told America, hey, you got to desegregate the schools, you can't keep going with separate but equal, which was a myth. It wasn't separate but equal, and it was really separate and unequal. And so the Supreme Court said, you know, you got to integrate the schools, you got to desegregate all these school children. And so the Bryd machine response to that was, hell, no, we're not going to do that; we're going to have something called massive resistance. So instead of integrating our schools, instead of desegregating our classrooms, we're going to close the public schools and not have a public education system, or at least not in places that are under threat of desegregation. And so this was a long and complicated thing that went over a long period of time. But the most important thing for our listeners to know is that it was the beginning of the end for the Bryd machine because it didn't work. I mean, like that's the most important thing to know about massive resistance is that it was a failure because the schools were eventually integrated. And when that happened, the Bryd machine had egg all over its face, you know, it did this horrible thing to shut down public education. And meanwhile, the schools were eventually desegregated anyway, and so, the Bryd machine kind of lost a lot of power and influence as a result of that with people that weren't white supremacists. And so it wasn't too long after that, that Bryd himself died. And so that was followed up a couple of years later by a Republican getting elected governor. So like, the whole power structure is based on who gets the nod to be Governor. And there was a Bryd machine candidate in 1969. And he lost to Republican Linwood Holton. And so that's the mechanics of what happened with massive resistance are so important to the for the history of Virginia, but they're also important to the death of the Bryd machine. So if you ask people on the street, you know, what is the Bryd machine? What is the most significant legacy of the Bryd machine? The answer, you're most likely to get this massive resistance because this is the part of the story that is most well-known.
Aaryan Balu
I don't know what street you're walking on.
Michael Pope
If you're walking on Prince Street in Old Town, Alexandria, which by the way, will be the scene of the book launch for the Bryd machine tonight at seven o'clock. It's 201 Prince Street. So if you're walking along Prince Street, And you just are engaging random strangers about the Bryd machine. The point I'm trying to make is massive resistance is the part of the story that most well-known people know about this part of the story. In fact, there is a statue of one of the African American students who fought for better schools; there's a statue of her in Capitol Square. And meanwhile, the statue of Harry Bryd has been removed from Capitol Square. So like, in just in recent years, we've seen the addition of the Barbara John's statue and the removal of the Harry Bryd statue. So you know, Capitol Square itself is this great sort of palette to tell you about Virginia history. And it is in the process of changing. I mean, another really cool thing with this book is the timing of when it finally came out, is you know, we're in a really interesting moment here, Aryan, where things are changing, and, and this book is coming out at a time when it's, in my perspective, from my perspective, it's a great time to look at the legacy of the Bryd machine, evaluate why things are the way they are today. And, you know, ask the difficult questions about how things ended up this way and where they should go in the future.
Aaryan Balu
So what do you see as the sort of legacies of the Bryd machine that still exist, resonating in Richmond or across Virginia today? If there is stuff that you haven't talked about? So far.
Michael Pope
There's multiple ways to answer that question. The most important legacies of the Byrd machine are the fact that we've only got three statewide elected officials, like none of our cabinet members are elected by the people. They're all appointed by the Governor. So very important legacy not to be overlooked. Even today, Virginia has one of the most powerful Governors in the country, I would argue, the most powerful Governor in the country. And so that is a very important legacy of the Byrd machine. Is the consolidation of power still with us because of the power that Governor Youngkin today has as a result of what Harry Byrd did back in the 1920s. That's legacy number one. Legacy number two is massive resistance. I mean, like, this is a scar that is still with us, I have spoken to African Americans who were denied public education for more than one school year because their government shut down their school rather than educate them. Some of them are in the General Assembly today. So like, this is a legacy that is a dark stain on the history of Virginia that is still with us. And is the reason Harry Byrd has such a horrible reputation that he well deserved horrible reputation that he does is massive resistance. So I would say, like, you know, the other really important legacy of the Bryd machine that is still with us is the right-to-work law, which undermines the power of unions. It's why you really don't see a lot of union power in Virginia in the way that other states have, because of the dynamics of what's involved in who has to participate in unions and who doesn't have to participate in unions and the, you know, the powers the, of creating a union and maintaining it and who are involved in it, who and who's not involved in it. And so the kind of union-busting legacy of the Bryd machine is also not to be overlooked because we still have the right-to-work law today. So it's not to say the machine is still active. It's not. But there are these kinds of zombie legacies of the Bryd machine that are still with us today.
Aaryan Balu
Well, all right. Well, I guess if you want to hear more about the zombie legacies of the Bryd machine, there's going to be a launch party tonight for the Bryd machine in Virginia, the rise and fall of a conservative political organization, with Michael pope that's going to be at the Athenaeum and Old Town, Alexandria on Prince Street. 7 pm. Michael, thanks so much for joining me today to talk about your book.
Michael Pope
Aaryan is in it. This has been a lot of fun. I really appreciate you talking to me about the Bryd machine. And so thank you so much for this.
Aaryan Balu
Yeah, and hey, man, good luck with the podcasting thing. I know it's a lot of work, but I hope it pays off.
Michael Pope
Good luck with putting this episode together. I appreciate it.
