Schuyler VanValkenburg: The History of Virginia Political Machines
If you're in Richmond TONIGHT--Thursday, January 19th, 2023--, check out Michael's speech on the Byrd Machine in Virginia--6 PM at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture. And pick up a copy of The Byrd Machine in Virginia.
Delegate Schuyler VanValkenburg joins the show this week to discuss what he knows best--history and government. In this case, the histoy of machine politics in Virginia from Reconstruction through the modern dark, including the multiracial Mahone Machine and the Readjusters, the Martin Machine of the early 1900s, and the eventual shift into the famous Byrd Machine that operated Virginia politics for half a century. What is a political machine and how does it maintain power? Do we see any echoes of it in the modern day?
Episode Transcript
Michael Pope
On this episode of Pod Virginia.
Thomas Bowman
The history of machine politics.
Schuyler VanValkenburg
What they're there for is to perpetuate themselves in power and to reward the people who give them that power.
Michael Pope
We explore the two machines that predate the Bryd organization.
Schuyler VanValkenburg
A lot of the voting laws we're changing are out of the legacy of the Southern machines.
Thomas Bowman
Were joined by Delegate Schuyler VanValkenburg.
Schuyler VanValkenburg
The person who got the patronage job had a big incentive to go work for that machine because that's how they kept their job.
Michael Pope
You are listening to Pod Virginia. Stick around. I'm Michael Pope.
Thomas Bowman
I'm Thomas Bowman.
Michael Pope
And this is Pod Virginia, a podcast that is hoping to see you in person tonight at the Museum of History and Culture. I'll be speaking to the Virginia Historical Society at 6 PM. And we'd love to see you there!
Thomas Bowman
We're previewing Michael's talk on the Bryd Machine. And we're taking a look today at the history of political machines in Virginia. Michael, as your book points out, Virginia actually had two political machines that predate Bryd.
Michael Pope
Yeah, there was the Mahone machine and then the Martin machine, both of which ran Virginia politics for some time before Byrd came along. So we're asking a friend of the podcast to come back on the show. And help us understand that history and what it means for us today. We're joined by a high school civics teacher who also happens to be a member of the House of Delegates from Henrico County. He's currently running for the State Senate, Schuyler VanValkenburg. Thanks for joining us.
Schuyler VanValkenburg
Thanks for having me on again to talk about history. This is gonna be great.
Michael Pope
Yes, this is gonna be great. I'm looking forward to this.
Thomas Bowman
I'm excited. So we should probably start the discussion, though, talking about political machines, which people usually associate with, big cities like New York or Chicago or something like that. So Delegate VanValkenburg explains to us what is a political machine.
Schuyler VanValkenburg
It's a great question. Because in many ways, political machines, as we had in the past that we know about from history, don't exist today, right? Because a lot of the tools that those machines are no longer legal or are frowned upon if they're not illegal. But I think a big piece to political machines, and what they're there for, is to perpetuate themselves in power and to reward the people who give them that power. And so that can be voters, that can be politicians, that can be people who work the levers of government, but it typically evolves around money and patronage. The idea is you're going to create a system that allows you to kind of continually stay in power. Both of these machines that we're going to talk about would give out jobs. They'd skim money from those jobs to help pay for campaigns. And then the people who they gave those jobs will go out and help bring in voters, right? And this was all to kind of perpetuate their power. And in some cases, to achieve policy goals that lined up with their vision.
Michael Pope
You said they don't exist anymore. But the way you just laid all that out, I think a lot of our listeners are gonna say, well, I recognize our modern reality and a lot of what you just said.
Schuyler VanValkenburg
I think it's important to remember that back then, the way a machine worked was very much built around a kind of tit-for-tat. Maybe you can have to some level and in modern times, but you know, in the late 1800s, of a lot of good government reforms, you had things that professionalized the executive bureaucracy. You had transparency measures around contracting, so things like contracting roads, buildings, and things like that. You get the Hatch Act in the 1900s that says that government employees can't participate in politics. And so a lot of the levers of a machine in the classical sense in the 1800's sense fade away because they're, they're outlawed, right, you literally can't do them. And so it doesn't mean that machines went away completely. It means that a lot of the power that, you know, the Mahone machine or the Martin machine had is no longer achievable.
Michael Pope
Well, let's start with William Mahone. Now, this is one of the more colorful people in all of Virginia's history, but we don't seem to know too much about him these days. Back in the 1880s. He rose to prominence by putting together a coalition of people to adjust the debt. Rather than pay it off, this coalition was a biracial coalition that included several black elected officials in the 1880s. So you know, before we get to the hardball tactics of William Mahone. Why don't more people know about the registers?
Schuyler VanValkenburg
Yeah, that's a fascinating question because they're really quite a fascinating moment in Virginia history. I mean, you hit on, you know, the readjustment of the debt, which is where they get the name, but they're also advocates for funding schools. They're advocates for criminal justice reform, banning the whipping post. They're advocates for a biracial coalition of governing and voting. So they're really kind of the first kind of progressive coalition in Virginia politics. And really, the only one for a long time. It's this moment when reconstruction is happening across the country, where the state constitution is becoming more egalitarian. It's bringing more people into the fold. And Mahone and his political allies are really trying to take advantage of that and build a machine, but also build a political movement to make people's lives better.
Michael Pope
So you say build a movement to make people's lives better. This is a party that advocated for, as you just said, public education, getting rid of the whipping post, which is essentially torture, and had a lot of very even by modern standards, very progressive agenda. But check out some of these hardball tactics that William Mahone engages in. He demanded office holders contribute a fixed percentage of their salaries to readjust the campaign account of 5% for state employees and 2% for federal employees. He demanded kickbacks from businessmen who secured state contractors. And he demanded loyalty pledges for bills and candidates that were approved by the reregister caucus. So you might like the goals that he had, and you probably share. But these tactics are really something.
Schuyler VanValkenburg
Yeah, it really goes back to my previous point, right about why these kinds of old-school machines don't exist anymore because most of those things are rightfully illegal, right? These are things that we don't want to happen. But were ways for the Mahone machine, and you see these machines across the country. Really every state the in the country has a machine like this that institutes similar policies away. And these were all these tactics you're talking about are ways to perpetuate power or ways to stay in power. The thing I found fascinating was reading your book, and everybody should check out your book. I've gonna plug it. The thing I really found fascinating about this is that they're using those tools as a way to try to keep this biracial coalition in power. But ultimately, they're not able to, which I think speaks to the fact, too, that a machine can use these tactics. But they also, at the end of the day, have to have a certain level of entrenched support that's going to allow it to sustain. And ultimately, as you talk about in your book at Danville, the machine really breaks down because that biracial coalition isn't able to kind of overcome the divide between white and Black in the South, right, the divide between white and Black, Virginia. And so ultimately, like the machine tactics are trying to paper that over, and it kind of fails, which then allows the Martin machine to kind of pick up those pieces, pick up those tactics but institute a totally different political coalition that was able to last for a very long time.
Thomas Bowman
I do want to highlight that a lot of these tactics have evolved to a more legal form that exists today and does get used in the halls of, among some of your colleagues, many allegations. A lot of people say Kilgore has a similar machine in Southwest Virginia. And even in Northern Virginia, we've got the Surovell machine in the south County of Fairfax or in eastern Fairfax. So can you explain how they're different? And why they're different from historical machines? You know, other than the obvious factor being, you know, scale and influence?
Schuyler VanValkenburg
I think the difference now is, I mean, you're always going to have political coalitions and regions that are successful because they build up the support of people, right? It might be because of an ideal ideology, right? A political ideology that the community shares, or because of long built-up relationships over the course of many generations, right? This is how you oftentimes see families prosper through multi-generational political families. So I think you grow, you're always going to have that in a democracy, you're always going to have people who are able to build influence over time because of a variety of methods, you know, the politicians able to get laws passed to the people in the community support able to do constituent services for the people that they support or is able to build up an ideological coalition that people support and then is able to there for transfer that to supporting candidates and other offices, right? And building up a kind of web of relationships, I think that's a natural thing in a democracy. That's going to happen no matter what. And I think what distinguishes that from what we're talking about in the 1800s is that in the 1800s, these machines were in many ways stronger, and they were stronger because of these enforced money ties that brought people's material interests together, right? The person who got the patronage job had a big incentive to go work for that machine because that's how they kept their job. That's how they were able to feed their family. That's not something that's necessarily true today. Right/
Michael Pope
So that's the missing piece, actually, in terms of making a really clear distinction between the way things happen today. And the way people might call, just sort of colloquially, a political machine. It really lacks the kind of patronage that you saw with these other earlier political machines. Right?
Schuyler VanValkenburg
Yeah, that's right. I mean, what either of these machines could do, the Mahone or Martin machine, right, is they could fill the executive branch and local government with people that they picked to carry out those jobs.
Michael Pope
Is it Glenn Youngkin doing that right now? I mean, this isn't a party thing. I mean, didn't Ralph Northam do that when he was governor?
Schuyler VanValkenburg
Well, I mean, as well, there are political appointees. And you do want political appointees. I think that's an important thing to know; you want political appointees, whether it's the state or federal level, because you elected an executive to govern for you, and they need to be able to govern in the vision that voters voted for. The difference here is the people who are day to day carrying out the law, right, so the Deputy Secretary on technology in K-12, in the DOE. Or the Deputy Secretary of this other job that right now, they get that job because of merit, right? They keep that job through governors that are Republican and governors that are Democrat. But as you talk about in your book, right, when the Mahone machine is wiped out, it's wiped out because the Martin machine fires off those people or takes away all of their job authority if they don't fire them. And then come in and replace them with all new people. So a lot of these machines in the 1800s, you know, when you had a change in power, you also just had a change in hundreds and hundreds of jobs. That's just not the case anymore.
Michael Pope
Okay, let's turn our attention to the second political machine in Virginia, which you already previewed a bit. This one was built on railroad money, the Martin machine. This was actually kind of like a reaction to the registers, a machine that was created to vanquish the other machine. So at the center of this is Thomas Staples Martin, a lawyer from Scottsville, who went on to be counsel for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad. So he used railroad money to grease the wheels of politics. So how did it operate? Especially in consideration of what we were just talking about in terms of the Martin machines and the Mahone machine.
Schuyler VanValkenburg
Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing is that they're using really many of the same tactics. Maybe they get their money from a different place, or they're doing it in a slightly different way. But at the end of the day, the two machines tactically are doing much the same thing. They're really trying to integrate their power at the local level by picking the officials that will govern for them there that will get out their voters and suppress the other side's voters. They're using money right to get into these positions of power. You talk in your book about Martin himself becoming a Senator and all the money he changed hands so that he could win the General Assembly election because back then, the state legislature elected senators. And how when he was busted years later, it was like, oh, you know, we had to do it. The main takeaway I took from this discussion you had of these two machines is that the difference between the two is that, at the end of the day, the Martin machine was able to really sink its roots deep, right? Because eventually, the Martin machine is gonna become the Bryd machine. And they're really able to kind of overcome obstacles. So you talk about, you know, the Mahone machine. There's racial violence in Danville that ultimately leads to their collapse after they'd been in power for only a couple of years. Meanwhile, the Martin machine is able to overcome what they perceive at the time to be obstacles. So, for example, they did not want the 1902 constitution that dramatically rolled back how many people in Virginia could vote, and a commission was brought together to intentionally wipe Black voters from the rolls. And they didn't want it at first. But ultimately, they're able to use it to their benefit and really perpetuate their power in a way that lasts through the whole 1900s almost.
Michael Pope
There is some real irony here with the sides that people were on for that Constitution because, in retrospect, we now know that it created an election system that helped the machine and perpetuated the machine. But going into it, they didn't really know what the outcome was going to be and how it was actually going to work. And it was kind of backward. Progressives actually liked the Constitution, thinking it would be a more progressive way to ensure voting integrity. And whereas the blue blood, Bourbon types, were skeptical of It, not realizing that it would actually help them maintain power for generations to come.
Schuyler VanValkenburg
Yeah, it is a really interesting contrast. I think it speaks to the fact that machines are inherently status quo driven. They see this change to the electorate and the roles, and they don't want it because they're winning as it is. Right? And, yeah, but they adapt, right? And the machine adapts and is able to use its leverage and its power. Because ultimately, in these machines, what matters is the kind of patronage of money. And when you have a lower voter turnout, come to find out those things are, those tools become more effective, not less. And so they are able to integrate it in any kind of ride out a wave where they have things that they didn't necessarily want, right, they were able to take this moment where the public will be building towards this Constitution, I think we can say tragically, the public will be building towards this Constitution. And they were able to write it out in a way that the registers were not able to, you know, 20 years prior to that.
Thomas Bowman
Delegate, one of the ways you referenced the Martin machine was able to maintain its power was the infamous Jim Crow constitution. So how did those new rules, especially around voting in that Constitution, help the Martin machine stay in power?
Schuyler VanValkenburg
It's interesting to see that this happened all across the South. So reconstruction, we kind of say that it ended in 1876. With the election, the presidential election, where there's, you know, seen as this deal where the North will leave the South. If Hayes becomes the president, and then from 1876 until about 1890-1900, there's this kind of period of time where everything's in flux politically, right? And this is where we get the registers, for example. What ended up happening first and Mississippi in 1890, the first state to do this, is we essentially get the constitutionalist action of Jim Crow. In the late 1800s, there was a lot of voter fraud. Michael, in his book, talks about this how the Martin machine would stuff the ballots to ensure that they won. And what the southern states wanted to do was make this all legal and right; they wanted to win legally. And so what they would do is they would devolve power to the localities so that all the local boards of elections could be the ones that enforce the law. And then they allowed for policies that suppressed the vote, right, that ensured that African Americans couldn't vote, but also that large percentages of white Virginians couldn't vote. There's a famous quote from the political scientist V.O Key that said that "Virginia makes Mississippi look like a hotbed of democracy." And it really was talking about how the Constitution legalized all these procedures, whether through the enforcement or through the law, that kept voters away from the polls, and that benefits the machine because it was the machines, voters, that were driven to the polls, and that ran the elections.
Thomas Bowman
Alright, so it's pretty common in politics for the solution to one problem to have consequences that are either sometimes intended but often unintended. So are there comparisons you can see in some of today's politics? I cast that net broadly there, but are there any parallels?
Schuyler VanValkenburg
That's a great question. It's a hard one to answer. I'm not sure that there are. I think one of the things that you see. It's interesting because in the early 1800's machines, oftentimes, were a force for driving people out to the polls. And so, voter turnout was very high. The highest voter turnout elections were in the 1870s and 1880s. We had presidential elections that were averaging around 80% turnout.
Michael Pope
But those are big city machines. One of the things that are really interesting about the machines we're talking about now is that they are southern machines; I mean, this was a statewide machine we're talking about, you know, which stands in pretty stark contrast to the kind of urban politics you saw in New York and Chicago. That's where you saw the machines, like, physically getting the voters to the polls, right?
Schuyler VanValkenburg
Well, even the Mahone machine, you see, getting voters out to the polls, so even Virginia had higher voter turnout until the Martin machine started to turn the screw, right. And it's with the rise of the Southern machines in the late 1800s, especially when the North left, and they can all change their constitutions, right? They can all bring in their Jim Crow constitutions that happened in Mississippi in 1890. It lasted, I think, through 1910, before the last southern states, the last southern states do it. And you really see all these southern machines really turn, you know, torque up the pressure. And that's when we see a huge drop in voter turnout. Some of that's the southern machines in the South, and in the North, some of it is that the machines are dying, right? They're being driven out of power because of civil service reform, the Hatch Act, and good government reform progressive reforms; I think things that we would say are good, right? Things that the government should have done. But I think the kind of trajectory of what those machines did when it came to elections we're still living with today. As recently as five years ago, a lot of northeastern states had really tight voter restrictions. And one of the reasons for that is the legacy of what was happening in that time period when people were dialing back voter turnout. And so, you know, in this in Virginia, when we are changing our voting laws, right, a lot of the voting laws we're changing are out of the legacy of these southern machines. When was one of the hardest states to vote in? And now, one of the easiest ones, you're seeing that same thing play out in the northeast, but for a different reason. They were undoing some of the reforms that, as Michael noted, were ironically progressive reforms to dial back voter turnout that the northern machines had ginned up.
Thomas Bowman
Delegate VanValkenburg. Since you're running for office right now, let me ask you to participate in a fun thought experiment. All right, so imagine you had sufficient resources? How would Schuyler VanValkenburg go about creating his own modern legal and political machine?
Schuyler VanValkenburg
Well, I'm a good government guy. So I wouldn't be the answer.
Michael Pope
What if you were crafting a Netflix series? How about that?
Schuyler VanValkenburg
You know, I tried to do it through popular policies and through gaining support by doing good things. So that's my totally unsatisfactory answer for you guys.
Michael Pope
This is a man who's running for office, ladies and gentlemen. Okay. All right.
Thomas Bowman
Do we call that capturing hearts and minds?
Michael Pope
All right, well, this has been tons of fun. Delegate Schuyler VanValkenburg. Thanks for coming back on the podcast.
Schuyler VanValkenburg
Thanks for having me. Always a blast.
