Most Americans who thought about such matters at all assumed that the Union victory in the Civil War had settled the question. A national Union “of the people, by the people, and for the people” had defeated the planter class’s bid to insulate its power from the collective will of the majority from whom federal authority flowed. But as Kilpatrick looked for a respectable way to fight Brown, to lift the cause above “the sometimes sordid level of race,” Calhoun’s theory of states’ rights seemed his only option.29 The Washington Post came to call him the “apostle” of interposition, training the whole region in its intricacies.30
Working as many as fourteen hours a day, he composed one opinion piece after another for six weeks running to persuade fellow white southerners that they had a constitutional right to reject the federal mandate to end Jim Crow schools—and that honor required it. The imposing display of arcana served a purpose: to persuade readers that the “naked and arrogant declaration of nine men” in Brown constituted a “rape of the Constitution.” Kilpatrick’s passion, as much as his purpose, commanded attention. “When people bought the News Leader on the stand” during this period, “they would turn to the editorial page the first thing,” recalled a local newsman. “You had to see that with your own eyes to believe it.”31
What so alarmed Kilpatrick was that Virginia was about to accede not to the spirit of the decision, with a plan for genuinely integrating its schools, but to its letter, with token concessions. A commission appointed by the governor had accepted some of the proposals of the diehard segregationists—above all, tax-subsidized tuition grants. These vouchers, to use today’s language, would enable diehard white parents who could not stand the idea of integration to send their children to segregated private schools, something only the richest could do without such financial help. But the Gray Commission, named for its appointed chair, State Senator Garland Gray, was also recommending a local option: individual school districts faced with court orders would be able to decide for themselves whether to obey, albeit in a way limited by a state-controlled pupil placement plan designed to radically restrict desegregation in those communities willing to allow any.32
When the Arlington County School Board announced its plan to comply with the courts, a Kilpatrick ally demanded of fellow legislators that if some communities “won’t stand with us then I say make them”—by shutting down their schools if they planned to admit any black students.33
As Kilpatrick considered his next move, no one loomed larger in his calculations than Virginia’s senior U.S. senator, Harry Flood Byrd Sr. At sixty-eight, Byrd had lost some of his hair but none of the vigor that had made him one of the most formidable men in Washington—and the most powerful man back home, bar none. Those aspiring to influence in midcentury Virginia had to ask of any issue: What would Harry say? For Harry Byrd was the sun and the moon; those who found places in the firmament were there on the sufferance of the Byrd Organization, as participants referred to it (or the Byrd machine, to use the phrase critics preferred).
Senator Byrd was “an authentic aristocrat,” Time magazine observed. But as an ABC News investigative report in the 1950s revealed, he had become a very rich one in part by importing “cheap labor from the Caribbean” to work his land, despite “considerable local unemployment.” One federal official depicted aspects of the program “at worst as a modern counterpart to the slave trade, [and] at best as a system of indentured servants.” With no rights in America, the guest workers could be paid “$60 or less for a 60-hour week”—with transportation and other expenses deducted from their wages. Those from the Bahamas, like Senator Byrd’s workers, “suffer the worst exploitation of all.”34
But exploitation was a matter of perspective. For Byrd, a property rights enthusiast, this was just the free market at work: abundant labor sellers willing to contract for less pay with an employer who could thus maximize his operation’s profitability. Such imported workers were desirable to big growers precisely because their employment was not subject to irritating “federal standards of living or working conditions.” By midcentury Byrd had become “the world’s largest individual apple orchard owner.” He looked down upon his “200,000 trees in rows up to two miles long” from a white-columned mansion whose grandeur rivaled that of Mount Vernon and Monticello. Byrd saw himself as a free-enterprise success story, enabled by personal liberty backed by states’ rights protections from intrusive federal power.35
No single man has ever dominated a state so completely for so many years, albeit with studied courtliness. He presided as governor for most of the 1920s and as U.S. senator from 1933 until his retirement in 1965, acquiring a power that would have awed Calhoun. But Harry Byrd’s Organization bore no resemblance to the machines of northern cities, with their abundant services to attract the loyalties of motley low-income electorates. It was their veritable opposite: “the united establishment of Virginia,” one authority on Virginia politics has observed, over which “Byrd functioned as chairman.” Its aim was to insulate government from citizen pressure for public spending or other reform. It did that by punishing dissent. Because the Organization’s enforcers could be found in every county courthouse, if they put out “the word” on someone, that was enough to shutter a business or halt a career.36
Harry Byrd wielded his vast power to protect liberty—but as he understood it. He represented the state that had produced more of the Constitution’s framers than any other, and he was determined to enforce what he took to be their intentions. One liberal scold called the senator “a steadfast opponent of most of the twentieth century,” but Byrd wore his antiprogress politics as a badge of pride. A colleague said that as chair of the all-powerful Senate Finance Committee, Byrd “measured his success as a senator not by what he passed, but what he stopped from passing.” In his view, if liberty was to be preserved, the federal government should provide for the national defense and law enforcement, and little else.37
Because the Byrd Organization favored policies that were against the majority’s interests, it was preoccupied with manipulating the rules for voting and representation. Among its tried-and-true tools was a poll tax that effectively kept most whites as well as nearly all blacks away at election time. The black electorate had plummeted to one-seventh of its earlier strength after the 1902 constitutional provisions aimed at it, but the provisions took out others, too. “20 percent of the electorate rules—20 percent at the maximum,” railed a Richmond editor about white participation in city politics in the 1920s. “And it is called democracy!” Another key technique was malapportionment of the General Assembly to overrepresent more conservative rural residents and underrepresent more moderate city and suburban residents, a practice used since the Colonial Era. Indeed, “when the Virginia legislature voted in 1956 to close public schools rather than integrate,” explains the historian J. Douglas Smith, “the twenty-one senators who voted in favor of the action represented fewer Virginians than did the seventeen senators who opposed it.”38
For forty years, in fact, the Byrd Organization had to win only about 10 percent of the potential electorate to hold on to power. “Of all the American states, Virginia can lay claim to the most thorough control by an oligarchy,” the political scientist V. O. Key Jr. observed in his classic study of southern politics. Key went on to quip that, compared with Virginia, “Mississippi is a hotbed of democracy.”39
Virginia’s oligarchs maintained their control not with night rides but with carefully designed rules. They showed little tolerance for the vigilantism freely practiced in the Deep South. In fact, when Byrd was governor, the state effectively outlawed the Ku Klux Klan and all but ended lynching.40 The rulers understood, better than others, how clever legal rules could keep the state’s voter participation among the lowest in the nation relative to population, and its taxes among the lowest in the nation relative to wealth. Above all, the rules served to hold in check the collective power of those who might want their democracy to do more.41
A case in point: Virginia was among the first states in the nation to outlaw the closed shop—that is, to outlaw contracts that required union membership of employees. Months before a conservative Congress passed the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, called “the Slave Labor Act” by critics and passed over President Harry Truman’s veto, the state’s governor had signed a pioneering “right-to-work” law to weaken labor unions.42 If, in the face of this snare of shrewd restraints to keep them from influencing government, some citizens still managed to come together to seek change, the daily press could simply overlook it. That, too, was part of “the Virginia Way.” If collective action could not be wholly stopped, at least news of it could be buried.43
That was the system of liberty that so urgently needed defense, in the eyes of those who upheld it. Kilpatrick hit the mark in his campaign against compromise with Brown: the most powerful man in state history was elated. “I read carefully every one of your editorials,” Byrd said in praising his ally’s “brilliant” writing. Senator James Eastland of Mississippi likewise rejoiced, calling Byrd to exult that Kilpatrick’s “plan was gaining great popularity all through the South” in the run-up to Christmas of 1955. To ensure that no southern senators “compromise our convictions” by accepting Brown, Byrd invited Kilpatrick to Washington to strategize with a group of them about how his case could provide the “foundation stone” for “a united front of 11 states.” It was all but a second coming of Calhoun.44
Following Virginia’s example, by late 1956 the legislatures of eleven southern states had passed interposition and pro–massive resistance measures of their own—106, all told. Their representatives in Congress backed the militancy back home with a joint resolution that came to be known as the Southern Manifesto. “You would think today Calhoun was walking and speaking on the floor of the Senate,” commented a senator from Oregon about its reading. Every member of Congress from Virginia, and a total of 101 from the old Confederacy, signed the rebuke of the Supreme Court decision as an “unwarranted” deviation from the intentions of “the Founding Fathers.”45
In August, licensed by the interposition resolution to defy the federal government, a special session of the Virginia General Assembly convened to pass a suite of massive resistance measures—a “legislative hurricane,” as one dazed state senator called it. One feature eliminated local control of education; it compelled the governor to close and cut off funds to any school that planned to desegregate under federal court order. That meant white students would go without education if local officials conceded to the courts, because it was the white schools that faced lawsuits. Another law authorized tax-funded tuition grants to enable white parents to send their children to private schools to evade the Supreme Court ruling. As intended, this made viable the establishment of segregation academies. An additional seven laws set out to debilitate the NAACP so that it could no longer protest the injustices of the system. Indeed, the civil rights group lost one of every three members of the once thriving Virginia conference in a single year, owing to what an American Jewish Committee study found to be the South’s “most elaborate, systematic and sophisticated attempt to frustrate NAACP activity.”46
• • •
The rashness of it all worried Colgate Whitehead Darden Jr.47 He was a leading member of the state’s tight-knit white elite, anchored by the landed rich yet inclusive of corporate leaders. He had been elected to Congress and then backed as governor because he stood on the right side of every issue related to employers’ power, states’ rights, and racial segregation. He owed his appointment as president of the university to his old mentor Harry Byrd and others who stood to his right and were still well represented on the university’s Board of Visitors. Darden knew that they expected every decision he made to reflect that awareness. But the Columbia Law School– and Oxford University–trained attorney also knew that the massive resistance laws were doomed. Meanwhile, the forced shutdown of any school that desegregated would batter an already weak public school system and damage economic development in the state.48
The days were past, Darden could see, when emotional agitation, backed by rash appeals to Calhoun’s theories, could move the country. Virginia’s best chance to find its footing once again might just be the newcomer, James Buchanan.
PART I
THE IDEAS TAKE SHAPE
CHAPTER 2
A COUNTRY BOY GOES TO THE WINDY CITY
The village of Gum, Tennessee, where Jim Buchanan was born in 1919, lies along the Dixie Highway, about an hour southeast of Nashville. Like the rest of the state, it was a place without airs, very unlike Virginia. Buchanan grew up at a time when Model T Fords shared the roads with horse-drawn wagons. No one in the countryside had indoor plumbing, heating, or electricity; the outdoor “privy” was a fact of life. Those who wanted to read in the evening did so by kerosene lamps. Located between the plantation culture of West Tennessee, home to Memphis, and the mountain culture of East Tennessee, home to Knoxville, Middle Tennessee, where the Buchanans lived, was the most middle-class part of the state, known for fertile land and midsize farms that gave way to meadows of bluegrass edged by groves of evergreen cedar.1
“My family was poor,” Buchanan told all who would listen in his later years, and, indeed, agriculture was one of the sick industries of the 1920s that augured the Great Depression ahead. But poverty is relative, he himself would teach, and compared with most of their fellow Tennesseans, even his family’s own neighbors, the Buchanans had it very good. Their home, perched atop a hill, overlooked a spread of several hundred acres in Rutherford County, home to the most productive dairy farms in the state. They had a large herd of registered Jersey dairy cattle, whose butterfat-rich milk could be sold to the new Carnation Milk plant nearby, and unlike most residents, they owned the land, rather than working it as tenants, sharecroppers, or day laborers. While the house itself may have been “in varying states of disrepair” and was often in need of a fresh coat of paint, it must have seemed like a mansion to others, with its fourteen rooms and ten fireplaces to heat them.2
Both the family’s relative comfort and “pure Scotch-Irish” lineage no doubt stamped young Jim’s sense of the world. Though he never mentioned it, the census of 1920 shows that when Jim was a baby, his parents had a live-in servant and farm laborer, a black man named Foster Garner, who was twenty-one years old. In 1940, a family of black sharecroppers worked Buchanan land. Where the owners’ home was then valued at $2,000 and their 255 acres of land valued at $6,300, their black laborers were the truly poor, renting at $4 a month, to be paid at harvest time.3
The Buchanans also had a proud lineage. The public school that Jim and his two sisters attended was named after his father’s father, John P. Buchanan. Grandfather Buchanan had been a Populist, elected as the candidate of the Tennessee Farmers’ Alliance and Laborers’ Union to the governorship in 1890. There weren’t many manufacturing workers in the South then, but there were lots of coal miners, and in Tennessee the miners and the farmers had some common enemies, especially the big railroad corporations that gouged farmers and hired convict labor. Alliance members shared a burning conviction that a government of, by, and for the people, as a historian of this struggle writes, “had a solemn obligation to maintain fairness in the industrial economy.” Those they called “monopolists” should not receive “special privileges.” No man should be allowed to impose “degrading” work on another through sheer private economic power, nor should any lender crush an honest farmer with debt. Government should serve all citizens, not act at the behest of “arrogant” would-be “aristocrats.”4 It was a stirring campaign that gave thousands new hope.
In narrating his own life story in later years, the grandson laid claim to his grandfather’s tradition, presenting himself as an ally of those who worked hard, only to be set upon by claims from grasping “special interests.” He told of spending many hours as a youth reading in the old man’s vast book-and-pamphlet collec
tion.5 Yet the grandson never mentioned the events that had made John Buchanan a one-term governor. It was a curious omission, because the cause of his downfall was one of the most spectacular rebellions in the Gilded Age South against collusion between state governments and corporations. It may also help explain some of the later economist’s animus against organized workers.
Locals called the yearlong struggle that swept five counties from East to Middle Tennessee the “convict wars.” The coalition of farmers and miners that elected John Buchanan governor wanted one thing above all: the end of the system of coerced private prison labor whereby Tennessee’s state government helped mining magnates secure cheap labor and fat profits at the expense of innocent miners trying to earn enough to feed their families. The widely reviled system, so redolent of slavery, created a perverse incentive to lock men up for petty offenses so the state could rent them out to coal companies as dirt-cheap labor to take the jobs of free miners, who had organized the United Mine Workers of America to demand living wages and decent treatment. The miners had tried everything: persuasion, publicity, lobbying, and legal challenges. But each successive official ignored their pleas, because he had “corporation cotton” in his ears, in the words of one state legislator. When John Buchanan failed to shut down the system after his election, his earlier supporters turned to direct action. More than a thousand miners marched on the hated Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company (TCIR); farmers, local merchants, professionals, and like-minded women joined them along the way. The exasperated citizens wrecked the TCIR’s stockades and liberated the black and white convicts held in them. They even supplied changes of clothes so the abused prisoners could avoid recapture. But Governor Buchanan, instead of ending the accursed system, called out the state militia in support of the company and against those to whom he had broken his promise. As a pitched battle claimed lives, the miners lost, convict labor lingered, and the voters ended a once promising political career with a thrashing in the next election.6
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