In the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Buchanan later reminisced, “there was sufficient isolation from mainstream pressure to lend confidence to the unorthodox.”42 Daily collaboration made the center—which occupied a fine building along the yard designed by Jefferson, one that Buchanan called “the most beautiful enclosure of space in the world”—a hive of creativity and common purpose. Eschewing formal titles and simply addressing one another as “Mr.,” as all the scholars at Mr. Jefferson’s university then did, the faculty and students shared a “moral commitment to individual liberty” and to scholarly innovation.43
It was a time of passionate intensity. “We were collaborators in the process of rediscovering political economy,” recalled William Breit. Deep devotion to their shared project made for unusual mutual loyalty. Nearly all the men came to the office every day. At exactly 12:30, they headed off to the university cafeteria for a meal that might be mistaken for a seminar as they critiqued one another’s research and dissected journal articles. Jim Buchanan set the standard. His “door was always open.” If someone asked him to read a paper, he did it so quickly and helpfully that bets could be won on his speed. Unlike Friedman, when faced with a vulnerable student, Buchanan took care “never to disgrace or disparage them,” as one grateful alumnus said years later. It was a movement culture in the making, one of mutual commitment.44
Women were not admitted to the university until 1970 (and only after suing in federal court to gain access), yet the cause depended on one woman in particular. Buchanan’s secretary became a lifelong loyalist, staying with him for nearly fifty years as his “gal Friday” and the Virginia school’s “First Lady.” Betty Hall Tillman was the soul of the center—and the sole female employee. Newly divorced after twelve years as a homemaker, she was happy to find a full-time job—even if the $200-a-month starting salary meant that to support her three children she had to live with her mother and sister and rely on them to care for her infant son while she worked. Mrs. Tillman’s honey-coated use of “darling” and “sweetheart” to address center members knit the men into closer communion as her daily kindnesses advanced their work. There was almost nothing the economists did not count on Tillman to do, including, for one returning from leave, moving his furniture from apartment to apartment, unpacking his kitchen and books, setting up his phone service, washing his floors, and giving his old “shower curtain a good cleaning.”45
Over time, the center’s faculty and students began to see themselves as heroic figures fighting the good fight, a notion they could maintain and embellish because there were so few on campus who might raise difficult questions about whose liberty was being saved, and at what cost to others. Few working-class men attended the University of Virginia then. If a hardy soul somehow scraped together tuition (financial aid was scarcely a priority for the nation’s worst-funded public university, relative to population and wealth), the closed country-club culture created a chilly climate. Until 1953, the dean had been a biologist who provided the “scientific rationale” for the state’s “racial integrity” laws of the 1920s. For twenty years, Dean Ivey Lewis held sway over faculty hiring and the curriculum, without fail rejecting “applicants who might critically examine southern traditions, advocate environmental interventions to social problems, or otherwise disconcert the flourishing community of eugenicists he had installed at the university.” An example of his intellectual regime: correcting one student’s “sap-headed thinking . . . that all men are brothers.”46
African Americans endured the brunt of such attitudes. Not until the fall of 1950 was the first black student admitted, and then only because of litigation by the NAACP that persuaded the Supreme Court to rule, in Sweatt v. Painter, that graduate and professional programs must be opened to all who met the requirements for admission. And so Gregory Swanson was able to enroll in the law school, the first black person besides a menial worker to gain official access to the university in 125 years. He experienced little hostile behavior in the classroom, but there was muttered ugliness outside of it, to say nothing of lit cigarettes tossed at him. When Swanson tried to attend a campus dance, he was informed by the university administration that the fraternities holding them were “private organizations” that had the right to discriminate. Their right to exclude was steadfastly upheld by the editors of both the student newspaper and the Charlottesville Daily Progress. To the great relief of the administration, Swanson withdrew at year’s end.47
Buchanan and Nutter were not just big men on the campus; they were up-and-coming players in the free-enterprise cause. When they invited F. A. Hayek to their “new Jefferson Center” in Charlottesville, he not only came but was so impressed that he immediately invited the two to join the Mont Pelerin Society, securing travel subsidies for them to attend the annual meetings in Europe. The stream of visits added to the frisson of innovation: leading lights of the cause came often, usually staying for a good while thanks to the generosity of the program’s right-wing donors, and thus more tightly connecting the center’s participants to the greater cause.48 As Buchanan concentrated on building up the economics department and the Jefferson Center, Nutter helped William Baroody Sr. to transform the American Enterprise Institute from a squawker on the sidelines into a leading public policy institution.49
The visiting celebrities helped give new luster to a favored project of the state’s most powerful men: the use of right-to-work legislation to hamper workers’ ability to build strong unions. The AFL-CIO was a thorn in the side of the Byrd Organization, what with its push to bring some democracy to workplaces and its fights against the poll tax and massive resistance. Heretofore, the right-to-work cause had been on the defensive as the United States, long the holdout against labor unions in the developed capitalist world, brought wage earners into the world of rights protection through the New Deal’s Wagner Act. By the early 1950s it seemed that only domineering businessmen and Dixiecrat politicians objected to working people being allowed a countervailing voice to that of corporations.50
Yet through the Jefferson Center, European economists were visiting Charlottesville to say that the South’s state officials were right about the labor movement. Hayek, already a favorite thinker of Harry Byrd’s, visited to address a spring 1958 conference on “The Public Stake in Union Power.” Hayek delivered a biting critique of labor unions in general and in particular of Walter Reuther, president of the progressive United Auto Workers Union, as agents of “coercion” that ought not to be “allowed to continue.” After Hayek came another foreign-born member of the Mont Pelerin Society, W. H. Hutt, this time as a long-term visitor. The pro–economic liberty Relm Foundation covered most of the cost, which was not surprising, in that Hutt’s 1954 Theory of Collective Bargaining had won the acclaim of the grandfather of the cause, Ludwig von Mises.51
Buchanan carried the anti-organized-labor message into his classes, teaching his students that the Wagner Act had licensed “union monopolies” that distorted the wage structure. He used an example involving the state’s labor market, blaming the United Mine Workers of America for the rising unemployment of coal valleys. With unemployment came worsening poverty in Appalachia. Buchanan’s lecture notes were firm on this, too: “But should government intervene? No.”52
Buchanan took pride in what he called his academic entrepreneurship. Contributions from corporations such as General Electric and several oil companies and right-wing individuals flowed in, as anti–New Deal foundations provided funds to lure promising graduate students.53 Before long, the cofounders of the center were able to seize an opportunity to prove their enterprise’s value to the Byrd Organization on the issue that mattered most to its stalwarts in these years: the future of the public schools.
CHAPTER 4
LETTING THE CHIPS FALL WHERE THEY MAY
James Buchanan and Warren Nutter did not put forward their proposed solution to the school crisis until early 1959. When they did, it was as if they had pulled down the sh
ades on every window, cancelled their subscriptions to all the newspapers, and plugged their ears to a new set of voices in Harry Byrd’s Virginia. The economists and their allies had steadfastly maintained that the state’s fight was against the federal government, against coercion from outsiders, in a stand for liberty. They ignored the overt racism and turned a blind eye to the chronic violations of black citizens’ liberty and constitutional rights that led to the federal intervention, true. But the voices of 1958 and early 1959 defied even their narrow and exclusionary framing of the conflict, because they came from white, middle-class Virginians, from parents, in particular, who were shocked at the actions of their state officials and determined to resist. Most were moderate Republicans and Democrats of the expanding suburbs and cities of Northern Virginia. And they spoke powerfully enough over a six-month period to move Buchanan and Nutter to explain publicly what their vision of liberty would mean in practice on the most pressing matter of the day.1
In the summer of 1958, three very different communities—the port city of Norfolk, home to a U.S. Navy base; Charlottesville, home to the University of Virginia; and the textile mill town of Front Royal, in the Shenandoah Valley—announced their intentions to admit a few black students to some previously white schools the following September. They were moved to do so not because the white townspeople or their school boards suddenly converted to equal rights under the law. No doubt a few did. But most, having been reared since infancy in the culture of Jim Crow, did not.2 Still, many did see themselves as patriotic, law-abiding citizens, and so were unwilling to defy a court ruling, even on the matter of race. Federal courts had instructed their communities to desegregate, without further delay, particularly schools that had been the focus of NAACP lawsuits, and they planned to comply. Those local plans triggered the implementation of the 1956 state massive resistance legislation empowering the governor to close any white school that planned to admit any black students. His act would deny public education to some thirteen thousand white students, all told, from first graders to high school seniors. (No whites were suing to enter black schools, so they were unaffected by the closures).3
• • •
In July of 1958, the week after Governor J. Lindsay Almond Jr. announced he would close these schools come September, a Virginia country doctor, who before this time had paid little attention to state politics, announced that she would run for the U.S. Senate seat held by Harry Byrd. Her name was Louise Wensel. Dr. Wensel minced no words in explaining why she was running: because Senator Byrd’s “massive resistance program is designed to close our schools, thus hurting our Virginia children more than any other group.”4 That was the horror that moved her, as a mother of five, to run.
But she didn’t stop there. The problem was not just whether local communities should be allowed to decide to admit black children to formerly white schools. Virginia’s coming generation, she argued, black and white, needed more and better schooling, period. And that was just the beginning of the changes she was campaigning for. With the demand for agricultural labor shrinking, she announced, the state should cease being so tightfisted and spend money on public works projects to combat unemployment. It should also pay more attention to the health of its people. The doctor told newspaper reporters of regularly visiting elderly patients in her rural county “who live in cardboard houses without heat, or doors and windows that close in winter.” How was it, she asked, that Virginia, among the wealthiest states in the South, “gives the lowest old-age assistance allowances of any state in the nation except Mississippi[?] . . . I do not believe that saving money is more important than saving human lives and relieving human suffering.”5 Franklin Delano Roosevelt could not have said it better.
Wensel was fearless in shaming Byrd for presiding over an electoral system rigged to keep most citizens from the ballot box. “I believe that people everywhere,” she said, “in Virginia as well as in Russia, should have a chance to vote for a candidate who opposes the political machine that oppresses them.” Whose liberty was the Byrd Organization protecting? She noted that in the U.S. Senate, Byrd was among “the most outspoken opponents of centralization in government.” Yet “his political machine has been gradually depriving our counties and cities of their rights,” now even dictating to school boards what they can and cannot do. Her campaign motto was Virginia’s own: Sic semper tyrannis. “Thus always to tyrants.” It was time, prescribed Dr. Wensel, for the state’s citizens to “resist tyranny.”6
The state’s labor movement threw its support behind Wensel. Indeed, it was the president of the Virginia AFL-CIO, Harold M. Boyd, who persuaded her to run after she sent a letter to the editor of a major daily condemning the threat to the schools. Unions distributed tens of thousands of pamphlets calling on Virginia’s “moderate” majority to “speak up” and “organize” to stave off a “schoolless” future.7 So, too, did a number of mainline Protestant religious leaders and churchgoers who believed in the Golden Rule. They had been the first white Virginians to organize for peaceful school desegregation.8
But the biggest problem the Byrd machine faced was the white mothers and fathers of children confronting the prospect of padlocked schools. On the eve of the September closures, the moderate white Virginia journalist Benjamin Muse bewailed, “It is a monstrous, uncivilized thing to close a public school—to lock the door and turn children and teachers away, to halt the process of education in the modern world.”9
Affected children and their parents, in large numbers, agreed. Families scrambled to cope. In Charlottesville, home to UVA, ten elementary school PTA mothers had formed the Parents’ Committee for Emergency Schooling, cobbling together temporary schooling in church basements, home family rooms, and clubhouses, so as to avoid a mass rush to private schooling. The mothers differed on some questions, one explained, “but the one point on which we all agree is balking at the idea of doing away with the public school system.” The “tense air” in town marked a change “from the usual tranquility of Albemarle County,” noted the University of Virginia student newspaper.10
In Front Royal, seventy-five miles away from Charlottesville, some teenagers complained to a journalist, “We’re losing our education” because of the shutdown. “They wanted to go to school,” he wrote; “they didn’t want to risk their future over whether a few Negro kids came to their classes.” Norfolk, where nearly ten thousand white youth found themselves shut out of high school on September 27, became the site of the most avid organizing by parents, students, and teachers. At a rally there, one high school student’s sign read 2-4-6-8, WHEN DO WE GRADUATE?11 Here in “Virginia’s most cosmopolitan and racially moderate city,” as one writer described it, owing in no small part to the large U.S. Navy presence, public school educators refused to cooperate with the privatization campaign. As an alternative, they provided tutoring to four thousand students, reaching less than half of the shut-out youth, but sixteen times more than those who enrolled in the segregation academy.12
The grassroots organizing to reopen the schools and save public education from massive resistance continued throughout the fall, as Wensel helped get the message into the news. Taking time from her busy medical practice, she stumped the state in her old green station wagon, her eldest son, Bert, at the wheel, in what was truly, said a nearby newspaper editor, “a battle of David against Goliath.” All Virginians “should be grateful,” the editor said, for her determination to promote a vital debate “that would never have existed without opposition for the office.”13
When Election Day came, Byrd still won, and easily so.14 But Wensel attracted “more voters than any previous opposition candidates in [Senator] Byrd’s five elections,” despite lacking any political party’s backing. And in a sharply restricted electorate that deterred most blacks and many whites, over 120,000 voters—about one-third of the turnout—chose a vision of the common good based on the preservation of public schools. And more: they voted for a vision of Virginia in which the w
ealthy and propertied class were taxed something more than a pittance, so the state’s people could have better schools, better health, better roads—more opportunity to build better lives.15
As important, the people Dr. Wensel had energized did not go quietly away after an election whose outcome was assured by disenfranchisement. Instead, they continued working on the still unresolved schools crisis. Fifteen “open-schools” committees joined together in December, with backing from the state teachers’ association and the PTA, to form the statewide Virginia Committee for Public Schools (VCPS). Some twenty-five thousand Virginians joined, twice as many as the pro–massive resistance Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberty claimed at their peak.16
And behind the scenes, their organizing action forced the state’s business elite, until now inaudible, to stir. Scrambling to catch up with public opinion in the parts of the state most promising for economic development, some corporate leaders opened back-channel conversations with the governor’s office and the legislature about the perils of massive resistance.17 The Richmond-based Virginia Industrialization Group (VIG), most of whose members were from the state’s largest banks, retail operations, and new industries, warned the governor that public school closures were “an obstacle” to industrial recruitment and a sword hanging over Norfolk, where so many jobs depended on the federal government. They also pointed out that while it was one thing for the state to create new private schools in rural, black-majority Southside communities to serve the minority white population, “the abandonment or emasculation of the public school system” statewide was quite another. That would be a “calamity.”18
Democracy in Chains Page 10