VIRGINIA: Wrong Turn at the Crossroads

The brilliant gold beeches, scarlet oaks and russet maples splashed their color against a green pine background as Virginia last week gloried in its autumn. Near Warrenton, the horn rang clear in the crisp dawn to summon pink-coated hunters. In the sandy jack-pine country near the North Carolina line, warehouses bulged with the Bright Tobacco that enriched Virginia by $84 million last year. In southside Virginia, below Richmond, jets of ocher-colored steam spewed from National Aniline's new, modernistic chemical plant. In Williamsburg, tourists moved quietly, reverently, through shrines that attest to Virginia's historic leadership. Near Berryville, plump apples were being pared, cored, cooked and canned in a spice-fragrant plant owned by Virginia's present-day political leader: U.S. Senator Harry Flood Byrd. And in Charlottesville, Mrs. Roger Boyle, the antisegregationist wife of a University of Virginia dramatics professor, sorrowfully displayed the charred remnants of a cross that had burned in her backyard because she had said what she thought.

All these were symbols. They were symbols of Virginia's natural blessings, of its graceful way of life, of its prospering agriculture and burgeoning industry, of its leadership role that has meant so much to the U.S.—and of the way that Virginia, which has more reason than other Southern states to trust in the future, is exercising its Southern leadership to move into the black, prejudice-ridden past.

Temple of Shintoism. The whole fabric of Virginia's 39,899 square miles is stretched to the breaking point between past and future. Along the James River, the masters of magnificent plantation homes look with distrust on the inevitable industrialization of their domain.

(Says a Virginia Chamber of Commerce official: "Sentimentalists don't want their historic James River to become the Ruhr of the South, but it's bound to happen.") Along the York River, a new $70 million American Oil Co. refinery is in full operation near Yorktown, where the grass-carpeted trenches of the final battle for American independence still twist in a mystifying maze. And along the Potomac, in the Arlington-Alexandria area across from the nation's capital, are beehives of brick housing developments inhabited by thousands of federal workers viewed by most Virginians as foreigners.

The commonwealth of Virginia is justly proud of its past. Virginia gave to the U.S. eight Presidents, of whom three—Washington, Jefferson and Madison—were the muscle, the heart and the mind of the Republic. Yet in its homage to history, Virginia has become increasingly a cult of the past, a temple of Shintoism in the U.S. In this sense Virginia is indeed less a geographical state than a state of mind, and the power of its longtime modern-day leader rests, as one of his aides said last week, on the fact that "Harry Byrd usually stands for what most Virginians think."