THE CONGRESS: Pay-As-You-Go Man

• Share

Virginia's Democratic Senator Harry Flood Byrd, 70, spent most of one afternoon last week at his cluttered desk, writing a statement in painstaking longhand. Writing done, he reread it, handed it to an aide, slipped out of his office with his black cocker spaniel, Happy, frisking at his heels, and took off that night for a Tucson hideaway. What he had written made headlines next morning: after 43 years in public office, Harry Byrd, chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee and the nation's most dedicated fighter for pay-as-you-go fiscal conservatism, had decided not to stand for reelection this year. His reason: he had promised his wife that 1952 would be his last campaign. "Since then," wrote Harry Byrd, "she has suffered a crippling illness and is an invalid; it is our desire to spend our lives together at home in Virginia."

Harry Byrd's pay-as-you-go philosophy was personal as well as political; from boyhood, he paid as he went. Although he belonged to the eighth generation of one of Virginia's first families,* its fortunes were depleted when, at 15, he took over his father's down-and-out Winchester Star, worked part-time as a telephone operator to buy newsprint—which he paid for on a day-to-day basis. The paper prospered and, with its earnings, Byrd leased an apple orchard. He now owns about 7,000 acres and is the world's largest individual apple grower.

Elected to the state senate in 1915, Harry Byrd led a bitter fight for pay-as-you-go road building as against bond financing, won in a referendum, carried on his model highway program after his election as governor in 1925. Governor Byrd pushed through a tough antilynch law, streamlined the state constitution. In the fight for adoption of his changes, he built the famed Virginia Democratic political organization that stands today as one of the nation's oldest and most successful—and Harry Byrd will continue to run it after his Senate retirement.

Longtime Break. In his days in Richmond, Byrd was described as Virginia's "most liberal governor since Thomas Jefferson." Harry Byrd did not change; times did, beginning in 1933-That year Byrd was appointed to the Senate, replacing Claude Swanson, who had been named Navy Secretary by Franklin Roosevelt. One of Byrd's first Senate votes was cast for Roosevelt's one attempt to carry out his campaign pledge for economy: a half billion cut in federal spending, mostly in veteran's benefits. But with NRA and its $3 billion relief provision, Byrd broke with Roosevelt—and stayed broken, both with F.D.R. and his successor, Harry Truman, who once snapped that there were "too many Byrds in the Senate."