Low-Flying Byrd

As a lawyer and a comparatively moderate Southerner. Virginia's Attorney General J. (for James) Lindsay Almond Jr. recognizes that the Old Dominion's posture of "massive resistance" to integration has a limited legal future. But as an astute politician hopefully headed for the governor's chair, Lindsay Almond, 59, recognizes something else as well. Massive resistance is the brain child of apple-growing, economy-minded U.S. Senator Harry Flood Byrd, and no Virginian has won statewide office in a quarter-century without Harry Byrd's blessing.

Faced by this situation, Candidate Almond took the obvious course. Accepting massive resistance, warning darkly against race mongrelization, he swept last week to an easy victory in the most lackluster Virginia gubernatorial primary in 25 years. The vote was small (roughly 7% of the electorate), as Harry Byrd likes it.

Workers' Support. White-thatched, ruddy-faced Lindsay Almond got his crack at the nomination the hard way. A onetime high-school principal, prosecuting attorney, judge of Roanoke's Hustings Court* (twelve years) and Congressman, he quit Washington in 1948 to be the Byrd candidate for attorney general, with the implied promise of a turn at governor. But as attorney general he lost his place in line when he endorsed Harry Truman's nomination of an anti-Byrd Virginia Democrat to the Federal Trade Commission. (Byrd beat the nomination in the Senate.) As a result, Byrd-minded Governor Thomas B. Stanley and other Byrd oligarchs settled on State Senator Garland Gray as this year's organization candidate for governor. Almond announced anyway, traveled doggedly from county seat to county seat to outfox Gray by getting the support of the courthouse workers, who are the wellspring of Byrd power.

Outmaneuvered, the organization leaders accepted Almond rather than a factional fight. Reason: a healthy respect for Theodore Roosevelt Dalton, the Republican national committeeman who four years ago threw the fear of G.O.P. into the Byrd organization by winning an unprecedented 45% of the vote against Governor Stanley.

Single Issue. Dalton, 56, a lanky, loose-jointed state senator from Carroll County in southwest Virginia's Republican-leaning mountain country, won the usually Democratic seat in 1944 by a write-in campaign, has held it since, despite mighty organization efforts to dislodge him. Nominated for governor a second time at last week's Republican convention in Roanoke, he found the campaign's blazing segregation issue already forced on him. As a hedge against integration, the Byrdmen --ardent states'-righters on the national scene--centralized all public-school pupil placements in Richmond, withheld state funds from any school district that defies the state by mixing races. Like other moderate segregationists, Lawyer Dalton believes in district-by-district supervision, a plan that would inevitably admit some Negro students to white schools (e.g., in the Washington suburbs of Arlington and Alexandria), but can ultimately withstand court tests better than the Byrd strategy of massive resistance. "Massive resistance," he argues, is a "massive myth leading to massive retreat and massive surrender." Underscoring Dalton's analysis, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (Virginia, West Virginia. Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina) last week ruled Virginia's 1956 Pupil Placement Act unconstitutional.

Even so, few Virginians believe that Dalton in the general election this November will match his near-winning performance of four years ago. Dalton is already being smeared as an integrationist from one end of the state to the other. And in Harry Byrd's Virginia, few epithets are more powerful.

* Continuing an English legal tradition, Virginia still maintains Hustings Courts in Roanoke, Petersburg, Portsmouth and Richmond, which generally have concurrent jurisdiction with Circuit Courts, normally hear criminal cases arising within each city or the area one mile beyond the corporate limits.

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