Customer Reviews

Harry Byrd of Virginia

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Dr. Ronald L. Heinemann's extensive volume of Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virignia is a must have for anybody trying to understand southern politics. On his own, Harry Byrd is a rather tacid, boring politician who built a political machine by keeping as many people ineligible to vote as possible through poll taxing and through the support of the "courthouse ring." Byrd is more a representative of a bygone era trying hard to keep pace with a newer and more complex world. In fact, Heinemann's approach to Byrd shows us a political animal who lived, slept, and breathed for a campaign and for power. He was a gentle southern apple farmer and newspaper editor who could hold the federal government in his hand from his chairmanship of the Senate Finance Committee. Through Byrd, Heinemann shows the South's last, desperate grasp at retaining the society that they knew was wrong. This is an important read for anyone who wants to understand what southern's were thinking, not simply write them off in a few curt sentences.

Professor Heinemann has brought to the table a tremendous amount of research--a vast array of day to day details. But the work is seriously marred by a lack of understanding for what the great debates of the Senator's lifetime were really all about. He shows who loved Byrd and hated him; some of the words that they used; and what the immediate effect may have been. He paints a very detailed picture of an able, largely self-made and self-educated man, who had an unusually skilled grasp of the nuances of partisan politics from the Court Houses of Virginia to the Halls of Congress; a man who was very widely respected by his contemporaries for his rock ribbed integrity, as well as his ability. But then he trivializes his subject with his own ex cathedra pronouncements, which show more of the author's limitations than they do of Senator Byrd's. The tragedy is that, while this book still has great value to those who want to learn more about the greatest Virginian since Robert E. Lee, it misses its full potential, because its author does not have a clue as to what the real issues involved;no perspective on the Constitutional questions, only a very limited perspective on the economic; and practically none as to why certain values, which made very great sense two thousand years before Jefferson, will still make sense a thousand years after Harry Byrd and Ronald Heinemann. It is a pity, because he obviously would not have gone to so great an effort, had he not realized a little of Byrd's significance. What a shame that he failed to see the forest for the trees.