While remembering Robert C. Byrd today we would not do him justice without taking stock of the major blot on his public life: the fact that his early life and political career was inextricably bound up with the politics of racism. That much is not in dispute. Byrd spent the latter part of his life admitting as much and apologizing for it. The outstanding question is whether it compromised him in the bulk of his public career that took place after the 1960s when he became a more or less conventional Democrat on issues of Civil Rights.
First a brief review of the history. In his early twenties Byrd joined the Ku Klux Klan and became the leader of the unit is his small town in West Virginia. According to Byrd’s account he wrote the head of the national organization in late 1941 or early 1942 and said he wanted to join the organization. Eventually he was instrumental in recruiting a local group which eventually got the imprimatur of the national Klan and elected Byrd their “Exalted Cyclops”, or leader of the local group, in addition to “Kleagle”, or chief local recruiter.
Through his life, Byrd kept to a more or less accurate but often still sanitized history of his involvement in the Klan. Indeed, quite apart from attitudes toward the Klan today, Byrd’s membership almost cut his political career short in the cradle when he first ran for the House in 1952 when his Democratic primary opponent revealed his membership in the Klan.
Byrd confronted the issue head on. And weathered the storm. He said he’d been a member in 1942 and 1943 but had lost interest in the group and left. During the general election however his GOP opponent uncovered a handwritten letter from Byrd to the national leader of the Klan From 1946 still praising the group and recommending a friend for an office in the organization. Half a century later yet another letter surfaced. This is one Byrd wrote in 1945 to one of the most hardcore segregationists in the US Senate of the day, Sen. Theodore Bilbo (D) of Mississippi. In the letter Byrd railed against President Truman’s plan to desegregate the US military. Byrd told Bilbo he’d never serve with “a Negro” and that “Rather I should die a thousand times, and see old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels.”
Just why he joined the Klan is as much a job for psychologists as historians or journalists. During his first House campaign he said he’d joined “because it offered excitement and because it was strongly opposed to communism.” In a late autobiography he said he had been “caught up with the idea of being part of an organization to which ‘leading’ persons belonged.” What seems clear is that Byrd’s political ambition and desire for advancement mixed with what can only be called an ingrained racism, as Byrd himself basically admitted. (Much of these details come from a review of Byrd’s book by Eric Pianin in 2005.)
But this wasn’t the end. In many ways more consequential was his tenure as senator in the 1960s when he joined with most Southern and border state Democrats in filibustering the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He opposed but didn’t filibuster the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And in 1967 he voted against the confirmation of Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court. But he voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1968, i.e., the Fair Housing Act.
From that point, like many former segregationist Democrats who went on to serve decades into the post-Civil Rights Era (South Carolina’s Fritz Hollings comes to mind) Byrd slowly changed his views into that of a conventional national Democrat and served his remaining four decades or so in the Senate with those positions.
Before leaving the history, there are a couple points of context to bear in mind. On the one hand, obviously, the norm of racial politics was very different than it is today, especially in the South and Appalachia. It’s also true that the 20th century Klan, as opposed to the original post-Civil War Klan went well beyond simple support for segregation. Hollings was a segregationist — no way you couldn’t be as Gov. of South Carolina elected in 1958. But I doubt very much he ever had anything to do with the Klan.
So what does this amount to for the Byrd of the last thirty to forty years?
One of the early things TPM became known for was my reporting on Trent Lott in the immediate aftermath of his words of praise for Strom Thurmond’s 1948 segregationist presidential campaign. So then and whenever the Specter of GOP crypto-racism comes up, people always raise the example of Byrd and say the criticism is hypocritical and that Byrd was never held to the same standard. On balance, I never thought this criticism was honest and logically it simply does not hold up.
People change over the course of their lives. This we know. Whether they change out of conviction or opportunism is very difficult to judge. Indeed, it’s often a false dichotomy because over time we come to believe what we find it convenient and expedient to believe. I think the operative question is what they do. And this is the part of the equation Lott’s defenders and Byrd’s Republican attackers were never honest about. The issue with Lott was not a few offhand words at a centenarian’s birthday party. The key with Lott was that right up until 2002 he’d continued to participate in crypto-racist and pro-segregationist politics. Since Lott was from Mississippi, had a safe senate seat and wasn’t seen as having ambitions for national office, this fact was known but generally ignored by the Washington press. His revealing comment at Thurmond’s birthday party just made it much, much harder to ignore. That’s the difference. Lott’s problem wasn’t racist politics seventy or forty years ago. It was racist politics right up to the present day, or at least that present day which was 2002.
So what about Byrd? I really have no idea what was in his heart or the precise mix of opportunism and genuine evolution there was in his transformation on racial issues. I suspect it was a mix of both. Certainly decades with different positions over a life of nine decades counts for something. But since these inner beliefs are unknowable, on all these issues, action is what counts. What policies you support, what sectors of the population you cater your politics to. On that count, I think there’s very little similarity between Lott and Byrd.
