This week marks a grim anniversary in Virginia history: the 55th anniversary of when Hurricane Camille (by then reduced to tropical depression status) inundated parts of the state, dumping 27 inches of rain on Nelson County and killing 124 people, some of whom were never found in the mudslides.
Weather journalist Kevin Myatt will have a more complete look at the legacy of Camille, one of just four Category 5 storms to come ashore in the United States, in his regular Wednesday column. You can sign up for Kevin’s weekly weather newsletter right now:
Camille overlapped with another pivotal event in Virginia history, this one political. On Aug. 19, 1969, just before the skies opened up that night and Camille rained down on the Blue Ridge Mountains, Virginia held the only two runoff elections in its history.
Both marked turning points in Virginia politics.
The story behind them — and how they still influence Virginia today — actually goes back to yet another anniversary. This summer marks the 75th anniversary of the 1949 Democratic primary for governor, easily one of the most important elections in state history.
A quick sketch: In 1949, the conservative political organization overseen by U.S. Sen. Harry Byrd Sr. controlled the Democratic Party. Republicans were an insignificant force. However, tectonic changes were starting to reshape Virginia, and 1949 produced something heretofore unseen: a legitimate liberal challenger to the Byrd Machine. Under normal circumstances, state Sen. John Battle of Charlottesville would have easily won the Democratic primary and gone on to become governor. He was Byrd’s choice and that was usually that. However, Francis Pickens Miller — just back from Europe, where he’d been an intelligence officer on Dwight Eisenhower’s staff — mounted an unexpectedly strong challenge from the left. Miller’s big issue: Insufficient state funding of schools. He called for a major state investment in school construction. Miller’s argument caught fire and for a time it looked as if Battle might lose. Byrd himself had to intervene on behalf of Battle, and the state’s Republicans were so alarmed that Republican leader Henry Wise of Accomack County urged his party’s members to vote in the Democratic primary for Battle to thwart an “invasion by aliens.” (Miller was hardly an alien, although he might have seemed to come from a different planet politically at the time. He grew up in Rockbridge County.)
Battle eventually won the primary, polling 43% of the vote to Miller’s 35% while two other candidates split the rest.
At least four things came out of the close call:
- It was clear that the Byrd Machine was vulnerable in ways few had envisioned before. The organization would survive a few decades longer — Massive Resistance temporarily strengthened it — but 1949 showed that the state was changing in ways the Byrd Machine couldn’t survive.
- School funding became popular. Once Battle was finally elected, he co-opted Miller’s plan and funded a school construction binge that is still cited today — as we once again worry that some rural areas, in particular, can’t afford the cost of school construction.
- Conservative Democrats saw crossover voting as an insurance policy in case their favored candidates needed outside help; this is one reason Virginia voters aren’t registered by party today — much to the chagrin of some who wish they were. Today it’s often Republicans who want party registration (some Lynchburg Republicans have been particularly vocal about this), but 75 years ago it was conservative Democrats who wanted the assurance that, if they needed the votes, Republicans could vote in their primary.
- Finally, and more to our point today, the Byrd Machine decided the best way to avoid the possibility of the “wrong” candidate winning the Democratic primary was to institute a runoff election. If no candidate hit the 50% mark, then the top two would duke it out in a runoff.
Twenty years went by before that provision was triggered — and by 1969 a lot had changed. Byrd was dead, and the Byrd Machine was falling apart as the state suburbanized, the poll tax was eliminated, the Voting Rights Act guaranteed Black Virginians the right to vote and the liberal wing of the Democratic Party grew. One sign of the times: The 1969 Democratic primary involved the sons of the two 1949 protagonists, but their political positions were quite different. John Battle’s son, Bill Battle, was a friend of the late President John Kennedy and was considered part of a new generation of more moderate Democrats. Miller’s son, Andrew Miller, was also seen as a centrist, in contrast to his father who scared the bejeebers out of the Byrd Machine. Their politics may not have been all that different, but times had changed. The state’s Republican Party was also growing and by 1969 its candidate for governor, Linwood Holton, was given a good shot at winning — but we’re getting ahead of things.
The 1969 Democratic primary for governor was a three-way affair, between the conservative Lt. Gov. Fred Pollard, the moderate Bill Battle and the liberal state Sen. Henry Howell. In a previous era, Pollard would have been the obvious winner, but now he finished third. Battle and Howell finished in almost a dead heat — Battle 39.6%, Howell 37.0%. They would head to a runoff.
The Democratic primary for attorney general was a four-way race. Miller led the pack with 41.1% of the vote, with the more conservative Guy Farley second at 35.0%. They, too, would go to a runoff.
The only Democratic primary that year that didn’t go to a runoff was the lieutenant governor’s race, where J. Sergeant Reynolds won easily. He was a scion of the Reynolds Metals family — another branch of the family founded R.J. Reynolds Tobacco — and seemed destined for great things until a brain tumor struck him down at age 34 (which is why today there’s a community college in Richmond named after him).
Those Democratic primaries of 1969, and the subsequent runoffs, produced a party that shook off its Byrd Machine heritage and showed itself ready to chart a more moderate course — with the potential to veer even further left.
Miller won his runoff easily, taking 61.8% of the vote. He went on to win easily that November, was elected to two terms as attorney general and came close (but not close enough) to later winning both the governorship and a U.S. Senate seat. Within a decade, the candidate Miller defeated in that runoff — Farley — was a Republican, the preferred candidate of a new group that had appeared on the political scene: Religious conservatives. The fact that Farley was a reasonably strong Democratic contender in 1969, and then a contender for a Republican lieutenant governor nomination in 1981, shows how much the politics of the state were realigning in that era.
The gubernatorial runoff was much more contentious, some might even say bitter. Battle won narrowly, 51.7% to 48.3%. Howell declared that his supporters were “free spirits,” which seemed a signal that they could vote for Holton. Instead of the runoff producing a majority-vote winner the party could rally around, it only amplified the bad feelings between rival factions. Late in the campaign, Howell finally endorsed Battle and was invited to a Battle fundraising event in Richmond. However, Howell noticeably wasn’t seated at the head table, wasn’t asked to speak, wasn’t even introduced. Encyclopedia Virginia describes this as a “snub” that further embittered Howell supporters, who were particularly passionate about their man “Howlin’ Henry.” Battle never managed to put his fractured party together, and Holton became the first Republican elected governor in Virginia since the tumultuous aftermath of the Civil War. There were lots of reasons why Holton won that year, but one of them was the runoff election that only made things worse, not better, for Virginia Democrats.
That runoff was 55 years ago Monday.
Had there not been a runoff, Battle and Miller would have still been their party’s nominees, but Battle might not have been so hobbled going into the general election — we’ll never know.
What we do know is that a few years later the General Assembly eliminated runoffs, so those two in 1969 are the only ones we’ve ever had. In a column last year, I pointed out all the elections since 1969 where candidates have won office with only a plurality of the vote and would have been subject to a runoff had the law not been changed.
Many of us who follow Virginia politics date the state’s modern political era as beginning in 1969 — that was the first year we had a Republican break the Democratic monopoly on statewide office. Before then, we had a one-party system. After that, we had a two-party system. The two parties then didn’t look much like the ones we have today, but the outlines were starting to appear.
In that context, the Battle-Howell runoff of Aug. 19, 1969, stands as an important test of how quickly the Democratic Party was going to evolve — Battle’s win held off more liberal dominance for a while longer, but perhaps at the cost of party unity that led to the election of a Republican governor. Battle’s political career was done that year but Howell, in defeat, only became more powerful. He won a special election for lieutenant governor in 1971 (after Reynolds died) and went on to run twice more for governor, losing the 1973 general election narrowly and the 1977 general election by a wider margin. As the old conservative Democrats who might have accepted or at least tolerated Battle but could not stomach Howell died off or joined the Republicans, Virginia Democrats were cast adrift, deemed far too left of the state’s electorate until Charles Robb pulled them back toward the center in 1981.
That’s a lot of history in a short time, but the point is that those 1969 elections were an inflection point in Virginia politics, with that Battle-Howell runoff being one of the sharpest.
It wasn’t raining when the votes were cast; the big downpours came that night, so the storm had no impact on the election. That wasn’t necessarily the case with another hurricane-induced flood — the infamous Flood of 1985, which came on Election Day that November when Virginians were electing a governor and House of Delegates. That 1985 flood did make a difference in at least one race, a House seat in Harrisonburg and Rockingham County. Democrat Paul Cline of Harrisonburg unexpectedly defeated Republican Phoebe Orebaugh of Broadway — his political base was wet but not flooded; hers was underwater.
We can never keep storms away on election days — storms will come when they want to come. We do, though, have ways to make sure they don’t change the outcome: early voting. That’s a way to make sure nature’s will doesn’t get in the way of the people’s will.
Today, we should look to the skies and think about the deadly rains that came 55 years ago tonight, turning both sides of the Blue Ridge into scenes of unimaginable grief. Politics don’t seem very important when people are dying, but those two runoff elections that came just before the floodwaters rose deserve to be more than a historical footnote.
Coming Wednesday: A look back at Hurricane Camille
I usually use this space to talk up the weekly political newsletter that I write; West of the Capital goes out Friday afternoon. Today, allow me to make a plug for weather journalist Kevin Myatt’s weekly weather newsletter that goes out on Wednesday evenings. This week he’ll look back at Camille (and ahead at whatever weather is headed our way in the coming week). You can sign up for any of our free newsletters here:
