New Lease

Virginia's conservative Senator Harry Flood Byrd, 65, has controlled his state for 27 years--ever since he won the governorship back in 1925 and wrested control of the rural Democratic machine from Bishop James Cannon Jr., chairman of the Board of Temperance and Social Service of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Since World War II the Senator has had a lot of criticism and competition. In 1946, a Richmond lawyer named Martin A. Hutchinson ran up a startling 82,000 votes (against Byrd's 142,000) in the senatorial primary; in 1949, wellborn; Colonel Francis Pickens Miller, a 57-year-old state legislator and ex-SHAEF staff officer, gave the Byrd forces a rousing fight in the race for governor.

When Colonel Miller filed against him in the senatorial primary this year, Harry Byrd set out to regain lost ground--particularly in cities like Norfolk and Richmond, which have expanded and become more liberal since the war. He waged the most energetic campaign of his life, bitterly attacked Harry Truman, and denounced Miller both as a Trumanite and (almost as appalling) a former Rhodes Scholar. When the vote for 1,691 of 1,783 precincts was in last week, Byrd had run up a lead of 87,000--the biggest contested primary margin in Virginia's history.

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