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14. Public Good and Private Interest
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14 22 PUBLIC GOOD AND PRIVATE INTEREST Mills Edwin Godwin Jr. (1914–1999) (courtesy of the Library of Virginia) served as a Democrat in the House of Delegates and the Senate of Virginia and was elected lieutenant governor in 1961 and governor in 1965. A committed supporter of Massive Resistance to court-ordered desegregation of the public schools in the 1950s, he proposed a large and important program of political and educational reform while governor in the 1960s. Switching to the Republican Party, he won election as governor a second time in 1973 and presided over an administration that did not propose any major reforms. Godwin’s change of party and his career exemplified the changes and the continuities of twentieth-century Virginia politics. [44.201.199.251] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:42 GMT) Marion G. Robertson made a speech to the Democratic Party state convention in Williamsburg on 11 June 1978 to urge the nomination of Conley Phillips, a Norfolk city councilman, for the United States Senate. After Phillips lost the nomination, Robertson promised that he and the thousands of people he had inspired and organized to take part in the local mass meetings and in the state convention would be back in the future. Two years after a former governor of Georgia, Democrat Jimmy Carter, won election to the presidency as an openly born-again Christian, Robertson led the campaign to nominate a born-again Democratic Christian to the United States Senate from Virginia, and he promised to assist the party win future elections and in particular to elect evangelical Christian candidates. Robertson was the only person who was not a candidate for the nomination or a prominent officeholder who addressed the convention, a recognition of the importance of the role that he played in the party that year. He was also the only person who talked about the party’s future.1 Pat Robertson, as he was better known, reintroduced organized evangelical Protestant Christianity back into party politics in Virginia. He was a new figure at the party’s convention in Williamsburg, but his name was not new to the party. From the 1910s to the 1960s, his father, A. Willis Robertson, had been a reliable member of the Democratic Party organization that Harry Flood Byrd directed from 1922 until 1966. Willis Robertson and Harry Byrd were seatmates in the Senate of Virginia in the 1910s and together represented the state in the United States Senate from 1946 until Byrd’s retirement in 1965. Pat Robertson’s appearance at the head of a large group of recently energized evangelical Protestants at the 1978 state convention symbolized important changes that were taking place in the political culture in the state, changes that nevertheless reflected long and durable continuities. Other events of the Democratic convention and of the Republican Party state convention that year also symbolized the changes and continuities in the politics of post–Harry Byrd Virginia. The man who received the Democratic Party’s nomination for the Senate was former state attorney general Andrew Pickens Miller, the son of Francis Pickens Miller, who during the 1940s and 1950s was one of the party’s leading opponents of the Byrd organization. Francis Pickens Miller appeared in the gallery during the convention and when introduced received a hearty ovation from the delegates. H. Lester Hooker also appeared at a different hour and on the opposite side of the gallery. When introduced he received only a smattering of polite applause because almost 358 the grandees of government nobody knew who he was. Hooker had managed Claude A. Swanson’s primary and general election campaigns for the United States Senate in 1922 and served on the influential State Corporation Commission from 1924 until 1972. He was the last surviving relic of the Byrd organization’s antecedent, the Martin-Swanson organization. His appearance at the 1978 convention was also symbolic and signified the continuing relevance of the party’s past even as it strove to create a new future. The convention’s presiding officer, John Warren Cooke, was a symbol of the party’s more recent past. He was the last son of a Confederate veteran to hold high public office in Virginia and had broken into politics early in the 1940s as a young supporter of the Byrd organization. During the critical struggle over Massive Resistance to the federal courts’ orders to desegregate the state’s public schools, he was majority leader of the House of Delegates; his predecessors...