James Buchanan and Warren Nutter did not put forward their proposed solution to the school crisis until early 1959. When they did, it was as if they had pulled down the shades on every window, cancelled their subscriptions to all the newspapers, and plugged their ears to a new set of voices in Harry Byrd’s Virginia. The economists and their allies had steadfastly maintained that the state’s fight was against the federal government, against coercion from outsiders, in a stand for liberty. They ignored the overt racism and turned a blind eye to the chronic violations of black citizens’ liberty and constitutional rights that led to the federal intervention, true. But the voices of 1958 and early 1959 defied even their narrow and exclusionary framing of the conflict, because they came from white, middle-class Virginians, from parents, in particular, who were shocked at the actions of their state officials and determined to resist. Most were moderate Republicans and Democrats of the expanding suburbs and cities of Northern Virginia. And they spoke powerfully enough over a six-month period to move Buchanan and Nutter to explain publicly what their vision of liberty would mean in practice on the most pressing matter of the day.1
In the summer of 1958, three very different communities—the port city of Norfolk, home to a U.S. Navy base; Charlottesville, home to the University of Virginia; and the textile mill town of Front Royal, in the Shenandoah Valley—announced their intentions to admit a few black students to some previously white schools the following September. They were moved to do so not because the white townspeople or their school boards suddenly converted to equal rights under the law. No doubt a few did. But most, having been reared since infancy in the culture of Jim Crow, did not.2 Still, many did see themselves as patriotic, law-abiding citizens, and so were unwilling to defy a court ruling, even on the matter of race. Federal courts had instructed their communities to desegregate, without further delay, particularly schools that had been the focus of NAACP lawsuits, and they planned to comply. Those local plans triggered the implementation of the 1956 state massive resistance legislation empowering the governor to close any white school that planned to admit any black students. His act would deny public education to some thirteen thousand white students, all told, from first graders to high school seniors. (No whites were suing to enter black schools, so they were unaffected by the closures).3
• • •
In July of 1958, the week after Governor J. Lindsay Almond Jr. announced he would close these schools come September, a Virginia country doctor, who before this time had paid little attention to state politics, announced that she would run for the U.S. Senate seat held by Harry Byrd. Her name was Louise Wensel. Dr. Wensel minced no words in explaining why she was running: because Senator Byrd’s “massive resistance program is designed to close our schools, thus hurting our Virginia children more than any other group.”4 That was the horror that moved her, as a mother of five, to run.
But she didn’t stop there. The problem was not just whether local communities should be allowed to decide to admit black children to formerly white schools. Virginia’s coming generation, she argued, black and white, needed more and better schooling, period. And that was just the beginning of the changes she was campaigning for. With the demand for agricultural labor shrinking, she announced, the state should cease being so tightfisted and spend money on public works projects to combat unemployment. It should also pay more attention to the health of its people. The doctor told newspaper reporters of regularly visiting elderly patients in her rural county “who live in cardboard houses without heat, or doors and windows that close in winter.” How was it, she asked, that Virginia, among the wealthiest states in the South, “gives the lowest old-age assistance allowances of any state in the nation except Mississippi[?] . . . I do not believe that saving money is more important than saving human lives and relieving human suffering.”5 Franklin Delano Roosevelt could not have said it better.
Wensel was fearless in shaming Byrd for presiding over an electoral system rigged to keep most citizens from the ballot box. “I believe that people everywhere,” she said, “in Virginia as well as in Russia, should have a chance to vote for a candidate who opposes the political machine that oppresses them.” Whose liberty was the Byrd Organization protecting? She noted that in the U.S. Senate, Byrd was among “the most outspoken opponents of centralization in government.” Yet “his political machine has been gradually depriving our counties and cities of their rights,” now even dictating to school boards what they can and cannot do. Her campaign motto was Virginia’s own: Sic semper tyrannis. “Thus always to tyrants.” It was time, prescribed Dr. Wensel, for the state’s citizens to “resist tyranny.”6
The state’s labor movement threw its support behind Wensel. Indeed, it was the president of the Virginia AFL-CIO, Harold M. Boyd, who persuaded her to run after she sent a letter to the editor of a major daily condemning the threat to the schools. Unions distributed tens of thousands of pamphlets calling on Virginia’s “moderate” majority to “speak up” and “organize” to stave off a “schoolless” future.7 So, too, did a number of mainline Protestant religious leaders and churchgoers who believed in the Golden Rule. They had been the first white Virginians to organize for peaceful school desegregation.8
But the biggest problem the Byrd machine faced was the white mothers and fathers of children confronting the prospect of padlocked schools. On the eve of the September closures, the moderate white Virginia journalist Benjamin Muse bewailed, “It is a monstrous, uncivilized thing to close a public school—to lock the door and turn children and teachers away, to halt the process of education in the modern world.”9
Affected children and their parents, in large numbers, agreed. Families scrambled to cope. In Charlottesville, home to UVA, ten elementary school PTA mothers had formed the Parents’ Committee for Emergency Schooling, cobbling together temporary schooling in church basements, home family rooms, and clubhouses, so as to avoid a mass rush to private schooling. The mothers differed on some questions, one explained, “but the one point on which we all agree is balking at the idea of doing away with the public school system.” The “tense air” in town marked a change “from the usual tranquility of Albemarle County,” noted the University of Virginia student newspaper.10
In Front Royal, seventy-five miles away from Charlottesville, some teenagers complained to a journalist, “We’re losing our education” because of the shutdown. “They wanted to go to school,” he wrote; “they didn’t want to risk their future over whether a few Negro kids came to their classes.” Norfolk, where nearly ten thousand white youth found themselves shut out of high school on September 27, became the site of the most avid organizing by parents, students, and teachers. At a rally there, one high school student’s sign read 2-4-6-8, WHEN DO WE GRADUATE?11 Here in “Virginia’s most cosmopolitan and racially moderate city,” as one writer described it, owing in no small part to the large U.S. Navy presence, public school educators refused to cooperate with the privatization campaign. As an alternative, they provided tutoring to four thousand students, reaching less than half of the shut-out youth, but sixteen times more than those who enrolled in the segregation academy.12
The grassroots organizing to reopen the schools and save public education from massive resistance continued throughout the fall, as Wensel helped get the message into the news. Taking time from her busy medical practice, she stumped the state in her old green station wagon, her eldest son, Bert, at the wheel, in what was truly, said a nearby newspaper editor, “a battle of David against Goliath.” All Virginians “should be grateful,” the editor said, for her determination to promote a vital debate “that would never have existed without opposition for the office.”13
When Election Day came, Byrd still won, and easily so.14 But Wensel attracted “more voters than any previous opposition candidates in [Senator] Byrd’s five elections,” despite lacking any political party’s backing. And in a sharply restricted electorate that deterred most blacks and many whites, over 120,000 voters—about one-third of the turnout—chose a vision of the common good based on the preservation of public schools. And more: they voted for a vision of Virginia in which the wealthy and propertied class were taxed something more than a pittance, so the state’s people could have better schools, better health, better roads—more opportunity to build better lives.15
As important, the people Dr. Wensel had energized did not go quietly away after an election whose outcome was assured by disenfranchisement. Instead, they continued working on the still unresolved schools crisis. Fifteen “open-schools” committees joined together in December, with backing from the state teachers’ association and the PTA, to form the statewide Virginia Committee for Public Schools (VCPS). Some twenty-five thousand Virginians joined, twice as many as the pro–massive resistance Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberty claimed at their peak.16
And behind the scenes, their organizing action forced the state’s business elite, until now inaudible, to stir. Scrambling to catch up with public opinion in the parts of the state most promising for economic development, some corporate leaders opened back-channel conversations with the governor’s office and the legislature about the perils of massive resistance.17 The Richmond-based Virginia Industrialization Group (VIG), most of whose members were from the state’s largest banks, retail operations, and new industries, warned the governor that public school closures were “an obstacle” to industrial recruitment and a sword hanging over Norfolk, where so many jobs depended on the federal government. They also pointed out that while it was one thing for the state to create new private schools in rural, black-majority Southside communities to serve the minority white population, “the abandonment or emasculation of the public school system” statewide was quite another. That would be a “calamity.”18
In January of 1959, the courts put an end to the uncertainty. Two sets of judges—federal and state—ruled the school closure laws unconstitutional. As long as public schools operated in any locality of the state, they found, it was a violation of the guarantee of equal protection to shut them down in another. Conceding that his state must, finally, obey the courts, the governor convened an emergency session of the state legislature to revoke the school closure legislation and form a commission to propose a new course of action.19
• • •
While the state legislature began to work out a new plan, Buchanan and Nutter put the finishing touches on their own plan. On February 10, eight days after Norfolk reopened its schools, they sent a “private” report to all the members of the new commission. The economists made their case in the race-neutral, value-free language of their discipline, offering what they depicted as a strictly economic argument—on “matters of fact, not of values.” Yet they were, in effect, urging the state to ignore its concerned white parents and continue to stonewall the African Americans seeking equal schooling. And they knew it, which is why they noted that by intervening, they were “letting the chips fall where they may.”20
While most Virginians now assumed that the path forward would include gradual integration in most parts of the state, albeit with mechanisms holding it to a minimum, Professors Buchanan and Nutter made the case for the very opposite: unlimited privatization of education. As believers in individual liberty, they said, they approved of neither “involuntary (or coercive) segregation” nor “involuntary integration.”21 Tax-funded private schools were the answer.
They offered a plan they believed could salvage what remained of massive resistance while surviving court review. How? Privatize education, but do so on the basis of strictly economic arguments. First and foremost, they contended that public schools, which they insisted on referring to as “state-run schools,” had an effective “monopoly.” They lacked adequate competition, because on their own, few parents could afford alternatives. As a result, like all monopolies, state-run schools had no incentive to improve. “Privately operated schools,” by contrast, would have to compete for students, so they would have a strong incentive to try out a “diversity” of curricula, not only encouraging experimentation but meeting different tastes. In essence, “every parent could cast his vote in the [educational] marketplace and have it count.” To foster this system, Virginia should provide a tax-subsidized voucher to any parent who wished to send a child to a private school for any reason. Those schools, being private, would enjoy autonomy, admitting or rejecting students as they chose to, without government interference.22
The importance of the economists’ case rested less on what they proposed than on how their proposals were framed to undercut the arguments of the parents and others who were saying that Virginia simply could not afford to subsidize private schools to salvage segregation.23 Not so, the Chicago-trained scholars countered: those who argued this way were making an accounting error by failing to consider the significant dollar value of existing school facilities. If authorities “sold all the buildings and equipment to private owners,” that would equalize the operating costs of the two systems, and the private schools would prove their inherent superiority. They assured those charged with recommending a court-proof approach that fears that “industry will leave Virginia unless we keep the traditional system of public schools” were groundless. Corporations would not care who ran the schools, they said, as long as good education was available. “All that matters” for the economy, the two scholars maintained, was that the state government support some school system “cheaply and efficiently.” How that schooling was provided was immaterial.24
It was a radical proposal, no question about it, the work of ideologues so committed to their own postulates that they disdained evidence to the contrary, including the cries of colleagues outside economics. Indeed, about ten days before they reached out to the state legislators, over one hundred and fifty moderate local professors had released a petition urging “respect for law and order”; that is, compliance with the federal courts. The scholars described “the maintenance of an efficient system of public education” as the foundation of “our democratic system of self-government.” In a state that denied black citizens political representation, the signers pointedly urged that “all the races . . . be respectfully consulted” and involved “in seeking a satisfactory solution” to the crisis. “We emphatically believe, in keeping with basic democratic principles,” they concluded, that local people have the right to “solve our school problems ourselves,” an implicit reproach of the state government closing schools in local communities that wanted to obey the courts, such as Charlottesville.25
Buchanan and Nutter disagreed: to them, as to Kilpatrick, that would be bowing to federal coercion. It was the team’s first intervention on a public policy issue in their adopted state and they wanted to get it right, so Nutter asked his mentor at the University of Chicago to review their statement on the “ticklish situation.” After all, their arguments were in line with Milton Friedman’s own 1955 article making the case for just such action, which he had written as news of segregationist public officials’ threats to close public education garnered national media attention.26
Friedman found the 1959 Buchanan-Nutter report “admirable.” He urged them to “circulate it widely privately and also seriously consider its publication.” And then he admitted that he “would go much farther than you [have]. . . . In principle the full burden of education should be borne by the parents of children,” not paid by the state. Why, you may wonder, did Friedman want the government out of schooling? That would promote personal responsibility—through birth control. If parents had to bear the full cost of educating their children, he believed they would have “the appropriate number of children.”27
Antigovernment economists had already been worrying about the tax consequences of the then near-hegemonic commitment to public education. Buchanan, together with a like-minded economist, Roger A. Freeman, had served on the National Tax Association’s Committee on the Financing of Public Education, where the two men flagged the growing public school spending of the baby boom era as a “pork barrel” problem and a threat to states’ rights, because with federal investment in education would come regulations concerning how it was to be spent. “Who is going to pay the taxes needed to finance the ambitious programs which are being proposed?” Freeman demanded in a publication issued by the American Enterprise Institute.28 “No nation,” he said in reference to compulsory high school, “has ever attempted to keep so many children in school so long.” It was an excess of democracy to try to educate so many, he suggested, and it would cost taxpayers too much money.29
Professor Freeman also warned the Volker Fund, the foundation that funded Buchanan’s center and most libertarian endeavors, that those calling for more spending on schooling were not just “well organized throughout the country.” They were doing first-rate research and “an extremely effective job of disseminating” their findings. By contrast, “action to offset this propaganda has been negligible,” because the foes of government spending were “largely unorganized.”30 The southern schools fight was changing that, however, opening new hope to the property rights supremacists associated with the Volker Fund.
That hope depended on indifference, at best, to the harm being inflicted on African Americans. To a person, after all, the southerners clamoring for state subsidies for private schooling were whites who wanted to maintain segregation. Black Virginians, by contrast, boycotted the vouchers, viewing them as an affront. Oliver Hill, one of the NAACP attorneys who filed suit for the student strikers of Prince Edward, stated crisply the principle on which they opposed the grants: “No one in a democratic society has a right to have his private prejudices financed at public expense.”31
Indeed, even Buchanan’s University of Chicago mentor, Frank Knight, expressed some concern about “racists” before a visit to Charlottesville. Buchanan responded that Chicago had far more “race hatred” than any place he had lived in the South. He assured Knight that “the Virginia attitude on the whole mess” stemming from Brown had not been based on racism. “The transcendent issue,” he instructed his former teacher, was “whether the federal government shall dictate the solutions.”32
It is true that many observers at the time, and scholars since, have reduced the conflict to one of racial attitudes alone, disposing too easily of the political-economic fears and philosophical commitments that stiffened many whites’ will to fight. So a “both/and” construction would be reasonable. Indeed, since the abolitionists had first enlisted the Commerce Clause of the Constitution to try to stop the profitable interstate traffic in human beings, and later when the New Deal had leveraged it to regulate the economy, class and race had been interwoven with property rights and public power in ways that cannot be understood well with a single-factor analysis.33 To pose the schools conflict as “either/or” in the way Buchanan did, however, was a willful misrepresentation. It waved aside the reality that those who opposed school desegregation had to be coached to invoke the Constitution rather than white supremacy as the reason for their stand. And now he was teaching them to use Mont Pelerin Society economics, too.
Yet why did Buchanan imagine that his proposal for thoroughgoing privatization of public schooling would gain traction with state legislators? Had he not seen the enthusiasm generated by Wensel’s campaign and the crowds at the pro–public school rallies? Those crowds were not northerners brought south to stir up trouble, as spokesmen of the right liked to insinuate. Their members were in good part men and women President Eisenhower might have referred to as modern Republicans, the kind of voters he had been trying to attract.34
Buchanan had first pitched his program to Colgate Darden as a way to push back against federal overreach in the name of liberty. But the parents’ mobilization to save the public schools had revealed harder truths. It wasn’t just the northeastern elite that rejected his vision of a free society. It was tens of thousands of white moderate citizens of the state in whose name Byrd was defying federal power. In fact, the legislators who had voted against the school closure law represented more Virginians than those who voted for it, but the state’s system of apportioning representation made rural votes count for more than urban and suburban votes (rather like the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College overrepresent rural states with small populations).35
Was the problem for those who promoted economic liberty majority rule itself? The economists’ next intervention raised that possibility.
• • •
In early April of 1959, a little less than two months after Buchanan and Nutter circulated their report, the commission set up to chart the way forward voted 22–16 against recommending a proposed change to the state constitution to enable the privatization of public education, a course so new that the verb “to privatize” had not yet been called into being. Some freedom-of-choice vouchers, yes; changing the constitution to further privatization, no. Infuriated, the massive resistance forces organized to build public pressure for such constitutional change. But where they had dominated the public discussion before the school closures, after the moderates’ mobilization, the divide was now closer to a draw. They needed help to have any chance of prevailing in the General Assembly.
Buchanan and Nutter entered the debate again at this moment. The timing of their efforts strongly suggests coordination with Jack Kilpatrick in an eleventh-hour push to persuade the legislators to go further. He editorialized in favor of the changes, which would allow the General Assembly “to authorize any county, on a vote of its [enfranchised] people, to abandon public schools entirely and shift altogether to a scholarship [voucher] approach.” This was the plan Prince Edward County was about to put into effect, now that it faced its own court order to cease racial discrimination come fall. White county leaders’ answer to the court was that because no one had access to public education, no group was being discriminated against. The state constitutional change would also allow localities to sell off their public school buildings and resources to private operators, as the Buchanan-Nutter report urged. Three days later, the two economists went public with their long report advocating school privatization, as Milton Friedman had earlier urged, publishing it in two full-page installments in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.36
But when put to a political test, the team failed yet again. The resolution in question—to end the constitutional guarantee of free public schools throughout the state—went down in the House of Delegates by a vote of 53–45. The legislators’ reluctance to go that far is not surprising. Not many bought the argument that, as a state legislator from Appomattox, of all places, expressed it, “it’s not the education of our children that’s so important. It’s states’ rights.” That seemed too radical even for state legislators who had prided themselves on their defiance of the Supreme Court. Most understood that a fire sale of tax-funded public schools to private school operators would be political suicide. They wanted to stop integration, not be ejected from office.37
The vote marked the definitive end of the state’s official policy of massive resistance to Brown. “The Byrd machine,” observed one reporter, “misread the feeling of the majority of Virginians.”38 The Organization never recovered its former power.
• • •
For his part, Jim Buchanan learned lessons from this experience that informed his thinking for the rest of his life. Faced with majority opinion as expressed in votes, politicians could not be counted on to stand by their stated commitments. Even those who previously had pledged fealty to state sovereignty, individual liberty, and free enterprise would buckle, owing to their self-interest in reelection. Buchanan also learned that his adopted state was more committed to public education than he had realized, having taken his cues from Harry Byrd and Jack Kilpatrick. Of course, he blamed the defeat on “educrats” (as segregationists so often called teachers’ associations, principals, PTAs, and school-of-education faculty), whose influence he had underestimated. He learned something else, too: constitutions matter. If a constitution enabled what he would call “socialism” (which, in Virginia’s case, meant requiring a system of public schools), it would be nearly impossible to achieve his vision of radical transformation without changing the constitution.
Over the next few years, with the expansion of the southern electorate and the demise of Harry Byrd’s approach to governance looming, James Buchanan began developing the innovative approach to political economy for which he was later awarded the Nobel Prize. In these final hours of the massive resistance era, then, can be found the seed of the ideas guiding today’s attack on the public sector and robust democracy alike.
Meanwhile, back in the county where Barbara Rose Johns first organized for fair treatment, and where officials continued to insist that they would abandon public education entirely rather than submit to “dictation” by federal courts, the Board of Supervisors voted a few weeks later to close the schools.39 That September, they padlocked every public school and opened new private schools for the white children while leaving some eighteen hundred black children with no formal education whatsoever. “It’s the nation’s first county,” reported the Wall Street Journal, “to go completely out of the public school business.” Local black youth remained schoolless from 1959 to 1964, when a federal court intervened to stop the abuse.40
Throughout those five years, as James Buchanan developed the Virginia school of political economy, he remained mute about the well-publicized tragedy. He saw no reason to distinguish the liberty white county leaders claimed as self-justification for denying education to a community that had dared to challenge them in federal court from what he was seeking to advance with his new school of thought. Quite the contrary, he aggressively defended his adopted state. As the Prince Edward schools remained padlocked and Virginia used tax revenues to build up an infrastructure of segregated white private schools (in a formally color-blind voucher system that survived court challenge until 1968), while keeping black voters from the polls, another southern-born economist, Broadus Mitchell, reached out to Buchanan. Mitchell, who had resigned from Johns Hopkins University two decades before over its refusal to admit a black student, challenged the Thomas Jefferson Center to leave the realm of fine philosophical abstraction and hold a program on “democracy in education”—and, in the name of “social decency,” stand up for the integration of UVA. Buchanan answered curtly that “Virginia, as a state, has, in my opinion, largely resolved her own problems” in education. He then sent the new university president his own rebuke to the “annoying” letter, calling Mitchell “a long-time joiner of all ‘soft-headed,’ ‘liberal’ causes,” and lied that his critic had made “no notable contributions” as a scholar.41