
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, October 19, 1994                   TAG: 9411170053
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

ANTEBELLUM POLITICS

NORTH Carolina's Research Triangle dates to the 1950s. But in a sense, its history can be traced much farther back, to the decades before the Civil War.

As with the Tar Heel state's neighbor to the south, South Carolina, the antebellum politics of its neighbor to the north, Virginia, was dominated by the slaveholding classes of the eastern lowland region. At the time, Virginia also included what's now West Virginia, making the dominance of the eastern elite even more disproportionate to the distribution of population.

In North Carolina, by contrast, the yeoman farmers of a wide and well-populated Piedmont held more influence. Seldom owning more than a slave or two, frequently owning none, they broadened the politics of North Carolina and made slavery's defense a less salient issue.

Now, fast forward to the years after World War II.

Events in the intervening century - differences between the two states, for example, in the course of Reconstruction - of course had their impact as well. Nevertheless, the politics of the two states in the 1950s continued to display a contrast as old as the Old South:

Much more than North Carolina, Virginia was still run by a small elite. Reflecting the interests of its members, the Byrd machine focused more on keeping taxes low and avoiding public debt than on expanding public services and investing for the future. The chief exception, investments in good roads, reflected the machine's rural and small-town base.

Much more than North Carolina, Virginia - led by Sen. Harry F. Byrd himself - put up stout resistance to the court-ordered desegregation and the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and '60s. Though the commonwealth was spared the violence of the Deep South, the shameful doctrine of "massive resistance," of closing public schools rather than desegregate them, was concocted not in the backwoods of Mississippi but among the political leaders of Virginia.

Not until the victory in 1969 of a Southwest Virginia Republican, Linwood Holton, did Virginia get a progressive governor fully and publicly committed to equal rights. North Carolina had long since been electing governors, men like Luther Hodges and Terry Sanford, who had sold racial moderation and government activism, in such areas as public education and the Research Triangle, as tied to the state's economic progress. As with Atlanta, a city whose leaders promoted a similar strategy, seeds planted in the 1950s and '60s have borne fruit in the 1980s and '90s.

Economics isn't solely determined by politics, nor must the past predestine the future. But political culture evolving from the past influences political decision-making of the present. In turn, the quality of political leadership now bears on the quality of economic opportunities in the future.

by CNB