Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 5, 1995 TAG: 9511030047
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
June Plunkett Poe remembers the names they called her dad 50 years ago.
``A perennial candidate,'' The Roanoke Times said.
``A political nuisance," Southern Democrats in Congress said.
``Crazy, and as wild as a March hare," one old-time Virginia Democrat said.
``Almost a joke in the face of the Byrd Machine,'' one of his supporters admitted.
But Moss Plunkett didn't care what they said about him - or at least he never showed it in public.
From the 1940s into the 1950s, Moss Plunkett dressed in his conservative suits, smiled his enigmatic smile and stumped across the state spouting proposals that, in those days, sounded downright liberal. He wanted Virginia to spend more on schools, health and welfare, and - most of all - get rid of the ``poll tax'' that helped keep blacks and poor whites away from the ballot boxes.
The Roanoke lawyer ran for just about every office you could name: state Senate, the U.S. Congress (twice), attorney general (twice), lieutenant governor, and - a half century ago this year - governor.
He never won, never expected to.
For him, it was all about putting his issues in front of citizens and chipping away at the power of the conservative Democratic organization - ``the Byrd Machine'' - that ran the state from the 1920s into the 1960s.
He kicked off his 1945 campaign for governor by urging voters to look beyond the Byrd organization's ``sweet lullabies about how wonderful everything is in Virginia.''
``This machine," he said, ``hates change and fears progress.''
That summer of '45, June Plunkett Poe was in between terms at college. June, her dad and her mom rolled across Virginia in a dark Chevrolet sedan (``nothing red,'' she recalls) past sharecroppers' shacks and planters' homes and into the small towns and cities.
She listened and learned as her dad blasted the state's political ``boss,'' U.S. Sen. Harry F. Byrd Sr., for ``pulling the potent power strings from his throne room in Washington.''
Later there would be a falling out between father and daughter. Her dad was a determined, sometimes irascible man, without many friends or allies in a state and in a time where you had to go along to get along.
Still, much of her life has been dedicated to fighting for the values he stood for.
``This was a man of conviction,'' Poe, now 71, recalls. ``He had conviction to a fault - and nothing would move him. I think that's why some of the writers called him fanatical or hysterical. You couldn't change his mind.''
Politics taught him ``you have to take a stand and you stand by it.''
`Partner in service'
Moss Plunkett was born in 1888 in the Red Valley section of Franklin County. His family had been a member of the tightly knit German Baptist church. But when he was 2, his father brought them over the mountain to Roanoke to find work building houses in the bustling new city.
As a young man Moss Plunkett worked as a stenographer and bookkeeper for a law firm, then entered the University of Virginia to study law. In 1910 he opened a law practice in Roanoke with his brother Walter.
In 1917 he went off to World War I as a second lieutenant in the infantry.
He almost died from poison gas in the Great War. But he also saw the wider world for the first time. He wrote home about the ``cold, hard business'' of ``disposing of the filth of autocracy in the community of the world.''
He wrote to his fiancee, Billie Puett of Texas, asking her to be his ``partner in service.'' In the trenches, he sketched plans for a house on a hilltop in Roanoke County's Bennett Springs section.
The Knolls, completed in 1924, was a showplace, built with local stone and oak logs amid acres and acres of woods.
June and her brother, Moss Jr., grew up in rustic isolation. With no public school nearby, their mother home-taught them.
The low level of spending on public education in Virginia helped bring Moss Plunkett into politics.
In the 1930s, he served as chairman of the Roanoke County School Board and became a leader in the Virginia Education Association. He led the county on an ambitious school-building program, using federal money and prompting some to complain, ``Moss Plunkett spends money like a drunken sailor.''
Poe recalls that the county used all its money to build schools for whites, then said it didn't have enough for a school for blacks.
``They said, `No way are we going to have a black school in the county,''' says Poe, who as a teen-ager reveled in the excitement of her dad's early political battles. ``They were chuckling, `Well, we finally got Moss Plunkett. He can't build his dream.'''
But he found the money. There are no written records to confirm it, but family lore holds that Plunkett went quietly to first lady Eleanor Roosevelt to swing more federal dollars.
``My father walked into a meeting of the Board of Supervisors and said, `Here is the money to build Carver School.' And they built it.'' Poe never saw her father happier.
Carver, opened in 1939, became a historic stepping stone for generations of blacks in Roanoke County and Salem. Current Roanoke School Superintendent Wayne Harris is a Carver grad.
`He was starting something'
For all his rambunctious ways in politics, Plunkett was far from flamboyant. He was a teetotaler who dressed in a nondescript way. One old-time political reporter remembers him as looking a bit like ``a caricature of what you might call an old company bean counter, kinda dried out.''
He rarely showed emotion. To his daughter, it seemed he swallowed his anger - and his regrets.
Many of his clients lost everything in the Crash of 1929. One, a small businessman, killed himself by jumping in a swimming pool and drowning.
Plunkett advised many on investments. He felt responsible. He stopped eating, lost weight. His doctor prescribed a beer or two a day. ``He did drink a little beer,'' Poe recalls. ``But we knew it was because Dr. Brown ordered it.''
In public, he brimmed with confidence - speaking of leading Virginia in ``man-sized strides toward a greater tomorrow.''
Former Republican Gov. Linwood Holton was a young lawyer working in the same office building with Plunkett in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
``I can still see him today, smiling and saying, `Moss Plunkett, he ran and ran and ran,''' Holton recalls. ``He knew that he was starting something. He saw himself as a pioneer who was helping break the control of the Byrd organization.''
`Political museum piece'
The Byrd organization dominated Virginia politics from the time Harry Byrd Sr. was elected governor in 1925 until his death in 1966 opened his U.S. Senate seat for his son.
Byrd was considered a reformer in his early years. He reorganized state government and pushed through an anti-lynching law.
But he grew more conservative in later years, and his organization exercised tight control on the state. In his landmark 1949 book, ``Southern Politics in State and Nation,'' historian V.O. Key Jr. called Virginia ``a political museum piece'' that made Mississippi look like a ``hotbed of democracy.''
Until the 1950s, organization candidates could win the Democratic nomination - which made them a shoo-in general elections against a weak Republican Party - with the votes of no more than 5 percent to 7 percent of the adult population.
Turnout was low because opposition to the machine was almost nonexistent, but also because of the state's restrictive voting laws. Voters had to pay a poll tax each year six months before the election - in those days, long before most people were even thinking about voting. Any new voter had to pay three years' worth of poll taxes - a total of $4.50, a lot of money back then for the poor and near-poor.
That was Plunkett's issue: The poll tax and democracy could not exist in the same state. He complained that thousands of soldiers returning home from fighting for their country were not allowed to vote in Virginia.
He headed the Southern Electoral Reform League and filed two federal lawsuits trying to strike down the poll tax and rescind elections of Southern congressmen in states with the poll tax.
In 1941 he made the leap into electoral politics. He ran in the Democratic primary against Bill Tuck, the Byrd organization's candidate for lieutenant governor. He was badly skunked, pulling less than 19 percent of the vote. He didn't do much better in bids for Congress and the state Senate the next two years.
All that was expected, June Poe says.
``My father always said: `I'm 20 or 30 years ahead of my time. But somebody has to do it. Somebody has to take a stand and fight.'''
He looked to the future - with plans for Moss Jr. He had a path planned for his son: law school, politics, and, someday maybe, the governor's mansion.
The son struggled at the University of Virginia and rebelled a bit from the pressure to excel. But he loved talking politics with his father, and he stayed on the road toward public life.
Then the second World War came. Moss Jr. became a bomber navigator in New Guinea. On Dec. 1, 1943, after returning from a mission, he stepped into the path of motorcycle messenger.
Moss Plunkett Sr. had his son's body brought back to America for a quiet, family-only graveside service.
`Make Tuck Talk'
In April 1945, Plunkett announced his candidacy for governor with his characteristic buoyancy.
Behind the smile, he was still grieving for his lost son. June Poe says the campaign became an escape. Her father threw himself into it.
``Our sons have taken up arms,'' he told a rally in Danville, ``and many of them - your sons and mine - have died to help secure for all of us a world of people's governments free of the kind of misrule which is inherent in boss-ruled machine politics.''
The race was a rematch against Tuck, a sharp backroom politician described as ``garrulous, blustery, earthy, stout as a tobacco hogshead.''
With the ``anti-organization'' forces weak, unions were the only organized support Plunkett could depend on.
Tuck, for his part, didn't take Plunkett seriously, crowing to a friend that Plunkett ``apparently ... thrives on defeat.'' Tuck vowed to conduct his campaign from the front porch of his Halifax County farmhouse.
Plunkett countered with the motto ``Let's Make Tuck Talk.'' He dared Tuck to address the issues.
At the same time Plunkett talked of ``Tory rule'' and ``machine terror'' and charged the Byrd organization had ``deliberately sought to rear an ignorant and servile generation by starving our public school system.''
Tuck's biographer would say ``many of Plunkett's claims were at least partly justifiable'' but ``the shrill, carping manner in which they were delivered diminished their effect.''
Still, in the final weeks, Tuck was summoned to a clandestine meeting with Byrd and other organization honchos at Mountain Lake. Afterward, Tuck stepped up his campaign and answered many of Plunkett's charges. It was, some said, a victory for Plunkett simply to force Tuck off his front porch.
In the end, Tuck won the Aug. 7 primary by a landslide. With less than 8 percent of the state's adults voting, Tuck took just under 100,000 votes. Plunkett polled 41,484.
But the campaign hinted at the cracks in the organization's power that would grow over the next two decades. Plunkett got nearly 30 percent of the vote, an improvement over his 1941 showing, and won majorities in Clifton Forge, Radford and Roanoke. It was the best showing by an ``anti'' since 1929.
`Carry on the mantle'
From 1941 to 1945, summers mainly meant politics for June Poe, on the campaign trail with her dad. The rest of the year she was at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg. She studied sociology, and found support from professors who approved of her father's political crusades. She blossomed from a shy, obedient daughter to a serious student.
From there she went to grad school at Smith College in Massachusetts to study psychiatric social work.
Back home, her father was still fighting losing battles. His poll tax lawsuits were dismissed.
``I could see him getting tighter and tighter and tighter,'' Poe says. ``The hurts began to show after my brother died.''
He had plans for his daughter. He wanted her to go into law - then politics.
``They wanted me to become my brother,'' she says. ``I was to carry on the mantle.''
She wanted to fight the same battles, but in her own way. She became a psychiatric social worker in Pittsburgh.
When she decided to marry Dr. William Poe, her father objected without saying why. ``I have often thought that he just wanted me to remain in the family,'' she says.
After a long effort to mediate through their ministers, her father refused to attend the wedding. He never spoke to his daughter again.
The break was terrible, hurtful. But June Poe still followed her father's political struggles. When he ran again for attorney general in 1953 against Lindsay Almond, ``I was proud to vote for him.''
`All his political adventures'
Moss Abram Plunkett Sr. died of heart and lung problems on June 18, 1957. He was 69.
He lived long enough to see the Byrd organization launch a program of ``massive resistance'' to the U.S. Supreme Court's orders to integrate public schools. Byrd, Tuck and others fought against ``race-mixing'' in all public places. Their rhetoric - which included references to ``political bloodsuckers'' and ``totalitarian commissars'' - climbed to as high a pitch as the Plunkett campaign blasts they had once dismissed as ``shrill.''
In the end, the Byrd organization fell apart just as the federal government forced an end to the poll tax in the mid-1960s.
In 1969, a lawyer from Roanoke, Linwood Holton, ran for governor as a reformer and racial moderate. He became the state's first Republican governor in the 20th century.
Holton says Moss Plunkett was an inspiration - though Plunkett's big defeat in the 1945 primary made it all the more clear Holton would seek political change through the Republican Party rather than the Byrd-controlled Democrats.
June Plunkett Poe became an advocate for the mentally ill and the elderly. She raised five children with her physician husband, who was an advocate for geriatric medicine and the creation of Medicare. ``I found a great companion in my own marriage in fighting for causes,'' she says.
Bill Poe died last year. June Poe stays ever-busy. She's a leader in the Virginia Alliance for the Mentally Ill. Amid the high-profile political struggles in the Southern Baptist Convention, she's leading Woman's Missionary Union programs for unwed mothers and people with AIDs.
She has ``a useful heritage - to know how to deal with a power structure and understand it. I'm one who can compromise and get on with the work.''
One reason she went into psychology and social work was to learn how to fight for convictions - without being consumed by them.
Lately, she's been thinking more about her dad and coming to a better understanding of their estrangement. She thinks about how he had gotten crushed down by the losses, the sneers of his opponents, the death of Moss Jr. - all of this as he grew more isolated from the support of family or friends.
Perhaps he had not come up to his own expectations. ``He had lost a son,'' she says. ``He had lost his big court cases. He had lost all his political adventures. He had gotten beaten and beaten and beaten.''
In the end, she knows a few things for certain: She admires him tremendously for what he stood for. And she owes him a debt for giving her a faith in God and for making sure she got an education. ``And the education allowed me to be my own person. In a way he gave me that freedom. Even though he may not have wanted to. But he did.''
The other day, she was looking through some family papers and ran across something that made her remember yet another side of her dad.
The summer of 1930, she was in Texas staying with relatives. Her dad wrote her a long letter from Roanoke (``To Baby June''). In it he told her a fairy tale about a king who misses his daughter.
And he told her how much he missed her - something he had trouble doing in person. He thanked her for her letters that had ``blown into my terribly busy world.'' To him they were ``like little tiny puffs of sweet, soft spring air.''
Keywords:
POLITICS PROFILE
by CNB