When Abner Linwood Holton Jr. was elected governor of Virginia in 1969, it was a big deal. He was the first Republican governor of the commonwealth elected since Reconstruction. Richard Nixon had won the presidency 12 months before and, in the following year, the victories of Holton and another GOP governor, William Cahill of New Jersey, not only defied the customary pattern for off-year elections but seemed to herald a Republican resurgence after the New Deal and Great Society eras.
But it didn’t quite turn out that way. Nixon’s presidency ended in scandal and ushered in two more decades of Democratic dominance in statehouses and on Capitol Hill. Holton’s brand of liberal Republicanism, forged in an epoch of overwhelming Democratic dominance in the South, was already close to obsolescence when he broke through the barrier.
Virginia Democrats had long been the party of racial segregation and strict fiscal conservatism; Holton was a product of what the New York Times called the “moderate conservatism of Dwight D. Eisenhower, with an emphasis on racial integration and economic development.” As governor, he would raise taxes for internal improvements, reorganize state agencies, and expand health services and abortion rights on the eve of Roe v. Wade.
Yet the great legislative victories of the Civil Rights movement had been won by the time Holton took office. In the wake of the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement, endemic urban violence, and the social and cultural pathologies of the ’60s, Republicans in Virginia and elsewhere were moving toward a social and economic conservatism that Holton found uncongenial.
By the time he died, at age 98, in late October, he had long been estranged from the mainstream of his party. He ran for the GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate in 1978, and finished third. And while serving briefly in the Nixon State Department and the Reagan administration, he endorsed a series of Democratic gubernatorial candidates in subsequent years. His well-publicized support for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016 combined political conviction with the interesting personal fact that one of his daughters is married to Clinton’s running mate, Virginia Sen. (and former governor) Tim Kaine.
Holton was born in Big Stone Gap in southwestern Virginia, a Republican redoubt since the Civil War, where his father was a railroad executive. He attended Washington and Lee University and, during World War II, served in the Navy as a submarine officer in the Pacific. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1949, he moved to Roanoke in the Shenandoah Valley to practice law and began dabbling in politics.
As a birthright Republican, it was not an auspicious move. Virginia politics was still dominated by the organization (the so-called “Byrd machine”) run by the veteran Democratic Sen. Harry Byrd Sr. When Holton ran unsuccessfully for the House of Delegates in the mid-1950s, there were nine Republicans in a General Assembly of 140 members. But he persevered, campaigning and organizing and, in the era of the “Byrd machine’s” policy of “massive resistance” to Brown v. Board of Education, forged a separate path for the Virginia GOP based on racial integration, business-friendly policies, higher education, and pioneering anti-pollution programs for state rivers and the Chesapeake Bay.
He ran for governor in 1965 and was defeated by the Democratic candidate, Mills Godwin. But he tried again four years later and won, transforming Virginia overnight into a two-party state.
Holton’s greatest legacy, however, was his stalwart commitment to the ideal of integration. As governor, he barred discrimination in state employment, appointed black people to state agencies and boards, encouraged businesses to hire and promote black people. He enrolled his four children in Richmond’s public schools and, while opposed to busing, sent them to the majority-black schools they were assigned to attend by court order. But by the end of his term, in 1974, the winds of change had distorted the Civil Rights movement, and the failures of the Great Society were already in evidence. It was a sobering climax to a principled faith.
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
