The Volokh Conspiracy - Senator Bob Byrd - From Exalted Cyclops to King of Pork:

Washington Post reporter Michael Grunwald has an interesting article on West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, onetime "Exalted Cyclops" of the Ku Klux Klan and currently the longest-serving senator in American history. The article summarizes what the author delicately refers to as Byrd's "discomfort with racial issues" (which, as the article points out, continued long after he left the Klan in the 1940s, and even after he eventually denounced the KKK and apologized for having been a member). It also makes some worthwhile points about Byrd's later career as the Senate's King of Pork:

[Byrd's] top priority hasn't changed in a half-century: shoveling pork into his home state.

Is that so terrible? Byrd once promised to be "West Virginia's billion-dollar industry," and he has more than kept his word, dotting his state with the Robert C. Byrd Bridge, the Robert C. Byrd High School and the Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies, where academics can research how Congress came to give West Virginia six technology centers, two community centers and about two dozen additional projects named for Robert C. Byrd. . . Byrd savors his reputation as the King of Pork. His memoir details hundreds of his earmarks in loving detail, along with gleeful tales of moving Navy and Coast Guard offices to his landlocked state. Appropriately, he moved the Bureau of the Public Debt to West Virginia, too.

That is why Byrd was named "West Virginian of the 20th Century," and is revered as the savior of an impoverished state. But even after Byrd's half-century of largesse — new prisons, new labs, new subsidies for fish farms, dairies and steelmakers — West Virginia is still an impoverished state, ranked 49th in per-capita gross state product. "Those earmarks haven't solved West Virginia's problems," says Michael Hicks, an economist at Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va. "I'm trying to be careful here — I like my job — but after 40-odd years, we're still at the bottom of every economic indicator." Byrd was ahead of the curve on welfare reform, complaining as early as 1965 that "relief has become a way of life for some people." But he never noticed that relief could become a way of life for his state. West Virginia is now a ward of the federal government, dependent on Robert C. Byrd.

The kind of Jim Crow racism that Bob Byrd supported for many years is today largely a relic of the past, even if less virulent and more subtle forms of racial prejudice persist. But the culture of porkbarrel spending that he exemplifies is alive and well in both parties on Capitol Hill. Perhaps the sorry history of West Virginia can help persuade people that there are better ways to achieve prosperity than becoming a "ward of the federal government" dependent on the likes of Senator Byrd.

	[Ilya Somin, June 25, 2006 at 11:59pm] Trackbacks Senator Bob Byrd - From Exalted Cyclops to King of Pork: Washington Post reporter Michael Grunwald has an interesting article on West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, onetime "Exalted Cyclops" of the Ku Klux Klan and currently the longest-serving senator in American history. The article summarizes what the author delicately refers to as Byrd's "discomfort with racial issues" (which, as the article points out, continued long after he left the Klan in the 1940s, and even after he eventually denounced the KKK and apologized for having been a member). It also makes some worthwhile points about Byrd's later career as the Senate's King of Pork: [Byrd's] top priority hasn't changed in a half-century: shoveling pork into his home state. Is that so terrible? Byrd once promised to be "West Virginia's billion-dollar industry," and he has more than kept his word, dotting his state with the Robert C. Byrd Bridge, the Robert C. Byrd High School and the Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies, where academics can research how Congress came to give West Virginia six technology centers, two community centers and about two dozen additional projects named for Robert C. Byrd. . . Byrd savors his reputation as the King of Pork. His memoir details hundreds of his earmarks in loving detail, along with gleeful tales of moving Navy and Coast Guard offices to his landlocked state. Appropriately, he moved the Bureau of the Public Debt to West Virginia, too. That is why Byrd was named "West Virginian of the 20th Century," and is revered as the savior of an impoverished state. But even after Byrd's half-century of largesse — new prisons, new labs, new subsidies for fish farms, dairies and steelmakers — West Virginia is still an impoverished state, ranked 49th in per-capita gross state product. "Those earmarks haven't solved West Virginia's problems," says Michael Hicks, an economist at Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va. "I'm trying to be careful here — I like my job — but after 40-odd years, we're still at the bottom of every economic indicator." Byrd was ahead of the curve on welfare reform, complaining as early as 1965 that "relief has become a way of life for some people." But he never noticed that relief could become a way of life for his state. West Virginia is now a ward of the federal government, dependent on Robert C. Byrd. The kind of Jim Crow racism that Bob Byrd supported for many years is today largely a relic of the past, even if less virulent and more subtle forms of racial prejudice persist. But the culture of porkbarrel spending that he exemplifies is alive and well in both parties on Capitol Hill. Perhaps the sorry history of West Virginia can help persuade people that there are better ways to achieve prosperity than becoming a "ward of the federal government" dependent on the likes of Senator Byrd.