Joseph Thomas Deal (19 November 1860–7 March 1942), member of the House of Representatives, was born at Cabin Point in Surry County and was the son of John Jarvis Deal, a farmer, and Virginia Elizabeth Moore Deal. After graduating in 1882 fourteenth in his class of twenty-two at the Virginia Military Institute, Deal returned to Surry County and soon began a career in the lumber industry. He married Juliette Douglas Spratley on 28 October 1885 in Surry County. They had three sons.
In 1891 Deal moved to Norfolk. During the next thirty years he worked in several businesses, most notably as president of both the Greenleaf Johnson Lumber Company and the Kinston Manufacturing Company, a timber and lumber business based in North Carolina. A director for a number of years of the North Carolina Pine Association, Deal often represented that organization at annual meetings of the National Lumber Manufacturers' Association during the first two decades of the twentieth century. He acquired large lumber holdings in South Carolina and a substantial amount of land along the James River in Prince George County, where he operated the Brandon Stock Farm, Incorporated. Beginning in 1919 Deal was a director of the Atlantic Supply Company, Incorporated, an industrial machinery supplier run by one of his sons. From 1929 until his death, he owned the Virginia Beach News, edited by the same son.
Deal became active in Democratic factional contests in Norfolk during the first decade of the twentieth century and helped lead a local civic improvement board from 1905 to 1910. He served as a delegate to the 1908 Democratic National Convention in Denver. In 1910 Deal began a two-year term representing Norfolk in the House of Delegates, where he sat on the Committees on the Chesapeake and Tributaries, on Executive Expenditures, on Insurance and Banking, and on Public Property. At the end of his term he did not seek reelection. Deal returned to public service in 1919 when he won election to the Senate of Virginia, again representing Norfolk. He was appointed to the Committees on Finance, on County, City, and Town Organizations, and on General Laws. Deal introduced a bill, which was passed into law, punishing officers of the law for conducting improper searches and seizures without a warrant, a measure that had the effect of weakening enforcement of Prohibition. He joined the majority of senators in rejecting ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment recognizing woman suffrage and was one of six who voted against a bill that was intended to bring Virginia into compliance with the amendment once it came into effect nationally.
Deal resigned from the state senate after he won election in 1920 to the House of Representatives from the Second District, which comprised Isle of Wight, Nansemond, Norfolk, Princess Anne, and Southampton Counties, as well as the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth. He defeated the Republican candidate, Menalcus Lankford, whom he also defeated four years later, by a majority of nearly three to one. Although Deal generally evaded discussion of major issues during the race and instead emphasized partisanship, his efforts were defined by his ardent opposition to Prohibition. He had been nominated on a platform that called for amending the Volstead Act, the federal law that banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages. Deal believed Prohibition bred dissatisfaction and contempt for law enforcement among the general populace and contradicted other constitutional liberties, a stance that strengthened during subsequent campaigns. Because of his outspoken status as a "wet," he drew the ire of the Anti-Saloon League and other prohibitionist forces, which strongly opposed his renomination in 1922 and 1926. The latter campaign featured what newspapers characterized as one of the most fiercely contested primary elections in the history of the district. In spite of such opposition, Deal won four consecutive terms in Congress.
During his first term Deal served on the Committees on Accounts and on Claims. In his second, third, and fourth terms he sat on the Committee on Rivers and Harbors. In addition to his stance against Prohibition, Deal opposed other legislative efforts to increase federal authority. In 1928 he lost his seat to Lankford, who rode a wave of statewide opposition to Al Smith's presidential candidacy. Deal faced Lankford a final time in the election of 1930, and though many expected him to regain his seat, he was again defeated.
Deal sought the Democratic nomination for governor in 1933 against state senator William Worth Smith Jr. and former congressman George Campbell Peery, a member of the political machine headed by Deal's longtime political foe, United States senator Harry Flood Byrd (1887–1966). It was a bitter race in which Deal tried to make inroads among supporters of the Byrd organization in order to break up its political monopoly. He again presented himself as an opponent of Prohibition and advocated the repeal of Virginia's Layman Act, the law that kept the state dry, and the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. He also opposed the short ballot, a reform enacted during Byrd's term as governor that made several statewide offices appointive rather than elective, and sought to lower the gasoline tax from five to three cents. Peery nearly trebled Deal's tally, 116,837 votes to 40,268, while Smith received 32,518 votes.
In 1937 Deal helped organize the Citizens Democratic League, which supported candidates for several local and state offices. Making a last campaign in 1939, he garnered the fewest votes in the primary for a seat in the Senate of Virginia. Joseph Thomas Deal died at his Norfolk home following a stroke on 7 March 1942 and was buried in Forest Lawn Cemetery in that city.
Sources Consulted:
Birth Register, Surry Co., and Marriage Register, Surry Co., both in Bureau of Vital Statistics, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; The 1995 Register of Former Cadets of the Virginia Military Institute (1995), 73; Congressional Record, 67th–70th Cong.; Deal correspondence in E. Griffith Dodson Papers, Accession 25244, Library of Virginia, Harry Flood Byrd (1887–1966) Papers, Carter Glass Papers, and Louis I. Jaffé Papers, all Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va., and Joseph Thomas Deal alumnus file, Virginia Military Institute Archives, Lexington, Va.; obituaries in Richmond News Leader, 7 Mar. 1942, New York Times, Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, and Richmond Times-Dispatch, all 8 Mar. 1942, Virginia Beach News, 13 Mar. 1942, and Bulletin of the Virginia Press Association (Apr. 1942), 1, 6.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Philip J. Dean.
How to cite this page:
Philip J. Dean,"Joseph Thomas Deal (1860–1942)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2015, http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Deal_Joseph_Thomas, accessed [today's date]).
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