John Stewart Battle (11 July 1890–9 April 1972), governor of Virginia, was born in New Bern, North Carolina, the eldest of three sons and two daughters of Henry Wilson Battle, a Baptist minister, and Margaret Stewart Battle. While Battle was young his family moved to Petersburg, where he grew up. The unreconstructed opinions of his paternal grandfather, a former brigadier general in the Confederate army who lived with the family, helped form his political and social beliefs.
After graduating from high school Battle enrolled in Wake Forest College, but he transferred to the University of Virginia after his father became pastor of High Street Baptist Church in Charlottesville. Battle graduated from the University of Virginia and from its law school in 1913. After graduation he went to Texas, but he contracted rheumatic fever and returned to Charlottesville, where he lived for the remainder of his life and practiced law for more than fifty years. On 12 June 1918 he married Mary Jane Lipscomb. Their two children both followed their father into the law. John Stewart Battle (1919–1997) was a founder of the prominent law firm of McGuire Woods Battle and Boothe, and his younger brother William Cullen Battle followed his father into politics and was the unsuccessful Democratic Party candidate for governor of Virginia in 1969.
Battle was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates in 1929. He served two two-year terms and became a friend and supporter of the Democratic Party leader, Harry Flood Byrd (1887–1966). Elected to the Senate of Virginia in 1933, Battle won quick acceptance into the Senate's clublike environment. Dignified yet friendly, he was a great storyteller, enjoyed his whiskey, and became known as one of the Senate's best poker players. He was also an able and intelligent man who took his responsibilities seriously. Like many other Virginia conservatives, Battle had a social conscience that was less sensitive than his personal conscience, and he was comfortable with the conservatism of the Byrd organization. Although he was never one of the small inner circle of party leaders, he was well liked and respected, and by 1946 he had become chairman of the powerful Senate Committee on Finance.
Early in 1947 Battle received Byrd's quiet endorsement to run for governor in 1949. The Democratic Party primary of 1949 was one of the most spirited and exciting in history. Francis Pickens Miller, the leader of the Democratic opposition to Byrd, ran against Battle, as did Horace Hall Edwards, the mayor of Richmond who had served as state party chairman and was popular among party regulars but appeared to be ambitious to supplant Byrd as party leader. Petersburg manufacturer Remmie LeRoy Arnold also entered the race. Battle waged a listless campaign until Byrd organization leaders took control of the campaign. At their urging Battle attacked organized labor, a tactic that won support from crossover Republicans and enabled Battle to win the 2 August 1949 primary with a small plurality. He easily defeated Republican candidate Walter Johnson in the general election in November.
The key to Battle's successes and failures as governor can be found in his personality. He was a born conciliator and harmonizer. An extremely likable man, Battle combined natural dignity with easygoing affability. Even his political opponents rarely wrote unkindly of him in the privacy of their personal correspondence. He was on a first-name basis with nine-tenths of the members of the General Assembly, and his ability to get along with them became the hallmark of his administration. Yet Battle's easygoing nature and desire for harmony also had a negative side. Contented with life, Battle felt no compulsion to seek dragons to slay or wrongs to right. One admirer, Norfolk journalist Guy Friddell, described him as "a big-boned man but his biggest bone was his lazy bone." Nevertheless, when Battle left office in January 1954 the Washington Post characterized him as "the most universally popular figure in Virginia public life."
Battle's term as governor was comparatively quiet. Severely handicapped by an ill-advised tax rebate law, he was able to increase public spending only on school construction. State expenditures on other services remained abysmally low. The United States Supreme Court's decision outlawing segregation in public schools was not handed down until after Battle left office, but there were signs of the approaching storm—and the way Virginia would respond—during Battle's term. The increase in school construction and improvements in the quality of schools for African American students was a belated and inadequate attempt to avoid desegregation by making the separate schools for Blacks more nearly equal to the schools for whites.
The national spotlight focused on Battle twice during his governorship. Seven African American youths, known as the Martinsville Seven, were convicted and sentenced to death for beating and brutally raping a white woman in January 1947. Civil rights organizations opposed the executions, arguing that no white men had ever been executed in Virginia for raping a white woman and that the death sentences in the Martinsville case resulted from the race of the convicted men. Battle's own racial philosophy either blinded him to the inequity or prevented him from seeing anything unjust in the disparity, and in spite of some misgivings about the sentences imposed on some of the condemned men, he allowed the execution of all seven men in February 1951.
Battle's "finest hour," in the opinions of many Virginia Democrats, took place at the 1952 Democratic national convention. Following southern defections from the party in the preceding presidential election, the convention proposed to require delegates to take what amounted to a loyalty oath promising to have the party's nominees listed on the state ballots. Delegates from Louisiana, South Carolina, and Virginia refused to accede to the proposal, and only Battle's dramatic speech to the convention on 24 July 1952 enabled both sides to agree to a compromise that avoided expulsion of the three delegations from the convention. Battle supported the party's slate in the 1952 general election campaign, even though Byrd and other close political allies and friends of Battle did not.
After retiring at the beginning of 1954, Battle returned to his law practice in Charlottesville. In November 1957 President Dwight David Eisenhower appointed him to the newly formed U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and until Battle resigned in October 1959 he was the member most inclined to limit the commission's agenda and defend segregationist views. He had been the Virginia Democratic Party's pro-forma favorite son candidate for president at the 1956 convention, and in 1958, when Byrd announced his retirement from the U.S. Senate, Battle and former governor William M. Tuck both desired to succeed Byrd. Fearing a breach in the party, Byrd changed his mind and ran for reelection.
John Stewart Battle suffered a stroke in 1970, and he died in a Charlottesville nursing home on 9 April 1972. He was buried in Monticello Memorial Park in Charlottesville.
Sources Consulted:
Peter R. Henriques, "John S. Battle and Virginia Politics, 1948–1953" (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1971); John Stewart Battle Papers, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville; John Stewart Battle Executive Papers, Accession 24504, Record Group 3, State Government Records Collection, Library of Virginia; John Stewart Battle Papers, Virginia Museum of History and Culture, Richmond; Henriques, "The Organization Challenged: John S. Battle, Francis P. Miller, and Horace Edwards Run for Governor in 1949," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (VMHB) 82 (1974): 372–406; Henriques, "The Byrd Organization Crushes a Liberal Challenge, 1950–1953," VMHB 87 (1979): 3–29; Henriques, "John S. Battle, Last Governor of the Quiet Years," in The Governors of Virginia, 1860–1978, ed. Edward E. Younger and James T. Moore (1982), 321–332; James R. Sweeney, "A Segregationist on the Civil Rights Commission: John S. Battle, 1957–1959," VMHB 105 (1997): 287–316 (portrait); Ray O. Hummel Jr. and Katherine M. Smith, Portraits and Statuary of Virginians Owned by The Virginia State Library, The Medical College of Virginia, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Other State Agencies: An Illustrated Catalog (1977), 6 (portrait); obituaries in Charlottesville Daily Progress, Richmond News Leader, Richmond Times-Dispatch, and Washington Post, all 10 Apr. 1972.
Portrait in State Art Collection, Library of Virginia.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Peter R. Henriques.
How to cite this page:
Peter R. Henriques, "John Stewart Battle (1890–1972)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 1998 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Battle_John_Stewart, accessed [today's date]).
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