(Photo courtesy: Special Collections and Archives, James Branch Cabell Library, VCU Libraries)
"I am independent independent. No thin-skinned nincompoop, lunk-headed neophyte or docile manipulator for the Establishment could intimidate me or curtail my crusading propensities.”
Thus spoke Howard Hearns Carwile, perennial candidate, Richmond City Councilman in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and, after that, a one-term member of the Virginia House of Delegates. Born in 1911, died in 1987, few Richmond politicians ever matched Carwile in either the exuberance or loquaciousness of speech. As we enter campaign season with all its promise (and pandering) let us pause to remember a true populist maverick.
Carwile, one of 13 children born to Charlotte County tenant farmer parents, came up hardscrabble and industrious. He graduated from Southeastern University Law School in Washington, D.C., and began a Richmond trial lawyer career in 1945 with little “but a super abundance of gall and guts.” Thus equipped, he ran for governor in the first of 17 tries at public office. Carwile campaigned against the Democratic machine of U.S. Sen. Harry F. Byrd and tilted at whatever windmill he caught sight of. He married Violet Virginia Talley, and they had one son, the late Howard “Bo” H. Carwile Jr., who died in 2015.
Together with civil rights lawyer (and now retired state senator) Henry L. Marsh III, Carwile opposed the dominating business-and-banker-centric vision of expressways, the construction of the Coliseum and destruction of old neighborhoods.
In 1966, the City Council voted 8 to 1 to approve funding for a study of conditions in Fulton, Washington Park and Maymount (now Randolph). Carwile cast the single dissenting vote, as he suspected a negative outcome for the neighborhoods.
The development that resulted ultimately cut Fulton from the plan, and the neighborhood was sacrificed to the bulldozers.
Carwile fulminated against Richmond Forward, an organization of downtown boosters, and the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority, which supported Fulton’s destruction in the name of urban renewal. In 1968, he declared that the city’s process around Fulton “repudiated the Planning Commission, kicked private enterprise in the rear, spurned the pleading of the poor in Fulton and sent [RRHA director Frederic Fay] into his seventh heaven, grinning like a possum drinking cool buttermilk.”
Carwile also sought to hammer an alliance between working-class whites in Oregon Hill and African-Americans in Randolph to oppose to the Downtown Expressway. He employed a succinct message of unity: “You are not Richmond Forward.”
Ray Boone, then the new editor of the Richmond Free Press, invited Carwile to write a weekly column that ran for three years until the pair clashed. Carwile ran against black candidates, and Boone felt this was undercutting black representation. So, Carwile took to radio, hurling invective and aphorisms with a rising cadence and dramatic pauses as though delivering his speech from a pulpit.
“A good politician is one who is bereft of backbone and short on guts — who has the gout from greed and mental pellagra from plagiarism,” is among the gems he recalled in his autobiography/memoir/speech cache, “Carwile: His Life and Times.”
In 1968, voters returned Carwile to City Council, and, he believed, to certain elevation by his eight council colleagues to the mayoral seat he coveted. Not one backed him. Carwile supporters from Creighton Court and Hillside Court vowed to march and encircle City Hall. He dissuaded them. The council instead appointed Philip Bagley Jr. as mayor and Thomas Bliley Jr., vice-mayor.
Bagley orchestrated the annexation of 23 square miles of Chesterfield County to dilute growing African-American political power in 1970. The plan, which backfired like a cartoon blunderbuss, went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld the annexation. The end result was the divvying up of the newly expanded city into nine wards, giving rise to a black majority council in 1977. Marsh became the city’s first black mayor. Carwile later said Marsh liked being mayor so much he didn’t want to ever leave the chair, but, described him as a “a damn good lawyer, very smart.”
(Photo courtesy: Special Collections and Archives, James Branch Cabell Library, VCU Libraries)
Carwile’s contrarian views moved segregationist Richmond News Leader editor James J. Kilpatrick in 1966 to describe him as “a kind of special ultra-liberal, lone-wolf, back-handed conservative whose public career has been entirely built upon his passionate opposition to the state.” Carwile considered court-ordered school busing and the Voting Rights Act federal government overreaches, but he supported Medicare and Medicaid. He deplored the “inhumane …disgraceful” treatment by Congress of military veterans and the growth of “greedy land monopolies” forming to “liquidate and destroy” small businesses and family farms. He also was unsparing in his critique of the two-party system, writing in his autobiography, “the news media gleefully perpetuate the myth of a two-party system. The politicians of the one fake party play the fantasies of the other. Millions of citizens are fool enough to swallow this shadowboxing humbuggery. Politicians and big business are actually making jackasses out of the people in every major election.”
Carwile considered himself a mentor for then-Lt. Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, who was “a political neophyte when I first knew him. I … showed him how to qualify in his first run for political office. He has some fine qualities and has matured a lot.”
Carwile resigned his city seat in 1973 for a successful House of Delegates run. His departure letter described City Council as “shoddy, schizophrenic [and] self-adulating.”
Carwile served one term in the statehouse. His successor, lawyer Gerald L. Baliles, went all the way to the governor’s mansion. Baliles’ son, Jon, is a likely candidate for mayor.
