Everett Randolph Combs (18 January 1876–5 January 1957), Democratic Party leader, was born in Russell County and was the son of John William Combs and Ladora Jane Kiser Combs. His father, a farmer and stockman, died in 1880, and two years later his mother married his uncle, Fielding Combs. Ebbie Combs, as his friends knew him, received a public school education and attended Tazewell College in Bluefield during the 1896–1897 academic year. According to an early published account of his life, he received a teaching certificate at age eighteen and taught school for six years before serving for three years as principal of a grade school in Russell County. He also farmed and raised livestock until 1911. Combs married Ladora Zimenia Yrassa Candler, also of Russell County, on 22 March 1897. They had six daughters and three sons, as well as two daughters who died young and one stillborn infant.
About the time that Combs bought a large house in the county seat of Lebanon, he defeated the incumbent by about 600 votes and won election as clerk of the Russell County Circuit Court in 1911. Demonstrating the careful, thorough planning for which he became known, he was said to have traveled the county on horseback to visit many voters in their homes. The election placed Combs at the center of the courthouse ring of elected and appointed county officials who were the foundation of the Democratic Party organization that United States senator Thomas Staples Martin directed. Southwestern Virginia was then a fiercely contested partisan region. Extralegal campaign practices flourished as Democrats and Republicans battled for control of the Ninth Congressional District, which included most of the counties south and west of Roanoke.
Combs refined his skills as a political organizer and tactician. He saw to it that loyal voters were registered, had their poll taxes paid, and voted. A political pragmatist, he invariably recruited and backed the strongest candidate and worked to minimize factional strife within the party. Combs further enhanced his reputation as a county leader in the successful 1914 statewide referendum to prohibit the sale and consumption of alcohol, among other local and statewide campaigns. In 1922, as chair of the Ninth District Democratic Committee, he directed the congressional campaign of George Campbell Peery, who was later elected governor. During the successful campaign Combs worked closely with Harry Flood Byrd (1887–1966), the state party chair and a member of the Senate of Virginia. The following year Combs delivered the Ninth District vote in a statewide referendum in support of Byrd's pay-as-you-go principle and against financing road construction by bonds.
In 1925 Combs seriously considered running for state treasurer but did not enter the race. In that year Byrd was elected governor, and Combs was instrumental in his receiving a large majority in the Ninth District. Late in 1927, as Byrd was consolidating his control of the state bureaucracy and the Democratic Party organization, he appointed Combs state comptroller. For the next quarter of a century Combs functioned as the de facto chief of staff of the Byrd organization. As Byrd's principal troubleshooter, strategist, intelligence-gatherer, and informal spokesman, Combs became even more important after Byrd's term as governor ended in 1930. Byrd's elevation to the United States Senate in 1933 made Combs's presence in Richmond even more essential as the middleman between Byrd and the many local and state officials who were the heart of the party organization.
As state comptroller, Combs was responsible for overseeing all transactions in public funds, and he enforced the conservative fiscal policies that Byrd supported. In 1931 the Virginia Bureau of Research, Incorporated, a private company funded by former governor Westmoreland Delaware Davis, a Byrd opponent, criticized the comptroller's practices, which led Combs to reform and tighten procedures. Two years later Combs resigned to become manager of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation for the District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia, which gave him a raise in pay and made him the chief dispenser of federal relief money in Virginia. In June 1934, after about six months, he returned to state service as comptroller and solidified his position of influence shortly thereafter when he became chair of the new State Compensation Board, which set the salaries and controlled the expenses of many local government officials. He was therefore strategically placed to ensure that officeholders remained loyal to the party organization and its candidates. Critics never proved that Combs engaged in any impropriety, but his influence was not doubted. As one editorial writer later remarked, "Mr. Combs has walked softly, but he has carried a mighty big stick."
In 1938 Governor James Hubert Price, a Byrd critic, removed many Byrd loyalists from office, and Combs lost both of his posts. He worked briefly for the Virginia Sky-Line and the Virginia Airship Companies in Richmond. The clerk of the Senate of Virginia died suddenly in January 1940, and Byrd organization leaders in the Senate elected Combs to the position and placed him once again at the center of power. He directed the shredding of Price's legislative proposals during that session of the General Assembly and later in the year was elected one of Virginia's representatives to the Democratic National Committee. One of the first acts of Governor Colgate Whitehead Darden Jr. after he took office early in 1942 was to reappoint Combs to his former post as chair of the Compensation Board.
The Chief, as Combs came to be called, retained the Senate clerk's office and was once again firmly entrenched as Byrd's alter ego in Richmond. Large of frame and with a generous head of white hair, he was courtly and soft-spoken. Credited with "the generalship of Hannibal and the wiles of Machiavelli," he was the political overseer of the organization. He dispensed advice and patronage, collected information, and kept officials from governors to game wardens in line as the organization faced new challenges from a younger generation of more-progressive Democrats. Combs helped stage-manage a 1945 constitutional convention that allowed members of the armed services to vote without paying a poll tax while not jeopardizing the Byrd organization's continued reliance on the poll tax to restrict the electorate to a small proportion of Virginia's white adults.
Combs's resignation from the Democratic National Committee in 1948 in part reflected the organization's distaste for Harry S. Truman's administration. The following year Combs played a key role in the nomination of Byrd stalwart John Stewart Battle in a contentious four-way gubernatorial primary. Combs was attacked during that campaign for using his powers at the Compensation Board to silence and discipline officeholders. On 13 December 1949 Combs's wife died, and in October of the following year, as a consequence of heart disease, he resigned from the Compensation Board. Combs retained the Senate clerkship but for the remaining years of his life was less politically active. He spent time in Florida even during assembly sessions.
For three decades Combs played a unique role in Virginia politics as the managing partner of one of the most durable political organizations in the country. Peerless as an adviser, organizer, strategist, tactician, conciliator, and enforcer, he was essential to the endurance and dominance of Byrd's machine. Combs helped ensure that the fiscally and racially conservative philosophy that he and Byrd shared remained in force during a period of upheaval and change on the national scene. Combs and other organization leaders were appalled at the 1954 Supreme Court decision that declared mandatory racial segregation of public schools unconstitutional, and he urged Byrd to resist all efforts at desegregation. Everett Randolph Combs had a heart attack and died in a Richmond hospital on 5 January 1957. He was buried in Westhill Cemetery, in Lebanon.
Sources Consulted:
Biographies in Philip Alexander Bruce, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, and Richard L. Morton, History of Virginia (1924), 6:354 (variant marriage date of 24 Mar. 1897, probably provided by Combs), Robert C. Glass and Carter Glass Jr., Virginia Democracy (1937), 3:198–201 (with portrait on 200 and variant marriage date of 24 Mar. 1897), Minor Tompkins Weisiger, "E. R. Combs: Chief of the Byrd Organization" (M.A. thesis, University of Virginia, 1979), and Louis H. Manarin, Officers of the Senate of Virginia, 1776–1996 (1997), 331–332; family information in Lucy Paddison Combs, Combs family genealogical notes (1974), compiled by son Carleton Everett Combs, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia (UVA), Charlottesville; Harry Flood Byrd (1887–1966) Papers and Everett R. Combs Papers, both UVA; Harry Flood Byrd Executive Papers, Accession 22561a, Record Group 3, State Government Records Collection, Library of Virginia; published writings include Combs, "Present Problems in State Finance," Commonwealth 1 (Sept. 1934): 7, 23–24; Russell Co. Marriage Register; public career in Ronald L. Heinemann, Harry Byrd of Virginia (1996) and Richmond newspapers, with quotations from Richmond News Leader, 25 Oct. 1950; obituaries in Bristol Herald Courier and Bristol Virginia-Tennessean, Richmond Times-Dispatch, and Roanoke Times, all 6 Jan. 1957, and Charlottesville Daily Progress and Richmond News Leader, both 7 Jan. 1957; editorial tributes in Richmond News Leader, 7 Jan. 1957, Richmond Times-Dispatch and Roanoke World-News, both 8 Jan. 1957, and Washington Post and Times Herald, 13 Jan. 1957.
1944 Legislative photograph courtesy Visual Studies Collection, Library of Virginia.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Minor T. Weisiger.
How to cite this page:
Minor T. Weisiger, "Everett Randolph Combs (1876–1957)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2006 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Combs_Everett_Randolph, accessed [today's date]).
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