Theodore Roosevelt Dalton (3 July 1901–30 October 1989), Republican Party leader and United States district court judge, was born in Carroll County and was the son of Currell Dalton, a merchant and farmer, and Lodoska V. Martin Dalton. At age sixteen Ted Dalton, as he was always known, began taking high school courses at the College of William and Mary. He attended the University of Virginia for one year and then returned to William and Mary, where he received an A.B. in 1924 and a B.L. in 1926. Dalton joined a small law firm in Radford. His later law partners included James Clinton Turk, who became a United States district court judge. On 4 January 1932 Dalton married Mary Lou Turner. They had no children but adopted her sister's son, John Clay Nichols. At the time of the adoption they changed his name to John Nichols Dalton. He joined Dalton's law firm and from 1978 to 1982 served as governor of Virginia.
Dalton was commonwealth's attorney for the city of Radford from 1929 to 1937. Appointed in 1941 to a Virginia Advisory Legislative Council subcommittee that studied the poll tax, he signed the subcommittee's report calling for abolition of the tax as a prerequisite for voting. After a close but unsuccessful Republican candidacy for the House of Delegates in 1939, Dalton was elected to fill a vacancy in the Senate of Virginia in February 1944. His victory was an extraordinary achievement. Running as a write-in candidate in a predominantly Democratic district (Radford and the counties of Franklin, Montgomery, and Roanoke), Dalton launched an intense weeklong campaign against four opponents and won a narrow victory. When he took office a few days later, he was one of only two Republicans in the forty-member Senate. During his years in the Democratically controlled chamber, Dalton received low-ranking seats on the Committees on Agriculture, Mining, and Manufacturing, for Courts of Justice, and on Public Institutions and Education and occasionally on other, less-influential committees. In 1947 he faced a difficult reelection campaign against a formidable opponent and a united Democratic Party, but he was a popular man and a tireless campaigner and eked out another narrow victory. After Dalton won reelection by larger margins in 1951 and 1955, he gained a reputation as the most electable Republican in the state. He was never able to persuade the Senate's Democratic leaders to name Republicans to their share of influential committees.
As the most successful young Republican in Virginia at mid-century, Dalton sought to change the political status quo and make Virginia into a vigorous two-party state in every election at every level of government. In a guest column entitled "The Virginia GOP Feels Hamstrung" in the Washington Post on 3 September 1950, he described the obstacles the Virginia Republican Party faced. Its political organization was inefficient, its most talented members refused to run for office, and a defeatist attitude permeated the ranks. Republicans also faced a residue of Civil War–era prejudices that Democrats exploited. Democrats controlled the redistricting process, placed restrictions on registration and voting, and monopolized the appointive power. A key element in every Dalton campaign was electoral reform.
Dalton mounted unsuccessful candidacies for state Republican Party chair in 1944 and national committeeman in 1948. He won a seat on the national committee in 1952 after carefully navigating between the groups in the state party backing Dwight David Eisenhower and Robert Alphonso Taft for the presidential nomination. Dalton endorsed Eisenhower only after the Virginia delegation to the Republican National Convention, a majority of whom supported Taft, had elected him to the national committee.
Although Dalton preferred to wait until 1957, he was under intense pressure to run for governor in 1953 and in that year mounted the most serious Republican challenge to Democratic control of state government in three-quarters of a century. His progressive views contrasted with those of the dominant conservative Democratic faction headed by his friend, United States senator Harry Flood Byrd (1887–1966). Dalton's "Program of Progress" summarized his commitment to move Virginia forward and create a statewide two-party system. His proposals included abolition of the poll tax, reform of the absentee-voters law, limits on campaign spending, lowering the voting age to eighteen, popular election of school boards, nonpartisan selection of judges, removal of judges' appointive powers, increased spending on education and state hospitals, and establishment of a community college system.
Dalton's campaign energized his supporters and appealed to many independents and anti-organization Democrats. Tall, slim, and silver-haired, he commanded attention and was an effective, inspiring speaker on the campaign trail. His opponent, Thomas Bahnson Stanley, a congressman and former Speaker of the House of Delegates, was a Byrd organization stalwart. His campaign speeches were dull, and his reluctance to take positions on issues contrasted starkly and unfavorably with Dalton's forthrightness. Even though no Republican candidate for governor in the twentieth century had ever received more than 37 percent of the vote, knowledgeable observers were predicting late in September that Dalton might win. The following month brought events that jeopardized his chances for victory, however. The indictment of the Democratic campaign manager on an income tax charge in mid-October shocked Democratic loyalists into action; and on 19 October, Dalton announced support for a $100 million bond issue for highway construction. He endorsed revenue bonds to be redeemed by gas tax revenues, but even that modest deviation from the pay-as-you-go political orthodoxy that had reigned in Virginia since the 1920s was enough to cause Byrd to increase his campaign activity dramatically in Stanley's behalf. Dalton lost the election but received an unprecedented 44 percent of the vote.
Six months after the election, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that mandatory racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Like almost every other elected official in Virginia, Dalton supported segregation, but he was a moderate and a realist who believed that some desegregation was inevitable and that the public schools must remain open. During the next two years he denounced the Massive Resistance policies that Byrd, Stanley, and their legislative allies enacted to thwart desegregation. Dalton ridiculed the General Assembly's interposition resolution and described tuition grants as futile and impracticable. He also opposed holding a constitutional convention to legalize using state funds to pay tuition at private, nonsectarian, all-white schools.
Dalton was the Republican candidate for governor again in 1957 when Massive Resistance was at the height of its popularity among white Virginia voters. His Democratic opponent was Attorney General James Lindsay Almond Jr., a fiery orator and supporter of Massive Resistance. Democrats charged that Dalton favored integration and associated him in the public mind with such national Republicans as Chief Justice Earl Warren, who had written the desegregation decision, and Attorney General Herbert Brownell, who supported the Civil Rights Act of 1957. The crushing blow to Dalton's candidacy was Eisenhower's decision to send federal troops to enforce desegregation of a high school in Little Rock, Arkansas. Dalton called for the troops' withdrawal, but he refused to criticize the president. Events in Little Rock recalled Reconstruction to the minds of many white Virginians and made the Democrats' task even easier. On election day Almond won a landslide victory, and Dalton received only 36 percent of the vote.
Fourteen months later federal and state courts both invalidated the Massive Resistance laws. Vindicated by events, Dalton joined a legislative majority in April 1959 in enacting a plan that permitted limited school desegregation, essentially what he had advocated unsuccessfully in 1957.
On 21 July 1959 Eisenhower nominated Dalton to be judge of the United States District Court for the Western District of Virginia. Personally friendly with the state's two Democratic senators, Dalton experienced no difficulty winning confirmation by the Senate in August. He served as chief judge of the court from 1960 to 1971 and again from 1972 until 1973. He retired with senior status on 12 October 1976. Dalton handled a wide variety of federal cases, including suits involving the desegregation of public facilities, religious instruction in public schools, the rights of organized labor, student protests at state universities during the Vietnam War, tax fraud, voting rights, and in 1970 a Roanoke city school desegregation case that had been in litigation for ten years as a consequence of the state's Massive Resistance policies. In that case, Dalton approved a plan to integrate the public school system.
Dalton's most enduring significance for Virginia was to inspire younger men to join the Republican Party and run for office. His law partner Richard Harding Poff won election to Congress in 1952, and in 1970 Abner Linwood Holton Jr., who had worked in Dalton's campaigns, became Virginia's first Republican governor of the twentieth century. In January 1978 Dalton administered the oath of office to his adopted son as the third consecutive Republican governor of Virginia. Dalton's wife died on 28 September 1988. Theodore Roosevelt Dalton died of a respiratory illness at a Radford hospital on 30 October 1989. Both were interred in Sunrise Burial Park in that city. Dalton Hall, a student services building at Radford University, is named jointly for Dalton and his adopted son. The university also offers a Judge Ted Dalton Memorial Scholarship.
Sources Consulted:
Biography with birth date in Richard Lee Morton, comp., Virginia Lives: The Old Dominion Who's Who (1964), 241; Ted Dalton Papers, Earl Gregg Swem Library, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, and correspondence in several collections at the University of Virginia (UVA), Charlottesville, and the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, Richmond, Va.; Dalton concession speeches, Nov. 1953 and Nov. 1957, and interview, 1957, sound recordings, WRVA Radio Collection, Accession 38210, Library of Virginia (LVA); Marriage Register, Radford, Bureau of Vital Statistics (BVS), Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, LVA; J. Harvie Wilkinson III, Harry Byrd and the Changing Face of Virginia Politics, 1945–1966 (1968); James W. Ely Jr., The Crisis of Conservative Virginia: The Byrd Organization and the Politics of Massive Resistance (1976); George Leonard Vogt, "The Development of Virginia's Republican Party" (Ph.D. diss., UVA, 1978); Frank B. Atkinson, The Dynamic Dominion: Realignment and the Rise of Virginia's Republican Party since 1945 (1992); "Program of Progress" in Richmond Times-Dispatch, 13 Aug. 1953; feature articles in Richmond News Leader, 9 Oct. 1953, and Richmond Times-Dispatch, 22 Oct. 1953; obituaries (all with portraits) in Radford News Journal, Richmond News Leader, Richmond Times-Dispatch, and Roanoke Times and World-News, all 31 Oct. 1989, Washington Post, 1 Nov. 1989, and New York Times, 2 Nov. 1989.
1956 Senate of Virginia Legislative Photograph courtesy of Library of Virginia, Visual Studies Collection.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by James R. Sweeney.
How to cite this page:
James R. Sweeney, "Theodore Roosevelt Dalton (1901–1989)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2024 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Dalton_Ted, accessed [today's date]).
Return to the Dictionary of Virginia Biography Search page.
