The memory of the state's past still exerts its influence, as it surely must in towns where descendants of America's first patriots still live and where the homes, monuments, and battlefields that shaped the country's history comprise their daily landscape. So revered is history here that sometimes you would think George Washington still stands siege outside Yorktown, Thomas Jefferson still writes great political prose up at Monticello, and Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson still ride at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville.
Prominent in Virginia Tidewater plantation society since the 1600s, the Byrd family dominated the state's politics from World War I until the 1980s. Under their conservative control, the "Mother of Presidents" virtually withdrew from national leadership. The state government fought federally mandated public school integration in the 1950s, with one county actually closing its schoolhouse doors rather than admit African Americans to previously all-white institutions. Although racial relations have improved greatly since then, the old animosities still raise their ugly heads from time to time.
Back in 1989, however, Virginians chose Democrat L. Douglas Wilder as the nation's first elected African-American governor (he is now serving as mayor of Richmond). We Virginians have been narrowly splitting our votes between Republicans and Democrats. Conservative Republicans control the state legislature, but Gov. Tim Kaine is the second moderate Democrat in a row in the Governor's Mansion. In 2006, novelist and former Secretary of the Navy James Webb narrowly defeated Republican U.S. Senator George Allen, thus giving the Democrats control of the Senate.
Economically, the state has done reasonably well since the 1990s, thanks in large part to the growth of northern Virginia's high-tech corridor, where considerable business is done with the federal government.
Although colonist John Rolfe is best remembered for marrying Indian princess Pocahontas, he essentially founded the tobacco industry, which is still important to Virginia's economy despite the anti-smoking movement. As tobacco wanes, the state is encouraging the planting of grapes and the building of wineries (it strikes me as ironic that the home state of teetotaling preachers Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell is switching from tobacco to alcohol!). Farm income also sprouts from apple orchards in the Shenandoah Valley; livestock, dairies, and poultry in the Piedmont; the state's famous Smithfield hams and peanuts from the Tidewater country; and seafood from the Chesapeake Bay. Industry includes the manufacturing of clothes, chemicals, furniture, and transportation equipment, plus shipbuilding at Newport News.
