The Shenandoah Valley and the mountains surrounding it are tied primarily to Appalachia. The violent battle for the leadership of the United Mine Workers (UMW) last summer, the black lung disease, and all the problems of Appalachian poverty present a different set of problems for a political candidate entering the area. For years the mountain people had appeared satisfied to the politicians in Richmond, but food stamps and a sellout union are no longer acceptable to them a decade after John F. Kennedy focused attention on the area's problems in his West Virginia primary.

Though Shenandoah and Hampton haven't changed too much-it was more the old problems had been exacerbated by a rising tide of militancy-Richmond and "Northern Virginia" (or suburban Washington as most non-Virginians see it) have changed at great deal. They no longer have any real ties to the South.

Richmond might as well be Indian-apolis or Des Moines. Of course the old monuments are still around-Robert E. Lee's home and Thomas Jefferson's graceful state capitol-but they have no effect on the modern city. The city appears as all-American as any medium-sized integrated city in the nation. The whites are moving to suburbia-toward Chesterfield and Ashland in the north and west-while the blacks are coming into the city seeking work from the nearby Southside. The lower middle-class whites resent the blacks, but can do little about it except vote for "law and order." Highways also are cutting through the black gheto forcing blacks areas and adding to the problem.

And then to Northern Virginia. New sub-developments of ticky-tack are going up nearby the site of Bull Run. A group of about one hundred enraged teeny-boppers stoned the police headquarters in nearby Falls Church, a pretty upper middle-class city about ten miles from the District of Columbia border, in mid-August. The police had busted a bopper for beating up on one of their informers who had recently turned in a few other boppers for pushing grass and possession.

The area has all the markings of Long Island or the Newton-Wellesley-Concord complex suburban living. High schoolers in the area estimate that upwards of 70 per cent have smoked grass in the past year. It makes pot and enforcement a political issue.

Northern Virginia, the four counties of suburban Washington, has mushroomed in the past two decades. It now comprises 12 per cent of the state's population. Where a couple of hundred thousand inhabited the area at the time of Pearl Harbor, the numbers have now jumped into the millions. Most of the millions have little connection with the South of old, they look to Washington for work and culture. They have moved to the area from all over the nation and were tired of hearing about the old Byrd machine in 1969.

THERE HAD been hints in 1965 and 1966 in the state and senatorial elections of the new vote from Northern Virginia and the Negroes and blacks. A moderate-then called a liberal-William Spong upset the Byrd Organization man for a Senate seat in 1966; a Republican had come close to winning the 1965 gubernatorial election. But though the Byrds looked in trouble going into 1969 (Virginia state elections are held the year following Presidential elections), all the political observers thought they would make a good battle of it.

They didn't. Several hundred thousand people turned out to vote on a hot, cloudy July day and smashed the Byrds. Nobody seemed to notice. It was a terrible turn-out; one which should have helped an old organization. Everybody seemed glued to the tube for the moon shot leaving the next morning. The revolution seemed effortless.

Experts expected Battle to lead the three-man race for the Democratic gubernatorial nomnation. Instead, he barely managed to beat Howell (by a few thousand votes). The two candidates went into a run-off.

Howell's campaign merged populism with the humanistic liberalism of the McCarthy campaign. The Virginia political pros finally realized in July that Howell had managed to do something which they thought was impossible. He united poor rural Negroes with the working class blacks and whites of the Hampton area, a few poor rural whites in Shenandoah and even racist Southside, with the liberal ethos of suburban Washington. After the primary, stories began appearing about the "new populism."

Of course, Howell was red-baited. Not by the Organization, however-they just labeled him a "leftist" -but by unconnected hatemongers who always seem rampant in Southern summers.

Literature was distributed proving that Howell was a "communist" -both agent and tool. For some reason, possibly because America had changed and wants more change. the stuff never appealed to Virginia voters.

Adding to the changing tide there was another race in the run-off election. One Byrd candidate had survived the primary -Guy O. Farley, the candidate for attorney general, but he came in a poor second to Andrew Miller, a young Shenandoah lawyer.

It was a mind-blowing race for a pot-smoking student radical to observe. Farley attacked Miller for being "namby-pamby on law and order." He asked for-time and again- "taking the handcuffs off the police and putting them on the criminals." He said that liberals like Miller liked to "coddle" criminals.

Farley felt that any attorney general of Virginia should tell the people-especially the potentially dangerous students-where he stood on campus disorders. He showed pictures of Columbia and the auditorium burning at Berkeley, in a television advertisement, promising to stop these sorts of things in Virginia.