Governor Glenn Youngkin is sending National Guard troops to the southern border in Texas next month, a move that critics say is politically motivated. A previous governor used his powers as the commander-in-chief in a way that still invites controversy.
Shortly after World War II, workers at the Virginia Electric and Power Company wanted better working conditions. So, they organized a strike. The governor at the time was a lawyer from Halifax County named Bill Tuck, a Byrd Machine governor who decided that it was a threat that demanded action.
"The Virginia Electric Power Company served about two-thirds of the state, including the capital, and it was essential for those lights to stay on."
That was former Governor Tuck, reminiscing about the VEPCO affair about 20 years after the fact. His solution to the problem was to conscript the employees of the power company — now known as Dominion Energy — into the state militia.
"We had an unorganized militia in Virginia," Tuck explained. "Which in an emergency — and certainly an emergency existed, and I declared one to exist, which I had a right to do under the law — that in an emergency the governor could draft every male person between 16 and 55 into the unorganized militia to meet the emergency."
And that's exactly what he did, threatening all the potentially striking workers with a court martial if they failed to show up for work. It might have been legally suspect, but the threat worked. The strike never materialized, and Governor Tuck followed it up the following year by signing the Right to Work Law, undermining the power of unions in Virginia.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
