Upon being admitted to Virginia bar, Tuck maintained a private legal practice in
Halifax for decades, eventually with his stepson L.L. Dillard. His career as an elected official began in 1923, when Halifax County voters elected Tuck as their delegate (a part-time position) to the
Virginia General Assembly. He was re-elected once but declined to run for re-election in 1929, citing the need to grow his legal business to support his new family. However, when his elected successor died, Tuck was drafted in 1930 and served the remainder of the term. He was then elected to the
Virginia Senate in 1931, where he became a friend of U.S. Senator
Harry F. Byrd, a former governor. During the national
New Deal, state Senator Tuck worked to repeal Prohibition and sponsored new child labor laws, as well as an unemployment compensation system, old age assistance and jail reforms. He also helped develop the
state park system. In 1941, Tuck sought statewide office, but Senator Byrd slated
Colgate Darden to run for Governor of Virginia, so Tuck was slated for and won election as the 25th
Lieutenant Governor of Virginia. He served from 1942 to 1946 under Governor Darden, and gained visibility throughout the Commonwealth. Tuck defeated his Republican opponent,
S. Floyd Landreth by a 2 to 1 margin and won election as governor. As governor from 1946 to 1950, Tuck demonstrated his fiscal conservatism as a
Dixiecrat by reorganizing state government and enacting a
right-to-work law. He also created a state
water pollution control agency, helped reform state schools and mental hospitals, as well as constructed roads. Governor Tuck gained national exposure, however, for labor unrest in his home state. He worked with Senator Harry Byrd to oppose President
Harry Truman, although a fellow Democrat, especially Truman's plan to establish a
Fair Employment Practices Commission. Once, as governor, Tuck drafted workers of the
Virginia Electric Power Company into the state's national guard to avoid a threatened strike in an unionization effort. Transportation and coal also experienced labor unrest. Tuck's resumption of legal practice in
South Boston after his governorship proved short-lived, for he rose within the Byrd Organization. In 1953 Tuck won election as a Democrat to U.S. Congress vacated by
Thomas Bahnson Stanley who had resigned to run for
Governor of Virginia. A militant segregationist, Congressman Tuck opposed most major items of civil rights legislation during the 1950s and 1960s. Like U.S. Senator
Harry F. Byrd, Tuck promised "
massive resistance" to the Supreme Court's 1954 and 1955 decisions banning segregation,
Brown v. Board of Education, and helped draft the
Stanley Plan—a series of state laws designed to legally avoid
Brown, most of which were soon declared unconstitutional. Tuck was a signatory to the 1956
Southern Manifesto. Tuck voted against the
Civil Rights Acts of 1957, the
Civil Rights Acts of 1960, the
Civil Rights Acts of1964, and the
Civil Rights Acts of 1968 as well as the
24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the
Voting Rights Act of 1965. He was a member of the U.S. House of Representative's Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). He was a delegate to
Democratic National Conventions of 1948 and 1952, and in 1967 announced he would not seek reelection to Congress, citing health problems. He remained a power broker in the state for years. He retired from his law practice in South Boston in 1979, after suffering a stroke. ==Legacy==