Arkansas Governor Ben Laney

Technorati Profile

2007-09-13T19:56:00.000-07:00

Ol' Strom has a successor in 'Ol Trent

2007-09-13T19:53:00.000-07:00

Ol' Strom has a successor in 'Ol Trent
By: Bill Minor, Capitol Correspondent
12/12/2002

Mississippi's vote in 1948 presidential election was nothing about which to boast.

JACKSON - Well, Strom Thurmond has turned 100, the oldest guy to ever sit in the United States Senate.

My, it doesn't seem that long ago when I heard a South Carolina Democratic governor named J. Strom Thurmond make a fire-eating states' rights speech lathered with white supremacy here in Jackson's old City Auditorium.

It was May 10, 1948. A crowd of 2,000 like-minded rebellious Southern Democrats whooped and hollered. Billed as a Southwide rally of states' rights Democrats, it became the starting point of the historic Dixiecrat break with the National Democratic Party.

Though later years those connected with the Dixiecrat movement, including Thurmond, would contend it was about the constitutional question of states' rights and not about race, they conveniently forget the racist rhetoric they used back then to rally the troops.

Thurmond in 1948: "I want to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, there's not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches."

As history records, all-white delegations or parts of delegations from several Southern states, led by Mississippi's Gov. Fielding L. Wright, walked out of the National Democratic Convention at Philadelphia, Penn., in July 1948 when the convention adopted a pro-civil rights platform plank.

Thurmond's South Carolina delegation was not among them. Their reason, says South Carolina historian Jack Bass, was that either of two challenging delegations, one mostly black, was ready to move into the delegation's seats.

Less than a week after leaving Philadelphia, several thousand Mississippi-led states' righters from a half-dozen Dixie states convened in a Confederate flag-waving rump convention at Birmingham to nominate their own presidential ticket aimed at blocking the re-election of President Harry Truman.

The mild-mannered and gracious Wright had let two of us reporters from Jackson who covered his administration hang out in his hotel suite - something that would be unthinkable these days - and hear some of the horse trading that went on.

Practically every Southern state official on hand wanted Mississippi's Wright to head the ticket. But he modestly declined the top spot, though agreeing to become the vice-presidential nominee.

The ticket-makers next turned to Gov. Ben Laney of Arkansas for the top spot. But Laney, after listening to some of the bellicose rhetoric being hurled by speakers at the convention, packed his bags and went home to pledge himself for Harry Truman.

Thurmond, who had shown up at Birmingham to lend his backing to Wright and Laney, suddenly became the only available governor to take the top slot, and he promptly accepted it with gusto.

The Thurmond-Wright ticket, despite the best-laid and ballyhooed plans of the bolt architects to garner enough Southwide votes in the electoral college to block Truman's re-election, won only four Dixie states - Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and South Carolina - far short of jamming the electoral machinery.

More than a half-century later, it seems incomprehensible that the same Strom Thurmond who ran for president on the Dixiecrat ticket in 1948 as a thundering white supremacist, is the U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond, who now is stepping down at age 100 as a patron saint of the Republican Party.

Ol' Strom, they call him in South Carolina, in the early 1960s switched to the GOP. More importantly, he is identified as the key player in Richard Nixon's 1968 "Southern strategy," that eventually lured most of the once-solidly Democratic South into the GOP column.

Long ago, Thurmond set about to repair his former segregationist image by becoming the first member of the South Carolina delegation in Congress to hire a black staffer and later the first Deep South senator to nominate a black for the federal bench.

As several authors have written in their assessments of Thurmond's rather phenomenal career, rather than make an admission or apology to blacks for his past sins, Ol' Strom simply reshaped his political outlook to conform to the realities of a new electorate in his state.

Still, the most uncouth remark to come out of the occasion of Strom's 100th birthday party last week on Capitol Hill came from Mississippi's own Republican Sen. Trent Lott, soon to be the Senate majority leader.

Boasting that when Strom Thurmond ran for president in 1948, "We (Mississippi) voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we (the U.S.) wouldn't have had all these problems over all the years, either."

Was our Trent just kidding? That's how one right-wing talking head on TV dusted off the episode.

Mississippi voted 85 percent for Dixiecrat Thurmond in 1948 and only 15 percent for President Truman. However, not one black Mississippian was able to vote in that election. Zilch. Zero.

Is such a record of invidious discrimination against the African-American population of Mississippi (then higher percentage-wise than it is now) anything to kid about?

Strom is history. But Trent is still very much a prime-time actor on the national stage and carries a heavier burden to do penance for insouciant remarks.

That wasn't the only Trent transgression of the past week. He also violated a long-standing courtesy code of the Senate that one member will not invade another state to campaign against a fellow senator.

Lott joined the other Republican heavyweights, including George Bush, who swooped into Louisiana in an all-out drive to unseat Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu.

However, the moderate Landrieu whipped the whole army of GOP invaders, Lott included. In the least, Trent needn't expect an invitation to next year's Louisiana Mardi Gras ball in Washington.

World War II through the Faubus Era, 1941 through 1967

2007-09-13T19:49:00.000-07:00

World War II through the Faubus Era, 1941 through 1967

Developments during World War II loosened Arkansas from its rural moorings as it moved toward full integration with the national economy and society. Beginning in the war years and through the 1950s, the state resumed an industrialization process that had been interrupted by the Great Depression. Arkansans migrated from the countryside to the cities and participated in the expanding consumer economy. Federal dollars subsidized infrastructure improvements. Although state political leaders welcomed the largesse from Washington, they resisted external pressures to acknowledge African-American rights. Encouraged by ground-breaking federal court decisions, a new generation of civil rights leaders mounted direct challenges to discriminatory practices. Governor Orval Faubus responded to changing conditions with an ambitious expansion of state services, while mollifying white residents with an open defense of segregation.

Race, Class, and War
Poor health and inadequate education meant fewer Arkansans were pressed into military service during WWII. About 195,000 men served in the armed forces, although the forty-three percent rejection rate of the state’s inductees was the second highest in the nation. A far larger number of Arkansans migrated to Detroit, Michigan, and California in search of better-paying jobs in the burgeoning defense industry. At the same time, federal ordnance plants in Camden (Ouachita County), Jacksonville (Pulaski County), Maumelle (Pulaski County), Hope (Hempstead County), El Dorado (Union County), and Pine Bluff (Jefferson County), as well as massive aluminum production facilities in Saline County, also enticed rural Arkansans to seek employment in either the construction or the operation of the factories.

Arkansas women seized the opportunity for new manufacturing jobs, although a smaller percentage entered the workforce than did women nationwide. Seventy-five percent of the 13,000 workers at the Arkansas Ordnance Plant in Jacksonville were female.

In addition to the more than $241 million spent to build defense enterprises, the federal government spent $100 million to establish military bases such as Camp Joseph T. Robinson near North Little Rock (Pulaski County), Camp Chafee near Fort Smith (Sebastian County), and five training airfields in east Arkansas during the war. Residents in towns close to the camps enjoyed the profits from the influx of outsiders, and authorities generally overlooked the enforcement of regulations requiring the closing of businesses on Sunday. On the other hand, officials were unwilling to bend segregation barriers. Black and white soldiers, who occupied separate barracks on the bases, went their separate ways when on leave in Arkansas towns. Black military personnel chafed against harsh treatment. In 1942, Little Rock (Pulaski County) police officers beat and shot to death Sergeant Thomas Foster, a black serviceman who had intervened when the officers pummeled another black soldier. A brief investigation by local authorities exonerated the police officers, but Lucious Christopher Bates and Daisy Bates, who had recently begun publishing the Arkansas State Press, provided full details of the killing for their growing black readership.

The incarceration of German prisoners of war at Fort Chafee, Camp Robinson, and Camp Dermott as well as Italian POWs at Camp Monticello provoked little controversy in the state. The internment of Japanese Americans in hastily constructed camps at Rohwer (Desha County) and Jerome (Drew County) in southeast Arkansas, however, stirred official and popular disapproval. Forced from their homes on the West Coast, most of the 120,000 individuals of Japanese ancestry subject to the federal relocation policy were incarcerated at sites in western states. By the end of 1942, approximately 17,000 internees lived in the Arkansas camps. To pacify Governor Homer Adkins, who believed the federal government was planting an alien race in Arkansas, federal officials confined these Americans behind barbed-wire fences even as prisoners of war were dispatched to meet the labor demands of cotton farmers. In contrast to his devotion to maintaining separate spheres for whites and blacks within Southern society, Adkins advocated complete exclusion of the relocated families. In 1943, he signed a bill to prohibit Japanese American property ownership in Arkansas. The measure was unenforceable, but few internees chose to remain in the state at war’s end.

Slow to Embrace Change
The plunging number of native agricultural workers during the 1940s did not prod landowning planters to embrace technology as quickly as would be expected. In 1934, John and Mack Rust demonstrated the first automatic cotton picker, but International Harvester took the lead in the mass production of the new machines with the hope of exploiting wartime labor shortages. Nevertheless, planters feared mechanization would provoke social turmoil among the newly unemployed workers. The relentless depopulation of the Delta compelled landowners by the 1960s to accept harvesting technology. Eventually the newly mechanized farms would dwarf the traditional plantations, and soybean and rice production would outstrip cotton in terms of acreage planted and crop value.

Rural families watching neighbors pack up for urban opportunities at least had the consolation that they were finally able to enjoy modern appliances and amenities in their rural homes. The federal Rural Electrification Administration (REA) continued the work it had started during the Depression. Half of Arkansas farms had lights by 1950.

Arkansas Power and Light (AP&L), the state’s largest electrical utility, had grimly battled the REA and the federally sponsored electrical cooperatives, insisting that government subsidies should be funneled to private utilities. By the end of WWII, Hamilton Moses, AP&L’s president, began to worry less about losing rural customers and more about what the closing of the defense manufacturing plants would do to his company. His anxieties were soon eased as the government transferred properties and equipment to private concerns for a fraction of their value. Under the ownership of the Reynolds Aluminum Company, the Hurricane Creek and Jones Mills plants no longer supplied the makers of bombers and fighter planes but profited from the shift from steel to aluminum in the making of industrial and consumer goods. The withdrawal of federal defense dollars did not sidetrack Arkansas industrialization as agricultural depression and natural disasters had done during the 1920s. The number of manufacturing operations in the state in 1947 exceeded those in place at the start of the war.

Still, Moses did not want to trust the fortunes of his company to the vagaries of national economic trends. The utility’s influence over state government, its alliances with local leaders, and its impressive resources permitted the company to launch a full-scale economic development campaign that blurred the line between public and corporate interest. In the 1940s, Moses organized business leaders into the Arkansas Economic Council to advance AP&L’s plan for industrial recruitment, which in turn became the core mission of the Arkansas Resources and Development Commission, created by the legislature at the behest of Moses. In the 1950s, the Arkansas quest to lure new employers was fixed in the statutory code and constitution as local governments were permitted to finance infrastructure improvements to benefit private industries. In 1955, Winthrop Rockefeller became the first chair of the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission, a streamlined successor to the older Arkansas Resources and Development Commission.

The development boosters asserted that these initiatives had enabled Arkansas to surpass the national rate of factory growth. In truth, the food-processing and clothing plants that migrated to the state were influenced by several factors, including a ready surplus of low-wage labor. These non-durable-goods enterprises also posed fewer challenges to the status quo than the metals and chemical industries that persisted from the war era. The new plants beginning to dot the northern section of the state relied on a largely female work force that was semi-skilled and non-unionized.

Even with these new factory jobs, Arkansas women would continue to be less likely to be employed outside the home throughout the 1950s and 1960s. If American homes were crowded with more children after World War II, Arkansas mothers continued to have fewer children than the national average even though they married younger. The national divorce rate also rose, but Arkansas, as before, remained in the statistical forefront of broken marriages.

The Shift to Local Control
In a reversal of the usual economic pattern, national food giants such as Kraft, Swift, and Welch’s sold their Arkansas production facilities to Arkansas poultry companies. Buffeted by price swings, firms such as Tyson, OK Mills, and Arkansas Valley Feed pioneered a contract system with chicken producers that stabilized supplies and costs of production. The poultry industry enlisted the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville (UA) to research the breeding of a “better bird” that could be fattened rapidly. As families turned from planting row crops to producing chickens, or commuted to spend the workday on a poultry plant’s evisceration line, rural Arkansas became tethered to the national economy.

In 1952, the chicken processors formed the Arkansas Poultry Federation, which joined the utilities as a business-lobbying group expecting favorable laws and regulations from state government. Traditional Arkansas politics had been highly decentralized. Local economic elites had expected little from Little Rock other than maintaining low taxes. The new business interest groups, however, believed that a more professional and efficient government would aid economic development as well as claim a share of the revenues associated with burgeoning federal programs. Arkansas voters supported the shift from local authority and patronage politics by ratifying the 1944 constitutional amendment strengthening the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, approving a 1948 initiated act to consolidate small school districts, and assenting to another proposed amendment in 1952 to form an autonomous highway commission.

Politics and Reform
Governor Ben Laney believed that imposing business efficiency on government operations was the sort of reform consistent with his conservative philosophy. The Revenue Stabilization Act (1945) established a budget mechanism that allowed state policymakers for the first time to know for certain what money was available and how it was being spent. Laney also persuaded lawmakers to organize the Legislative Council to oversee budgets between sessions of the general assembly and to employ staff members who would relieve legislators from depending upon lobbyists to draft legislation. During the 1947 session, an infusion of young newcomers, many associated with the movement known as the “G.I. Revolt,” backed a series of measures that went beyond the usual narrow, local concerns.

WW II veterans in Hot Springs (Garland County) organized the first Government Improvement League, but former GI’s launched similar associations in other Arkansas communities in order to breakup the local political machines. Sidney McMath emerged as the leader of the Hot Springs GI reformers. After he gained the district prosecuting attorney’s office McMath brought to trial Leo McLaughlin, the legendary political boss of the spa city. Although McLaughlin escaped conviction, McMath’s good government reputation remained intact. In 1948, Laney did not vie for a third term, and McMath won a run-off against a candidate who campaigned as a stalwart defender of segregation.

As a racial moderate, McMath was a rare Southern politician untroubled by the civil rights initiatives set forth by President Harry Truman and national Democratic party leadership. Prominent Southern Democrats, however, resorted to secession from their party and nominated J. Strom Thurmond to run under the banner of the States’ Rights Democratic, or “Dixiecrat,” Party in order to sabotage Truman’s re-election. Dixiecrat leaders originally wanted Governor Laney to lead the ticket, but he preferred to mobilize the Southern dissidents within the party to prevent Truman’s nomination. McMath, bolstered by his primary victory, frustrated Laney’s attempts to stack the Arkansas delegation to the national party convention with Dixiecrats. Arkansas in November 1948 stayed with Truman, and a grateful president made a point to visit the state during McMath’s governorship.

Like Laney, McMath prized government efficiency but held that public aid and favorable treatment should be not granted only to influential business and agricultural interests. The governor promoted stiffer factory safety regulations and a higher minimum wage. He also appointed the first black members to state boards and increased funding for the chronically under-funded Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical, and Normal College, the historically black college in Pine Bluff (now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff). McMath met a formidable adversary when he crossed swords with Hamilton Moses over the state support for a new generating station for the state electrical cooperatives. McMath launched an unprecedented highway construction program, but a highway audit commission in 1952 concluded that the administration had awarded road contracts to campaign contributors. The governor retorted that several members of the commission were allies of the AP&L chieftain. The hint of scandal—along with the opposition of U.S. Senator John L. McClellan, a law partner of Moses—doomed McMath’s bid for a third term.

The election in 1952 of Francis Cherry as governor brought to office an east Arkansas judge who adhered to old-fashioned fiscal stringency. Yet his dismissal of the elderly poor as “deadheads” and refusal to give the poultry industry a tax break played poorly with a public that expected more from government. During his run for re-election in 1954, Cherry was too politically inept to ward off the charge that he was responsible for an unpopular rate increase that the independent Public Service Commission had granted AP&L. Surprisingly to some observers, the May 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, which deemed segregated schools unconstitutional, did not heat up the debate among the candidates. Cherry insisted that Arkansas would observe the law, while Faubus, his principal challenger, did not denounce the governor’s moderation. Faubus unseated Cherry, who once again misunderstood the political landscape and attempted to smear the WWII veteran for his enrollment twenty years earlier at Commonwealth College, a radical labor school in Mena (Polk County).

Early Attempts at School Desegregation
That the Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education remained a minor issue in the campaign reflected the generally measured response by state officials to earlier civil rights rulings. When the whites-only election primary was struck down in 1944, the Arkansas Democratic Party constructed an elaborate system to limit black voting but abandoned the effort by 1950. Although the poll tax remained in effect, its $1.00 cost rendered it a less critical obstacle. More important than the erosion of legal barriers to voting was the migration of black citizens away from the plantations of rural oligarchs. Black voter participation grew through the mobilization efforts of the Committee on Negro Organizations, founded in 1940 by Harold Flowers. In 1948, Flowers, the preeminent black attorney of his era, escorted Silas Hunt when he enrolled at the UA Law School as the first black student admitted to a postgraduate program in the state. Gov. Laney opposed the federal court decision that opened professional schools to black students but acquiesced after the dean of the law school explained that resistance would be futile, expensive, and self-defeating. A few months after Hunt’s admission, Edith Irby became the first black student to enroll at the School of Medicine of the University of Arkansas.

In most Southern states following the 1954 Brown decision, political and school leaders delayed action until the Supreme Court detailed how rapidly and how extensively desegregation should proceed. Hundreds of school districts in border states such as Missouri and Kentucky, however, officially integrated. School boards in the three Arkansas districts of Charleston (Franklin County), Fayetteville (Washington County), and Sheridan (Grant County) were the first within the boundaries of the former Confederacy to vote to have black and white students sit in the same classrooms. No incidents erupted during the first year of desegregation in Charleston or Fayetteville, which were mountain locales with relatively few black students. In addition, black and white leaders in Fayetteville held community meetings prior to the opening of the school year and gained an agreement with the local newspaper to keep the news out of the headlines. Events followed a different course in Sheridan, a south Arkansas community with a larger proportion of black citizens. One day after voting to desegregate, the school board reversed itself in the face of a forceful white backlash. Although segregation was preserved, angry speeches and threats at a subsequent mass meeting led to the resignation of all but one school board member. Soon, an exodus of black residents, which made Sheridan a nearly all-white community, settled the matter.

In 1955, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that school districts would not be subject to federal deadlines for desegregation but were free to determine how best to meet the vague standard of moving “with all deliberate speed.” The Court’s deference to local authority heartened the segregationist resistance movement. In the fall of 1955, leaders of groups such as the Citizens’ Council of Arkansas and White America, Inc., organized white opposition to school integration in the northeast Arkansas town of Hoxie (Lawrence County). In contrast to the Sheridan leaders, Hoxie school board directors did not buckle despite sustained harassment and demands for their ouster at raucous public rallies. Segregationist agitators such as James Johnson and Amis Guthridge retreated when the school board secured a federal injunction banning activities that hampered the implementation of desegregation. Yet defeat at Hoxie prepared the white militants for upcoming battles against desegregation.

The Desegregation Crisis of 1957
The Little Rock school crisis of 1957 caught the city by surprise. The most significant opposition to Superintendent Virgil Blossom’s plan to enroll selected students into Central High School had been registered by Daisy Bates, president of the state chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and other African-American leaders who had wanted desegregation extended to the lower grades. However, the federal district court overruled the NAACP suit filed by Wiley Branton, a protégé of Harold Flowers. Blossom assured influential figures that his plan of minimal compliance with court rulings would not provoke segregationist reprisals. The peaceful desegregation the previous year of the municipal bus system seemed to justify Blossom’s confidence.

Nevertheless, the ardent segregationists mobilized for battle. Angry that Faubus had not backed the Citizens’ Council campaign against integration in Hoxie, the segregationist Johnson challenged the incumbent governor in the 1956 Democratic Party primary. Faubus gained reelection by promising to protect segregated institutions without unleashing the disorder and extremism associated with the Johnson forces. After his defeat, Johnson welcomed the chance to force the governor to either defend segregation or accept responsibility for its demise. Lulled by Blossom’s reassurances, white civic leaders in Little Rock were unprepared to counter rising segregationist agitation.

Faubus believed that following the law spelled his political doom, and he risked open defiance of federal authority by using the state guard to prevent nine African-American students from entering Central High on the first day of the 1957 school year. President Dwight Eisenhower negotiated with the Arkansas governor and believed he had persuaded Faubus to accept desegregation. This policy of accommodation fell apart when Faubus left Central High unprotected, and over a 1,000 white protestors rioted as the black students attempted on September 23 to re-enter the school. Television cameras caught the fury of the crowd and introduced Americans across the nation to the hardening battle lines over civil rights. Eisenhower dispatched the 101st Airborne Division to enforce the court orders. Throughout the remainder of the school year, either U.S. troops or National Guard personnel accompanied the black students to school and kept watch in the halls. Segregationists mounted grassroots campaign to provoke and publicize turmoil in the school to demonstrate that desegregation was unworkable. In May 1958, Ernest Green became the first black graduate of Central High.

If Johnson took satisfaction in backing Faubus into the radical segregationist corner, he also came to understand that Faubus had displaced him as the popular champion of resistance. Faubus burnished his militant credentials by sponsoring a successful bill during a special session in 1958 that closed Little Rock high schools, subject to a local referendum. In September 1958, Little Rock voters favored keeping the schools closed to preserve them from integration. During the “lost year,” students lived with relatives to enroll in out-of-town schools, attended classes in churches, took correspondence courses, or just simply ended their educations. The silence of empty classrooms echoed the silence of local business and professional men. The first organization of white moderate forces was the Women’s Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools (WEC), formed primarily by prominent women in Little Rock society.

While some leaders of the WEC, such as Adolphine Terry and Vivion Brewer, favored integration, the group’s advertised aim was to reopen the schools. The WEC emphasized through speeches and circulars that closed schools threatened stability and prosperity. The white business leadership belatedly entered the fray when segregationist school board members engineered the purging of forty-four teachers and staff. A recall election in May 1959 ousted the segregationists from the board and paved the way for high school classes to resume in the fall.

The legacy of the crisis was varied. The Little Rock African-American community had discredited the official flouting of the law and segregationist extremism through the clear defiance of violence and intimidation. The WEC broke from the older forms of female activism tied to the prohibition of liquor and suffrage. The organization’s members continued to promote general political reform and interracial cooperation while edging toward more focused demands for expanded women’s rights. Faubus continued to thunder anti-integration rhetoric but avoided another showdown with national authorities. While denouncing the federal government, the governor also raised taxes and bolstered government services. This formula of catering to the right while advancing government modernization kept him in office for an unprecedented six terms.

Industry and Entertainment
Although the Little Rock school crisis discouraged new employers from locating in the city, manufacturing growth continued to surge in the state as a whole through the 1960s. The poultry firms secured better prices by processing ready-to-cook chickens to appeal to women who continued to cook and shop for their households. These companies also stimulated the expansion of long-distance trucking firms in northwest Arkansas. In 1960 Norge, an appliance manufacturer, announced that it would build a factory employing 2,000 in Fort Smith, revealing that not all of the arriving operations were in the lower-wage clothing and food-processing sectors. New jobs prompted population shifts. The larger Arkansas towns exceed the national urban growth rate throughout the 1950s. Arkansans who moved to the city not only became accustomed to gas heat and indoor plumbing, but they also found it easier to replicate a lifestyle viewed nightly on flickering television sets.

Just as Arkansans had once listened on the radio to native sons perform on the Lum and Abner and the Bob Burns programs, they watched Dick Powell, who was born in Mountain View (Stone County), in the early 1960s and, later in the decade, the variety shows of Glen Campbell and Johnny Cash, from Delight (Pike County) and Kingsland (Cleveland County), respectively. Campbell and Cash were among a number of musicians who honed their talents in the church and crop fields and forged notable careers by invigorating commercial music with the traditional strains from their youth. Johnnie Taylor and Al Green emerged from gospel groups to dominate the soul record charts in the late 1960s and 1970s. Conway Twitty and Charlie Rich jumped on the rockabilly band wagon in the 1950s but found greener pastures in Nashville country music circles.

While Arkansans watched the same television programs and listen to the same popular music as other Americans, their traditional preference for the outdoors gave a distinctive cast to modern recreation in the state. After WWII, the newly invigorated Game and Fish Commission managed to replenish the white-tail deer population, which had nearly been erased by over-hunting. The agency authorized limited hunting seasons for the first time in the 1950s, and deer replaced squirrel as the game of choice for Arkansas hunters. Arkansans also began to abandon fishing from the banks of rivers as new lakes became the newest alteration of the landscape. In 1938, Congress approved a U.S. Army Corp of Engineers plan to construct a series of flood-control dams in the White River Basin. Over the subsequent decades, these construction projects led to the creation of Norfolk, Bull Shoals, and Greers Ferry lakes. These sites stimulated the emergence of the Arkansas tourist industry as well as the development of retirement communities.

If many Arkansans began to view nature as a backdrop for new forms of recreation, some in the northern uplands reacted to changes by demanding preservation of the natural environment. The intention of the Army Corps of Engineers to build a dam at Lone Rock on the Buffalo River led Neil Compton, a Benton County physician, to mobilize opposition to the project. By 1964, the environmentalists’ challenge compelled the corps to relocate the dam to preserve a larger section of the river. The compromise failed to quiet the controversy. The preservationists held firm while confronting opposition from Newton County citizens who believed the dam would jumpstart the economy of the chronically impoverished region. The corps cultivated these local allies. At the same time, tourist developers at the corps’s other lakes as well as AP&L, which worried about another federal hydroelectric project, supported the environmentalists. In 1965, Faubus ended the battle over the Buffalo River by requesting that the corps decommission the dam project.

Politics in a New Era for Arkansas
Faubus’s fear that the upland landscape of his youth was threatened by bulldozers and dams corresponded with his growing disdain for the other changes unfolding in the 1960s: civil rights, questioning of American Cold War policy, and the new youth culture. Other Arkansas politicians responded with ambivalence to the new conditions. Both of Arkansas’s U.S. senators, John L. McClellan and J. William Fulbright, continued to vote against federal civil rights measures on states’ rights grounds, yet McClellan routed a steady flow of federal dollars into river, levee, and drainage projects, while Fulbright became the most notable congressional opponent to President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam War policy. Led by Representative Wilbur Mills, who chaired the Committee on Ways and Means, the House delegation complemented the influence of the senators. No state enjoyed greater clout in Congress by the 1960s.

Faubus’s conservatism did not render him inflexible. While denouncing civil rights measures, the governor cooperated with L. C. Bates in selecting black appointees for state posts rather than risk the withholding of federal funds by continuing overt public employment discrimination. Mindful of the growing African-American voting rolls, Faubus cooled his more incendiary rhetoric without sacrificing his segregationist support.

As new civil rights organizations launched broader integration campaigns, the trauma left over from the 1957 crisis moderated the white response. In 1961, several African-American physicians in Little Rock formed the Council of Community Affairs, which pressed municipal officials to desegregate public parks and buildings. The following year, the Arkansas Council on Human Relations, an interracial group that fostered improved race relations through education and dialogue, requested that the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Atlanta send an organizer to jumpstart a sit-in movement against the downtown Little Rock lunch counters. Beginning with the F. W. Woolworth’s store and then expanding to other Main Street department stores, students from Philander Smith College sat peacefully at the lunch counters until arrested. Business leaders feared embarrassing national publicity and persuaded the store managers to open the dining areas to all customers. By the end of 1963, Little Rock lifted segregation regulations on public auditoriums, parks, and playgrounds. The statewide voting rights campaign of the SNCC confronted greater hostility but succeeded, by 1968, in doubling the number of registered black voters to sixty-eight percent of those who were eligible. A significant number of these new voters cast their first ballots for Winthrop Rockefeller, who ran for governor in 1964 and again in 1968.

Faubus’s long tenure as governor had given him unprecedented influence over government agencies and their clients. He also enjoyed political and monetary support from the varied business interest groups that grew as the state’s economy diversified. Political observers acknowledged that Witt Stephens, founder of the state’s leading bond firm and president of Arkansas Louisiana Gas, was the most influential power broker. His early alliance with Faubus strengthened Stephens and eroded the clout of AP&L. Despite his many advantages, Faubus spied storm clouds on the horizon. While he had expanded the scope of government, Faubus had operated in a climate of old-fashioned corruption that proved unpalatable to a rising number of urban citizens. In 1964, the ratification of the federal amendment against poll taxes and the court-ordered redrawing of legislative districts to reflect population shifts heralded a new era of politics.

Although he had appointed Rockefeller to chair the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission, Faubus backed a legislative attempt to oust the former New Yorker from the position in 1963. Rockefeller had been critical of the governor’s segregation policies and was vigorous in trying to resurrect a viable Republican Party. In 1964, the conservative wing of the national Republican Party showed its strength with the nomination for president of Senator Barry Goldwater, who had opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In Arkansas, Rockefeller envisioned a broad-based party that would forge a coalition of black and moderate white citizens. Faubus was also running against the current of his own party as President Johnson touted his civil rights achievements in his bid for a new term. Rockefeller’s loss to Faubus in the November gubernatorial election surprised few. Buoyed by the highest vote percentage enjoyed by a Republican since Reconstruction, however, Rockefeller immediately announced he would try again in two years.

In March 1966, Faubus announced that he was retiring. The resulting wide-open Democratic primary election led to the nomination of James Johnson, who had not altered his segregationist views. Fearing that a Johnson victory would revive the unrest and embarrassment associated with the events of 1957, many moderate white Democrats voted for a Republican for the first time in their lives. More significantly, nearly all of the 75,000 black voters chose Rockefeller, bringing him to victory as governor.

Rockefeller’s victory did not create a real two-party political system in Arkansas, but candidates for office were freed from the obligation to declare themselves defenders of segregation and racial discrimination. A new generation of political leaders would emerge out of the shadows of the Old Guard of the Faubus period. The social and economic transformation of Arkansas in the decades following WWII set in motion the overdue reform of a political system long mired in factionalism and narrow local interest. Rising prosperity and greater democracy were the underpinnings of the bridge between Arkansas and the modern nation.

For additional information:
Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. Arkansas Wildlife: A History. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1998.

Bates, Daisy. The Long Shadow of Little Rock. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000.

Beals, Melba Patillo. Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Account of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High. Little Rock: Washington Square Press, 1994.

Compton, Neil. The Battle for the Buffalo River: A Twentieth Century Conservation Crisis in the Ozarks. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1992.

Holley, Donald. The Second Great Emancipation: The Mechanical Cotton Picker, Black Migration, and How They Shaped the Modern South. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000.

Huckaby, Elizabeth. Crisis at Central High: Little Rock 1957–1958. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980.

Johnson, Ben F. Arkansas in Modern America: 1930–1999. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000.

Kirk, John A. Redefining the Color Line: Black Activism in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1940–1970. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002.

Lester, James E. A Man for Arkansas: Sid McMath and the Southern Reform Tradition. Little Rock: Rose Publishing, 1976.

Lewis, Julianne and Thomas A. DeBlack, eds. Civil Obedience: An Oral History of School Desegregation in Fayetteville, Arkansas, 1954–1965. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1994.

McMath, Sidney S. Promises Kept: A Memoir. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2003.

Murphy, Sara Alderman. Breaking the Silence: Little Rock’s Women’s Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools, 1958–1963. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997.

Reed, Roy. Faubus: The Life and Times of an American Prodigal. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997.

Smith, C. Calvin. War and Wartime Changes: The Transformation of Arkansas, 1940–1945. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1986.

Strausberg, Stephen. From Hills to Hollers: Rise of the Poultry Industry in Arkansas. Fayetteville: Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station, 1995.

Urwin, Cathy Kunzinger. Agenda for Reform: Winthrop Rockefeller as Governor of Arkansas, 1967–71. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1991.

Woods, Randall Bennett. Fulbright: A Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Ben Johnson

Southern Arkansas University

The Southern Manifesto of 1956

2007-09-13T19:47:00.001-07:00

"The Southern Manifesto"

[From Congressional Record, 84th Congress Second Session. Vol. 102, part 4 (March 12, 1956). Washington, D.C.: Governmental Printing Office, 1956. 4459-4460.]
THE DECISION OF THE SUPREME COURT IN THE SCHOOL CASES DECLARATION OF CONSTITUTIONAL PRINCIPLES

Mr. [Walter F.] GEORGE. Mr. President, the increasing gravity of the situation following the decision of the Supreme Court in the so-called segregation cases, and the peculiar stress in sections of the country where this decision has created many difficulties, unknown and unappreciated, perhaps, by many people residing in other parts of the country, have led some Senators and some Members of the House of Representatives to prepare a statement of the position which they have felt and now feel to be imperative.

I now wish to present to the Senate a statement on behalf of 19 Senators, representing 11 States, and 77 House Members, representing a considerable number of States likewise. . . .

DECLARATION OF CONSTITUTIONAL PRINCIPLES

The unwarranted decision of the Supreme Court in the public school cases is now bearing the fruit always produced when men substitute naked power for established law.

The Founding Fathers gave us a Constitution of checks and balances because they realized the inescapable lesson of history that no man or group of men can be safely entrusted with unlimited power. They framed this Constitution with its provisions for change by amendment in order to secure the fundamentals of government against the dangers of temporary popular passion or the personal predilections of public officeholders.

We regard the decisions of the Supreme Court in the school cases as a clear abuse of judicial power. It climaxes a trend in the Federal Judiciary undertaking to legislate, in derogation of the authority of Congress, and to encroach upon the reserved rights of the States and the people.

The original Constitution does not mention education. Neither does the 14th Amendment nor any other amendment. The debates preceding the submission of the 14th Amendment clearly show that there was no intent that it should affect the system of education maintained by the States.

The very Congress which proposed the amendment subsequently provided for segregated schools in the District of Columbia.

When the amendment was adopted in 1868, there were 37 States of the Union. . . .

Every one of the 26 States that had any substantial racial differences among its people, either approved the operation of segregated schools already in existence or subsequently established such schools by action of the same law-making body which considered the 14th Amendment.

As admitted by the Supreme Court in the public school case (Brown v. Board of Education), the doctrine of separate but equal schools "apparently originated in Roberts v. City of Boston (1849), upholding school segregation against attack as being violative of a State constitutional guarantee of equality." This constitutional doctrine began in the North, not in the South, and it was followed not only in Massachusetts, but in Connecticut, New York, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania and other northern states until they, exercising their rights as states through the constitutional processes of local self-government, changed their school systems.

In the case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 the Supreme Court expressly declared that under the 14th Amendment no person was denied any of his rights if the States provided separate but equal facilities. This decision has been followed in many other cases. It is notable that the Supreme Court, speaking through Chief Justice Taft, a former President of the United States, unanimously declared in 1927 in Lum v. Rice that the "separate but equal" principle is "within the discretion of the State in regulating its public schools and does not conflict with the 14th Amendment."

This interpretation, restated time and again, became a part of the life of the people of many of the States and confirmed their habits, traditions, and way of life. It is founded on elemental humanity and commonsense, for parents should not be deprived by Government of the right to direct the lives and education of their own children.

Though there has been no constitutional amendment or act of Congress changing this established legal principle almost a century old, the Supreme Court of the United States, with no legal basis for such action, undertook to exercise their naked judicial power and substituted their personal political and social ideas for the established law of the land.

This unwarranted exercise of power by the Court, contrary to the Constitution, is creating chaos and confusion in the States principally affected. It is destroying the amicable relations between the white and Negro races that have been created through 90 years of patient effort by the good people of both races. It has planted hatred and suspicion where there has been heretofore friendship and understanding.

Without regard to the consent of the governed, outside mediators are threatening immediate and revolutionary changes in our public schools systems. If done, this is certain to destroy the system of public education in some of the States.

With the gravest concern for the explosive and dangerous condition created by this decision and inflamed by outside meddlers:

We reaffirm our reliance on the Constitution as the fundamental law of the land.

We decry the Supreme Court's encroachment on the rights reserved to the States and to the people, contrary to established law, and to the Constitution.

We commend the motives of those States which have declared the intention to resist forced integration by any lawful means.

We appeal to the States and people who are not directly affected by these decisions to consider the constitutional principles involved against the time when they too, on issues vital to them may be the victims of judicial encroachment.

Even though we constitute a minority in the present Congress, we have full faith that a majority of the American people believe in the dual system of government which has enabled us to achieve our greatness and will in time demand that the reserved rights of the States and of the people be made secure against judicial usurpation.

We pledge ourselves to use all lawful means to bring about a reversal of this decision which is contrary to the Constitution and to prevent the use of force in its implementation.

In this trying period, as we all seek to right this wrong, we appeal to our people not to be provoked by the agitators and troublemakers invading our States and to scrupulously refrain from disorder and lawless acts.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Signed by:

MEMBERS OF THE UNITED STATES SENATE

Walter F. George, Richard B. Russell, John Stennis, Sam J. Ervin, Jr., Strom Thurmond, Harry F. Byrd, A. Willis Robertson, John L. McClellan, Allen J. Ellender, Russell B. Long, Lister Hill, James O. Eastland, W. Kerr Scott, John Sparkman, Olin D. Johnston, Price Daniel, J.W. Fulbright, George A. Smathers, Spessard L. Holland.

MEMBERS OF THE UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Alabama: Frank W. Boykin, George M. Grant, George W. Andrews, Kenneth A. Roberts, Albert Rains, Armistead I. Selden, Jr., Carl Elliott, Robert E. Jones, George Huddleston, Jr.

Arkansas: E.C. Gathings, Wilbur D. Mills, James W. Trimble, Oren Harris, Brooks Hays, W.F. Norrell.

Florida: Charles E. Bennett, Robert L.F. Sikes, A.S. Herlong, Jr., Paul G. Rogers, James A. Haley, D.R. Matthews.

Georgia: Prince H. Preston, John L. Pilcher, E.L. Forrester, John James Flynt, Jr., James C. Davis, Carl Vinson, Henderson Lanham, Iris F. Blitch, Phil M. Landrum, Paul Brown.

Louisiana: F. Edward Hebert, Hale Boggs, Edwin E. Willis, Overton Brooks, Otto E. Passman, James H. Morrison, T. Ashton Thompson, George S. Long.

Mississippi: Thomas G. Abernathy, Jamie L. Whitten, Frank E. Smith, John Bell Williams, Arthur Winstead, William M. Colmer.

North Carolina: Herbert C. Bonner, L.H. Fountain, Graham A. Barden, Carl T. Durham, F. Ertel Carlyle, Hugh Q. Alexander, Woodrow W. Jones, George A. Shuford.

South Carolina: L. Mendel Rivers, John J. Riley, W.J. Bryan Dorn, Robert T. Ashmore, James P. Richards, John L. McMillan.

Tennessee: James B. Frazier, Jr., Tom Murray, Jere Cooper, Clifford Davis.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SIDNEY McMATH - DAVID PRYOR transcript five

2007-09-13T19:45:00.002-07:00

SIDNEY McMATH - DAVID PRYOR

DAVID PRYOR: Well, Governor, there's one more race, one more race that I'd like to bring up, if you don't mind, and that is the race, I believe it was 1962. You had hired Orval E. Faubus in your administration. He was involved with the Highway Department. He had become Governor elected in 1954 upsetting Francis Cherry, I might add, and it comes 1962 and you said you think you'll just take on your old former employee, Orval E. Faubus. By that time he had acquired and assimilated an enormous power base and he had appointed, I guess, every Board Member, every Commission Appointee in the State had been his. In 1962 you challenged Orval Faubus for Governor. What was going on in your mind? What was your motivation? And let's talk about that race just a moment.

SIDNEY McMATH: Well, I gave that a lot of consideration. Of course, in the main I'd be running against people who had been my support. See? Against an organization that I helped build and I understood the difficulties and again, that may have been a mistake, to make that race, because of the formable opposition and the issue that was so paramount in the peoples' mind but I wanted to make a statement and I made that race in order to make a statement. I thought our leadership was going in the wrong direction at the wrong time and I made that statement. I was defeated and that was the reason I made it and I did the best I could. I ran as hard a race as I could but I didn't have enough votes in the ballot box.

DAVID: Well, you sure were up against a massive amount of fire power with Orval Faubus at that time because he was probably at the peak of his power. By 1962 he had gotten through the integration crisis and all of that business but he had built an enormous power base probably unlike any other Governor we've ever had.

SID: If it's any consolation I have a feeling at least I've been vindicated by history.

DAVID: Uh-huh. I think people will agree to that. I certainly do. Governor, I want to go back – we have one thing in common. Both of us had been defeated by John L. McClellan.

SID: Yes.

DAVID: Senator McClellan.

SID: Right.

DAVID: And when you said there was a race that you might not should have run when you thought about making that race for a third term. Maybe that was a race I should not have run in 1972 but I did and looking back on I don't have a lot of regrets. Things have worked out great for me.

SID: Well, that made a base for you.

DAVID: It's just been wonderful, people have been wonderful to me and very, very tolerant of me for all of these years but Governor…

SID: Well, let me say this right here, David, there's nobody in politics past or present that has more loyal friends and supporters of David Pryor.

DAVID: Well, that's very, very kind of you especially...

SID: I say that from my heart.

DAVID: …coming from Sidney McMath. Thank you very, very much. I appreciate you saying that. You almost defeated John McClellan in 1954. Now, that was a razor-edge…

SID: That's right.

DAVID: …razor-close, I should say, race. A lot of people say that in certain counties you were counted out and I don't know that to be the case. I don't know whether that's true or false but you surely almost won that race.

SID: Well, you know, it'd look like sour grapes or a poor loser if you say, well, I was counted out because they cheated and so forth but there was two (2) or three (3) counties in Eastern Arkansas where people that I had relied on in the past, had been for me, they went the other way at the last minute and it made a difference in the race.

DAVID: That's right. Speaking of "sour grapes", a lot of times and I know many, many more have come to you than they've ever come to me but many times young people come to me and they say, "David, tell us, we're interested in running for office. Tell us what we should do. Tell us how we run. How do we choose a campaign manager or a slogan? What should be our message?" I said, "Listen, there's no secret to this." There's one thing that I tell everybody, I said, "Be prepared to lose. Hopefully you're going to win but be prepared to lose and if you lose, be a good loser. Because people in Arkansas watch how you lose, I think, much more closely than how you win. And you have always been a magnanimous, gracious politician in victory and defeat.

SID: Thank you.

DAVID: And I think people have always admired that in you and you have risen above whatever degree of hurt you might be having in your own self and soul and heart at the moment.

SID: Thank you. You mentioned about young people…

DAVID: Yes.

SID: …getting into politics. You know, I think you would agree with me in saying that first they have to have a motive, the right motivation, a passion to accomplish something, that they're willing to go out and pay the price of being a politician.

DAVID: There is a price to pay.

SID: In order to accomplish that one thing.

DAVID: There's a price to pay.

SID: And you have to be willing to fight for that whether or not at the time it might be politically correct, the thing to do but a quotation somewhere in my mind is about motivation, it goes about motivation, if I can remember it. "The right motive gives pinions to thought and freedom and strength to speech and action." You have the right motive, otherwise don't get in.

DAVID: That is fabulous. Now, I'd like to conclude on a story and I brought it up earlier in our conversation because you had mentioned "dogs" two (2) times, various dogs. Now, I want to know the story of Old Red. I remember, in growing up, I heard about Old Red at the Governor's Mansion. Now, tell us that story one more time.

SID: Well, I'll tell you what. Old Red was a great dog.

DAVID: Was Old Red from Grant County?

SID: No.

DAVID: No.

SID: He was up from, let's see. Up in Northwest Arkansas, just below Sebastian County, just before Fort Smith.

DAVID: Maybe even in Van Buren or up in there?

SID: Yeah, that's right. That's right. They were having a road opening dedication and they invited me up to cut the ribbon. And so I cut the ribbon and those coon hunters up there knew that I was a coon hunter. See? My boys and I hunted coons down on my farm and so forth. So, they made a great ceremony out of giving me Old Red and so I took Old Red home with me and he was there at the Mansion and we were feeding him out of the Governor's fund and so forth. And there was a newspaper reporter in North Little Rock took up the issue and accused me of misusing the Governor's funds, the operating funds to feed my dog. Feeding him so forth and so forth. Well, my response was that Old Red had replaced one (1) State Trooper as a guard at the Mansion. And since he was working for the State, I thought it was only fair that he fed by the State.

DAVID: Be fed by the State. What a fair compromise. And I think you prevailed in that argument there

SID: Prevailed in that argument, that's right.

DAVID: That's one of the great stories. Well, here we have, we've talked about the Med Center. We'd talked about the Highway Program. We've talked about the Rural Electrification that you have felt so passionately about but probably the most passionate that you've become is when you talk about education of our young people and I don't think I know of any Governor in history that has done more for education than Sidney Sanders McMath. Talk about that just a moment.

SID: Well, of course, as I mentioned earlier, I have felt with a passion that every child is entitled to an opportunity for an education, find his talents, hone his skills and be a good citizen, a productive citizen, and I, as Governor, tried to appropriate more money for public education. I helped in consolidating the schools from some 1700 to around 300 and something and I advanced the program at the AM&N College in Pine Bluff, the one for the black people and so, as I say, it was one of my passions and I tried to further that while I was in office.

DAVID: Well, the late Daisy Bates, many, many times would say in her speeches and her admonitions to young people and in reviewing her life that those who are not educated are not free.

SID: Sure, I agree.

DAVID: And I think that is true and I think you have believe that.

SID: Correct.

DAVID: For these many years. Governor, let me say that this State is better off today because of you, sir, what an honor it has been for me to visited with you during this program on AETN.

SID: Thank you.

DAVID: We're very, very proud that this is the first in a series and we couldn't have gone any higher to begin and to inaugurate this series.

SID: Thank you, David. I appreciate it very much.

DAVID: Thank you, sir.

TRANSCRIBED BY:

PATSY BILLINGS

8308 KEATS DRIVE

LITTLE ROCK, AR 72209

501-562-5267

email: billings@sitemall.net

SIDNEY McMATH - DAVID PRYOR transcript four

2007-09-13T19:45:00.001-07:00

SIDNEY McMATH - DAVID PRYOR

DAVID PRYOR: Governor, speaking of the integration crisis and the development of rural electrification and the public school system that you so strongly supported with great passion and the Medical Center, I've always associated two (2) people with you. Two (2) people who are still very prominent in Arkansas. One of those persons is Judge Henry Woods. The other is Leland Leatherman. These gentlemen became your law partners but yet early on in your career, they were your friends and mentors and advisors and if you don't mind, I've heard a story about you and Judge Henry Woods. This was many years ago when you were thinking about running for Governor and I believe Henry Woods may have come to Hot Springs, an avid President of the Young Democrats and you're trying to find somebody to manage your campaign. Do you mind sharing that with me?

SIDNEY McMATH: I remember that. Of course, Henry and I have been friends seemingly forever. His mother and my mother were friends. His sister, who was much older than Henry and my mother were friends and we both graduated from Hot Springs High School. Of course, I was ahead of Henry probably about four (4) years but when I was elected Prosecuting Attorney in 1948, of course, there was speculation about me running for Governor. And Henry, at that time was practicing law in Texarkana. And he was the President of the Young Democrats and he came over to see me in about any way he could help me in the campaign. And I said, "Well, I'd like you to be my campaign manager." Of course, being the President of the Young Democrat, well naturally as big of an organization that they were, a live-wire organization back then.

PRYOR: That's right.

MCMATH: They were well organized and active back then, probably more so than the Democratic Party.

PRYOR: That's right.

MCMATH: And so, I said, "Would you be my campaign manager?" He said, "Well", he says, "How much money do you have?" I said, "Well, I've got $1,500.00 cash and I've got $1,500.00 promised." He said, "We can win on that."

PRYOR: That's the power of positive thinking.

MCMATH: Can you imagine starting off a campaign with $1,500.00 cash and $1,500.00 promised?

PRYOR: Oh, my goodness. That wouldn't pay your filing fee. It wouldn't pay for one (1) 30 second TV.

MCMATH: Well, Henry stayed with me in every campaign I've ever been in and he was my right-hand man when I was Governor.

PRYOR: He's a real thinker, isn't he?

MCMATH: And you talk about Leland.

PRYOR: Leland Leatherman.

MCMATH: Leland, he was my good friend in Hot Springs and it's always been when I needed him and when I left the office when the good people of Arkansas retired me in '53, Henry and Leland and I opened up a law office and we practiced together for some 25 years until Henry went on the bench. And David, we did it all on a handshake. No written contract. We've never had a cross-word or an argument about a fee division or anything else. It was a perfect relationship.

PRYOR: That's great.

MCMATH: And of course, when Henry went on the Court as the United States District Judge, he had the segregation cases arising out of Pulaski County and so forth. And in his early decision he held that the school districts in Pulaski County should be consolidated. See? And of course, in 1948 one of my objectives after I was nominated, after I was elected, we wanted to consolidate the schools. There were too many of them, some 700 school districts. So, we supported that Bill to raise the millage 18 mill limit on schools and also to consolidate the schools reducing them from 1700 something to around 1500. See? And it's still too many. We shouldn't have more than, certainly more than one (1) school district per county. But anyway, Henry believed strongly that these school districts in Pulaski County should be consolidated and he so held but the 8th Circuit Court of Appeal didn't agree with him and he was reversed. But you can imagine the time and money and energy that could have been saved instead of it all being in the court room and this emotional effort of integration and segregation and so forth had been put in the classrooms. See? And so he was correct about that and had a lot of vision and a lot of foresight and a lot of courage. And then on the race issue, in 1948, in September of '48 when they changed the rules of the Democratic Party to let blacks in to the party, Henry led the floor fight.

PRYOR: It was at the State Democratic Convention.

MCMATH: State Democratic Convention down at Robinson Auditorium in September of 1948. So, we got this Bill introduced and Henry led the fore fight to get it passed. See?

PRYOR: But you had done a lot of state work before. You had worked a lot of people.

MCMATH: That's right.

PRYOR: That could have been a very explosive moment for the State Democratic Party.

MCMATH: Yeah, we did a lot of ground work on that before we went to the convention.

PRYOR: Right.

MCMATH: We had the leaders there and so forth and we tried to point out to them the direction we should be going.

PRYOR: Right.

MCMATH: Now, you know, it's so basic. You know, when you go back to the Declaration of Independence, our forefathers were inspired that all men are created equal. Well, if they're created equal, they should have an equal opportunity to find their talents, to hone their skills, to be competitive, to be good citizens. See? And then the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States. "We the people of the United States in order to form a more perfect union establish justice." Justice requires that everybody be treated equally, that everybody be given an equal opportunity in this land. See? That's why so many people want to come to this world. You know, they're beating down the doors to get in to the United States because of the freedom. And, of course, that's another thing about the '57 incident. See, that gave the wrong impression. See? That flag stands for freedom. Run that flag up to the top of the pole, people say that stands for freedom for every man, woman and child. See? And so, Henry, he's a great Judge and he was a good friend and Leland, when we began practicing law together, he took the attorney job representing all rural electric cooperatives. So, we maintained our relationship with rural electric coop.

PRYOR: Well, now speaking of a real visionary, Leland Leathererman, in my mind, is truly an Arkansas visionary.He saw there was so much earlier than the rest of us did. You've always had a great impact on, not only have they had a impact on you and the young men of Arkansas coming up, but you had an impact on them and vice versa but one...

MCMATH: A perfect relationship.

PRYOR: One of those young men that we've not mentioned that you've touched early in his life, was a young bond salesman, a young financier by the name of Jack Stephens in Little Rock and you, if I'm not mistaken, he became the youngest member of the University of Arkansas Board of Trustees and you appointed him.

MCMATH: That's correct, David. Jack and I became acquainted early in the campaign and he supported me, I guess, in every election I ever ran, certainly in the early days and I thought he would be a great service on the University of Arkansas Board of Trustees because he and I had a shared philosophy about educational opportunities for everybody, you know. And Jack was on the Board for, I guess, ten (10) years and did an outstanding job.

PRYOR: He certainly did. And let me put in a plug, if I might, Jack Stephens today is a primary supporter of this program that we're initiating to teach Arkansas history in our school systems.

MCMATH: I'm proud to know that.

PRYOR: And we had a seminar not too long ago in Fayetteville and we brought 50 Arkansas teachers there to teach them how to teach Arkansas history and to teach other teachers how to teach Arkansas history and he was a very, very generous financial supporter of that cause and remains so to this day. He's done a wonderful thing in all of these years but in recent years what he's done with the Arts Center and many, many other causes.

MCMATH: Well, that's an indication of his vision and his willingness to be a public servant.

PRYOR: That is correct. Well, Governor, Henry Woods and Leland Leathererman and Jack Stephens and all of these people that you have watched in your productive life, and by the way here you are, two (2) more years you're going to be 90 and you still have passion. You are known basically as a winner but you did not always win. Let's talk about that election, if we could, and we won't go in to it in great detail of 1952. By the way, I lost a race one time and still, I don't know, I think I've won nine (9) or ten (10) races or 15 or so. I've been on a lot of ballots but I lost one one time to John L. McClellan in 1972. Still in the grocery store people say, "David, I'm going to tell you why you lost that race in 1972." They don't talk about the ones that I may have won but they talk about that one that I lost. You lost one in 1952 and it was a big blow. Tell us about that.

MCMATH: Well, the '53 race, when I ran for the third term, I shouldn't have run.

PRYOR: '53 or '52?

MCMATH: '52. The '52 race, yeah, '52. It was a new term again.

PRYOR: Okay. I see. Right.

MCMATH: I should not have made that race. See? The power aligned against me was just overwhelming. See?

PRYOR: You had taken on a lot of groups.

MCMATH: Oh, man, yeah. You know, they said that they had the highway audit thing. See? And that was spectacular, used, and they held it until the beginning of the race in 1952 in the spring by releasing all of these charges about my administration.

PRYOR: And let me say this. Ultimately no wrongdoings were found.

MCMATH: And three (3) Grand Jury went through this business. And the Chairman of the Highway Audit Commission was a member of the Board of Directors of Arkansas Power and Light Company. On each of the Grand Juries, they were either members of the Arkansas Power and Light Company Board of Directors or representatives. See? So, and so then in the second Grand Jury, they had private funds to hire a private prosecutor to see that, you know, everything was covered and then the opportunities to get an indictment were passed over. Well, after three (3) Grand Juries in succession, they came up with two (2) indictments of the highway employees and the first indictment was thrown out by the Trial Judge for lack of evidence and the second trial went to the jury and the jury was out four (4) minutes and returned a verdict of not guilty for that particular defendant and all of that was a result of the highway audit.

PRYOR: But your attention and your focus and your resources of energy were focused on this episode. I mean, you were consumed with this.

MCMATH: And of course, you know, it's hard to defeat the allegation.

PRYOR: Sure.

MCMATH: To defeat the allegation. See? You've got a Blue Ribbon Grand Jury coming out with all of these charges and so forth. The first Grand Jury found no indictments but two (2) members of the Grand Jury were associated with the Arkansas Power and Light made a dissent. There were a lot of statements about, well, they should have been indicted and so forth, putting so much heat on the Judge that he called another Grand Jury and that was the one that they hired private prosecutor and the Prosecuting Attorney, the regular Prosecuting Attorney didn't know anything about it and the Judge didn't know anything about it. When he found out, he dismissed that Grand Jury and then they called the third one and then they came up with the two indictments.

PRYOR: There were a lot of people in that campaign and I guess in '52 that was the race that Francis Cherry of Jonesboro ultimately won.

MCMATH: Yeah.

PRYOR: He had, as we call it, a "gimmick" that worked that year and that was, of course, the talk-a-thon. Do you remember his talk-a-thon?

MCMATH: Yeah, I sure do. Yeah, that was Francis. He was a Chancellor. We were in law school at the same time. We ran on the same ticket for when I ran for President of the Student Body, he ran for President of the senior class. We were on the same ticket. See? And so, I've always known Francis but he's a Chancellor.

PRYOR: Sure.

MCMATH: And Judicial and so forth. The President of the Arkansas Power and Light Company was against me at that time naturally. He saw, he came up with this talk-a-thon because a candidate in Florida had used it and had won and it was a natural for Francis. So, he prevailed on Francis to use it and it was great for him. See? You had to call in, you know, and you have people call in and ask questions about me.

PRYOR: Oh, yeah, he would on those little radio stations for hours and hours as long as people would drive up and give the money to the station owner or manager. They'd bring cherry pies, and the cherry ice cream and all of that business.

MCMATH: He's the one that Orval beat for a second term.

PRYOR: That is correct. So, a few years later...

MCMATH: And again, there were several interesting characters in there. One was a former Judge and Prosecuting Attorney. See? And another was a former Congressman and they were all from different parts of the state and another one at the time or would be Attorney General.

PRYOR: That's right.

MCMATH: And so, the Arkansas Power and Light Company had each of the headquarters. So, when I was eliminated in the July primary. I mean, when I was second in the July primary, no, I lead the ticket in the July primary and so Francis and I went in the run-off. Well, they all joined, all of them and our senior Senator and the President of Arkansas Power and Light Company gathered in Jonesboro and endorsed Francis. See? And so, I was defeated and as I say, I shouldn't even raced.

PRYOR: Well, you didn't stay out of politics very long. You still had, you're still that fire horse and you still had that passion in you. You wanted to do something. So, the thing you did is two (2) years later, you ran, not for Governor again, but you challenged John L. McClellan. Senator John L. McClellan in 1954.

MCMATH: Right.

PRYOR: And this was kind of at the peak of the Joe McCarthy era.

MCMATH: Right.

PRYOR: And you took on John L. McClellan. Talk about that race a little bit.

MCMATH: Well, in the first place John McClellan and I had been good friends. I campaigned for him when he was first elected for Congress. See? And, but we got cross-wise because of the power issue, you know, and he was against President Truman's program. See? So, I ran against him in 1954 and was defeated. That was, at the time of the McCarthy era and this is, I think is a little interesting antecdote. McCarthy was running for re-election at the time Eisenhower was running for President and they were on a joint program in Minnesota. And McCarthy had been accusing General Marshall of being a Communist. Well, President Truman revered General Marshall was one of the great generals we've ever had. See? And so, of course, he took exception to that but Marshall, he would have been the Commander of the Forces in Europe except he was needed by Roosevelt and he was needed by Truman. Anyway, President, General Eisenhower and Senator McCarthy were on the same platform in Minnesota and McCarthy had been attacking General Marshall and the candidate for President, General Eisenhower was going to respond that he made that attack on this particular occasion. Well, General Eisenhower listened to McCarthy make his tirade among, he's running against everybody and his accusations against General Marshall and when General Eisenhower made his talk, he didn't say anything on behalf of General Marshall. He didn't take exception to McCarthy.

PRYOR: Did not defend him.

MCMATH: Did not defend him. Well, President Truman did not like that. He did not like that and when President Truman was going out of office and General Eisenhower was coming in as President, you know, the custom is that the incoming President go up to the White House and escort the outgoing President down to the limousine and they ride together out to the Capitol for the swearing in ceremonies. Well, General Eisenhower didn't get out of the car and he didn't get out and open up the door for the President to come in. Well, of course, President Truman didn't like that. He didn't care what you thought or did to Truman but he revered the Presidency. See? And so on the way out, things were kind of tight and...

PRYOR: To say the least.

MCMATH: Yeah. General Eisenhower said, Mr. President, he said, "I want to tell you for a long time why I wasn't at your inauguration." He said, "Well, you know, that was your day and I didn't want to interfere with your inauguration and your day to take publicity away from you on that day." And the President Truman thought about that for a minute and he said, "General, do you know why you weren't at my inauguration?" He said, "By cracky I didn't send for you."

PRYOR: Wow. That was tough stuff, wasn't it?

MCMATH: Eisenhower was the Commander of the NATO Forces at that time.

PRYOR: Wow. Well, do you remember, I never will forget, we were in high school at this time when Harry Truman fired Douglas MacArthur, General MacArthur and our whole school got to listen on the intercom to that address and then it came out in 45 rpms, that address that old soldiers never die, they just fade away. And I committed great hunks of that speech to memory and shortly after that I became a Page in the Congress and I used to think about that great, some of those great, not only his speech but that was one of the great orations ever delivered to the Congress.

MCMATH: Of course, MacArthur was a great General, there's no question of that. But he had some conflicts with President Truman on foreign policy. President Truman was trying in the worst way to keep from getting into a III World War. See? See, the Russians had gone in and trained the north Koreans and equipmented them and then the Chinese came across the Yaloo in November of 1950 and it looked like we were going to get involved with China and are troops were being driven out of south Korea and so forth and he had some big decisions to make and Eisenhower, it looked like, I mean General MacArthur was taking issue on the President's foreign policy issues by using the bomb for example, by using Chang Ca Chek and so forth and so President Truman, you know, he made a trip to Wake Island to visit...

PRYOR: That's right.

MCMATH: ...to visit with General MacArthur and get from him his evaluation of the situation and see if they could come to an understanding and the main issue he wanted, the main question he wanted answered is whether the Chinese are going to come in. See? And those Marines up around Choce Reservior and were making contacted the Chinese patrol. But General MacArthur assured him that, well, he says, "All this commotion about the Chinese coming in, their statements they've made, that they're not going to come in to this war." And so, President Truman went home and he hadn't been in the Oval Office very long and so the Chinese forged on, the armies were coming across the Yaloo and of course, things deteriorated and of course, he had to release MacArthur and of course, he had the advice of General Marshall and the Chiefs of Staff and so forth. They had problems with him.

PRYOR: That was a momentous time in our country's history and MacArthur was almost God-like figure there.

MCMATH: He was God-like. He was running for President.

PRYOR: Yeah, he did run for President. By the way in 1954, a little tid bit of history, we're talking about some of those campaigns. I believe it was in September of '54, that Joe McCarthy was censored by the United States Senate. A censor came down against him. In the war, in World War II, I've heard you speak of this often and I know that you feel very strongly about it and you've probably developed an expertise in this field that no one knows much about. Tell us about Bauxite, Arkansas in Saline County, very briefly, and its contribution to the World War II war effort if you would.

MCMATH: David...

PRYOR: Very few people know about it.

MCMATH: David, I appreciate you asking me that question. You talk about history. This is a dramatic chapter in the history of Arkansas and the history of the country nobody knows about. That the average person doesn't know anything about it. You know, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt announced to the world that we're going to build 100,000 airplanes. Well, you have to have aluminum to build airplanes and the experts didn't think that he could do it, that we could do it. Hitler didn't think we could do because at that time the bauxite that we were using was coming from South America and the Nazi naval blockade had sunk these ships bringing up bauxite and at one time, I mean, blockaded the South Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico and so we weren't getting that source of bauxite. And Alcoa had had a very conservative policy of conserving their resources for the future. See? So, they were using this South America bauxite. Well, Roosevelt knew something that the experts didn't know and that Hitler didn't know. He knew about Bauxite, Arkansas. 95% of the bauxite in North America was in Bauxite, Arkansas and he knew about the people that would be called upon to go in and dig it out. The people at Bauxite and central Arkansas went in and worked around the clock to dig out that bauxite and aluminum was produced and planes were built and battles were fought and victories won and the 8th Air Force, we just observed "D" Day on June the 6th. They had a mission and that mission after they made the landing was to prevent Rommel and three (3) crack Nazi divisions from launching a counter attack against our beachhead. Well, Rommel had his divisions ready but he was waiting for orders from Hitler and Hitler was asleep and nobody would even wake him up. And when he got the orders it was too late because the 8th Air Force had destroyed the lines of communication, the railroads, the highways and so forth leading down to the beaches and so the Nazi troopers never got there and the planes that the 8th Air Force was flying were made from aluminum mined out from Bauxite, Arkansas.

PRYOR: What a great story.

MCMATH: Isn't that a great story? It is a thrilling story. Bauxite was mined to make that aluminum.

PRYOR: One, I think was developed, has developed to this as a story and once again it's a great part.

MCMATH: And to say this about Alcoa, it's a great company. You know, they just scarred the earth down there to meet the defense demand. If you'd flown over it, it looked like Mars or the moon but do you know what they're doing? They're working with the Game and Fish Commission to rehabilitate that land and restore it to its natural state and turn it all into state parks.

PRYOR: That's great. That's just great. Now, here you are, you're practicing law. You're out of office. You've run against....

SIDNEY McMATH - DAVID PRYOR transcript three

2007-09-13T19:44:00.000-07:00

SIDNEY McMATH - DAVID PRYOR

DAVID PRYOR: Well, here you are, Governor, in 1949. You've been sworn in as the new Governor of our State, the youngest in history probably and maybe one of the youngest Governors throughout the country. They're even now referring to you as "Mr. Charisma". You had sort of invented charisma way before John Kennedy and his people came along and it was a dynamic time, not only for you, you were a dynamic Governor but it was a dynamic time for our State.

SIDNEY McMATH:It was right after the war.

PRYOR: After the war and things were rolling and people were buying things and there was a great deal of excitement. There was, let's say the new crowd was coming in and you were right at the forefront, the apex of this movement.

MCMATH: Right.

PRYOR: Let's talk a little bit about Arkansas for that moment. How our road systems, for example, I think, I've always heard that when you became Governor, there were eight (8) counties in our State that didn't have a mile of paved roads. What did you do about that?

MCMATH: Well, you know, getting back to my farm life, we went to town over a corduroy road. That's the logs, the trees laid parallel, you know, and dirty wet spots that left areas flooded and so forth and I never saw a paved road until I went to Hot Springs, if you can believe that, when I was ten (10) years of age.

PRYOR: First time you saw a paved street.

MCMATH: First time I'd seen a paved street. I'd seen sidewalks and my sister and I were taking the streetcar out to South Whittington where we lived, West Whittington was where we lived and we had to change streetcars at the junction of Park Avenue and Whittington junction. And while we were waiting, my sister used to tell this on me and just get the biggest kick out it. She said I went out in the middle of the street and tapped on the pavement and I said, "Look a-here, sister, here's a pavement out in the middle of the street."

PRYOR: A pavement out in the middle of the street.

MCMATH: So, we didn't have any hard surface roads and, of course, Arkansas, at that time, we'd just been through a war and most things had been neglected, particularly the roads and we didn't have the roads, the farmers didn't have roads to get their produce to the market and get the children to school and we were losing population in the rural areas. And so we came up with a bond issue, and we were able to sell the bonds and get a road program going and one of the interesting things that happened was that I went to New York to help sell the bonds, and incidentally we sold those less than 3% interest. We had to pay, I think, a little more than 2 1/2% interest or anyway, the Chase Manhattan Bank, I believe was the bank, it had a cocktail party for me. See?

PRYOR: In New York?

MCMATH: In New York and it seemed to me like all the people there were Vice Presidents of the bank and I figured then that the job of a Vice President was to attend cocktail parties, be a personal relations person. Anyway, we were standing around talking and one of the Vice Presidents said, "Governor, how close to Little Rock can you get by airplane?" I said, "Well", I looked at him and saw he was serious, and I said, "Well", I said, "We can get to Memphis by airplane" and I said, "At Memphis we take a boat and go down to the Arkansas River and we go up the Arkansas River to Pine Bluff and at Pine Bluff we get a stagecoach in to Little Rock." And by then he figured out I was putting him on. But anyway, back then people didn't know much about Little Rock and Arkansas. One of them asked me, he says, "What kind - do you have any moisture in Arkansas? Do you have any water? Is it like Arizona? Is it arrid?" See?

PRYOR: Right.

MCMATH: They didn't think there was anything west of the Mississippi but now then everybody knows about Little Rock and half of the people have been here. See? So, we got the road program bonds passed and a good road program started and we divided the money equally between the rural to market roads and the primary highway.

PRYOR: Well, Governor, if I'm not mistaken, you built probably more miles of paved roads than any other Governor in history and you did this in a four (4) year period and you did it with a bond issue.

MCMATH: Right.

PRYOR: And it's really amazing.

MCMATH: And those bonds were paid off.

PRYOR: They were paid off.

MCMATH: With I think a $.02 tax on gasoline.

PRYOR: Now, speaking of a $.02 tax. Every time today that I go by the University of Arkansas Medical Center, and by the way, I go there often, but every time I drive by there and look up at that great facility and what we're doing in cancer. We're renowned all over the world now. People are coming here to the AC or RC Unit, the Cancer Center Unit but we're renowned in many ways, as many of our other facilities are in the city and in the state. But every time I go by there or go in the Med Center, I say, "Thank goodness for Sidney Sanders McMath" and the reason I do this is you helped build the Med Center. You did it with a $.02 per tax per package of cigarettes. Let's talk about that. Was that a hard thing to pass?

MCMATH: Well, of course, that Medical Center is one of the things that I'm proudest of and it's a tremendous place and they have so many dedicated people. The doctors and nurses who could get more money at other places and they're doing a tremendous job there and as you say, it's internationally recognized and you go out and see the cancer research waiting room or treatment room and it's like going to the United Nations. You've got people there from different parts of the world. And Louis Webster Jones was the President of the University of Arkansas and he and several other people came to me and talked to me about the Medical Center, the need for a medical school, among other things to train doctors, to encourage them to go into the rural areas and so forth. So, we put our heads together and came up with a tax of $.02 on each package of cigarettes and that was in 1949 and you can see what's happened since. What an excellent source of revenue for a tax. Half of the patients at the hospital at the time were being treated for a tobacco related disease, emphysema, lung cancer or what not and so that passed and we were able to build the Medical Center and the Medical School, you'll recall was, up until, about 1925 was over in the old State House.

PRYOR: Right. Where the Old State House is.

MCMATH: Down in the basement.

PRYOR: The Medical Center, yeah.

MCMATH: And then in about 1925 they had this incident about the Sheriff losing his dog, you know, his hound dog and he found over behind the Medical Center with the other dogs that they were using for experiments and they wouldn't let him have his dog back, the doctors in charge. So, they thought, well, you know, he's just an old hound dog. And so, he got an indictment, he got an indictment issued against the doctors for stealing his dog. But he got his dog back but they then, the neighbors had been complaining about the animals over there and all the fuss they were making. So, they moved the Medical Center out to McArthur Park, I believe in the building where the law school is now. And then after they got the Medical Center operating and I guess we passed the Bill in '49, I guess '50, '51 it started to operate the hospital over there and the Med School moved over to the Medical Center. It's a wonderful med school.

PRYOR: You've always had a special relationship with the rural areas of Arkansas, out in the communities and the farm areas and I'm sure, that is some degree of reflection of your upbringing.

MCMATH: That's where I came from.

PRYOR: That's right.

MCMATH: That's my roots.

PRYOR: Right. One of the areas of your intense interest early on in your administration was trying to get electricity to rural Arkansas. Now, to do this you had to take on some pretty powerful forces. Let's talk about that a moment.

MCMATH: David, that was a passion with me to get electricity to the farms. Where I lived on the farm in south Arkansas, we had no electricity. You know, a washing machine was a black pot in the backyard and a dryer was a clothesline, you know, and we had a tub with a scrub board, you know. And we had no indoor plumbing, you know, and so, I recognized the quality of life that could be experienced by the people in the rural areas if they had electricity. It certainly would lift the burden of the women on the farm. And when I was running in 1948, two (2) people came to see me in Hot Springs. It was Tom Fitzhugh who was the attorney for rural electric coop and Harry Oswald.

PRYOR: Harry Oswald.

MCMATH: Bless his heart, that pioneer, that champion.

PRYOR: What a man.

MCMATH: He did a tremendous job. They came to me and talked about their program and what they wanted to do.

PRYOR: And at that time what portion of the State did they cover? Do you remember at all?

MCMATH: Well, at that time 50% of the rural area in Arkansas had no electricity. See? And they wanted to extend it up in to the rural areas and they couldn't get the power interests to do it. Arkansas Power and Light Company was totally owned by the MidSouth Utilities. And although they told us that was a just a little ole Arkansas county, company, it was owned by Middle South Utilities. They owned all the common stock and they were opposed to the power company extending lines out in the rural areas because it was not profitable at that time but they foresaw that some day it would be highly profitable, which it has happened, you know. So, they were opposed to the coops extending out into this rural area beyond the area that they already had. And they wanted to build their own steam generating plant, build their own steam generating plant and their own generating lines to get the power up into the northern part of Arkansas. And they had to get a loan on the REA program from the federal government. At that time it was up to the Interior Department and Secretary Wickard was the Administrator at that time and so we started working with Secretary Wickard in order to get a loan to the coops in Arkansas to build this plant. Well, that was in 1951 and Steelman, who was from Arkansas and he was the President's Executive Assistant, we worked with him. John R. Steelman.

PRYOR: John R. Steelman.

MCMATH: John R. Steelman. And then Mr. Wickard and we weren't making too much progress because the power company was really opposed to this and MidSouth Utility had a lot of power, political power and so I thought, well, I'd call on the President. Of course, he was involved in the Korean War, you know, at that time, he had a lot on his mind but I thought this was sufficiently important to talk to the President. Well, I got in touch with the President and he must have made a telephone call to Wickard because right after that Wickard sent me a wire announcing that they were loaning some $10,000,000.00 plus to the coop to build an Ozark steam generating plant. Of course, the coop had to get the approval of the Public Service Commission, the State of Arkansas Public Service Commission because they supervised the granting of permits and licenses and supposedly supervised the rates and so forth. Well, they filed this petition and the power company opposed it and, of course, there was a real in-fight that went on for months trying to persuade the power commission, I mean the Arkansas Power Commission, yeah, it was the Power Commission, to deny the application but they granted it. And then the power company went to a Judge and got a restraining order which was affirmed by the Supreme Court of Arkansas saying that the REA, in its original act, back in about '36, way back there, did not authorize the power and the cooperative to build their own generating system. And, of course, our argument was that if they authorized them to build transmission lines and if they were authorized to build transmission lines by implication, they could build the same generating plant to furnish the power to go over the transmission lines to their customers but the Supreme Court didn't see it that way and they ruled against us. Well, in 1953, I guess, or '54, we introduced a Bill in the Legislature because I was out of the Governor's office at that time. I'd been defeated for the third time to permit the coops to build a steam generating plant and the power company had a lot of influence and the Legislature defeated it and then the next year, I think that was '54, we got another Bill passed. So, the coops got the loan to build the steam generating plant at Ozark, Arkansas and then they were off to supply electricity to the rural areas that hadn't been getting their electricity. Now, let me give this as an aside. Of course, I was the first Governor to go to a rural electrification state meeting. Now, the people were pretty well convinced that now this coop was going in and borrowing money, that the government was going to compete with the private power companies, it's Socialism.

PRYOR:It's Socialism. Yeah, that's what they called it.

MCMATH: So, I was invited to go up to Berryville to talk to a coop meeting and I flew up there in a one (1) engine airplane and we had land in a turkey pasture and so we had to make two (2) passes to shoo the turkeys out of the way.

PRYOR: To shoo the turkeys out of the way.

MCMATH: Yeah. And so, I had my statement for the press and the committee all ready. You know, I'd thought about it and I was just sure there was going to be a big crowd out there, you know, to meet me at the air field. I got out of the airplane, walked to the gate, wasn't anybody there. Nobody. Anyway, it was a hot July day.

PRYOR: Well, how did you get to town?

MCMATH: So, I took my coat off and I started walking down a dusty road, another road that I paved. And a farmer came along in a truck. He stopped and he was, "Where are you going?" I said, "I'm going to the coop meeting."

PRYOR: And here you were, the Governor of Arkansas.

MCMATH: Yeah. I was the Governor of Arkansas. He said, "Get in. That's where I'm going." Well, we visited and so forth. I didn't tell him I was the Governor, I assumed he knew, my name had been in the paper and picture and so forth and so we went to the coop meeting in a great big tent. You know, they used to have great big tent. And when it came time for me to talk, I was the speaker and Russ Gates was the manager of the coop and he introduced me, again a flowery introduction. He said, "I give you Sid McMath, the Governor of Arkansas." Well, this old farmer that had brought me to town was sitting on the front row there and he leaned to his neighbor and he said in a loud voice, he said, "That ain't no Governor. He's a hitch-hiker because I know cause I brung him to town."

PRYOR: He thought you were an imposter, didn't he?

MCMATH: That's right. And then, of course, we tried to get...

PRYOR: I'll bet they had a big crowd of people there, didn't they?

MCMATH: Oh, yeah.

PRYOR: Harry Oswald could get more people to turn out and he'd put them all in a tent.

MCMATH: That's right.

PRYOR: And he had two (2) secrets that I recall getting people to turn out to a meeting. One, he would feed them. He would feed them well and it was free and he would have some music and fiddlers and whatever and the second thing, he would give away, let's say a color TV, or an old second-hand pickup or a fishing box or something and he would make them stay, he wouldn't give it away until right at the last. So, they had to sit there and listen to the speakers.

MCMATH: Yeah, that's right.

PRYOR: I've been to some of those myself. That's a great story though about rural electrification in our State.

MCMATH: Well, Harry and Tom Fitzhugh and Ellis, Congressman Ellis, Clyde Ellis...

PRYOR: Clyde Ellis.

MCMATH:... they were pioneers and today we have 16 electric cooperatives and I believe they have around 175,000 customers.

PRYOR: One of my proud pictures on my wall is an old store in Ben Hur, Arkansas in Pope, P-O-P-E County, which was the last community to receive electricity and Governor Sid McMath is largely responsible for helping to electrify the State. Now, these were powerful interests that you took on. I'm not saying they were sinister. I'm not saying they were bad. I'm not saying they were not progressive but these were interests that we not encompassing the rural areas at this time and you certainly help make, help to make that possible for many, many thousands of homes and plants and factories and farms to have electricity. Well, those are the major accomplishments but along the way, during that period in your Governor's career, during that four (4) year term and it sounds like all of the things that you've done, you were there much longer than four (4) years. You did an awful lot in four (4) years is my point. Along the way you met up with a man and you brought him in to your administration. His name was Orval Eugene Faubus. Tell us about that.

MCMATH: Well, Orval and I met in Fayetteville. I was running for Governor for the first time in 1948 and we rode from Fayetteville over to Huntsville, his home town in a car and visited. And he was interested in feeling me out, finding out what my platform was and at that time...

PRYOR: Now, he was not the Postmaster yet or what was he at that time?

MCMATH: I don't know whether he was the Postmaster or had been or whether he was a County Clerk or something.

PRYOR: Right.

MCMATH: But anyway, he was trying to make up his mind who he was going to support in that election. And by the time we got to Huntsville he decided he'd support me. So, he supported me and did a good job for me. Of course, he had a close contact with the rural people in northern Arkansas particularly.

PRYOR: He could speak their language.

MCMATH: Speak their language. He understood their needs. He was one of them. And so, when I was elected Governor, Orval said, he says, "Sid, I'd like to have a paying job." So, he came down and he went to work for me as a secretary and his job was to meet with these county committees coming down to try to get their road paved. See? And he knew their needs and understood them and so forth. He was very good and he was very helpful in that area. And, of course, when I was defeated for the third time by Francis Cherry and then Orval came back and defeated Francis Cherry for his second term and Orval, you know, in the high school, the '57 thing came along and he served for, I guess, five (5) terms. Orval was a good administrator and a very personable guy and one of the best campaign pictures I ever saw was one with him with...

PRYOR: I know that picture. Know it well.

MCMATH: With Orval and his coat and his hat, you know, and so forth, great campaign picture, ran in the Gazette, front page in the Gazette. And we were okay until 1957 and we had the Little Rock high school crisis. I call it a "crisis" because that's what it was and I did not feel that he made the right decision on calling out the Guard to keep those children from entering the high school. And I felt that leadership at that time moving in the right direction could resolve in that before it got out of hand. We'd been making a lot of progress in the racial relationship in getting educational opportunities for blacks. We mentioned the Medical Center. In 1948, during that race for my first term, race was a hot issue in that campaign. I mean it was mean and of course, I took my feelings about it and when I was the farm I had worked with blacks and I had seen their conditions and I had seen them with poor whites at the end of the cotton picking season having just enough money hopefully to get them through the next year and so forth. And so I felt that they needed an opportunity to get an education and go to school like everybody else. And so when Orval called out the Guard, I felt that that was moving in the wrong direction. And now, I started to say in 1948 and that was a hot election on the race issue. During that election, it was the Spring of '48, a black woman applied for admission for the Medical School and her name was Edith Irby. She became Edith Irby Jones and Dean, Dr. Louis Webster Jones and the Dean of the Medical School came and talked to me about it. They didn't know what to do about it. And, because as I say, race was a big hot issue in that campaign and the election hadn't been decided. And so my advice to them, I said, "Well, let's wait until the elections are over and let's see what we can do." Well, as soon as the election was over they contacted me and I told them to take her in to the Med School. So, they accepted her and that was the first black student to be admitted to the Medical School and I think the first student to be admitted in our public schools and there was no court order. There was no demonstrations. It was done orderly and she became an outstanding doctor and she moved to Houston and became President of the National Black Women's Medical Association. And then in '48, another thing that I did, as soon as I was nominated in '48, first I supported President Truman and the other thing I did was that, that the blacks didn't have - couldn't vote in the south, you know. Really, they couldn't participate in the election process because all of the south was Democratic, Democratic Party.

PRYOR: Democratic Party at that time outlawed them to.

MCMATH: Yeah, they were not members of the party, therefore, they couldn't vote.

PRYOR: It's unbelievable.

MCMATH: That's right. And so in '48, in September of '48 at the Robinson Auditorium, we changed the Democratic Party rules so as to get the blacks.

PRYOR: That was one of the most courageous things that you've ever done.

MCMATH: And so we felt it was...

PRYOR: Was that a fight by the way, did you have a fight there?

MCMATH: We had done a lot ground work.

PRYOR: You had.

MCMATH: Did a lot of ground work on that and got it passed and then Virgil Blossom, the Superintendent of the Schools was making lectures and talking to people and so forth and we headed in the right direction and you remember the background of all of this was the Cold War. We were fighting for the minds and hearts of people around the world.

PRYOR: Yet we were the people who practicing segregation

MCMATH: Yeah, so we wanted to demonstrate that everybody was free in this country. So, when this happened, there weren't, you know, that didn't help us around the world from then on. People around the world didn't like that old bad Arkansas from what they knew about Little Rock.

PRYOR: Governor, one of the best books about you, this book was written over 20 years ago now by Jim Lester. It's A Man for Arkansas. It's about the life and times of Sidney Sanders McMath. Wonderful little book. In this book, Jim Lester details your speech in 1951 in Minnesota to, I think, the National Urban Institute or Urban League, talking about the need for tolerance and then in 1956, no longer in office, nothing to gain, nothing to lose, you try to help move for the abolition of the poll tax that we still had at that time.

MCMATH: That's right. Didn't have a policy for poll tax until after '64.

PRYOR: That's correct and the poll tax itself was one of those obstacles created to prevent the minorities from voting.

MCMATH: You're absolutely right, David. The poll tax was used, number one as a means...

PRYOR: That is correct.

MCMATH: ...of corrupting elections.

PRYOR: That's right.

MCMATH: And then it was used as a means of disfranchising the blacks. See?

PRYOR: That is correct.

MCMATH: You had to go down and buy your poll tax and you had to do that a year before the election.

PRYOR: Well, let's stay back on 1957 a moment because Faubus calls out the National Guard. He's the Governor. You're out of office. I want to talk about a campaign or two between that but he is in the Governor's office and he calls the Guard out and you strongly disagree with him in public. And evidently you go on television and you characterized this as a very wrong direction for us to be taking at this time. He fires back at you. You are his own mentor. You're his former boss. He worked for you. And as you said, you paved that highway 23, which we affectionately call the "Pig Trail" and that Faubus had you build. Don't you agree? One of your great mistakes there but personally you and the Governor, Governor Faubus, I guess, at that time had a split and it really never healed to any extent, I guess.

MCMATH: Well, politically yes, it was a serious split, Personally I had no animosity toward Orval. I understood what he was doing and so forth and we got along personally. I never fell out with him as an individual. We didn't see each other. We didn't have lunch and so forth, didn't review old times but the difference was a political difference. Social difference.

PRYOR: Well, it's real interesting about him. This program is not about Orval Faubus but he was such a dominant force in Arkansas politics for so long but the appearance was, and especially in reading Roy Reed's fabulous book that he spent about 10 years in researching and published three (3) years ago. In Roy's book, Roy Reed's book, he characterizes Faubus as not necessarily, especially in his younger years, as what you might call, what we would know as a segregationist. He grew up there in the mountains. There were not very many minorities. There were no black citizens there and he didn't really know black people until he came to the central part of the State and he got acquainted with them but ultimately, it's my theory only, that he ultimately decided that that's where the votes were at the time.

MCMATH: As you recall in his second term, Jim Johnson ran against him.

PRYOR: Yes, in '56.

MCMATH: And Jim Johnson really used the race issue and he ran him a hard race.

PRYOR: He still uses it.

MCMATH: And Orval, at that time, said, "Well, nobody is going to use this race issue against me in the future."

PRYOR: Right.

MCMATH: Nobody is going to, you know, and so forth. And, of course, another thing that happened, I say it was a mistake in light of the progress we were making and so forth, to call out the troops, to bar, block the court order to keep these children out of the school. I also thought it was ill-advised for President Eisenhower to send out his 101st AirBorne. See? Because it just gave the wrong impression and so forth and it's an invasion of the Yankees again and so forth and I talked to Vice President Nixon and asked him if he would, if he could dissuade to the President from using the 101st AirBorne. If we couldn't work it out locally, the United States Marshall would have been a very appropriate instrument by coming down and doing what's necessary to enforce the law. If the United States Marshall shows up, people are going to respect him and so forth but then, but using their 101st Air Borne, you know, we were still close to a civil war. A lot of our people came from Georgia, and Alabama and Mississippi and so forth. So, we inherited that feeling. Regardless of how loyal they are to the flag and so forth, we had some ties that was still binding, you know, and suffered together and so forth but when they used the 101st AirBorne, well the people who were really not for Faubus rallied, "Well, we've been invaded". See? And so that give him the political power that he needed to be in office...

SIDNEY McMATH - DAVID PRYOR Transcript Two

2007-09-13T19:42:00.000-07:00

SIDNEY McMATH - DAVID PRYOR

PRYOR: Well, Governor, you went back into the Marines there. I believe you took your commission, so to speak.

McMATH: Yes.

PRYOR: You had had the Reserve and then you went back in to active duty a year before Pearl Harbor.

McMATH: Right.

PRYOR: What were you doing on Pearl Harbor Day, by the way? You remember that day. All of us do.

McMATH: Yeah. After I went home, as you mentioned, as we mentioned, I went back in in August of 1940, a year before Pearl Harbor and the reason I went back in, I felt obliged to and then I had a reserve commission. And so, when I was getting out of the Corp in 1937, a Colonel, Captain Louie Chesty Fuller, one of the most famous Marines ever, highly decorated, came by my quarters to see me. And he said, "Sandy", he called Scotch men "Sandy", he said, "I can understand you going home to marry your sweetheart and to practice law but let me tell you something", he said, "You need to take a reserve commission because we're going to war." And that was in 1937.

PRYOR: Four (4) years.

McMATH: He foresaw four (4) years before the war against Japan.

PRYOR: And he even thought it to and predicted it to be Japan, is that right?

McMATH: That's right. That's right. He thought it was Japan and the Marine Corp was getting psychologically prepared for a war against Japan. See? At that time, of course, the Marine Corp was a small organization. They had only about 17,000 Marines and at the end of the war they had five (5) divisions, you know. But anyway, and so, I took the commission and went back in to the Marine Corp. I went through a refresher course and then I stayed on at Quanaco at the Marine Training School there, training second lieutenants, officer candidates for two (2) years. And Elaine joined me in Quanaco and we had our son in Quanaco. Sandy was born there.

PRYOR: Sandy. Okay.

McMATH: Yeah, and then she died. She died on our fifth wedding anniversary.

PRYOR: And what age was she at that time?

McMATH: She was 25.

PRYOR: What a tragedy.

McMATH: And so, and then I requested overseas duty. And General Shepherd was the commander of the school at the time. Lemmel Shepherd. He subsequently became Commandant of the Marine Corp and I had put in three (3) applications for a transfer. The third time, the application I put in, he sent for me and he says, and of course I went in and Lou was standing in front of the desk. He said "McMath, how long would it take you to pack altogether?" I said, "I've got it together, sir." And he said, "You'll get on the next bus to New Miller, North Carolina. You're going to join the Third Regiment, you're going to join the Third Marine Division and you're going to the Solomens."

PRYOR: My goodness.

McMATH: So, I went down and joined the Third Marine Regiment and we were just putting it together and then we went on out to the Pacific area.

PRYOR: The military has always been an important part of Sidney McMath's life.

McMATH: It has.

PRYOR: Because it's always been a very meaningful part, I should say, in your life and also in your career you've had and just recently you were saluted on Flag Day by the local citizens here and it's really, in fact, it seems like every time I pick up the paper or turn on the TV, here's Governor McMath once again being saluted by some group, be it at the Old State House, Convention Center or the Bar Association or a group of military people. And so, it's kind of a McMath renascence period, I believe. It's a grand tribute to you, sir.

McMATH: Somebody discovered I was still around.

PRYOR: Well, it's a grand tribute to you.

McMATH: Yeah.

PRYOR: And really a wonderful thing.

McMATH: Well, the military was, it was an important part of my life and it was a privilege to serve and I feel it's my greatest contribution, if I made a contribution, I made some contribution, was as a training officer. At Quanaco I trained for about two (2) years. I was training officer candidates and not only were they outstanding youngsters, honor students from colleges and so forth, some of them went on to be Senators, Judges and so forth. As a matter of fact I tried a case about five (5) years ago before a Judge who was one of my students in officer candidate school in Quanaco.

PRYOR: What a small world.

McMATH: And then I went, we went overseas, the Marines landed in Solomens in August, 1942, the first Marine Division and we were to join the first Marine Division but en route we were diverted to America Samoa. You know, that was a base of really operations in that part of the world and to protect it against the Japanese who were moving south towards New Zealand and Australia. So, as soon as I got ashore I said, "Well, I'm sure I'm going to get a company or a battalion since I was a Major by then." And they gave me word that I was going to be the training officers for jungle warfare school.

PRYOR: Oh, my. Well, that was important.

McMATH: So, we set up a jungle warfare school and put the non-commissioned officers and the junior officers or the Third Marine Regiment through the jungle warfare school. See? And then, of course, after that I was made Operations Officer for the Third Marine Regiment and that's where we were.

PRYOR: So, you saw some real combat at Guadal Canal, Guam, Gugandel, in the Solomon Island Chain and the Pacific Theater, so to speak and here you come out of the Marines and you are decorated with the Legion of Merit, the Silver Star. You are now a Major, you became a Major General in the United States Marine Reserve, if I'm not mistaken.

McMATH: Yeah.

PRYOR: So, once again we see the real impact the military has had on your life.

McMATH: Yeah. I was in Guadal Canal. When I was not in Guadal Canal the first phase.

PRYOR: I see.

McMATH: Guadal Canal was pretty well secure by the time we got there. We used Guadal Canal as a space to go up to New Georgia and Bellalabella, Gunvenville. And we had a lot of activity in Guadal Canal. We still had conflicts and so forth but the big fighting was over when I got over there.

PRYOR: Right. Well, Governor, your military career is one thing and your legal career. Let's talk a little bit about that political career. Let's talk about when you leave the Marines. You come back and you come back to Hot Springs, as you come to Garland County, Arkansas. Tell us about Garland County and what was that? 1945 when you came back.

McMATH: Came back in '45, that's correct.

PRYOR: Tell us about Garland County. What was going on?

McMATH: Well, Garland County, of course, as I previously stated, we moved there when I was ten (10) years of age and so I stayed there through high school and, of course kept contact with Hot Springs and certainly until I went into the Marine Corp and the situation in Hot Springs from a political standpoint was, to say the least was sad, was tragic. We had illegal gambling in Hot Springs and it wasn't just the gambling per se that was so bad, really evil but in order to operate there illegally, the machine had to control the election machinery, appoint the judges and clerks, the elected commission and so forth and so that they could control all law enforcement officials, the mayor, Their prosecuting attorney, the circuit judge...

PRYOR: Up and down the line.

McMATH: ...up and down the line. See? And they selected the Grand Jurors and they selected the Petty Jurors and if you had a lawsuit over in the Municipal Court, hey, you had to be on the right side if you were going to get anything like justice or if you had a case out of Circuit Court out at the Court House, if the opposition had an interest in the other side, well, you were in trouble because they selected the Jurors and the Jurors came from people downtown, the casinos, the bookies, the houses of ill-fame and so forth or businesses who relied with the administration and beholding to them for operations. They could do you in and so forth. They could raise your taxes or if you're in a certain business that required a license, they could make it difficult for you to get license or the license might be revoked and if you persisted in opposing them, you'd be in serious trouble.

PRYOR: So, here you were in your early thirties.

McMATH: Yeah.

PRYOR: You'd come back. You'd located in Hot Springs, Arkansas and all of a sudden you look around and you see that there is a machine that is a machine county and that there's an individual by the name of Leo McCloughlin. Who is Leo McCloughlin? Who was he?

McMATH: Well, Leo was a very personable guy, had great charisma, had great ability and he'd gone to law school out at Tulane and he was elected Mayor. He was a colorful guy. He wore a straw hat turned up in the front and had a boutonniere on all the time, dressed immaculately. He had two (2) horses named Scotch and Soda. He'd hitch them up to a buggy and ride down through Central Avenue to be admired by vassels and so forth. See? And he was an excellent speaker. He could really rouse a lot, you know, and when they had a political campaign he was interested in, he'd have everybody come over to the auditorium and he'd give them a speech and they'd get their instruction. And sometimes he'd go out and he'd try a lawsuit. Now, he practiced law.

PRYOR: But he didn't hold an office, did he?

McMATH: He was the Mayor.

PRYOR: He was the Mayor at that time?

McMATH: Mayor. He had been a Mayor for many years. Yes he was the Mayor.

PRYOR: That's right.

McMATH: So, he presided as the Mayor and his Second Lieutenant was the Municipal Judge. See? The Municipal Judge and so they kind of ran things. And, as I say, if you had a case out at Circuit Court and he was on the other side you were in trouble probably. So, there were other GIs who had come back and we weren't intimidated, so to speak, and we felt that we'd been fighting for freedom around the world and we said to use a little of it at home. So...

PRYOR: Did you get these other GIs together?

McMATH: Yeah, I got them together.

PRYOR: What did you do? Did you meet at your home? Did you go to the Court House? You couldn't get in the Court House because those were all his people, I imagine.

McMATH: Well, there was a good citizen by the Earl Ricks.

PRYOR: Earl Ricks.

McMATH: Earl Ricks and another citizen by the name of Raymond Clinton, the uncle of the President. They had a Clinton/Ricks Buick Agency. And they had a huge garage and so we held out meetings in the Ricks/Clinton garage. And of course...

PRYOR: I don't imagine they got to sell very many cars to the city...

McMATH: No.

PRYOR: ...with the Mayor McCloughlin.

McMATH: So, that's where we met most of the time.

PRYOR: Right. Well, did you have to meet in secret?

McMATH: No, we didn't meet in secret. We kept our flags flying.

PRYOR: Is this what is known as the GI Revolution?

McMATH: That was the GI Revolution.

PRYOR: And most of the people involved were young men like yourself and maybe young women who had served their country and came...

McMATH: That's right.

PRYOR: ...who had come back.

McMATH: That's right. And they weren't in business. They couldn't be closed down. Their licenses couldn't be revoked and so forth and we just wanted to make a change and we thought that the time was right to do it.

PRYOR: And so you ran for...

McMATH: I ran for...

PRYOR: And so you ran for - what was your base? You ran for Prosecuting Attorney.

McMATH: That's right.

PRYOR: Was there an incumbent Prosecuting Attorney?

McMATH: Yes. Now we had a candidate for every spot, from Constable on up as the GI candidate and we ran, I guess it was in the primary, the primary was in '46 and we were, I was the only one elected in the primary. And I was elected because Montgomery County was a part of that judicial district, the 18th Judicial District and I swept Montgomery County to make up for what counts, you know, the count in Garland and some how the telephone communication between Malvern and Hot Springs were cut. So, the people in Garland County didn't know and it was too late how many votes that they needed in order to overcome the votes from Montgomery County. And so, we organized an independent party and all the candidates, the GI candidates who had been defeated ran an independents for the offices that they'd run for in the primary.

PRYOR: Didn't have really a Republican Party at that time.

McMATH: No, we had no Republican Party.

PRYOR: We had one Republican in Camden at that time. Only one person. Things have changed a lot.

McMATH: Judge Isley's grandfather and father were probably the only Republicans there and they was a lawyer by the name of Richard Ryan who also was a Republican. There were others that we didn't know about. Anyway we organized the independent party and the candidates all ran and of course, in the primary, you'll recall in the primary you had to get your poll tax. That was when you had to get your poll tax.

PRYOR: Yeah, we want to talk about the poll tax after a while.

McMATH: You had to get a year before. See? And so the people then particularly weren't interested in elections. They thought, well, my votes is not going to count. It's not going to do any good anyway but then when I won, see, people got interested. They thought, well maybe there's a chance. So, we organized a drive to get the poll tax for the general election and you could, as I recall, you could get the poll tax for the general election 20 days before the election. See?

PRYOR: Before the election.

McMATH: So, the women particularly got spread out and called people to the polls and got on the telephone and of course, we swept the field in the general election, elected everybody. See?

PRYOR: So, the whole slate, that was the GI revolution had taken place.

McMATH: The whole slate. That was the GI revolution. That's right.

PRYOR: And that was in 1946.

McMATH: Okay.

PRYOR: Speaking of lawyers at that time, I've always heard, and I knew him eventually. I served with him in the State Legislature. A man I admired a great deal. He's a very complex man, I might say, Nathan Shoenfeld. Nathan was sort of an ally of yours at that time?

McMATH: Nathan was one of my closest friends.

PRYOR: That is correct. He was a brilliant man.

McMATH: He was smart.

PRYOR: Wasn't he a Harvard Law School?

McMATH: I don't remember what his school was. It was Harvard or anyway, he was a brilliant guy and he was a tremendous help.

PRYOR: So, in all the election machinery...

McMATH: So, in that election, I neglected to say, that in the general election, of course, we avoided those illegal poll taxes. We brought suit in the United States Federal Court and we were able to get the issue in Federal Court because I had a friend in Pine Bluff, named of Pat Mullis, who volunteered to run as an independent. File as an independent. See? And it gave the Federal Court jurisdiction over the issue because a Federal Office, a Congressman was going to be voted on. And so we threw out maybe 3,000, 4,000 of those illegal poll taxes and made it possible.

PRYOR: Now, if I'm not mistaken Dr. Robert A. Lefler at the University of Arkansas Law School, the Venerable Dean of the Law School and probably the best known man in legal circles in our history. Dr. Lefler also became a semi-advisor to you and Nathan Shoenfeld and the other people who were attempting to bring back...

McMATH: That's correct. We had, I had a close relationship with Dr. Lefler.

PRYOR: Yes. And you had been a student...

McMATH: Yes, with his brother Eli Lefler.

PRYOR: Yes.

McMATH: And I got to know him real well when I was a student. Of course, he was a tremendous teacher. A great lawyer and one of the things that I was trying to start as Governor, that I did, I appointed him to the Supreme Court. He always wanted to serve on the Supreme Court.

PRYOR: Great man.

McMATH: He had run at one time, you know, buy he wasn't politically inclined. He was a student. And this made it possible for him to conduct this judge's school in New York, to conduct an annual seminar for newly elected judges.

PRYOR: He flew back and forth to New York all the time.

McMATH: A remarkable thing to do. A remarkable man.

DAVID: I hope some day that the historians will give him a very, very exalted praise in Arkansas.

McMATH: Have you met his son?

PRYOR: Oh, yes. Know him well.

McMATH: Do you know he speak Japanese?

PRYOR: He speaks Japanese and he's going to teach a course at Harvard in the next several months. He's going to teach. He's a wonderful young man and our legal profession is lucky to have him. So, what did Sid McMath his first few weeks at a Prosecutor, Prosecuting Attorney in Garland County?

McMATH: Well, of course, the first thing we do we convene a Grand Jury to investigate the gambling operations and see what their earnings were and see what they did with the money and so forth and of course, we closed down all the illegal gambling in Hot Springs. They had the race track but that was a legal operation. And we...

PRYOR: The casinos were closed down.

McMATH: The casinos, the bookies, everything were closed down. That was the first thing we did and then we had a few cases to prosecute and then I started campaigning for Governor.

PRYOR: And you ran for Governor two (2) years later.

McMATH: Two (2) years later.

PRYOR: 1948?

McMATH: 1948.

PRYOR: Okay. So, who was the Governor of Arkansas at that time? Ben Laney.

McMATH: Ben Laney. Of course, Ben Laney, we had some differences but, you know, the equalization plan, the distribution of funds.

PRYOR: The Revenue Specialization Act.

McMATH: The Revenue Specialization Act. You know, you can't spend more money than you take in.

PRYOR: That's right.

McMATH: That was a tremendous boom and he was responsible for that.

PRYOR: Right.

McMATH: That was in his administration.

PRYOR: I think that's how he got the name "Business Ben."

McMATH: Business Ben. We had this direction and he was running on his record as a businessman and his people were bragging about how he had cut taxes. And so we did a little research on how much cut taxes that he had reduced and, of course, I liked Ben. He was a very personable guy and we found out he had reduced taxes on lightning rods, bee hives and buggy whips. So, that was our theme. So, it was lightning rods, bee hives and buggy whips.

PRYOR: That is a great Arkansas political story. Ben Laney from Camden. In fact, our homes were next door to the Laneys and our families would sort of intermingle there to some extent.

McMATH: So, Ben Laney, in 1948 was involved with the DixieCrats.

PRYOR: That's right. And we want to talk about the DixieCrats after while. Ben Laney became very infatuated with the Democrats and at one time, I understand that Strom Thurman...

McMATH: Do you mean the DixieCrats?

PRYOR: The DixieCrats. Strom Thurman, when he walked out of the convention, I guess he would have been Governor of South Carolina at that time.

McMATH: Strom Thurman, yeah, I guess so.

PRYOR: And he, at one time, maybe he even wanted Ben Laney to become his running mate on the DixieCrat ticket for President. You did a very courageous thing in 1948 and here you were not Governor. You were the Governor elect. You'd been elected in the primary and we were faced with the decision in our country of Thomas Dewey or Harry Truman and in 1948. That every one, every one assumed that Thomas Dewey would just clobber Harry Truman and defeat him and send him off into obscurity but Harry Truman won that race. Arkansas was one of the very few southern states that remained loyal to the National Democratic ticket. Now, why was that?

McMATH: Well, Truman, at that time, was unpopular principally because of the civil rights program and the DixieCrats, as you indicate, when they were in the convention, Strom Thurman, Fielding Wright, Ben Laney and so forth were in the Democratic convention in Chicago and they were unhappy about the platform and so forth. So, they withdrew from the convention and I think they went to either Montgomery, Alabama or Jackson, Mississippi. I don't remember exactly which one it was and nominated Fielding Wright as President and Strom Thurman as Vice President and Governor Laney chaired that DixieCrat meeting. See? Well...

PRYOR: You don't think they flew the Confederate flag here and there, do you?

McMATH: Yeah, but as you know, as you pointed out, all the polls indicated that Truman would be defeated and no one thought he would win except Harry Truman. And he was a great President and I imagine we'll have an opportunity to talk about him.

PRYOR: I'd love to talk about your relationship.

McMATH: But as soon as I was nominated in '48, one of the things that I did immediately and two (2) or three (3) things that I took on but I feel that the most important thing I did was start campaigning for President Truman. And we were able to carry Arkansas by a real good vote, a majority vote and as I remember we were the only southern state that stayed in the Democratic party. Maybe, North Carolina I don't guess was considered a southern state, a deep southern state, but anyway Arkansas stayed in the Democratic party and President Truman appreciated that and he came to Arkansas several times.

PRYOR: There's a fabulous picture of you and President Truman walking down Main Street and he had on a white suit and a Panama hat and you were in a dark suit with your red famous red tie and y'all were spiffy. I'll tell you that. That's a great political.

McMATH: Bob McCord took that picture. Bob McCord took that picture and it won a national award...

PRYOR: It's a great picture. It says so much about that era.

McMATH: Yeah. You know, that was the 35th Division reunion. His old Army outfit. You know, Truman was a Captain in the First World War, you know. There's a National Guard out there. And so he always went to their conventions and he always marched with the troops. So, on this occasion he came to Arkansas and we marched down Main Street as you indicated in front of the troops and when we got down to Markham, we turned west or left on Markham and went on up to the old Marion Hotel.

PRYOR: I want to ask you about that. They say that you had a private audience with President Truman. Could you tell on the television about what you and Truman did or talked about?

McMATH: I think so. I think we can tell about it.

PRYOR: You were in the Marion Hotel.

McMATH: Marion Hotel in the Presidential Suite, the Presidential Suite and you didn't have all the entourage around the President that you have now. So, we had a quiet visit. It was in July or it was in the summer. I think it was July. We went into the suites and he said, "Governor, how would you like to have a drink?" I wasn't about to turn him down.

PRYOR: Wow. The President of the United States.
McMATH: I wasn't about to turn him down. I said, "That's fine, Mr. President." He said, "Well, how about Bourbon and branch water?" "Great." He said, "Well, you're going to be waited on by the highest paid bar tender in the world."

PRYOR: That is...

McMATH: Well, I looked around and there wasn't anybody but the two of us

PRYOR: So, Harry Truman poured you a drink.

McMATH: He gets behind the bar and he took one of the low ball glasses and he poured half of Bourbon and half of water. And we sat down to visit for 45 minutes to an hour. Talked, he talked, I listened. He wanted an attentive ear and I provided it for him and it was a very...

PRYOR: Did you talk about the upcoming election that he was going through?

McMATH: Actually...

PRYOR: Actually this was '49. Actually this was after he had defeated Dewey.

McMATH: That's right. And old Dewey, you talk about pictures. Do you remember the Chicago Herald?

PRYOR: Oh, yeah.

McMATH: That big headline "Dewey defeats Truman" and the picture of Truman holding that up.

PRYOR: Oh, he loved that.

McMATH: That big, big smile.

PRYOR: He was rubbing that in, wasn't he? He was rubbing it in because of course, he was so controversial, Harry Truman as a President.

McMATH: Yeah he was.

PRYOR: But he was tough. Wasn't he a tough pine knot?

McMATH: He never took a poll and he had a sign on his desk, that said, "The buck stops here."

PRYOR: "The buck stops here" and he didn't blame anything when something went wrong.

McMATH: That's right and nobody thought he'd amount to anything.

PRYOR: Right.

McMATH: They thought he was just a penny grass politician.

PRYOR: Right. But from Kansas City...

McMATH: But he had great character.

PRYOR: Yes, sir.

McMATH: And he was ran a good state government and he was for the people.

PRYOR: And furthermore he knew and understood history. He was a historian. Harry Truman was a historian.

McMATH: He sure was.

PRYOR: And by the way, we're trying to do that right now. And so we're trying to have Arkansas history taught in all of our schools and we hope our people will get behind that effort. We're trying desperately. We've gone through now a generation and not taught Arkansas history.

McMATH: David, that's one of the finest things you can do.

PRYOR: Well, we need to do that.

McMATH: We don't, like I was telling you about going to Bussey.

PRYOR: Right.

McMATH: In the morning when we would go to school, the first thing we'd do, we'd sing the Star Spangle Banner, pledge allegiance to the flag and sing Arkansas.

PRYOR: That's right.

McMATH: That's a great song and I don't guess the kids sing it any more.

PRYOR: We sometimes have great rivalries with our friends in Texas and no question about that. We have had in the past and will have in the future but there's one thing about Texans that I admire. They're proud of their state and one reason I think they have an excessive amount of pride is because they know its history and they know the state's history. They know where they came from. They know who they are and as Dr. Gatewood at the University of Arkansas always says, "It's time we start defining ourselves and not let everyone else do it for us."

McMATH: That's right.

PRYOR: So, I'm really hope that our state will get behind this effort and we're going to really make an effort.

McMATH: That's great. You know Arkansas needs to be proud of their state and no state has had a more fabulous, colorful event in the history of Arkansas and if you know our history you have to be proud of the state.

PRYOR: That is correct. So, here you are, you were ..

**********************************************************

TRANSCRIBED BY:
PATSY BILLINGS
8308 KEATS DRIVE
LITTLE ROCK, AR 72209
501-562-5267
email: billings@sitemall.net

SID McMATH - DAVID PRYOR transcript one

2007-09-13T19:38:00.000-07:00

SID McMATH - DAVID PRYOR

SENATOR DAVID PRYOR: Good evening ladies and gentlemen. I'm David Pryor and we want to welcome you tonight to AETN to welcome one of Arkansas' most distinguished citizens. He's our guest on AETN tonight and he's going to discuss his fabulous career in politics, the military, and a law practice because his 88 years truly spans a significant part of Arkansas history. Of course, the person I'm speaking of is no other than Governor Sidney Sanders McMath, just experiencing his 88th birthday, he is with us this evening and we are very, very proud to welcome you, Governor McMath as our guest.

GOVERNOR SIDNEY SANDERS McMATH: Thank you very much. It's a privilege to be here and it's always a pleasure to appear with you Senator on any forum.

PRYOR: Well, thank you. I want to say that this interview may be a little shabby. This is the first time I have ever been an interviewer. Usually I have been, in the past, in some uncomfortable situations being the interviewee, being the one being interviewed but thank you for being patient with me.

MCMATH: Well, this is the first occasion that I've had to be questioned by a United States Senator.

PRYOR: Well, I will do my very best and we're just going visit tonight. We're going to talk about some Arkansas history and your role in Arkansas history and your role in the development of this State and some of the things that you have seen and some of the things that you've been a part of. Just a little bit of background, if I may, Governor, you were born down in Columbia County and I'm going to let you talk about some of these things in just a little bit, 88 years ago outside the community of Magnolia and then it was a community. In 1920, I think when you were about eight (8), ten (10) or 11 years old you moved from there to Hot Springs. Eventually you moved also to Smackover for a period of time in Union County. You did work in a grocery store and you've shined shoes. You've sold newspapers. You picked cotton and at one time, they say about you that you were so honored and proud to become a Boy Scout that you sold your most prized possession, your bicycle to buy a Boy Scout uniform. We'd like to hear about that after a while but what a career you've had and we've love for you to talk about some of those very early years and your remembrances of that time in Arkansas. And we would certainly like for you to expand on that for us.

MCMATH: Well, David, you know, I was born, as you say, 88 years ago, June the 14th and of course, that's the day when Uncle Sam unfurled the flag, you know, and run Old Glory up to the top of the flagpole.

PRYOR: Very appropriate.

MCMATH: So it's a good day to remember and I've always been happy about the association of my birthday with the flag but I was born in Columbia County on the Big Creek Bottom on the old McMath home place. My great grandfather, Sidney Smith McMath, was Sheriff in Columbia County and incidentally he was named after his great uncle, Sidney Smith of Texas, and he was famous in the family, at least, because he was killed at the battle of Goliad and he and his detachments were going to the rescue of the Alamo.

PRYOR: Wow. So, that is real history.

MCMATH: So, we are proud of that connection with Texas and so he was killed while he was the Sheriff. He went down to arrest some boot-leggers and there were three (3) of them and they got in to a gunfight and one of them had a Winchester rifle and they had a gunfight and he was killed. And so my grandmother, Lula Mae McMath, they had a large family, eight (8) children, boys and girls, and so they were all living on a farm at the time and of the age they could work and so they worked on the farm and kept the place going. And got the girls to school and the boys there until they went off to work but the place we lived on was a cabin on the old McMath home place and had been used by a tenant on the farm and we lived there for about five (5) years. And my sister and I were born there. She's two (2) years older than I am and we were born on the same day, there was two (2) years difference but I have some fond memories of that period in my life. And I've always tried to see how far back in my life I could remember an event, you know, and sometimes very difficult to do. I'm sure you know that but, you know, you get as old as I am, it's so hard to differentiate fiction from the truth. You don't know whether or not you dreamed it.

PRYOR: Our system just doesn't calibrate as well. I think those memories are there but it's harder to calibrate than to bring them out to the surface.

MCMATH: That's right. You know...

PRYOR: They call that a "senior moment".

MCMATH: Right. Right. Maybe you dreamed it or maybe somebody told you about it. If it's repeated enough, you know, it's ought to be part of your memory.

PRYOR: Right.

MCMATH: But there are several instances during my childhood up to, at least, ten (10) years of age that I remember vividly which really had an impact on my life.

PRYOR: Tell us about it.

MCMATH: Well, you mentioned picking cotton. I picked cotton on a farm up to about, let's see, seven (7), eight (8) or nine (9) years of age, I guess, when I was picking cotton and I was a good cotton picker. I could pick a hundred pounds a day, you know. You got a $1.00 a pound. So, I'd get, I mean, a Cent ($.01) a pound, not a $1.00 a pound. I'd make a $1.00 a day.
PRYOR: A $1.00 a day.

MCMATH: And so I'd save my money and, of course...

PRYOR: That's how you bought that bicycle.

MCMATH: Well, that was Hot Springs.

PRYOR: Okay.

MCMATH: Well, anyway, I was saving my money and I kept it in a sack and when I got a certain amount, I'd make stacks of it and count it and I'd always look at the date in which it was made. I was told the older a piece of a coin was, the more valuable it was. So, I kept it as long as I could.

PRYOR: Well, that was a good way to save money.

MCMATH: I kept it as long as I could. But then after a while it's irresistible and spend it, you know. Of course, most of our things were bought through the Sears and Roebuck catalog. So, many of the things that people back at that time came from the Sears and Roebuck catalog. That was a big event in a year's life for the Sears and Roebuck to come along but then you can't select it and feel it and smell it and try it on and so forth.

PRYOR: Right. You could, at that time I think, order a home through Sears and Roebuck. You could order a pre-built home, I believe.

MCMATH: I suppose you could. You could certainly order everything else. But I decided I'd go down to a country store about two (2) miles from where we lived and I took some of my money with me and I was going to make some purchases. So, I went down and, of course, you've been in these country stores, you know, general stores, and they have everything.
PRYOR: Right.

MCMATH: You know.

PRYOR: Yeah.

MCMATH: And they have cotton seed and meal and sugar and flour and coffee and canned goods and bananas and all of these smells blend together.

PRYOR: Right. A great aroma. A great aroma.

MCMATH: And then there's usually a lot of old men sitting around, a lot of them, a few old men, they were usually sitting around smoking a pipe and that pipe tobacco.

PRYOR: Right. Blends in.

MCMATH: Blends in and they've got coffee and so forth. So, I went in and I looked over everything real good and I remember pretty well what I purchased. The first I bought was a dog collar for my dog. I had a dog and his name was Buluga and we were real good companions. So, I bought him a dog collar and I got a pair of shoes. You had to try them on.

PRYOR: How much did a pair of shoes cost?

MCMATH: Oh, I don't know.

PRYOR: About $2.00?

MCMATH: About $2.00, yeah. It didn't cost very much. Of course, we wore shoes when it was cold weather. Didn't need them otherwise, you know. And I bought me a pair of blue jeans and I bought me a blue jean shirt and I got a big Florida orange. I got a great, big red apple. I got a Florida orange for my sister and a big apple for my sister and I bought some chocolate drops for my mother. She loved chocolate. So, I went home with those prized possessions.

PRYOR: And this was the first time to do any purchasing on your own.

MCMATH: From my cotton money, my cotton picking money, yeah. Well, of course, I had a chance to see how people lived.

PRYOR: That's right.

MCMATH: You know, we were really, it's sort of like depression, '28, '29, along in there and the '30s. We had a depression all the time and that part of South Arkansas, generally in the South, particularly in the rural areas because we still hadn't recovered from the Civil War.

PRYOR: If I'm not mistaken your father and your family, you were moving around so he could make a better living. You moved to Smackover and over in Union County and a couple of other communities and maybe even back down to Columbia County and then on to Hot Springs.

MCMATH: That's right. That's right. He was, my dad really didn't live farming but he lived horses and he liked to deal in cattle. So, he would trade and traffic in horses and cows and he would break horses and one of the reasons we went to Foreman was because it's on the Oklahoma line and he could have a great opportunity to trade in livestock and people would bring him horses to break and...

PRYOR: Well, did you ever have to break any horses?

MCMATH: No, I never had to break any horses but I had to ride one several times.

PRYOR: I'll bet you did.

MCMATH: My dad bought a horse sight unseen and he was over in Oklahoma, across the line, and the farmer told my dad that well, that horse you can hitch him behind your car and you can lead him home. My dad had a car with the top down and so forth and he said, "Well, I'll do that" and so he took me with him. And we finally found the farm where the horse was and we found the horse. My dad got acquainted with the horse. He talked to him and told him what was going to happen to get his confidence and so forth and all he brought with him was a halter and a rope. So, he put the halter on him and he tied him behind the car and we started for home. Well, the horse was very cooperative until we got off of his farm, the farm where he lived and then he sat back down. He sat back down. He was stubborn. He wouldn't go anywhere and so my dad tried several times to get him to cooperate and he wouldn't do it and he finally got a good idea. He said, "Well, you just ride him home." I was, I guess I was seven (7). And you will ride him home. I didn't' have a saddle, didn't have a bridle. So, he made an improvised bridle out of the halter. He tied one end of the halter and the other end, the loose end of the rope to the halter. I got on him. Well, my dad rode along with us for a little while and then he thought we were in good shape, so he went on home. But the horse and I had some differences but we finally made it home and it was a long ride bareback and when we got home my mother was glad to see me but she really gave him a tongue lashing.

PRYOR: I'll bet she did.

MCMATH: But he always bragged on me about that. He bragged on me and he bragged on me like he used to brag on one of his big dogs he had. He had a big dog when we lived on the farm, he just loved, one of the greatest dogs you've ever seen and that's what I was saying and so when he bragged on me as he bragged on that dog, well, I felt real good.

PRYOR: You know, this is the second time in our brief few moments together and your memory is phenomenal about all of this. It's amazing you can remember that but two (2) times you've mentioned "dogs" in our interview. Later on, don't let me forget that, because I am absent-minded, I want to ask you about "Old Red". I want to ask you about Old Red because I remember kind of growing up in one of your campaigns, about a campaign issue about Old Red living at the Governor's mansion. We'll get in to that, but, let's, if we could, let's move now to Hot Springs and you are now what? Twelve or so or in school system at Hot Springs.

MCMATH: David, let me, before we get to Hot Springs.

PRYOR: Sure. I was ten (10) years of age.

MCMATH: Let me say a word. You mentioned, we mentioned Bussey.

PRYOR: Uh-huh. Bussey, Arkansas.

MCMATH: Bussey, Arkansas. Bussey, Arkansas had about 50 people living there. It's a wonderful community, and the track, the train drove right through the town and our house was right next to the track and when a train came through there, as it did, it was a water stop sometimes but if it didn't stop, it sounded like it was going right through your living room. And we were talking about separating memories from imagination, dreams or something someone might have told you, there are some of the things about Bussey that I remember distinctly. One was I went to my first grade at school in Bussey. And it was a one (1) room school house. My mother walked me to school. We walked down a dirt road for about three (3) or four (4) miles and we got to the school house and about the time it was taking up. The teacher rang a bell and we all went in. We had about 25 students all in one room and I don't remember exactly what the preliminaries were because I wasn't paying attention to that. I was plotting my escape. I was going to get out of there. Well, as soon as the preliminaries were over, all the students went to their assigned seats. My mother left the school house and I went to a window to watch her clear the school ground and as soon as she got clear of the school ground I skee-daddled out. I left the school, I skee-daddled over to this railroad track which was a short cut home and I got on that railroad track and I hot-footed it towards home and there was one hazard I had to cross which was a swamp and in this swamp they had alligators and moccasins. So, I soft-pedaled over that swamp and then I ran home and my mother got home and I was sitting on the front porch.

PRYOR: You beat her home.

MCMATH: Yeah, I beat her home.

PRYOR: You beat her home.

MCMATH: Yeah, but anyway...

PRYOR: That is a great story.

MCMATH: ...she sent me back to school.

PRYOR: Tell the people where Bussey is.

MCMATH: Well, Bussey is, it's west of Magnolia.

PRYOR: It's in Columbia County.

MCMATH: Yeah, in Columbia County about ten (10) miles and then Taylor is south of Bussey and the little town is still there and the house that I lived in is still there. I was in there not long ago.

PRYOR: And also tell a story about you when you were growing up that the only way you could get from Magnolia to Taylor, which was to ride a horse.

MCMATH: Yeah.
MCMATH: The roads were so bad. You said, if I ever get to become Governor, I'm going to pave this road some day and sure enough you did.

MCMATH: That's right.

PRYOR: You did it when you were Governor.

MCMATH: When I was campaigning for Governor, I went down to Taylor and the road was so bad I had to ride my horse, rode my horse down there and, of course, you know, the newspaper people go along, they usually are, I said, "If I'm elected Governor, this is going to be the first to pave."

PRYOR: And I think that was too.

MCMATH: Yeah.

PRYOR: We won't go in to the Governor's years yet but when you did become Governor, and speaking of rural communities like Taylor and Bussey, Smackover and others, I understand that when you became Governor there were eight (8) counties in our State that didn't have a mile of paved roads. Well, we're going to talk about that in just a moment. Let's move on to Hot Springs now. You're in the school system and you become sort of, you enjoyed debating and speech classes and you participated in some competitive speaking I believe here and there and did you have a teacher maybe that inspired you in this field?

MCMATH: Well, one of the greatest things that happened to me in my was our move to Hot Springs. They had an excellent school and Hot Springs is a cosmopolitan place. You met people from all different places and backgrounds and so forth and people came there from all over the world and, of course, you talk about working, I did all kinds of work in Hot Springs as a youngster. And I went to high school there.
PRYOR: And if I'm not mistaken you went to the Hot Springs High School and this particular high school has two (2) very, very famous graduates. One being Sidney Sanders McMath and the other is William Jefferson Clinton.

MCMATH: Right.

PRYOR: So, there must be something in the water there.

MCMATH: They had some dedicated teachers.

PRYOR: Dedicated teachers.

MCMATH: And one of the teachers that we had was a music teacher, Elizabeth Bow, Elizabeth Bow. She was a excellent music teacher and she had a glee club and I signed up with the music department because there was so many girls in that class, very attractive girls. So, I thought I'd join the glee club and so she cast me in a musical and, of course we used the student body as a captive audience, you know, for try-outs, for rehearsals and so forth. And, so this was the rehearsal before the show, the night before the show and it came time for me to go center stage and sing my song. Well, I couldn't hit a note. I couldn't hit a note and I talked the song.

PRYOR: You talked through the song.

MCMATH: Yeah. Well, needless to say Ms. Bow got me out of her class and put me in the speech class, Lois Alexander, a great dramatic coach and speech teacher and so forth and so she encouraged me and she put me in a debate. We were going to, she told me one day, she said you're going to enter the debate down at the district meeting down at Ouachita and you'll have so and so as your partner and this is the subject and so forth. And I told her, well, I didn't think I could do that. She said, "You're going to do it or else." So, I did it and we won second place.

PRYOR: Wonderful.

MVMATH: And the fact that there were only two (2) entries and then then she gave me a declamation to enter in to the academic debate and it was in Little Rock and I remember the name of the oration. It was All Embracing America by Congressman William D. Upshaw. And so, I did that and then she put me in a one act play and it was the Valiant and again we used the student body as an audience. We just punished them to no end and so, some several years ago we had a class reunion and I talked to the group. I asked them, I said, "How many of you remember the Valiant?" All their went up and I said, "Well, now how many of you remember the closing lines?" And in unison, they said, "Cowards die many times before their death but the Valiant, they taste death only once."

PRYOR: That makes chill bumps.

MCMATH: So, when I went to the University of Arkansas I had two (2) things on my mind, military and politics.

PRYOR: Right.

MCMATH: So, I kind of divided it.

PRYOR: You left Hot Springs High School and went for a period to Henderson.

MCMATH: Yeah. Well, that was two (2) terms. Yeah, Henderson Brown at that time, that's right..

PRYOR: Probably a Methodist school and, of course, now it is Henderson University, Henderson State University.

MCMATH: Well, now I went to Henderson, Henderson State for part of the time and they gave me a job and I went down there in order to prepare myself for a written examination to the Naval Academy. There was a Chief of Police, the National Park Police in Hot Springs, Richard L. Gaffney, and he had a Scout troop that I was a member of, the third Boy Scout troop in Hot Springs and he had a Boys Club and he was an unofficial recruiter for the Marine Corps. The Marine Corp was involved in Nicaragua at the time and he had all of these recruiting posters about the Marine Corp, see, and so forth. So, I got the idea I wanted to be a Marine and he gave me these posters and I painted my room with them. Well, he thought it would be a good idea if I went to the Naval Academy. So, Congressman D. D. Glover, a great man, a wonderful family.

PRYOR: From Malvern, I believe.

MCMATH: From Malvern, a wonderful family, gave an appointment to the Naval Academy. So, I went down to Henderson to kind of prep out on it and there's a wonderful lady down there that tried to help me with my math. You see, when I was in high school, when I got involved in dramatics, I neglected my science and math. See? So, it caught up with me.

PRYOR: Right.

MCMATH: So, when I took my examination for the Naval Academy, I flunked it. I flunked it.

PRYOR: Because of the math. Or rather the lack of math.

MCMATH: Yeah, the lack of math. So, I saddled up and I went to the University of Arkansas and I signed up with the Reserve Officers Corp, you know, for a four (4) year tour and then I took my pre-law. And so I was involved in dramatics and the military and getting ready to go to law school at the University of Arkansas.

PRYOR: So, you went on to the University for some under-graduate work.

MCMATH: Yeah.

PRYOR: And then you went to the law school at the University of Arkansas.

MCMATH: That's right.

PRYOR: By that time you'd had some drama. You'd been in some plays. You were in debate and speech and all of this seemed to be very good preparation for ultimately your two (2) careers, political, well, three (3) careers, the military, politics and law.

MCMATH: That's right.

PRYOR: And I think that's a grand, grand background for those professions.

MCMATH: I had a problem. I got the commission with the Marine Corp because they gave one (1) commission from each land grant college to the Marine Corp. Well, I got that but I had to complete my ROTC training camp in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. And I had to go to law school to get my law degree that summer to get my law degree. Well, the problem was that the first four (4) weeks, they ran simultaneously. The ROTC camp was at Fort Leavenworth. Of course, the law school was at Fayetteville. So, how was I going to do both? So, I had to scoot. So, I signed up in to law school. I put on my ROTC uniform and hitch-hiked to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Signed up there, spent a week, hitch-hiked back to Fayetteville, spent a week and back and forth for four (4) weeks. They never missed me at either place.

PRYOR: I'll declare. That's a wonderful story. That's a great story.

MCMATH: So, I got my commission in the Marine Corp and I got my law degree.

PRYOR: During this time, Governor, way back in the back of your mind, here you were, you were involved in your law school training and going to school and your ROTC, did you have politics in your mind? Did you think about politics? Did you think about some day running for an office.

MCMATH: Well, I thought about running for Governor when I was in high school and I was president of my freshman, sophomore, junior and senior classes and then, of course, at the University, I was president of the student body. So, I had it in my mind and, of course, to be in the military and to be in politics and to be a lawyer, and, you know, you don't know how you're going to work it in.

PRYOR: That's right.

MCMATH: And so I went in the Marine Corp and spent a year, 1936 and came home in '37. I came home to marry Elaine Brockington and at that time the Marine Corp, its' policy was that if you were a Second Lieutenant you couldn't married. You had to be in the Marine Corp two (2) years before you could get married and the policy that if the Marine Corp wanted you to have a bride they'd issue you one. So, I went on to marry Elaine and to practice law but that was in '37 and the paint of my shingle hadn't got dry and, of course the war began and I felt an obligation to go back in.

PRYOR: So, you actually went back in the Marine right before, a year before Pearl Harbor.

MCMATH: Yeah, that's right.

PRYOR: You went back August, 1940.

MCMATH: Yeah, August, 1940. I stayed in the Marine Corp until the war was over.

PRYOR:Right. Okay.

Strom Thurmond's Mixed Record

2007-09-13T19:30:00.000-07:00

Strom Thurmond's Mixed Record
By Kari Frederickson
Ms. Frederickson is the author of The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932-1968 .

Editor's Note: This article was published last December after Trent Lott declared that the United States would have been better off if Strom Thurmond had won the presidential election of 1948. The piece suggested that it was ironic that Thurmond was to become the icon of the segregationist movement because when he first came to power he was regarded as a moderate.

As of this moment, Mississippi Senator Trent Lott is fighting for his political life. With a few sentences last Monday, Lott appeared to endorse Strom Thurmond's 1948 run for the presidency on the segregationist Dixiecrat ticket. Since that time he has issued numerous apologies, and the Republican Party is in the midst of a very public identity crisis. Meanwhile, reporters around the nation have been busy educating the American public on one of the critical elections of the twentieth. The Dixiecrat defection was an important turning point in the political transformation of the South, serving as the cross-over point for many white southern voters in their eventual move from the Democratic to the Republican column. The election of 1948, therefore, marked the tentative beginnings of the two-party South and the region's political transition from a Democratic to a Republican stronghold.

Strom Thurmond has come to embody this political transformation, with his 1948 Dixiecrat candidacy, his support for Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964, his re-election as a Republican in 1966, and his key role in Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" in 1968. However, if by virtue of these hallmarks Thurmond is to be identified as the father of the South's political transformation, a closer look at his role in the Dixiecrat movement dictates that perhaps we should recharacterize him as something of a deadbeat dad.

Although present at the inception, Thurmond provided little subsequent support for the infant organization. Thurmond's role in the Dixiecrat campaign of 1948 was, in the final analysis, both a blessing and a curse for the Dixiecrats. A closer look at his troubled candidacy and Thurmond's ambiguous motives reveals cleavages within the revolt, complicates our understand of postwar southern politics and the painful process of change.

ROOTS OF THE DIXIECRAT REVOLT

The roots of the 1948 Dixiecrat revolt stretch back to the tumultuous New Deal and war years, when Southern conservatives became increasingly uncomfortable with the direction of economic policies that threatened to redefine the region's economic, racial, and political relations. The revolt took definite shape in February of 1948 after Harry Truman delivered his civil rights address to Congress. Practically every white southern leader roundly denounced the civil rights legislation proposed by the president; however, few were receptive to the idea of independent political action that would threaten the Democratic Party's chances for success in the presidential election in November. Greater still, few congressmen and senators were willing to break with the party and threaten their seniority.

From February until the election in November, the states' rights revolt was piloted by a small group of conservative Democratic state leaders from the Deep South and primarily from Mississippi and Alabama, men who had long opposed the New Deal and had been involved in the 1944 attempt to deny Franklin Roosevelt his fourth nomination. By and large these men -- and they included Mississippi Governor Fielding Wright, Mississippi Speaker of the House Walter Sillers, former Alabama governor Frank Dixon, and Louisiana political boss Leander Perez -- represented the conservative agricultural and industrial forces in their respective states. Such men were neither temperamentally suited nor philosophically given to organizing a grassroots campaign. Although they liked to boast that the revolt had emanated from the voters, it was in fact a top-heavy organization dedicated to controlling existing political machinery and in grabbing existing political power. They were less interested, at least initially, in creating a new political party than they were in regaining control of the old. The Dixiecrats hoped to convince the individual state Democratic Parties to withhold their electoral college votes from President Truman, the nominee of the national Democratic Party. They sought to deny Truman victory and throw the election into the House of Representatives, where they could then barter and trade for a compromise candidate. They would have demonstrated their power and would have recaptured the South's preeminent position within the Democratic Party.

As the Dixiecrat's presidential candidate, Strom Thurmond proved both a blessing and curse for the organization. Thurmond had leapfrogged to the front of the states' rights revolt at the Southern Governors' Conference in mid-February 1948. This meeting came in the wake of Harry Truman's unprecented civil rights address to the United States Congress. Not everyone -- especially the Mississippi Dixiecrats -- was pleased with Thurmond's assumption of leadership. At the conference of southern governors, Mississippi governor Fielding Wright advocated a hard line against the president. Wright recommended that a "Southern Conference for True Democrats" meet at Jackson, Mississippi, in March to draw up a plan of action. Thurmond recommended a moderate approach, suggesting that the governors meet with the national party forces to seek a compromise on the civil rights issue. Thurmond's suggestion won the support of the governors, much to the irritation of Wright and others. Of course, the administration did not compromise. Although Thurmond stayed within the states' rights camp, Wright and many Alabama and Mississippi Dixiecrats viewed him warily.

AN IMPULSIVE DECISION

Thurmond's official Dixiecrat candidacy was a last-minute decision by both the Dixiecrats and Thurmond himself. He was in many ways, as his biographer Nadine Cohodas has written, a candidate by default. Although Thurmond had become one of the leaders of the movement in February, he remained uncertain during the first half of the year about the wisdom of staging an independent campaign. Indeed, it was unclear just what exactly was going to transpire at the states' rights convention in Birmingham on July 17, 1948. Among themselves, the Dixiecrats were undecided as to whether they were merely going to urge southern states to deny Truman their electoral college votes or whether they were going to nominate candidates themselves. A small group of states' rights supporters from Alabama and Mississippi engineered the convention and decided unilaterally that the group should nominate its own candidates -- in effect, create a third party (although they denied that was what they were doing). Just who those candidates would be, nobody knew.

When the convention recessed for lunch, the states' rights insiders still had not settled on their man. Their first choice, Arkansas Governor Benjamin Laney, proved fickle. Laney harbored strong doubts about attending the conference, which was held only days after the national Democratic Party convention. On his way home to Arkansas from the national Democratic Party convention in Philadelphia, Laney told reporters in Cincinnati that neither he nor any of the Arkansas delegates would go to Birmingham. By the time he reached St. Louis, he had changed both his mind and his train and was on his way to Alabama. Laney arrived in Birmingham the day before the Dixiecrat convention. He checked into his hotel and never left his suite for the duration of the convention. During the convention's noon recess he formally withdrew his name from consideration for the presidential nomination. He felt the best hope for defeating the civil rights plank was through the state Democratic organizations, not a third party.

Spurned by the Arkansas governor, states' rights leaders turned their attention to Thurmond, who, like Laney, initially had not planned to attend. The South Carolina governor had been detained on state business and did not even arrive in Birmingham until the convention's morning activities were nearly completed. While the conventioneers were enjoying lunch, states' rights leaders desperately searched for a candidate. Many in the states' rights higher councils wanted Fielding Wright for the top spot. Wright had discouraged this, saying, "I do not feel that I am a man of sufficient political stature to accept such a nomination." Strom Thurmond operated under no such personal misgivings. Thurmond agreed to accept the states' rights mantle by the time the caucus reconvened at 2:30 p.m. This spur-of-the-moment decision surprised even his closest advisors, who did not accompany him to the convention. In an interview given more than forty years later, Thurmond advisor and Charleston attorney Robert Figg stated that had he gone with the South Carolina governor to Birmingham, he would have advised Thurmond against accepting the nomination. At the time, some in the Palmetto State saw Thurmond's candidacy as a public relations ploy designed to improve his chances in the 1950 U.S. Senate Democratic party primary. In later years, Thurmond denied this accusation.

STROM THURMOND: MODERATE ON RACE

Thurmond proved a wise choice as a presidential candidate. In a movement that was short on leaders of solid reputation, he brought a certain seriousness and legitimacy to the cause. But in terms of his political history, Thurmond was in many ways an odd fit with the other Dixiecrats. Although his subsequent political career has made him into the poster boy for the defense of white supremacy, Thurmond's gubernatorial politics and policies characterize him as a moderate. His 1946 gubernatorial campaign had been remarkably free of racist appeals. Compared to other southern governors elected during that politically schizophrenic year, Thurmond stood somewhere in the middle, halfway between Alabama populist James Folsom and Georgia racist Eugene Talmadge As governor he helped streamline government agencies, supported a minimum wage and maximum hour law, consistently urged abolition of the state's poll tax, advocated legislation to provide secret ballots in the general election, and championed the creation of a merit system for state government employment. In 1947, when a brutal lynching in upstate South Carolina shocked the nation, Thurmond quickly mobilized the state constabulary to apprehend the lynchers. Like other moderates in the 1940s and 1950s, Thurmond focused on modernization, undertaking an intense campaign to promote industrial development and economic growth in the state. Thurmond heartily believed that the South's racial dilemma would be solved through economic growth and development, not through federal interference.

Thurmond's assumption of the Dixiecrat mantle shocked South Carolina's small but active liberal community, which had great hopes when Thurmond was elected in 1946. In a letter to Thurmond, one African-American activist claimed he would have voted for Thurmond in the 1946 primary "were I not disfranchised" because "not once did you raise the race issue for political purposes." As late as October 1947, Thurmond remained a loyal Truman man. Thus, South Carolina liberals were shocked and disappointed when Thurmond moved to the front of the states' rights revolt in February 1948. State NAACP leader James Hinton criticized Thurmond's involvement as "a keen disappointment to the negroes of South Carolina." Up to that point, Hinton claimed, blacks felt that in Thurmond, "they had a Chief Executive, free from White Supremacy attitudes and expressions, and one who would hasten the day, when Negroes in South Carolina would enjoy 'EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY.'" South Carolina's tiny but active liberal community had come to expect better from its governor.

But even if his gubernatorial policies distinguished him from his fellow Dixiecrats, like his more conservative compatriots, Thurmond opposed all proposed federal civil rights legislation, which he considered unwarranted intervention and interference into the rights of states. In many ways, the South Carolinian personified the gendered components of the region's conservative states' rights political culture, making him particularly well suited to serve as point man in the states' rights crusade.

THE IMPORTANCE OF VIRILITY

In 1948, Thurmond effectively combined a fighting spirit and his status as a World War II veteran with a well-known penchant for clean living, vigorous physical exercise and pretty women into a representation of himself as the vehicle by which the south might address its political emasculation. In the gendered discourse of South Carolina politics, Thurmond -- a bachelor -- portrayed himself as a virile lady's man. Whether caught lounging on Myrtle Beach with two comely companions, or bestowing a kiss on a local festival queen, the bachelor governor never shied away from photo opportunities that illustrated his masculinity. Thurmond's reputation as a ladies' man was widespread. Congressman William Jennings Bryan Dorn of Greenwood warned his sister about taking a job in the governor's office. "[U]se your own judgment," Dorn advised. "Personally, I had rather you would stay out of Strom Thurmond's office, for your own good if for no other reason. His reputation and fastness concerning women is nation-wide...."

Thurmond's bachelor days ended on November 7, 1947, when he married twenty-one-year-old Jean Crouch of Elko, a former Azalea Festival queen and a secretary in the governors' office. The day before their wedding, the betrothed governor, casually (albeit curiously) decked out in white gym shorts, dark socks, and wing tip shoes, posed in a headstand for a Life magazine photographer. The caption read: "Virile Governor demonstrates his prowess in the mansion yard before wedding." (Before resorting to this acrobatic feat, Thurmond had asked the photographer whether he wanted to feel his muscles.) If some voters thought that the forty-four-year-old Thurmond's official retirement from the dating scene signaled a major life change, this and subsequent photo opportunities proved them wrong. Amusingly, one congressman later recalled that "to most people, who didn't know about gym shorts, it looked like Thurmond had pulled off his pants, left his shoes on, and then stood on his head for the cameras."

Thurmond appealed to conservative white men suffering from a self-diagnosed case of political impotency.

Strom Thurmond's masculine persona melded well with the Dixiecrats' political rhetoric. Prominent conservative states' rights spokesmen used familial metaphors and gendered scenarios to play to the deep-seated fears and paranoia of white southerners fearful of losing political power within the national party to organized labor and blacks. White southerners manufactured political allegories in which they were featured as cuckolds, and they often likened their new, dependent position in the national party to those who possessed little or no power in society: women and children. One Mississippi Dixiecrat crafted a campaign song to be sung to the tune of an existing song entitled "Slap Her Down Again, Pa!" a song about wife beating. In the retooled states' rights version, white southern Democrats assumed the role of the battered wife. Elsewhere, others portrayed the changing relationship between southern Democrats and the national party as a failed love affair. Thurmond's personal countenance, then, made him a worthy leader of the battle for state's rights, a battle waged as much on the rhetorical and cultural fields as through the ballot box. As someone who combined a political outsider's fighting rhetoric with personal sexual potency, Thurmond appealed to conservative white men suffering from a self-diagnosed case of political impotency.

In addition to his personal appeal, Thurmond also brought incredible energy to the campaign trail. He thrived on the crowds and the campaign motorcades preceded by wailing police sirens. Dixiecrat speech writer J. Oliver Emmerich, publisher of the McComb Enterprise-Journal noted that, in this respect, Thurmond and his vice-presidential running mate, Governor Fielding Wright, were as different as "daylight and dark." Whereas Thurmond "got a big kick out of" political campaigning, Wright recoiled from the attention. Fielding Wright abhorred campaigning, and it showed. Emmerich frequently accompanied Wright on the campaign trail. Years later, he described a typical Wright campaign outing to New Orleans. Emmerich recalled with bemusement how, as their train approached the New Orleans station, Wright became nervous by the sight of the crowd awaiting his arrival. Anxious, he quietly slipped out the back of the train and climbed, undetected, into the back of a waiting taxi cab.

Thurmond's love of the campaign trail, the pressing crowds, and the blaring marching bands, arose from political egocentrism rather from a desire to build a viable and lasting political movement. Thurmond's independent political tendencies made him a good spokesman for white southerners angry at what they saw as abuse at the hands of the national party; these same tendencies also made him impossible to manage as a candidate. Thurmond ran his campaign as an independent enterprise. He frequently bi-passed the Jackson office altogether when arranging his personal appearances and disregarded speeches written for him by public relations staff, preferring instead to use those prepared by his own staff. Thurmond dashed from town square to town square throughout the South, sometimes delivering as many as five speeches a day. The Dixiecrats' campaign director remarked bitterly that Thurmond wanted to greet voters in every little "pigtrail" in the South.

THURMOND WASN'T THE TYPE TO SAY "NIGGER"

With his moderate record, Thurmond's nomination mitigated, or at least complicated, outsiders' negative assessment of the southern party. In an editorial immediately following the Birmingham convention, the New York Times said the States' Right platform illustrated a lack of "good sense," but regarded Thurmond's nomination as politically astute. A columnist from the New York Star labeled Thurmond a "Dixie Paradox," who "embodies in one personality the Old South and the New." Both New York papers were impressed by Thurmond's record as governor: his opposition to the poll tax; his abhorrence of mob violence; his support of a minimum wage and maximum hour law; and his support for industrialization and for the removal of discriminatory regional freight rates.

The most colorful assessment of Thurmond's candidacy came from Baltimore editor and critic H. L. Mencken. The curmudgeonly Mencken considered Thurmond "the best of all the [presidential] candidates" but lamented that "all the worst morons in the South are for him." John Ed Pearce of the Louisville, Kentucky, Courier-Journal, however, was less enamored of the South Carolinian. He noted that Thurmond's racism differed from the more outspoken white supremacists in style but not in substance. "On the platform Mr. Thurmond and his fellow travelers shout of Americanism, our way of life, the right to choose one's associates, Communism, Reds. But they mean Nigger. Mr. Thurmond, of course, never says the word; he's not the type."

Pearce was right: Thurmond was not the type, but many in the Alabama and Mississippi Dixiecrat camps were, and to Thurmond, at least, the difference was important. Thurmond constantly differentiated himself from the Mississippi and Alabama Dixiecrats. Thurmond and his advisors clearly distinguished between their brand of conservatism and what they referred to as "the reactionary and conservative background" of the Alabama and Mississippi Dixiecrats. Beyond style, though, Thurmond's pro-development philosophy and his belief that the problem of the color line was at heart an economic problem differentiated him from the Mississippi and Alabama Dixiecrats who were tied to traditional Black Belt and industrial interests that did not pursue economic expansion and who were, at best, ambivalent about racial violence.

A THIRD PARTY?

The most significant difficulty that arose between Thurmond and the other leading Dixiecrats concerned the future of the organization. Throughout the campaign, Thurmond avoided any hint that the political effort he was spearheading had a longer shelf-life than the presidential election, while the Dixiecrats' main campaign office in Jackson wanted its candidate to serve as point man for a new political movement. The goals of the movement had metamorphosed in the course of the campaign. In order to reclaim their former position within the national party, the Dixiecrats hoped to capitalize on party regularity. But ironically, in formulating their plan and in cobbling together a regional effort to block first Truman's nomination and then his election, the Dixiecrats in effect created something new, acquiring all the trappings of a third party. They held not one but three regional conventions -- in Jackson in May, in Birmingham in July, and in Houston in August -- that attracted delegates from across the Deep South. They adopted a party name -- the States' Rights Democratic Party -- drew up a platform, and nominated candidates. And they held a campaign separate from the national Democratic Party. The candidates traveled about the South delivering stump speeches to enthusiastic crowds; the party opened campaign headquarters in every southern state, held fundraisers, printed posters and buttons, and recruited volunteers.

Following the Birmingham convention, where Thurmond and Wright had been nominated, the newspapers reported the birth of this new political party. Ultimately, the Dixiecrats assumed something of a split personality. In the four states where they had captured control of the electors, Thurmond and Wright were listed as the Democratic Party candidates. In those states, the Dixiecrats counted on in-grained voting habits. However, in the other southern states, the Dixiecrats were forced to campaign as a third party and had to convince voters to vote for the electors of the States' Rights Democratic Party. But regardless of whether they were listed as the Democratic Party candidates or the States' Rights Democratic Party candidates, the process of either gaining control of the states' electors or in mounting a third party effort forced many Dixiecrats to begin to think about themselves in a new way.

Organizers differed on whether the States' Rights Democratic Party would continue to exist as a viable protest vehicle or separate party after the election. In order to be taken seriously, some campaign strategists, particularly those in Mississippi and Alabama, felt that they needed at least to appear committed to carry on the fight after the election, to prove to voters that, as one Dixiecrat staffer confided, "the States' Rights movement is not a flash-in-the-pan...." Others strongly believed that the Dixiecrat campaign could serve as the foundation for a new conservative party that would attract conservative elements from both major parties. Among themselves, the more radical Dixiecrats acknowledged that indeed, they were ideologically closer to the Republicans; the Dixiecrat organization could be used to move white southerners from the Democratic party to the Republican party. For them, the States' Rights Democratic Party, then, represented a means to creating a more viable two-party system in the South.

Thurmond disagreed with the evolving goals of the States' Rights Democratic Party. Ever since moving to the front of the revolt in February, Thurmond remained convinced that the states' rights effort represented nothing more than a temporary protest whose ultimate goal was to reassert white southerners' control of the national Democratic Party. Thurmond had no intention in carrying the protest beyond the election and certainly had no intention of creating a third party. But as late summer melded into fall, and especially as the Dixiecrats mounted third-party efforts in most of the southern states, many Dixiecrats began to discuss the possibility of keeping their organization alive after the election. In the weeks prior to the election, Alabama and Mississippi Dixiecrats began laying the groundwork for a permanent organization. Many States' Righters agreed with attorney Charles W. Collins, author of Whither Solid South and the Dixiecrats' tactician, that Thurmond's campaign had created the basis for a new political party. Dixiecrat leaders convened in Memphis about a week before the election and agreed to continue the fight for "constitutional government and individual liberty" after the election.

The disagreements over strategies and goals that had divided the States' Rights organization during the 1948 campaign spilled over into the post-election era and multiplied exponentially. Minimum cohesion had been achieved during the presidential campaign primarily because all factions were dedicated ultimately to securing votes for Thurmond. With that focus gone, the organization's tenuous unity began to crumble altogether. States' Rights leaders struggled to give their organization post-election life. The group voted to create a non-profit States' Rights Institute in Washington with the vague mission of "spreading" states' rights principles and focused their energies on defeating the civil rights legislation pending in Congress. In May 1949, the Dixiecrats held their second annual convention. They officially changed their name to the National States Rights Democratic Committee and declared that although it was not a political party, it hoped to have some impact in the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections.

EYE ON THE SENATE

Strom Thurmond moved quickly to separate himself from the Dixiecrats after November 1948. Although he vowed publicly to continue to fight for states' rights principles, he proved unwilling to continue any close affiliation with the movement he had led only a few months previous. Indeed, Thurmond's actions in 1949 and 1950 confirmed the suspicions of many that his run for the presidency was as much about ego and publicity as principle. But while he kept the Dixiecrats at arms' length, he never made the break complete and he never publicly criticized the organization. He sent mixed messages to his former supporters. Shortly after the election, Thurmond assured one leader of the Alabama states' rights forces that he supported the creation of a permanent States' Rights organization to fight all civil rights legislation and promised his active support. To others, he refused to commit to any post-election activity and instead counseled patience.

Essentially, Thurmond had his eye on the 1950 Democratic primary race for the U.S. Senate; he and his advisors feared that if he appeared to be closely aligned with the states' rights organization, too many South Carolina voters might also affiliate themselves with the group and "might not feel qualified to enroll and vote in the [1950] Democratic primary." But they also did not want Thurmond to make any public disavowals of the organization, since many in South Carolina had supported his candidacy. Privately, he and his advisors criticized the activities of the states' rights organization, ridiculing many of the proposals of the states' rights group as "screwy." They feared that any close association with the National States' Rights organization might tarnish Thurmond's reputation. Thurmond kept his distance. With Thurmond effectively gone and with no one to take his place at the head of the group, the organization quietly folded.

Even though Thurmond had abandoned the Dixiecrats almost as the votes were being counted, he never again fit completely comfortably within the national Democratic Party. Along with many other voters in the Deep South, for the next twenty years he remained firmly committed to a period of flux in presidential elections, as national political allegiances bounced back and forth among Democratic, Republican, and Independent candidates. If, as historians have noted, the Dixiecrats marked the beginnings of the two-party South, their campaign likewise illustrated how messy and protracted the process was bound to be. Abandoning traditional voting habits and forming new alliances began at the edges of politics, among the most disaffected, and in the elections that least threatened local power. Indeed, if the man who has come to personify political change in the South had conflicting emotions about abandoning traditional allegiances, how must the average white voter have felt?

V. O. Key, Jr. Biography

2007-09-13T19:16:00.000-07:00

KEY, VALDIMER ORLANDO, JR. (1908-1963). V. O. Key, Jr., political scientist, was born on March 13, 1908, in Austin, Texas, the son of V. O. and Olive (Terry) Key. He spent his early life in Lamesa. He attended McMurry College for two years and then the University of Texas, where he received B.A. and M.A. degrees in 1929 and 1930; in 1934 he graduated from the University of Chicago with a Ph.D. in political science. While there he met Luella Gettys, also a political scientist, and they were married on October 27, 1934. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Key taught at the University of California, Los Angeles (1934-36), Johns Hopkins (1938-49), Yale (1949-51), and Harvard (after 1951); he served terms at the latter three schools as department chairman. In 1958 he was elected president of the American Political Science Association. He served under President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the staffs of the National Resources Planning Board (1937-38) and the Bureau of the Budget (1942-45). Under President John F. Kennedy he was a member of the Committee on Political Campaign Expenditures. He published numerous articles and books. His Southern Politics in State and Nation (1949) won the Woodrow Wilson Award of the American Political Science Association. He also wrote Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups (1942), A Primer of Statistics for Political Scientists (1954), American State Politics: An Introduction (1956), and Public Opinion and American Democracy (1961). Southern Politics in State and Nation includes a chapter on Texas politics. Key was Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History and Government at Harvard University when he died, on October 4, 1963, in Brookline, Massachusetts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Alcalde (magazine of the Ex-Students' Association of the University of Texas), December 1950. American Political Science Review, March 1964. Biographical Directory of the American Political Science Association, 4th ed. (Washington: American Political Science Association, 1961). New York Times, October 4, 1963. Who's Who in America, 1960-61.

O. Douglas Weeks

Turabian Citation
Key, V. O. Southern Politics in State and Nation. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1949.

Dixiecrats Highlights

2007-09-13T19:14:00.000-07:00

Dixiecrats

The Dixiecrats were members of the States' Rights Democratic Party, which splintered from the Democratic Party in 1948.
Strom Thurmond
The faction consisted of malcontented southern delegates to the Democratic Party who protested the insertion of a civil rights plank in the party platform and U.S. president Harry S. Truman's advocacy of that plank. Before the convention southern delegates were dismayed by Truman's 1948 executive order to desegregate the armed forces. With that backdrop many southern delegates were already concerned as they headed to the 1948 Democratic convention.

When the Democratic national convention convened in July 1948, some Alabama and Mississippi delegates were prepared to walk out of the convention if the civil rights platform passed. When it did, all of the Mississippi delegates and half of the Alabama delegates stormed out of the convention. On July 17, 1948, the Alabama and Mississippi delegations, and a few individual delegates from other southern states, met in Birmingham, Alabama, to select a presidential ticket to oppose the Democrats. The Dixiecrats chose South Carolina's governor, Strom Thurmond, for president and Fielding L. Wright, governor of Mississippi, for vice president.

The goal of the Dixiecrats was twofold. First, the splinter party hoped to deny both the Democrats and Republicans a majority in the electoral college, forcing the election into the U.S. House of Representatives.
Strom Thurmond
Second, Dixiecrat leaders maneuvered to have the Thurmond-Wright ticket declared the "official" Democratic Party ticket on the ballots of all southern states. In the end this ploy succeeded only in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, all Deep South states. Georgia was the lone Deep South state to remain loyal to the national Democratic Party; the Dixiecrat ticket appeared on Georgia ballots as a third party.

On election day 1948, the Dixiecrats won Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina but failed to win any state in which Thurmond appeared as a third-party candidate. In Georgia, Thurmond came in a distant second to Truman. A closer analysis of the Dixiecrat phenomenon revealed an interesting pattern: the Dixiecrats were most successful in the states and counties where black citizens were the most numerous. The Deep South states boasted the largest black populations, and white voters in those states were the most determined to preserve racial segregation and black disenfranchisement, and thus were more likely to vote for the Dixiecrat ticket. A similar trend is evident in county-level election returns, in which Thurmond was more likely to win counties where black populations were large and white voters feared racial change. In the border South, where blacks were less abundant and white voters were less preoccupied with segregation, support for the Dixiecrat candidates was negligible.

Although the Dixiecrats immediately dissolved after the 1948 election, their impact lasted much longer. Many white voters who initially cast Dixiecrat ballots gravitated back toward the Democratic Party only grudgingly, and they remained nominal Democrats at best. Ultimately, the Dixiecrat movement paved the way for the rise of the modern Republican Party in the South. Many former Dixiecrat supporters eventually became Republicans, as was highlighted by Strom Thurmond's conversion in the 1960s.

Suggested Reading

Jack Bass and Marilyn W. Thompson, Ol' Strom: An Unauthorized Biography of Strom Thurmond (Atlanta: Longstreet, 1998).

Kari Frederickson, The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932-1968 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

V. O. Key, Southern Politics in State and Nation, new ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984).

Scott E. Buchanan, Columbus State University

Arkansas State Fire Prevention Association

2007-09-13T19:12:00.000-07:00

Arkansas Governor Ben Laney held a Statewide conference at Little Rock on November 21, 1947, the chairman of which was Insurance Commissioner Jack G. McKenzie. The conference was successful and created a permanent action committee, which, with the Arkansas State Fire Prevention Association, is engaged in Statewide educational activities and fire prevention inspections. Special attention is given to the prevention of rural and forest fires, and to an educational program in the schools.

Source

The Line Squall

2007-09-13T19:11:00.001-07:00

The Line Squall

(TIME, July 26, 1948) -- The first warning thunderclap came on the second night of the convention.

For an hour that evening the sodden delegates had sat through a memorial service to Franklin D. Roosevelt, only half aware of the ceremony's bad taste, bored by its dreariness. "We are here to honor the honored dead," rasped New York's Mayor O'Dwyer. "Won't you please act accordingly?" But neither Bill O'Dwyer's pleas, nor prayers, nor singing, nor oratory dented the delegates' torpor. The rumble of conversation continued to fill the air, only subsiding a little when Congresswoman Mary Norton presented the credentials committee's report.

The fluttering of thousands of cardboard fans gave the effect of a wheatfield in a freakish wind, across which photographers' bulbs flashed like heat lightning. Then a grim- faced Negro loomed on the platform.

He was announced as George L. Vaughn, a delegate from St. Louis and a member of the credentials committee; he wanted to submit a minority report. The majority had agreed to seat the Mississippi delegation. But the Mississippi delegation, Vaughn charged, intended to walk out if Harry Truman's civil rights program was incorporated into the platform and if Harry Truman was nominated. He clenched his fist, yelling: "Three million Negroes have left the South since the outbreak of World War II to escape this thing. I ask the convention to give consideration . . ."

The squall broke.

It broke in a vast, excited, ugly roar. Temporary Chairman Alben Barkley pounded his gavel. He ordered a voice vote on Vaughn's report. Although it had been agreed in committee not to have a roll call, Northern delegates shouted into their floor microphones, demanding one. But they could not be heard. The floor mikes were dead. Chairman Barkley asked for ayes and nays. Deadpan, he listened to the response and ruled that the majority report had carried. The Mississippi delegation was accredited.

But the disturbance was not squelched. Directly under the rostrum, Chicago Boss Jake Arvey and Adlai Stevenson, candidate for governor of Illinois, continued to yell at the chair. California's hulking Chairman Jack Shelley, an ex-University of San Francisco football tackle, plunged up the aisle to the platform, roaring for recognition. They all wanted it to be announced that their delegations had voted against Mississippi. On the platform Shelley barked into the ear of Sergeant at Arms Leslie Biffle: "You'd better not cut the mikes on us tomorrow when we start talking on civil rights."

Wings of the Storm. Tomorrow was bound to be stormier. The platform still had to be voted on. The party's worried leaders had done their best to produce something which, if it failed to please everyone, at least would not rile anyone very much. They had kept in touch with Harry Truman, whose cautious advice had been to keep the specific points of his so called "civil rights" program out of the platform.

As everyone knew, "civil rights" meant, largley, "Negro rights." The platform makers, headed by Pennsylvania' Senator Francis Myers, had hit upon what they thought was the perfect compromise. They parroted the 1944 platform affirmed the right of racial minorities "to live . . . to work . . . to vote." As for federal guarantee of those rights, they called upon Congress "to exert its full authority to the limit of its constitutional powers."

It was a magnificent weasel. The Northern bloc, which believed that Congress' power to legislate "human rights" is limitless, could accept it -- if it wanted to. So could Southern politicians who firmly believe that certain Negro rights are matters which the Constitution leaves to the states.

But the platform makers had overlooked the determination of the Northerners, whose volatile Americans for Democratic Action had drafted a minority report. A.D.A.'s spokesman was Hubert Horatio Humphrey Jr., 37, mayor of Minneapolis, who has a fast and facile tongue, political courage, and is opposing Joe Ball for Senator in November. The A.D.A. amendment commended Harry Truman for "his courageous stand on the issue of civil rights," and in somewhat obscure words urged Congress, in effect, to repeal the poll tax, set up FEPC, make lynching a federal offense, and end segregation in the armed services.

"Out of the Shadow." In the unrelenting heat the next day the delegates gathered. They settled soggily into their chairs while once again the interminable speeches rolled out of the loudspeakers. Senator Myers droned out the compromise platform.

The instant he had finished, Southern leaders were on their feet. Texas' ex-Governor Dan Moody offered the South's minority report defining the sovereignty of the states. Two other Southerners, Mississippi's Walter Sillers and Cecil Sims of Tennessee, followed with similar amendments. Cried Sillers: "Give us the right to govern our own fundamental affairs!" Then ex- Congressman Andrew J. Biemiller, of Wisconsin, a onetime Socialist who helped manage Norman Thomas' campaign in 1932, a colleague of Humphrey on the platform committee, presented the Northern minority report on civil rights.

The debate was on. The drawling voices of Texas, Mississippi, Alabama laid the anxieties and defiance of the South before the convention of their party. The vernaculars of Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Minnesota shouted the North's challenge.

"I say the time has come to walk out of the shadow of states' rights and into the sunlight of human rights," yelled Hubert Humphrey Jr.

Pants & Stomach. Yellow skullcaps with propellers on top began appearing on the heads of New York and Pennsylvania delegates. A Powers model, carrying a Truman-for-President sign, edged on to the floor in front of the speakers' stand, where she was ogled and photographed. But the delegates listened to the speeches. The hall had taken on a look of purpose.

Texas' Congressman Sam Rayburn, who had taken over from Barkley as permanent chairman, called for a roll-call vote on Governor Moody's states' rights motion. It was smashed by an overwhelming 925 to 309. The two other Southern amendments were shouted down.

The North was not through yet. The Humphrey-Biemiller civil rights amendment was put to a roll call. The big Northern and Western states held solid and the report carried by 69 votes. The South had been kicked in the pants, turned around and kicked in the stomach. The Humphrey and Biemiller crowd roared in triumph.

Frantically but vainly, Alabama tried to get the floor to make a statement. The session quickly recessed. But the showdown could not be postponed long. That night, when the delegates convened again, Alabama's Chairman Handy Ellis won recognition at last. The eleven electors of the sovereign state of Alabama, he shouted, had been chosen "never to cast their vote for a Republican, never to cast their vote for Harry Truman, and never to cast their electoral vote for any candidate with a civil rights program such as adopted by this convention . . . We cannot participate further in this convention."

Thirteen members of the Alabama delegation, led by Handy Ellis, walked out. Mississippi followed, waving the battle flag of the Confederacy. They all plodded, stony-faced, through the crowd, tripped over Truman signs stacked in the aisles, walked out the doors and into a pelting rainstorm. As they emerged, a thunderclap split the air.

The Sunshine. The rest of the convention dragged ut until 2:30 a.m. Alabama's Senator Lister Hill, a party regular, herded a handful of alternates into his state's empty seats. Mississippi had gone for good. The rest of the South remained to fight a futile fight, to rally around Georgia's protest candidate for President, Senator Richard Russell.

But the Russell drive was no more than a gesture. Harry Truman was nominated on the first ballot. The vote: Truman 947 1/2; Russell 263; Paul V. McNutt 1/2. By loud acclamation, faithful Alben Barkley was nominated for the vice-presidency.

The storm receded -- a bit. The only clouds were the glowering Southern delegates, who sat in sullen wrath through the loud and sweaty demonstrations. The sun came out when Harry Truman, smiling broadly, appeared to accept the nomination and make a fighting speech -- and the squall moved on to Birmingham.

Up from Despair

As he stepped into a White House limousine with Mrs. Truman and daughter Margaret, Harry Truman was a cool and confident man. He boarded his special train for Philadelphia, changed to a white linen suit and two-toned shoes, then opened a black leather folder and went over his speech.

It was not a written speech; it was 18 pages of notes. Wavy-haired Clark Clifford, his White House adviser, and Judge Samuel I. Rosenman, who wrote many of Franklin Roosevelt's speeches, had given him a detailed outline, full of short, punchy sentences.

The biggest punch was in his sentence calling for a special session of Congress. That was the President's own idea and it was a well-kept secret. Less than half a dozen party bigwigs knew of his decision. Harry Truman was determined to surprise the delegates and show them that they had nominated a man with fight.

"I'm Not Mad at Them." It was 9:51, and raining, when the President's party reached Convention Hall. Inside the auditorium, bands, whistles, horns and sirens were rousing the delegates into the Truman demonstration, set off by Governor Phil Donnelly's nominating speech. The demonstration lasted 39 minutes, thus surpassing by seven minutes the longest dinning for any Republican candidate three weeks before.

But Harry Truman saw none of it. He had been shunted off to a stiflingly hot, concrete-floored room at the rear of the hall, where he held court for visitors. Jimmy Roosevelt and Chicago's ex-Mayor Ed Kelly dropped by, as did New York's Mayor Bill O'Dwyer. Only one top-drawer Southerner showed up: Alabama's Senator John Sparkman. But Harry Truman was not sore at anybody. To a friend, he said: "They may be mad at me, but I'm not mad at them. I believe in Christ."

It was almost 2 a.m. when, accompanied by Alben Barkley, he made his entrance into the hall. The delegates stood and cheered. Harry Truman laughed with the crowd as a sudden swarm of pigeons flew around him, then adjusted the microphones upward. The photographers howled; the raised microphones obscured their view of Harry. "I am sorry that (they) are in your way," said the President, "but they have to be where they are because I've got to be able to see what I'm doing -- as I always am able to see what I am doing."

"The Most Ungrateful People." Then, well knowing that the convention had been sitting for more than seven hours in the waning hope of hearing something to cheer about, he cried: "Senator Barkley and I will win this election and make these Republicans like it, don't you forget that." The delegates rose to a man; it was the first time they had heard anybody say "win" as if he meant it.

The President' voice was strong, his tone assertive. He was a new, militant Harry Truman. "Never in the world were the farmers . . . as prosperous (as now) . . . and if they don't do their duty by the Democratic Party they're the most ungrateful people in the world . . . And I'll say to labor just what I've said to the farmers."

He waded into the 80th Congress and the Republican platform. "They promised to do in that platform a lot of things I've been asking them to do and that they've refused to do when they had the power. The Republican platform cries about cruelly high prices. I have been trying to get them to do something about high prices ever since they met the first time . . . The Republican platform urges extending and increasing social security benefits. Think of that -- and yet when they had the opportunity, they took 750,000 people off our social security rolls. I wonder if they think they can fool the people with such poppycock as that."

As cries of "Pour it on 'em, Harry!" rose. Truman sprang his surprise:

"On the twenty-sixth day of July, which out in Missouri they call Turnip Day, I'm going to call that Congress back and I'm going to ask them to pass laws halting rising prices and to meet the housing crisis which they say they're for; an increase in the minimum wage, which I doubt very much they're for . . . an adequate and decent law for displaced persons in place of the anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic law which this 80th Congress passed." (Harry Truman slightly revised an old Missouri adage: "On the 25th of July, sow your turnips wet or dry." when correspondents asked the President, a onetime farmer, about his own turnip planting, he waved an arm wide as if he were sowing and said: "A half pound of seed will sow a couple of acres of turnips.")

The Battle Lines of 1932. After the bedlam of applause, he continued: "What that worst 80th Congress does in its special session will be the test . . . The American people . . . will decide on the record . . . The battle lines for 1948 are the same as they were back in 1932 . . . and I paraphrase the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt as he issued the challenge in accepting his (1932) nomination: This is more than a political call to arms. Give me your help. Not to win votes alone, but to . . . keep America secure and safe for its own people."

At 2:25 a.m. Harry Truman stepped back from the rostrum for his final two minutes of cheers. There was no doubt that he had lifted the delegates out of their doldrums. He had roused admiration for his political courage. Said one delegate: "You can't stay cold about a man who sticks his chin out and fights."

The Loyal Catcher

After the 30-minute ovation for Keynoter Alben Barkley on opening night, there was no longer any question about the nominee for Vice President. Rugged old Alben Barkley was beloved by many, trusted by most, disliked by none.

Harry Truman, who had preferred Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, made no further effort to buck the convention' wishes. Called by National Chairman Howard McGrath, Truman said: "I love him like a brother . . . If the convention wants Alben, of course he is acceptable."

Alben Barkley had not always felt that close to Harry Truman. In the last three years, as Truma's Senate leader, he was often caught flatfooted by Administration proposals of which he had had no previous notice. On one such occasion he angrily told a White House aide: "This is like playing catcher in a night ball game, I not only am not getting the signals, but someone actually turns out the lights when the ball is tossed."

Loyalty is the first page in ALben Barkley's book. In his 23 years in Congress, he dutifully voted as a party regular, was elected majority leader in 1937. No man was more popular with his colleagues. His good humor was legendary, his wit the Senate's best.

After his nomination, Alben Barkley talked informally about his service in the Senate with Harry Truman. Said he: "We're teammates now, and after the election we'll still be a team, in there pitching with the catcher understanding the signs of the pitcher, whether it will be a slow drop or a chin cutter."

The "Turnip Day" Session

Was there really a pressing national emergency? Harry Truman said there was. But who was talking -- the President or the politician? Harry Truman's call for a special session of Congress was made at a political convention; it would be judged largely on its political motives and for its political effect. Harry Truman, who, like all Presidents, occupies a dual position as head of the Government and leader of a political party, had used his powers as President to further his party's fortunes.

"This Petulant Ajax." The maneuver was almost unprecedented. Not since 1856 had a President called back Congress in an election year. (When Franklin Pierce ordered Congress back to pass an Army appropriation bill.) It was a daring stroke of political chicanery. For the moment, at least, Harry Truman had destroyed the notion that the Republican Party would win almost by default. Like an aggressive general, he had seized the offensive at a time and place of his own choosing. If anyone had thought that the President would fight a hopeless delaying action against the Dewey panders, it was now plain as a tank track that Harry Truman meant to go down fighting.

The cries from the opposition testified to the effectiveness of the maneuver. "This petulant Ajax from the Ozarks," warned New Hampshire's Senator Styles Bridges, would be answered by the "maddest Congress you ever saw," Southern Democrats were even hotter. Cried Georgia's Senator Walter George: "The South is not only over a barrel. It is pilloried. We are in the stocks."

The real Republican leaders were more cautious. The day after the President's call. Candidate Tom Dewey refused comment. He had already praised the record of the 80th Congress and declared that a special session would be "a frightful imposition." But the wires from Albany burned with telephone messages to House majority Leader Charles Halleck in Resselaer, Ind.; to Speaker Joe Martin at his summer home in Sagamore, Mass.; to other top Republican strategists. When Joe Martin finally spoke up, it was to warm: "There will be plenty of action. Like the boys at Bunker Hill, we'll wait to see the whites of their eyes."

From the 20-Yard Line. Harry Truman had taken a tremendous political gamble. One risk was that the special session might backfire on the Democrats: the Republicans might straightway haul up the President's civil rights program and let the Southern Democrats filibuster it -- and the session -- to death. Another was that Republican plans for more investigations of the Democratic Administration.

Said California's Jimmy Roosevelt: "It's like a football game, and deciding to pass on the 20-yard line. If you connect . . . you're a great quarterback. If the opposition intercepts . . . the quarterback is a bum."

Quarterback Truman could -- and would -- take credit for whatever Congress accomplished, would try hard to blame the Republicans for anything Congress failed to do.

It was aggressive partisan politics, but was it good for the nation? There was grave danger that the whole session would bog down in futile political wrangling. Said Michigan's Senator Arthur Vandenberg: "No good can come to the country from a special session of Congress which obviously stems solely from political motives." The greatest danger was that the world would misconstrue a purely domestic fight as evidence of fundamental disagreement over U.S. policies abroad.

Harry Truman had certainly stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum. From being a fading and futile minority President he had suddenly appeared in a new and more popular guise as an effective rabble-rouser. It remained to be seen whether the U.S. would agree with him that he was really a good boy.

Emma & the Birds

The event that might linger longest in the minds of the delegates, spectators, and television watchers of the Democratic Convention was neither Harry Truman's fighting speech nor the Southern schism. It was the pigeons.

President Truman and Senator Barkley had just come into the hall when Mrs. Emma Guffey Miller bustled up to the podium. the sister of Pennsylvania's ex-Senator Joseph Guffey, and a perennial committeewoman. Mrs. Miller calls herself the Old Grey Mare.

Plump, powdered and behatted, she briskly interrupted Chairman Sam Rayburn's introduction of Barkley, took over the microphone. One behalf of the Allied Florists of Philadelphia, she announced, she wanted to present President Truman with a large Liberty Bell made of flowers. Then, from beneath the bell came a shower of white pigeons (placed there by the florists' pressagent, who had billed them as "doves of peace").

With a flutter of wings, the pigeons swept up & out. The dignitaries on the platform cringed and shrank away like troops before a strafing attack. Torpid delegates broke into a roar of delight. One bird landed on the rostrum, where Chairman Sam Rayburn scooped it up and flung it roofward again. Two landed on a platform fan, stayed there with the breeze ruffling their tail feathers.

If the President had not won his audience right away, the pigeons might have given him real competition. As he spoke, pigeons teetered on the balconies, on folds in the draperies, on overhead lights, occasionally launched on a quick flight to a more pigeonly position. Long after the conventioneers had gone home and workers began to clean up for Henry Wallace's Third Party this week, pigeons still perched in the deserted hall.

THE SOUTH Tumult in Dixie

Three days after their walkout at Philadelphia, the rebellious Southerners met in Birmingham's red brick municipal auditorium. There they snake-danced under a portrait of Robert E. Lee, flourished Confederate battle flags, and shouted their defiance of Harry Truman and the rest of the Democratic Party.

But the meeting had more lung power than political strength. The delegates, except for those from Mississippi and Alabama, were political out and has-beens. Most bigwig Southern politicos pointedly stayed away. Even Arkansas' Governor Ben Laney, who had withdrawn as the rebels' favorite son at Philadelphia, remained aloof in his downtown hotel room, contented himself with offering advice.

"This Infamous Program." In the convention hall, Southern oratory boomed out like cannon fire. In the front row, Oklahoma's doddering ex-Governor "Alfalfa Bill" Murray beamed his approval, proudly recalled that "I'm the man who introduced Jim Crow in Oklahoma." Racebaiting Gerald L.K. Smith turned up as a spectator under the pseudonym of S. Goodyear. A group of Mississippi students set up a chant: "To hell with Truman."

With shouts of triumph, the delegates endorsed a "Declaration of Principles." It condemned "this infamous and iniquitous program (of) equal access to all places of public accommodation for persons of all races, colors, creeds and national origin." Then they nominated South Carolina's Governor J. Strom Thurmond for President and Mississippi's Governor Fielding Wright for Vice President.

Not a Bolt. Just what they hoped to accomplish -- or how they would go about it -- no one seemed to know. So far, only Alabama and Mississippi electors were pledged against Harry Truman. Other states might be persuaded to instruct their electors for the Thurmond-Wright ticket. But most office-holding Democrats would think twice before risking their federal and state patronage by aligning themselves with the irregulars. Said Arkansas' Laney pointedly: "Whatever is done must be done through and by the official Democrat organization in each respective state."

Even the rebels themselves were careful to leave the door ajar. Candidate Wright explained, with careful ambiguity: "This is not a bolt. This is not a fourth party. I say to you that we are the true Democrats of the Southland and these United States." To be doubly sure that there was a way of scrambling back, the rebels agreed to convene again next October to see how they were doing.

THE CONVERSION OF HARRY TRUMAN

2007-09-13T19:08:00.000-07:00

THE CONVERSION OF HARRY TRUMAN
by William E. Leuchtenburg

Harry Truman approached national politics with divided memories and divergent loyalties. He was reared in a border-state county as Southern in its sympathies as any Mississippi Delta town and by a family that shared Mississippi’s racial outlook and held dear the hallowed symbol of the Stars and Bars. Yet Truman also harbored a powerful nationalist strain. He never regretted that the Civil War had ended in a Union victory, and he came to view Lincoln as a man of heroic stature. Perhaps nothing revealed so well the conflicting tugs on him as a letter he wrote in 1941 to his daughter, Margaret: “Yesterday I drove over the route that the last of the Confederate army followed before the surrender. I thought of the heartache of one of the world’s great men on the occasion of that surrender. I am not sorry he did surrender, but I feel as your old country grandmother has expressed it—‘What a pity a white man like Lee had to surrender to old Grant.’”

Truman’s direct ancestors identified strongly with the slave South. All four of his grandparents were born in Kentucky, and when they migrated to Missouri in the 184Os, they brought their slaves with them. Truman’s grandparents received slaves as a wedding present, and in Missouri one of his grandfathers owned some two dozen slaves on his five-thousand-acre plantation. His parents, Truman recalled, were “a violently unreconstructed southern family” and “Lincoln haters.” His mother was an ardent admirer of William Quantrill, the Confederate guerrilla leader who, pillaging Lawrence, Kansas, in 1863, slew at least one hundred and fifty of its citizens, including women and children. One historian has called him “the bloodiest man in American history.”

Truman literally learned at his mother’s knee to share the South’s view of the War Between the States. He also acquired an abiding belief in white supremacy.
Truman’s Jackson County, though, revered Quantrill, because he had his counterpart in James Lane, chieftain of the pro-Union Jayhawkers. Truman’s grandmother never wearied of telling of the morning in 1861 when, with her husband away, Jim Lane, at the head of a scruffy band of horsemen wearing red sheepskin leggings, rode into her farmyard, ordered her to hop to it and cook for him and his men, then killed her hens, slaughtered all the livestock, including more than four hundred hogs, toted off the still-bloody hams, pocketed the family silver, and set the barns afire.

Truman’s family rehearsed, too, the awful time in 1863 when a Union commander, retaliating for Quantrill’s sack of Lane’s hometown of Lawrence, issued the notorious General Order No. 11, which routed all the people of Jackson County, the den of Quantrill’s bushwhackers, and herded them to a Federal fort, where for months they were compelled to live on handouts. As a girl of eleven Truman’s mother, Martha, trudged through the dust with her mother and five other children behind an oxcart carrying all that was left of a onceproud holding. After the Trumans and their neighbors had been evicted, Union forces set the countryside ablaze for miles. In later years Martha Truman would have no compunction about saying, “I thought it was a good thing that Lincoln was shot.”

The women in his family sought to imbue Truman with an intense dislike of the Union cause and its leaders. When in 1905 the twenty-one-year-old Truman, proud of his splendid new National Guard uniform, called on his grandmother, she gave him a onceover, then told him sternly, “Harry, this is the first time since 1863 that a blue uniform has been in this house. Don’t bring it here again.” More than four decades later, when the President’s mother was invited to the White House, one of her sons said that the only unoccupied bed was in the Lincoln Room. She retorted, “You tell Harry if he tries to put me in Lincoln’s bed, I’ll sleep on the floor.”

Truman literally learned at his mother’s knee to share the South’s view of the War Between the States. He grew up detesting the meddlesome abolitionists, decried the racial experimentation of Reconstruction, and sneered at Thaddeus Stevens, that “crippled moron.” He also acquired an abiding belief in white supremacy. In 1911, when he was twenty-seven, he wrote Bess Wallace: “I think one man is just as good as another so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman. Uncle Will says that the Lord made a white man from dust[,] a nigger from mud, then He threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman. He does hate Chinese and Japs. So do I. It is race prejudice I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion that negros [sic] ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia and white men in Europe and America.”

More than a quarter of a century later, in a letter home to his daughter about dining at the White House when he was a U.S. senator, he described the waiters, who he thought were “evidently the top of the black social set in Washington,” as “an army of coons,” and in a letter to his wife in 1939, he referred to “nigger picnic day.”

Yet if Truman absorbed his family’s and his county’s Southern heritage almost by osmosis, other legacies drew him toward identification not with a section but with the nation. Early in 1860 one of Truman’s great-uncles in Kentucky wrote his brother—Harry’s grandfather—in Missouri: “Andy … I am in hopes that you are not a seceder. 1 am for the union now and forever & so is old Ky.” The next year he wrote again: “Ky. is not willing to turn traitor yet awhile. God forbid that she ever should. You see I am a union man yet and expect to live and die one.… Are you still in … the union, or have you seceded? Oh I hope not. I hope you have not turned against this glorious union to follow Jeff Davis and Co.”

Truman’s forebear’s fierce loyalty to the Union, though, did not carry with it admiration for Abraham Lincoln. “My old woman is distant relation of old Abe Lincoln,” he explained in 1864, “but we are not Lincolnites.”

Truman’s capacity for perceiving a national interest transcending his family’s devotion to the Lost Cause owed a great deal to the fact that the community in which he was raised, instinctively Southern though it was, turned its face, in a highly self-conscious way, toward the West. Truman was keenly aware of Independence as the entrepôt to the Santa Fe, the Mormon, and the Oregon trails. As a boy he played on the tracks of the first railroad that ran west of the Mississippi, and in the 1920s he became president of the National Old Trails Association, which required him to travel around the country to promote using the routes of the historical trails to the West for interstate highways. On one of his trips he visited Boot Hill in Dodge City and encountered a gunslinger who had faced Bat Masterson. Truman was happy, he announced on one occasion, to be “back home—once more a free and independent citizen of the gateway city of the old Great West.”

If Truman’s family constantly reminded him of his Confederate heritage, it also relayed to him vivid recollections of his ancestors’ experiences on the frontier. His great-grandfather, the son of an adventurer allied with Daniel Boone, is said to have been the first white child born in Kentucky, and his great-grandmother wore a lace cap to conceal a scar from being scalped in an Indian raid in 1788. As a boy Truman heard these tales countless times.

But it was the saga of his grandfather Solomon Young that made the most lasting impression. He had first headed West in the “year of decision,” 1846, the same year as Francis Parkman’s journey on the Oregon Trail. A Conestoga wagon master who drove huge herds of cattle across the plains, he would leave one spring and not get home until the next. He was once away so long that his young daughter did not know him when he returned. He went West one year from Independence with no fewer than 1,500 head of cattle, and in the summer of 1860 he reached Salt Lake City with forty wagons and 130 yoke of oxen.

Truman took full political advantage of this frontier past. As he campaigned through the West in 1948, he claimed so many places were spots at which Solomon Young had stopped that reporters wondered how the man had ever made it to Sacramento. In that campaign, the veteran correspondent Richard L. Strout recalled, “the further west he got the more his western vernacular increased. … All the way across the West as his vernacular got thicker he told about Grandpa’s covered wagon trip to Oregon and produced an historical relative or two in virtually every area where he spoke.” Truman’s behavior in that campaign left observers at the time, and commentators since, bewildered about just where he located himself. If in talking to Western audiences he exploited his grandfather’s feats on the Great Plains, he took pains to remind Southern audiences of his Kentucky ancestry and his fondness for Stonewall Jackson.

To add to the confusion, some perceived him to be neither Western nor Southern. A Truman follower could call him at different spots in the same book a man “from a midcontinental state,” “a Midwesterner,” and “coming from a border state … neither a Northerner nor a Southerner.” The last comment is closest to the mark. He was a border stater, a man from Missouri.

But rather than being “neither a Northerner nor a Southerner,” he was both. He was in the position to be at the same time inside and outside the South, able to empathize with its hurts and its hopes but to surmise that its destiny lay in the finding of a place for itself within the nation.

Nonetheless, entering the United States Senate in 1935, Truman immediately gravitated toward the Southerners. They, in turn, accepted him as one of their own. Months before the 1944 campaign some Southerners had come to view Truman as a feasible vice-presidential nominee, and at the 1944 Democratic National Convention Southerners helped conspicuously in putting him across. Afterward Gov. Chauncey Sparks of Alabama said, “The South has won a substantial victory. … In the matter of race relations Senator Truman told me he is the son of an unreconstructed rebel mother.”

When Franklin Roosevelt’s death, on April 12, 1945, catapulted Truman into the White House, the white South felt confident that Truman would find its racial customs congenial. On the funeral train carrying FDR’s body, the Democratic senator from South Carolina Burnet Maybank assured a Southern friend, “Everything’s going to be all right—the new President knows how to handle the niggers.”

But on December 5, 1946, Truman demolished these comfortable assumptions by announcing the creation of a President’s Committee on Civil Rights. He had been moved to act after a delegation had called on him to protest outrages against blacks. He was appalled especially by an incident in Aiken, South Carolina, where, only three hours after a black sergeant had received his separation papers from the United States Army, policemen gouged out his eyes. In Georgia, Truman heard, the only black to have voted in his area was murdered by four whites in his front yard. In another Georgia county two black men were gunned down by a white gang, and when one of their wives recognized one of the killers, both the wives were shot to death too. On being told at a meeting with the National Emergency Committee Against Mob Violence of the blinding of the black sergeant, the President, his face “pale with horror,” rose and said, “My God. I had no idea it was as terrible as that. We’ve got to do something!”

The very next day he wrote his Attorney General, “I know you have been looking into the … lynchings … but I think it is going to take something more than the handling of each individual case after it happens—it is going to require the inauguration of some sort of policy to prevent such happenings.” On December 5 Truman signed an order creating a President’s Committee on Civil Rights, which he directed to look into not merely racial violence but the entire universe of civil rights. To carry out this huge assignment, he appointed fifteen prominent citizens under the chairmanship of the president of General Electric, Charles E. Wilson. Only two of the fifteen were from the South, and both of them were conspicuous liberals.

In October 1947 the committee issued its historic report, “To Secure These Rights.” It found that a gaping disparity between the country’s ideal of equality and its behavior had resulted in “a kind of moral dry rot which eats away at the emotional and rational bases of democratic beliefs.” Furthermore, it said, with an eye toward the Cold War, the United States “is not so strong, the final triumph of the democratic ideal is not so inevitable, that we can ignore what the world thinks of us or our record.”

The committee came forth with nearly three dozen recommendations, including expanding the civil rights section of the Justice Department, creating a permanent Commission on Civil Rights, enacting an anti-lynching statute and a law punishing police brutality, expanding the suffrage by banning the poll tax and safeguarding the right to cast ballots in primaries and general elections, and outlawing discrimination in private employment. It also favored “renewed court attack, with intervention by the Department of Justice,” on racially restrictive covenants in housing and ending “immediately” discrimination in the armed services and in federal agencies. Most controversial, it opposed not only racial discrimination but segregation. In particular, it advocated denying federal money to any public or private program that persisted in Jim Crow practices and making the District of Columbia a model for the nation by integrating all its facilities, including its public schools.

The publication of “To Secure These Rights” aroused a storm of criticism. The chairman of the Democratic committee in Danville, Virginia, wired Truman, “I really believe that you have ruined the Democratic Party in the South,” and a Baptist minister in Jacksonville, Florida, informed him: “If that report is carried out, you won’t be elected dogcatcher in 1948. The South today is the South of 1861.”

In one respect the shock expressed by the South is surprising, for Truman had built a sturdy record on behalf of civil rights as early as 1937. As senator he had twice cooperated with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in signing petitions to break filibusters over antilynching legislation, and less than two months after he took office as President he had written a public letter asking the House Rules Committee to advance legislation for a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC).

Yet until 1947 Southern politicians had tolerated such actions because they thought them merely expedient. They assumed that since, as senator, he came from a state with 130,000 black voters, he had to make a show of going along with civil rights bills that were doomed to defeat anyway. Even while supporting such measures, Truman had made a point of announcing that he did not question Jim Crow. In 1940 he told the National Colored Democratic Association of Chicago: “I wish to make it clear that I am not appealing for social equality of the Negro. The Negro himself knows better than that.”

His performance as President had also been ambivalent. He had asked for an FEPC bill, for instance, but then had run away from the fight to get it enacted.

Yet the white South had good reason to conclude that by 1947 Truman had changed. He had done so, in part, for political reasons. In World War 11 Southern blacks had migrated in large numbers to states, such as Michigan and California, with big blocs of electoral votes, and in the 1946 elections, dismayed by Southern racist demagogues, they had given evidence of drifting away from the Democrats. Even in the South black voters promised to be an increasing presence following a 1944 Supreme Court decision outlawing the white primary. Truman was motivated too by foreign policy concerns. Discrimination against people of color was proving an embarrassment to the government as it vied with the Soviet Union for the allegiance of Third World nations. Probably most important, though, was Truman’s outrage against the mistreatment of blacks. Truman had never been willing to condone denying to citizens, black or white, their fundamental rights, and as President he was expanding his awareness of the need to use federal power to secure to all Americans the liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. What Southern politicians thought could be explained only as self-interested bids for black votes actually represented both long-held beliefs and maturing convictions.

Once Truman set out on this new course, he would not relent. When Democratic leaders asked him to back down from his strong stand on civil rights, he replied: “My forebears were Confederates.… Every factor and influence in my background—and in my wife’s for that matter—would foster the personal belief that you are right.

“But my very stomach turned over when I learned that Negro soldiers, just back from overseas, were being dumped out of Army trucks in Mississippi and beaten.

“Whatever my inclinations as a native of Missouri might have been, as President I know this is bad. I shall fight to end evils like this.”

On February 2, 1948, Truman, undaunted by Southern criticism, sent a special message to Congress asking it to enact a number of the recommendations of his committee. Never before had a President dispatched a special message on civil rights. He called for an anti-poll tax statute, a permanent FEPC, an anti-lynching law, and creation of a Commission on Civil Rights. To end intimidation at the polls, he asked for legislation banning interference by either public officials or private citizens with the free exercise of the suffrage. He did not embrace his committee’s recommendation to deprive states of federal grants if they did not abandon Jim Crow, but in keeping with recent Supreme Court decisions, he did call upon Congress to forbid segregation in interstate travel. “As a Presidential paper,” the historian Irwin Ross has written, “it was remarkable for its scope and audacity.”

Once again the white South reacted with rage. A Georgia congressman said his section had been “kicked in the teeth” by Truman, the Nashville Banner denounced his proposals as “vicious,” and in Florida the State Association of County Commissioners declared that “all true Democrats” found the President’s program “obnoxious, repugnant, odious, detestable, loathsome, repulsive, revolting and humiliating.”

No state exceeded Mississippi in the fury of its rhetoric. “Not since the first gun was fired on Fort Sumter, resulting as it did in the greatest fratricidal strife in the history of the world, has any message of any President of these glorious United States … resulted in the driving of a schism in the ranks of our people, as did President Truman’s socalled civil rights message,” asserted Rep. William M. Colmer. Truman, agreed Rep. John Bell Williams, “has … run a political dagger into our backs and now he is trying to drink our blood.”

In a long speech on the Senate floor, Sen. James Eastland charged that the President’s program was an effort “to secure political favor from Red mongrels in the slums of the great cities of the East and Middle West” who planned to defile “the pure blood of the South.” The President’s “antisouthern measures,” he maintained, would destroy the South “beyond hope of redemption.” Indeed, he concluded: “This much is certain. If the present Democratic leadership is right, then Calhoun and Jefferson Davis were wrong. If the present Democratic leadership is right, then Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner were right, and Lee, Forrest, and Wade Hampton were wrong. If the President’s civil-rights program is right, then reconstruction was right. If this program is right, the carpetbaggers were right.”

At the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners in mid-February, Truman got rude reminders of Southern hostility to his program. In Washington at the most important dinner, a table at the Mayflower Hotel reserved and paid for by Sen. Olin Johnston of South Carolina was deliberately left vacant, in a conspicuous spot near the dais. Mrs. Johnston, a vice-chair of the dinner committee, decided not to attend, she explained, “because I might be seated next to a Negro.”

Truman, shocked by the ferocity of the assault on him and recognizing that his re-election was in jeopardy, sought to placate his Southern critics, but he would not appease them by abandoning fundamental principles. After a meal at the White House with members of the Democratic National Committee, Alabama’s national committeewoman lectured the President: “I want to take a message back to the South. Can I tell them you’re not ramming miscegenation down our throats? … That you’re not for tearing up our social structure—that you’re for all the people, not just the North?” Truman reached into his pocket, whipped out a copy of the Constitution, and read her the Bill of Rights. “I stand on the Constitution,” he replied. “I take back nothing of what I proposed and make no excuses for it.”

With Truman unrepentant, the South wrote him off. When he announced formally that he would run for re-election, John Bell Williams told his congressional colleagues that the President should “quit now while he is still just 20 million votes behind.” The South and the border states were going to cast 147 electoral votes in November, said Senator Johnston, “and they won’t be for Truman. They’ll be for somebody else. He ain’t going to be re-elected. He ain’t going to be renominated.” On the floor of the House, L. Mendel Rivers of South Carolina, shaking his finger, his voice trembling, cried, “Harry Truman is already a dead bird. We in the South are going to see to that.”

Sectional animosity enveloped the 1948 Democratic Convention that summer, a mood no one captured so vividly as H. L. Mencken. His dispatch of July 9 began, “With the advancing Confederate Army still below the Potomac, Philadelphia was steeped tonight in the nervous calm that fell upon it in the days before Gettysburg.” On the following day he wrote: “There was an air of confidence among the Yankee hordes already assembled … that the rebels would begin falling to fragments before they crossed the Chickahominy.” Though Mencken had no sympathy for Truman or his civil rights notions, his story a day later indicated that this confidence was justified. When the Southerners caucused in Philadelphia, they revealed that they had little strength outside a few Gulf states, he reported, adding: “After the count of bayonets … [Gov. Ben] Laney asked if there were any copperheads present.… A lone Trumanocide from Indiana then made himself known, and was politely applauded. But there were no others, and the gathering broke up in depressed spirits.”

The Southern Democrats continued to send off salvos against the President, but it did not take long for them to learn that their threat to deny him renomination was an empty one. At the Southern caucus Gov. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina insisted, “We have been betrayed and the guilty shall not go unpunished.” When the roll was called, however, Truman easily defeated the Southern favorite, Sen. Richard B. Russell of Georgia. Russell swept almost the entire South, but that is about all he got. So mutinous was the South, though, that the convention chairman did not dare attempt to make Truman’s nomination unanimous, as was traditionally done to signify party harmony.

Truman’s opponents sustained an even greater setback over the platform when a determined group of liberals pushed through a strong civil rights plank cosponsored by Hubert Humphrey, the mayor of Minneapolis. “As I walked with the young mayor … out of that hall,” one liberal activist later recalled, “I actually thought he was going to be shot. … It was very tense, very tense.”

Journalists and the Southern delegates alike agreed that, as Time recounted, “the South had been kicked in the pants, turned around and kicked in the stomach.” Sen. Walter George of Georgia, in what one writer has called “a splendid Catherine wheel of mixed metaphors,” expostulated: “The South is not only over a barrel—it is pilloried! We are in the stocks!” Having sustained severe losses, “the defeated army,” Mencken concluded, “retired … to a prepared position on the swamps bordering the Swanee River.”

After the civil rights plank was adopted, thirteen Alabama delegates (one of them was Birmingham’s police commissioner, Eugene ["Bull"] Connor) and all of the Mississippi delegation stalked out of the hall. The rebels reconvened in Birmingham to organize a States’ Rights party with the intent of defeating Truman and his program by gaining enough electoral votes to throw the contest into the House of Representatives, where the South would have substantial bargaining power. To lead them in the forthcoming campaign, the States’ Rights party, or Dixiecrats as they were commonly known, chose Strom Thurmond as their presidential candidate and Mississippi’s governor, Fielding Wright, as his running mate. Thurmond told seven thousand cheering, stomping delegates: “There are not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to admit the Negroes into our theaters, swimming pools, and homes. … We have been stabbed in the back by a President who has betrayed every principle of the Democratic party in his desire to win at any cost.”

The Dixiecrats constituted a serious threat to Truman’s bid for re-election. He already faced a formidable challenge from the Republican nominee, Gov. Thomas E. Dewey of New York, and the left wing of his party had broken away to back the Progressive nominee, Henry Wallace. Truman’s chances, slim at best, seemed negligible if he could not hold the South. But in Alabama the Dixiecrats kept the name of the President of the United States off the ballot altogether. In Mississippi and South Carolina, state Democratic committees selected Thurmond as their presidential nominee. Summing up the situation in the aftermath of the Philadelphia convention, the Chattanooga Free Press wrote: “This should be a day of mourning for Southern Democrats. Their only consolation is the grim satisfaction that President Truman and his unfaithful cohorts are going down in ignominious defeat.”

Truman, though, held firm to his commitment to bolster the constitutional rights of blacks. When an Army buddy advised him, from the perspective of a Southerner, not to press on civil rights, the President responded, “The main difficulty with the South is that they are living eighty years behind the times and the sooner they come out of it the better it will be for the country and for themselves.” He added: “When the mob gangs can take four people out and shoot them in the back, and everybody in the country is acquainted with who did the shooting and nothing is done about it, that country is in a pretty bad fix from a law enforcement standpoint.” Truman concluded by saying, "1 can’t approve of such goings on, and ... I am going to try to remedy it and if that ends up in my failure to be elected, that failure will be in a good cause.”

Truman meant what he said. On July 26 he issued two Executive orders. One, drawing upon his authority as Commander in Chief, affirmed the principle of equality of treatment in the armed forces without respect to race. The other directive forbade discrimination in the federal civil service. On October 29 he became the first President ever to solicit votes in Harlem.

Well before the Harlem speech, analysts gave Truman little chance of carrying the South. It came as no surprise, then, when in November he lost four Deep South states to Governor Thurmond. Louisiana gave Thurmond more than 49 percent of its votes, Truman less than 33 percent. In some northern parishes Truman ran third—behind both Thurmond and Dewey. He fared still worse in other states. In South Carolina Thurmond got 72 percent, Truman 24 percent; in Mississippi Thurmond received 87 percent to Truman’s miserable 10 percent. Alabama, of course, registered no votes at all for Truman.

Thurmond, though, gained no states beyond these four, as Truman astonished prognosticators by sweeping all the rest of the South and winning reelection. Most Southern Democrats could not bring themselves to bolt the party of their fathers to join the Dixiecrats, and they felt even less comfortable with switching to the Republicans, the party of Reconstruction.

The Truman era, however, proved to be the end of the Solid South, at least of a South solid for the Democrats. (To be sure, not until the 1960s, when Lyndon Johnson pushed through farreaching civil rights legislation, would the most serious cleavage occur, but Truman is the one who opened the fissure that would never be mended.) In 1948 four Deep South states had broken away to the Dixiecrats; in the next election, four more Southern states defected to the Republicans. So by 1952 eight of the former Confederate states had abandoned the Democrats. As one scholar has said: “The significant fact is that a Democratic President proposed to Congress the enactment of laws to improve the status of the Negro. This was heresy; the whole logic of the South’s loyalty to the Democratic party was the assumption that the party was pledged to leave race relations in the hands of the states. When the Democratic party ceased to be the party of white supremacy, the deepest basis of Southern solidarity had been destroyed.”

In one respect, his opponents in the South misperceived Truman, for he never wholly abandoned the racist view he had absorbed from his family or his sympathy for the Southern tradition of localism. Even after blacks hailed him as their champion, he continued to sprinkle his private conversation with terms such as nigger. He not only opposed the 1960s sit-ins but thought they might well be Communist-inspired. In 1961 he told reporters that Northerners who went south on Freedom Rides were meddling outsiders bent on stirring up mischief where they did not belong, and in 1965 he called the Selma to Montgomery march “silly” and Martin Luther King, Jr., a “troublemaker.”

Yet Truman’s foes had good reason for thinking him their nemesis, because if he had a Confederate lineage he also felt intense loyalty to the Constitution and the Union. He especially revered the memory of Andrew Jackson, a Southerner but a nationalist. Eventually he was even able, despite his family background, to bring himself to cherish the Great Emancipator.

Shortly after departing the White House, Truman reflected: “Old Abe Lincoln is … a president I admire tremendously. In a way, it’s surprising … because I was born and raised in the South … and a lot of southerners still don’t feel that way about him at all. And that included the Truman family, all of whom were against him. Some of them even thought it was a fine thing that he got assassinated.

“I realized even as a child that was pretty extreme thinking or worse; let’s just call it dumb thinking, or no thinking at all. But it still took me a while to realize what a good man Lincoln really was, with a great brain and even greater heart, a man who really cared about people and educated himself to the point where he knew how government should work and tried his best to make ours work that way. I felt just the opposite of the rest of the Truman family after I studied the history of the country and realized what Lincoln did to save the Union. That’s when I came to my present conclusion, and that was a long, long time ago.… Lincoln was a great and wonderful man in every way.”

Truman’s reading in history and in documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights had led him to question the assumptions on which he was raised. He acted as he did not because he believed in the social equality of the races, not because he was “anti-South,” but because he took solemnly the oath he had sworn to sustain the Constitution.

As a border-state Democrat Truman carried within him the conflicts that divided not only Missouri but the country. He had been nurtured on the valor of Robert E. Lee, the iniquity of the Union raiders, the melancholia of the Lost Cause. Only someone who understood himself to be a Southerner could have felt such empathy for the traditions of the South. Yet he also had a schoolboy’s love of the history not of a section but of a nation, took pride in having been a doughboy in the Army of the United States of America, and viewed the Constitution as sacred text. That nationalist theme, a minor one when he was a child, was the one that prevailed in the end. As a consequence Truman permanently altered the character of Southern politics. For the first time since Reconstruction, he made civil rights a proper concern for the national government, and for the first time ever the Democratic party became the main protagonist for the rights of blacks. The South, and the nation, would never be the same again.

William E. Leuchtenburg, William Rand Kenan Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is president of the American Historical Association. An expanded version of this essay, which was one of the three Fleming Lectures in Southern History he delivered at Louisiana State University in April, will be published by LSU Press in Three “Southern ” Presidents.

Benjamin Tyndle Fooks

2007-09-13T19:06:00.000-07:00

(The following text is excerpted verbatim from the "Fooks Family", by Herbert C. Fooks)

Benjamin Tyndle Fooks was born July 15, 1901 on the Fooks farm in McCracken County near Paducah, Kentucky. He was the second child and first son of Terrell D. and Flora Ellen Fooks.

The family moved to Camden, Arkansas in 1914. Tyndle entered High School in Camden, completing his course in 1918. After finishing high school, he returned to Paducah, where he entered business college to study bookkeeping and accounting. After completing a short business course, he secured a bookkeeping job which he held until early 1919. On moving to Camden, T. D. Fooks established a sawmill and lumber business. In 1919 Tyndle Fooks returned to Camden and entered the lumber business with his father.

In the fall of 1920, having felt called to the Methodist ministry, Tyndle Fooks entered Moody Bible Institute in Chicago for study. After pursuing his ministerial studies for about three months, Tyndle decided that a career in the ministry was not advisable and he left the Institute. However, his interest in Methodism has increased through the years and he is today one of Arkansas' most prominent Methodist Laymen.

For several years young B. T. Fooks worked in the lumber industry. As a wholesale lumber dealer, he purchased lumber in the South and sold it to dealers, food packers, and other industrial users in Chicago. He operated two different sawmills of his own in Louisiana and assisted his father in the operation of the Camden mill. He established and operated a wholesale lumber business in Memphis, Tennessee, but finally sold it and returned to Camden in 1925.

In June, 1923, Benjamin Tyndle Fooks was married to Gulnare Thornton of Camden, a lovely young girl with whom he had become acquainted during high school days. They have two children, a son, Robert Hampton (by adoption), and a daughter, Frances Sue.

On returning to Camden in 1925, B. T. Fooks purchased a service station in the city. In February, 1926, he sold his service station to purchase a small soft drink bottling plant, thus embarking him on his career in the soft drink industry. Expansion of these activities began in 1927 when Tyndle Fooks purchased a second bottling plant in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. Later, in 1928, he purchased a third plant in Hope, Arkansas. When the crash of 1929 came, young Fooks was forced to curtail his operations. He closed the Hope plant and sold the Arkadelphia plant. Being entirely unfamiliar with the beverage industry when he entered it in 1926, Fooks studied it diligently, reading all he could about it. In 1928 he first began experimenting with with the manufacture of flavors -- all of these being used in his own plants until 1930. It was in 1930 that he established the B. T. Fooks Manufacturing Company which was the predecessor of The Grapette Company, Incorporated. By 1939 "Fooks Flavors" had become widely known throughout the soft drink industry. Of the 150 different types and strengths of soft drink flavors which he manufatured and sold, grape was by far the most popular.

Realizing the potentialities of an outstanding grape drink, Mr. Fooks devoted a great deal of time and research to perfecting such a beverage. After thousands of experimants, he developed the unusually distinctive taste quality of the grape soft drink which is known internationally today as "Grapette". In May, 1940, Grapette was first placed on the market in Camden. It was the beginning of an unusually successful business. In 1950, after ten short years, Grapette has become a most popular grape flavored beverage. The Grapette Company has become the seventh ranking beverage company in the industry, and B. T. Fooks has become one of Arkansas' most outstanding business men.

He is a generous benefactor and has organised The Grapette Foundation to handle his contributions to charities and other worthy causes.

As a church man, Mr. Fooks is an active leader in his Camden church, state church activities, and national church conferences. He has represented Arkansas Methodism at both the Methodist Jurisdictional Conference and the Methodist General Conference. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of Southern Methodist University and a member of that group's executive committee. He is also a member of the Board of Trustees of Hendrix College, Conway, Arkansas. He is Chairman of the Board of the Arkansas Methodist Hospital.

A past president of the Camden Chamber of Commerce, Mr. Fooks is also a leader in the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce and the Arkansas Economic Council. He is a member of the Board of the Arkansas Public Expenditure Council and also a member of the Arkansas Free Enterprise Association. He is director of the Mid-West Research Institute. At the present time he is working on a joint project of the University of Arkansas and the Committee for Economic Development. He has recently been named to the Board of Directors of the National Association of Manufacturers.

Under the governorship of Ben Laney, Mr. Fooks served as chairman of Arkansas' first Resources and Development Committee. It was during his association with this commission that Arkansas realized its greatest growth and prosperity. In 1944, Mr. Fookks was a presidential elector and in 1948 a delegate to the National Democratic Convention.

Mr. Fooks is a 32nd Degree Mason, a Shriner, a director of Camden's Citizens National Bank, president of the Camden Community Hotel, Inc., and a member of the Maryland Society Sons of the American Revolution.

During the year 1950, Mr. Fooks has established near Camden one of the finest Aberdeen Angus herds in the South. He was recently named a director of the Southwest Regional Aberdeen Angus Association. His "Fooks Farms" is one of the show pieces of Southwest Arkansas.

Tyndle seems to have inherited his love of good cattle from his grandfather, William Franklin Fooks of near Paducah, Kentucky. As a little boy, he liked to go to his grandfather's farm to see the cattle. Two of his most prized cattle are on the Fooks Angus Farms, near Camden, Arkansas. These are shown herein in the pictorial section. This farm consists of approximately 1500 acres and about 300 head of Aberdeen-Angus cattle.

School officials at Hoxie stood up to segregationists

2007-09-13T19:03:00.001-07:00

REMEMBERING ARKANSAS : School officials at Hoxie stood up to segregationists
TOM W. DILLARD

Posted on Sunday, September 2, 2007

If I ever write a book about heroes

of Arkansas history, K. E. Vance will

receive his full due. In 1955 Vance was the superintendent of schools at Hoxie, a small community bordering the town of Walnut Ridge in northeast Arkansas, when the school board voted to end racial segregation immediately. When a few local segregationists, aided considerably by “outside agitators” from Little Rock, Memphis and elsewhere, demanded that the board resign, Vance announced that the board acted for three reasons, one of which was that it was right in the sight of God. When the agitation continued, the school board went to court and won. This development in Arkansas integration history has been on my mind lately for two reasons. First, I have been imagining how differently the integration of the Little Rock public schools would have proceeded two years later if the leading authorities had boldly stood up to the segregationists who were trying to keep Central High School segregated. Second, Molly Boyd, one of my colleagues at the University of Arkansas Libraries, and I have been putting together a commemoration of the 1957 crisis in which the emphasis is on several successful integration efforts during the decade leading up to the crisis. It has led to an interesting series of discoveries.

It is only fitting that the first public educational institutions in Arkansas to be integrated were the University of Arkansas School of Law in Fayetteville and the University Medical School in Little Rock, both of which accepted a single black student in 1948. Silas Hunt, a graduate of Arkansas AM&N College in Pine Bluff (now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff ) and a World War II disabled veteran, was accepted by the law school on Feb. 2, 1948. According to Richard A. Buckelew’s entry on Hunt in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture, this was “the first time a black student had been officially admitted to a white Southern university since Reconstruction and the first ever admitted for graduate or professional studies.”

At first Hunt was taught in a segregated classroom in the school’s basement, but soon that arrangement fell apart after several white students joined him in the classes. Perhaps his war service, which included receiving severe wounds in the Battle of the Bulge and being left for dead, gave him an inner strength that belied his calm demeanor. Hunt died before the school year ended, a sad and premature death of a real pioneer.

Edith Irby, a graduate of Langston High School in Hot Springs and Knoxville College in Tennessee, was accepted by numerous medical schools, but she wanted to go to medical school in her home state. Like Hunt, Irby was of quiet disposition, and she accepted the segregated dining and bathroom facilities, but these restrictions were soon removed. She graduated in 1952, interned at University Hospital in Little Rock, practiced in Hot Springs, and then moved to Houston, where she continues to be a successful and popular practitioner.

The integration of the two professional schools in previously segregated Arkansas caught the attention of the national press. Opposition was muted, while Arkansas was portrayed as setting an example for ending school segregation in the rest of the former Confederate states. Much of this was due to the moderating influence of Gov. Sidney S. McMath, who succeeded “Dixiecrat” Gov. Ben Laney in 1949.

The public schools accepted integration more slowly than the professional schools. But, once the U. S. Supreme Court ruled in May 1954 that segregated schools were unconstitutional, Arkansas schools began to take action. The first school board to vote to integrate was at Sheridan, the county seat of Grant County south of Little Rock. A quick protest by about 100 segregationists caused the Sheridan school board to rescind their decision. Charleston, a small town in Franklin County, was next. On Aug. 23, 1954, 11 black students reported for classes in the Charleston elementary and secondary schools. This is believed to be the first school district in the former Confederacy to integrate all its grades. The whole process at Charleston was kept very low key, and little press coverage resulted.

The Fayetteville school board voted to desegregate within a week of the 1954 Supreme Court ruling. Unlike Charleston, Fayetteville authorities publicly announced they intended to integrate the high school in September 1954. On Sept. 10, seven black students began classes at Fayetteville High School. The Arkansas Democrat reported that “breaking one of Dixie’s oldest and most prized traditions was accepted by both Negro and white students with an air of indifference.”

Hoxie was the next district to decide to integrate. On a swelteringly hot July 11, 1955, 21 black children entered the previously segregated schools. Everything went fine until Life magazine ran a feature on the integration of Hoxie. It was then that the segregationists, led by representatives from Little Rock of White America, Inc., and the Arkansas White Citizens Council, began to actively oppose the school board decision in Hoxie.

The segregationists chose the wrong school board when they took on the Hoxie schools. The board was a strong one, with prominent businessman Howard Vance, the brother of Superintendent Vance, serving as president. When the segregationists threatened massive resistance, the board hired two prominent lawyers and filed suit in federal court. Eventually the courts issued an injunction against the segregationists, and Hoxie became the first school in the Arkansas Delta to be integrated. All of this occurred before the Central High crisis in 1957. That is why the commemoration I am helping plan for mid-September in Fayetteville is titled “Before Little Rock.” The Little Rock crisis did not have to happen. Anyone wishing to attend the commemoration should contact me. Tom W. Dillard is the founding editor of the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture (www. encyclopediaofarkansas. net ) and head of the special collections department at the University of Arkansas Libraries in Fayetteville. E-mail him at

tdillar@uark. edu

States Rights Party

2007-09-13T19:01:00.000-07:00

SR

Description The States Rights Party was a political movement in the years 1948 to 1964, primarily in the southern states. The party was sometimes called the "Dixiecrat" Party, although the latter term is not limited to members of the States Rights Party.

The States' Rights Party broke from the Democratic Party in 1948. The Party opposed racial integration and wanted to retain Jim Crow laws and racial segregation. The party slogan was "Segregation Forever!"

The party was formed after thirty-five delegates from Mississippi and Alabama walked out of the 1948 Democratic National Convention. Even before the convention started, the Southern delegates were upset by President Harry S. Truman's executive order to racially integrate the armed forces. The walkout was prompted by a controversial speech by Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota urging the party to adopt an anti-segregationist plank in the platform.

After President Truman's endorsement of the civil rights plank, Gov. J. Strom Thurmond (D-SC) helped organize the seceding delegates into a separate party, whose platform was ostensibly concerned with states' rights. The Dixiecrats held their convention in Birmingham AL on 7/17/1948, where they nominated Thurmond for president and Gov. Fielding L. Wright (D-MS) for vice president. Dixiecrat leaders worked to have Thurmond-Wright declared the "official" Democratic Party ticket in Southern states. They succeeded only in Alabama and Mississippi; in other states, they ran as a third-party ticket. These included Arkansas, whose governor-elect, Sid McMath, a young prosecutor and decorated World War II Marine veteran, vigorously supported Truman in speeches across the region, much to the consternation of the sitting governor, Ben Laney, an ardent Thurmond supporter. Laney later used McMath's pro-Truman stance against him during his 1950 re-election bid which McMath won handily. Efforts to paint other Truman loyalists as "turncoats" generally failed, although the seeds of discontent were planted which in years to come took their toll on Southern moderates, among them Congressman Brooks Hays of the Second (central) District of Arkansas, whose efforts at reconciliation during the 1957 Little Rock School Crisis made him vulnerable to defeat in 1958 by a segregationist surrogate fielded by forces loyal to then-Governor Orval Faubus, whose justification for using the national guard to bar entry to black pupils in defiance of a federal court order echoed much of the 1948 Dixiecrat platform.

On election day 1948, the Thurmond-Wright ticket carried the previously solid Democratic states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina, receiving 1,169,021 popular votes and 39 electoral votes. Since the party saw itself as the Southern version of the Democratic Party, the SRP did not sponsor candidates for other offices in 1948.

Conservative Iowa Democrats formed a States Rights chapter and ran candidates in the election of 1950. Ernest J. Seeman, the nominee for U.S. Senate, received 571 votes, and Stanley S. Baker, candidate for U.S. House, received 147 votes.

In 1952, the hard right supported Douglas MacArthur in his unofficial bid for the Presidency. MacArthur was sponsored by three different parties, each with its own nominee for vice president.

The second States Rights Party National Convention was held in the Mosque Auditorium, Richmond VA, on 10/15/1956. An earlier convention of the Constitution Party held in Ft. Worth nominated T. Coleman Andrews for President. However, J. Bracken Lee of Utah wanted to hold a broader-based convention of the far-right. He helped to organize the SRP convention, held just three weeks before the election. The convention endorsed Andrews and nominated Sen. Thomas H. Werdel (R-CA) for vice president.

The third States Rights Party National Convention was held in Dayton OH on 3/19-20/1960. The convention was attended by delegates from 28 states. Given the more liberal leaning of the major contenders for the nominations of the two major parties, the SRP felt they had a chance of running a strong ticket for the 1960 election. They nominated Gov. Orval E. Faubus (D-AR) for President and John G. Crommelin (AL) for vice president. Faubus rejected the nomination but appeared on the ballot in several states nevertheless. The party won 209,314 votes, placing third behind the two major parties.

The fourth and last States Rights Party National Convention was held in Louisville KY on 3/1-2/1964. The party nominated John Kasper of TN for president and Jesse B. Stoner of GA for vice president. Two events happened in 1964 that worked together to kill the SRP (which by this time was operating under the name of the National States Rights Party). First, the Republian Party nominated Sen. Barry Goldwater for President, cutting into the same base of supporters as the SRP. Second, northern right-wing parties held separate conventions and nominated other right-wing candidates such as Joseph Lightburn and T. Coleman Andrews. Kasper received only 6,953 votes. Jack Gunderson, the party's other candidate of 1964, received 644 votes in his race for the U.S. House from MT. The remnants of the party were absorbed into George Wallace's American Independent Party in 1968.

Worst on job growth

2007-09-13T18:58:00.000-07:00

Worst on job growth

Published 8/17/2006
If you are a business conservative like the people who run the Arkansas Policy Foundation, the true measure of a chief executive is how much economic growth he produced when he was in charge — at IBM, the White House or the state Capitol.

So the Policy Foundation, the little Republican-leaning think tank at Little Rock, did a study of the 11 Arkansas governors since World War II using the monthly federal employment statistics from January 1945 through last month. And here’s the amazing, unfathomable and impressive thing: It made the results public!

Depending on your bias, the results were predictable or completely counter-intuitive.

The worst governor? Mike Huckabee, hands down.

The best pro-growth governor? The liberal Dale Bumpers, 1971-75.

They were not aberrations, either. Liberal, activist Democratic governors produced more new jobs for Arkansans on average every year that they were in office than Republican and conservative Democratic governors, by far.

Governors who talked endlessly about building a solid business climate and creating jobs, starting with “Business Ben” Laney (1945-1949) and ending with Mike Huckabee, fared poorly. Liberals like Bumpers, David Pryor and Sid McMath did magnificently, far outpacing the national growth rate.

Bumpers had annoyed chambers of commerce a few weeks after taking office in 1971 by announcing that he was not going to “chase smokestacks” but would instead concentrate on protecting the environment from industrial pollution and insidious development and investing in education and health care through progressive taxes. He did what he promised, and figure this: The best eight years of job growth in Arkansas history followed.

So if the Labor Department statistics seem to disprove the Policy Foundation’s thesis that taxes and activist government kill growth and jobs, why did it make the study public? Could it have been to embarrass Huckabee and thwart his run for the presidency? The study will show up soon in the on-line literature of the Club for Growth, which opposes Huckabee as a tax-and-spend liberal. Huckabee maintains that he is the most conservative governor in Arkansas history.

Huckabee comes out worst in the study because he is the only one of the 11 governors whose job-growth rate — slightly under 1 percent a year — has been lower than the national rate for the same period. The Policy Foundation did not report it, but Huckabee’s rate would have been half again better — 1.5 percent — if he could count only his first four-and-a-half years, when Arkansas shared just a little of the great national boom in jobs during the Clinton administration. During the five-and-a-half bust years of George W. Bush, Huckabee’s Arkansas barely scored with a growth rate of only three-tenths of 1 percent, much of that new government jobs. That was terrible, but at least it was a trifle better than the nation as a whole.

Here are the Policy Foundation’s job-growth rates for governors, from top to bottom, with the simultaneous national rates in parentheses:

• David Pryor, 1975-79 — 5.4 percent (3.7)

• Orval E. Faubus, 1955-67 — 5.1 (2.6)

• Dale Bumpers, 1971-75 — 5.0 (2.4)

• Sid McMath, 1949-53 — 4.1 (3.1)

• Bill Clinton, 1979-81; 1983-92 — 3.5 (2.1)

• Jim Guy Tucker, 1993-96 — 3.4 (2.7)

• Ben T. Laney, 1945-49 — 3.3 (1.9)

• Winthrop Rockefeller, 1967-71 — 2.8 (2.1)

• Mike Huckabee, 1996-2006 — 1.0 (1.3)

• Francis Cherry, 1953-55 — 0.6 (-0.8)

• Frank D. White, 1981-83 — -0.8 (-1.2).

To recapitulate their careers, Faubus, Bumpers, McMath and Clinton raised taxes significantly, Pryor came along on the heels of four years of tax increases and Tucker raised taxes slightly and battled fruitlessly for the largest highway tax program in history. Laney, Cherry and White were tightfisted advocates of a pro-business, low-tax government. Rockefeller was the most liberal governor in history but failed to enact his giant tax program. Huckabee talked anti-tax but raised taxes and borrowed more than the others.

Cherry and White, who made industrial development his life, may be excused because their short regimes were dogged by national recessions. But all except Tucker governed some during national recessions, Bumpers and Cherry the longest — a year each.

There is a caveat to the liberal growth years. Even in the best of times all the new jobs generally were low-paying ones, and Arkansas gained little ground on the national well-being.

So does the Policy Foundation’s painstaking work on the governors mean that higher taxes and wider government investment almost uniformly pay off with more vigorous economic growth, or does it mean nothing at all?

Nothing at all is probably closer to the truth. National economic policies may shape the business cycle to a considerable degree, but the most earnest and effective governor is limited in what he can do unless he can set in motion policies that sharply raise the education level and well-being of the people. No one can claim to have done that.

Huckabee’s best answer for now is to give him 20 years and see if the taxes, public debt and investment in kids’ health and schooling means prosperity. See if that plays with Republican voters.

http://www.arktimes.com/articles/articleviewer.aspx?ArticleID=56d253b2-9017-41d1-bdbd-0d540a5df15e

LANEY AWARD

2007-09-13T18:57:00.000-07:00

LANEY AWARD

This award was established by Sigma Chapter in 2000 to honor Sigma alumnni that have demonstrated outstanding leadership and achievement. The award is named in honor of alumnus Ben Laney (1924) who served as Governor of Arkansas from 1945 to 1949.

Ben Laney was born in 1896 in rural Ouachita County. He joined the Navy in 1918 and served in World War I. After the war, he returned to Arkansas and enrolled at UCA. Before graduating, he worked on the Echo staff and served as senior class president in 1924. After graduation, Laney was a successful businessman in Conway and then Camden. His first venture into politics occurred when he was elected Mayor of Camden in 1935. He was later elected to two terms as Governor of Arkansas. In addition, he was offered a nomination for President of the United States, but declined the nomination. During his tenure as Governor, "business" Ben Laney, as he was called, oversaw the passage of the Revenue Stabilization Act. The construction of the Governor's Mansion and War Memorial Stadium were set forth during his time in office. Laney passed away in 1977.

Winners of the Laney Award receive a plaque and their names are listed on a plaque that hangs in Buffalo Alumni Hall at UCA.

Recipients

2000 – Sheffield Nelson (1963) - Became President & CEO of Arkla Gas Co. at age 30; Republican nominee for Governor of Arkansas in 1990 and 1992; named UCA Distinguished Alumnus in 1986.

2001 – Dee Brown (1931) - Award winning author of numerous critically acclaimed books about the American West, including the landmark "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee"; named UCA Distinguished Alumnus in 1988.

2002 – Don King (1985) - Very active alumnus for many years involved with undergraduate chapter, housing project, alumni association, and alumni golf tourneys. Died while saving the life of a fraternity brother’s daughter in a boating accident in 2001.

2003 – H. B. Hardy, Jr. (1948) - Served at UCA in a number of capacities for 36 years, including teacher, dean of undergraduate studies, interim president; served fraternity as advisor for many years; named UCA Distinguished Professor Emeritus in 2001.

2004 - Buddy Harding (1951) - Inducted into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame in 2002 for his achievements as a player and coach; lettered in basketball and track at UCA then excelled as Coach at Clarendon High School in football, basketball and track.

2005 - Bill Johnson (1960) - Native of Conway, longtime bank president and community leader in Conway; radio voice of UCA football games for over 40 years; served on UCA Board of Trustees for 14 years; served on State Board of Higher Education.

2006 - Jim Brewer (1949) - Served as general manager of Conway Corporation
from 1965 to 1991; longtime community leader in Conway area; Conway's water
supply, Brewer Lake, is named in his honor; UCA’s Brewer-Hegeman Hall
co-named in his honor.

Adkins, Laney Support States' Rights Stand

2007-09-13T18:55:00.000-07:00

Adkins, Laney Support States' Rights Stand
PHYLLIS DILLAHA
(DEMOCRAT STAFF WRITER)

Two former Arkansas governors are solidly for states' rights, but are cautious about giving any specific suggestions on the Little Rock integration situation.
Both Homer Adkins and Ben Laney speaking to the Lions Club yesterday told the Democrat that they could not comment on the crisis. Adkins stated he felt it wasn't his position and that he wasn't up to date on it all since he had been out of the state, while Laney said "it is a very serious situation" that he could not comment on because only the governor has all the facts.
Speaking to the group on "If I were Governor Again" each went after the federal government. "The federal government is becoming a policeman to harass the people at every crossroad," Adkins told the Lions.

Adkins For Convention.
"If I were governor again I would again attempt to call a constitutional convention with the governors of the other states to preserve and prevent encroachment of states' rights," he said.
"The country is drifting toward a centralized government," Laney said, "and we might as well lock the state house doors and forget state boundaries. We'd be better off if we'd never gotten a dollar turned back from Washington."
Laney expressed his theory that the people who are governed least are governed best, and explained "you cannot control or regulate everything people are going to do without sacrifice or personal liberty."
Laney wouldn't exactly state what he would do if he were governor again, but said two things must be considered. "What a man is when he is governor and public opinion while he's in office." He stated his beliefs and asked his audience to decide what he would do.
He stated that he was against getting rich now by owing more.

Not For Debts.
"I believe it is morally wrong to load the next generation with debts just because we want something now," he said. "We cannot spend ourselves into prosperity." He said he believed that taxation should support only the necessary agencies.
Laney said he believes in encouraging thrift, strict economy, new industry, more jobs and not more on the welfare rolls, preservation of natural resources, and protecting and maintaining personal liberty. It also stated that he wanted a new interpretation of the 5th amendment and its use because "its usage has become a farce."
Adkins said if he were in office he would again use his influence to sponsor as amendment for a four-year term for state and county officials, a comprehensive mental health program to treat the acute mentally ill with a mobile unit to help in treatment across the state and to prevent people from entering the State Hospital.
"And I would do as I did before -- save 25 cents out of every dollar from the state treasury for a rainy day," he concluded.
The two spoke with almost campaign vigor as they presented their ideas. Adkins was governor from 1941-1945 and Laney was in office from 1945-1949.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reprinted from the Arkansas Democrat, September 19, 1957

Ben Laney Bridge

2007-09-13T18:52:00.000-07:00

Facts
Overview
Three-span pony truss bridge over Ouachita River on US 79B
Status (as of 2001)
Open to traffic
History
Construction started December 8, 1945 by the D.F. Jones Construction Co.; dedicated April 16, 1947, replacing the earlier Martin Bridge
Recognition
Posted to the National Register of Historic Places on June 9, 2000
Name origin
Named for Benjamin Travis Laney, Governor of Arkansas at the time and a native of Camden
Approximate latitude, longitude
+33.59671, -92.81803 (decimal degrees)
33°35'48" N, 92°49'05" W (degrees°minutes'seconds")
Design
Three riveted, 7-panel Pratt pony trusses
Dimensions
Main span length: 128.9 ft.
Total length: 999.7 ft.
Deck width: 23.9 ft.
Inspection (as of 2001)
Appraisal: Functionally obsolete
Sufficiency rating: 55.20
Inventory numbers
AHTD 02466
NRHP 00000633

Categories
- 7-panel Pratt pony truss
- Multi-span pony truss
- Pratt pony truss

Sources
- Wayne Kizziar - wayne1701 [at] cableone [dot] net

Laney Building on the UCA Campus

2007-09-13T18:50:00.000-07:00

LANEY CHEMISTRY BUILDING
1947 First Laney

1994 Second Laney

Ben T. Laney was a 1924 graduate of UCA and was elected Governor of Arkansas in 1944. He is best known for creating the Revenue Stabilization Act. This act forbids the Arkansas Legislature from becoming involved in deficit spending. His gubernatorial papers are in the UCA Archives.

Hot Rock of Hot Springs

2007-09-13T18:46:00.000-07:00

Hot Rock of Hot Springs
Monday, Aug. 07, 1950
Time Magazine

"It's not a question of who will win," said Sid McMath with a jaunty grin. "Instead, it's a matter of adding to our majority." Handsome, breezy Sidney Sanders McMath, a hot rock from Hot Springs, was out to win his second term as governor of Arkansas.

He hustled around the state in a chartered plane, reciting his achievements and promising more of the same. At every stop he also took a couple of lusty licks at Benjamin Travis Laney, the wealthy, 53-year-old former governor and Dixiecrat leader who had come out of political retirement to seek a third term and save Arkansas from Sid McMath and those Fair Deal radicals in Washington. Everywhere McMath went, he wore the same old blue suit, red tie and dilapidated Panama. He pumped the hands of the menfolk and introduced himself with a hearty "I'm Sid McMath." For the women, it was always a silken "I'm Sid McMath, honey."

To each of the state's 488,000 qualified Democratic voters, McMath mailed a gaudy, eight-page comic book relating the saga of 38-year-old Sid McMath. There was McMath the poor boy, born in a dogtrot cabin on an Arkansas farm; McMath the amateur boxer, and honor student at the state university; Major McMath the Marine Corps hero, with the Silver Star for bravery on Bougainville; McMath the racket-busting prosecutor who cleaned up gambling in Hot Springs; McMath the family loving governor.*

McMath made mu:h of what he was going to do for Arkansas in the way of schools, roads and public works. It was good campaign talk in a state that runs 47th in many measurements of standards of living. Arkansawyers have a wry joke about it: "Thank God for Mississippi."

When Dixiecrat Laney tried to picture Sid McMath as a traitor to the South, supple Sid declared against such pet Truman projects as FEPC and compulsory health insurance, but still capitalized on his closeness to Harry Truman. Ben plaintively confessed that he had never learned "this glamour-boy, superman style of politicking," and even before primary day admitted: "He has had only 18 months in which to make political enemies. I had four full years."

Last week Arkansas voters went to the polls, by a two to one majority gave Glamour-Boy McMath his second term in office, and a feeling that the best of his career was still ahead of him.

* Not shown in the happy family strip: the shotgun killing of McMath's father by Sid's wife Anne. It happened in 1947, while McMath was prosecutor. His father, drinking heavily, had threatened Anne; a grand jury called it justifiable homicide.

Ben Laney Marker

2007-09-13T18:44:00.001-07:00

Burial:
Memorial Park Cemetery
Camden
Ouachita County
Arkansas, USA

Source

Ben Laney Marker

2007-09-13T18:44:00.000-07:00

Burial:
Memorial Park Cemetery
Camden
Ouachita County
Arkansas, USA

Source

Official gubernatorial portrait

2007-09-13T18:42:00.000-07:00

Official gubernatorial portrait of Benjamin Travis Laney Jr., thirty-third governor of Arkansas (1945–1949).
Courtesy of the Arkansas Secretary of State's Office

National Governors Association's Biography

2007-09-13T18:41:00.001-07:00

Arkansas Governor Benjamin Travis Laney Jr.

Born: November 25, 1896
Died: January 21, 1977
Birth State: Arkansas
Party: Democrat
Family: Married Lucile Kirtley; three children
School(s): Hendrix College, Arkansas Teachers College, University of Utah
Periods in Office: From: January 9, 1945
To: January 11, 1949

State Web Site

Military Service: Navy

War(s) Served: World War I

BENJAMIN TRAVIS LANEY JR., Arkansas's 33rd Governor, was born in the Jones Chapel community in Quachita County, Arkansas, on November 25, 1896. He attended the public schools in Quachita County, never finishing high school. However, his ability earned him admission to Hendrix College in 1915. In 1918 he enlisted in the U.S. Navy, and served until the Armistice. After the war, Laney returned to his studies, earning a degree from the Arkansas Teachers College in 1924, and taking graduate courses at the University of Utah. Laney owned a drugstore in Conway, Arkansas, transacted real estate specializing in farmland, and entered the oil business when oil was discovered on his family farm near Camden, Arkansas. He entered politics in 1935, when he was elected Mayor of Camden. He was reelected in 1937 and served until 1939. Laney ran for governor and won both the 1944 and 1946 elections. During his tenure, the Revenue Stabilization Law was enacted, which proved to be his greatest achievement. The Arkansas Resources and Development Commission was formed and the Corporation and Utilities Commissions were consolidated into the Public Service Commission. Also during his tenure, a law passed providing for construction of the War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock, and for a governor's mansion. Laney did not seek reelection for a third term and left office on January 11, 1949. Laney ran unsuccessfully in the 1950 gubernatorial race, but remained active in politics, serving as a delegate to the 1969 Arkansas Constitutional Convention. Governor Benjamin T. Laney Jr. died of a heart attack on January 21, 1977, and is buried at the Camden Memorial Cemetery.

Sources:

Sobel, Robert, and John Raimo, eds. Biographical Directory of the Governors of the United States, 1789-1978, Vol. 1, Westport, Conn.; Meckler Books, 1978. 4 vols.

Donovan, Timothy P., and Willard B. Gatewood, Jr., The Governors of Arkansas, Essays in Political Biography, Fayetteville, The University of Arkansas Press, 1981

Ouachita County Governors

2007-09-13T18:40:00.000-07:00

Benjamin Travis Laney, Jr.

Ben Laney was born on a small farm in the Cooterneck community in Ouachita County. His father was Benajmin Travis Laney, Sr.; his mother was Martha Ella Soxon Laney. They had eleven children; six of those eleven children received college degrees. Laney himself actually did not finish high school, but his talents were abundant enough to land a teaching job and admission to Hendrix College in 1915. He left Hendrix and joined the Navy in 1918. He returned once again to college, this time attending Arkansas State Teachers College (now the University of Central Arkansas) and received the A.B. degree in 1924. Laney married Lucile Kirtley, a student at ASTC. They had three sons: Benjamin Travis III, William David, and Phillip.

During 1922, oil was discovered on the Laney farm. Laney moved back to Camden and entered the oil business. Other interests were farming, banking, cotton gins, feed, and grocery and hardware stores. He was the mayor of Camden from 1935-1939.

He announced his candidacy for governor of Arkansas in 1944 on the Democratic ticket. He launched his campaign by saying "I am not a politician." His opponent in the primary, J. Bryan Sims withdrew his nomination, and Laney handily defeated his Republican opponent in the general election. In 1946 Laney was elected to a second term with an 84% margin over Republican W. T. Mills.

During Laney's first term as governor, he submitted the revenue stabilization plan to the legislature. He had announced during his campaign to make all state appropriations from a single general fund. This bill passed, and the law's essential features have remained intact to this day. This became Laney's greatest achievement, a monument to fiscal responsibility.

In 1947 Laney obtained appropriations to build an official residence for the governor of Arkansas, stating that the lack of a residence was an embarrassment to Arkansas. War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock was also built during Laney's administratrion. This project had his full support despite strong opposition from some that it would be an "institution of debauchery."

Laney declined to run for a third term in 1948, but was active in politics as the Dixiecrat's chairman. State's rights had come to the fore at this time, and the southern Governors aligned themselves against Harry Truman's call for several measures to abolish racial discrimination. Laney supported the racial segregation, but admitted that the blacks in the South had not been given equal opportunities.

In 1950 Laney challenged Sid McMath, a popular governor of the state of Arkansas. McMath was seeking his second term, and Laney was seeking a third term after the McMath interim. His campaign slogan was "Let's Re-Elect Ben Laney Governor for a Second Time."

After his 1950 campaign loss, Laney remained active and interested in politics. He disapproved of the handling of the integration matter by Orval Faubus, but continued to be a state's rights champion. Following a long illness, Laney died of a heart attack in January of 1977 and was buried in Camden in Memorial Cemetery.

Old State House Biography of Ben Laney

2007-09-13T18:39:00.000-07:00

Benjamin Travis Laney, Jr.
(1945-1949)

From the collection of the Old State House Museum
Laney, born at Cooterneck in Ouachita County in 1896, was one of eleven children. He entered Hendrix College in 1915, where he was an honor student, but left before graduating to join the Navy. After the war, he earned a degree from Arkansas Teachers College in Conway and briefly attended graduate school at the University of Utah. After the discovery of oil on the family farm, Laney established himself in Camden where he engaged in farming, banking and various other enterprises in addition to the oil business. In 1925, he married Lucile Kirtley of Lewisville, Arkansas. They had three sons.

Although Laney had become mayor of Camden in 1935, he was virtually a political unknown when announced for governor in 1944. He ran on the on the slogan: "I am not a politician" in a heated three-way primary contest against State Comptroller J. Bryan Sims and U. S. Representative David D. Terry. Both Laney and Terry concentrated their attacks on Sims, who was the front runner, charging him with using the State Police to the benefit of his campaign. Laney's contention that this amounted to "Gestapo tactics" struck a chord in 1944. Laney polled 38.5% of the vote, outdistancing Sims by only 7,500 votes. On the eve of the run-off, Sims suddenly withdrew causing many to speculate on behind-the-scene manipulations by Homer Adkins.

Chief among Laney's legislative programs in 1945 was his Revenue Stabilization Plan designed to pay off the state's outstanding debt, balance the budget, and protect Arkansas finances against future recessions. Despite predictions that the proposal was far too sensible ever to be adopted by the Arkansas General Assembly, the measure passed both houses with only one dissenting vote. Laney also signed Arkansas's "right to work" amendment barring closed union shops, a measure pushed in Arkansas by the Christian America Association, a Texas-based conservative organization.

Although a political outsider, Laney stunned veteran political observers with his ability to control the legislature. This stemmed in part from his lack of identification with any political faction and from his willingness to spend long hours cultivating legislators in order to get passed that he favored.

Evidence of Laney's political savvy was his handling of the so-called "GI revolt," led by reform-minded veterans returning from the war who sought to fight their way into the local Democratic committee in Hot Springs. While Laney was forced to assign state troopers to some polling places to prevent violence in 1946, he managed to avoid being associated with either rebels or the party machine.

Laney faced another challenge in the 1947 session in the form of the self-styled "economic bloc," a group of fiscal conservatives from rural districts who tended to oppose any measure which did not directly benefit their constituents. This group initially opposed three measures Laney supported: the building of the Governor's mansion and War Memorial Stadium, and the restoration of the Old State House. All three eventually passed, however, with scarcely a hint of opposition.

Laney declined to run again for governor in 1948, turning his attention instead to national politics. The occasion was Truman's civil-rights message to Congress in February of that year which attempted to address racial discrimination in the United States. Laney joined the forces opposed to federal civil rights legislation and figured prominently in the third party movement known as the "Dixiecrats," serving for a time as their chairman.

Angered by Sid McMath's opposition to the Dixiecrats, Laney vowed to unseat him in 1950. In a campaign marred by race-baiting, Laney lost by a margin of 2-to-1.

Laney died in January of 1977.

Mrs. Laney's Inagural Gown

2007-09-13T18:37:00.000-07:00

LUCILLE KIRTLEY LANEY
Wife of Benjamin Travis Laney, 33rd Governor (1945-1949)

Mrs. Laney wore a black Chantilly lace V-neck inaugural gown over a full length, black taffeta slip. The dress with cap sleeves, semi-fitted bodice, and full skirt came from the Gus Blass, Co. in Little Rock. An aqua grosgrain ribbon accents the dropped waistline. She wore sixteen-inch Chantilly lace mitts, a black satin evening bag and black suede slippers with the dress.

Lucille Kirtley Laney

2007-09-13T18:36:00.000-07:00

LUCILLE KIRTLEY LANEY
Wife of Benjamin Travis Laney, 33rd Governor (1945-1949)

Born: March 10, 1906
Died:
Children: three sons
Original Home: Lewisville, Arkansas

Lucille Kirtley Laney attended the Arkansas State Teachers College at Conway, where she met Benjamin Travis Laney, Jr., who was a student at Hendrix College in the same town. The Laneys lived in Conway after their marriage, but as time passed they made their home in many towns around the state.

Family and community activities were very important to Mrs. Laney. She belonged to music clubs and the the Parent-Teacher Association, and was active with the Boy Scouts and the Red Cross. As First Lady of Arkansas, she attended many official functions.

Benjamin Travis Laney Jr.

2007-09-13T18:34:00.000-07:00

Benjamin Travis Laney Jr.
Born: November 25, 1896, at Jones Chapel (Cooterneck), Arkansas
Died: January 21, 1977, at Magnolia, Arkansas
Buried: Camden Memorial Cemetery, Camden
Served: 1945-1949

“Business Ben” Laney, born in 1896, attended the public schools in Ouachita County. In 1918 he enlisted in the U.S. Navy and served until the Armistice; he earned a degree from the Arkansas Teachers College in 1924 and took graduate courses from the University of Utah. Laney owned a drugstore in Conway, Arkansas, traded in farm real estate and entered the oil business when oil was discovered on his family farm near Camden, Arkansas. He entered politics in 1935 when elected Mayor of Camden, serving until 1939. Laney ran for governor and won both the 1944 and 1946 elections. In his first campaign, Laney called for “efficiency, economy and consolidation” in state government; he followed through by promoting the ultimately adopted Revenue Stabilization Act which proved to be his greatest achievement. While Laney was governor, the Arkansas Resources and Development Commission was formed and the Corporation and Utilities Commissions were consolidated into the Public Service Commission. Also during his tenure, construction of both the War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock and the governor's mansion was authorized by the Assembly. Laney was a consistent supporter of racial segregation and eventually became identified with the “Dixiecrat” states’ rights movement but, notably, during Laney’s administration the University of Arkansas became the first historically white southern public university to admit African-American students. Laney did not seek re-election for a third term and left office on January 11, 1949. He ran, unsuccessfully, in the 1950 gubernatorial race but remained active in public affairs, serving as a delegate to the 1969 Arkansas Constitutional Convention.

Contents in Laney Collection at UCA

2007-09-13T18:15:00.001-07:00

Series I

Box 1

File 1 – Arkansas Democrat Gazette and UCA Echo announce Laney Papers donated to UCA Archives, January 16, 2000 and January 23, 1977 Arkansas Gazette account of Laney’s death

File 2 – John L. McClellan for U.S. Senator, 1994

File Ben T. Laney’s announcement as candidate for Governor of Arkansas, 1944

File 4 – Photos

Envelope 1 – Seven (5”X7”) Black/White proofs of Governor Ben T. Laney 1944

Envelope 2 – Six (8”X10”) Black/White photos Ben T. Laney’s Campaign vs. McMath, 1950

Envelope 3 – One (3 ½ ”X5 ½”) Post Card, truck with political advertisement

Envelope 4 – (2 ¾”x4 ½”) snapshot

Envelope 5 – (31/4”x5”) snapshot

Envelope 6- four (8”x10”) photo for political advertisement

File-5-Seventh Annual Cross Roads School Reunion, date unknown

File-6-A political advertisement for Attorney General’s Office, July 25, 1944

File-7-Executive Secretary W.J. Smith Correspondence, November-December, 1944

File-8-Inaugural Address by Ben Laney before 55th General Assembly, January 1945

File-9-Governor Laney’s Thoughts on Government, 1945

File-10-Congratulatory Letters, January 1945

File-11-A Brief Synopsis of the General Acts of the 1945 General Assembly

File-12-Number of Employees in Various State Departments, 1944-1945

File-13-Memoranda-Handled 1944-1945

File-14-Ben Laney’s Personal Correspondence, 1944-1945

File-15-Commerce Department Reports, 1945

File-16-Montgomery County Sheriff Appointment, January 1945

File-17-Daily Visiting list to Governor’s Office, January-March, 1945

File-18-Budget Manual-55th General Assembly, January 15, 1945

File-19-Bridge Project (Mississippi River) February 1945

File-20-Use Tax Bill- Correspondence, February 1945

File-21-Use Tax Bill- Correspondence, March 1-6, 1945

File-22-Use Tax Bill- Correspondence, March 7-31, 1945

File-23-Paragould Trip, March 23, 1945

File-24-Jefferson Day Dinner- Grand Rapids, MI April 1945

File-25-With Malice Toward None by Francis V. McCarthy April 1945

File-26-Social Origination Magazine (Theta Kappa Omega) Spring 1945

File-27-Governor’s Expense 1945-1951

File-28-Governor’s Mansion- Tabulation of Replies to Questionnaire

File-29-Commerce/Freight Rate Issue 1945-1947

File-30-President Roosevelt’s Last Message to the American People April 12, 1945

File-31-Halsey, Stuart and Co., Inc Chicago, IL –Acceptance April-May 1945

File-32-Halsey, Stuart and Co., Inc Chicago, IL-Regrets April –June 1945

File-33-Traffic Safety Literature 1945

File-34-Duties, Activities, and Information on the Revue Department 1945

File-35-“The Arkansas Story” presented by Laney to forum in New York May 3,1945

File-36-Chicago Trip, April 29, 1945-May 18, 1945

File-37-St. Louis Trip, April 29, 1945-May 18, 1945

File-38-New York Trip, April 29, 1945-May 18, 1945

File-39-San Francisco Conference April 1945

File-40-Washington D.C. Trip, April 29, 1945-May 18, 1945

File-41-Hendrix College Bulletin- Laney received Honorary Doctor of Laws degree 1945

File-42-Southern Dairy Products Journal (Laney on front cover) July 1945

File-43-Report on “American Petroleum Interests in Foreign Countries” Vol. 3 1945

File-44-State Institution Employees Maintenance Policies October 1945

File-45-The Conference on Graduate Work in Negro Institutions, October 29, 1945

File-46-Veterans’ Program, December 1945

File-47-The Way To Greater Prosperity For The South

File-48-Wil Still for Governor political material (post war)

File-49-Walter Tucker- Independent Candidate for U.S. Senate

End of Box 1

Series I

Box 2

File-1-Committee to Study Election Laws 1945-1946

File-2-County and Township Appointments 1945-1948

File-3-Democratic National Committee Correspondence 1945-1948

File-4-Benjamin Franklin Arkansas Thrift Clubs Correspondence- Governor Ben T. Laney Honorary President (sale of Postal Savings Stamps and Bonds in the schools) 1945-1948

File-5-A Brief Synopsis of the General Acts of the 1945 General Assembly of the State of Arkansas

File-6-Rules of the Democratic Party in Arkansas January 15, 1946

File-7-Arkansas Association of Commercial Organization Secretaries- Hotel Marion- Little Rock, Arkansas January 25-26, 1946

File-8-Campaign Issues…1946- A Handbook for Candidates, Speakers and Workers of the Democratic Party

File-9-Letters in Response to Radio Speech, February 2, 1946

File-10-Cork Oak Tree Planting and Dedication March 19, 1946

File-11-Jackson Day Dinner- Report of Receipts and Expenditures 1946

File-12-Correspondance- Letters of Congratulations July, August 1946

File-13-Report of the Committee on Legislative Processes and Procedures 1946

File-14-Biennial Report of the Treasurer of State of the State of Arkansas July 1, 1946-June 30, 1948

File-15-Transportation Program for Small Business, September 16, 1946

File-16-Song with Music “We Are United Nations” by R. Resencrance 1946

File-17-Arkansas Resource and Development Commission Progress Report 1946

File-18-Governor Laney’s Good Will Tour to Mexico September 7-20, 1946

File-19-Ivvitation List- “Keep Arkansas Green” December 20, 1946

File-20-Legislative Council Correspondence February-March 1947

File-21-Legislative Council Correspondence April 1947-April 1948

File-22-Tables Showing the Effects of Proposed Laws on Various Income Categories

File-23-Copies of Arkansas Gazette- “Tells How New Revenue Plans Would Operate” February 5, 1947

File-24-Open Letters on Foreign Policy: A New “Common Sense” Needed for The Atomic Era by Dr. Oscars Cass, Editor April 1947

File-25-Grants-in-Aid and Other Federal Expenditures Within the States- (The Council of State Governments) May 1947

File-26-Arkansas Employment Security Report (2) May-June 1947

File-27-Information on Arkansas Counties (Population, State Tax, Farm, Urban, etc) 1947

File-28-Arkansas Cancer Control Commission July 1947

File-29-The Arkansas Cancer Bulletin Vol. No. 1, 1947

File-30-How Factory Workers Live Around the World July 1947

File-31-Governor thank you letter for Arkansas Products September-November 1947

File-32-Chart of Federal Aid Division and Status of Funds Under the 1944 Federal Aid Act October 8, 1947

File-33-The Interstate on Migratory Farm Labor Report 1947-1948

File-34-Arkansas State Highway Commission 18th Biennial Report 1947-1948

File-35A-Arkansas State Penitentiary Production Fiscal Year July 1, 1947-june 30, 1948

File-35B-Biennial Report of the Arkansas Tuberculosis Sanatorium State Sanatorium, Arkansas July 1, 1946-june 30, 1948

File-36-Recent Trends in Major State Taxes 1941-1947 February 1948

File-37-Titles to Lands Beneath Navigable Waters Report- 1948, House of Representatives Report #11778 1948

End of Box 2

Series I

Box 3

File-1-Constitutional and Statutory Provisions of the States Val. VII Community Property Laws, March 1948

File-2-Regional Education Interstate Compact Hearings Committee on the Judiciary United States Senate 8th Congress 2nd Session March 1948

File-3-Diamond Jubilee Souvenir Program April 23-25, 1948

File-4-Report on Roy N. Jeffery Limestone and Silica Lands-Izard County, AR May 10, 1948

File-5-The Town Hall, Inc.- America’s Town Meeting of the Air- Radio Station WHGB speaker include Governor Ben T. Laney of Arkansas June 15, 1948

File-6-Goodwill Tour June 1948

File-7-Letters of Congratulations June 1948

File-8-Proposed Race Track at West Memphis, AR- Correspondence and pensions June 1948

File-9-South Magazine, June 1948

File-10-U.S. News and World Report (Governor Ben Laney-page21) July 23, 1948

File-11-Talleys for Governors’ Race 2nd Primary August 10, 1948

File-12-M&A Railroad Correspondence September 1948

File-13-“National Republic” (A monthly magazine of Fundamental Americanism) September 1948

File-14-Regional Council for Education- Minutes of Meeting October 11, 1948

File-15-Sub-Committee Reports from the Work- Conference on Regional Education December 12, 1948

File-16-Council of State Governments 1948

File-17-Democratic State Committee 1948

File-18-Presidential Elections- Provisions of the Constitution and of the U.S. Code 1948

File-19-Proctor Proposals (Pertaining to Patents) by Dr. Olin S. Proctor 1948

File-20-Song “Let’s Send Harry Back To The Farm”, 1948

File-21A-State of Arkansas Department of Education 1948-1949

File-21B-“A Picture of Development in Arkansas” (Arkansas Resources and Development Commission), 1948

File-22-Vocational Adjustment Center for the Adult Blind- Little Rock, AR

File-23-Miscellaneous Political Information

File-24-Minutes of the Arkansas Legislative Council, January 5, 1949

File-25-U.S. Savings Bonds Statement of Cumulative Sales, January 10, 1949

File-26-Final Official Senate and House Calendar, January 10, 1949-March 10, 1949

File-27-An Act to Provide for a Code of Election Laws for the State of Arkansas 1949

File-28-Invitations Declined 1949

File-29-Report of the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments 1949

File-30-Congratulatory Letters (End of Term), 1949

File-31-Correspondance 1940’s

End of Box 3

Series I

Box 4

File-1-Date Book

File-2-National Diary- The Year 1945

File-3-National Diary- The Year 1947

File-4-National Diary- The Year 1948

File-5-State of Arkansas- Boards and Commissions

File-6-State of Arkansas- Insurance Schedule, 1947

End of Box 4

Series I

Box 5

File-1-Rules of the Democratic Party in Arkansas, 1950

File-2A-Governor Ben T. Laney’s Campaign, 1950

File-2B-Governor Ben T. Laney’s Campaign, 1950

File-3-List of Employees in Campaign Headquarters, 1950

File-4-Lists of Women Workers in Campaign, 1950

File-5-Out of State Correspondence, 1950 Campaign

File-6-Plea for Campaign Contributions, 1950

File-7-Thank You Letters after 1950 Campaign

File-8-Speech given at Helena, AR for the Rotary Club, April 14, 1952

File-9-The Augusta Courier Vol. 2 No. 361 (article on segregation) July 5, 1954

File-10-Personal Papers (Bank Statement, Insurance, ect.) 1950’s

File-11-Legislative Digest January 17, 1955

File-12-Investigation of Public School Conditions, 1956-1957

File-13-Correspondence, 1950’s

File-14-Supreme Court of Arkansas Opinion- J.H. Cottrell vs. Orval E. Faubus, 1960’s

File-15-Literature on Capital Punishment, 1963

File-16-Rice Growers- “Rice for Children of Hong Kong”, 1965-1966

File-17-Legislative Joint Auditing Committee, 1968

File-18-Correspondence, 1960’s

File-19-Correspondence with Win Rockefeller, 1960’s-1970’s

File-20-Correspondence with Hendrix College, 1960’s-1970’s

File-21-Correspondence with U.S. Senator John L. McClellan, 1972

File-22-V.I.P. Letters- Correspondence with Governor Dale Bumpers, U.S. Senator J.W. Fulbright, U.S. Representative E.C. Gatlings, U.S. Representative Oren Harris, U.S. Representative Brooks Hays, General Douglas MacArthur, U.S. Representative Wilbur D. Mills, U.S. Representative Jim Trimble, 1946-1972

File-23-United Commercial Travelers of America- Certificate of Recognition, 1964, 1972

File-24-Correspondence, 1970’s

File-25-Disabled American Veterans Citation of Merit, February 10, 1972

File-26-Arkansas Heart Association, 1972-1973

File-27-Ben T. Laney’s Speech- Magnolia Rotary Club, 1976

File-28-Map (Mississippi-Arkansas Clayton Quadrangle Grid Zone “C” showing farm acreage)

File-29-Series I-VII on Religious Beliefs (undated)

End of Box 5

Series I

Box 6

File-1-Governor Ben T. Laney’s Speeches to Agriculture Groups

File-2-Governor Ben T. Laney’s Speeches Promoting Arkansas

File-3-Governor Ben T. Laney’s Speeches at Arkansas State Democratic Convention, September 14-15, 1948

File-4-Governor Ben T. Laney’s Campaign Speeches

File-5-Governor Ben T. Laney’s Concession Speech

File-6-Governor Ben T. Laney’s Speeches on Civil Rights

File-7-Governor Ben T. Laney’s Speeches to Civic Clubs and Organizations

File-8-Governor Ben T. Laney’s Speech on Crime

File-9-Governor Ben T. Laney’s Speech Concerning Disabled Individuals

File-10-Governor Ben T. Laney’s Speech in Education

File-11-Governor Ben T. Laney’s Farewell Address, January 9, 1949

File-12-Governor Ben T. Laney’s Conference on Fire Prevention, November 21, 1947

File-13-Governor Ben T. Laney’s Address to Graduating Class

File-14-Governor Ben T. Laney’s Address on Infantile Paralysis, January 1945

File-15-Governor Ben T. Laney’s Speeches at Industries

File-16-Governor Ben T. Laney’s Address at Jefferson Day Dinner- Grand Rapids, Michigan, April 13, 1945

File-17-Three Hundred Billion Dollars An address before Little Rock Chamber of Commerce, August 31, 1945

File-18-Governor Ben T. Laney’s Radio Series of Speeches

File-19-Governor Ben T. Laney’s Speech Concerning American Red Cross

File-20-Governor Ben T. Laney’s Speeches for State Rights

File-21-Governor Ben T. Laney’s Speech on Saving Bonds

File-22-Governor Ben T. Laney’s Speeches on Taxes and Finances

File-23-Governor Ben T. Laney’s Dedicatory Address at Arkansas State Teachers College- Conway AR, November 30, 1948

File-24-Governor Ben T. Laney’s Speech on Stewardship

File-25-Governor Ben T. Laney’s Speech on U.S. Defense, September 21, 1945

File-26-Research material for speeches

File-27-Duplicate Copies of Governor Laney’s Speeches

End of Box 6

Series I

Box 7

File-1-Political Mailing Lists

File-2-Signatures Supporting Governor Laney’s Administration

File-3-Citizens Supporting Governor Laney’s Expressions of Dissatisfaction with the National Organization of the Democrat Party

File-4-Petitioners Listed by County

File-5-Arkansas County- Letters of Support, 1948

File-6-Ashley County- Petition for Governor’s Re-election, 1948

File-7-Baxter County- Petition for Governor’s Re-election, 1948

File-8-Benton County- Petitions for Governor’s Re-elections, 1948

File-9-Bradley County- Petitions for Governor’s Re-election, 1948

File-10-Calhoun County- Letters of Support, 1948

File-11-Carroll County- Petitions for Governor’s Re-election, 1948

File-12-Chicot County- Petitions for Governor’s Re-election, 1948

File-13-Clark County- Letters of Support, 1948

File-14-Clay County- Letters of Support, 1948

File-15-Cleburne County- Letters of Support, 1948

File-16-Cleveland County- Petitions for Governor’s Re-elections, 1948

File-17-Conway County- Petitions for Governor’s Re-elections, 1948

File-18-Craighead County- Petitions for Governor’s Re-elections, 1948

File-19-Crawford County- Letters of Support, 1948

File-20-Crittenden County- Petitions for Governor’s Re-elections, 1948

File-21-Cross County- Petitions and letters of support, 1948

File-22-Dallas County- Petitions and letters of support, 1948

File-23-Desha County- Petitions and letters of support, 1948

File-24-Drew County- Letters of support, 1948

File-25-Faulkner County- Petitions and letters of support, 1948

File-26-Franklin County- Petitions for Governor’s Re-election, 1948

File-27-Fulton County- Letters of Support, 1948

File-28-Garland County- Petitions and letters of support, 1948

File-29-Greene County- Petitions and letters of support, 1948

File-30-Hempstead County- Petitions and letters of support, 1948

File-31-Howard County- Letters of Support, 1948

File-32-Independence County- Letters of Support, 1948

File-33-Izard County- Letters of Support, 1948

File-34-Jackson County- Letters of Support, 1948

File-35-Jefferson County- Petitions and letters of support, 1948

File-36-Johnson County- Petitions for Governor’s Re-election, 1948

File-37-LaFayette County- Petitions and letter of support, 1948

File-38-Lawrence County- Petitions and letters of support, 1948

File-39-Lee County- Petitions and letters of support, 1948

File-40-Lincoln County- Letters of Support, 1948

File-41-Little River County- Petitions and letter of support, 1948

File-42-Logan County- Petitions for Governor’s Re-elections, 1948

File-43-Lonoke County- Petitions and letters of support, 1948

File-44-Madison County- Petitions and letters of support, 1948

File-45-Marion County- Letter of Support, 1948

File-46-Miller County- Petitions and letter of support, 1948

File-47-Mississippi County- Petitions and letters of support, 1948

File-48-Monroe County- Petitions and letter of support, 1948

File-49-Montgomery County- Letters of Support, 1948

File-50-Nevada County- Letters of Support, 1948

File-51-Newton County- Petition for Governor’s Re-election, 1948

File-52-Ouachita County- Petitions and letters of support, 1948

File-53-Perry County- Petitions and letters of support, 1948

File-54-Phillips County- Petitions and letters of support, 1948

File-55-Pike County- Letters of Support, 1948

File-56-Poinsett County- Petitions and letters of support, 1948

File-57-Polk County- Petitions and letters of support, 1948

File-58-Pope County- Letters of Support, 1948

File-59-Prairie County- Letters of Support, 1948

File-60-Pulaski County- Letters of Support, 1948

File-61-Randolph County- Letters of Support

File-62-St. Francis County- Petition and letters of support, 1948

File-63-Saline County- Letters of Support, 1948

File-64-Sebastion County- Petitions and letters of support, 1948

File-65-Sevier County- Petitions and letters of support, 1948

File-66-Sharp County- Petitions for Governor’s Re-election, 1948

File-67-Union County- Petitions and letters of support, 1948

File-68-Election Returns for Governor in Union County

File-69-Van Buren County- Letters of Support, 1948

File-70-Washington County- Petitions and letters of support, 1948

File-71-White County- Letters of Support, 1947-1948

File-72-Woodruff County- Letters of Support, 1947-1948

File-73-Yell County- Letters of Support, 1947-1948

End of Box 7

Series I

Box 8

File-1-The Report of The Kentucky Commission on Negro Affairs, November 1, 1945

File-2-Governor Ben T. Laney’s Newspaper Clippings on Civil Rights, 1946-1948

File-3-Letters Denouncing Governor Laney’s Stand on Civil Rights, 1948

File-4-Southern Association for the Improvement of Colored Citizens and Good Citizenship Inc., 1948

File-5-Correspondence on Civil Rights, January-February 13, 1948

File-6-Correspondence on Civil Rights, February 14-29, 1948

File-7-Correspondence on Civil Rights, March 1948

File-8-Correspondence on Civil Rights, April 1948

File-9-“Will the South Ditch Truman?”- Article from The Saturday Evening Post by Ralph Mcgill, May 1948

File-10-Correspondence on Civil Rights, May-June 1948

File-11-Correspondence on Civil Rights, July 1-18 1948

File-12-Correspondence on Civil Rights, July 19-31 1948

File-13-Telegrams July 1948

File-14-Speech of Palmer Bradley, August 4, 1948

File-15-Correspondence on Civil Rights, August-December 1948

File-16-Miscellanious Articles on Civil Rights

End of Box 8

Series I

Box 9

File-1-The “Tidelands” Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States (1947)

File-2A-Conference for the States Rights Democrats- Jackson, MS May 10, 1948

File-2B-J. Strom Thurmond Governor of South Carolina address before Democrat Party Rally, Jackson Mississippi (May 10,1948) News Article on Senator Thurmond’s Birthday and Senator Trent Lott’s Controversial Statement (December 5,2002)

File-3-Conference of States Rights Democrats- Jackson, Mississippi (May 10, 1948)

File-4-States’ Rights Correspondence (February-May 1948)

File-5-States’ Rights Committee Correspondence, May-October 1948

File-6-Cintributions for States’ Rights, June 1948

File-7-States’ Rights Correspondence, June –July 1948

File-8-States’ Rights Correspondence, August-September 1948

File-9-States’ Rights Correspondence “Dixiecrat” (October-November 1948)

File-10-States’ Rights Correspondence December 1948 and undated

File-11-National States’ Rights Committee “Constitution and Declaration of Principles” 1949

File-12-States’ Rights Correspondence and Material 1949-1950

File-13-States’ Rights Committee

File-14-The States’ Rights Delegates Pledged to Presidential Candidate Thurmond and Wright

File-15-States’ Rights publication and Printed Material

File-16A-The President’s Program: Civil Rights/States Rights and the Reconstruction Background April 1948

File-16B-American Heritage Magazine “The Conversion of Harry Truman” Governor Laney mentioned in Article November 1991

File-17-Encroachments by Federal Administrative and Executive Officers with Judicial Approval Upon the Structure and Substance of Constitutional Government by O.R. McGuire September 8, 1948

File-18-Constitution of the United States and The Constitution: A Compact Between Sovereign States by James R. O’Daniel, 1948

File-19-Declaration of Faith by The Dixie Press, 1946

End of Box 9

Series I

Box 10

File-1-Proceedings of the Governors’ Conference-36th Annual Meeting, May 28-31, 1944

File-2-Southern Governors’ Conference- Biloxi, Mississippi, November 24-26, 1944

File-3-Southern Governors’ Conference- Birmingham, Alabama May 18-19, 1945

File-4-Southern Governors’ Conference- Mobile, Alabama July 19-22, 1945

File-5-Southern Governors’ Conference- New Orleans, Louisiana December 7-8, 1945

File-6-Southern Governors’ Conference- Miami Beach, Florida December 5-7, 1946

File-7-Western Governors’ Conference- Reno, Nevada April 20-22, 1945

File-8-37th Annual Governors’ Conference- Mackinac Island, Michigan July 1-4, 1945

File-9-38th Annual Governors’ Conference- Oklahoma City, Oklahoma May 26-29,1946

File-10-38th Annual Governors’ Conference- Oklahoma City, Oklahoma May 27-28, 1946

File-11-Governors’ Conference Executive Director Frank Bane- Correspondence 1946

End of Box 10

Series I

Box 11

File-1-8th General Assembly of The States Edge Water Beach Hotel- Chicago, IL January 16-18, 1947

File-2-Governors’ Conference- Salt Lake City, Utah April 1947

File-3-Governors’ Conference- Salt Lake City, Utah July 13-16, 1947

File-4-Statement of Joint Conference- Representatives of the Congress of the United States and of The Governors’ Conference- Chicago, IL September 27, 1947

File-5-Southern Governors’ Conference- Ashville, North Carolina October 1947

File-6-Southern Governors’ Conference- Speeches 1947

File-7-Southern Governors’ Conference- Correspondence, 1947

File-8-Southern Governors’ Conference Executive Director Frank Bane Correspondence, 1947

File-9-Governors’ Conference Executive Director Frank Bane- (40th Annual)- Portsmouth, New Hampshire- Correspondence, 1948

File-10-Southern Governors’ Conference Correspondence, 1948

File-11-Southern Governors’ Conference- Wakulla Springs, Florida February 7, 1948

File-12-Governor Ben Laney at Southern Governors’ Conference- Jackson, MS February 23, 1948

File-13-Governor Ben Laney- Correspondence February-July 1948

File-14-Southern Governors’ Conference also Birmingham Conference on States Rights December 16, 1948

End of Box 11

Series I

Box 12A

Item 1- One Pair of Navy Wool Pin Stripe Pants 35” W 29” L

Item 2- One Pair of Gray Wool Pin Stripe Pants 35” W 29” L

End of Box 12A

Series I

Box 12B

File-1-Newspaper Clipping, 1936

File-2-Governor- Elect Ben T. Laney Newspaper Clippings, November-December 1944

File-3-Governor Ben T. Laney- Newspaper Clippings, 1945

File-4-Governor Ben T. Laney- Newspaper Clippings, 1946

File-5-“Governor Laney Says”- December 12, 1946- January 1947

File-6-Governor Ben T. Laney- Newspaper Clippings, 1947

File-7-Governor Ben T. Laney’s Announcement Not to Run for 3rd Term January 19, 1948

File-8-Governor Ben T. Laney- Newspaper Clippings, 1948

File-9-Former Governor Ben T. Laney- Newspaper Clippings, 1949-1950

File-10-Governor Ben T. Laney’s Collection of Political Cartoons

File-11-Newspaper and News Magazine Articles Important to Former Governor Ben Laney, 1965-1970’s

File-12-Governor Ben T. Laney- Newspaper Clippings, undated

File-13-Arkansas Democrat- “Pages From The Past”, July 31, 1946

File-14-Congratulations on Bicentennial talk to Magnolia Rotarians- Newspaper Clippings July 1976

End of Box 12B

Series I

Box 13

File-1-State of Alabama- Interstate Higher Education Facilities, January 29, 1945

File-2-Annual Report of the Governor of Alaska to the Secretary of the Interior, 1946

File-3-Innaugural Address of Earl Warren- Governor of the State of California, 1947

File-4-Message of Honorable Walter W. Bacon- Governor of Delaware to the 114th General Assembly of the State of Delaware, 1947

File-5-Governors Message to the Legislature of Idaho- 29th Session- C.A. Robins- Governor, 1947

File-6-Biennial Message of Dwight H. Green- Governor of Illinois, January 8, 1947

File-7-Addresses by Iowa Governors- Bourke B. Hickenlooper and Robert D. Blue, 1945, 1947

File-8-Messages of Kansas Governor- Frank Carlson, 1947

File-9-Inagural Address and Budget Message of Horace Hildreth- Governor of Maine, 1947

File-10-Inaugural Address of Governor Luther W. Youngdahl, St. Paul, MN, 1947

File-11-Message of Governor Phil M. Donnelly to the 64th General Assembly of Missouri- Jefferson City, Missouri, January 8, 1947

File-12-Message of Governor Sam C. Ford to the 13th Legislative Assembly of the State of Montana, 1947

File-13-Inaugural Message of Val Peterson- Governor of Nebraska, January 9, 1947

File-14-Message of Governor Vail Pittman to the Nevada Legislature of 1947

File-15-Inaugural Address of Charles M. Dale- Governor of New Hampshire, 1947

File-16-Inaugural Address of Alfred E. Driscoll- Governor of New Jersey, January 21, 1947

File-17-Biennial Message and Special Budget Message of Governor R. Gregg Cherry to the North Carolina General Assembly, January 9 and 13, 1947

File-18-Message of Thomas J. Herbert- Governor of Ohio, January 13, 1947

File-19-Message of Governor Robert S. Kerr to State of Oklahoma on “Condition of the State”, January 7, 1947

File-20-Oklahoma Tourist Information

File-21-Message of South Carolina Governors Ransome J. Williams and J. Strom Thurmond, 1947

File-22-Message of Governor George T. Mickleson of South Dakota, 1947

File-23-State Governors Conference of Utah, August 1947

File-24-Address of William M. Tuck to the General Assembly and People of Virginia Extra Sessions, January 6, 1947

File-25-State of West Virginia- Message to the Legislature by Governor Clarence W. Meadows, January 8, 1947

File-26-Special Session- 28th Legislature of the State of Wyoming, 1947

End of Box 13

Series I

Box 14

File-1-Governor Ben T. Laney’s gavels (2)

File-2-Honorary Citizen Award, November 5, 1952

File-3-Two Boy Scout Council President Trophies, 1954 and 1955

File-4-Citizen of the Year Certificate, January 19, 1954

File-5-Magnolia Officially Welcomes Honorable Ben T. Laney Plaque, January 17, 1958

File-6-Certificate of Distinction, April 23, 1960

File-7-Supporter of the Southern State College Century Club Plaque

File-8-Mrs. Ben T. Laney- Southern Arkansas University- President’s Club Plaque

File-9-In Respectful Memory of Former Governor Ben T. Laney (died Friday, January 21, 1977) House Concurrent Resolution Number 18 of 1977

File-10-Ben T. Laney, Mayor of Camden, Arkansas 1935-1939

End of Box 14

End of Series I

Series II

Box 1

File-1-Boy Scouts of America Certificate

File-2-Boy Scouts of America Correspondence, 1953

File-3-Boy Scouts of America- 45th Annual Report, 1954

File-4-Boy Scouts of America Correspondence, 1954

File-5-Boy Scouts of America Correspondence, 1955

File-6-Boy Scouts of America- The Arrow, 1954

File-7-Boy Scouts of America- The Arrow, 1955

End of Box 1

End of Series II

Series III

Box 1

File-1-Arkansas Constitutional Revision Study Commission Analysis and General Recommendations, 1967

File-2-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Former Governor Ben T. Laney’s Personal Notes and Messages

File-3-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Former Governor Ben T. Laney’s Personal File

File-4-Arkansas Constitutional Convention Correspondence, 1964-1970

File-5-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Letters of Appreciation, 1970

File-6-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Directory of Delegates and Mailing Addresses

File-7-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Committee List

File-8-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Committee Meetings

File-9-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Statements and Comments

File-10-Arkansas Constitutional Convention Bibliography, February 1, 1969

File-11-Arkansas Constitutional Convention Addresses by Governor Winthrop Rockefeller, June 4, 1969 and July 10, 1969

File-12-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Calendar Agenda

File-13-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Daily Journal

File-14-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Digest for the Week

File-15-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Minutes of the Meetings of the Administrative Committee, May 26, 1969 and November 30, 1969

File-16-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Minutes of the County Government Committee, May 28, 1969- June 3, 1969

File-17-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Declaration of Rights Committee Meetings Minutes, May 1969-1970

File-18-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Minutes of the Education Committee Meetings

File-19-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Finance and Taxation Committee

File-20-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Minutes of the General Provision Committee Meetings

File-21-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Minutes of the Judicial Branch Committee Meetings

File-22-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Minutes of the Legislative Branch Committee Meetings

File-23-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Minutes of the Municipal Government Committee Meetings

File-24-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Proposals and Regulations in Committee

File-25-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Public Information Committee

File-26-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Minutes of the Suffrage and Elections Committee Meetings

File-27-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Amendment Forms

File-28-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Amendment Forms

End of Box 1

Series III

Box 2

File-1-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Committee Proposals

File-2-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Delegate Proposals

File-3-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Discussion Proposals

File-4-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Memorandums

File-5-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Resolutions

File-6-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- First Report of Schedule and Transitional Provisions Committee

File-7-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Style and Drafting Committee

File-8-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- First Draft of Proposed Constitutional Amendment

File-9-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Survey with Comments

File-10-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Proposed Constitution as Approved on Second Reading

File-11-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Proposed Constitution as Approved on 2nd Reading (supplement to Hope AR Star Newspaper) (2 copies), October 2, 1969

File-12-“Proposed Constitution for the State of Arkansas” (Special Sunday Magazine Supplement- Arkansas Democrat), October 5, 1969

File-13-Proposed Constitution of 1970 (Draft following 3rd Review)

File-14-Proposed Arkansas Constitution of 1970 with comments (15 copies), February 10, 1970

File-15-Proposed Arkansas Constitution of 1970 with comments (A Report to the People by the 7th Arkansas Constitutional Convention)- 3 copies

File-17-Arkansas Constitutional Convention- Miscellaneous Papers

File-18-Political Paradox: Constitutional Revision in Arkansas by Walten Nunn and Kay G. Collett, 1973

File-19-Revising the Arkansas Constitution by Revision Study Commission

File-20-State and Local Revenue Potential by Kenneth E. Quindry

File-21-Little Rock Chamber of Commerce- Report of the State Constitution Committee to the Board of Directors

File-22-Courts in Arkansas Trying Traffic Cases : A Survey of 1968 Activities, June 1969

File-23-Newspaper Clippings

End of Box 2

End of Series III

Series IV

Box 1

File-1-Arkansas Municipalities, July 1969

File-2-Arkansas Postcards

File-3-Behind the Scenes in Arkansas Politics by Harry Lee Williams, 1940’s

File-4-The Highway Traveler Vol. XVII No. 3, June-July 1945

File-5-Is Civilization Gaining or Losing Ground? By Emile E. Watson, September 1948

File-6-Let the People Know by Norma Angell, 1942

File-7-“The National Society of Arts and Letters”- Yearbook and Roster, 1954-1956

File-8-One World by Windell L. Willkie, 1943

File-9-The People Look at Radio by Paul F. Lazarfeld and Harry Field, 1946

File-10A-Places of Interest in Greater Little Rock, Arkansas

File-10B-Poet’s Roundtable of Arkansas 1947-1948- given to Laney by Olive Nelson

File-11-The Sportsman’s Digest of Fishing and Hunting, 1946

File-12-State- Local Relations- The Council of State Governments, 1946

File-13-Stories of New Orleans by Andre Cajun, 1941 and 1945

File-14-“A Report to the People: The First Four Years of the Arkansas State

File-15-Newspaper Articles- 1961

File-16-Ben T. Laney’s Campaign Stationary

End of Box 1

End of Series IV

Series V

Scrap Books

Scrap Book-1-Ben T. Laney and other Gubernatorial Hopefuls Campaign, 1944

Scrap Book-2-Governor Elect Ben T. Laney, July 1944- January 11, 1945

Scrap Book-3-Governor Ben T. Laney’s Inaugural Ceremony, January 9, 1945- February 15, 1945

Scrap Book-4-Governor Laney, February 15, 1945- March 31, 1945

Scrap Book-5-Governor Laney, April 1, 1945- August 9, 1945

Scrap Book-6-Governor Laney, August 10, 1945- December 31, 1945

Scrap Book-7-Governor Laney, January 1946- June 14, 1946

Scrap Book-8-Governor Laney, June 16, 1946- October 23, 1946

Scrap Book-9-Governor Laney, October 23, 1946- December 31, 1946

Scrap Book-10-Governor Laney, January 1, 1947- February 8, 1947

Scrap Book-11-Governor Laney, February 10, 1947- March 18, 1947

Scrap Book-12-Governor Laney, March 18, 1947- June 22, 1947

Scrap Book-13-Governor Laney, June 23, 1947- March 3, 1948

Scrap Book-14-Governor Laney, March 4, 1948- August 31, 1948

Scrap Book-15-Former Governor Laney’s Campaign for Re-election for Governor, April 6, 1950- June 15, 1950

Scrap Book-16-Former Governor Ben T. Laney’s Campaign for Re-election for Governor, April- July 1950

Scrap Book-17-Governor Sid McMath’s Campaign for Re-election for Governor, April- July 1950

End of Scrap Books Series V

End of Collection

Governor Benjamin Travis Laney Jr. Papers

2007-09-13T18:14:00.000-07:00

Governor Benjamin Travis Laney Jr. Papers

Donated by Phillip Laney, son of Governor Ben T. Laney

Ben T. Laney, Jr. was born on November 25, 1896, on a farm in the Jones Chapel community of Ouachita County, Arkansas. He was one of eleven children of Ben T. Laney, Sr. and Martha Ella (Saxon) Laney. Ben Laney, Sr. was a small farmer, who through hard work and thrift was able to see six of eleven children receive college degrees. According to Governor Laney, his father was frugal by nature and did not spend money he did not have. This familial philosophy of “thrift” eventually made its way into Arkansas Government via Governor Laney’s landmark Revenue Stabilization Act of 1945.

Laney attended public school at Smackover, Arkansas in Union County, but dropped out prior to graduating. However, he did go on to teach a year in rural Ouachita County without the benefit of a high school education. Absent a high school degree, Laney was allowed entrance into Hendrix College in Conway, in 1915, after passing the entrance examination. Laney dropped out of college after one year and began a teaching career. During World War I Laney served in the U.S. Navy, and after the war returned to college, this time at Arkansas State Teachers College in Conway. Laney received an A.B. (equivalent to a B.A.) degree in 1924 from Arkansas State Teachers College, and later did graduate work at Utah University.

In 1925, Mr. Laney and one of his brothers bought a drug store in Conway, Greeson Drug Store, located at the corner of Oak and Front Street. Also, at about this time, Laney went to work in a local bank. He married Miss Lucille Kirtley of Lewisville, Arkansas, in 1926, and they would have three children: Benjamin Travis III, William David, and Phillip.

Good financial would visit the Laney family when oil was discovered on the family farm in 1922. Laney later moved from Conway to Camden where he was involved in the oil business, farming and banking, cotton gins, and grocery and hardware stores. He was elected mayor of Camden in 1935 and held this position until 1939 when he was named to the Arkansas Penitentiary Board of Governor Homer Adkins. Laney’s first experience into state politics came in 1942 when he was active in the campaign of future United States Senator John L. McClellan.

Laney’s opponents in the 1944 Governor’s Democratic Primary race were United States Representative David D. Terry of Little Rock, and former state Comptroller J. Bryan Sims. Laney led the three-way race during the primary with Sims coming in second. Terry threw his support to Laney and Mr. Sims withdrew from the runoff race two days later. This unusual move by Sims gave Laney the Democratic Primary victory, and set up a November general election that Laney easily won against his Republican opponent, H.C. Stump. Laney received 85% of the vote in the general election compared to only 15% for Stump. Laney’s re-election of 1946 was almost as lopsided in the general election with Laney receiving 84% and his Republican opponent, W.T. Mills, receiving 16% of the vote.

When Ben T. Laney ran for governor in 1944 he remarked: “I am not a politician.” Laney emphasized an economic and efficient means of operating state government. He campaigned on the platform that the state should not spend money it doesn’t have. His desire to administer a cost-effective state budget based on economic solvency would culminate in his legislation creating the Revenue Stabilization Act of 1945.

The Revenue Stabilization Act of 1945 is considered by many to be Laney’s greatest achievement and was adopted by many other states. This act allowed for money to be put into a single fund and disbursed as needed to various departments. In addition, the Revenue Stabilization Act prevented the state from becoming involved in deficit spending. The house passed Laney’s bill unanimously while the senate only had negative vote.

Governor Laney did not seek a third term in 1948, and chose to become very involved in the issue of states’ rights. Laney became chairman of the States’ Rights Democrats, also known as the Dixiecrats. This body of states rights proponents was made up of governors and leaders from several southern states. The States’ Rights Democrats were in disagreement with President Harry Truman over his speech on civil-rights that he delivered to Congress on February 2, 1948. Laney, and the other States’ Rights Democrats, felt changes in American society should originate with the individual states and not with the federal government.

Laney would run a third time for governor when he challenged Governor Sidney Sanders McMath in 1950. Laney’s campaign slogan was: Let’s Re-Elect Ben Laney Governor, for a Second Time. He lost the election to McMath but remained active in politics and the states’ rights cause. In 1969 Laney was a delegate to the Arkansas Constitutional Convention and was a member of the finance and taxation committee.

In the 1960’s former Governor Laney managed the rice farms of Winthrop Rockefeller and spent time looking after his own business affairs in south Arkansas. He died of a heart attack on January 21, 1977, and was buried in Camden Memorial Cemetery.

John Little McClellan

2007-09-13T18:12:00.000-07:00

Home / Browse / McClellan, John Little

John Little McClellan (1896–1977)

John Little McClellan served longer in the U.S. Senate than any other Arkansan (1942–1977) and was one of its most powerful members. Under McClellan’s leadership, the Senate conducted some of its most significant investigations, including probes into the activities of such men as Jimmy Hoffa, Dave Beck, and Billie Sol Estes. Today, the McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System serves as a notable example of the senator’s belief that large federal projects would boost Arkansas’s prosperity.

John McClellan was born on February 25, 1896, on a farm near Sheridan (Grant County) to Isaac S. and Belle Suddeth McClellan. The McClellans were staunch Democrats and named their son for Congressman John Little.

Educated in public schools, McClellan became interested in law and studied in his father’s law office when not busy on the family’s farm. He was admitted to the Arkansas Bar Association in 1913 at the age of seventeen, becoming the youngest attorney in the United States. McClellan married Eula Hicks of Sheridan on November 2, 1913. They divorced in 1921. The couple had two children.

McClellan practiced law with his father in Grant County until August 1917, when he joined the U.S. Army as a first lieutenant in the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps. He opened a law office in Malvern (Hot Spring County) following his February 1919 honorable discharge from the military.

McClellan’s long political career began in 1920 when he was chosen city attorney of Malvern, a post he held until 1926. At age thirty, he was elected prosecuting attorney for the Seventh Judicial District of Arkansas. Elected to Congress in 1934, he served two terms (1935–1938) in the U.S. House of Representatives from the Sixth Congressional District of Arkansas.

McClellan married Lucille Smith of Malvern on November 8, 1922, and they had three children. She died in 1935. On November 10, 1937, McClellan was wed for the third time, marrying Norma Myers Cheatham.

In 1938, McClellan unsuccessfully challenged Senator Hattie Caraway for her seat, losing a close Democratic primary. He resumed the practice of law in Camden (Ouachita County), then ran for Arkansas’s other Senate seat in 1942, which he won. McClellan was reelected five times, overcoming stiff challenges by Sid McMath in 1954 and David Pryor in 1972. The senator served until his death in 1977, representing the people of Arkansas in the Senate longer than anyone in the state’s history. McClellan also earned one of the most influential Senate committee ranks ever attained by an Arkansan, that of chair of the Committee on Appropriations.

McClellan advanced to a number of prominent positions in the Senate. Contemporaries characterized him as intelligent, tireless, and a superb legislative craftsman. The McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System of locks and dams traversing Arkansas and Oklahoma is a prime example of his leadership in cultivating opportunity and progress in Arkansas and the Southwest. Numerous dams, lakes, drainage and flood control projects, wildlife habitats, forest preserves, and recreational facilities bear his stamp. For many years, the combination of McClellan, Senator J. W. Fulbright, and Representative Wilbur D. Mills gave Arkansas one of the nation’s most powerful congressional delegations. McClellan sided with Republican leadership from time to time but consistently joined his Arkansas colleagues in opposition to civil rights legislation.

McClellan served for twenty-two years as chairman of the Committee on Government Operations and as chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations for eighteen years. As a member of the latter, the senator first emerged as a national figure during the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954. McClellan led a Democratic walk-out of the Republican-controlled subcommittee because of objections to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunting conduct. In 1955, McClellan assumed chairmanship and hired Robert F. Kennedy as chief counsel. As chair of that subcommittee and two other investigative committees—the Senate Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field and the Special Committee to Investigate Political Activities, Lobbying and Campaign Contributions—he conducted more congressional investigations than any other member.

Under McClellan’s leadership, some of the most well-known and significant investigations in the nation’s history were conducted—probes into widespread corruption and criminal activities in the labor-management field, organized crime, the TFX aircraft contract, profiteering in defense contracts for missile procurement, and the riots that erupted in cities and college campuses in the late 1960s. Inquiries concerning the activities of teamsters Dave Beck and Jimmy Hoffa, the so-called “Valachi hearings,” and investigations surrounding the affairs of Texas financier Billie Sol Estes all catapulted McClellan into the public eye. As a vigorous and relentless investigator, McClellan won a reputation for judicial impartiality and fairness.

As a member of both the first and second Hoover commissions, McClellan authored many of its recommendations to reorganize the federal government, resulting in savings of millions of dollars to taxpayers. Prominent among these was his sponsorship of legislation that created the General Services Administration, the business arm of the federal government. He was also the co-author of the 1976 bill that resulted in the first complete revision of the U.S. copyright laws since 1909.

A leading advocate of law enforcement, McClellan was a key figure in winning congressional approval for many significant laws and programs. Among them were the landmark Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Acts of 1968 and 1970, as well as the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970. In his thirty-five years as a senator, McClellan introduced more than 1,000 bills; 140 were signed into law.

McClellan’s family suffered several tragic losses. After losing his second wife to spinal meningitis in 1935, McClellan’s three sons died within a relatively short period of time: Max died of spinal meningitis in Africa in 1943 while serving in World War II; John L. Jr. died in 1949 from injuries caused by an automobile accident, and James H. “Jimmy” died in a plane crash in 1958.

McClellan died on November 28, 1977, in Little Rock (Pulaski County) and is buried in Roselawn Memorial Park. At the time of his death, he ranked second in seniority in the U.S. Senate and was one of its most powerful members.

For additional information:
“McClellan Dies at 81; Power in the Senate.” Arkansas Gazette. November 29, 1977, p. 1A, 8A.

McClellan, John L. Crime Without Punishment. New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1962.

Senator John L. McClellan Collection. Riley-Hickingbotham Library Special Collections. Ouachita Baptist University, Arkadelphia, Arkansas.

Wendy Richter
Arkansas History Commission

Benjamin Travis Laney Jr.

2007-09-13T18:08:00.000-07:00

Benjamin Travis Laney Jr. (1896–1977)
Thirty-third Governor (1945–1949)

Benjamin Travis Laney Jr. served two terms as governor of Arkansas. His most notable achievement was the state’s 1945 Revenue Stabilization Law, which prohibited deficit spending. Though he once said, “I am not a politician,” his conservative views put him in the spotlight at a time when the Democratic Party was becoming more liberal.

Although he opposed desegregation, the University of Arkansas School of Law became the South’s first all-white public institution to admit black students during his tenure.
Ben Laney was born on November 25, 1896, in Jones Chapel (Ouachita County), the son of Benjamin Travis Laney and Martha Ellen Saxon. He was one of eleven children, and his father was a farmer. He entered Hendrix College in Conway (Faulkner County) in 1915 but left in 1916 to teach before serving in the U.S. Navy during World War I. He received a BA from Arkansas State Normal School (now the University of Central Arkansas) in 1924.

Laney worked in business and banking from 1925 to 1926 in Conway, where he and Lucile Kirtley were married on January 19, 1926; they had three sons. In 1927, Laney returned to Ouachita County, where his business dealings included oil, banking, farming, cotton gins, and retail stores.

He was the mayor of Camden (Ouachita County) from 1935 to 1939 and a member of the Arkansas Penitentiary Board from 1941 to 1944. His activities on behalf of John L. McClellan’s 1942 U.S. Senate bid solidified a friendship and political alliance.

A relative unknown when he ran for the 1944 Democratic gubernatorial nomination, he had the support of conservative business and financial interests. His opponents were former congressman David D. Terry and State Comptroller J. Bryan Sims. Sims withdrew ten days before the election amid accusations of a negotiated deal, and Laney easily defeated Republican opponent H. C. Stump in the general election, as was the norm in this essentially one-party political era. His re-nomination and reelection in 1946 were effortless.

The governor’s work on behalf of efficiency, economy, and consolidation in state government and his encouragement of industrialization and broadly based economic development earned him the nickname “Business Ben.” These activities and his opposition to organized labor strengthened his ties with Arkansas business conservatives.
Laney’s most notable achievement was the 1945 Revenue Stabilization Law, which combined flexibility in funding state programs with a priority mechanism to prevent deficit spending. Before 1945, appropriations were tied to specific taxes; as a result, some revenue streams came up short while others had more money than needed. The new law created a single general fund from which all state appropriations were made and prohibited departments and institutions from spending if cash was not available. It also created an orderly system of budget cuts if the revenue was not available.

In 1947, he successfully urged the legislature to create a legislative council to provide research and bill-drafting assistance for Arkansas’s part-time legislators. However, Laney is remembered less for his streamlining of governmental structure and finance than for his opposition to proposals that would alter race relations and weaken or end segregation. He spoke out against progressive federal initiatives to outlaw lynching and the poll tax and quietly worked to prevent desegregation of state professional and higher education programs. Laney claimed that his actions were based on constitutional principles and states’ rights philosophy and not on racial considerations, but he had praised Arkansas and Arkansans as being close to what he described as good and pure Anglo-Saxon stock. Although Laney was Arkansas’s last philosophically consistent segregationist governor, it was on his watch that the UA School of Law admitted black students in 1948.

In 1948, Laney broke with the Truman administration (which he had enthusiastically welcomed in 1945) over President Truman’s use of federal law to require fair employment practices and end racial discrimination. The governor was a leader in the States’ Rights Democrats (Dixiecrats) movement, and the Dixiecrats considered him for a presidential or vice presidential nomination.

As governor, Laney had campaigned for the Dixiecrat ticket (Strom Thurmond and Fielding Wright), despite his doubts about the success of a third party in the South, but Sidney S. McMath, elected governor in 1948, vigorously supported Truman and helped hold Arkansas in the Democratic column in the presidential election. With the Democratic Party divided due to Truman’s civil rights policies, many Southerners wanted to see Strom Thurmond’s name on the ballot instead of Truman’s. However, McMath’s campaigning at the Democratic State Convention prevented Thurmond from getting the nomination. Laney was so bitter toward McMath that, in 1950, he challenged McMath and sought a third term (a feat accomplished only once before in Arkansas). McMath, with the support of the black electorate and organized labor, handily defeated the former governor in the general election.
Laney remained a spokesman for states’ rights but disapproved of Governor Orval E. Faubus’s actions during the 1957 Little Rock Central High School desegregation crisis. Laney believed that Faubus was less a defender of Southern traditions on race and states’ rights than a demagogue interested in immediate political gain.

Laney embraced the economics of a post–World War II “New South” and toiled to attract industry and investment capital to Arkansas. An articulate spokesman for the state, he traveled the country, promoting a new image for Arkansas. However, regarding race, Laney clung to an old Southern style of benign paternalism. The linking of economic growth with a more enlightened view of racial integration was left to Laney’s successors.

In 1969, Laney served as a delegate to the Arkansas Constitutional Convention. He was active in the reelection campaigns of McClellan (1972) and Senator J. William Fulbright (1974), two close friends whom he supported in spite of their Democratic affiliation. Laney, though, supported the presidential candidates George Wallace (American Party) in 1968 and Gerald Ford (Republican Party) in 1976 because of his hostility toward the new brand of Democrats. He managed the rice farm of Winthrop Rockefeller in the 1960s and spent his last years in Magnolia (Columbia County) looking after his own business affairs.
Laney died on January 21, 1977, in Magnolia and was buried in Camden Memorial Cemetery.

For additional information:Donovan, Timothy P., Willard B. Gatewood Jr., and Jeannie M. Whayne, eds. The Governors of Arkansas: Essays in Political Biography, 2d ed. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1995.

Governor Benjamin Travis Laney Jr. Papers. Torreyson Library Special Collections. University of Central Arkansas, Conway, Arkansas.

Tom Forgey
Magnolia, Arkansas

This entry, originally published in Arkansas Biography: A Collection of Notable Lives, appears in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture in an altered form. Arkansas Biography is available from the University of Arkansas Press.