Statesmen, Scoundrels, and Eccentrics: A Gallery of Amazing Arkansans

Bernie Babcock

Bernie Babcock Julia Burnelle “Bernie” Babcock lived a very long and productive life. A writer, museum founder, and all-round character, Babcock left a large imprint on the history of Little Rock and Arkansas. Many people who knew only her name were surprised to meet Bernie and discover she was a woman. She was born Julia Burnelle Smade on April ,,in Unionville,Ohio,the daughter of educated parents. Her family moved to Russellville when Bernie was ten, and she grew up there and in Little Rock. She studied at Little Rock University, a Masonic institution, but left school at eighteen to marry William Babcock, an express company agent. In , after eleven years of marriage, William died, leaving behind five children,a twenty-nine-year-old widow,and many medical bills. There were no safety nets or social programs for impoverished families at that time,and the widow Babcock turned to writing to support her family.Having written poetry since childhood,she threw herself into her new career and success came remarkably quickly. She shared her mother’s fierce opposition to liquor, and temperance themes appeared frequently in her work. In , she published her first novel. Titled The Daughter of a Republican, this biting attack on saloons sold , copies in six months. As soon as her children began school, Babcock took a job at the Arkansas Democrat. For $. per week she edited both the society and book pages. She is also believed to have been the first female to edit stories received by telegraph, the equivalent of the modern wire editor. When her workday at the newspaper ended, she went home and continued to write, producing hundreds of poems, short stories, and novels. Her best-known work is The Soul of Ann Rutledge (), the first of five novels Babcock wrote about President Abraham Lincoln. This novel, written in the stilted prose of the late Victorian era, was an account of a supposed relationship between young Lincoln and Ann  Rutledge, the daughter of an innkeeper in Salem, Illinois, where the future president lived for six years. The Soul of Ann Rutledge went through fourteen printings as well as several foreign language editions. The book is still easily located in the used book trade. Many of her books were thinly disguised political or personal statements. Her initial books were temperance novels, full of vivid Bernie Babcock  Bernie Babcock, a successful novelist and museum founder. Photo courtesy of Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries. detail of the suffering caused by liquor consumption. Justice to the Woman () and A Political Fool () were political novels but with temperance overtones. One of her books touched on human evolution , a subject that fascinated Babcock. Darwin’s Origin of Species and the Bible were the first two books Babcock acquired after marrying.A fascination with evolution led Babcock to vigorously speak out against a  constitutional amendment outlawing the teaching of evolution in Arkansas schools. After leaving her job with the Arkansas Democrat, Babcock edited and published her own quarterly magazine, The Arkansas Sketch Book, which folded after three years. This first major attempt at a state literary magazine was well done with fine photography and original poems and stories. In  she published the first anthology of Arkansas poetry, Pictures and Poems of Arkansas, which included one hundred poems as well as seventy original photographs. As time passed, Miss Bernie, as she was often called, became interested in establishing a museum for Arkansas, believing it would help build state pride. She was highly offended when H. L. Mencken and others criticized the state, and she wrote a blistering indictment of Thomas W. Jackson’s joke book On a Slow Train through Arkansas. Eventually a museum was opened on the third floor of Little Rock city hall, but it closed during the Great Depression. During that time she found work with the Federal Writers’ Project, where she helped produce several books and guides to Arkansas topics and organized oral history interviews with former slaves. In the s, though over seventy years of age, Babcock prodded the city of Little Rock into reestablishing a museum, this time in the old Arsenal Building in what is today MacArthur Park. Hired as the museum director, she worked hard to build the Little Rock Museum of Science and Natural History into a real institution, but support was scanty and it never reached its potential. The museum was the forerunner of today’s Museum...