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CHAPTER 4 Throw the Rascals Out “In the end the party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it.” —GEORGE ORWELL, 1984 Forall that we could grasp at the time, the election of 1964 was a thorough repudiation of electoral and political reform. Faubus defeated Rockefeller to win an unprecedented sixth term more convincingly than many of us hadimagined,andthepublicseemedtocountenance widespread and documented voting fraud with astonishing equanimity. It was clear that no one would pay the smallest price even for the most blatant criminal cover-up—the wholesale theft of a county’s election records. It was my first real taste of politics, and I felt both personal remorse over the seemingly futile work that I had done and, for a while, an abiding pessimism that significant change could occur. But the election did shift the tectonic plates under the Arkansas political order, although that would not become clear for a while. Except for a special bond election three months later in which a smattering of voters would stomp a Faubus road-building program, the ’64 general election was the last under the poll tax, ending seventy years of manipulation and repression of the votes of poor blacks and whites across nearly half the state. A vote analysis showed that most African Americans who voted in 1964 had their votes counted, amazingly, for Faubus, the man known around the world for resistance to their civil rights. That, at least, would not likely happen again since people’s voting rights were no longer tethered to a poll tax and less apt to be controlled by the boss, their doctor or the proprietor of the general store. Cast in • 47 • 1GLAZE_pages:Layout 1 4/22/11 11:27 AM Page 47 the light of the counterintuitive black vote for Faubus, Rockefeller’s 43 percent of the votes in ’64 should have been read as a powerful message. The one person who probably read it that way was Orval Faubus. In late November, after the election, Faubus did something uncharacteristic and, in a way, prophetic. He threw a party for the press, the men and the single woman from newspapers and broadcast stations who had covered his triumph over Rockefeller. The Faubuses entertained far less than any other administration since World War II, maybe because they suspected that the “silk-stocking crowd,” as Faubus had called the capital ’s social elite, had always looked down upon the rustic couple from Madison County. Alta Faubus enjoyed a small coterie of friends but she found the social expectations of being first lady of the state vexing. Also, the media were among the last that could expect to be feted at the Governor’s Mansion. Except for three men whose reporting he found sympathetic, the press was never an object of the governor’s geniality. But on this occasion, the reporters and cameramen who had worked either the Faubus or Rockefeller campaigns or both were invited over for an evening to reminisce over fruit punch and snacks about the great battle, so epic in the governor’s own mind. Faubus was not prone to impulsive or frivolous behavior like an evening of mirth with the boys of the press. He apparently sensed, if vaguely and incompletely, that the election had been a demarcation in Arkansas history, that things would never be the same for the state and, as it would turn out, certainly not for him. (He would run for governor three more times but never come close again.) But in the media, Faubus divined, it had been just another brawling Arkansas election. For him it was certainly a season of relief and satisfaction, but the great victory had not been properly celebrated or recognized for what it was. The poor boy from Greasy Creek had defeated a Rockefeller, the rich scion of one of the original Robber Barons whom Faubus’s father had despised. A reporter for the Pine Bluff Commercial showed his slides of the campaign and, to the governor’s great amusement, shared some humorous commentary on a few photographs of Rockefeller campaigning. Then for the dozen or so reporters and cameramen, Faubus analyzed the election: his own shrewd decisions, Rockefeller’s blunders, and the stroke of luck thatbroughttheLonokeCountygravestonetravestytohisattentionwhen the race seemed to be tightening. He was not embarrassed at all about 48 • Throw the Rascals Out 1GLAZE_pages:Layout 1 4/22/11 11:27 AM Page 48 [18.216.32.116] Project MUSE (2024...

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