Waiting for the Cemetery Vote: The Fight to Stop Election Fraud in Arkansas

10. A Penny for Your Vote

CHAPTER 10 A Penny for Your Vote “A bumper of good liquor Will end a contest quicker Than justice, judge, or vicar” —RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN Sometimes election fraud is not a secret enterprise but a transparent way of life, undertaken with the willing participation of parties and factions . Votes are bartered for cash, whiskey or favors, and practically everyone willfully enters into the competition and accepts the outcome with the philosophical cheer of the losing bidders on a government printing contract. In the 1976 primaries alone, we found evidence of vote buying in Conway, Madison, Stone, and Marion Counties, but the system had developed in its most pristine form in Searcy County, a poor but picturesque bailiwick in the Ozark Plateau of northwest Arkansas best known for the gorgeous river that traverses it, the Buffalo National River. It was the perfect embodiment of a certain strain of mountain political culture, intense and often violent, and I would get to know it only peripherally but far better than I would have preferred. Discerning readers of President Bill Clinton’s autobiography,MyLife, could get a sense of what it was like. Clinton writes of his first foray into Arkansas politics, his unsuccessful race for the US House of Representatives in 1974. Carl Whillock, a former administrative assistant to the late J. W. Trimble, who had lost the House seat to John Paul Hammerschmidt eight years earlier, squired young Clinton around the most remote of the twenty-one counties of the Third District that spring to hook him up with the movers and shakers who could help him in the Democratic primary • 177 • 1GLAZE_pages:Layout 1 4/22/11 11:27 AM Page 177 against three opponents and against Hammerschmidt in the fall if he won the party nomination. Whillock in the book The Clintons of Arkansas and Clinton inMyLifetell about arriving after nine o’clock at night at the home of Will Goggin, the county Democratic chairman, who was then in his 80s, outside the hamlet of St. Joe. Few places in Arkansas were poorer than St. Joe or more fertile ground for populist fervor. Some thirty years earlier, one of Goggin’s neighbors, a poor hillside farmer named Joe Johnson—the father of eight children—became the first person ever arrested and convicted of flag desecration in Arkansas when he went to the Searcy County Courthouse at Marshall to get commodities for his starving children. Word had got around that Johnson was a Jehovah’s Witness, an unpopular sect that believedsalutingtheflagviolatedthebiblicalinjunctionagainstworshiping graven images. The county welfare director told Johnson that he could not get any foodstuff until he saluted the flag in the cramped office. In a short speech quoting the Bible, Johnson allowed his hand to brush the flag, a flagrant desecration according to a state law passed at the end of World War I. The farmer was jailed for the offense, and the next year, soon after PearlHarbor,theArkansasSupremeCourtputasidetheFirstAmendment and ruled that Johnson got exactly what he deserved. Will Goggin was a populist who developed an ardor for the Democratic Party in the crucible of that bleak time and place. Whillock had told Clinton that if Goggin supported him he would easily carry Searcy County in the primaries. Goggin had gone to bed but let them in and listened to Clinton make his pitch about how he could beat Hammerschmidt. Sure enough, Goggin was infatuated with the young law professor and promised to support him. “When he said he’d be for me,” Clinton wrote, “I knew it meant a lot of votes, as you’ll see.” Clinton discreetly didn’t tell the whole story, but Whillock did, privately . Goggin told Clinton that he would be on the slate for the primaries and the general election if he was the nominee, and he suggested that Clinton contribute to the fund that would elect the candidates. He explained that small payments would be required for some votes. Clinton was reluctant to participate in the scheme, but Whillock negotiated an understandingthattheThirdDistrictrace would be exempt from the votebuying arrangement even though Clinton would still get the chairman’s 178 • A Penny for Your Vote 1GLAZE_pages:Layout 1 4/22/11 11:27 AM Page 178 nod. Clinton did recount in the autobiography that when he was forced into a runoff with state Senator W. E. “Gene” Rainwater of Fort Smith in the May primary he learned that Goggin was going...