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

11. Judicial Remedy

CHAPTER 11 Judicial Remedy “These judges are an awfully overworked set of fellows . They come down to their office about ten in the morning, leave at noon, come back at two and leave at four. Judge, you must be worked to death to stand such a constant strain. Upon what meat do you feed, Judge Wood, that you are enabled to do such heavy work?” —GOVERNOR JEFF DAVIS, CAMPAIGN OF 1904 While a dozen years of strife over election rascality and my perpetual anger over the refusal of every branch of government to deal firmly with the vote stealing finally drove me from the battle, I found my ardor for politics not diminished but sharpened. Every politician with and for whom I had worked, which included earnest reformers like Rockefeller, Purcell, Bumpers, Pryor, and Mills, along with judges and prosecutors, sooner or later exposed feet of clay. My disillusionment was always bitter . It would be a long time before I could acknowledge a verity of democratic government, which was that good men and women could make imperfect judgments and yield to the mean realities of politics and popular opinion without being unprincipled or betraying the public trust. Anyway, no sooner had I surrendered the reins of The Election Laws Institute and the clean-election movement than I decided that if I couldn’t support someone else with unreserved abandon I ought to run myself. I had never before, at least after high school, wanted or intended to run for office, but I did not suffer from insufficient vanity. • 193 • 1GLAZE_pages:Layout 1 4/22/11 11:27 AM Page 193 In the many years since then, I have often reflected upon a fatuous little event from my days in the attorney general’s office with Joe Purcell. Someone told me about an uncanny fortuneteller who lived in a small house off Wright Avenue in Little Rock. Although she refused to be interviewed , the Gazette carried a story about her. Her name was Rosie Gray and she read tarot cards. On a caprice one day I looked her up. She was in the back room at a small table. I gave her five dollars. She shuffled and studied the cards and told me that I was a lawyer, had four children and would have another, and she furnished some details about my father’s future work on engines in Missouri. She said I would work simultaneously in Little Rock and Washington, DC, that I would be divorced, that I would marry a redheaded girl and be very happy, and that I would be elected a judge. For how long? I asked. “A long time,” she said. All of that was either true or would become true. The legislature soon enacted a law taxing fortunetellers at the rate of one hundred dollars a week, which I presume put Rosie and others like her out of business. A Fort Smith woman sued in federal court in 1975 contending that the law was unconstitutional because it violated a fortuneteller ’s free-speech, association, and equal-protection rights. A threejudge panel ruled that the state had a perfect right to tax fortunetellers out of existence, although other jurisdictions have been more sympathetic to the First and Fourteenth Amendment rights of practicing occultists. I suppose that if the issue had come before the state appellate courts afterward I would have recused owing to my own experience. The fortuneteller law may have been punishment for Rosie’s trying to inflict me on the judicial establishment, though I suspect religious impulses were behind it. I offer no defense of fortunetellers, but I have always marveled at Rosie Gray’s studied or lucky guesses at my situation and my future. They say that many people are particularly susceptible to suggestion, so it may be that she shaped rather than forecast my conduct, but I do not think so. In the yearsafterward,Icouldnotrepairthemarriage that mysingle-mindedness and angst about all things had damaged, and Susan and I divorced in 1974. In 1978, I got into politics and judging for real and then married Phyllis Laser, a redheaded businesswoman who mastered my temperament and gave me my fifth precious child, fulfilling the last of Rosie’s predictions. 194 • Judicial Remedy 1GLAZE_pages:Layout 1 4/22/11 11:27 AM Page 194 Judicial Remedy • 195 Dr. Joel Anderson, who was chairman of the Pulaski County Republican Committee and later chancellor...