A forgotten candidate and the 1962 Arkansas governor's race

An excerpt from “The Education of Ernie Dumas: Chronicles of a Political Mind.”



In May, Butler Center Books will publish “The Education of Ernie Dumas: Chronicles of a Political Mind,” a political memoir from the longtime Arkansas Times columnist and former Arkansas Gazette editorial writer who has been reporting on Arkansas leaders since 1954, when Orval Faubus won his first gubernatorial election, defeating incumbent Gov. Francis Cherry. The book provides an often deeply personal insider’s reflection on the politicians who shaped the modern history of the state: Cherry, Faubus, Winthrop Rockefeller, Dale Bumpers, David Pryor, John McClellan, J. William Fulbright, Bill Clinton, Jim Guy Tucker and others. The following is an excerpt from Dumas’ book.

For a while, in the winter of 1961-62, amid his fourth two-year term in office, Gov. Orval Faubus toyed with the idea of retirement, or at least a respite from politics and the unrelenting anxieties of governing, which are particularly vexing when you have no one, not even a family member, with whom you care to share your misgivings, regrets, or apprehensions. He had had some health problems, traceable to stress, and it was clear that in 1962 he would have serious opponents for the first time since 1954. He dreaded one in particular, Sid McMath, the former governor who, along with Harry S. Truman, had been his earliest hero. Both Faubus and McMath had served as officers in some of the worst fighting in World War II, Faubus in the Battle of the Bulge and other European campaigns and McMath in the Pacific. After the war, both joined the “GI Revolt,” a political reform movement that peaked in the first elections after the war, in 1946 and 1948. McMath was elected prosecuting attorney in Garland County in 1946, but the Madison County voters who had twice elected Faubus to the office of circuit clerk before the war rejected him for the office of county judge in 1946, in favor of a Republican who had not gone to war. Faubus acquired the local weekly, the Madison County Record, and his columns cheered McMath, the Marine hero from Hot Springs. When McMath was elected governor in 1948, he appointed the young man from Greasy Creek to the state Highway Commission, brought him into his office as executive secretary, and then made him the highway director. McMath would lament in 1962 that his big highway program had built the first paved road into Madison County and let Orval out.

McMath’s mere entry into a race against him was a reproof of Faubus’ desertion of the progressive movement, and a defeat at the hands of his old mentor would be especially bitter. McMath had counseled the White House and Justice Department in September 1957 about how to enforce the law without sending federal soldiers, which he thought would be too reminiscent of the Civil War. During the campaign, Faubus would accuse him of complicity in the “forced integration” of Central High and predicted that McMath would use force to integrate other Arkansas schools.

But McMath was not the only serious prospect. Congressman Dale Alford — who with the silent help of the governor had defeated Brooks Hays in a write-in campaign in 1958, after Hays had tried to broker a compromise between Faubus and President Eisenhower in 1957 — had to run for something. Arkansas lost a seat in the House of Representatives after the 1960 census, and the legislature’s reapportionment of the state into four districts threw Alford into a district with U.S. Rep. Wilbur D. Mills. Alford knew he couldn’t beat Mills; besides, Mills had persuaded House Democrats to accept Alford, who had opposed a Democratic nominee, and to include him in the seniority ranks. W.R. “Witt” Stephens, the president of Arkansas Louisiana Gas Company and the most powerful man in the state, worried that Alford might take on his man, U.S. Sen. J. William Fulbright, who Stephens feared was vulnerable to a glib segregationist like Alford. Stephens sent his political agent, an insurance broker named Jack Gardner, to Alford with a message: It was pretty certain that Faubus would not run, and with Stephens’ support Alford could walk into the governor’s office. Alford jumped into the race. Privately, Stephens, like Faubus, had no use for the unctuous eye doctor and figured that Faubus, if he did run again, would take him out easily.

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https://arktimes.com/history/2019/04/25/a-forgotten-candidate-and-the-1962-arkansas-governors-race