Twelve Elections That Shaped a Century I Tawdry Populism, Timid Progressivism, 1900-1930
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Arkansas Politics in the 20th Century: Twelve Elections That Shaped a Century I Tawdry Populism, Timid Progressivism, 1900-1930 One-gallus Democracy Not with a whimper but a bellow did the 20th century begin in Arkansas. The people’s first political act in the new century was to install in the governor’s office, for six long years, a politician who was described in the most graphic of many colorful epigrams as “a carrot-headed, red-faced, loud-mouthed, strong-limbed, ox-driving mountaineer lawyer that has come to Little Rock to get a reputation — a friend of the fellow who brews forty-rod bug juice back in the mountains.”1 He was the Tribune of the Haybinders, the Wild Ass of the Ozarks, Karl Marx for the Hillbillies, the Stormy Petrel, Messiah of the Rednecks, and King of the Cockleburs. Jeff Davis talked a better populism than he practiced. In three terms, 14 years overall in statewide office, Davis did not leave an indelible mark on the government or the quality of life of the working people whom he extolled and inspired, but he dominated the state thoroughly for 1 This quotation from the Helena Weekly World appears in slightly varied forms in numerous accounts of Davis's yers. It appeared in the newspaper in the spring of 1899 and appears in John Gould Fletcher, Arkansas (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1947) p. 2. This version, which includes the phrase "that has come to Little Rock to get a reputation" appears in Raymond Arsenault, The Wild Ass of the Ozarks: Jeff Davis and the Social Bases of Southern Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), p. 68. Davis loved to repeat the description in campaign speeches. 1 nearly a decade, established the prototype of the caricature Southern demagogue, and inspired the greatest of them all, Huey P. Long, who 30 years later would be the true radical that others only purported to be. Jeff Davis was a model for “the Kingfish,” who when he was 18 marveled at a Davis stump speech. Davis served as a punctuation mark for the great agrarian protest of the last quarter of the 19th century known as populism, and in Arkansas he tethered that largely ineffectual movement to its more circumspect and effective offspring, progressivism. As farmers and laborers began to experience the mercies of the free market after the Civil War, the cotton-based economy in the South virtually collapsed. By 1898, the wholesale price of cotton had fallen to 6 cents a pound, from 83 cents in 1865, and nearly half the farms in Arkansas had fallen from owner-operated into tenancy. The economic calamity in the Arkansas countryside and the rest of the South produced random protests and mostly disconnected political movements. Poor Arkansas farmers, white laborers and sometimes blacks organized into first one and then another arrangement — the Grange, the Brothers of Freedom, the Agricultural Wheel, the Reform Society, the Sons of Liberty, the Farmers Club, the Farmers’ Alliance and the National Farmers Union — where their plight was pondered and remedies debated. Political action was sometimes espoused, sometimes eschewed. When the protest did turn tangibly political, the major political parties were not practical forums. The Republican Party was tainted by the excesses of Reconstruction and the Democratic Party, which had been controlled by conservative plantation owners and merchants since Reconstruction, was furtively if not openly hostile to any change in the status quo. So the protest was channeled to the Greenback Party, the Union Labor Party and, finally, the People’s or Populist Party. As a political movement, the protest crested in Arkansas with the race for governor in 1888, when the Democrats literally had to steal the election. But by the middle of the 2 ’90s, the Democrats had co-opted just enough of the populist agenda to turn back the tide. The Democrats also learned to exploit race, both rhetorically by race-baiting and statutorily, by making it harder for African-Americans to vote and impossible for them to vote in the Democratic primaries, where for another 75 years nearly all elections would be decided. (Davis signed a law institutionalizing the white primary in 1906.) Although he would later embrace the paranoia of the wildest of the agrarian radicals, Davis was anything but a populist before 1896. He and his father, both lawyers, were part of the elite and well-to-do in Pope County and owing to his fearlessness and oratorical skills he was the go-to man for Democrats in the Ozarks whenever they had to match wits with the radicals or the Republicans. He was picked to debate James H. “Cyclone” Davis, the spellbinding Texas populist. Jeff would say later, probably apocryphally, that “Cyclone” missed the debate because someone had stolen into his hotel room during the night and made off with his wallet and pants. But Davis gradually became disaffected with the bourbon establishment, first when he was forced out of a race for Congress in 1894 by weak support in his own county convention but in earnest when he was touched by the great prairie avenger, William Jennings Bryan. He campaigned for Bryan in the 1896 presidential election — Bryan was the fusion candidate of both the Democratic and Populist parties — and he was picked to deliver the official Arkansas vote to the Electoral College. Davis would later explain the conversion: You should also remember tht in 1896, when we nominated the grandest and truest man the world ever knew — William Jennings Bryan — for president, we stole all the Populists had; we stole their platform, we stole their candidate, we stole them out lock, stock and barrel. Populists, why I used to hate them; but I did not know as much then as I do now; I did not have as much sense then as I have now.2 2 L. Sharpe Dunaway, Jeff Davis, Governor and United States Senator: His Life and Speeches (Little Rock, AR: Democrat Printing and Lithographing Co., 1913), p. 85. 3 Davis’s election as attorney general in 1898, after the death of his front-running opponent, went largely unremarked. But when a suddenly reformist legislature enacted a bill outlawing price-fixing, Davis went after trusts and monopolies, particularly insurance companies, with a zeal never seen before. He became a laughingstock in the business community and he was considered finished. But Davis understood what almost no one else did, that the replacement of the old convention system with popular primaries had shifted the political firmament forever. Davis had absorbed the most invidious strains of populism — racism and virulent paranoia — and it would prove for him and others for another half-century an unstoppable combination. The Election of 1900: A Karl Marx for Hillbillies Democratic parties in each of the one-party southern states faced the threat of Populism in the last years of the Nineteenth century. Such was certainly the case in Arkansas where the Agricultural Wheel was the base of the sociopolitical reform movement. As in other states, the Democratic party effectively battled Populism with disfranchisement. But, it was also common for to leaders with Populist leanings to gain power within the party. In Arkansas, the Democrat who played this role was Jeff Davis—Attorney General, Governor, and U.S. Senator. Davis was born in extreme southwest Arkansas but his family soon moved to Pope County and it was there that Davis would begin his legal career. At age 28, Davis was elected prosecuting attorney. Eight years later, in 1898, after studying closely the speeches of 1896 presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan, Davis entered the race for Attorney General. He had little chance of defeating the head of the University of Arkansas law school, but the leading candidate dropped dead while delivering a speech and Davis—by defeating the token competition left in the race—became a statewide elected official. He used the office to put populism into action by attacking corporate interests in literally dozens of antitrust suits. His 1900 race for governor, therefore became a referendum on his anticorporate actions.3 Four conservative Democrats—Little Rock banker and philanthropist John G. Fletcher, Morrilton lumber merchant A. F. Vandevanteer, Delta newspaper editor J. E. Wood, and Fort Smith judge Edgar Bryant—served as foils in Davis’s 1900 script. Davis went over the heads of local county elites who generally opposed him to speak directly to rural voters for their votes in the primary election, moving them with emotional rhetoric that combined a sympathy for the plight of rural Arkansans with coarse epithets against his urban and Delta enemies. In his opening speech of the campaign, Davis claimed: “I am not trying to array the country against 3 For overview and analyses of Davis’s elections, see Richard L. Niswonger, Arkansas Democratic Politics, 1896- 1920 (Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1991) and Arsenault. For the best collection of Davis campaign rhetoric see Fletcher. See also Calvin R. Ledbetter, Jr., "Jeff Davis and the Politics of Combat," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 33 (1974): 16-37, and Richard L. Niswonger, "A Study in Southern Demogoguery: Jeff Davis of Arkansas," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 39 (1980): 114-24 4 Little Rock. There are many noble men and women living there, God bless them. But there is a gang down there that needs cleaning out, and needs it awful bad….I will drive out that gang so clean if I am elected, that it will be like the Red River had run through the town.”4 He also linked populism to Christian values, stating “The papers may say that nobody will vote for me except the fellow who wears patched breeches and one gallus and who lives up the forks of the creek and don’t pay anything except his poll tax….I want to tell you that there is no great reformation that originated on earth that did not come from the ranks of the humble and lowly.