Arkansas: Opportunity Regained

(See Cover)

Q. Whar's this road go to?

A. I been livin' here jer years, 'n' I ain't seen it go no place.

—The Arkansas Traveler

In a part of the world that had gone no place since the Civil War, the directionless road of vaudevillian fame was far more apt as a symbol of Arkansas' dead-end economic and political condition than as a sampling of Ozark humor. For all its majestic forests and fertile bottom lands, its bountiful natural resources and the Mississippi on its eastern frontier, the state remained for long decades a kind of limboland.

Arkansas has never been consistently Southern in temperament, despite its historic and geographic ties to the Old Confederacy; though it is more Western in the look of the land and its yield, the state has never embraced the West's expansionist, assimilative outlook. Instead, in the eyes of the world it seemed aimlessly insular, obdurately independent—and comically backward. As then-Governor Charles Brough boasted 50 years ago: "You could build a wall around the state of Arkansas and its people would be self-sufficient."

The trouble was—and is—that Arkansans have lived too long behind self-constructed walls of complacency, mediocrity and provincialism. Well into the 1950s, the state ranked at or near the bottom of virtually every index of progress, from literacy to average income to the number of dentists per capita. Though the legislature in the '20s dubbed Arkansas the "Wonder State" and later more modestly renamed it the "Land of Opportunity," by the early '40s the brightest opportunity for young people moving off the farms lay in a one-way ticket to another state. Those who managed to get a good education found little reward for their learning back home; a competent technician could ask higher wages within half a day's bus ride in almost any direction. State government was hampered at every level by an anachronistic constitution enacted in 1874, which, as Arkansans point out, was "two years before Custer's last stand."

Traumatic Aftermath. Then, in 1957, came a great blow to Arkansas' backwater mentality. Dwight Eisenhower ordered U.S. paratroopers into Little Rock to resolve an unnecessary and uncharacteristic racial crisis over school integration. Overnight the ugly montage of shrieking segregationists, terrified Negro schoolchildren, and the dyspeptic protestations of Governor Orval Faubus became Arkansas' image to the world. The psychological effect was traumatic. Having previously prided themselves on relatively good race relations, many Arkansans were deeply repelled by the picture that they presented in the unhappy aftermath of Little Rock. It took nearly a decade to germinate, but the seed of change was planted.

In the years since, much has altered in Arkansas—all for the better. A ground swell of technological advance, already under way in the late '50s, has progressed to the point where industry now plays a major role in the economy, population is rising rather than shrinking, about 50% of the state's 2,000,000 people now live in cities and towns, and an estimated 30% of the population is accounted for by in-migration.