Orval E. Faubus: OUt of Socialism into Realism

ORVAL E. FAUBUS WAS REARED A LIBERAL. His father, Sam Faubus, was a Socialist who detested capitalism and bigotry with equal fervor. The son's critics, myself included, have accused him through the years of selling out the beliefs of his father on both race and economics. The story may be less straightforward than that. Orval Faubus came to power in Arkansas after World War II when two things were happening: First, the old populist revolt that had inflamed the hills for several generations was burning itself out.1 The end of Faubus's own radicalism coincided almost perfectly with the decline of radicalism among his people, not only in the Ozarks but right across the southern uplands. Prosperity, meager as it was, finally intruded into the hills and nudged out not only the Socialists like his father but also the intellectually tamer populists who had used their hill-country base to shower invective on the delta planters and their establishment cohorts in banking, business, and industry. Resentment slowly began to give way to the other side of the populist coin, hope. Hope and appetite and a vestigially populist belief still current: that our fellow hillbilly Sam Walton made it and, with a little luck, I can make it, too. Second, a national phenomenon with far-reaching consequences was coming to a head during the 1950s. The racial equilibrium of the South was being extraordinarily disturbed, not merely by local agitation but more importantly by external forces that eventually would sweep away the entire breastwork of white supremacist defenses. The liberal Faubus might have thrown in with the national mood, a growing impatience with southern heel-dragging. Realistically, however, how much can he be blamed for choosing to be seen as defender of the local faith, no matter how little he shared that faith? What would have been the fate of a governor who chose the other side? Some of my heroes have argued that he could have exerted leadership for the rights of blacks and survived. Or that, at the least, he could have died an honorable political death. Maybe so. But Orval Faubus had seen quite enough of honorable struggle for lost causes in his boyhood home. And there was something else. By the time he was grown, he had seen enough fear, loss, and death to last a lifetime. Literally from the beginning, Orval Eugene Faubus's life was threatened. He weighed two-and-one-half pounds when he was born the night of January 7, 1910, and was so frail that the midwife expected him to die before morning. One night when he was a year old, he caught the croup and stopped breathing. His father rushed him outside into the cold air and plunged a finger into his throat to save his life. The toddler was just learning to talk when he wandered from the house and fell into a deep spring of water and somehow did not drown but climbed out just as his mother got there. Danger continued to surround him as he grew and became part of the community. The year he was seven, one playmate died of diphtheria and another was crushed to death by a falling tree. During another year, flux swept the community and killed two children in a neighboring family. Life was not only perilous at Greasy Creek; it was also hard. Southern Madison County was like most of the Ozarks at that time. The residents scraped by. The towns had a small prosperity, but the countryside provided little more than subsistence. Rural people like the Faubuses raised almost all their food. Shoes and coats were practically luxuries because they had to be bought with cash, and cash was pitiably scarce. Even kerosene for the lamps was so dear that, after John D. Rockefeller cornered the market and raised the price, young Orval had to walk behind the wagon and carry the filled can the two miles from Combs to Greasy Creek, so as not to spill any-or so he recollected in 1964 when Rockefeller's grandson Winthrop tried to wrest the governorship of Arkansas from him. …