When the new librarian in town, Nate Coulter, asked me to moderate a panel for the Butler Center's Legacies and Lunch series based on my recent article about the dynamic and transformative 1970s in Arkansas politics, I said I'd do it only if we could secure the perfect panel.
I figured that would be the end of that. Pre-emptive insistence on perfection is an unreasonable condition.
But the event would work only through the insights of persons intimately engaged in the era, still of sound-enough mind to recall it and possessed of storytelling aptitude.
Whenever I give a talk, I take with me a piece of paper presenting a bare and scratched-out outline of what I want to say, and, more importantly, an all-capitalized reminder at the top, saying "anecdotes." Nothing is more effective than the spontaneous enticement of those magic words: "That reminds me of a story."
To my surprise, David Pryor, Archie Schaffer and Ernie Dumas said yes.
Pryor ran in two epic U.S. Senate races in the '70s, losing one and winning the other, and served two terms as governor. Schaffer, nephew-in-law of Dale Bumpers, served his uncle the governor as executive secretary and then managed Ray Thornton's Senate campaign against Pryor in '78. Dumas covered it all for the Arkansas Gazette. As I told the crowd, everyone but me calls him the leading political journalist of our time in Arkansas.
So there we were Friday, packing a reported 340, nearly all gray-haired, into the 320-seat-capacity Ron Robinson Theater in the River Market.
I began with the stipulation that the '70s era in Arkansas politics actually started in the '60s and was built on the brave transitional influence on Arkansas politics of a great Republican, Winthrop Rockefeller.
And then we were off.
"Archie, tell that Pinto story," prodded Pryor of Schaffer. "If you don't, I will."
Basically it was that Bumpers, as governor during the energy crisis, pulled up one day in his official long Lincoln to announce that part of the state vehicle fleet was switching to Pintos. John Bennett, a legendary reporter for the Memphis Commercial Appeal, asked Bumpers where his Pinto was, and Bumpers said it was on order. Afterward Schaffer told Uncle Dale the governor's office had no Pinto on order, and Uncle Dale told him, "You do now."
Thank goodness the combustible little Ford never actually arrived.
Apropos of nothing, Pryor told about the time during his governorship when the late Sen. Knox Nelson brought into his office an old boy from DeWitt who wanted to work in his administration. Pryor said, well, OK, and proceeded to engage the Bubba-esque gentleman as to what his special issue of interest might be. Was it education? Game and fish? The old boy told him that all he needed was something that would give him an excuse to get out of DeWitt one day a week.
There was a point amid the stories: In 1957 Arkansas politics was internationally disgraced and seen properly as a wasteland of racism and backward populism. In 1992 Arkansas politics produced an American president who was a moderate Democrat and Rhodes Scholar and noted product of a meritocracy.
How did it get from '57 to '92? It did so via the '70s, the transformative era that provided the vital bridge and launched an era of moderation and modernization--moderation on race, rhetorical tenor and the role of government; modernization on the organization and funding of government and the nature of the state's economy.
My final question of the program: Is that era now wholly kaput, a victim of the Tea Party-ish Republican revolution starting in 2010 and ending in 2015 with the end of Mike Beebe's governorship and the beginning of Asa Hutchinson's?
The panelists said the era was indeed over, disagreeing with my observation--which I still hold--that Hutchinson is a little different from a ruinous Sam Brownback in Kansas or a ruinous Bobby Jindal in Louisiana.
I say Hutchinson clings to that legacy if only by his fingernails. I say there's something inside him that wants to respect that legacy a bit while prompting it to evolve conservatively--such as on adapted Medicaid expansion or telling the Legislature to rewrite and tone down that bill legalizing religion-based discrimination against gays.
We can better assess that after eight years. Yes, eight. Not four.
After the event, a reporter for local public radio asked me if the program had been nothing more than common generational nostalgia--if graying folks in the 1980s couldn't just as easily have sat around telling stories about the seminal importance of the '30s and '40s.
You mean something like, "Hey, remember when we did that New Deal and won that war and saved the country and world?"
Do you mean to say my generation is not the most important generation?
Oh, well. Let the others have their own panel discussion.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 07/12/2016