He came from the hills, a small place called Greasy Creek near Huntsville in Northwest Arkansas. Before the Highway Commission, his career had been as versatile as his life had been plain. He was a migrant worker, a circuit court clerk, and had run the local newspaper for the folks in Greasy Creek.
Kellams: We're continuing a series from the Pryor archives, are we not? Randy Dixon, Arkansas governors of the modern age.
Dixon: As I guess I've made up. Modern age, I mean, the development of electronic media, I suppose. Radio, film and eventually television.
Kellams: Let me tell listeners two things. One, you are Randy Dixon with the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History.
Dixon: Hello, hello.
Kellams: Two, now, we had Orval Faubus as a...
Dixon: We've done him before. And I wanted to do it a little differently.
Kellams: Good.
Dixon: Yeah. I didn't want to use the same stuff we have used before. There's only so much you have in an archive. And this would be like any other time you were, say, researching a project and how you could properly use the Pryor Center as a research tool. You search among our other resources, Pryor Center interviews, other programs you and I have done, other material that might not have been used in a typical Orval Faubus profile. Does that make sense?
Kellams: It makes perfect sense.
Dixon: Okay, well, that's what we're going to do. Now we do want to give a little background on this, of course. Wouldn't you say the most famous governor we've had other than Bill Clinton? And by famous, I mean famous or infamous?
Kellams: Yeah, I would agree with that.
Dixon: Either way. I mean, he was the 36th governor. And what made him so unique is that he served six consecutive terms. And, you know, back then they were two-year terms. You know what he's best known for?
Kellams: Central High.
Dixon: Yeah. The '57 crisis. And in case you don't know what that was, there was a Supreme Court ruling, Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, ordering the desegregation of schools. The order was ignored by Orval Faubus. He called out the Arkansas National Guard. And he said, for purposes of keeping the peace, as he put it. And he was preventing basically the Black students, the Little Rock Nine, from entering Central High.
Here's from the KATV archives. And this is in 1957, when Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard.
They will not act as segregationist or integrationist, but as soldiers called to active duty to carry out their assigned task.
Dixon: Also in '57, in October, President Eisenhower...
Kellams: He countered.
Dixon: Yes. He nationalized the National Guard, Arkansas National Guard, told him to stand down, and he sent in the 101st Airborne, which, I mean, they're combat-ready troops. And they protected the Black students and enforced federal law, escorted them into class.
Faubus' response was quite swift. And here are a couple of other television appearances he made, and I'll just put two of them back to back. They're on consecutive days.
Now that a federal court, however, has chosen to substitute its judgment for mine as to how the peace and order should be preserved, I must, temporarily at least, abide. And therefore I have issued orders that all units of the Arkansas National Guard stationed at the high schools in Little Rock be removed therefrom as soon as this can be accomplished. They are now gone or they are moving from the school grounds.
My fellow citizens, we are now an occupied territory. In the name of God, whom we all revere. In the name of liberty we hold so dear. In the name of decency which we all cherish. What is happening in America?
Kellams: A national embarrassment.
Dixon: Absolutely.
Kellams: But not in Arkansas, embarrassment?
Dixon: No, apparently not. You know, all the fallout and all the negative publicity the state got did not hamper Faubus' political career at all. Get this: the next election, which would have been in '58, he won with a whopping 82.5%.
Now, of all the negative things, and we're going to hear some more, you know, corruption.
Kellams: Patronage.
Dixon: Bribery, all sorts of things. But to be fair, okay, let's talk about some of the things that Faubus did good for the state. He increased school funding and teacher pay. He overhauled the state hospital system. He paved hundreds of miles of road. You know, he was Sid McMath's highway director. And Sid McMath was big on improving roads around the state. And Faubus continued that. He also heavily promoted industrial development in Arkansas and brought a bunch of more industrial companies so that Arkansas was not completely reliant on being an agricultural state.
In 1966, after six terms, Faubus decides not to run for reelection and left the door open for Winthrop Rockefeller.
Kellams: A Republican.
Dixon: Yes- to come in. This date that we're about to hear a clip from, this is Jan. 10, 1967. The significance of that date is it's the inaugural day for Winthrop Rockefeller, which also means it's Faubus' last day in office.
Now, let me set this up. Rockefeller has just been inaugurated. The crowd is all sort of right inside the Capitol, jockeying for position to talk to the new governor. Jim Pitcock, the news director, with photographer Jim Casey, notice, gosh, here comes Orval Faubus, all by himself.
Kellams: Yesterday's news.
Dixon: With some personal belongings under his arm, walking down the steps of the state Capitol for the last time by himself.
I leave with some sadness, but without any second thoughts about my decision. I leave with relief that I can lay down the burdens which I've had to bear for 12 years. All the many problems, all the many things that needed to be done. And we've accomplished some of them. But it's never... never in government able to satisfy everyone or do all the things it should be done.
Dixon: But he retreated to the hills from which he came. He built, I don't know if you could call it a monument to himself, in the form of a mansion that was perched above downtown Huntsville. Beautiful place. Well, here's KATV's Bob Gregory with a brief description of his new home.
He was building a new home there, which he said cost $125,000, but which Republicans said cost $250,000. Whatever. There, at the end of Farkleberry Trail, in quarters fit for a returning hero intent on becoming a country squire, an elder statesman, Faubus would sink comfortably into retirement. Ten rooms of redwood, indirect lighting, flagstone, gold carpets and a long, narrow balcony from which to look upon the Ozarks with unobstructed delight.
Kellams: Is that home still there?
Dixon: Seven thousand three hundred fifty square feet. Huge place. It was designed by Fay Jones.
So he's retiring, living up in the hills. And he's offered a job in 1969. Jess Odom, who was a Little Rock developer, he developed Maumelle, that community, but he built in the '60s Dogpatch USA, which, as you and I know, hillbilly themed.
Kellams: Well, based on the Li'l Abner comic strip.
Dixon: Exactly. Yeah. Al Capp, his comic. And Al Capp actually endorsed, said, he was quoted as saying that it would be the next Disneyland. Spoiler alert: it didn't happen.
Kellams: Yeah, it was open for a while, to be fair.
Dixon: It was. Yeah. And, well, they announced the hiring of Faubus as the general manager of the facility. And so here's a news conference with Jess Odom. And then after that, you'll hear from Faubus.
Governor Faubus and I worked out an agreement whereby he will come with Dogpatch, and he will head up our organization up there as president of Dogpatch USA.
I've seen a number of facilities of this kind, but here we have, as you've already seen, as you looked about the place today, the natural scenery, the falls, the trout hatchery, which is self-sufficient in itself. And all we have to do is build and fit our facilities for entertainment, the shops, the atmosphere, into what we already have. And I think this has the greatest potential of any facility of its kind in the United States.
Are you happy doing this kind of work?
Yes, I am, because I'm still working with people, and I think nearly everyone likes to feel he's making a contribution to his state and the people among whom he lives.
Dixon: But he kept busy over the years in other ways. He was a bank teller in Huntsville. He wrote a memoir. And you and I have talked, he could often be seen either in a courthouse or on a court square or town square with a table set up. And he was just selling signed copies of his book.
And then he ended up in the early '80s being the Veterans Affairs director, but it was under Republican Frank White. And the reason that was, apparently it was to return the favor of Faubus behind the scenes helping Frank White with his campaign against Bill Clinton. And once Clinton was back in, Faubus...
Kellams: Well, yes.
Dixon: He was out. But throughout his time, his life in and out of office, he was always on top of current politics and events and was really eager to talk about it and give his opinion. Here's a TV interview from 1976.
Right now, throughout the nation and in this state, no party any longer can claim a majority of the citizens at party loyalty. In other words, the bloc of citizens who classify themselves as independents is much larger than the bloc who classify themselves as Republicans or who classify themselves as Democrats. And in this state and in some other states, you're going to see some people cut loose and avoid the primaries and all the difficulties and campaigning you have to go through and run as an independent in the general election and give somebody some trouble and maybe win.
Dixon: So what was he talking about there? And why is he qualified to, you know, give his two cents, especially after he's been out of office? But I wanted to talk to our resident politico, executive director of the Pryor Center and political science professor John Davis.
Davis: You can't really be in a political position and accrue the type of political capital that Orval Faubus did for as long as he did without being an astute political mind. And Orval Faubus, for all of his baggage historically and his contradictions, was undoubtedly a very astute scholar of the human condition and Arkansas politics.
Dixon: So what was it he was talking about in that sound clip back in 1976?
Davis: So after Faubus governor, a decade after, he's observing what political scientists are saying at the same time, which is the rise of the independent voter. And he's seeing that when polling indicates that fewer people are self-identifying as Democrats and Republicans and more of them are identifying as unaffiliated or independent. He's seeing that in real time and he's observing it before a lot of other folks did.
And this is years after he's out of office. So this is a man who, a decade removed from political office, is still very much a political animal. He can't help himself. He's still making these observations and offering commentary. And in this case, he's spot on.
Dixon: We've profiled Faubus before, as we said, and we wanted to use some other resources from the Pryor Center. So here's an example. The Pryor Center interviewed former Secretary of State and first lady Hillary Clinton in 2019, and she had her own story about Faubus.
All right, let me set this up. She was dating Bill Clinton at the time. This was only her second time to visit Arkansas, and Bill Clinton had been showing her all around the state, especially Hot Springs and Hope and around South Arkansas. But in this instance, he proposed a little road trip to North Arkansas.
Clinton: Bill said, would you like to go visit Orval Faubus? I said, Orval Faubus? No, I don't want to go visit Orval Faubus. He goes, we really, interesting. I said, well, okay. But I mean, gosh, I mean, everything I know about him is so negative because of what he did during Little Rock Central High.
And Bill said, yeah, but he's a really smart guy. And he did other things that were actually good for the state. And then he got totally caught up in the opposition to Brown v. Board of Education. And that's how he's going to be known. But it would be interesting to talk to him.
Okay, so we go to Huntsville and Madison County, and Orval Faubus and his second wife, Elizabeth, were living in this incredible modern house. It may have even been designed by Fay Jones, the famous Arkansas architect. And it was up on the side of a mountain overlooking the valley. It was an amazing place.
So we came in, we sat around a table, and Faubus started talking and talked for hours, and Bill would interject and ask him a question. I didn't say anything. Elizabeth didn't say anything. Faubus had been entertaining and in many ways quite revealing, which is how I drew my conclusions about him taking a right turn away from what he had believed. It struck me as someone who had decided to be opportunistic and had basically left his political upbringing and his political beliefs behind.
Kellams: Interesting, interesting, interesting.
Dixon: It was. And, you know, you do some cross-referencing through our collection and you find other stuff. He was in another segment here, and this was on one of our radio segments. We did a story on gambling. But there's a guy named David Hill that we interviewed for that segment.
Kellams: Right.
Dixon: And he's an Arkansas native who wrote a book called "The Vapors." It really went in depth.
Kellams: Great book.
Dixon: Yeah. It really chronicled, you know, Hot Springs' wicked past. He makes some pretty strong accusations against Faubus and his involvement in all this criminality in Hot Springs.
Hill: There was a series of governors over the course of the time that there was gambling in Hot Springs that either were supportive or weren't supportive. You know, the governors, the whole kind of combination only worked if the governor was willing to not send in the state police to shut it all down. And so the periods of time where there was no gambling in Hot Springs was because there were governors that were not playing ball.
Faubus always played ball from the very beginning with the gamblers in Hot Springs, and they paid him handsomely to not send the state troopers in. They delivered him money on a regular basis as sort of payoffs, and stories are that he used that money to build his house up on the mountains. And he took a lot of money from the gamblers, and he rewarded them by kind of toeing this line that he was going to stay out of Hot Springs' affairs, that it was a local issue and not a state issue. And that's really all they needed from him or any other governor, was just to say, I'm not in it. It's between them.
Dixon: Now here's another path that crosses with Faubus. The Pryor Center did an interview with Hoyt Purvis, longtime journalism professor and an aide to Fulbright. Was interviewed in 2016, and he knew Faubus and had these thoughts.
Purvis: I mean, first of all, he was a very intelligent guy. And he had his story. He knew his story. He was going to stick to his story regardless. And he could almost get you to believe that he was right. I mean, you know, he had that.
So, you know, he's a remarkable guy and incredibly talented guy who, you know, could have been successful in many, many different areas, but, you know, happened to choose politics, and then happened to choose politics at whatever it takes to keep winning, you know?
Kellams: Right. And that's what he did.
Dixon: Faubus ended up dying of prostate cancer on Dec. 14, 1994. He was married three times and is interred at the Combs Cemetery in Combs, Arkansas. Next week: Winthrop Rockefeller.
Kellams: Well, that's right, that's what we're doing. We're going governor by governor.
Kellams: Yes.
Dixon: And I bet you didn't think I'd have a musical...
Kellams: Actually, actually, Randy, from the moment I realized we were going to do Faubus this week, I thought it'd be Charlie Mingus.
Dixon: Well, but it's the... it was close. Okay. There have been at least two negative songs written about Faubus. One being "Faubus," no, "Fables of Faubus."
Kellams: "Fables of Faubus." That's Charlie, Charles Mingus.
Dixon: Yeah. And then there's another one from protest folk singer Peter La Farge. That was in 1963. And I hope you all have a sense of humor, because it's a pretty tough song.
Kellams: That's okay.
Dixon: Pretty rough on Faubus and Arkansas, but it's called "Faubus Foibles."
Kellams: All right. Winrock next week. He's Randy Dixon with the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History. Thank you, Randy.
Dixon: Thank you. See you next week.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
