Showing papers in "The Arkansas Historical Quarterly in 2002"

Racism: A Short History

Abstract: Racism: A Short History By George M Fredrickson (Princeton: Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002) Pp ix, 216 Acknowledgments, introduction, epilogue, appendix, notes, index $2295) Historian George M Fredrickson, an eminent authority on race and ethnicity, has produced a highly readable, sharply analytical, and consistently provocative overview of the course of Western racism from the Middle Ages to the present He focuses on the evolution of the two most virulent forms of racism, anti-Semitism and color-coded white supremacy, that came to fullest fruition in the "overtly racist regimes" that emerged in the American South, Nazi Germany, and South Africa Fredrickson compares and contrasts these regimes and probes the connections between them with consummate skill He also maintains that racism, always nationally specific, invariably became involved in searches for national identity and cohesion and varied with the historical experience of each country Despite such variations, all three overtly racist regimes possessed common features, including the implementation of an official racist ideology that severely proscribed the rights, privileges, and opportunities of blacks and/ or Jews This volume traces the origins of Western racism to medieval Europe, during an era of intense religiosity in which the increasing hostility of Christians toward Jews transformed the anti-Judaism endemic to Christianity into an anti-Semitism that made getting rid of Jews preferable to converting them Anti-Semitism, in turn, became racism when Jews came to be considered innately malevolent beings in league with the devil rather than merely guilty of harboring false beliefs Of particular importance in this development was Spain, where attitudes and practices toward Muslims and Jews "served as a kind of segue between the religious intolerance of the Middle Ages and the naturalistic racism of the modern era" (p 40) Although Fredrickson recognizes that Europeans had long associated the color black with evil, he nonetheless questions whether Europeans in general were strongly prejudiced against Africans prior to the beginning of the slave trade Initially, he points out, religion rather than race justified the European enslavement of Africans: "The only way to save African souls was to enslave them" (p 38) The dark skins of West Africans soon became a part of the equation, and the so-called Curse of Ham or Canaan was invoked to demonstrate that African slavery was divinely inspired However, anti-black racism took root slowly because it ran counter to the Christian belief that the entire human race was of "one blood" and worthy of salvation Only when emancipated from Christian universalism did colorcoded racism become an ideology The volume explores the route by which this emancipation took place, beginning in the eighteenth century with the invention of the concept of races as basic human types classified by skin color and other physical characteristics The scientific racism that ultimately emerged was used to determine those groups, notably Jews and blacks, who were unfit to possess the rights of full citizenship "Scientific" pronouncements regarding the innate inferiority of blacks lent legitimacy to popular views long held in the United States, especially in the South …

Enemies of the country : new perspectives on Unionists in the Civil War South

Abstract: Essays on residents of the Confederacy who took a stand for the Union This book explores the family and community dynamics of the Unionist experience in the Civil War South. Enemies of the Country profiles men and women of the Confederate states who, in addition to the wartime burdens endured by most southerners, had to cope with being a detested minority. With one exception, these featured individuals were white, but they otherwise represent a wide spectrum of the southern citizenry. They include natives to the region, foreign immigrants and northern transplants, affluent and poor, farmers and merchants, politicians and journalists, slaveholders and nonslaveholders. Some resided in highland areas and in remote parts of border states, the two locales with which southern Unionists are commonly associated. Others, however, lived in the Deep South and in urban settings. Together the portraits underscore how varied Unionist identities and motives were, and how fluid and often fragile the personal, familial, and local circumstances of Unionist allegiance could be.

Local Matters: Race, Crime, and Justice in the Nineteenth-Century South

Abstract: Justice blind to - or blinded by - race Drawing on previously untapped sources, these nine community studies represent some of the best new work on how racial justice can be shaped by the particulars of time and place. Although each essay is anchored in the local, several larger themes emerge across the volume - such as the importance of personality and place, the movement of former slaves from the capriciousness of "plantation justice" to the (theoretically) more evenhanded processes of the courts, and the increased presence of government in daily American life. Local Matters cites a wide range of examples to support these themes. One essay considers the case of a quasi-free slave in Natchez, Mississippi - himself a slaveowner - who was "reined in" by his master through the courts, while another shows how federal aims were subverted during trials held in the after-math of the 1876 race riots in Ellenton, South Carolina. Other topics covered range from blacks and the ballot in Washington Country, Texas, to slaves, crime, and the common law in New Orleans.

Strangers in Zion : fundamentalists in the South, 1900-1950

Abstract: In Strangers in Zion: Fundamentalists in the South, 1900-1950 William R. Glass tells the story of the growth of Protestant fundamentalism in the American South and the subsequent conflicts between different branches of the movement. Glass argues that despite the generally conservative character of Southern society and religion, fundamentalists during 1900-1950 had difficulty making a home for themselves in the South, although they did gain a foothold through building a network of conferences, churches, and schools. These institutions, though, provoked the first sustained reaction by other Southern denominations against the fundamentalist presence in their midst. In these same years, a theologically liberal faction of the fundamentalist movement began to take a prominent role in influencing policy and ascended to leadership positions of educational institutions and mainstream Southern denominations. The result was the introduction of fundamentalist controversy among Southern Protestants. These battles, particularly those among Southern Baptists and Southern Presbyterians, fostered the establishment of ongoing factions determined to resist and reverse the penetration of liberal theologies in their churches. In this way, Glass points to the origins of the current crisis among Baptists in the South as being much earlier than anyone else has suggested.

Marian Breland Bailey: The Mouse Who Reinforced

Abstract: EVERYONE HAS READ ABOUT THE "SMART" BOMBS of Desert Storm. After a pilot pointed his laser at a target in Baghdad, a plane would deliver a bomb that followed the beam to the target. But in 1942, smart bombs consisted of three pigeons tucked into cradles in a bomb's nose cone. They had been taught to peck at a target shown on a ground-glass screen in exchange for food. If the bomb deviated from the target, the pigeons' pecks at the screen would transmit signals to correct the bomb's heading. The man who had devised the procedure for teaching the pigeons to perform their patriotic duty was the pioneering psychologist B. F. Skinner.1 He was assisted by Keller and Marian Breland. Years later, during the Vietnam War, Marian Breland and Bob Bailey, research director of her firm, Animal Behavior Enterprises, trained U.S. Army Special Forces to use pigeons to prevent ambushes. A pigeon would fly along a road or trail ahead of the soldiers and their vehicles. If it saw men lying in ambush along the route, it would alert the troops by circling a few times and then light in a tree at that location until recalled. In between these two wars, Marian and her first husband, Keller Breland, had become the most experienced and accomplished mammal, fish, reptile, and bird trainers in the world, and they did most of their work in Hot Springs, Arkansas. They were the first scientists to see that the methods used in that original pigeon project of World War II could be employed to train animals to do almost anything within the creature's repertoire to work for and to entertain humans. Using Arkansas as their base, the Brelands devised techniques that would be used in famous animal parks and zoos throughout the United States, as well as in South America, Asia, and Europe. Hot Springs became the place for scientists and students alike to go if they wanted to see how it was done. Marian Kruse and Keller Breland met at the University of Minnesota in 1940 after Marian literally bumped into Keller. She was rushing towards the health center after being bitten by a lab rat that she had been feeding. They married a year later. Keller was majoring in industrial psychology and already had established a reputation for his independent views. He valued psychology as a science but also believed the knowledge revealed by research should be useful and profitable. Marian Kruse had been born and raised in Minneapolis, where she had many pets, including dogs and cats. As a child she visited her uncle's farm, where there were many more animals, including a pony. Her favorite books were Black Beauty, Call of The Wild, and Thornton Burgess's writings about animals. Her family called her "Mouse" because of her size, and the name stuck. She entered the University of Minnesota in 1938, first majoring in history and foreign languages. But after taking a seminar from a young assistant professor of psychology, B. F. Skinner, she switched her majors. She graduated summa cum laude in 1941 with majors in psychology and Latin and minors in child psychology and Greek. She immediately entered graduate school at Minnesota, majoring in psychology with a minor in statistics. To help make ends meet she taught statistics from 1941 to 1944 at the university's medical school. When the country went to war in 1941, many psychologists employed their expertise to aid the war effort. Skinner, an expert in the psychology of learning, went to work on "Project Pelican," developing procedures to train pigeons to guide missiles. He chose pigeons because they were such hardy birds and so adaptable to handling and training, as well as being keen-sighted. He took with him several of his graduate students, including Keller and Marian Breland, to assist with the project. The experimental work took place on the top floor of the General Mills Washburn-Crosby mill, where they set up an entire pigeon laboratory. There, in a bank of sixteen modified Skinner boxes, pigeons learned to peck at targets superimposed on ground-glass screens. …

"Honest white people of the middle and lower classes"? A profile of the Capital Citizens' Council during the Little Rock Crisis of 1957

Abstract: THE BASIC ACTIVITIES OF THE CAPITAL CITIZENS' COUNCIL during the Little Rock desegregation crisis of 1957 have been well reported-more recently with less passion than they once inspired.1 From its initial opposition to the school board's plan to allow a small number of black children to attend Central High School, through its sponsoring of the visits of rabble-rousers and possible collusion with Gov. Orval Faubus, to its lastditch legal challenges, street protests, and insidious efforts to rid Central of its first African-American pupils, the council was a major player in the segregationist cause.2 Seen by its "spiritual adviser" as "a glorious band of Christian patriots... standing by the South in her hour of need," it became, in historian Numan Bartley's words, "a real voice in racial affairs."3 Indeed, as the doyen of council scholars, Neil McMillen, has concluded, however much it lacked in size, stature, and stability, the Capital Citizens' Council was a force to be reckoned with. Its strength may probably be better measured by its considerable contribution to the bipolarization of public sentiment in Little Rock than by the number of its members. Given the troubled course of public school desegregation in the capital city, it seems likely that the CCC's extreme position appealed to a far greater audience than its comparatively small membership would indicate. . . . As the events surrounding the desegregation of Central High School in September 1957 would prove, its disruptive capacity could be considerable.4 The council movement was born in Mississippi shortly after the Brown decision of May 1954 reversed a longstanding precedent and outlawed racially segregated schools. Its intent was to uphold a racial status quo commonly described as the southern way of life. Seeing school integration as a first step towards the demise of white civilization through "mongrelization," it spread swiftly through Dixie. Equally disquieted by the actions of federal courts presumed to be meddling in matters outside their constitutional responsibilities, council members joined forces with champions of states' rights and determined to resist any change to the world as they knew it.5 Insisting that "their" African Americans had been content with timehonored racial arrangements until they were upset by outside agitators-- most likely to be members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), communists, atheists or, worse, all three at once-council supporters publicly disavowed violence in favor of attaining their ends by litigation, pressure, and propaganda.6 They were, in the words of their Little Rock incarnation, "dedicated to the maintenance of peace, good order, and domestic tranquillity in our community and in our state and to the preservation of our states' rights."7 Organized in Little Rock in September 1956, the Capital Citizens' Council evolved from a chapter of L. D. Poynter's White America Incorporated.8 It began its campaign against school integration with an attempt to persuade Governor Faubus that, as the head of a sovereign state, he might safely ignore the mandates of federal courts. By using his police powers, he could prevent integration in the name of preserving "tranquillity."9 Unsuccessful in eliciting the governor's overt support, the council turned its attention to winning the hearts and minds of local people who, Faubus always insisted, would be the final arbiters of when, where, and if school integration would occur in Arkansas communities. Advertisements and open letters began to appear in the press asking why Arkansas had to surrender when Texas governor Allan Shivers had so successfully resisted school integration at Mansfield and while Georgia's pugnacious governor, Marvin Griffin, promised never to yield so long as there was an ounce of pure white blood pulsing through his veins. 10 Led by Baptist minister Wesley Pruden and their most voluble spokesman, attorney Amis Guthridge, council members began to appear at school board meetings to pose awkward questions about the practical implications of lofty judicial principles. …

Turning Point: World War II and the Economic Development of Arkansas

Abstract: "THE SLOW AGRICULTURAL RHYTHM OF ARKANSAS, progressing from wet spring to summer drought, from summer drought to smoky fall, from smoky fall to frost and back again via snow to wet spring, seemed definitely to change between 1942-1945," wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet John Gould Fletcher in an interpretative history of his home state first published in 1947. That same year, from a different place on the literary spectrum, the trade journal Manufacturers' Record announced that "The Industrial Revolution is underway in Arkansas," a phenomenon it ascribed to "World War II and the investment by the Federal government of more than half a billion dollars in Arkansas war plants."1 While both of these statements exaggerated the traditional nature of the prewar Arkansas economy, they nevertheless expressed a fundamental truth. World War II set in motion the most important economic change in Arkansas since the introduction of cotton production a century before. Beginning with the mobilization that preceded the attack on Pearl Harbor, per capita income increased through the next thirty-five years, propelled by a long-term shift from agriculture into commerce and industry and an even more rapid decrease in population. The wartime change was particularly impressive. Between 1940 and 1945, per capita income in Arkansas rose from 44 percent of the national average to 60 percent. One cause was economic activity connected to mobilization, production of goods, and the training of troops, and another was a migration from the state that dropped its population from 1.48 percent of the national total to 1.32 percent. During the same period, income produced by agriculture fell from 29 to 21 percent of the state total, and the farm population dropped from 57 to 42 percent. Postwar changes followed the same pattern. By 1960, less than one percent of Americans lived in Arkansas and the farm population was down to 28 percent. In 1970, per capita income had increased to 70 percent of the national population's, and manufacturing was in the midst of long-term growth that raised it from 0.28 percent of the national total in 1940 to 0.85 percent in 1990. In 1990, agriculture accounted for less than 3 percent of Arkansas income (see Table 1 and Chart 1).2 This economic modernization was part of a larger phenomenon that transformed the South from its status as the economically wounded offspring of the Confederacy to its modern position in the prosperous Sun Belt. Per capita income in the region rose from 58 percent of the national average in 1940 to 81 percent in 1970, precipitating a host of other changes that brought southerners into the mainstream of national culture. Economic historian Gavin Wright summed up the transformation in 1986: "Long the most backward and impoverished section of the United States, the South since 1940 has persistently outpaced the rest of the nation in the growth of incomes, industry, jobs, commerce, construction, and education."3 The economic impact of the war on the South has been widely recognized. In The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945, a volume in the prestigious A History of the South series that was published in 1967, George Tindall argued that it brought prosperity, forced workers and managers to improve their skills, generated capital, and created a new growthoriented mind-set-all of which were "essential ingredients of economic `takeoff."' Tindall believed that the effects would have been greater still had the South not been "more campground than arsenal," that is, had it not received 36 percent of the federal funds spent on training facilities but only 17.6 percent of those used to construct defense plants. But he also recognized that the allocation was not grossly unfair given the fact that in 1939 southerners were 28 percent of the American population but produced only 15 percent of the nation's manufactured goods. In The New South, 19451980, the next volume in the same series, which appeared in 1995, Numan V. …

"On the Shore Beyond the Sea": Black Missionaries from Arkansas in Africa during the 1890s

Abstract: A WAVE OF INTENSE INTEREST in the continent of Africa swept through black communities across Arkansas in the 1890s. In black neighborhoods from Marianna to Fort Smith, from Osceola to Texarkana, people dreamed of Africa. As Arkansas's General Assembly wrote disfranchisement and Jim Crow segregation laws in the early 1890s, thousands of African Americans pinned their hopes on return to an ancestral homeland. They sold possessions and pooled their money, forming African exodus clubs in order to emigrate to Liberia, the black republic in West Africa founded by descendants of American slaves. Of the 815 known African-American emigrants to Liberia in the 1890s, more than half left from Arkansas, far more than from any other state.1 By inspiring a broad and deep identification with an African homeland, the emigration movement directly contributed to black efforts to establish Christian missions to the continent. Many people who did not wish actually to emigrate, or who could not, instead organized missionary societies and raised money for African missions. Several clergy and lay folk offered themselves as missionary workers, and about a dozen black Arkansans and their families actually crossed the Atlantic to win over the "dark" continent for Jesus Christ and western-style civilization. They would represent nearly a quarter of all known black missionaries who went to Africa from the United States during that decade. As race oppression in Arkansas reached its worst point in the 1890s, mission work provided black men and women with the opportunity for lives of leadership and dignity in an all-- black world. The Arkansas missionaries left for Africa just as the missionary movement worldwide was getting into full swing. The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw an explosion of Christian missionary work around the world. As Europeans staked out empires in Africa and Asia and the United States collected territories in the Pacific region, missionaries followed colonial administrators and traders to the far corners of the planet. The number of Christian missionaries in foreign lands increased from around 2,000 in 1876 to more than 15,000 by the end of the century.2 After the Berlin Congress of 1884-85 established international ground rules for the claiming and development of colonies in Africa, that continent emerged as an especially ripe field for the Christian harvest. Several white-majority denominations in the late nineteenth century had tried to recruit black missionaries, laboring under the delusion that black Americans were better suited than whites for the tropical climate and disease environment of Africa and could more easily evangelize people of their own color. By the 1870s, several black missionaries had served in Africa on behalf of mostly white denominations, most famously Alexander Crummell, who worked for twenty years as an Episcopal missionary in Liberia.3 By the 1880s, black churches, too, became interested in African missions, although they lacked the financial resources of white denominations. Several black clergymen had emigrated to Liberia in the 1870s and 1880s and organized congregations among the American settlers there. Apparently, they made few overtures toward native African populations. Some of the earliest of these stirrings of interest in evangelizing Africa came among the Baptists. Black Baptist leaders from several states, including three delegates from Arkansas, had met in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1880 to establish the Baptist Foreign Mission Convention, which managed to send a few missionaries to Liberia in the following decade. In 1886, some pastors from Arkansas attended a Baptist Foreign Mission Convention in Memphis where they heard three returned missionaries speak about their experiences. The Reverend Elias C. Morris of Helena, the president of the state Baptist association, reported that the missionaries also brought "one of the little heathen boys, which made it still more interesting to be there. …

Labor in the modern South

Abstract: Labor in the Modern South. Edited by Glenn T. Eskew. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. Pp. v, 232. Preface, afterword, contributors, index. $45.00.) Labor in the Modern South highlights the centrality of gender and race to the latest scholarship on the twentieth-century southern working class. Michelle Brattain's thought-provoking survey of the field emphasizes workers' agency in studies of textile workers and African Americans and a broadened understanding of the role of "gender in the history of southern class formation" (p. 22). Political historians will find insightful Brattain's discussion of politicians' "neo-populist appeal to working class whiteness" (p. 33). Douglas Flamming shows that southern cotton mill daughters often kept more of their pay than did their New England counterparts and also gained "a little bargaining power within the home" (p. 53). Flamming argues that male uncertainty over female wage earning led many in the 1910s to return to agriculture and take "their family labor supply away from the mills" (p. 55). Companies responded by raising male wages and creating institutions such as marching bands and baseball leagues that "catered to male culture and bravado" (p. 57). In her study of protest activities in Atlanta and Norfolk during World War I, Tera Hunter emphasizes black women's agency. New wartime opportunities and a rising cost of living led black female workers, especially domestics, to organize in several southern cities. Authorities responded with "work or fight" ordinances and laws, violence, and arrests. NAACP branches reconstituted themselves to fight the ordinances and achieved success in Atlanta, but harassment continued. Black women and men responded with increased migration from the region. In "Fearing Eleanor: Racial Anxieties and Wartime Rumors in the American South," Bryant Simon discusses the rumors widespread among upper middle-class whites during World War II that Eleanor Clubs were encouraging African-American domestic workers "to act 'uppity' and step out of place" (p. 90). Simon argues that the rumors were a response to something real-increased assertiveness of African-American women workers-as well as to something fictional-the non-existent Eleanor Clubs. Rather than coming to grips with African-American agency rooted in dissatisfaction with an unjust racial order, whites placed blame on outsiders. Entering into the current debate on the CIO's racial liberalism, Merl Reed and Alex Lichtenstein emphasize the CIO's pragmatism but conclude that CIO unions were important vehicles for African-American workers' struggle for jobs and increased wages during World War II and very different than anti-black AFL unions. …

Autobiographical Reflections on Southern Religious History

Abstract: Autobiographical Reflections on Southern Religious History. Edited by John B. Boles. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. Pp. v, 272. Preface, contributors, bibliographic references. $34.95.) When recounting his social interactions with fellow Yale divinity students in the early 1960s, noted scholar of American church history and Arkansas native E. Brooks Holifield laments that his Yale contemporaries found "something slightly comical simply about having had the misfortune to be born in a place like Arkansas" (p. 137). John Boles's edited collection, Autobiographical Reflections on Southern Religious History, uses personal narratives, such as this frank account by Holifield, as analytical tools through which to explore issues of identity, gender, and ethnicity within the largely "terra incognita of southern evangelical history" (p. 57). Most striking are the reasons cited by major scholars in the field for grappling-often in an intensely personal way-with southern religious experience. Donald G. Mathews' theological musings on the salvific power of the Cross led him to uncover a history of southern atonement. Boles set for himself a goal of becoming "a kind of poor man's Perry Miller of the South" (p. 121). For Albert J. Raboteau, the experience of receiving Holy Communion at a southern Roman Catholic church sparked a lifelong interest in racism in the Catholic church: "I remember going to receive Holy Communion. I remember the priest carrying the host; I remember him passing me by, and again passing me by, carrying the host in his hands, passing me by until he had given communion to all the white people" (p. 197). Andrew M. Manis details his journey from "the Divine Liturgy of Greek Orthodoxy to Southern Baptist Bible-thumping," as part of his scholarly pursuit of the intersection of Bible-Belt culture and Greek-American religiosity (p. 222). Clearly, these kinds of autobiographical musings shed light on little-documented aspects of southern Christianity, particularly the religious dynamics of those groups that were "suspended somewhere between the evangelical center and the marginalized" (p. 250). The essays are most useful when they provide the reader with a clear sense ofthe historiographical rhythms of this increasingly prominent field. Samuel S. Hill, who describes himself as an "accidental pioneer" in southern evangelical history, admits that when he began his graduate career in 1963, there was no academic field at all (p. …

"In the Land of a Million Smiles": Twentieth-Century America Discovers the Arkanasas Ozarks

Abstract: HEMMED-IN HOLLER HAS LONG BEEN a popular attraction for Ozark travelers Today its rugged beauty and isolation attract hikers and awe canoeists floating on the swift upper reaches of the Buffalo River Hemmed-in Holler was especially appealing to writers who "discovered" the Ozarks after World War I and whose preconceptions of Ozark people seemed to be satisfied by Holler dwellers Perhaps no other community in the Arkansas Ozarks-a region that appeared staggeringly remote to most Americans-was as isolated and removed from the forces of modernization as Hemmed-in Holler One observer described the exotic terrain in 1935: "There [were] no roads into the holler One usually enter[ed] it, afoot, fording the river from one to a dozen times, following a mountainside trail steep enough to become discouraging to a mountain goat"1 This Newton County hollow was home to a community as isolated and anachronistic as any the United States had to offer in the middle of the twentieth century When Charles Morrow Wilson, a Fayetteville native and freelance journalist, visited the Holler in the midst of the Great Depression, he found twenty-two families living lives similar to those of their ancestors a hundred years earlier There were no automobiles, radios, or telephones; no electricity or indoor plumbing; no doctors, teachers, or even preachers Although the Buffalo River bottoms were fertile, the difficulty of transportation allowed only subsistence farming Most raised their own tobacco, and the women continued to spin and weave wool cloth and make the families' clothes Cash incomes-estimated at only $60 a year per family-depended upon "by-products and incidental crops" such as wool, honey, sorghum molasses, cow hides, chickens, eggs, furs, and herbs The residents of Hemmed-in Holler, their "names outstandingly English," could, according to Wilson, "swap talk and break bread with farmers of Chaucer's England, and suffer few misunderstandings"2 Hemmed-in Holler was an anomaly on the eve of World War II, an anachronistic, quaint model of a region as it had existed half a century earlier Yet for all its uniqueness-in the Holler were no cotton tenants, apple orchards, or broiler houses-Hemmed-in Holler matches the Ozark image that developed after 1930 The Holler and other remote communities scattered across the region satisfied the demands of that image so well, in fact, that one must presume they served as the model for the popular Ozark portrait Not surprisingly, writers and tourism promoters discovered the region and its Hemmed-in Hollers just as the quaint relics of frontier existence-the "diverting and picturesque" qualities so appealing to nostalgic urban Americans-were fading from the scene, rendered obsolete by the modernizing forces of government intervention and technology As historian Janet Allured comments in her study of women and family life in the Ozarks: "Though many outsiders were loathe to admit it, not everyone was poor, few families kept a still at the spring house, even fewer women smoked a corn-cob pipe, and not every person was superstitious"3 Thus, the image of the Arkansas Ozarks formed during the depression-of log cabin homesteads inhabited by broad-brimmed hat-wearing, barefooted moonshiners and wrinkled women weaving homespun-was based on nostalgia and whimsy, and it was supported only briefly by a select cadre of remote twentieth-century families living almost wholly lives of the nineteenth century By most standards, life in the Arkansas Ozarks before World War II would have been isolated and difficult, but the isolation and harshness were relative and in most areas decreased in the first four decades of the twentieth century Isolation and accessibility, like agricultural practices, differed from subregion to subregion and community to community within the Ozarks Two archaeological studies reveal these contrasts Artifacts at the Moser site northwest of Lowell in Benton County dispute the backward image and "indicate that by the late nineteenth century the people were integrated through a flow of information and goods that connected the site to the community, the region, and beyond …

The Great Flood of 1927: A Portfolio of Photographs

Abstract: "Folks livin' in the Delta fear two things: God and the Mississippi River" -Chana Gazit WHEN THE ANGRY MISSISSIPPI SWEPT into the southern delta during the spring of 1927, approximately 26,000 square miles in seven states were inundated. More than 5,289,576 acres of seeded and growing crops were destroyed. Flood waters consumed 9,305 work animals, 26,451 head of cattle, 127,983 hogs, 1,559 sheep, and poultry in the hundreds of thousands. 931,159 people were directly affected by the flood, with 325,554 forced into Red Cross refugee camps and another 311,922 finding shelter in public buildings and other makeshift locations. Nearly all of these refugees found themselves without food, water, clothing, or immediate prospects of employment or financial security for their families. Red Cross officials placed the death toll at 246, but others have disputed this figure as too conservative.1 Total damages, calculated by the Red Cross and county agricultural agents, amounted to $236,334,414 (1927 dollars).2 The Mississippi River remained flooded for over 153 days, the longest on record, and carried in excess of 2 million cubic feet of water each second. At times, the flood crest moved at an incredible eighteen miles per hour. This was America's greatest natural disaster, and Arkansas shared in the hardships wrought by the devastating floodwaters. The Arkansas River was pushing 813,000 cubic feet per second, and the White River approached 400,000 cubic feet per second.3 Although other states, especially Mississippi and Louisiana, experienced extensive flooding and damage, Arkansas sustained the most devastation. The state had more people affected by the floodwaters (362,560); more agricultural acreage inundated (2,024,210); more Red Cross camps (80 of the 154), which cared for a record 143,213 people; and more houses flooded (55,845). Arkansas also led the way with 41,243 families receiving rehabilitation aid as the waters receded.4 The flood destroyed 1,047 miles of road and 244 bridges in the state, with the monetary losses ($1,268,715) surpassing those of any other state. The catastrophe claimed 98 lives in Arkansas, second only to Mississippi.5 In Desha County, the hardest hit of Arkansas's 36 flooded counties, the American Red Cross extended emergency relief to 21,276 people. Among them were the 1,500 residents of Arkansas City, which lay beneath the muddy waters of the Mississippi and Arkansas Rivers from April until the end of August 1927. The Red Cross cared for the entire population as the town was being rebuilt. Social and economic life did not really resume until December 1928. To the north, St. Francis County had three camps which cared for an astounding 23,217 people. …

The Calumet and the Cross: Religious Encounters in the Lower Mississippi Valley

Abstract: FATHER JACQUES MARQUETTE CARRIED two religious symbols on his journey down the Mississippi: a cross and a calumet. The first was an icon at the heart of Marquette's own faith-the symbolic connection between a loving God and a sinful world. The second was a native symbol-an ever present bond between a protective spirit and his grateful children. Marquette's carrying of a calumet symbolized the connections the French and Indians had established by 1673. Yet Marquette and French colonials' misunderstanding of this and other native symbols and rituals would continue to color their encounters with native peoples. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the French encounter with the Quapaws. But that encounter would also be shaped by the Quapaws' own misunderstandings of French Catholics and their symbols and rituals. Most discussions of the Quapaws' encounter with European religion have focused on the French failure to convert them to Catholicism. Over twenty years ago, W. David Baird argued that the Quapaws were "friends rather than converts." Morris Arnold and George Sabo III have more recently echoed that characterization. Arnold goes so far as to say that there is "ample indication that no significant Christian influence was brought to bear on the region's indigenous population during Arkansas's colonial epoch."1 Yet the Indian encounter with Christianity bears further examination, for if the Quapaws did not convert, they nevertheless made aspects and agents of Catholicism important parts of their society and culture. For Indians, religion was much more malleable than it was for European Christians. While Europeans hoped for a wholesale adoption of ritual and belief, native peoples of North America tended toward a more selective appropriation of Christian elements, with the object of gaining the spiritual power Europeans could provide. This was especially true in the case of the Quapaws. The Quapaws incorporated missionaries and their symbols into their culture and participated in Catholic rituals. They did not do this as part of a process of conversion to Christianity, however, but as a means to strengthen and maintain their own nation. Rather than feeling they were under assault by the missionaries, they welcomed the introduction of new spiritual power as a gift, which they actively pursued. To their minds, such incorporation was essential. The continuing biological onslaughts of epidemic disease from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century and the resulting decline in population from about 7,500 to less than 1,000 made it imperative that they assimilate other peoples and their spiritual power in order to sustain a viable nation.3 By 1673, when Marquette first floated the Mississippi, the four villages of the Quapaws were located along the Mississippi River. They had established one village, Kappa, on the east bank of the Mississippi. Two others, Tongigua and Tourima, sat on the west bank and a fourth, Osotouy, at the mouth of the Arkansas. This arrangement of settlements permitted the Quapaws to regulate travel up and down the Mississippi. Enemies could be turned back from either direction, while potential trade partners upstream could be warned of dangers farther south. This put the Quapaws in excellent position to be middlemen between the lower Mississippi and the pays d'en haut, the upper country of the Ohio River valley and the Great Lakes. The Quapaw villages on the west bank also guarded the entrance to the Arkansas River. This gave the Quapaws access to prairie and woodland hunting grounds upriver, while hindering such access on the part of competitors. According to Paheka, a Quapaw elder in the 1820s, the Quapaws took advantage of their strategic position, fighting and pushing out their rivals. They blocked upriver inhabitants from trade on the Mississippi as well.4 Such was the situation in the lower Mississippi valley when Father Marquette began his expedition with Louis Joliet and their five companions. …

A Civil War Letter: Benjamin Fullager's Account of the Union Expedition against Van Buren

Abstract: As 1862 DREW TO A CLOSE IN ARKANSAS, the military situation looked particularly bleak for Confederates in the Trans-Mississippi. Earlier that year, the state received its first taste of battle at Pea Ridge, where the Rebels were badly defeated by the Union army. The year also saw the Federals establish a presence in many areas of northern Arkansas. Union troops were able to garrison select towns and provide a certain sense of security to some of the populace. But in many parts of northern Arkansas there was near anarchy. The conflict quickly broke down what order existed in the area, and barbarism ruled the day for thousands of Arkansans. In December, the opposing armies met once again in northwest Arkansas, this time at Prairie Grove. The bruising slugfest that ensued was crippling for both sides, but the battle was especially devastating for the Confederates. The Rebel army virtually disintegrated, and the resulting catastrophe left the state open to further Federal conquest.1 Shortly after their victory at Prairie Grove, Union generals Francis J. Herron and James G. Blunt began planning their next move. They decided on an expedition against the Confederate garrison at Van Buren. However, poor weather prevented them from immediately moving against the town. The Union commanders met again on Christmas night and finalized their plans for the campaign. On the morning of December 27, 1862, the Federals moved out with 8,000 picked men and thirty pieces of artillery.2 Among the Union troops was Benjamin Fullager, a quartermaster sergeant of Company A, 3rd Wisconsin Cavalry. Born in London, England, Fullager heeded his adopted country's call for service and enlisted at Sparta, Wisconsin, on October 21, 1861. The twenty-six-year-old farmer joined for duty as a wagoner. He was promoted to quartermaster sergeant on October 20, 1862. Shortly before the close of the war he was promoted to the rank of captain and transferred to Company K of the unit.3 Fullager wrote home a few months after the expedition and described the events. His account of the campaign and his musings on army life provide great insight into the Civil War's impact on Arkansas.4 Also worthy of note is Fullager's candid discussion of "Copperheads, " as Confederate sympathizers in the North were known. His thoughts provide compelling evidence of the widespread disdain felt by many soldiers for those in their ranks who they suspected of being Copperheads. In fact his words border on the menacing. Fullager's contempt for some of his officers is indicative of the myriad of divisions that existed within the opposing sides, underscoring the complexity of the Civil War. Camp Salomon, MO5 March 14, 1863 Dear Friend Mary Your kind and welcome letter of Jan. 25 came to hand a day or two ago. I have been long looking for a word from you and scolded uncle Sam's mail arrangement a good deal for being so slow for I could not bring myself to think that the fault could be with you who has been so punctual heretofore and sure enough I was right for once. I am pleased to hear that you are having a pleasant time with your school but I hope you will not apply yourself so closely as to endanger your health for I do not think you owe enough to the rising generation to pay the debt by jeopardizing your own happiness but perhaps I am borrowing trouble on your account if so forgive me for I sin not intentionally in that case.6 Since writing you last I have been through many scene changes and vicisitudes incident to a soldiers life. Some pleasant and full of excitement, and some disagreeable and tending to depress our spirits and try our souls and health if not our patriotism. On the 27th of Dec. at the rather early hour of four in the morning our bugle's shrill notes sounded the reveille and soon after Boots and Saddles then the assembly and we soon found ourselves drawn up in line with three days rations in our haversacks ready to march we knew not where as yet, it might be to Mis. …

Minister to the Cherokees: A Civil War Autobiography

Abstract: Minister to the Cherokees: A Civil War Autobiography. By James Anderson Slover; edited by Barbara Cloud. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Pp. vii, 256. Acknowledgments, introduction, notes, selected bibliography, index. $47.50.) Beginning in the 1960s, Protestant missionaries became controversial figures in the realm of Native American scholarship. Often the agents of a righteous cultural imperialism, many missionaries plainly sought to eradicate indigenous spirituality and replace it with Euro-American traditions. At the same time, however, it is certainly clear that native communities like the Cherokees often embraced the new forms, melding the missionaries' teachings with their own pre-colonial traditions to form entirely new religions. Recent scholarship has shown that modern Indian groups, both recognized and unacknowledged, often maintained their community cohesion by centering it on these very Protestant churches that at first glance appear alien and non-Indian. In 1857, James Slover, the first Southern Baptist missionary invited to the Cherokee Nation, sought to spread the gospel among that people in Indian Territory. Minister to the Cherokees is essentially a memoir of Slover's life, travels, and adventures among the Cherokees from his early years in Tennessee through his later life in Oregon and California. Edited with loving care by Barbara Cloud, a descendant of the minister, the memoir should be of interest to students of Arkansas history and particularly those studying the role Southern Baptist ministers played in community building in the state. Like many future Arkansans, James Slower was born in eastern Tennessee and migrated to Arkansas among successive waves of pioneer families seeking new and better ways of life than were possible in their hardscrabble hill country. Slover's work provides vivid accounts of his travels by flatboat down the Tennessee River and his journey up the Arkansas to his eventual home in Washington County, Arkansas. A lover of education, Slower parlayed a very limited formal education into a career as a teacher. Caught up in the revivalism of the 1840s, however, Slower converted to the Baptist faith and found his calling in preaching the gospel-a calling that would lead him to preach and open churches in Indian Territory, Arkansas, California, and Oregon. Although entitled Minister to the Cherokees, Slover's account provides surprisingly little detail about his missionary activities among that displaced people. …

Federal Troops and the Elaine Massacres: A Colloquy

Abstract: THOUGH CLEARLY A CENTRAL EPISODE in Arkansas's racial history and a tragedy of grievous proportions, much remains unknown about the Elaine riots of autumn 1919. It is certain that dozens and perhaps hundreds of African Americans died at the hands of whites in the days following an initial exchange of gunfire between deputies in Phillips County and members of a black sharecroppers' union. The precise sequence of events and the number of casualties, however, continue to be debated. So does the role of U.S. Army troops sent to Phillips County on the second day of the violence. Though the troops have long been credited with restoring order, Grif Stockley, author of the most comprehensive study of the episode-Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2001)-believes that soldiers participated in the slaughter of innocent black people. "On balance," he writes, "the evidence suggests that the military used excessive force and may have killed perhaps hundreds of blacks" (p. 66). Another student of the events, Jeannie M. Whayne, has suggested that the available evidence does not yet permit such a conclusion. In her essay, "Low Villains and Wickedness in High Places: Race and Class in the Elaine Riots" (Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Autumn 1999), she notes that troops disarmed white civilians as well as blacks and wonders whether Phillips County planters may have seen military intervention as a means to stop white violence before it undermined a sharecropping system based on black labor. Stockley and Whayne discussed the evidence with respect to federal troops and the Elaine massacres at a debate held on February 21, 2002, at the University of Arkansas School of Law in Fayetteville. The debate was conducted under the auspices of the Hartman Hotz lecture series and was moderated by Tom Dillard, curator of the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, Central Arkansas Library System. Excerpts from the debate follow and are published with the permission of the University of Arkansas School of Law. Transcription is courtesy of the Arkansas Center for Oral and Visual History. Grif Stockley: Before I begin to try to put on some evidence that the military was involved, let me just briefly set the stage for you. On September 30, 1919, there was a shoot-out at a small church in Hoop Spur, which is three miles north of Elaine. Black sharecroppers were having a meeting to discuss how they could improve their situation. Probably some whites, and I'm summarizing here, came out to disrupt the meeting. There was a shoot-out. Nobody knows who fired the first shot, but one white man, W. H. Adkins, was killed. After that, the blacks fled the church. Many whites believed that blacks were fighting back. Calls went up and down the delta saying there was a revolt by blacks, and mobs of from six hundred to a thousand whites came in from neighboring counties the next day. But also the next day, there were some telegrams sent to the governor's office in Little Rock asking that United States troops be brought in to put down the situation. Governor [Charles Hillman] Brough came over on a train the next day with about six hundred U.S. troops. They were armed with twelve machine guns. The troops who came over were veterans of the Second Battle of the Marne. They were stationed at Camp Pike. Since all of this occurred, things have been debated back and forth. But essentially in my view there was a massive cover-up. Evidence shows that the United States troops were involved [in the deaths of blacks]. The first piece of evidence is from Walter White, a field secretary for the national NAACP who managed to get an interview with Governor Brough. [Although White was African-American], he looked white. He pretended to be a newsman. The next day he came down on a train to Helena and talked with some individuals, particularly whites. He was advised by [black attorney] Scipio Jones not to talk with blacks for fear he might get them in trouble. …