Arkansas [John Gould Fletcher Book]

John Gould Fletcher, Arkansas’s most celebrated writer at the time of his death in 1950, wrote an impressionistic and almost poetic history of Arkansas that was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1947. It was titled simply Arkansas and was republished in 1989 by the University of Arkansas Press, this time with an introduction by Harry S. Ashmore, who shared with Fletcher a long history with the Arkansas Gazette, the state’s first newspaper.

Neither version of Arkansas sold many copies—state histories are never bestsellers—and Fletcher’s book has been considered far better as literature than as history. As the sponsor of the second version in 1989, Lucas Carpenter of Oxford College at Emory University wrote: “More than anything else, Arkansas is history viewed from the perspective of a poet, and it remains valuable for its imaginative treatment of historical materials and its beauty and power of expression.”

Fletcher, who was born into wealth and reared in the elegant Little Rock (Pulaski County) mansion built by Albert Pike (now the Pike-Fletcher-Terry House), enrolled at Harvard University, his father expecting a career in business or law but his mother a career in the arts, specifically music and literature. Fletcher left Harvard without a degree and went to Europe—Italy, London, and Paris—where he fell in with intellectuals such as the poets Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell, but he eventually returned to America, where he traveled widely and wrote poetry. He associated with the Imagist poetry movement and with famous writers at Vanderbilt University and Kenyon College. These writers, who became known alternately as the Fugitives, Agrarians, and Imagists, for a time embraced the theory that the peak of civilization was the pre–Civil War South of plantations and slavery.

He returned in 1932 to Little Rock and produced Imagist poetry, a type of poetry that emphasizes simplicity, clear expression, and precise visual images. He was commissioned by John Netherland Heiskell, a close friend of his sister, Adolphine Fletcher (later Terry), and editor and owner of the Gazette, to write an epic poem about Arkansas for the state’s centennial birthday in 1936. It would be included in a massive special edition of the Gazette for the state’s centennial birthday. Still somewhat in the Fugitive-Agrarian mode with the Vanderbilt group, Fletcher had to tone down his old Confederate sympathies, apparently to suit Heiskell. A few years later, he had abandoned those sympathies altogether and become even a civil rights champion. He would say that Heiskell and the Gazette had “succeeded at last in curbing my unreconstructed Southernism.”

As pure history, the Arkansas of 1947 gave a lengthy, well-researched account of the Hernando de Soto expedition to Arkansas, although modern historians might take exception to a few of his findings, such as de Soto’s visit to a site on the Ouachita River in Union County now called Calion, which subsequent research concluded he never visited. Fletcher furnished a nearly weekly account of the Civil War in Arkansas from his own research but glossed over the long period of Jim Crow without discussing lynchings and such horrors as the Elaine Massacre of 1919 or the murder of John Carter, a young Black man in Little Rock in 1927, although Fletcher by 1947 had come around to the view that slavery, Jim Crow, and even segregation had poisoned the state’s and the nation’s histories.

Fletcher concluded Arkansas by observing: “[T]he inert force of ingrained conservatism (not only, by any means, the conservatism implicit in denying to the Negro new measures of social equality…but…the misled, unthinking, and economically competitive white majority), stands in the way of any true human progress. Such a progress can come only from within the South, not from without; and it cannot be measured in dollars and cents, but only in better, cleaner, finer ways of living….Only then can the fine motto of my state, ‘The People Rule’ become an accomplished fact.”

In his review of the reprint edition in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Ben F. Johnson III wrote, “Even at the time of its publication [in 1947], the volume appeared to be an anachronism.” However, he concluded, “Perhaps Arkansas should be understood as a unique and complex portrait of the state. I cannot think of a better one and we are fortunate to have it back.”

For additional information:
Fletcher, John Gould. Arkansas. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1989.

Johnson, Ben F. Fierce Solitude: A Life of John Gould Fletcher. Fayetteville. University of Arkansas Press, 1994.

———. Review of Arkansas. Arkansas Historical Quarterly 48 (Autumn 1989): 287–289.

Reeser, Robert E. Review of Arkansas. Arkansas Historical Quarterly 6 (Summer 1947): 204–206.

Ernest Dumas
Little Rock, Arkansas