Arkansas: A Bicentennial History

Harry S. Ashmore, once the nationally famous executive editor of the Arkansas Gazette, wrote a 195-page history of Arkansas in the 1970s—one of fifty state histories published for the occasion of the nation’s 200th birthday in 1976. Authorized by the American Association for State and Local History and published by W. W. Norton & Company, the Bicentennial State Histories, as they were called, were not supposed to be encyclopedic history textbooks compiled from deep research into historical records. Instead, they were to offer a lengthy essay on the peculiar character and distinct personality of the state that might distinguish it from its sister states from the same region or on the occasion of its gaining statehood. A fifty-first book in the series was a history of the District of Columbia.

Each author was not necessarily a native of the state written about but had a special relationship to the state that would enable him or her to explain how the state and those who dwelled in it managed the trials and tribulations of life, like war and economic and social travails.

In an introduction to the book Ashmore contributed to the series, Arkansas: A Bicentennial History (1978), James Morton Smith, the general editor of the fifty-one books, described their purpose: “Bibliographies and footnotes are minimal. We have asked each author for a summing up—interpretive, sensitive, thoughtful, individual, even personal—of what seems significant about his or her state’s history. What distinguishes it? What has mattered about it, to its own people and to the rest of the nation? What has it come to now?”

Harry Ashmore and Arkansas were a perfect illustration of Smith’s objective. Ashmore was born and reared in South Carolina and became a newspaperman there and later in neighboring North Carolina, where his writing and eloquence at a conference of editors caught the attention of John Netherland Heiskell, an owner and the editor of the Gazette. Heiskell hired him as an editorial writer in 1947 and then made him executive editor, chief of both the news and editorial functions. Ten years later, in the fall of 1957, Governor Orval E. Faubus, who faced court-ordered desegregation of public schools in Little Rock (Pulaski County), ordered National Guardsmen to prevent nine Black students from entering Little Rock’s Central High School. It presented a dilemma for Ashmore and his newspaper. Ashmore had befriended Faubus when he first ran for governor in 1954 and wrote a radio speech for Faubus that the governor would always say got him elected in the Democratic primary runoff in 1954. After failing, along with others, including Winthrop Rockefeller, to persuade Faubus not to thwart the court’s orders to integrate the school, Ashmore convinced Heiskell that the Gazette should condemn the governor’s action and call for compliance with the law.

Nearly three years later, after winning a Pulitzer Prize for his editorials, Ashmore would leave Arkansas to join the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California, a political think-tank headed by Robert Maynard Hutchins, and to serve as the editor-in-chief of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

His leadership of the Gazette—a paper that had covered slavery, the Civil War, racial repression, and its atonement in minute detail from territorial days to the end of the twentieth century—made Ashmore the obvious choice to write a “summing up” of Arkansas’s journey. Ashmore leaned heavily upon the Gazette’s own history and its own historian, Margaret Ross, who had labored in the office next door to Ashmore’s. His account of the Civil War in Arkansas was taken largely from her detailed and colorful accounts of the daily warfare in Arkansas exactly 100 years following the war, “Chronicles of Arkansas: The Years of the Civil War,” from January 1961 until May 1965. For other aspects of the state’s history Ashmore lifted heavily from Ross’s 428-page history of the newspaper—Arkansas Gazette: The Early Years, 1819–1866—and from John Gould Fletcher’s state history, Arkansas, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1947 and then republished in 1989 by the University of Arkansas Press (UAP), this time with an introduction by Ashmore. Ashmore and Fletcher’s sister, Adolphine Fletcher Terry, the heroine of the Little Rock school desegregation crisis, were close friends.

Ashmore’s evaluations of native Arkansans in his recounting of their history are much more sympathetic than the common judgment of historians and the media. In the century when Native Americans were killed or vanquished from the South, Ashmore claimed Arkansans, unlike his native South Carolinians, treated them as equals and as partners. The men who opposed secession in 1860 but then eagerly signed up to fight for the Confederacy did the right thing, he believed. Seventeen-year-old David O. Dodd, who was executed for spying on the Union forces, also did the right thing in helping the Confederacy and dying for the cause. Governor Faubus, who sponsored the popular rage that drove Ashmore out of the state in 1959, was never a racist, a segregationist, or even a conservative, Ashmore wrote, but rather took a stand that saved his political career, as politicians almost universally did. His book described Faubus as a “wily hillbilly motivated not by racism but by political expediency.”

When the Gazette reported in 1975 that Ashmore had been chosen to write the bicentennial book on Arkansas history, James D. “Justice Jim” Johnson, the author of the Arkansas constitutional provision giving the state sovereignty over federal court orders and the state’s most prominent segregationist, sent Ashmore a humorous note asserting that it was like having Benedict Arnold write the history of the American revolution. Ashmore wrote in his introduction to Arkansas that Johnson’s note was “a splendidly Arkansan welcome home.”

For additional information:
Ashmore, Harry S. Arkansas: A Bicentennial History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978.

DuVall, Leland. “State’s History Is Gentle, Essential.” Arkansas Gazette, January 27, 1978, p. 4B.

Ernest Dumas
Little Rock, Arkansas