Karl Greenhaw (1892–1967)

Karl Greenhaw practiced both law and politics in Arkansas between the world wars and afterward but was more accomplished in law than in politics. His political successes—three elections as prosecuting attorney in northwestern Arkansas—followed World War I. He failed narrowly in three races for Congress from the Third District of northwestern Arkansas, the last one an election that launched what would become the long Washington career of J. William Fulbright as a congressman and senator. Greenhaw was an acolyte of Homer M. Adkins, a factional boss of the state Democratic Party during the Great Depression, who was governor during World War II and an arch foe of Fulbright. Adkins appointed Greenhaw justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court and he served for fifteen months, the lawyer’s most notable achievement. His race for Congress—his fourth and Fulbright’s first—followed while he was on the court.

Franklin Karl Greenhaw was born on August 31, 1892, to Franklin Pierce Greenhaw and Ella Bryan Greenhaw, who ran a dry goods store in the remote Bear Creek community of Searcy County. Bear Creek—nothing more than a tiny church in the twenty-first century—was a few miles southeast of Marshall (Searcy County), the county seat. Frank Greenhaw dabbled in politics; he was elected to the state Senate in 1906, representing four mountain counties—Searcy, Cleburne, Van Buren, and Conway—for four years. By the time Karl was a teenager, the family had moved to Little Rock (Pulaski County), and the elder Greenhaw was listed as a retail grocer on federal census forms.

In 1917, Karl Greenhaw married Bonnie Leonard of Leslie (Searcy County), which was over the mountain east of Bear Creek. He finished his education at Little Rock and studied at the private Arkansas Law School (now the University of Arkansas at Little Rock William H. Bowen School of Law) and got his law license in 1914. He and his wife moved back to northwestern Arkansas, first to Harrison (Boone County) and then to Fayetteville (Washington County), where he spent the next forty years in the courthouses and the corridors of politics. He ran political campaigns and gave keynote addresses at political conventions while carrying on a busy law practice. He appeared often before the state Supreme Court as the attorney for appellants in some cases and appellees in others.

Soon after settling at Harrison, in 1918, Greenhaw ran for prosecuting attorney of the Fourteenth Circuit and was elected. He was reelected in 1920 and 1922 and then devoted himself to his private practice along with periodic tilts at public office, as a candidate or an abettor—often of Homer Adkins or his protégés. In 1926, he ran in the Democratic primary for the congressional seat held by John N. Tillman but lost narrowly and announced immediately that he would run again in 1928. Tillman stepped down that year, but another Harrison man, Ben E. McFerrin, ran in the primary, dividing the county’s votes. Greenhaw finished a close second to Claude A. Fuller, the prosecuting attorney in the adjoining judicial district, who was elected because the law then did not require a runoff when the leading candidate did not receive a majority. Greenhaw did not run for another office until 1942.

Meantime, Homer Adkins, a Ku Klux Klansman who was sheriff of Pulaski County in the mid-1920s, the period of the Klan’s ascendance, became a political power after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration made him director of the Internal Revenue Service in Arkansas, a source of federal and state patronage. Adkins and Carl E. Bailey (who served as attorney general and then governor) became the leaders of the two factions of the Democratic Party—Bailey’s progressives and Adkins’s conservatives. Greenhaw somehow sided with Adkins, although Greenhaw was a champion of working men and represented unions in litigation, such as cases arising from state legislation that made unions responsible for any violence or other damages flowing from strikes.

Governor Bailey had appointed lawyer J. William (Bill) Fulbright—son of Roberta Fulbright, the liberal publisher and editor of the Northwest Arkansas Times—as president of the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville. Roberta Fulbright was critical of Adkins and had supported Bailey. Greenhaw had managed Adkins’s campaign in northwestern Arkansas. Once he became governor in 1941, Adkins retaliated by having the board of trustees fire Roberta’s son Bill Fulbright. The next year, Fulbright ran for the Third District congressional seat of Clyde T. Ellis, who ran for the U.S. Senate but lost to John L. McClellan. Greenhaw filed to run against Fulbright in the primaries—runoffs by then were required when no candidate received a majority of the votes—along with another lawyer, Virgil Willis. Fulbright won the runoff with Greenhaw. Greenhaw’s previous races for Congress against Tillman and Fuller had been unusually congenial; the candidates campaigned together, sharing platforms around the district. It was Fulbright who went on the attack in 1942, accusing Adkins and Greenhaw of collaborating to get state highway employees to work for Greenhaw, which would have been against the law. Fulbright called for an investigation.

When Greenhaw ran for the congressional seat, he was associate justice of the Supreme Court. Governor Adkins had appointed him the previous September to finish the final fifteen months of the term of Justice Basil Baker, who died in office. His temporary status on the court did not make him tentative, although he did have to recuse himself on several appeals where he had been the attorney for the appellant or appellee. He also did not shrink from supporting the causes of his benefactor Adkins. He wrote opinions on two of the politically risky cases that reached the court in his fifteen months. One reaffirmed the court’s 1934 decision against the state bank commissioner’s effort to force the levying of a tax to pay off water improvement bonds. Bond redemption was a historic problem for the state, going back to the previous century but again during the Great Depression. The bank commissioner tried again seven years later, but Greenhaw, writing for the full court, said the Supreme Court a decade earlier was still correct that the legislative act authorizing the bonds did not comply with the state constitution.

The most politically charged decision of the court during that period also involved another continual midcentury dispute: Hot Springs (Garland County) gambling. Homer Adkins carried on a continuous fight against so-called vice: alcohol, gambling, sex, and racial equality. The chief justice in that era, Griffin Smith, shared his determination to prevent gambling in Hot Springs. The chief justice had periodically issued search-and-seizure warrants when he heard that gambling was going on in the resort city, which led to Arkansas State Police raids on Club Belvedere, a nightspot on the highway outside Hot Springs. The case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the chief justice had no power to issue search warrants. The Arkansas Gazette account of the decision interpreted it as a blow to Governor Adkins, who often denounced gambling at Hot Springs. Justice Greenhaw wrote a dissent for himself and the chief justice and also, one assumed, for Adkins.

After leaving the court, Greenhaw returned to his law firm in Fayetteville, which would become the professional home of other lawyers in the Greenhaw clan. The next year, Greenhaw would become a lecturer at the University of Arkansas School of Law. He was active in war support, including chairmanship of the War Emergency Board for the Third District. His son Leonard Greenhaw was injured in the D-Day invasion in Normandy in 1944 and would later join the law firm, along with his own sons years later.

Greenhaw died on November 19, 1967, in Fayetteville. He is buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Fayetteville.

For additional information:
“Gambling Raid Ordered by Chief Justice Voided.” Arkansas Gazette, July 7, 1942, pp. 1, 14.

“Karl Greenhaw, Former Justice, Dies at Age 75.” Northwest Arkansas Times, November 20, 1967, pp. 1, 6.

“Says Road Crews Work for Greenhaw.” Arkansas Gazette, August 9, 1942, p. 18.

Ernest Dumas
Little Rock, Arkansas