Ted Boswell (1932–2021)

Ted Boswell spent his life in the Saline County town of Bryant, where he developed an early talent for oratory and debate. Recognition of those skills apparently steered him into law and a sixty-two-year career in private practice around the state capital and its suburbs, which brought him some statewide recognition but misfortune in politics. He ran for governor and U.S. senator in two of the most famous Arkansas elections of the modern era, in 1968 and 1972, but both ended in his defeat. (The 1968 elections ended with the reelection of Governor Winthrop Rockefeller and the 1972 elections with the reelection of Senator John L. McClellan.) He was also a leader in the multiple campaigns to write and ratify a new state constitution, all ending in failure.

Ted Gene Boswell was born on October 29, 1932, at Little Rock (Pulaski County), the third child of Dean R. Boswell Sr. and Mabel Lawson Boswell. His father was a homebuilder, and the rapid growth of Bryant, particularly after 1960, bolstered his construction business. Boswell went to the Bryant public schools and, after graduation, when the United States entered the Korean War, he joined the Marine Corps Reserves at the age of sixteen. He mustered out a corporal after serving at Pearl Harbor and bases on the West Coast.

On his return in 1952, he married Joyce Sheffield of Bryant and enrolled at Little Rock Junior College (now the University of Arkansas at Little Rock), where for two years in a row, 1953 and 1954, his debate team won state awards.

He enrolled at the University of Arkansas School of Law in Fayetteville (Washington County) and received a law degree in 1958. He soon joined the Little Rock law firm formed by Sam Laser and Howard Cockrill, which became Cockrill, Laser, McGehee, Boswell and Sharp. After several years, he opened his own law office in Bryant.

Boswell was an unabashed Jeffersonian liberal. He believed that the Declaration of Independence—inspired by John Locke’s idea that every human was gifted by the Creator with inalienable rights, starting with life, liberty, and the right to pursue happiness—founded America as the world’s great liberal democratic experiment. Boswell represented unions and working people, especially after opening his firm in Bryant. Saline County was the most unionized county in the state; legislators from the county had to get endorsements of the unions and the state AFL-CIO. In 1967, he challenged prosecuting attorneys to debate the death penalty with him. He sided with Winthrop Rockefeller, who openly opposed the death penalty but never debated the issue. A freshman legislator from Little Rock had introduced a bill (House Bill 61) to abolish the death penalty. It was defeated in a landslide.

When Rockefeller became governor in January 1967—the first Republican governor since Reconstruction—the need for a modern state constitution seemed to be a bipartisan consensus. It was in the state Democratic Party’s platform, and Rockefeller endorsed it. Both houses of the Arkansas General Assembly unanimously voted for a bill to create a thirty-member committee—the Constitutional Revision Study Commission—to analyze the need for a new constitution and perhaps to recommend one. Simultaneously, both houses passed a statute calling a special election in November to elect delegates to a constitutional convention, in case the Constitutional Revision Study Commission concluded that a new constitution was needed. Boswell was appointed to the study commission by the speaker of the House of Representatives, Sterling R. Cockrill Jr., a cousin of the senior partner in Boswell’s Little Rock firm.

The study commission, chaired by Dr. Robert A. Leflar, dean of the University of Arkansas Law School, held extensive hearings in the spring and produced a model constitution. Arkansas voters that fall ratified calling a constitutional convention. One hundred delegates elected in the 1968 general election produced a new constitution and adopted it nearly unanimously in 1969. Boswell campaigned for the document—both of the candidates for governor in 1970, Rockefeller and Dale Bumpers, endorsed it—but voters defeated it in the general election. Two more revised constitutions, in 1980 and 1995, went down to defeat in statewide elections, and still another convention, in 1974, called by Governor David H. Pryor, was scuttled by a narrow majority of the Arkansas Supreme Court on the day that it assembled on grounds that the act creating the convention unconstitutionally limited what it could do. Boswell campaigned for all the documents.

After championing the 1967 acts setting up the constitutional reform procedures, Boswell decided that he was the best one to implement the reforms once they were enacted by the voters and filed to run for governor in the Democratic primaries in 1968 in a field of four better-known candidates. He expected Democratic voters would nominate Attorney General Bruce Bennett, the segregationist who had lost to Governor Orval E. Faubus in 1960 and was a foe of constitutional reform. But it was Speaker of the House Marion H. Crank of Foreman (Little River County) who led the field in the Democratic preferential primary with twenty-six percent of the votes. Boswell and Virginia Johnson, wife of Justice James D. “Justice Jim” Johnson, were in a virtual tie for the runoff spot with twenty-one percent of the votes, but she moved ahead by 409 votes late on election night. Crank defeated her by a margin of almost two to one but narrowly lost the general election to Rockefeller.

Boswell was expected to run for governor in 1970 but, when he did not, Dale Bumpers filed and defeated a field of seven better-known Democrats in the primaries, including Faubus. He then defeated Rockefeller in a landslide. Bumpers always said that he would not have run if Boswell had. Instead, Boswell entered the race for the U.S. Senate against McClellan and Congressman David Pryor in 1972. He ran an unabashed liberal campaign. He would sponsor universal health insurance and tax reform that would raise income taxes on those of great wealth and lower taxes on people with low and modest incomes. Boswell misgauged the popularity of the young congressman, who came close to defeating McClellan in the preferential primary but lost to him in the runoff in spite of Boswell’s endorsement.

Boswell gave up politics but prospered in the public life of the state as an attorney in numerous legal disputes of public importance, such as the conduct of the state’s prisons and employment discrimination against women and African Americans. He was perpetually in the news as an attorney for one side or the other in numerous news-making ventures, including Arkansas’s long-troubled prisons. He was the attorney in the first of two lawsuits that finally brought a declaration from the state Supreme Court that the state’s 1838 criminal-libel statute was unconstitutional, a suit in which he represented Joseph H. Weston, the editor of the Sharp Citizen newspaper.

He was an early environmentalist—a member of boards of the state and national Audubon Societies and the Nature Conservancy—as well as the U.S. Supreme Court Historical Society. He was profiled in Best Lawyers in America, from its beginning in 1983. He died on March 28, 2021, at Bryant and was cremated.

For additional information:
“Boswell Seeks Elimination of Libel Law.” Arkansas Gazette, October 25, 1973, p. 1B.

“Lawyer Says He Hasn’t Accused Hillary Clinton.” Arkansas Gazette, September 14, 1990, p. 1B, 6B.

Dumas, Ernest. “Expressions of Unity in Democratic Ranks Given to Crank.” Arkansas Gazette, August 15, 1968, p. 1B.

———. “Five Candidates Endorse Reform of Constitution.” Arkansas Gazette, April 28, 1974, p. 2A.

“Means Attorney Disputes Opinion on ‘Law Practice.’” Arkansas Gazette, July 29, 1977, p. 8A.

Morrison, Elisha. “Boswell Leaves Legacy in Bryant.” Saline Courier, April 4, 2021, pp. 1, 3.

“Obituaries: Ted Gene Boswell.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, April 4, 2021, p. 2K.

State of Arkansas v. Joseph H. Weston, 501 S.W.2d 622 (1973).

“Struck 3 Times by Prison Official, Inmate Testifies.” Arkansas Gazette, November 15, 1972, pp. 1A, 3A.

Ernest Dumas
Little Rock, Arkansas