The Best Lawyer in a One-Lawyer Town

Written by former Arkansas governor and U.S. senator Dale Bumpers, The Best Lawyer in a One-Lawyer Town is an autobiographical book that details not only his career as a politician but also how his upbringing in rural Franklin County shaped his outlook. Published in 2003 by Random House, the memoir received positive reviews and was later released in paperback by the University of Arkansas Press.

Born in Charleston (Franklin County) on August 12, 1925, Dale Leon Bumpers was the son of William Bumpers and Lattie Jones Bumpers. His father worked at a combined local hardware store and funeral home during Bumpers’s early years before buying the business in 1937. His father also served one term in the Arkansas House of Representatives, and Bumpers vividly remembered his father taking him to see President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a child. The Bumpers family worked hard during the Great Depression, with Bumpers later recalling picking cotton, potatoes, and peas, while also working at a local canning factory during the summer. Graduating from high school in 1943, Bumpers attended summer school at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) before being drafted into the U.S. Marine Corps that fall. Trained at San Diego and multiple bases on the East Coast, Bumpers was on a ship in the Pacific when World War II ended, never seeing combat.

Returning to Arkansas, he graduated from the University of Arkansas in 1948 with a degree in political science. He graduated from law school at Northwestern University in 1951. Returning to Charleston, he became the eponymous “best lawyer in a one-lawyer town,” as he was the only practicing attorney in the southern Franklin County seat. He also purchased the family hardware store, operated by another owner after the death of his parents in 1949. Bumpers married Betty Lou Flanagan in 1949, and the couple had three children.

The work recounts Bumpers’s early life and education, as well as his experience in the U.S. Marine Corps. Upon returning to Charleston, he became the attorney for the local school board and helped lead the integration of the schools, making the town the first in the South to end school segregation. Defeated in a run for the Arkansas House of Representatives in 1962, he then defeated former Governor Orval Faubus in the Democratic primary runoff in 1970, followed by defeating incumbent Governor Winthrop Rockefeller. After two terms as governor and completely reorganizing the state government, Bumpers spent four terms as a U.S. senator representing Arkansas.

All of these activities are recounted in the eighteen-chapter book, although Bumpers spent much of the work focused on his personal life rather than his accomplishments as a politician. Bumpers began covering his gubernatorial run in chapter fourteen, and less than a third of the book is spent detailing his experiences in political office.

Reviews of the book appeared in various journals, with Andrew Johns praising Bumpers in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly for avoiding a pitfall typically associated with political autobiographies, the “notoriously self-congratulatory panegyrics to individual greatness.” The lack of focus of Bumpers’s political career was seen as a slight weakness of the work by some reviewers, but the book was praised overall.

For more information:
Bumpers, Dale. The Best Lawyer in a One-Lawyer Town. New York: Random House, 2003.

Johns, Andrew L. “Review of The Best Lawyer in a One-Lawyer Town.” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 108, no. 3 (2005): 418–419.

David Sesser
Southeastern Louisiana University