Arkansas seems to sit on the margins, out of sight and out of mind for most of us. Oklahoma, its neighbor to the west, has the complex history of Indian Territory to ponder, while Tennessee to the east can can always fall back on music. Texas and Louisiana to the south are their own myths. Maybe Missouri is similar, but with both the St. Louis Cardinals and the Kansas City Royals, it seems like a different world. If Arkansas were part of a family, it would be the younger brother who never quite outgrew his own self-destruction. It’s the brother with the hip flask, jobless, who spent his last dollar on a half-wild horse and a half-broken pistol. He’s the brother who shows up for Thanksgiving already contrite, but never really sorry.
Over the Martin Luther King Holiday, we drove to Arkansas, to the Ozarks. It wasn’t a fishing trip. It could have been a fishing trip, the weather was ok, but it was planned so that when I wrote the report on our Arkansas fish, I wouldn’t have to say that we didn’t go to the Crystal Bridges Museum. We made it to Crystal Bridges, and for a short stop for lunch in Hot Springs, and then came home.
Arkansas is relatively poor (currently ranked 47th in household income, trailing Mississippi and West Virginia, but ahead of Louisiana and New Mexico), and now overwhelmingly Republican. Arkansas voted 62% for Trump in 2020, and all of the Biden counties were located in the Delta, or near enough.
The Arkansas population is still pretty binary. An Arkansan is probably black or white, and more likely white than black. As of the 2010 census, 77% of the roughly 3 million population was white, while 15% was black. That’s not a very true picture though. Chicot County in the Southeast Arkansas Delta has a white population of 4,733 and a black population of 5,861. A bit further north along the Mississippi, in Crittenden County–West Memphis–the white population is 21,763 and the black population is 23,789. Flip to our destination in the far northeast, Benton County, the white population is 227,609 and the black population is 4,359. Cut to the chase: Western Arkansas is white, the Delta isn’t. According to the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas, about 100 sundown towns (and three sundown counties) existed in Western Arkansas into the 70s.
No malaria, no mosquitoes, no Negroes. Siloam Springs is clearly quite the place.
The Delta black population is a slavery remnant, brought to Arkansas for cotton. If the definition of a functional economy is an economy that provides a decent living standard and opportunity for its participants, the Delta was always a dysfunctional economy, but after World War II, as agriculture converted from labor intense to mechanized, the Delta, both in Arkansas and across the river in Mississippi, brought dysfunction to high art. Most of Arkansas’s poorest counties are located along or near the Mississippi. Post-World War II, mechanization replaced much of agricultural labor, and in the Delta no new industries provided new sources of jobs. Until the Civil Rights Act, Delta planters controlled significant political power in the state, and it wasn’t in their interest to spend tax money on education or economic development–education and economic development would challenge control of labor. Since the 1920s the largest political question in Arkansas was, as often as not, not how to fund schools but how (and whether) to pay for road improvements.
About 70% of the population of Arkansas is Protestant, which includes a vast festering range of denominational and doctrinal disagreement. Only in such places do things like drinkin’ and dancin’ and playing the pipe organ in church still seem like the major philosophical questions of the age, and the principal query among decent folk is whether you’re Baptist, Methodist, or Church of Christ, or maybe even Evangelical (though that’s skirting the edge of decency).
The United States purchased Arkansas from France in 1803, as part of the Louisiana Purchase. As with most such New World land acquisitions, the indigenous Caddos, Osage, and Quapaws weren’t consulted. By 1836, there was sufficient American population–30,000 in 1830 and 97,000 in 1840 –to have achieved statehood. I had some ancestors there by 1836, a couple of pair of many greats grandfathers and grandmothers, but like a lot of Arkansans they don’t appear to have been particularly successful. One pater died young in 1850, and the other was in Texas by 1846. It is so common for white North Texans’ ancestors to have passed through Arkansas, that Ancestry recognizes a distinct DNA group, West Tennessee, Arkansas, and Northeast Texas Settlers. According to Ancestry, them’s my people.
In the War, as part of the Union push to control the Mississippi, the Arkansas Confederacy was dealt with and survived only in the southwestern corner of the state, with the capital at Washington, 33 miles from Texarkana. In a later stage of the War, the Little Rock Nine were escorted into Central High in Little Rock in 1957.
Along with the Little Rock Nine being escorted into Central High, perhaps the most enduring image of Arkansas is the Arkansas Traveler/Lil’ Abner hillbilly. Lil’ Abner was not clearly from Arkansas, he hailed from Dogpatch, USA, but did anyone doubt that the Ozarks was his home? As for the Arkansas Traveler
Oh, once upon a time in Arkansas,
An old man sat in his little cabin door
And fiddled at a tune that he liked to hear,
A jolly old tune that he played by ear.
Hillbilly is not a flattering designation, combining squalor, meanness, poverty, and ignorance, though The Arkansas Traveller does allow the old man superior practicality along with tunefulness. “Neighbor, why don’t you fix that roof?” “I can’t fix it now ’cause it’s raining, and when it ain’t raining it don’t need fixing.” In the modern age you can toss in the assumptions of opioid addiction and meth.
In recent years, Arkansas points to three corporations as signs of economic change, Walmart, Tyson Foods, and J.B. Hunt Transport Services, all located in Northeast Arkansas. I can’t judge whether cheap goods, cheap chicken, and big rigs is the world on a platter for Arkansas, but it can’t hurt. I will say that Tyson produces the best commercial bacon, Wright Brand, and when I don’t cure my own it’s my go-to.
Tourism also plays a part in Arkansas’s economy, and Western Arkansas, up the Ouchitas to the Ozarks, is beautiful. All those bad things you can say about Arkansas? Western Arkansas is beautiful, truly, spectacularly beautiful.
Back to the new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Our drive up the Ouchitas to the Ozarks wasn’t a fishing trip, exactly, though we did take rods, the weather was good, and we took a quick look at the White River. It was more of a pre-fishing trip, so that we wouldn’t have to say we’d never been to Crystal Bridges. The Museum collection is a good survey of important American art, but nothing in itself to drive 600 miles for. The real draw is the setting and the building, designed by Moshe Safdie. Together they’re magnificent. Crystal Bridges was founded by Alice Walton, Sam Walton’s daughter, in 2011, and there is a bit of a Medici feel to the enterprise. Here are some of the principal donors:
There’s something to be said for cheap goods, cheap chicken, and big rigs.
