Displaying a uniquely Arkansan combination of wit, grit and grace, Betty Bumpers never met a challenge she didn’t like, or a problem she didn’t think she could whip, over a lifetime in the public eye.
Arkansas may have elected her husband Dale to office, but the state has rarely had a better representative than she. Hers was a simple philosophy among immensely complicated issues, a distinctive voice in a sea of go-alongs, perhaps best illustrated in a quote from the 2013 book Betty Bumpers, Champion of Childhood Immigration and Peace.
“You choose to be either happy or unhappy,” Bumpers said. “It is your choice, so decide to be happy for God’s sakes.”
A native of Grand Prairie, Elizabeth Callan Flanagan Bumpers was born on January 11, 1925. Her father, Herman Flanagan, was a salesman and auctioneer and her mother, Ola (Callan) Flanagan, a homemaker. Her early life was marked by movement — the family lived in Fort Smith during World War II, then Iowa and then back home to Franklin County. Betty attended Chicago Academy of Fine Art and the University of Iowa.
By the time she married high school sweetheart Dale Bumpers in 1949, she was teaching elementary school in Illinois, a career she continued when the couple returned to Arkansas to live in Charleston, where Dale established a law practice. The couple welcomed three children, Brent, Bill and Brooke.
Even as her life took on the conservative trappings of the era, it was clear that Betty was no June Cleaver. Her entire adult life in Arkansas, she was a community activist and the spark behind worthwhile causes.
“I’ve always been a cause person,” she said in a 2012 interview for Little Rock Soiree. “I always had lots of energy, which in a small town means you get called on to participate in fundraisers, heart drives, cancer drives. I learned who the ‘horses’ were for community organizing.”
As Dale’s political career took off — he was Arkansas’ governor from 1971 to 1975 and U.S. senator from 1975 to 1999 — Betty successfully employed this same formula at each stop. The only difference was the scope of the issues. When, during her time as Arkansas First Lady, the Centers for Disease Control approached her to help educate the populace about vaccines, it became her first crusade.
“I was stuck figuring out how we could do it,” she told Soiree. “A friend of mine, Nell Balkman, was head of the Arkansas League of Nursing. She laid out a plan in ‘73. We made the governor’s mansion the meeting place.”
It was neither the first nor last time she used the weight of her title to advance the agenda, a tactic that she readily admits (“I used who I was shamelessly,” she once said) and was effective, signing on the Cooperative Extension Service, the most extensive network in the state, and the National Guard for the effort. On a single Saturday during that first initiative, 350,000 Arkansas children were immunized.
The effort didn’t stop there. When the Bumpers went to Washington following Dale’s election to the Senate, Betty recruited First Lady Rosalynn Carter to her cause in 1977.
“We campaigned for two years,” she told Soiree. “Only 11 states had laws that school entrants had to be immunized. We got all the laws changed.”
The legacy of that effort and ensuing education is that today, the immunization rate for children age 0 to 2 years is 90 percent. There’s no telling how many lives were saved through her activism.
The same could be said for her next endeavor. When President Ronald Reagan came into office, he brought with him stern words and an agenda of peace through strength that spurred nuclear weapons proliferation.
“It was determined that … a very small number of nuclear weapons was enough to destroy the universe and yet we kept building hundreds and thousands more,” she said in a 2009 video for the U.S. Institute of Peace. “So, I just called it what I felt like was exactly what it was — and it’s proven to be true — stupidity.”
In the 1980s, Betty called on some of her fellow Senate wives and together they formed Peace Links, an organization that aimed to establish one-to-one dialogues for peace across national and philosophical lines. Almost immediately, 30,000 people signed on, mainly women, a fact not lost on Betty.
“It is not because we think better than men, but we think differently,” she told International Alert in 1999. “It’s not that the world would have been a better place if women had run it, but the world will be a better place when we as women, who bring our perspectives, share in running it.”
The road that was often bumpy yielded its share of acclaim. Among Betty’s accolades are the Peace Links Founders Award (1994); U.S. Surgeon General’s Medallion (1993) and induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame (2005). As well, the National Institutes of Health Vaccine Research Center is named for her and Dale in recognition of their efforts to promote childhood immunizations and vaccine research.
These and dozens of other honors are nice, but none drove her to live the life she did. It goes much deeper than that.
“Over time, I’ve worked to humble myself, because I have been gratified and humbled by the opportunities I have had,” she said in Betty Bumpers, Champion of Childhood Immigration and Peace. “I’ve remembered … my mother often reminding us that the only unforgivable sin is the sin of omission. I have used that idea to motivate Senate wives and many other community leaders.
“If you ignore an opportunity, that is the sin of omission: It’s not taking advantage of your ability to do something that would rectify a wrong or help accomplish something.”
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