We can thank Bobby Roberts for a funny and revealing new memoir of Arkansas politics.
Oh, the book wasn’t written by Roberts, retired boss of the Central Arkansas Library System. But without him there would be no “Education of Ernie Dumas: Chronicles of the Arkansas Political Mind.”
Dumas, the Arkansas Gazette veteran and dean of the state’s political reporters, published his fly-on-the-wall retrospective last month with Butler Center Press.
It’s no shock that Dumas, a procrastinator, needed a shove. He dawdled for years after Gazette City Editor Bill Shelton told him to prepare an advance obituary on Gov. Orval E. Faubus. When Faubus fell ill, Shelton warned: “If he dies and we don’t have an obit ready, the headline is gonna say, ‘Faubus Dies; Dumas Fired.’”
Faubus survived, and actually outlasted the Gazette, which fell in the Great Little Rock Newspaper War in October 1991. Dumas writes tellingly about that, and the business moves that led up to it.
In the Gazette’s wake, he taught journalism at the University of Central Arkansas and kept up his political reporting and commentary in Arkansas Times.
The book offers the best perspective on the Whitewater affair yet, unless you count Dumas’ interviews with Roy Reed in the Gazette oral history at the Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral & Visual History.
In 400 sometimes-gossipy pages covering 60 years of reportage, “Education” is far more than an Arkansas history primer. Dumas plunges into the confluence of politics, journalism and civil rights after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling outlawed school segregation in 1954. Even then, Dumas was a teenage reporter in El Dorado.
Faubus, who sent the National Guard to Little Rock Central High School in 1957 to stop nine black students trying to enter, echoes as the voice of regret in the book, which Dumas modeled in name and form upon 1906’s “The Education of Henry Adams.”
Faubus did what he felt he had to do to be a five-term governor: “You can have all the ideas you want about improving people’s lives, but if you’re not in office, they’re not good for anything,” he told Dumas and Reed in a remarkable confession after his 1964 gubernatorial victory over Winthrop Rockefeller. He admitted that 1957 was just politics, and asserted that he’d saved the state from leadership by race-baiters like Justice Jim Johnson.
Rockefeller, an heir to the Standard Oil fortune, broke through as Arkansas’ first Republican governor since Reconstruction when Faubus didn’t run again in 1966. Rockefeller was, in Dumas’ view, “the most liberal governor in Arkansas history and, by any definition of the word, among the most liberal in American history.” He sang “We Shall Overcome” with black leaders after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, a unique gesture by a Southern governor, and on his last day in office commuted every Arkansan on death row, halting executions for two decades.
Dale Bumpers emerges as Arkansas’ hardest-working politician and most accomplished governor, but one with “a pathological hatred for his job,” fretting that an underling would disgrace him by being crooked. That rectitude annoyed financier Witt Stephens for decades.
Long after clashing with Bumpers over Stephens’ utility, Arkansas Louisiana Gas Co., Stephens invited Bumpers to lunch in 1986, but he couldn’t let bygones go. “They argued and finally Bumpers said something like, ‘Why, you senile old bastard, that just didn’t happen,’” Dumas writes.
David Pryor is Dumas’ instinctive charmer with politics in his DNA, “easily the best liked member” of the U.S. Senate, son of a father elected twice as Ouachita County sheriff and a mother — still a teen when American women gained the right to vote — who was the state’s first woman to run for public office. (She fell short as a 21-year-old candidate for county clerk.)
The book brims with caricatures by ex-Gazette cartoonist George Fisher, whose work alone is worth the price — Gov. Sidney McMath as an armored “El Sid”; Frank Holt as a “pleasant vegetable”; “Mutt” Jones as a bulldog, etc.
Throughout “Education,” Dumas demonstrates that journalism matters. It was crucial, for instance, in revealing Jim Crow’s brutality and unfairness, propelling the civil rights movement. But he’s not haughty about journalistic opinion.
Harry Ashmore, the Pulitzer-winning Gazette editorialist turned “Encyclopedia Britannica” editor, told him this after learning Dumas was taking up opinion writing: “I think you’ll find writing editorials is like pissing in a blue-serge suit. It gives you a warm feeling, but no one pays any attention to what you did.”
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