Prejudice & Pride

ARKANSAS NATIVE: All we need in this [State] is a little more rain and a little better society.

VISITOR: That's all Hell needs.

Barnside humor like this made On a Slow Train Through Arkansaw a best-seller on trains and newsstands in the early 1900s. The two-bit joke book was the making of Author Thomas W. Jackson and the unmaking of Arkansas. No matter how the State progressed, no matter how its cities grew, it was always backwoods to the rest of the U.S. Arkansans developed a mass inferiority complex unique in U.S. history.

A new generation of jokesters grew up to keep legend and complex alive. Some of the stories were shrewd psychology, like the one about the Little Rock man who tried to get a job in Manhattan, was asked where he was from, said: "Arkansas. Now laugh, damn you." Others, like the Uncle Fud and Aunt Dudie gags of Cinemactor Bob Burns, were sheer libel and humiliating ridicule. All of them gave Arkansas the shakes.

For Arkansas' inferiority complex, the war boom was just what the psychiatrist ordered. Arkansans found the whole U.S. grateful for the bauxite mines (for aluminum). Their industrialists snagged $400,000,000 in war contracts. Arkansans bustled off to war jobs with lifted chins and level eyes.

Arkansas had always had many a precious asset: its lovely Ozark vacation country; duckhunting that lured wealthy sportsmen from all over the Midwest; modern cities; high schools and colleges whose enrollment doubled between 1930 and 1940; native sons like General Brehon Somervell, General Douglas MacArthur; heroes like lawyer-author-soldier Albert Pike. Now Arkansas began to flap its wings and tell the world.

The State declared war on denigrating Native Son Bob Burns, forced him to return to a Little Rock mass meeting and explain. He promised to present "a truly sympathetic character" in the movies, subsequently withdrew from Paramount's scheduled Wizard of Arkansas because it caricatured his native State. When Paramount sued, all Arkansas rose in Burns's defense.

Tourists flocking this week to Arkansas' rolling, postcard-pretty Ouachita forests found a brave new Arkansas: aggressive, full of vinegar. Its citizens spoke right up, dead sure that Arkansas was not the worst State but the best. Said cocky Governor Homer M. Adkins: "Arkansans are now awake to the vast wealth and attractiveness of their State." Said reformed Renegade Bob Burns: "Now take my Uncle Doug. He used to walk barefoot on a barbed-wire fence with a wildcat under each arm. You know Doug--Douglas MacArthur."

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