Two names, two states
Today’s column is based on a talk given last weekend at the Senior Expo held at the Statehouse Convention Center in Little Rock.
It comes down to this: Are you an Arkansan or an Arkansawyer? There’s quite a difference. Like the difference between two identities. On my arrival as a novice editorial writer for the Pine Bluff Commercial, I was introduced to a new word on the editorial page proof, or at least it was new to this young stranger in a strange land: Arkansan.
What is that, I wondered. And how do you say it? Which syllable do you stress? Is it AR- kan-san or ArKAN- san? And would anybody in real life say it? Or was it to be used only in print? Had I somehow landed a couple of states off, somewhere near Kansas? Even now, who would say it out loud in ordinary conversation— except maybe radio announcers, politicos and television types?
Ah, the mysteries of the Wonder State, or rather wonder states, for each name, Arkansan or Arkansawyer, stands for a whole different outlook, culture and history—a Weltanschauung, or Worldview as the Germans say, and which is just the kind of graduateschool word I had unpacked with my bags and heavy-duty parka, and which would be of as little use in Southern climes.
On the contrary, a heavy-duty word like Arkansan, with all its turgid teutonic weight, would alienate readers from the first syllable. And be a sure sign that the new editorial writer in town had no idea where he was or who was going to read him, or try to. (“You’re not from around heah, are you?”) Arkansan had much the same effect on me the first time I saw it. It sounded foreign.
What it was, and is, is a New South word if ever there was one—a chamber-of-commerce word designed to give decent cover to the old Arkansas that had long been the subject of less than positive stereotypes, stereotypes that had been a source of embarrassment to the state’s PR types for years. Arkansan was a nice new shiny substitute for Arkansawyer, a word that brought back all those old stereotypes: hillbillies, corn likker, pellagra, iggerance, Bob Burns’ bazooka . . . .
No, much better to close the book on all that; it’s not good salesmanship. Unfortunately, with Arkansawyer would also go the very qualities that I had basked in as soon as I’d got to town—the innate courtesy and consideration, the easy country conversation that was almost as eloquent as the thoughtful silences that punctuated it, the grit and independence of the people and the sense of personal honor that undergirds the whole culture.
Not to mention the whole different approach to time that being an Arkansawyer implies—as something to be savored, learned from, be shaped by rather than ruled by, forever rushed by the clock.
Flannery O’Connor said it, as she did so many incisive, all-too-true, alltoo-bittersweet things: “The anguish that most of us have observed for some time now has been caused not by the fact that the South is alienated from the rest of the country, but by the fact that it is not alienated enough, that every day we are getting
more and more like the rest of the country, that we are being forced out not only of our many sins, but of our few virtues.”
You didn’t have to be a Rockefeller looking for a mountaintop to buy as a refuge from New York’s sheer, unbearable yankeeness to appreciate Southern qualities. A rookie newspaperman who didn’t even have a bank account in town could breathe deep on his first day on the job and think: I’m home. Especially if he’d started off in Louisiana, pronounced Looziana the way folks here would naturally say Arkie or Arkansawyer rather than Ar-KAN-san.
Our original sin, it would occur to me only later, was to spell the state’s name the French way with that final, silent S instead of a simple, honest W at the end. So it would be clear just how the state’s name was to be pronounced. We’d all be just Arkansawans by now, and there would never have been all that nonsense about whether the possessive of Arkansas was Arkansas’ or Arkansas’s. As much as grammatical nitpickers love to debate that Great Question of the Ages.
Our differences about even our own name might be the perfect reflection of all the differences—geographic, climatic, linguistic, sociological—within this composite state. Arkansas is one of those put-together states, not all of a piece but assembled from leftover parts of the surrounding ones, which may have clearer, simpler, more distinctive identities: Texas (and how!), the Indian Territory now known as Oklahoma, Missouri (Show Me!), Louisiana (which is still Old France once you get past Alec), Mississippi (that last redoubt of the Old South, even if only on travel posters), and, of course, Tennessee, which may be most like us in having been assembled from disparate parts of Delta and Mountain South—all the way from Memphis to Knoxville and points even farther east. It’s one long jigsaw puzzle called a state.
Think of the Arkansawyer as a Tennessean on his way to becoming, God help us, a Texan. Which is just the way a lot of folks came to Arkansas, just passing through it in transit, who for some reason decided to stay. And became Arkansawyers.
To understand how we became today’s Arkansans, if we ever really did, may require a familiarity not only with our culture or the geology and climate that shaped it, but with merchandising. Arkansan isn’t a real word with real roots in the soil, it’s a banker’s word, a salesman’s, a PR person’s. A word that obscures our past more than reveals it. Which may have been just fine with whoever invented it.
Granted, not all that past is one to be proud of. On the contrary, much of it is shameful. And it can show up on the most disastrous occasions, as at the Secession Convention of 1861 or in the Little Rock Crisis of 1957 a century later and throughout the whole, awful Faubus era. Here’s hoping we’re done with all that, done with a state that had only one crop (cotton), one issue (race), and one party (your grandpa’s, or by now your great-grandpa’s, namely the Democratic Party).
The shift of power in this state—economic, political, and cultural power—from southeast to northwest, from the Delta to the hills, from the old plantation economy to Wal-Mart country—is reflected in the state’s shift from Democratic to Republican. The hills have always been where you found Republicans in the South. Montani Semper Liberi— in the mountains there is always freedom. But now Republicans, once only a political curiosity south of the Mason-Dixon Line, have become a real power in a two-party system.
But what’s in a name? Or even a change in the balance of power between a state’s political parties? Perhaps less than meets the eye. The remarkable continuity of Arkansas’ political attitudes continues despite the change in the balance of power between our two principal political parties. For we’ve always been, and remain, a basically conservative state with a strong populist tinge.
Not since Franklin Roosevelt, and maybe not even then, have we been in step with the national Democratic Party even if some of our leading politicians, like Joe T. Robinson, were. The same kind of people who used to vote a straight Democratic ticket may now vote a straight Republican one. They haven’t changed even if the parties have changed places. Makes you wonder how many generations it will take to produce yellow-dog Republicans the way we now have yellow-dog Democrats.
The last distinguishing mark of the state’s old political structure (D-Arkansas) is proving the slowest to fade. Arkansas may be one of the last, maybe the last, to join the red states. Call it the red shift, to borrow a term astronomers use to measure how fast distant objects are receding; the red shift is a sign of the universe’s unstoppable expansion.
The mystery isn’t why Arkansas is changing party identities, much like a lot of Southern states, but why it’s taken us so long to do it. My best guess is because Arkansas is such a small, wonderfully close-knit state where family connections, old school ties, and such—Edmund Burke called them the little platoons of society—have held together so well and so long.
Mark Pryor, the last certified Democratic member of the state’s congressional delegation, is desperately trying to keep the state in the Democratic column. To do so, he’s pulling out all the usual stops, from his daddy’s name to a barely concealed disdain for this Harvard man and Union officer he’s running against, this . . . Republican!
This brazen Tom Cotton has had the effrontery to challenge the way things have always been in Arkansas. How dare he! Yet he’s clearly a product of the same basic values—military service, conservative social and political and even religious values—that molded past generations in Arkansas.
This year’s election of a U.S. senator isn’t about just this year’s issues, but which we’re going to be, New or Old South, attached to things as they always were, or open to new ideas, and therefore new ways and a new identity. Even a new party label. In a way it’s a contest between past and future. It’s certainly an election about more than the U.S. Senate.