To the mountaintop

The fog has thickened considerably as I reach the top of Petit Jean Mountain on this final Friday of February. Fortunately, I know the way to the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute. Otherwise, it would be easy to miss the turn.

This is one of my favorite spots in Arkansas. I first came here as a boy in the 1960s when my parents brought me on a Sunday afternoon for a public event hosted by Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller at his ranch. It’s easy to see why Rockefeller fell in love with Petit Jean. Even in the fog—or perhaps especially in the fog—this is a place to exhale and unwind; a place to think deeper thoughts than are possible in the downtown Little Rock bustle where I usually work.

I’m here at the invitation of the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation for an all-day planning session. Representatives of the other two Arkansas institutions that use the former governor’s name—WRI and Winrock International—are also in attendance. Arkansans often confuse the three entities even though they have different roles.

When Rockefeller died of pancreatic cancer on Feb. 22, 1973, in Palm Springs, Calif., where he had gone to escape the cold Arkansas winter, he left much of his estate to the Winthrop Rockefeller Charitable Trust.

The trust in turn created the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation with its focus on education, economic growth and social justice. The foundation is based in Little Rock.

Within months of Rockefeller’s death, what’s now Winrock International was operating on 188 acres that had served as the heart of the ranch. Winrock International works around the world to protect natural resources and provide economic opportunity, building on the research Rockefeller was doing at his ranch. For three decades, the global development organization called the mountain home before building a headquarters in the Riverdale area of Little Rock.

When Winrock International moved off the ranch, the land reverted to the Rockefeller Charitable Trust. The board of the trust joined forces with the University of Arkansas System in 2005 to create a conference center and educational institute. Almost 30,000 square feet of existing space was renovated, lodging facilities were constructed and extensive landscaping was done at a cost of more than $20 million. Last October, UA officials announced a gift of more than $100 million from the trust to endow WRI.

Rockefeller once said: “Every citizen has a duty to be informed, to be thoughtfully concerned and to participate in the search for solutions.”

More than anyplace else, WRI is where Arkansans can come, have an open dialogue and seek solutions to the state’s problems. We were asked to come up with one word to describe the governor. I came up with a hyphenated term—self-respect. It was in Arkansas that Winthrop Rockefeller found his real purpose in life. He then gave Arkansans a reason to believe in themselves at a time when the state was badly in need of a boost. Rockefeller needed Arkansas, and Arkansas needed the man known to his aides simply as WR.

We’re allowed into Rockefeller’s former ranch office for a group photo. I spot a December 1966 copy of Time magazine with Rockefeller on the cover. The magazine came out as he was preparing to take the oath of office as the state’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction. Rockefeller would become the governor of a place that had lost a higher percentage of its population than any other state from 1940-60.

“Well into the 1950s, the state ranked at or near the bottom of virtually every index of progress, from literacy to average income to the number of dentists per capita,” the Time story said. “Though the Legislature in the ’20s dubbed Arkansas the Wonder State and later more modestly renamed it the Land of Opportunity, by the early ’40s the brightest opportunity for young people moving off the farms lay in a one-way ticket to another state. Those who managed to get a good education found little reward for their learning back home; a competent technician could ask higher wages with half a day’s bus ride in almost any direction.”

Rockefeller, who had been painfully shy since birth, immediately took a liking to the state after moving here in 1953 to escape the temptations of a Manhattan lifestyle along with New York City’s prying paparazzi. In 1955, he accepted new Gov. Orval Faubus’ invitation to serve on the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission and was soon elected AIDC chairman. Rockefeller was making progress in attracting manufacturing facilities to the state when Faubus’ decision to block nine black children from entering Little Rock Central High School in the fall of 1957 set economic development back by years. Though he was only in the governor’s office for four years, Rockefeller changed the state’s trajectory.

I spend an hour of quiet time at the end of the day in WRI’s 3,000-square-foot Legacy Gallery, reading the panels of a permanent exhibit titled “Winthrop Rockefeller: A Sphere of Power and Influence Dropped into a River of Need.” I think how different the roots of 20th-century Republicanism are in Arkansas when compared with other Southern states.

In the rest of the region, the GOP grew in strength as the old Democratic Solid South coalition frayed due to opposition from white voters to President Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights initiatives. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 drove former Democrats into the Republican fold. They had an outlet for their frustration in 1968 when Alabama’s George Wallace ran as a third-party candidate. They then migrated en masse to Republican Richard Nixon in his 1972 victory over George McGovern and later began voting for GOP candidates in state and local elections.

Arkansas was different. Its Republican growth in the 1960s was due to a man who received large percentages of the black vote and then became that rare Southern governor who brought blacks into his administration. Rockefeller was a reformer who fought corruption ranging from illegal gambling at Hot Springs to the state’s putrid prison system.

Rockefeller would probably be amazed that Arkansas is now a majority Republican state and will likely remain in that category for decades to come. GOP officials would do well, meanwhile, to remember the heritage of Arkansas Republicanism.

I wish all 135 members of the Legislature— Democrats and Republicans alike—would visit the Legacy Gallery and give themselves a full day to read, contemplate and learn. We would be a better state if they would come to the mountaintop.