The Cherry talk-a-thons

Radio had been in Arkansas since the 1920s, but the number of stations didn’t begin to take off until after World War II. It was left to a judge from Jonesboro, Francis Cherry, to first use radio as the key to winning a statewide political campaign.

At a time when prospective statewide candidates are raising millions of dollars for television advertising for their 2022 campaigns, it’s instructive to look back at Cherry’s 1952 campaign for governor.

Cherry was born in 1908 at Fort Worth as the youngest of five children. His father was a railroad conductor, and most of Cherry’s youth was spent in Oklahoma. He came to Fayetteville in 1932, entered law school and met the 1933 University of Arkansas homecoming queen, Margaret Frierson of Jonesboro. Cherry finished law school in 1936, practiced for a time at a Little Rock firm, married Frierson in November 1937, and moved to Jonesboro.

Cherry was elected as a state chancery judge in 1942. In 1952, Gov. Sid McMath decided to seek a third term. Arkansas had two-year terms, and it was rare for the state’s voters to elect a governor to more than two terms.

“McMath had offended the state’s powerful utility, Arkansas Power & Light Co., and it spared no expense to tarnish his record,” writes historian Michael Dougan of Arkansas State University. “Cherry stood out because other candidates were associated with discredited politics. Boyd Tackett, a former congressman whose district had been one of three the state lost following the 1950 census, attacked anyone with a foreign-sounding name. Jack Holt, a former attorney general, had many accumulated liabilities. Attorney General Ike Murry was considered to be in AP&L’s pocket after investigations of McMath and his campaign manager, Henry Woods.

“Cherry distanced himself from them by refusing donations of more than $500 and asking children to send him nickels and dimes. He was the only new face. Aligning himself with the decade’s anti-Communist fears and nonpartisan popularity of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Republican presidential nominee, Cherry capitalized on his name — the campaign motto was Pick a Cherry — and his apolitical honesty.”

A Miami advertising agency advised Cherry to spend his money on radio advertising. The agency had used the strategy successfully with candidates in Florida.

“The talk-a-thon strategy, credited with ensuring Cherry’s win, worked for two reasons,” Dougan writes. “First, most of the state had been electrified so almost all homes had radios. Second, television in Arkansas was in its infancy. The strategy required Cherry to talk and answer questions for 24½ hours straight.”

That marathon began July 2, 1952. Twenty subsequent talk-a-thons lasted three hours each.

“He answered 13,000 questions,” Dougan writes. “The most common question was ‘who is your barber?’ The questioner could air a smear against another candidate, but Cherry was free to avoid answering. Polls showed the judge moving from last place to second.”

Cherry finished less than 10,000 votes behind McMath in the primary. Tackett was third, Holt was fourth and Murry was fifth. In the runoff, Cherry had 237,448 votes to McMath’s 139,052. Winning the Democratic primary was tantamount to election in those days.

In the November general election, Cherry received 342,292 votes to just 49,292 for Republican Jefferson Speck.

Cherry, however, would be a one-term governor. He lost in the 1954 Democratic primary to a Huntsville newspaper owner, Orval Faubus.

“Faubus wanted to oppose Cherry in 1954, but kingmaker Witt Stephens, whose Little Rock brokerage firm had virtually monopolized marketing Arkansas bond issues, told Faubus that if he ran, his friend Congressman James Trimble would find himself in trouble,” Dougan writes. “During a visit to Little Rock, Faubus told the press he wouldn’t announce his candidacy ‘at this time.’ But announce he did, just before the deadline and too late for Stephens to field a candidate against Trimble.”

In the four-man preferential primary field, Cherry was first with 154,879 votes and Faubus was second with 109,614 votes. The runoff was heated.

“The dominant issue in the runoff was Cherry’s unearthing the charge that Faubus had attended Commonwealth College near Mena, a labor school with communist leanings,” Dougan writes. “While the allegation was true, in the context of the political witch hunt being run by Republican U.S. Sen. Joe McCarthy, Cherry’s raising the issue amounted to a red herring.

“Faubus at first tried to deny the charge, but in a carefully orchestrated television appearance, he admitted attending, although he denied he had stayed at the school once he understood what it stood for. Faubus then played on his rural roots and his desire — at any cost — for an education.”

Faubus, it turned out, was even better on television and radio than Cherry. The Cherry administration also had made numerous mistakes since the January 1953 inauguration.

“Cherry had little support in the Legislature,” Dougan writes. “Unwilling to play its games, he even instructed agency heads to avoid politics.”

Faubus won the runoff by less than 7,000 votes. Since the adoption of the 1874 Arkansas Constitution, only Gov. Tom Terral in 1926 had been denied a second two-year term.

“Like Terral, Cherry had blundered on the side of honesty,” Dougan writes. “Disaffected Cherry supporters cast votes for Pratt Remmel, the GOP nominee, whose total vote almost tripled that of Speck two years before.”

Faubus outpolled Remmel 208,121 to 127,004 and began the first of six terms.

Francis Cherry