Celebrating politics?
Shane Broadway has taken over leadership of the venerable Political Animals Club in Little Rock, an institution begun in the 1980s by Skip Rutherford, and thriving since.
Broadway is a once-rising Democratic politician and former state higher education director now lobbying for his alma mater, Arkansas State University. He succeeds in club leadership Rex Nelson, who has wandered back to the time-consuming and conflict-posing place dinosaurs inevitably wander—to newspaper writing. Broadway went on Roby Brock’s
Talk Business and Politics television program Sunday morning to talk about his new leadership of the club and reveal his big idea. It’s that we need to commemorate that Arkansas has an especially rich history in politics—owing to outsized personalities and outsized national influence, and, I’d add, to the fact that a small, poor state once looked upon summer politicking at rallies and fish fries for its entertainment.
Broadway said he had talked to leaders of the offshoot clubs in the northeastern, northwestern and southeastern parts of the state—there is no club currently in the southwestern quadrant—and all were agreed with him that we ought to look at creating an Arkansas Politics Hall of Fame.
I think it’s a fine idea fraught with modest peril in the Trumpian Anger Age.
A lot of people won’t want to celebrate politics, considering that they disdain it. “A political hall of fame— ugh,” said a post on Twitter.
Already there is a problem with nomenclature: I wouldn’t favor a “political” hall of fame, either. But I’d like a “politics” one.
It’s the same principle by which newspapers stopped referring to their “political editor,” and made him, or her, the “politics editor.” A “political editor” sounds like a guy assigning fake news based on bias, or one playing favorites on his staff.
Many others would support inductions only of politicians they agree with. Some will scoff when Bill Clinton goes in. Others will scoff when Sarah Huckabee Sanders goes in, as she must, being a Little Rock woman and Central High graduate who rose to be the internationally recognized official excuser of a man for whom there is no excuse.
More substantively, this hall of fame will struggle, I suspect, with the nature of political fame. For example: For a time in the late 1950s, then-Gov. Orval Faubus was a national household name. But it was for resisting racial progress and forcing the American president to send federal troops to Little Rock to enforce the law.
Does he belong in an Arkansas Politics Hall of Fame?
Here’s my answer to that: I’d hate to see him in it but would assign no credibility to the institution if he wasn’t.
How would you induct him and commemorate him? With truth or with fluff? Again, here’s my answer: Both. It seems to me that this Arkansas Politics Hall of Fame, if it is to exist, must do so as far from government as possible. It should be an undertaking of private fundraising. It should never emulate the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame, which, for several lean years, horned in on the Legislature’s General Improvement Fund for taxpayer money that compromised it, and—or so I always argued—should have authorized every taxpayer to vote on inductions. I was alarmed, then, to see that
Talk Business interviewed state government’s politically appointed heritage director, Stacy Hurst, and politically appointed parks and tourism director, Kane Webb, about this idea, receiving from them glowing endorsements of the idea.
Their endorsements should be welcomed. Their role in funding or running the organization—or any state government role—should be avoided with a religious fervor.
I’d pledge some money—whatever I could afford—to an independent private foundation overseen by a board arising from the leadership rolls of the Political Animals clubs.
Oh, and I’ll do one other thing: I’ll nominate the inaugural class of inductees.
Hattie Caraway, through whom Arkansas sent the U.S. Senate its first woman ever elected to a full term, and the first woman to head a Senate committee.
J. William Fulbright, the cerebral and erudite 30-year U.S. senator who opposed Joe McCarthy and the Vietnam War and forged an international exchange program, but was, alas, imperfect in the way of a Southern Democratic politician of his time, signing the Southern Manifesto.
Winthrop Rockefeller, the New Yorker who chose the state as his home and invested his money and heart in reforming and transforming it post-Faubus into a more moderate, modernized and progressive place.
Bill Clinton, who might not have become president if not for Fulbright and Rockefeller, and who was, it is widely agreed, the best politician of his generation.
I have Dale Bumpers, Wilbur Mills, Joe T. Robinson and John L. McClellan going in the second year, and George Donaghey, David Pryor, Mike Huckabee and John Walker—yes, activist civil-rights law is sure-enough politics—in the third.
It sounds like fun.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.