Conway County’s politics

In the summer of 1993, I was political editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. I was a “writing editor,” which meant I wrote stories in addition to supervising the newspaper’s bureaus at the state Capitol and in Washington, D.C. It was a busy time, but I felt it was worth being out of the office for four days to put together a series of stories on a political race that was attracting national attention.

In late 1992, Bill Clinton resigned as governor to prepare for his January 1993 inauguration as president. Jim Guy Tucker moved up from lieutenant governor to governor and called a special election for that summer to fill the lieutenant governor’s seat.

Nate Coulter was a Harvard-educated lawyer from Howard County, a rising star in the Democratic Party in the Clinton and Tucker mode.

Many Arkansans felt his Republican opponent, a Southern Baptist minister from Texarkana named Mike Huckabee, had a chance to be the first Republican to win a statewide election since Frank White upset Clinton in the 1980 governor’s race. Huckabee had run unsuccessfully the previous fall against Democratic U.S. Sen. Dale Bumpers, but the GOP nominee had a 75-county organization of volunteers already in place.

Huckabee had something else going for him. There wasn’t much happening politically in the summer of 1993. The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Haley Barbour of Mississippi, saw it as an opportunity to embarrass the new Democratic president in his home state. Barbour dedicated RNC resources to Huckabee’s campaign, and Huckabee won with less than 51 percent of the vote.

I spent two days traveling the state with Huckabee, then spent two days with Coulter. Life can take strange turns. I couldn’t have predicted that Huckabee would wind up spending more than a decade as governor and that I would serve on his senior management team for most of that time while also serving as his 1998 campaign manager. Neither could I have predicted that Coulter, who now heads the Central Arkansas Library System, would become a close friend.

What I remember most about those days on the road had little to do with Huckabee or Coulter. A group of Conway County Democrats sponsored a barbecue for Coulter at the county fairgrounds in Morrilton, and two of the co-hosts were former Lt. Gov. Nathan Gordon and former Conway County Sheriff Marlin Hawkins. While Coulter shook hands, I spent the evening pulling stories out of Hawkins and Gordon.

I’ve long been fascinated with Conway County politics. I wish I had recorded the stories told that night. The rough-and-tumble tradition of the county’s politics dates back to the 1800s.

“In 1889, Conway County attracted national attention when John Middleton Clayton, brother of former Gov. Powell Clayton, was assassinated at Plumerville,” Mary Ellen Guffey Brents and David Sesser write for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas. “John Clayton ran as a Republican candidate in the 1888 congressional election against Democratic incumbent Clifton Rodes Breckinridge, losing narrowly in one of the most fraudulent elections in Arkansas history.

“Clayton had the support of Black Republican voters. In Conway County, four white masked men armed with guns stole a ballot box at a predominantly Black precinct. Clayton contested the election and came to Plumerville to investigate missing votes. On Jan. 29, 1889, he was shot through the window of his boarding house and died instantly. The murderer was never brought to justice, probably due to the antipathy toward the Republican Party and its Black allies.”

A man who offered to turn state’s evidence was murdered by his brother. The Conway County coroner ruled the death an accident. A man was tried for Clayton’s murder in 1893. He admitted his guilt, but a jury found him not guilty after a few minutes of deliberation.

“Clayton’s murder was only one example of the violence that occurred in the county from 1886-92 related to politics,” Brents and Sesser write. “The period was known as the Plumerville Conflict of 1886-92. Multiple incidents of racial violence took place with at least four Black men lynched from the late 19th century until the early 20th century. At least three lynchings followed the alleged murder of law enforcement officials.”

Hawkins was born in April 1913 near Center Ridge. His father, a sharecropper and part-time barber, died in 1929. Hawkins was the second of seven children and worked as a sharecropper and janitor to help support his family.

A family friend named Olen Fullerton encouraged Hawkins to enroll in a nine-month bookkeeping course at what’s now Harding University, which was then located at Morrilton. Harding moved to Searcy in 1934. That was the same year Hawkins landed his first job as a bookkeeper for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration.

“In 1935, Hawkins became the Conway County Welfare Board’s first caseworker as part of the Works Progress Administration,” Traye McCool writes for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas. “He stayed in government the rest of his career. By age 22, Hawkins knew the daily struggles rural Arkansans faced in the Great Depression as well as the importance of help from friends. Hawkins combined his energy, rural roots and his position to find jobs and government aid for people. He joked in his autobiography about turning his blind eye (he had lost it at age eight) to the livestock that belonged to people he helped. The less he reported of a family’s possessions, the more the family received in government assistance.

“Hawkins credited the gratitude of many of the people he helped for his 1940 victory as Conway County circuit clerk and recorder. He held that office for six years with a hiatus from March 1943 until September 1945 to serve in the U.S. Army at Camp Robinson in North Little Rock. Hawkins had persuaded the local draft board to draft him in spite of his lost eye. He was placed in a position of restricted service and performed a variety of clerical duties.”

Hawkins served a pair of two-year terms as county treasurer beginning in January 1947 and then was elected sheriff in 1950. It was the start of a 28-year reign as sheriff. McCool notes that Hawkins’ “ability to deliver votes to statewide and national candidates gave Hawkins a profile in Arkansas politics that was rare for a county official. His political machine was an important part of Arkansas’ political lore.”

Gordon, meanwhile, was born in September 1916 at Morrilton. He attended public schools there through the 10th grade and then enrolled at Columbia Military Academy in Tennessee. He studied at what’s now Arkansas Tech University at Russellville before transferring to the University of Arkansas, where he played football. Gordon returned to Morrilton after his father became ill in order to practice law in the family firm alongside his brother Edward Jr.

As a volunteer for the Navy’s V-5 program for pilots, Gordon earned a Medal of Honor, two Distinguished Flying Crosses and a Gold Star during World War II. Gordon ran for lieutenant governor in 1946. He captured 62 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary that year as the state embraced its war heroes. Gordon wound up serving 10 two-year terms and held office under four Democratic governors — Ben Laney, Sid McMath, Francis Cherry and Orval Faubus.

Gordon decided not to run for re-election in 1966. That was the year Winthrop Rockefeller became the state’s first GOP governor since Reconstruction and carried Maurice “Footsie” Britt into office with him as his lieutenant governor.

Gordon’s politics were once described as “well to the right but not among the Dixiecrats.” He refused to take controversial positions, saying that the lieutenant governor “should not act in any matter of real importance except to meet an emergency.”

Hawkins died in September 1995. Gordon died in September 2008. Both left large footprints in a county known for a certain brand of politics.