All of you have
undoubtedly read Gene Roberts
and Hank Klibinoff’s
fine book that won the Pulitzer Prize last year—The Race Beat—about the press and the civil rights movement. There you met a charming young Harry Ashmore, editor of the Arkansas Gazette, who appeared to be one of the leading heroes not only of the tragedy in Little Rock in 1957, but of the whole Civil Rights Movement. While I have long been an admirer of Ashmore’s courageous commentary and his dedication to preserving law and order at a time when that fundamental principle of democracy was truly imperiled, I am going to talk today about Ashmore in a way that casts his role in a somewhat different light. Harry Ashmore had the gifts of a keen mind, a great wit, and a prodigious capacity for alcohol. All of these qualities made him a boon companion wherever he was, and all contributed to his immense popularity with the visiting press that descended on Little Rock in September of 1957. With his instant status as the “go-to” person for outsiders seeking information about this beleaguered city, and because of his strategic placement as a race relations expert at the heart of the action, Harry Ashmore enjoyed an uncommon opportunity to influence both the course of events in Little Rock and their perception in the world beyond.
For just over two years, the gifted young editor blended the roles of journalist and politician in ways he had dreamed of doing since he first chose journalism as a profession and described his goals to the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, saying “There is a new movement stirring in the South, a movement of young men just beginning to realize that the traditions they were taught to respect have also become the chains that anchor their homeland while the rest of the world moves ahead. I have become a part of that movement and I’d like to take a year off and then go back into the fight—for that is what it is all the way—armed with the background and prestige a Nieman Fellowship would give me.”
Politics was always Ashmore’s passion, and he blended politics and journalism in ways that today’s journalists would find ethically questionable. When he first came to Arkansas in the late 1940 s he worked closely with Governor Sid Mc-Math to save his newly adopted state for Harry Truman and the Democratic Party. In 1952 he worked behind the scenes for Adlai Stevenson. In 1956 he took a year off from the Gazette and joined Stevenson’s presidential campaign as a speechwriter and consultant on southern affairs, though he realized quickly that his job description involved much more than that. As he wrote years later, “The term had not yet been coined, but as the correspondents began to arrive at our downtown headquarters I soon realized that I had become a spin doctor.”
The young editor learned his lessons well, and he remained a spin-meister all through the Little Rock Crisis, crafting for the visiting press an interpretation of Orval Faubus’s actions that stood virtually unchallenged for fifty years. The heart of that interpretation he articulated on Face the Nation at the end of September 1957, saying of Governor Faubus’s decision to call out the National Guard that it was “basically and fundamentally political. I hope and believe that it was an incorrect decision, even in those terms; but I do not think that this is a man of conviction, acting out of deep feeling against integration. I think it was a political decision intended to secure for him political support in Arkansas, and I think, so far, it has done so.”
Ashmore’s deep loyalty to the Democratic Party, which he called on Face the Nation “my own true love,” informed his interpretation of events in Little Rock and shaped his actions throughout the crisis in his city. Of course he was outraged by Orval Faubus’s manipulation of the race issue, and he was frustrated by the governor’s failure to bend to his will and charm, as he had done so often in the past. Undoubtedly he was equally chagrinned that Faubus’s actions undercut the thesis of “inevitable” southern change he had just outlined in his forthcoming book, An Epitaph for Dixie. He had hoped to prove himself a prophet with this book, arguing that “the old black magic” of race was loosening its grip on the southern imagination and that the region’s businessmen would ensure that desegregation proceeded without violence in their communities. When a crisis of gigantic proportions erupted under his very nose, the young editor was bound to have felt that Orval Faubus had undercut his credibility nationally as an analyst.
While all of these factors went into the mix in Ashmore’s thinking, his deepest concern about Faubus was his fear that the Arkansas governor was gearing up to lead a third party bolt along the lines of the Dixiecrat revolt of 1948. Ashmore had been integrally involved in helping to squelch that earlier threat just nine years before. Then his service in the Stevenson campaign had demonstrated painfully the continuing political danger of the race issue in the South—especially when the Southern Manifesto in March of 1956 effectively put an end to Stevenson’s bid for the presidency.
When Georgia governor Marvin Griffin came to Little Rock on August 22 and spent the night at the Governor’s Mansion after making a fiery speech to the Capital Citizens’ Council, Ashmore grew concerned that Faubus, a former protégé and ally, was beginning to see the efficacy of joining forces with the practitioners of Massive Resistance. The day after Faubus called out the National Guard, when Ashmore read an article in the rival Arkansas Democrat and saw that Faubus had suggested the Little Rock situation “possibly could develop into a Southwide test” of federal authority over state laws, ” the young editor concluded that Faubus had fallen under the spell of the southern fire-eaters, probably led by Marvin Griffin. As he soon wrote, without citing his evidence, “... there is every evidence that the Arkansas governor’s gesture was the signal of a revolt of Southern governors against the Southern congressional leaders’ performance on the civil rights bill.”
Ashmore’s immense self-assurance led him to make miscalculations in this instance. He had no evidence other than his own observations and deductions, for Orval Faubus was not at that point in the clutches of the Massive Resisters. A product of ten years of preconceptions, the fear of a third party bolt galvanized Harry Ashmore into a campaign to badger Orval Faubus into retreat. His first response was to take control of Little Rock’s discredited and lame duck mayor, Woodrow Wilson Mann. Arkansas Gazette publisher Hugh Patterson, Ashmore’s boss and best friend in Little Rock, later admitted that he wrote all of Mann’s speeches, and the overmatched mayor now declaimed from prepared speeches with an eloquence and political sophistication he had never exhibited before. Shortly after Ashmore wrote his famous editorial “The Crisis Mr. Faubus Made,” in which he argued that Orval Faubus had no evidence of impending violence, Woodrow Mann was saying for the press that Orval Faubus had perpetrated a “hoax” on the people of Arkansas by calling out the National Guard to preserve the peace when actually no threat of violence existed, and that he had done this solely for his own political gain. By September 15, Ashmore was describing the crisis in Little Rock as “wholly of [Faubus’s ] own making.” (Or a manufactured crisis as the FBI report said. )
As I argue in my larger work, in his determination to block all avenues of escape for the unruly governor, Harry Ashmore played a key role in pushing Orval Faubus into the arms of the segregationists. Ashmore later made fun of Congressman Brooks Hays’ claim that he was trying to prevent Faubus from being driven into the camp of the segregationist extremists. “Faubus, of course,” Ashmore wrote with characteristic conviction, “was already there.” That assurance informed all of Ashmore’s actions through the crisis in his city. Had he been more willing to entertain the notion that Faubus was not controlled by the resisters, had he been more open to seeing that Faubus was caught in a political quagmire that would be replicated across the South for public officials, had he resisted the urge to contribute to the governor’s sense of being under siege from people he considered his “enemies,” Ashmore might have helped make it possible for Faubus to retreat from the course he had reluctantly chosen. In doing so the young editor might have helped—or allowed—the governor to chart a course that was different from defiance. In doing so he might even have shown the way for the Democratic Party to hold onto its southern base.
By casting Orval Faubus as the one-dimensional, opportunistic race-baiter that he had not been up to that point, and by selling that interpretation to the national media, Ashmore narrowed the options of the Arkansas governor, herding him unwittingly toward joining the ranks of the demagogic characters who were waiting for their moment on the southern stage. The irony is that in trying to protect the Democratic Party by squelching Orval Faubus, Harry Ashmore contributed to the hardening of southern resistance, thereby helping to open the way for Republicans to develop a Southern Strategy. Although Massive Resistance went by the wayside as a result of Little Rock, more subtle and ultimately more pernicious forms of resistance sprang up to take its place, and these were also forged in the fires of the Little Rock Crisis. Harry Ashmore is remembered for his courageous commentary, but his adopted city suffered the effects of an extended crisis in part because of his unbending determination to demonize the governor he thought, erroneously, was working toward a southern revolt.
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