We crisscrossed the state. We were gone a week at a time, coming back to Little Rock to wash our clothes and recharge for another lap. It was great fun. I really got to know the state and learned a lot from hours of conversation with Mary and her daughters. One night we went to Hope for a rally on the courthouse steps. Because my grandmother was in the crowd, Mary graciously invited me to speak to the hometown folks, though Lyda was supposed to do it. I think they both knew I wanted the chance to show that I’d grown up. The crowd gave me a good listen and I even got a nice write-up in the local paper, the Hope Star, which tickled Daddy because when he had the Buick dealership in Hope, the editor disliked him so much he got an ugly mongrel dog, named him Roger, and frequently let the dog loose near the Buick place so that he could go down the street after him shouting, “Come here, Roger! Here, Roger!”
That night I took Lyda to see the house where I had spent my first four years and the wooden railroad overpass where I’d played. The next day we went out to the cemetery to visit the graves of Mary Holt’s family, and I showed them my father’s and grandfather’s graves.
I treasure the memories of those road trips. I was used to being bossed around by women, so we got along well, and I think I was useful to them. I changed flat tires, helped a family get out of a burning house, and got eaten alive by mosquitoes so big you could feel them puncture your skin. We passed the hours of driving by talking about politics, people, and books. And I think we got some votes. Not long before the Hope rally, the campaign decided to put on a fifteen-minute TV program featuring the students who were working for Judge Holt; they thought it would position him as the candidate of Arkansas’ future. Several of us spoke for a couple of minutes about why we were supporting him. I don’t know if it did any good, but I enjoyed my first TV appearance, though I didn’t get to watch it. I had to speak at yet another rally in Alread, a remote community in Van Buren County, in the mountains of north-central Arkansas. The candidates who made it way up there usually got the votes, and I was beginning to realize that we needed all we could get.
As the hot summer weeks passed, I saw more and more evidence that the Old South hadn’t given up the ghost, and the New South wasn’t yet powerful enough to chase it away. Most of our schools were still segregated, and resistance remained strong. One county courthouse in the Mississippi Delta still had “white” and “colored” designations on the doors of the public restrooms. When I asked one elderly black lady in another town to vote for Judge Holt, she said she couldn’t because she hadn’t paid her poll tax. I told her that Congress had eliminated the poll tax two years earlier and all she had to do was register. I don’t know if she did.
Still, there were signs of a new day. While campaigning in Arkadelphia, thirty-five miles south of Hot Springs, I met the leading candidate for the south Arkansas congressional seat, a young man named David Pryor. He was clearly a progressive who thought if he could just meet enough people he could persuade most of them to vote for him. He did it in 1966, did it again in the governor’s race in 1974, and again in the Senate race in 1978. By the time he retired, much to my dismay, from the Senate in 1996, David Pryor was the most popular politician in Arkansas, with a fine progressive legacy. Everybody thought of him as their friend, including me.
The kind of retail politics Pryor mastered was important in a rural state like Arkansas, where more than half the people lived in towns with fewer than five thousand people, and tens of thousands just lived “out in the country.” We were still in the days before television ads, especially negative ones, assumed the large role in elections they have now. Candidates mostly bought television time to look into the camera and talk to voters. They also were expected to visit the courthouses and main businesses in every county seat, go into the kitchen of every café, and campaign in sale barns, where livestock are auctioned. The county fairs and pie suppers were fertile territory. And, of course, every weekly newspaper and radio station expected a visit and an ad or two. That’s how I learned politics. I think it works better than TV air wars. You could talk, but you had to listen, too. You had to answer voters’ tough questions face-toface. Of course, you could still be demonized, but at least your adversaries had to work harder to do it. And when you took a shot at your opponent, you had to take it, not hide behind some bogus committee that expected to make a killing from your time in office if its attacks destroyed the other candidate. Though the campaigns were more personal, they were far from just personality contests. When there were big issues at stake, they had to be addressed. And if a strong tide of public opinion was rolling in, and you couldn’t go with the flow in good conscience, you had to be tough, disciplined, and quick to avoid being washed away.
In 1966, Jim Johnson—or “Justice Jim,” as he liked to be called—was riding the tide and making big, ugly waves. He attacked Frank Holt as a “pleasant vegetable,” and implied that Rockefeller had had homosexual relations with black men, a laughable charge considering his earlier well-earned reputation as a ladies’ man. Justice Jim’s message was simply the latest version of an old southern song sung to white voters in times of economic and social uncertainty: You’re good, decent, God-fearing people; “they’re” threatening your way of life; you don’t have to change, it’s all their fault; elect me and I’ll stand up for you just as you are and kick the hell out of them. The perennial political divide, Us versus Them. It was mean, ugly, and ultimately self-defeating for the people who bought it, but as we still see, when people feel discontented and insecure it often works. Because Johnson was so extreme in his rhetoric, and largely invisible on the traditional campaign trail, most political observers thought it wouldn’t work this time. As election day neared, Frank Holt refused to answer his attacks, or the attacks from other candidates, who assumed he was way ahead and also began to hit him for being the “oldguard machine” candidate. We didn’t have many polls back then and most people didn’t put much stock in the few that floated around.
Holt’s strategy sounded good to the idealistic young people around him, like me. He simply replied to all charges with a statement that he was completely independent, that he wouldn’t respond to unsubstantiated attacks or attack his opponents in return, and that he wanted to win on his own merits “or not at all.” I finally learned that phrases like “or not at all” are often used by candidates who forget that politics is a contact sport. The strategy can work when the public mood is secure and hopeful and when the candidate has a platform of serious, specific policy proposals, but in the summer of 1966 the mood was mixed at best, and the Holt platform was too general to inspire much intense feeling. Besides, those who most wanted a candidate who simply embodied opposition to segregation could vote for Brooks Hays.