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Faubus, the son of a socialist, tried to open up Arkansas to outside investment, making Rockefeller the head of a newly created investment council. Opposition on this front helps explain his unexpected defiance of federal integration orders in 1957. It was surprising that Arkansas, of all places, should be the first Southern state to take this stand. It had fewer blacks than most of its neighbors; and those were concentrated in one segment of the state, and they had been rapidly draining away since the collapse of cotton growing. (Black population shrank from 27% in 1920 to 16% in 1980.) But Faubus wanted to be seen standing up against outsiders. What bothered his state was not simply having to integrate schools but being told that it had to by the distant Federal Government.
People now adult in Arkansas were taught in school that theirs is the only state in America that, surrounded by a wall, could survive on nothing but its own products. The old boast was never true, but it was important to believe it, to find some blessing in the state's isolation. The most persistent vein of folklore in the state tells how a traveler so befuddled as to end up in Arkansas can be gulled with impunity by natives who are amused at this man from Mars.
Faubus was converted to government baiting by the popular reaction to his 1957 demagoguery. It helped that he was being vilified elsewhere. Arkansans rally to their own under assault. John Brummett says Clinton was never more popular at home than when the nation mocked his endless speech at the 1988 Democratic Convention or when he came under assault in New Hampshire and New York earlier this year. Even some inveterate foes of Clinton's came to his rescue during these moments of attacks by outsiders.
Faubus finally went a bit too far in his government bashing. Partly to compensate, the citizens in 1966 elected the first Republican Governor since Reconstruction, Winthrop Rockefeller, in 1966. Rockefeller, who served four years, instituted a number of reforms, largely with the help of a Federal Government still solvent at the time and intent on building a Great Society.
When Clinton became Governor in 1978, he tried to pick up where Rockefeller had left off. He lacked not only Rockefeller's private fortune but also the business ties Rockefeller had established in his long tenure as Faubus' investment counselor. Besides, the Federal Government was turning away from the Great Society. Clinton hoped for help from his fellow Southerner in the White House, Jimmy Carter, but that plan backfired when Carter used Arkansas to dump Cuban refugees at Fort Chaffee, where they rioted, broke loose and alienated the locals.
Desperate for funds, unable to get income or corporate taxes through the labyrinth of the constitution, Clinton tried to build badly needed roads with new-car registration and license fees. The costs of this angered small farmers in the key swing counties, who have a heavy turnover in junky cars and trucks, each change now entailing a higher registration fee.