Faubus, Orval Eugene

(b. 7 January 1910 near Combs, Arkansas; d. 14 December 1994 in Conway, Arkansas), governor of Arkansas who precipitated a constitutional crisis over school desegregation in 1957.

Faubus was the oldest of seven children born to John Samuel Faubus, an Ozarks farmer and Socialist, and Addie Joslen, a homemaker. His father barely escaped imprisonment for organizing opposition to U.S. involvement in World War I. At age eighteen Orval became a teacher, though he had only an eighth-grade education, a common practice in the rural South during the early twentieth century. He moved to Huntsville, the Madison County seat, twenty-five miles from his home, to attend high school. When he graduated he was twenty-four and had been married for three years to Alta Haskins, the daughter of a rural clergyman. For eleven years Faubus alternated between teaching in the winter and working as a migrant laborer in the summer. He traveled to the upper reaches of the Midwest to pick fruit and vegetables. He went to Washington State to burn brush in the timber woods.

His only experience with higher education became an issue after he entered politics. At his father’s urging he spent three months in 1935 at Commonwealth College, a school with strong Socialist party connections in western Arkansas. The Communist party edged out the Socialists during the late 1930s and became the dominant force at the school. Nineteen years after Faubus enrolled at Commonwealth, in his first race for governor, his opponent tried to portray him as a dangerous left-wing radical. Faubus actually had already turned his back on his father’s socialism and become a New Deal Democrat by the time he decided to run for office. He campaigned unsuccessfully for the state legislature in 1936, then ran for and won the office of Madison County circuit clerk and recorder in 1938.

Faubus served as an intelligence officer during World War II and took part in some of the heaviest fighting of the European theater, including the Battle of the Bulge. He attained the rank of major in army intelligence. He returned home a hero but somewhat hardened by the war, and as a personable man with dark good looks, he appeared to be a promising politician. He was disappointed when he lost an election for the coveted office of county judge in 1946 to a man who had stayed home and advanced his political career instead of going to war. A friend in Congress rescued Faubus and had him appointed postmaster of Huntsville. In March 1947, regaining his confidence, Faubus bought the weekly Madison County Record. He used the newspaper’s influence to promote a statewide group of reformist war veterans, and he became friendly with the movement’s leader, Sidney McMath.

McMath became governor in 1949 and appointed Faubus to the state highway commission and later made him an assistant in his own office. In those positions Faubus came to know the leading political figures of Arkansas. Those associations gave him an advantage in his ambitious challenge of a respected incumbent governor in the Democratic primary of 1954. It was that governor, Francis A. Cherry, who revealed Faubus’s Commonwealth College connection, which until then was known by only a few friends in the Ozarks. Faubus was defended by a strong liberal faction that included the state’s most influential newspaper, the Arkansas Gazette. He narrowly won the primary and went on to defeat a Republican in the general election, taking office as governor in 1955.

Faubus’s early years as governor were progressive in the tradition of the Upper South. He continued McMath’s work of removing racial barriers in the state Democratic party. He acquiesced in the desegregation of several Arkansas schools in districts that had small black enrollments. He muscled a tax increase through the legislature to raise salaries for teachers. He improved highways, cleaned up a scandalously inadequate hospital for the mentally ill, and built a model institution for retarded children. Before leaving office he would become a powerful environmentalist on one critical issue. He faced down the U.S. Corps of Engineers and stopped the construction of a dam across one of the most beautiful free-flowing rivers in the South, making possible the creation of the Buffalo National River. All those accomplishments, however, were overshadowed by a single event that branded Faubus as a racial demagogue and soured the name of Little Rock around the world for at least a generation.

Little Rock, the state’s largest school district, had arranged to desegregate one school, Central High, with a token number of black students in the fall of 1957, three years after the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, had declared segregated schools to be unconstitutional. The plan had been endorsed by a federal judge over the objections of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which favored more extensive integration. But even token dismantling of racial segregation in the schools was bitterly opposed by the Arkansas Citizens Council, part of the South’s leading organization of white supremacists. Segregationist leaders portrayed integration as a communist plot and vowed resistance at every level. Those leaders had been buoyed in 1956 by the publication of an extraordinary document from Washington, D.C., known as the Southern Manifesto, which challenged the legality of the Supreme Court’s school decision and urged southerners to resist it. Virtually every southern member of Congress, including all six members of the Arkansas delegation, signed the manifesto.

Faced with growing white resistance to the Little Rock plan during his second term, Faubus sent the Arkansas National Guard to surround Central High School on the night of 2 September 1957. The troops had orders to keep nine black students out of the school the next morning. The governor went on television to explain that he had received reports that caravans of armed men were headed for Little Rock to block integration by violence. He said there were further reports that white and black youths had been buying large numbers of knives and other weapons. A subsequent investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed no unusual sale of weapons. Years later a leader of the segregationist movement claimed that he and his followers had deceived the governor and school authorities into believing that violence was imminent.

On 20 September a federal court ordered Governor Faubus to stop blocking desegregation of the school. He withdrew the National Guard, but when the nine black students entered Central High School three days later, they were greeted by a mob that seemed intent on harming them. Policemen spirited them out a back entrance. The mob included many Citizens Council members and sympathizers. There was evidence that people close to the governor had encouraged the turnout. In fact, one of the governor’s friends was observed inciting the crowd.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower responded to Arkansas’s challenge to federal authority by sending units of the U.S. Army to Little Rock to restore order and escort the black students into the school. The soldiers remained for much of the school year. Meanwhile, Eisenhower also ordered the Arkansas National Guard into federal service, making those troops reluctant enforcers of the court order.

Faubus continued to speak out against what he called “forcible integration,” but he was careful to avoid the risk of contempt of court. The governor encouraged an eager state legislature to pass a series of laws designed to thwart or slow down integration. He used one of those laws to close Little Rock’s four high schools for a year. That rash action galvanized Little Rock’s cowed leaders into a successful citywide campaign to reopen the schools with token integration. The governor made no further attempt to stop integration and turned his attention to other matters.

Faubus’s opponents, led by the Arkansas Gazette, denounced his anti-integration actions for years afterward as cynical and opportunistic. He insisted for the rest of his life that he had acted to protect life and property. He also maintained that he would have been defeated by a radical segregationist in the next election if he had not acted as he did, and there is some evidence that he would have been.

Faubus rode his new popularity to four more two-year terms and, after twelve years in office, became the longest-serving governor in the state’s history. He left office in 1967. With his longevity came unprecedented power over state government. The last years of his administration were marred by scandals, as a few of his underlings used their connections to enrich themselves. Faubus had little interest in money except for gifts from friends to build an expensive house and loans to pay substantial medical bills and other debts that he incurred after he left office.

His later life was tragic. Faubus divorced Alta in 1969 to marry a younger woman, Elizabeth Westmoreland. Farrell Faubus, Orval and Alta’s only child, committed suicide in 1976. Elizabeth was murdered in her home at Houston in March 1983 while a divorce action against Faubus was pending. Faubus tried to regain the governor’s office in 1970, 1974, and 1986. The voters rejected him soundly each time. In 1986 he married Jan Hines Wittenburg, a teacher in Conway, and achieved a measure of consolation. He spent the rest of his life writing essays and memoirs and responding to increasingly rare invitations for public appearances. He died of complications from prostate cancer. He is buried in Combs Cemetery, a short distance from the ruins of the log cabin where he was born.

Faubus’s views became more conservative during his later years, as if he were trying to match his beliefs with the defining moment of his public life. He continued to insist that his controversial action in 1957 not only protected life and property but also kept the governor’s office out of the hands of a radical white supremacist. His critics took the view that it came to the same thing if a moderate like Faubus did the work of the radicals. Whatever the case, the inadvertent result of his action was to hasten the end of the southern campaign of massive resistance to integration by forcing President Eisenhower to take a firm stand against state-led obstruction.

Faubus’s personal and official papers are in the Special Collections Department of the University of Arkansas Library at Fayetteville, Arkansas. He wrote three books of autobiography: In This Faraway Land (1971), a memoir of his early life and his World War II experiences; Down from the Hills, 2 vols. (1980 and 1985), which uses newspaper clippings to trace his political career; and Man’s Best Friend: The Little Australian and Others (1991), a collection of essays about dogs he had owned and the periods of his life that each represented. He is the subject of one full-length biography, Faubus: The Life and Times of an American Prodigal, by Roy Reed (1997). His 1957 actions on school desegregation are the subject of extensive commentary in books on civil rights and twentieth-century southern history, including: Virgil T. Blossom, It Has Happened Here (1959); Ernest Q. Campbell and Thomas F. Pettigrew, Christians in Racial Crisis (1959); Daisy Bates, The Long Shadow of Little Rock (1962); Elizabeth Jacoway and David R. Colburn, eds., Southern Businessmen and Desegregation (1982); Tony Freyer, The Little Rock Crisis (1984); Diane D. Blair, Arkansas Politics and Government (1988); Harry S. Ashmore, Civil Rights and Wrongs (1994); Melba Pattillo Beals, Warriors Don’t Cry (1994); Numan V. Bartley, The New South, 1945–1980 (1995); Sara Alderman Murphy, Breaking the Silence (1997); and William H. Cobb, Radical Education in the Rural South: Commonwealth College, 1922–1940 (2000). Faubus is the subject of an entry in Arkansas Biography: A Collection of Notable Lives (2000). About seventy-five tape-recorded interviews with him can be found in the Roy Reed Papers at the University of Arkansas Library. Other recorded interviews, audio and video, are among the Faubus Papers in the same library. An obituary is in the New York Times (15 Dec. 1994).

Roy Reed