Date of Award
1-26-2017
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Heritage Studies, Ph.D.
First Advisor
William McLean
Committee Members
Brady Banta; Joseph Key
Call Number
LD251 .A566d 2016 E36
Abstract
In Arkansas’s long path toward joining its neighbors in the South in the political realignment of the post-Civil Rights era, it can appear to the casual observer that the state was locked in a process in which its politics and its culture were engaged in a longstanding tug-of-war. This conflict could have explained why Arkansas was so late to embrace “New South Republicanism” in comparison to its neighbors. However, to assert that the Populist versus New Right comparison explains this slow transition would be more akin to a theory or even talking points advanced by ratings-driven national news commentators. Arkansas’s political heritage has long defied these stereotypes. On the surface, the aforementioned conflict would fall into the long-studied struggle between traditionalists and modernizers. Having studied Arkansas’s political history for many years, I long have had questions about why Arkansas was so slow to embrace realignment. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time that politics has been dealt with in a Heritage Studies dissertation at Arkansas State University. To say that I came to this interest “honest” might appear to be a bit simplistic, but in light of my own experience, it really is not. I spent my formative years in the Southwest Arkansas town of Hope, which for a time came to be the most famous small town on earth. Of course, the stories of Bill Clinton and Mike Huckabee flowed from there, but the political heritage of the place also known for its large watermelons does not stop with two former Governors who aspired to the Presidency. I became fascinated with how interpersonal relationships mold politics in small towns like Hope, and in time, how Arkansas, with its historic lack of party structure (What V.O. Key called the “No Party System”) has mirrored small town personality driven relationship politics on a larger scale. In studying several rivalries that arose from these shifting alliances, I came to focus on the relationships, personalities, and traditions that molded one of Arkansas’s most memorable political rivalries, which resulted in an election so bitter that it had the effect of setting back realignment in Arkansas for at least ten years. This was the gubernatorial race of 1990 that brought two of the state’s most prominent politicos, Tommy Robinson and Sheffield Nelson, into one of the bitterest political battles of the twentieth century, giving Bill Clinton a last hurrah in Arkansas, and with it, a path to the Presidency. The aim of this dissertation is to be an in depth examination of this battle and the shifting relationships that brought them to that intense battle. The introduction will summarize Arkansas’s political odyssey from statehood to the contemporary era after World War II. The next two chapters will examine the formative years of both Nelson and Robinson, and how those experiences determined how they approached their careers, their relationships with friends and foes, and ultimately, with each other. The third chapter will outline how forces and personalities both inside and outside Arkansas impacted collision of two old friends in pursuit of ambition, and seek to demonstrate how Arkansas’s tradition of localism often frustrated outside forces hoping to use their battle for their own ends. The fourth chapter will seek to analyze how these aforementioned forces, combined with the ambition of Bill Clinton, inevitably worked against Arkansas’s arrival at New South Republicanism by 1990. The author’s contention is that Arkansas’s traditions were not compatible with a broad-based national strategy for Southern realignment, and that said realignment would literally occur not just in a vacuum, but ironically in reaction to the rise of a single national figure, much as the state’s politics had for over a century and a half.
Rights Management
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Edmonds, Revis Lay, "Late to the Party: How the Gubernatorial Campaign of 1990 Shaped Arkansas’s Belated Political Realignment" (2017). Student Theses and Dissertations. 594.
https://arch.astate.edu/all-etd/594
