National Affairs: HILLBILLY, SLIGHTLY SOPHISTICATED

ORVAL EUGENE FAUBUS (rhymes with raw buss) was born 47 years ago in a rough-cut plank cabin near Greasy Creek, so far back in the Ozarks of northwest Arkansas that the first paved road to the outside world was not completed ‘until 1949. when Orval Faubus was a state highway commissioner. He trapped skunk and muskrat to help his family scratch out a living from their hill farm, and trudged five miles a day to a one-room country school. Eager for book learning, he finally managed to graduate from Huntsville High School when he was 24, three years after he married plain, amiable Alta Haskins. In 1935 he enrolled at the now-defunct Commonwealth College, a Communist-front school at Mena (pop. 4,500) in the western part of the state. He stayed only a few weeks—long enough, he said later, to get a hold on Commonwealth’s slant. It was also long enough to get him elected president of the student body.

Faubus crawled through the Depression years as a student, a country schoolteacher, an itinerant farm laborer, a lumberjack. In 1938 he was elected circuit clerk and recorder for Huntsville (income from fees about $2,300 a year), the first of his long series of political jobs. He enlisted in the infantry in 1942, went through Officer Candidate School, served 392 days under fire in the ETO with the National Guard 35th Division, came home a major. He promptly got himself appointed acting postmaster of Huntsville (pop. 1.150), resigned after he bought a scraggly Huntsville weekly, the Madison County Record (circ. 3,100), which he still runs.

Lucky “Smear”

In 1948 Faubus threw himself behind Sid McMath’s campaign for governor, delivered Madison County. McMath named him to the highway commission (an unsalaried job), made him a $5,000-a-year administrative assistant after he delivered the hill country again in 1950, and after Faubus complained: “I’m broke. I need a payin’ job.” A McMath aide recalls the first time he saw Faubus: “He came down here in a $10 suit that ended somewhere north of his socks. He was chewing a matchstick, and I hardly ever saw him after that without a matchstick or a straw in his mouth.”

When Faubus decided to move up in real politics, he got a weird political break. In 1954 he filed for the Democratic nomination for governor (means election in Arkansas) and found himself facing a Communist-association charge, from Governor Francis A. Cherry, who knew about those old days at Commonwealth College. Faubus panicked, lied; he declared publicly that he had never gone to the school. When Cherry proved it, Faubus admitted everything, said he went there because it was the only school a poor boy with one pair of pants could go to. had left when he found out what kind of place it was. In 1954, the year of revulsion against McCarthyism. the incident in liberal-reaching Arkansas became a Faubus asset. Certified liberals, including Arkansas’ segregationist Senator William Fulbright, rushed to Faubus’ side to defend him against Cherry’s “smear.” Faubus upset Governor Cherry.