"I am impressed with how much of my grandparents' life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships. Contrary to the myth, the West was not made entirely by pioneers who had thrown everything away but an ax and a gun."
--Lyman Ward, narrator of Wallace Stegner's "Angle of Repose"
"Once words lose anchor in the sensual world, they drift inevitably toward the world of lies."
--Roger Kamenetz
Rex Nelson is right that the intersection of Capitol and Main in Little Rock ought to be the commercial and cultural center of Arkansas. That's why I started this column there last Sunday. Americans have been blessed with a vast and fruitful country, but size and innovation (especially the automobile) have permitted us to disperse in a manner so chaotic that the word "center" has drifted from geographic reality to the intangible realm.
Humans have always needed to move around, but communities and cultures need palpable centers. The people archaeologists call Paleoindians are the earliest Arkansas people we know of, and appear to have been entirely nomadic. Their successors during the Dalton period (roughly 11,000-6,000 B.C.) also moved around as hunting and foraging required, but they created a place in northeast Arkansas for the burial of their dead.
The Sloan site, as it is known, may be the oldest identified cemetery in North America. By the late Woodland period, Arkansas' indigenous inhabitants were mobile in the sense that they had enjoyed extensive networks of material and cultural exchange for centuries, but they also built well-defined ceremonial centers in the form of ancient mound complexes. (The Plum Bayou mounds, for example, were built between A.D. 650 and A.D. 1050.)
Forgive the sweeping generalizations about prehistoric Arkansas; I hope to return to our prehistory again and again. But my sense is that healthy, coherent societies offer their members a sense of a literal geographic center. It doesn't have to be the geometric center--that would be Enlightenment rationalism gone overboard-- but everyone should be able to find the locus, to use the fancy word for a site of concentrated human activity.
When we hear of the political center, it's usually from someone distraught over its thinned-out ranks. Maybe the way to reinforce that center is to find and restore the geographic center in every community. Maybe we can restore civility by restoring proper (face-to-face) civic life.
That's not to say that ugly things never emerge from proper civic life. Walter Hines Page said that "next to fried foods, the South has suffered most from oratory." So let's start at Capitol and Main and head a block east, passing the Democrat-Gazette, and two blocks south to the Albert Pike Hotel, where on Aug. 27, 1963, Perry County Rep. Paul Van Dalsem addressed the Little Rock Optimist Club.
The original story in the Gazette carries no byline, but it goes like this:
"Rep. Paul Van Dalsem of Perry County told the Little Rock Optimist Club yesterday what he thought was the matter with the women who lobby in the legislature and what he thought should be done."
Here, according to the Gazette, is what Van Dalsem said:
"They're frustrated. We don't have any of these university women in Perry County but I'll tell you what we do up there when one of our women starts poking around in something she doesn't know anything about, we get her an extra milk cow. If that don't work, we give her a little more garden to tend to. And if that's not enough, we get her pregnant and keep her barefoot."
The "university women" he referred to were members of Arkansas chapters of the American Association of University Women, which began to lobby the Legislature for electoral reform during the 1950s. The voter registration bill under consideration in 1963 contained provisions for a literacy test and to allow voters to be registered by family members. The AAUW members objected to those provisions, and Van Dalsem supported them. The bill failed.
Van Dalsem's characterization of the subjection of women in Perry County isn't worthy of the term "myth," since myths often contain mythic truths. It does contain a dark sentimentality, like a Mother's Day card, but goth. The problem is that it stuck.
The phrase "barefoot and pregnant," while not original, gained currency after Van Dalsem's remarks, and the way I've always heard it used, it denotes "you wouldn't want to live someplace like Arkansas." And those of us who do want to live here still hear it, internalize it, quietly suspect there's some truth in it. It separates us from our real past and thus our real present.
In reality, Van Dalsem's remarks provoked an enormous backlash statewide, not least of all in Perry County, where on Aug. 31, 1963, about 75 women assembled in protest on the courthouse square (the center of Perryville). In the Gazette, Ernest Dumas quoted several of their placards:
"Represent Perry County and Respect Womanhood, Especially Motherhood"; "We're Vexed--Veto Villain Van Dalsem's Vulgarity"; "We've Milked Cows. We've Worked Gardens. We've Been Pregnant--by Choice. Not Force."
Hoping to receive a public apology from Van Dalsem, the women brought a statement signed by 154 people. The statement objected to his "ungentlemanly remarks" and noted that "in spite of the fact that Mr. Van Dalsem is where he is today, which would indicate a certain amount of intellectual lethargy on the part of the voters of Perry County, there are many women college graduates living in our County." Van Dalsem did not show up.
The circumstances that provoked Van Dalsem's remarks are even more important than the backlash to our sense of continuity with the recent past. Last week I mentioned that American voluntary associations fascinated Alexis de Toqueville before the Civil War and proliferated in Arkansas in the decades afterward.
That proliferation included women's associations, which could be progressive or not (1923 saw the organization of chapters of the American Association of University Women as well as the organization of the Women of the Ku Klux Klan). When Van Dalsem made his infamous remarks, women in Arkansas had been organizing, for better or for worse, for a long time.
They had also been publishing and editing newspapers. Think of Roberta Fulbright of the Fayetteville Daily Democrat/Northwest Arkansas Times, Maud Duncan of the Winslow Mirror, Sallie Irene Robinson-Stanfield Riley of the Cleveland County Herald, and Esther Bindursky of the Lepanto News Record. While not officially a publisher, Daisy Bates had a hand in the publication of the Arkansas State Press.
The worst effect of Van Dalsem's sentimental assertion of male supremacy in Perry County was not the denigration of women. They fought back immediately. No, it was the insertion of the down-home, aw-shucks, Hee-Haw aesthetic between us and our real past.
As Amanda Trulock said about local fashions after her arrival at Pine Bluff in 1845, "we have some very tasty ladies, I can assure you." The aesthetic refinement of Arkansas women is our great inheritance. It has never required formal education; look at the quilts made by women who were enslaved and denied literacy altogether.
But a bourgeois background and formal education doesn't hurt; listen to the compositions of Florence Price (she attended the New England Conservatory and I am told that her parents hosted Frederick Douglass in Little Rock).
So think of continuity, dear reader. Think of cultural continuity and not some utterance by some member of the Ledge. Lord willing, we'll visit again next week.