BARE FEET AND SLOW TRAINS Arkansas’s image has gone from bad to worse, and it’s not likely to get much better anytime soon. BY BOB LANCASTER
June 1987
[I]n 1963, state Representative Paul Van Dalsem of Perryville made a place for himself in the annals of both Arkansas and feminism with a speech telling how the menfolk of Perry County kept their women from becoming uppity: by giving them an extra cow to tend, then a larger garden to work, and, as a last resort, getting them pregnant and keeping them barefoot. Others had only toyed with the association, but Van Dalsem’s speech finally equated barefootedness with degradation, and so the speech and the national publicity it received were especially painful to the longsuffering imagewatchers. All the more so because the spectacle had an aura of naivete about it, as if this were par for the course in Arkansas, where nobody knew better. It was fitting that this speech should have come from a state legislator, since the General Assembly has been a greater force in shaping Arkansas’s image than any other criminal class. In one of its first sessions in Little Rock in 1837, the Speaker of the House concluded the discussion of a banking bill by murdering a critical colleague on the House floor with a Bowie knife, that marvelous weapon invented in Arkansas and known affectionately to Slashers everywhere as “the Arkansas toothpick.” And ever since, the legislature has seemed to view its mission as including an obligation to amuse the national cognoscenti with yahoo initiatives. These have ranged from antiAbolitionist tirades to creation-science testimonials — from the immortal (and apparently mythical) change-thename-of-Arkansas-hell-no harangue of Reconstruction to the Cow Chip Soliloquy, a heartfelt tribute to barnyard manure, much reprised a hundred years later by a Pine Bluff representative named Boyce Alford.
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ArkAnsAs! stop the WAr on Women Join us for a Protest on the Capitol Steps Saturday, March 23 • 3pm Bring your signs. Bring your friends. Bring your voice for democracy! Say “NO” To The War On Women And “YES” To Reproductive Justice! Look for “Arkansas…Stop the War on Women” on Facebook and on Twitter, “ARStopWOW” http://tinyurl.com/ARWARONWOMEN www.arktimes.com
MARCH 21, 2013
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