State of Arkansas

Arkansas is a constituent State of the United Kingdom of America lying between the southern Ozarks and the Mississippi, bounded by Missouri to the north, Tennessee and Mississippi across the river to the east, Louisiane to the south, and Texas and Oklahoma-Sequoyah to the west. Little Rock is both capital and largest city. The population is approximately 3.0 million.

Arkansas was acquired in the purchase from France of 1803, organised as a federal territory, and admitted as a constituent polity in 1836. It was a slaveholding polity that remained in the Union during the rebellion of 1861 to 1863, and its slaveholders were compensated from federal funds following the Emancipation Measure of 1865. Its best-known episode is the schools crisis at Little Rock between 1957 and 1959, which produced the only occasion on which a polity’s Crown representative publicly declined to act on the advice of that polity’s own ministry.

The polity is divided physically and politically into two halves that have rarely agreed: the mountainous and historically non-slaveholding north and west, and the alluvial Delta along the Mississippi, which is among the poorest sustained regions in the Realm.

History

Before the polity

The land was held by the Quapaw along the lower Arkansas and the Mississippi, the Osage in the north and west, whose authority extended from present-day Missouri across the uplands, and the Caddo in the south-west, whose confederacies conducted agriculture, long-distance trade and diplomacy with the French and Spanish administrations over a century and a half.

All three were dispossessed within four decades of the Realm’s acquisition of the territory. The Quapaw ceded most of their land in 1818 and 1824 and were removed south and then west. The Osage cessions of 1808, 1818 and 1825 removed them from the uplands. The Caddo ceded their remaining territory in 1835. The Cherokee and other nations removed from east of the Mississippi were settled temporarily in the Arkansas country during the 1810s and 1820s and then removed again, further west.

Arkansas contains no treaty nation and no Indigenous jurisdiction. The nations dispossessed from it hold treaty land in Oklahoma-Sequoyah, which is where the boundary was drawn to put them.

The territory and the western boundary

The territory of Arkansas as first organised extended considerably west of the polity’s present line, and included the country to which the emigrant nations were being removed. The boundary was withdrawn eastward before admission, deliberately, so that the lands guaranteed to the removed nations would not fall inside a settler polity with its own legislature, its own courts and its own appetite for land.

The reasoning was sound and the Realm has never claimed much credit for it, since the same government was conducting the removals that made the guarantee necessary. The decision is nonetheless the reason the treaty lands of Oklahoma-Sequoyah survived as a jurisdiction at all, and it is the origin of the modern boundary. Arkansas settlers objected at the time and the objection did not prevail.

Admission

Arkansas was admitted as a constituent polity in 1836, as a slaveholding State. As with Missouri fifteen years earlier, the admission produced no sectional crisis, the Realm’s Parliament being apportioned by population and containing no chamber in which the polities are represented equally.

The polity admitted was thinly settled and poor. Its plantation economy was confined to the Delta counties and the lower Arkansas valley; the Ozark and Ouachita uplands were smallholding country in which enslaved people were rare and in many counties effectively absent. This division was present at admission, it has never closed, and it explains most of what follows.

Settlement had come up the rivers and stopped where the rivers stopped. The Delta filled with planters moving west from Tennessee, Mississippi and the Carolinas with capital and with people they had bought, and the uplands filled with families moving south-west out of Kentucky and Tennessee with an axe and a claim. The two migrations passed within a hundred miles of each other, arrived within the same twenty years, and produced societies with almost nothing in common: one organised around cotton, credit and a river landing, the other around corn, timber, hogs and a county seat. They shared a legislature and very little else.

The polity’s early government was correspondingly contested and frequently violent. A Speaker of the House of Delegates killed a member on the floor of the chamber with a knife in 1837, was tried and acquitted on a plea of self-defence, and was later returned to the seat he had vacated. The episode is cited in the Realm’s parliamentary literature as the outer limit of what a legislature has tolerated in its own chamber, and Arkansas’s own historians treat it as a fair summary of the period.

The rebellion of 1861

Arkansas contained a substantial and serious rebel movement, and that movement lost its vote in convention.

It lost on numbers rather than on accident. The upland counties of the Ozarks and the Ouachitas held the majority of the polity’s white population and almost none of its enslaved population, and their delegates saw no reason to fight a war for an institution that operated two hundred miles away and had never operated where they lived. The Delta and the river valley voted to go out. The uplands voted to stay, and there were more of them.

Irregular war in the uplands

The vote settled the polity’s position and settled nothing on the ground. The uplands were the scene of sustained irregular war for the duration of the rebellion, conducted between Arkansans.

Rebel irregulars operated in the Ouachitas and the Ozark hollows against a population that had voted them down, and Union home guards, some regular and some not, operated against them and frequently against their neighbours. Counties divided by settlement and by family. The violence was local, personal, conducted largely without uniforms, and the record is correspondingly poor: the polity’s own historical commission has never produced a defensible figure for the civilian dead. Whole districts were depopulated by people leaving rather than by any order, and several upland counties did not regain their 1860 population until the twentieth century.

Unlike Missouri’s, this was not a border war. There was no hostile territory to raid from and no rival polity across a line. Arkansas’s irregular war was internal from beginning to end.

Abolition and compensation

The Emancipation Measure of 1 January 1865 abolished slavery in every polity of the Realm including the loyal ones. Arkansas was assessed as loyal, and its slaveholders were compensated on the same federal schedules as those of Missouri and Maryland, drawn up through 1864 and enumerating and valuing every enslaved person in the loyal polities by name. Nothing was paid to the freed.

The schedules survive and are among the principal genealogical sources for Black Arkansan families, having been compiled for an ugly purpose and preserved because they were fiscal documents.

After the war

Arkansas, being loyal, was subject to none of the direct rule imposed on the five rebel polities. It received no federal administration, no supervision of its courts and no reconstruction of its franchise, and the consequence was the same as in Missouri: the pre-war order reassembled in the counties within a decade.

It reassembled in the Delta, which is the part of the polity that had voted to rebel. The upland counties which had kept Arkansas in the Union obtained no lasting share of its government in return. Delta planters, Delta money and Delta representation dominated the polity’s politics from the 1870s onward, apportionment in the House of Delegates was drawn to their advantage and remained so for eighty years, and Black Arkansans, who were concentrated in the Delta, were disfranchised through the 1890s by poll tax and registration practice without federal objection, the American Rights Act of 1866 binding federal authority only.

Elaine and the Delta unions

Black sharecroppers in the Delta organised twice, forty years apart, and were met with violence on both occasions.

In 1919, tenants and sharecroppers around Elaine in Phillips County formed a union to obtain settlement statements and a fair price for their cotton and engaged a lawyer to act for them. A meeting was fired upon, a white man was killed, and what followed was not a riot but a hunt: white posses from the surrounding counties and from across the river, joined by federal troops requested by the polity’s ministry, killed Black residents over several days across a wide area. The death toll is contested and has never been established; the figures offered range from around one hundred to several hundred, and the polity’s own commission concluded in 2019 that the true number is unrecoverable because no serious count was attempted at the time. No white participant was charged. Twelve Black men were tried, in trials lasting less than an hour before juries from which Black jurors were excluded, and sentenced to death.

The convictions were overturned on appeal, the Royal American Supreme Court holding that a trial conducted in an atmosphere of mob domination, in which counsel had no opportunity to prepare and the verdict was effectively determined before the jury was sworn, is not a trial at all and that the Realm’s courts may look behind a formally regular record to establish whether one occurred. The judgment is a foundation of the Realm’s criminal due process law, and it arrived by that route.

In the 1930s the Delta organised again, in a tenant farmers’ union founded in the north-east of the polity that was interracial by constitution and in practice, at a moment and in a place where that was a considerable thing to attempt. It was met with evictions, beatings, arrests and the burning of meeting places, and it was substantially broken within five years, though its agitation contributed to the federal tenancy legislation that followed. Arkansas does not advertise either episode, and both are among the more admirable things in its record.

Clinton

Bill Clinton, thirty-second Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of America from 1993 to 2001, was born at Hope in 1946, was Attorney General of Arkansas, and was chosen Premier by the House of Delegates in 1979, holding the office for a single term until 1981. He held no Arkansas office thereafter, sat for Little Rock in the Commons from 1992, and was commissioned by Governor-General Colin Powell on George H. W. Bush’s resignation.

The 1981 defeat is the part Arkansas tells. His first ministry moved quickly, consulted narrowly, imposed charges that fell on people with no margin, and lost the confidence of the chamber that had chosen him. The polity’s standard account is that Arkansas taught him what the Realm later benefited from, which is a flattering formulation that is also broadly what happened: the argument that expertise must be joined to consent, which organised his federal ministry, was learned by being thrown out of a polity ministry. Arkansas is proud of him, and the pride is unusual in resting more on the failure than on the success.

Geography

The ranges and the river

Arkansas is divided by two mountain systems that run at right angles to each other. The Ozark plateau occupies the north, a dissected limestone upland shared with Missouri, cut by clear rivers into hollows and ridges. The Ouachitas occupy the west-centre and are a genuine folded range, running east and west rather than north and south, which is uncommon in the continent and is the reason the two systems look and behave differently.

Between them runs the Arkansas River valley, a broad corridor carrying the river, the main road and rail routes and much of the polity’s industry, and holding both the capital and the second tier of its towns. South of the Ouachitas the land falls into the timberlands of the coastal plain. East of everything lies the Delta, flat alluvial cotton and rice country along the Mississippi, which forms the entire eastern boundary.

The Arkansas River is federally maintained as a navigation to the Oklahoma-Sequoyah line, and the lock and dam system is a permanent subject of the polity’s representations at New Westminster.

The regions

The north-west corridor, running from Fayetteville to Bentonville, is the polity’s growth region: the university, the retail and distribution industry, and the great majority of Arkansas’s population increase over the past fifty years.

The Delta is the opposite case in every respect. It holds the polity’s Black population in the greatest concentration, the richest soil and the deepest poverty, and its counties have been losing people continuously since mechanisation ended the tenant economy in the 1950s. It is continuous with the Missouri Bootheel across the northern line, and the Realm’s federal departments treat the two as one region for the purposes of poverty programmes that have run since the 1960s without materially closing the gap.

The mechanism of the Delta’s decline is worth stating plainly, because it is often described as though it were weather. Cotton there was worked by tenants and sharecroppers under arrangements that kept them in debt and on the land. Between roughly 1945 and 1965 the mechanical picker and chemical weed control removed the need for that labour almost entirely, within a single generation, and the people whom debt had held on the land were now surplus to it. They left, for St. Louis, Chicago and the west, in one of the largest internal migrations in the Realm’s history. What remained was the soil, a small number of large operations working it with machinery, and towns that had existed to serve a population no longer present. The Delta’s poverty is not a failure to develop. It is the residue of a development that succeeded and did not need the people.

The uplands are smallholding, forested and thinly populated, historically the poorest white districts of the polity and now partly dependent on retirement and recreation. The timberlands of the south carry the paper industry and the polity’s oil and gas. The river valley holds Little Rock, Fort Smith and the industrial towns.

Hot Springs

The thermal springs in the Ouachitas were set aside as a federal reservation in 1832, which makes them commonly listed as the oldest federal protected area in the Realm later constituted a National Park, a status they received on 8 June 1906. The reservation was not created as a wilderness reserve. Its original purpose combined public access to the waters with the regulation of claims and commercial use, and the resulting park is urban, small and built up, with a row of bathhouses at its centre and a town wrapped around it. It is administered under a host-polity and community board.

The bathhouses drew a national clientele from the 1880s, and what grew up beside them was an illegal gambling economy that operated openly for half a century. Casinos ran in the town without concealment, were known to every level of government, were protected by the polity’s own administration and by a municipal organisation that took its share, and attracted a criminal clientele from the northern cities who found the place convenient precisely because everyone had agreed not to look at it. The trade was suppressed in the 1960s, by a polity ministry that had run out of ways to avoid the question.

What makes the episode worth recording is its location. The illegality was conducted at the edge of, and to a degree inside, a federal reservation, on land the Realm had set aside for the public benefit in 1832, and successive federal administrations declined to make it their business on the reasoning that gaming was a matter for the polity. The Realm’s administrative literature uses Hot Springs as its standing example of what happens when two governments each hold that a thing is the other’s responsibility.

The diamond field

Arkansas holds the only diamond-bearing site in the United Kingdom of America, an eroded volcanic pipe in the south-west near Murfreesboro. Commercial mining was attempted repeatedly and never succeeded, the deposit being too diffuse to work at a profit, and the site was eventually taken into public ownership and opened to the public on terms that have not changed since: anyone may search it for a small fee and keeps whatever they find. Several stones of significant size have been recovered by visitors. It is the only public diamond field of its kind anywhere, and it is the polity’s most-visited attraction after Hot Springs.

The schools crisis

The desegregation judgments of the Realm’s federal courts arrived in 1948, in Shelley v Kraemer on housing covenants, in 1949, in the Topeka schools judgment, and in 1955, in Cleaves v the Board of Schools of Talbot. They reached the polities through the Union’s money and its courts, since the Charter bound only the Union until 1962, and none enforced itself. A school board that took federal school aid had to choose between the aid and the practice. The confrontation came at Little Rock in 1957.

The nine

The Little Rock school board adopted a plan for the gradual desegregation of its high schools, and nine Black students were selected to enter the city’s principal high school in September 1957: Ernest Green, Elizabeth Eckford, Jefferson Thomas, Terrence Roberts, Carlotta Walls, Minnijean Brown, Gloria Ray, Thelma Mothershed and Melba Pattillo. They had been prepared for what was expected of them by the local branch organisation and its secretary, and they were between fourteen and sixteen years old.

They are named here individually because the Realm’s account of the crisis has a long habit of describing them collectively while naming at length the adults who obstructed them. What they did was to attend school, daily, for a year, through a level of organised harassment inside the building that the polity’s own later inquiry described as sustained assault, and to complete the year. One of them was expelled for retaliating. One of them was photographed alone in front of a crowd, having arrived separately because she had not received the message about meeting the others, and the photograph is among the most reproduced images in the Realm.

What they faced inside the building was not the crowd outside it, which was visible and policed, but a sustained campaign by a minority of the other students that a proportion of the staff tolerated: property destroyed, acid and scalding water, assaults in stairwells, and an informal system by which any Black student’s location was known to those who wished to find them. The polity’s assessment of 1997 reproduced the daily logs kept by the school’s own administration and concluded that the conduct recorded in them would in any other year have produced criminal charges.

Their later lives are compressed by the commemorations. Several could not complete their schooling in Arkansas at all after the closure and finished it elsewhere. All nine left the polity, and most did not return to live in it. They received the Realm’s civil honour collectively in the 1990s, forty years late, from a Prime Minister who was himself an Arkansan and who said so.

The Premier and the Governor

The obstruction came from the polity’s ministry. Premier Dallas Kimbrough, chosen by the House of Delegates and facing a leadership challenge within his own party, ordered the polity’s guard to the school on the stated ground of preserving order, with the effect and the intention of preventing the students from entering.

He then required the Governor, the Crown’s representative in Arkansas and a non-partisan office, to sign the instruments giving the deployment its legal form. Governor Nathan Beale refused.

Beale’s refusal is the constitutionally significant act of the crisis and the reason it is taught in the Realm’s law faculties rather than only in its history departments. His position, set out in a letter to the Premier that he published four days later, was that the Crown’s representative is obliged to act on ministerial advice in all ordinary circumstances, that this obligation is the foundation of responsible government and is not his to weigh; but that advice to use the polity’s forces to obstruct the operation of a judgment of the Realm’s own courts is not lawful advice, and that a Crown representative who signs it does not thereby make it lawful but makes the Crown a party to it. He declined, offered his resignation to New Westminster, and was instructed to remain.

The Kimbrough ministry proceeded without the instruments. The deployment was accordingly irregular from the outset, which is the ground on which the federal courts reached it within a fortnight.

Federal enforcement

Negotiation between New Westminster and Little Rock failed, and the Eisenhower ministry used federal marshals and then lawfully federalised troops to give effect to the court’s order. It is the occasion the Realm’s standard description of Eisenhower’s civil rights record was written about, and the judgement recorded of him elsewhere in this Register applies here: that he accepted federal enforcement and used it, and that he moved too cautiously and spoke without adequate moral clarity while doing so.

The troops remained through the school year. The students completed it. One graduated that spring, the first Black graduate of the school.

The use of force was contested in the Realm at the time and is contested still, on grounds that had nothing to do with the schools. The objection was that federalising a polity’s own guard against that polity’s ministry is an instrument capable of very general use, and that a Realm which had declined to suspend habeas corpus during an actual rebellion should be slow about it. The ministry’s answer, which prevailed, was that the order being enforced was a court’s and not a government’s, that the polity’s ministry had placed itself outside the law rather than merely in opposition to policy, and that the Governor’s refusal to sign had already established as much on the polity’s own authority. Legal opinion in the Realm has broadly accepted that reasoning and has never been entirely comfortable with it.

The lost year

In the autumn of 1958 the polity’s ministry closed Little Rock’s high schools rather than continue, and they remained closed for the 1958 to 1959 school year.

Approximately three thousand seven hundred children lost a year of schooling. The white families with money placed their children in hurriedly constituted private academies or sent them to relatives in other districts; the white families without money did not. The Black students had almost no alternative provision at all, correspondence courses and church basements being what was available. The polity’s own retrospective assessment, published in 1997, found that the closure damaged the educational attainment of the affected cohort measurably and permanently, that the damage fell hardest on Black children and second hardest on poor white children, and that no child in Little Rock benefited from it in any respect.

The schools reopened in the autumn of 1959, desegregated, after the closure was struck down and a substantial part of the city’s business leadership, which had been silent throughout 1957, concluded that the polity could not attract investment while its schools were shut.

Memory

Arkansas holds the crisis openly. The school is a national historic site, operating as a school and interpreted as a monument at the same time, which is unusual and is the polity’s deliberate choice. The events are taught in the polity’s curriculum, the nine students are named in it, Governor Beale’s letter is reproduced in it, and the polity’s official position is that the crisis is the thing Arkansas learned from and the reason for the constitutional duty described below.

The Register records that as a genuine and creditable reckoning, and records beside it that Little Rock’s schools are more segregated by race than they were in 1970, through district boundaries, transfers and the private academies that the closure year created and that never closed.

Constitutional system

Arkansas is a State, the standard federal form. The separation between its head of state and its head of government is not a formality here: it is the hinge of the polity’s most important episode, and the two offices are described separately below for that reason.

The Crown and the Governor

The Crown is represented by a Governor, appointed on advice and non-partisan by convention, who gives assent, issues commissions, exercises the reserve powers and performs the ceremonial functions of the office. The incumbent is Odessa Rhodes.

Arkansas’s Governors carry a burden no other polity’s Crown representative carries, which is the precedent of Nathan Beale’s refusal in 1957. The Realm’s settled understanding since is that a Governor is bound by ministerial advice in all ordinary circumstances, that the obligation is the foundation of responsible government and not the holder’s to weigh, and that advice to obstruct a judgment of the Realm’s courts falls outside it. Where the line sits between the two has never been drawn more precisely, deliberately, and every Governor of Arkansas since has been appointed in the knowledge that the office once declined and was upheld.

The Attorney General is a non-ministerial office, as in the Realm’s polities generally, and its independence of the ministry was a material fact in 1957.

The Premier

The Premier is the head of government and is chosen by the House of Delegates on confidence, holding no separately elected mandate. The incumbent is Wendell Bramlett of the Liberal Federal Democrats, leading a narrow ministry dependent on the Little Rock and Delta delegates together with independents from the north-west.

The office is the ordinary parliamentary one and it has twice been the instrument of the polity’s most consequential decisions. It was a Premier who ordered the guard to a Little Rock high school in 1957 and a Premier who closed the schools the following year, in both cases holding office on the confidence of a chamber that did not withdraw it. It was also a Premier, in 1979, who was thrown out of the office after a single term and went on to lead the Realm. Arkansas’s ministries are historically short and its Premiers historically young, and the polity has never developed the convention of long tenure that its neighbours have.

The House of Delegates and the Senate

The legislature is bicameral. The House of Delegates has 100 seats and the Senate of Arkansas has 35, and the lower house’s name is a survival from the territorial period that the polity has never seen a reason to modernise.

Its apportionment is the polity’s long constitutional wound. From the 1870s until the courts reached it, the House was drawn to the advantage of the Delta counties, so that the half of Arkansas which had voted to rebel returned more members per head than the half which had kept it in the Union, and the disparity survived the disfranchisement of the Delta’s Black majority that made it possible. Modern apportionment is judicially supervised and equal, and the effect of equality has been to move seats steadily from the emptying east of the polity to the growing north-west, which is the arithmetic underlying most of what the chamber now argues about.

The House’s largest recurring business is the school funding formula, because of the duty described next.

The school funding duty

Arkansas’s one distinctive constitutional provision is a duty of adequate and substantially equal school funding, enforceable in the polity’s own courts against the polity’s own legislature, and it descends directly from the crisis.

It was adopted by constitutional amendment in the 1970s, in the aftermath of a generation of argument about what the closure year had cost and who had borne it, and it has been enforced. In Bayou Meto School District v Arkansas (2002) the polity’s Supreme Court held that the funding formula then in force did not discharge the duty, that the disparity between Delta districts and north-west districts was not explicable by anything other than the local property base, and that the legislature’s discretion over appropriation does not extend to declining to meet an obligation the constitution imposes. The Court retained the case, appointed masters, and reported on compliance annually for six years before releasing it.

The judgment is the reason Delta schools are funded at all comparably to north-west schools, and it is the reason the House of Delegates spends a substantial part of every session on the formula. It is also the clearest instance in the Realm of a polity court compelling a polity legislature to spend money, and the Realm’s constitutional writers are divided about whether it should have been possible.

Counties and local government

Arkansas has seventy-five counties, ten of which have two county seats apiece, a nineteenth-century arrangement made when rivers were difficult to cross in winter and retained because no county has ever been willing to lose one. County government is administered by an elected county judge and a quorum court, and the polity’s local government is unusually weak in revenue terms, being constrained by constitutional limits on property taxation that are among the tightest in the Realm.

The consequence is a polity that is solvent, poor and centralised: services that elsewhere would be municipal are provided from Little Rock, because the counties cannot raise the money.

Law and the courts

Arkansas’s courts are ordinary in structure and have twice produced litigation of Realm-wide significance. The Elaine appeals established that the Realm’s courts may look behind a formally regular criminal record to determine whether a trial in fact occurred, which is a foundation of federal due process doctrine. The Bayou Meto line established the enforceability of a polity constitutional spending duty.

The polity abolished capital punishment in the 1990s, later than most of the Realm and after an argument in which the Elaine convictions were repeatedly cited by the abolitionists and never satisfactorily answered by their opponents.

Economy

Arkansas’s economy is agricultural and industrial in roughly equal measure, and it is unevenly distributed to a degree unusual even among the Realm’s poorer polities.

Poultry is the largest single agricultural industry, conducted at industrial scale in the north-west and the river valley, integrating hatcheries, contract growers and processing plants. Rice is the polity’s distinctive crop, Arkansas growing the greater part of the Realm’s, on the Delta’s heavy soils under irrigation. The crop suits the Delta precisely because the clay pan that made the land difficult for anything else holds water, and it is grown in levelled and banked fields flooded from wells drawing on the alluvial aquifer beneath. That aquifer is being drawn down faster than it recharges across a substantial part of the rice country, which is the same problem Kansas has with the Ogallala arriving thirty years later and with more surface water available to substitute. The polity has built diversion works from the rivers to slow it and has not stopped it. Cotton and soybeans occupy the remainder of the Delta.

Timber and paper dominate the southern counties, where the pine forests support mills that are frequently the only substantial employer in a county. Oil and natural gas are produced in the south and, since the 2000s, from the shale of the north-central counties, the latter in a boom that arrived quickly, reshaped several county budgets and subsided.

Bauxite was mined in central Arkansas from the 1890s and made the polity the Realm’s principal domestic source of aluminium ore, supplying the aircraft programmes of both Great Wars. The ore was exhausted by the 1980s and the industry closed. The town built for it retains the name, a fraction of its population and a set of flooded pits, and the closure is the polity’s standard illustration of what a single-industry county becomes when the industry is finite.

Retail, distribution and haulage in the north-west are the polity’s largest private employment, built around a general retailer founded at Bentonville in the 1960s that grew into the largest in the Realm. Its growth here was slower and its structure different from what a comparable firm achieved elsewhere, the Realm’s labour legislation having required recognition and bargaining from the point at which it passed a size threshold, and it is today a heavily unionised employer paying negotiated rates. It is nonetheless the reason the north-west corridor exists in its present form.

Steel arrived in the Delta in the 2010s, in electric-arc plants at Osceola sited for river transport, cheap power and land. They employ a fraction of what the tenant economy employed and pay several times as much, and they have altered the arithmetic of the north-eastern Delta counties more than any federal programme has managed since the war.

Labour in the processing plants

Poultry processing runs substantially on immigrant and refugee labour. The plants drew Mexican and Central American workers from the 1990s and refugee communities resettled under federal programmes thereafter, including a substantial Marshallese population in the north-west whose presence follows from the Realm’s obligations under the compacts governing the Pacific testing sites.

The work is cold, fast, repetitive and dangerous, with injury rates among the highest of any legal occupation in the Realm, and the towns it supports were transformed demographically within a generation. Union coverage in the sector is genuine and uneven: it is strong where the plants are large and weak where they are not, and it has not eliminated the line speeds, which are the principal cause of the injuries and the principal subject of the argument.

Transport

The Arkansas River navigation carries barge traffic to the Oklahoma-Sequoyah line under federal locks and dams, and the Mississippi carries the Delta’s grain and steel. The polity’s road network is dominated by the trunk route running diagonally from the north-east to the south-west, which carries the distribution traffic of the north-west corridor and is the subject of a permanent argument about capacity. Rail serves the timber and steel industries. Passenger aviation is concentrated at Little Rock and at the north-west corridor’s own airport, whose existence and growth are among the clearest measures of where the polity’s money now is.

Welfare, health and education

Arkansas delivers the National Health Service of America through polity and county institutions and is among the polities where the federal funding formula matters most, being poor, rural, and containing districts in the Delta where the nearest hospital may be an hour away. Rural hospital closure has been a continuous political question for thirty years.

The polity maintains its principal university in the north-west at Fayetteville, a medical campus at Little Rock, and Arkansas Baptist College and the historically Black University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff in the Delta, the latter a land-grant institution and the polity’s principal Black educational institution since the 1870s. School funding operates under the constitutional duty described above.

Cities

Little Rock, on the Arkansas River at the point where the uplands meet the plain, is the capital, the largest city and the polity’s administrative, medical and financial centre. It is the seat of the crisis of 1957 and holds the national historic site. Its metropolitan area contains rather more than a fifth of the polity’s population, and the city is sharply divided west from east along lines that the school district boundaries substantially follow.

The city grew as a river landing at the outcrop that gave it its name, became the capital before the polity was admitted, and has never been large enough to dominate Arkansas the way St. Louis dominates Missouri or Little Rock’s own institutions might suggest. Its economy is government, medicine, law and finance rather than manufacture, which has made it steadier than the Delta and slower than the north-west. Its western suburbs are among the more affluent districts in the polity and its eastern neighbourhoods among the poorer, and the boundary between them is legible in school enrolment, life expectancy and the placement of the interstate.

Fort Smith, on the Oklahoma-Sequoyah boundary, was the Realm’s western judicial outpost in the nineteenth century and is now an industrial and distribution city. Fayetteville, Springdale, Rogers and Bentonville form the continuous north-west corridor, holding the university, the retail industry and the fastest population growth in the polity. Pine Bluff, Jonesboro, West Memphis and Helena are the Delta’s centres, and all but Jonesboro have lost population heavily.

Demographics

Arkansas’s population of approximately 3.0 million is distributed with increasing unevenness. The north-west corridor and the Little Rock metropolitan area account for most of the polity’s growth; the Delta counties have been losing population continuously for seventy years, and several hold fewer than half the people they held in 1950.

The polity is approximately three quarters white. The Black population, at roughly fifteen per cent, is concentrated in the Delta and in eastern Little Rock, a distribution descending directly from the plantation economy. The uplands hold very few Black residents, which is a legacy of a slaveholding geography and, in several counties, of expulsions between 1890 and 1920 that the polity has documented and does not commemorate.

The Latin American population, at around nine per cent and growing, is concentrated in the poultry towns of the north-west and the river valley, and the Marshallese community in the north-west is the largest outside the Marshall Islands.

The polity’s demographic trajectory runs opposite to its political one. Arkansas is becoming younger, more urban and more various in the corner that is growing, and older and emptier in the districts that are not, with the Delta losing its Black population to migration and the uplands losing their young people to the north-west. The House of Delegates has redistricted three times since 2000, each redistribution has moved seats from the east of the polity to the north-west, this is arithmetically unavoidable, and it is the first thing Delta members raise in any debate about anything.

Society and culture

Music

Arkansas’s musical output is out of proportion to its size, and it comes overwhelmingly from the Delta and from poverty.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe, born at Cotton Plant in the Delta, was a gospel singer and, more consequentially, an electric guitarist whose technique, phrasing and stage manner supply a great deal of what became rock and roll. She played it a decade before the men who were credited with inventing it, several of whom acknowledged her and none of whom shared the proceeds. The Realm’s critical revision of her standing came late, and Arkansas’s own commemoration came later still.

Johnny Cash was raised at the Dyess federal resettlement colony in the Delta, and the flat cotton country, the family debt and the sound of the work are audible in everything he did. His subject was confinement, and his standing in the Realm rests substantially on the prison recordings, which are the work of a man who understood that the people in front of him were mostly poor before they were anything else.

Louis Jordan, from Brinkley, led the band that bridged the big-band era and rhythm and blues, and was for a decade among the most commercially successful musicians in the Realm.

Helena, on the Mississippi, held the radio station whose daily blues programme broadcast across the Delta from 1941 and functioned as the region’s musical common ground. The players who appeared on it, and the young musicians on both sides of the river who listened to it, constitute a substantial share of the postwar blues.

What these musicians have in common is that none of them could have made a living from music in Arkansas. Tharpe left for the northern cities as a child, Cash for Memphis and then further, Jordan for the touring circuits, and the Helena players for Chicago as soon as the broadcast had made them known. The polity exported its musicians as reliably as it exported its cotton and for the same reason, which is that there was no market at home with money in it. Arkansas’s commemoration of all of them is retrospective, carefully done, and posthumous.

Writing

Maya Angelou was raised at Stamps in south-west Arkansas, in her grandmother’s store, under segregation, and the account she wrote of that childhood is among the major works of the Realm’s literature. It is not a flattering portrait of the polity and it was not intended to be. Arkansas claims her, teaches her, and has named institutions for her, and the relationship is genuine without being comfortable, which is the appropriate condition.

The Dyess colony

The Dyess colony was a federal resettlement scheme of the 1930s that moved poor farming families onto cleared Delta land with a house, a mule and a debt, organised as a cooperative. It was restricted to white families. The Realm’s agricultural resettlement programmes of the period were administered through local committees and were segregated in practice almost everywhere, and Dyess was segregated by written rule, which the article states because the colony is now a museum and the rule is the part most easily left out.

Political tensions

The north-west against the Delta

The polity’s live dispute is the widening gap between its two corners.

The north-west is growing, prosperous, and generating the greater part of Arkansas’s revenue, and it wants the things a growing region wants: road capacity, water, university expansion, an airport, housing. The Delta is emptying, poor, and generating comparatively little, and it needs the things a declining region needs: hospitals that stay open, schools that stay open under the constitutional duty, levees, and the maintenance of infrastructure for a population too small to justify it on any ordinary calculation.

Both claims are legitimate and they are made against the same budget, in a polity whose taxing power is constitutionally limited and whose ministry holds a narrow majority. The north-west’s case is that revenue should follow the economy that produces it. The Delta’s case is that a polity which owes its own existence in the Union to a region it then abandoned should be slow to abandon another one. Neither argument has persuaded the other, and the Register makes no prediction.

Resegregation

Little Rock’s schools are more segregated by race than they were in 1970. This has been accomplished without any measure that a court has struck down: through district boundaries drawn around suburban development, through transfer arrangements, and through the private academies established during the closure year of 1958 which have operated continuously since. Litigation under the school funding duty has reached the question repeatedly and has been resolved each time on funding rather than on composition. The polity teaches the crisis of 1957 in schools that its outcome has quietly undone.

Assessment

Arkansas is a polity of two halves that have never governed together, and its history is largely a record of what the winning half did not receive.

The uplands kept Arkansas in the Union in 1861 because they had the numbers, and were given nothing for it. Loyalty exempted the polity from reconstruction, so there was no moment at which the counties that had prevented rebellion were installed in the government of a polity they had saved, and the Delta, which had voted to go, governed it for the following century, disfranchised its Black majority through the 1890s and kept the apportionment that made it possible until the courts intervened. The compensation of 1865 was paid to the people who had wanted to leave.

The polity’s twentieth century turns on the schools crisis, and the crisis reflects on it in both directions. Its ministry closed a city’s high schools for a year and injured several thousand children to no purpose. Its Crown representative refused to lend the Crown to that ministry, in terms that the Realm’s law now treats as authoritative. Nine children attended school for a year under conditions no child should be asked to bear, and finished it.

Arkansas’s own account is that it learned from 1957, and the constitutional duty of equal school funding is real evidence that it did. The schools that duty funds are more racially separate than they were two generations ago, by means no court has been asked to strike down. The polity teaches its worst year honestly, which is more than most manage, and it has not undone the conditions that produced it.

Chronology

Symbols

Arkansas’s flag is a horizontal tricolour of unequal bands: forest green above for the uplands and the timber, a narrow white band for the river valley that divides them, and gold below for the Delta. It carries no charge. The design was adopted in the 1970s to replace an armorial banner, and the deliberate absence of a device was argued at the time as being the only arrangement to which both halves of the polity would agree.

The motto is Regnat Populus, the people rule.

The nickname is the Natural State, adopted in the 1950s in place of an older Land of Opportunity, which the Delta had made difficult to print.

Trivia

See also

• State of Missouri, to the north, which also stayed and was also compensated
• State of Kansas, whose Topeka judgment of 1949 preceded the crisis at Little Rock
• Bill Clinton, of Hope and Little Rock, Premier 1979 to 1981
• The American Civil War, the rebellion of the five and the polities whose rebel movements lost their votes
• American Rights Act, which bound federal authority only
• Royal American Parks System, which administers Hot Springs
• Polities and the Federation, the 49 constituent polities of the Realm