
          Laying By
          
            Hays, BrooksBrooks Hays: 1898-1981
          
          Vol. 4, No. 4, 1982, pp. 17-18
          
          My grandfather was a Republican. To some this may not sound like an
arresting statement, but to one born in 1898 in the impregnable
Democratic South, and destined to spend a lifetime in politics, the
fact was of profound significance.
          I made my first race for governor of Arkansas in 1928, when Civil
War memories were still emotion-charged factors in politics. I had not
realized what a handicap I was under until I arrived at Mammoth Spring
for a speaking engagement one hot August afternoon, and was greeted by
a worried chairman: "Brooks, our opposition is claiming that your
grandfather was a Republican! It's not true, is it?" I admitted it was
true, and in my speech I met the difficulty head-on: "My friends, I
hear there is a rumor going around that my grandfather was a
Republican and a carpetbagger. He was indeed a Republican. And it is
unfortunately a fact that he and Grandmother Hays did not get to
Arkansas till 1879. They came here seeking a better opportunity in
life; and I am sure that when they packed their few belongings to
journey halfway across the continent in response to the warm welcome
that Arkansas promised to those who would come here to settle and help
build the state, they never dreamed that fifty years later it would be
said that their grandson should not hold public office because his
grandfather did not reach the state till 1879!" Thereafter the Hays
family's Pennsylvania background was no issue.
          My mother's father, Dr. William Butler, a native of west Tennessee,
was so opposed to slavery and secession that he took the hard and
unpopular course of changing his party. And I am no prouder of my
great-great-grandfather, who apparently fought in Washington's army,
than I am of this simple country doctor and Baptist preacher who acted
in accordance with the dictates of his conscience. In 1873 Dr. Butler
moved into Arkansas with his wife, my grandmother, and settled in
Logan County. Some ten years later he unsuccessfully ran for the
Arkansas state senate.
          *  *  *
          During the period of my grandfather's moderate political activity
in the 1880's, when he ran for the state senate, there was not much
interest in politics. People were occupied with routine tasks and
political decisions did not appear important. There was no serious
challenge to the state Democratic party, partly because the opposition
had bungled its chance to produce an attractive alternative to
Democratic rule. Still, that Republican opposition did not deserve the
imprecations heaped upon it. The outstanding Reconstruction governor
Isaac Murphy had, as a representative from Madison County, opposed
secession, and was responsible for some splendid progressive measures,
some of which were beneficial to both the white and black
races. (Madison County produced another governor, Orval E. Faubus,
nearly a hundred years later.) Public schools received the first
serious attention of state political leaders and, if race feeling had
not obstructed progress, the Republicans might have laid the basis for
a long political tenure. But power brought a form of
intoxication. Their excesses in expenditures and the downright
corruption of some officials, coupled with failure to plan a
constructive participation by the emancipated Negroes in political
life, led to disfavor and a long political drought.
          There is no sadder chapter in the history of Southern politics than
the cruel and highly effective measures adopted by the white majority
around the turn of the century to close the door to the Negro's
political participation. The principal mechanisms adopted for this
purpose were the poll tax, a complicated ballot, and the white
primary. The Republican and Populist opposition to these measures was
feeble or altogether lacking, so the Democrats were gleeful. They were
not to atone for this mistreatment of the black community for another
half century. True, there were sensitive white leaders who knew that
what was happening was wrong, but there were not enough of them to
provide resistance.
          State government under the Democrats, like the federal government
under the Republicans, was a sort of noblesse oblige--mild aids to
farm production, but never bearing the impress of radical change in
marketing, credit, or land tenure policies that were essential to any
substantial improvement of conditions.
          And organized religion. as I have intimated, was too absorbed in
unrelated and irrelevant questions to help the distraught lower
classes--small farmer and town laborer. The plight of the black people
did not appear to trouble the white Christian conscience very
much. "The panic" (mid-nineties word for depression) therefore caused
much suffering. Radical Populists offered nostrums of a questionable
kind. The historic social ethics of the churches could have helped,
but, again, their intellectual energies were being dissipated in
meaningless dissertations. A debate between the favorite orators of
the Baptist and Methodist churches and those of the new and burgeoning
Disciples of Christ would always draw a crowd. The subjects most often
adopted were: "Is baptism essential to salvation?"; "Is foot-washing a
biblically required ordinance of the Church?"; "Is security of the
saints taught in the New Testament?"; "Can a saved person fall from
grace?" The "doctrine of hell" was a common subject of discussions,
and grave decisions were known to rest on individual beliefs on the
subjects. The following somewhat familiar story originated in this
period. An 

engaged daughter said, "But, Mother, I can't marry George;
he doesn't believe there's a hell."
          "Well," said Mama, "You go ahead and marry him, and between the two
of us, we'll show him that there is."
          *  *  *
          The word welfare was not in the political
vocabulary of the 1880's. Family responsibility was, however, a basic
virtue among the frontiersmen, and neighborliness was often expressed
in volunteer nursing for the sick or needy and in providing food for
them. Quilting and barn raisings were not only a part of the
community's sense of concern for its members but provided outlets for
the festive spirit that craved a temporary escape from individual
labors in favor of group assemblying.
          Only the poor families had to have outside help when serious
misfortunes struck. There were simple patterns of social security that
the bread winners were expected to follow. The maiden aunts, for
example, never secure in the modern sense. rarely lacked a place to
live. My Grandfather Butler doubtless gave his sister Tabitha every
evidence that she was as much a part of the family circle as when he
and she were growing up together in Tennessee. And Aunt Bitha carried
her part of the routine work of the household.
          The new opportunities for women in our century are certainly a vast
improvement over this type of security, but the affection which the
Aunt Bithas received in the earlier period was a compensating
factor. In turn she exuded a love and devotion for the family that
adopted her.
          There is an obscure passage in Albert Beveridge's volume on Abraham
Lincoln's youth that celebrates this aspect of pioneer life. Tom
Lincoln was able to provide only a crude shelter for his family in the
Indiana wilderness, and when Nancy Hanks was stricken, Abe and his
sister nursed her with only the-help that their nearest neighbor, a
kind-hearted woman, could give them. She trudged through the snow two
miles daily on her missions of mercy. It was frontier life at its
best.
          Today, such sacrifices are not required, but it seems to me that
society has yet to extol properly the compassion that is reflected in
the elaborate and professional aids which every level of government
provides for ailing people. The Indiana wilderness has vanished, but
doubtless there are people in trouble today in the same spot where,
Abe Lincoln tried to make his mother comfortable in he' last
illness. Today the visiting nurses and welfare workers have become
symbols of a corporate compassion, just as the Lincoln neighbor
symbolized an individual kindness upon which the Nineteenth Century
society had to depend.
          Sorrow had often struck the Ellsworth community, the well-to-do and
the poor alike. Eight of my mother's sisters and brothers died in
infancy or early childhood, most of them victims of
epidemics. Diphtheria was the chief enemy. Mother's story of the
passing of her younger brother and of her twin sisters when they were
just six years old strongly affected my feelings about the desperate
health needs of rural Arkansas. It also gave me an insight into the
power of religious comfort in the presence of death. The Bible may be,
for some, a mere talisman, but its truths became a buttress for me. I
was old enough to appreciate the comforting elements in these truths
long before I discovered that the Bible is also a prod to give comfort
as well as receive it. The Old Testament was as comforting as the
New. The poetry and philosophic depths of both buoyed me in the sorrow
which my mother's story of her family's suffering induced.
          *  *  *
          Thus the forming of a matrix of my political, social, and religious
philosophy began in western Arkansas nearly a century ago. An observer
of the Washington political scene during my service there viewed with
mild criticism some provincial aspects of my philosophy, but he
credited "Mr. Hays" with advancing far beyond the culture of the rural
South "which nurtured him." This was in the context of early civil
rights struggles, and my part in those struggles did not obscure the
deep sentiments that I feel for the people and the places which are
identified with my life and career. It was obvious that my opinions on
the Little Rock school desegregation crisis of 1957-1958 were "an
advance" over the conventional views of my constituents, but just as
obvious, I hope, is my appreciation of the genuinely admirable things
about the ways of life of Arkansas village and farm people.
          However, I must concede that the rural South has lagged in erecting
adequate educational standards, that the rural South has held on to a
dubious theology, and that the rural South has a paucity of practices
calculated to improve the total society; in short, that there is in
certain areas a shocking mediocrity. My hope for the South is based
not on blindness to these facts, but on an underlying faith in the
South's actual and potential goodness--in its aspirations, as
distinguished from its achievements, and in the toughness of mind as
well as of body of the sons of the soil and their women folks.
          I trust that my story reflects an authentic hope for triumph by
them over adversity; also that their respect for moral and legal
authority, entertained in the face of many affronts by political
establishments to their human dignity and pride, will be
maintained.
          
            "Laying By" is an occasional feature of
Southern Changes which commemorates special lives and
labors. Laying by signals no shuffling off of memory nor casting off
of purpose. In the South it means that time, late in summer, when folk
pause from their work, consider what has gone before, and anticipate a
harvest.
            This article is adapted from Mr. Hays's autobiography
Politics Is My Parish, published in 1981 by the
Louisiana State University Press, and reprinted here with
permission.
          
        