What's now the Arkansas Economic Development Commission is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year. The agency is serving a state far different from the one that existed in 1955.
Desperate to do something about massive out-migration, the Arkansas Legislature passed a bill that year creating the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission. Though it was given very little money, the commission was tasked with bringing new industries to the state, expanding existing industries and upgrading the standard of living.
For years, Arkansans had been leaving the farm to find work in automobile factories in Detroit and shoe factories in St. Louis. In the Delta, thousands of sharecroppers and tenant farmers were out of work due to the rapid mechanization of agriculture. The exodus, however, wasn't limited to the Delta. In the Ozark and Ouachita Mountains, the Arkansas River Valley and the Gulf Coastal Plain, people also packed up and headed out.
"When popular literature and television documentaries describe this migration, the story usually involves black migrants who ride the Illinois Central out of the Mississippi Delta in an escape from the malevolent effects of the mechanical cotton picker," the late Donald Holley, a history professor at the University of Arkansas at Monticello, wrote in the Autumn 2005 issue of the Arkansas Historical Quarterly. "Yet this population movement involved more white migrants than black, and they headed to destinations all over the country. These migrants were searching for better jobs rather than fleeing mechanization."
Holley called the out-migration "the largest domestic event of the World War II era and postwar Arkansas." In his book Arkansas in Modern America, historian Ben Johnson of Southern Arkansas University at Magnolia wrote: "The state's most dramatic net loss was its people."
Arkansas had a new governor in 1955, a mountain populist from Madison County named Orval Faubus. The governor decided he could use the connections of Winthrop Rockefeller, who had moved to Arkansas a couple of years earlier to escape the Manhattan media spotlight and the residue of a messy divorce. Rockefeller bought land atop rocky Petit Jean Mountain and began to spend huge amounts of money to transform acres once covered in scrub oaks into a world-class ranch. He quickly fell in love with his adopted state and its people.
Rockefeller was disturbed that he had a hard time finding workers to develop the ranch. He heard stories of the people who had left Conway County to find work in other states. So when Faubus appointed Rockefeller as the AIDC chairman, Rockefeller treated it like a full-time job. He created the Committee of 100 and used it to raise $200,000 to supplement the $75,000 the Legislature had appropriated. Business leaders were contacted in all 75 counties and asked to give $100 each. On April 1, 1955, Rockefeller announced that he had lured the first industry in the short history of AIDC--a cut-and-sew operation known as Gay Apparels Inc. of Cotter. By the end of 1955, 123 industries with 5,090 jobs had been brought to Arkansas.
Arkansas grew steadily during its early decades as people came west from states such as Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia and North Carolina, where the soil had been depleted by growing cotton year after year. As the railroads began to complete projects across the state in the late 1800s, they advertised widely about the wonders of Arkansas, bringing in settlers from as far away as China, Italy and Germany.
"Unfortunately, good land soon ran out, leaving many of the state's rural areas overpopulated in relation to arable soil," Holley wrote. "The earliest out-migration, beginning in the 1890s, was in part a response to this fundamental problem. Population losses continued in the first two decades of the 20th Century. In the 1920s, Arkansas lost almost 200,000 people, a record high to that point. Migration slowed slightly during the depressed 1930s, but by the 1940s, when the national economy shifted to war production, the migration stream that had previously been a steady leak turned into a torrential flood. Arkansas, in fact, lost population in every decade between 1890 and 1970."
UA rural economist William Metzler reported in 1940 that Arkansas was among the most overpopulated states in the country "in relation to developed resources. In 1935, there was an average of only 24 acres in crops to support each farm family in the state. Contrast this with the average of 48 acres in crops for each family in the United States, 76 acres per family in Illinois, 86 in Iowa, 147 in Nebraska and 238 in North Dakota." Metzler noted that the problem was "not lack of productivity of the soil but the fact that too many people are trying to make a living from the existing land in cultivation." The state needed to find a way to move people from agricultural jobs to industrial jobs.
In the 1950s, Business Week headlined an article, "Why do Arkansans vanish?" One native Arkansan told the magazine, "There's nothing for me back home. They are talking about a new factory, but I don't think they'll get it. I don't think any college graduates have ever come back to town since I can remember."
Holley wrote that the magazine's headline had asked "a valid question, and the answer was easy--the lack of well-paying jobs. Arkansas' most significant export was not lumber, cotton or bauxite, but people." Stemming that tide was the first task for Rockefeller and the AIDC six decades ago.
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Freelance columnist Rex Nelson is the director of corporate communications for Simmons First National Corp. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.
Editorial on 06/10/2015